Day 1 – Thursday, August 21, Odeon West End, Leicester Square
Five days, 27 features, plus sundry shorts, trailers, Frightfest is without question Britain’s most comprehensive and exciting annual genre festival.
But it is also a grueling endurance test for the hardened horror survivalist, bludgeoning viewers into desensitised, zombie-like submission with a tally of films that far outpaces the average slasher’s body count.
On day one the FrightFester still looks fresh-faced, perhaps even innocent, but knows, deep down, that it is going to be a long haul.
Fortunately, the festival was kick-started by an unannounced short film especially commissioned for the festival, by Adam and Joe.
Not television’s lo-fi comic duo, but their equivalent in the contemporary horror world, the garrulous young directors Adam Green (Hatchet, Spiral) and Joe Lynch (Wrong Turn 2: Dead End) who had been popular contributors and entertaining on-stage speakers at last year’s FrightFest.
The short is knowing, funny and cheap and goes down well. Best of all, it turns out there is a different one of these Green/Lynch shorts for every night of the Festival.
First film of the evening is the World Premiere of James Watkins’ Eden Lake. Already dubbed a ‘hoodie horror’ by the press, it is essentially Deliverance, but with the rednecks replaced by a gang of British teens (with a psychopathically vicious leader) who menace a bourgeois couple at an idyllic campsite.
Fully exploiting the fear of children that currently pervades our media, it is a little more rounded and subtle than it at first sounds. It expands its initial pedophobic focus to, ahem, a fear of the working class in general and – at the same time – exposes of the danger of knee-jerk responses.
But, while it is more white-knuckle thriller than social realist drama (and nothing wrong with that), it does seem destined to provoke a lot of national soul-searching, not to mention more tabloid hysteria, come its theatrical release.
Last year’s FrightFest screened a hilarious trailer for an eighties-style, cricket-based slasher comedy called I Know How Many Runs You Scored Last Summer. Sadly, the title turns out to be the only funny thing about this joyless, turgid feature.
Horror viewers are more tolerant than most of low production values, but the constraints of a microbudget can never excuse aimless conception, poor writing and sluggish editing. You won’t be bowled over – but at least co-directors (and partners) Stacey Edmonds and Doug Turner offered a good-humoured, slightly inebriated presence on stage.
The night ended with a shift to Shaftesbury Avenue’s Cineworld for a special digital projection of one of this year’s most anticipated offerings.
Scar is a generic slasher; even it seems jaded with the ‘torture porn’ bandwagon onto which it leaps, ultimately feeling like WAZ for dummies.
Yes, Scar is entirely average – but it is also in 3D, a perennially appealing gimmick which finds its perfect home in the tawdry sensationalism of horror.
Enough said – although perhaps a few of the 3D horrors to come might offer a little more depth of ideas to match their depth of field.
