Horror Film Festival opens today
The Historic Central Theater, 1008 Central Ave., opens its doors today to horror, science fiction and thriller film connoisseurs for the sixth annual Hot Springs International Horror Film Festival.
The festival, presented by the Hot Springs Arts and Film Institute, has grown slowly over the years, according to director and producer Bill Volland. This year, it will feature 40 films and iconic actors RA Milhailoff, who portrayed Leatherface in the third installment of the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” series, and Michael Berryman,
whose credits include “The Hills Have Eyes” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
“We have seminars that we do besides the films and a lot of times the films that come in have celebrities in them,” Volland said, adding that Milhailoff and Berryman will both premiere new films at the festival.
“Some of the seminars that we have, we have how to make a mask, how to make your own,” he said. “So we’ll show you how to make a Leatherface mask (and) get a chance to win a signed Leatherface mask.
“We have somebody doing a class on lenses, different types of lenses to use for motion picture films. And then two more — one of them is creating atmosphere for if you want to do a home haunted house or if you want to do a professional haunt, things you can buy at Lowe’s and how to make a wooden door look like it’s an old, rusty metal door — things like that. Then there’s a blood and guts one where we teach how to make fake blood and pull somebody’s arm off; lots of crazy stuff.”
Volland said oftentimes when people think of the horror film genre, they tend to think of “slasher” films, but he said many of the films cross over into thrillers and science fiction. Not all films at this year’s festival will be features, either, he said.
“We have a couple documentaries; one’s on the ‘Briar Beast,’ I think it is,” he said. “It’s a documentary on a certain place where they’ve had sightings — like a Bigfoot-type thing. Then there’s another one on one of the scary children’s books authors.
“There’s the documentary part of the horror and then there’s a lot of comedy horror where it’s spoofs on slasher stuff. Then we have some animation horror. There’s one called ‘The Potato Clock,’ that’s a student film that’s pretty good. And then, of course, we have a few of the regular slasher films. There’s a lot of them that cross the line into thriller horror, sci-fi thriller, so the three genres kind of intermingle in there.”
The festival will wrap up Sunday with about 10 to 12 hours of back-to-back films each day, Volland said.
Alfred Hitchcock’s camera crane, which Volland said has been used on a few projects including Natural State commercials and the Arkansas State Police’s “Click-it or Ticket” commercials, will be on hand for photo opportunities.
“Alfred Hitchcock took it over at Universal Studios and pretty much kept it and used it on all of his films until they came out with a newer crane,” he said.
The festival is filmmaker-friendly, Volland said, with many of the films coming from across the globe. All films are no more than two years old and about 75 percent are world premieres.
“There’s, I think two or three, local films,” Volland said. “There’s one feature film called ‘10/31’ submitted by Rocky Gray, he’s local. And then I guess you can call RA Milhailoff’s film local — not Hot Springs local, but Arkansas local — the executive producer, Steve Lowery is from Fayetteville, so they’re going to be coming in. It’s an apocalyptic biker-type movie, so they’re doing a ride on Saturday from Rodney’s Cycle House in Little Rock down to the theater. They’ll be parking all their bikes and coming in, watching the movie. So it should be pretty interesting having all the bikes come in.”
The film festival will complement the third annual SpaCon taking place Friday through Sunday at the Hot Springs Convention Center, with Milhailoff and Berryman scheduled to make a stop at the multigenre convention to sign autographs.
“A lot of the people over there like the same kind of stuff,” Volland said. “Obviously they have (Butch) Patrick over there from ‘The Munsters,’ so we’re sending Mike Berryman and RA over there to do some signing for a little bit. So they complement each other in terms of the people that like to come to them.”
Volland hopes in years to come the festival will continue to grow as filmmakers travel the country following their films and fans start traveling, as well.
“I’m hoping to draw people in from Little Rock, Texas, some surrounding states to actually come in,” he said. “We’ve got filmmakers coming in from Europe, France, Germany and what they’ll do is they’ll follow their films around the other festivals, then they’ll come here, then down to Texas. So we’re hoping that people, just the general public that like this kind of genre of film festivals will start doing the same thing.”