MondoMacabro Tagged Articles at Cinematical

You just don't see many Comedy Movie Festivals (although there are a few), and you rarely if ever find yourself attending a Drama-Con or a panel discussion with the collected hosts of Family Feud -- but horror ... yeah, there's lots of horror festivals and conventions out there. (Sci-fi, too, obviously -- but those guys are even weirder than the horror freaks!) In North America we have Fantasia, Fantastic Fest and ScreamFest (among many quality -- usually smaller -- events), but across the globe the horror genre is even more beloved. (And, get this, respected!)

So I wasn't all that shocked when I caught wind of Insomnifest, the world's first exclusively online horror film festival. A joint effort between the ravenous gore-munchers of Slasherpool and the cult curators of Mondo Macabro, Insomnifest runs from February 11 to 24, showcases twelve new (or little-seen) fright flicks from across the globe, and appears only on your computer monitor. (Each flick will set you back five bucks, which seems more than fair in relation to your average rental / VOD options.) But since this is the first year of the event, combined with the fact that I haven't seen any of the flicks yet, I thought I'd pick the brain of Swedish horror junkie Josh Frederik Nordstrom, Insomnifest ringleader and longtime horror advocate at Slasherpool:

Puran Mandir (The Old Temple) is the second feature from Mondo Macabro's Bollywood Horror Collection (the first of which was discussed in last week's installment of Killer B's on DVD), and represents yet another example of Hindi language horror. Directed by the Ramsay Brothers, this film was a huge success in India at the time of its release in 1984, and is in fact the movie credited with launching the short-lived Bollywood horror craze.

Several generations ago, a demon named Samri was sentenced to death for molesting married women, murdering children, and eating corpses. I'm a little fuzzy on why the marital status of the women the demon assaults is an issue, particularly in light of his other offenses. Samri is to be decapitated, and his head and body interred separately to insure that the creature does not rise again. The body is buried near a temple while the head is placed in a box and sealed in a sub-basement of the palace owned by King Hari Man Singh. As insurance, the trident of Shiva is placed on the box, in hopes that the religious artifact's presence will make Samri's death a permanent one. Before his execution, Samri curses Singh so that as long as Samri's head and body are apart, all of Singh's female descendants will die in childbirth, and once the head and body are united, Singh's dynasty will end.