Keene State students got into the spirit of the Halloween season by watching student-made films inspired by the holiday at Keene State Media Productions’ Halloween Film Fest.
The event, which took place on October 24 in KSC’s Putnam Theater, was open to submissions from any student on campus. The submitted films were screened for an audience of students, who were offered a selection of free seasonal food to enjoy while watching the films.
After all of the films had been shown, everyone involved in the making of the films who was in attendance participated in a Q&A session with the audience. The film producers and actors shared their experiences throughout the process of creating the films.
Senior Colin Murphy, president of Keene State Media Productions, the organization that put on the event, was also involved in the creation of two of the films that were shown.
According to Murphy, the idea behind the event was about building community. “We’re hoping to just get people across the campus to come together, watching some Halloween films and just really bond over working together and then viewing it in the end,” Murphy said.
Senior Jacob Conway, vice president of Keene State Media Productions, was the cinematographer and co-writer of “Divination,” one of the event’s films.
Conway, who is a film major, said the film was originally created for one of his classes. Conway said he enjoyed the experience of sharing his work with other students at the film festival. With four years of experience in classes, Conway said he felt comfortable with the process of sharing his work with others, and found it to be beneficial.
“Now though, it’s relieving. Especially when criticisms and analyses come into play, because the way that I see it is that the more people who watch it are the more people who could say, ‘This is bad and this is good.’ And with both of those comments, the film can only get better the more people watch it,” Conway said.
Additionally, Conway discussed how he would feel about seeing more events like this on campus in the future.
“I would absolutely love it, because this is for everybody. This is an outlet for people to get excited about making stuff,” Conway said. “It’s just so much fun to have events like this to build a community because we all share the creative passion of making films and media, so having events like this just gets me excited.”
First-year student Jae Campanelli attended the event as an audience member. Campanelli said she enjoyed the event and the films shown, “I thought they were so good, I thought they were entertaining and the food was really good.”
Campanelli added that she would “absolutely” be excited to see events like this happen again in the future.
Justin Dearborn can be reached at
