Dance Freak (Fantasia International Film Festival 2026)

I’m pretty sure you haven’t seen a movie like Dance Freak – I know I haven’t. Let’s rewind a little to the process of picking movies to cover for this year’s Fantasia. I tend to be ruled by my immediate gut reaction when choosing what appeals to me, and sometimes that pays off, but other times doesn’t. The work of North American alt‑comedy legends Robby Rackleff and Alan Resnick, my first reaction with Dance Freak was curiosity, my assumption being that it would be some perverse variation on a dance movie or a musical. Since it’s Fantasia it’s unlikely to be a straight version of either, and technically I was right (which is the best kind of right).

On paper it sounds like a fairly cut‑and‑dry affair. Rackleff stars as the put‑upon Obie, a man victimised and bullied by just about everyone in a town that’s well past saving – though that won’t stop his ex‑girlfriend and aspiring politician Dorty (Megan Koester), from campaigning to sort it out. While the pair are having a meal together, Obie spots a man dancing aggressively in the street outside, and through that he becomes infected with “something”. That thing is Dance Freak, and now whenever Obie’s upset, pissed off, or even hears music, he’ll become it, and when the Dance Freak comes out, people are going to die. It sounds absurd on paper, and while it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that a serious movie could be made from this material, Rackleff and Resnick are not those filmmakers.

I don’t even know where to begin talking about Dance Freak, so let’s start with the world in which it takes place as Rackleff and Resnick are trying to evoke a sense of otherness, which put me in mind of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and John Waters. With Darkplace, it’s the feeling that this town isn’t normal and feels off, like it belongs to another reality where our rules barely hold, and that ethos informs the whole production, becoming a key foundation. The John Waters comparison is equally pertinent if you recall his early underground work in Baltimore, when it was just him and his friends putting strange, scrappy creations into the world. The character names in Dance Freak evoke a similar sense of space: Obie’s boss is a psychopath called Mr. Megaman (Stavros Halkias); there’s a gang roaming the streets called the Salad Boys who threaten people with their mysterious bag of veg while taking great joy in beating them up; and the two police officers who are powerfully direct, yet weirdly juvenile. I never really laughed at any point in Dance Freak because, like Joe Pesci asks in Goodfellas, funny how?

CLICK ON THE POSTER AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE FOR MORE ON DANCE FREAK

World‑building is the most important thing for any script, so now that we’ve laid down those foundations, let’s revisit the nature of the story with the titular Dance Freak bursting out of Obie. When he isn’t being bullied or being an overly sad sack, we get brief glimpses of his life – a stint at his workplace, visits to the spot where he builds birdhouses, and other scattered moments. There are also scenes shared between characters who are inevitably going to succumb to the Dance Freak, and the film follows a fairly traditional horror structure, albeit one presented in both an absurdist and deeply experimental package. The more interesting narrative avenue is the central conflict of the whole production – Dance Freak is both a deeply stupid movie and an incredibly smart one. Its intelligence comes from the fact that it’s rooted in modern American folklore with the implied inclusion of MKUltra – the CIA’s Cold War mind‑control programme that used drugs, hypnosis, and other methods throughout the 1950s and ’60s. Its stupidity is that the Dance Freak is summoned by negative emotions and music, and when he turns up he aggressively dances at people, hypnotising them until their head pops like a balloon. To clarify, these aren’t headsplosions, I literally mean like a balloon with a hole in it, so it looks like their heads rapidly deflate … to death.

For a movie called Dance Freak, you expect the music to be up to standard, and the disco‑laden post‑punk that undercuts the film, when paired with the idiosyncratic visual identity, places it firmly within a lo‑fi 1990s Shot-on-Video sensibility, so it’s consistently impeccable. The most striking and immediate aspect of Dance Freak is that it’s a black‑and‑white movie that’s both grimy and distorted (in the sense of warped lenses, but also in the sense that it looks like something you’d see on Adult Swim at 3:00 am after coming down from a drink or drugs bender), crossed with Eraserhead – if Lynch shot it like a Full-Motion-Video from a 1990s PlayStation One game.

It’s a singular, difficult vision that will split audiences between those who can fully invest in the intentionally rubbish ethos and the stylistic intent that gives the feeling of watching a 10th‑generation VHS rip, and then there are those who will take it at face value. Dance Freak exists in its own bizarre ecosystem, which is why I’ve littered my thoughts with far more references and touchstones than I usually would. This Guy Maddin‑esque nightmare fuel is the sort of thing you could watch ten times over and feel ten different ways about, and having only seen it once I can’t wait to watch it again on the biggest screen possible, something that will give this obnoxiously weird film the platform it deserves.

Or, you could hate it, because it is, after all, the very definition of horses for courses.

ROB’S ARCHIVE – DANCE FREAK (2026)