To be a freak, in the deepest, most polysemic, and annoying sense of the word (should each of you make do with it) conceals the most radically anti-nationalist and a-patria attitude.  To be a freak to the backbone, bizarre lover, scholar of the Dark Side, vicious of the abnormal, and in love with morbid fascination -everything else is a hindrance, as the song says- is to not mind frontiers, nations, ethnicity, race, or colours, including those of flags (not taking into account black, that absence of colour we are so much compelled to). You and me, Spanish or Japanese, Canadian or Brazilian, Yankee, French, or English, who adore spiritism stories with taunting spirit (BAGHEAD), the bloody and youthful Black Metal, although it might cost our lives (LORDS OF CHAOS), the psychedelic pulp fiction, Surrealism and exploitation, Gido Crepax, Métal Hurlant, Robbe-Grillet y James Bidgood (ULTRA PULPE), the dead’s macumba and the ghostly soap opera (MORTO NAO FALA), the cabinets full of wonders and grotesque absurd eroticism (WUNDERKAMMER), sadomasochism as a lifestyle,  not-so-serious serial killers, the music of the gialli and torture as one of the fine arts (PIERCING); you and me, whether a Canadian with a Czech soul, a Sorian or  a Swedish filming in England, Zedon Caixiao’s fellow countryman, a French fascinated by Italian sexploitation or an Italo-American reading Japanese perverse, we all share the same homeland: Freakland, Darkland, or whatever the hell you’d like to call it, if it should  have or needs a name. The only homeland for which we would give our lives, and we have, a nation without frontiers, kings, presidents, armies, state, or police. The kingdom of the senses’ impure anarchy, a film’s orgy and a kind of art beyond good and evil, which are nothing but purely aesthetic without ethic, sensibility without sense, perversity for free or for necessity, an investment in a world which is always better when it seems to be the worst to the rest.  This year’s Freakiest Night is both international and intergalactic, onanistic and intersexual, metafilmic and nostalgic, as wells as hypermodern and neuralgic. It dyes with humour the horror and mixes the reality and darkness of crime chronicles with full-colour fantasy, feeding on film with feeding on men, the animation with the masturbation; combining in Dionysian wedlock formats, music, nations, genders, transgenders, humour, bilious, blacks and people of every colour. Japanese eroguro with the most independent American film, English spiritism with Hispanic esperpento, Anglo-Saxon ghost stories with Latin-American magic realism, French avant-garde with Glam Britt and Italian “S” cinema, Canadian animation with Czech – Slovak Surrealism… If you want to escape from the absurd country you were born in, The Freakiest Night opens its frontiers to all of you, terrorists, anarchists and a-patria. Let’s run away as rats from the ship called Reality, which drowns helplessly, and travel disguised as pirates to the end of the red night, second star to the right, and straight to dawn. However, I won’t lie to you: when you come back the next morning, there might not be any place to return to.


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