I’m not sure at what point I realised I was losing my grip. Perhaps it was the moment in existential French psychodrama Pandemonium where a recently deceased motorist finds himself being introduced to hell by a 7ft-tall mega-demon; or it could have been the copious vomiting scene in Cobweb, which was the third copious vomiting scene I’d witnessed in 24 hours. Either way, by the time I got to the third day of Frightfest, I realised it was time to go home – even though, for the crowds of gore devotees gathered outside the cinema behind me, this was just the halfway point.
Now in its 24th year, Frightfest offers both new movies (often getting their world premiere) and classic chillers, taking in the whole gamut of the genre from straight-up slasher flicks to bizarre artsy experiments. Over five days more than 70 films are shown on several screens, and there is a wonderful community feel: people dressed in Evil Dead and Cannibal Holocaust T-shirts mix amiably with cos-players decked out as mad scientists and vampires.
But I wasn’t there to chat, I was there to pack in as many movies as possible from 5pm on Thursday to 5pm on Saturday – and as Kurtz famously put it in Heart of Darkness: “The horror, the horror!” It started with the ridiculous Suitable Flesh, a pastiche of 1990s erotic thrillers in which a body-swapping demon terrorises Boogie Nights star Heather Graham while occasionally partaking in soft-focus sex scenes. The same night I saw tense scuba diving thriller The Dive (basically 127 Hours but underwater) and then vengeful-ghost shocker Cheat, which I’m certain holds the world record for the number of times a creepy Victorian ghost girl can walk toward the camera looking furious. The next day was total horror from 10am to 1am: it swung from the interesting It Lives Inside, about an Indian American teenager stalked by a monster from Hindu mythology, to the convulsive and hypnotic Faceless After Dark, about a horror movie actor who takes bloody revenge on the misogynistic fans who stalk and abuse her.
There was surprisingly little gore in the films I got to see (although I heard from other attendees that Onur Tukel’s Poundcake, shown in one of the small Discovery screenings, was genuinely horrific); I did, however, see a lot of strange deaths. Among the most impressive: a man having his head crushed by a repeatedly reversing car, a man castrated with rusty garden shears, and the parents of a gifted child being killed with rat-poison-infused pumpkin soup. I have a note that I scrawled in my exercise book during the strange Where the Devil Roams, about a murderous carnival family in 1920s America, that just says, “Fire poker through neck of Norwegian”, but I’ve somehow blanked that scene out of my brain. In four films, people were beaten to death with frying pans, and I began to wonder if this was a comment on the recession: the tragedy of homicidal sociopaths finding they could no longer afford specialist murder equipment and having to improvise with whatever they had available.
The experience confirmed to me how, even now, horror movies are designed to exploit our most ancient, primal fears. Throughout the 13 films there were multiple scenes of characters slowly approaching closed doors and reaching for the handle; there were bumps and scrapes in the night; there were clouds passing across full moons; there were creepy black birds gathering outside windows. These images explore legitimate terrors: the predator lurking in the woods; the threat of the unknown; the quiet knowledge of our own mortality.
Weirdly, after doing absolutely nothing but watch horror films for every waking moment for two and a half days, I found I had become incredibly attuned to the creepiness of the real world. Leicester Square felt like a baroque vision of hell, with its thronging masses of zombie-like pedestrians stumbling between fire-breathing unicyclists and street preachers yelling about the damnation of the human race. On the journey back to where I was staying in north London at 1am on Friday, everything became rife with supernatural threat: the solitary strangers on the night bus, an echoing subway, a shadowy figure loitering in an alley, the creaking gates of the park. When I finally reached it, the lifts weren’t working so I had to walk up four flights of stairs, lights flickering, complete silence. Some say London is the most haunted city in the world, and I was really feeling it.
I saw some great films over those intense hours. Monolith, an Australian existential thriller about a journalist researching strange black bricks that were being sent to people all over the world, was fascinating, as was New Life, a sad, reflective take on the apocalypse. But what struck me was just how weirdly comforting it was to watch horror with other fans. I got talking to a group of festival attendees who had been coming for over a decade. “It’s that feeling of being scared in a safe environment,” said Clare from east London. “That build-up of tension and then release – it’s the human condition being shared.” Dave, also from east London, said: “I was scared when I came to my first Frightfest, which is silly because I was in the marines and I’ve seen real-life horrors. You think, this isn’t real, but for the five days you are here, it is.”
This is what I realised that night, as I ran up the eight flights of stairs, vaguely concerned about something following me. My two days of unremitting horror were merely confirming what I already knew: the scariest demons are the ones we take into the cinema with us.
Frightfest was at Cineworld Leicester Square, London, 24-28 August
