Scares imported from all over

THE fifth annual Screamfest Horror Film Festival and Screenplay Competition runs Friday through Oct. 23 at the Universal Studios Cinemas. Among the films available for preview is Ahn Byeong-ki’s “Bunshinsaba: Ouija Board.” Not in the league of the South Korean director’s best-known horror film, “Phone,” “Bunshinsaba” is still a creepy entry into the girls’ high school genre in which a student wreaks revenge upon her tormentors.

Yu-jin (Lee Se-eun) seems to have committed no sin other than to have moved from Seoul, becoming an outsider in a small-town girls’ high school, where students bully her. Yu-jin takes to her Ouija board to curse them with the nonsense word “bunshinsaba.” But she unleashes the spirit of a girl who died a horrible death 30 years ago. Complications -- and corpses -- pile up, at times to confusing effect.

Yam Laranas’ “The Echo” (Sigaw) is a real stunner, a stylish chiller set in what has to be Manila’s biggest, most derelict apartment house. Likable young waiter Marvin (Richard Gutierrez) has scraped together enough money to buy a unit. Down the hall lives a young woman, Anna (Iza Calzado), with a jealous husband (Jomari Yllana). He is an incessant wife-beater who sometimes even takes out his rage on their small daughter, Lara (Janella Denise Guevarra), who tends to appear and then disappear in unlikely places all over the building. When Anna reaches out for help from Marvin, his situation grows worse, and his girlfriend, Pinky (Angel Locsin), struggles to get him to move out.

Laranas, a master at creating an ominous atmosphere, builds to an exceptionally rigorous, satisfying conclusion. “The Echo” could easily become a cult film.

Early avant-garde

On Sunday, Filmforum will present a tantalizing sampling from “Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1891-1941,” a seven-disc boxed set of 155 newly preserved films, selected from leading archives by curator Bruce Posner and producer David Shepard.

Among Sunday’s offerings is W.L. Dickson’s “Annabelle Dances and Dances,” three tinted shorts shot from 1894 to 1896 featuring Annabelle Whitford Moore, who could manipulate her skirts like Sally Rand maneuvered her fans. Fernand Leger and Dudley Murphy’s Dada-ist “Ballet mecanique,” which intercuts mechanical devices with a woman’s face, will be shown the first time with its mechanical-percussionist score composed by George Antheil and arranged by Paul Lehrman.

The “By a Waterfall” number from “Footlight Parade” (1933) represents one of choreographer Busby Berkeley’s grandest geometric explosions, an Art Deco aquacade featuring 100 bathing beauties. Mary Ellen Bute’s “Spook Sport” (1939-40), with animation by Norman McLaren, is a jaunty Minimalist short in which spirits arise from graves to prance and fly to the music of Saint-Saens’ “Danse macabre.”

The program will be held in the Egyptian.

Note: The American Cinematheque’s Cinema Italian Style continues at the Egyptian through Sunday in the main theater, concluding at 6 p.m. Sunday with Pupi Avati’s “So When Are the Girls Coming?,” featuring several young people dealing with crises.

Back to Africa

Ray Mueller’s “Her Dream of Africa,” which will be shown at the Goethe-Institut after Tuesday’s screening of Jesse Amirouche Allaoua’s “Tango Dream,” chronicles Leni Riefenstahl’s return to Sudan in February 2000. She first went there in the ‘50s, discovering among the Nuba people a way of resurrecting her life. Finding acceptance, Riefenstahl translated the Nuba’s strength and beauty into images that would launch her career as a still photographer.

At 97, Riefenstahl made her farewell journey to the Nuba despite the civil war in Sudan. Accompanied by her friend Hans Kettner and Mueller, she flew for a reunion made profoundly bittersweet by seeing a sad and decimated people whose cultural identity had been destroyed by forced conversion to Islam.

Mueller incorporates footage Riefenstahl shot of the Nuba in the 1950s; it and her photographs stand as a record of a vanished way of life. Riefenstahl fled Sudan as gunfire started in a countryside area. She was then nearly killed when her helicopter was shot down. Suffering from broken ribs and facial wounds, she remained undaunted and, at 98, resumed scuba diving and underwater photography. She died in 2003 at 101.

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Screenings

Screamfest Horror Film Festival

* “Bunshinsaba: Ouija Board”: 10 p.m. Saturday

* “The Echo”: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday

Where: Universal Studios Cinemas, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City

Info: (310) 358-3273

Unseen Cinema

When: 7 p.m. Sunday

Where: Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

Info: (323) 466-FILM

Goethe-Institut

* “Tango Dream” and “Her Dream of Africa”: 7 p.m. Tuesday

Where: 5750 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 100, L.A.

Info: (323) 525-3388