Pigeon Shrine FrightFest 2024, will be at The ODEON Luxe Leicester Square, London, taking over all seven screens, including the two ODEON Luxe West End screens.
Running from Thursday August 22 – Monday 26 August, Pigeon Shrine FrightFest will showcase sixty-nine features from across the world. Plus, there’s the regular short-film showcase (to be announced later), panels, and some surprise 25th edition extras.
The festival opens with the World premiere of Broken Bird, the directorial debut feature from actress/filmmaker Joanne Mitchell. Based on an original story by Tracey Sheals and Mitchell’s subsequent award-winning short Sybil.
The closing night film is the English premiere of The Substance, French writer/director Coralie Fargeat.
Actress and singer Bella Thorne, features in the UK premiere of Saint Clare. FrightFest will also be showing the UK premiere of Bella’s short film directorial debut Unsettled.
Features of the main screen are Bookworm, reunites the Come To Daddy team of Elijah Wood and director Ant Timpson, Azrael: Angel Of Death, a wordless flesh-eating creature feature; the true crime horror Invader, haunted house thriller Ghost Game, and The Last Voyage Of The Demeter, never shown in the UK before.
Other main screen attractions include the International premieres of An Taibhse (The Ghost), and The Dead Thing. The European premieres of Strange Darling, A Desert, and Cold Wallet. Plus, the world premiere of Test Screening, and UK premieres for Dead Mail, The Last Ashes and Survive.
Tales of supernatural terror are given contemporary twists this year with Traumatika, the male stripper caper Member’s Club, queer ghost story anthology Hauntology, the paranormal thriller Shelby Oaks and Ladybug, where a gay artist is haunted by a homophobic serial-killer.
Then there is DW Medoff’s I Will Never Leave You Alone which explores personal mental health themes, and Dark Match, featuring wresting champion Chris Jericho.
The main screen also features The Invisible Raptor, the monster hit of this year’s FrightFest Glasgow event. Genre icon Christopher Lee is intimately brought back to life in the World premiere of documentary The Life And Deaths Of Christopher Lee.
The Discovery strand once again reflects the festival’s legacy in championing emerging and established voices from across the world. Graham Skipper is back with the post-apocalyptic tale The Lonely Man With The Ghost Machine. Carnage For Christmas is a gory shocker from transgender filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay. Brian Hanson’s, The Bunker, an alien invasion shocker.
The UK is represented this year with seventeen Discovery screen presentations, including the World premieres of Jonathan Zaurin’s crime thriller Derelict, Cinderella’s Curse, a twist on a familiar fairytale, female avenging psycho-dramas Cara and Charlotte, vampire road movie Bogieville, cat-and-mouse horror Never Have I Ever, eerie adult fairytale The Flights Of Fancy and unsettling terror tale Fright. Also showing, twenty-five years after its release, is a 4K restoration of Jake West’s playfully subversive vampire gore-fest Razorblade Smile.
Then there is FrightFest’s First Blood strand, which continues to shine a spotlight on emerging British talent. This year there are six World firsts – Sophie Osbourn’s The Monster Beneath Us, Aled Owen’s Scopophobia, Joy Wilkinson’s 7 Keys, Tony Burke’s Protein, Benjamin Goodger’s Year 10 and Josephine Rose’s Touchdown.
There are range of documentaries covering subjects such as exploration of tech-centric genre cinema (So Unreal), the rise of boutique specialty collector labels (Boutique: To Preserve And Collect), and the huge wealth of early Millennial genre films (Generation Terror). Then there is Children Of The Wicker Man, where Robin Hardy’s sons Justin and Dominic journey through the complex nature of independent filmmaking and fatherhood.
There are three Discovery screens this year. From the USA there is evil rising The Daemon, The A-Frame and Things Will Be Different, the grisly Happy Halloween, Dean Alioto’s The Last Podcast, the experimental Agatha, Jeff Daniel Phillips trippy Cursed In Baja, retrotech romance Video Vision, road movie Drive Back, and the slasher maniac is back in Mutilator 2.
From Canada, there is creature feature Scared Shitless, from Iceland the mythical haunter From Darkness, from Sweden the unholy In The Name Of God and the tormenting Delirium. From France there is thriller Schlitter: Evil In The Woods and Aurélia Mengin’s visual extravaganza Scarlet Blue.
From Japan there is the time-altering A Samurai In Time and, to celebrate its 40th Anniversary, there is a screening of Mermaid Legend, a rare exploitation cult movie that has never played any film festival outside of its native Japan.
Finally, FrightFest has once again teamed up with Warner Bros to celebrate the 40th anniversary of A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The festival guest line-up and full details for the Short Film Showcases and other events will be revealed soon.
The all important Ticketing details:
Passes on sale from Saturday 13 July, noon
Single tickets on sale from Saturday 20 July, noon
All the details can be found
here.
