As the post-Halloween blues coalesce with the lead-up to Christmas, the Soho Horror Film Festival returns with a landmark hybrid edition to make this November all the more sweeter. Spread across two consecutive weekends, there are unique film programmes for the 5th annual in-person festival in South London, and the 10th online country-wide home invasion. The combination of 30 fiendish features and over 50 short films highlights the best in brand-new independent genre cinema, along with some special events, marks the festivals largest, most diverse, transgressive, and outright bonkers lineup to date.
Bookending the in-person festival will be a pair of tundral terrors, offering the cutest and most terrifying polar bears in each of these UK Premieres. Opening the festival is Nyla Innuksuk's Slash/Back, which pits a rag-tag Inuit gang of teenagers against a skin-crawling invasion by out-of-this-world bodysnatchers. Finishing up in the post-apocalarctic wastelands is Kirsten Carthew's majestic survivalist Polaris.
The 2022 edition will continue the festival's cornerstone of platforming LGBTQ+ voices in horrors, starting with the World Premiere of Alex Birrell's deviously clever and homegrown literary chiller The Latent Image. There's also a special preview of the pulse-racing and demon embracing Hypochondriac, along with the International Premiere of Daniel Montgomery's beautiful heartbreak haunter The Jessica Cabin.
Teenagers and horror go together like Mentos and coke, as the result is always explosive and most certainly messy. Schools out for Soho involving a time-travelling portapotty in the gross-out Totem, projectile ectoplasm in the practical creature filled The Ghastly Brothers, and the throwback thrashing with sorority slashings of the Teen Scream Midnight Marathon.
For a festival that's meant to be horrific, there's an assurance nobody will have too much fun. The masterfully challenging and nihilistic Megalomaniac is a worthy addition to the gruelling canon of New French Extremity. The UK Premiere of Johannes Grenzfurthner's unhinged Masking Threshold offers a transgressive and blood-soaked serial killer study like no other.
For anybody wanting midnight madness and retina-widening insanity, calm your gag reflex for the drugs n' bugs narcotic nightmare All Jacked Up And Full Of Worms. A cult face unlikely adversaries in a Karen and a cancelled reality TV bounty hunter, in the stomach achingly hilarious Cult Hero. Screening in its International Premiere, Sung Kang's monster mash-up Shaky Shivers sees best friends grapple with a werewolf, curses, and ice cream.
Would it be Soho Horror Fest without an under the radar indescribable oddity? This year's addition comes in the form of Shane Brady's astonishing Breathing Happy, a sleight-of-hand fever dream that arrives with a festival first exclusive surprise that will leave the audiences jaws on the floor.
Accessible online across the United Kingdom and Ireland, the festival's virtual event will also feature menacing delights and UK first surprises. Opening the online festival is the UK Premiere of The Third Saturday In October Part V, bringing the nineties-tastic feel of a straight-to-video slasher sequel while the long-lost original The Third Saturday In October Part I will close out the event. Bookending the virtual festival are Jay Burleson's pair of body count bangers while also offering a brilliant homage to the video store days of the past, watching sequels before the original and experiencing franchises out of chronology.
Continuing on the vein of nostalgia, while razorblade ready to slice it open, is the viscerally brutal neo-giallo Night Caller, late-night television horror hosts and Goosebumps galore in the interdimensional cable campness of HeBGB TV, and classic BBC British ghost stories in Jamie Hooper's The Creeping. If you've ever wanted to see a Lovecraftian Home Alone is made by Benson & Moorhead, look no further than the International Premiere of the hilarious All Eyes. The past is literally torn up in Aristoltelis Maragkos's The Timekeepers of Eternity, which offers a painstakingly handmade and staggeringly unique reworking of Stephen King's 90's direct-to-video disasterpiece The Langoliers. This will be a crown jewel in a centerpiece programme on the master of horror himself, Stephen King.
If you thought the in-person festival got all the cult goodness, think again. If Bridesmaids met Midsommar, you'd get Alexandra Spieth's folk femme fury Stag. Cerebral sci-fi mystery is on offer with Cyro, and vloggers get violent in the online premiere of Jeff Ryan's affecting, funny, and aptly titled Mean Spirited.
No passport or visa are needed to globe-trot the expanses of the horror globe, as the festival heads to Iceland (not the supermarket) for the scintillatingly strange pregnancy shocker It Hatched, before crossing treacherous waters to battle Taiwanese aquatic arachnids in Abyssal Spider, untomb a legacy of atrocities in Lebanon's terrifying found-footage nightmare What Is Buried Must Remain, and digs into the dark under(pork)belly of truffle harvesting in the surprising and tense Canadian thriller Peppergrass. All of which will be playing in the UK for the first time, to all you lucky lot.
If you think that's everything Soho Horror Fest have planned for you, then you don't know jack. Tickets for both the physical event and virtual event are on sale now.
The Soho Horror Film Festival will run from 11th-13th November at the Whirled Cinema in Brixton, London. The virtual Sohome Horror Film Festival will run from 17th-20th November, and will require internet access to take part. Please note, the films will vary between in-person and online festivals. Information, full details on all the films on show, and tickets can be found at www.sohohorrorfest.com
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