FrightFest unveils Halloween 2020 line-up
Anton Bitel | On 17, Sep 2020
Note: This planned event has now been replaced with a digital weekender. For more information, click here.
Halloween is like Christmas for horror freaks. It’s that time of the year when long shadows and winter chills close in, and the ghouls and goblins come out to play. Add a pandemic into the mix, and you have all your horror angles covered. So this year, Halloween is something special – so special, in fact, that it has its own dark double.
That’s right, we are getting to celebrate Halloween twice – for FrightFest is not only expanding its normal six-film all-day event into a 34-feature weekender (from 22nd to 25th October) at Cineworld Leicester Square, but also doubling up the following weekend with a second, all-online event comprising some of the Cineworld films, and some additional new titles. So the end of October is going to be an endless cavalcade of genre treats (as well as the odd trick) which you can enjoy in the company of masked strangers and/or in the comfort of your own (possibly haunted) home.
The line-up for the digital edition will be announced in the coming weeks, but today the in-person Cineworld programme goes public. Spread over three screens, it comprises features from 10 countries and 4 continents. It opens with Yeon-Sang-ho’s sort-of sequel Peninsula, both made and set four years after zombie diptych Train to Busan and Seoul Station, and amping up the post-apocalyptic escapist urban action to the levels of John Carpenter or George Miller. The closing film is Chris Lofting and Travis Cluff’s Held, a claustrophobic relationship thriller that promises to capture this year’s locked-down mood.
In between them is something for everyone – Natalie Erika James’ extraordinary tale of a family cursed by its own mortality, Relic, Bryan Bertino’s thematically similar story of farmyard devilry The Dark and the Wicked, Chris Smith’s haunted house period horror The Banishing, Jill Gevargizian’s long-awaited feature-length (hair) extension of her 2016 short The Stylist, Aaron B Koontz’s weird western The Pale Door, Neil Marshall’s timely plague parable The Reckoning, Elza Kephart’s killer jeans comedy Slaxx, Andrew Thomas Hunt’s gruesomely gladiatorial girl-power gorefest Spare Parts, Marc Price’s stranded-in-space saga Dune Drifter, Takeshi Kushida’s photoshopped romantic thriller Woman of the Photographs, Jud Cremata’s single-take Let’s Scare Julie and Gabriel Carrer and Reese Eveneshen’s genuinely Halloween-set For the Sake of Viciousness.
There are other titles, of course – 34 in total, including much British “first blood” – and, as always with FrightFest, it is often those obscure, unknown titles that prove the most satisfying discoveries.
Tickets for the Cineworld event go on sale Monday 21st September. – and for full information on the line-up, ticketing details and event guidelines, click here.
Watch this space for news on the digital programme.