Events 2019
Abertoir in Space
At Abertoir Corp, we’ve always prided ourselves on making our film festival unique – and to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Alien and our sci-fi theme, we’re attempting something that’s literally out of this world! We’re thrilled to announce that Abertoir is following in the footsteps of many a long-running horror franchise before us: WE’RE GOING INTO SPACE! We’re thrilled to have teamed up with one of the writers of Alien, Ron Shusett, to record a very special introduction to our screening of the film. Before the festival, Ron’s video will be loaded onto a computer attached to a special…
Bad Film Club
Comedians Nicko and Joe know terrible cinema better than anyone, and we like to drag them here in order to demonstrate some true cinematic shit for you, complete with their own, very special, very silly live commentary. Regulars know what to expect by now – verbal abuse, free sweets and a truly terrible film!
Barking Mad - Gavin Baddeley on Lycanthropy for Fun and Profit
What would happen to somebody who binged some 200 werewolf movies in a few short months? In the name of medical science - and because he'd been asked to write a book about cinematic shapeshifters - author and Abertoir regular Gavin Baddeley did just that. The first thing he discovered was that while lazy filmmakers just squirted some ketchup on their mates and made another zombie snoozefest, or tied an actress to a chair and shot another shitty home invasion turkey, it takes a special kind of crazy to decide to make a low budget werewolf movie. But we prefer…
Donald Pleasence: Portraits Of Affection, Eccentricity & Mischievousness
Oct 5th 2019 marks the centenary of the birth of Donald Pleasence. A career that spanned over 45 years from stage to screen, adored by theatre and cinema critics, Donald Pleasence was undoubtedly one of the most widely known British character actors. With nearly 150 movies on his filmography, and countless television credits, Donald Pleasence defied typecasting and relished his reliability to engross himself into eccentric roles and quirky characterisations – from a James Bond super-villain to a dodgy bookie, from mischievous tramp to a dictatorial President of the United States, from Prisoner of War to Henrich Himmler. Independent scholar…
Gary Sherman Masterclass
Creating the Illusion: Poltergeist III and the Secrets of Practical Special Effects In an age where special effects are created by a computer long after shooting has finished, where actors react to nothing against a green screen, and literally anything can happen at the push of a button – the ability to create real practical special effects is a truly skilled art form. Many horror films of the past have relied on a dedicated team of specialists to bring nightmarish creations to life and director Gary Sherman is one of them. His 1988 film Poltergeist III, the final film in…
Norman J. Warren
in conversation with Tristan Thompson
Join author Tristan Thompson as he interviews renowned British director Norman J. Warren. Taking in his varied career as director of horror and sex films, and later production work, this is a wonderful opportunity to hear one of the giants of British genre filmmaking discuss his work.
Prince of Darkness
OFFSITE SCREENING
We’ll be whisking you away to a secret location for this year’s off-site screening. Marking Donald Pleasence’s centenary year with John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, we’ll take you into the wilds of Wales for an atmospheric screening and maybe a bit of devil-spotting…
Pub Quiz
The Abertoir Pub Quiz is a chance to win some fabulous goodies, and to show off your film knowledge! Don’t expect any sense of coherence (especially not with this year’s even shorter running time...!), but expect plenty of impossible questions, plenty of drinks…and if you’re lucky, plenty of prizes too!
Silent Shorts Vol. V
With such improbabilities as a car journey to Saturn and a soap-bubble excursion to the stars, the Silent Horror Shorts series continues its trademark exploration of all that is quirky, comic, dark and dangerous in the rich treasure-house of silent horror films. Once again, Paul Shallcross will be both premiering his newly-composed scores to this afternoon's six films and introducing them with his own trademark explorations of all that can so easily be missed when watching Silent Horror Shorts.
The Satanic Rites of Robin Ince
Robin Ince is best known for his work with evidence based sidekick Professor Brian Cox on the Infinite Monkey Cage, but when not being obsesses with relativity and black holes, he has been obsessed with horror since he was eight. Satanic Rites is a love letter written in his own blood to Cushing, Karloff and the giant killer crab novels of Guy N Smith. Expect bursts of Christopher Lee arias, Rabies public information films and memories of the day he made his English teacher vomit.
The Science Fact in Science Fiction
This year’s festival has seen science fiction movies screened made in the 50s right the way through to the present day. We’ve seen aliens crashing to earth in meteorites, man-made spaceships travelling to other dimensions, humans being frozen to travel vast distances and mysterious life-forms living on even more mysterious planets. It’s easy to write all that off as pure science fiction, but a lot of what we see in the films isn’t as fantastical as it first sounds. In this special presentation, Professor Andrew Evans attempts to take some of the widest used conventions of science fiction and separates…
