Halloween Frightfest 2026: The Cull, Dead Howling, Brute 1986 & The Dark Gets In

We are seasoned hands with FrightFest, with our coverage dating back to 2018. Most of that, however, comes from the main event in Leicester Square in Central London, and remotely at that, so the other events are ones we are less versed in. There’s the March event in Glasgow, and starting in 2027 the north east is in for a treat when it takes over the gorgeous art deco Tyneside Cinema, literally a stone’s throw from the monument metro in Newcastle Upon Tyne. You bet we will be there, so come and say “hi” if you see us. The other event is the main event of all things Horror: Halloween. From that event, we have four movies to talk about (as well as Crawlers, which we watched for Grimmfest): J.P. Davidson’s The Cull, John V. Soto’s Dead Howling, Marcel Walz’s slasher sequel Brute 1986, and Sean Hogan’s latest The Dark Gets In.

First, we stop off with multi-hyphenate filmmaker J. P. Davidson for THE CULL. Indie mainstay Craig Russell stars as Niall, a man wrongly imprisoned for his mother’s murder. Starting his life anew and renouncing his violent ways, he retreats to a remote woodland cabin seeking redemption and the truth. There, he meets a hostile community ruled by a ruthless family who know more about his past than first appears. As tensions rise, violence becomes unavoidable, and his dreams begin blurring the lines between all-too-real nightmares and reality. The deeper The Cull digs, the more it reveals the community’s connections with witchcraft, blood sacrifice, forbidden ritual, and a mysterious entity lurking deep in the forest.

This community is full of unlikeable sorts, Russell being the exception as he elevates Niall into something relatable. He is just trying to live his life anew, but other members, including Rory Wilton’s Jim, demand to be let back into the cabin out of desperation. Something dangerous has been going on there. As the situation boils over, Niall is met with a familial connection he was blissfully unaware of, one that is pulling him back into old violence. Davidson has talked about The Cull being about justice, which it does in terms of inescapable totality with Niall bound by his past transgressions, and those potentially committed by his family too.

There are some great sequences throughout, including a party scene that creatively throws colour and eccentric visuals at the screen to see what sticks, and most of it does. Then there is the ending, where violence unfolds of both the visceral kind that ties together the criminal underpinnings of the ensemble, and the slowly burning supernatural embers. It is well acted across the board and set in a part of Cornwall that gives it an incredible, pronounced personality, making it stand out from other rurally based genre fare. The effects, too, punch way above their weight. Davidson’s film is enjoyable; however, how well it melds the real and the unreal is up for debate. Whilst the cinematography is strong, there are a handful of awkwardly framed shots in the edit. Still, it is to be lauded for taking chances and being so very different from the standard British indie horror fare.

Next, we jump to the opposite side of the world with John V. Soto’s Dead Howling. On paper, this seems like a hard sell, because how many indie zombie movies have there been over the last decade thanks to The Walking Dead‘s influence? More than we can care to count. However, how many of those are also werewolf movies? That’s where Dead Howling stands out, following the chemically assisted lycanthrope Carter (Joel Jackson) and teens Megan (Téa Heathcote-Marks) and Billy (Riley Stiles) after their Uncle Tony (Temuera Morrison) dies. Crossing strangers and threats along the way, the trio head off (with some reluctance) in search of a sanctuary periodically advertised via a cycling radio broadcast. There’s also the threat of the zombies evolving to become more intelligent as time goes on, and the typical threat of the real monster being humans.

There’s an inherent issue with Dead Howling that is utterly unavoidable for the horror faithful: it’s a zombie project. To say the sheen of interest in that sub-genre has worn off would be an apocalyptic understatement. From the off, it’s dealing with a level of fatigue that makes the Marvel-verse seem as fresh as a daisy. As a pure zombie exercise, Soto’s film does little to escape the gravity of the sub-genre’s vortex. That being said, the introduction of werewolves adds a level of fun to proceedings, especially with a predominantly practical Lycan suit in play. Seeing a massive werewolf scrap with the undead is a fun wrinkle, and one that the script gets as much mileage out of as possible. The chemistry between the core trio is strong, with each bringing their A-game, even if the emotions and characterisation feel undercooked and perhaps that leaves too much on the floor for a potential sequel. All of that is fine and easy to live with as the spectacle offers a great deal of fun. However, it comes back to the inescapable fate that wings all zombie texts: the story is full of the exact same beats and escalations we have seen a thousand times before, and that is too big a hump for any movie to clear.

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Moving to North America next for Marcel Walz’s slasher sequel, BRUTE 1986. With a prolific nature comparable to Miike at his peak, Walz’s follow-up to 2024’s Brute 1976 comes after 9 films spanning that divide. This time, fictional 1980s hair metal band Leather Kobra are shooting in the middle of an abandoned town, and living next door is the Birdy family, the group behind the infamous murder spree in the town of Savage some 10 years earlier (the subject of the prequel). The band are joined by two groupies, the low-budget filmmakers responsible for shooting LK’s music video, and their manager. Before that, though, the stage is set in a cold open when two friends of the band turn up a day early at the neighbouring property and are set upon by the Birdy family. These players satisfy all the classic slasher food groups: nubile blondes, muscle-bound brutes, gender-ambiguous bullies, and their queen knife-gloved hen. Naturally, the band are set upon, leading us right down to a well-worn final girl situation, albeit here there are two of them.

I’ll be up front: I don’t like slashers, from the stylistic homogeneity to their sexual and conservative-leaning politics of punishing the promiscuous, but it’s mostly due to how repetitive they are. Their celebration mostly falls on how graphic things become, or how grisly their killings become. Brute 1986 is no different on that level, with its big centrepiece being a guy cut in half from groin to head by a chainsaw. Which is fine if you are interested in that; after all, Terrifier has been a fascinating global success and it is little more than this across the three films. Walz and co-writer Joe Knetter try to play with the form by having so many threats, and the in-fighting between them being fatal. Likewise, it tries to represent the groupie with a little more nuance than history has reduced that social trope to, and throws a spanner into the works with its depiction of this ultimate machismo in rock music being home to two closeted gay men. They even make a comment about Rob Halford’s (Judas Priest) heterosexuality, playing up that he is both gay himself and his entire routine was ridiculously queer-coded, even back then. But all this is irrelevant; there are people who will lap this up as there is a school of horror fans who pine for this retro, simplistic style of spectacle horror, and it’s cool that FrightFest is catering towards them.

The last and best of this fearsome foursome is Sean Hogan’s (To Fire You Come at Last & The Devil’s Business) THE DARK GETS IN. This is the most experimental of the four, being a faux documentary like Creature of the Pines, Noroi: The Curse, or Lake Mungo; which is to say a movie that tells a fake horror story using the language and style of a real documentary (not a mockumentary, as these are often misappropriated). In this case, the story is simple: a seemingly happy teenage girl up and vanishes one day, and the in-canon documentary is being made to revive and advertise any effort to find her. But as is often the case in this style, we are drawn into a much darker world than the subjects dared anticipate.

I won’t reveal the darkness of The Dark Gets In, as the journey is the point and to reveal the final destination would rob Hogan’s movie of its power. To call back to one of the other four, if The Dark Gets In was a secret zombie or werewolf movie, that fact is far less interesting than the journey of getting there. Likewise, if the more horrific instances and happenings were shot through traditional means, the power would be immediately robbed, rendering the whole project flaccid. The power of The Dark Gets In comes from its commitment to the bit: the news reports, the increasingly fractious interviews with family members, talking to Bradford’s second-best psychic, the dark web, fears of shadows from the past, the crappy phone footage of sightings or weird happenings, or the skin-crawling finale shot through a panicked character clutching at their phone. Together, these seemingly weak parts collide to make the movie sing as a quietly accomplished choir, and no choir member deserves his flowers for this project more than British indie horror stalwart James Swanton, who is cast to perfection, is all I’ll say. The presentation is the point, and they are still rare enough to feel really special. Of course, it’s such a singular style that I’ve seen people hate this medley of found footage and documentary for being boring, and that’s fine, but you’ll never find me among them.

There we have it, FrightFest is done and dusted for 2026. We can heartily confirm that we will be in 2027 covering as much of it as possible. At the very least, we will be there in person for the May event at the gorgeous Tyneside Cinema and the whole August weekend in Leicester Square, London. We can’t wait to see the sights they have to show us, and we’ll see you there.

TUBI FRIGHTFEST GLASGOW – 4th, 5th & 6th March, 2027
TUBI FRIGHTFEST NEWCASTLE – 1st & 2nd May, 2027
FRIGHTFEST LONDON 26th to 30th August, 2027
FRIGHTFEST HALLOWEEN 29th & 30th October, 2027

ROB’S ARCHIVE – HALLOWEEN FRIGHTFEST: The Cull, Dead Howling, The Brute 1986 & The Dark Gets In