Grimmfest, Manchester’s International Festival of Fantastic Film, are delighted to announce their full feature film lineup for 2023!
Get your festival passes right here!
The festival will be returning to regular venue the Odeon Great Northern in Manchester on October 6-8 to showcase the very best in genre cinema. This year’s festival is a leaner, meaner creature: three high-impact, fear-filled days, positively crammed to bursting with shorts and features, a veritable carnival of horrors. All the carefully curated films are new to Manchester, and many are regional, UK or even international premieres.
This year’s festival also sees something of a regime change. As Grimmfest founders Simeon Halligan and Rachel Richardson-Jones, Lord and Lady Grimm, take a year out to focus on their own forthcoming feature film, it falls to acting festival co-directors Linnie Blake and Leonie Rowland to take the wheel, and to bring their own vision to the festival. To reflect Leonie’s specific field of expertise as a J-Horror scholar, there’s an exclusive chance to catch a long-lost genre classic, alongside the latest mindblowing movie from one of Japan’s hottest new talents.
Never screened outside of Japan, and believed lost for nearly 30 years, Banmei Takahashi’s boundary-battering, genre-smashing 1988 classic, DOOR, is a magnificently excessive mix of deadpan domestic comedy, chilling stalker thriller and baroquely bloody home invasion horror. It finally had its belated international premiere at BIFAN in South Korea in July, and Grimmfest are delighted to be hosting the first UK screening.
In the same manic maverick tradition, Kenichi Ugana’s jaw-dropping LOVE WILL TEAR US APART offers a riotous roller-coaster ride through genre convention, encompassing dark and deadly romance, satiric slasher movie, bizarro psychological thriller and even some martial arts mayhem, and confirms Ugana as a major voice in contemporary genre cinema, ready to take his place among such wild cards as Sion Sono, Takashi Miike and Teruo Ishii. Grimmfest is delighted to be hosting the UK premiere in Manchester, birthplace of Joy Division, whose music inspired the film’s title.
The wider cultural influence of J-Horror can be found, too, in the half-glimpsed spectres that haunt the protagonist of the Filipino psychological thriller DELETER (UK premiere), Mikhail Red’s sulphurous study of an overworked, emotionally and morally detached internet content moderator, haunted by her own repressed memories, and by the suicide of a co- worker, who starts to fear she is being by something more supernatural. DELETER’s harrowing depiction of a woman under pressure is reflected in this year’s wider festival focus on female-centric horror and existential threat; on moral compromises and the many pathways to damnation. Characters caught up in circumstances beyond their control and pushed way beyond breaking point, attempting to survive by any means necessary in environments that seem designed to destroy them. Dark family histories and toxic social situations. Political brutality and corporate exploitation. Bad science and bad faith. The horrors of everyday life: as terrifying and soul-destroying as the mythical monsters of old. Imagine you woke up one morning, and your right to bodily autonomy and self- determination had essentially disappeared overnight.
This just happened to much of the female population of the USA, with the overthrowing of Roe vs Wade. OBJECTION / GIVE ME AN A (UK premiere) is the response. Conceived and co-ordinated by creative powerhouse and Grimmfest favourite Natasha Halevi and featuring Virginia Madsen, it’s a punchy portmanteau of 16 short pieces in which various female filmmakers and writers react to this assault on their rights. Ranging from broad black farce to sour satire, sci-fi to body horror and social realism to surrealism, even throwing in a laconic history lesson and a few musical numbers, it’s a surprisingly controlled howl of fury, a furiously focused fist in the faces of repressive legislators and mealy-mouthed, morally self-righteous hypocritical politicians.
Now imagine you starred in a hugely successful clown-themed horror film, only to find yourself targeted by incels and stalkers who have made you the focus for their sickest fantasies. Jenna Kanell doesn’t have to imagine. Loosely inspired by Kanell’s own experiences following her appearance in the first TERRIFIER film, Raymond Wood’s FACELESS AFTER DARK (regional premiere), co-written by Kanell, deftly balances splatter, satire, vicarious vengeance, and a twist of sly metacinematic mischief to offer a pointed critique of some of the more questionable aspects of the horror genre and the ways in which fame in an era of toxic social media can prove a truly Faustian bargain. It refuses to hold its tongue or pull its punches and is guaranteed to ruffle more than a few feathers among the genre’s gatekeepers.
Faustian bargains abound, too, in WHAT YOU WISH FOR (regional premiere), Nicholas Tomnay’s mordantly witty fable of the sophisticated savagery of the very rich, and of the gradual bartering away of a soul in a desperate struggle to survive in their world. Nick Stahl is truly exceptional as the increasingly haunted protagonist, a down-on-his-luck chef fleeing gambling debts who assumes the identity of a dead friend, only to realise that he has, quite literally, bitten off more than he can chew. Starting out as a Highsmith-style tale of purloined identity, it shifts sideways into a black-hearted, satirical social comedy, combining the pokerfaced, dry wit and quiet surrealism of late period Bunuel with the urbane, polite cruelty of a Paul Bowles short story.
Gerry Anderson meets Philip K. Dick in Evan Marlowe’s ABRUPTIO (English premiere). Entirely enacted by lifelike latex puppets, it’s a technical tour de force, with an astonishing all-star voice cast including James Marsters, Jordan Peele, Christopher MacDonald, Sig Haig, Robert Englund, Hana Mae Lee and Rich Fulcher. It is a hallucinogenic, increasingly bizarre tale of human bombs, social collapse and an alien invasion. Combining the coolly ironic tone and distanced, postmodern self-awareness of Charlie Kaufman with the broader, bloodier, more grotesque and gleefully ridiculous sensibilities of Lloyd Kaufman, it’s a wild, weird, pedal-to-the-metal ride through a surreally tweaked LA noirscape where the worst imaginings of internet conspiracy theories and paranoid 1950s B-movie sci-fi might turn out, any second, to be all too troublingly and absurdly real.
In a similarly paranoid and unpredictable vein, noir-tinged vein, Miguel Azurmendi’s dazzling debut feature, KERATYNA (UK premiere) is a tense, surreal spin on REAR WINDOW for the age of the internet incel. It combines a slow-burning psychological thriller with bizarro David Icke-style conspiracy theories and a mordant, yet surprisingly sympathetic character study of a fairly unsympathetic, rather wretched character. Consistently engaging and surprising in its unexpected shifts in tone and slippery narrative twists, it’s a film that carefully draws you into its protagonist’s reality, only to blindside you with a truly jaw-dropping, utterly mindboggling final twist that will leave you wondering just what the hell you just saw.
EVIL EYE (regional premiere) sees Mexican maestro Isaac Ezban (THE SIMILARS, THE INCIDENT) moving away from the Twilight Zone sci-fi strangeness of his previous films and into full-blooded Latin American Gothic. A flamboyantly realised fable of two young sisters sent to stay with their sinister grandmother, who, they gradually start to suspect, might be a witch, it combines full-on, furious grand guignol horror with a real understanding of the power and resonance of myth that rivals Guillermo Del Toro or Angela Carter. Beautifully played by the two young leads and featuring an extraordinary performance from Mexican screen legend Ofelia Medina as the grandmother from Hell, it’s a dark and deadly delight; a truly Grimm(fest) fairy tale.
A search for her own murky origins as a product of the infamous “Lebensborn” Project leads a young nurse into a confrontation with Nazi Eugenics, Nordic-Teutonic folklore, and witchcraft, in Marie Alice Wolfszahn’s MOTHER SUPERIOR (English premiere). A subversively female-focused repurposing of classic 1970s-style Euro-horror tropes to create a flamboyantly Gothic psychodrama with a challenging contemporary twist, it confronts head on the ways in which questionable mythology and bad science can be twisted to the service of evil ideologies.
Keeping with the theme of female-centred repurposing of 1970s genre tropes is Tamae Garateguy’s AUXILIO (UK premiere), a nerve-shredding spin on the notorious nunsploitation subgenre is a far closer spiritual cousin to Ken Russell’s THE DEVILS than it is to Walerian Borowczyk’s BEHIND CONVENT WALLS. A furiously full-on fever dream of vengeful ghosts, religious hypocrisy, political intrigues and family guilt, it’s a film that pulls no punches. But its confrontational in-your-face imagery and visceral visual extremes – orgies, graphic torture, even cannibalism – are matched by the incisive intelligence with which it explores complex questions of love and faith, politics and metaphysics, and the ruthless, unflinching interrogation it offers of Church power-mongering, State corruption and the toxic collusion between them.
Homaging an entirely different school of 1970s cinema, Jenn Wexler’s THE SACRIFICE GAME (regional premiere) is a whip-smart, cineliterate callback to – and subtle reinvention of – several classic genre tropes; a devious, mischievous mash up of home-invading Satanist psychos, sinister girls’ boarding schools, and alienated, victimised teens with dark secrets. It’s a knowing and self-aware film that nevertheless plays it admirably straight-faced, taking its familiar components and tweaking them, playing with cruel cunning on the expectations of a hardened genre audience, and benefitting hugely from an amoral, meanspirited willingness to do horrible things to sympathetic characters when the audience least expects it.
A film where the Devil holds all the best cards. Damnation is on the cards, too, in Quarxx’s astonishing PANDEMONIUM (regional premiere). Not so much a Panorama of Hell, as a Portmanteau Purgatorio, Sartre with added Satan, the film presents an existential nightmare journey into the various hells of other people. A visual and emotional tour de force, with cinematic and literary references ranging from Sartre to Angela Carter, Lovecraft to Lars Von Trier, this is bold, brutal, bravura filmmaking, utterly uncompromising, devoid of comfort or closure, offering a truly merciless vision of the grim(m) reality of eternal damnation that even Dante might flinch from.
In Caya Casas’ THE COFFEE TABLE (UK premiere), a hapless husband’s desire to assert himself against his overbearing wife by buying a singularly hideous table unleashes a nightmarish chain of events that will destroy not only the couple themselves, but all of those around them. Starting as a sour black comedy, before quickly spiraling into a suffocating nightmare of desperate deception and guilt, it has the same sense of social anxiety and escalating chaos as a domestic farce, but is played utterly, brutally straight. Utterly pitiless, it really, truly is a film that will shake even the most hardened of genre fans.
In Travis Greene’s sly and slippery 8 FOUND DEAD (UK premiere), various characters find themselves unexpectedly double-booked at their AirBnB accommodation and facing an uncomfortable night with a decidedly sinister elderly couple. Deftly juggling three separate timelines and playing them off beautifully against one another to consistently surprising effect, it’s a smart, tense, deviously tricksy and utterly black-hearted character-driven comic thriller, with a jaded, misanthropic view of humanity that Jim Thompson would be proud of.
Acting co-director Leonie Rowland says: “The horror we are showcasing this year is interior, intelligent, engaged and explosive. It delights in the genre as much as it bends and redefines it. We are so proud of our 2023 lineup and so excited to share it with you all.”
The full screening schedule, along with details of the shorts programmes, festival guests and other events, will be released soon.