By Martin Unsworth
Candy (Paula Brasca) is a late-night DJ who specialises in hosting listeners’ chilling tales. She’s quite acerbic, not afraid to call out when she thinks the stories are BS. One caller puts her on edge, though, as her night is set to become even more terrifying.
A follow-up to 2019’s A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio, this is more of the same – a DJ wraparound story to hang a selection of short films. While the stories are entertaining on varying levels, the fact that they are just imported from an archive of festival-run films and not specifically created for this anthology stands out. There’s no correlation between the stories and what’s going on in Candy’s world other than a sense of dread and isolation. That’s not to say they don’t work; it’s just the contrast of styles and quality is jarring.
Of the shorts that are showcased, the strongest is Lorcan Finnegan’s Foxes (also the oldest of the tales, coming from 2011). Here, a young couple is at risk of drifting apart after moving to a rather uncanny housing estate (the shots of the identical buildings disappearing in the distance are genuinely haunting and a precursor to Yonder in the director’s later Vivarium). The wife becomes obsessed with a pack of local foxes, and her descent into a feral state begins. Some are shorter than others, but at under 80 minutes, none of them overstays their welcome or risk bogging down the portmanteau. The final vignette, David M. Night Maire’s Chateau Sauvignon, is the most peculiarly placed since it comes at the height of the action in the main story.
This lack of cohesion between the segments is a little disappointing, with the majority of the menace coming from a supernatural source rather than a stalker or other threat, as in the main story. Something building up the solitude would work better. However, if you can accept that, this is a decent low-budget effort that highlights some shorts you may have missed over the past few years. The wraparound is a decent showcase for Brasca, who manages to keep things interesting.
The patchwork nature of the film isn’t a massive problem in general, it works more often than not, but the curator needs to make sure they gel a little better. Still entertaining despite everything.
Nightmare Radio: The Night Stalker is available on digital platforms.
