Bradford is remarkable in that it has not just one but four - or should it be three and a half? - successful film festivals every year. Tony Earnshaw, Film Programmer and the man behind the Fifth Fantastic Films Weekend believes this "half festival", as he prefers to call it, is definitely here to stay after five successful years: "We were talking to someone at the Cannes film festival recently and they said most film festivals fold after five years and we've managed to do five and the audiences are growing all the time so that augers well for the future. I'd like it to continue and be even bigger and even better. I feel quite justified myself in a way, in that it has lasted and we've found a niche in the market and exploited it because people do seem to enjoy it.
 | | 'The daddy of all vampire movies.' |
"This one had more to prove because horror festivals are two-a-penny. There's lots of them…If you were to put on a festival of westerns or war movies it doesn't quite work for most people unless you do an anniversary like D-Day but the horror film/sci-fi genres have got a very healthy following. It makes sense for us to something like this because it is the only genre that can stand alone and be successful, and theres a hell of a lot of product out there." However, Tony is not content to sit back and just watch the same people roll in to Bradford's National Museum of Photography, Film and Television where the annual Weekend is based. Strangely, in 2006 he relied on one of the most famous of all horror films to bring new faces through the Museum's doors. Why? Because it was shown with a live musical score specially composed by Yorkshire-based composer Terry Ladlow. Tony explains: "One of the continually popular elements of our programme is silent film. We don't do enough of it simply because there's not a lot out there to do with both decent prints and decent scores played by decent composers...Whenever we play a film with silent music, whether it's a Buster Keaton film or Eisenstein's Strike, we always get a good crowd and that's a purely commercial decision by us because we want to try and take an element of Fantastic Films outside of the weekend and bring in a different kind of audience because the people who might want to watch Nosferatu, and really buy into the concept of the music, are not necessarily the ones who want to come and watch zombie and vampire movies.
 | | A rare chance to get abord Horror Express! |
"What I'm trying to do in a small way is engender an identity which runs outside of the barriers of a horror and science fiction film festival. Science fiction and horror movies are often ghettoised and you think the people who tend to watch them are dressed in black, heavily tattoed and have bits of metal stuck in their face. Well, some of them are but I'm trying to get past the idea that horror films are just for kids and sci-fi geeks – they're for everybody! Nosferatu kind of sums that up: its classic horror, it's very intelligent horror and it's the daddy of all vampire movies." But why call such films fantastic? Tony explains: "We are not saying all our films are fantastic. What we are trying to do is play on the French 'Cinema Fantastique' because it covers several genres. If you want to overload it with horror, which we are doing this year, then no one complains. In 2003 we did the Lord of the Rings films, which are not horror and which are definitely not sci-fi but are very much fantastical in flavour, but again no one complained. We didn't want to be pretentious so we called it 'fantastic' and we hope it means all things to all people." Even so, it was perhaps surprising to find the controversial 1960s TV film The War Game in the programme for the 2006 weekend - but for Tony this is reality horror: "It's the ultimate in horror as it's what could happen if there was a nuclear strike. However, if you were to do a nuclear bomb movie today the chances are the things director Peter Watkins depicted in The War Game couldn't be shown because people would perceive it as being too shocking – people being shot for looting, children being horrifically burnt, furnaces being used as crematoria – and all of that was absolutely devastating to the average TV viewer which was why it was banned. I think it is very much of its time, but if you buy into what he was trying to do and you think back to the era of the Cold War and CND, The War Game which only runs to about 50 minutes absolutely sums it up, so as far as I am concerned it absolutely falls under that umbrella of realist horror."
 | | Christoher Lee in The Wicker Man |
In 2006, the Museum also offered a rare opportunity to see a few films which have ended up in its own collection: Horror Express, The House That Dripped Blood and Strip Nude For Your Killer. Be afraid, be very afraid! Well, perhaps not, but this was the only chance for many to ever get to see these films. However, what makes a film festival for most keen filmgoers are its guests. In 2006, Robin (The Wicker Man) Hardy and Julian (Darklands) Richards were the star performers. Both film directors are friends of Tony's and it's not the first time they'd spent this very special weekend in Bradford. Also coming along in 2006 was Robert (Dr Phibes) Fuest. Tony says the veteran director acted as artist, designer and writer as much as director on his films: "He cut his teeth on the Avengers [TV series] in the 1960s and made such a success of it that he got offered a big budget version of Wuthering Heights with Timothy Dalton which was shot up here. After that he did the Doctor Phibes movies with Vincent Price which is kind of high camp jokey horror. Price has to eat from a thing in his neck because he has no mouth." The 2006 Bradford Fantastic Films Weekend concluded with a screening of The Wicker Man in the presence of the director. Discovering that Tony Earnshaw has been writing a book on the film, would he agree that Fantastic Films was more than just a day job for him? "You've got to understand I was a Star Wars kid. I was 11 when Star Wars came out and before that I'd been watching John Wayne westerns and, suddenly, on the back of Star Wars there was a sci-fi explosion and that happened exactly at the right time for me. It shoved me into movies and reading sci-fi and horror. And who was in Star Wars? Peter Cushing. Peter Cushing was also in Hammer Horror and I just went, "Gffffff!", off in all sorts of directions. I've always loved this kind of stuff - I wouldn't make a career out of it but I do like it." Click on the links below to listen to Robert Fuest and Robin Hardy speak to BBC Radio Leeds' James Addyman about their scary creations which have made such a mark on the horror genre! | 
