FilmFear returns to HOME and the Film4 channel for the sixth year, with a line-up of horror, dark fantasies, eerie thrillers and chilling tales for the Halloween period. With sneak previews, UK premieres, cult classics and special events this year’s season is not one to be missed.

The festival is created and curated in partnership with Film4 and runs from Thursday, 28 October to Sunday, 31 October. Tickets go on sale to the general public on Monday, 4 October, with priority booking for HOME Friends on Friday, 1 October and HOME members on Saturday, 2 October.

Jason Wood, Creative Director for Film and Culture at HOME, said: “It’s great to collaborate once again with Film4 on FilmFear. It’s a diverse and eclectic programme that celebrates talent both emerging and new. It’s especially thrilling to close with Titane, a film which seems to be re-writing history after its Palme d’Or win.”

Film4’s David Cox said: “We’re delighted that FilmFear is returning to HOME this year with a full programme of new films – a line-up that includes fresh voices and visions while displaying the wide range of styles, themes and concerns that makes horror and dark fantasy so surprising, provocative and relevant. It’s also very exciting to be able to pay tribute to a film that means so much to Film4 and to genre fans by hosting a 10th anniversary screening of Ben Wheatley’s Kill List.”

The festival’s opening film on Thursday, 28 October is Ruth Paxton’s A Banquet, starring Sienna Guillory, Jessica Alexander, and Ruby Stokes. Paxton’s debut feature tells the story of a traumatised all-female family in the form of a dark fairy-tale in which the horror is both psychological and supernatural. The screening will be followed by an onstage interview with the director.

John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness will screen on Thursday, 28 October, as a pick by HOME’s Young Film Programmers. In the film, John Trent, an insurance investigator, is sent to investigate the strange disappearance of hack horror writer, Sutter Cane. John soon finds himself trapped in the sleepy fictional town of Hobb’s End, surrounded by the evil creepy characters from Sutter Cane’s books.

 In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, on Friday 29 October, teenager Casey participates in ‘the internet’s scariest horror game’, a fully immersive experience that offers spooky cheap thrills along with the possibility of meaningful interaction, transformation and liberation. Jane Schoenbrun’s film is an unconventional, disquieting and endlessly provocative attempt to capture a very modern phenomenon on-screen, while young lead Anna Cobb is a remarkable discovery as Casey, making her screen debut in a demanding role which has no direct precedent in cinema.

Three films will screen on Saturday, 30 October, along with two Q&As. From Japan, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (Droste no hate de bokura) is a low-budget sensation following hot on the heels of cult favourite One Cut of the Dead, which screened at FilmFear 2018. The proprietor of a Tokyo neighbourhood café finds that his computer monitor allows him to speak to himself from two minutes into the future, setting in motion a dizzying series of small-scale events that rapidly escalate into a potential full-blown temporal crisis.

In Paul Andrew Williams’ Bull, Bull is back on the streets, searching for the son that was taken from him and dead-set on taking revenge. The director of London to Brighton Paul Andrew Williams delivers a formidably brutal thriller, starring Kill List’s Neil Maskell as former enforcer Bull and David Hayman as a purely evil gangster who, despite his strength, has no idea what’s coming his way. Williams and Maskell will also take  part in a Q&A following the film.

Maskell appears again on 30 October in a tenth anniversary screening of Ben Wheatley’s breakthrough second feature film, in which hitmen Neil Maskell and Michael Smiley are hired to do a job that leads them to some very dark places. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Ben Wheatley, Neil Maskell and Michael Smiley.

Having its UK Premiere at FilmFear, The Scary of Sixty-First (Sunday, 31 October) is a thoroughly creepy tale of haunting and possession set against the real-world backdrop of the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein. Two friends searching for an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side come across what appears to be the perfect space, albeit one that’s suspiciously empty and affordable. When one of the young women finds herself taken over by a presence within the apartment, the other sets out to investigate further and uncovers a psycho-geographical web of secret histories and dark conspiracies. The film won the Best First Feature award for director Dasha Nekrasova at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year.

Finally, closing the festival is Titane, Julia Ducournau’s follow up to her debut Raw, and a baroque shocker that won the top prize of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. A young dancer (Agathe Rousselle), who suffered a terrible injury following a car crash when she was a child, embarks on a fantastical and violent odyssey involving serial murder, self-harm, physical transformation and a mysterious pregnancy. Ducournau twists narrative forms into radical new shapes while staging a number of flamboyantly extreme set-pieces, pushing the film towards a state of sensory overload.

For more details of the programme, or to book tickets, visit homemcr.org/filmfear2021.

About The Author

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Simon is a journalism tutor in London, who also just happens to be a movie fanatic, with a craving for the darker side of cinema. He has written three books - on the horror films of director Bob Clark (2014), the history of the character Norman Bates (2015) and the work of British exploitation director Pete Walker (2017). He is currently working with director Richard Loncraine to explore all avenues in a bid to orchestrate the re-release of 1978 Mia Farrow chiller Full Circle