IN A FOREIGN TOWN Short Film Debut

I read somewhere that this short film is a concept for an anthology series Butcher Bird Studios is developing, so we may not get it until there are any news about this project.
 
I liked how they portrayed the Showman, and the run-down, crumbling city scenes since that is such a common theme in Ligotti's work, but it did seem like they made it into kind of a conventional story about childhood trauma, whereas the original was about a guy whose sense of reality is crumbling as his own memories become unreal to him. Maybe the finished film will involve those more Ligottian themes.
 
I don’t know, I thought they overdid the peekaboo element up to a degree where it became ineffective. I am happy however that filmmakers are turning to Ligotti for inspiration.
The film is said to be inspired in Ligotti’s storieS in plural. Which stories did you recognize, other than “Gas station Carnivals” and, I assume, “The Chymist”?
 
nyctalops said:
Which stories did you recognize, other than “Gas station Carnivals” and, I assume, “The Chymist”?
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I didn't recognize any other specific stories, but they did touch on some general ideas, like the scene where they are in the train and the father is saying that the carnival is "in another town" across the border, which enforced the sense of crossing the border of the normal world into the unreal and strange, and the mannequin in the theater window, because if you are going to make a movie based on Ligotti's stories you should throw in a mannequin here and there.
 
Up until the credits rolled, I was convinced that the psychiatrist was portrayed by F. Murray Abraham, Amendola looks very much like him in my eyes.

I thought the sound mixing was interesting and disconcerting. I also thought it incorporated elements from quite a number of Ligotti's stories - the references to Quine company on the drug bottles, the manikin in the cashier's booth at the theater's entrance, that peculiar factory rising above the city's skyline and all the obvious "another town across the border" stuff.

It would be great to see something Ligottian get full length treatment. Also a collaboration between Ligotti and the Quay Brothers. That would be a terrific dream come true.
 
I think one of the posters also mentioned "Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech". It's of course a nice game of intertextuality and allusions in this short film but I'm still not quite sure how (well) Ligotti can be adapted to the big screen. The Showman gave me the creeps but I wonder if a film can really make one feel this existential dread that the best of Tom's works can evoke. Mind you, I'd like to be proven wrong.
 
I only learned about this short from one Polish horror page on Facebook on Tom's birthday, and today I managed to watch it. For me, it works really well with evoking the atmosphere of his stories and mixing different motifs together. I found it on YT and here's the link, if someone would like to watch or re-watch it:

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There are subtle musical differences between the YouTube (Alter) version above, provided by Mr Fatigue, and the earlier version still available on Vimeo. Nothing major, just curious.

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