Silver is the colour of a classic screen, of a knife glinting in the dark, and of a 25th anniversary – all of which makes silver an apt emblem for this year’s August Bank Holiday weekend FrightFest, as it celebrates a quarter century of frightening, fuddling and freaking out audiences with its carefully curated mix of horror, sci-fi, fantasy, action.
FrightFest is where genre comes out to play, without embarrassment, guilt or shame – and although, over two and a half decades, the festival has transformed many times in scale and venue, ever-growing and always mutating to keep up with contemporary anxieties, thankfully it has not matured or grown out of its appeal to the terrified, enthralled child in us all. FrightFest hits us in the primals, taking us right back to where those elemental emotions first took form.
This year FrightFest returns, but as ever to a changed landscape. While FrightFest has been hosted by Odeon West End in bygone years (2005-2008), since then that cinema has closed down – and so now, when the festival takes place across the multiple screens of Leicester Square’s two Odeon Luxes, it will be back to a place it has never quite been before. This is how the genre works too, always looking back to move forward and disinterring its own past to build the future. Unsurprisingly, amid all the latest works from horror’s cutting edge, this year’s edition will also feature several retrospective titles: 40th anniversary screenings of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm St and Toshiharu Ikeda’s Mermaid Legend (both 1984) – as well as the international première of Buddy Cooper’s belated meta requel to his own 1984 slasher The Mutilator. There is also a re-screening of FrightFest regular Jake West’s debut feature Razor Blade Smile (1998), and plenty of documentaries casting their analytical eye over different aspects of the genre’s history (Jon Spira’s The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee, Justin Hardy, Dominic Hardy and Chris Nunn’s Children of the Wicker Man, Ry Levey’s Boutique: To Preserve and Collect, Phillip Escott and Sarah Appleton’s Generation Terror, and Amanda Kramer’s So Unreal).
Meanwhile there is the return of familiar filmmakers: E.L. Katz (Cheap Thrills, 2013) with sacrificial silent Azrael: Angel of Death; André Øvredal (Troll Hunter, 2010) with (finally!) The Last Voyage of the Demeter; Mitzi Peirone (Braid, 2018) with assassination trip Saint Clare; Jill Gevargizian (The Stylist, 2020) with phrogging phreakout Ghost Game; Ant Timpson (Come To Daddy, 2019) with father-daughter cryptozoological adventure Bookworm; Mickey Keating (Pod, 2015; Psychopaths, 2017; Offseason, 2021) with missing-person domestic thriller Invader; Lowell Dean (WolfCop, 2014) with ritualised wrestling picture Dark Match; Alice Maio Mackay (T-Blockers, 2023) with sleuth-y slaughterhouse Carnage for Christmas; Graham Skipper (Sequence Break, 2017) with post-apocalyptic break-up The Lonely Man With The Ghost Machine; Brian Hanson (The Black String, 2018) with sci-fi psychodrama The Bunker; Damon Rickard (short film The Package, 2015) with his feature debut Never Have I Ever – and Joanne Mitchell, who has previously starred in all of her husband Dominic Brunt’s FrightFest-premièring films Before Dawn (2013), Bait (2014), Attack of the Adult Babies (2017), Evie (2021) and Wolf Manor (2022), now has the transgressive undertakings of her own directorial debut feature debut Broken Bird opening FrightFest.
In fact this is the first time that FrightFest has had its coveted opening and closing slots both filled with films directed by women, given that the festival will end with Coralie Fargeat’s camp, Cannes-confounding body horror The Substance. In between are a further 68 features, including of course the ‘First Blood’ programme of debuting British fillmakers (Sophie Osbourn’s The Monster Beneath Us, Aled Owen’s Scopophobia, Joy Wilkinson’s 7 Keys, Tony Burke’s Protein, Benjamin Goodger’s Year 10 and Josephine Rose’s Touchdown). There are a few films that I have already seen and can heartily recommend: Joshua Erkman’s metacinematic, elegiac neo-noir A Desert, Kelly Bigelow Becerra and Roland Becerra’s beautifully bewitching rotoscoped experiment Agatha, Jonathan Zaurin’s social-realist, self-interrogating revenge flick Derelict, Kyle McConaghy and Joe DeBoer’s Eighties-set Midwest mystery thriller Dead Mail, Michael Felker’s slyly mind-bending time-travel heist Things Will be Different, Cutter Hodierne’s Christmas cryptocurrency home invasion drama Cold Wallet, Mike Hermosa’s comic creature-(doesn’t-)feature The Invisible Raptor, and Loïc Tanson’s Western(-European) rape-revenger The Last Ashes. As for the rest, all you need to know is that one of the greatest joys at FrightFest is discovery, when you chance upon a title of which you know next to nothing, and are taken somewhere surprising and amazing that stays with you long after.
Indeed there has never, in my experience, been a FrightFest where the magic has not happened, often when you least expect it. So, many happy returns to a festival that ages with grace precisely by refusing to grow up. It is the devilishly handsome silver fox that still proudly sports the old horror-themed T-shirt…
Pigeon Shrine FrightFest will take place this year 22nd-26th August across the two Luxe Odeons on Leicester Square. Full festival and day passes go on sale from midday on the 13th of July, and single film tickets will be available from midday on the 20th of July.
Full booking and programme details can be found here: https://www.frightfest.co.uk
