Presented by Films Fanatik and Horreur Fanatik
Sator
Directed by Jordan Graham
Hosted by Director Jordan Graham
Director
Jordan Graham
Writer
Jordan Graham
Cast
Michael Daniel, Rachel Johnson, Aurora Lowe, Gabe Nicholson, June Peterson, Wendy Taylor
Producer
Jordan Graham
Cinematographer
Jordan Graham
Composer
Jordan Graham
Editor
Jordan Graham
Adam (Gabe Nicholson) lives a lonely existence in a cabin in a desolate forest, checking “Deer Cam” feeds on his computer and occasionally receiving visits from his brother Pete (Michael Daniel). Another family member looms large in his life: his grandmother “Nani” (June Petersom), who has long been a receptor for a spirit she calls Sator. This presence has been getting into her head and “training me, teaching me to be a person,” Nani says, and Adam slowly discovers that it has a more malevolent purpose as well. No longer confined to Nani’s psyche, Sator begins manifesting in other ways, threatening the lives of Adam and his troubled family.
An exercise in horror minimalism and getting the most out of modest resources, SATOR is also a deeply personal film for Jordan Graham. Basing the story on his own family’s experiences, Graham weaves a moody tale of physical and emotional isolation and dysfunction, exacerbated by the growing threat of the supernatural. As signaled by the handwritten opening credits, this was a true do-it-yourself project for Graham, who wrote, directed, produced, shot, edited and did pretty much everything else on SATOR, which took him five years to complete. The end result is short on dialogue and long on eerie middle-of-the-woods atmosphere, as Graham and his small cast elicit a tangible threat lurking both outside in the night and within Adam’s tortured psyche. Alternating between widescreen colour and square-screen black-and-white flashbacks, with many long, eerily composed static shots, the filmmaker finds a chillingly austere beauty in mist-shrouded woods and snow-covered fields. SATOR draws you in and holds you captive, and then freezes your blood with freakish visitations and moments of unflinching violence. – Michael Gingold
Showings
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Lodge
Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala
Hailed at Sundance as “the next great horror film,” this nerve-shredding story of inexplicable, terrifying things happening to a snowed-in family stars Richard Armitage, Riley Keough and Alicia Silverstone...
Tone-Deaf
Richard Bates Jr.
The magic of Airbnb connects fed-up-with-everything millennial Olive (Amanda Crew) with angry-with-everything MAGA widower Henry (Robert Patrick). Sparks fly, along with a whole lot of witticisms — and blo...
The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue
Jorge Grau
Influenced by the counterculture and informed by an anger that speaks to catastrophic environmental neglect, one of the great leftfield Euro-horror works of the ’70s — a still-startling nightmare creation ...