I’ve made no secret of my love for Sir Christopher Lee over the years. I cried for hours when the actor died in 2015. I’ve got his iconic visage as Dracula tattooed on my leg, something I’m sure he would have hated. So when I saw that writer-director Jon Spira’s new documentary about the man, The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee, was playing at Fantastic Fest, my finger was poised to snag a ticket the moment they dropped. And while I certainly enjoyed the doc (and cried again… twice), it’s not without its faults — one of which some fans may struggle to overlook.

Lee lived an extraordinary life, and The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee manages to cover an awful lot of that life in under two hours. From Lee’s still-secretive military service during World War II to his early struggles as a too-tall actor and his bristly attitude toward being labeled the King of Horror, the documentary moves quickly yet comprehensively through Lee’s life in a mostly linear fashion, pausing to flesh out certain details like his long-time friendship with the late Peter Cushing (pass the tissues, please).

If you’ve read Lee’s autobiography, Tall, Dark and Gruesome (later re-released as Lord of Misrule), much of this information won’t be new. Yet The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee finds ways to keep the material fresh, leveraging a blend of puppetry, animation, and talking head interviews with Lee’s friends, biographers, and peers.

The use of a marionette to represent Lee is by far the most compelling choice that the documentary makes, with actor Peter Serafinowicz lending his dulcet tones to bring the puppet to life. The doc imbues the wooden Lee with severity and softness, wit and woe, capturing the many sides of the often conflicted and restless actor. Lee wrote and spoke enough about his life and career that this portrayal doesn’t come across as tasteless in the way that some posthumous reanimations do, such as the CGI rendering of the aforementioned Cushing in 2016’s Rogue One. But it is noticeable that the documentary rarely includes footage of the real Lee talking, when plenty of archival interview footage certainly exists.

Several other people talk about Lee, however, including Lee’s niece, Harriet Walter, and directors Joe Dante and Peter Jackson, who worked with Lee on Gremlins 2 and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy respectively. Lee’s friend John Landis also appears repeatedly and rather outstays his welcome, telling stories about Lee that largely revolve around himself. Meanwhile, Lee’s biographer, Jonathan Rigby, provides some interesting nuance around the actor’s rocky relationship with the horror genre and his inadvertent habit of pushing fans away.

These interviews and puppet interludes are spliced with footage from some of Lee’s films (though they’re rarely labeled), still photographs, and a variety of animated segments, and it’s the latter that will likely leave a sour taste in the mouth. Because, for all its use of practical puppetry, The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee can’t help but dip into AI’s bag of tricks to fill some screen time. And where other films have at least edited the work that AI produced (looking at you, Late Night with the Devil), Spira seems content to leave it obviously unfinished and, frankly, ugly.

There’s a moment in The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee when one of the talking heads comments flippantly that Hammer Film Productions — where Lee shot to fame — was not in the business of creating art. Hammer was certainly thrifty and business minded, always quick to churn out a sequel or flash a bare breast to make a quick buck, but it also had an immensely talented and hardworking crew behind the scenes who frequently spun gold out of straw. That’s why Hammer and Lee’s legacy with the company have lived on long after the horror genre at large left their brand of cozy Gothic terror behind. You can feel all the fingerprints on film, and they’re beautiful.

It’s hard to imagine something that leans so heavily on AI having as much staying power.

The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee had its North American premiere at Fantastic Fest 2024.

Supernatural horror films tend to share one core element in common: what’s buried won’t stay buried. Taiwanese horror-comedy Dead Talents Society takes this in an absurd — and absurdly brilliant — new direction, presenting us with a world where the dead compete to become (and stay) urban legends to avoid disappearing.

Gingle Wang stars as The Rookie, who is on the fast track to oblivion after her family inadvertently throws away a key artifact from her life. In order to be seen by the living and earn her keep in the afterlife, she has to audition for a “haunter’s license” — an audition that she bombs spectacularly. You see, The Rookie didn’t die in a way that would lend itself easily to urban legend, and she’s so shy and hesitant that life passed her by even when she was alive. Luckily, she’s taken on as an assistant to fading diva Catharine (Sandrine Pinna), once an icon of the industry, now wilting in the shadow of her more famous protege, Jessica (Eleven Yao).

This apprenticeship gives director John Hsu, who co-wrote the script with Kun-Lin Tsai, the opportunity to pay loving homage to all the great horror that East Asian cinema has produced over the past few decades. References to The Ring, The Grudge, and even Perfect Blue are woven throughout the various urban legends, always with a cheeky wink to the audience. There are shades of Beetlejuice here too, though never to a point that feels derivative. Where Burton presented the afterlife as one of boredom and drudgery, albeit through a cartoonish filter, Hsu’s version of the eternal waiting room is glossy and frenetic, with the dead as obsessed with the allure of celebrity as we are.

A lesser film might take the easy path of simply critiquing celebrity culture, but Dead Talents Society merely uses this critique as a springboard for a deeper commentary about the crushing weight of expectations. This is something that every one of us can relate to on some level, and Hsu ensures that The Rookie’s deep-felt hurt over being overlooked and her consequent feelings of worthlessness remain the beating heart of the film, even amidst all the zany ghost antics.

And Dead Talents Society is certainly zany, juxtaposing slapstick shocks like The Rookie’s fumbling attempts to become an urban legend with more traditional scare scenes like Catharine’s award-winning hotel haunt. The script knows when to go full tilt and when to pause for breath, and while it favors the former to great effect, it’s those quieter character moments that will haunt you long after the final fright is through.

Dead Talents Society made its U.S. premiere at Fantastic Fest 2024, where it won Best Director and the Audience Award.