Can we (still) laugh at this? Horror comedy at Razor Reel
You see something gruesome happen and start laughing. Strange behaviour in a cinema? Not at the Razor Reel Flanders Film Festival, where audiences can be just as enthusiastic as they are terrified.
Horror comedy has a peculiar trick: what makes you look away in one film can make you laugh in another. An excessive fountain of blood, a monster with unfortunate timing, or someone making a spectacularly bad decision at the worst possible moment. We know the drill by now. And sometimes it gets even funnier when the laughter was never intended.
This year, Razor Reel explores different ways in which fear and humour reinforce each other. From Japanese splatter to an Italian Christmas Eve that goes disastrously wrong, and a prison where everyone suddenly tries to become their best self.
Love, jealousy and a LOT of blood
A love triangle at school: there’s a romantic comedy waiting to happen. In Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl, Naoyuki Tomomatsu and Yoshihiro Nishimura take a different approach. A vampire falls for a boy who already has a girlfriend. That rarely ends well in real life, and things don’t look much better here.
The humour comes from excess. Teenage romance and jealousy are blown up into a frenzied, bloody confrontation. For anyone who enjoys seeing just how far a film will take an absurd idea.
Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl — Saturday 31 October at 22:15
Grandma is staying for Christmas
Family celebrations can be exhausting. In Unholy Night, Gino has an additional problem: his dead grandmother returns to celebrate Christmas Eve, then embarks on a killing spree. As if that weren’t enough, more dead relatives turn up.
The familiar tension around a festive dinner table takes a decidedly gruesome turn. How do you keep the family together when some of them have climbed out of their graves? More importantly, how do you keep the living relatives alive? Is a drunken uncle really still your biggest problem?
Unholy Night — Friday 6 November at 22:15
Good behaviour under threat of death
In Joko Anwar’s Ghost in the Cell, prisoners face a spirit drawn to the darkest energy. Suddenly, good deeds have a very practical purpose: they might save your life.
Murderers, thieves and con artists desperately polishing their auras and acting like angelic children on their First Communion day: the premise leaves room for pitch-black humour and social criticism. What does good behaviour mean when fear is your main motivation?
Ghost in the Cell — Saturday 7 November at 20:00
Laughing together in the dark
These three films find humour in very different places: grotesque excess, familiar family problems and a moral dilemma with deadly consequences.
Whichever approach you prefer, a festival audience adds something to that strange combination. Someone jumps, someone laughs too soon, and a moment later the whole row joins in. Sometimes your neighbour’s reaction is almost as entertaining as what’s happening on screen.
Based on an idea and original text by Nick, reworked by Milo Vermaelen.