In the new Norwegian horror film "Dead Snow" a group of young medical students on holiday in a remote mountain cabin are besieged by a battalion of reanimated zombie Nazis. When an undead soldier cracks a student's skull open like a walnut and a pink, vein-laced brain plops out on the floor, the moment needs no subtitles.
"The language of thrills is universal," said Colin Geddes, programmer of the Midnight Madness section at the Toronto International Film Festival. "Whether it's a gore scene or a cat-and-mouse stalker scene, you understand it. It's all the language of visuals. You can sense the rhythms, and you can sense the patterns of terror."
With the relative crossover success of recent pictures such as the Thai martial arts film "Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior" or the Swedish vampire movie "Let The Right One In," international genre filmmaking seems to be gaining momentum with American audiences. This, of course, follows an earlier wave of Asian horror films such as "Ju-on: The Grudge," "The Eye," and "Ringu" and their subsequent Hollywood remakes.
IFC Films, which released "Dead Snow" in Los Angeles on Friday (the film is also available on video-on-demand), has a series of six international genre films rolling out. Focus Features, the usually highbrow distributor of films such as "Brokeback Mountain," will soon be releasing Korean director Park Chan-wook's vampire story "Thirst." That film recently won a jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival, where it screened in competition alongside Filipino revenge thriller "Kinatay" and Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To's crime picture "Vengeance."
"If you think of English-language action and horror -- adrenaline movies -- a lot of times they are thought of as low filmmaking," said Tim League, director of the genre-centered Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, where he estimates about 70% of his selections come from overseas.
"There's such a glut of willfully lazy, bad, cheap American productions," League said. "And it's not the same in other countries. I think the ratio of good stuff to bad stuff from almost every other country is higher than what it is in the United States."
Foreign filmmakers turning to American genres for inspiration is a long-standing tradition, including the western-influenced Samurai films of Akira Kurosawa in Japan, the Hitchcock perversions of Mario Bava and Dario Argento in Italy, and the action heroics of '80s filmmakers in Hong Kong.
