FrightFest 2026 - day one

FrightFest 2026

 

 

So I have been coming to FrightFest for 16 years now. I don’t look deeply into the blurb on

the films – one of the joys of FF is going in blind – but I do take a little look for names. Again, this means I am missing out on the wealth available on the Discovery Screens, but you have to make a decision somewhere and mine is almost always to stay in the main screen. So I am expecting Abner Pastoll’s ‘Nervous’ and the Adams family’s ‘The Glorious Dead’ to be solid, Yeon Sang-ho’s ‘Colony’ to be very entertaining, ‘Grind’ to be of interest as it has the Brea Grant involvement, Makoto Ueda’s ‘You Are the Film’ to be  very promising. These are my surface expectations.

After the organist has played music from ‘Santa Sangre’ and ‘A bad Moon Rising’, he descends below the stage and we’re off.

 

Nervous

Abner Pastoll, 2026, South Korea-UK

Nicely mounted and played, but ultimately predictable and an unconvincing - it tells us how things will end early on, and there are no surprises or even a necessary sense of doom and tragedy. There are many intriguing details - male voices being increasingly indecipherable is a good gag without a punchline, for example. There is, however, excellent sound design and ear trauma.

 

Colony

 Yeon Sang-Ho, South Korea, 2026

Yeon Sang-ho sets up a central twist on the zombie genre, introduces slender characters and just sets them loose. Having given horror one of the most enjoyable undead films with ‘Train to Busan’, it’s as if he knows he can’t capture the emotional core of that and doesn’t even try. Rather, he proves a master of pell-mell zombie action with exceptional editing and pacing that doesn’t let up. But the true stars are the stunt-people-dancers-contortionists that spend the whole film throwing themselves around sets and streets. The dilemmas are fun-enough, the bad guy vivid and the synchronised zombie communication and movements scary. As always, people in survival mode are their own worst enemy although any true message about hive-minds solving the problem of human miscommunication is usurped by megalomania. Perhaps some allegory there?

 

Big Baby

Spider One, USA, 2025

Brandon Scott and Krsy Fox give excellent performances that carry this through its meta-slasher story - the Big Baby killer he’s writing is becoming more and more real! It’s not quite so clever but the central relationship is heartfelt and makes this work mostly as a tale of one man’s mental illness and the partnership it destroys. Especially when much is unclear, the kills come later, and particularly the post-credits note which is more revenge concession than logical.