SXSW fest sets Fantastic and other horror titles

Austin, TX’s South by Southwest Film Festival has announced its lineup of features for the 2010 event, running March 12-20. Among them is a slate of Midnighters features including several rounded up by the folks behind the city’s Fantastic Fest, an eclectic group of international movies that counts three in the horror genre.

Among the Fantastic slate is the international festival premiere of HIGANJIMA, a Japanese/Korean co-production directed by Kim Tae-kyun from a script by Tetsuya Oishi. The title refers to an island where a teenager goes with some friends in search of his missing brother, and discovers a legion of evil vampires. See the trailer (no subtitles) below and look for more Fango coverage of HIGANJIMA in the near future.

World-premiering via the Fantastic program are British writer/director Gareth Edwards’ MONSTERS, about a journalist and a tourist traveling through an area of Mexico infested with alien beings to reach safety in the U.S., and Ireland’s OUTCAST, helmed by Colm McCarthy from a script he wrote with Tom McCarthy, in which a couple with magical abilities are pursued by a relentless hunter. A “Super Secret” world premiere to be announced is also part of this group.

Elsewhere on the Midnighters schedule are the U.S. premiere of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Belgian giallo homage AMER; a screening of the early Ivan Reitman horror/comedy CANNIBAL GIRLS; the world premiere of COTTON, directed by Daniel Stamm, scripted by Andrew Gurland and Huck Botko and produced by Eli Roth, about a documentary crew filming a reverend’s final exorcism; ENTER THE VOID, the surreal new feature by Gaspar Noé about a dead man’s spirit in an increasingly nightmarish city; the world premiere of Andrew Bowser’s cryptozoological saga JIMMY TUPPER VS. THE GOATMAN OF BOWIE; Sean Byrne’s THE LOVED ONES, in which a girl and her father kidnap a boy she likes and subject him to a brutal “prom”; and the buzz-building TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL, directed by Eli Craig from a script by him and Morgan Jurgenson, about a pair of hillbillies mistaken for backwoods killers by a group of vacationing college friends.

Meanwhile, SXSW’s Emerging Visions series will showcase the North American premiere of RED WHITE & BLUE, the violent psychodrama by THE LIVING AND THE DEAD’s Simon Rumley about three young people whose lives collide with disturbing results; see the beginning of our RED coverage in Fango #291, on sale this month. And in the TX-centric Lone Star States series, Chad Feehan’s WAKE will have its world premiere; Josh Stewart and Jamie-Lynn Sigler star as a couple who encounter strange folks and events at a desert motel. For more info on all of SXSW’s movies, events, tickets, etc., check out the website linked above.