My sister was telling me that she loved October because that is the time when the weather starts to change, which that can only mean that the Christmas season will be upon us soon. Disagreeing, I told her that I loved this month because it meant Halloween was around the corner, and where there's Halloween there are inevitably Halloween movies. And not just a handful of big budget remakes like Halloween or perennial sequels like Saw, but a cornucopia of eclectic visions that challenge us as much as scare us.

As horror enters into a golden age of grotesque (due, in my opinion, to post September 11th angst being negotiated more successfully by the horror genre than any other), the cinema is seeing gorno (also known as gore pornography or torture films), zombie movies, and vampire movies, to name a few, at their prime. This year alone, the three best films released, The Host, 28 Weeks Later and Sunshine, successfully take elements horror and retool them in the most artistically ambitious and socially urgent of ways. In light of this climate it is only fitting that the flourishing horror sector finds a (haunted) home in L.A. as the seventh annual Screamfest at the Mann's Chinese Theater (6801 Hollywood Blvd. Hollywood, CA 90028) celebrates exactly as what's in its title suggests: screams.

Here we have a refreshingly upfront festival that celebrates one genre. And why not? The more opportunities fans have to gather the better -- tis the season, after all. Screamfest’s mission statement is to celebrate "the masters" as much as it does current horror cinema so it makes perfect sense that the festival kick-off film (Friday October 12) reflects both traditions. That film: George Romero's Diary of the Dead.

Of course I'm dying to see the new chapter in Romero’s seminal zombie series, but also intriguing are the films being screened in competition from October 16 through October 20 -- such as The Signal (a must-see if you liked the Steven King's novel Cell), Bogymen 2 (sequel to the hit 2005 film starring Tobin Bell and, a personal favorite, Buffy's Tom Lenk), and Wasting Away (a rare zombie film that takes the POV of an actual zombie; "zombies are people too" the film reasons). And you never know, maybe Robert Rodriguez's out of competition presentation of Planet Terror: Extended Cut (screened Monday October 15) will be better than the mangled version last seen in Dimension’s disastrous Grindhouse.

The bottom line is that the horror genre has a built-in community and by centralizing it with a seasonal festival Screamfest hopes to create a forum that legitimizes the genre in the face of many naysayers as well as codifying its enduring cultural impact during this turbulent decade.