By MICHAEL GINGOLD
The festive fiends at Glass Eye Pix want you to have a scary Christmas all December long, so they’re launching a daily short-film showcase tomorrow, and they gave us some exclusive photos and words on the festival!
The Creepy Christmas Film Festival, which we first reported on here, consists of 25 shorts debuting at the official website one a day from December 1-25, created by numerous members of the Glass Eye stable and other filmmakers and animators. “This is the 10-year anniversary of Creepy Christmas!” Glass Eye’s Larry Fessenden tells RUE MORGUE. “Beck Underwood, my better half, animator and production designer on STAKE LAND and I SELL THE DEAD, put together this festival 10 years ago to be like an advent calendar, where you open a new movie every day for 25 days during December. She has brought back the concept, and it’s an amazing array of artists and artisans: people like Glenn McQuaid [I SELL THE DEAD], Graham Reznick [I CAN SEE YOU], Mickey Keating [PSYCHOPATHS] and also people from Beck’s world of animation and puppetry. There’s no real money involved; it’s just a labor of love, and an invitation to do art for art’s sake. What she did was distribute a word or term associated with the holidays, and each person constructed a movie based on that small inspiration.”
“There were 25 words,” Underwood explains, “one for each filmmaker, like ‘Santa,’ ‘gingerbread,’ ‘candy cane,’ ‘stocking,’ ‘snowflake,’ ‘Mrs. Claus,’ ‘elf,’ ‘wreath,’ ‘toys,’ etc. I’m very excited with the films that have been coming in, and people look to be having a great time making them. It seems a lot of the participants are channeling strange family memories and things that have haunted them about their own holidays. I myself was taken off guard with the term I picked out of the Santa hat, ‘Christmas tree’—but finally an idea came to me, starring a very mischievous critter that now lives in my studio under lock and key! [That’s the little monster in the photo above.] I would like to add that the films are, by and large, very short—three to five minutes—so viewers can watch each daily premiere or binge-view in chunks using the interactive calendar on the website.”
“I like that it’s multimedia, in a sense,” McQuaid adds. “When Beck did the Creepy Christmas Fest 10 years ago, I made a sort of abstract animation, and I’m tackling something similar yet a little different this time, so it’s fun to have that variety.”
“There’s so much texture,” Fessenden concludes, “because there are so many different approaches. It’s a real carnival of insanity.”
