Silver Screamers opens with a montage of its subjects, a group of senior citizens tasked with producing a horror film, telling the camera that they mostly don’t enjoy horror movies. So, why are they here, and what do they hope to get out of working with independent filmmaker Sean Cisterna on a frightening short?

The answers are varied, complex, and form the meat of this 90-minute documentary, produced and directed by Cisterna and built with heart, humor, and charm to spare. It’s not necessarily a journey to horror film fandom for these elderly filmmakers, but it is a journey to finding something inside them that many didn’t know they had. If you’re a horror fan who believes in the genre’s ability to bring people together, it’s a must-see.

But let’s back up a minute. The film’s journey begins with Cisterna, a director working in Ontario, Canada, who wants to make a new short film. But he’s having trouble getting funding. In an effort to save on production costs, he decides to take advantage of outreach programs for local senior citizens, programs designed to keep them active, creative, and engaged. The plan is to use a story involving elderly characters—in this case, “The Rug” by Edo Van Belkom—and gather enough senior volunteers to form most of the cast and crew for the resulting short film. 

Storytelling is, as many people have said, an act of creative problem solving, and the nuts and bolts of getting an independent film off the ground work much the same way. The first problem, getting enough volunteers, is eventually solved, leaving the rest of Silver Screamers to devote itself to getting to know these senior filmmakers, what drives them, and how they react to the intricacies and challenges of making a movie. 

Along the way, we meet a wheelchair-bound woman in her 90s who’s still full of energy, a hobbyist puppeteer tasked with making a rug into a sentient movie monster, an Italian painter who’s as much a philosopher as she is an artist, a local character with stories to spare, and a former videographer whose filmmaking dreams were derailed by illness. Some of these people come to the film to keep their minds occupied, some to distract themselves from becoming recent widows, some to chase a creative instinct they’ve nurtured in some way or another all their lives. They are all compelling, all charming, and they genuinely want to succeed in their mission to finish a film. 

On a surface level, this is all quite simply very charming. You get the sense that wherever Cisterna turned his camera, as he and a group of younger crew mentored the seniors, he would have found something delightful. Despite their lack of horror cinema experience, these seniors dive headlong into spraying artificial blood on walls, making monstrous slurping and chewing sounds with a foley artist, hand-retouching fake severed limbs, and so much more. It’s just a joy to watch in a very simple way, and while nothing in this film is especially revelatory, it’s the tenderness with which Cisterna treats his subject matter that makes a difference. 

Stephen King once said, “Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.” Being creative has the capacity not just to reshape us, but to heal us, to buoy us, to fill us with a pride we didn’t realize we knew. Silver Screamers is never at a deficit for charm, but where the film really shines is Cisterna’s ability to focus in on each of these people as they find their place within this creative endeavour, often struggling along the way, and emerge on the other side of it.

There are moments of extraordinary patience, determination, simple kindness, pure bursts of inspiration, and so much more as these amateur filmmakers step up for two days of production and a few days of post, and through it all, there is no mockery, no cynicism, no sense that we’re watching a novelty. There’s an earnestness to it all, and a tactile quality that feeds your soul, and allows you to feel that not only is it never too late, but you’re never too far from doing something potentially amazing.

In an age when we frequently see grifters attempting to paste artificial intelligence into cinema and call it “art,” we need more movies like Silver Screamers. Making art is not about speed, or efficiency, or slick imagery. Making art is about finding a new way to live, or reconnecting with an old way to live. It’s about the work and the joy you find there. Silver Screamers is a film bursting with joy, and every horror fan and movie lover needs to see it as soon as possible.

And if you ever get a chance to see “The Rug,” the finished short film these seniors made, you should take it. They made a good movie.

Tags: Fantastic Fest

Categorized: Reviews