Telluride Horror Show: What’s in the Basket?

10 Oct Telluride Horror Show: What’s in the Basket?

The Telluride Horror Show is in its fourth year, and it has proven itself as a serious film festival that explores the genre of horror movies. This year is no exception, with guest director Frank Henenlotter, who helped to sculpt the genre with his 1982 cult classic Basket Case, a dark yet funny film about a man who carries his deformed Siamese twin around in a basket, avenging their separation years later on the unsuspecting doctors and strangers who ask innocently, “What’s in the basket?”

What’s in the basket of this year’s Telluride Horror Show is a rumination on the last four decades of the horror film genre, from Henenlotter’s foray into the early comedy-horror movement through more modern additions to the genre like animated horror (there is a special presentation by the Laika Animation Studio that produced hits like Coraline and ParaNorman and the upcoming Boxtrolls to be released in 2014) as well as “found footage,” first explored in the Blair Witch Project and seen this year at the festival in Bobcat Goldthwait’s new film Willow Creek (trailer above).

Henenlotter will participate in a Q&A session after the screening of a 2013 film that dissects the coming of age of the horror and low-budget film industry, Rewind This!, which is a documentary about how home video revolutionized the cinematic world, putting giving ambitious backyard filmmakers the opportunity to compete against Hollywood. The film features interviews with the rogue directors, rental employees, XXX vets, box artists and collectors and the Q&A promises to be a great discussion about the rapidly evolving world of film.

(For more about low-budget films, the elements of Marxism in the horror movie genre, and how crowdfunding is bringing a movie project back from the dead, read the TIO post about Telluride Horror Show.)