Horror is a big tent for Portland Horror Film Festival (PHFF). Giving filmgoers the ghoulies for almost a decade, the weekend celebrates scary in all its many manifestations—hilarious, psychological, and pure gore, to name a few.

Co-directors and spouses Gwen and Brian Callahan got into the festival game because they owned a T-shirt company and started selling horror-themed apparel at Portland’s H.P. Lovecraft film festival. They got more and more involved with the Lovecraft Fest, and eventually the old directors handed the reins off to them. But, they wanted to go beyond Lovecraftian cosmic horror.

“We thought, ‘let’s start a film festival for all genres of horror',” says Gwen Callahan. “There are a lot of sub-genres under horror, in a similar way to drama. There’s all kinds of drama. Technically horror is an effect. You have sci-fi horror, slasher horror, dramatic horror, torture horror, queer horror, or folk horror. It goes with everything. It’s a wide field.” 

Past PHFF offerings bear out Callahan’s description: The festival has featured traditional and stop-motion animation, horror comedies, tense psychological dramas, meditations on trauma, gory action movies, slasher flicks, and, of course, zombies. 

Though everything at the festival falls under the banner of horror, there isn’t any one meaning in terms of tone or content. What unites the films at PHFF, in addition to scares and screams, is independence. These are films made outside the studio system, powered by fake blood, hard work, and sincerity.

The first PHFF was in 2016, and ran for just two days. Callahan says that 2020 was a major turning point: “The pandemic kind of cracked things open for us.” She and her co-director streamed screenings to viewers at home, and virtual attendees were able to communicate with filmmakers via Discord. When live showings resumed, PHFF grew into a five-day event spanning both the Hollywood Theatre and the Clinton Street Theater. In 2021 Moviemaker Magazine, a quarterly film industry publication known for covering film festivals, named the Portland Horror Film Festival as one of the 50 best genre film festivals.

The co-directors’ wide approach to horror is apparent in this year’s schedule, which kicks off June 11 at Hollywood Theatre. It includes 10 feature films and over 60 shorts from 13 countries. Non-English languages represented include, but are not limited to, Turkish, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, Arabic, and Indonesian. Several of the filmmakers will be in attendance at the screenings and talking about their films on stage. Opening night features actor Ethan Embry as a special guest at the Pacific Northwest premiere of Oregon-filmed Alma & the Wolf.

Eloise Lola Gordon in You Know What You Are Rose Marie Trimboli

For Callahan, showcasing the wide world of horror also means making a concerted effort to platform filmmakers whose work you’re not going to see anywhere else. That includes new filmmakers like Rose Marie Trimboli whose first feature You Know What You Are will open the June 14 Saturday Horror Extravaganza matinee. Trimboli describes the film as a vampiric riff on managing one’s mental health. “I have severe obsessive compulsive disorder, which gave me the idea of vampires,” she says. “I wanted to write a movie about my OCD and how I see myself…. The vampire archetype was a good way of exploring that.”

Trimboli calls the process of making her film “hectic,” as she worked to balance a day job with the logistics of making a vampire movie. A mentor referred her to PHFF as one way to get her film in front of audiences and other filmmakers.

PHFF’s evening block on June 14 will include The Scalpel, a 1936 black-and-white film by Richard Lyford that was once thought lost. Lyford worked for Disney in the middle part of the 20th century and contributed to films like Dumbo, Fantasia, and Pinocchio. His early horror short was only recently found, restored, and scored by Ed Hartman, a Seattle-based composer. 

Independent filmmaker Izzy Lee struggled for years to make her feature House of Ashes. She characterizes the film as a thriller about someone who’s jailed for having a miscarriage, coupled with a ghost story. “It became a point of frustration going the traditional route and pitching for years and years,” says Lee. “There are a lot of systemic barriers for female filmmakers. I’m positive that’s one of the issues I ran up against.” Eventually Lee was able to get funding together from producers and a Kickstarter campaign, and now House of Ashes will celebrate its area premiere in the Friday the 13th evening block of films.

Both Lee and Trimboli describe festivals as key tools for new or non-traditional filmmakers. It’s about more than just getting onto the big screen. “It’s not only an opportunity to introduce your film to an audience,” says Lee, “you meet future collaborators.” Participating in a film festival is also a way to potentially kick off a career. For instance, Parker Finn, the writer and director behind the Smile movies, had a short in PHFF in 2019 before moving on to larger projects.

That, and a kind of party atmosphere pervades the whole event. “I have met many, many friends and future collaborators at film festivals,” says Lee. “You’re part of something bigger and everyone’s happy to be there. It’s a joyous place to be.”

The 10th Annual Portland Horror Film Festival takes place at Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy; Clinton Street Theater, 2522 SE Clinton, Wed June 11-Sun June 15, single day tickets $20-30, full fest pass $120 ($95 until Mon June 9), show schedule and tickets.