FrightFest review – Traumatika

FrightFest review – Traumatika

I was very taken with Pierre Tsigaridis’ Two Witches – a formally daring, brilliantly-crafted shocker with a lot of content – and his follow-up, which carries over the extraordinary lead actress Rebekah Kennedy, is if anything even stronger.  You have to be willing to pay attention to a structure which feels like what you’d get if you subjected an Amicus-style anthology picture to William S. Burroughs’ cut-up-and-rearrange technique to get the most out of the film, though it also delivers enough proper scares, imaginative spins on familiar horror motifs and splatter effects to hold the attention.  The original title – Traumatika – probably counts as a trigger warning in itself.  An early caption lists the sub-categories of child abuse, which signals that this isn’t going to be a fun thrill-ride … then a prologue set in Egypt in 1910 taps into mummy/exorcist vibes as a haunted father buries a demon statuette in the desert and commits suicide (the image of blood congealed on sand is striking).

The film hops around in time – in the narrative present (2023 or so), exploitative talk show diva Jennifer Novac (Susan Gayle Watts), who audiences will wind up hating more than the demon, hosts a Halloween special interview with Alice Reed (Emily Goss), who has written a book (Mommy Monster) about her sister Abigail (Kennedy), who was subjected to sexual abuse by their drunken antique-smuggler father (Sean O’Bryan) and semi-possessed when he twisted the head off that statuette.  In the early 2000s, Abigail fled the family home to hide in a burned-out property and abduct a series of boys as possible hosts for the demon – with only Mikey (Ranen Navat) passing muster.  In this segment of the story, told out of order, we meet Abigail – who has a hare-lip and open sores on her face – as kidnapper, watching public domain spooky toons on TV (a recent horror film trope) and trying to keep a sheriff (AJ Bowen) from learning the truth about what horrible things are in the basement.  We also flash back a year or so to find Abigail not a monster but a victim, then see her being nagged by a oil-dribbling phantom version of her father and a blue-skinned Nosferatish djinn (perhaps inspired by an old Les Edwards paperback cover which has become a classic image) to select a child victim.

In the present, Alice is a fragile survivor but similarly nagged by the crass Jennifer and a one-scene boyfriend with a crisis coming on Halloween night as that TV special airs, raking up the past, and just-out-of-an-institution adult Mikey (Luke Bucaro) turns up dressed as a ghost, also influenced towards violent evil but not 100% possessed.  A repeated, unusual theme is characters under a demonic pall trying not to be evil and indeed going to heroic lengths to resist doing dreadful things – contrasted with Jennifer, who is just an awful person, and happily throws everyone else under a bus for ratings (a shoe-throwing moment is likely going to be a thing audiences remember from the film).  Tsigaridis also co-scripted with Maxim Rancon (who also plays the demon Volpaazu).  Like Two Witches, it has an oppressive, dark, grimy, gory look which is all the more unnerving for its few sunlit stretches or inserts of chintzy video blur TV footage.  O’Bryan is one of those you-know-the-eyebrows actors (a regular in the Has Fallen films, recently in the solid horror indie Nyctophobia) and throws himself into an extremely seamy role – he’s a worse person when not imagined as a demon by his shattered daughter.  Tsigardis has a knack of shifting viewpoint across characters and time periods – it ought to derail involvement in the mosaic storyline but doesn’t, with players like Bowen, Goss, Alondra Andrade (as Jennifer’s suffering minion) coming on and occupying centre screen so firmly that the perils their characters endure register powerfully.  Beside the shoe-throwing, there’s a signature moment involving a typical kid Halloween ghost-in-a-sheet costume which is a great coup de frisson.