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Day two of Frightfest 2003 kicked off with the announcement that later in the day we'd be seeing the first fleeting glimpses of the new British horror comedy Shaun of the Dead, by the creative team behind the excellent cult TV hit Spaced. It was then straight into the first film, and the first short of the event, Simon Hynd's creepy, Ringu inspired Virus. Without a single word spoken, this tells the tale of office worker Andrew who, working late one night, tries to contact his girlfriend Amber. Unable to get a reply from her mobile phone he instead gets an email containing an attachment which activates webcams in his office and in Amber's flat - webcams that reveal a shadowy figure creeping up on her. But why does Amber look so scared? What is she seeing on Andrew's webcam broadcast? Making maximum use of limited resources, Hynd crafts a genuinely eerie film from the flimsiest of plots and the sight of the ghostly figure rising up behind an unsuspecting Amber provided the first genuinely spooky moment of the weekend.

The day's first feature was the German Tattoo, a bleak, stylish serial killer offering from Robert Schwentke that has enough original twists and turns to make it the best film of the festival so far. After a wonderful opening shock, rookie cop Marc Shrader is assigned to the veteran, no-nonsense homicide detective Minks, a man with a haunted past, who is investigating a series of killings in which the victims have had elaborate tattoos removed from their bodies.

Deservedly a huge hit in its native Germany, Tattoo is a grisly, compelling policier that isn't afraid to acknowledge its influences, chiefly David Fincher's Se7en (1995) which it perhaps occasionally tries to emulate a little too closely. But every time you think that you've guessed what's coming because of its similarity to Fincher's film, Tattoo catches you off guard with some unexpected twists. The identity of the killer isn't terribly hard to work out, but the fate of some of the lead characters is unexpected and the final shot adds a chilling wrinkle to the well worn story.

Performances throughout are outstanding, particularly from August Diehl (who went straight from this to Anatomie 2 (2003)) as the immature rookie forced to grow up very quickly as the horrors threaten to overwhelm him, German TV veteran Christian Redl as the depressed, haunted Minks and another TV graduate, Nadeshda Brennicke, soon to be seen in another German serial killer movie, Anti-Matter, as the woman with more secrets than you can shake a stick at.

Tattoo has been picked up for UK distribution by Metro Tartan so should be getting a theatrical and DVD release at some point - great news as this a film deserving of the widest audience it can find.

There was more European horror up next as French director Eric Valette stepped up the mic to introduce his Maléfique, which played extremely well with the Frightfest crowd but which left me rather cold. Perhaps it's my dislike of black magic movies, but there was something about Maléfique - which is exceptionally well made and contains some startling images - that didn't quite work. Carrère, a businessman accused of corporate wrong-doings, is thrown into a cell which he has to share with pre-op transsexual Marcus, the wife murderer Lasalle and the childlike cannibal Daisy. Hidden in the walls of their cell is a book written in the 1920s by a former inmate, Danvers, who used the black arts to apparently escape from confinement by walking through the walls.

Sadly, it takes forever for the prisoners to work up the courage to actually try out the incantations in the books and lead to the excellent climax which contains all of the film's best ideas. Valette makes the most of his claustrophobic set and some of the performances - particularly from Gérald Laroche as Carrère and Clovis Cornillac as Marcus are very good. There are some impressively realised and inventive effects too, but one can't help but feel that this would have been so much more effective as a short where the genuinely good ideas could have taken centre stage.

Outside, I chatted with Frightfest organisers Paul McEvoy and Ian Rattray, trying to get out of them the title of the mystery "surprise" film being shown on Sunday morning. Ian's comment that it was "British made" the night before turned out to be incorrect as Paul revealed - and Alan Jones later announced from the stage - that it's going to be Guy Maddin's black and white vampire ballet (no really, that's exactly what it is...) Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary. Alan later warned the crowd that there was no blood and gore and the announcement was met with a stony silence so it'll be interesting to see if anyone else actually turns up!

Another short film followed, the British Suspended from Zak Emerson. Inspired by the work of Ambrose Bierce, this atmospheric 5 minute vignette is set in 1642 at the height of the English Civil war and features a daring escape by a peasant due to be hung from a bridge. But the finale reveals that what we've seen may not be quite all it seems.

The first of the weekend's must-see movies was up next, Cypher which marked the welcome return of Cube (1997) director Vincenzo Natali with a stylish cyberpunk thriller that owes an obvious debt to Philip K. Dick. Jeremy Northam (looking unnervingly like a young Cary Grant) is excellent as the tormented central character, a corporate spy in the near future whose identities keep shifting and changing as he gets sucked further into a complex web of industrial deceit. Employed by Digicorp to record deadly dull speeches at conferences across the country, accountant Morgan Sullivan becomes corporate spy Jack Thursby. After meeting the mysterious Rita (Lucy Liu), Sullivan / Thursby begins to seriously doubt his true identity as Digicorp and rivals Sunway Systems try to manipulate him to their own ends.

Cypher is a film that demands total attention throughout - its complex narrative takes so many twists and turns that letting your concentration slip for just a moment could leave you as bewildered as its protagonist. But it's also a film that rewards your attention with an absorbing and intelligent SF thriller the likes of which we rarely see these days. Readers of one Philip K. Dick novel in particular will see the twist ending coming very early on, but it's still effective and the film boasts excellent performances, particularly from Northam in a difficult role. I'm not usually a Lucy Liu fan as she all too often gives the same one-note performance in everything she does, but here she's perfect for the role of mysterious femme fatale who's the key unlocking the final mystery.

Natali has barely worked since his brilliant debut Cube in 1997. Apart from the short Elevated and a handful of episodes of the TV show Earth: Final Conflict, we've seen nothing of him since. but Cypher shows that he's lost none of his skills and is still a director whose work will be eagerly awaited by genre fans in the future. Here's hoping that he doesn't take another six years before the next one!

After the break, Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, writer / star and director respectively of Spaced, took to the stage to introduce a tantalisingly brief 90 second glimpse of their forthcoming romantic comedy / horror hybrid (a "Rom Zom Com" according to Wright) Shaun of the Dead. The trailer had been specially made by Wright from raw footage that hadn't yet been colour balanced but the blink and you'll miss it collection of scenes suggests that this is going to be huge fun. Alan Jones announced that he appears briefly in the film as a zombie before introducing the next biggie of the day, Victor Salva's Jeepers Creepers 2, a film that Alan has been enthusing about for some time.

In truth, Creepers 2 isn't as outstanding as Alan's enthusiasm for it would suggest. It's by no means a bad film, but it's nowhere near as good as the first film. Set four days after Trish and Darry Jenner met the Creeper, the sequel picks up at the very end of the Creeper's current feeding frenzy as the creature snatches away farmer Jack Taggart's (Ray Wise) son in broad daylight before disabling a coach full of high school football players and their cheerleaders. The teens battle not only the Creeper but also their own fears and prejudices as the winged terror picks them off one-by-one, while vengeful Taggart and his other son close in on the the Creeper with a home-made harpoon gun strapped to their pick-up for a final showdown.

In the first film, the Creeper had been a genuinely unnerving monster until Salva decided to show us too much of him. This time, Salva shows us way too much of him, in a series of lingering close-ups that rob him of any air of mystery. His grinning glances at camera run the risk of turning him into the new Freddy Kreuger and subsequently his appearances just don't seem as scary as they should.

The other major problem here is the collection of idiot stereotypes we're supposed to be rooting for. A busload of screaming yobs on a bus is really just asking for the audience to cheer on the Creeper, which presumably is what Salva wanted as there isn't a single likeable character on the crippled school bus. It doesn't help that the performances are almost uniformly awful, with the exception of the always wonderful Ray Wise who simply doesn't get enough screen time.

Having said all that, the action scenes are well staged and there are one or two effective scare moments (I actually jumped at one point!) but the Creeper has become just another generic movie monster and no amount of sly references to The Birds (1963) and Jaws (1975) is going to help make him any scarier. There's a nice coda though which sets us up for a possible Jeepers Creepers 3, though Alan announced before the film began that Salva's next project will find him stepping into the shoes of Don Siegel, Philip Kaufman and Abel Ferrara as he tackles the fourth version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Day two came to a close with an altogether very different film - instead of the glossy Hollywood sheen of Jeepers Creepers 2, Saturday drew to a close with the long awaited first ever public screening of the finished version of Jim Van Bebber's Charlie's Family. A workprint from the late 90s has long been a staple of the fan bootleg circuit for many years but this was the version completed by Van Bebber with the help of Blue Underground, whose producer Carl Daft was on hand to introduce the film.

Not being a great fan of Van Bebber's earlier work, I wasn't holding out too many hopes for this documentary style take on Charles Manson and the killings he inspired so was pleasantly surprised to find that it's an intelligent and gripping debunking of some of the myths that have grown up around Manson and his family over the last three and half decades.

In 1996, a pair of film producers are preparing a documentary on Manson's followers, his so-called "Family" and are reviewing a mysterious videotape they've received containing interview footage with those who were there at the Spahn Ranch in the fateful summer of 1969 as well as shock re-enactments of the murders at Cielo Drive. As they watch a tape which re-enacts the orgies of sex and violence that Manson presided over, they are unaware that a new cult of killers has targeted them for a Tate / LaBiance style execution.

What makes Charlie's Family so much more than the usual Manson-glorifying nonsense is the way so many films about him have done is the way it focuses less on Manson himself and more on those who fell under his spell. It blows away many of the ridiculous myths that have sprung up around the Family and exposes them as a gang of drug-addled maniacs who were easily manipulated by the deranged Manson.

The film is deliberately shot to look like a 70s low-budget horror, bringing a warm glow of nostalgia to those of us who scoured obscure video shops in the early 80s hunting out exactly those films. But there's nothing 70s about the provocative and deeply disturbing depiction of the killings, the unflinching depiction of the Family's drug use and the effects it had on them and the confrontational sex scenes. Make no mistake, this is powerful stuff and not for the easily offended or the weak of stomach. Those with the nerves to take it however will be rewarded with the best film ever on the subject of the Manson killings and the film that finally shows us exactly what Van Bebber is capable of. It's perhaps an indication of just how galvanising Charlie's Family is that an appreciative audience sat through it largely in stunned silence.

It was the perfect end to a generally excellent second day. Now we've got the hardest part to get through - a 10:30 start and five features on day three, including the Korean Phone, Darklands director Julian Richards' The Last Horror Movie, Takashi Miike's Gozu and the highly fancied Cabin Fever. All this and Guy Maddin's vampire ballet movie...
KEVIN LYONS

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Last Updated: 15 October, 2008