HALLOWEEN: Our Best Directors - 13. Franck Khalfoun (P2, Maniac)

NOTE:  If you live in Los Angeles and are ever up in the Valley, go to a place called Charlie's Pantry on Ventura.  Ask for their Silverback Coffee.  I'm no connoisseur, but it's some of the most delicious coffee I've ever had.  No sweeteners needed.  I've started buying beans from the place and grinding them at home (hey, cheaper than Starbucks) and sipping it while I furrow my brow and nod at my computer monitor as if to say, "I am nodding at my computer monitor."

Anyway, back to the countdown.

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13. Franck Khalfoun

(P2, Maniac)

There’s a real mix of homeless, and artists, and wealthy people all mixed in the middle of downtown all sort of interacting with each other. That seemed like... a more logical setting for the character who is an artist, who ended up meeting another photographer artist, and that a relationship might start. And what a great place for a hunter, for a stalker, to find victims.

- Franck Khalfoun

(this man hats very well)

Urban horror remains a mostly-untapped sub-genre of horror, when it really ought to be dominating these days.  We no longer live in the frontier-laden world of horror that began with Poe's distant house of Usher and pretty much ended with Poltergeist transplanting every horror trope into the middle of town.  While many horror directors struggle to accommodate modern life - mostly by dragging heroes back into the woods or apocalypse-ing the whole damn world - Franck Khalfoun's two horror films, P2 and Maniac, live in the center of the big city, and both work.

Well, they mostly work.  P2 might not be to all tastes.  It's one of those fast-paced single-setting suspense pieces, like Phone Booth or Red Eye.  A girl gets stuck in a parking garage, and Wes Bentley of American Beauty is the demented security guard who won't let her out.  The film offers no larger commentary, no deep meaning.  It's just a heroine out-thinking a killer in an eerily banal setting for around 90 minutes.  At least a third of what makes this movie worth watching is a scene where a blood-soaked Bentley plays Elvis Presley's "Blue Christmas" over the garage intercom and shakes his hips and lip-syncs with the King.

Maniac, however, is something more, an achingly sad depiction of the compulsion of serial killing.  The film's selling point sounds like a gimmick: nearly all the action in the film is shot from the point-of-view of its main character, Frank (Elijah Wood).  But instead of growing tiresome, the limited perspective (camerawork sinuous instead of herky-jerky) forces the viewer to see how Frank sees.  This leads to some ingenious techniques.  Flashbacks stand directly next to present actions, and a few moments dislodge from Frank's perspective and smoothly circle around him.  Is he having an out-of-body experience?  Does it represent how killers must "detach" themselves from empathy?

In a way, there's something necessary about such a film, given how news media and popular culture are so eager to alternately romanticize and demonize serial killers without considering them as human beings who got lost along the way.  Such people don't require our sympathy, but they do demand our understanding.  Along with P2, Maniac shows Khalfoun's interest in finding real tension and horror in the middle of civilization, in the minds of normal-looking people.  One of his next films is a reboot of The Amityville Horror.  Let's hope the out-of-the-way mansion is as frightening as the city at night.

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Previous Entries:

14. Adrián García Bogliano (Penumbra, Here Comes the Devil)

15. James Watkins (Eden Lake, The Woman in Black)