Popular high school cheerleader Jennifer (Megan Fox) and geeky kid Anita, aka Needy (Anna Seyfried), are unlikely friends who have been inseparable since childhood. But when Jennifer heads off with a visiting band one night and comes back radically changed, Needy starts to realise that her friend’s newly acquired cannibalistic tendencies might just put a damper on their friendship.
We blame the after effects of last night’s party for not making it to this morning’s screening of The Horseman, although we hear from other FrightFesters that it was a gory delight. Our first film of the day is Beware the Moon, an enthusiastic documentary looking at the making of the 1981 horror classic An American Werewolf in London. Written and directed by Werewolf fan Paul Davis, the film brings together cast and crew for an entertaining trip down memory lane.
It’s a cinematic rule of thumb that having children play major roles in a horror movie makes the film about 50 per cent more scary than it would otherwise have been; would such works as The Bad Seed, The Exorcist or even The Omen have become such classics without their pint-sized protagonists? Young Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra certainly understands this and uses it well and truly to his advantage in Orphan, a horror film that’s successful enough to forgive Collet-Serra’s his 2005 travesty House of Wax.
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