Good news for anyone that thinks Austin horror begins and ends with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: two local productions with a uniquely ATX twist on shocks and scares will be on your screens before Halloween.
Tonight The Honor Farm celebrates its arrival on VOD with a special screening at the Alamo South Lamar, accompanied by a very special cast and crew Q&A. The Kickstarter-funded psychedelic rewrite of the prom night slasher plays more on supernatural strangeness than straight-out shocks, for a very unique kind of thrill ride. As director Karen Skloss explained, “If someone’s going to go through a rite of passage, there’s usually an element of danger.”
Closer to Halloween night itself, meta-horror-comedy Found Footage 3D finally possesses your TV. The Austin-developed, Gonzales-shot shocker with smarts has become a critical smash on the horror festival circuit, including nabbing the Dark Matters audience award at last year’s Austin Film Festival (see our interview with director Steven DeGennaro here). Now it arrives on horror streaming site Shudder on Oct. 26, in not just one, but three formats: modern 3-D, traditional 2-D, and, in a nod to the classic immersive horrors of yesteryear like Creature From the Black Lagoon, old-fashioned anaglyph 3-D. So even if you don’t have a 3-D TV, all you need is a pair of those red-blue cardboard glasses and it will all be coming right atcha.
For some more Austin horror viewing options, read our interview with Aaron B. Koontz, the Austin-based director of Camera Obscura, and start filling out your viewing schedule for the haunting season.
This article appears in October 6 • 2017.
