Matt James, drummer for indie band Gene, is not an obvious starting point for a Halloween Society history/overview, or whatever, but in a weird way we owe it all to him! Matt The Hat, as he became known in the gossip columns of the music press, was booking bands on Thursday nights down at Brixton's now defunct Vox Club. I'd been doing some DJing for him down there, and got chatting about my enthusiasm for South London's amazing and anarchic Exploding Cinema events; me and my colleague, Tim Harding, had screened a couple of our lo-budget shorts at their events. Matt suggested that we could try something in a similar vein at the Vox. Gene were just getting interest from labels, and their manager agreed to help with some promotion for a short film night, which we dubbed, kind of obviously, 20th Century Vox. Iattended Peeping Tom's, then ran by filmmaker Kaprice Kea, to source short film work, and contacted Mark Aitken's now defunct Short Film Agency.

I didn't want to source films from Exploding as they may have considered us competition, even though we'd always planned to do more of a programmed event, unlike their 'anything goes' policy. So with a selection of our own efforts as well, myself and Tim did the first night in March 1995 with compere Eddie Sponge, a Vic Reeves Big Night Out regular who we knew from the New Cross comedy circuit. Two events attracted a ragtag of interested film folk from Peeping Toms and NME (through Matt's connections) to watch a small selection of (not very good?) VHS projected shorts, but it was never going to set the film world alight. Gene got signed, and Matt pulled out of the Vox, so we were venue-less.

I decided that if we were to do anymore of these we should really move to where the film industry is - Soho. We trailed around looking for cheap rooms above pubs around Dean Street and Wardour Street; the sort of places that hire out for pub cabaret nights, and decided on The Crown & Two Chairman. Also at this time, I started a new job within the British Council's Films Department, a civil service organisation that promotes British films, including new short films, to international film festivals. My eyes were opened to the vast amount and never-ending supply of short films - from colleges, from big budget production houses, from DIY independent filmmakers. So programming a selection of British Council work (including Andrew Kotting's still powerful Smart Alek) we had our first Halloween Society film night, still VHS projection, and still with the Northern comedy of Eddie Sponge. We used the name Halloween Society as a last resort; it came from our (not overly serious) interest in paganism that stemmed from being hippies and metalers at school. It was a name to conjure up images of a weird Victorian secret society, such as the Hellfire Club, that met regularly and, well, did weird things! We'd also used the name as a production company on some films and low budget pop promos. Anyway, the night went ahead with a strong short film programme and... five people turned up!

The landlord at the Chair was not up for taking another chance with us, so another recce around Soho's streets found us Nellie Deans. Navigating the video projector around the pool table, we decided to screen a low-budget gore mini feature, advertising it as our gore-fest night. I'm not a big fan of the whole horror gore scene with its comedy decapitations and excess bloodletting, but it certainly had them queuing up down Dean Street. We did a second successful night, starting to screen animation such as the eventual TV commissioned Pond Life and Rex The Runt. For further Halloween Society events we now needed a larger room, and we moved over to the Clachan behind Liberty's for a further three screenings before taking the plunge to find a major venue in Central London. This was only November of 1995; given that we'd only started in March of the same year, this was quite a fast rise...