Frightfest - Beneath the Dark Heart of Cinema
"Based on real events"
Every August bank holiday a celebration occurs in London which brings together horror movie fans from all corners of the globe to celebrate the genre. Its name is FrightFest.
Frightfest - Beneath the Dark Heart of Cinema is a superb documentary takes a look behind the scenes of this beloved event and chats to the FrightFest team as well as the fans who make the annual pilgrimage.
FrightFest was conceived by Paul McEvoy, Ian Rattray and Alan Jones and staged its first event in 2000 at the Prince Charles cinema, off London's Leicester Square. Its August Bank Holiday weekend date has remained a fixture ever since. Greg Day, their long-serving PR man, joined the company as a co-director in 2006. The objective of FrightFest was to provide the UK with a horror fantasy festival of similar stature to the market leaders in Europe, Sitges (Spain) and Brussels (Belgium). FrightFest has since evolved into a community where audiences and guests alike travel from all over the world to be part of the event's unique atmosphere. Due to rapidly increasing audiences and its burgeoning reputation as a must-attend event, FrightFest moved home to Screen One of the Odeon West End, Leicester Square in 2005. 2009, the festivals 10th anniversary, marked FrightFest's biggest leap so far. Moving just a couple of hundred yards across Leicester Square, the festival upgraded to the UK's largest traditional cinema screen at the Empire Cinema. The move heralded the most ambitious line-up of new genre movies presented to date. Additional screens soon followed plus the addition of the popular Discovery strand. Since then the event has also started to show movies at The Prince Charles cinema just along the road from the main event allowing even more choice for fans to enjoy. The rest, as they say, is horror history.
By interviewing the team separately, we get the full picture of the event as well as how they gelled over the years, even though they're polar opposites personality wise anyway. Through the Shock-Around-The-Clock events right up to the present day we get to see how the event evolved and become not only a must attend event for fans but for the makers of horror movies. Director Chris Collier manages to eek out all the information you could possibly want about the event and the people who run it. Where he plays his trump card though is interviewing old and new attendees who describe the event as an unmissable event, where strangers soon become firm friends all because of their love of horror. It also gives fans the chance to meet their heroes up close to discuss cinema and have their prized treasures autographed. No one could forget the year John Landis attended or the few times Guillermo del Toro graced the event or the zombie walk which took over most of Leicester Square! Now, can you name any other movie genre that does this?
It's hard not to emphasise the importance and cultural impact of such an event. It has inspired countless creatives to pick up their cameras and begin to shoot their own wor and having covered the event myself for the last 17 years, others to run their own events and many memories made. I can only say that this doc could have easily been much, much longer. Maybe its time for a director's cut Chris?
FrightFest 2022 runs from August 26th - 30th and for more information check out the official FrightFest website.
wedotv is streaming some of the best from FrightFest's past including: old school style slasher Hatchet, genetic engineering terror in Black Sheep, based on a true stroy The Dyatlov Pass Incident, demonic thrills in At The Devil's Door and the brutal revenge-filled shocker Some Kind of Hate.