Popcorn Frights Film Festival Announces 2019 Award Winners
August 19, 2019The fifth annual Popcorn Frights Film Festival has come and gone, closing out one of the more entertaining slates in its five-year run.
This year’s nine-night lineup included 74-total films, including 24 feature films, spanning over 16-different countries and saw over 5,000 moviegoers.
Popcorn Frights paired with horror brand, Alter, this year, a partnership which provided selected short films that premiered at PFFF with eligibility for review for distribution on the platform. The films selected were Andrew Hunt‘s Frost Bite, Starlets, from Marten Carlson, and Anthony Dones‘ A Doll for Edgar.
This year’s film jury was made up of Jonathan Barkan (Dread Central), Ariel Fisher (Shudder), Derek Anderson (Daily Dead), Jason Sheppard (True Horror) and Omar Usman, of Promote Horror. The group chose to select Adam Egypt Mortimer’s Daniel Isn’t Real with the Jury Prize Best Film Award. Earning Honorable Mention Runner-Up was the world premiere of Haunt, from the filmmaking duo of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods.
The Jury Prize Scariest Feature Film Award went to Z, from Brandon Christensen. Beck and Wood’s Haunt also garnered Honorable Mention Runner-Up in this category as well.
Carlos Baena‘s stop-motion animated film, La Noria, took home the Jury Prize Short Film Award, with Honorable Mention Runner-Up going to Paul Autric‘s Wild Love. The Jury Prize Scariest Short Film Award went to Other Side of the Box, from Caleb J. Phillips, while Alexandria Perez‘s The Final Girl Returns earned the inaugural Jury Prize Best Florida Film Award.
The Audience Award for Best Feature Film, for the first time in the festival’s history, saw a tie, as Villains, from Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, and Giles Alderson‘s The Dare, both garnered laurels. Toe, from Neal O’Bryan and Chad Thurman, accepted the Audience Award for Best Short Film. The two Audience Award(s) for Honorable Mention Runner-Up in each category went to Haunt (Feature Film) and Go Back, by Nathaniel Barber (Short Film).
All awards aside, our favorite feature film that we saw over the course of the week was, hands down, Victor Danell‘s The Unthinkable, a highly-ambitious Swedish apocalyptic offering.
The sixth annual Popcorn Frights Film Festival will return August 6-14, 2020, so get those films ready, because this year’s slate will be hard to top!
Click HERE for the official awards announcements via, Popcorn Frights, and HERE for our 2019 PFFF Preview, including a look at all films shown.
