Ink is the final instalment in Scottish horror filmmaker, Andy Stewart’s body-horror trilogy. It follows a lonely man who is not given a name nor says a word throughout the film.
We follow ‘the man’ as his obsession with tattoos becomes dangerous and he struggles to hide his secret. He begins to steal other people’s tattoos and sews them onto his own skin.
The violence in the 20-minute short is impressive because it is so subtle, yet the gore is so frequent. We only really see the aftermath of the extreme violence but still are still able to understand exactly what happened. Body-horror can be effective in the right setting – luckily, Ink has this appropriate atmosphere that means the scenes of gore work perfectly.
Following Andy Stewart’s two previous films, Dysmorphia and Split, Ink is the final instalment in his trilogy of horror short films. The gore effects in all three of these films are excessive yet extremely effective. These low-budget gore-fests all feature one man with no name who usually says nothing. The tense atmosphere in Ink works really well in establishing how ill ‘the man’ is and how warped his sense of reality is.
Although Ink is pretty short, the story is explained well enough even though there is no dialogue. This form of story telling works really well here; there is no forced exposition yet you understand exactly what is going on.
As the plot continues and you realise that ‘the man’ is becoming more desperate as he notices that his stolen tattoos are not surviving on his body – all of this tension builds up to a great ending.
Overall, Ink is a great little horror film full of visual yucks and tense, atmospheric sequences. The film emphasises the possibility of horror being present in our lives – behind closed doors – and this type of graphic horror in a seemingly normal world is very effective and unsettling.
Ink’s premiere will be on October 25th at the Celluloid Screams Horror Film Festival in Sheffield.
