“Your mother sucks…!” Oops, just reliving my juvenile delight and naughtiness at seeing The Exorcist as a young teenager while my parents thought I was innocently watching an episode of Grange Hill. And also getting rather feverish about the prospect of seeing that classic movie again on the monster-sized Imax screen at Cineworld Leicester Square this month. It’s just one of the bile-curdling, blood-spurting, freakily terrifying pleasures to be had as Pigeon Shrine FrightFest returns to London on 24-28 August.
Horror fans, this is your chance to frolic in totally fresh gore, carnage and mayhem, as there are no less than 25 world premieres over the festival’s five days. Opening film is Joe Lynch’s outrageously visceral and raunchy body shocker Suitable Flesh, an HP Lovecraft adaptation starring Heather Graham, while the event closes with Jenn Wexler’s 1970s horror tribute The Sacrifice Game, in which boarding school girls face up to a demonically murderous cult.
In between, look out for insanely fun splatter-party Here For Blood (surely, however handy you are with an axe, it’s a mistake to invade a home where the babysitter is a beef-mountain pro-wrestler). How about national treasure Eddie Izzard as Nina Jekyll in Doctor Jekyll or a lesbian couple awkwardly caught in the middle of warring militias, prejudiced hillbillies and, of course, good old zombies in Herd? Bishal Duuta’s impressively creepy debut It Lives Inside, a dark freefall into a pair of Indian-American girls’ identity crises, is one of the undoubted highlights. And for the experimentalists, Transmission will take you on a surreal death trip told entirely through the TV channel surfing activities of a freaky old man.
There are also documentaries, Asian genre flicks, Scandi horror and plenty of retrospective screenings; fans never get bored of the classics. So grab your exorcist’s cross, or maybe a plastic hatchet, and head to Leicester Square for the most friendly feast of blood-letting you’ll find in London until Halloween rolls around.
