There’s only a handful of horror film festivals that enjoy international reputations and Edinburgh’s Dead by Dawn is one of them.  In a way, its founder and director Adèle Hartley is the ultimate fan—with no real prior experience, she nonetheless started the kind of event that she knew she’d love to attend.  That was in 1993.  And the startling success that she’s achieved since tells me that all of us in horror could probably learn something from her.

This year Dead by Dawn will run April 24-27 and, after the opening movie, feature three full days of programming.  And I mean “full”:  each evening of scares usually runs into the “wee hours,” and the Saturday program starts at noon and includes an all-nighter.  Although Hartley’s sights are always firmly set on the individual fan’s experience, she and her team have had no problem attracting important filmmakers from around the globe.  And even in its modest beginnings of screening only five films, Dead by Dawn showed a commitment to providing a historical context for the genre—one of those films was Murnau’s Nosferatu.  Nowadays, in addition to revisiting classics and premiering new features, the festival spotlights up-and-coming talent and short films; it's even launched a scaled-down spin-off, Spawn of Dawn.

A novelist and editor, too, Hartley is one of the busiest and most accomplished people I’ve met in the genre.  We’re fortunate that she found time to share her thoughts on the universal appeal of being scared in the dark...

Firefox News:  Let’s start with the filmmakers.  Which Dead by Dawn alumni, perhaps who were relatively obscure at the time, have had careers that you’ve enjoyed following since?

This is the joy of running a discovery festival!  Jorge Olguin (Sangre Eterna), Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers), Lucky McKee (May), Jaume Balaguero (Los Sin Nombre), Jeremy Kasten (Attic Expeditions), the Spierig Brothers (Undead), Fujii Shugo (Living Hell), Junji Ito (Uzumaki), Ten Shimoyama (St. John’s Wort), J.T. Petty (Soft for Digging), Alexandre Aja (Haute Tension), Maurice Devereaux (End of the Line), Peter Cornwell (Ward 13)…. I could go on. *smiles*

Wow, that’s an impressive list.  After all these years, do you keep a coolly professional and detached demeanor or do you get a small thrill of anticipation every time a new submission arrives?

Not every time one arrives.  In the couple of months before the fest I reckon I spend maybe three full days (9am till about 7pm) just watching back-to-back screeners.  We programme a maximum of 10% of what we see—often less—so you can imagine the hours and hours spent watching the rest.  It can be frustrating when you see a movie that is really strong in a lot of ways but just not right for us, but then you see something that is perfect and that’s when there are goosebumps.  Suddenly I’m not seeing it on a small screen, it’s like I’m watching it from the back row in a packed cinema, and that’s when I know it’s right.

Watching horror movies in the dead of night—even all night long… what makes that such a special way to experience the genre?

The world feels different when most other people are asleep.  It’s time out of time, I think.  For people who have grown up with the festival and now have more responsibilities and commitments, it’s a real throwback to being a teenager when we could just stay up all night, getting drunk and watching horror movies without worrying about the next day.  Also, when we were younger we probably had the stamina to do that without suffering quite so much!  There’s that fantastic feeling in the cinema that, yeah, all the sensible people are asleep so that’s our cue to unwrap the sarnies [“sandwiches” for us Yanks], get the beers in and settle back for a sneaky ten hours of grue.

  And horror is so theatrical—jumping on your own in the dark is one thing, but jumping when 300 other people jump is a much better thrill!  Also, maybe it helps that at a busy festival, no one has to go down the dark corridor for a pee all on their own after a creepy movie!

Tell us a bit about the significance of the Read by Dawn anthologies that you curate.*  How important is it to connect the literary with the cinematic—either for you personally or for the health of the genre?

It’s vital, in both ways. The first thing that will spoil a film for me is a weak story.  Story is everything, unless it’s an out ‘n out bloodbath but even then I’m tempted to think there’s only so much f/x you can watch before repetition and boredom set in.  The more mainstream cack there is—oh, I dunno, take some dumb teenagers, put them in the woods, pick ‘em off one by one, blah blah blah—the more I crave a film that actually wants me to think about it.

As any horror fan will tell you, it’s possible to be far more scared by the images your subconscious will generate than by 99% of movie images.  A really classy, effective horror film will show you very little.  The Thing, or Alien, or the original The Haunting—these films will show you just enough so you think you know what you’re dealing with, but after that it’s character, tension and atmosphere all the way.

Most screen horror isn’t confident enough to let you engage your imagination—the point was made recently in a Guardian article that for some reason, it’s hard to watch a film these days without having to watch someone vomiting on screen and ever since I read that, I’ve noticed it more and more.  It hammers home to me how unsubtle films can be and reinforces the fact that most horror films just aren’t scary.  Some soundtrack screeching will induce reflex spasms, but not actual fear.  For that to happen, you have to help the audience scare themselves.  Where did all the subtlety go?  Trouble is, I guess, that the target audience is about 20 years younger than me, so getting a real kick from a horror movie is becoming a rarity.

The anthologies are a joy to curate and edit because ultimately I’m a fan of the genre, so being able to source and profile quality both on screen and on the page completes the cycle for me.

From your vantage point, what does horror look like internationally?  For example, do you find that some countries have fans who are quite aware of what’s going on globally whereas others really have their eyes opened by attending Dead by Dawn?

Part of Dead by Dawn’s job is to introduce material that fans might not otherwise discover by themselves or have access to.  I find that horror fans, for the most part, relish the opportunity to be reminded why they fell in love with the genre in the first place and will consume much more than fans of almost any other genre.

With horror becoming so consistently commercially viable in the last decade, mainstream screens have been saturated with such crap it just takes my breath away.  The state of independent horror seems to me to be very healthy but too much of it is being bought, sat on indefinitely and eventually punted out without much fanfare onto DVD and that’s what’s unhealthy.  The good films get lost.  A festival like Dead by Dawn is there to create some breathing space and to allow calmer consideration of individual movies, I hope.  Of all the places I go to watch horror films with horror fans, I find the fans pretty much the same—totally devoted and just wishing their list of classics didn’t have so many ‘70s titles in it!

What are some of the things that attendees have to look forward to this year?

The sense of quiet satisfaction of having bought a ticket for the best genre festival in the UK?  The fact is, I can’t tell you just yet, but with only one film left to book, the line-up is pretty stunning with some incredible new indie titles with lots of cast and crew around.  Also, there’s some fabulous classics that just don’t get to the big screen very often.  I’m also really proud of the shorts programmes—they are just fantastic.  A full schedule will be posted on the website nearer the time, but people can always visit our site and sign up for our mailing list.

Great, and thanks so much for your time.

*Full disclosure:  the interviewer has a story in Read by Dawn’s 2008 volume.