Full Feature Film Line-Up Unveiled For Grimmfest 2024

The city’s international festival of fantastic film, devoted to showcasing the best in new genre cinema. Manchester’s Grimmfest has announced an exciting line-up of feature-length offerings for its 2024 edition, as it prepares to return to the ODEON Great Northern this October (3rd – 6th).

After a one-year sabbatical. Festival directors Simeon Halligan and Rachel Richardson-Jones are back at the helm, promising four fear-filled days that include an array of feature film premieres, including three World Premieres, six International Premieres, one European Premiere, seven UK premieres, one English Premiere and four Northern UK Premieres. *Short film premieres will be announced soon*

Celebrating the festival’s fondness for vehicle-based cinema. Nightmarish journeys are very much on the menu this year with the ‘FEAR ON FOUR WHEELS’ strand. Launching the strand, and opening this year’s festival will be the World Premiere of Shudder’s Black Cab directed by Bruce Goodison, a slippery mix of claustrophobic psycho-thriller with a touch of supernatural. Dark secrets are revealed, when a bickering couple make the mistake of accepting a ride with Nick Frost’s unnervingly over-friendly taxi driver.

Another Grimmfest World Premiere. It’s a case of man versus machine in Delivery Run, Joey Palmroos’ inventive winter-based riff on a much-loved genre classic as a debt-ridden and desperate delivery driver finds himself in a life-or-death confrontation with a deranged Snow Plow driver.

A Fantasia Festival winner for director Michael Pierro. A cash-strapped cabbie finds himself out of his depth when he downloads a mysterious app, promising high-paying but increasingly dangerous driving jobs, in gritty neo-noir Self Driver which has its European Premiere.

A sleep-deprived taxi driver, plagued by terrifying nightmarish visions is forced by a maverick psychiatrist to confront repressed memories and long-buried guilt, in writer-director-star Nick Cheung’s dazzling and disorientating surrealist psychodrama Peg O’ My Heart (UK Premiere).

Completing their FEAR ON FOUR WHEELS strand, A young Latina petty thief driving cross country finds herself the target of a devious, psychopathic, redneck sheriff, who views his badge as a licence to prey on vulnerable young women, in Lawrence Jacomelli’s gritty and gruelling desert noir road movie, Blood Star (UK Premiere).

Meanwhile, the woods are eerie, dark, and deep, in their TERROR IN THE TREES strand. Oppressive patriarchal puritanism collides with a far older faith for Didier Konings’ ferocious period set feminist folk horror fable, Witte Wieven (Heresy) (UK Premiere). Recalling Bergman at his most unflinching, but with a wild psychedelic edge all its own.

A weekend camping trip goes badly and bloodily wrong, as tensions are exposed, friendships betrayed, and psychopathologies unleashed, in Robyn August’s satiric slasher, Killher (International Premiere), a crowd-pleasing call back to old school 80s slashers.

A young boy is forced to leave the safety of his forest home, and cross a desolate, plague-riddled landscape in search of what remains of civilisation, in Vardan Tozija’s heart breaking, emotionally brutal post-apocalyptic fairy tale, M (UK Premiere).

Guilt and emotional damage collide with local legend and a treacherous forest landscape in Philip W. de Silva’s From Darkness (Northern UK Premiere), a visually stunning fusion of Scandi-noir, Swedish mythology, and the supernatural.

The camera, they say, never lies. But it doesn’t always tell the whole truth in Grimmfest’s IN CAMERA Strand.

Brilliantly realised pastiche Strange Harvest (UK Premiere), the latest film from Stuart Ortiz (Grave Encounters) sees “The Call of Cthulhu” recast as a True Crime documentary, chronicling the hunt for a terrifying serial killer with a uniquely bizarre agenda.

Boasting an all-star cast that includes Rosanna Arquette and Ron Perlman. A frustrated new father is catfished by a camgirl with a secret far deadlier than he could ever imagine, in R.J. Daniel Hanna’s outrageous, genre-smashing shocker, Succubus (International Premiere).

Aaron Fradkin (Val) makes a welcome return with Beezel (International Premiere), a terrifying chronicle of a New England house over a fifty-year period, and the influence of an ancient evil upon several generations of the same family; an unreliable narrative, captured on a series of equally unreliable recording formats.

In another festival return. Pierre Tsigaridis (Two Witches) offers up their love letter to horror cinema Traumatika (Northern UK Premiere). A wild tale of demonic possession, incestuous abuse, and an unstoppable killer, that combines elements of “found footage”, slasher, giallo, and satanic panic.

Other Grimmfest World premieres include Andrew Bell offering an extraordinary contemporary spin on vampirism, in Bleeding. A stark, grim, utterly unsentimental exploration of the nature of addiction and teenage desperation, it’s harrowing, horrifying, and emotionally brutal.

Other Grimmfest International Premieres include a newly-wed couple finding their relationship under strain. When their honeymoon is hijacked by a manic inventor and his cynical wife in search of funding for their improbable project, in Chris Skotchdopole’s Crumb Catcher; a pitch-black comedy of social discomfort that turns into a violent life or death conflict.

A city is faced with the thirty-minute countdown to a nuclear strike, and the instinct for survival overrides every other consideration, in Loïs Dols de Jong’s suffocatingly tense Amsterdam Alert. A masterclass of white-knuckle cinema verité storytelling.

Also having their UK Premiere at Grimmfest. Can Evrenol (Baskin) pulls no punches with Sayara, a brutal exploration of the nature of revenge, which also hammers home some sharply observed points about racism, misogyny and corruption in Turkish society. This is not a film for the faint-hearted.

Early Birds, Michael Steiner’s stylish and kinetic neo-noir chase movie, about two mismatched and desperate women on the run from a brutal drug gang is both a heart-rending thriller, and a gripping tale of female friendship and self-determination.

An egotistical scientist meets his match in Stimson Snead’s high-concept time-bending head-spinning sci-fi comedy, Tim Travers & The Time Traveler’s Paradox. Featuring a brilliant central performance, by Samuel Dunning, and scene-stealing support from such cult film icons as David Keith and Danny Trejo.

Lauren Lavera (Terrifier 2) stars as an ambitious art restorer, enlisted by a sinister baroness to salvage a damaged family portrait, only to discover demonic activities down below in The Well. Federico Zampaglione’s (Shadow) homage to classic Italian horror has its English premiere at Grimmfest.

Last but not least. Other Northern UK Premieres include Dead Mail. A twisted, darkly funny tale of a hapless synthesizer developer held hostage by his increasingly deranged sponsor, and the efforts of a dead letter investigator to find him in Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy’s masterful thriller.

Meanwhile. The Children Of The Wicker Man is a poignant documentary from Justin and Dominic Hardy, which combines fascinating new details about the production of the classic film, with an unflinching and moving study of two grieving sons coming to terms with the legacy of their father.

The full screening schedule, along with day passes and individual film tickets will be released on Monday 19^th Aug.

Full festival passes are available now at https://www.grimmfest.com/festival/