Benny (Luke Bracey) parks his car in the dark near a bar, quickly flosses his teeth, chews on a breath mint, glances at photos of a woman, winks at himself in the rearview mirror, and enters The Oubliette with a bunch of flowers in hand. This romeo is on a date and out to score,…
The Brook world première in the First Blood strand at FrightFest, 29th August 2026 Given its small population, the remote English village of Elmbrook, from which Paul Stainthorpe’s narrative feature debut The Brook takes its title, has a strikingly large number of missing persons, their faces displayed on a wall at local music venue The…
Fresh Meat world première at FrightFest, 29th and 31st August 2026 June Nolan (Joelle Farrow) and her friends Valerie (Hannah Galway) and Brett (Alex Sands) record their explorations of abandoned spaces, and then post the finished pieces on their vlog Abandoned with June. They are diligent, good-natured and safety-conscious – which is to say unsuccessful…
Slay world première at FrightFest, 27th August 2026 “I grew up on horror movies and Clueless, which explains a lot,” says Chloe Cruz (Zoey Luna) near the beginning of Kyra Gardner’s Slay. Her words certainly explain a lot about the movie itself, which is pitched precisely between sassily scripted saga of teen rivalry and romance,…
The Red Mask first published by SciFiNow from its world première at FrightFest 2025, Saturday 23 August Allina Green (Helena Hoard) is a writer, and blocked. She has been offered a dream gig to script a reboot of The Red Mask – an iconic, and iconically basic home invasion slasher from 1982 which spawned a…
Love and death may be literature’s two greatest themes, but they make strange bedfellows in cinema. Conventionally love belongs to the romance, and death to horror, but Josh Ruben’s Heart Eyes brings them together in this slasher rom com that genuinely adheres to the rules of both genres. Wearing a mask with heart-shaped pink lights…
Pitfall at Panic Fest, 12 April 2026 “Family is forever,” says the patriarch Drew Williams (Grant Vlahovic) near the beginning of Pitfall. Drew is driving back through thick mist from a camping trip he has just taken with his wife of decades Loraine (Teresa Laverty) and their adult children Scott (Marshall Williams) and Ashley (Alex…
The slasher formula is fixed yet, paradoxically, also flexible. You know the drill: people are going to be dispatched one by one in grisly fashion, until the murderer is eventually unmasked, apprehended or eliminated in such a way that the underlying issues remain only partially resolved and there is always room for more serial killing…
Writer/director Luis Calderón’s The Treehouse (La casa en el árbol) begins as it will continue: split down the middle. For after a brief prologue from 9 May 2008 in which Jesús (Claudio Portalo) and his girlfriend Ale (Sandra Escacena) are driven away from the funeral ceremony for Jésus’ mother by her spiteful, spitting family (“They…
Mutilator 2 first published by SciFiNow, for its international première at FrightFest 2024, 23 Aug Buddy Cooper and John S. Douglass’ The Mutilator first screened in January 1984 in North Carolina (where it was also shot and set) under the title Fall Break, and was retitled towards the end of that year, even as –…
From its opening sequence, Brandon Christensen’s Night of the Reaper is hard-coded as a product from the second half of the Eighties. It is not just the cathode ray television playing music videos on MTV, or the kitchen fridge containing drink cans labelled Coca-Cola Classic, or the touch-tone phone in the living room, but also…