Do you know when Christmas for horror fans is?

If you said Halloween, I hate to break it to you, but you’re wrong.

Because horror Christmas starts this Thursday, August 23, 2018, when the FrightFest Film Festival kicks off in London, England.

As a genre, horror rarely receives the respect it deserves. Imaginative, crowd-pleasing horror films are too easily dismissed and underestimated by major studios and audiences alike. That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of horror films that have wowed both dedicated horror fans and critics (a la Get Out, Hereditary, see my whole blog). But honestly, there are way more horror films deserving of attention, if not acclaim.

That’s why I started blogging about horror movies at film festivals and why I’m so excited about this year’s FrightFest. I wanted to bring attention to horror films that, against harsh odds, broke out of their confines and stampeded into the spotlight. From Sundance to Cannes to TIFF, horror movies are proving that they can hang with the best of the best.

Still, it’s exhausting always having to prove that point, isn’t it?

But this week, my horror-fan prayers will be answered by the 18^th annual FrightFest, a unique film festival dedicated to horror and other genre-bending films. FrightFest initially started as a quest to give British horror fans a high-caliber horror film festival before quickly becoming an internationally renowned festival. FrightFest is the festival where Danny Boyle debuted the first reel of 28 Days Later, where Guillermo del Toro chose to premiere Pan’s Labyrinth instead of the more glitzy London Film Festival, and where Neil Marshall held a gala preview for The Descent.

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***Note: Some Spoilers for The Beauty***

The distrust between the male and female sexes has and will probably always be fertile ground for horror narratives. The difference between the sexes foster fear; the shared human experience between them gives form to that fear. We know what the other is thinking and what they might do to us. They are devils we’ve always known and could never escape.

As the saying goes, “Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.”

This is the plot of Aliya Whiteley’s The Beauty, her 2014 novella, which was published recently in the United States. In the dystopic near-future of The Beauty, a mysterious disease has claimed the lives of every woman and girl on earth. The men have grown old, and the remaining boys have grown into men. Some of these men inhabit what used to be a thriving off-the-grid community. Every day, the men busy themselves with all the various activities needed to keep the community running, unsuccessfully ignoring the fact that they are merely waiting to die. Every night, Nathan, the community’s storyteller, recounts stories of their dead women and idealized past. Nathan is on the brink of losing hope when their women come back, rising from their graves in the form of mushroom-woman hybrids.

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