Preview: Manchester’s Festival of Fantastic Films

On October 20, Manchester’s Pendulum Hotel and Conference Centre will open its doors for a weekend of the bizarre and the gory with the return of Manchester’s Festival of Fantastic Films. Described as a “friendly, intimate festival with a unique atmosphere,” it will screen a mix of forgotten archive gems alongside a wide-ranging selection of new international short films as part of its Delta Film Awards.

Since 1990, this festival has been home to guests from across the breadth of genre filmmaking. Their inaugural edition even included stop-motion legend and pioneer Ray Harryhausen, known for his ground-breaking style of animation known as Dynamation. This year’s edition was set to include Mark Gatiss who has unfortunately had to cancel due to a scheduling conflict but the guest line-up still includes, amongst others, Hammer Horror regular Madeline Smith and Andy Nyman, the man behind the film and stage play Ghost Stories.

Far away from the feeling of Manchester’s other (and better known) genre festival ‘Grimmfest’, the Festival of Fantastic Films promises something a lot more akin to a smaller Comic Con-type environment where guests and geeks mingle alongside one another. However, I do not say this to reduce the level of programming that goes into something like this. The retrospective room is screening truly forgotten gems, most of which I’m ashamed to say I haven’t encountered. Just to give you a taste of the kinds of films that are on offer, there is everything from a 1970s asylum-set horror film Don’t Look in the Basement to the 1924 Robert Wiene silent film The Hands of Orlac. 

Although the first edition of the festival was not until 1990, the origins of this festival go back to the late 1950s with a group of Manchester-based filmmaking enthusiasts Delta SF Group. Slowly but surely, this passion developed into smaller screenings much akin to something like a University film society which meets wherever it can find and gets together to watch a movie. Going from a small group of friends making low-budget horror films to the professional scale that the festival operates on, this is a true Manchester success story. 

Day and weekend passes are available: Festival of Fantastic Films Manchester – “The unique annual celebration of horror, SF and fantasy in films, TV and books.”