‘Oldboy’ was a Secret Film Festival favorite.
Fans of The Walking Dead will appreciate the scene outside the Del Mar next Sunday, around noon. That’s when the 12-hour Secret Film Festival will finally grind to a halt, spitting out a couple hundred bleary-eyed film fans who have just seen a marathon of films, without knowing in advance what even one of them was going to be.
It’s a vision festival organizer Scott Griffin has seen many times now, this being the eighth year of the film fest.
“That’s one of my favorite parts, seeing everybody spill out onto the street at noon, in their pajamas and blankets,” he says.
Oh yes, lots of fans wear their pajamas to the Secret Film Festival, and bring blankets to cozy themselves up in. In fact, it’s a lot like bedtime, if bedtime were ruled by film geeks.
So why do they do it? Speaking as someone who has been to the festival many times, but made it all the way from midnight Saturday to noon Sunday not even once, I am completely unqualified to answer this question.
Thanks to the ludicrously low $15 admission, one has gotten a full return on their investment after just a film and a half. The next four and a half, as I see it, are pure gravy. And yet, every year most of the audience stays for the whole thing.
“I think there’s a little bit of a competitive quality, to be able to say ‘I watched the whole fucking thing,’” says Griffin. Maybe, but maybe they’re also staying around for the raffle, which he infuriatingly holds at the end? His excuse: “It’s a little bit of closure.” I also enjoy closure, as in closure of my eyes, but I am clearly in the minority here.
Every year, the films are a wild mix of genres, not at all the fanboy genre blitzkrieg one might expect. Griffin is especially proud of some of the wild shifts in tone, which started off right from year one with the gentle arthouse drama The Squid and the Whale (it hadn’t been released yet, which is true of many of the films and part of the reason for the top-secret factor) followed by the over-the-top cult classic Oldboy.
The tradition continues this year with a wide range of genres. Last year, Bobcat Goldthwait’s God Bless America and the hockey comedy Goon (known to fans by the shorthand “the next Slap Shot”) were two hard-to-find gems featured at the festival.
For Griffin, the bottom line is simple: “The idea is you’re getting a complete film festival, compressed into the middle of the night.”
The Secret Film Festival plays Saturday at midnight through Sunday noon the Del Mar.
