Collectionary
Brazil
Director - Kapel Furman
Two paramedics discover a treasure in an old cellar. Accidentally, they activate an inter-dimensional portal, bringing to life the creature known as The Engineer, a being with electromagnetic powers who will stop at nothing to recover the jewels that allow him to travel between dimensions.
Kapel is one half of the team that made Skull The Mask and while I had some concerns about the overall storytelling there was no denying that the gory effects were awesome and that film played very well on the festival circuit. The project is already state funded and came to the Lab looking for an additional small sum to complete funding. The budget itself seems meager but Furman’s background is special effects. The small amount the team is looking for might be made up in pre-sales depending on who backs the project
Skull also had a good international sales team behind it, our friends at Raven Banner. I'm not suggesting they get behind this one but there is at least a prior relationship there. Our friends at Fantaspoa are producing the flick.
Crono-Capsulas
Chrono Capsule
Costa Rica
Director - Miguel Gómez Orozco
Samanta (Sam) is a young clinical psychology student who would like to understand the human mind and its relationship to the world. She feels that her love life deconcentrates her from her goals, lately she has been behind in her thesis and is already getting impatient with Carlos, her best friend and research partner, this due to her latest love failure, which has had her drained and uninspired.
Billed as a sci-fi adventure romance, Orozco created a teaser for his pitch video and honestly this felt like it would work better as a web series than a feature film. Never mind he announced that this would be part of a planned franchise of films. It did draw some attention at Sanfic Morbido in Chile the other month which will give them 30% of their budget. Those of us in a position of higher power see something in Chrono Capsule worth investing in. The script is done and looking to shoot in the Summer.
PIT
Ecuador
Director - Diego Araujo
Diana, 27, travels to a remote island with her boyfriend Pit, 45, to salvage a halting relationship. When Pit is bitten by something, his already toxic behavior takes a more sinister turn. Diana convinces herself that it’s all in her head, even when Pit starts looking and behaving like a hairy beast after dark. When the half-eaten cadaver of the resort’s cleaning lady appears, Diana realizes what kind of beast the island has unleashed.
Araujo plans to use the horror genre to tell the story of an abusive relationship and aims to place the lycanthrope against a tropical backdrop. He also wants to explore the patriarchal society that allows the monster to exist, metaphorically and figuratively. Themes will include abuse and gaslighting, which Araujo hopes will speak to a female audience slightly older than the genre’s target audience of teen to 30s.
Hela
Venezuela
Director - Gisberg Bermúdez
A dystopian world that explores the dark side of blind ambition, ego and their lead to destruction. Takes place in an infinite time loop that transcends the past, parallels the present and is without reach of the future. The story is set against an aged sanatorium with a mythical lake that houses a creature. It follows Henry’s blindsided quest into finding a cure for his daughter’s cancer.
The video was too short and did not go into the film or the director’s vision as well as other videos have. Gave us very little to go on so we really cannot comment on impressions that we got. However, this project came to the market with one of the highest asking prices this year and they are looking for pre-sales to make the last %30 needed. It makes for a large amount of investments on behalf of joining production companies. Yikes. Looking to shoot in Romania, have already taken advantage of the country’s rebate program.
Líbranos del mal
Deliver Us From Hell
Colombia
Director - Juan Diego Escobar Alzate
The eighties pass in a remote and conservative community that surrounds a hydroelectric plant. A family made up of three young brothers, father and mother, has grown apart for unknown reasons, but the death of their father will bring them together again. This is just the beginning of a family tragedy that will lead them to discover and decipher dark puzzles of their lineage, and terrifying and ancestral truths of the community.
Resigning to put his ambitious project Searching for the Black Rainbow on the back burner for now my friend Juan Diego came to this year’s LAB with a smaller but far more combustible project Deliver Us From Hell. Taking hard topics like pedophilia, atrocities from the church and injustice towards civil, social and human rights and looking at them through a genre lens he’s not going to pull his punches. With more and more injustices towards children being uncovered on all corners of the world a film like this would be like a match thrown into a tinderbox. A voice for innocent children by way of a phantasmagoric horror. Then JD threw in Sinister, Relic, Midnight Mass and The Lodge as references. With a below modest asking price and letters of intent from some of Colombia’s leading talent, if we were committed to a top five list this would have been on it.
Los Gatos
The Cats
Bolivia
Director - Juan Pablo Richter
Bolivia, the early sixties. The Hemorrhagic Fever epidemic, produced by an unknown virus, is wreaking havoc on the population of San Joaquin, an Amazonian small town. Valdemar, a writer immersed in grief after the death of his daughter, has been chosen by Death to narrate the horrifying events; it is his journey through Hell looking to heal his punished soul.
The production team is looking for a screenwriter to bring Richter’s treatment to life. Everyone likes a good underdog story, even if it is a potential horror movie called The Cats. Based around real life events involving a pandemic in Bolivia in the 60s it looks like Richter and his producer Paola Gosalvez are aiming to look at the event with a sort of gothic horror eye. It would be rife with characters associated with Death, a narrator speaking on their behalf, an international doctor who caused the death of his wife and a mysterious nurse who just happens to be the last person patients see before they die. Richter would take visual cues from early Del Toro faves The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth but said he would mostly draw from Dreyer’s Vampyr. Cool. The budget seems a bit high but if you don’t ask you don’t get. They will likely have to trim that down if the project moves forward.
Manifesta
Peru
Director - Enrique Méndez Valverde
A young youtuber is unexpectedly tortured by piercing headaches. Meanwhile, some specters appear to him every night, which seem to be derivations of his computer into the real world and which also represent the characters of his network consumption. Something indecipherable is unleashed.
Manifesta is interesting, if not for just coming from Peru but there is this underlying punk rock world that can be interesting. Valverde appears to work in a very indie state of mind and Manifesta also looks to take place in a low-down urban setting, of broken pavement, factories and warehouses. International appeal may come with the main character’s online presence and persona, as deep as we are in this social age.
This is a micro budget horror and with a large amount of the sum already committed prior to the pandemic the team only needs to secure a small amount for production and visual effects work.
Of note, and probably something that will come up when speaking with international partners, is that Valverde’s prior films do not appear to have played outside of Latin America. We’re missing more information about his prior independent films that would prove otherwise.
Não Morto #0
Undead #0
Brazil
Director - Carlão Busato
On All Souls’ Day, Gilvan, a lonely middle-class young man, suffers a domestic accident and is visited by Death. But our hero refuses to die. The unexpected decision hampers Death’s schedule that, stuck to Gilvan’s stubbornness, is forced to miss her commitments. No longer taken by her, the dead begin to roam the world that collapses while Gilvan and Death resolve the impasse.
Carlão Busato had me when he mentioned The Meaning of Life in the pitch video. I’m pretty easy that way. Tell me Monty Python was an influence on your project and I’ll push you right to the top of the list. This also feels like something that would happen in a Prachett novel as well, someone refusing to die and putting Death in limbo. And Death wouldn’t be the only one in limbo either. In the pitch video Busato revealed that another character would be a serial killer who is quite upset that Death is not keeping their end of the bargain. Man, that’s dark.
This project has a hefty price tag attached to it. Even after the math it’s a bit for investors to recuperate with international sales. But the idea that Death is thwarted and just stops doing their job is darkly funny and has potential.
Síndrome de Wendy
Wendy´s Syndrome
Director - Sinhué F. Benavides
Mexico
Consuelo will spend a life in prison for the murder of her husband. She gets an authorization to spend an afternoon at her house for the last time; her children Ana, Ángel and Raquel will be there too. During the afternoon, the past emerges in each of them and it is not always generous. One question will be asked: How much do you love your children?.
Ah. So this is interesting on a social level, the rise of domestic violence during the pandemic because everyone was forced to stay at home, together. It is something that we would not think about during these times. Wendy’s Syndrome sounds very personal to Mexican director Sinhué F. Benavides, basing the script off of stories from his family and his own fears of his father’s rage.
Upiro
The Sisters of Blood
Spain
Director - Óscar Martín
Spain, 1755. A young woman is sent to a cloistered monastery in which several novices have been mysteriously bled to death. An unconventional Franciscan looks into these unsettling events. Everything seems to lead to an ancient tale that the new Enlightenment society would rather keep out of sight. A bloodthirsty upiro seems to have infiltrated the convent.
Martin has based his film on the first case of vampirism in Spain! Neat. What also should be known is that the nuns in the convent have committed to a vow of silence so anticipate a lot of storytelling with just images alone, at least at the beginning. Until the screaming starts.
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