Although there’s a fair amount of seasonally appropriate snow on display, this horror feature represents a stonking slice of counter-programming for the festive season, given there is nothing merry in the least about it. That said, there are sly flashes of tongue-in-cheek humour throughout from married co-writers Aaron Fradkin (also the film’s director) and Victoria Fratz Fradkin (one of the film’s leads). Consequently, Beezel is an impishly nasty machine for jump scares and creepy just-seen imagery using old-fashioned practical effects. It’s not a terribly original work but does create its own toxic, hypnagogic atmosphere.
Using a mini-museum’s worth of audiovisual recording technology to capture footage – starting with Super8 and advancing to recent digital cameras – the Fradkins create an episodic work that spans several decades. In the first tranche of storytelling in the 1960s, a woman and her son are killed by a supernatural witch-demon-creature who lives in the basement of an otherwise unremarkable New England tract house. (Apparently the director’s own childhood home served as the location.) Then we jump to the 80s and videographer Apollo (LeJon Woods, underplaying effectively) arrives at the house to record resident Harold Weems (Bob Gallagher, deliciously sinister) as he gives an account of the aforementioned witch, whom he calls Beezel and who killed Weems’s son and previous wife.
After that episode ends in gristle and gore, it’s on to an early 2000s timeframe wherein hospice nurse Naomi (Caroline Quigley) arrives to look after Weems’s widow Deloris. In a final act, Deloris’s son Lucas (Nicolas Robin) and his wife Nova (Victoria Fratz Fradkin, a hoot) arrive to sell off the manse at last, only to fall prey to Beezel’s dream-haunting, illusion-casting, innocent-torturing shenanigans. The film’s refusal to fill in the backstory and just let the spooky bits work as exercises in tension is both admirable and sort of frustrating, while the musical bed of creaks and drones, credited to the delightfully named Robot Disco Puma, makes for an effective scare workout.
• Beezel is on digital platforms from 6 January
