Most people associate Halloween with tiny candy bars, cheap costumes and orange strings of lights. But CurtisPrather prefers to celebrate the holiday in a more ghoulish way. Six years ago, he founded the Spooky Movie International Horror Film Festival, the only one of its kind in the D.C. area.
“There was an audience that was not being catered to,” he said. He believes that the genre is especially conducive to creating quality independent films. “Someone with not a lot of money can make a really good horror movie and find a receptive audience,” he said.
Each year the festival shows about 40 films, including shorts, before the night’s main features and a movie trailer contest. Independent films are the focus of the event, with flicks coming in from across the country and around the world. This year, the films were screened between Oct. 13 and 16, though the festival officially concludes Halloween weekend with the screening of two classic horror films, House on Haunted Hill and Night of the Living Dead.
This year’s selection ranged from the Japanese zombie movie Helldriver to the heavy metal musical Mr. Bricks. One stand out is The Oregonian, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and stars Lindsey Pulsipher of “True Blood.” It tells the story of a woman who wakes up from a car accident to find herself in a stranger world than she remembers.
“It’s very disturbing, unsettling and weird,” Prather said. “Is she dead, is she alive, why is there suddenly a giant Muppet following her?” Prather enjoys showing films like The Oregonian because they divide audiences and leave an impact.
The films often unintentionally follow trends.
“The first two years, it was zombies. One year, there were a lot of psychotic killer women. I was wondering if people were afraid at the prospect of Hillary Clinton being president,” Prather said. “The hillbillies in the woods are a popular theme right now.”
But Prather is not content with showing films that tell the same tired stories.
“This audience is a little jaded. They’ve seen everything,” he said. When choosing films, he tries to make unique selections. “[We have] movies like The Dead,[which] takes a zombie movie and puts it in Africa, which is something we’ve never seen before.”
The festival enjoyed a new venue this year at Artisphere in Arlington, Va.
“The films this year are definitely the most successful we’ve run,” Prather said. “I’m already thinking about next year and what we’ll be doing then to make it better.”
The festival operates around the notion that there is a unique experience in watching horror films in a movie theater with others who respond to what they’re seeing. “We’re trying to replicate something you can’t get at home watching TV or Netflix,” Prather said. “There is something perfect about the shared experience of these kinds of films, especially at this time of year.”
