Having impressed with Peter Hengl’s “Family Dinner,” a 2022 Tribeca world premiere, Vienna-based Capra Film is developing an ever expanding slate of movies and series which establishes it as a growing genre force to keep track of in Europe.
Founded in 2015 by producer Lola Basara and writer-director Hengl, Capra Film was the only production-house to have two titles at October’s Sitges Fanpitch, where Hengl’s“Krampusnacht” won a Fantasia-Frontières Award, consisting of an invitation to Frontières, Fantasia’s vibrant industry platform, running July 26-29.
As a potential follow-up, Hengl is developing “Bug Boy,” a teenage body horror creature feature. Also in the Capra hopper are period horror film “Dracu,” from Schlegel, horror film “In the Moorland,” by Michael Winiecki, TV series “Newfall,” from Stefano Nurra, and vampire film “Thirst,” by Paul Ertl.
“Krampusnacht”
“We are a young Austrian production company committed to creating high quality genre feature films with a distinctive Austrian sensibility and an international target audience,” Capra Film’s template runs.
This is nowhere clearer perhaps than in the works of Hengl. “Family Dinner” plumbs the abusive power dynamics in a dysfunctional family – a common Austrian horror trope – which call on children to sacrifice themselves to their parents’ desires.
Written and to be directed by Hengl, “Krampusnacht” has added as script consultants both writer, genre historian andproducer Kier-La Janisse, founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies and recipient of Fantasia’s 2022 Canadian Trailblazer Award, and Nicole Dade.
Produced by Basara, “Krampusnacht” is set at Austria’s Krampus Night, where young men dress up as a Krampus-masked satyr. During the Night, visiting siblings Val and Mat feel intrigued by the mysterious leader of a Krampus group, whom they come to suspect to be the Devil incarnate. It also seems like he’s out for Val’s soul and sanity.
Winner of Sitges’ Fanpitch Fantasia-Frontières Award, “Krampus is well known internationally because of all kinds of media treatments including a Hollywood film, but nobody has yet used in a film the actual local Austrian Krampus tradition we know and grew up with, with its wooden masks and fur costumes!” Hengl toldPvNew.
To shoot in English, the film will have a screenplay around mid-July.
“Bug Boy”
Inspired by Franz Kafka – Czech not Austrian but an acknowledged influence on Hengl in his tales of isolated individuals and distrust of authority – “Bug Boy” turns on 14-year-old Samy, for whom puberty is proving a difficult time: Not only because he’s an outsider at school, girls don’t care about him, and his parents can’t help him, but also because he’s apparently in the process of turning into an insect….
“Bug Boy” will shoot in German. A treatment will be ready mid-July.
Like “Thirst,” Hengl’s trio of titles are coming of age tales whose teen protagonists, isolated, fixate on authority figures who are revealed to have hidden malignant designs, such as a social media influencer in “Bug Boy,” who Samy comes to look up to.
“At its core, ‘Bug Boy’ – a classic “creature feature” coupled with a good portion of body horror – is a metaphorical coming-of-age story – it’s about metamorphosis into adulthood, a transformation that is shown as horrific and pathological, and its consequences are exclusion and isolation,” Hengl said.
“Still, I want the tone of the film to be light and with a strong whiff of irony. Social media and particularly video platforms like TikTok or Twitch play a big role in the story and I want to take the visual language established by these platforms to create a dynamic, entertaining, and ultimately humorous film,” he added.
“Dracu – The Eleonore Case”
Written and directed by Schlegel, the German-language “Dracu,” Capra Film’s second production, is based on a real case: an attempted exorcism by Zoe, a Viennese parapsychologist, who in 1925 travels to Romania to investigate the case of the 12-year-old peasant girl Eleonore who, the locals claim, is possessed by a demon calledDracu. Zoe finds the terrified girl under dire circumstancesin a Romanian insane asylum, she takes her back to Vienna, seeing the chance of establishing the brand new discipline of parapsychology in Austria, and also to discover what happened to her little brother who died as a child under similar circumstances. But the more intensely Zoe tries to investigate the secret of the demon, the moredevastating the results become.
“In addition to being a horror film, ‘Dracu’ is also a film about an unusual woman of her time. One of the most exciting aspects of this story is the strong historical protagonist, who takes in a Romanian peasant girl supposedly possessed by the devil in order to investigate the phenomena. In doing so, she inevitably assumes a mother role that is unfamiliar to her.”
“Dracu” is currently at the financing stage, being structured as an Austrian-German co-production.
“In the Moorland,” “Thirst”
Winiecki’s “In the Moorland” (“Im Moorland”), an entry at Slash Filmfestival Campfire Tales, is set in fall 1988, when a young migrant family from Poland is taken in by a remote Austrian spa town. But Maja, the family‘s pregnant matriarch, uncovers a bloody, centuries-old secret to do with the surrounding moorland. In Paul Ertl’s “Thirst,” Nick, 17, accidentally kills someone on the evening of his graduation, and flees Vienna in panic. Hitchhiking, a van stops, inside which are four strange characters, led by Samuel, who are vampires and accept Nick, via a massive blood orgy.
Nick’s sudden isolation from his loved ones could be seen as another Austrian horror trope. “In regards to horror, while said tropes are certainly typical for what a rising subgenre of ‘Austrian Horror’ comprises, we believe that there is also a distinct Austrian sensibility that extends beyond said tropes and that could be described as a very dark, often very black-humored worldview. We want to encourage this uniquely Austrian perspective and bring it to a global audience,” Hengl said.
“Newfall”
Capra Film can focus on cutting-edge issues, such as TV series “Newfall,” also presented at Sitges Fanpitch. It is set in a derelict town of that name, in which Anna, a young wheelchair user with muscular dystrophy, unearths the local, abandoned workhouse’s folklore: it is haunted by a dark spirit able to cure the invalids, the synopsis runs.
“Newfall is a modern, emotionally-driven horror series that explores the stereotypes of ableism as Anna struggles with a malevolent entity hellbent on convincing her she needs to be fixed,” Nurra said before the Sitges Fanpitch.
Hengl and Schlegel started out largely writing comedy, such as Schlegel’s sitcom “Meine heile Welt” for ZDFNeo and dramedic TV movie “Curling for Eisenstadt,” written together. Capra Film’s slate features a marriage farce, “All You Need Is Love,” written and to be directed by Basara and Hengl. Capra Films’ slate, however, focuses very much on horror.
Capra’s expanding slate comes as genre is one of the most resilient market options for European film producers, awakening interest in theatrical distributors and streamers alike. Yet that is not the driving force behind Capra Film’s expanding slate, Basara and Hengl argue: “We don’t want to create unique and original horror films just because horror as a genre is currently thriving globally and is a genre that allows us to create globally attractive films from our local standpoint,” they argue. “We want to create horror films because we both love the genre and want to first and foremost create films that we ourselves would love to watch!”
