“Given how remarkably strong this year’s Spooky Season kicked off with the one-two punch of The Sacrifice Game and When Evil Lurks (both of which played at this year’s Knoxville Horror Film Festival and Nashville Film Festival’s Graveyard Shift, with the former also doing duty as the closing-night film for this year’s Brooklyn Horror Film Festival), navigating the genre offerings that proliferate this fall was always going to be an interesting endeavor — especially given how scattershot the release patterns for horror in Nashville can be. So whether in theaters (or the sneaky one-night-only event screening model) or on the usual streaming suspects like Shudder, Screambox and Arrow, here are some of the highlights coming your way from this year’s Brooklyn Horror Film Festival (as well as the Knoxville Horror Film Festival and the Seattle Queer Film Festival).
The Irish film All You Need Is Death (BHFF) finds a fascinating path between the ethnographic drama of Songcatcher and pure, Lovecraftian folk horror, shifting form periodically and conveying the viewer to a gutsy end that couldn’t help but stick in the craw for days after the film ended. It’s easy to accept the existence of shunned artifacts and tomes, but it’s rare for a film to take the idea of a cursed song and fully explore what that would mean in the modern era.”
