25YL
Whether you’re a film festival junkie or a casual fan who just wants to know what to look out for in the next year or so, we here at 25YL have you covered. JP Nunez and his lovable sidekick, Sean Parker, have recently finished covering Fantasia, and now they’re gearing up for the next big genre festival, FrightFest.
This year’s edition of the festival is set to run from August 22-26, and as always, the slate looks fantastic. It features intriguing debuts, returning fan favorites, and a whole bunch of titles we can’t wait to check out. JP and Sean are ready to work day and night to cover as many movies as humanly possible, and if you’re wondering what to expect, here’s a little sneak peek of their most anticipated films.
JP Nunez
When I think of FrightFest, the first thing that comes to mind is the amazing movies I saw at the festival last year. To take just a few examples, I watched the minimalist masterpiece Monolith, one of the best international horror films of 2023 in Good Boy, and the excellent pseudo-anthology Pandemonium, which I can’t wait to buy on Blu-ray from Arrow Video sometime soon.
That’s just a small taste of the awesome titles FrightFest introduced me to in 2023, and if you add in the last couple of years before that, you get a veritable cornucopia of terror that this festival has allowed me to see before the rest of the world. It’s made FrightFest one of my favorite genre events to cover every summer, and 2024 is no exception. This year’s slate looks fantastic, and here are five films I’m dying to see.
Broken Bird
First up, we have Broken Bird, a movie about a lonely mortician named Sybil who desperately seeks to fill the emptiness inside her, but it seems like that void will be too much for the poor woman to bear. As the FrightFest plot synopsis puts it, “Reality and reason are slipping away from Sybil, and her dark desires are becoming more insatiable and progressively out of control.”
I’m not entirely sure what those “dark desires” are, but if the trailer is any indication, they probably have something to do with Sybil’s affinity for the dead. I think that’s a fascinating premise for a horror film, and from the looks of it, Broken Bird is going to be executed nearly to perfection.
Test Screening
I’m a sucker for movies about people who love movies, so when I first got wind of Test Screening, I knew I had to check this film out. It follows four friends who snag tickets to a test screening of a mysterious new blockbuster, but when the highly-anticipated movie begins, they get a bit more than they bargained for.
Apparently, this test screening is a mind-control experiment, and it has horrific effects on the people who see it and the community around them. Again, that’s an amazing premise for a horror film, but what really sold me on Test Screening was the trailer. It’s dripping with atmosphere and genuinely chilling, so this might even be one of the best movies of the entire festival.
The Lonely Man with the Ghost Machine
When I read the FrightFest plot synopsis for The Lonely Man with the Ghost Machine, a single phrase immediately stood out to me. It called this film a combination of I Am Legend and A Christmas Carol “by way of cosmic H. P. Lovecraft,” and that was all I needed to know.
I’m a huge fan of all things Lovecraftian, so whenever I hear about a new movie that takes its cue from the master of cosmic horror, I need to check it out. There’s just something about this brand of terror that fascinates me to no end, so I can’t wait to see what unknown chills and thrills The Lonely Man with the Ghost Machine has in store.
Fright
If you couldn’t tell from my comments about The Lonely Man with the Ghost Machine, it’s not hard for a film to catch my attention. All it needs to do is harken back to something I already love, and I’ll be instantly intrigued.
So when I heard that Fright was “a homage to the unsettling atmosphere of 1950s horror cinema” and an echo of haunted house classics like The Haunting and The Innocents, I was immediately on board. Those movies are right in my wheelhouse, so even though the FrightFest plot synopsis was pretty vague, I already can’t wait to see how this movie turns out.
The Monster Beneath Us
Last but not least, we have The Monster Beneath Us. This is another haunted house flick, and much like Test Screening, what really sold me on it was the trailer. Sure, the FrightFest plot synopsis interested me too, but it didn’t give me a sense of what the film would be like. For that, I needed to see some footage, and once I did, I was all in.
Even when nothing particularly creepy is happening, almost every frame of this trailer is dripping with an atmosphere of eerie dread that’s guaranteed to get under your skin, and that’s the kind of horror I live for. This movie will be a real treat if it’s even half as good as it looks, and with a trailer this tantalizing, it’s hard to imagine The Monster Beneath Us being anything other than a huge win.
Sean Parker
In a film festival filled with time-traveling samurai, banshees, and invisible raptors (oh, my), I’m tasked to choose only five films I’m looking forward to at the upcoming Pigeon Shrine FrightFest. It’s just not fair. There are so many subversive films and docs to warp your brain (looking at you, So Unreal) that it’s difficult to choose only five.
Cursed in Baja
After being featured prominently throughout Rob Zombie’s filmography, Jeff Daniel Phillips pulls double duty by starring and venturing behind the camera for his second feature directorial credit. In Cursed in Baja, Phillips plays an ex-detective tasked with finding the missing heir to a substantial fortune. There’s only one big problem: the rapper-heir has settled in with a chupacabra-worshipping cult in Baja, Mexico.
If you’ve seen the teaser for Phillips’ film, then you’re probably wondering why Cursed in Baja might be a pick for my top five at FrightFest. It’s clearly a microbudget DIY film that is heavily reliant on the grit of its creator. That’s all it takes to make a cantankerous grindhouse feature stand the test of time, and Phillips has been shoulder-to-shoulder with Zombie for years, who does his best work in the grindhouse spaces. This is an underground horror flick that looks primed to surprise and go to some desperate extremes. Plus, Barbara Crampton!
Things Will Be Different
After a botched robbery, estranged siblings Joseph (Adam David Thompson) and Sidney (Riley Dandy) drive to a farmhouse containing a unique escape route: a grandfather clock that allows them to travel through time. While they may have escaped the police, they wind up beholden to the orders of the mysterious force that has stranded them in time. Turns out that messing with the spacetime continuum may have worse consequences for this brother-sister duo than facing justice in the present.
Director Michael Felker’s feature debut gets the stamp of approval from Rustic Films’ producers Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, and David Lawson Jr., with Benson also co-starring in the film, and that’s a pretty good endorsement. The guys who directed Something in the Dirt and The Endless are producing someone else’s time travel film? Odds are it’s probably gonna be damn good. See it at FrightFest on August 23.
Scarlet Blue
There is nothing else that looks as alluringly mysterious or as visually striking as Aurélia Mengin’s Scarlet Blue. The film’s teaser features topless women, a suspended cocoon with baby doll parts, a mad scientist, and lots of neon. Beyond that, it doesn’t say much, and that’s ok. With a sophisticated palette of lights, colors, and horizontally laid vertical shots, Mengin’s tapestry springs forth, and you really don’t need the advocacy of “Bava meets Lynch” in the synopsis to get me on board, but it’s for sure a “shut up and take my money” mic-dropper.
Scarlet Blue is a journey through Alter’s (Amélie Daure and Anne-Sophie Charron) depression and schizophrenia. When she consults a cave-dwelling healer (Anthracite’s Stefano Cassetti) for help recovering her fragmented childhood, his mystical hypnosis seems to unfurl layers of fear with Alter. He gifts her a Polaroid camera to capture the moments before and after any anxiety attacks to help her piece together what may be triggering the crises. Scarlet Blue only plays once during FrightFest, but something tells me it’s going to stay with you long after. Catch it on August 23.
Bogieville
The logline had me at “An American Vampire Road Movie.” Sure, I suppose that could also describe the divisive 2001 film The Forsaken, but I’m way more optimistic with Bogieville, which highlights a playground of terror through practical effects in a disparaging tone over its sixty-second teaser trailer. The story here is a bit “wrong place, wrong time,” with an on-the-run couple being convinced to stay at a run-down mobile home park and getting caught in the middle of a vampire turf war.
Sean Cronin, known for portraying henchmen in James Bond and Mission Impossible films, directs and stars in this blood-soaked romp that just screams, “This is going to be a ton of fun.” The effects alone had me, but the camera work of the film has a particular style all its own that really grabs your attention. Plus, what could go wrong with an immortal beef battle? Bogieville is like having a vampire trailer park version of Freddy vs. Jason, and I’m here for it. FrightFest is hosting the World Premiere of Bogieville on August 25. It’s already sold out, but tickets are still available for the encore on August 26.
Strange Darling
Kyle Gallner is just fu*king awesome. You’ll know him from Smile, Scream (2022), Jennifer’s Body, and The Cleansing Hour, but his audacious anti-hero performances in underseen movies like The Passenger (2023) and Dinner in America make him an actor I find myself magnetized by. In Strange Darling, Gallner is fully in the shoes of the bad guy, hunting Scream: The Series star Willa Fitzgerald in a brazenly captivating game of cat-and-mouse that looks about as white-knuckled a thriller as you can get. The images of a cherry-haired Fitzgerald against a crew-cut Gallner getting steamy in a motel room against the duet of “Love Hurts” looks pulled straight from Wild at Heart before the tone quickly deviates into chaos.
Suggesting commentary on the reticent fear women face in a world of Tinder dating, where you have no idea about the person sitting across from you, Strange Darling has been on my radar for a while. FrightFest attendees will be there for the film’s International Premiere, seeing it a month ahead of its release in the UK on September 20. The film has been collecting rave reviews left and right, with the words “unexpected” and “surprises” appearing in many. Strange Darling is like a Christmas gift I just can’t wait to open.
