The best films we saw at FrightFest 2023, including Suitable Flesh, The Sacrifice Game, New Life, and one-take wonder Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives.
FrightFest took place in London’s Leicester Square across five days and on four screens over the August Bank Holiday weekend.
With films playing from all over the globe, the 2023 edition featured 25 world premieres, 23 European premieres, and 12 UK premieres. As well as a packed programme of shorts.
We caught as many as we could over the long weekend, with the following our 14 favorite FrightFest flicks.
The best of FrightFest 2023
The standard was high at FrightFest 2023, meaning lots of films didn’t quite make the cut when it comes to our ‘best of’ list.
So sadly there’s no room for Werewolf Santa, Herd, It Lives Inside, Poundcake, Faceless After Dark, The Blue Rose, and Enter the Clones of Bruce – even though there was something to recommend in all of them.
But the following are our favourites from FrightFest 2023 – in alphabetical order – most of which will be coming to a cinema or streaming service near you soon.
The Dive
This incredibly tense aquatic thriller is ostensibly a two-hander that stars the excellent Sophie Lowe and Louisa Krause as a pair of scuba-diving sisters who swim into trouble following a landslide above the water.
With one sister trapped and the other facing a race against time to save her, The Dive will have you on the edge of your seat throughout. Tension between the pair ratchets up that suspense, making the film’s final few minutes both emotional and unbearable.
Founder’s Day
Filmmaker brothers Erik and Carson Bloomquist scored a FrightFest hit with summer camp horror She Came From the Woods in 2022. Now they return with a new spin on the slasher genre via Founder’s Day.
Set in a New England town during a mayoral election, this is a shocker with a political twist. While it’s also something of a whodunnit as both voters and candidates are killed – in entertaining and imaginative fashion – by a mysterious masked assailant.
Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Live
Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives is impressive for two reasons: The fact that director Thomas Sieben shot the 84-minute movie in a single, continuous take, and for Nilam Farooq’s grandstanding central performance, carrying the entire movie on her shoulders.
Farooq plays the heavily pregnant Maria, who has just moved into a house in the countryside. While waiting for her husband to return home from work, she hears noises in the cellar, and her investigation reveals hidden family secrets, that put Maria – and her baby – in danger. Whats follows gets scarier and scarier as proceedings event, and by the end of the movie, we really do see where that evil lives.
The J-Horror Virus
In the 1990s, a new kind of scary movie – birthed in Japan – briefly dominated the genre landscape. Grouped together as J-Horror, films like Ring, Pulse, The Grudge, and Dark Water told ghost stories in a very modern setting, where technology was not to be trusted.
This documentary puts the movement in social and historical context, featuring early work like Psychic Vision and Scary True Stories, which were precursors to J-Horror. It also explains why the films’ apparitions were usually women, positing that people who have little power in our world are more terrifying when they return as vengeful spirits. The result is a fascinating film that will work for hardcore fans of the sub-genre, and those who simply want to learn more.
Mancunian Man
Mancunian Man is a hugely entertaining documentary about a truly unique character. Cliff Twemlow was a filmmaker who worked in Manchester throughout the 1980s, shooting low-budget action, thriller, sci-fi, and horror movies that went straight-to-video, and quickly built a cult following.
Through contemporary interviews, archive footage, and clips from Cliff’s bonkers back-catalogue, director Jake West paints an affectionate portrait of a genuine one-off, whose work you’ll want to dive into once the credits roll.
Minore
Minore is a Greek creature feature that starts slow, picks up speed in the home straight, and ends up being an absolute blast. First, there’s an hour of scene-setting, as a mysterious stranger arrives in a seaside town in search of his musician Dad.
His hunt brings him into contact with the town’s quirky characters, and once everyone has been established, a monster movie finally kicks in. Minore effortlessly combines comedy with horror as the locals get picked off in ever more gruesome – and hilarious – fashion. We won’t spoil the nature of the threat here as it’s a mystery for much of the movie, but the malevolent monsters really do need to be seen to be believed.
New Life
Unstoppable object meets immovable force in New Life. Elsa (Sonya Walger) is the former, a fixer tasked with tracking down the latter, an innocent woman who might – unknowingly – trigger the apocalypse.
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Elsa is battling her own demons however, with the onset of ALS affecting both her body and mind. Written and directed by John Rossman, New Life is a superb paranoid thriller that’s strong on atmosphere, and builds to a beautiful, heartbreaking finale.
Pandemonium
Pandemonium begins with a ballsy near 30-minute sequence that’s pretty much just two men standing in the middle of a road talking. There’s been a crash, and the pair slowly come to the realisation that they might not have survived. And that their fate might have been sealed by what they did in life.
It’s scintillating stuff that the rest of the film – written and directed by Quarxx – doesn’t quite live up to. That’s because Pandemonium turns into an anthology horror, and stories two and three aren’t nearly as interesting as story one. So it’s welcome relief when the film returns to where it began in mercilessly macabre fashion.
Piper
While a movie about the Pied Piper – starring Elizabeth Hurley – might not sound all that appealing, Piper is something of a surprise package; one that’s filled with beautiful imagery, excellent kills, and some smart twists and turns.
Hurley is predictably bad as a teacher starting a new job at Hamelin International School during the Pied Piper pageant. But the rest of the cast is solid, Mute Witness helmer Anthony Waller directs proceedings with a sure hand, and the script turns the title character into a slasher who is more interesting than most.
Punch
Set on the Hastings coast during winter, Punch finds heroine Frankie embarking on a night out before heading back to university. But her pub crawl is interrupted by a masked man with murder on his mind.
The mask is that of Mr. Punch, with writer-director Andy Edwards crafting a seaside slasher around the Punch & Judy story. And while the titular villain isn’t all that scary, Punch nevertheless builds to an enjoyably dark denouement.
River
The team behind wonderful time-loop comedy Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes return to FrightFest with another film about a two-minute time-loop. Here the location is a countryside inn, where those visiting and working there repeat the same 120 seconds over and over again.
There’s fun to be had seeing how different individuals react to such an occurrence, a romance midway through proceedings is really quite affecting, and the solution to the central mystery is suitably – and enjoyably – deranged.
The Sacrifice Game
Director Jenn Wexler opened FrightFest 2018 with The Ranger. Now she closes FrightFest 2023 with The Sacrifice Game, a bloody blast of yuletide fun that revolves around a killer cult descending on a Catholic school on Christmas Eve.
Two pupils are stuck there for the holidays, and the rest of the film follows their efforts to survive the night while their captors play the titular game. Wexler co-writes the film with Sean Redlitz, and their twisted humor underpins the horror, making for a frightful and funny festive banger.
Suitable Flesh
FrightFest faves Joe Lynch and Barbara Crampton return with an HP Lovecraft adaptation that serves as a spiritual sequel to 1980s Stuart Gordon classics Re-Animator and From Beyond.
Heather Graham stars as Dr. Elizabeth Derby, a therapist who becomes obsessed with a young patient who has a serious possession problem. While Crampton is the doctor to whom Derby tells her story, and who finds herself drawn into this twisted tale in the film’s bonkers last half-hour.
To Fire You Come at Last
Clocking in at less than 45-minutes, To Fire You Come at Last is a folk tale that’s set in the 17th century, and revolves around four men transporting a coffin through the English countryside.
As darkness falls, paranoia sets in, fuelled by superstition, while tensions rise as connections to the man they carry emerge. Which makes for a tense watch that harks back to the sub-genre’s 1970s heyday.
The Weird Kidz
This animated gem combines comedy and horror with a sweet coming-of-age tale. Dug, Mel, and Fatt are 12-year-old friends who embark on a camping trip with Dug’s older brother Wyatt, and his girlfriend Mary, with whom they all immediately fall in love.
On their way to the canyon, they’re told an urban legend, one that comes to life overnight, and sends them on a hilarious – and blood-splattered – adventure that plays like Goonies on mushrooms.
Those are our picks for FrightFest 2023, while these are our favorites from the 2022 edition.