VLOG and Devi Snively at LIFF 2009

UK PREMIER VLOG dir. by Joshua Butler Mon, Apr 20, 6pm -- Free at the door, but if you need a reservation, click here VLOG is a groundbreaking extreme-horror film from the producers of SAW. In association with popular website Break.com, it is the first feature film produced directly for the internet and has already received over 10 million views online. Conceived as a series of video blogs, or vlogs, the film chronicles Brooke Marks, a sexy webcam girl who posts intimate details about her life to the 1.2 billion people on the internet. Her engaging personality, searing wit and hot body create an obsession in one diabolical fan, who posts his own video blogs in which he stalks and kills Brooke’s friends in extremely gruesome ways. But the story of VLOG doesn’t end there. Producer Chad Cole and writer/director Joshua Butler cast the part of Brooke Marks…with Brooke Marks. She is a real-life webcam girl who has had a presence online for over 2 years. With tens of thousands of friends on MySpace and millions of viewers on Break and YouTube, she allowed the filmmakers—in complete secrecy—to fictionalize her life. The film quietly appeared as installments of her real-life video blog, setting up “friends” who would later become “victims” of the stalker-fan. Butler and Cole then set up the Internet Killer’s website for real and posted fractured snuff-video versions of the film’s extreme horror setpieces. 5 million viewers were watching VLOG and they didn’t even know it. As the demon child of YouTube’s Lonelygirl15 scandal and the Blair Witch hoax, VLOG is a wake-up call for the viral video generation, a cautionary tale that challenges the ideas of conventional narrative and online “reality.”
	Guest Speaker: Devi Snively The Culture of Horror Mon, Apr 20, 7:15pm -- Free at the door, but if you need a reservation, click here Devi Snively is a writer, director, academic, and an award winning filmmaker. Devi is an adjunct professor at the University of Notre Dame where she teaches her always over-enrolled course “Cultures of Fear: Anthropological Perspectives of The Horror Film,” the impetus for her upcoming book. She also teaches theory and methods courses in screenwriting, documentary film, film studies, media studies and visual anthropology. Devi’s unique filmmaking approach to the horror genre has been likened to everything from Buster Keaton to EC Comics, Tim Burton and beyond. Her films have been selected to over 100 festivals worldwide, garnering awards and critical acclaim. In 2007 she was selected as one of 8 participants in AFI’s prestigious Directing Workshop for Women, she is currently in post on her first feature, trippin’, is a featured director in author Greg Lamberson’s upcoming Cheap Scares, highlighting the next wave of horror auteurs, and she’s in development for an original TV series. “Please, please, someone give this (wo)man a gob of money to make a feature!!” ~ SpookyDan, Bloody-Disgusting.com “Devi Snively is probably one of the most recognizable horror directors in that her films have a very distinct look and feel; somewhere between early silent films and rock videos.” ~ Heidi Martinuzzi, FilmThreat.com