In quiet consolation of the fact that today apparently marks the 65th year since Thomas Ligotti first entered into the corporeal state of the horror of being, we present The Frolic: a short film based on Ligotti’s tale of the same name (and scripted by Ligotti and Branton Trenz).
Thusfar, this is the only on-screen adaptation of Ligotti’s work - and it is perhaps unsurprising that the film-makers opted for this particular tale, as it is about as close as Ligotti has ever come to writing something akin to a ‘conventional’ horror story. Even so, the quiet yet chilling denouement of The Frolic effects a typically Ligottian shift in questioning the very fabric of what we take as ‘reality’, further suggesting that one of the worst crimes imaginable is but a cipher for an even more horrifying encounter with the unreal. Maury Sterling also puts in an excellently understated yet unsettling and otherworldy turn as the film’s principle antagonist, the child murderer John Doe.
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