Cost-wise: it’s just over forty-bucks for a film pass. Travel-wise: it’s a short two-hour flight from Denver. So why not? I decided to check out the 15th Annual Austin Film Festival. My other big motivator was that they were having the U.S. premiere of Shinya Tsukamoto’s Nightmare Detective 2 – and I’ve always been keenly interested in Tsukamoto since his directorial debut of Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989).

The AFF runs from October 16th-23rd and I was immediately drawn to the fact that it was affordable and included both comedy and horror film programs. Also: I’d been wanting to visit the downtown Alamo Drafthouse for quite some time. This month they’ve been running “Terror Thursdays,” and last Thursday’s screening of The Boogens (1981) sold out – leaving me and friends to the chaos of drunken revelry along 6th street. We found ourselves helping one incapacitated woman to her friends’ car. Later someone tried to pick a fight with me by ramming into my shoulder and spinning me around (I just laughed it off). It’s part Mardi-Gras, part mall-brawl, with agro-energy made more combustible on a big football weekend that saw Texas slaughter Missouri. It’s also a good time to be inside a cool and calm movie-theater to escape the mobs.

First-up was a double-feature of horror films projected big on an IMAX screen; Eric Red’s 100 Feet, followed by Nightmare Detective 2. 100 Feet is about a young woman (played by Famke Janssen)  who “is granted early release from her prison sentence for manslaughter (killing her husband – a violent NYC cop – in self defense) on condition she wear an electronic ankle bracelet and remain within her home, effectively under house arrest, for the remainder of her sentence.” This especially sucks for her because “Her dead husband (now a malevolent ghost) is still in the house and intent on savage revenge.” Red is the screenwriter behind The Hitcher (1986) and Near Dark (1987), and I have to give him props for not using CGI. But I had a hard time believing prison life was so bad that anyone would rather stay home getting bludgeoned by a sadistic ghost than break her house arrest.

Nightmare Detective 2 also dealt with ghosts, but in a far different manner that falls somewhere between Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Solaris (1972). Kyoichi Kagenuma “is cursed with the ability to enter others’ nightmares,” which at first seems to echo Dennis Quaid’s situation in Dreamscape (1984, clearly a good year for dream intrusions). But with Tsukamoto at the helm the film is as far from a conventional narrative as you can go and is instead infused with all manner of psycho-sexual horrors, both Freudian and Japanese, and it brings to the fore how horrible it would be to have the ability to read other people’s minds – it  would definitely lead to madness. Unfortunately, Tsukamoto allows handheld jerky-cam aesthetics to obliterate a lot of otherwise fine work, but he is still a master at creating some truly inspired and hauntingly poetic (yet deranged) images, including indescribable horrors from other dimensions that would have blown H.P. Lovecraft’s mind.

But why am I still typing? There are still more movies to watch, including more ghostly matters tonight with Tom Malloy’s Alphabet Killer. Malloy’s Wrong Turn (2003) was a guilty pleasure, and the cast for Alphabet Killer includes a string of actors I’d love to see mix it up: Timothy Hutton, Michael Ironside, Tom Noonan, and Martin Donovan. Hopefully this time I can make it through 6th Street without getting body-slammed and find safe harbor inside the Alamo Ritz.