Five FrightFest Facts From with Alex Noyer director of Sound of Violence

2021 has been a strange year and although things may not have completely returned to normality one thing to be thankful for is the return of the Arrow Video FrightFest which takes place for real this year at Cineworld, Leicester Square in central London.

The annual five-day four-screen 50+ film extravaganza runs between 26th and 30th August and after a year online, it is wonderful to have FrightFest back with a hybrid event featuring in-cinema and online components bringing audiences a whole host of truly terrifying and terrific horror films.

Below we feature one of those monstrously amazing movies with our regular exclusive interview feature Five FrightFest Facts From and these five are from Alex Noyer director of Sound of Violence:

1. Please tell us a little about your film, Sound of Violence…
It’s the story of an artist, Alexis Reeves played by the extraordinary Jasmin Savoy Brown, who makes music through murder. As a child, Alexis lost her hearing in an accident, but she regains it amidst a very traumatic event. In that event, she also gains synesthetic abilities that manifest themselves from the sounds of bodily harm. As an adult, she seeks to compose a masterpiece from those sounds she longs and that sends her into an escalating destructive artistic process with great collateral damages.

2. How did you get into making horror movies?
Most of my seventeen-year producing career has been in documentaries. It culminated with 808, a documentary about the legendary TR-808 drum machine that premiered at SXSW 2015 and became the first feature to release on Apple Music. After that I felt like a new challenge and my wife is the one who encouraged me to follow my lifelong passion for horror movies and start producing those. And it got me writing. Then my writing got me to directing. In the midst of various projects I was developing, I was reminiscing about 808 and drum-machines which brought me to a lightbulb moment, “I need to kill someone with a drum machine”. My short film Conductor was born out of that and it then inspired Sound Of Violence.

3. Which film, new or old, would you love to see screened at FrightFest and why?
FrightFest has had such a great history bringing exciting programing so I won’t even think about being revisionist in any way. So, looking forward, I would say I hope my friend Sebastien Bazile’s horror anthology, Sinphony, makes it there. It’s born out of the app clubhouse where he recruited aspiring filmmakers and backed them to deliver chapters to this amazing project. It’s a fantastic example of indie genre filmmakers supporting each other and I can’t wait to see the result. And obviously I’d love to see whatever I do next shown here too.

4. If you could create your own award to hand out at FrightFest, what would it be and why?
An Innovation Award. We are in the most experimental genre and pushing experimentation brings about incredible advancements whether technical or related to storytelling or, like in our case, as far as the use of music. Genre filmmakers are mad scientists. So in fact it should be the “mad scientist award”. I’d love to help pick the mad scientists and celebrate them.

5. If your life was made into a horror film, what would it be called and who would play the starring role?
“Tenacious”. It’d be a metaphorical survival story, set in a fantasy world, like in the animated film ‘Heavy Metal’, where my hurdles, episodes of self-doubt and inner demons unite as dangerous creatures to overcome. It’d be a quest for a creative grail ultimately revealed to have all played out in my head. I’d like to see Daniel Radcliffe, with a fair bit of weight gained, to play me. Come to think of it, now I have to start writing this story.

Sound of Violence has its UK Premiere at Arrow FrightFest, 29th August. Find our more and book your tickets HERE. Dazzler Media presents Sound of Violence on Blu-ray, DVD & Digital from 30th August. Find it on Amazon: www.amazon.co.uk/Sound-of-Violence-Blu-ray/dp/B094KGYFH7