Chattanooga Film Festival 2020: Online, but Undiminished

Last weekend I "attended" the online Chattanooga Film Festival, which was rescheduled from its original incarnation as an in-person event in April. I've been attending this festival for the last few years, so I was interested to see how they'd pull it off online.


I've been meaning to write about it here on my blog, but like a lot of Americans, both in my native Twin Cities and elsewhere, I've been preoccupied with the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the ensuing unrest. I have a lot to say about that and America's continuing traumas surrounding police violence toward Black people. I will write up some of my thoughts later. But I did want to say a little bit about the Chattanooga Film Festival (CFF).

CFF isn't officially a horror film festival, but that's definitely most of it, which I've discovered much to my delight in attending the last few years.

The biggest issue: How did they have an online film festival? Very well! I was seriously impressed. For just $30 for a four-day pass, you could watch dozens of shorts and features on demand as well as several scheduled events each day. I compiled a list below of everything I watched, but you can see the full schedule online. See another write-up here.

Movie theaters are one of the things I'm missing most in the pandemic. I've always liked horror, but I've been getting even more into horror films as of late. I've taught a class on philosophy and horror a few times where students made their own short horror films and showed them in an event on campus. I even got Chris Dortch, founder of CFF, to serve as one of the jurors. (I'm not sure how I'll do that class this fall, but CFF may have given me some ideas).

One of many events at CFF 2020

For all that, I'm not a real film person like some of the serious filmmakers, journalists, and aficionados you'll meet at an in-person film festival like CFF. I feel like an amateur looking on from the sidelines. Of course, I pretty much feel like that all the time. Even in domains where I feel pretty knowledgeable, like science fiction, I'm never quite as hip or with it as the people at the core (I've felt this way at Worldcon, too). Believe it or not, even though I am ostensibly an expert in philosophy (with a PhD to prove it), I usually feel this way when reading or engaging with people in highly specialized areas of the discipline.

Not that I'm complaining or that any of this stops me from having fun at SF cons or philosophy conferences. The "jack of all trades, master of none" generalist impulse is one of my basic personality traits. And I honestly enjoy life more for being that way. I get to experience a lot of different things. In fact, this is why I became a philosophy major as an undergrad: I couldn't decide what I wanted to major in, and in philosophy you get to think a little bit about everything!

"Yeah, nice navel gazing, buddy, but what about the festival?"

Oh, yeah! Sorry. It was awesome! The whole CFF team really knocked it out of the park with this one. It's probably the most fun four days I've had since the pandemic started, which made the extreme shittiness of the following week that much shittier for me.

Waiting for an event, breaking the rules by reading a book outside

Short Films

One thing about the affordability of the pass was that I was able to watch a lot more than usual. In recent years I've just bought tickets for the events and films I want to see, and I usually skip most of the shorts, which is a shame. I definitely gained a new appreciation of short films this time. I particularly enjoyed The Haunted Swordsman (Samurai puppet horror... no really, it's awesome), Little Willy (grownup child star of a Child's Play-like franchise deals with demons), Girl in the Hallway (heartbreaking animation about a young girl going missing), and Separation (the disturbing horror of breaking up from filmmaker/professor Dr. Rebekah McKendry).


Feature Films

When it came to features some of my favorites were Skull (a fun Brazilian slasher drawing on South American mythology), The Vice Guide to Bigfoot (a mockumentary satirizing contemporary journalism), The Wave (a trippy science fiction drug film starring Justin Long and Donald Faison, with extra props for being filmed in Albuquerque and being Phildickian, even if the filmmakers denied that Dick's influence was explicit when I asked in the Q&A), and Scare Package (a great horror comedy anthology film somewhat in the vein of another one I recently watched, John Carpenter's Body Bags).

My two favorite features were The Ringing Bell and The Beach House.

Casey T. Malone's The Ringing Bell is a difficult film to summarize, but it starts with a man who has a condition in which he dreams while awake. Given my interest in philosophers' takes on dreams from Zhuangzi to Vasubandhu to Descartes and subsequent science fictional explorations in Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and the Wachowskis, I was keen to check it out. The imagery is trippy with shades of David Lynch, and the plot of the film definitely veers into Lovecraftian territories, but for all these comparisons, The Ringing Bell is its own thing, too. One cool thing: the main character has a dream about being a bug, which reminded me of Zhuangzi's famous bit about dreaming he was a butterfly and being unsure whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. (See also this review from Kevin Wozniak).

Jeffrey A. Brown's The Beach House was probably my favorite feature of CFF 2020 (coming soon to Shudder as well). A delightful beach vacation turns Lovecraftian. If that's not enough for you, the main character is studying astrobiology and frequently discusses her ideas about the fragility of life in the cosmos, sometimes while the camera dwells on close-ups of food and beverages to make her philosophical point through the medium of film. I've always maintained that Lovecraft wrote a weird sort of science fiction, and this film leans into that take quite a bit. I asked the director about Lovecraft influences during the Q&A, and he said that he likes the idea of Lovecraft more than reading Lovecraft (fair enough, the guy was ... problematic to say the least), but he did discuss some of the points about the tendency for thinking deeply about life, especially its origins and fragility, can be terrifying. I think this leads us to something like the notion of the Absurd in Albert Camus (I teach a unit on Camus and Lovecraft in my horror class). The Beach House is a fresh take on cosmic horror that I find delightfully chilling both as a horror fan and as a philosopher. And the ending... well, I won't spoil it, but it is sublime, in the sense of terrifying awe at the incomprehensible vastness of the ocean of being from which we come and into which we dissolve.

Anyway, these were some of my favorites. You can see the official winners of the festival currently on the CFF website. (One of the winners, The Wanting Mare, I personally didn't care for, but I could appreciate the look of it and the fact that a weird science fiction-adjacent film could be made mostly in a studio but still look good... it was maybe my science fiction instincts wanting more from the plot and reasons to care about the characters).


Events!

"Yeah, yeah. Hey, pal, what about the events?"

Oh, yeah! Sorry. The events, held on Microsoft Teams (basically Microsoft's Zoom/Skype type thing), were also great! I got to see Alex Winter (Bill of Bill and Ted), GWAR, and Ice-T (not at the same time, although that would have been awesome). There were Q&A's on a lot of the films shown at the festival and other films (like one with Mick Garris on his 1994 adaptation of The Stand). There were a few events on general issues like women in horror and one on publishing Fangoria magazine. Most of the events allowed fans to ask questions in a chat that were then approved by a moderator and asked of the guests. I asked a bunch of questions and a lot of them were answered, which was really cool. Some of my favorite events were live commentaries with producer Dave Lawson and directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead of their films Resolution, Spring, and The Endless. (I recommend all of these as some of the most interesting science fiction horror of recent years. The Endless is on Netflix.)

But the CFF team didn't stop there! They rented a studio for a lot of the intros and some of the interviews featuring a duo of horror characters in full costume and make up as well as the demon Beelzebub, affectionately nicknamed "Bubs." It was like watching an old school creature feature on UHF at 2am in 1985. Hail, Bubs!

Hail, Bubs!

Hopefully the festival will be back in person in 2021, but I have to say the online format wasn't all bad. As Katelyn Nelson from Killer Horror Critic discussed, the online festival is actually a lot more accessible for everyone. I for one loved it. If only we could have more fun and cool things like CFF during these otherwise incredibly shitty times.

Stuff I watched at CFF 2020!

Features: 

The Beach House, The Ringing Bell, The Wanting Mare, The Vice Guide to Bigfoot, Skull, The Wave, Scare Package, Attack of the Demons, The Pandemic Anthology

Shorts:
The Haunted Swordsman, Creepshow (episode of the new show with commentary), The Boogeywoman, Inferno, Metamorphosis, Disco Graveyard, Live Forever, JazzBerry, SeaSapien, His & Herzog, Compartmentalization Storage Facility, For No One, Little Willy, Gabby!, Beauty Juice, Best Friends Forever, Conspiracy Cruise, Maere, Sonnie, Catatonic, Teraphobia, Girl in the Hallway, Separation, Fatale Collective: Bleed

Events: 

Women in Horror, Alex Winter on Zappa, GWAR, Resolution Live Commentary, Ice-T (Remembering the Game), The Beach House Q&A, Vice Guide to Bigfoot Q&A, Skull Q&A, CFF Awards, The Wave Q&A, The Endless Live Commentary, Scripts Gone Wild (The Thing), How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Publish the Summer 2020 Fangoria, Mick Garris Revists The Stand, Scare Package Q&A

Taco Bell and Miller High Life: Perfect Pairing for GWAR