One of the special events of the 2018 Blood in the Snow Film Festival was an installation at the Super Wonder Gallery featuring Offerings: A Seance in Three Acts, the new 26 minute experimental short film directed by Torin Langen (3 Dead Trick or Treaters).
Probably the best description I have of Offerings is that the film is likely what would happen if Guy Maddin took acid in a graveyard and had a baby with Ingmar Bergman and the Blair Witch. Offerings has only a very loose narrative, featuring a lot of strange creatures performing in front of the camera, with much of the film being presented with a three section split screen. In fact, a lot of the twisted imagery in Offerings reminded me of the 3D sequences of the cult Canadian horror film The Mask. On their own the images are both hypnotic and psychedelic, but they are brought to a new level by the creepy ambient score, performed live at the installation by 3 Dead Trick or Treaters composer Stephen Schooley and Andrew Laughton and Lauren Taylor of Safe as Houses.
As part of the BITS of installation, there was an alternate cut of Offerings that featured “circuit bent video remixes” by Branko Vranic. This version makes the film look like it’s being played on a VHS tape with very bad tracking, resulting in a lot of static and hard to make out images, which takes the film to a whole other level. Altogether, I have to say that Offerings: A Seance in Three Acts is a wildly original piece of experimental cinema.
