Family Fears Another Night of Terror (Imagine Film Fest 2026)

Having attended and covered a fairly large number of horror film festivals over the past few years, I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon – or, more accurately, the lack of one. I have seen many contemporary festival horror films which make it their priority to shock an audience, or make them laugh, or make a socio-politically relevant and emotionally affecting point, but I’ve found it to be unexpectedly rare for a horror picture on the festival circuit to actively and primarily aim to frighten its viewers.

Perhaps this is because of the fact that creating a truly “scary” film is more of a practical challenge than making one which is funny or disgusting, especially when playing to a festival audience that is highly likely to be desensitized to, and a little jaded by, the tricks that filmmakers will use to make them jump. This is all to say that Argentinian filmmaker Cristian Ponce’s latest feature, Family Fears Another Night of Terror (2026), is a film which dares to be terrifying regardless of modern horror lovers’ heavy exposure to the genre and the ways in which scares are constructed, and in this case, the risk was most certainly worth the reward. I gasped and jumped whilst viewing the screener for this film at home, and I can’t begin to imagine how much more effective those scares must be when experienced as part of a Halloween-night audience at the Imagine Fantastic Film Festival in Amsterdam, who selected the movie as part of their 2026 line-up.

Presented as a lost horror-tinged Argentinian telenovela from 1986, Family Fears Another Night of Terror follows an unnamed family of four as they get ready to have dinner together in their home. As they are introduced one by one, we learn that each family member is dealing with an all-consuming personal terror: Mother (Nadia Lozano) sees and hears phantoms in the dark following her own mother’s passing, Father (Diego Velázquez) believes that the neighbours are conspiring against him, Son (Max Federico Aleman) is obsessed with satanic black metal in the hopes that a force from beyond our world will save him from the military draft, and Daughter (Mora Magnarelli) is desperate to escape from her parents’ “evil” house via any means necessary. Together, they will see their fears and anxieties brought to life over the course of a night where nothing is as it seems, and reality may not be what they thought it to be; all that the family know for certain is that, once the sun sets, someone – or something – is coming to take them away, and they must do whatever they can to ensure it does not successfully enter their home.

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‘Analog horror’ is all the rage now with the success of Backrooms (2026) and web series such as The Walten Files and The Mandela Catalogue, but tech-literate televisual terror has been director Cristian Ponce’s thing from the start. Ponce’s feature debut, History of the Occult (2020), was a cosmic horror tale which takes place during a live talk-show broadcast in ‘70s Argentina, and it remains a uniquely compelling piece of weird fiction in how directly its existential terror is tied to the film’s format and black-and-white lo-fi presentation. A lot of the main sources of horror in Family Fears Another Night of Terror are similarly specific to the aesthetics and stylistic techniques that it is mimicking, although this film is less of a Lovecraftian affair (though quite existential nonetheless) and more of a haunted house story. As with History of the Occult, part of me wonders if an Argentinian viewer might pick up on more narrative details and suggestions in the stylistic quirks and telenovela pastiche of Family Fears Another Night of Terror than I did as an English-speaking viewer in the UK, and there are likely a lot of jokes throughout for those in the know that I didn’t quite understand – because yes, there are jokes, many of them very subtle but undeniably meant to be humorous nonetheless.

For all that I might not have understood about Family Fears Another Night of Terror because of my lack of the cultural background knowledge to fully “get” it, Ponce’s film thankfully speaks to the viewer in a universal language – the language of fear. There’s an ingeniously creepy utilisation of negative space displayed throughout, whether it be through shapes showing up in gaps in the grain, or even something as explicit as figures lurking in the shadowy, abstract backdrop; even in the narrative’s periods of relative “safety”, we’re never allowed to ignore the threat that someone or something frightening can, even through the very medium itself, make its presence known in deeply unsettling fashion. There’s a scare early on involving the use of a split-screen which is one of the more profoundly dread-inducing moments I’ve experienced in a film recently, and a very experimental sequence later on featuring the Son is an equal parts spooky and awesome demonstration of technical skill which has to be seen to be believed. Plus, even given my lack of familiarity with Argentinian television and its style, I frequently found that Family Fears Another Night of Terror was reminiscent in its approach to generating tension and horror to many classic TV terrors from my own country; the dark, abstract set design and play-like staging brought to mind things like Sapphire and Steel (1979-82) and Dead of Night: The Exorcism (1972), and the whole thing has more than a little flavour of Ghostwatch (1992) to it, background lurkers and all.

Family Fears Another Night of Terror is an unusual, chilling, compelling slice of Argentinian analog horror, one which I didn’t always understand but consistently felt, and in many ways I think that’s what matters most. It takes some curious turns the more it goes on, ones which I intentionally neglected to mention in this review so as to let those interested experience them for themselves, but I will say that some of the ideas it approaches are ones which haven’t been done quite the same anywhere else, let alone to this degree. It’s an odd, discomforting frightener where the family don’t even need to go to the bad house – they’ve been living there all their lives, and have never known anything else. Regardless of anything else, it’s appropriately scary viewing for Halloween night, so I’d absolutely recommend that you tune in to see what terror that family on the telly are in for tonight.

ROBYN’S ARCHIVE – FAMILY FEARS ANOTHER NIGHT OF TERROR