Dead by Dawn 2007 was our usual mix of real genre treats

In Elio Quiroga's LA HORA FRIA (The Dark Hour), a group of survivors are trapped in their bunker, making occasional forays to the store for supplies and surviving intermittent lock-downs where the bunker temperature plummets and something strong and hungry hunts the abandoned corridors. Intense, bleak and beautifully paced, this predatory, claustrophobic thriller left our audience running for fresh air when it was all over. www.lahorafria.com

Jim Mickle's MULBERRY STREET is stunning. A subway worker is bitten by a rat. But what should be a one-off incident is replicated once, twice, a few times and soon the rate of infection has escalated beyond anything that can be contained. Manhattan becomes a no-go area and the inhabitants of Mulberry Street have been abandoned first by their neighbours, then by their mayor and ultimately by their government. This is independent film-making at its finest - a movie that aims high and manages to sustain an all-pervading aura of menace throughout. The story unfolds through clear, rounded characters whose humour and humanity are the only things not compromised by the plague. If you didn't like rats before, this film isn't going to help. www.mulberrystreetmovie.com

GRUESOME is Groundhog Day but without any of the laughs. Or nice things that happen. Or the happy ending. Or in fact anything remotely pleasant at all. But that's ok cos this is a horror festival and not a festival of saccharine-soaked rom-coms with Andie MacDowell mooching about hoping someone'll give her a good seeing to and then read her some damn French poetry. Instead, our heroine gets in the wrong car (for a good reason) then decides her chauffeur is a dodgy loony (for a good reason) and nearly escapes. Nearly. But 'nearly' is so not enough when the dodgy loony knows where you live and has a wee scythe in his back pocket. Poor little heroine. As if getting murdered isn't enough, she wakes up the next day all alive and in one piece. Confused but relieved, she isn't particularly prepared to relive the entire experience. Over and over and over again. Such a simple idea and so beautifully executed. Which is ironic, really... There is a trailer at the official site - www.salvagemovie.com - but it's riddled with spoilers!

SHUTTER is a Thai ghost movie, but just when you think you might have seen it all, remember how hard you jumped when the first crawler appeared in the frame in The Descent...? Well, what starts as an almost by-the-numbers ghost movie develops (cheap pun definitely intended) into a full-on creepy and properly scary horror movie, with all kinds of nasty things appearing in photographs.

SOUTHERN GOTHIC is a classy, confident, slick down-the-line vampire movie, but with such style you want to slather some scenes with butter and just devour them. A single mother working as a dancer in a local dive finds herself adored by a gloriously sleazy preacher. Having rejected his advances, she has to find allies in a hurry when things start changing in their small town but lucky for her, a man called Hazel is watching from the shadows. Director Mark Young was here to intro and discuss his movie, seeing as it was the World Premiere. www.southerngothicmovie.com

THE ABANDONED is Nacho Cerda's latest movie. He, of course, is the amazing guy responsible for the shorts trilogy of Genesis, Awakenings and the legendary Aftermath. This feature is written by him, Karim Hussain (director of Subconscious Cruelty) and one Richard Stanley. The story concerns an American film producer named Marie who returns to her homeland, Russia, where her mother's dead body has been found under bizarre circumstances. She never knew her, having been adopted and brought to America as a baby. The only clue to what might have happened is an isolated, abandoned farm in the mountains that supposedly belonged to her natural parents. Being the only next of kin, she inherits the place but no one will take her there as local superstitions believe the area to be damned. Only one man will embark on such a dangerous and long journey - a stranger that oddly seems to know quite a bit about her history. But once arrived, the guide mysteriously disappears, forcing Marie to explore the derelict location alone. This was both a preview screening and our Closing Movie. www.theabandonedmovie.com

From the Filmax series called 'Films to Keep You Awake' we had two of the truly finest to show. One is from Alex de la Iglesia and is called THE BABY'S ROOM and carries on this interesting theme of things we can only see through a viewer. Trust me, the pixies that live in your camera are evil and they will melt your head. A nice, happy family moves into a seriously creepy house, without thinking to ask why it came so cheap. But the mad old lady next door knows, cos voices in her broken radio told her. http://slasherp.nexcess.net/htm/reviews/babysroom.htm

Alex himself was our Special Guest

The second one was from Jaume Balaguero (he of Los Sin Nombre, Darkness and Fragile). Called TO LET, it features a nice young couple flat-hunting who find themselves in an unfamiliar area, encouraged by a slightly over-friendly landlady in a building that looks like it fell off a street corner in a disreputable part of hell. Hurrah!! It's all about to go horribly wrong... http://slasherp.nexcess.net/htm/reviews/tolet.htm

Scott Thomas's movie PLANE DEAD was a fine example of one-upmanship. Scared of snakes? Scared of flying? Oooh, snakes on a plane EEEEK!!! Ah f*ck it - let's go one better....let's have a zombie infection break-out on a plane. Yep, at 35,000 feet, a bucket of something nasty in the hold gets breached and before you know it, the passenger that just passed away as they were serving the meal isn't quite as dead as they were five minutes ago. Factor in a cabin full of people you would hide the parachutes from, as well as a lunatic transferring prisoner and a nun (a NUN!!! You gotta love this guy...) then it's just one big bloodbath waiting to happen.

Why did we show HITCHER? Easy. I have always appreciated just how deliciously, relentlessly cruel this film is. Revisit it, and remember fondly a time when you could hide a finger in a bowl of real chips, cos now you'd get bloody French fries and it'd stand out like a....well, like a sore thumb.

As you will know if you've ever been to the festival before, our short film programmes kick ass!

The Cutting Edge short film competition is designed to profile debut or emerging directors and so is a showcase just stuffed to its stapled, bleeding seams with potential.

From Rod Gudino, President of Rue Morgue magazine, came THE EYES OF EDWARD JAMES, the story of a man so badly traumatised by the murder of his wife that he is being helped to the real, nasty truth by a very friendly hypnotist. In THE FIFTH, four guys can't play poker if things go on like this...how come no-one ever seems to stick around for more than one game? For anyone remotely squeamish about things medical, there's your worst nightmare come true in ANAESTHESIA when it turns out that a patient isn't as numb as she wants to be and in BLIND MAN'S ALLEY, five kids face up to the realities of an initiation requiring nerves of steel. FACELESS is what happens when a morally bankrupt artist resorts to extreme forms of inspiration. Look away now....GRACE is here with a pregnancy only Cronenberg could love. In 13 DE MARS 1941, two explorers split up to investigate a deep, dark hole. Don't these people ever watch horror movies?? THE AMAZING DEATH OF MRS MULLER has a nice, polite suburban housewife take on a local sleaze in a ten-pin bowling showdown. In LUMP, a young woman finds that the lump her surgeon has removed seems to be more persistent than anyone was expecting. In FILM EIGHT a truly moronic robber tries hard to outrun his pursuer but finds fate is always one step ahead of him. MIME MASSACRE needs no explanation really, it's just clever, funny and ever so therapeutic. I wish they'd make a sequel about jugglers. In NOSE HAIR a girlfriend begs her man to dispose of one huge unsightly hair before her friends arrive but his compliance isn't quite what she had in mind.

The What You Make It programme is for those films that may not be what you'd traditionally label as horror but are horrific in their own special, twisted, deeply unpleasant ways. Included in this section this year is a Spanish movie AVATAR in which a couple trapped by a traumatic past play increasingly dangerous and damaging power-games. In Y QUE CUMPLAS MUCHOS MAS (Happy Birthday to You) a young woman wants to make sure her present reaches the birthday boy but he has his own ideas about what would constitute the perfect present. In LES PETITS HOMMES VIEUX (Men from Older Space) the wrinklies are everywhere and no-one can escape the shuffle of time.

Included in the main programme this year is LES MORVEUX (Little Brats) which will serve as seriously satisfying therapy if the soundtrack to Les Choristes made you grind your teeth together...and talking of teeth, L'INSTANT AVANT will offer you a severe but permanent cure for any dental trouble you may be having. We've got an Irish serial killer in HITCH who meets his match in the most unlikely way possible and in THE DEAD TREE HOTEL, a French couple lost at night take the advice of an old man with a spade. Never trust a man who's ready to dig a hole...From Canada comes THE FROLIC about a man who just wants to help those who can't help themselves. Are you ready to come and out and play with him? Also, there's 24 minutes of TERROR! in Ben Rivers' homage to the finest moments of the genre. There's a fantastically stylish reworking of a 70's classic TV show in THE LOVE CRAFT. Oh if only we were in charge of the world, daytime telly would be so much more fun! From Australia comes MONSTER, a tale of childhood fright that will have you checking every cupboard in your house before you switch off a single light and from Denmark comes IT CAME FROM THE WEST - possibly the world's first zombie puppet western as some cowboys come up against the Dark Butcher. French animator Nieto will demonstrate some truly innovative technique (and by innovative I mean sick) in two shorts, CARLITOPOLIS and FAR WEST and finally ROOM 69 is all about a new night watchman at a mental institute who is totally sure the staff will try to pull a prank on him, which is why nothing that happens seems too much...

For those fans who didn't have the time or stamina for the full event, we offered Spawn of Dawn. Running through the night in Cinema Two from midnight on Saturday 28th, this featured five features and ten shorts from the main programme. Think of it as Dead by Dawn Lite. And it also counted as one of your five portions of fruit & veg for that day. Ok, I lied about that.