Day Five of FearNYC was the best day of the festival so far. With one exception, the lineup was all premieres, and they were all stellar. The afternoon started off with an experimental short film program containing five shorts, ranging from the extremely experimental to a pretty cut-and-dried ghost story. The first film was The Last Letter, which chronicled a serial killer targeting people on their cell phones. Pieced together from archival footage of real performance art from the 80's along with present-day narrative, Last Letter an arthouse-y film that pushes the boundaries of a) what is considered a film and b) what is considered horror. I personally have little patience for these types of films. However, there was something vaguely unsettling about the performance art footage (one such piece of footage depicts a woman "making" a pizza by sitting on it and stamping it with her feet—right after delivering a pizza to the audience). Last Letter was followed by Mexican Flamenco, in which La Catrina, a skeleton, and La Llorona, a famous Mexican ghost, meet and communicate through an exploration of flamenco dance. Mexican Flamenco was beautifully shot, and the two dancers clearly knew their craft, but, again, it pushed the boundaries of what defines horror. Was it merely the fact that the dancers depicted ghosts and skeletons that made it a horror film? The film was made in Mexico, so I think if the audience had more information about what the characters' significance in Mexican culture, it would've been much more effective as a horror film. As a dance short, it was gorgeous and fluid. Next up was my favorite of the program, The Ghost of Madness, also shot in Mexico. A lonely man is haunted by a series of ghostly events in his house while watching a film called The Ghost of Madness that may have something to do with his past. Ghost of Madness is a brilliant depiction of a man slipping further and further into insanity after a violent episode. It's deeply unnerving, and the film is helped by its spot-on cinematography. The fourth film of the program was titles Boys Just Wanna Have Fun. Created by SUNY Purchase film students, it was about a college freshman who explores his sexuality by joining a mysterious cult. This film was incredibly smart; I think it is a scathing commentary on our country's attitude toward sexuality. (Spoiler alert) The young man breaks the second rule of the cult—be clear and honest about your sexuality, or else there will be consequences—when he declares himself "undecided" when prompted to define his sexuality as straight, gay, or bisexual. Two members of the cult break into his dorm room (after watching him spend the night with one of the male cult members) and murder him and his girlfriend in his sleep. It's basically a fit-in (be straight)-or-pay type of scenario, of which there are still plenty in parts of the world. I was just super impressed with this film. The last film was a Ukrainian film called Hunters for Metal. It was a pretty run-of-the-mill ghost story: two guys searching for metal scraps in the woods stumble upon an abandoned mansion. When they go inside, they discover the house isn't completely abandoned. Good, but not great. Still, after talking with the directors after the screenings and finding out they had almost no funding, I was impressed that they had made such a good-looking film with the budget they had. Festival goers were then shown a world premiere double feature of not-quite-shorts, not-quite-features: Squatters and Accursed. Squatters followed a trio of small-town paramedics who receive an anonymous 911 call from a seemingly abandoned house. They soon find out that the house is not all it appears. Squatters felt incomplete, and the directors of the film admitted as such. They felt it should've been a feature-length film but they didn't have the resources to turn it into one, which is a shame, because the film that was shown suffered for it. The special effects were great (they should've been; they were done by Michael Del Rossa, who worked on 300 and Pirates of the Caribbean) and the twist at the end was, well, expected but still a good ending. Accursed, on the other hand, was extremely polished and felt like a feature despite being only 45 minutes long. Presented as an anthology, six groups of people have their lives changed for the worse when someone drops off a peculiar box at an antique store and unleashes an ancient evil upon everyone in the store. Each story is terrifying (one woman gets kidnapped, has her legs cut off, and then gets fed her own legs in a stew) and it's all tied together neatly with the scene in the beginning when the store owner opens the box. I wish this incredible film had been a feature. (Who knew something so dark could come out of Canada?) If these two films ever get the funding to be completed, snatch them for your horror collections immediately. Next up was the NYC premiere of Dry Blood, a psychological thriller about a drunk and drug addict named Brian who locks himself away in a secluded cabin in the woods to get sober. He starts having ghostly visions (because he's in withdrawal or because there are ghosts?) and is visited multiple times by a sadistic police officer. As a last resort, Brian begs his only friend, Anna, to come to cabin to save him. It doesn't end well. Not the most polished film, but Clint Carney's performance as Brian is incredible. Carney, who also wrote Dry Blood, really sells the desperation and the fear that Brian experiences as he slowly loses his mind, especially at the end when he finally snaps. The effects are amazing, and the score really helps the film. Shelf this next to the rest of your psychological thrillers. Dry Blood was preceded by the short film The Smiling Man—directed by the visual effects designer of Avatar and Star Wars: The Force Awakens—in which a little girl comes face to face with the creature that murdered her mother. Visually stunning, of course, and a painfully tense film. My favorite film of the evening was Sickhouse, the world's first movie filmed entirely on Snapchat. Starring real-life Snapchat celebrity Andrea Russet, Sickhouse documents a group of friends who delve into the woods to explore the urban legend of Sickhouse, a house where a millionaire supposedly poisoned his wife and to which he now lures young women to become his new wife. The film plays out in 1-to-10-second Snapchat videos that add up to a 68-minute story. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Sickhouse. I went into it with a certain amount of skepticism, as I think everyone present did, but it was genuinely scary. Though it wasn't as good as The Blair Witch Project, there are certainly parallels between the two films, and I would go far as to say Sickhouse is the Blair Witch of the social media age. The four teenage protagonists in the film were all good actors, especially Laine Neil, who played Andrea's tormented cousin Taylor. Good old-fashioned found-footage film updated for the digital age. This belongs right next to your copy of Blair Witch Project and V|H|S. Sickhouse was preceded by the short film Engagement, which was about a group of six friends celebrating the engagement of two of them. They all get a mysterious Amber Alert–style message saying five people have been murdered in the area—but the message is from three hours in the future. Convinced that one of them is the murderer, they start to turn on one another. Very interesting concept for a horror film. Next was the NYC premiere of the remake of the 1963 splatter flick Blood Feast. Fuad Ramses, a man who owns his own America-themed diner in Paris by day and works as a security guard at a museum by night, becomes entranced by a statue of Ishtar, the ancient Egyptian goddess of love and lust. Ishtar demands sacrifice, and Fuad is more than willing to meet her demands. He begins to prepare a feast of godly proportions, and the blood and guts start flying. I've never seen the original film, but I'm assuming that the warning they show at the beginning of the remake ("those with heart problems need to leave the theatre" etc.) is in the beginning of the original. It doesn't belong in the remake because, even though it's gory, the remake doesn't warrant it. That intro hypes up the film as a gore fest (or blood feast, if you will), but it's no more gory than any other film of this nature. Therefore, I was mildly disappointed with the film, which was then compounded by the lackluster performances of the actors. I don't know if the original warrants a spot on your horror shelf, but the remake certainly doesn't. Before Blood Feast, festival goers saw a screening of the short film Chateau Sauvignon: Terroir, in which an annoying mother and son meet more than they bargained for while touring a winery. Be careful the next time you go wine tasting; it may not actually be wine. The last movie of the night was a screening of Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), considered to be one of the best worst movies ever made. The epitome of so-bad-its-good B-movies, it features a convoluted plot in which aliens resurrect Dracula, his wife, and a zombie to stop humanity from building some sort of bomb. If your library is hosting a B-movie horror/creature-feature moviethon, this should be the first film on your docket. Day Six comes tomorrow, and here is Day One, Two, Three, and Four!