protean depravity

These past two weeks Berlin wasn't only blessed with icy cold and incredibly sunny weather, there were also film lovers running all around the city because it was Berlinale time again! For the 75th time this year! Although the film selection wasn't necessarily the best of all time, it was decent enough and I had the chance to finally satisfy my hunger for lots of movies from around the world despite financial concerns (the tickets get more expensive by the year and it's going off my vacation budget), frustration over sold out showings, and lots of other personal stuff I had to take care of. I'm happy that I was able to join three screenings followed by director interviews, I think two of them were even premieres, and that despite the unsettling collective cacophony of coughing and sneezing and sniffling I made it out halfway healthy. Let's take a look at the films now, here's my festival in a nut shell!

Enjoy the new short reviews!

As I previously mentioned in my introduction to this series, very few short stories from King's debut collection Night Shift haven't been adapted into other media; notably films, short films, series or even radio adaptations, and that's one of the reasons this work is a staple to have set standards for horror fiction to come. That entails setting up new tropes, pushing existing tropes into the horror domain or reinforcement thereof, creating a "hype" around them. The next short stories I'll discuss, Graveyard Shift (originally published in 1970 in Cavalier Magazine), Night Shift (Ubris Magazine 1969) and I Am the Doorway (Cavalier Magazine 1971) are all writings that boosted tropes that were both sort of hanging in the realm between science fiction and horror as well as pushed them into the mainstream horror of its time. As always, I recommend reading the short stories along.

The Fantasy Filmfest White Nights, a mini-festival which took place this past weekend, was both a lovely launch of Film February as well as a warm-up for the upcoming Berlinale (February 13-23) followed by the Final Girls Berlin Filmfest (March 5-9). So as to not exhaust myself and my finances early on, I only did two films per day, totaling four films; Above the Knee , Presence , MadS and Street Trash - I liked them all, although I have little critiques, comments and opinions I want to dump here. It is noteworthy that three out of four (horror) films I saw rely on narrative or technical methods that are experimental in nature. Now of course, I'm referring to my personal selection and not the entirety of the festival, and I may have been unconsciously drawn towards a certain kind of film, but I can assure that it wasn't apparent in their description, at least not necessarily for all of them. The thing is, it's awesome that more and more filmmakers dare breaking through the...