THN interview Frightfest’s Alan Jones

Frightfest is a film festival that celebrates the dark side of cinema. Taking place during the August Bank Holiday every year, the event takes over a cinema located in Leicester Square and brings in fans of the horror genre in their droves. Since its inception the festival has grown in size and now runs from Thursday evening all the way through to Monday night. Not only does it show a variety of films but the team also manage to secure a lot of talent who attend and give insights into their projects in post screening Q and A’s.

Following on from the success of this year’s festival the Frightfest team have joined up with Icon Distribution to create a new digital film platform. The venture, simply called Frightfest Presents, features six of this years line-up (Aaaaaaaah!, AfterDeath, Estranged, Night of the Living Deb, The Sand, and Some Kind of Hate) hand picked by the festivals co-directors Alan Jones and Paul McAvoy. The selection is being advertised as the first wave and features three of our favourites from this year’s festival.

To coincide with the release of the platform we caught up with Alan Jones to find out how the project came together, what his Frightfest highlights are, and when we can expect to see wave two arrive.

Frightfest just turned sixteen – how did it all begin?

I’ve been doing this job forty years and back in the eighties I started a film festival with a friend of mine, Stefan Jawardzin, called Shock Around the Clock. That lasted for a couple of years and it literally went from 12pm on a Saturday to 12pm on a Sunday. Literally a 24 hour marathon. After a while I got tired of doing that because there’s only so much you can do. Then I went to the BFI and did another festival called Fantasm, and after a few years of that I got quite tired. It was a bit too corporate. Then Paul McAvoy, who I knew from Shock Around the Clock, said to me ‘you go to all these film festivals all around the world like Stitches etc. Why don’t we set something similar up in London?’ When he said that, it made sense. We chose the August Bank Holiday period; I live very near the Notting Hill gate carnival and I absolutely hate it so anything I can do to get away from it is fine.

We started off for one day, then went to two, then three, five, changed cinemas and we’re doing really well. I think we actually hit at the right time to do a festival too because the internet was getting quote big at that time back then, it was kind of a small community but of course it grew and grew. I think we came along at exactly the right time because the film industry changed too. We weren’t just reliant on the film studios and distributors to get us movies, we could actually get them direct from the film-makers because they were going out and making them independently anyway.

You’ve had a lot of very high profile movies screen at Frightfest over the years, are there any in particular that really stand out to you as ‘I can’t believe we got that one’?

If you ask me what my major coupé was I would have to say Pan’s Labyrinth because I talked Guillermo Del Toro into letting us have it straight after it’s Cannes première. Every other festival was so jealous of us getting that and he brought along the producer and the director of Gravity as it turned out, Alfonzo Curron. I’ll never forget being on the stage with those two and the reaction from the audience after they saw the movie.

I think there are a couple of films, I mean Martyrs I’m glad we got. That was another difficult film that I thought we would have problems with.

As we’ve got bigger, Frightfest has gotten a major international reputation. Our brand has I suppose really gone global and as such people realise the opportunity they have by screening their film with us. What’s not to like, we can put their film that they want horror fans to see, in front of  the biggest audience London will ever get – we get a bigger audience than the London Film Festival when it comes to these sort of movies. As a result of that I think film-makers and distributors realise our value. I think now there’s very few films that we wouldn’t be able to get if we asked for it.

You’ve recently branched into the digital domain with Frightfest Presents; how did that idea come to fruition?

Icon Film Distribution – who we love – have been one of Frightfest’s biggest supporters since it began. If they’ve had a horror movie they’ve always given it to us. They came to us and said ‘Look this is the idea, you can recognise those films that might go under the radar’ they release films like It Follows, The Guest which their aiming for a bigger audience. So they said, ‘you guys can guess or ascertain what sort of films audiences might like’. We know our audience really well and know what sort of films certain audiences are going to like. They said ‘if you can do a deal with the film companies, the sales agents or film-makers themselves – because so many people now own the rights to their own material’. So we can actually go to them and say ‘are you interested in this, you’ll get this for it, we promise we’ll get behind it’. I love working with Icon, they understand what Frightfest is about, they actually understand the community. They understand the genre has its fans and they actually really like the fact that we can get to those fans in a way that isn’t cynical and in a way that isn’t us just self-promoting. We are providing a service with Frightfest. Never underestimate what we are doing, we know we put on the movies because people want to come and see it. We are actually that sort of community.

The film launches with six films, how did you whittle it down to just six?

It actually was a lot more than that, we had to divide it up. It was originally going to be four but then we thought, no let’s do something in every kind of sub-genre we could think of, like a creature feature with The Sand, a slasher movie with Some Kind of Hate, or a comedy horror with Aaaaaaaah!. We wanted to cover all the bases. It wasn’t originally going to be like that but it did pan out to be that way.

It was an easy enough process because we get submitted over 300 movies a year via our website so literally all of them bar one we got through that process.

It’s being marketed as the first wave of films, any hints as to when and what might make up the second wave?

I can’t tell you the titles, but it will probably be around February/March time. We’re going to see how this wave goes. We’ve got some really nice titles for next time as well.

As well as this new digital work you’ve also launched a site dedicated to merchandise, what’s next?

It’s all about getting people to realise we’re a serious concern. When Frightfest first started it was very difficult for us to sell ourselves to the major studios. Going to someone like Paramount or Colombia as saying ‘well can we have Hellboy?’ they would go ‘oh why would we give it to you? We don’t know who you are, you’re just fanboys.’ It took someone like Guilermo to step in and say ‘no this is the audience I want’.

This weekend Frightfest takes over the Prince Charles for the annual Halloween event – what can attendees expect and which movie should they make sure to stick around for?

I shock so many people when I say this, but I Spit on your Grave 3 was a real surprise to me. I thought it was going to be absolutely terrible, but I loved it. It’s like Universal Soldier or Children of the Corn, where the first film was terrible but then the third or fourth sequel down the line was actually a masterpiece, it’s the same case with this one I think.

I thought ‘here we go again’ but it did turn the tables. I did like the fact that they were this rape squad going out avenging, taking revenge on men. I think it was really well directed, I was surprised with the direction it took. I liked it a lot. I’m surprised the BBFC let a couple of scenes through, but when I spoke to them they told me they were just as refreshed by how different it was too.

I particularly like Momentum , the action thriller with Olga Kurylenko which I think is really fast and furious. It’s almost like a Bond movie on a low budget. It’s terrifically well done.

Which Frightfest Presents movie should readers download for Halloween?

Because I love it so much I’m going to have to say Night of the Living Deb. It’s scary, but it’s also romantic and you come out of it with a great feeling. You’ll want to party all the way through the night after watching it. I love it so much and I think the performances are just terrific and the soundtrack is great. It’s one of my favourites. But I think if you want to be scared rigid it has to be Some Kind of Hate.

Go to Frightfest Presents now and connect with your favourite.