There are two little girls, one bright blue eyed and blonde haired, innocent; the other darker, more knowing. One day they are sitting in the darker one’s house, bored; fed up of listening to 80s pop music and watching Grease. And they find there, hidden in the deep, dark depths of the father’s video collection, films in black boxes with obscure names, with 18 certificate stickers plastered on them. The two little girls look at each other, wide eye; one inserts the video into the recorder, and presses play. Is this the start of the loss of innocence?
Parents say that scary films fuck kids up. I’ve been watching them since I was about 8 years old, and I think I’ve come out alright. I’m not a mass murderer; I don’t torture animals; I’ve never been to prison or been caught doing anything I shouldn’t; I’ve been to school, college, university. I pay my bills. I live a life within the confines of our society. So, therefore, if I’m the model, why the fuck is everyone freaking out about violent films? The 80s bought us moral panics about such films as Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Poltergeist, I Spit on Your Grave, The Chucky films, etcetera. The Daily hysteria branded them harmful to our children. Other people read into this bullshit and burned their video collections because they feared what these movies would do to their kids, unbeknownst to our overprotective, nice, kind, parents, that we’d been watching them after they’d gone to bed, and they were doing things far greater than we could imagine in the bedroom, we were watching serial killers, aghast, peeking out from behind the comfort of our sleeping bags!
Twenty years on, things have changed somewhat. I’m twenty seven for a start! But I even get ID’d when I go to the video store now; something that just didn’t happen when my 8 year old self was asking teenage boys to rent horror films on my behalf. It’s not that there’s less access to the darkest of dark films; even our parent’s attempts to shut such travesties away in locked cupboards, remained futile; no, it’s more than there’s an acceptance that such films are a piece of “art” of some sort. Some people (myself probably included here) believe that some films are artistic in their brutality; some films have something important to say; some films have a message, a vision, and that vision is best shown through something dramatic, something extreme, something otherworldly, visually stunning; something that attacks our consciousness and makes us sit up and think and take notice of a screen that we are, otherwise, accustomed to and pay such little attention to.
There are people in the world like this; who believe in this vision; who believe that horror films have something important to say and they’re not just another band of Hollywood directors trying to sell their souls out at the box office for maximum profits. Some of these people run a horror film festival in London, called Frightfest. We like these people.
Frightfest started 11 years ago, as a side project to Paul McEvoy’s day job – running a small chain of horror film stores in the UK. Paul was obsessed with horror films and one day just happened to think to himself, “Why hasn’t London got an incredible genre film festival?” It didn’t take long before he joined with his band of Frightfest brothers to create such a thing. He knew Alan Jones through Shock Around the Block (a then defunct genre film festival), a horror and fantasy film writer, and as passionate about the genre as Paul was. They joined together with Film Distributor, Ian Rattray to create a horror film festival BY fans FOR fans. Their original ethos was that they wanted to create a festival that was completely and insanely passionate about horror that would appeal to the people who were just as nutty about the genre as they were!
The Frightfest “boys” – Paul McEvoy (far left) & Alan Jones (second from right)
Photo credit: Julia Edwards
They started off in a tiny little grindcore cinema in London’s West End in August 2000. Over the last 11 years, the festival has grown organically to take over the UK’s biggest cinema screen at the Empire in Leicester Square. Now it boasts the UK premieres of some of the hottest new horror film releases; this year’s no exception, with the presence of Eli Roth, in the Producer seat for the UK premiere of The Last Exorcism .
Less recently, the festival has seen premieres of many a groundbreaking feature, including (but not limited to), Takashi Miike’s Audition, Battle Royale, Richard Kelly’s debut Donnie Darko, Switchblade Romance, Old Boy, Wolf Creek, Jeepers Creepers, Hatchet, Hostel, Cabin Fever, Eden Lake, House of 1000 Corpses, Martyrs, etc. You can often see horror film directors wandering around the festival. In my short time there, I spotted Adam Green, Director of Hatchet; Simon Rumley (The Living & the Dead) and Eli Roth (Hostel). This year, they hosted a Tobe Hooper special screening day (he of Texas Chainsaw Massacre), with a Q&A with the man himself. Not too shabby for us horror fiends!
Tobe Hooper Q&A at Frightfest 2010
Photo credit: Julia Edwards
We caught up with Paul McEvoy to find out how his once-was side project has now overtaken the day job.
“We’re now in the 11th year of Frighfest, which is very exciting! We started out in the Prince Charles Cinema; we were there for 3 years. We outgrew that fairly quickly and moved to the Odeon West End, then just last year we moved to the Empire and started the Discovery screen, so we essentially have two screens of horror films running at the same time!”
The festival has not always been the showbiz, showbiz media event it is now, boasting a press wall with directors milling about the cinema halls, followed by camera men from the Horror Channel. In its early incantation, it was just an idea, a vision, by the Frightfest “boys” to bring a horror festival to London to appeal to fans of the genre! Film festivals are, after all, notorious for being far more about the industry than for fans themselves, who simply reveal in the showbiz awesomeness of media hype! So what makes Frightfest different?
“When we first had the idea for Frighfest there was nothing else going on. We’re making the festival for the fans. It has grown, yes. But we do try and make it a soulful and heartfelt event so that everyone is included.” – Paul McEvoy
It may be difficult to maintain a balance between attracting directors and artists to showcase their work, and keeping the fans happy but somehow Frightfest manages it with interactive Q&As with legendary directors, such as Tobe Hooper (2010) and George Romero (Night of the Living Dead / Day of the Dead), and a friendly and approachable public area where the public can, and do, meet their horror idols.
Q&A with the cast of Dead Cert at 2010 Frightfest
Photo credit: Julia Edwards
Obviously attempts to provide artists with a credible outlay to premiere their films and providing the public with some much needed gore, horror and more importantly, fantasy, in their otherwise, mundane lives, can be problematic, as such priorities can often conflict. What the public are allowed to see, can compromise the artistic integrity of what the director might like to be seen. After all, there are boundaries and limits set by our Governments and institutions, which dictate what is suitable for the silver screen.
As an example, this year, Westminster Council took offence to one of the films being shown at Frighfest, as Paul explains,
“Every year we have to submit a list of movies we’re screening to Westminster Council. This year they did have a problem with us screening A Serbian Film. There’s no way we’d (Frightfest) want to show the film in a bastardised form. As Alan explained on stage, in a heartfelt speech, before the film was due to be shown, Westminster council wanted way too many cuts and they couldn’t guarantee us that even with those cuts, we’d be able to show it. We ended up showing Buried instead, which is an amazing movie! This is the first time, we’ve ever had to pull a film for this reason, so we just hope it doesn’t happen again!”
In fact Westminster Council asked for 49 individual cuts to the movie, amounting to almost 4 whole minutes of screen time. It’s perhaps no wonder that the Frightfest organisers decided to not show a film so heavily tampered with by the “establishment”. A Serbian Film, directed by Srdjan Spasojevic, revolves around the story of a former porn star lured from retirement and, unfortunately, contains some not very nice depictions of rape (IMDB it if you want the gory details!).
The director defended his film to British Broadsheet The Guardian saying,
“This is a diary of our own molestation by the Serbian government. It’s about the monolithic power of leaders who hypnotise you to do things you don’t want to do. You have to feel the violence to know what it’s about.”
The film’s intention was to use the depictions of violence to metaphorically portray the omnipotent abuse of power by the Serbian Government, to its public. Co-director, Alan Jones also told The Guardian that the Frightfest organisers did not want to cut the film, as they did not want to interfere with the Director’s artistic integrity,
“FrightFest has decided not to show A Serbian Film in a heavily cut version because, as a festival with a global integrity, we think a film of this nature should be shown in its entirety as per the director’s intention.”
There’s obviously a fine line to tread between pandering to the “establishment” (a legal requirement) in order to show films to the public in their “purest” format, void of censorship and the original messages prevailing over propaganda edits (especially those that utilise imagery currently on the “banned list”). It’s important, perhaps, in a time where other countries (such as Serbia) are being censored and whose artistic outlays are being controlled, to give a voice to the voices that are being silenced. Is it not even more imperative, therefore, for such films to viewed in countries, such as the UK and the USA, where we allow ourselves certain civil rights and freedoms so that such works can be viewed by us, untampered with?
See the trailer for A Serbian Film
Other delights actually shown at Frighfest included: The UK premier of Eli Roth’s The Last Exorcism, slasher sequel Hatchet II, London vampire movie Dead Cert, The original horror to end all horrors, Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, hoody horror F, remake of the1979 exploitation classic, I Spit on Your Grave, and rising Director Simon Rumley’s latest blood curdling thriller, Red, White and Blue.
See the trailer for The Last Exorcism
See the trailer for I Spit on Your Grave
See the trailer for Red, White & Blue
If you like horror cinema, you could do a lot worse than to check out some of these awesome films! Frightfest will be back on the Bank Holiday weekend in 2011 with even more horrific delights for your wide eyes to feast on!
we dance to all the wrong songs 