Horror fans rejoice, for once more this March’s Glasgow Film Festival welcomes another weekend of wickedly fun international depravity, courtesy of the that all-too-reliable FF banner. 13 films, over 3 days, with one positively freakish re-imagining of Winnie the Pooh as a serial killer; there’s never a dull year as far as FrightFest is concerned.
With this year’s line-up gathered together from all over the globe, spanning nine different countries including France, Spain, Austria, Finland, the Netherlands and Lithuania, as well as the usual British and American fare, there’s certainly a wide variety on offer too.
The one horror hounds will no doubt already be humming about is the cult-flavoured Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, a deliciously nasty slasher that pits everyone’s favourite cuddly characters from the Hundred Acre Wood against each other, in bloody fashion. With Pooh and friends now in the copyright-friendly public domain, expect director Rhys Frake-Waterfield to well-and-truly go to town with the kid favourites. Childhoods will be ruined.
Equally unusual but a little less dark is French surrealist Quentin Dupieux’s latest Smoking Causes Coughing, which finds a group of cigarette-slinging superheroes on a team building weekend that spells chaos. Dupieux’s time-bending comedy Incredible But True sat very nicely at last year’s FF summer event, and his matter-of-fact weirdness has only gone from strength to strength in the decade or so since his masterful breakout killer tyre picture Rubber.
Finnish genre master Jalmari Helander (Rare Exports, the Samuel L. Jackson-as-the-President actioner Big Game) returns with his latest too, in Sisu – a self-confessed white-knuckled action “epic” which sees a local prospector duking it out with the Nazis in WW2. As does British FF favourite Christopher Smith (Triangle, Creep, Severance), with the international premiere of his Jena Malone-starring Scottish nun thriller Consecration.
And of course it wouldn’t be a FrightFest without championing plenty of newer filmmakers along the way; Jonas Trukanas brings the very first Lithuanian slasher with Baltic thriller Pensive; Andrew Bowser bumps his viral hit Onyx the Fortuitous up to the big screen, with Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton en-tow; and social media horror gets another exciting new instalment with Travis Bible’s found footage/screen-life chiller #chadgetstheaxe.
As usual, expect both nightmares, and a wickedly good time.
FrightFest Glasgow returns as part of the Glasgow Film Festival from 9th-11th March. For passes, individual tickets and the full line-up, head to https://www.frightfest.co.uk/2023glasgow/
