plug: Sheep Theater (2020) is a marvelous quarantine indie-horror
"Finally, something to talk to."
Welcome to today’s plug, a quick recommendation of an oft-forgotten film, cult classic, or movie that is dying to be rewatched //
Hey hey, comin’ atcha with another spooky season rec: one of my absolute favorites from the ever-evolving folk filmmaker YouTube canon. I covered the folk filmmaking movement in the latest edition of the the tube, which you can read here. Basically it’s a group of independent, micro-budget filmmakers that self-fund and self-distribute their films on the internet.
Anyway, Sheep Theater is a 2020 quarantine horror film by Daniel Lotz, curator of the folk films playlist on YouTube. Lotz is one of several indie filmmakers, both in and outside “the business,” who shot a movie, largely alone, during the pandemic last year. Sheep Theater is probably my favorite one, about a guy (played by Lotz) forced to grieve the very recent death of his wife alone at the height of COVID. After a couple strange, supernatural occurrences in his apartment, Dan elicits the advice of an eccentric paranormal expert (Joel Dik) who isn’t much help. Desperate to get out of his own head, Dan gets some Sheep plushies from a friend and starts talking to them on the daily. These stuffed Sheep eventually come to life, which is fun and therapeutic until things start to get sinister.
Like Lotz’s other films I’ve seen, I find myself completely swept away by Sheep Theater’s camera work, as well as the inventive Sheep puppetry and other no-budget effects. I also dig the way Lotz incorporates various pop-culture objects — a Star Wars comic, a Disney’s Cinderella snow globe, a Mandy t-shirt, a Taxi Driver poster, to name a few — so they come off as both personal and broader cultural, melancholy relics of the “before times.” It might be the most thematically effective use of pop-culture signifiers I’ve ever seen in a movie. There’s also a sort of righteous transgression in using copyrighted songs and images of iconic entertainment in a freely available, micro-budget film that I really vibe with.
Closing out this plug with fellow folk filmmaker Joel Haver’s on-point Letterboxd review:
When Dan Lotz and Joel Dik released Chlorine, they made major steps in showing the internet that you don’t need money and connections and distributors to get a great feature film made and seen. Sheep Theater is them doubling down on that. Largely made alone by Dan in quarantine, this film is everything Chlorine was but better. More beautifully shot, more charming in its no-budgetness, more emotional in its personal moments. Dan’s acting has notably improved and he and Joel both give great performances by any standard. The effects are perfectly simple and made all the more impressive considering Dan having to accomplish them alone. From start to finish it feels like the vision of someone so compelled to make films that they can’t help but do it no matter the circumstances. That is filmmaking baby! And it’s happening now!
It’s fascinating how so many films from the folk filmmaking movement function as palpable, personal dreamscapes of grief. I haven’t seen anyone capture both the collective and individual pain & loss of the pandemic as powerfully as these filmmakers have, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
You can watch Sheep Theater on YouTube. You can also follow Dan Lotz’s YouTube channel here.
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