/film-on-the-hill/ is a new monthly or so Capitol Hill film column. Have ideas for future editions? Let us know in the comments.

By Kyler Knight

The Make Believe Seattle: A Genre Film Festival just finished its run on Capitol Hill. While the festival is a testament to the city’s pandemic recovery return to an exciting indie film exhibition scene. There will be room for more like The Nightmare Emporium, a collection of horror anthology short films which ran around Halloween for three years in Seattle’s Central District and Capitol Hill. From 2017 to 2019 the festival gave local filmmakers the chance to watch their short films on the big screen with an audience of like-minded horror fanatics and lovers of indie cinema.

How do these kinds of projects experience a resurrection — and come back from the dead?

While participating filmmakers were more or less given free reign to make their short films however they liked, there was one condition in order to tie all the wildly disparate narratives together: each short film had to utilize a specific prop like a baseball, a knife, or a pair of handcuffs. But these weren’t just random props per se. Narratively speaking, these were artifacts hand-picked from a decades-old collection of strange relics by the Nightmare Emporium’s host, a sinister Shopkeeper played by Mark Waldstein. Between each short film the Shopkeeper would set the stage by dusting off one of his oddities and presenting it to the viewer like the Creepshow Creep or the Crypt Keeper in Tales From The Crypt.

Speaking to Capitol Hill Seattle Blog, the festival’s founder Danny Cork said the idea for The Nightmare Emporium snowballed from what was originally a personal project.

Cork

“I had been wanting to do a short film about a creepy antique dealer,” Cork said. “A couple of my friends had some ideas to do their own horror shorts and I thought it would be fun to stitch them all together.”

In its three-year run The Nightmare Emporium bounced between the Central Cinema and the Northwest Film Forum before the pandemic seemingly sent the festival to an early grave. At least, that’s the impression that was left on a few filmmakers who had submitted shorts in previous years. But Cork claims he already intended to take a year off after the 2019 festival drained him physically and financially. As a filmmaker first and foremost, he was always more interested in the creative aspects than the organizational side of things. It’s no surprise that working a full time job while running a film festival with limited resources on the side left Cork burning the candle at both ends.

To this day none of the three festivals recouped Cork’s investment, which is ironic in light of the 2018 festival’s title The Nightmare Emporium 2: Diminishing Returns. But making money was never the goal. The whole point of Nightmare Emporium was to create an environment for, as Cork puts it, “veteran filmmakers to rub shoulders with first-timers”. Still, in its second year Cork and others involved in the festival toyed with the idea of franchising it out, an intriguing endeavor which Cork believes would require “an Evangelist in every city” and, of course, a lot more money.

So, will The Nightmare Emporium ever return to Seattle? Cork certainly hopes it will one day, especially since he’s written years of plot ideas for the Shopkeeper host storyline.

Will we ever see Cork’s absurdist, macabre visions? It all hinges on whether Seattle audiences want the festival back or if they’d rather leave it to slumber in its crypts for eternity. If there are any horror fans or indie filmmakers out there willing to lend a hand or chip in a buck to bring Seattle’s most terrifying film festival back from the dead you can reach Cork at [email protected].

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