I don't just throw these things together you know...

No, and the proof of it is, Welcome To Essex (which regular readers will be aware were the final words of the previous entry) is a new zombie apocalypse movie, a key scene of which was shot early the other Sunday morning in Brentwood High Street. I normally spend my Saturday nights in Ingrave, but this was all too psychogeographically apt to resist. The Gazette had rather gone to town on the whole thing – God knows what they'd do in the event of a real zombie apocalypse – even to the extent of producing a pull-out 'commemorative issue' in which the events of the film were reported as fact. A casual reader, leafing through their local paper without paying too much attention, might have been alarmed to read reports of a half-decapitated corpse found in Copperfield Gardens, or a woman killed by 'pale-looking rioters' in the High Street – I envisaged a War Of The Worlds-style panic, which would at least give them something to talk about in next week's issue.

In fact, most readers probably just tutted and shook their heads, having always assumed that it would come to this. There was, naturally, an article about the effect of the zombie apocalypse on house prices. A downward trend was predicted.

On the day itself I heard a voice say: 'Now everyone get to your positions', and then woke up. It was 7:30. When I left the flat at 8:10 a lone zombie was walking towards me down King's Road. In truth he didn't look so scary, more like a volunteer at a Face Painting By The Terminally-Depressed class. I thought he'd probably be the only zombie I saw, such is my luck, but I needn't have worried – the High Street was swarming with them. Or lumbering with them.

In the event it wasn't all that different from a typical Saturday night, except that it was daylight and you could clearly see all the open wounds and festering sores. The director, Ryan Fleming, seemed to be that tall guy who used to live a couple of doors down from us at Copperfield Gardens. Of course, we never spoke to him. As I remember, he even invited us to a party once and we didn't go, so determined were we to maintain our outsider status. Well at least now I can say that I have played a part in his film. A man in a high-vis jacket told me to get out of the way 'mate', and I did. Thus, I can honestly say that I made this film possible.

As I watched grey-faced people in tattered clothing milling about in search of direction under strangely appropriate shop signs (Co-Operative Funeralcare, Blockbuster Video – itself now deceased) I wondered if I was in fact witnessing a premonition of post-TOWIE Brentwood. To counteract this cultural apocalypse my suggestion is that they now make this an annual event. As Maldon has its Mud Race, so Brentwood will have it's Zombie Parade.

On the very same afternoon the Historic Chapels Trust were opening up the Petre family's chapel in Thorndon Park, with its skeleton-filled vaults, ransacked by Satanists in the 1970's for skulls to throw at police stations. The dead weren't rising here – the crypt was 'blocked by masonry', we were told, although a mosaic inset in the floor is actually a lift on which coffins were placed for their journey to the crypt just below. We weren't allowed a go on it, but if the Historic Chapels Trust is a forward-thinking organisation, it has no doubt considered turning it into a ride, down to the vaults, where wired-up skeletons will get up and rattle their bones for the delight of shrieking children. Why leave sacrilege to the Satanists?

My Dad was born in Mortuary Cottage nextdoor. Obviously, in keeping with the times, it has since changed its name. To House of The Living Dead.

Frightfest 2

Frankenstein's Army

It was very hard to resist a film with a title like this. So I didn't. This is a found-footage horror movie set in World War II, in which Russian soldiers towards the end of the war happen across Doctor Frankenstein (not the original, a descendant) and his contribution to the Nazi war effort, a collection of weird and wonderful anthropomorphic weapons. Found footage tends to imply a degree of authenticity – however, students of the period may be confused by the fact that the Russian soldiers here are speaking English, albeit accented English, from the start. The message here is: do not expect strict historical accuracy. So I didn't. There's not much plot in this, but quite a bit of forward momentum, which will do. It's a bit like a first person computer game, though I wouldn't know about that. Dave does, but he wasn't quite so keen on this as I. The director, Richard Raaphorst, got the audience to pretend to be zombies, and took a photo. Those zombies were more convincing than the ones in:

Cannon Fodder

This is part of a new wave of Israeli horror, a wave consisting of three films, one of which (Big Bad Wolves) may not in fact be a horror film. I saw the first Israeli horror film, Rabies, at Frightfest two years ago, and its clever play on genre conventions led me to expect great things of this. I was sadly disappointed, then, by this cheesy low-budget action flick which (mobile phones and bad CGI aside) could easily have been made in the 80's. Here a crack troop of Israeli soldiers go behind enemy lines to investigate reports of terrorist-created zombies, although the general ambience, I thought, was closer to paintball-scenario-gone-wrong.

Shock value comes less from the usual horrors than from the soldiers' racist banter, which is not the kind of thing you get to hear in Hollywood movies these days, and from scenes of Muslim women being shot in the head by Israeli soldiers - scenes which, since they are zombies, we were meant to be straightforwardly cheering on I think. Of course, world cinema often presents the viewer with such cultural challenges.

The director said, I think, that he had the idea for this film when he was ten. And made it, I'd guess, when he was eleven.

The Desert

Talking of world cinema, Frightfest's artiest offering (probably) gives us an Argentinian take on the zombie apocalypse, featuring a grand total of one zombie - and that doesn't come in until halfway through. After Cannon Fodder, this was difficult to adjust to – the film virtually had to break me down emotionally and then build me back up again. But it managed to do so, and finally this turned out to be the best film of Frightfest 2013 apart from, possibly, one of the ones I didn't see, of which there were about fifty.

It tackles the familiar post-apocalypse scenario from an unusual angle – a love triangle, with the zombie as eventual fourth member. The question it's really asking is: can we overcome the hang-ups of the old society and create something new? The answer is (SPOILER ALERT): no. But the journey is atmospheric and absorbing, and the movie bodes well for first-time director Christoph Behl.

Dave didn't think so, but he did appreciate the heroine's performance – specifically, her willingness to, shall we say, expose herself. Certain parts of herself in particular.

And that's Frightfest for another year. It was interesting to have another perspective on this occasion, and useful in that Dave seemed to like the ones I didn't, thus in a way redeeming my stupid decision to watch them in the first place. At one point over the weekend Dave made the extraordinary claim that he had opened a Virgin megastore 'in his pants', at which point I suggested that this might account for the drop-off in sales that had afflicted that company. I just couldn't have that conversation with anyone else. Among the stars I was thrilled to see were that guy from Human Centipede 2, Paddy from Emmerdale, and – well that's about it in fact. I told a work colleague I was going to Frightfest and got an unusually positive reaction – 'Oh, that's interesting!' It turned out she'd thought I'd said I was going to Cyprus.

You're Next

Oh yes – there's a sequel. This showed at Frightfest but we saw it in Basildon. An upper-middle class American family is brutally dispatched one by one by masked killers in Adam Wingard's home invasion horror, which both Dave and I found a pleasant watch. Viewing conditions in the Empire, Bas Vegas, might actually have been improved by the appearance of some brutal masked killers had they turned their attentions on the audience - notably two girls sitting a way behind us, who could be heard gossiping throughout, as if the events of the film were happening to people they knew, but didn't much care about.

This film makes an interesting contrast to The Conjuring and Haunter in that the American family here is not sacrosanct but thoroughly complicit in its own downfall. And it is also an effective shocker, with a certain wit about it – the resourceful heroine, it turns out, was raised in a survivalist compound. Nice, as the guy next to me (the one who wasn't Dave) kept saying - not at examples of deft screenwriting, but at the sight of people having their heads bashed in. Welcome to Essex.

Frightfest 1

For Elisa

In this Spanish film, a concert pianist recruits babysitters to be used as 'dolls' for her adult-sized, mentally-deficient daughter to torment. The potential for high camp grotesquerie in this scenario remains sadly unrealised, and we end up with the kind of feeble torture porn where victims are tied up with ribbon. An audience member commented on the excellence of the opening credit sequence, filmed inside a piano. He wasn't wrong – that was by far the best bit.

However, I went to Frightfest with Dave (Kempster), who – to my ongoing astonishment – loved this, proclaiming it to be 'intense'. So they can put that on the poster.

The Conjuring

No, this wasn't showing at Frightfest, but we took the opportunity to see it at Cineworld in the Trocadero. A nice family from the 1970's is menaced by a nasty dead witch in this highly-praised mainstream shocker, 'based on true events'. They soon call in the Warrens, freelance husband-and-wife demonologists who are like the spiritual equivalent of really good plumbers, only much less expensive – in fact, since we are assured that most manifestations turn out to be noises in the pipes, they probably are really good plumbers too. As soon as the family tell them that the unexplained knocking sounds they hear come in threes, they are quick to diagnose a demon at work: mockery of the Holy Trinity, you see. That's why you need professionals – I would have suspected a cheeky reference to Tony Orlando and Dawn's 1971 hit single Knock Three Times (On The Ceiling If You Want Me).

This has some very effective moments, but tends to chuck everything at the viewer, regardless of whether it fits. So quietly scary bits – a child insisting that someone is hiding behind the bedroom door – are in there alongside a generic witch who looks like the one in Sam Raimi's Drag Me To Hell, and at one point vomits red stuff in Lily Taylor's mouth. Taylor is very good but even she can't make her rather abrupt possession by the witch credible because there's no psychology here – it's all about Good and Evil, and nothing in between. The exorcism seems too easy. As Vera Farmiga, playing – rather well – one of the investigators, urges our Lily to fight off the evil influence by remembering the good times (conveniently symbolised by a family photograph) you begin to doubt her demonological credentials: isn't this entry-level stuff? A not especially imaginative screenwriter could have come up with it.

Dave was as ambivalent as I about this one.

Haunter

Back at Frightfest, Vincenzo Natali's film has a Goth-y teenager (Abigail Breslin) circa 1985 complaining to her parents that every day in her life is exactly the same. Nothing new there, except in this case it's the literal truth, since the whole family seem to be living the same day over and over again (same meatloaf, same episode of Murder She Wrote), but she's the only one who's wise to it. This is such a splendid evocation of the teenage situation that it's a shame when the mystery starts to unravel, especially as it does so in a way that is often more confounding than intriguing. Nevertheless, it finally does make sense, more or less, and the family turn out to be (SPOILER ALERT) dead, and being held captive in a collection of souls kept by the equally posthumous serial killer who used to own the house. The killer has effected the death of the family by possessing the dad, and making him kill them and himself, and now he's working on the present-day tenants too. The plucky heroine foils his evil plan, consigns him to a form of Hell and winds up back with her family in a form of Heaven. And I don't begrudge them this one bit. But I heartily concur with Dave when he pronounces this film 'good' in a not very enthusiastic voice.

There is a scene where the heroine expressly absolves her Dad of any guilt over killing his family, making her an unusually forgiving teenager (if my Dad had killed me, I'd have definitely spent a few days sulking in my room). This points to a curious similiarity with The Conjuring - both films have parents who kill or attempt to kill their kids, and who, since they were possessed, are wholly blameless. Were I tempted to make wild assumptions about the American state of mind from seeing these two films in quick succession, it would go something like this: we can do all kinds of terrible things, and none of it is ever our fault. Luckily, I'm not. Both films also have clocks that stop at a certain time: 3:07 in The Conjuring, 1:14 in Haunter. Make of this what you will.