Dis­cov­er the post-Scream plea­sures of this ​’90s meta-slasher

“The oth­er day I came into her room and she was repeat­ing a word over and over in her sleep. Kolo­bos.” ​“Kolo­bos? What does it mean?” ​“I have no idea.” ​“Six years of med school, all I real­ly need­ed was a good dic­tio­nary. Who knew?”

This con­ver­sa­tion, between Dr Wald­man (Kim Thomas) and Dr Jur­gen (Todd Bea­dle), con­cerns a heav­i­ly ban­daged and trau­ma­tised Jane Doe who, even before she was knocked over by a car and brought into the hos­pi­tal, had already recent­ly sus­tained severe facial lac­er­a­tions inflict­ed with sur­gi­cal pre­ci­sion, as well as bear­ing much old­er scars from what appear to be past acts of self-harm and even a sui­cide attempt.

A flash­back trig­gered by an ad in the local paper makes up the bulk of Daniel Lia­tow­itsch and David Todd Ocvirk’s Kolo­bos. Days ear­li­er, the patient, men­tal­ly unsta­ble and insti­tu­tion­alised artist Kyra (Amy Weber), joins four oth­er ​‘free­loader’ vol­un­teers – stu­dent Gary (John Fair­lie), ambi­tious actress Eri­ca (Nic­hole Peler­ine), fast food cashier Tina (Promise LaMar­co) and stand-up com­ic Tom (Don­ny Ter­ra­no­va) – for an artist’s ​“ground­break­ing exper­i­men­tal film“ where, in exchange for free food and board, they will live togeth­er in a house and be record­ed ²⁴⁄₇ on CCTV cam­eras. There is, how­ev­er, some­one else in the house – a face­less fig­ure (Ilia Volok) who watch­es and waits for the right moment to attack, whether through blad­ed boo­by traps or more direct means.

Here we see the inter­sec­tion of three dif­fer­ent ideas, two of which are back­ward-look­ing, while the third looks for­ward to a medi­um that would come to dom­i­nate the fol­low­ing decade. First­ly, the gial­lo genre, with its merg­ing of aes­thet­ics, psy­chol­o­gy, iden­ti­ty con­fu­sion and mur­der, is evoked right from the impres­sion­is­tic open­ing cred­its that show black-gloved hands pass­ing over hand-drawn sketch­es and wiring up a house, all to the accom­pa­ni­ment of William Kidd’s overt­ly Sus­piria-inspired score.

Sec­ond­ly, Kolo­bos places itself in the tra­di­tion not just of the clas­sic slash­er, with its char­ac­ters being killed one after the oth­er by an unseen assailant, but also of the Scream-style ​’90s meta-slash­er. This reflex­ive ele­ment comes to the fore as Eri­ca insists that her new house­mates watch videos of the entire Slaugh­ter­house Fac­tor hor­ror fran­chise in which she had been cast as a venge­ful killer.

Their var­ied reac­tions to one of these films, from Tom’s dis­mis­sive, ​“It’s a Fri­day the 13^th rip-off… These are all the same… so shit­ty… It sucks,” to Gary’s aca­d­e­m­ic read­ing of the film’s ​“psy­cho­log­i­cal ratio­nal­i­sa­tion” and the protagonist’s ​“mul­ti-faceted per­son­age”, rep­re­sent a gamut of poten­tial respons­es to Kolo­bos itself, which might be regard­ed either as yet anoth­er by-num­bers instan­ti­a­tion of slice-and-dice, or as a psy­che­del­ic map­ping of a character’s ​“inner demons” through the stylised lan­guage of genre.

The third struc­tur­al ele­ment of Kolo­bos was way ahead of a com­ing zeit­geist. Made the same year that Big Broth­er was first broad­cast on Dutch tele­vi­sion, Kolo­bos adopts a real­i­ty TV for­mat, with its house­ful of par­tic­i­pants and its ubiq­ui­tous cam­eras, that had not yet become prop­er­ly pop­u­larised, and so antic­i­pates by some years oth­er hor­ror films – like My Lit­tle Eye, Hal­loween: Res­ur­rec­tion and TV’s Dead Set – that would exploit this format.

Of course, real­i­ty itself is up for grabs here, as Kyra’s hor­rif­ic expe­ri­ences are inter­cut with her trau­mat­ic delu­sions, leav­ing us uncer­tain, at least until the end, where the truth lies, and how much of what we see might belong mere­ly to a the­atre of the ​‘hebephrenic’ imagination.

We are first intro­duced to male chau­vin­ist Tom at a women’s rights group where he is doing a dis­as­trous­ly mis­judged com­e­dy set. Short­ly after­wards he dis­cov­ers to his shock that the pret­ty woman with whom he has been aggres­sive­ly flirt­ing is the next paid act: a female imper­son­ator. Here, as so often in gial­li and slash­ers, gen­der is unsta­ble. If you want to know the actu­al mean­ing of the film’s mys­ti­fy­ing title, all you real­ly need do is con­sult Wik­tionary (not avail­able in 1999).

Ulti­mate­ly, the film itself reveals the word’s mean­ing too, so I won’t spoil – except to observe that kolo­bos is an Ancient Greek ​‘two-ter­mi­na­tion’ adjec­tive, which is to say that it, per­haps sig­nif­i­cant­ly, uni­fies its mas­cu­line and fem­i­nine forms.

Kolo­bos is released by Arrow on Blu-ray in a brand new 2K restora­tion from the orig­i­nal neg­a­tive on 11 March.