Feral by
Film at Lincoln Center has announced the lineup for the 12th edition of ‘Scary Movies,’ New York City’s top horror festival, which includes the New York premiere of two Mexican films: Feral by Andrés Kaiser and Belzebuth by Emilio Portes. Featuring the genre’s best from around the globe, the festival offers moviegoers the cathartic treat of experiencing the exhilaration of suspense, thrills, and gore on the big screen as part of an audience. The 7th edition of ‘Scary Movies’ will take place August 16-21 at Film at Lincoln Center in New York City.
The Blair Witch Project meets Truffaut’s The Wild Child in Feral, a visually arresting, deeply haunting found-footage faux-documentary from first-time director Kaiser. Feral elegantly deploys the framing and construction of an investigatory expose, weaving together “interviews” with the surviving residents of a small Oaxacan village, and VHS footage recorded by an enigmatic, high-minded priest who, twenty years prior, had discovered an unsocialized “wild child” in the nearby woods, and brought the child to live with him in an isolated mountain outpost. With a slow-burning tension and a claustrophobic intimacy, the film builds to a dread-infused climax while methodically reconstructing the story of one man’s hubris and its consequences.
In Portes’ Belzebuth, five years after his infant son is murdered in a horrific, senseless massacre, police detective Emmanuel Ritter (Joaquín Cosio) is drawn into the mystery of another mass killing that eerily parallels the first. Begrudgingly teaming up with an American priest who’s become a paranormal investigator (Tate Ellington), Ritter follows the trail of an increasingly disturbing series of clues that point to the involvement of an elusive, excommunicated man of the cloth with satanic affiliations (Tobin Bell). This high-stakes procedural drama rapidly evolves into a vividly original outing in the subgenre of exorcism horror and a potent political allegory.
Additionally Scary Movies will also screen Black Circle, the newest film by Argentine-Spanish filmmaker Adrián García Bogliano, a Swedish-Mexican production, which will be screened with the director in attendance.
