Anna Biller's The Face of Horror: a Hammer homage built to be laughed at

By Daniel Okafor

Anna Biller premiered The Face of Horror at the London film festival, a deadpan homage to the garish Technicolor horror of Britain's Hammer Films in the Peter Cushing 1960s. The Guardian's review calls it a possible future cult classic.

Biller, the US indie film-maker whose previous feature The Love Witch (2016) announced her ecstatic love of style, surface and the A-pleasures of the B-movie, has now made her most brazen genre piece yet — a medieval tale built on red velvet, melodrama and black comedy.

The film's visual emphasis on red velvet, the Guardian notes, carries a Freudian significance that "can only be guessed at".

Is it pastiche or something else?

The review argues it isn't pastiche, strictly speaking. The advent of AI, the critic writes, has "arguably undermined the value of skilled pastiche in movies and literature".

Instead, Biller attempts something trickier: to make another film in the same vein as Hammer, continuing that rackety tradition of melodrama, eroticism and black comedy — and to create a film "that can be laughed at as well as laughed with, just as they were at the time".

That distinction matters. Biller doesn't send the genre up. She extends it.

What's the story?

The setting is a cod-medieval England of courtly nobles, smudgy-faced peasants and ladies in floor-length gowns with rope-style belts.

Biller's starting point, though, is not English at all. She has adapted the classic Japanese ghost story Yotsuya Kaidan, a tale that has also inspired, among others, Takashi Miike and Hideo Nakata.

The plot, as far as the review reveals it:

• Edward (Jonah Hauer-King), a handsome, unscrupulous knight suspected of robbing his former master, rides through a sun-dappled forest with his shifty squire Richard (Leo Suter).
• Eleanor (Kristine Froseth), blond and beauteous, is Edward's intended bride.
• Eleanor prepares a preposterously lavish meal with her equally blond sister Beatrice (Ellie Bamber) in one of the vast, oppressive wood-panelled halls that Hammer horror made its own.

How well does it work?

The verdict from the Guardian is warm. Biller's intricate tribute to the British 1960s genre "plays melodrama for laughs and pulls it off wonderfully".

That's no small feat. Playing it straight and funny at once is the hardest trick in deadpan comedy, and Hammer itself — knowingly ridiculous, sincerely upholstered — set a high bar.

The review positions The Face of Horror as a future cult classic, which is both a compliment and a prophecy. Cult status tends to find films that know exactly what they are, and Biller's film appears to know down to the last fold of velvet.

After The Love Witch earned her a devoted following, Biller now has two consecutive films in love with mid-century excess. A third would make it a tradition — rackety, red and entirely her own.