FOUNDER’S MANIFESTO

By Fernando Perezgil

I founded the Sinister Horror Film Festival after spending years on the other side of the submission process.

As a horror filmmaker, I participated in hundreds of festivals and began to notice something that never felt right. Too often, the people who had spent months or years making a film became little more than a title on a program. Sometimes you barely knew you had been selected. Sometimes you won and the experience amounted to little more than a notification.

I believed a festival could do better.

Sinister was created around a simple idea: if the work matters, the people behind it should matter too.

A selection should feel like a recognition. A screening should feel like an occasion. Filmmakers, writers, actors, cinematographers, editors, composers, designers, effects artists, photographers, and everyone whose work makes these creations possible should feel that they are genuinely part of the festival.

But recognition means very little without standards.

Sinister exists to search for exceptional horror. Not the work with the most convenient story behind it, not the project that fits a fashionable narrative, and not the one that asks to be admired for reasons outside the work itself.

The work comes first.

I want Sinister to be a place where we can ask a simple question every year: What is some of the best horror being created in the world right now?

The answer can come from anywhere. From an established filmmaker or someone making their first film. From Mexico City or from the other side of the world. From a feature, a short, a screenplay, an animated film, a music video, or a single photograph.

Horror is one of our oldest ways of confronting what frightens, fascinates, disturbs, and obsesses us. It can entertain us, unsettle us, challenge us, and create images and stories that remain long after the lights come back on.

At Sinister, we treat it accordingly: as an art form.

My ambition is for Sinister to become more than an annual screening program. I want it to be a meeting place, a celebration, a platform for discovery, and a recognition that artists are proud to carry with them.

A place where being selected means something.

A place where audiences come to discover what horror looks like today.

And a place that continually challenges all of us who create within the genre to raise the standard of our own work.

That is why Sinister exists.

— Fernando Perezgil

Founder & Festival Director

Sinister Horror Film Festival