I was watching old Lumiere Brothers films a decade or so ago, and marveling at how powerful those little actualities were. There was one, a child walking on a path in a garden, that had me deeply hooked. There was a step, you see, and the baby was toddling towards it. You knew, at some point, it was going to get there, and that the baby would fall, would start crying, and you were waiting the entire time for one of the adults to go and grab it.
Spoiler - it fell down the step.
This is the essence of horror filmmaking. It is the inevitable, the unstoppable, coming ever closer, ever closer, ever closer. Whether it is a child going towards the step, a monster hiding in a shadow, seen only by the audience, Michael Myers taking bullet after bullet but still standing and pressing ever forward. That is horror in its easiest form, but there is a more abstract form, and the short film Loa's Promise deals with it most beautifully.
The concept is rather simple: it is a film poem, of sorts. There is a letter being read, and we are shown images of Chile's Atacama desert, full of ghost towns, abandoned to time, but standing as if in protest to the progression of time. Among these images, we are shown what the future holds for the Atacama, power generation and other technologies that are laid into the scenery, sticking out as much as a Rembrandt would in a contemporary art gallery. It is a series of shots that establish what would happen in a future that has thrown water rights out, and turned the desert into a pure wasteland. The images are too honestly portrayed, an absolute eye towards faithfulness to what the reality will most-likely be to be called science fiction. It is speculative in its very nature, and feels as if it is not a prediction, but a pitch. This is what it could be; this is what it will be.
And in that, it is a horror film.
This is the inevitability. There is nothing we can do to keep that baby from walking towards that step, just like there is nothing we can do to prevent the Atacama being wired, technology creeping its way into the desert, laying roots across the baked Earth in the name of a progress that seems to make no sense from where we stand. The horror is not in the telling of a story, but in the presentation of a view as honest as if it had been sent back in a time machine. We are moving towards this. Look upon our works, ye Mighty, and despair. This horror short is subtle, abstract, but in reflection, so thoroughly in-line with historic paths.
I love every second of Loa's Promise. The future, at least in the Atacama, is not looming megalopolises rising above the rain-less plains, but of a slow, but relentless creep, devouring as the wires slither.
You can see Loa's Promise as a part of the Mindbenders program at Cinequest - https://payments.cinequest.org/websales/pages/info.aspx?evtinfo=84964~78899376-35a9-4153-8303-e1557be2dc32&#.XEtb_VVKhdg
Spoiler - it fell down the step.
This is the essence of horror filmmaking. It is the inevitable, the unstoppable, coming ever closer, ever closer, ever closer. Whether it is a child going towards the step, a monster hiding in a shadow, seen only by the audience, Michael Myers taking bullet after bullet but still standing and pressing ever forward. That is horror in its easiest form, but there is a more abstract form, and the short film Loa's Promise deals with it most beautifully.
The concept is rather simple: it is a film poem, of sorts. There is a letter being read, and we are shown images of Chile's Atacama desert, full of ghost towns, abandoned to time, but standing as if in protest to the progression of time. Among these images, we are shown what the future holds for the Atacama, power generation and other technologies that are laid into the scenery, sticking out as much as a Rembrandt would in a contemporary art gallery. It is a series of shots that establish what would happen in a future that has thrown water rights out, and turned the desert into a pure wasteland. The images are too honestly portrayed, an absolute eye towards faithfulness to what the reality will most-likely be to be called science fiction. It is speculative in its very nature, and feels as if it is not a prediction, but a pitch. This is what it could be; this is what it will be.
And in that, it is a horror film.
This is the inevitability. There is nothing we can do to keep that baby from walking towards that step, just like there is nothing we can do to prevent the Atacama being wired, technology creeping its way into the desert, laying roots across the baked Earth in the name of a progress that seems to make no sense from where we stand. The horror is not in the telling of a story, but in the presentation of a view as honest as if it had been sent back in a time machine. We are moving towards this. Look upon our works, ye Mighty, and despair. This horror short is subtle, abstract, but in reflection, so thoroughly in-line with historic paths.
I love every second of Loa's Promise. The future, at least in the Atacama, is not looming megalopolises rising above the rain-less plains, but of a slow, but relentless creep, devouring as the wires slither.
You can see Loa's Promise as a part of the Mindbenders program at Cinequest - https://payments.cinequest.org/websales/pages/info.aspx?evtinfo=84964~78899376-35a9-4153-8303-e1557be2dc32&#.XEtb_VVKhdg
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