Because all of the cool kids in horror are doing it, and I just want to be popular, here are my picks for the best horror movies of the past 10 years.


Let's amend that.

There were great movies made during this period, so many deserving of a wide audience, that it's impossible for me to state that these are the "best." But these are the ones that most affected me, and the ones that remain resonant. I believe it's worth your while to seek them out.

In order of release:
​

Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil (2010)
You're Next (2011)
The Cabin in the Woods (2012)
Kill List (2012)
The Sacrament (2013)
The Babadook (2014)
Honeymoon (2014)
It Follows (2014)
Green Room (2015)
Hell House LLC (2015)
The Invitation (2015)
Savageland (2015)
The Witch (2015)
Train to Busan (2016)
Get Out (2017)
The Endless (2017)
Hereditary (2018)
Revenge (2018)
Crawl (2019)
Ready or Not (2019)

Other World Austin and its horror counterpart Under Worlds Austin offered strong material during its 2019 festival, but the standout was a small Canadian horror film called Dead Dicks, which told the story of a mentally ill young man who discovers what appears to be his own dead body after a suicide attempt. When his sister arrives at his apartment to check on him, they find more dead versions of him as well as a strange hole in his bedroom wall.  Dead Dicks covers tough subject matter with an honest portrayal of mental illness and depression, and it captivated me from its opening frame. 
 
I had the opportunity to speak with directors Chris Bavota and his wife Lee Paula Springer, both of whom also wrote the screenplay, and actor Heston Horwin, who plays the eponymous Richard.  Over delicious Indian food (and too much beer on the part of the interviewer), we chatted about their careers, the making of Dead Dicks, and what is in store for the filmmakers in the future.
 
Derek Austin Johnson: Tell me a little about your work before Dead Dicks.
 
Chris Bavota: I decided, for whatever reason, to go to the Chattanooga Film Festival.  I didn’t have a film playing, but I had friends who had their films playing, and so Lee and I decided, like, if this is going to be the career we take, then we really need to start traveling, networking, and so I was going to go to this festival.  And, by chance, Heston (Horton) was there with Rocksteady Row.  We ended up hanging out because his film was distributed by the same company that distributed my friend’s film.  When I got back to Montreal, I said to Lee, “Look, we’re writing this script, and I really think this guy I met would be right for this role.”  So I described him, and then we watched Rocksteady Row together, and I was like, yeah, he could be this kind of funny, horrible character that we were writing.  When that script was finished, I contacted [Heston] on Facebook--we had been friendly on Facebook since after we met--and said, “I don’t know if you’d be willing to read this script, but there’s a character in it I think you’d really be good for.”  And he was like, “Yeah, send it over!”  And we sent it, and he said, “I would totally love to be this character.  What do you need from me?”  We said that if we could get a letter of intent from you just saying that you’d be in the film, we could start casting it and start trying to raise some money.  He sent us the letter, and after passing around the script we got some positive response on it, we spent a year and a half trying to raise the budget.  We got a bit of money, and we were suddenly at TIFF (the Toronto International Film Festival) in Toronto, and we had these meetings set up.  Heston had us hooked up an agent from UTA, and we thought, this is going to happen.  This film is coming together.  And after we leave TIFF and we’re driving back to Montreal, a series of phone calls told us all of our dreams were falling apart.  It was just one after the other, all in the car ride driving for five hours to Montreal, nothing but negativity coming our way.  Lee and I were like, “What are we going to do?  This film is dead.”  We decided we could be sad for this car ride, but when we got back to Montreal we had to come up with a plan because we can’t go another year without making a movie.  When we got back to Montreal, I said that I have this idea that I’ve had in my head for a while, and I think we can do it for no money.  I sat Lee down and our producer Albert, and I pitched them the idea.  Lee said we should do a short film, but I felt we had to do a feature because there were too many short films and I didn’t think we had enough money to make a short film that would really stand out.  We have to make a feature, because even if we make a feature for the same amount of money, at least it’s a feature.  It took a bit of time to convince them, and then I started writing Dead Dicks and decided to write it for Heston.  I said, “Let’s write it for him, and we’ll send it to him, and if he agrees to do it, I’ll think he’ll do an amazing job.  So we wrote it, and sent it to him, and he responded, “I’ll do anything you guys want.  If you guys are really going to make this, I’ll come out to Montreal and I’ll live in your basement.  Let’s just make this happen.”  And then we raised the budget pretty quick.  We raised twenty-five grand from friends and family, and then we were like, oh my god, this might actually happen.  And we had to figure out how to get Heston here.  Heston said, “I’m really sorry, but you have to talk to my manager.”
 
Heston Horton: (laughs) Yeah, manager was like, “Pump the brakes.  What’s happening?  You can’t make your own deals for free.”
 
CB: But it all worked out.  His manager was amazing, and super helpful, and then he pretty much did that.  He flew out, lived in our basement, and we made this movie in ten days.  It just flew by.  We weren’t too sure how it was going to turn out or what was going to happen.  Lee and I had never made a film together, but we’d made commercials and music videos.
 
Lee Paula Springer: We’d written together, but we’d never directed together.
 
CB: We’d never directed together, and I’d only done one short film, though I’d produced and written for years, so coming out the other side of it, I guess we weren’t really sure what we were making or how it was going to be received.  The fact that we’re [at Other Worlds Austin] now is just shocking, overwhelming, and amazing.

​DAJ: I love the premise behind Dead Dicks.  It’s one of the things that sold me on the movie, and why I wanted to see it immediately.  Can you talk a little bit about its origin?
 
LPS: Well, it’s like Chris said, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, or just getting to a place that was, like, if we don’t make something, we’re never really going to do it.  So we decided to do it.  Chris had had this idea that was just a grain of an idea: what if a man was pooped out of a wall?  And I asked, “How is that a movie?”  (laughs)  And when this happened and we were decided that, if we financed it with friends and family, and raised whatever we can, we need to write really small, think of it as a chamber piece, and wondered how we were going to do it.  Initially, I think Chris’s idea was that it was going to be two male roommates, but it was hard to connect, we just wondered why we cared.  And then we asked, “What if it’s siblings, a brother and a sister?”  And I thought the dynamic of a younger sister in a parentified kind of role…it was familiar to me, and all of the sudden we could access the characters, if that makes sense.  And then it was a blur.  We trashed the first draft real quick, then talked it out and wrote another draft, and had acting student read it, which was really helpful. 
 
CB: The mental health aspect just seemed to be surrounding us in our personal lives.  So many things were happening with friends that shocked us and made us realize that we didn’t really talk about this kind of stuff, so it became a subject that we talked about a lot.
 
LPS: But that wasn’t the intention.  We were never really saying we were going to write a movie about mental health.  It was just really us that came out.

DAJ: That leads into my next question, because one of the things that really wowed me about this particular movie was that it was a commentary on mental illness.  It’s a commentary on suicide.  And the thing I really like about the movie is its matter-of-fact approach with its subject matter.  It treats it very honestly.  What kind of research did you find yourself conducting to get those details right?  How much of this was personal?
 
LPS: Highly personal.  I grew up in an environment with a very unusual upbringing, to put it mildly.  So I’ve been on both sides, to be the sort of Becca (the sister in Dead Dicks), and I myself have struggled with depression for many years, on and off.  In terms of, how does one deal when one is through it, and how does one deal with the shame that comes with it when you realize how, when you pull yourself out of it, the damage…I didn’t need a lot of research.  It was there.  But also to be the support person was very familiar to us.  We also read a lot in the DSM, particularly, although it’s never named in the film, a lot about bipolar disorder.  A film that I had seen and that Chris definitely has seen many years ago, was The Devil and Daniel Johnston and also the film Crumb.  Both the films had a profound effect on the pair of us.  I remember the part in the movie when Daniel Johnston is reading the DSM entry for bipolar, which was then called manic depression, and he was like, “So there you have it.  I’m a manic depressive with manic delusions.”  I feel like that was in our heads for a decade.  And then this whole movie thing happened, and when I was writing it, I said that we needed to look at this entry in the DSM and keep this in our back pocket because we had relatives like this.  Because the character Richard was an artist, we wanted to include elements of the DSM in the art, so there are passages cut into it.
 
CB: Rather than slap people over the head with it, we wanted to find ways we could incorporate it into character development, like his self-centered behavior of how he creates his art all being self-portraits.  Only when he sees what his sister has gone through does he draw a portrait of her.  Just these interesting ways to describe the things Lee had experienced, what I was experiencing.  We wanted to express ourselves, and in doing that we tried to make a very sincere and honest film unintentionally.
 
LPS: That also has fart jokes.
 
CB: (laughs) Sure, it’s got a lot of humor in it, but I think the heart that’s there and the way we approach the subject matter…the only way we knew how was to do it through our own experiences.  I think that what comes across, and I think that’s why maybe the audience is able to connect with it and not see it as if we’re standing on top of a soap box or following something that’s trending.  This was the only movie we could make at this moment.
 
LPS: And I use humor as a defense mechanism, so it’s very natural to go in that way.

DAJ: You mentioned wondering how you make a movie out of a wall pooping out people.
 
LPS: Or birthing. (laughs)
HH: (laughs) Is it a vagina or an asshole?

LPS: I’m firmly Team Vagina.
 
DAJ: That specific image has a kind of Lynchian feel to it, as well as some heavy David Cronenberg overtones…
 
LPS: Huge influences.
 
CB: We’re fans of the Davids.  David Cronenberg is a hero for most young Canadian horror filmmakers.  As we prepared to shoot Dead Dicks, we watched Dead Ringers quite a bit to understand how he did the doubling, the creative ways he used it--
 
LPS: How do you hide the split?
 
CB: --and how we could be creative with a way we could use it, too, because we wanted it to be subtle and not just, “This is a doubling shot,” like it was just happening around you.  But there’s so much in the film that Cronenberg-influenced, like Richard’s first outfit, when he comes out in the blazer and the boxer shorts is right out of Dead Ringers, when Jeremy Irons comes out wearing that at the end of the film.  The university Becca gets into is called Congerber, which is an anagram of Cronenberg, so it is a really juvenile homage.
 
LPS: I still remember when I was going to London, it was always the best when my teacher would roll out the television and the VCR and you were like, “Oh, this is going to be a good class.”  I guess he was tired this one day, so he told us we were going to watch the best hour of television that’s ever been on.  And we watched the Twin Peaks pilot.  And it was like…(makes sound of head exploding).  So to even to make something where someone says, “I see the thing that you love,” is like…
 
CB: It’s amazing for us.

DAJ: Heston, what were some of your influences?
 
HH: I had my research and my homework that was given by Chris and Linda, which included The Devil and Daniel Johnston, which I really connected with on an immediate, deep level.  Something about Daniel Johnston makes me really want to care for him.
 
LPS: There’s a sweetness.
 
HH: Yes.  So I studied that and other films they were watching in terms of their filmmaking approach, even if it wasn’t necessarily a direct character translation or parallel, like The One I Love by the Duplass brothers.  That was something, because it was done on a very small budget, one location, very few characters, a great sci-fi, horror-y feel…that was a great movie.  We also watched Crumb together.  We also watched an offbeat horror movie called Another Evil.  I just wanted to be in their heads as much as I could so we were speaking the same language.  They also sent me articles in terms of bipolar disorder.  I really wanted to get it right and treat it with gentleness and authenticity, because that can go south so quickly if you’re not really prepared to take that on.  So I read a lot of articles that they sent to me.  In terms of the character, it’s a lot of exaggerating my own psychoses and idiosyncrasies.  I don’t have bipolar disorder, but there are certain emotional waves that Richie rides that are real for me and I kind of felt like, in other roles, where I’ve studied other characters and I studied other actors, for this one I watched Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook, and outside of that, I built Ritchie from scratch with Chris and Lee.
 
DAJ: So what’s next on the horizon for everybody?
 
HH: I did another feature this July with another buddy I went to film school with; he did another Other World feature called The Axiom, and he and Chris touched base…
 
CB: By coincidence, I spoke with him and he said he knew Dead Dick was, and I said, “How?”  And he said that he’d just made a movie with Heston, and I was like, “Who are you again?  What is going on?”
 
HH: So that’s in post, and really exciting, and also just another flavor of character that I was trying out.  After that, in Los Angeles I’m a part of this theater company called the Groundlings Theater that has a lot of Saturday Night Live connections, all sketch comedy, and I’m on the Sunday Company there.  I just started a month ago and will be performing every Sunday.  And I’m just really growing that muscle, trying to apply the comedic muscle to the scope of me as an actor, now I’m working on these sad, fucked-up but funny characters and am constantly trying to build from scratch different people that I can be.
 
LPS: We have two features in the works.  One is the original script that we have been trying to push uphill, which I think got a little more traction, because of Dead Dicks, with a group called the Velvet Icons in Toronto.  It’s a very loose adaptation of an H. P. Lovecraft story called “The Outsider,” from the perspective of the people that the creature comes to.
 
CB: In the story, it’s the perspective of the monster, and he encounters a family, or some people having a party.  We wanted to see what it would be like from that party, but also create a movie where there’s a monster that doesn’t know it’s a monster.  So when this monster encounters the family, it sees them and tries to mimic them, but because it doesn’t know its own strength winds up just slaughtering them.
 
LPS: It’s a creature feature, but we also really like the idea of exploring who a monster is depends on your perspective, and the idea of invasion, and casting people as invaders, inverting the racism of Lovecraft.  That will take a long time, because we want the monster to look really dope.  (laughs)
 
CB: We’ll need a bit of a larger budget for that.
 
LPS: A smaller one in development is called Red Acres.
 
CB: It’s a personal film about my grandfather, who had dementia at the end of his life.  My grandfather also came from Italy, and I didn’t know a lot about his history, so we started talking about the idea of loving a person who might have a dark secret.  So it’s about this young man who meets his grandfather for the first time near the end of his life.  This young man is all alone except for this old man.  He becomes his caregiver to understand where his grandfather comes from.  And what he learns is that his grandfather is this prolific serial killer whose been killing people and burying them on his land for forty years, but he’s been feeding this thing that lives underneath the ground.  So, it’s about that.  That’s something we think we can do with a small budget, something we can do in like fifteen or twenty days, quick and dirty, with the same kinds of themes and the tone of Dead Dicks.
 
LPS: We always wonder if it’s still a movie if we took out the genre element, if it still stands up, but what’s so wonderful about genre is that ability to take a theme and push it all the way to the end.  So we’re excited about that one.

It seems fitting that Other Worlds Austin, Texas’s premiere science fiction film festival that ran December 5-8, launched its sixth year with 1984’s Dreamscape, a B-feature classic that follows psychic Dennis Quaid as he joins an experiment to have sleepers enter each other’s unconscious.  Fitting because it not only showcases a forgotten if occasionally clunky effort that often reminds one of the source code for Christopher Nolan’s Inception, but also because the movie’s central idea (to say nothing of its title) offers insight into not only the festival itself but science fiction in general: what is science fiction but a tour through society’s dreamscape, examining our hopes and nightmares of our universe?

The twenty-plus features (plus shorts) selected this year by the Other Worlds team gave us remarkable glimpses into these dizzying dreamscapes.  If genres often possess a collective focus, then this year saw several stories using time travel motifs, each running their characters back and forth through the chronosynclastic infundibulum to illuminate their lives and the conditions we often wish to escape.  In the absorbing British film Around the Sun, a film location scout falls in love with a crumbling château as well as its beautiful, flirtatious representative as she recounts the story of a famous book set there.  They flirt, they discuss life, the universe, everything that matters, though they may only be characters in a book.  The Ascent, another British movie, this one about a military team that is forced to fight the same battle over and over in perpetuity.  Afterlife, from the Netherlands, tells the story of a woman who returns to the beginning of her life with the sole intention of saving her mother, who had died much too soon.  It’s a touching, bittersweet parable that focuses on the realities of life and death.  Volition, by contrast, is a lean and mean thriller that begins as a gritty film noir that follows a man who has visions of his own murder and attempts to change a fate that he knows is fixed.  It’s worth your while.

​If the above time travel movies kept their eyes on the past, it may have been because our grasp of the future has loosened.  This doesn’t mean that other filmmakers failed to set their sights futureward, however.  In After We Leave, a former criminal obtains a visa to an off-world colony but cannot leave the run-down, dystopian Los Angeles without his wife.  It’s an interesting premise, though it didn’t connect with me like I thought it would.  The documentary I Am Human, on the other hand, provided an exploration of co-evolution of humans and technology, focusing on people with different ailments that choose to use robotic implants to cure themselves.  It’s a good primer on a dizzying subject.  In The Honeymoon Phase, a young couple lie about their marital status so that the can receive $50,000 for joining “The Millennium Project,” a 30-day scientific study analyzing couples’ relationships while they reside in secluded futuristic smart homes.  Slowly, one succumbs to madness as she questions the identity of her partner.  One of the festival’s closing movies, it said much about who we are and how we may cope with an ever-encroaching future.

Running concurrent to Other Worlds Austin was Under Worlds Austin, with a focus on horror film.  The best effort was Dead Dicks, directed by Chris Bavota and Lee Paula Springer (an interview with the pair as well as actor Heston Horwin will appear here on Friday), which tells the story of a mentally ill young man who discovers what appears to be his own dead body after a suicide attempt. When his sister arrives at his apartment to check on him, they find more dead versions of him as well as a strange hole in his bedroom wall.  Dead Dicks covers tough subject matter with an honest portrayal of mental illness and depression.  It’s my favorite movie of the entire festival.  In Dementer, a woman attempts to put her life back together after escaping a backwoods cult by taking a job in a home for special needs adults, only to have the dark messages of her past tell her one of the sick patients needs more than just medicine.  The Canadian feature Spiral is about a same-sex couple that moves to a small town so they can enjoy a better quality of life and raise their teenage daughter. However, nothing is as it seems in their picturesque neighborhood.  In the festival’s centerpiece picture Scare Package, Rad Chad’s Horror Emporium onboards its mysterious new employee.  It’s a meta-comedy meant to subvert different horror tropes, and was probably the most-attended film of the weekend.  Alas, I wish I had enjoyed it more.

Other Worlds Austin often showcases the work of a specific filmmaker, and this time it was one that means a good deal to me: Nicolas Meyer, the writer/director responsible for saving the Star Trek franchise with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.  It would be impossible to underestimate his influence on my own geek interests.  I discovered the film adaptation of his novel The Seven Percent Solution when I was nine years old, and almost immediately became obsessed with Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories.  A couple of years later I saw Time After Time, which ran at Other Worlds Austin on Friday night for its 40th anniversary screening.  In it, H. G. Wells invents a time machine in 1893 London, only to have it stolen by Jack the Ripper.  Inevitably Wells chases the Ripper through the streets of San Francisco 1979, where his dreams of utopia must face the harsh realities of his future…and, interestingly, our past.  After both it and a screening of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country on Sunday, Meyer spoke about working in Hollywood, about Star Trek, and about his new novel The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols, where he revisits Holmes and Watson.  

If there was one thing I lamented initially about this years festival, it was the seeming lack of space opera, which remains one of my favorite sf subgenres.  I needn’t have worried, because the final movie was the German film The Final Land, and it stands as one of the best of the festival’s six-year run thus far.  Two men, an escaped prisoner and the guard assigned to recapture him, discover a derelict spaceship in the middle of a desert sandstorm.  They work together to make it operational and fly off the planet, setting course for a nearby space station.  Then the prisoner begins reading the ship’s log and learns that the former crew succumbed to space sickness, just as his shipmate begins showing signs of it.  Made with found materials and practical special effects, The Final Land stayed with me for days afterward, charting our collective dreams to the stars…and for Other Worlds Austin, a capstone for its sixth year. 
 
I look forward to its seventh year, when it charts new dreamscapes.

Other Worlds is one of the premier SciFi Film Festivals in the US, championing filmmakers and writers and bringing the best films to the Geek Capital of the World. With a diverse and approachable team of programmers, we are building a network of SciFi fans and filmmakers, leading a loyal community, and launching SciFi films into the wider world.

Running from December 5-8, it's the festival's sixth year, and the lineup looks even more impressive than its did in the previous five. 

This is without a doubt my favorite film festival.  I love covering it, and will post updates on my Twitter feed.  I hope to see you there.

Thursday, December 57:42PM Dreamscape (35TH ANNIVERSARY SCREENING) 
LAUNCH FILM
Joseph Ruben | USA | 99 min | 1984
Writer: David Loughery, Chuck Russell, Joseph Ruben
Cast: Dennis Quaid, Kate Capshaw, David Patrick Kelly, Max von Sydow, Christopher Plummer
Psychic Alex Gardner escapes his life of petty crime to join a government research project in which he uses powers to enter dreams of those with sleep disorders. However, as his talents develop and he delves deeper into the experiment, he discovers not everyone on the team shares the same motives and he may be the only one who can stop a plot against the project.
Featuring a great cast and the perfect mix of SciFi, Horror, and Action, DREAMSCAPE was only the second film to receive a PG-13 rating. We are very proud to bring together Director and co-writer Joseph Ruben, Producer and co-writer Chuck Russell and Screenwriter David Loughery for this exclusive 35th Anniversary Screening care of 20th Century Fox.
David Loughery broke into television with a story for HART TO HART. After the success of DREAMSCAPE, Loughery wrote STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER. He teamed up with Rubin again for Wesley Snipes/Woody Harrelson buddy cop film MONEY TRAIN.

Joseph Ruben broke into film with sexploitation films like THE SISTER IN LAW and teensploitation films like THE POM POM GIRLS before achieving cult status with DREAMSCAPE and THE STEPFATHER. His greatest success came with the 1991 Julia Roberts thriller SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY and 1993 Macauley Culkin thriller THE GOOD SON.

Friday, December 6

4:15PM The Final Land (North American Premiere)
(screens again Sunday, 7:40PM)
Marcel Barion | Germany | 113 min
Writer: Marcel Barion
Cast: Milan Pešl, Torben Föllmer
A runaway convict and his pursuer escape a prison planet in an old spaceship in search of a new home. As they search for a place to go, their separate paths to this moment become a point ofconflict, as well as the strange history of this derelict ship that they now drive. Then a strange signal gives them hope of a new future. In the grand tradition of 2001 and SOLARIS, THE FINAL LAND plays off the mystery of vastness of space and our still miniscule understanding of our place inside it.

4:30 Under World Shorts: Dark Nights & Dark Thoughts

4:40PM Afterlife (Texas Premiere)
(screens again Saturday, 7:20PM)
Willem Bosch | The Netherlands | 93 min
Writer: Willem Bosch
Cast: Sanaa Giwa, Romana Vrede, Gijs Scholten van Aschat, Jan-Paul Buijs 
After her mother’s passing, teenage Sam takes up most of the household responsibilities. When she, too, ends up in the afterlife and finds out she can get a do-over, Sam gives life another try with the sole mission of saving her mother. A fantasy science fiction film, Afterlife tugs on the heart strings and deals with the hard realities of life and death.

7:10PM Time After Time (40TH ANNIVER. SCREENING)
Defender of the Universe Film
Nicholas Meyer | USA | 112 min | 1979
Writer: Nicholas Meyer
Cast: Malcolm McDowell, David Warner, Mary Steenburgen
Serial murderer Jack the Ripper escapes Victorian England using a time machine built by SciFi writer H.G. Wells. Pursing the criminal to 1979 San Francisco, Wells fails to find the socialist utopia he expects, instead landing in a world more suited for Jack the Ripper’s tastes. After reading an unpublished early draft of his friend’s novella, Meyer optioned the work and developed in into a charming comedy of two men, out of time, and the woman who gets caught between them, as well as a not so subtle dig at modern times.
Nicholas Meyer is often referred to as the man who saved the STAR TREK Franchise, his STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982) setting a world record for its first-day box office gross and overcoming a perceived lackluster response to the first film. He went on to co-write STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME (1986), and write and direct STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY, as well as write for STAR TREK: DISCOVERY. Other major films include VOLUNTEERS (1985), THE DECEIVERS (1988), SOMMERSBY (1993), the television event film THE DAY AFTER (1983), which set a record as the highest-rated television film and the two-part History channel HOUDINI (2014) starring Adrien Brody. An accomplished fiction writer as well, Meyer adopted his first novel, THE SEVENPER-CENT SOLUTION, into an Academy-Award nominated screenplay. The Sherlock Holmes story was followed by three more, including THE ADVENTURE OF THE PECULIAR PROTOCOLS released this year.

7:15PM Z (Texas Premiere)
Brandon Christensen | Canada | 83 min
Writers: Brandon Christensen, Colin Minihan
Cast: Keegan Connor Tracy, Jett Klyne, Sean Rogerson
Cynical Beth feels trapped by her status as mom. She takes care of others before taking care of herself. She doesn’t think anything of it when her son, Josh, brings Z, an Imaginary Friend, into the house, ignoring small signs that her son’s new friendship may not be a healthy one. After a particularly tragic play date, Beth drugs Josh, leaving Z without a friend to play with. And he turns to Beth.

7:20PM Alien Addiction (US Premiere)
(Screens again Sunday 5PM)
Shae Sterling | New Zealand | 96 min
Writer: Shae Sterling, Melanie Price and Ricky Silvester
Cast: Jimi Jackson, Thomas Sainsbury, Harry Summerfield, Jojo Waaka, Ayham Ghalayini
Riko lives in a small town in the middle of nowhere (well, Waikato, New Zealand). Life is pretty normal, that is until two aliens crash-land near his house. Fortunately for Riko, the aliens like to get high and chill as much as he does and they develop an intergalactic friendship of epic proportions, as well as a strange relationship to human feces. However, unknown to the happy go-lucky visitors, alientologist Peter Mackintosh is hot on their trail and plans to capture them and reveal them to the world.

9:55 PM Enhanced (US Premiere)
OPENING NIGHT FILM
James Mark | Canada | 97 min
Writer: James Mark, Matthew Nayman, Peter Van Horne
Cast: Alanna Bale, George Tchortov, Adrian Holmes
A secret task force hunts down a group of enhanced mutant outcasts, until their team leader begins to question if he is on the right side. When forced to capture a young girl just learning how to use her powers, he instead joins her to fight the government that is after her. But they are not the only ones on the tail of the mutants, as a super powerful enhanced serial killer seems intent to take down others of his kind.
Other Worlds 2019 gets a jump start with the action packed, high tension ENHANCED as its Opening Night Film. The programming team selected this film to set the tone as to what to expect from this year’s line-up. This is the superhero genre that has taken over the cineplex, but told in a fresh, indie way. James Mark utilizes his experience as a stunt man and fight choreographer to fill the screen with intense action scenes. He combines this with a strong narrative and real characters with heart and drive.

9:45PM Spiral (Texas Premiere)
Kurtis David Harder | Canada | 90 min
Writers: Colin Minihan, John Poliquin
Cast: Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman, Ari Cohen, Jennifer Laporte
In the mid-nineties, same-sex couple, Aaron and Malik, move to a small town so they can enjoy a better quality of life and raise their 16-year-old daughter, Kayla, with the best social values. However, nothing is as it seems in their picturesque neighborhood. At first, Malik holds back his suspicions and covers up bigoted vandalism in their home. Nevertheless, when Malik witnesses the folks next door throwing a very strange party, his suspicions become a Lovecraftian reality.
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10:05PM Lake Michigan Monster (Texas Premiere)
​Ryland Brickson Cole Tews | USA | 78 min
Writer: Ryland Brickson Cole Tews
Cast: Ryland Tews, Erick West, Beulah Peters
The eccentric Captain Seafield hires a crew of specialists in his revenge plot against the creature that killed his father. After several failed attempts, Seafield is forced to take matters into his own drunken hands. What began as a simple case of man versus beast soon plunges down a rabbit hole of mysterious unknowns and Lovecraftian hijinks.

Saturday, December 7

11:30AM SciFi Shorts 1: Love in the Time of Robots

11:30AM Dementer (Texas Premiere)
Chad Crawford Kinkle | USA | 80 min
Writer: Chad Crawford Kinkle
Cast: Larry Fessenden, Katie Groshong, Stephanie Kinkle, Scott Hodges
Katie begins to put her life back together after escaping a backwoods cult by taking a job in a home for special needs adults. Then the dark messages of her past tell her one of the sick patients needs more than just medicine. Dementer is an art house horror passion project that came to life when director, Chad Crawford Kinkle wanted to make a film with his special needs sister. Shot in an almost documentary style, the film embraces and properly represents the developmentally disabled, both in the script and in the actual casting, while still being both thrilling and disturbing.

11:45AM I Am Human (Texas Premiere)
Taryn Southern, Elena Gaby | USA | 90 min
I AM HUMAN explores the co-evolution of humans and technology, focusing on a small group of people with different ailments that choose to use robotic implants to cure themselves. Diving deep into the current technology and where science could take us in the future, I AM HUMAN fills its frames with heart-warming stories of real people and their process of deciding to accept technology as a part of their bodies.

1:50PM 1BR (Texas Premiere) 
David Marmor | USA | 90 min
Writer: David Marmor
Cast: Nicole Brydon Bloom, Taylor Nichols, Giles Matthey 
After leaving behind a painful past to follow her dreams, Sarah scores the perfect Hollywood apartment. But something is not right. Unable to sleep, tormented by strange noises and threatening notes, her new life quickly starts to unravel. By the time she learns the horrifying truth, it’s too late. Caught in a waking nightmare, Sarah must find the strength to hold onto her crumbling sanity…or be trapped forever in an existential hell. 

2PM SciFi Shorts 2: Crossing Over to the Future

2:15PM LIVE FROM OTHER WORLDS FILM FEST – IT’S “SCIENCE VS FICTION”
Scott Weinberg is a veteran film critic. Steven DeGennaro is a doctor of astrophysics. Every week they compare and contrast two noteworthy SciFi films on their popular podcast “Science vs Fiction,” where they discuss the artistic quality of the films, whether they get the science right, and whether or not that even matters. Past pairings have included ARMAGEDDON vs DEEP IMPACT, ALIENS vs STARSHIP TROOPERS, and JASON X vs LEPRECHAUN IN SPACE IN SPACE.

Other Worlds, they will open the massive can of worms that is cinematic time travel when they turn their talents on the 1979 classic (and Opening Night Film!) TIME AFTER TIME.

4:20PM The SciFi Lecture: The Old Dark Trope
“It was a dark and stormy night.” The couple’s car breaks down, blows a tire, crashes into a tree and runs out of gas. Yes, all at the same time. An ominous Victorian house at the top of the hill is the only refuge for miles and miles. They have nowhere to go and must seek refuge in THE OLD DARK HOUSE.

This year at Other Worlds, we are exploring the trope of the Old Dark House, how it originated, other tropes and stories that appear in within the Old Dark House, and how the trope has evolved and continues to be used today. Join Other Worlds Programmer and Screenwriting Director Eric Harrelson for a discussion and curated clip show curated by Other Worlds newest Programmer Wyatt Walker. Find out why old tropes never die, they just get subverted.

4:25PM Long Shorts: Lingering Visions

4:35PM Dead Dicks (US Premiere) 
Chris Bavota, Lee Paula Springer | Canada | 83 min
Writers: Chris Bavota, Lee Paula Springer
Cast: Heston Horwin, Jillian Harris, Matt Keye
When a young nursing student named Becca receives a series of panicked messages from her older brother Richie, she rushes over to check on him. Following a seemingly successful suicide attempt, Richie, who suffers from mental illness, discovers what appears to be his own dead body. When Becca gets to his apartment, they find more dead versions of Richie as well as a strange hole in his bedroom wall. Together, they must figure why his suicide just won’t keep.

4:20 UW Shorts: Dark Nights & Dark Thoughts

7:20PM Afterlife 
Willem Bosch | The Netherlands | 93 min
Writer: Willem Bosch
Cast: Sanaa Giwa, Romana Vrede, Gijs Scholten van Aschat, Jan-Paul Buijs 
After her mother’s passing, teenage Sam takes up most of the household responsibilities. When she, too, ends up in the afterlife and finds out she can get a do-over, Sam gives life another try with the sole mission of saving her mother. A fantasy science fiction film, Afterlife tugs on the heart strings and deals with the hard realities of life and death.

7:30PM The Ascent (North American Premiere)
(screens again Sunday, 2:15PM) Tom Paton | UK | 100 min
Writer: Tom Paton
Cast: Rachel Warren, Simon Meacock, Bentley Kalu
Special ops squad “Hell’s Bastards” are sent to infiltrate a civil war to retrieve intel. The unit soon find themselves trapped on a never-ending stairwell forced to climb or die. To survive, they must revisit their past sins if they ever want to get off. 

9:45PM Doppelganger 
(Founder’s Choice)

10PM Volition (Texas Premiere) 
Tony Dean Smith | USA | 91 min
Writers: Tony Dean Smith, Ryan W. Smith
Cast: Adrian Glynn McMorran, Magda Apanowicz, John Cassini
On a rain-soaked night in 1991, two cars collide, leaving all drivers dead on the scene, including the mother of the lone survivor – a child – James Odin. Seven-year-old James foresaw the accident happening two days prior and tried to prevent it, but who’s going to believe a kid who claims to see the future? Twenty-plus years later, James is a product of the failed foster care system, using his ability for petty crime and cheap thrills. But when a pre-sentient vision reveals to him his own imminent murder, James must go on the run and change a fate he knows is fixed.

10:15PM Scare Package (Texas Premiere)
Under Worlds Centerpiece Film 
​USA | 103 min
Directors: Emily Hagins, Baron Vaughn, Noah Segan, Chris McInroy, Anthony Cousins, Hillary & Courtney Andujar, Aaron B. Koontz
Cast: Toni Trucks, Joe Bob Briggs, Dustin Rhodes, Chase Williamson, Baron Vaughn, Noah Segan
A meta Horror-comedy anthology film where each segment subverts a different set of Horror tropes, SCARE PACKAGE intertwines its components around the on-boarding of a mysterious new employee at a struggling genre video store: Rad Chad’s Horror Emporium.
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This year’s Under Worlds Centerpiece film is very special for our programming team for many reasons. It’s an intelligent, creative look at the Horror genre that is both hilarious and scary. Furthermore, three of the segments were shot here in Austin by local filmmakers, one of whom is an Other Worlds alumni. The producing team for the film does a great job managing the tone of the anthology while still maintaining each director’s vision. It is rare to see an anthology film where connecting material is just as compelling as the individual parts, but the team has done it here.

Sunday, December 8

11:15AM Around the Sun (Texas Premiere)
Chad Crawford Kinkle | USA | 80 min
Writer: Chad Crawford Kinkle
Oliver Krimpas | UK | 78 min
Writer: Jonathan Kiefer
Cast: Cara Theobold, Gethin Anthony
A film location finder is shown around a repossessed, crumbling French château. Over the course of the afternoon, he slowly falls for both the place and the owner’s flirtatious representative, as she recounts the story of a famous book set there. But is their present-day connection for real, or just a projection of the book’s 17th Century characters? As the scene plays over in different variations, the two almost lovers orbit around each other like a binary star system, forever circling but never quite reaching each other.

11:45AM SciFi Shorts 1: Love in the Time of Robots

12:00PM The Old Dark House
(World Premiere of New Score)
Chad Crawford Kinkle | USA | 80 min
James Whale | USA | 73 min | 1932
Writer: J.B. Priestley (from the novel by) (as J.B. Priestly), Benn W. Levy (screenplay)
Cast: Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton, Gloria Stuart
A precursor to the genre of renegade young people getting stranded among older (and far more degenerate) adults in a remote location, THE OLD DARK HOUSE is a “pre-code” film and features some language and sexually suggestive material that would be banned from American screens until the 1960s. Boundaries will be crossed, reality will fail, and mayhem will ensue. The family our kids come across, this time, can also be seen as the grandparents of THE ADAMS FAMILY. THE OLD DARK HOUSE, is FRANKENSTEIN director, James Whale’s follow up horror film that also stars the previously unknown Boris Karloff and is a precursor to their final film together, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN. Like many films of the day, it was released with a “library score,” music not specifically composed for the title. Award-winning composer Jay Woelfel has composed a brand new 52-minute music score, the first ever done for the film.

2:15PM SciFi Shorts 2: Crossing Over to the Future

2:15PM The Ascent (North American Premiere)
Tom Paton | UK | 100 min
Writer: Tom Paton
Cast: Rachel Warren, Simon Meacock, Bentley Kalu
Special ops squad "Hell's Bastards" are sent to infiltrate a civil war to retrieve intel. The unit soon find themselves trapped on a never-ending stairwell forced to climb or die. To survive, they must revisit their past sins if they ever want to get off. 

5:00PM Alien Addiction (US Premiere) 
Shae Sterling | New Zealand | 96 min
Writer: Shae Sterling, Melanie Price and Ricky Silvester
Cast: Jimi Jackson, Thomas Sainsbury, Harry Summerfield, Jojo Waaka, Ayham Ghalayini
Riko lives in a small town in the middle of nowhere (well, Waikato, New Zealand). Life is pretty normal, that is until two aliens crash-land near his house. Fortunately for Riko, the aliens like to get high and chill as much as he does and they develop an intergalactic friendship of epic proportions, as well as a strange relationship to human feces. However, unknown to the happygo-lucky visitors, alientologist Peter Mackintosh is hot on their trail and plans to capture them and reveal them to the world.

5:05PM After We Leave (North American Premiere) 

Aleem Hossain | USA | 82 min
Writer: Aleem Hossain
Cast: Brian Silverman, Clay Wilcox, Anita Leman Torres, Anslem Richardson
Jack returns to a bleak Los Angeles after abandoning his wife six years ago. There’s only one way to escape this high crime, dystopian world – getting a visa to an off-world colony, but it’s a couples’ visa and Jack needs his wife to use it. Jack dives back into the world of crime that he left behind in search of his wife and a way off the planet. Is Jack back because he wants to make things right or because he needs his wife to use this “lottery ticket” to a better life?

5:10PM Long Shorts: Lingering Visions

7:40PM The Final Land (North American Premiere)
Marcel Barion | Germany | 113 min
Writer: Marcel Barion
Cast: Milan Pešl, Torben Föllmer
A runaway convict and his pursuer escape a prison planet in an old spaceship in search of a new home. As they search for a place to go, their separate paths to this moment become a point ofconflict, as well as the strange history of this derelict ship that they now drive. Then a strange signal gives them hope of a new future. In the grand tradition of 2001 and SOLARIS, THE FINAL LAND plays off the mystery of vastness of space and our still miniscule understanding of our place inside it.

7:40PM A Good Woman Is Hard to Find (Texas Premiere)
Abner Pastoll | UK/Belgium/Ireland | 113 min
Writer: Ronan Blaney
Cast: Sarah Bolger, Edward Hogg, Andrew Simpson
Recently widowed mother of two, Sarah, is desperate to know who murdered her husband in front of her young son, rendering him mute. Coerced into helping a low-life drug dealer stash narcotics stolen from the local Mr. Big, she’s forced into taking drastic action to protect her children, evolving from downtrodden submissive to take-charge vigilante.

4:35PM The Honeymoon Phase (Texas Premiere) 
CLOSING NIGHT FILM
​Phillip G. Carroll Jr. | USA | 88 minWriter: Phillip G. Carroll Jr
Cast: Chloe Carroll, Jim Schubin, François Chau, Tara Westwood
Struggling young couple Tom and Eve lie about being married so they can enter “The Millennium Project.” Paying $50,000, this 30-day scientific study analyzes couples’ relationships while they reside in futuristic smart homes secluded in the woods. Run by a mysterious researcher and his associate, the experiment finds Eve descending into violent madness, questioning her lover’s trust and whether he is the man she thinks he is.
THE HONEYMOON PHASE caps off the 2019 Other Worlds Program with a love story covered in tension and drama. On top of the thrilling relationship ride, the film will leave the audience with plenty to contemplate and discuss until Other Worlds 2020 begins.