Support independent cinema while keeping Halloween alive by checking out Seven Hells, a horror anthology pulled together by celebrated local filmmaker Jason Tostevin and Gateway Film Center president Chris Hamel.
Tostevin’s Hands Off Productions is a Columbus-based independent production studio whose horror/comedy short ‘Til Death traveled the festival circuit last year, raking in nearly 100 awards and becoming Columbus’s winningest short film ever. The experience gave Tostevin the chance to check out the wares of other filmmakers working with shorts, and he was impressed. He wanted others to get the same opportunity to appreciate the work.
“Today, there are a lot of great short films being made, and almost no established channels for watching them,” he says. “We went to lots of festivals, saw hundreds – probably thousands – of shorts, and I found myself telling all my friends and our fans to find these gems. But there was no way to catch them, really, except to track them down at the next festival.”
Tostevin set out to change that, enlisting the help of a local cinema that champions both independent film and the short form.
“I partnered with Chris Hamel at Gateway Film Center as my distribution and production partner, and he’s been a godsend — between his nose for movies and his connections across the country, he’s made the project even better,” he says.
And then? “I started tracking down filmmakers, trying to convince them I wasn’t nuts, and went from there.”
The product, Seven Hells, is a curated set of horror shorts culled from festival winners’ circles.
“These are fests that determine the direction of horror for the year ahead,” says Tostevin. “They get thousands of submissions and only take a few dozen shorts, and these are the best of the best of those.”
One up and coming director included in the anthology is Robert Boocheck, whose M is for Masticate ranks as one of the most entertaining shorts in the anthology ABCs of Death 2, currently in theaters.
Not every award winner was collected for the project, though. Tostevin felt the film had to hold together as a cohesive whole.
“This wasn’t a formula where we said, ‘We’re taking the winners from fest one, two and three and mashing them together,’” he explains. “We had a theme. Each segment is about people trapped in a living hell, and they vary: scary, funny, gross, WTF – all well-made winners.”
“The movie,” which includes Tostevin’s own ‘Til Death, “works as one feature, and has something for everyone.”
Seven Hells begins a weeklong run at Gateway Thursday, 10/30. Tostevin will take the feature to Phoenix next month and plans to book it in other theaters throughout the fall and winter before looking into home entertainment options.
A full slate of movie reviews is available on my website www.maddwolf.com. You can also follow me on Twitter @maddwolf and like me on Facebook at facebook.com/MaddWolfColumbus.