THE FACE OF HORROR
35mm, color, 120 mins.
Written and Directed by: Anna Biller
Produced by: Mike Goodridge, James Bowsher, and Anna Biller
Starring: Jonah Hauer-King. Kristine Froseth, Ellie Bamber, Leo Suter, Ben Radcliffe, Bella Heathcote
Cinematography: M. David Mullen, A.S.C.
Exective Producer: Jared Sanford
Production Design: Pavel Vojtíšek
Costume Design: Anna Biller
Comsposer: Gabriel Andrés Gallegos
LOGLINE
A ghost in medieval England rises from her grave to seek revenge on her husband, in a gory tribute to classic Technicolor horror films.
SYNOPSIS
Shot gorgeously on 35mm film, Anna Biller (The Love Witch) delivers a lavish, fast-paced medieval nightmare evoking the lost grandeur of 1950s cinema. The film opens on Eleanor (Kristine Froseth), a young woman dreaming of her lover, Edward (Jonah Hauer-King). But romance curdles into horror when Edward slaughters Eleanor’s father in a sudden fit of rage. Trapped by circumstance, Eleanor and her sister Beatrice (Ellie Bamber) are forced to marry Edward and his accomplice Richard (Leo Suter), and live with them in an isolated, wind-swept mansion. When Edward cruelly abandons the sickly Eleanor for a wealthy noblewoman (Bella Heathcote), an act of unspeakable cruelty of the part of the lovers transforms the sisters’ bond into an engine of bloodthirsty supernatural vengeance. Based on the most famous Japanese ghost story of all time, Yotsuya Kaidan, The Face of Horror is a stunning homage to classic blood-soaked Technicolor horror films.
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
The Face of Horror is based on a famous Japanese ghost story called Yotsuya Kaidan. It features an onryō, or a vengeful spirit, a woman so wronged in life that she returns to torment those who caused her suffering. In the Shinto tradition (my family tradition on my mother’s side), many shrines are dedicated to terrifying ghosts, who might otherwise rise and strike down the living. This story was first produced as a Kabuki play in 1825, and it was the first proto-feminist play in Japan, and the first horror play. It remains the most popular Japanese ghost story today, inspiring more than thirty film adaptations.
Although Yotsuya Kaidan harks from a folklore tradition of the vengeful ghost that is over twelve hundred years old, it is also a modern domestic drama. Part of its popularity with Japanese audiences is the catharsis that comes from watching a Japanese woman release her fury on a man, due to the intensely unequal treatment of women in Japan. Like the classical tragedies and folklore that inspired it, the film holds a complex, shifting landscape of human experience—it is beautiful, scary, and darkly absurd as it points to a horrifying medieval misogyny that feels all too current and familiar.
Set within the architectural geometry of 14th century England, the movie was captured on 35mm film in the ancient castles and medieval churches of Prague. Together with my cinematographer, our visual language draws directly from the majestic, studio-controlled opulence of Michael Powell, the operatic staging of Visconti and Kurosawa, and the hypnotic gravity of Mizoguchi. We have rejected the flat, naturalistic desaturation of contemporary digital filmmaking in favor of a vibrant, hyper-saturated 1950s Technicolor palette, using intense color as a conduit for psychological dread and sublime beauty. This film does not operate within the ironic distance of pastiche or camp, but is rather an uncompromising Gothic melodrama—a pageant of terror, beauty, and tragedy crafted for an audience that still demands cinematic grandeur.
The film, although Japanese at its core, is also very much about the world of 14th century England—a religious, magical, plague-ridden world, a world of death and violence and decline. Visually inspired by the exquisitely colorful paintings and illuminated manuscripts of the Medieval and early Renaissance eras, the film highlights the strangeness of that death-obsessed world—a world of knights and ladies, Troubadour songs, demonic imagery, sex, violence, plague, guilt, intrigue, and religious horror—while also anchoring it in currently urgent concerns about gendered power imbalances.
World Sales: Embankment Films
