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To mark the digital release of the acclaimed period horror film Fright on Prime, writer and director Warren Dudley reflects on the challenges/joys of indie filmmaking, his passion for football and what frightens him.

Your latest film, Fright, recently enjoyed a successful World premiere at FrightFest 2024, where it was compared to The Haunting and The Innocents. Describe what the occasion was like.

The entire Frightfest experience was the usual festival mix of nervous excitement and terror! It was the first time the cast and crew were seeing the film too so I was really hoping they would love how it turned out – and I think they did. The paying audience added even more pressure, being made up of seasoned horror fans who, by that point, had already watched around 25 films over the weekend so that was quite stressful.

However, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive from the audience and the Frightfest critics.

Stars: Gwyneth Evans, Jill Priest, Daniel Tuite, Jamie Martin | Written and Directed by Warren Dudley

It’s a rare feat for a film to convincingly transport its audience back in time and believably sustain the world it builds, but that is exactly what Warren Dudley’s Fright achieves.

A love letter to 1950s cinema, Fright is a gothic horror film that follows Emily (Gwyneth Evans), who is on the cusp of adulthood. Yet, her liberation and personal freedoms are constrained by her agoraphobia as well as her domineering mother (Jill Priest), who is intent on keeping Emily confined to the house. At the brink of mental collapse, Emily is haunted by a malevolent force – a gnarled black hand that represents Emily’s trauma and will stop at nothing to use it against her.

Stories about a protagonist haunted by a ghostly apparition are not unique. Still, Dudley offers a fresh...

1937. Emily (Gwyneth Evans) is close to becoming an adult but her forthcoming eighteenth birthday won’t be much of a cause for celebration as, due to chronic agoraphobia. she has never left the rambling, crumbling gothic pile which is her home. Haunted by visions of a gnarled, black hand, Emily longs for the day her long absent father will return home and save her, but her strict, overbearing mother (Jill Priest) insists that he is gone forever and that Emily needs to be more concerned with the terrors lurking outside…

In an era with so much horror that’s cranked up to eleven in terms of sound and fury, it’s pleasing to take the odd detour into a simpler, more measured time. Warren Dudley’s Fright, presented in black and white and performed in that slightly mannered method of many a 1950s Brit chiller, evokes the atmosphere of those...