‘Death of a Yellow Bird’ Review: Get Ready for The Saddest Scary Movie of 2026 [Fantastic Fest]

Horror and heart-wrenching drama is a shockingly rare combination in the genre world. There are only a few horror films that can claim to both scare you and make you cry. There are some stellar examples like Don’t Look Now, Lake Mungo, and The Orphanage, but the entries are few and far between. Thankfully, writer-director Cody Calahan (who previously produced A24’s Undertone) has blessed us with the latest entry of tear-jerking horror movies: Death of a Yellow Bird, which had its world premiere at the 2026 edition of Fantastic Fest. By combining found footage aesthetics and haunted house tropes with end-of-life reflection, Calahan crafts a deeply moving film about memory, distant tragedy, and what it means to seek forgiveness.

Ari Millen stars as the film’s sole character, an unnamed man who heads to his childhood home in the wake of a terminal cancer diagnosis. It’s the dead of winter and he’s left his wife and young son at home while he tries to process the short time he has left on Earth. Alone in the seemingly vast, shadowy house, the man ponders his life and what he’ll leave behind, especially for his only kid. As he haunts the house like a living ghost, he discovers an old camera and a series of video tapes under the floor boards. On the tapes, he finds footage of his deceased brother, Danny, who died when they were just kids. After decades, the man is finally able to connect with his brother who almost seemed like a figment of his imagination. 

But soon after the tapes are unearthed, strange things start to happen around the house. The man then realizes that the recently discovered camcorder can be used to talk to whatever is haunting the house. With the camera set up on the dining room table, connected to an old CRT TV and pointed at an empty chair, the man tries to communicate with whoever is watching him at night. And he gets an answer. Sort of. The ghostly presence reveals clues to help the man remember the past, a past that he’s tried his whole life to forget.

Calahan appropriates analog horror trends to craft his heart-breaking take on the haunted videotape subgenre. There are familiar beats here, beats even seen throughout this year’s Fantastic Fest in films like and . Haunted videotapes are having a moment, to say the least, but Calahan uses them in ways more similar to Paul Owens’ 2021 film , where family video tapes are used to reveal devastating truths about a past long forgotten. The camera is a conduit for the paranormal and Calahan uses found footage as a way of communicating with the dead.