Tubi FrightFest Halloween 2026 takes place Fri 30th to Sat 31st October
Although FrightFest is perhaps most associated with the August Bank Holiday when its main annual event takes place, there is no date in the calendar better suited to its preoccupations than Halloween – the night when the barrier between the material and the occult worlds is at its thinnest, and when all the ghosts, monsters, devils and freaks come out to play. The Halloween minifest had its first manifestation in 2006, and for some years took the form of an all-nighter which brought its own weird magical vibe during the wee hours, whether through the sleep deprivation of the audience or perhaps the free intermingling of Samhain spirits. Those who experienced this collective endurance test will never forget it – although in 2015, when the event changed into an all-dayer, we were all almost a decade older, and relieved to get our dose of six unrespectable films during more respectable hours. Since 2023, it has become a two-dayer, typically showcasing nine films over an evening and the following day.
This year’s takes place Friday 30th and Sat 31st October, which means that its ending will more or less coincide with the beginning of Halloween’s witching hour. The line-up includes Freaks Part II, Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein’s long-awaited follow-up to the mutant sci-fi superheroics of Freaks (2018), which screened at Glasgow FrightFest 2019. There is another sequel, Marcel Walz’s Brute 1986, having its world première in the wake of last year’s Brute 1976, though reviving its gory Hills Have Eyes set-up a decade on, and this time pitting a glam metal band against the murderous Birdy clan. Regular FrightFesters will be familiar with Walz from his Blood Feast remake (2016), his slasher Blind (2019) and its sequel Pretty Boy (2021) and his metacinematic That’s a Wrap (2023). Other world premières include J.P. Davidson’s cabin-set ex-con horror The Cull and FrightFest favourite Sean Hogan’s latest, the faux documentary The Dark Gets In, which finds anxieties both contemporary and ancient in the mysterious case of a teen girl gone missing from her bourgeois home.
As its title economically suggests, John V. Soto’s Dead Howling pits zombies and werewolves against each other in a post-apocalyptic revenger, while Ángel Gómez Hernández’s Crawlers has the residents of an apartment building – including one played by Matilda Lutz, from Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge (2017) – locked in with an infestation of deadly spiders. Meanwhile I have seen, and can therefore vouch for, the remaining three titles. John Valley’s Christmas psychodrama American Dollhouse “offers up the American household as a locus of abandonment, perversion and madness, where family history leaves gaping cracks deep in the domestic structure, and can never be outrun.” Michael Gabriele’s Unholy Night is also a Christmas film – albeit Italian-style and with zombies – whose antihero Gino (Marc Benavid) “will literally go through hell and back to resolve his feelings for his ex, and to find his place at the family table.” Last but not least another FrightFest stalwart – and one of my favourite directors – Adrián García Bogliano brings the UK première of maybe-supernatural psychodrama Talking to a Stranger, in which Gigi Saul Guerrero gives a “fraught, frazzled performance as a woman on – and beyond – the edge of a nervous breakdown, desperately clinging to her love for the dead while blinded to the needs of the living.”
© Anton Bitel
