Fear Today, Horror Tomorrow Scandisk Entertainment, 2004

Bringing horror Hollywood to Hastings

Hastings will soon have claim to international cult film fame when the Cult Film Archive moves here from London. It is the world’s only research centre that contains over 4,000 international movies which will be used as a resource for the new BA Honours degree in Digital Film launched by the Hastings arm of the University of Brighton in October. Linked to the archive and degree course is the annual Cine Excess Cult Film Festival which will be held in Hastings, St Leonards and Brighton in November.  HOT reporter Lauris Morgan-Griffiths went to see the man behind this cult phenomenon, Dr Xavier Mendik.

Xavier Mendik is a man of enormous enthusiasm and energy.  He is an interesting mix of academia and fan-dom. I can’t think of any other discipline where academics and fans come together on such an equal footing.

Why is Xavier attracted to Hastings?   “I just think it’s a great place to be. People are enthusiastic and open.  They’re wanting to make things happen and there’s terrific talent down here.”  He also thinks horror films are emblematic of Hastings culture; people coming in from outside and changing things.  He doesn’t say but there is the feeling of the spectre of Aleister Crowley, who died in Hastings, smirking over the idea of these films having a home here.

And what is a cult film? I was only midway through the sentence before Xavier was answering the question. “Cult films are feel-bad movies.  They are unsettling to watch. And sometimes they are interesting movies but badly made. Some movies are so bad, they’re good.”

That is something that Hastings’ites will be able to find out at the Cine-Excess International Conference in November where cult movie buffs are joined by students, academics, film critics, film-makers and film distributors as well as internationally known film figures. The conference was started in 2007 as a one-off and at the end of that Xavier said never again.  However, the experience had got into him.  “I’d got the bug and I had to do it again,” and since then the conference has taken on a life of its own.  In past conferences there have been attendances by Dario Argento, Joe Dante, Ruggero Deodato, Enzo Castellari, Franco Nero, Jane Asher , who acted in Masque of the Red Death and presented Roger Corman with his Cine-Excess Lifetime Achievement Award at the event.

Xavier Mendik

An academic, film-maker, broadcaster, writer – writing about gender and sexuality in cult and horror films (he is a huge fan of cult movies and everyone associated with them) – Xavier takes trash seriously and has given respectability to the genre.   The seventies, with recession, the Vietnam war and urban unrest, was a rich time for horror  “When it’s a bad time for society, it’s a good time for horror”. Now, with the current economic downturn, horror is back, and with the Quentin Tarantino effect there are new audiences and a garnered respect for the genre.  By remaking Enzo Castellari Inglorious Bastards (as Inglourious Basterds) and Sergio Corbucci’s Django (starring Franco Nero) as Django Unchained, Tarantino has brought cult films out into the daylight.

Through his own writing and documentary work, Xavier Mendik has also been casting a similar light on hidden and important cult traditions. For instance, his documentary Cabin Fever: Fear Today, Horror Tomorrow examined how American horror had changed following 9/11. More recently, he was at the forefront of having the notorious film Cannibal Holocaust reconsidered by the UK censor.

The Long Road Back From Hell

Previously banned and then heavily cut for UK release, Xavier mounted a defence of the film on intellectual and cultural grounds through directing a 40 minute documentary, The Long Road Back From Hell: Reclaiming Cannibal Holocaust, which appears on the recent UK DVD release of the film.  Through that and his other activities, Xavier is well-known to the cult cognoscenti and has direct contact with many of the luminaries in the business. Consequently, he can invite his film heroes to the conference and they will come, like Roger Corman who, in Xavier’s opinion, has discovered and brought on some of the best innovative and influential film directors and actors.

Made in 1979, Cannibal Holocaust was released to a storm of  controversy, as well as pioneering the ‘found footage’ horror tradition that would later become popularised through the The Blair Witch Project. So effective was Cannibal Holocaust’s use of grisly realism that the film was even deemed to be a snuff movie and was banned – at one time it was even illegal to own a video copy in the UK. The film is about a missing group of documentary makers who went into the Amazon jungle to film a cannibal tribe.  When they didn’t return an anthropologist led a party to find them and retrieved the horrific lost documentary footage.  In Italy the director Ruggero Deodato was accused of making a snuff movie because it was reported that some actors had been killed during filming.  Since part of the contract had been that the actors should disappear at the end of the production, they then had to mount a desperate search for the actors in real life to appear as witnesses to defend the film.

Since 2011, Cine-Excess has re-mastered and distributed DVDs of prominent cult movies including Amsterdamned, Suspiria and Viva.   They have also just set up the Cine-Excess eJournal to initiate debate between leading film critics and theorists, international film directors and actors.

With the conference moving from London to Hastings, there is to be an announcement very soon about a major event – which will involve a well known American horror director who will give a master class in cult film in May. Watch this space.

 www.cine-excess.co.uk

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