Exclusive Interview with Screamfest Founder Rachel Belofsky
Sean Decker
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With the 17th Annual Screamfest Horror Film Festival in Hollywood, California, in full swing, we sat down the other night with festival founder Rachel Belofsky to discuss the fest’s roots, evolution, and her outlook on the horror genre, nearly two decades into her career nurturing it.
“I created Screamfest seventeen years ago, after having produced a documentary that did the festival rounds,” said Belofsky of the fest and her produced 2001 doc Fast Women, an in-depth look at women in the sport of auto racing, “and we had won some awards (with the film), but the journey itself was not satisfying, and I felt like some of the festivals were just there to exploit the filmmakers. So I really felt lost, and after the experience I thought, ‘I want to create a festival that’s really about helping filmmakers.’ And doing a fest based in horror was fascinating to me because it’s a genre that makes this industry billions of dollars, but at the same time it’s so disrespected and is treated like the bastard child of the industry. And it makes me mad. Look at the work of Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson, Wes Craven, and the list goes on and on, of directors who cut their teeth on horror, and yet it’s still not respected, and it really infuriated me and still does. And that’s way I wanted to do it, and I initially thought it would be a smaller thing on the production side, but I didn’t realize that it would turn into the amazing event that it has become.”
Reflecting on the venues Screamfest has inhabited over the years, before settling into its often and current home of TCL Chinese 6 Theaters (6801 Hollywood Blvd.), “Our first year of the fest was held down the street at a venue that at the time was called the Vogue Theatre, which is now called the Supper Club, and the second year it was held at the Laemmle on Beverly Boulevard, which is now non-existent, followed by two years at Universal CityWalk, and then we came here,” offered Belofsky of the bustling lobby and theater complex in which we sat.
As horror cinema is often reflective culturally of the time in which it’s made (take Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and its satire of consumer culture, for instance), Belofsky said of the submissions she received and programmed for 2017, “It seems to me that we are going through very dark times in our world, and it’s very depressing, so some of the things that I responded to were the films with a light-hearted nature. Dead Ant, for instance, it just knows what it is, and it just wants to have fun. So I was like, ‘Good!’ Todd vs. The Book of Evil was another. It’s raunchy, funny humor, and yes, it was a spin-off of the television show, but it’s just fun humor. Double Date, Tragedy Girls, they are all sort of light-hearted in their own ways, so those were some of the things that we sort of gravitated to.”
“For me personally,” she added, “we need more films like [Michael Dougherty’s] Trick ‘r Treat.”
Related Story: Screamfest L.A. 2017 Full Schedule
Pertaining to the multitude of short films selected for the fest this year, of which Belofsky curated with festival co-director Karen Martin, “They were really diverse,” she said. “Some of them were just completely bat-shit crazy. There are some with great shock value, there are some that lean more into the fantastical and artistic, in addition to traditional slasher, etc. We programmed a lot of foreign (short) films this year, as they just seemed to dominate, and at the end of the day it is a competition, and for whatever reason, time after time, many of these foreign shorts had all of the right things. The acting, cinematography, structure, as where in some of the other shorts we received they were more derivative in nature, or the production values weren’t up to par, or they weren’t as fresh as some of the other films they were up against. Americans should watch more foreign horror!”
As for the closing night of the festival and award show, hosted by (full disclosure) yours truly and Cabin Fever star and actress Cerina Vincent, “We are very excited about that,” concluded Belofsky. “It’s taking place at the historical Roosevelt Hotel, which is the home of the original first Oscars ceremony, and we are excited to be back there.”
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