Doc/Fest 2017: Spookers Fright Night

Today’s big event was a trip out of town into the newly re-furnished Abbeydale Picture House, and where better to show a film to impress our international audience than in Sheffield’s oldest surviving cinema? The event was billed as Spookers: Fright Night, based around screening a film about the people who dress up as zombies, ghouls and unspeakable creatures to work at a zombie theme park in Australia. The park is built in and around an old insane asylum, and as you might imagine, people who make a living dressing up as the undead all have a story to tell! Before the film though, the audience were led through their very own Fright Night experience, in a room deep in the hidden recesses of the Picture House. Here we were warned that we were about to be very scared indeed. It was all great fun, although not much more scary than a trip on a fairground Ghost Train for me, but it served as the perfect preparation for the main event. The film was made by Florian Habicht, who made the Pulp concert film a few years ago. It was a tad too long for me, telling a story that could have been done in less time, and there didn’t seem to be any real narrative to the film, but none the less it was all terrific fun.