Ah springtime! Is there a better season than spring? Aside from summer I mean. Maybe, maybe not, but when it comes to springtime in horror films there’s one constant. The harvest needs to be watered with the blood of human sacrifice. The harvest in question can be literal or more of a metaphorical inference to the season’s life-giving nature. Children of the Corn, The Wicker Man and even Jeepers Creepers all fall into this category, as does today’s horror film. Of the three examples Rites of Spring most resembles the last as it features a semi-annual slaughter as someone, or some thing, comes out of hiding to kill on the first day of spring. It’s an improvement over Jeepers Creepers in that it’s not directed by a convicted pedophile, but in almost every other regard unfortunately it’s a disappointment.

In the indie horror flick Rites of Spring, some kidnappers snag a rich kid and then hides out in an abandoned building. Unfortunately for them, it’s the most dangerous spot they could have picked because there’s something monstrous waiting to take its yearly sacrifice. From writer/director Padraig Reynolds, it stars A.J. Bowen, Katherine Randolph, and Anessa Ramsey. Check out the trailer for yourself. It’s a good reminder that stealing children might be a bad idea.

There’s a solid chance that you haven’t heard of most of these movies. Yet they exist – out there somewhere as a thorn in the side of movie fans trying to see as much as possible. Nuggets of potential waiting to be picked up from the movie orphanage by a distributor and given a warm home with cup holders in every seat. The European Film Market is fascinating for that reason and for the way people attend it. Tickets this year were around $600, but that’s a reasonable price for companies sending representatives trying to find the next moneymaker for their company or the hot movie to bring to their festival. That means screenings come complete with people on cell phones and unimpressed buyers walking out after ten minutes to hustle next door to see if the other movie playing has any promise to it. It’s a bizarre way to watch movies, but it makes a kind of sense given the massive size of the movie list compared to the tiny amount of time to see everything. There were upwards of 675 movies in the EFM this year, all of them with their own selling points. Here are the 87 most interesting-sounding with descriptions found in the official catalog. For the most part, I haven’t seen these movies (and didn’t even know about many of them until the Berlin Film Festival), but they all have something going for them that should earn them a spot on your radar.