Ready for a long weekend of horror

Tonight is the opening of the inaugural Twisted Celluloid Film Festival at the Triskel Christchurch cinema in Cork City.

The idea stems from the Twisted Celluloid nights that film programmer Christopher O’Neill began at the venue on Halloween night, 2011. The monthly Twisted Celluloid shows cult movies, from Japanese animé and science fiction to camp classics and horror. But the Twisted Celluloid Film Festival is exclusively horror.

“My interest in horror movies is that horror movies, to me, are like an outsider genre,” says O’Neill. “There are certain horror movies that are made by the studios and get a mainstream release; and there’s nothing wrong, necessarily, with them; some of them can be quite good, as well. But when I was a kid, I was interested in horror movies and I got into, say, foreign language films, arthouse films, independent films, because I saw all of them as something different, outside the mainstream. I’m not like a horror film junkie; I just like films of all kinds. But it’s fun to delve into horror movies and find some really amazing ones, because, thematically, they can explore issues socially, emotionally, in a more visceral way than a straightforward film could.”