Forbidden Worlds Film Festival
The Big Scream
The Bristol Megascreen
11-12 October 2024
STRANGER DANGER!
Don’t answer the phone! Don’t stop your car! Don’t open the door!
Bristol’s biggest repertory genre film festival is back to issue a very serious public warning: do not speak to strangers or involve yourself with them in any way. It will not be good for your health… or your life!
On the 11th and 12th of October 2024, the Big Scream returns for a two-nighter at Bristol’s former IMAX screen – now renamed the Bristol Megascreen. As the nights draw in and spooky season gets closer, Forbidden Worlds looks at the perils of stranger danger with six selections from around the globe: the cult British folk horror of The Shout; a brand-new 4K restoration of VHS favourite The Hitcher, starring the much-missed Rutger Hauer; Dario Argento’s audacious Opera, also presented in a brand-new 4K restoration; the creepy and influential Cure from Japan; teen horror fave I Know What You Did Last Summer; and the quintessential ‘stranger danger’ horror, When a Stranger Calls.
This year, as a special treat, each film will also be preceded by a horror short. Five of those shorts are the work of Bristol-based and/or Bristol-born filmmakers, plus a recent audience favourite from the horror festival circuit – all of which will look and sound positively amazing on the biggest screen in the South West!
At-a-glance schedule
Friday 11 October 2024
4.30PM: THE SHOUT (1978)
7PM: THE HITCHER (1986)
9.15PM: OPERA (1987)
Saturday 12 October 2024
4PM: CURE (1997)
7PM: I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER (1997)
9.30PM: WHEN A STRANGER CALLS (1979)
Festival Passes and Tickets
Festival Pass holders are able to attend ALL screenings over the course of the festival.
Day Pass holders can only access screenings on that particular day.
Upon your arrival at the event, if you have a Festival or Day Pass, you will be given a festival lanyard for ease of access.
Early Bird Festival Pass (Fri & Sat): SOLD OUT
Festival Pass (Fri & Sat): SOLD OUT
Friday Day Pass: SOLD OUT
Saturday Day Pass: SOLD OUT
Individual Tickets: £8.50/£5
Trailer by Arthur Cauty
Festival Programme
Friday 11 October 2024
4.30PM: THE SHOUT (1978)
Dir: Jerzy Skolimowski | UK | 86 mins | Cert. 15
Prepare yourself – every muscle, every nerve – for the ultimate soul shattering experience of The Shout.
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Anthony Fielding, an experimental musician, encounters a stranger on a Devonshire beach. The man soon becomes his uninvited guest, refusing to leave the house Anthony shares with his wife. He also has a mysterious past, claiming to have lived with an Australian Aboriginal tribe and learned their shamanistic powers – including the ability to kill or send somebody insane with a shout.
Adapted from a 1927 short story by Robert Graves, and originally intended as a project for Nicolas Roeg (Don’t Look Now), The Shout is a slow-burn slice of folk horror, redolent of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas, especially with its coastal setting, and directed with a caustic eye by Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski (Deep End, EO). He presents an England of cricket matches and local vicars, populated with fine British actors like Alan Bates, John Hurt, Susannah York, Tim Curry and Jim Broadbent, but something underneath the surface is off, a little strange, uncanny and unnerving…
The Shout will be preceded by Lís, a short film by Gabriela Staniszewska.
7PM: THE HITCHER (1986)
Dir: Robert Harmon | USA | 97 mins | Cert. 18
The terror starts the moment he stops!
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Don’t give lifts to strangers. Even if it’s raining. And especially if they look like Rutger Hauer. But Jim Halsey doesn’t listen to this advice and, within seconds of the opening titles concluding, he’s got hitchhiker John Ryder in his passenger seat – and John is a psychopath. They pass another car on the side of the road, whose driver is now dead. As John explains, “I cut off his legs… and his arms… and his head… And I'm going to do the same to you.”
Alongside Blade Runner’s Roy Batty, John Ryder was one Rutger Hauer’s defining roles of the 1980s – and he’s both perfect and absolutely terrifying in the part. Blessed with the leanest of screenplays by regular Kathryn Bigelow collaborator Eric Red (Near Dark, Blue Steel), The Hitcher is presented in a brand-new 4K restoration courtesy of Second Sight Films.
The Hitcher will be preceded by Stop Dead, a short film by Emily Greenwood.
9.15PM: OPERA (1987)
Dir: Dario Argento | Italy | 107 mins | Cert. 18
You are invited to enjoy an evening of terror… at the opera.
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Betty, an understudy in a new production of Verdi’s Macbeth, is given the role of Lady Macbeth when the star is injured in a hit-and-run. While opening night appears to be a huge success, an opera house employee is murdered in one of the boxes and, after the performance, Betty is tied up and forced to watch the slaying of her boyfriend – needles positioned under her eyes so that she cannot even blink. Who is the assailant? A deranged fan unknown to Betty, or someone closer to home?
Considered by many to be the final film of Dario Argento’s imperial phase – one that included such classics as Suspiria and Forbidden Worlds favourite Tenebrae – Opera finds the filmmaker at his most confident, offering up dizzying camerawork and audacious set pieces. You’ll never look through a keyhole again!
This screening will mark the UK premiere of a brand-new 4K restoration of the film, courtesy of Severin Films and the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA).
Opera will be preceded by The Babka, a short film by Michael Jenkins.
Saturday 12 October 2024
4PM: CURE (1997)
Dir: Kiyoshi Kurosawa| Japan | 111 mins | Cert. 15
People like to think a crime has some meaning. But most of them don’t.
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Detective Takabe is assigned to a series of murders distinguished by the same “X” carved into the victim’s upper body, but with its own perpetrator. As the investigation deepens, he becomes convinced that the key to cracking the case lies with a mysterious stranger suffering from amnesia.
Though it never played UK cinemas at the time of its initial release, Cure has since been recognised as one of the most significant horror films of the nineties. Its distinct sense of dread continues to exert an influence – most recently in Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs – while interesting echoes can be found in Friday night’s opener, The Shout. The film also features the star of 2024 arthouse favourite Perfect Days, Kōji Hashimoto, in the role of Detective Takabe.
The screening will be introduced by Harriet Taylor, producer, writer and director of SWITCH.
Cure will be preceded by Crocodile, a short film by Matt Harris-Freeth.
Please note: this film will be shown in its original Japanese language with English subtitles.
7PM: I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER (1997)
Dir: Jim Gillespie | USA | 101 mins | Cert. 15
If you’re going to bury the truth, make sure it stays buried.
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While driving home after a night of Fourth of July celebrations, four friends accidentally hit a stranger on a secluded road. While attempting to dump the body, they realise it isn’t quite as dead as they thought – but dispose of it anyway and agree never to talk of the night. Until, that is, one year later when one of them receives a letter saying: “I know what you did last summer!”
Written by Kevin Williamson, the man who also penned Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer presents a more straightforward, less self-aware take on the slasher movie. Assisted no doubt by the casting of Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe and Freddie Prinze Jr in the lead roles, the film overcame a mostly negative reaction from the critics to clean up at the box office and, alongside Scream, revitalise the horror genre as a commercial enterprise at the turn of the millennium. Now, some 27 years after its initial release, it stands out as one of the slicker, sleeker examples of the slasher revival.
I Know What You Did Last Summer will be preceded by Tapped, a short film by Benjamin Brewer.
9.30PM: WHEN A STRANGER CALLS (1979)
Dir: Fred Walton | US | 97 mins | Cert. 15
Every babysitter's nightmare becomes real…
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A babysitter, looking after two children who are asleep upstairs in a large house, is persecuted by a series of phone calls, each one asking her if she has “checked on the children”. Terrified, she contacts the police, only to be that the calls are coming from within the house…
Inspired by the success of the original Halloween – which played the very first Big Scream event in 2022 – Fred Walton decided to expand his 1977 short film, The Sitter, to feature-length and cash-in. The first 20 minutes of When a Stranger Calls remakes the short in its entirety, before opening out the story to encompass Charles Durning’s ex-cop private investigator, the seedy side of New York in the late seventies, and one of the greatest ever nerve-jangling finales to a horror film. The only way to conclude a Big Scream is to let out a big scream!
When a Stranger Calls will be preceded by Guise, a short film by Paul Llewellyn.