Plenty of rancid horrors to be savoured at the Cork Film Festival

The Cork Film Festival, the oldest such event in the nation, begins its 61st edition this weekend.

Cinema enthusiasts can enjoy such treats as the Irish premieres of Billy O'Brien's I Am Not a Serial Killer and Kelly Reichardt's much-admired Certain Women. The streets will be alive with cinephile cries.

Cork will also be screening one of the most interesting horror films of the last decade. Anna Biller's The Love Witch – which, sadly, does not have commercial distribution here, yet – combines high feminist theory with low period-populism to delicious effect.

Samantha Robinson plays an elegant young woman who, newly settled in northern California, uses potions and spells to lure men towards sexual doom.

The Love Witch celebrates its protagonist's independence with rapturous enthusiasm. The film is about the assertion of control.

Vintage trash culture
What strikes the viewer most forcefully, however, is the film-maker's delight in the tropes and techniques of vintage trash culture.

Shot in lovely 35mm, The Love Witch pays homage to glamorous soap opera, shaky TV movies and pre-VHS horror.

The colours are bold. The emotions are sly. Large parts of the film play like Columbo before Columbo shows up.

This is not the first time in recent years that a horror has been among the best-reviewed films of the season.

We can detect waves in cinema. French movies are on the way up one year. Science fiction finds a new energy the next. But no tissue seems to hold together the current surge in quality macabre.

The movies come from different places at different angles.

In 2009, Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In, a Swedish vampire thriller, topped many critics' end-of-year polls. The film was sober, moving and oddly romantic.

More recently, from Australia, we have had Jennifer Kent's The Babadook.

Universal childhood horrors
That film expressed universal childhood horrors through the form of a sprite that appeared to emanate from a pop-up book.

Over the last two years, we have had David Robert Mitchell's It Follows – a sexual haunting in decaying Detroit – and the biblical, frontier folk horror from Robert Eggers, The Witch.

Nothing much unites these pictures beyond their loose categorisation as horror. It Follows shares a slipperiness about period with The Love Witch: both cast 1970s shapes while including some contemporary technology.

The Babadook and Let the Right One In are both about childhood. After that, we find ourselves struggling.

One unfortunate binding force is that, with the exception of The Witch, these films didn't make very much money.

The public still prefers less idiosyncratic horrors that rely on jump scares and torture porn. Some, such as the recent Don't Breathe, by Fede Alvarez, can be very good indeed.

It is, nonetheless, sad that such innovative variations on populist forms don’t find the audiences they deserve.

What seems to have happened is that the long-standing high-brow aversion to horror has worn off and young, adventurous filmmakers now feel able to experiment with the genre when taking their first steps.

They may or may not stay with the form as their careers develop. For now, we should savour the abundant rancid delights.

[ Cork Film Festival ]