After a hugely successful virtual edition earlier this year, Soho Horror Film Festival is back at Whirled Cinema in Brixton, London this November for a weekend of fun and frights. Now in its fifth year of in-person events, from 11-13th November the festival will screen a wave of new and exciting genre content from all across the globe. If you can’t make the trip down to London and can wait an extra week, there’s also a digital version to look forward to from 17th – 20th November. Each event will have its own set of films, and both promise to be fantastic.
Over the weekend the line-up was announced for both festivals and there are a lot of films to get excited about. Firstly, the in-person festival will have a special screening of the absolutely incredible Hypochondriac. The online event screens Mean Spirited amongst others, which is another of our favourites. These are not the only gems however; read the official press release below for the full list of titles as well as information on how to get your ticket.
This November, prepare for the sweetest screams of all as the Soho Horror Film Festival returns in a landmark hybrid edition; with its 5th annual in-person festival in South London, and its 10th online country-wide home invasion. Spread over two consecutive weekends and boasting two unique film programmes, this marks the Soho Horror Film Festival’s largest, most diverse, transgressive and all out bonkers lineup to date. Bringing hungry horror hounds 30 fiendish features and over 50 short films from the very best in brand new independent genre cinema, as well as some special events you would be dead foolish to miss.
Book-ending the in-person festival will be duo of tundra terrors,: opening with Nyla Innuksuk’s kickass SLASH\BACK which pits a rag tag Inuit gang of Top-Of-The World teenagers against a skin crawling invasion of Out-Of-This-World body-snatchers; and finishing up in the post-apocalyptic wastelands of Kirsten Carthew’s majestic survivalist POLARIS. Prepare to see both the cutest and most terrifying polar bears of your life in each of these incredible UK Premieres.
Continuing the festival’s cornerstone of platforming LGBTQ+ voices within the horror genre, the 2022 Edition will host the World Premiere of the deviously clever and homegrown literary chiller THE LATENT IMAGE from Alex Birrell; a special preview of the pulse racing and demon embracing HYPOCHONDRIAC, as well as Daniel Montgomery’s beautiful heartbreak haunter THE JESSICA CABIN which will be ripping out audience’s hearts with its International Premiere.
Teenagers and horror are like mentos coke: always explosive and most certainly messy. Whether it’s the projectile ectoplasm of the practical creature filled spooktacular THE GHASTLY BROTHERS, a time travelling portapotty in the gross out TOTEM or the sorority slashing and throwback thrashing of the surprise filled Teen Scream Midnight Marathon, schools out for Soho.
Ensuring that no one has too much fun at a festival that’s meant to be horrific, is a worthy addition to the gruelling canon of New French Extremity , the masterfully challenging and nihilistic MEGALOMANIAC. Equally unhinged, transgressive and blood soaked is a serial killer study like no other in the UK Premiere of Johannes Grenzfurthner’s utterly unique MASKING THRESHOLD.
If it’s midnight madness and retina widening insanity you come for, stifle your gag reflex for the drugs n bugs narcotic nightmare ALL JACKED UP AND FULL OF WORMS, that is destined to be a future cult classic. Classic cults find themselves facing unlikely adversaries in both the pairing of a Karen and a cancelled reality TV bounty hunter in the stomach achingly hilarious CULT HERO, and up against BFF gypsy-curse-werewolf-ice-cream girls in Sung Kang’s equally ab-inducing monster mash-up SHAKY SHIVERS, which will screen its International Premiere at the festival.
And of course it wouldn’t be Soho Horror Fest without an under the radar indescribable oddity that, this year, comes in the form of the sleight-of-hand fever dream that is Shane Brady’s astonishing BREATHING HAPPY, itself coming with a festival first exclusive surprise that will leave the audiences jaws on the floor…
The festival’s virtual event – taking place online and accessible across the United Kingdom and Ireland- will also feature a menagerie of menacing delights and UK first surprises. In a brilliant homage to the video store days of old, watching sequels years before the original and franchises wildly out of chronology, to open the online festival will be the UK Premiere of the nineties-tastic straight to video slasher sequel THE THIRD SATURDAY IN OCTOBER PART V; but don’t fret viewers, for the long lost original THE THIRD SATURDAY IN OCTOBER PART I will close out the event, a loving throwback duo of body count bangers from the mad mind of Jay Burleson.
Also in the vein of nostalgia- but a razorblade ready ready to slice it open- is the viscerally brutal neo-giallo NIGHT CALLER, late-night television horror hosts and Goosebumps galore in the interdimensional cable campness of HeBGB TV, and classic BBC British ghost stories in Jamie Hooper’s THE CREEPING. An answer to the age old question: what if Benson & Moorhead made a Lovecraftian Home Alone in the International Premiere of the hilarious ALL EYES; and the past is quite literally torn up in the painstaking handmade and staggeringly unique reworking of Stephen King’s 90s DTV disasterpiece The Langoliers with Aristotelis Maragkos’s THE TIMEKEEPERS OF ETERNITY. The latter of which will also be a crown jewel in a centrepiece programme on the master of horror himself: Stephen King.
Don’t go thinking the in-person festival gets all the cult goodness as folk femme fury synchronise cycles in the Bridesmaids-meets-Midsommar gem STAG from Alexandra Spieth, cerebral sci fi mystery in CRYO, and vloggers get violent in the online premiere of Jeff Ryan’s affecting, funny and aptly titled MEAN SPIRITED.
Globe trotting the expanses of the horror globe needs no passport or visa as the festival heads to Iceland for the scintillatingly strange pregnancy shocker IT HATCHED, crosses treacherous waters to battle Taiwanese aquatic arachnids in ABYSSAL SPIDER, untombs a legacy of atrocities in the terrifying found footage nightmare WHAT IS BURIED MUST REMAIN from Lebanon, and digs into the dark under(pork)belly of truffle harvesting in the surprising and tense Canadian thriller PEPPERGRASS. All of which will be playing in the UK for the first time, you lucky spookers.
And if you think that’s all Soho Horror Fest has planned for you, then you don’t know jack… Tickets for both the physical event and virtual event are on sale now! The Soho Horror Film Festival will run from 11-13th November at the Whirled Cinema in Brixton, London. The virtual Sohome Horror Film Festival will run from 17- 20th November and will require internet access to take part. Please note, films will vary between in-person and online festivals. Information, full details on all the films on show and tickets can be found at www.sohohorrorfest.com.
