Viscera 2007
Featuring films by: Victoria Waghorn, Shannon Lark, Michelle Fatale, Reyna Young, Heidi Martinuzzi, Leslie Delano, Brandy Rainey, Amber Steele, and Sallie Smith
2008, The Chainsaw Mafia

The brainchild of Shannon Lark and The Chainsaw Mafia, Viscera is a film festival that seeks “to give recognition through participating sponsors, awards, and distribution for today's female horror filmmakers making a difference in the genre.” And the first ever Viscera film festival selections are now on DVD. Part of the Viscera Project (co-sponsored by Pretty/Scary), which was created by women to facilitate the advancement of females reaching for more powerful roles within the horror genre, the Viscera DVD is a great taste of what you can expect to find from women receiving more support in the horror genre. 8 short films of the creepiest nature are collected on one DVD to give the world a sampling of what women are capable of creating when they are given the chance…

Yes, Wretched, a short film written and produced and co-directed by myself, is on the DVD, so I will not be reviewing that. I mean, I know its great, but it just wouldn’t be fair.

But the films on Viscera are stand-alone and awesome, each with a very distinct flavor and tone. This proves that women’s interests in horror are as varied as Shannon Lark’s wacky and colorful creations and Brandy Rainey’s chilling story of traditional horror survival. (To read a full review of Brandy Rainey’s The Snake Pit, go here).

Shannon Lark has a distinct style as a filmmaker. Her focus on color and detail in Brains, Go Ask Alice and Its My Birthday are a frightening contrast to the dark subject matter of each film. Brains is a fun and funny music video shot with Lark’s dance troupe The Living Dead Girls and starring Amber Steele who, dressed in zombie garb, sings about eating brains. Its My Birthday jumps right into the middle of a  scene in which a girl is forcing a birthday guest to sing ‘The Birthday Song’ for her amid the dead bodies of all the other birthday guests. Birthday cake, presents, clothes, and traditional ‘happy’ elements are overshadowed by the sudden and completely shocking violence. In Go Ask Alice, again there is a gorgeous scene of Alice in Wonderland (played by Sallie Smith) enjoying tea at a tea party with the white rabbit and a bird-like creature that, again, turns into a random act of unexpected and gruesome violence. Lark’s objective is first to lull you with the brightness of her films, and then to torture you with some imagery that’s going to really disgust you.

Victoria Waghorn’s sullen When Sally Met Frank plays on the Dr. Frankenstein mythos by incorporating it into modern day plastic surgery. A doctor lays a patient out on metal cot and proceeds to perform liposuction, amongst other procedures, in what looks like a careless and awful way. In fact, as the film goes on, the skin and tissue he is working with starts to take on the look of some kind of raw meat, until, at the end, we see that the woman has been transformed, metaphorically, into a pig. Still lying on her metal slab, she’s a euphemism for how lightly we take plastic surgery procedures and how much respect our bodies are probably given by the doctors who perform these procedures.

Sallie Smith’s very short I’m A Little Teapot takes Lark’s need to shock one step further by giving us a surreal experience in which a girl, wearing a bag over the upper half of her body, is shot point blank up against a brick wall while singing the opening verse of the “teapot song”. What does it mean? I have no idea. But it’s definitely worth watching to see the realistic shot.

The Cleaner by Michelle Fatale is the star of this DVD, a traditional storyline about a woman who deals with her cheating husband the same way she deals with her obsessive compulsive disorder: by cleaning up. The Cleaner shows how much Fatale has grown since her last horror short, Dead Line, and her lead actress Kristin Burke is stand-out good. Lark appears as the home-wrecker who gets what she deserves.

Reyna Young’s Out Of Print is a whimsical horror short that recreates the fear many of us have of dolls, clowns, and features a black and white dialogue-free scene involving a simulacrum with a deadly weapon. It’s freaky.

While most of the women are Northern California gals, Viscera hopes that the second year will expand the horizons. The 2007 DVD will no doubt be the first of many awesome collections of underground, indie, and just plain awesome shorts in the horror genre all made by girls.

Check out the DVD!