The search is over as this year’s New Blood participants have been unearthed and will be attending Arrow FrightFest for a special mentoring session in a Central London venue at the start of festival on Thursday 25th August where they will pitch their feature script ideas to a panel of industry professionals
After a record number of submissions, eight projects have been chosen to be presented to the four mentors. They come from all over the UK and amazing imagination unleashed in their script ideas. The grateful eight and their respective projects are Hail Santa by Jonny Grant, She Knows Why!!! by Alix Austin and Keir Siewert (AK), Caravanserai by Ayad Andrews , Crave by David Yorke, This House Is Fucked by James M. Macleod, Crawl To Me by Penelope Yeulet & Ruby Abbiss, Ovipositor by Elizabeth Parikh, and Vessel by Ellena Loughrey
The successful shortlisted applicants will workshop their ideas in a group setting under the guidance of top industry professionals and genre experts. Regular mentor Queensbury Pictures’ Giles Edwards is joined this year by Neil Marshall, Emmy-nominated director of Dog Soldiers and this year’s opening film, The Lair; Aaron Koontz, producer of Pale Horse, and the Scare Package franchise, and James Moran, prolific screenwriter of Severance, TV’s Curfew series as well as FrightFest’s very own Turn Your Bloody Phone Off campaign
Following the selection, Giles Edwards, Head of Development at Queensbury Pictures, said: "I'm thrilled with our, once again, fabulously diverse torrent of New Blood for 2022. This year's crop is as wild and wicked as ever. It proves that the creativity of the UK's undiscovered genre talent is a roaring, rampaging river of pure, palpable and delectable terror...."
New Blood is the new writer’s initiative jointly held by Arrow FrightFest with Giles Edwards of Queensbury Pictures with its mission to find emerging UK-based writers dedicated to the genre and nurture their projects from script to screen.
Arrow FrightFest 2022 runs 25th to 29th August at the Cineworld, Leicester Square and The Prince Charles Cinema.