View Map

The only people who ever seem shy about using dEdmonton are Edmontonians. Everywhere else people think it's a great idea, and they don't have a negative connotation with it. Like when we did the film festival last year, they thought the name was really cool. They liked it.

We're all thinking the dEdmonton Festival could explode. Especially with the horror angle of the film festival, Deadmonton, of which I was a part last year. This year, dEdmonton is going to be an umbrella name for all the Halloween events going on. DEDfest: Hellberta's Horror Festival will be the horror film fest.

DEDFest is actually Canada’s only true horror film festival. There are other festivals that go on, but they're all genre. They’re a mix of sci-fi with maybe some action thrown in there, things like that, but there’s no true horror festival in Canada right now that I know of. We’re the only one. So where dEdmonton wants to brand Edmonton the Halloween Capital of Canada, my goal with DEDFest is to make us the horror capital of Canada.

Horror fans love it. They travel to come to festivals like this. Last year we showed a couple of films that didn't get shown anywhere else in Canada, so I was pretty proud of that. We had some local films as part of it too, in between the main features. What I really want to try and do with the film fest is to keep it edgy, keep it unique, keep it interesting, and keep it kinda scary. Lots of blood and guts and gore, definitely.

We have to be careful though. I think dEdmonton is a really good marketing tool, but it's also a double-edged sword. If you start being lame or using it in mediocre ways, you're totally going to reinforce the name and spread it through the country. It fits a Halloween festival perfectly, but we have to be cautious. I'm very adamant that we have to keep it extremely edgy and arts-based. It just has to stay interesting and scary.