Adele Hartley at Edinburgh’s delightfully gory Dead By Dawn horror film festival (which also now includes more literary components as well as blood-soaked celluloid) writes to bring us up to date on the rapidly approaching DbD weekend at Edinburgh’s Filmhouse on April 20th to 23rd:
“With the festival less than six weeks away, the programme is mutating rather nicely and has some seriously unpleasant treats in store.
With the features, we have the World Premiere of BLOOD TRAILS, if not the first ever mountain bike stalker movie then definitely the first one I’ve seen. It’s nasty. Happily, some of the cast and crew will be here to answer for themselves!
There’s also Adam Mason’s stunning indie feature BROKEN. It’s the story of a mentalist survivalist who seems to play by rules that mean only he can win. It’s one of the more deliciously vicious and bleak movies I’ve ever seen and hopefully Adam and his leading lady will be on hand to discuss the movie.
In THE LAST SUPPER a charming Japanese plastic surgeon revered on daytime telly for being domesticated, good-looking and a damn fine cook turns out to be a hungry little freak. It’s never a good sign when your date has a lockable fridge in his kitchen and girls, it’s really not good news when he says he wants to eat you.
In HAZE, Shinya Tsukamoto gets claustrophobic in a big way. Well, not so much a big way as a not-enough-room-to-fart kinda way, and I swear if you’re squeamish about your teeth, you might wanna start the therapy before the screening. There’s a noise in this film you won’t ever be able to brush away. Prepare to squirm.
In SEVERED, a bunch of tree-hugging hippies get it in the neck (woohoo!) as the highly toxic, illegal and unnatural chemical experiments of an unethical logging company somehow (who can say just what unholy machinations make this
happen) SOMEHOW turn everyone into slavering, flesh-craving zombies!! Soon the woods are full of the undead, and . DON’CHA JUST LOVE ZOMBIE MOVIES?? -
what do loggers have lots of? Hmm. Chainsaws!! Yay!!! It’s
wobbly-shambling-reanimated-corpse-tastic in the way that only a zombie movie with well-timed supplies of fresh meat can be.
Our classics programme is shaping up nicely too with Nic Roeg’s perfect DON’T LOOK NOW, and the welcome return of a little seen movie GRIM PRAIRIE TALES starring Brad Dourif and James Earl Jones. Both films back up on the big screen where they belong. There’ll be a couple more but news on those soon.
The shorts programme goes from strength to strength too. As ever there’s the Cutting Edge short film competition for debut and emerging film-makers, there’s the main shorts programme and, after the success of last year’s selection, the What You Make It programme returns too. This year so far it includes a mother to make you realise your parents ain’t so bad after all, a WWII game of cat and mouse and a tale of a bogeyman so bad that even keeping your socks on won’t help you make it through the night.
Amongst the other shorts are the quickest protruding-jaw reduction imaginable, a disgruntled Welsh turkey-impregnator with a power tool, self-inflicted cruelty, psychological torture, yet more claustrophobic nightmares and a yogi in a blender. And there’ll be so much more, too!
Trust me, it’s all deliciously twisted, sick, unsettling and may just break whatever bits of your brain a lifetime of watching weirdness has miraculously left intact.
We’re adding stuff to the programme every day, so expect plenty of updates over the next month 
Sweet dreams
Adele”
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