Sunday 29 June 2014

Frightfest 2014: The Sleepy Queue

Yesterday morning my dad and I woke up at 3.45am in order to go and queue in an alley for four and a half hours. There is pretty much nothing else in the world I would do that for except for Frightfest, and it's actually a lot more fun than it sounds. It's not even as though we were being that hardcore. The people at the front of the line had been there since 6am the previous morning. I guess there's a thin line between dedication and madness.

Anyway, we'd decided that we needed to get there before people started arriving on the first tubes, because that's the big rush. Having said that, if we'd arrived a bit later we would have been around the corner in the sun and not freezing in Leicester Court, where the sun never shines. And we also wouldn't have had to stare at the poorly designed posters in the windows of the Hippodrome. I really hope they didn't pay much money for those posters, not only do they look shit, but they are written in pretty bad English.

But I'm making it sound awful. It's not. We took turns going to get coffees and chai teas, kept nice and full on croissants, and had remembered (mainly thanks to my mum) to take camping stools with us so we could have a nice sit down. We said "hello" to lots of people that we've met in the past, and chatted with the people in the queue next to us. I say this all the time, but there is such a lovely, friendly atmosphere at Frightfest and it's brilliant to meet new people to chat to in between films. We've met a lot of those people in the Sleepy Queue.

And if we hadn't got there at 5.25 in the morning, my dad and I would not currently be in possession of festival passes for seats right in the middle of the front row of Screen 7 at the Vue West End. We had put no effort into thinking what screen we wanted to be in, hadn't even looked at the spreadsheet that's someone has kindly put on the Frightfest forum. What we're interested in is leg room, and that's what we have.

So, very excited for the end of August. I love the anticipation you feel in the time between buying the tickets and the festival itself. And that all starts in the Sleepy Queue.

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