FEAR ITSELF Midnight

Film essayist Charlie Lyne uses clips from horror films to explore why the world’s most popular film genre burrows so deeply into our psyches in this fourth-wall-breaking, boundary-pushing, cinematic deep-dive. Using lone female voice narration — eerily reminiscent of the “Final Girl” trope of many horror films — the film navigates a dreamscape of terror and critical thinking. Blending the classic, the cult and the phantasmagoric beautifully, the film draws lines between genres from all over the world and from an array of periods of film history. Brilliantly edited and executed so as to avoid jump scares and other horror clichés, and instead choosing to play on the audience’s film literacy to hauntingly fill the spaces between clips, FEAR ITSELF takes on a strange, mesmerizing and unexpectedly terrifying power. — Lane Kneedler