Bristol’s biggest repertory genre film festival is back with a selection of ‘popcorn horrors’ designed to thrill and chill this spooky season.
- Forbidden Worlds Film Festival: The Big Scream returns to the former Bristol IMAX on 13 and 14 October 2023.
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This year’s line-up consists of a selection of retro ‘popcorn horrors’ screened over two night: B-movie homage Night of the Creeps, Guillermo del Toro’s sci-fi monster movie Mimic, a 40th anniversary screening of John Carpenter’s Stephen King adaptation Christine, Amblin’s ‘family friendly’ spider-fest Arachnophobia, body-snatching actioner The Hidden, and the late William Friedkin’s unfairly maligned killer-tree spectacular The Guardian.
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With many of these films finding their audiences on VHS and DVD, now is a unique opportunity for horror fans to see them on the biggest screen in the South West.
Launched in May 2022 at the former Bristol IMAX screen housed in Bristol Aquarium, Forbidden Worlds Film Festival is the city’s first genre film festival dedicated to screening repertory fantasy, action, science-fiction and horror films from around the world, and celebrating the people that made them.
This year’s main festival, held in May, drew a lot of attention by celebrating iconic ‘Creature Creators’ including Willis O’Brien, Ray Harryhausen and Stan Winston, and receiving specially recorded video introductions from Hollywood A-listers such as James Cameron, Peter Jackson, Renny Harlin and more, as well as having Ray Harryhausen’s daughter, Vanessa, and Polite Society director Nida Manzoor introduce screenings in person. The festival also premiered some new restorations, including The Way of the Dragon to mark fifty years since the passing of Bruce Lee, whose daughter Shannon Lee provided a special pre-recorded video introduction.
October’s Forbidden Worlds Film Festival: The Big Scream is a smaller version of the main festival, purely dedicated to horror films that many people would have grown up renting from video shops or watching on TV… and can now finally enjoy the chance to see them on a massive 18m x 15m screen!
Promising a demon car, a killer tree, giant bugs, plenty of spiders, and alien invaders, this year’s Big Scream has something for everyone!
Saturday begins with the Steven Spielberg-produced Arachnophobia, a film that many still rank among their scariest horrors despite the ‘PG’ rating thanks to those eight-legged menaces. They’ll be followed by John Carpenter’s Christine, adapted from the Stephen King bestseller and premiering a new 2K DCP ahead of Park Circus’s 40th-annniversary re-release across the UK and Eire on 20 October.
Saturday night, and the festival as a whole, conclude with The Hidden, a unique crowd-pleasing mash-up of the body-snatching alien trope and the mismatched-cop buddy movie starring a pre-Twin Peaks Kyle Maclachlan!
Co-programmer Anthony Nield says of the line-up, “We wanted to keep things punchy for this year’s Big Scream, and so we settled on two nights of triple-whammy horror thrills. All of the films were made to be screened to the biggest crowds on the biggest screens, though many have only seen them at home on their televisions, and we are more than happy to oblige.”
