I have spent a lot of my life in dark rooms full of strangers. Festival coverage comes with the job, and over the years I’ve collected enough lanyards to build a very sad wind chime. Some festivals dazzled me with their programming. Others opened doors I never could have opened on my own.
I have never attended one that made me feel as welcome as Nightmares Film Festival. That caught me off guard. I walked into Gateway Film Center in Columbus with my notebook and my usual festival armor on. Somewhere along the way I forgot I was wearing it.
The People Behind the Nightmares
A festival takes on the personality of the people running it. The Nightmares organizers are approachable and genuinely nice, and you feel that in every corner of the building. They seemed to care about everyone who walked through the doors, whether you made a film, bought a ticket or showed up to write about it. That kind of attention is hard to fake for an afternoon, let alone an entire festival.
Jason Tostevin gets his own paragraph, so here it is. Jason founded Nightmares with Chris Hamel in 2016, and the two serve as its festival directors. His hospitality made my time there a real pleasure. I left Columbus understanding that the welcome I felt didn’t happen by accident, and he is a big reason why.
Where the Velvet Ropes Stop Mattering
Nightmares has its VIP spaces and its official networking events like any serious festival. What surprised me was how little those lines kept people apart. Directors, actors, journalists and fans kept drifting into the same common areas between screenings. People sat down together after a film and simply talked about what they had just seen.
At one point I found myself talking with the director and writer of Looky Loo: Part II, which had its world premiere at the festival. We got into what it takes to make a feminist home invasion horror movie. It was the kind of conversation that could fill a panel. Here it just happened, between people who wanted to talk about horror.
I’ve done enough networking to know how quickly it turns into a trade. You shake a hand and both of you are quietly working out what the other person might be useful for. At Nightmares I mostly forgot to do the math. The conversations felt like the ones horror fans have always had in video store aisles and late night message boards, just face to face.
Every Film Deserves Its Moment
Independent horror lives and dies on attention. A small film can vanish before anyone knows it existed. What struck me at Nightmares was that every film I encountered seemed to matter just as much as the next one. A newcomer’s work got the same appreciation and respect as a project from someone with a long list of credits.
I kept thinking about what that means for a first time director sitting in a theater while their movie plays. The feeling in that room tells you whether you belong there. You can’t print that on a poster or promise it on a submission page. From where I sat, the room kept saying yes. Several of the festival winners directly credited Nightmares for their films existing at all.
Why This Matters
Horror is a genre built around fear. We spend our weekends watching people get stalked and possessed and turned inside out, and we call it a good time. The thing that has kept me in this genre for years was never really the scares. It’s the people who show up for them.
Independent filmmakers need places where they can meet audiences, journalists and fellow creators without fighting their way through a crowd of gatekeepers. Nightmares gives them that space, and it gave me something too. After years of covering horror professionally, I had started treating festivals as work. This one reminded me why I wanted to be part of this world in the first place.
The Nicest Nightmare I’ve Ever Had
There is something funny about finding this much warmth at a festival called Nightmares. The posters promise blood and the screens happily deliver. Then the lights come up and a stranger turns to ask what you thought. They actually wait to hear your answer.
I went to Columbus looking for good horror movies. I found those. What I didn’t expect was to find a place that made me feel so completely at home.
