Midnight Peepshow

Whilst it struggles to find audiences elsewhere, the short film format continues to thrive within the horror genre, with shorts programmes proving popular at all the major festivals. Onee of the easiest ways to package it for distribution in formats which will actually see people get paid is through anthologies, most of which are planned out in advance around agreed themes. They vary wildly in quality, often taking on work from too many different filmmakers and ending up too tonally haphazard as a result, or with very weak links. Midnight Peepshow, which featured at this year’s Frightfest, is one of the better ones, with just three directors involved and an overarching plot which blends easily into each separate tale.

This plot concerns the peepshow of the title, in a scuzzy little building at the end of a dark London alley, a splash of neon in the shadows. Graham (Richard Cotton) has had a rough night, getting his wallet stolen and then getting tearful over the absence of his wife, a story we’ll learn more about later. A friend buys him drinks and lends him cash, and then he wanders the streets until he finds his way into that building, wanders along a narrow vagina-coloured corridor, and is greeted by a veiled goth madam who is stroking a fluffy black rabbit. Two pounds in the slot, she says (it’s not clear where he gets the coins), and then he can watch.

Inside the booth, a series of performers give him more than the usual (apparently for a far lower fee), each telling him a story in which sex and violence are intimately entwined. It’s a film which leaves one wondering if cinema could work this way, like a What The Butler Saw machine with a slightly more sophisticated plot – an interesting format, perhaps, for a video art installation, though it might not be able to get away with making viewers as uncomfortable as Graham’s experiences make him. That he stays tells us something both about his connection to the larger plot and about who he is as a person. Cotton brings a lot of weight to this and elevates the film in the process.

First up is Personal Space (directed by Airell Anthony Hayles of Heckle and They’re Outside fame), the story of a bickering couple interrupted by the arrival of an intruder who takes a sexual interest in Alice (Roisin Brown), which belongs firmly within the film noir tradition. It’s Hayles’ best work to date, sleek and simple and competently acted, even if the dialogue could do with a bit of a polish.

Next is Fuck, Marry, Kill (by Andy Edwards, whose writing credits include the recent Ghosts Of Monday), presented as a gameshow in which a woman (Miki Davis) is forced to decide the fates of three captive men with whom she has been involved at various stages in her life. The difficulty here is that none of these men really seems worth saving, but the director seems to recognise this and trusts the charismatic Davis to anchor the story.

Finally we get The Black Rabbit (by Jake West), which ties the rest of the story together and adds a more emotional element into the mix. Like the others, it treads a fine line in seeking to explore misogyny without unduly exploiting its female characters in the process, and some viewers will feel very uncomfortable with the film as a whole, but if you’re one of them, that should be obvious to you before you start watching.

Despite the promotional material which implies – like any half decent peepshow advert – that we are going to get a glimpse of something truly unusual, the sexual fantasies addressed here are pretty common ones (even if not all of them are routinely acted out), which means that there’s a fair chance of the average viewer finding some of the content erotically appealing, if not exactly novel. There’s not a great deal of depth to the adjacent narrative, but the film holds together pretty well, the pacing is good, and Cotton keeps us caring. Absent any claim to greater sophistication, it’s good enough to satisfy on a lonely night.