FilmShaft Diary: When Ed went to Frightfest
For most of us the August Bank Holiday weekend means barbeques, beer on the village green and meeting up with the friends you’ve ignored for weeks but FilmShaft’s Ed Whitfield, having received no invitation to eat charcoaled meat went to London’s premier horror film festival instead. One week on, he’s finally ready to talk about what he saw there. Dare you read on?
I’m not a horror aficionado. Having cut my corneas on Huston, Hitchcock and Verhoven, there seemed to me something witless and crude about ninety percent of the genre’s staples. It was, from the perspective of a nervous boy who harboured night time fantasies about being eviscerated by burglars while his dear single mother was bludgeoned by their hands, and who still, in his thirties for God’s sake, bolts upright in bed at the odd creak, rustle or howl, never a genre that connoted entertainment.
And wasn’t horror the retreat of sexually retarded teenage boys and their abused girlfriends anyway? I may be more inclined to give it a chance now I don’t need the night light on anymore but somewhere, festering in the jet black void in the centre of my psyche – the place where as you approach there is only scratching and blowflies, lie the old prejudices. In my mind the archetypal horror fan was an awkward creature; a diseased ghoul, typically a refugee from a metal band, whose roadie appearance and typically fraught background had disposed them toward a deathcentric view of life.
They liked their movies like they liked their music – profoundly misogynistic, loud, suffused with violence and built on simple, easy to learn riffs. They shared a common vocabulary with their US brethren, having been educated on their guitar bands and consequently, though they’re late of Sussex or Buckinghamshire, their spiritual home is in California. Typically they seek out women who, like themselves, felt the Devil’s hand squeezing their heart from an early age. These are the girls that were never quite felt comfortable in their own skin and saw romance in death. They were the ones that craved escapism from their humdrum existence and reached for the fantastical – Wicca, vampirism, the supernatural– anything but that colourful, upbeat discharge that their peers enjoyed. Horror appealed to them because it mirrored their cynical view of the world. So what if the girls in these movies are typically mutilated, brutalised, murdered, or mere sexual objects; poster girls for the rape fantasies of men who’d never really understood the fairer sex? This seemed to them instinctively correct. They too had always been prayed upon by twisted boyfriends and they could relate. This was a safe way to be scared and it reflected their experience back to them. Yes, this surely, was what horror movie spectatorship was all about wasn’t it?
Such thoughts permeated the mind as I prepared to attend Frightfest – the annual celebration of photochemical unpleasantness in London’s Leicester Square. The interest came from a friend, a lifelong reader of Hachette mag Fangoria and someone whose appetite for sickness had remained unsated since his early teens. We’d seen the odd film in previous years but this time he wanted the mother load, or at least that mother’s head. We’d attend for a full day on Bank Holiday Saturday – a day’s pass for 45 blood stained pounds. There would be a movie either side of this gore marathon on the Friday and Monday. Some attendees would be paying £145 to see all 27 movies across 5 days. I wondered how many of them were genre tourists like myself. No one who’d be missed that’s for sure.
The festival, now in its 10th year, has become an essential part of any horror fans calendar. Started in 2000 by organisers Greg Day, Alan Jones, Paul McEvoy and Ian Rattray – a quartet drawn from the world of PR, Journalism and Film, it was conceived as a showcase for cult (that is to say, barely seen) blood baths and occupied the lone screen of the Prince Charles Cinema. Its popularity soon expanded much like a cadaver in the few days after death. A move to the larger Odeon West End cinema followed. Directors and key players in the movies were attracted by the opportunity to wax lyrical with their core audience – planting a seed of awareness that would grow via internet discussion forums and later, blogs and social networking sites like Twitter. Not ones to stand on ceremony, Frightfesters didn’t expect to be penned in while their spiritual leaders preened for photographers. There was a convention feel to this thing, a coming together of fan and filmmaker that put them in close quarters before and after each screening. Many horror movies directors are themselves genre fans and consequently felt a natural affinity with their audience. At Frightfest, the cast and crew freewheel through the crowds like maniacs at a massacre and the victims gratefully wait for their turn. Whatever you think about the movies this is a pure celebration of the cinema going experience.
With one gouged out eye on expansion, the festival had moved again this year, this time to the Empire Cinema. I’d been attending movies at this venue since my teens and knew it better than own living room, but I’d never seen it like this. My first visit, to see a new print of American Werewolf in London was initially so disorienting, I’d nervously tapped the back of my head, half expecting to find blood on my fingers. The lobby of the cinema was rammed. Against the wall, a promotion board had been erected against which Director John Landis fielded questions from the assembled media. He looked bored and you couldn’t help but feel that he’d rather be in the auditorium watching his own movie.
The minutes before the screening bore witness to a cacophonous melee with hardly any space to move. I’d made a beeline for the concession counter as noone wants to face a werewolf with a dry throat, only to find myself in the most surreal queue of all time. To my rear, a couple of girls, both improbably tall and dressed in full scale Victoriana – faces painted like dolls, debated whether it was better to eat chocolate or have a proper dinner. I’d initially flinched as the corner of my eye had detected what seemed to be a lion bounding through the crowd but sharply turning round, the truth was more dangerous – it was Justin Lee Collins and he was blocking the path to the popcorn counter. At home with man-child juvenilia, Collins worked this crowd like a cohort drawn from his own fan club, posing for photographs with the whole spectrum of Frightfest attendees. These ranged from ladies dressed for a west end premiere to men whose wisps of facial hair and nocturnal skin colour evoked those ‘Burbs villains, the Klopecks. As Landis made his way to the doors of the auditorium, he did so as one of the crowd, fighting for his spot with the likes of Nazi zombies and those with more piercings than clothes. Was this the thick or thin end of the filmmaking wedge? I wish I could have got close enough to ask him.
Finally seated I’d taken the opportunity to survey the crowd. It was surprising that so many of them looked like normal healthy people. They could be my archetypes in disguise of course – the banality of evil and all that, but a horrible thought began to germinate. Maybe I’d got it wrong. Ah, but there they were – fans that had made the journey from my cerebellum to the Empire’s plush red seats. The pony tailed men with goatee beards and long leather coats sat pumped up and baying for blood. A few rows from where I sat were the Goths. Cliches certainly, but horror is a genre that celebrates cliché and all was right with the world. Finally the spotlight shone on the makeshift stage and Landis appeared to rapturous applause. “How many of you guys have seen this movie?” he asked, though you sensed he knew the answer. 500 people put their hands up. “Well, then you know what you’re going to see, I guess there’s nothing more to be said!” It hardly mattered – this crowd would have turned up to see Landis sell Nachos. Come to think of it, so would I.
The movie itself was, as ever, a darkly comic delight, though Landis aggressively closed down a questioner who described it as such in the post-film Q & A. It’s a quirk of the cinema experience that filmmakers are not always the most qualified people to talk about their own movies. A director can tell you what they tried to do of course but only an audience can tell you what they did. These movies belong to us you see, whatever the studio’s legal team say, and there’s a wonderful tension in these Director meets audience sessions that reflects this. Werewolf was a serious movie with ‘fantastical elements’, its director told us, but you had to wonder whether he was entirely serious when about a movie centred on mythical beasts, undead backpackers and featuring an hilarious porn movie within the movie, ended with a card congratulating Charles and Di on their (then) recent nuptials.
The aforementioned porno, “See you next Wednesday” gave, ahem, rise to a surprising, if creepy moment, when the “star” actress Linzi Drew took to the stage along with selected cuts from the film’s crew. Having seen Ms Drew’s pendulous DD bare breasts writ large across seventy feet of Empire screen just minutes earlier, there was a slight predatory vibe as the actress, now some thirty years older, embraced the spotlight to wolf whistles, some of which may not have been totally ironic. “It’s Linzi Drew!” boomed Landis and incredibly it was – it really was. Noone asked Linzi any questions, presumably because the pertinent one, ‘what does it feel like to watch yourself as a naked twentysomething with an audience of 500 people?’ just seemed a little forward. Landis, a minor celebrity in his own right, was the man the audience were really interested in. He took a question on aspect ratios – the obligatory geek inquiry, with good grace and handled the rest with the kind of easy charm you imagined had talked the clothes off Ms Drew as well as many others. The crowd clapped, whooped and laughed as he went – more compare than speaker, and this you felt was what gave Frightfest its momentum – it was mutual masturbation amongst friends.
My second day was to be a 12 hour marathon. I arrived with the first few Frightfesters around 10am to queue for my purple day pass wristband. By 10.30am there were already fifty people there. Most of these were, like me, about to attend a horror of film writing workshop in the Empire 4. This was a screenwriting competition run by newly minted production company JPEG Films. Reasoning that the Frightfest crowd were the ultimate focus group, whatever you thought about making films that way, they’d invited fans to attend a presentation. Up for grabs was the opportunity to write a horror movie which had to be centred around the Tower of London.
The session itself reanimated some of the old prejudices. We’d be asked to write a treatment for the movie and the brief took us on a tour of the thinking that underpins so much of UK horror cinema…to its detriment. We were given a booklet which contained box office information for a spate of recent genre offerings. Next to each of these was a demographic breakdown of the audience – their age range, their sex – the constituency we’d be expected to write to, rather than for. Such thinking you felt, contributed to so much of the derivative fare served up under the horror banner. What ever happened to ‘the public wants what the public gets’ I thought, and what a lovely idea that was.
The company’s creative people had done some more thinking on the premise. They wanted a movie about 5 teens, locked in the tower by accident overnight. What happened next, within those very restrictive terms of reference, was up to us. The presenter had mentioned “Scooby Doo” as shorthand for the idea which was a relief, because I had the same thought listening to it. It was a poor hook I thought, and the dejected faces of some of the writers in the audience suggested this was the consensus. Further instructions hinted at the creative stagnation that kills most movies in the womb. Don’t make it too complicated – complexity after all might confuse gore whores (had they forgotten this was the audience they were addressing?), don’t have too much dialogue – after all no dialogue heavy film had ever been successful, you could ask Quentin Tarantino, and if you could, have an American character “It plays well with the American market and you can always kill them off, which plays well with the British audience.” Why would anyone with so little interest in what made great movies want to make one I wondered?
Perhaps I was living in a romantic dreamland of auteurs and cineastes, where engagement with the material walked hand in hand with entertainment and the two skipped a merry dance through a field of buttercups, but this poverty of ambition told its own story. UK horror output, slight as it is, was patterned on America, and as such had no cultural distinctiveness to match the stories coming out of, for example, Spain, Japan, Norway or Sweden. No one was thinking about how to attach cultural specificity to horror concepts and this reluctance reflected industrial timidity, namely the idea that if you made it too niche, an international (i.e. American) audience wouldn’t buy it. But wouldn’t a genuinely nerve shredding movie made with confidence and imagination always play well with this crowd? Was it enough to set an American haunted house flick in London and call it British and what was the point of asking the Frightfest community for ideas on the movies they wanted to see made if you were going to box them in with well worn genre cliches? These weren’t questions that anyone in this room was interested in.
This notion that the audience weren’t being given enough credit and that perhaps my check list of audience stereotypes held greater currency than I imagined, continued into the afternoon. At the presentation of Millennium: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a representative from Total Film, the movie sponsor, almost apologised for the film before it had started, telling the crowd that it “wasn’t as hard as you guys might expect.” They’d agonised about adding it to the programme at all they said, and this was ironic as it was the stand out film of this, or indeed any festival. The Swedish murder mystery, based on the novel by Stieg Larsson, was in fact far ‘harder’ than any adolescent gore offering, involving incest, murder, one graphic depiction of rape and the drip drip of dread that made it a highly compelling, psychological thriller. Here was an assumption that a movie that wasn’t an obvious horror flick – one that didn’t contain chainsaws or women dunked in corrosive acid, might not play well with the Frightfest crowd. The applause at the end suggested that this audience were as happy to see well made, character based movies as anyone else and I sat there hoping that the men from JPEG could hear the ovation, assuming of course they were still in the building.
So if the some of the thinking behind the festival was flawed, no matter, you couldn’t fault its variety. Saturday’s programme was nothing if not inventive. Smash Cut, starring Canadian musician and sometime actor David Hess, was a no budget movie in-joke about a critically panned horror film director who kills to give his opus some much needed authenticity. The movie itself was camp, badly made and pointless – Peeping Tom had it been written by Frank Spencer, but Hess’ post-credits appearance and on stage musical performance went a long way towards covering the cost of admission. Hierro was an effective Spanish chiller with elements of Dark Water and Red Riding that traced a mother’s pursuit of her son following his disappearance during a ferry crossing, while Giallo – a serial killer and beauty girl kidnap kino from Dario Argento, proved the unexpected comic highlight of the day. Adrian Brody as the brooding, monosyllabic detective had never been worse, though it did make you nostalgic for The Comic Strip Presents.
Pontypool, my last film of the day, genuinely broke new ground; a Canadian zombie movie, for the most part without the zombies, it was set in a radio station during a shock jock’s morning broadcast. The setup – news of the apocalypse slowly coming in the form of live reports was a great hook but the movie went further by having language itself as the transmitter of the infection. Semiotics had made its horror debut. Low budget, original and reliant on the imagination of the audience to deliver the shocks, it was the sort of movie Frightfest was made for. Are you listening JPEG?
My Frightfest experience was almost over but there was still the closing night movie, The Descent: Part 2. The original film had received its premiere at the festival and it was this aspect of the festival – providing a forum for new or up and coming filmmakers to showcase their work and find an audience, that the organisers were justifiably most proud of. Like its predecessor this was to be the film’s world premiere and the vibe on the night was akin to a red carpet event where the rug in question had been stolen, leaving all unconcerned unsure of where to stand. As with American Werewolf, these were chaotic scenes – the movie’s principle cast buffeted on all sides by spectators. People locked, I found myself standing behind Gavan O’ Herlihy, an actor I last saw being killed in Never Say Never Again. He couldn’t know that his on screen death, the result of having a voluptuous woman pull up alongside his car and tossing a giant snake onto his lap, was my preferred way of leaving this world, but I imagined that he’d been told this many times. Face spotting I’d also clocked a disgruntled looking Kim Newman, the genre critic who knew he was lucky to have that kind of facial hair and not be in prison, patiently shuffling along like a commuter during rush hour. After years of wondering what it might be like to have Newman’s job, he was discovering how it felt to get to mine each morning.
The movie itself was something of an anticlimax. Director Jon Harris, subbing for Neil Marshall, had inadvertently remade Beyond the Poseidon Adventure with caves. As the film went through its familiar paces, my mind wandered. Perhaps there really was more to horror fandom than brain mashing decrepitude and emotional stunting (though the movies were undoubtedly misogynistic). Maybe, having witnessed the camaraderie between the fans, the affection of the filmmakers and the good humour that ran through the best of the films I’d seen like a name in a stick of rock, I’d undersold this thing. Indeed as the film was ending my thoughts turned to the horror writing workshop I’d attended earlier. Perhaps I could use my improved genre knowledge and enter that competition. Yes, why not me? I’d write that treatment and in a couple of Frightfests I might be sitting down to my own 90 minutes of schlock and gore. If I was determined enough surely nothing could prevent me from being on this bill one day. Well, nothing except JPEG Films reading this of course.
Further information on Frightfest is available at www.frightfest.co.uk
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