‘Friday the 69th’ Pays Tribute to Trashy ’80s Horror at Dead Northern

A killer beekeeper, a fake 1981 slasher production and an entire feature shot on an iPhone are heading to York later this month as Alex Montilla’s microbudget horror-comedy Friday the 69th joins the 2026 Dead Northern Horror Film Festival line-up.

The film will screen as a regional premiere at City Screen Picturehouse on Friday 25 September, bringing its deliberately scrappy homage to the bottom-shelf slashers of the early 1980s to a festival audience already primed for cult horror.

Written, directed, shot, edited, produced and partly performed by Montilla, Friday the 69th follows a group of adult filmmakers in 1981 attempting to cash in on the slasher boom by making their own bargain-basement horror movie about spring-breaking college students being stalked by a murderous beekeeper. As you might expect, the fictional production does not go according to plan.

Made for somewhere between $12,000 and $15,000, the film was shot entirely on an iPhone and leans into its limitations rather than hiding them. Montilla has cited Robert Rodriguez and El Mariachi as major inspirations, adopting a similarly hands-on approach that saw him fill multiple roles both in front of and behind the camera.

The project also contains a particularly notable genre connection, with one scene filmed at the original house used in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. That location adds another layer to a film already built around affection for handmade horror and the anything-goes spirit of early independent filmmaking.

Montilla developed those instincts long before his feature debut. After making films for school morning announcements, he studied filmmaking at the University of Miami before moving to Los Angeles, where his credits included work in the editing rooms of Hot Tub Time Machine and The Muppets, as well as production experience on projects including Hop, The Hangover Part III and ESPN programming. His short horror-comedy OverKill later picked up multiple festival awards, paving the way for a more ambitious attempt to translate the same irreverent energy into a full feature.

The cast includes Amy Letcher, Rob Zoppo, Bud Galloway, Amber Kellehan, David Arnold Rubin, Anna Bess and Montilla himself, with Chris Ranier providing the score.

Friday the 69th has already travelled internationally in 2026, beginning with its world premiere at the Brussels International Festival of Fantastic Film in April, followed by screenings at the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix and Calgary Underground Film Festival.

Friday the 69th screens at Dead Northern Horror Film Festival at City Screen Picturehouse, York, on Friday 25 September at 4.45pm, followed by a Q&A. Get your tickets from the Dead Northern site, or below:
deadnorthern.co.uk/

Friday the 69th trailer