FrightFest Archives - Sci-Fi Tips

Piper review at FrightFest: An uncanny intersection of fantasy and reality

admin — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 19:00:36 +0000

In Piper, a car speeds alongside woods in the rain at night. Inside Kerry Weiss (Alma Rix) tries to stay in command of the vehicle, while preventing her manically humming young son Matty (Jékabs Grigalis) from throwing himself onto the road. At the Hamelin hospital, Kerry – and Kerry alone – sees a hooded piper and a swarm of rats, and then Matty hangs himself with electrical wire right before her eyes.

Hamelin is of course both a real town in Germany and a place of myth – and when three weeks later, Liz Haines (Elizabeth Hurley) arrives to replace Kerry as history teacher at the International School, the very first assignment that she gives her class is “to separate fact from fiction” in the legend of the Pied Piper. “Come up with your own theory,” she tells the students, who now include her own teenaged daughter Amy (Mia Jenkins), reluctantly dragged here from her American home.

In a sense, Piper is also coming up with its own theory on the myth, if one that is neither plausible nor even economic. For far from being an aggrieved ratcatcher who lures to their deaths the children of locals who did not pay him for his services, here the piper is a demonic entity (played by Arben Bajraktaraj and a bunch of CGI) who punishes adults for their sins and guilt, first with hallucinatory plagues, then with the suicide of their children – and there are other ghosts, too, in this mirror world where past and present coexist. Liz’s guilt is what drove her to flee America in the first place, and as Amy starts to settle in, and to embark on a relationship with local horse-riding magician Luca (Jack Stewart), something is going very wrong in their new home – the very one that Kerry and her son had previously occupied. History seems doomed to repeat, as Liz starts to see rats, and Amy begins to be infested with insects.

“Think of them as metaphors,” suggests Auntie Aishe (Tara Fitzgerald), the Romani wise woman to whom Luca has brought Amy for advice. “Metaphors don’t bite,” replies Amy. Yet here, as Aishe insists, “Metaphysically they can. Fundamental fears, beliefs, even wishes can manifest themselves in this world from a parallel reality.” In other words Piper is a film where emotions and affects are reified, where the psychological is made real, and where love – whether maternal or romantic – is tested to its limits by a horror that is no less eternal.

Yet the film’s very abstraction – the way it keeps pulling the rug from under anything or anyone who seems real – makes it hard for the viewer to find a purchase. If this character is just a ghost, and that character but a demon of the imagination, then the drama shared between mother and daughter seems oddly weightless, with even its potential consequences perhaps little more than a figure.

Director Anthony Waller (Mute Witness, 1995; An American Werewolf in Paris, 1997) certainly knows how to shoot stylised twilight zones (often washed with rain), or to confuse the corridors of a house or hospital above with the tunnels of catacombs below – but his screenplay, co-written with Duncan Kennedy (Deep Blue Sea, 1999), consists mostly in gruelling repetitions or raw exposition, leaving the cast with too little bone to flesh out convincingly.

It does not help that the accents are all over the place, with American Liz and Kerry’s German husband Peter (Robert Daws) sounding decidedly English, and the Romani traveller Luca speaking with a broad Scots brogue. With even the Piper himself reduced to a boogeyman archetype, in the end some will wonder why this was set in Hamelin at all (in fact most of it was shot in Riga, Latvia).

Still, a succession of mid-credits codas plays further upon the uncanny intersection of fantasy and reality that the film has constantly been traveling, leaving the viewer utterly disoriented as to what actually happened beyond all the overt artifice.

Piper has its world première at FrightFest 2023. Find more reviews at SciFiNow.

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Farang review at FrightFest: Revenge-fuelled rampage

admin — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 10:51:57 +0000

‘Farang’ is the Thai word for ‘Caucasian’, or more generally for ‘foreigner’ – and while Xavier Gens’ film of the same name begins in France, its Algerian protagonist Samir ‘Sam’ Darba (the extraordinary Nassim Lyes) is already an outsider, even if we first see him on the inside, in prison on a drugs rap. There he is cleaning up his act: working out his aggressions practising Muay Thai in the prison gym, while carefully avoiding trouble, so that he can be released on good behaviour and get a legitimate job at a building site. Yet Sam’s criminal past keeps catching up with him, and a violent clash with one of his former criminal acquaintances forces him to flee abroad.

Five years later, in East Thailand, Sam appears to be nearing his goal of living a straight life, despite having to face local prejudice. He is married to half-Thai, half-French Mia (Loryn Nounay) who is pregnant with their baby, and he is lovingly accepted as a father by Mia’s young daughter from a previous marriage Dara (Chananticha Tang-Kwa). He works for a local hotel driving tourists to and from the airport, he has put a downpayment on a beachside plot of land where Mia wants to build her own bar, and in his spare time he continues to box.

Yet much as he is occasionally tempted by his friend Sombat (Sahajak Boonthanakit) to throw a match for cash, he is also drawn into the orbit of French criminal kingpin Narong (Olivier Gourmet). When things go south and Mia and Dara get caught in the aftermath, the left-for-dead Sam will be nursed back to health by his boxing coach Hansa (the ever astonishing Vithaya Pansringram) and set out on a path of vicious vendetta, as he tries to recover whatever may be left of his family.

The plot of Farang is woven from clichés that we have seen many times before: the one last job, the rage-fuelled revenge, the corridor fight, the father searching for his daughter. Indeed there is fun to be had in recognising what it has borrowed from, e.g., Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (1979), Prachya Pinkaew’s Ong-bak (2002) and Warrior King (2005), Pierre Morel’s Taken (2008), Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003), Gareth Evans’ The Raid (2011) and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives (2013). Yet all those tropes are stripped down to their very quintessence, as Stéphane Cabel, Guillaume Lemans and Gens’ script proves as spare and spry as Sam in the ring.

It is also played entirely straight, refusing to nod and wink to the audience or ironise itself in any way. For the film’s back-to-basics simplicity and determined earnestness are key to its relentless intensity, as misfit Sam is always having to fight hard for his dream of a normal life.

Building and building to Sam’s rampage, and then unleashing an explosion of gasp-inducing, bone-crunching violence (including close combat in an old lift unprecedented for its bloody ferocity), Farang may start in jail, but it takes no prisoners.

Farang had its UK première on Saturday 26 August for FrightFest 2023

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Transmission review at FrightFest: Seeking answers in the Void

admin — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 02:49:51 +0000

Transmission begins with a satellite flashing a red light over Earth, and a large radar dish below picking up its signal – which is to say that, as the film’s very title suggests, here the medium is the message, along with its means of distribution.

As text announces that many years ago something strange happened on every television screen, and promises to show what one channel-surfing old man witnessed that night, we are made to realise that this is to be, apart from the scenes right at its beginning and end, a screenlife film – except that instead of switching between windows on a computer screen, it shows in real time what is being broadcast across multiple TV stations, as remixed by one casual – or perhaps not so casual – viewer.

What follows is a serial montage of live news reports (on murder suicides across the city and an armed hostage siege in a woman’s suburban home), a black-and-white sitcom about a married couple struggling to tune in their TV set, a children’s show with puppets doing a jigsaw puzzle, an evangelical preacher talking fire and brimstone, a dumb-assed Eighties teen romance called Nutballs! (somewhere between Say Anything… and Screwballs), porn and ads.

Yet if our unseen viewer is desultory, restless and impatient, there are two related programmes on which he settles the longest: the première screening of the sci-fi horror Transmission, long believed lost but now being introduced by an Elvira-like presenter (Jennifer Nangle) on her show Malvolia’s Movie Madness; and meanwhile, over on Incredibly Strange Movies, a documentary made by Rachel Roth (Nicole Cinaglia) which uncovers the story of her grandfather Frank Tadross Roth (Vernon Wells), the cult (and occult-obsessed) horror director who went missing under mysterious circumstances before his final film Transmission could be completed and released.

“So, are you sure all these pieces are gonna fit together?” wonders an on-screen muppet of the puzzle he is trying to assemble. “Oh they will, I promise,” replies his fellow puppet, “You’ll see.” Anyone who has ever flipped between channels, bleary-eyed in the wee hours, will know the strange experience of cross-talk that can ensue, as the brain synthesises disparate programmes as though they were all presenting a single if fractured narrative customised for and by the holder of the remote control. This is the effect of watching Transmission, whose varied programming starts to echo and blur with maddening metacommentary, as these different shows reflect each other in surprising ways.

Malvolia is not only presenting the film-within-a-film Transmission, but also appears as a talking head in the documentary on its director, while other participants in the documentary will appear on the live news, and all these broadcasts will bleed into each other in an unexpected manner.

Indeed, it is not unlike one of Frank’s films, in which, according to Malviola, “there are usually three or four different storylines that come together in some crazy way, and then they usually build up to some sort of dark, twisted ending.” Even though Frank’s last film, which riffs on Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires (1965) and Paul W.S Anderson’s Event Horizon (1997), is said to have been shot from a script whose last five pages were never written, and is thought never to have been fully filmed, everything here comes with the strong sense of an ending, as numerous signs point to an ominously approaching if unguessable apocalypse which in the end will be duly, yet impossibly, delivered.

There are different traditions (all niche) feeding into writer/director Michael Hurst’s feature. First there is the paradoxical notion of a lost film maudit which, Medusa-like, has a baleful effect on anyone unfortunate to cast eyes upon it. This is an idea explored in the pseudo-documentary features of Fabien Delage’s Fury of the Demon (La rage de démon, 2016) and David Amito and Michael Laicini’s Antrum: The Deadliest Movie Ever Made (2019) – except that here there are layers upon layers of forbidden film, as Hurst’s Transmission, Frank’s Transmission within it, and another illicit piece of video placed within several programmes, all threaten to endanger viewers (including us) with pernicious content that “wants to be seen”.

Second, there is a variation on the haunted broadcasts seen in Lesley Manning’s Ghostwatch (1992), Damien LeVeck’s The Cleansing Hour (2019), Cristian Ponce’s History of the Occult (Historia de lo Oculto, 2020) and Cameron and Colin Cairnes’ Late Night With The Devil (2023) – films where live transmissions either unleash or expose a diabolical underpinning to our mediated reality.

As a long-term genre fan on a transgressive quest for essential horror that gets past cheap thrills and easy catharsis, Frank will – at least up to a point – be a figure of identification for any hardened horror viewers, and his hidden collection of VHS hauls from abroad will seem familiar to anyone who grew up in the Video Nasty era. Even his obsessive search for a film made by Dario Cozzi (Robin Hill), whose very name conflates Italian genre directors Dario Argento and Luigi Cozzi, will be relatable to the very particular audience of Transmission, as will his proselytising desire to have horror seen in everything and by everyone.

Yet in this film, set in the conventionally fictive Californian twilight zone of Santa Mira, it is not just horror viewers, but also the infinite, insatiable emptiness of their desires, that is being revealed. For here we are all seeking answers in the Void, yet finding them in the most unexpected and innocuous places. What greater display could there be of humanity’s worst side than a cavalcade of inane witching-hour viewing? You are, after all, what you choose to watch – and if you choose not to watch Hurst’s (and Frank’s) multimedia feature to its bitter end, you might miss out on one hell of a Lovecraftian punchline – or what Malvolia describes as “the never before seen conclusion”. What self-respecting horrorhound can resist staring into that abyss?

Transmission had its world première at FrightFest 2023 on 26 August

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Hostile Dimensions review at FrightFest: Scary, funny sci-fi on a budget

admin — Sat, 26 Aug 2023 18:46:43 +0000

Much like writer/director Graham Hughes’ previous feature Death of a Vlogger (2019), Hostile Dimensions begins with intradiegetic camerawork, as unseen cameraman Brian follows graffiti artist Emily (Josie Rogers) into an abandoned building where they discover a door and frame standing bizarrely in the middle of an otherwise empty, dilapidated room. Distracted by a noise, Brian turns the camera away for a moment, and by the time he has turned it back, Emily has vanished screaming into thin air. Brian points the camera at the now open door, and a red-eyed monster appears on the other side.

At this point the film becomes both literal found footage and screenlife, as we realise we have been watching, along with Sam Shields (Annabel Logan) and Ash Shah (Joma West), a clip of Brian’s video published online. “I think that’s our new film,” says Sam, who acknowledges that the footage looks like a prank, but also points out that Emily has been missing for a month since. After the failure of their last documentary, Sarah can see something “more marketable” in this mystery, as though a new door were opening for these filmmaking friends.

Indeed, just as Brian’s film had seemed to feature a portal to another world, Sarah and Ash’s film – which has already started, given that they record everything and what we are seeing is what they are shooting – also contains screens and windows, on phones and computers, to other people’s footage and the other worlds which that footage contains. It is all very involuted, but the warning here is constant: be careful what you open, and who – or what – you might let in.

The door and frame from the abandoned building are brought into the living room of Sam’s flat, soon to be opened and even tentatively entered by the two women as they try to find and rescue Emily. Discovering miracles and monsters – Sam’s dead mother still very much alive, a talking dog, a panda “that just shoots spikes out of its hands” – they realise that they are out of their depth, and turn for help to the lecturer Dr Innis (Paddy Kondracki). Soon all three of them are navigating a doorway to multiple possible worlds, as they both pursue and are pursued by another interdimensional traveller (Hughes himself) through more than one portal, while trying to keep a god-sent apocalypse from overwhelming their own world.

Pitting women’s solidarity and creative energy against a toxically masculine impulse to destroy, Hostile Dimensions imagines a series of mirror worlds – some frightening, others appealing, all fanciful – and lets its misfit characters try to find not just a missing person or persons, but also their own place in the multiverse. As such, it is a little bit like Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), and a little bit like James Ward Byrkit’s Coherence (2014), revealing lives where flaws are ever present, and perfection is a fantasy just on the other side of screen or door. Told in nine formally headed chapters plus an epilogue, this is scary, funny sci-fi on a budget, conjuring surreal, literally otherwordly cosmoses while anchoring everything to the mundanities of the Scottish everyday.

“You do not know existential pain,” Sam will say, “until you’ve produced a film.” She is no doubt speaking for Hughes too, but when the results are as chaotically compelling as this, perhaps all that grief and anguish come with their own rewarding teleology in shifting our perceptions, realising the imaginary and – maybe just maybe – changing the world.

Hostile Dimensions has its world première at FrightFest 2023. Find more reviews at SciFiNow.

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The J-Horror Virus review: Delving into a cultural phenomenon

admin — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 18:20:54 +0000

J-Horror typically features alienated individuals and viral curses, and uses technology – whether outgoing and analogue, like hand-me-down VHS cassettes, or incoming and digital, like the internet – as the medium for its uncanny hauntings.

As its very title implies, the key thesis of Sarah Appleton and Jasper Sharp’s documentary The J-Horror Virus is that this distinctive form of Japanese ghost movie, emerging around the turn of the millennium, spread through not only Japan’s film culture, but the world’s, like one of those infectious, self-replicating viruses that so often propel its narratives, and that leave their sinister trace everywhere even as they mutate.

Of course, every pandemic has its index case, its patient zero, its epicentre – and for this genre, it is Hideo Nakata’s Ring (1998), placed literally at the film’s centre. Yet if, both in its title and in its central image of the round entrance to a deep, dark well, Ring foregrounds absence – like the hole in a donut – capturing the emptiness of its characters’ lives and of their last-ditch efforts to go on living, then there is also a conspicuous absence in The J-Horror Virus. For while an impressive array of J-horror directors appears in the film, including Teruyoshi Ishii (Psychic Vision), Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Sweet Home; Cure; Pulse), Norio Tsuruta (Scary True Stories, Ring 0), Joji Iida (Spiral, 1999), Takashi Shimizu (Ju-on: The Grudge; Marebito), and while comments are solicited in the discussion of Ring from its screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi and actress Rie Ino’o (who played Sadako), Nakata himself, who is the director of Ring – and of my favourite J-horror Dark Water (2002) – is notably absent, even if his influence, like that of a ghost, can still be felt.

Perhaps, though, there is a point, besides no doubt the pragmatics of his unavailability, to Nakata’s absence. For even if The J-Horror Virus correctly privileges Ring – now sequelised, satirised and remade – as the film that put J-Horror on the international map and economically established for a broader audience what were coming to be the tropes of this new genre, Appleton and Sharp are just as interested in the periphery of J-horror, its antecedents and afterlife.

With help from the filmmakers, as well as scholarly commentary from Lindsay Nelson, Tom Mes and Sharp himself, the film traces the traditional iconography of the vengeful female spirit, with characteristic white robes and long black hair, right back to classic kaidan (ghost stories) or kabuki plays like Yotsuya Ghost Story, The Peony Lantern or The House of Broken Plates.

Meanwhile, the revolutionary shift to a modern setting, to a haunted tape reel, and to ghosts that just stand in the background of ordinary daylit settings, goes back to the mockumentary video Psychic Vision (1988) and was developed further by Scary True Stories (1991), whlle Tsuruta’s influential Super Horror Experience 4: Psychic Video (1995) featured a haunted video. Meanwhile, the Haunted School television miniseries took J-horror conventions from V-cinema to the much broader audience of television, popularising the genre and giving rise to the term ‘J-horror’, as well as spawning a series of adapted theatrical versions.

Another popular made-for-television J-horror was Joji Iida’s feature-length Ring: Kanzenban (1995), screened three years before Nakata and Takahashi would adapt the same source novel into Ring, and one year before Nakata would direct the first theatrical J-horror Don’t Look Up (1996) – and then there is the odd excellent outlier like Cure (1997), not quite J-horror but certainly drawing on the genre’s imagery and alienating vibe. Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999), released a year after Ring came out, similarly strikes its own tortu(r)ous path.

Still much J-horror that comes out after Ring is in its shadow while chasing its success. A string of J-horror remakes – Gore Verbinksi’s The Ring (2002), Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge (2004), Walter Salles’ Dark Water (2005), Jim Sonzero’s Pulse (2006) and Eric Vallette’s One Missed Call (2008) – all convert their Japanese models into American horror idioms, while their excess exposition and more aggressive ghosts ensure that the subtlety and irrationality of the originals become lost in translation (something which The Grudge, with its Americans disoriented and doomed in Tokyo, literalises). Being able to see these film side by side exposes national difference, while highlighting what makes the Japanese films so special. Yet J-Horror has become a globalised phenomenon, its motifs and mannerisms, its spooks and sensibilities, now a recognisable feature of horror cinema the world over.

“The J-Horror film genre could be made in any country,” Kurosawa observes, “I think that is the greatest significance of J-Horror.” With their team of articulate interlocutors, Appleton and Sharp tap into, and tease apart, just what it is about this expanding body of films that is both so culturally specific, and so universally appealing.

The J-Horror Virus has its world première on Friday 25th August at FrightFest 2023. Read more reviews at SciFiNow.

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Where The Devil Roams: Discussing clowns, horror, music and filmmaking with the Adams family

admin — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 08:55:00 +0000

“A lot of my nightmares growing up were about clowns,” Zelda Adams reveals when we ask her about her new movie, Where The Devil Roams, “especially after I watched season four of American Horror Story!”

We’re feeling you Zelda – clowns and carnivals are a staple in the horror genre, and Where The Devil Roams follows a family of carnival acts as they journey around the US, committing a murder or two along the way…

The family we follow are mother Maggie (Toby Poser), father Seven (John Adams) and their daughter Eve (Zelda Adams) and indeed Toby, John, Zelda and eldest daughter Lulu Adams comprise their own act – of the filmmaking kind.

The Adams family write, direct, produce, edit, star and even create their own music for their movies and Where The Devil Roams is their seventh feature in a long and varied career of making films, jumping different genres.

Lately, though, the Adams have been playing in the horror pond, with their fifth feature, the dark ghostly tale The Deeper You Dig taking the family into the supernatural horror direction, followed by witchy and magical HELLBENDER and now Where The Devil Roams. Their movies are made via their production company, Wonder Wheel Productions and it’s no accident that their latest focuses on carnivals, given their company’s namesake

“I mean, the name of our production company is after a big Ferris wheel!” Toby laughs when we delve into horror’s association with carnivals with her. “I think the kind of carnivals that we’re attracted to are the little side carnivals that are an equal hybrid of seedy and thrill. That you never know if you’re going to die on those little rickety rides but you have to go on them,” she tells us. “And the lights and the bad foods that smell so sweet and good and the strange possibilities of sideshow strangeness is very romantic…”

“There’s magic in circuses,” John agrees. “There’s also magic in the romance of us all looking back at the 1930s or anytime in the past. I think it was the perfect place to set this film of these characters that we wanted to bring to life because there is already a built-in dark romance to that time and that part of society.”

Indeed, the movie is set during the great depression of America in the 1930s and sees the family travelling around in a rather impressive 1931 Chevy (we’ll come back to that later), which is pretty ironic seeing as the journey the Adams take on their road to moviemaking, too, usually happens in the car: “We have long car rides to soccer practice or drives to the city and we are always just talking, bringing up little ideas,” reveals Zelda. “Sometimes it’s me, sometimes it’s Toby, sometimes it’s John, just bringing up something like: ‘Hey, what do you guys think about this?’ We like to call it throwing spaghetti; start throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks about the idea. And then sometimes this wonderful monster is formed.”

The beginning of their journey for Where The Devil Roams was no different: “I was sitting in the car with John,” Zelda remembers, “and I was thinking to myself: ‘Hey, what if the clown actually wasn’t the bad guy?’ That’d be a really interesting movie.

“So I brought this idea of a clown on the carnival circuit that’s the protagonist and John and Toby did a wonderful idea of warping that into a story that didn’t end up being about a clown, but it was about a group of carnies that were flawed, but were the protagonists of the film.”

Flawed is a pretty attenuative way of describing the three complex central characters in the film. First up we have Maggie, who we first see in the movie as a child joining her sister in the murder of their parents and who grows up to have a penchant for much of the same. At the same time, she’s a loving mother and supportive wife, who goes above and (murderously) beyond protecting her family and who we see at points lovingly touching children’s shoes that she sometimes finds – a throwback to a traumatic childhood memory. “I just thought that Maggie should be lovable and horrible and deeply, deeply flawed, like all these characters,” Toby reveals. “I don’t think she’s the sharpest tool in the shed but I wanted her to know how to use those tools. I wanted to play Maggie and she kind of just came out of the desire to play someone who was both horrible and lovable.”

Maggie couldn’t be more opposite to John, who balks at the very sight of blood after suffering from PTSD as a result of being a war doctor. Luckily for him, Maggie always makes sure to gently blindfold him before carrying out her deadly deeds. Meanwhile, Eve takes a more voyeuristic role in Maggie’s murders, carefully photographing each terrible tableau after the event.

Eve is also a mute, which was actually handy for Zelda when it came to shooting the movie: “I was pretty happy because I didn’t have to learn any lines!” she laughs. “I could just show up and go ‘let me give a couple of different expressions’. So that’s it. But I actually really did love it because she’s one of the main characters and she has to tell a lot through her emotions. So I did feel like it was a fun acting challenge for me.”

Though she’s mute, for their carnival act, Eve sings on stage while her parents perform with her and in another delightful twist of life imitating art, the family is also in a band together in real life – H6LLB6ND6R, which is what their sixth movie was named after. Oh and the band is awesome and you can listen to them on Spotify here.

It’s not surprising, then, that music plays an integral role for the family during the filmmaking process. “I think that music is actually a lot of our backbone when we’re making a film,” Zelda reveals. “It’s something that we can rely on and it’s something that can help guide us through the story.”

The family didn’t listen to H6LLB6ND6R on the set of Where The Devil Roams mind you, and went for a heavier vibe of music to fit in line with the tone of the movie. “Through our process, we’re always recording and listening to music,” John reveals. “So we’re all very aware of what the musical tone of our film is going to be.

“We were going for a more heavy stoner-rock vibe [in the movie] and so on car rides and stuff we were listening to bands like Pigs, pigs, pigs, pigs, pigs pigs, pigs or Slomosa.”

Oop! We’re back to the car rides again. Travelling has certainly been central to the Adams’ career, and they tell us that this whole filmmaking adventure actually started when John and Toby decided to take a year off and travel around in an RV, while home-schooling the children, who were about 11 and 6 years old at the time.

“Instead of waiting for others to give us permission, [we were like] ‘let’s just do something we want to do’,” Toby says. “The kids were interested in acting. So we just set off on the road in 2010 for a year and we shot our first film Rumble Strips and we were just absolutely hooked!”

Rumble Strips follows a mother who is arrested for growing marijuana and takes her two young daughters on an RV trip before she’s sentenced, so they can be prepared for her absence. Though their movies all have very different tones and fit into different genres, that central theme of family is always present, whether it’s the uncle/niece dynamic in their fun 2014 drama Knuckle Jack or the incredible bond between mother and daughter in The Deeper You Dig and Hellbender, family is key. And for the Adams, that’s both in front of the camera and behind.

Indeed, for Where The Devil Roams, even the extended family and their community were called into arms. “We live in a very small rural town and a lot of times people just come up to us and say ‘will you please kill me in your movie?’ And so who are we to deny them?!” Toby laughs. “It was so much fun and that’s very much in our DNA – we love to use what is around us. And there were a lot of enthusiastic people who were wonderful.”

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Another honorary family member who appears in the film is the Chevy that the central family drives (we told you we’d get back to that) – which is actually John’s dad’s car and was a linchpin in the filming process: “[Filming] began with the 1931 Chevy,” Toby nods.”There were times we had to give it a little push, but that baby just was our star.”

“Everybody was up for Christmas,” John continues the story. “There was a snowstorm and we were like ‘oh my god, this would be great, let’s give it a try’, so we put the Chevy up on a flatbed and my brother-in-law drove the truck pulling us all along. I sat in the back filming and these guys were in the car and it was great!”

Though Where The Devil Roams is a slightly bigger production than some of their previous movies, the community and family vibe in creating it was still very much apparent. “This film was still like a small Adams Family Film,” Zelda nods. “Maybe we had an extra dollar or two to pay for the clothes and the wood that would build our sets, but it was still John, Lulu and Alex sweating their balls off making those sets. It was still us with a broken tripod and two tiny little mics. So it still felt like it was very true to our Adams Family Films style, which almost resembles the family travelling on the carnival circuit, just trying to get by with the little things that they have.”

Speaking of that Adams Family Films style, it truly is unique and we can’t help but ask them how they would define that style: “I tend to think of us as like a band of misfit filmmakers,” answers Toby. “I guess I like the word misfit. I think there is something that feels a little bit like an outsider for us, but we are very much a ragtag team.”

“I hope people think that our films are honest,” John adds. “Like with Hellbender we tried to be honest about a mother-daughter relationship, with The Deeper You Dig we tried to be honest about guilt and loss, and in this film, we’re trying to be honest about what true love is, which is no matter how fucked everything is, love is always being able to forgive. But this really takes it to a dark place…”

Speaking of going to a dark place, Where The Devil Roams certainly broaches those murky corners, especially when the movie delves into Seven’s past as a war doctor (in one scene, Seven even decapitates a fellow soldier), which is told via flashbacks. “I love the World War One flashbacks, I think they’re really cool,” says Toby. “I think that’s where our most brutal violence comes. I think it’s the most brutal any of our films have ever been, particularly in the last World War One flashback [with the decapitiation], which is actually Zelda’s boyfriend. I feel so bad because when his mother sees that she’s just going to hate us!”

“It’s perfect for me because people say ‘how did you deal with Zelda’s first boyfriend?’ and I’m going to say ‘I cut his head off’,” John laughs. “That’s going to be it. The end of the conversation, so that people are very uncomfortable…”

What the Adams are finding uncomfortable right now (in a good way) is the wait for the movie to be released to wider audiences: “We’re very nervous because nobody has seen it until just now so we’re all excited but definitely nervous!” Toby laughs.

“This is our horror movie. Now when we roll it out, we’re just fucking terrified!” John says. “This is where it’s fun for us.”

The movie will be showing at this year’s FrightFest and the only people who will be terrified are audiences because the Adams have hit the nail on the head once again with Where The Devil Roams – bringing horror, heart, and humour all into one glorious genre rollercoaster of a carnival ride.

Where The Devil Roams will be showing at FrightFest in London on 25 August. Get your tickets here.

The post Where The Devil Roams: Discussing clowns, horror, music and filmmaking with the Adams family appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.

“I’m glad we got the amount of blood we were able to get.” Erik Bloomquist on his new slasher Founders Day

admin — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 16:23:27 +0000

The Bloomquist Brothers – Erik and Carson – (She Came From The Woods) are back with another horror this summer as their political slasher Founders Day heads to London for its international premier at the UK’s top horror festival, FrightFest.

The movie sees a small town shaken by a series of ominous killings in the days leading up to a heated mayoral election. As accusations fly and the threat of a masked killer darkens every street corner, the residents must race to uncover the truth before fear consumes the town.

We spoke to Erik Bloomquist about his love of slasher movies, taking on multiple filmmaking responsibilities and how the killer’s wig was the biggest diva on set…

Founders Day has taken around 10 years for you to make, is the version we see today the version you and your brother originally created?

It very much still is a love letter to formative slashers in autumn in New England but over the years, it’s evolved as our sensibilities sharpened and then a relatively recent infusion of this election that’s happening in the town.

There was a mayor, there was this crisis about what the town was going to do in terms of going forward with this festival after the first body turns up, but in terms of it being a hot-button election issue, that happened in the last year or two. We thought of that probably two years ago and everything just popped into place when that happened in terms of putting the commentary we want to make and raising the stakes and making characters more defined.

So it still very much has the same heartbeat that it’s always had. It’s now a fully formed version as it evolved, as we have evolved. I think the path for all the other movies that we’ve made has led us full circle here.

What were your slasher influences?

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention [Scream]. I mean, they’re huge for me. We watched it a little too young and we got it from the library on a winter afternoon.

We’re definitely different in the sense that we’re not referencing movies. I love how they do it. It’s perfect but Roger Jackson isn’t on the other end of the phone in our movie. I think what we really glean is this sense of mischief and play and curiosity and intrigue and puzzle, and having a degree of fun in the whole thing too.

We definitely want to scare people, but we also want it to be a bit of an adventure, like everything we make. We want it to be something that people watch maybe when they’re a little too young for it, but in a good way…

What do you think it is about Scream and those classic slashers that have resonated with people to create their own?

I think people, certainly me and Carson, love speculating and seeing all the different paths people are going to go down. We loved Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid and I think it’s similar to that, where it could be anything and then seeing what it is and people having multiple identities, like metaphorical masks and when those metaphorical masks are off, it just feels like play in a really fun way.

Horror in general is just a really great way to have a community experience and an individual experience at the same time. That’s why I’m really drawn to the genre in general. But this one’s been a long time coming, so we are very excited to see it with a crowd.

Founders Day has a very unique mask – how did the idea for that come about?

It was really important to us. The idea originally was that it’s like a comedy/tragedy mask fused together so that on one side there’s a frown and then if you turn, he’s smiling. We wanted to make the look that was very, as Carson says “distinct but not gimmicky”. Which is very hard to do.

We thought about it a lot. We liked the idea of simple, tactical, and something that applied to judges’ robes and the mask had to feel worn but not necessarily old.

We worked with Tony Gardner’s company which was amazing and we decided to go red instead of white with the mask. Going red just felt really right to us both in terms of being distinct and in terms of camouflage and in terms of being a devil judge. There was just something about it. We wanted it to be simple but distinct and I’m very happy with how it came out.

There’s also a fun weapon – that was something that developed as we did the movie. So all these little touches will hopefully work together to create something that is very distinct for people and has a character of its own.

The slasher’s costume also comes with a wig… is this the first killer with their own wig?!

It might be! Yeah, because it’s usually the hood right? That wig was fun to shoot with and there are outtakes where we’re in the middle of a kill and the wig just falls off and then the person behind the mask would look at the camera and just shrug. So there was a lot of tape and adjusting. Probably in real life it would fall off a lot if someone was actually killing in that wig, but movie magic is good.

So the wigs were the biggest divas on set…?

Exactly. We had three of them. They’re in my closet right now. We have three masks and three wigs. Hopefully, we’ll be able to do some publicity stunts with them at some point but there won’t be quite as much violence so hopefully, that won’t be as much of an issue!

A lot of thought went into creating a unique mask in Founders Day… though the wig was a bit of a pain!

What’s the writing process like with you and your brother Carson?

It changes as we go. We write relatively chronologically, but sometimes we’ll work on a linchpin scene first and work backwards from there. Sometimes we’ll be in the same room and just pass a laptop back and forth. We refine all this work and at some point, we’ll have a draft and we’ll just go through it together and redline it and change it.

Then working very closely with the actors – I have a real acting background, I still act. I act in this movie and it informs the way I direct and change the script as we go, just to fit the voices of the characters. There are things that I think are really important that we try to keep in there – structurally and character-wise – but it’s really cool when we can have that marriage between voice and actor.

You directed, co-wrote, produced, edited and starred in Founders Day. What’s your favourite role in the filmmaking process?

For me, the most foundational part of it all is acting. I’ve been acting since I was little and that evolved into me directing and knowing how to work with actors and then writing my own stuff and then producing and learning how to do that out of necessity.

I really enjoy wearing multiple hats. I know it might be perceived as fatiguing to an extent but for me, in a lot of ways, it’s energising. Because if I’m in the middle of problem-solving a scene and can just jump in and act for a second, I get to act on instinct and then I get to look at the monitor and make sure the shot looks right.

It’s a really fun way to make sure that I’m staying fresh. I find that when I’m acting within a scene that I’m also directing and I can set a tempo or tone from within the scene. Then Carson’s behind the monitor just making sure I’m not making weird faces!

Was it always planned for you to star in Founders Day? Was the character written for you?

He was a relatively new character actually, as it became an election movie we just figured that [mayor] Blair Gladwell needed a right-hand man. It made sense for me because we have these two ensembles – we have the high school ensemble and we have the adult ensemble. And deputy Miller played by Adam Weppler and I kind of bridge those two and live in both of those generations just to unite the town.

It was important to us to establish that everybody in this town kind of knows of each other. Has an opinion about each other. I think that the fact that we are both adults in the town but also still kind of the younger generation is a way to just establish scope and intimacy at the same time. I just thought that’d be really fun to do.

How would you describe the movie’s main protagonist, Allison?

I think that she is somebody who in some ways feels bigger than this town but is also tied to this town and is a very loyal person. And I think that that makes for a really interesting person to follow – there is a loyalty to this place, to her dad, to her girlfriend, to her teacher, to her school, and that really makes her believably want to figure out what’s actually happening, even though she’s on the route out of there.

What was it like having Naomi Grace, who plays her, on board?

Naomi is wonderful. She brought a real goodness and enthusiasm in front and behind the camera. She made it happen in a really engaging way and she was just so lovely to work with. I know she’s so excited – she is going to be in London and I am very excited to have her see it!

The movie has lots of great kills! Do you have a favourite?

They were so fun to do, and I wish we had even more time to do them. But I’m really happy that we were able to do as many pieces as we did.

There is one in particular that is pretty theatrical, almost choreographed to music and that one I’m particularly excited to see. There are kills in the movie that I didn’t think would necessarily jump out as the first piece of the conversation and I love that everyone’s going to have their own.

Some are fun and some are particularly brutal. But I like that they’re all character driven to an extent. That they feel distinct not just because of how they happen but because of who they’re happening to and when they’re happening and I can speak more about that if you catch me after FrightFest!

I’m just very excited to see those and I’m glad we got the amount of blood that we were able to get. I mean it’s not it’s Terrifier, but there’s blood!

What do you want audiences to take away from the movie?

I’m excited for people to have the conversation about ‘who did you think it was? And when did that change and why?’ I’m excited for me to hear that, just to overhear those side conversations.

Ultimately [I want] for people to be energised and to continue to think about things. We don’t want to be preachy, but we do want to be outspoken. I think the ultimate feeling we want people to take away is that it was fun and thoughtful and ultimately has a little bit of bite beyond when the final credits are over…

Blue Finch Film Releasing presents the International Premiere of Founders Day at FrightFest on 28 August 2023. Tickets are available here.

The post “I’m glad we got the amount of blood we were able to get.” Erik Bloomquist on his new slasher Founders Day appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.

The Adams Family head to FrightFest

admin — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 06:32:39 +0000

The UK’s top scare bonanza, FrightFest, returns to London for its 24th edition on Thursday August 24 – Monday 28 August 2023 and the festival always attracts not only some of the top horror movies we’re going to be excited about for the coming year, but all aspects of the filmmaking community.

This year, members of the Adams family – comprising John Adams, Toby Poser and their children, Lulu and Zelda Adams – will also be attending. They are the creative minds behind The Deeper You Dig and Hellbender and it’s safe to say the filmmaking family are firm SciFiNow faves. We’re not kidding, we’ve chosen their latest movie Where The Devil Roams as the SciFiNow hosted movie at the festival, and we’ll be speaking to them after the European Premier of their movie on 25 August at the festival.

Where The Devil Roams follows a family of carnival folk as they murder their way through America during the 1930s and come across a mystical hand that’s linked to the devil.

“We always love playing with mythology in our films,” says Toby. “It was similar in The Deeper You Dig, we had this old verbiage in an old book. In Hellbender we also have a book and we were creating the Hellbender characters. So in this case, we just love the idea of ‘let’s really explore the story of the devil’”.

Not only will the Adams be attending FrightFest to discuss their movie, but Toby will also be attending as a mentor for the festival’s New Blood initiative. When we ask her for a snippet of what advice she’ll be giving aspiring filmmakers at the festival she says that “it would be to not hinge everything upon money and budgets. There’s so much at your fingertips or just beyond the corner of your eye that you can make something wonderful with.

“If you have a story that is honest and compelling, just make it and don’t worry about all the bells and whistles, otherwise you’ll be waiting forever,” she continues. “Just get going and then you’ll get better every time. Just like us, we’re learning every time. I can learn as much from that person I’m going to be talking to as they can from me.”

Where The Devil Roams is the Adams’ seventh feature and they can’t wait to see it on the big screen in Leicester Square with a crowd of fellow horror fans: “My favourite thing about FrightFest, showing at FrightFest is actually the FrightFest audience,” John nods. “I can’t wait because they’re such a film-educated crew and I’m just excited to learn from them. That’s going to be really great for me. I look forward to that.”

Us too!

Where The Devil Roams will be showing at FrightFest in London on 25 August. Get your tickets here.

The post The Adams Family head to FrightFest appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.

The Dive Review: A deep dive story of survival in extremis

admin — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 22:31:14 +0000

“I still get a bit nervous every time,” says Drew (Sophie Lowe), about to step off a narrow jetty into the sea for a cave dive. “Lucky you,” replies her sister May (Louisa Krause), “Nervous is good. Excitement’s a good thing.”

May does not get nervous. This is not only because she is a consummate professional, calm, cool and collected, who works with deep-diving oilmen every day – but also because, unlike the perkily enthusiastic Drew, May is cold, aloof and emotionally disengaged. Indeed the siblings’ pre-dive conversation carefully modulates two different receptions of a thriller like The Dive that can often coexist in the one viewer: on the one hand, the jaded, seen-it-all-before response that perceives this as just another movie; and on the other, the reaction that suspends disbelief, dives right into the film’s edgy fiction, and opens itself to being nervous and excited all over again.

These two sisters are both still reeling from the loss of their father (played, in flashbacks and hallucinations, by David Sicluna). Where Drew has moved back in with their mother, May has fled, distancing herself from both, and meets up with her estranged sister only once a year, and even then only reluctantly. Their relationship is difficult, and so the space into which they dive, and where they must face, both together and apart, intense, sink-or-swim trials, is no less metaphorical than it is real.

“Alright, back into the womb,” quips Drew as they head into a dark underwater crevasse, foregrounding the regressive, Freudian nature of their journey – and both that fissure, and the sudden rockfall which will leave May pinned dangerously to the floor, map out all at once the rift that has grown between Drew and May, and the crumbling fragility of the ties between them.

With May rooted to the spot, the sisters swap rôles: Drew must now shoulder the burden of enormous responsibility as May’s lifeline, while the fugitive May, now unusually immobilised, has to confront and work through the feelings buried in her conscience, and even ends up singing the very song (The Platters’ Only You, 1955) that Drew loves and she hates. So for all its frenzied panic, Maximilian Erlenwein’s feature, co-written with Joachim Hedén, always remains a close character study.

Like Scott Mann’s Fall (2022), except set 100 feet below rather than 2000 feet above, or like Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours (2010) except (literally) more breathless, or like Johannes Roberts’ 47 Meters Down (2017), except without the sharks, The Dive is a story of survival in extremis, as its two characters must contend with a big rock, depleting oxygen, the bends, nitrogen narcosis and their own deep-seated vulnerabilities. All this is filmed (by DP Frank Griebe), both above and below the surface, with an immersive fluidity, as intimate close-ups are cross-cut with alienating wide shots and aerials, showing two individuals alone and under pressure in a vast, unforgiving universe where all they have is each other.

Gaspingly tense, with its against-the-clock missions unfolding (and mostly failing) in near real time, The Dive plunges us into a precarious sibling bond. Here, as May points out, “There are so many ways how this could end, but it’s all happening for a reason.” Perhaps that reason is to help two people who love one another, but have drifted apart, find themselves again. And if nerves must be shredded to get there, well, nervous is good.

The Dive plays at FrightFest on 24 August. It will open in cinemas across the UK & Ireland on Friday 25th August 2023

The post The Dive Review: A deep dive story of survival in extremis appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.

Pigeon Shrine FrightFest 2023: SciFiNow Top Picks

admin — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 21:59:50 +0000

Our favourite UK scare fest is back next week with Pigeon Shrine FrightFest returning to Cineworld in Leicester Square, London, for its 24th edition.

Running from Thursday August 24 – Monday 28 August 2023, Pigeon Shrine FrightFest will have feature-length and short films, as well as documentaries, and will encompass 25 World, 23 International / European and 12 UK premieres, with 14 countries represented, spanning five continents.

From carnival murderers and underwater claustrophobia, to demons and a man who dresses like a dog, there’s something for everyone at this year’s Pigeon Shrine FrightFest. Here are our top picks (all in handy date order!)…

Thursday 24th August

Suitable Flesh

Just days ago, Elizabeth Derby was a successful psychiatrist with a loving husband and the world at her fingertips. Now, she finds herself locked up inside a psych ward after the murder of a young male patient to whom she had an inexplicable, almost otherworldly attraction. Hoping to clear her name, Elizabeth confides in her doctor and recounts what happened, giving way to a bizarre and disturbing tale of sexual madness, supernatural horror, and homicidal rage.

Read our review here.

Director: Joe Lynch.

Cast: Heather Graham, Barbara Crampton, Bruce Davison, Johnathan Schaech.

Where: Empire Studio Main Screen

When: Thursday 24 August | 5.45pm

The Dive

Experienced scuba divers May and Drew are two sisters with a close but complex bond who go on a deep sea diving trip to a beautiful but remote beauty spot. During their dive, May is struck by a rock from a landslide above the water, leaving her trapped on the seabed 28 meters below the surface. With dangerously low levels of oxygen and cold temperatures taking their toll, it‘s up to Drew to fight for her life, which jeopardises her own…

Director: Maximilian Erlenwein

Cast: Sophie Lowe, Louisa Krause

Where: Empire Studio Main Screen

When: Thursday 24 August | 8.25pm

Friday 25 August

It Lives Inside

It Lives Inside finds Indian-American, Samidha, at that point where her culture and hanging out as a normal teenager collide. She has supportive parents and a teacher ally, and she’s interested in a boy named Russ. But none of this matters when her estranged friend Tamira breaks a jar she claims houses an ancient demon. When the evil force kidnaps Tamira and starts targeting her friends and family, Samidha must acknowledge that some legends are true as she tries to end the reign of terror.

Read our review here.

Director: Bishal Dutta

Cast: Megan Suri, Neeru Bajwa, Mohana Krishnan, Betty Gabriel

Where: Empire Studio Main Screen

When: Friday 25 August | 10.45am

Eight Eyes

A mysterious local crashes a couple’s vacation through the former Yugoslavia, pulling them deeper into his web of psychic rituals in this unique shocker drawing equally from Eastern European genre cinema and American regional horrors of the 1970s.

Read our review here

Director: Austin Jennings.

Cast: Emily Sweet, Bradford Thomas and Bruno Veljanovski

Where: Discovery Screen 3

When: Friday 15 August | 1.15pm (plus an additional screening on Sunday 27 August at 8.55pm)

Where The Devil Roams

We’re big fans of the Adams family’s work here at SciFiNow (so much so, that we chose their newest movie, Where The Devil Roams to be our hosted film at the festival this year, find out more here).

Where The Devil Roams is set in the harsh Depression-era America, and explores a dark, eerie journey filled with suspense, thrills, and chills. Venture into a nightmare alley with the Adams pack as they trace a family of murderous sideshow performers travelling around the world on the dying carnival circuit on a bloody search for eternal life.

Read our review here.

Directors: John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser

Stars: John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser

Where: Empire Studio Main Screen

When: Friday 25th August | 3.30pm

What You Wish For

A chef with gambling problems flees to a Latin American villa where he assumes another man’s identity in What You Wish For. A morality tale about omnipresent greed in the post-President Donald Trump years, Tomnay looks at how the rich and powerful in America have become completely uninterested in the world as a community, particularly inaction concerning climate change.

Read our review here.

Director: Nicholas Tomnay

Cast: Nick Stahl, Tamsin Topolski, Randy Vasquez, Penelope Mitchell

Where: Discovery Screen 2

When: Friday 25 August | 6.20pm

Saturday 26 August

Cobweb

Inspired by the short story ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ by Edgar Allen Poe, Cobweb tells the story of a mysterious, constant tap that plagues eight-year-old Peter from inside his bedroom wall – a tapping his parents insist is all in his imagination. His concerned schoolteacher starts enquiring after Peter shows clear evidence of trouble at home. But as Peter’s fear intensifies, he believes his parents could be hiding a terrible, dangerous secret and questions their trust. And for a child, what could be more frightening than that?

Read our review here.

Director: Samuel Bodin

Cast: Lizzy Caplan, Anthony Starr, Cleopatra Coleman, Woody Norman

Where: Empire Studio Main Screen

When: Saturday 26 August | 1.10pm (plus an additional screening at the Discovery 3 screen with closed captions)

Pandemonium

In Pandemonium, Nathan and Daniel wake at the scene of a car crash, confused and seemingly unscathed. The two men begin to slowly understand that they did not make it. They are dead. Nathan’s previous acts will now determine his fate, however reprehensible they might have been. He will have to leave this earthly world and enter the depths of Hell that await him for all eternity and be confronted with other tormented souls whose pain he will be forced to experience by the demon Norgül.

Read our review here.

Director: Quarxx

Cast: Hugo Dillon, Ophelia Kolb, Arben Bajraktaraj, Manon Maindivide

Where: Empire Studio Main Screen

When: Saturday 26 August | 3.30pm

Doctor Jekyll

Doctor Jekyll is a modern reimagining of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. When ex-convict Rob takes the carer position to the infamous Nina Jekyll, little does he know he’s part of an evil master plan devised by her alter ego Rachel Hyde. But to what lengths will Rob go to satisfy his client’s weird wishes and ambitions for the daughter he has never seen?

Director: Joe Stephenson

Cast: Eddie Izzard, Scott Chambers, Lindsay Duncan, Simon Callow

Where: Discovery Screen 1

When: Friday 25 August | 8.45pm

Transmission

Transmission’s story unfolds on a television screen as we switch between different channels and slowly realise that each of these channels is actually telling different aspects of the same horrific narrative…

Director: Michael J. Hurst

Cast: Vernon Wells, Felissa Rose, Dave Sheridan, Sadie Katz.

Where: Empire Studio Main Screen

When: Saturday 26 August | 11pm

Sunday 27 August

The Seeding

In The Seeding, a hiker finds himself marooned with a mysterious woman in a remote desert canyon where a pack of feral boys have built a primitive society structured around a brutal coda of entrapment and procreation. A slow-burning survival thriller from prolific music video director Barnaby Clay, this stone-cold shocker confronts the dread of isolation and unchecked toxic masculinity head-on. Boys will be boys, and in the terrifying vastness of the California arid region, their worst desires come out to play.

Read our review here.

Director: Barnaby Clay

Cast: Scott Haze, Kate Lyn Sheil, Alex Montaldo, Charlie Avink

Where: Empire Studio Main Screen

When: Sunday 27 August | 1.25pm

Raging Grace

Raging Grace is a bold coming-of-age story that follows Joy, who is an undocumented Filipina immigrant struggling to do her best for her daughter, Grace, when she secures the perfect job; taking care of an extremely wealthy but terminally ill old man. The position pays well and guarantees a roof over their heads, but soon, Joy realises everything is not as it seems. Something is festering beneath the surface, threatening all they have worked for.

Read our review here.

Director: Paris Zarcilla

Cast: Jaeden Paige Boadilla, Max Eigenmann, David Heyman, Leanne Best

Where: Empire Studio Main Screen

When: Sunday 27 August | 6.15pm (plus an additional screening on Monday 28 August at 1.15pm)

T Blockers

When ancient parasites that thrive on hatred rise from beneath a small town, taking the most fearful and susceptible as hosts, a young trans filmmaker struggling to transition in these increasingly hostile times for LGBTQ+ people finds herself the only one who can sense the possessed, and rally the resistance before the horror escapes and spreads.

Read our review here.

Director: Alice Maio Mackay

Cast: Lauren Last, Lewi Dawson, Lisa Fanto

Where: Discovery Screen 2

When: Sunday 27 August | 6.40pm

Monday 28 August

Good Boy

Millionaire heir Christian meets student Sigrid on a dating app. Meeting up at his mansion, she’s shocked after their liaison encounters his dog, Frank. The problem is Frank is a man dressed and acting like a dog – therapy Christian says for his friend with a traumatic past to cope with stress. Concerned at first, Sigrid gradually comes around to the pet ‘puppy’ antics and starts dating Christian properly. Then he asks her to spend a weekend at his country cabin, where events take a completely unexpected turn, and their whimsical romance lurches into shocking horror.

Director: Viljar Bøe

Cast: Gard Løkke, Katrine Lovise Øpstad Fredriksen, Nicolai Narvesen Lied, Viljar Bøe

Where: Discovery Screen 2

When: Monday 18 August | 1.20pm

The Sacrifice Game

It’s bad enough that elite boarding school students Samantha and Clara can’t go home for Christmas. But things take a deadly turn for the worse when a murderous gang of cult killers arrive, intent on summoning a demon. What must the girls do to survive the night?

Read our review here.

Director: Jenn Wexler

Cast: Mena Massoud, Olivia Scott Welch, Chloe Levine, Gus Kenworthy

Where: Empire Studio Main Screen

When: Monday 28 August | 9.15pm

Find the full line-up for the 2023 Pigeon Shrine FrightFest and for more information on the festival, click here.

The post Pigeon Shrine FrightFest 2023: SciFiNow Top Picks appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.