• Spanish

WHAT: ShockFest Film Festival 2011
WHERE: Raleigh Studios, Los Angeles, California
WHY: Horror is NOT dead, and Eli Roth confirms it

Text by Lizandro Melean @Lizandro_Melean

Photos by Greta Álvarez @Grets

Do you want blood? Do you want to know the sickest minds out there? We were in the right place to do so! Shockfest was a two day festival that occurred on the Raleigh Studios in Hollywood where we watched the best offerings of amateur horror filmmakers who want to kick hard the horror genre, but don’t have the place to do it. Guil Claveria, its director, has managed to make one of the best offerings of horror film festivals I have seen on the west coast with 5 editions under its machete.

On this fifth edition Claveria and his team of great psychopaths, paid homage to actor/director Eli Roth (Hostel, Inglorious Basterds), who were there to receive the Shocking Filmmaker of the Decade Award followed by a special screening of Cabin Fever commemorating its 10^th anniversary.

What sets this festival aside from the rest is that it feels truly intimate and genuine. It gives a gold opportunity to a lot of new filmmakers to show their shorts to an audience for a reasonable fee and it gives the audience the chance to meet horror movie celebrities in a personal environment.

Although some of the offerings didn´t amuse me so much, I need to give the responsibles of this festival a reverence; they really love gore, guts and suspense, and if you love all this like I do, Shockfest is a treat for you. Also, we need to say that Girls And Corpses it’s one of the coolest magazines in California, which by the way was all over the place that night; it combines the best things in the world for a horror fanatic.

The entrance was a maze full of scare actors disguised as monsters with twists and screams in every corner, a major Halloween attraction like the ones showed every year in Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights, but unexpected. A good starter for the rest of the night.

After we walked out of the maze, the red carpet was there. Celebrities like Sid Haig (House of a 1000 Corpses’s Captain Spaulding), Tyler Mane (Michael Myers 2.0), Derek Mears (Jason in the Friday The 13th reboot) and DJ Quals, who made that movie with Tom Green called Road Trip, also received an award for his career in comedy films on the Mockfest (a part of the festival dedicated to comedies and mockumentaries).

In this humorous part of the event we watched an indie canadian flick called Running Mates which you need to find ASAP. It’s one of those comedies that happens to be better than most comedies that are out there in the theaters and it has a heart of its own. It won the Best comedy of the Year Award on the Mockfest.

Then, it was saturday night, and the cherry of this zombielicious ice cream appeared: Eli Roth, who was there for the cameras and for the fans. Inside the theater he even did a live commentary, like the ones included in any DVD, in a moment where the Cabin Fever screening was lacking audio, it was priceless. Roth also mentioned, just after he received the award, how studios are still saying that horror is dead while movies like Paranormal Activity 3 are breaking box office records worldwide.

After the screening, the bloodbath continued in Hollywood’s Hard Rock Café where the Shockfest awards were given to the best shorts and feature films of the year. The Houses October Built was the best short film and Ritual took home Best Videoclip, Sexiest Sweetheart (Windy West) and the Monster Award (Greg Joseph).

We’re anxious already for Shockfest 2012.

• Spanish

WHAT: The Murder Tour: American Horror Story
WHERE: Country Club Park, Los Angeles, California
WHY: A new deadly californian point

Text by Lizandro Melean @Lizandro_Melean

Photos by Greta Álvarez @Grets

American Horror Story is the new TV series from creator Ryan Murphy. Murphy was the creator of Nip/Tuck and Glee. Now he come back with this offer that pays homage to a lot of horror movies from Amityville Horror, The Shining and even Rosemary´s Baby, reviving this genre on the small screen.

CoolHunting Project went to the house used to film the establishing shots of the house on the show. Taking a picture to this antique is even more valuable than a picture with the protagonists of the show, in the end “she” is the real star of this ghost story.

When we arrived, a twilight kind of fans were there taking photos, asking its supposed “owner” if this place was really hunted and how is the experience of living there. The man, which by the way I think is just the night watcher of the house hired by the FX crew, says the house is his, that he  bought it 16 years ago on Halloween night and that it is in fact haunted. He even said one of the most annoying ghosts of the house was a butler with no legs.

This guy, a kind of fat man that looks like an electrician with curly hair, reminiscent of Larry from The Three Stooges, said the house was build in 1902 and that FX pay him a lot of Money for a 7 year contract.

Is this a Marketing strategy? Is he the real owner?  Is he just a man hired to watch the house that is having fun with the ones that are visiting it?

Whatever the answer may be, this makes everything about the show better.

When we were about to leave we watch an old lady cleaning the windows, which by the way are made out of Tiffany’s glass, we I was looking for her again, in the matter of a second, she was gone. Was she a real ghost? Was she a new character? Were they shooting? I don’t know but the experience ending up like that was more than cool.