FrightFest preview

Nigel Floyd looks forward to this year's celebration of all things horror.

Aug 22 2006

'Thanks to Alan Jones and FrightFest,' reads an end credit on Christopher Smith's British horror movie 'Severance', which gets a sneak charity preview as an appetiser for this year's horror, fantasy and science-fiction showcase.

Jointly programmed by Jones, Paul McEvoy and Ian Rattray, the festival enters its seventh year with a new sponsor (Zone Horror), a bigger venue and a bumper crop of horror movies from all over the world. The four-day bank holiday weekend starts proper with Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro's mesmerising 'Pan's Labyrinth', an allegorical fairytale set in 1940s fascist Spain. Other international offerings run the gamut from Swedish vampires ('Frostbite'), Korean squid-monster mayhem ('The Host'), German cannibalism ('Grimm Love'), and French diabolism ('Sheitan') to an anthology of blaxploitation horror ('Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror').

This year's line-up is especially strong on movies by first-time filmmakers, which the festival has a well-deserved reputation for supporting. Christopher Smith's debut movie, 'Creep', screened at FrightFest in 2004, enjoying a baptism of fire in front of its keen, demanding and knowledgeable fans. 'FrightFest was a major factor in the success of 'Creep' in the UK,' acknowledges Smith. 'The audience was made up of 100 per cent hardcore horror fans, and it felt as if it got the horror seal of approval. Loyal horror fans are the top level of critique, so to speak. But they're also hard to scare, harder to surprise and the hardest to please.'

Among those whose films will be subject to similar scrutiny this year are a slightly nervous Hadi Hajaig, the director of 'Puritan': 'It's not an out-and-out horror movie, it's more of a modern film noir with a teasing hint of the supernatural. But I think the kind of people who like 'Donnie Darko', Peter Ackroyd's Gothic novel 'Hawksmoor', or the comic-books of Alan Moore, will also like 'Puritan'. FrightFest has taken a risk by showing a small, independent film that we made completely off our own backs; but that's what smaller, more specialised festivals are all about, giving a platform to first-time filmmakers.'

Also hoping to benefit from the die-hard horror fans dedication to the genre is Irish filmmaker Billy O'Brien, whose experiences on the film festival circuit with his riveting rural horror movie 'Isolation' have so far proved positive but nerve-wracking. At the Brussels International Fantasy Film Festival earlier this year, he was warned that fans would simply get up and walk out en masse if they didn't like his film: 'Fortunately, the audience stayed to the end, clapped and shouted all sorts of stuff in French, which I don't speak; but the organisers assured me that they had enjoyed it. Having seen how the film plays in Canada, France and Belgium, I'm keen to see how it goes down with an English horror festival audience.'

A film with a head-start on the FrightFest audience is Scott Glosserman's witty slasher movie/mockumentary 'Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon', in which a three-person student film crew chronicles the modus operandi of a would-be serial killer with aspirations to being the next Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. Echoing both 'Man Bites Dog' and Christopher Guest's 'Best in Show', the film takes a wry, knowing look at the conventions of slasher movies such as 'A Nightmare on Elm Street', 'Halloween' and 'Friday the 13th'.

Glosserman knows he's preaching to the converted, but he's not complacent about the need to meet the demanding fans' high expectations. Sloppy pastiche, he knows, simply would not cut it: 'The problem with a lazy movie like 'Scary Movie' is that it doesn't elevate the genre. That's because you're laughing at the movies it parodies, not with them. So although my film is a send-up of all those slasher movies we have loved, the nostalgic references and cameo performances [including a cast-against-type Robert Englund in the caring shrink role] make the audience feel that they own part of the film. And I think that's why they laugh (and scream) along with it.'

For those with less demanding tastes there are plenty of throwback gore movies: Adam Green's 'Hatchet', Gregory Dark's 'See No Evil', Chris Silvertson's 'The Lost', and Martín Garrido Barón's 'H6: Diary of a Serial Killer'. By contrast, the two low-budget British entries – Adam Mason's 'Broken', a grim study of the relationship between a kidnapped woman and her captor, and Simon Rumley's distressing study of family madness, 'The Living and the Dead' – just straddle the fine line between extremity and exploitation.

For full FrightFest details head here, and to read our exclsive interview with Alan Jones, click here.

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