The Telluride Horror Show kicked off yesterday, opening three days of scary movies, scary stories and extremely good people in the gorgeous mining town of Telluride, Colorado. This is the 16th year of the fest, and I'm happily back for the first time since 2019, serving as guest host.
Day One started with the event that launches the Horror Show every year: the ice cream social. It's a perfect representation of the friendly, wholesome nature of this particular horror fest: the whiskey flows and the blood spurts, but also there's ice cream, and black-billed magpies, and quaking aspens, and everyone's smiling all the damn time because it's just such a nice place to be.
The first day's movies included a riotous 40th anniversary screening of Lamberto Bava's Demons, in which absolutely disgusting things take place in a (German!) cinema, making it the most fun kind of cinema viewing possible. Man Finds Tape, from Peter Hall and Paul Gandersman (I know them!), Brock Bodell's Hellcat, Zak Hilditch's We Bury the Dead, Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks' Blood Shine, Randolph Zaini's A Woman Called Mother, Todd Rohal's Fuck My Son!, Rod Blackhurst's Dolly, and Grégory Morin's Flush rounded out the day's features. Plus we got two 16mm secret screenings that shall remain secret, even now.
My two favorite parts of Telluride Horror Show (besides the magpies) are the shorts programming and the literary programming, and Day One offered a bounty in both departments. I was thrilled to host the Chamber Of Horrors Shorts Block, bringing up fest programmer Brady Richards (writer/director) and The Adams Family's Toby Poser (producer/star) to intro their phenomenal, riveting short “The Chosen.” And it was well-matched in quality with the other shorts in the block: Inuktitut, Swedish, Spanish, Cornish and American films all offering the most diverse manner of subject, media and perspective. The only thing these shorts had in common is that they were all a really, really good time.
On the literary side, the festival's opening day featured the first in a series of Horror Summits hosted by author Jeremy Robert Johnson, yesterday in conversation with Sarah Langan and Paul Tremblay. And the evening brought one of the most popular events of the festival, Creepy Campfire Tales. Every year, the festival hosts guest authors, led by Johnson, around a campfire to read from their work or to share brand-new stories of terror. This year, the campfire element was rained out (though nicely represented through a Yule Log Fireplace situation), but the stories were as creepy as ever:
Johnson told a real-life ghost story from his past; the ever-prolific (and beloved Fango columnist!) Stephen Graham Jones read a story he banged out the night before about a bar meet-cute that goes VERY wrong; Daniel Kraus treated us all to a harrowing but ultimately beautiful excerpt from his upcoming book Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Saved My Life and Changed the World; Tremblay read what just so happens to be my favorite part of his terrific book Horror Movie; and Langan read from a hilarious and troubling sci-fi horror short story called “Does Harlen Lattner Dream of Infected Sheep?” Grady Hendrix was also in the audience and oft-shouted out by the rest of the writers, and listen, I have read at least one if not several books by every author in attendance this year, and they're all absolute bangers. This is no lightweight lineup.
And all that was just day one, whew! Here's what's on for today.
