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$200,000 in cash. That is what the Ripcord Halloween Film Festival is putting in front of ten genre shorts this October, and $100,000 of it goes to a single filmmaker. Submissions close October 1.
Ripcord is calling it the largest prize pool dedicated exclusively to independent genre short films, and we went looking for a bigger one. We could not find it. The largest short-film prize we turned up anywhere pays $50,000 to a single winner — Ripcord’s first place doubles that on its own, and there are nine more checks behind it.
How to enter: Submit your short at ripcord.film, or go direct through FilmFreeway. The deadline is October 1.
The money, broken down
| Place | Prize |
|---|---|
| First | $100,000 |
| Second | $50,000 |
| Third | $25,000 |
| Fourth | $4,000 |
| Fifth through Tenth | $3,500 each |
| Total | $200,000 |
All ten finalists also get flown to Los Angeles for the live finale, with airfare, hotel, per diem, and airport transfers covered. Even California filmmakers who are not already based in Los Angeles will receive a hotel room.
Does your short qualify?
The rules are narrow, so read them before you pay the entry fee:
- Genre: horror, thriller, science fiction or fantasy
- Runtime: between 4 and 30 minutes
- Age of the film: completed within the past 24 months
- Language: English, or English subtitles
- Where you live: legal residents of the United States or Canada, excluding Quebec, at the age of majority
Entry fees run $30 standard and $25 for students, with a $27 rate for Ripcord Gold members.
And here is the detail worth passing along to anyone already on the circuit: the entry fee is waived for filmmakers referred by Fantastic Fest, Beyond Fest, Fantasia, Sitges, Sundance, New Filmmakers LA, FrightFest, Screamfest or Shriekfest. If your short has played any of those, ask about the waiver before you check out.
The audience decides who makes the final ten
The festival is built to put viewers in the middle of it rather than behind a jury door.
The Top 50 selections are announced October 12. From October 19 through 22, all fifty shorts stream free at ripcord.film, where anyone can register, watch, talk to the filmmakers directly and vote. Those votes determine the Top 10, announced October 23.
The finalists then screen for a live audience at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on October 29, where the winners are announced and the money is handed out.
Fifty genre shorts, free to watch, ranked by the people who actually watch this stuff. That is a better deal for a short film than most festivals offer, before anyone mentions the prize money.
The man behind it made a video game
Ripcord launched September 9 as a platform for independent genre film — a place where filmmakers sell directly to fans and keep the revenue from each purchase, and where fans follow, rate and talk to the people making the work. The Halloween Film Festival is its opening move.
The founder is Charlie Cleveland, a name horror may not know yet but gaming does: he co-founded Unknown Worlds Entertainment and directed Subnautica. That is someone who built a following by shipping something strange and letting the audience find it, which more or less describes the thesis here.
“Too many great independent films never find an audience, not because they aren’t good enough, but because the traditional path to distribution shuts most filmmakers out entirely,” Cleveland said in announcing the festival. “Ripcord exists to remove that gatekeeper and provide filmmakers with a direct line to the fans who are hungry for their work, and give those fans a real hand in discovering what’s next.”
This festival is the first step in building that home.
Charlie Cleveland, founder of Ripcord
That problem is not hypothetical, and it is not new. Great indie horror gets buried fast — we have written before about the films that vanish under the weight of everything else on streaming. A festival that hands the discovery job to the audience and puts six figures behind the winner is at least a serious attempt at the problem.
Serious Genre Credentials Behind the Festival
The programming bench is genre-native. Vanessa Meyer is Program Director — she heads The Genre Film Lab and has programmed for the Frontières International Co-Production Market, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival and Reel Love Film Festival. Serving as Festival Directors alongside Cleveland are John Hegeman, CCO of Wayward Entertainment and formerly president of Orion Pictures and Blumhouse Tilt, and Stacy Jorgensen, producer of Color Out of Space and Daniel Isn’t Real and the former COO of SpectreVision.
Submissions Close October 1st
October 1.
Four to thirty minutes.
Horror, thriller, sci-fi or fantasy.
Finished in the last two years.
Submit at ripcord.film or filmfreeway.com/RipcordHalloweenFilmFestival.
