This year’s New Blood participants have been identified and will attend Arrow FrightFest for a special mentoring session in Central London at the festival’s opening on Thursday 25th August. These intrepid filmmakers will pitch their feature script ideas to a panel of industry professionals.
After a record number of submissions, eight projects were chosen to present to the four mentors. These submissions come from all over the UK and demonstrated amazing imagination from the creators. The Excellent Eight and their respective projects are Hail Santa by Jonny Grant, She Knows Why!!! by Alix Austin and Keir Siewert (AK), Caravanserai by Ayad Andrews, Crave by David Yorke, This House Is Fucked by James M. Macleod, Crawl To Me by Penelope Yeulet & Ruby Abbiss, Ovipositor by Elizabeth Parikh, and Vessel by Ellena Loughrey.
The successfully shortlisted applicants will workshop their ideas in a group setting, guided by top industry professionals and genre experts. Regular mentor Queensbury Pictures’ Giles Edwards is joined this year by Neil Marshall, Emmy-nominated director of Dog Soldiers and this year’s opening film, The Lair; Aaron Koontz, producer of Pale Horse, and the Scare Package franchise, and James Moran, prolific screenwriter of Severance, TV’s Curfew series as well as FrightFest’s very own Turn Your Bloody Phone Off campaign.
Following the selection, Giles Edwards, Head of Development at Queensbury Pictures, said: ‘I’m thrilled with our, once again, a fabulously diverse torrent of New Blood for 2022. This year’s crop is as wild and wicked as ever. It proves that the creativity of the UK’s undiscovered genre talent is a roaring, rampaging river of pure, palpable and delectable terror….’
New Blood is the new initiative jointly held by Arrow FrightFest with Giles Edwards of Queensbury Pictures. Its mission is to find emerging UK-based writers dedicated to the genre and nurture their projects from script to screen.
Arrow FrightFest 2022 runs from 25th to 29th August at the Cineworld, Leicester Square and The Prince Charles Cinema.
