AHITH 2022—LINE-UP ANNOUNCEMENT

The 19th edition of Another Hole In The Head Film Festival (“AHITH”) will take place December 1 to 18, 2022 at the Roxie Theater, 4 Star Theatre, Stage Werks, Eventive, and Zoom. Offering 18 days of films in the sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and other assorted (sordid?) genres, AHITH continues its practice of bringing the latest independent genre films from around the world to San Francisco audiences. This year's event will include dozens of feature films and hundreds of shorts. 

AHITH 2022 kicks off with their Roxie Theater Opening Night feature Satanic Hispanics (2022), an anthology of five short films from some of the leading Latin filmmakers in the horror genre, spotlighting Hispanic talent both in front and behind the camera. With segments directed by Mike Mendez (The Convent, Big Ass Spiders!), Demian Rugna (Terrified), Eduardo Sanchez (The Blair Witch Project, From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series), Gigi Saul Guerrero (Bingo Hell), and Alejandro Brugues (Juan of the Dead), Satanic Hispanics was hailed by Kate Sánchez as a “masterclass in anthologies” when it premiered at Austin’s Fantastic Fest, where it was awarded the Best Directors in the Fantastic Fest Horror Features category.

  

Sánchez lays out the anthology’s structure as four stories introduced by an unnamed mysterious man chained in a locked room. Identified only as “The Traveler”, Efren Ramirez (Napoleon Dynamite, Lightyear, Crank: High Voltage) recounts the tales within his own, where he is being questioned as the sole survivor of a massacre. “In the vein of classic Amicus and Hammer horror anthologies,” Joseph Perry notes at his site Horror Fuel, “he regales the detectives, sometimes to their dismay and often to their shock, with a series of tales.” A “thrilling ride that manages to show the depth of Latin takes on horror and on how much one genre can offer when combined with others”, Sánchez deems Satanic Hispanics a “near-perfect anthology” that “manages to tell an astounding wrap-around” that holds its different tones and themes together.

Horror Movies Uncut features a videotaped interview with the filmmakers.

  

George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), the original zombie film that started it all and just won’t stay dead, is given fresh atmospherics with the world premiere performance of a new score by Sleepbomb whose “unique blend of doomy drones and electronics”, AHITH asserts, will insure that you will “never see the film the same way again.” Sleepbomb is a San Francisco ensemble focused primarily on film adjacent music. Stylistically ranging from drone and electronics to sludge and doom metal, Sleepbomb's unique scores provide a transformative take on classic genre films (such as Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Conan the Barbarian), recontextualizing them for contemporary audiences. 

 

For their “Live on Stage!” sidebar at the Stage Werx Theatre, AHITH offers “The Twilight Zone (Special Edition)” in a co-presentation with the Bay Area theater company Dreams On The Rocks. This special live event reimagines two classic episodes of The Twilight Zone: In "Eye of the Beholder" a woman wrapped in bandages awaits the results of her doctors' latest attempt to correct her facial deformities) and in "Nightmare as a Child" a school teacher is visited by a strange young girl. Completing the "TV" experience, a selection of commercial parodies will be performed during the break. Both episodes will be performed each night of the engagement. 

AHITH (2022) also boasts the U.S. premiere of The Curse (A Praga) by horror icon José Mojica Marins (aka "Coffin Joe"). The Curse was originally filmed in 1967 for Marins’ Brazilian TV show, but that version was lost in a fire. In 1980, Marins began filming a second version, but production was halted due to financial difficulties. The existing footage went missing until 2007, when producer Eugenio Puppo rediscovered it while preparing a retrospective of Mojica's work. After years of intensive restoration, including recovering the lost dialogue with the assistance of a lip-reader (!), the 52-minute film will make its U.S. debut at the 4 Star Theater. The Curse will double-bill with Mojica's Last Curse, a 17-minute documentary chronicling the restoration, which will screen immediately after the feature. 

Further offerings include Living With Chucky (2022), a documentary by Kyra Elise Gardner who grew up alongside Chucky the killer doll. She seeks out the other families surrounding the Child's Play films as they recount their experiences working on the ongoing franchise and what it means to be a part of the "Chucky" family. 

Also in the line-up is Shawn Burkett’s Don’t Fuck In The Woods 2 (2022), wherein the counselors of Pine Hills Summer Camp are getting the grounds ready for the season. While they set up, a mysterious girl enters the camp after a night of bloodshed. And there are things following her as well. 

 

Elevating their genre, AHITH includes Steve Balderson’s Alchemy of the Spirit (2022), a “gothic deconstruction of death, art, and mystery” that Film Threat describes as “haunting, beautiful, and extraordinary.” At The Arts Fuse, Eva Rosenfeld describes Alchemy as “a largely nonverbal story line about the complexities of mourning” and a “product of grief” conveyed as an “unreal vision through visual disruptions: veils, reflections, glaring light, a slippery sense of time. The colors—blues and yellows—are hypersaturated, as if Argento’s Suspiria were set in the daytime.”  

More titles to be announced.