Horrifying new film festival debuts just in time for Halloween

In a dimly lit theater, the last survivors of an obliterated culture search for spiritual bonds in a reality show from hell. This isn’t a nightmare — it’s just one of the films featured at the inaugural Pest Control Film Festival, a one-day horror movie festival running noon to 8 p.m. Saturday (Oct. 19) at the Historic Howell Theater.

While the organizers use “horror festival” as shorthand, co-founder Jack Pratt was quick to clarify the breadth of the programming.

“We’re including traditional horror, B movies, experimental oddities, grindhouse, gory films, animated movies and the like,” said Pratt, who founded the festival with his friend and filmmaking collaborator Lee Ivy.

The day promises to be full of “bizarre, esoteric and disquieting” cinema.

“Horror audiences are very open to thinking outside the box,” Pratt said. “We literally have a movie that’s just about balloons.”

Born from a New Year’s Eve sighting of a “decrepit, gnarly-looking pest control van” in Chicago, Pratt and Ivy, who have collaborated on short films since 2016, have had this idea in mind for the past seven years. They previously worked with the now-defunct Threadbare Mitten Film Festival and have judged for the Capital City Film Festival.

“We’ve had a lot of fun judging films, curating them, scheduling them, watching them,” Pratt said. “Eventually we thought, ‘Why don’t we just do our own festival?’”

Saturday will feature three blocks of films, each containing three shorts and one feature-length movie. Highlights include “The Triangular Door,” a short narrated by Canadian screenwriter and director Guy Maddin and shot on Super 8 film, and “Burnt Flowers,” a feature from the United Kingdom starring Laurence Harvey of “The Human Centipede 2” fame.

The festival is restricted to ages 18 and older, with tickets priced at $10 for each individual block or $20 for an all-day pass. The first block runs from noon to 2:30 p.m., the second from 3 to 5:30 p.m., and the third from 6 to 8 p.m. Synopses for all the films are available at pestcontrolfilmcollective.com/film-festival.

As the festival draws closer, the local community of filmmakers and horror enthusiasts has been reaching out to organizers to ask about networking.

“We didn’t plan for that, but absolutely. Shoot your shot,” Pratt said. He noted that the breaks between film blocks are the perfect time for attendees to meet up and network.

“We’re thrilled to bring together this community of filmmakers and movie lovers,” he said.