Frightfest is one of the biggest horror film festivals on the planet. For five days around the August Bank Holiday, it serves up an unrelenting feast of movies, Q&As and surprises. Frightfest is all about the terror.
That wasn’t the reason why, on the opening night of the festival at about 9:15, I was as scared as I’d ever been. I was about to walk onto the stage at the Empire, Leicester Square with the rest of the Habeas Corpus Crew and introduce a teaser trailer in front of a packed house of hardcore horror fanatics. You can understand the nervousness.
There’s a hell of a lot of work in that 94 seconds. Although the shoot was only a day and a bit long, there was a week of editing and polishing, probably six weeks of pre-production and an awful lot of tears and heartache before Clive, Simon, Paul, Brendan and I ended up in a nervous huddle underneath a screen that suddenly seemed very big indeed.
I was by far the least involved of the five. I had only been tangentially moved into play towards the end of the process. The other four seemed calm and quietly certain. I felt like I was the only one that was bricking it.
I needn’t have worried. The Coming Soon banner was met with a roar of approval. To be frank, the Frightfest crowd will always respond to a pretty girl licking a zombie. We’re scoping right in on the core needs of our target audience. As fans ourselves, we know what they want.
I want to take a sec just to thank everyone that gave so freely of their time and talent to get our teaser up at Frightfest. From the crew on the day of the shoot, to Marcelo who did a grand job on the sound design, Jon whose music makes the piece, Jaeson for the incredible comic-style imagery, and of course Emily Booth, the best zombie licker in the business.
Guys: here’s to next year!
Finally, some very good news. After a year of graft, knockbacks and heartbreak, Simon has a couple of festival dates for his vampire drama Blood + Roses. He will be screening THIS SATURDAY at the Portobello Film Festival. 3:30 at the Westbourne Studios. That’s free to get in, and I can recommend it on the big screen.
Even cooler, he will be at the Freakshow FilmFest in sunny Orlando, Florida, between the 8-10th of October. This is international recognition for a film that really deserves a wide audience. I couldn’t be happier for Simon. Looks like it’s the start of big things for him!
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 