A Scrappy New Downtown Film Festival Bets Big on Monsters and Machines

NEW YORK — At a downtown theater last weekend, the line for a midnight screening stretched around the block, past a cluster of filmmakers nervously eyeing the crowd and a homemade banner announcing the arrival of a festival that did not exist a year ago. The inaugural edition of a scrappy new genre-film festival — devoted entirely to horror, science fiction, fantasy, and the hard-to-categorize — has staked a claim in a city whose film scene, its organizers argue, has too often treated genre work as a guilty pleasure rather than an art form.

The festival was founded by a pair of programmers who met working the concession stand of a repertory cinema and bonded over a shared frustration: the movies they loved most, the low-budget creature features and cerebral science-fiction shorts, rarely got the red-carpet treatment. "There are a hundred festivals in this city for serious dramas about serious feelings," one co-founder said. "We wanted one for the weird stuff. The stuff people actually stay up until 2 a.m. to watch."

The lineup skewed heavily toward first-time directors and micro-budget productions, many of them shot in and around New York on a shoestring. A standout among the premieres was a claustrophobic thriller set entirely inside a stalled elevator, shot over four nights in a real office building after hours. Another, a science-fiction short about a delivery robot developing a conscience, drew the festival's biggest ovation and, its director hopes, the attention of a distributor.

Genre festivals occupy a particular niche in film culture, prizing invention and audacity over polish, and this one leaned into that ethos with midnight screenings, live musical accompaniment for a silent horror revival, and a costume contest that spilled into the surrounding streets. The atmosphere, attendees said, felt less like a stuffy industry showcase than a raucous convention of true believers who had finally found their room.

Not every gamble paid off. A handful of screenings drew sparse crowds, and the festival's shoestring budget showed in the occasional technical hiccup and the volunteer staff's evident exhaustion by the final day. But the organizers insisted that turnout exceeded their modest expectations, and that the enthusiasm of the audiences — who cheered practical effects and groaned at cheap jump scares with equal delight — vindicated the entire risky endeavor.

The co-founders are already planning a second edition, with hopes of expanding to a larger venue and adding a competition for local student filmmakers. "We proved there's an audience here that's been ignored," one said, surveying the wreckage of the closing-night party. "People in this city will absolutely show up at midnight to watch a robot have a crisis of conscience. We just had to be the ones dumb enough to book it."