GRIMMFEST DAY ONE
Written by Daniel Benson
Grimmfest 2022 kicked off last night at the Odeon Great Northern in Manchester. Making a shift from an out and out horror festival to one of 'fantastic films' signals a significant shift in the focus of Grimmfest, but will it pay off? Well, over the next four days, I’ll find out.
It might seem an odd choice to launch proceedings with a short film programme (normally, these happen somewhere mid-festival), but considering there are two collections of shorts running this year, they had to go somewhere. Still, how better to get people in the mood than with some short sharp shocks?
Enough Sleep 
Starting with what would be a recurring theme through this collection, an exhausted post-natal mother has to deal with a constantly crying baby, eavesdropping the neighbours’ violent clashes via interference on the baby monitor and a husband who just gets weirder and weirder. Almost like Eraserhead with its perpetual white noise and screaming baby, it’s a disorienting watch that will have you questioning what is real and what is in the bewildered mother’s head.
Yummy Mummy
From post-natal to pre-natal, Gabriela Staniszewska’s 15 minutes follows an expectant mum whose identity is gradually eroded and overshadowed by the baby she is carrying. A stark message that women are not just defined by the children they bear, and a gut punch of an ending.
Ringworms 
Don’t you just hate it when the AirBnB you rent has a worm-worshipping cult in the basement? Incubation of another kind in Will Lee’s swift slab of body horror that features some truly revolting digital and practical effects.
Unheimlich
This entirely dialogue-free, monochrome Happy Death Day features a woman persistently fighting a monster in the rooms and corridors of a decrepit old house. Is it really a monster or something more personal?
Tranvia
Like the preceding short, it’s also without dialogue, but Carlos Baena’s haunted trolley car story makes up for the lack of words with stunning visuals.
Baby Fever
Rounding out the shorts comes Hannah May Cumming’s Baby Fever, a ‘70s set practical monster movie that again involves pregnancy. No cute bundles of joy here, though, as the offspring wreak havoc at a bloody prom that’s the bastard love child of Carrie and The Deadly Spawn.
The Loneliest Boy in the World
Ushering in mid-evening was Martin Owen’s heartfelt and endearing grim fairy-tale about Oliver, an unfortunate kid who lost his mother and faces incarceration in a psychiatric ward unless he can prove his normality by “making friends”. After a series of fatal disasters in his local town, the cemetery is overflowing with potential buddies for Oliver and all he needs is a shovel to expand his social circle.
Equal parts heart-warming, hilarious and grotesque, the film never quite goes where it’s expected. His newly exhumed companions fill the roles of both family and his new best friends, but rather than remaining as inanimate corpses they come to life and give Oliver the sense of belonging he’s always craved. It would be almost expected in this kind of story that some outsider would meet the family and we, as the audience, realise that the game of undead happy families was all in Oliver’s head but it's not the case. The once-buried kin he surrounds himself with both interact with others and protect Oliver when necessary.
The Loneliest Boy in the World will never win any prizes for scares, but for sheer feel-good entertainment – with zombies – it can’t be beaten.
The Passenger
Rounding out the evening was the UK premiere of the parasitic alien road trip movie The Passenger. When a group on a cross-country ride share run over a woman at night, it turns out to be the least of their problems. Crashed alien spacecraft and body-consuming creatures are the order of the day.
While there are no complaints with the mostly practical effects and the action when things get going, the build up to anything happening takes too long. If it’s intended to be character-driven, it doesn’t flesh out the cast to the point we can care about them, save for the driver and hero of the piece, Blasco. Still, we get worms, tentacles, buckets of slime and hijacked bodies that straight up tear people’s heads off. I just wish we didn’t have to spend so much time bickering in a van to get there.
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