Grimmfest 2024: Shhhh... First TItles Announced

Grimmfest, Manchester's International Festival of Fantastic Film is delighted to announce the first tranche of titles for 2024.

 

The festival will be returning to its regular venue, The Odeon Great Northern on October 3rd–6th, for four high-impact, fear-filled days of the very best in new genre cinema.

 

The full line-up of features, shorts, guests, and associated events remain a closely guarded secret, as the team continue to finalise and fine-tune the programme. But, by way of an astringent appetiser, Grimmfest offers the first sinister salvo of selected films.

 

Guilt, emotional damage and fear of the dark collide with local legend, a treacherous landscape, and an unseen threat, as a park ranger and her former partner search for a missing woman in a vast and dangerous nature reserve, in FROM DARKNESS, Philip W. de Silva's engrossing, harrowing and visually stunning fusion of Scandi-noir, Swedish mythology, and the supernatural, which has its Northern UK Premiere at Grimmfest.

 

A weekend hen party camping trip goes badly and bloodily wrong, as tensions are exposed, friendships betrayed, and psychopathologies unleashed, in Robyn August's smart and surprisingly savage satiric slasher, KILLHER. Boasting spectacularly splattery practical effects, cartoonishly cruel carnage, and anchored by a star-making lead performance by M. C. Huff, this is a crowd-pleasing call back to old school 80s slashers, which finds unnerving new life in classic genre tropes. The film has its International Premiere at Grimmfest.

 

Aaron Fradkin, director of VAL, makes a welcome return to Grimmfest with the International premiere of BEEZEL, an enigmatic and unsettling chronicle of the increasingly sinister legends and dark history surrounding a suburban New England house over a fifty-year period.  A portmanteau of narratively interlinked vignettes exploring the influence of an ancient evil upon several generations of the same family, the film presents stories across generations and multiple formats, not simply to suggest the passage of time, but also to produce a record of overlapping experiences that slowly reveal the true identity and intentions of the evil haunting the family house.

 

Federico Zampaglione (SHADOW) channels the classic era of Italian Gothic horror cinema in the full-bloodied and ferocious fable, THE WELL. TERRIFIER 2's Lauren Lavera stars as an ambitious young art restorer, enlisted by a sinister Baroness to salvage a fire-damaged family portrait, only to discover demonic activities down in the cellar. Conjuring up the baroque bizarreness of Argento, the gleeful grotesquery of Fulci, and the sly satire of Farina, the film unleashes its horrors with an admirably straight face and considerable visual panache. THE WELL will have its English Premiere at Grimmfest.

 

And, in the generation-traumatising tradition of Peter Watkins' THE WAR GAME and Mick Jackson's THREADS, Grimmfest is delighted to present the International Premiere of Loïs Dols de Jong's suffocatingly tense, emotionally brutal, and utterly unflinching AMSTERDAM ALERT; a masterclass of white-knuckle cinema verité storytelling, in which the city of Amsterdam is faced with the thirty-minute countdown to a nuclear strike, and the instinct for survival overrides every other consideration. In the current global political climate, it's a film that feels all-too-terrifyingly real.

 

Festival Director, Simeon Halligan, said; ‘That’s just a taster of the incredible movie premieres we are lining up for Grimmfest 2024. We don’t want to give too much away at this stage and there is still a whole body of premieres to be announced in late Summer. We can’t wait to reveal more amazing movie exclusives for Grimmfest fans, over the coming months, keep your eyes peeled for further news!’

 

Grimmfest 2024 Full Festival Passes are available now, from: www.grimmfest.com