We all have 24 hours in a day, but 11 students stretched those hours to the limit during Lafayette Film Society and Art Society’s Halloween-themed Film-a-thon last Friday.
Students participating in the event were tasked with writing, filming and editing a movie — all in 24 hours. Each group was assigned specific horror genres, lines of dialogue and props required for their movie.
According to the event’s main organizer McKenna Graf ’26, the three participating groups produced “some pretty funny, scary pieces.” Graf serves as president of the Arts Society and secretary of Lafayette Film Society.
“I don’t know if it was due to the fact that they were all engaging with horror, but it was quite impressive,” Graf said.
Isabella Gaglione ‘25, the vice president of Lafayette Film Society, noted that the group has wanted to organize a 24-hour film festival since the club’s revival two years ago.
“We were talking about integrating more hands-on, making things,” said Sam Cohen ‘25, a board member for the Film Society and another event organizer. “We heard the Play-a-thon that happened last year and were like, ‘What if we do a 24-hour Film-a-thon?’”
After being given the prompts last Friday, the groups immediately got to work. They used their assigned prompts to guide the creative process.
“Our prompt was ‘your mother wants us to come down for Christmas,’ Liu ‘25 said. “We were immediately like, ‘Okay, we want to do an intergenerational story about trauma and stuff, sibling rivalry,’ and I had a lot of fake blood at home.”
The group used the fake blood to paint pentagrams on a wall.
“There’s something liberating about horror and getting messy and breaking conventions of neatness,” Liu said. “It’s like exploring the taboo.”
Some groups explored creative interpretations of their prompts. One group was given the line “The dog or me. Your choice,” and chose to interpret “the dog” as a hot dog.
“I just thought, ‘What is some way that we could subvert expectations?’” Leo Ontiveros ‘26 said. “I don’t know, maybe I was hungry that day and I was like, ‘hot dog.'”
Ontiveros said his teammates, James Kohler ‘26 and Nikolai Gentes ‘27, got on board quickly.
After 24 hours, the films were all shown on Sunday at the Landis Cinema. Titles included “A Picnic Like No Other,” “Echoes of the Forgotten” and “Runs in the Family.”
“As a judge, some of the things that we were looking at were if they followed the guidelines,” Cohen said. “But also, we had to look at creativity, story and execution, both regarding the camera, but also with the story.”
“Did they do anything unique in the camera placement?” he continued. “Camera movement? Lighting? Did they take creative liberties in the story?”
Gentes, Kohler and Ontiveros would go on to win the Film-a-thon, with the grand prize of bragging rights.
Looking back on the experience, Gentes said he found it to be incredibly fun.
“It can be very easy to lose your passion for things, I think, especially when you translate them to an academic setting and you have everything else weighing you down,” Gentes said.
“Stuff like this really helps just kind of bring passion and bring creativity back into this thing that we all love,” he continued.
Disclaimer: Editor-in-Chief Isabella Gaglione ’25 did not contribute editing or reporting.
