Bloodfest feature on ABC Radio
BLOODFEST FILM FESTIVAL is a youth short film competition.
We:
- encourage young people to be the creators of their own scary stories and characters.
- ask young people to actively participate in the arts as opposed to passively observe.
- give young people free licence in a safe space, so we as their audience get a glimpse into what they might be finding confronting or frightening.
As artists and producers, we created this festival in collaboration with young people and industry professionals.
Bloodfest is an opportunity to empower our youth.
In the words of Arthur Conan Doyle
"Where there is no imagination, there is no horror."
Boo,
Nat & Curly (Festival Directors)
WHY HORROR?
Why should kids make horror?
A lot is demanded of young people, and there is push for them to be creative. What about being creative in the taboo? Can a young person's interest in playing dead, playing thrilling situations, or playing horror themes be of value to their experience? We believe so. Combining scary stories and children is not a new idea at all. The infamous Brothers Grimm first published their dark tales in 1812 and are ever popular with kids that are thrilled rather than scared when the wolf finally appears… The Grimm fairytales were didactic in nature at a time when discipline relied on fear, and many of their tales such as ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’ were written to be ‘warning tales’ for children.
Horror filmmaking is a safe place to confront fears, secure in the world of make believe. A place to practice survival kills, where one can achieve great catharsis (transition from high tension to relief), or triumph - depending on whether or not the hero overcomes their foe.
Horror characters do the absurd, the unimaginable (sometimes even the supernatural), the terrifying, and the things we ourselves would shy from doing. Horror uncovers the possibility that there’s so much more to the world than what we sense or understand. Horror Films require us to face the unknown, to understand it, to make it less scary. They allow us see our fears and put them into context to play what if ? Often, the central menace of a work of horror fiction can be interpreted as a metaphor for the larger fears of a society.
There’s something about horror that speaks directly and instinctively to the human animal. Millions of years of evolutionary psychology have ingrained in our minds certain fear triggers - a survival instinct. Fear of the Dark where predatory animals might be laying in wait, fear of animals with large sharp teeth who would make a quick meal of us, fear of Poisonous Spiders who can kill with one bite. So ingrained into our developmental psychology that research done by Nobuo Masataka show that children as young as three have an easier time spotting snakes on a computer screen than they do spotting flowers. Research by Christof Koch show that the right amygydala, the portion of the brain associated with fear learning, responds more vigorously to images of animals than to images of people, landmarks or objects even though those are much more dangerous in our civilized world.
This may explain the shape of our movie monsters: creatures with sharp teeth or snake like appearance. The fear of being eaten alive also explains the cannabilistic traits of human monsters like Dracula and Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
But brain scan research in 2010 by Thomas Straube at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena show that scary movies don’t actually activate fear responses in the amygdala at all. Instead, it was other parts of the brain that were firing - the visual cortex - the part of the brain responsible for processing visual information, the insular cortex- self awareness, the thalamus -the relay switch between brain hemispheres, and the dorsal-medial prefrontal cortex - the part of the brain associated with planning, attention, and problem solving.
Excerpted from John P Hesse Lesson The Psychology of Scary Movies
The Human Brain and Horror - John. P. Hesse