FilmFear at HOME
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
FilmFear, created and curated by Film4 and HOME, returns this spooky season with a packed schedule of screenings comprised of the best of British horror, alongside some scares sourced from around the world.
The season starts with a one-off cinema preview of the first two episodes of Ben Wheatley’s zombie comedy television series Generation Z on Tuesday 22 October. The satirical new TV project sees Wheatley back in the UK, with a story featuring teenagers forced to defend themselves from their flesh-hungry elders when a military experiment infects the residents of a suburban retirement home.
There’s more comedy in the “punkish, horror-tinged” Sister Midnight on Wednesday 30 October as Radhika Apte stars as a young woman who goes to Mumbai only to find herself joylessly confined in an arranged marriage. Writer-director Karan Kandhari will be on hand to answer your questions following a film which promises both supernatural surprises and a playlist-ready soundtrack.
The satirical new TV project sees Wheatley back in the UK, with a story featuring teenagers forced to defend themselves from their flesh-hungry elders
Things take a darker turn on Halloween itself, Thusday 31 October, with a double bill dedicated to one of Britain’s undisputed horror titans: Christopher Lee. First up is The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee, Jon Spira’s new documentary which tells the story of the actor from his work on Hammer horror, through Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings, using his own words, as well as those of a few famous collaborators, including John Landis and Peter Jackson. That’s followed by a showing of 1968 Satanic thriller, The Devil Rides Out — supposedly the actor’s favourite of his films.
There’s a couple more double bills scheduled into the weekend. First up, on Friday 1 November FilmFear have a screening of new British documentary Witches, which takes a unique perspective as it uses the portrayal of witchcraft in cinema and connects it to director Elizabeth Sankey’s — who will join the screening for a Q&A — experience with post-partum depression. That film is followed by Jayro Bustamante’s magical-realist fantasy, Rita, based on a 2017 tragedy in which 41 girls died in a Guatemalan children’s home.
Saturday 2 November is given over to two American horror titles. Joshua Erkman’s A Desert follows a landscape photographer drawn into a horrifying vortex. Drawing on Hitchcock’s Psycho, this new nightmare is billed as one of the horror events of the year. It’s followed by one of the greatest horror movies of all time, in Brian DePalma’s Carrie. The 1976 Stephen King adaptation has been recently restored in 4K, but the potent tale of teenage cruelty, shame and revenge never lost its shine.
