FRIGHTFEST
SINCE THE TURN of the century, I’ve spent August Bank Holiday weekend at FrightFest, arguably the UK’s flagship horror festival. One reason I risk screen blindness to see so many of the 65-ish films scheduled is to get ahead with the review slots of this column. Some FF films turn up on various platforms, formats or in cinemas immediately… others creep out over the months (and, sometimes, years) to come. A few are never heard from again — which means they’re possibly terrible, though occasionally luckless. Several I sometimes think I imagined, only for other festival-goers to confirm that, yes, there really was a Snoop Dogg’s Hood Of Horror… or a riffle through my shoebox of check discs* reminds me that someone remade The Banana Splits as a robots-on-the-rampage slasher film.
Inevitably, we focus on one-offs… outstanding achievements in horror and ‘go-straight-to-movie-jail’ disasters which creep through. But a festival programme can just drop you in a morass of movies, so you can spot connections or ongoing/ coming trends. Every year, FF is a health-check for horror, a genre which is obliged to track what we’re worried about or afraid of and show it back to us with the addition of a giant, tentacled being from the beyond or a masked slasher lurking outside the cabin in the woods. In the last few years, for obvious reasons, there have been a lot of lockdown-set pandemic-paranoia movies. Now, we’re getting the first what-lessons-didn’t-we-learn? horrors, as the world opens up but we remain terrified — two solid films about the claustrophobia of wide-open spaces are The Seeding (set in a Utah desert crater) and The Moor (set in Yorkshire). It’s great to see more than just lip-service being paid to diversity, with films by and about a wider range of people — see Paris Zarcilla’s Raging Grace, Clare Cooney’s Departing Seniors, Alice Miao Mackay’s T Blockers, Ariel Vida’s Trim Season and Otto Baxter’s The Puppet Asylum.
