You don’t have to wait until Halloween to have the stuffing scared out of you. Just journey downtown this weekend for the New York Horror Film Festival.
There’s a wide selection of shorts and features – with the emphasis on new indies – as well as a tribute to George A. Romero.
He’s the 63-year-old gentleman from Pittsburgh who gave us one of the most copied horror movies of all time, “Night of the Living Dead,” and a slew of other ghoulish gems.
Romero’s “Creepshow” (1982), based on five stories by Stephen King (who has a cameo), will screen tonight at 9 when the director picks up his lifetime-achievement prize.
“Romero embodies everything that’s great about, not just horror films, but independent films,” says festival honcho Michael J. Hein, himself a genre helmer.
“The man has literally thrown away millions of dollars by refusing to do movies that he had problems with. To us, that’s the spirit of independent film.”
A bevy of horror directors, including Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman, Larry Fessenden (“Habit”) and Bill Lustig (“Maniac”), will be also be attending, as part of a panel discussion at noon tomorrow.
No matter what your perversion, you’ll find a film to satisfy it.
Like “Revelation,” at 3 p.m. tomorrow. It features British actor Terence Stamp and, according to the festival, “flayed bodies, ravenous Rotweilers, flaming corpses, severed tongues and torturous traitors.”
In “Hell’s Highway,” at noon today, seven teen friends battle to keep from becoming lunch for a band of hungry cannibals.
“The Shower Scene,” a short showing at 6 tonight, is billed as a shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock’s most famous sequence, “with a twist for the perverted.”
The fest winds up tomorrow night at 6 with one of the countless films influenced by Romero, Dan O’Bannon’s “The Return of the Living Dead.”
Highlight: a dead punk rocker lurching toward the camera screaming, “More brains!”
Tribeca Film Center, 375 Greenwich St., at Franklin Street; http://www.moodudefilms.com.