Filmmaker, musician and artist Lindsay Denniberg a devout student and practitioner of the straight-to-video b-movie arts and a strange and sinister performer to boot comes “home” — much like one Michael Myers — to Orlando this week to present her skewed and sublime visions.
Denniberg takes over notable local counterculture havens on two successive nights. First up on Thursday, Aug. 1, she heads over to Stardust Video to perform a set of hybrid music and video art in her Pandora’s Talk Box persona. Then Friday, Aug. 2, will be a film screening of her magnum opus Video Diary of a Lost Girl as part of the Enzian Theater’s Freaky Fridays midnight movie series.
After a stint living in Chicago, and now currently calling the wilds of Weeki Wachee home, Denniberg is excited to return to the city where she cut her creative teeth.
The hybrid Freaky Fridays/Meet the Filmmaker late-night event is the ideal setting to present Video Diary.
Finished in 2012 after years of work that started back when she was a film student at UCF, Video Diary is a VHS fever dream: vaporwave-meets-video nasty meets Residents-y surreality. It’s a film that has been screened all over the country at various events and happenings.
“It’s the story of a succubus named Louise who works at a video store. And she also is a Lilin, which means she’s part of a supernatural group of beings known as the daughters of Lilith from biblical times — the children of demons,” says Denniberg. “I took this whole mythology of Lilith and turned it into more Gregg Araki characters or Amy Heckerling characters from Clueless. Very John Hughes, infusing that mythology into more of a teen comedy and horror movie world from the ’80s and ’90s.”
Denniberg’s love of the videotape aesthetic permeates the film, and for her it’s not some gimmick or fad but a sincere love of the format and its near-physical presence.
“My love for VHS is almost where my love of film came from, that primordial ooze, so to speak, so far as materiality. It’s almost a spiritual thing with VHS because it has a very specific impression and quality,” explains Denniberg.
“Going with the materiality of that medium, I’m bringing it into the modern day. Originally, I was even thinking of shooting the entire film on VHS. But I found that using VHS as the form of memory in the film would be more interesting; using the juxtaposition of different formats, which is a technique that I learned from my collaborator Chris Shields.”
Video Diary found a new audience when the horror hounds at tastemaking cult-film reissue imprint Vinegar Syndrome and American Genre Film Archive released the film on blu-ray, with all the attendant bells and whistles. And that includes some archival extras.
“We put in a lot of extras, like all the short films I’ve made in Orlando, with a big one being Chances, with the Triscults, Mr. Transylvania and a bunch of other Orlando-based, early 2000s performance-oddity people, It was like our Downtown 81,” says Denniberg. One of these might even make their their way into Friday’s screening.
On the aforementioned Thursday, she performs at Stardust Video as Pandora’s Talk Box, her solo video/music project that’s a hybrid of alien karaoke and noise chanteuse.
"I make my own karaoke videos with silent movie titles, but use those silent movie titles as lyrics. I’m expanding to using actual literature like Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley — it’s all an experiment.”
Pandora’s Talk Box haunted Orlando venues like Uncle Lou’s, International Noise Conference in Miami and even an Orlando Denny’s (“one of the best experiences of my life ... and they didn’t kick us out!” recalls Dennenberg) — best believe that one’s on YouTube — over a decade ago.
Thursday will be a return from a long performance dormancy. She’s excited to revive the project, try new things — and finally see Orlando electronic project Bacon Grease.
“I’ve never seen her play and I really just want to see her play live,”says Denniberg.“So I figured it’d be a great time to see her.”
Denniberg gives a lot of credit to Orlando as a “formative” place where she was able to hone her creative craft early on, both in film and music. She shouts out Jimmy Schaus, Kate Shults, Uncle Lou’s and supportive UCF professors.
Her current home base of Weeki Wachee is, also, providing inspiration both old and new.
“I grew up going to the mermaid shows, they were a big inspiration for my movie. I love those tacky mermaid aesthetics,” says Denniberg. “It feels like I’m very much home.”
And Denniberg is using her time to finish up her next feature film Killer Makeover, one she’s been working on for several years now.
“That one is about a beautician who gets kicked out of beauty school and then she gets cursed, so that everyone she puts makeup on dies. And that one is written by Chris Shields — who also is in Video Diary and helped write Video Diary — with Sarah Fensom, who writes for big publications like Sight & Sound, and Phil Chernyak, who works in television production. We’ve got so many different people from so many different threads of artistic expression coming in.”
Now seems the best time for the obligatory horror host-ish come to the shows ... if you dare.
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Denniberg takes over notable local counterculture havens on two successive nights. First up on Thursday, Aug. 1, she heads over to Stardust Video to perform a set of hybrid music and video art in her Pandora’s Talk Box persona. Then Friday, Aug. 2, will be a film screening of her magnum opus Video Diary of a Lost Girl as part of the Enzian Theater’s Freaky Fridays midnight movie series.
After a stint living in Chicago, and now currently calling the wilds of Weeki Wachee home, Denniberg is excited to return to the city where she cut her creative teeth.
The hybrid Freaky Fridays/Meet the Filmmaker late-night event is the ideal setting to present Video Diary.
Finished in 2012 after years of work that started back when she was a film student at UCF, Video Diary is a VHS fever dream: vaporwave-meets-video nasty meets Residents-y surreality. It’s a film that has been screened all over the country at various events and happenings.
“It’s the story of a succubus named Louise who works at a video store. And she also is a Lilin, which means she’s part of a supernatural group of beings known as the daughters of Lilith from biblical times — the children of demons,” says Denniberg. “I took this whole mythology of Lilith and turned it into more Gregg Araki characters or Amy Heckerling characters from Clueless. Very John Hughes, infusing that mythology into more of a teen comedy and horror movie world from the ’80s and ’90s.”
Denniberg’s love of the videotape aesthetic permeates the film, and for her it’s not some gimmick or fad but a sincere love of the format and its near-physical presence.
“My love for VHS is almost where my love of film came from, that primordial ooze, so to speak, so far as materiality. It’s almost a spiritual thing with VHS because it has a very specific impression and quality,” explains Denniberg.
“Going with the materiality of that medium, I’m bringing it into the modern day. Originally, I was even thinking of shooting the entire film on VHS. But I found that using VHS as the form of memory in the film would be more interesting; using the juxtaposition of different formats, which is a technique that I learned from my collaborator Chris Shields.”
Video Diary found a new audience when the horror hounds at tastemaking cult-film reissue imprint Vinegar Syndrome and American Genre Film Archive released the film on blu-ray, with all the attendant bells and whistles. And that includes some archival extras.
“We put in a lot of extras, like all the short films I’ve made in Orlando, with a big one being Chances, with the Triscults, Mr. Transylvania and a bunch of other Orlando-based, early 2000s performance-oddity people, It was like our Downtown 81,” says Denniberg. One of these might even make their their way into Friday’s screening.
On the aforementioned Thursday, she performs at Stardust Video as Pandora’s Talk Box, her solo video/music project that’s a hybrid of alien karaoke and noise chanteuse.
"I make my own karaoke videos with silent movie titles, but use those silent movie titles as lyrics. I’m expanding to using actual literature like Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley — it’s all an experiment.”
Pandora’s Talk Box haunted Orlando venues like Uncle Lou’s, International Noise Conference in Miami and even an Orlando Denny’s (“one of the best experiences of my life ... and they didn’t kick us out!” recalls Dennenberg) — best believe that one’s on YouTube — over a decade ago.
Thursday will be a return from a long performance dormancy. She’s excited to revive the project, try new things — and finally see Orlando electronic project Bacon Grease.
“I’ve never seen her play and I really just want to see her play live,”says Denniberg.“So I figured it’d be a great time to see her.”
Denniberg gives a lot of credit to Orlando as a “formative” place where she was able to hone her creative craft early on, both in film and music. She shouts out Jimmy Schaus, Kate Shults, Uncle Lou’s and supportive UCF professors.
Her current home base of Weeki Wachee is, also, providing inspiration both old and new.
“I grew up going to the mermaid shows, they were a big inspiration for my movie. I love those tacky mermaid aesthetics,” says Denniberg. “It feels like I’m very much home.”
And Denniberg is using her time to finish up her next feature film Killer Makeover, one she’s been working on for several years now.
“That one is about a beautician who gets kicked out of beauty school and then she gets cursed, so that everyone she puts makeup on dies. And that one is written by Chris Shields — who also is in Video Diary and helped write Video Diary — with Sarah Fensom, who writes for big publications like Sight & Sound, and Phil Chernyak, who works in television production. We’ve got so many different people from so many different threads of artistic expression coming in.”
Now seems the best time for the obligatory horror host-ish come to the shows ... if you dare.
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