It’s a freezing Saturday night in Melbourne, but the latespring rain hasn’t put off the small crowd gathered for the Blood Ritual, a movie screening at True North cafe in Coburg, in the city’s inner-north. For a group preparing to be spooked, the atmosphere is surprisingly jolly. There are free lollies, a raffle, and beer served in grinning, skull-shaped glasses. A temporary screen is set up near the kitchen door, and there are large cushions on the floor for anyone who hasn’t nabbed a seat. Organisers Mel Begg and Dave Lorensene are attentive and welcoming hosts. If we’re going to be screaming, they want to make sure we’ll be screaming comfortably.
A monthly event run by the Melbourne Horror Film Society (MHFS), Blood Ritual is the casual offshoot of the society’s regular screenings at Long Play bar in nearby Fitzroy North, where a 30-seat cinema is used for films that require a more serious experience. At Blood Ritual, says Lorensene, the movies are “a bit more bonkers”.
It’s a phrase that perfectly describes tonight’s screening: The Cabin in the Woods, a 2011 sci-fi horror film co-written by now-controversial Buffy creator Joss Whedon and directed by Drew Goddard. The over-the-top satire is both gruesome and hilarious, and the crowd screams and laughs as one by one almost every character is gorily eviscerated, dismembered or decapitated. I didn’t think I was a horror fan, but this is actually a lot of fun.
Halloween may be the time of year that brings many people back to horror, but for true fans, the scary season never stops. Grant Hardie is the festival director at Monster Fest, a horror film festival established in 2011 that now runs throughout October in Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, along with other horror film events throughout the year. Hardie thinks horror fans are by far the most committed of all film-goers. They are “one of the most passionate, enthusiastic and supportive audiences within the whole scope of film genres,” he says.
Although it is niche, Monster Fest attracts around 10,000 people to its national screenings each year. At a festival event on a Friday night at Cinema Nova in Carlton, the theatre is packed. The audience is here for Trim Season, the new film by director Ariel Vida set on a marijuana farm in the backwoods of northern California where things soon, obviously, become deadly. Just like the Blood Ritual screenings, the audience is mixed – old and young; men and women; people who like to dress up; people who don’t; people who are there for the fun; people there just for the films; people on dates; with friends; or on their own. The group defies the stereotype – far from being menacing or male-dominated, the audience is as chatty and excited as any other group of cinema fans.
The horror scene is very welcoming, confirms Lorensene, who has made many friends (and even found love) thanks to horror. While he admits the society was once a group of mostly horror-obsessed men, he says it’s become much more diverse, a change he credits to co-organiser Mel Begg who, he says, has helped widen the audience base and make it a more inclusive space.
The word inclusive may seem at odds with a genre where racist, homophobic, and sexist tropes are a feature, not a glitch. But, says Dr Jessica Balanzategui, a senior lecturer in media at RMIT, whose PhD focused on creepy child characters, that stereotype is changing. “Horror people … are some of the sweetest, nicest, most generous people in the world,” she says.
“Some of the most prominent people working in the genre at the moment are women, which obviously breaks open a lot of these outdated, sexist narrative tropes that have plagued the genre for a long time,” she says.
Many of the classics of the genre are now decades old, but with a new generation of horror filmmakers on the rise, the glory days are far from over. Balanzategui believes the genre is currently “having a real moment”, crediting films such as Talk to Me, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and M3GAN with bringing a new generation of horror fans to the cinema. As a movie-going experience, horror has plenty to offer – laughing, screaming, and in the case of M3GAN, dancing in the aisles. As the late legendary zombie film director George Romero said: “It’s the genre that never dies.”
In Coburg, as the screening of The Cabin in the Woods ends, there’s a buzz in the room. The adrenaline rush has made everyone talkative, perhaps a result of the bonding that happens following a fright, or just the boost that comes from having a very good time.
Lorensene puts it simply: “When you’re with a group of people, it just makes it more fun.”
