Big Ears 2018 – Regional Cinema, Regional Fear

You won’t find any mention of this on the official Big Ears website, but this year’s film lineup is built around two themes: 3D Cinema and Regional Cinema. The latter, curated primarily by Public Cinema co-founder Paul Harrill, highlights films made outside the commercial hotbeds of Hollywood and New York—films that are all the more groundbreaking for their humble origins. Harrill is a notable regional filmmaker in his own right, as the creator of the locally-filmed feature Something, Anything (available to stream on Kanopy with your Knox Public Library card!) and the soon-to-come Light From Light (produced by actress Elizabeth Moss). It’s easy to see how his own Knoxville-based work is inspired by his love for American Regional Cinema.

Harrill’s Big Ears Festival lineup—titled “A Sense of Place”—is a celebration of ten under-seen cinematic gems. Many of the filmmakers featured are widely known for their Hollywood work, like Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused) of Austin, Texas and Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting) of Portland, Oregon, whose early features It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books and Drugstore Cowboy (respectively) will play at the fest. Others have remained notorious outsiders, like John Waters, whose films gleefully lean into their countercultural indecency—perhaps none more sensationally so than Polyester, which will be screened in full “Odorama” thanks to recently-out-of-print scratch-and-sniff cards that complement the experience. Many of the independent films to be screened, however, have long flown under the radar—like Property by Penny Allen (another Portland filmmaker), which took home prizes at the first-ever Sundance Film Festival before fading into obscurity. Big Ears 2018 will offer a rare opportunity to see them on the big screen–or, in some cases, see them at all.

But the titles in this lineup that likely had the biggest effect on film culture, surprisingly enough, are horror films: Carnival of Souls and Night of the Living Dead. It is hard to imagine the horror genre as we know it today without these titles, which came as part of a decade-long wave of 60s horror cinema that redefined what Americans found scary. Before this, most prominent horror films centered on mysterious creatures that found their origins in faraway lands: Dracula, Frankenstein, King Kong, The Blob, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon, to name a few. But the year 1960 represented a sea change for the genre; the last film in the long-running “Universal Monsters” series (The Leech Woman) was released to little fanfare just months before Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho electrified audiences and suggested a new kind of monster–the boy next door. With the advent of 1960s horror—Carnival of Souls and Night of the Living Dead being prime examples—American audiences came to see their own backyards hiding monstrosity of all kinds (paving the way for slashers of the 70s-80s, of course). Regional Horror finds the evil germinating within the heart of America much more fearsome than any potential threat from outside our borders; our most real threat is ourselves.

The first regional horror film playing at Big Ears 2018 is 1962’s Carnival of Souls, directed by Herk Harvey of Lawrence, Kansas. It’s the sole fictional feature of a workman who made industrial films with the Centron Corporation for a living—like the highway safety film None for the Road, which clearly informs the botched drag-race of Carnival’s opening scene. The film immediately switches gears to follow a young atheist woman (played by Candace Hilligoss–the movie’s only trained actor) who has, despite her non-belief, taken a job as a church organist. It is an eerie, wandering film, in which the whirling sustain of her organ swells and fills the cinematic space even when she steps away from the keys to sleepwalk through a small-town American landscape. She’s inexplicably drawn to the magnetic pull of an abandoned amusement park populated by ghouls covered in smeared makeup–the lead ghoul being played by Herk Harvey himself.

The movie feels almost contemporary to the Conjuring universe in the reality-breaking way it will disrupt a scene with a spectral presence. But often, Harvey uses his jump scares as a fake-out, grabbing your attention with a ghostly interjection and then transferring your fear onto a more recognizable threat: namely, skeezy dudes trying to coerce/force the protagonist into non-consensual sex (or at the very least, uncomfortable social interaction). The movie is often talked about regarding its spiritual themes, but I think that Carnival of Souls will play much more directly as an exposé of entitled male predation for audiences living in the #MeToo moment. With $30,000, one trained actor, borrowed industrial equipment, and the Kansas countryside, Herk Harvey made an unnerving ghost story that haunts us even more strongly in the present. Hearing that organ score ring out in a full-sized theater is going to be an otherwordly experience.

A much more famous success story of Regional Cinema is 1968’s Night of the Living Dead by the late, great George A. Romero, who also worked in industrial filmmaking before making his first feature. In addition to carving out an illustrious career for Romero (unlike Herk Harvey, who just made the one), Night of the Living Dead is a movie that codified modern zombie tropes, so the story is one you might expect. The dead are walking, and no one knows why—so a set of strangers find themselves stuck in a house together struggling to survive the night. The film is powerful, though, and it owes a lot of its power to it’s modest production. Romero filmed in black-and-white because it was cheap, which made the film feel like news footage from its day (which audiences would have seen on celluloid in movie theaters) which evoked a sense of plausibility not unlike Orson Welles’s infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast. No one on his small team could play music, so they repurposed public-domain recordings from cheap sci-fi films to give a rural American landscape an unearthly aura. The zombie makeup was minimal due to a lack of special effects (Romero has actually stated that the character design was inspired by Herk Harvey’s look in Carnival of Souls), which made the zombies look much more like recognizable Americans than fantastical creatures—a staple of post-Psycho horror that grants it all that aforementioned thematic weight.

And perhaps most importantly, Romero’s limited resources meant he had no choice but to cast the film from amongst his friends/coworkers, leading to the revolutionary casting of Dwayne Jones, the first black man to ever play the lead in a horror film. There are many sequences involving Jones’s character slapping around unconsciously racist white people, and the image of him holding a shotgun, surrounded by hoards of barely-unhuman white farmers and businessmen, is evocative, especially in the heat of the civil rights movement. According to Romero, the part was written for a white lead, so the film’s racially progressive subtext was a happy accident rather than a product of artistic intent (he does claim, though, that he was exploring the quintessentially-1960s disintegration of society, communication, and the family unit). It’s spooky, with this in mind, to consider this anecdote from Romero: as he was driving to deliver the finished celluloid cut of the film, he heard the radio broadcast announcing Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. If you know how the film ends (don’t worry, this is not a spoiler), it’s all the more harrowing. If you don’t know how the film ends, be prepared for this moldy old film to legitimately shock you. Keen observers will even catch the way in which Jordan Peele called back to Night of the Living Dead in 2017’s searing social thriller, Get Out. Again: this past is not dead.