The top 50 scariest movie moments

Twenty-seven horror films crammed into five days at the Odeon West End. That’s the Film4 FrightFest, a fixture of the August calendar since 2000, providing spilled blood and subtle chills, and promoting genuine engagement with horror as a vital, challenging, necessary mode of discourse in the 21st century. Trends have come and gone – lank-haired Japanese spook ladies, tied-to-a-chair “torture porn”, good-ole-boy cannibals – but the horror film endures.

In the world of FrightFest, there’s as much excitement that Frank Henenlotter (auteur of such defiantly grotty video-era efforts as Basket Case and Frankenhooker) is back with his first film in nearly 20 years as there was at Cannes when Terrence Malick returned from the wilderness. Henenlotter’s Bad Biology shows that some things don’t change: the director still has a knack for creating the most bizarre, yet sympathetic characters – and no idea how to construct a story around them.

Still, now that Seventies nostalgia has dried up, retro-Eighties is a workable vein, and the festival offers zombies, demons and spinal-fluid-sipping mad doctors galore in daffily endearing, if ramshackle offerings such as Jack Brooks Monster Slayer (featuring the genre fixture Robert Englund), Autopsy (where the trouble really starts when the ambulance arrives), Dance of the Dead (which climaxes with a genuinely charming zombie prom) and Bubba’s Chili Parlor (probably the cheapest film of the festival).

In this past year there has been a surge of homegrown horrors, and F4FF’s opening night gala screening is James Watkins’s Eden Lake, a gruelling Middle England Deliverance featuring a tabloid buzz menace (keywords: hoody, ASBO, knife crime) and an exceptionally brave survivalist performance from Kelly Reilly. Eden Lake sets the tone for other strong homegrown films, blending classic horror themes with a specifically 2008 British sense of dissatisfaction and despair. This is a Ken Loach-Mike Leigh vision of Britain, albeit with more mutilation – Steven Sheil’s Mum & Dad is an abduction-torture tale of warped family values; Sean Ellis’s The Broken is a classy, chilly doppelgänger horror toplining Lena Headey; and Johnny Kevorkian’s The Dis- appeared is a council estate ghost story about missing children and broken families.

Horror is global, and F4FF offers a chance to catch up with new talents from unexpected regions: Fear(s) of the Dark is a classy, black-and-white French cartoon anthology; The Chaser is an unusual Korean serial killer/suspense picture; Martyrs is building a reputation as the nastiest film to come out of France; The Substitute is a Danish science fiction satire about an inhuman teacher; Time Crimes is a Spanish exercise in stalking via timetravel; The Midnight Meat Train is an American film, directed by the Japanese monster specialist Ryuhei Kitamura, with a once-in-a-lifetime casting coup of Brooke Shields and Vinnie Jones; and Let the Right One In (already an award-winner at Edinburgh) is an outstanding Swedish film that boasts the most impressive massacre I’ve seen all year.

Part of the point of festivals is making connections – for instance, Let the Right One In and The Disappeared have surprising, interesting overlaps, while neglected children feature in a number of movies, suggesting what we’re currently afraid of. And on the last night we get Jason Statham in Death Race – a remake of Death Race 2000. Now that’s what I call a British Bank Holiday weekend.

Film4 FrightFest, Odeon West End, London WC2 (www.frightfest.co.uk 0871 2244007), Aug 21-25 2008

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