It
is a film so powerful, it causes disorientation, short-term psychosis, and
violent rioting, but it is still more entertaining to watch than A Serbian Film. It is the oldest of old
school horror films, helmed by the pioneer himself, Georges Méliès, or perhaps
one of his sinister colleagues. Technically, the notorious lost film never
really existed, but that does not stop the French genre cinema establishment
from analyzing the heck out of it in Fabien Delage’s droll mockumentary, Fury of the Demon (trailer here), which screened
during the 2016 Fantasia International Film Festival.
Every
decade or so, someone stumbles upon a print of Fury of the Demon and screens it, unwittingly unleashing chaos.
Eccentric American film collector Edgar A. Wallace (note middle initial) sort
of knew what he had, but his private screening for French film scholars and
journalists yielded similar results. Various French critics play it admirably straight
for Delage as they describe the terrors of the experience. Frankly, they aren’t
bad actors at all. For added genre appeal, Alexandre Aja and Christophe Gans
also get in on the joke as talking head commentators.
Fury bizarrely taps
into something that is hard to define. With over two hundred of Méliès’ five
hundred film oeuvre missing, who is to say what we haven’t seen? After all, his
Robinson Crusoe just turned up four
years ago. Ironically, the universally ignored B-movie Playback, sort of used a similar Macguffin, but it that case it was
Louis Le Prince (a.k.a. Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness). Although Playback’s riff on Le Prince lacked
Delage’s erudite sophistication, it was still the best part of the film.
However,
Fury really does it right. Delage
cleverly assembles evocative Méliès clips and constructs an eerily believable
alternate mythology in a mere sixty minutes. Did Méliès really have an
occult-obsessed junior partner named Victor Sicarius, who secretly made early
splatter-gore films on the side? It is doubtful, but if so, maybe its all real.
In that case, could someone point out where Manhattan’s “historic Virginia
Theater” stands?
