Curious Stories, Crooked Symbols is a collection of three short films powered by the viewer’s own imagination and its instinctive making-up of stories. So in The Eyes of Edward James we have a gory murder scene approached via a hypnotherapy session, with the patient playing and rewinding and replaying the night's events, each time drawing closer to remembering the event itself before balking and cutting to black. It’s an effective tension builder, leaving the viewer’s imagination thrashing in the blank between memory and corpse, and there’s a neat conclusion. Demonology of Desire, at once the longest and the least successful of the three films, is a slab of grotesquerie that seeks to create unease by confounding the viewer’s narrative expectations, but it’s undermined by a gurning performance from the lead actress as an insane, sadistic schoolgirl. No such problems with The Facts in the Case of Mister Hollow, which is a beautifully executed piece exploring a gothic tableau: the camera is the viewer’s imagination, zooming in for a close-up, pulling back, sweeping from rook to church to bonfire, gradually piecing together the terrible story behind the picture.
These are all strong, startling ideas, realised by a director – Rodrigo Gudiño, founder of Canadian horror mag Rue Morgue – who understands how horror works and seems genuinely interested in pushing to see what can be achieved with the form. The inspiration and mechanics are all here; if Gudiño can bring them alive with some human characters he’ll be a name to look out for.
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