Snapshot world première at FrightFest, 31st August 2026 Joseph Archer’s Snapshot both does and does not present itself as a classic found footage film. Text at the beginning reveals that its reels were donated to the British Film Archives by the will of ‘Mary Tamworth’ in 2026, and appear to have been ‘cut, reordered and…
Hy3na world première at FrightFest, 31st August 2026 Two women, Nicole (Kirsten Kaster) and blue-haired Rachel (Storm Steenson), dance close in bisexual lighting on a crowded dance floor. “Best friends one minute,” Rachel whispers to Nicole, “but as soon as you add a boy…”, and she starts strangling Nicole then and there. Somehow Nicole regains…
Bloom world première at FrightFest, 31st August 2026 Bloom opens impressionistically. There is a soft-focus close-up of a nose sniffing deeply at the stamens of a distinctive red flower. A man with blood-stained forearms pushes a wheelbarrow towards a woman kneeled before a bed of those flowers who is herself covered in blood, and she…
Compliance UK première at FrightFest, 31st August 2026 Compliance begins as in fact it ends, with high-angle CCTV footage of various room interiors, each logged by a digital label (“Cornell S living room” etc.) to mark the location. The last shot in this series is a bedroom, with Sam Cornell (Megan Wilcox) asleep in bed,…
Bad Karaoke world première at FrightFest, 30th August 2026 Bad Karaoke opens in 2012, in a small-town bar. As a drunk man (Justin Miner) staggers forward and angrily unplugs the ‘Song-a-Ling’ karaoke machine that others are enjoying, he electrocutes both himself and the woman at the live mic (Kate Miner), whose rendition of the old…
Do You Want To Play? world première at FrightFest, 30th August 2026 It is 1970, and little Ward Weaver (Trent Longo) is playing a terrifying game of hide-and-seek with his hulking father John (Lorin McCraley). As John turns violent, Ward stabs his father with a kitchen knife, and then dying John is seen to exhale…
Meat Kills (Vleesdag) UK première at FrightFest, 30th August 2026 Meat Kills (Vleesdag, literally ‘Meat Day’) opens with a creepy point-of-view shot through the dark corridors of a slaughterhouse. This is not the perspective of an animal on its last journey, but of ‘inside girl’ Mirthe (Caro Derkx, her forename the Latin word for ‘meat’),…
Frogman retrospective screening at FrightFest, 30th August 2026 In August 1999, on a car trip with his bickering parents (Justen Jones, Emily Joe Hayes) and older sister Lizzie (Shea Mikel) to Loveland, Ohio, ten-year-old Dallas (Indiana Arnold) captures something walking bipedally in the woods on his Hi-8 camera – a creature with human height and…
Heraldry Paranormal world première in the First Blood strand at FrightFest, 29th August 2026 Finlay McCoy (Jimmy Roberts), his brother Seamus (the film’s writer/director Ashley Nashville) and their researcher Emerson (Tara Baranakul) are ‘Heraldry Paranormal’, new kids on the block in Yorkshire-based paranormal investigating, while Finlay’s American girlfriend Blair (Parker Paige), whom he has never…
The Nameless Ballad world première at FrightFest, 29th August 2026 Filmmaker Federico Zampaglione has a thing about toads. In his Shadow (2009), the antagonist Mortis (Nuot Arquint) is shown enthusiastically licking the back of a Bufo alvarius; and in his latest a squat toad appears several times, and at one point events are even shown…
Binding Eva world première for the First Blood strand at FrightFest, 29th August 2026 Conscian Morgan’s debut feature Binding Eva comes with two prologues. The first comprises text that reads: “In these woods, an elder woman keeps to the old craft. She binds what will not let go. A trial for lost souls.” These are…