Abertoir
The International Horror Festival of Wales

Norman John Warren’s horror films epitomise the very essence of 1970’s British ‘new wave’ horror cinema. Subversive, sadistic and sleazy…and directed with a raw cinematic skill and an unnerving style.

Norman grew up with a love of cinema and entered the film industry at the age of 17 and went on to carve out a something of a living freelancing around London’s film community. Making his feature directorial debut in 1967 with Her Private Hell, a moralistic sexploitation fable about glamour photography, Warren had an acute understanding of commercial cinema and in 1976 unleashed the self-financed Satan’s Slave upon cinema audiences and went on to produce some of the most memborable British horror films of the 70s and 80s. His films epitomise the very essence of British ‘new wave’ of horror cinema - subversive, sadistic, sleazy and directed with a raw cinematic skill and an unnerving style.

A writer, producer and director, Gary Sherman has a long list of feature film credits including such horror classics as Death Line (aka Raw Meat), Dead and Buried, Poltergeist III and the highly successful, innovative action thriller Vice Squad. He has also created and/or produced many television series including Sable (based on the Mike Grell comic book), Missing Persons and Poltergeist: The Legacy. Aside from his known creative abilities, he has run several successful production companies and holds patents on some hi-tech systems he has invented. A self-confessed technophile, he has been “possessed” by computers and new media since his first “516K word-cruncher” back in the Dark Ages.

Before becoming one of the UK’s most prolific film composers, John Scott had already accumulated an impressive discography of professional music credits. From nationwide tours with many of the UK’s leading big band & swing assembles to recording with some of the most influential British artists of the 60s (The Beatles, Tom Jones, The Hollies). Part of the UK’s vibrant 60s jazz scene he recorded and toured as Johnny Scott and it was his smooth jazz compositions he contributed to Norman J Warren’s 1966 short film Fragment and debut feature Her Private Hell. Scott has gone on to compose over 100 film and television scores, spanning every conceivable genre while working within a diverse range of musical styles, innovatively pressing boundaries that transcended traditional film score arrangements, and has been be embraced by fans of British horror cinema for his sinister melodies and atmospheric arrangements for films such as Trog (1970), Doomwatch (1972), Craze (1974) and Norman J Warren’s Satan’s Slave (1976) and Inseminoid (1981).

Antonella Fulci is an Italian writer, film lover and translator. She started in the mid 80's as a reviewer of X-rated films for Home Video magazines. In 1998, she created and ran a website about indie and underground cinema called CineXtreme. The next year, she saw the infamous 'found footage' of the Blair Witch Project on the web and wrote a book about the troubled making of the movie and its potential, in order to show the way to filmakers with great ideas and tiny budgets. She lives in Rome with her beloved pugs, working as a translator for the italian versions of documentaries about movie history and such - that she loves as much as every job that includes watching moving images on the screen. Daughter of Lucio Fulci.

Giada Mazzoleni is an Italian producer who has worked on numerous productions including True Love, Eva Braun, and I Passi Leggeri. She is also the founder of Paguro Film, an independent production company based in the Midlands that focusses on cinema documentaries. Her most recent projects were Moths to Flame and Fulci For Fake.

Robin Ince is probably best known for the Sony Gold award winning Radio 4 series The Infinite Monkey Cage, but when he is not being kept rational by Brian Cox, he has an obsession with vampires, ghouls, shadmocks and dark arts. With Johnny Mains, he edited two anthologies of horror stories, Dead Funny and Dead Funny Encore. He has made documentaries for the BBC about hollow earth theory, the apocalypse and Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds. He is also the author of Bad Book Club, a celebration of Guy N Smith's Killer Crabs books, and I'm a Joke and So Are You, a book about creativity, mental health and death. He has just finished a 77 date world tour Wirth Brian Cox, playing to over 250,000 people. He is the winner of the Time Out outstanding achievement in comedy award, The Francis Crick science journalism award and was nominated for Best Live show at the British Comedy Awards.

A graduate of a Master’s degree in cinema, French-Moroccan director Talal Selhami began his career by directing several short films. His first feature film, Mirages, was a thriller set in the Moroccan desert and produced by the well-known Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch. The film was part of the official competition at the Marrakech Festival, where it quickly won the acclaim of the public and the critics. In 2014, Talal Selhami set up his own production company in Morocco, Overlook Films, with a strong desire to develop other types of films and to further explore genre filmmaking. Subsequently, he directed Achoura, the first feature film with a creature inspired by Moroccan mythology.

Jordan Graham was born July 10, 1986 in Santa Cruz, CA. He first discovered his love of filmmaking at the young age of 13, and despite no formal training, he has spent nearly two decades producing a wide range of projects, from music videos to short and feature films. In 2013 he began working on his newest feature film, Sator, the namesake of a spiritual entity that profoundly affected his grandmother’s life and loosely inspired the movie. Because he was required to operate within an extremely limited budget, Jordan executed virtually every task himself, both behind the camera and post production. This ultimately resulted in the film taking 5 years to complete. Now awaiting the film's release, Jordan is currently at work on a screenplay based on his grandmother's journals in 1968, that will depict the emotional and psychological impact of a spiritual intervention she and her family encountered that year.

Dr Benjamin Halligan is the Director of the Doctoral College, University of Wolverhampton. His critical biography Michael Reeves was published in 2003 by Manchester University Press, drawing on interviews with many of Reeves's collaborators and contemporaries. Subsequent books have looked at radical cinema and 1968, music documentaries, avant-garde music practices, post-punk, and arena concerts. A study of British 1970s pornography on film, Hot Beds of Licentiousness, is forthcoming.

Gavin Baddeley is an English writer specialising in the devilish and decadent, Gothic and macabre, with a special interest in the darker fringes of history. In addition to penning numerous books in these areas, he’s written for numerous, diverse periodicals and newspapers, ranging from The Observer and Knave, to Metal Hammer and Medieval History magazine. While researching his first book, Lucifer Rising, Baddeley was made an honorary priest by the 20th century’s leading Satanist, San Francisco’s ‘Black Pope’ Anton LaVey, and has subsequently made numerous media appearances and advised sundry bodies as a leading expert on the dark arts. He has also made annually appearing at Abertoir part of his varied career, so let's hope evil keeps giving him plenty more topics to share with us.

Nicko and Joe have been confusing, disturbing and delighting audiences with their unique brand of comedy since 2004. Their infectious enthusiasm on stage and twisted creativity in their writing has resulted in many comparisons being made to other artists. These range from the surreal group 'They Might be Giants' to 'Trey Parker and Matt Stone', creators of South Park.
As well as their live shows they already have three CD's under their belt, "Geek by Proxy", "Wallpaper" and "Auld Tartan Fudge Box", the latter proving that Joe should never be allowed to name the CDs.

Silent film pianist Paul Shallcross is a staple part of the Abertoir Horror Festival, bringing his in-depth knowledge and passion for the silent era to the fore in his regular performances for classic silent horror films. He has toured many different venues around the UK playing many different kinds of music, but his association with Abertoir always brings him back here to perform his new music publicly for the very first time.

Tristan Thompson is an independent scholar & writer on cult, horror & exploitation cinema and has contributed towards a variety of magazines, fanzines, journals, festivals and websites.  He is responsible for a number of excellent publications for Midnight Media including Blazing Magnums: Italian Crime Thrillers of the 70s.  Tristan also contributes greatly to Abertoir, and his obscure and hilarious A-Zs have always been a highlight of our festival brochure.

Dellamorte is a DJ who has been involved in more scenes and genres than we can reasonably list here. From Northern soul nights to being co-founder of long-running London breakbeat night Rocksteady, to lighting up late night radio as part of cult electronica trio Codex Machine. You can now find him playing to local audiences on regular basis as well as at music festivals all over the UK.

Professor Andrew Evans is Professor of Materials Physics and currently Director of the Institute of Mathematics and Physics at Aberystwyth University. He has worked in areas far beyond the understanding of us at Abertoir: he has worked on the characterisation of wide-gap materials, and developed synchrotron radiation methods for the study of surfaces and interfaces. His PhD is in semiconductor physics. We nod and agree when he tells us things.