Message from festival directors Dean Bertram and Lisa Mitchell
We’re incredibly excited to announce the call for entries for the 2008 festival, and we can hardly wait to see the films that some of you will submit. Indeed, the best part of being involved in a horror film festival is having the chance to watch a wide variety of cutting edge films made by up and coming genre filmmakers.
The horror genre has always provided an outlet for the dark imaginations of cinema’s most talented practitioners: Carl Theodor Dreyer, Fritz Lang, Ingmar Bergman, Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrik, and Francis Ford Coppola (to name but a few), have all made important and powerful horror films. Hollywood’s current A-list includes several directors – notably Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson – who launched their careers with inventive, low-budget horror masterpieces. And thankfully some of our favorite directors, including John Carpenter, Dario Argento and George Romero, never left the genre that they helped define.
This decade has so far been a great one for horror fans, with a selection of bloody and macabre films unparalleled since horror's Golden Age in the late 70s and early 80s. We hope that by actively promoting the genre in Australia, and by doing its bloody best to discover the new masters of horror cinema, A Night of Horror International Film Festival will continue in its own way to contribute to this horror renaissance.
See you at the grindhouse,
Dean and Lisa
Festival directors Dean Bertram and Lisa Mitchell stand either side of Dalibor Backovic (director of The Ancient Rite of Corey McGillis - the winner of the 2007 festival's "Best of Fest" award.)
