FrightFest Presents unveils 2018 line-up
David Farnor | On 09, Aug 2018
FrightFest Presents has unveiled its new line-up of releases for 2018.
The terrifying new initiative between the UK’s leading horror film festival and Signature Entertainment was announced earlier this year, relaunching the FrightFest home video brand to bring the best of the fest’s undiscovered movies straight to genre fans’ living rooms. Through Signature’s established network of partners, the films will be made available across physical, digital and TV/SVOD platforms in the UK and Ireland, and the first slate for 2018 promises an scarily diverse range of titles, from suspense and creature features to old-school terror.
All enjoying premieres at FrightFest this August, the films will then be released by FrightFest Presents in the autumn, led by The Dark and Secret Santa in October and November respectively.
“We’ve got the right – and fright – mix together and are delighted by our exciting acquisitions with the UK’s brightest, best and most versatile distributor,” says Alan Jones, Co-Director of FrightFest. “We’ve known from our 19 years as the UK’s top genre festival that there has always been an appetite for the scream of the crop, carefully handpicked by the veteran FrightFest crew. Now, with the genre at an all-time prolific high, FrightFest together with Signature can supply the building demand for quality horror, sci-fi, thriller and fantasy.”
“I feel so blessed to have found a distribution family as dysfunctional and twisted as my own,” comments Adam Marcus, Director of Secret Santa.
Here’s the line-up:
The Dark
Directors: Justin P. Lange, Klemens Hufnagl
Cast: Nadia Alexander (The Sinner, Seven Seconds, Blame)
FrightFest Screening: 27th August
The film follows Mina (Alexander), a young woman who was murdered and stalks the forest that saw her demise. Anytime some unfortunate soul enters her area, they are quickly dispatched and become her feast. But when she stumbles across a young boy named Alex in the back of a car who shows signs of clear and horrifying abuse, she can’t bring herself to do away with him. Rather, she becomes his protector while trying to protect her own little world. As police and locals search for Alex to help bring him home, their own growing relationship seems to be changing Mina in ways she never thought possible.
FrightFest Presents release date: October 2018
Secret Santa
Directors: Adam Marcus (Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday & Texas Chainsaw 3D)
Cast: Michael Rady, Drew Lynch, Debra Sullivan, A Leslie Kies
FrightFest Screening: 27th August
The Pope family’s Christmas Eve dinner goes horribly and hilariously wrong when someone puts something in the party punch causing everyone to tell the unvarnished truth at the already dysfunctional holiday reunion. When the head of the household psychopathically freaks-out, the scene is set for murderous mayhem and splatterific revenge as the deviant relatives reveal their long-buried hatreds and festering loathings.
FrightFest Presents release date: November 2018
Boar
Directors: Chris Sun (Daddy’s Little Girl)
Cast: Bill Moseley (House of 1000 Corpses, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Devil’s Rejects), John Jarratt (Wolf Creek)
FrightFest Screening: 24th August
In the harsh, yet beautiful Australian outback lives a beast, an animal of staggering size, with a ruthless, driving need for blood and destruction. It cares for none, defends its territory with brutal force, and kills with a raw, animalistic savagery unlike any have seen before.
FrightFest Presents release date: 25th February 2019
Pimped
Directors: David Baker
Cast: Benedict Samuel (Gotham, The Walking Dead, Home and Away)
FrightFest Screening: 24th August
A psychological thriller, Pimped follows Sarah Montrose, a woman who isn’t well-equipped to live within society’s accepted lines of behaviour, struggling with her own identity, desires, and loves. When all this is threatened by two scheming men, Sarah has to fight for herself to take revenge all the while embracing her psychopath alter-ego.
FrightFest Presents release date: Q2 2019
Lifechanger
Directors: Justin McConnell
Cast: Lora Burke, Jack Foley, Elitsa Bako
FrightFest Screening: 24th August
A murderous shape-shifter sets out on a blood-soaked mission to make things right with the woman he loves but had to leave behind for her own safety’s sake. But zipping between ever-faster body snatches is becoming confusing, mind-bending and more debilitating by the minute. Something has got to give. Like dark romance, feral natural instincts and fractured sanity. Time to take a dive into the deep aliveness that comes from following your broken heart, in acting on what you love despite the monstrous circumstances, alien limitations, hidden emotions or fears of the shocking unknown.
FrightFest Presents release date: 11th March 2019
Fright Fest
Directors: Ante Novakovic
Cast: Dylan Walsh, Madison McKinley, Romeo Miller
FrightFest Screening: 25th August
Blood runs rampant on Halloween night when the Mayor of Sommerton decides to mount a live Fright Fest event within the walls of a long abandoned lunatic asylum. Only problem is a van of criminally insane prisoners crashes just outside and the trick or treaters think their murderous acts are part of the performance. Enter if you dare.
FrightFest Presents release date: 4th March 2019
FrightFest runs from 23rd to 27th August in London’s Leicester Square. For more information on this year’s festival, visit the official website at www.frightfest.co.uk.