FrightFest 2026 - summary

 FrightFest 2026 - summary

Favourites:

‘Colony’

‘Imposters’

‘Drag’

‘The Glorious Dead’

‘You are the Film’

 

And:

‘Grind’ and ‘Ghost in the Cell’ for being such fun

‘Species’ for solid body-horror fun and work-life satire

Favourite scripts

‘Drag’

‘Imposters’

‘You Are the Film’

‘The Glorious Dead’

 

Favourite performances:

Tim McInnerny (‘Spider Island’)

Toby Poser (‘The Glorious Dead’)

Bill Camp (‘Ponderosa’)

Brandon Scott and Krsy Fox (‘Big Baby’)

 

Notes: 

‘Nervous’ – ear trauma.

‘Drag’ – back trauma and breeze blocks.

(once I realised the latter, I actually made an involuntary noise of horror.)

‘Colony’ – marvel at the pell-mell stuntmen/contortionists/dancers.

‘Ithaqua’ – I did jump when they found the mountain of meat.

‘Imposters’ – going in blind and the film taking a long game approach and thrilling to see where it would go.

 

I had a little panic and issue when buying my ticket, found myself in front row with delightful neighbours who were all as or more informed than me on the genre. I mean, where else would I go where everyone I met had seen ‘Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes’ and therefore excited to see the Makoto Ueda film? Hope my friends’ recommendations from the Discovery screens turn up on Shudder to catch up.

And now, John Higgins playing ‘Creepshow’ music to ease us out of another year of leaving reality behind for the refuge, insight and fun of genre films.

FrightFest 2026 - Day 5

FrightFest 2026 - Day 5

Oddities

Tyler Savage, 2026, USA

Small-time crime thriller flees into horror scenario. Its self-destructive and foolish protagonists may annoy, but they are bonded and defiant, and ultimately admirably so. This and the burnt-out but still angry Adrienne Barbeau keep things fiery. Powered by this female defiance, there’s enough pace, love of genre mash-up and dancing around its tropes that it always remains solidly entertaining. It may say a little folk horror keeps the world together and the selfishness of self-destructive types will ruin it for everyone, but its denial at a usual genre moral judgementalism (say, ‘Labyrinth’ or ‘The Pitchfork Retreat’) makes it not so typical.

 

Valley View Motel

Kevin Ignatius & Nick Psinakis, 2026, USA

Introduced as “a Seventies crime thriller” but obviously via Tarantino and the Coens. Impressively and convincingly mounted on a tiny budget, it looks slick and moody with undoubted enough period detail and a handful of decent characters. Chapter headings, colliding stories, deliberate pacing with a dash of black humour ensue. If it ultimately feels hindered by its homages and yet also too convoluted, there’s much here to admire and promises much better from this team.

 

You Are the Film

Makoto Ueda, 2026, Japan

If ‘You Are the Film’ is not quite as mind-boggling as Ueda's ‘Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes’, the same benign, inventive, smart, meta-fun, reality-bending playfulness is fully in charge here. Characters fully embrace with gleeful gusto the dilemmas and conundrums, dashing around the small geography of locations to take charge of their scripted fates. It is funny, slight, cute and a homage to the joy of watching cinema and its characters.

 

Hyena

Matthew Ninaber, 2026, Canada

Starting with a montage of what’s to come and a voiceover trying to mislead you from a twist that isn’t hard to figure out early, ‘Hyena’ is not as clever or as interesting as it thinks it is. With its twist a given, the constant flashbacking meaning you lose interest, style-over-substance, the underwhelming characters and watermark of misogyny, this is one to give up on very early in.

 

Hoodsteps

Nomura Fusso, 2026, Japan

Offbeat, amusing, stop-animated short that is at once benign and odd. Stop-animation is always impressive, the meta-film context and seeming message of going bonkers to get the idea you need for work baffling. But that bafflement is part of the charm.

 

Species

Marion Le Corrolier, 2026, France-Belgium

 

It may be ‘Raw’ mashed-up with ‘The Substance’ – with which it shares Pierre-Olivier Persin’s skin-splitting special-effects – but it also shares the workplace concerns of ‘Grind’. Made with dour precious and dark humour, always interesting, intriguing and excellently performed, it may be no more than a very solid body-horror with zeitgeisty concerns about burn-out without that magic ingredient that made those films stand out, but its promise is incontestable for future Le Corrolier works.