In an interview on the Blu-ray of The Shining, filmmaker Ernest Dickerson said:
“The best horror movies are the ones that follow you home.”
I love that quote. It’s so simple and romantic and wise, implying that there are no boundaries to keep viewers from falling in love with any horror movie that resonates with them. Whether it’s The Shining or Fuck The Devil, all horror films have the potential to haunt us for life. It just depends on what we bring to the table.
If the cursed VHS tape from Ringu had its own subgenre, it would be known as Analog Horror—a strain of 21st century found footage films from the fringes of the Internet. From Local 58 (a document of a mysterious TV broadcast signal intrusion) to The Walten Files (an exploration of murderous animatronic pizza parlor mascots), these experiments focus on mood over narrative. They’re constructed out of found video clips, crude CGI, and tacky faux VHS effects. Each series is chilling, fun, and more addictive than a $30 block of Gruyère cheese. Over the past year, I’ve devoured every Analog Horror project that I can find. But Magic World of Ania is the one that followed me home.
“Good evening. I’d like to report that my daughter is missing.”
On the night of May 29, 1993, a 21-year-old college student named Ania went missing. Ania was prone to stress-induced hallucinations. In the months before the disappearance, her personal items started to disappear. Did Ania simply run away? Or was she abducted? As Ania’s mother and friends lead the search, we learn more about Ania, suspects like Mr. Antoni (he lives in the woods in structures that resemble Jason Voorhees’s shack in Friday the 13th Part 2), and a bizarre cult leader/“energy exorcist” named Teodor. This is a good time to point out that Ania has a grotesque paper mache face instead of a human head.
Split up into fifteen chapters and running approximately 70 minutes, Magic World of Ania is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The plot is a little flat, feeling like a true crime riff by way of The Vanishing. Luckily, the subtext is grim and multilayered, providing an ideal accompaniment to the film’s gorgeous sense of design. When it comes to visuals, Ania looks like a box of fireworks going off inside the Andy Warhol Museum. The anonymous filmmaker(s) from Poland deploy rotoscope animation, live action footage, paper cut-outs, stop motion, found footage, and anything else you can think of to form a living, breathing collage. It resembles what would happen if artist Kelly Sears made a horror movie on mushrooms, which is basically everything I could ever ask for. The minimalist synthesizer score provides a creeped-out backdrop and keeps the tone lively, even when some of the animation is recycled. There are a few missteps. Most notably, a montage of nostalgic cartoons (Scooby-Doo, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Sailor Moon) pulls us out of Ania’s synthetic world and into real life, thereby breaking the spell. But then there’s a series of flashes featuring a gore-strewn bedroom and all is well.
Magic World of Ania is a haunting and hypnotizing art project that might follow you home. Or it might put you to sleep. Whatever the case, it proves—once again—that the horror genre will never stop surprising us.
