SXSW Film 2016: the docs, cult hits, and big premieres – The Verge

HBO’s Slenderman documentary grapples with troubled teens getting lost online

2017-01-23T12:29:00-05:00

"If you don't know who Slenderman is, you're living under a rock," remarks one of the dozens of teens appearing in YouTube videos that are excerpted in Beware the Slenderman. It's the first hint that the documentary is going to try to do the impossible:€" explain the internet, and its seedy underbelly, to people who… live under rocks. In other words: primarily offline.

The uncanny disconnect between what feels culturally ubiquitous on the internet and what is truly something everyone in the physical world knows about is central to the argument that many of the documentary's speakers make in one way or another: the internet has a unique abil …

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The rise of Mo’Wax founder James Lavelle — and the record industry that fell with him

2016-03-29T10:40:46-04:00

Biographical music documentaries usually fall in one of two categories: there are the worshipful nostalgia pieces, made for fans by fans, that seek to immerse the viewer in a completist bubble bath of hits and ephemera; then there are the elegiac tributes, following a familiar skyrocket-and-crash narrative of an artist who tragically left the world too soon. Both ultimately cement the untouchable reputation of the artist in question, even if the path is a little unpleasant.Artist & Repertoire, an exhaustively sourced new documentary about Mo'Wax Records founder and UNKLE mastermind James Lavelle is a little of both, but it's anything but a d …

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The unlikely history of Heavy Metal Parking Lot, the original viral video

2016-03-18T10:42:01-04:00

In 1986 two aspiring documentary filmmakers took some video equipment from a local cable access channel, and headed to the parking lot of a Judas Priest show in Largo, Maryland. John Heyn and Jeff Krulik filmed the tailgating crowd as they partied, drank, and professed their love for all things metal. The result was Heavy Metal Parking Lot, a bizarrely perfect, 16-minute time capsule showcasing the passion (and yes, sometimes the aggressive stupidity) of teenagers at an '80s metal show getting all kinds of fucked up.

But decades before the internet made sharing video clips as simple as posting to Twitter or Facebook, something special happe …

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Pee-wee’s Big Holiday is the perfect Netflix movie: snackable and totally disposable

2016-03-17T20:30:02-04:00

When Netflix first started making its own television shows it may have seemed like a lark, but the company has nearly single-handedly changed the way we watch television. People started binge-watching with DVDs, sure, but releasing an entire season of an original show at one time fundamentally altered the way we consume and talk about the medium, and even how it's made (it's hard to imagine the slow burn of Bloodline lasting long even on a cable network).

Now that the company has been getting into original movies, it's fair to wonder if they'll have a similar impact. With Netflix unable to get its films into major theater chains, many of it …

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The making of Hardcore Henry, the craziest first-person action movie you’ll ever see

2016-03-16T16:06:42-04:00

"You mind if I smoke?"

I'm sitting outside a trailer in Austin, TX, a few days into the South by Southwest film festival, talking with director Ilya Naishuller. There's a relentless energy about the young Russian filmmaker in the Ray-Ban aviators; he leans forward intensely one moment, then jumps up the next to demonstrate what it was like to play a particular moment in his feature debut, Hardcore Henry. Naishuller never stops - and neither does his movie.

Hardcore Henry is somewhere between video game and cinematic dare: it's an action movie shot entirely from the first-person perspective of its eponymous lead character, who wakes up in a …

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Terminator producer Gale Anne Hurd: ‘I embrace being a bitch. No guy would be called that.’

2016-03-16T11:48:19-04:00

The entertainment industry's lack of representation, diversity, and opportunity has come under increasing criticism over the past few years, and at Gale Anne Hurd's Tuesday SXSW keynote, the producer behind characters like Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor took the issue head-on. In an indictment of gender bias as it exists in the business today, Hurd described her own experiences as a woman blazing trails in producing sci-fi and fantasy movies, and told the crowd that while things like pay inequality are still huge issues, there is still a path forward for aspiring filmmakers regardless of gender.

If there's anyone that can speak with authorit …

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In Robert Kirkman’s Outcast, demons aren’t the only enemy

2016-03-15T19:45:22-04:00

In the opening moments of Outcast, Cinemax's new series from The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, we see a 10-year-old boy named Joshua (Gabriel Bateman) eat the bloody remains of a cockroach. The stomach-turning image of the demon-possessed boy sets the tone for this supernatural horror show. But it's when we meet the boy's mother Betsy and teenage sister Mindy, bickering almost stereotypically about whether or not Mindy can go out that night, that things take a turn. There's anxiety and even exhaustion in the argument, the kind that gives the sense that it's not an entirely happy home. That a demon can creep its way into this familial …

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How Preacher showrunner Sam Catlin brought the methods of Breaking Bad to a supernatural drama

2016-03-15T15:49:04-04:00

When the pilot for AMC's upcoming series adaptation of Preacher screened at SXSW yesterday - to rapturous applause from the fan-heavy crowd - much of the focus was on directors and executive producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. But the secret weapon of the show is writer/showrunner Sam Catlin, a veteran of Breaking Bad with credits like the infamous bottle episode "Fly" to his name.

Tackling an adaptation of Garth Ennis' comic - a violent horror-drama about a Texas preacher named Jesse Cutler (Dominic Cooper) who goes on a hunt for God with his ex-girlfriend Tulip and an obnoxious Irish vampire called Cassidy - may not sound like the mos …

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SXSW horror flick Hush is coming soon to Netflix — but you’ll wish you saw it in a theater

2016-03-15T13:38:15-04:00

Director Mike Flanagan introduced his second feature film, Hush, at the Alamo Drafthouse screening I attended this weekend saying, "this screening that you're seeing, here in this theater, is the best one so far." Aside from the noxious combination of the Drafthouse's pizza and beer-infused seat cushions, and 100 people who had been sweating buckets in Texas all day, it was easy to see what he meant. The theater was perfect for a horror movie -€" pitch black, all screen, not an extra square foot of space. The sound was incredible, and Flanagan's competent but unsurprising home invasion thriller became a physical, exhilarating experience in t …

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JJ Abrams-backed web series Moon Shot focuses on the human scientists behind space travel

2016-03-15T09:27:49-04:00

It can be easy to forget the human element behind robotic spaceflight. When we send complex, exploratory probes deep into space, much of the focus centers around the spacecraft themselves - that thing that travels through the Universe - and less on the spacecraft's makers at home on Earth. Everyone remembers the Curiosity rover on Mars, for instance, or the New Horizons spacecraft that flew by Pluto. But the names of the engineers and scientists who made those robots are harder to recall. In the end, these great minds are overshadowed by the fame of their own creations.

The new web series called Moon Shot aims to shine the spotlight back on …

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