Grimmfest Easter 2022 full film line up and more

Grimmfest Easter launched in 2021 as an annual event, taking place over the Easter Weekend, and complimenting the long-established festival in October. The initial Easter festival was online only, due to the Covid-19 Lockdown in the UK. But 2022 sees it going live at regular host venue the Odeon Great Northern in Manchester UK, screening exclusive feature film premieres, together with Q&As and talks.

Grimmfest Easter will be a hybrid event with an online element, which will complement and sit alongside the live festival. Much of the content will cross both events but there will also be one or two online exclusives.

Grimmfest Easter, like the October festival, will be a competitive festival, with a number of awards up for grabs. This year’s awards will include, BEST FEATURE, BEST SHORT, BEST DIRECTOR, BEST SCREENPLAY, BEST PERORMANCE, BEST SCARE and BEST SFX.

We are also delighted to announce the Easter Jury. Deliberating and debating over the various films will be Actress and Producer Joanne Mitchell (BAIT, BEFORE DAWN), Grimmfest’s longtime visual guru, artist and graphic designer, Ilan Sheedy, Mary Beth McAndrews editor in chief at Dread Central, and Rosie Fletcher, UK editor at Den of Geek.

Check out the Grimmfest Easter 2022 poster art, designed by jury member Ilan Sheady.

There will also be a selection of startling, shocking, surreal, and darkly comic shorts. Ted Raimi takes on the culture of the Online Influencer, in the UK premiere of RED LIGHT. A nagging sound lures a man back to an all-too-chilling reality, in Chris Suchorsky’s nightmarish neo-noir, CRICKET.

There’s an EC comics style lesson in launderette etiquette in Craig Low’s mischievous and darkly funny DON’T TOUCH. The grief of bereavement summons monsters in Daniel Romero’s emotionally harrowing SHE AND THE DARKNESS. A suppressed suburban housewife receives an unexpected visit, in Gregory Nice and Jack Stanton’s subtly disquieting DOMESTICITY.

Brian Krause stars as a concerned father who only wants the best for his daughter, in Nicole Ihasz’s BECKY, a bloody and blacky comic broadside against bullying. An overly intense actress takes her method way too far in Kelsey Bollig’s sour and sulphureous satire THE FOURTH WALL. And Dietrich Polla offers a mordant and macabre meditation on capitalism, consumerism, workforce exploitation – and cars – in the truly horrifying WERKSTATT.

Join us live at the Odeon in Manchester or at home on online and enjoy some amazing movie premieres this Easter. All the details and tickets can be found at www.Grimmfest.com

‘Grimmfest Easter’ offers all the cinematic thrills, spills, and chills, all the blood and black comedy that you have come to expect from Grimmfest, but in a leaner, meaner, more concentrated form. Something to satisfy even the most jaded of palates. Here are some highlights:

The festival kicks off in fine style with a sharp and genre-savvy spin on the classic haunted house mystery. Alchemic lore meets quantum physics, and the devil is in the details, in the English Premiere of Brendan Muldowney’s Irish horror, THE CELLAR, which stars Elisha Cuthbert (CAPIVITY) and Eoin Macken (RESIDENT EVIL: THE FINAL CHAPTER).

There’s a sobering reminder that pandemic panic is nothing new, as a traumatised young photographer confronts the restless dead and his own sense of survivors’ guilt in a rural Hungarian village ravaged by the post-World War One Spanish Flu outbreak, in the Northern UK Premiere of Péter Bergendy’s critically-acclaimed, and visually sumptuous spinechiller, POST MORTEM.

In the first of a brace of UK Premiere, white-knuckle thrillers from Spain, Maria Pedraza (Netflix’s MONEY HEIST), stars as a troubled young woman whose search for online romance amid the Covid-19 Lockdown unleashes a particularly intrusive stalker, in the UK premiere of Alfonso Cortés-Cavanillas’ slippery psychodrama of identity theft and personality breakdown, EGO.

While Alex de la Iglesias regular Mario Casas (Netflix’s THE INNOCENT) stars as a timid young man hopelessly out of his depth and driven to ever greater extremes in David Victori’s brutal and breakneck modern spin on the “Yuppie Nightmare” neo-noir, CROSS THE LINE.

Cleanliness is not always next to godliness in the A PURE PLACE Nikias Chryssos’ much-anticipated follow-up to DER BUNKER, an unsettling and darkly witty allegorical fairy tale of ex-Nazis, mad messianic ambition, and arcane cult activity in the Greek Islands, which also has its UK Premiere at Grimmfest.

An oppressive cult of a very different kind features in Dan Slater’s tense and claustrophobic exploration of religious oppression and group-think gaslighting, THE FAMILY, while guilt leads people to take strange and winding forest paths, in Adam Reider’s eerie and enigmatic existential survival drama, WOODLAND GREY. Both films are European Premieres.

And a seemingly utopian community in post-Civil War America is finally brought face to face with the falsehoods and fantasies necessary to sustain it, in the festival’s closing film, Matt Glass and Jordan Wayne Long’s sharp, socio-political Southern Gothic Folk Horror, GHOSTS OF THE OZARKS, starring David Arquette (SCREAM), Tim Blake Nelson (WATCHMEN) and Angela Bettis (12 HOUR SHIFT), and reuniting many of the creative team behind Grimmfest audience favourite, 12 HOUR SHIFT. This will be the film’s international premiere.

Exclusive to the online programme, Grimmfest is delighted to present the Northern UK Premiere of Alex Bruchon’s mischievous and minimalist giallo-flavoured neo-noir, THE WOMAN WITH LEOPARD SHOES, a tense, and claustrophobic tale of entrapment, betrayal, text messaging and fetishistic footwear, almost entirely played out in a single room.

Grimmfest Director Simeon Halligan said: Continuing to bring film fans back into the cinema post Covid is something we are very keen to do, here at Grimmfest. We look forward to bringing some cinematic mayhem to brighten Easter 2022. That said, we understand some people are still not comfortable with attending in person events, so we are happy to continue offering content, securely, online, and available for fans to view at home in the UK”.

Grimmfest Easter full festival passes are available now, from www.grimmfest.com