Arrow Video FrightFest’s “Twenty Bloody Years” August bank holiday celebration kicks off with the Elijah Wood starrer Come To Daddy, Alexandre Aja’s crocodile-thriller Crawl and Andre Øvredal and Guillermo del Toro’s freaky-faced team-up Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, before rounding out with Abner Pastoll’s highly-anticipated A Good Woman Is Hard To Find.
Returning to the heady heights of Leicester Square’s huge Cineworld and darling indie, the Prince Charles Cinema, Alan Jones, Paul McEvoy, Greg Day and Ian Rattray have delivered another fierce line-up for a very special year for the fest. Having taken their first bow as London’s go-to genre film festival way back in 2000 in the very same square, Team FrightFest are promising big things for their 20th anniversary.
And not just with their always killer selection of movies either. Sure we’re looking forward to The Soska Sisters’ Rabid re-jig, Lucky McKee’s Kindred Spirits and Jason Mewes’ (Jay himself) Madness In The Method. And all-in, this year’s programme does boast a record-breaking seventy-eighty films, from fourteen countries – twenty of them being world premieres. But on top of all the blood-curdling fun, for the first time ever, FrightFest are expanding into the video-game world too.
Man of Medan, the first game in The Dark Pictures anthology, will have its own special preview event as part of the line-up, twinned with Q&As with the development team behind the horror adventure, before it hits PS4 and Xbox One later in the month.
To cap things off, Alan Jones will be joined by cinematic legend Dario Argento (in the flesh) for a wildly exciting look back at his much-hailed giallo masterpiece Tenebrae too, 27 years on. One of Argento’s most talked about slices of pure madness, it’s up there with Suspiria and Deep Red as the most influential European horror films ever made, right down to that now trademark Goblin score.
Whatever the weather, whatever your tastes (funny, scary, or a bit of both), this year’s Arrow Video FrightFest is set to be another hugely twisted, full-on weekend of genre-fused fun – and that’s not forgetting the short film and special events programmes still yet to be announced.
We say it every year but the fact remains the same – get yourself down to Leicester Square this August bank holiday weekend, and you’ll never look back.
The 20th Arrow Video FrightFest kicks off on 22nd-26th August 2019, more info can be found at frightfest.co.uk.
