Chicago Film Festival After Dark Lineup

Posted : October 16th, 2015

From the Chicago International Film Festival, currently in progress:

We’re thrilled to announce the lineup for After Dark! Plunge into paranoia, witchcraft, and soul-wrenching stand-up comedy with our lineup of horror and flinch-inducing fringe films! Featuring eight full-lengths from the U.S., Canada, Taiwan, India, and Japan, and a shorts program from Austria, Romania, UK, Mexico, and South Korea, the After Dark program boasts a diverse lineup for fans of the bizarre.

In Tag, Sion Sono, Japanese cinema’s most entertaining shockmeister, delivers his craziest picture yet. A young schoolgirl (who’s actually three different people) must fight killer winds, machine-gun-toting teachers, pig-headed monsters, and fate itself to escape a strange, deadly reality. The terrifying Ludo matches hypnotic imagery with sinister mythology to create a truly frightening experience. In Entertainment, Gregg Turkington (a.k.a. Neil Hamburger) delivers a memorably disturbing performance in this absurdist road-movie oddity co-written by Tim Heidecker (Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim) and throbbing with angry humor. The Laundryman, is a kinetic horror/kung-fu mash-up featuring innocuous-seeming dry cleaners fronting for a hitman-for-hire operation. A modern-day Taxi Driver, Other Madnesses plumbs the seedy underbelly of New York through the eyes of a man slowly losing his mind. Like a marital twist on The Fly, Bite incisively uses body horror to uncover the true terror of humanity’s mating rituals. The Abandoned is a claustrophobic, bone-tingling thriller that merges visceral scares with slow-burning mystery, a haunted house that turns into a chilling psychological portrait. A disturbingly intimate take on paranoia, the debut of They Look Like People will leave you on high alert, taking a good look at your co-worker, your neighbor… and even your best friend. In our Drawn to the Blood – Midnight Program, prepare for the sexy, the horrifying, and the abnormal with these boundary-pushing short films.