Celluloid Screams Review: Sheffield’s Horror Film Festival

As I arrived at the Showroom Cinema on Thursday evening to collect my pass, an older gentleman approached me, confused, and asked sincerely “is it Halloween tonight?”. It wasn’t Halloween, I reassured him, but the opening night of Celluloid Screams, Sheffield’s annual horror festival, and that was why the lobby was full of people dressed in black clothing and sporting spooky makeup.

Celluloid Screams has been running for seventeen years and has hosted the UK premieres for a number of significant modern horror films such as Titane, The Witch, and Barbarian. This year was no different, and its twenty-piece programme (with three additional screenings available to those who purchased separate tickets) listed more premieres than they have ever hosted before. After retrieving my pass and my goodie bag — a screenprinted Celluloid Screams tote bag containing a high-quality souvenir programme and a random horror DVD (in my case a copy of the Soska Sisters’ 2019 remake of David Cronenberg’s Rabid), as well as a Drumstick lolly and a pack of Fizzers — I took my seat in the packed 272-capacity cinema in which I was about to spend about thirty hours over the next three days.

The festival opened with the UK premiere of Queens of the Dead, a fun, queer take on the zombie film directed by Tina Romero (the daughter of zombie progenitor George Romero) that depicts the apocalypse from the perspective of a group of drag performers holed up at a club night. We were then treated to our own drag apocalypse courtesy of performers from Cryptid Queers, a Sheffield drag monster show and club night, who, after introducing the audience to the dos and don’ts of cabaret spectatorship, each gave a short performance based on their favourite horror film.

We saw a terrifying striptease from Jada Love, who twitched and jittered as a nurse from Silent Hill whilst taking off their clothes (but keeping on their mask), a comedy burlesque routine from Folkme Arder as the ancient demon from The Nun, and a romantic ballad about Count Dracula and Mina Harker from the show’s host King Confuza (after calling Jonathan Harker a "cuck"), to name a few. Then, in keeping with the alternative theme, the opening night came to an end with a 40^th anniversary screening of the classic 1985 zombie comedy The Return of the Living Dead, a bloody and nihilistic romp in which the vicious undead clash with a group of equally vicious teenage punks.

Friday morning began with a premiere of the anomalous Silver Screamers, a charming documentary that follows a group of senior citizens in a Canadian retirement community as they set out to create a horror film. Despite its seeming incongruence with the rest of the Celluloid Screams programme, the documentary proved to be a favourite amongst attendees, ultimately winning the festival’s gold award for feature film through an audience vote, and the short film produced by the retirees, 'The Rug', received a glowing reception as it debuted before the final screening.

However, the wholesomeness of the morning quickly dissipated by the afternoon, when a 4K restoration of the controversial French horror film Martyrs reminded us what we had signed up for. Pascal Laugier’s 2008 film is infamous for its graphic depictions of violence and its unrelentingly despairing tone, and, perhaps surprisingly for a horror festival, it proved slightly too much for many attendees (“I’m not very good with torture” was an oft-repeated refrain). Martyrs was followed by 'The Occupant of the Room', a short film by renowned horror writer Kier-La Janisse that felt like a warm bath by comparison; a modern adaptation of an Algernon Blackwood story inspired by the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series.

Friday ended with a Celluloid Screams’ traditional secret film, which, having previously been the premiere of Synchronic, The Autopsy of Jane Doe, and even Paranormal Activity, was an exciting prospect. This year it was the upcoming Australian zombie thriller We Bury the Dead, which stars Daisy Ridley as a woman searching for her husband in post-apocalyptic Tasmania, and has possibly the most discomfort-inducing zombies I’ve ever seen (even now remembering the sound they make forces a wince).

The first screening of Saturday was Man Finds Tape, one of two films shown that were produced by Rustic Films, a production company founded by directors Aaron Benson and Justin Moorhead, who were mentioned as part of the "festival family", and whose grounded approach to horror fits well within the Celluloid Screams sensibility. There was no feature film from them this year, but their short ‘Jacques the Giant Slayer’, part of Wayward Entertainment’s Tales from the Woods fairytale horror anthology series, was screened on Sunday.

After this, Saturday afternoon provided my personal highlight of the festival: Scared Safe Vol. 2. At the 2015 iteration of Celluloid Screams they screened a film called Scared Safe, which was a selection, curated by the festival team, of 1970s and 80s public information films from the Central Office of Information (a now-defunct government marketing agency) that were excessively horrific to the point of comedy. Now, ten years later, they have produced a sequel. Scared Safe Vol. 2 featured, among other things, a film warning that “old fridges can KILL”, an anti-pickpocketing advert entitled ‘Snatch of the Day’, a road safety film starring Jimmy Saville, and an advert that pointedly asks “Do you know where your lad’s going tonight?”. There were also some longer films weaved in, such as Apaches, a hilariously ill-advised 1977 film that shifts bewilderingly between comedy and tragedy in its depiction of a group of five schoolchildren playing on a farm, each dying one-by-one in differing farm accidents before the closing credits reveal a shockingly long list of children who died in those same circumstances in 1976.

Despite the original intended seriousness of its films, Scared Safe Vol. 2 had the entire cinema howling with laughter, and at a festival for horror films that is no mean feat. Saturday evening then began with the UK premiere of Head Like a Hole, a no-budget Canadian horror by Stefan MacDonald-Labelle, who was present for a Q&A. This was followed by a short film retrospective on the work of Chris McInroy, whose work has been screened at previous Celluloid Screams festivals, and who also gave a Q&A. Both Stefan and Chris spoke separately about the importance of community to horror, a theme you may find surprising, but one that has ran through the entirety of the festival; in their opening remarks organisers Rob, Lucy, and Polly spoke to the value of uniting a community of like-minded people, before asking all new attendees to raise their hands and having them warmly welcomed by the regular festivalgoers.

The penultimate film of Saturday night, It Ends, was possibly my favourite of the entire festival. The debut feature of young American director Alex Ullom, It Ends is a stripped-back film about four young people stuck driving down an endless highway, only every time they stop the vehicle a hundred or so people come running out of the surrounding woodland and swarm the car like zombies. A thoughtful, if not particularly subtle, extended metaphor for the absurdity of life and the search for meaning, what It Ends lacked in horror it made up for in its simultaneous elicitation of laughter and existential dread.

While It Ends may have disappointed genre fans who came to see heads chopped off and lashings of fake blood (though, given it won the silver award for feature film, there can’t have been too many such people), the following film, Deathstalker, provided tenfold. A remake of the 1983 film of the same name and its 1987 sequel (“minus the problematic sexual violence”, we were told), the 2025 Deathstalker was essentially 104 minutes of camp fantasy sword fighting, as a series of increasingly unsightly (and impressively practically constructed) monsters were relieved of body parts by the titular hero.

As self-aware as it was silly, Deathstalker, a film about the seemingly endless joy of repeatedly pushing a sword through prosthetic rubber, was the perfect counterbalance to the Sisyphean ennui of It Ends. For the hardcore horror fans, however, Saturday night did not end with Deathstalker, but rather the “Mystery 35mm Grindhouse Film” screened at midnight. Because I lack fortitude I did not attend this screening, however I am informed that it was the 1985 sci-fi horror classic The Stuff. Fun!

Sunday, the final day of the festival, began with Descendent, the second of the Benson and Moorhead-produced films, and another of my favourites. The film was a down-to-earth sci-fi narrative, the story of an alienated (emphasis on alien) working class man who believes that he was abducted and probed after falling off the roof at his job. Extraterrestrial sightings were minimal, but the film carried a tension that built as the protagonist’s grip on reality gradually loosened. This was followed by the 1972 British anthology film Tales From the Crypt, a heavy-handed moral tale about five strangers each suffering karmic retribution for their respective misdeeds. The five segments differed in quality, but the film offered plenty of vintage horror silliness, as well as great performances from Joan Collins and Peter Cushing.

After this, the festival ventured into world cinema, with Japanese thriller Confession (the UK premiere of which was held back just for this festival), a violent and entertaining film about two old friends snowed in in a remote cabin, South Korean supernatural horror Noise, an uneven film about having noisy neighbours, and then the final film of the festival and Julia Ducournau’s latest, Alpha, a bleak but touching story about a deadly virus that turns human skin to marble. As Alpha came to an end, the audience remained seated to hear the winners of the feature and short film awards. The feature film awards were voted for by the audience, with bronze awarded to Head Like a Hole, silver to It Ends, and gold to Silver Screamers.

The short films, one or two of which were screened before each film, were voted on by an independent panel of horror connoisseurs, with bronze awarded to ‘Obey’ (a film which brought a sad groan from the audience after a forewarning of “animal peril”), silver to ‘Whitch’, and gold to ‘The Occupant of the Room’. After this there were a staggering number of giveaways, with a variety of posters, Blu-Rays, and books given to the occupants of seat numbers chosen from a hat. The night then descended into a bout of the famous Celluloid Screams karaoke in the Showroom bar, an activity which I am informed can go on until 3am, but I shan’t divulge the details here.

Celluloid Screams is an essential experience for any horror film fan, and one that just so happens to take place right here in Sheffield. Attendees are guaranteed to see a significant number of UK premieres of films from all over the world, with most of the directors, if not actually present, having sent in thoughtful video messages (my favourite being that of It Ends’s Alex Ullom, who talked about his love of The Inbetweeners before giving a “shoutout to the UK”).

There really is something for every kind of horror fan, from cerebral puzzlers, to trashy splatter-comedies, to the kind of films I have to half-watch because of the perpetual threat of something going into someone's eye. Celluloid Screams also offers number of unique merchandise stalls: there was an extensive range of horror film t-shirts available (which were well-worn by attendees), as well as books and DVDs from FAB Press, DVDs from Arrow Video (the sponsors of the festival), and a wonderful stall selling fun horror-related trinkets and knick-knacks (‘Zombaubles’, anyone?).

There was also a horror-themed, and surprisingly vegan-friendly, festival menu, consisting largely of burgers, fries, and cocktails, with the kind of amusing pun-based names that you’re slightly embarrassed to ask for (“can I have the The Last Voyage of the De-Meater Burger, please?”), as well as festival beer provided by Triple Point Brewing. In Celluloid Screams tradition the Showroom cafe also housed a life-size diorama, this year a blood-stained recreation of a 1980s living room, which held the mystery of a family torn apart following the rental of a mysterious VHS from a shop called Video Nightmares.

For anyone who enjoys horror, attending Celluloid Screams offers the perfect opportunity to surround yourself with a knowledgeable, creative, and welcoming community of like-minded people. It is also, importantly, a way of supporting a unique, grassroots project that is bringing weirdness and wonder to the city of Sheffield.