London’s FrightFest 2026, one of the best festivals in the world, returns to the Odeon LUXE Leicester Square and the […]
London’s FrightFest 2026, one of the best festivals in the world, returns to the Odeon LUXE Leicester Square and the ODEON Luxe West End for its annual five-day celebration of nerve-jangling eeriness, hair-raising shock, and epic scares.
This year’s line-up highlights the genre’s transforming landscape and reflects the amazing span of progressive global genre filmmaking.
Running from Thursday, August 27 – Monday, August 31, FrightFest will showcase a record-breaking eighty-two features across five screens, including the popular ‘First Blood’, Documentary, and Retrospective strands. This year there are twenty-four world premieres, with sixteen countries represented, spanning four continents.
From the press release:
The opening night of the festival has a distinctive Asian flavour with the World premiere of Nervous, Abner Pastoll‘s subversive, cross-cultural tale of psychological alienation and dangerous obsession. Shot entirely in South Korea, the film’s narrative is specifically rooted in the disorientating cultural and physical terrain of the Korean countryside and reunites Pastoll with his A Good Woman Is Hard To Find star Sarah Bolger, who plays a woman losing her ability to hear men’s voices. As her grip on reality starts to fracture, paranoia, hallucinations, and dangerous desires spiral out of control. The director and cast will be attending.
Pictured: Nervous
This is followed by Cannes sensation Colony, the highly anticipated zombie shocker sensation from , director of and – both of which will also be screened – the latter to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the zombie shocker that became an instant cult classic.
The Asian line-up also includes 2026 Berlin Film Festival favourite Ghost in the Cell, where Indonesian genre wizard Joko Anwar crafts a gleefully grotesque horror-comedy, Salmokji: Whispering Water, which has just become the highest-grossing Korean horror film of all time, and cult Japanese masterpieces Crazy Lips and Gore From Outer Space, now remastered from original negatives.
Pictured: Ghost in the Cell
The closing night film is the UK premiere of Species, an exhilarating Gen Z shocker. French writer-director Marion Le Corroller‘s debut feature is a darkly comic sci-fi body-horror with a deeper allegorical message about workplace burn-out. Its unique body-mutation sequences are created by special make-up effects designer Pierre-Olivier Persin, who won an Oscar for The Substance.
The twenty-five tales of terror, trauma and torment in the main screen sees the return of a lot of familiar talent, including The Adams family, with their deeply affecting apocalyptic fable The Glorious Dead, Spider One with subversive dark comedy Big Baby, produced by Cher, Holy Shit! director Lukas Rinker with his seat-edged survival thriller Frostbite, Cheat directors Kevin Ignatius and Nick Psinakis with their stylish crime thriller Valley View Motel, Italian horror maestro Federico Zampaglione, with supernatural chiller The Nameless Ballad, and Ryuhei Kitamura (The Midnight Meat Train) with Labyrinth, a game-changing shocker in the Saw tradition.
Pictured: Spider Island
Tubi FrightFest also welcome back Christopher Smith, with the World premiere of his eight-legged satirical horror, Spider Island, Padraig Reynolds with his teeth-snapping homage to 1970s creature feature exploitation, Gator Face, and James Nunn with survival thriller Hungry, where Louisiana bayou tourists are stalked by a ravenous, territorial hippopotamus.
Hammer also returns with Ithaqua, a gripping period survival horror, directed by Casey Walker, who becomes the first director to have two films screening at the same festival, the other being Home Bodies, a Christmas movie unlike any you’ve seen before.
Pictured: Gator Face
Plus, there is the unique anthology The Pitchfork Retreat, from the producers of the Terrifier franchise, which features the last appearance of Candyman star Tony Todd, twisted horror comedy Drag, co-produced by Danny DeVito and starring his daughter Lucy DeVito. Brea Grant, Chelsea Stardust and Ed Dougherty bring us Grind, a horror satire anthology about the modern gig economy, and actress Lulu Wilson is back as our favourite lethal anti-hero in Jenn Wexler‘s The Last Temptation of Becky, the biggest, bloodiest and most unhinged instalment yet.
Other Main Screen titles include Oddities, a twisty dark tale of antiques and aliens, starring genre royalty Adrienne Barbeau (The Fog, Escape From New York), You Are the Film, an interactive, fourth-wall-breaking experimental feature, Hyena, a brutal, fast-paced serial killer thriller, Stewart Sparke‘s Dead Reset, a video game inspired twist on the time travel genre, tense paranoia thriller Imposters, and fresh from its sensational Tribeca Festival launch comes Ponderosa, a hilarious, creepy and surreal Bunuelian nightmare.
This year’s four Discovery strands continue to demonstrate Tubi FrightFest’s established ethos for promoting new talent, original content and experimental formats, and this is no more evident than in the ‘First Blood’ strand.
The five World premieres this year are: Annabella Rich‘s The Death of Us, where grief and supernatural forces collide to devastating effect, Paul Stainthorpe‘s The Brook, in which a search for historical answers spirals into a serial-killer mystery, William Brooke‘s The Alice Paradox, which offers a thought-provoking new perspective on the time-travel genre, as does Conscian Morgan‘s Binding Eva, where a man on the run is trapped in a terrifying time loop. Finally, there is Ashley Nashville‘s Heraldry Paranormal, a boisterous unique take on the classic paranormal investigation horror which also stands as a vivid representation for queer voices, featuring many characters from LGBTQ+ backgrounds.
Besides the ‘First Blood’ entries, the UK is represented by many talents, both established and new, and include the World premieres of Lawrence Fowler‘s demonic board game horror Grin, Dan Schaffer‘s erotically-charged Electric Meat, which co-stars Emily Booth and Sylvia Soska, Justin Hardy‘s Wrath of the Gods, the definitive conclusion to the “Wicker Man trilogy”, and you’ll need to hang on tight for Howard Ford‘s latest nerve-jangler Zip Wire, starring MyAnna Buring. Other UK titles include eerie B-movie homage The Peril at Pincer Point, Welcome to G-Town, a Glaswegian splatter-comedy from upstart twins Nathan McQuaid and Ben McQuaid, and Chris Green‘s music and murder mix Synthesized.
Other Discovery Screen One highlights include Faces of Death, the meta slasher retooling of the cult 1978 mondo classic, starring Charli XCX, the heart-felt gross-out shocker Bowels of Hell, unusual thriller Terrestrial from Hot Tub Time Machine director Steve Pink, razor sharp, gory satire Starsuckers, Larry Fessenden‘s graveyard monster mash Trauma Or, Monsters All, intense, psychological found-footage horror Infirmary, Dracula: The Night Around Us, a tale of flesh, fangs, forgiveness and funerals, dark web crime thriller Compliance, and Snapshot, the first found-footage film which uses a unique pinhole camera aesthetic.
Pictured: Frogman Returns
Discovery screens 2, 3 & 4 play host to a global menu of genre delights. From North America comes Kyra Elise Gardner‘s horror dramedy Slay, Cameron Francis‘ psychological horror thriller Blood Secret, Andy Chen‘s much-anticipated Another, starring Heather Langenkamp and Doug Jones, Justin M. Seaman‘s blood-spattered end to his creature feature trilogy The Barn Part III, Henry Chaisson‘s ghostly Recluse, starring Toby Poser, Codey S. Wilson‘s brutal home invasion nightmare Lesions, Casper Kelly‘s trippy Buddy, Nick Lyon‘s demonic Do You Want to Play?, Robert J. Steinmiller and Chris Lightbody‘s cursed Bad Karaoke, Stefan Colson‘s possessed Bloom, Carson McKinnon‘s emotionally-driven shocker Mother and Me and from Josh Lobo, the rising star director of I Trapped The Devil, comes J-Horror inspired sci-fi shocker Night After Night. Finally, Frogman is back as director Anthony Cousins returns to Loveland with his even wackier cryptid sequel Frogman Returns. Fans will also be able to catch a retrospective screening of Frogman, with Cousins in attendance.
South America is represented by director Patricio Valladares‘ Chilean sequel to Invoking Yell, Invoking Scream, from Brazil we have Ian SBF‘s sinister psychological thriller The Flesh Itself, plus Remanence, Kapel Furman‘s high voltage cosmic drama and from Uruguay comes Sweet Violence, the feature debut of Jeremias Segovia, one of the most exciting talents in South America.
Audiences can also sample devilish delights from down-under including Our Effed Up World, the latest mindbender from transgender director Alice Maio Mackay, first-person found-footage horror Dead Eyes, haunting chiller The Latcher, and Bunny Rabbit, the apocalyptic genre breakout of the year.
From Canada, Sam Scott brings the axe-shredding punk-rock tribute Turn It Up!, while Daniel Turres delivers the wild, blood-soaked survival horror Fresh Meat. Rounding out the line-up is the even meatier Meat Kills, from Dutch director Martijn Smits.
Tubi FrightFest has always explored industry movers and shapers in its documentary strand and this year is no exception with the world premiere of Sarah Appleton‘s Full Moon Rising: The Charles Band Story, a new feature documentary about the truly incredible life and career of Charles Band, prolific producer/director of such genre classics as Re-Animator, From Beyond, Trancers, and Castle Freak. Charles will be attending the festival.
There is also the European premiere of Rubberhead: The Life & Times of Steve Johnson, a humorous and heartfelt portrait of one of Hollywood’s most prolific special effects makeup artists. Plus, there is the UK premiere of The Fright Stuff, Mike Meyer‘s all-access documentary that takes the viewer behind the scenes of the haunted house industry in America.
This year, Tubi FrightFest presents 4K restorations of both Ghostkeeper, Jim Makichuk‘s Canuxploitation supernatural slasher classic, and Val Guest‘s timeless The Abominable Snowman. This is a World premiere presentation from Hammer Films and is a restored version of the original UK cut complete with original title sequence.
Pictured: The Death of UsScreenshotPictured: Frogman ReturnsPictured: Ghosts in the CellPictured: Gator FacePictured: NervousPictured: Spider Island
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