What to look out for at Fantastic Fest 2026

Born at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas, Fantastic Fest seems to spread its geographical and cultural remit a little further every year. There aren’t many genre festivals that can boast an advance screening of a likely Oscar contender, as well as restored silent movies and new films from Venezuela, India, Thailand and Slovenia, to name but a small sliver of countries represented in 2026’s line-up. Here’s a look at what to expect when it all kicks off for eight days of movies starting September 17th.

The Oscar contender mentioned above is Wild Horse Nine, Martin McDonagh’s follow-up to The Banshees of Inisherin. That film went home empty-handed from the Oscars when Brendan Fraser stole Colin Farrell’s Best Actor trophy in a daring raid; there is every chance the new film could be too sly and offbeat for the Academy as well, but who cares about them? The story of two reckless CIA agents stationed in Easter Island during the 1973 Chilean coup, it stars John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as one of McDonagh’s classic bickering double-acts, as well as Tom Waits, Parker Posey and Steve Buscemi. As well as that mouthwatering line-up, it’ll be interesting to see how McDonagh handles the film’s politics. The 1922-23 Irish Civil War was far enough in the past for The Banshees of Inisherin to treat it as (literally) noises off, but the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro earlier this year means Wild Horse Nine‘s revisit to the School of the Americas has the potential to really ruffle some feathers.

Speaking of those two countries… Fantastic Fest audiences will also get the chance to see Venezuelan director Jorge Thielen Armaud’s Death Has No Master, a rare point of intrigue from this year’s terribly boring Cannes. It stars Asia Argento as a woman returning to Venezuela to sell the family cacao plantation, only to find the people living there have different ideas. Back in Chile, there’s also a chance to see Wolf House stop-motion mavericks Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña’s latest film Donkey Princess. Taking place in a magical kingdom where love has been banned, it has a creepy fairy-tale vibe that should pair well with Anna Biller’s new film The Face of Horror. Resetting the traditional Japanese ghost story ‘Yotsuya Kaidan’ in fourteenth-century Europe, early pictures show Biller’s knack for lavish production design and cinematography hasn’t left her in the ten years since The Love Witch.

There’s also a world premiere for some more directors who’ve been missing in action for some time, Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer. Their last film was the 2019 Pet Sematery remake but true heads will know them for Starry Eyes, their 2014 chiller that now seems oddly predictive of everything from the ‘elevated horror’ cycle to #MeToo. They’re getting right back to basics with The Swallow, a sinkhole survival tale which promises extensive practical effects. Fantastic Fest isn’t only for directors who haven’t made a film in too long, of course. Sometimes it showcases people who make thirteen films before breakfast, like Quentin Dupieux. The French surrealist wit is back with two films; the higher-profile of the pair is Full Phil thanks to its cast including Woody Harrelson, Kristen Stewart, Emma Mackey and – reunited at last! – Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. But you should also try and catch Vertiginous, Dupieux’s take on simulation theory. In an inspired conceptual joke, this film sees a group of deliberately badly-animated CGI characters trying to decide whether or not they’re living in a computer program…

Maybe it’s inevitable in these times, but paranoia is a recurring theme in this year’s selections. “Alex has proof, and he wants you to see it” is the logline for James Cullen Bressack’s found footage feature I Have Proof; other details are unforthcoming ahead of this world premiere, but seeing as Bressack’s 2012 film Hate Crime was refused a certificate by the BBFC you should expect something potent. (Found footage freaks should also look out for Kyle Mangione-Smith’s Compliance) A warmer look at the wilder fringes of belief can be found in Brad Abrahams and Simon Ennis’s Gimme Truth. Abrahams’s previous features and shorts have taken a clear-eyed but compassionate look at everything from cryptozoology to alien abduction, and this promises to give a similarly fair but responsible hearing to modern conspiracy theorists. A smaller-scale conspiracy seems to be at play in Jordan Downey’s The Cycle, in which the ThanksKilling director dials it back a little for a thriller about a woman unravelling the mystery of her long-absent father’s death.

A very different kind of cycle is at the core of Luka Marčetić’s Girl in the Night, in which the titular vigilante finds herself as part of an unwanted double-act when a lonely man steals her bicycle. You should probably watch it if only to say you’ve seen a Slovenian absurdist vigilante buddy-comedy, and similar wild genre mash-ups are promised from Indonesian genre star Joko Anwar in his new film Ghost in the Cell. As the title implies, it’s a horror movie and a prison movie, with plenty of martial arts and a side order of political satire. The currently vibrant Indonesian genre scene is also represented by Kimo Stamboel’s Janur Ireng, while martial arts are also present in Fergal Costello’s Kung Fu Deadly. A comedy horror in which two lads realise they’re the last line of defence against an ancient evil, it comes from the home of classic martial arts movies… er, Ireland?

The more mainstream face of horror comes with a preview of the first two episodes of Mike Flanagan’s much-anticipated Carrie miniseries, and Zachary Wigon’s buzzy adaptation of Virginia Feito’s literary hit Victorian Psycho, with Maika Monroe and Thomasin Mackenzie in the leads. There’s also horror’s other Zachary, Zach Cregger, with a gala screening of his new Resident Evil movie. That looks to be a thorough reinvention of the zombie franchise, though even this is not as iconoclastic a remake as What Happened to Doris? Nick Simon’s film, which gets its world premiere at Fantastic Fest, is based on the 1974 case that inspired Sidney J. Furie’s The Entity (and, therefore, Peter Tscherkassky’s Outer Space, which remixes footage from that movie – it’ll be interesting to see if that gets alluded to). Heather Graham, who’s on a very interesting run of genre roles at the moment, takes the lead.

Fans of older titles will also be well-served by the reissues and restorations, which this year encompass everything from John McNaughton’s subgenre-defining Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer to Herschell Gordon Lewis’s less sombre but no less significant Blood Feast. The restorations include two significant moments in queer horror – Rufus Butler Seder’s Screamplay and Todd Verow’s slash-happy Dennis Cooper adaptation Frisk – as well as one film, the 1997 Thai satire Dog God, which was banned in its home country for insulting the national faith and monarchy. Clearly, there’s a lot in here that you won’t see anywhere else, and even if you have you won’t always have seen them like this. That’s the case with a series of silent shorts, which will be accompanied by a live string quartet. The musicians will be playing specially-composed new scores written by composers aged between 17 and 24, and the films include J. Searle Dawley’s landmark adaptation of Frankenstein, the hell sequence from Benjamin Christensen’s Haxan, and King Kong maestro Willis O’Brien’s The Ghost of Slumber Mountain.

As with all Fantastic Fests, there’s too much here to summarise in one article – we haven’t even mentioned the unusually strong line-up of animated films, including the Canadian dark fantasy Kylgor in the Grisly Abyss, Taiwan’s first rotoscoped feature Welcome to Dolly’s House and Jim Queen, a French feature in which two gay men rush to find the cure for a global pandemic that turns people straight. There’s also plenty of work from directors who couldn’t fit into a trend if they tried. French cinema’s weirdest queer auteur Bertrand Mandico follows up his gender-flipped sword-and-sorcery pastiche She is Connan with Roma Elastica, starring Marion Cotillard and Noémie Merlant in a homage to ’80s Italian sci-fi, and veteran Austrian avant-gardist Ulrike Ottinger follows up a series of well-received retrospectives with The Blood Countess, in which Isabelle Huppert plays Elizabeth Bathory. One thing’s for sure, you won’t see a more eclectic line-up of films until Fantastic Fest 2027.