Interview with Grimmfest Senior Programmer

Grimmfest is Manchester’s premium international festival of genre film, including (of course) horror, and it will be enjoying its 10^th anniversary when it opens on October 4-7, 2018. The final line-up is now out, and it includes some fantastic films.

This year, Grimmfest has partnered with House of Leaves Publishing in the promotion of their forthcoming book, Scared Sacred: Idolatry, Religion and Worship in the Horror Film, to offer day passes to the 2018 festival. For more information, please visit Scared Sacred‘s crowdfunding page.

Ahead of Grimmfest’s opening, I interviewed Senior Programmer Steve Balshaw about Grimmfest—and about the broader shape of horror today.

 

What do you think is distinctive about Grimmfest?

First and foremost, the range and selection of films. We are interested in exploring the darker side of cinema, in all its various forms. Obviously, our focus has always been on horror, and to a lesser extent science fiction, but we have also found space over the years for Southern Gothic, Crime and Film Noir, black comedy, Fantasy and even Sword and Sorcery, as well as cinema that it simply weird, wired and utterly uncategorisable. Genre cinema has always been pretty broadly defined anyway, and we will screen everything from grindhouse to arthouse. Over the years, we have developed an international reputation for pushing at the boundaries of genre, and focusing on more left-field and independent material, rather than more mainstream horror and sci-fi films. We like to stretch and redefine the parameters, and hopefully we will continue to do that. If we like a film, and think our audience will like it, or simply that they need to see it, we will try to find a slot for it.

Grimmfest is also unusual in that our Festival Directors, Simeon Halligan and Rachel Richardson-Jones, are themselves filmmakers – a writer-director and a producer respectively – and so bring an industry insider’s perspective, knowledge and contacts to the festival. This can mean that we hear about upcoming films before anyone else and have a general sense of genre trends long before they start to become widely apparent. That being said, we also pride ourselves on our inclusiveness and lack of snobbery. There is no “us and them” at our festival. We encourage guests to mix with our audience, try to create a sense that we are all part of one big community, brought together by a love of genre cinema. Festivalgoers know that we will always take time to chat and socialise with them, hear their feedback. They are, after all, the people we are doing this for.

What are some of the criteria you use to make decisions about what you’ll screen at the festival?

Personally, I am always looking for something new, something I haven’t seen done before. I want to be surprised, challenged, entertained, and  yes (this being a horror festival), scared and freaked out. But I guess the main criteria are the fundamental ones: Is it good? Do we like it? Will our audience like it? How will it sit alongside other films we are considering for this year’s programme? Other than that, I’d like to think we keep a relatively open mind. Obviously, we are a genre festival, so the films we select must have some genre element to them, but as stated already we do like to push at the boundaries of genre more than somewhat.

Usually, at that point we ask ourselves how it will play with our audience. The Grimmfest audience is a very open-minded one, very smart and cine-literate (as so many horror and genre fans tend to be). Over time, a relationship of mutual trust has built up. They trust our judgement in terms of what we select, just as we trust their willingness to go along with whatever journey a film offers them. So we can take a few risks in the programming, go a little outside of the mainstream; indeed, it’s expected of us by now.

In terms of the programming process itself, we have a viewing panel of Programmers, which varies in line-up from year to year, but has had several mainstays dating right back to the earliest years. As the films come in we all work our way through as many films as we are each able to find time for. As Senior Programmer, I try to watch everything, if I can. This means not every film has to be watched by all of us, but it needs to get a thumbs up from at least three of us before we’ll seriously consider it. Then, those who haven’t seen it yet will generally take a look too, just to be certain. If a film is in any way contentious, controversial, or has otherwise divided the members of the viewing panel, everybody takes a look – including those members of the team who do not generally involve themselves in the selection process. Over the years, we’ve come to trust one another’s judgements and to know one another’s tastes – and those of our regular audience – well enough for this approach to be quite effective.

Beyond that, we always keep an eye on what films are playing elsewhere and the receptions they are receiving. Every year there will be certain movies that our audience will want to see and we’ll try to make that happen if we can. We’ll be looking out for films that might attract potential guests too, of course, and for which older films are scheduled for a 4K reissue or Blu-ray release that we might like to present as a “genre classic”.

 

What trends do you notice in contemporary horror? Have you noticed any changes in horror in the 10 years Grimmfest has been running?

Horror trends and tropes tend to recur in cycles, and there are some which never really go out of fashion. What shifts is the approach to them, or the uses to which they are being put. When we started Grimmfest, everybody was making “Found Footage” films, there were a lot of “home invasion” narratives, and we were in the middle of that vogue for what was dismissively described by hostile critics at the time as “Torture Porn” – films that were essentially exercises in grande guignol theatre of cruelty.

Ten years down the line, and horror has rediscovered its sociopolitical conscience. So while the same three tropes still persist, other elements have been added to the mix. The modern found footage movie tends to be as much about why the footage is being recorded, and how, and where it is being broadcast or streamed – a comment on our perpetually online, linked in multimedia age. Home invasion movies continue to be made, but often there’s an element of cyber invasion now, too. And we are also seeing their opposite – a rise in what I’d term “domestic lockdown movies”, in which characters are trapped in their home, or some other such enclosed space by some sinister force, Government, military, or otherwise – no doubt a reaction to increasingly authoritarian times. And any film that might be viewed as “Torture Porn”, these days tends to have some kind of socio-political context for what is happening.

I think the main change, though, beyond individual trends, is that horror has become far more widely acceptable than it was when we started out. Certain elements have moved right into the mainstream. True, even ten years ago, there was a move towards popular acceptance – the “Zombie Walk” phenomenon was already an established tradition; indeed a colleague of ours staged one for the very first Grimmfest. But now we see zombie movies with A-list casts and colossal budgets, such as WORLD WAR Z. The new film version of Stephen King’s IT was the Box Office hit of the year, pulling in an audience that extended way beyond genre fans. We have horror films winning Academy Awards. Film Festivals that have never had any interest in genre before are all now adding “genre sidebars” to their line-ups. Horror is big business, and it has critical respect.

But of course none of this is actually new. Horror has always dealt with serious issues, social issues, has always been a reaction to, and a comment on, the era that produces it. And there have always been “serious” directors who were drawn to what the genre had to offer them – Murnau, Bergman, Fellini, Hitchcock, Polanski, Nicholas Roeg, Ken Russell. Even so, there is definitely a real trend for this right now. Hollywood A-listers making these huge, two and a half-hour, barking mad movies, filled with left-field takes on familiar genre tropes, such as Darren Aronofsky, with mother!, and Gore Verbinski with The Cure for Wellness, and now Luca Guadagnino, with his reworking of Suspiria. Maybe it’s just a reflection of the age we live in. Paranoid, crazy times tend to be good for horror films, because they are the films that most seem to capture the mood, and can comment on it without being too direct. And I think filmmakers across the board are realising this and being increasingly drawn to the genre as a means of expression.

Have you noticed any changes / recent trends in terms of who is making horror these days? Do you see an increasing diversity?

Grimmfest has always been a festival keen to support diverse voices in horror. I’d argue that as a genre, horror is more inclusive than most. True, it usually gets viewed as something which appeals primary to white adolescent males, but this is not altogether true. Horror appeals to people of all ages and races. There is a large female horror fanbase, a large LGBTQ horror fanbase. And we are finally beginning to see this reflected more in the films being made. Jordan Peele’s Get Out is the most recent high-profile example of a black horror auteur, but he’s by no means alone. We are starting to see filmmakers coming out of the LGBTQ community engaging with horror tropes, and certainly more LGBTQ characters in horror movies. And of course there are far more women producing, writing and directing horror now, far more female-centric horror films. We’ve several extraordinary features from female writer-directors at Grimmfest this year, and our shorts programmes are pretty much dominated by women filmmakers, which bodes well for the future in terms of gender equality.

[Note: The fabulous Devil’s Doorway by Aislinn Clarke will be screening, which we review here.]

But there is still a long way to go in this respect. There’s an increase in diversity, but the field is still largely dominated by white men, middle aged and older. There is definitely room for more change, more diversity and divergent voices. And festivals like Grimmfest have a part to play in continuing to push that forward, by screening more diverse content. And hopefully the response to this from the horror community will be one of welcome and acceptance. Because let’s face it, the more experiences, the more voices, the more cultures that add their voices to the genre, the bigger it gets, the more varied its stories.

 

We should point out that one of our favorite horror films of 2018 will be screening at Grimmfest, so put Summer of 84 on your schedule if you haven’t seen it yet.