Saturday is always the busiest day at Nightmares Film Festival and this year was no exception. The packed lineup this time ‘round includes 2 panels, 7 blocks of short films (including a Stephen King “Dollar Babies” block), and a whopping 10 feature films. Saturday always runs from 10am to 4am of the following morning, making it a massive endurance run for the festival’s sleepless fans. Most of the events also run simultaneously, so there are a lot of hard choices to be made each time out.
Do you opt for mostly features? Mostly shorts? A mixture of both? It’s not easy and wanting time to mingle with other fest attendees is always a third option on the table. After all, the screenings never stop, so if you want to chat, you’re going to be missing stuff. Luckily there’s never really a wrong choice to be made, so long as you have a great handle on your own cinematic tastes.
Of the feature films that I managed to sit down with, the clear standouts for me were Livescream and well-known Friday the 13th fan film favorite Never Hike Alone. Speaking with other attendees, it sounds like The Head, Confessions of a Serial Killer, The Night Sitter, and Trauma were big hits as fans and filmmakers alike. Rounding out the rest of the features were documentary More Blood!, psychological thriller The Final Interview, the super-violent La Puta es Ciega (aka The Whore is Blind), and international anthology flick The Field Guide to Evil.
The focus of the two panels were “Distribution” and “Social Progress Through Horror”. The former examined a lot of the benefits and pitfalls of trying to get an independent film actually shown to the masses once you’ve completed it. We live in a world where physical media is becoming more of a collector’s market filled out by many boutique home video labels, especially when it comes to horror. Many people have switched over to digital collections over the past five years and it’s something that is really hurting the industry. After all, most filmmakers can’t make much money off of streaming services and digital outlets, which in turns hampers their ability to make further features and shorts.
I can already hear some out there groaning about the “social progress” panel. Well, guess what? You can stuff it. Social commentary has ALWAYS been an important component of horror filmmakers, from the early silent era that was deeply affected by the events of WWI to the rise of socially progressive “masters of horror” in the 1970s like John Carpenter, George A. Romero, Wes Craven, and David Cronenberg. Like it or not…ignore it or not…social progress and politics will always be reflected within the genre. As a result, both filmmakers and audiences need to grow with the times as our world marches on and (hopefully) becomes more accepting of people and issues that exist outside established norms.
Next up is Sunday, the final day of the fest, but one that still has plenty to offer. An additional four features and three blocks of shorts are on deck to close things out for 2018. It’ll be a bittersweet ending, as always, but one I’d never miss.
