Ghosts and supernatural entities are common threads weaving together these three films that premiered at Fantastic Fest 2024— the annual festival in Austin, Texas highlighting genre films— but those horror trappings also give way to character studies that are accomplished with varying degrees of success. Read on for my reviews of the found footage horror Wbat Happened to Dorothy Bell?, the meta horror The Draft!, and the action thriller Ghost Killer.
WHAT HAPPENED TO DOROTHY BELL?
There’s an especially frightening pall that hangs over most found footage horror films, their reliance on facsimiles of home video footage and other media relics bringing even the most outlandish tales unnervingly close to reality. What Happened to Dorothy Bell? sets this tone immediately with the one-two punch of a grainy home movie of a child reciting a nursery rhyme: “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly,” whose concluding line, “perhaps she’ll die,” is particularly skin-crawling.
That child is Ozzie Gray (Asya Meadows), who was extremely close to their grandmother, Dorothy Bell as a child. But one day, Dorothy inexplicably attacked little Ozzie, the trauma from the incident unspooling over years and prompting Ozzie as an adult to distance themselves from work, friends, and family (information that is tidily unpacked via an assemblage of voicemail messages). But now that Ozzie is looking back at the event more carefully, they realize that there was something else going on with Dorothy (even the question-as-title conjures up an association with the so-called psycho biddy movies of the 60s and 70s that centered on aging female stars), an investigation that takes them to the library where she died to attempt to communicate with her spirit, and leads them to team up with an occult YouTuber (Sargon).
What Happened to Dorothy Bell? is the second feature from writer and director Danny Villanueva Jr., and it’s about as mixed as a bag can get. Villanueva wrings some truly sinister scares out of his story, largely through communicating violence that occurs just off-screen via sound and fleeting glimpses, the restriction of a single, handheld camera serving as an asset. But that’s also where the film’s found footage format occasionally fumbles, Villanueva searching for odd workarounds like shifting a barely-perceptible phone camera to new angles. That doesn’t contain quite the same striking effect as the retro footage or the Zoom meetings Ozzie has with their therapist (Lisa Wilcox), where the limitations of the screen works in the horror’s favor.
There are other issues with What Happened to Dorothy Bell? beyond that, including stilted acting from some of the cast and an increasingly convoluted story that involves a cursed book. Unfortunately, the film’s finale— reconciling familial bonds in the past and present— doesn’t feel earned, despite being rich material to mine for a compelling emotional arc. But if you’re looking for basic found footage thrills paired with some thoughtful meditations on how trauma impacts mental wellbeing, What Happened to Dorothy Bell? will certainly scratch that itch.
What Happened to Dorothy Bell? had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest 2024 on September 22. Runtime: 80 minutes.
Five young adults embark on a weekend getaway to an isolated home in the middle of the woods. Sound familiar? It’s the premise of so many horror movies that have come before, and something that The Draft! attempts to turn on its head. The Indonesian horror comedy from director Yusron Fuadi sets up all the recognizable archetypes— the pretty girl, the jock, the tomboy, the nerd, and so on— and thrusts them into increasingly weird and violent circumstances before reframing them with a twisty bit of information: everything we are watching is a horror movie screenplay in progress. And as the stymied writer intermittently revises his rough draft, the action morphs: characters who die are suddenly brought back to life, new wrenches are thrown into the plot, and so on.
The Draft! is a meta commentary of sorts on horror movie tropes, but only in a superficial sense. It plays with the trappings of the genre— character archetypes, kills and jump scares— but doesn’t interrogate them with any nuance or thoughtfulness. Suspension of disbelief is generally second nature for me when it comes to these types of movies, but even that becomes hard when the narrative takes such preposterous and confounding turns, such as the characters suddenly determining exactly what is happening to them, and beginning to push against it. It’s clever, sure, but perhaps too much so for its own good. It fast becomes too hard to track (the cutaways to the faceless writer don’t help), and by extension, too hard to care deeply for the characters, who possess little interior lives beyond the stereotypical traits they are granted. It that way, The Draft! becomes basically the exact thing it is trying to subvert.
The Draft! had its international premiere at Fantastic Fest 2024 on September 20. Runtime: 84 minutes.
It’s hard enough being a single woman trying to make your way in the world. It’s even harder when you’re being followed around by the ghost of a murdered hit man. Stories of spirits and humans intersecting possess a rich cinematic history that has frequently been mined for its alternately romantic and comedic potential— think 1947 love story The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, or the 1990 phenomenon Ghost. But Ghost Killer, a film from noted Japanese action director and stunt performer Kensuke Sonomura, balances thrills with a fairly nuanced character study.
Akari Takaishi stars as Fumika, a single millennial with all the usual single millennial problems under her belt: a demeaning job in food service, financial woes, and relationship drama. She’s helping her best friend ditch a bad boyfriend when she suddenly begins being followed around by Hideo (Masanori Mimoto), the ghost of an assassin whose murder by a gang of thugs we witness in the film’s punchy opening scene. Fumika not only is the sole person who can see and speak to Hideo; a mere hand clasp allows Hideo to also possess Fumika, granting her the same acrobatic fighting abilities he possessed in life.
Following some wavering (Ghost Killer fortunately blows through the initial comic freakouts typical of this scenario quite quickly), Fumika decides to help Hideo get revenge on the gangsters who killed him. The action set pieces, largely involving hand-to-hand combat, are solidly conceived, with Sonomura often holding the camera back from the actors and utilizing long takes to showcase their bodies and movements. But the action never overwhelms the story— if anything, there could have been a little more of it. The mechanics of the organization Fumika and Hideo end up taking on are perhaps dwelt on a little too much, considering that the dynamic between Fumika and Hideo is what is of real interest here. The push and pull between them, and the fish-out-of-water aspect as Fumika is pulled into a violence world she knows nothing about, gives way to each of their self-actualization as people. Ghost Killer is entertaining and funny, but its characters are also richly realized, and that makes all the difference.
Ghost Killer had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest 2024 on September 19. Runtime: 105 minutes.
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