The horror I am referring to is not the dystopian political landscape, nor the hellish pandemic scarred terrain of our future for the next few months but rather to dark cinema, frightening film, that will shortly be coming into and enriching my life.

This week year 11 of the Horrible Imaginings Film Festival. Two years ago, the festival moved from its native city of San Diego to the Santa Ana in Orange county about an 80-minute drive from my home and in anticipation of days going back and forth to the festival I took several days off extending my weekend to five days. Of course, the pandemic has shattered these plans but the festival’s director Miguel Rodriguez has managed to keep the celebration alive by movie it online and this weekend I will still be watching blocks of short films and several features all of these from around our world. It will not be the same without the mingling in the theater’s lobby, discussing the films we just watched with the fans and filmmakers but in the depressing times we must find what joy we can.

This weekend will not be my only excursion into unknown horror cinema. Sunday night while doom scrolling through the terror that is my twitter feed, I came across a link of an older Finnish horror movie that the tweet described as a were-reindeer movie. I mentioned it to my sweetie-wife, who has a love of things Finnish, and soon we discovered the film The White Reindeer from 1952 was a Cannes and Golden Globe Award winning film inspired by pre-Christian Finnish folklore. Well, damn! That’s something we both need to see and bang a Blu-ray of a recent restoration has been ordered and should arrive from Germany later this month.