Alix Turner
It was lovely to catch up with three people who I normally only see when there is no time to talk: the team behind the planning and hosting of Mayhem Film Festival in Nottingham, UK. They are Chris Cooke (top left), Melissa Gueneau (known as Meli, bottom left), and Steven Sheil (bottom right). It was therefore a rare chance to ask “How’s life?”
“I think it’s been a full-on year for each of us in different ways,” Steven said, the only one who seemed to know how to answer. “The festival is always a focus for us, but outside of that I’ve got a freelance career trying to make films, and Meli’s got numerous jobs, and Chris has his teaching. So there’s always a lot going on and it can feel a bit like a miracle when we get the festival done, especially this year.”
“It was tough going this year,” agreed Chris, “but it felt like it was a positive one as well, from an audience point of view.”
Steven’s name may be familiar to some of the more hardened genre film-lovers from his title Mum and Dad; and Chris’s from One for the Road…I confessed that outside of Mayhem, that was all I knew about them; and even less about Meli’s experience. Tell me more, I said.
“There’s nothing much else,” Chris said. “It’s all-consuming. I’m at Nottingham Trent University now, used to teach at Sheffield Hallam, on a practical film-making course; but it takes up a lot of time. It’s great working with students who are full of ideas; I think I’m that kind of lecturer who’s going to lean on horror because it’s something like cause-and-effect: you can see what horror is and how to understand it. So I’m working like that with the current students, so I’ve been quite busy.”
“Chris and I met about thirty years ago,” said Steven. “We’d both moved to Nottingham, after doing degrees in other places and both got involved in the local film-making scene; which was quite nascent, when Shane Meadows was starting to do stuff. There was a shift: equipment was hard to get hold of at that time because it was expensive (it was film cameras, or big, hefty cameras). Myself and Chris did a course together at a place called Intermedia, which used to be part of Broadway [the venue where Mayhem takes place each year]. It was a practical film-making course, which led to us making films together after it finished; as well as separately, working on each other’s films. So there was this whole community of filmmakers who really embraced when digital video came in, mini-DVD. Then Chris made a short film, a couple of shorts that were well-received; then off the back of those, made One for the Road, BFI’s first full-length digital video feature. We were all involved in that scene, and the reason I think all that ties in with Mayhem is there has never really been a film school in Nottingham, and apart from Intermedia, nothing compared to what there is now: if you made films, you did it on your own, or with mates. We grew up in a close community, making things happen by ourselves…which is kind of the impetus behind Mayhem: there aren’t any film festivals around here, no horror festival around here, let’s just do it! There’s long been a feeling of grass-roots initiative like that here, rather than big organizations coming up with things: most of what happens in the Nottingham film scene happens because we want things to happen.”
“Steven’s kind of responsible for a lot of the horror in Nottingham,” Chris half-joked. “He was the one who was already making horror films.”
So I had to ask how Meli got involved.
“I started working at Broadway in 2013,” she said, “but I was already sort of in touch with Chris and Steven in my previous role: I’d been doing marketing for the City and had been trying to give a little bit of coverage to the festival. Then I started working at Broadway initially as a marketing person, so from the get-go, I carried out some marketing for the festival as part of my main job; but I feel like I got all my fingers in that pie pretty quickly! I’ve been very lucky that I’ve met few people here and there that have given me the opportunities that Chris and Steven have: I joined programming a few years later, became responsible for selecting the shorts; then that grew to programming anything that was showing. Once I was at Broadway, the relationship between the three of us became quite organic; I don’t know if it’s coincidence, luck, or whatever, but we got along well pretty quickly.”
“There was definitely a shared sensibility”, agreed Steven. “But Meli, I don’t think you were particularly horror-oriented before joining Mayhem, were you?”
“No, it was all your fault,” she said with a smile and a glare.
And this led to a point about Mayhem’s development…
“It used to be Mayhem Horror Festival, and then it became Mayhem Film Festival,” recalled Steven; “and part of that was about us wanting to broaden out what we could show as a festival, and that ties in with our sensitivities and our tastes broadening. And just the idea of not being constrained: if there was a film we wanted to show, it didn’t have to be horror. Even now…we showed Hundreds of Beavers this year, which is not a horror, not a sci-fi, but it is an absolute cult film. We have a sense by now of what the audience might go for, so it’s good to put that kind of stuff in front of them.”
So they didn’t commission it, as such?
“No, not at all,” he said. “And for the first few years, Broadway’s perception of the audience that we were getting in was that it wasn’t ‘a Broadway audience’. The Broadway you see now was not how it was 20 years ago: it was very much indie, art-house, French subtitled movies…classic art-house cinema. They did some Hong Kong double bills, stuff like that, but they were very much out-sourced. They also did the Bang Short Film Festival, which was what Chris first started working on. So for the first four or five years, Broadway weren’t fully on board with the idea of hosting a horror festival. I think it didn’t quite meet their perception of what their audience was. So in terms of a symbiotic relationship, the presence and development of Mayhem has definitely allowed Broadway to broaden who they think their audience is and to show more genre stuff. There are now more genre clubs and other film clubs that do their events at Broadway, and part of that is because we brought an audience who were very committed, and growing over the years. Also, I think there was this initial perception that a horror audience would be made up of seven-foot-tall guys wearing goth or metal t-shirts; that’s part of our audience, but it’s not all you get with us. They worried that it wouldn’t be an arthouse audience, but once the audience started coming in, and interacting with Broadway, spending a lot of time in the bar, staff started to realise that they were all lovely people. And actually, they’re just normal people who happened to be into horror and genre movies. So there was a bit of breaking down some preconceptions of what a horror audience is before Broadway could fully embrace Mayhem.”
Tangents are great, but I wanted to find out more about how Mayhem started.
“I’d been working as a programmer on Bang Short Film Festival for years,” said Chris. “It was a really popular event that had been screening shorts from all over the place. And at one iteration of it, I said we should do a horror night, because there had been quite a few horror shorts coming through. We put on a single set of horror shorts and there was a huge audience response. It’s a genre I love, but I hadn’t been plotting this like some evil marketeer or anything, like ‘can I lure in a crowd of people?’ But it’s great when you open the doors and get a full house of people who love a genre and want to support it, absolutely brilliant; but we felt we needed to try it on its own… so Mayhem was born, an independent event.”
Steven came back in there: “It was started by Chris, me, and Gareth Howell, and we’d all been to horror film festivals in our youth (Chris and Gareth had both been into Black Sunday in Manchester). We started doing horror nights around each other’s houses, when we’d watch four or five films together, mostly me, and Chris would be the only ones awake by the end. So originally our idea was to put on an all-nighter at Broadway, replicate what we were doing in our own living rooms at Broadway. We went to see them, they said ‘No, we don’t want to do a horror all-nighter’. We wanted to do something with horror, Chris had been involved with Bang Shorts, so why don’t we do something that combined those: hence, Mayhem Shorts. Chris came up with the name, I think.”
“Because it was in May,” Chris said, like it was obvious.
“Now it’s in October, it makes less sense,” Steven confessed. “The first two iterations were programs of short films. Chris had experience of programming; me and Gareth hadn’t, but we all chose the shorts together. Then it was a couple of years of shorts plus one feature.”
I took a look at their archive: Wilderness (Michael J. Bassett) in 2006, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (Jonathan Levine) in 2007…and then it all kind of blew up! The 2008 event must have been something special, with Blood on Satan’s Claw and Martyrs, amongst other titles, and some strong special guests.
“My film was coming out then,” Steven reminisced, “and we got Mark Gatiss. I’d met him a couple of times, and—somewhat cynically—he seemed like a good draw to bring in Broadway audiences as well as a Mayhem audience. Mark Gatiss had been writing novels at the time, had been in The League of Gentlemen, and was more of a known face; we could sell that name to Broadway. A similar thing happened a couple of years later when we had the Nick Roeg event at the church; his was a name that had a pull for the Broadway audience. So that first full-weekend iteration had a couple of things that made Broadway admit they could get into it, and part of that was definitely getting Mark Gatiss in.”
“I think it was that way,” agreed Chris; “getting guests in to put the two audiences together. The other thing happening in the background was that we started to get regular attendees, and they were being treated like Broadway patrons. The Broadway is a great venue in terms of the front of house, the projection staff, the bar; teams of people who work to make it all happen. They really liked that growth: suddenly they were presented with a four-day horror festival.”
I had assumed, when looking over that archive, that it was something to do with the number of submissions meaning they simply had to expand.
“In terms of shorts, we were getting more submissions,” said Steven, “but in moving to features, we don’t ever ask for submissions, we go out and find them. It was suddenly a lot more work for us, having to find those. The other thing to mention was that Broadway had an event in the nineties called Shots in the Dark, a crime movie festival; a jewel-in-the-crown of Broadway’s calendar. That had stopped a few years earlier, so there was a kind of gap asking to be filled; but although Broadway clearly liked doing festivals, it took them a while to see Mayhem as anything like Shots, with the same kudos for them. But we edged towards that, and showed them: we’re a festival, we bring a festival crowd in, the bar staff like it, and all the staff there buy into it; they really like that for a full weekend, every screening is full of people, and there’s a buzz around the place. And the people who come are lovely!”
Having attended a few now, I can vouch for that.
“It’s like Halloween coming early,” added Chris. “We used to be on at Halloween weekend, but then realized it was basically asking people to choose: do they want to go out to a party or stay in with us and watch films? So we moved it a couple of weeks earlier, so we could be part of like a Halloween month.”
2024 will be the twentieth year of Mayhem Film Festival, and I get the impression that the team has developed an understanding of the audience and the market, built up some contacts, and got a good understanding of how to work together. But if we go to the event next year and look back to 2003, what would the difference would be? What would we see, looking back in time twenty years?
“It’s been a lot of learning on the job,” Steven started. “Our background was as filmmakers, though Steven had a little programming background, so it was a big learning experience to put on the first festival; and I’m sure we made mistakes, but the way it’s grown has been very organic. It’s a very small team, still, with just three of us doing it all (along with Broadway’s backup and support of course); so the scale of the programming and management is still pretty much the same, though our knowledge is greater now. The size of the team means it’s a challenge for us, but it also means we can be very close to the audience: there are three of us, so we’re doing the intros and Q&As between us, and we’re the ones who are meeting people. I hope that means the festival has an intimate feel, even though it’s grown; we’ll mingle with them and make sure everyone’s having a good time, find out how they feel about the program, and that they feel valued by us because we don’t exist without them. We’ve always been careful not to take the audience for granted, and not to think they’ll always be there, but make sure they know we’re very grateful for their presence and support: that’s the only way the festival can continue.”
If I went back twenty years, I wondered whether Mayhem would still look like the festival I’ve gotten to know in recent times.
“We’ve been developing content and our approaches to it since the get-go,” said Chris. “One of the things I’m really pleased with is our lack of compromise: we’ve always put in high-quality films, films that we know people will like because we like them; we’re fans too. But we always have to find those gems and then get them—and sometimes have to work with other festivals (like London Film Festival, to get The Witch)—to know that those things are going to be big discussion points, experiences for the audience. That’s been our aim from the beginning. I think over the years, my urge to shock people has probably diminished, which the others are probably grateful for.”
Meli gave me her perspective: “Obviously, I wasn’t there at the beginning, so there’s about eight years that I know nothing about; but from someone who went to Mayhem as an audience member before getting involved, I don’t feel that there is much difference between now and twelve or thirteen years ago: the experience is relatively similar. I’d say what has changed is the breadth of the programming, which has changed for many reasons: some of it is a learning curve; some is about talking to the audience, as Steven said; how people respond to films and where we put them in the program is really important. Also, us as programmers; we are human beings: we grow and learn over the years. Our tastes and sensitivities may shift each year, as we become aware of certain things and we might become proactive about seeking out some voices. Again, we’ve moved from horror to broader genres to give us more breathing room and the chance to explore more. Horror is kind of an adjective, but there are lots of horrific things that people wouldn’t necessarily classify as ‘horror’, so it has been interesting to have a wider scope of films to choose from. I think the experience, certainly within the last twelve years, has not changed that much. The organizers are still there, accessible, if anyone wants to talk to us, share their experience; and we very much encourage people to come and talk to us, let us know how they feel, what they enjoyed. We always take that on board, and it is carried forward to the next festival and the one after. It’s a very friendly and welcoming space for everyone; that’s not changed, and it was always at the core of the event.”
“The only thing I’d add,” said Steven, “is that we started off in Screen 2; and initially for those first few years, it might have felt like a little clubhouse within Broadway, that members would come and hang out in. Whereas now, when we have Mayhem, Mayhem is Broadway—you know what I mean?—the whole space is our clubhouse. The growth of the festival and the growth of the relationship between Mayhem and Broadway means that everyone is excited about being there, and the venue itself is a central part of the event.”
Read Part 2 now and see how Mayhem Film Festival is programmed and run, as well as some favourite memories. The next festival takes place at Broadway, Nottingham from October 17th-20th, 2024, their twentieth edition. Weekend passes are available now from Broadway Cinema.
