Horror film festivals have become a staple of the modern Halloween experience – offering cinemagoers the chance to encounter a new generation of scares from the world of independent filmmaking. In his own search for new shocks this October, Dr Vincent M. Gaine returned to sample some of the delights at Grimmfest 2024. Here is what he found.
Great North Manchester is a cavernous space, formerly owned by the Great Western Railway company and now converted into a leisure venue. Restaurants, bars, coffee shops, roller skating and axe-throwing (!) facilities share space with the mighty Odeon Great Northern, a cinema with over 16 screens that annually plays host to the north of England’s largest horror film festival, Grimmfest. Playing over the first weekend in October, Grimmfest 2024 continued this festival’s tradition of challenging, enjoyable and downright scary films, along with illuminating guests and insightful Q&As.
One of the biggest thrills this year was the premiere of Black Cab, starring Nick Frost. This nightmarish tale opened on October 3rd, wowing audience members with its chilling tale of a sinister cab driver. Black Cab was followed by Beezel, that sadly failed to deliver the goods. This tale of a house haunted by a malevolent presence is a clumsy and garish hash-podge of horror tropes, that tries to make up for a lack of narrative and visual focus with painfully obvious reveals and edits that are straight-up painful.
Thankfully, Friday was a major improvement, beginning with the short film The Blue Diamond, which proved to be a deliciously demented day-glo nightmare, and was part of a double bill with Dead Mail. These two made for an odd pair, as the latter offers a thoroughly downbeat period rendering that, while somewhat protracted, is still meticulously macabre and at times terrifically tense kidnap horror of sinister sounds and the might of mail.
Next up was a documentary, Children of the Wicker Man. Directed by the sons of Robin Hardy, Justin and Tommas, this is an incisive, moving and fascinating investigation into the making of a cult classic and the trauma of a family. Not to speak ill of the dead, but this film gives a strong impression that the director of The Wicker Man was an utter prick. Rather more fun came in the form of Crumb Catcher, the most darkly absurdist and wildly surprising tale about the WORST wedding night you can imagine. Chris Skotchdopole’s tale of a couple whose wedding night is interrupted by home invasion and recriminations is both deeply uncomfortable and at times humorously macabre. Next, Federico Zampaglione’s The Well offered a very promising idea, but this combination of Hostel and Suspiria creates a curiously unsatisfying blend of gothic occultism and captivity torture, that undermines its suspense with excessive gore and convoluted lore.
Another double bill was this viewer’s last experience of Friday, with a Double Dutch offering that included Amsterdam Alert, quite possibly the most terrifying film of the festival. Loïs Dols de Jong’s real time thriller about citizens responding to an alert of a nuclear missile heading towards Amsterdam is a chilling portrait of both impending disaster and public panic. The second in this double bill was Heresy, that plays somewhat like The Witch on magic mushrooms, being an eerie and psychedelic folk horror of fanatical beliefs, entrenched misogyny and the divine feminine.
Saturday began with a collection of short films, described here in appropriately brief terms: Suffocate is intense, chilling, relatable; A Green Affair immersive, melancholic and botanically erotic. Carnivora is gastronomically gruesome, although From Me To You suffers from over-stylisation. Coleoptere strikes a balance between being mournful and suitably grisly, and Selfie could be described as ‘The Instagram of Dorian Gray’, while Apotemnofilia takes the viewer on a wild ride from body dysmorphia to gruesome body horror, making these three quite the triple bill.
“This reviewer’s personal highlight of Grimmfest 2024 was From Darkness. This fantastically atmospheric Swedish folk horror of trauma, recriminations and redemption sees a former couple searching for a lost woman in a nature reserve that is supposedly haunted by a creature from folklore.”
The next feature was M, and not the Fritz Lang classic. Rather, this is a new film from Macedonia, directed by Vardan Tozija and focused on a child’s experience of a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Tenderly framed and emotionally heartfelt, this is a touchingly beautiful survival horror of family, holding on and the thin line between despair and hope. However, strong as M is, it was followed by this reviewer’s personal highlight of Grimmfest: From Darkness. This fantastically atmospheric Swedish folk horror of trauma, recriminations and redemption sees a former couple searching for a lost woman in a nature reserve that is supposedly haunted by a creature from folklore. Director Phillip W. da Silva makes highly evocative use of snowbound forests at night, where modern technology collides (sometimes violently) with tradition and superstition. The film also maintains a brilliant level of ambiguity, a feature all too rare in cinema as ultimately, clarification will tend to win out. This ambiguity is testament to the skills of everyone involved, and makes From Darkness one of the finest horrors of the year.
Lighter but more head-scratching fare came next with Tim Travers and the Time Traveller’s Paradox. This goofy, zany and mind-blowing sci-fi comedy manages the complex task of making the literal disruption of the universe and (again literally) finding yourself sweet and charming, not to mention comprehensible. Perhaps that is the biggest paradox of all. I confess that I also had a ticket for Traumatika, but I was that knackered by this point on Saturday that I went to the pub!
Sunday began with another set of shorts, including Dead of Night, a creeping long take of dread, and The Feast, a gloriously grotesque nightmare of consumption. Strange Creatures is spooky if obvious, but Izzy provides a fitting scream at the absurd demands placed upon women, with added red glitter. Dark Roads, from the excellent director Jeremiah Kipp, is quite the malevolent trip, and Paspocalypse makes great use of a single location to deliver something genuinely eerie, uncanny and unsettling. Safe is a darkly humorous relationship tale, and Parasomnia a compelling portrait of excruciating paralysis. As proved to be a recurring theme at the festival, Ambrosia takes an intriguing premise but undoes itself, in this case by excessive gore and style. A more astute use of gore and pain came in The Neighbourhood at the End of the World, that could also be called ‘Torture of the Body Snatchers’. But the pinnacle of the shorts was Outside Noise, a gripping and terrifying interweaving of technology and mysticism that might give you pause over the next app you download.
“Vampires never seem to go out of fashion, but in a year of more traditional versions such as Last Voyage of the Demeter, Salem’s Lot and Nosferatu, Bleeding is genuinely innovative and definitely worth a look.“
Due to train times, I only managed two features on Sunday, the first of which was Bleeding. Reductively described as True Blood meets Dopesick, Andrew Bell delivers a grim, gripping and gruelling tale of addiction, connection, coercion and desperation. Vampires never seem to go out of fashion, but in a year of more traditional versions such as Last Voyage of the Demeter, Salem’s Lot and Nosferatu, Bleeding is genuinely innovative and definitely worth a look. Last but most certainly not least was Early Birds, a Swiss neo-noir case thriller (not a phrase one often uses) that features two women on the run from the mob with a whole lot of contraband. This fast and furious chase thriller (with suitably grounded forms of transport) also manages to be tender and touching, and provides a defiant shout against different forms of institutional oppression.
It is safe to say that Grimmfest 2024 offered something for all tastes. Real world thrillers, extra-worldly and dimensional wonders, supernatural spooks, as well as a penetrating documentary and imaginative shorts. If you want a mainline rush of new and exciting cinema, hosted by friendly folk and with fellow viewers not to mention cast and crew that you can hang out with in the lobby as well as the nearby pub (the Lion’s Den, official sponsor), Grimmfest is a great way to spend the first weekend of October.
Dr Vincent M. Gaine is an academic, film critic and podcaster. He has published books and articles, as well as reviews for the Geek Show, the Critical Movie Critics, Bloody Good Screen and Moving Pictures Film Club. He specialises in the intersection of globalisation, liminality and identity politics on screen and will happily talk for hours on end about spies, superheroes and Boston. His insights from the 2023 Grimmfest can be found here.