What to see at the 2026 Fantasia Film Festival
Festivals and events
If you're craving an unconventional, art house-style movie-going experience that feels both old school and on the bleeding edge, look no further than the Fantasia International Film Festival's 0th edition, happening July 16 to August 2, 2026.
Founded in 1996, the Fantasia International Film Festival is a world-renowned genre movie celebration, once described as "a sanctuary for genre" by director Joe Lynch. Here, "B movies" by lesser-known writers and directors are elevated and celebrated alongside wild new works by critically and commercially successful filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro (Academy Award Best Picture Winner, The Shape of Water) and Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar).
With an audience of fans and industry professionals, the thrill of Fantasia comes in large part from its interactive screenings and spirited yet respectful Q&As. Known for generating buzz around low-budget films in the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror genres, Fantasia also showcases extraordinary cinema from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Come for the zombies, vampires, and aliens, and stay for the fun atmosphere and panels with some of genre film's biggest stars. With so many world and Canadian premieres taking place, you might just be among the first to see the next breakthrough horror film!
With a colossal lineup of over 125 features, more than 200 shorts, and an abundance of special events, exhibitions, and artist talks, Fantasia 2026 is an event not to be missed. Read on for a selection from this year’s massive program, then head to Fantasia’s website to discover everything happening at this singular summer film event.
A hallucinatory opener
True to form, Fantasia's 30th edition kicked off with the Canadian premiere of Her Private Hell, a “hallucinatory fairy tale death trip” by Nicolas Winding Refn. While this surreal, Neo Noir-style exploration of memory, death and resurrection has already screened, you can watch the trailer here and catch the film in wider release starting July 24, 2026. Refn, a legendary Danish director, screenwriter, and producer, was honoured with the festival's Cheval Noir Career Achievement Award on opening night.
Postcards from Japan
J-horror legend Takashi Shimizu, creator of the Ju-On saga, returns to Fantasia with a double feature. In the world premiere of Village of Eight Gravestones, a young man named Tatsuya travels to the rural village where his estranged mother once lived, teaming up with the legendary literary detective Kosuke Kindaichi to untangle a family curse and a fresh wave of killings. Shimizu's second title, The Mouths, gets its North American premiere and follows university students who tempt fate by visiting a cursed cemetery tree in the dead of night and quickly find themselves in a waking nightmare. Elsewhere in Japanese programming, Kiyoshi Kurosawa blends the genres of Japanese period film and mystery in The Samurai and the Prisoner, while Atsushi Nishigori, Chief Animation Director of the wildly popular, Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, unleashes GROTESQQQUE, a three-part anthology overflowing with aliens, gyarus (gals), and vampires, and Eriko Katagiri offers a dreamy werewolf tale with a fresh take on female isolation and alienation in When You Open the Door.
Spotlight on Quebec and Canadian Cinema
Simon Harrisson’s sci-fi comedy, The Galactic Ghoul, follows Vincent Hoss-Desmarais in a dual role as space explorer Oscar Bravo and his sly subordinate, staging a great escape from a prison planet alongside Katharine Isabelle's Queen Xaltalusia XXIII. Blending practical costuming with cartoony digital animation, it's a loving, lower-budget homage to B-movie space operas. Les Saturnides, from director Neegan Trudel, is an eerier Montréal story: strange glowing clouds plunge the city into mass insomnia, and an overprotective young mother and her optimistic boyfriend must fight to separate reality from hallucination as paranoia takes hold under a state of emergency. And in Someone's Daughter, director Wiebke von Carolsfeld strands a defence lawyer (Pascale Bussières) and the client she once got acquitted of rape (François Arnaud) in the Canadian wilderness after the accuser's father kidnaps them both, unspooling a tense, morally ambiguous survival story.
Genre gems from around the globe
In Giddens Ko's Kung Fu, Taiwan's first martial-arts fantasy in over 40 years, two unlikely heroes gain magical powers thanks to a chance encounter with an aging martial arts master. Michael Gabriele brings Christmas in July with Unholy Night, a holiday horror-comedy where Gino's family Christmas Eve descends into chaos after his dead nonna comes back to "help." Edwin's Sleep No More turns a haunted Jakarta wig factory into a blood-soaked indictment of exploitative labour, following two sisters investigating their mother's death on the job. Andrea Corsini's Ferine is a welcome addition to the lush, transgressive Italian horror genre as a grieving art collector awakens a primal predator within herself. In God Skin, a broke Bangkok delivery boy stumbles into an underground martial-arts betting arena with a high-tech, dystopian twist. I Love Paris is a comedy horror mockumentary vampire film that follows an apathetic hipster musician turned bloodsucker as she loiters around the city of lights looking for her next meal. Mia'Kate Russell's Penny Lane Is Dead is a blood-drenched, by times comedic, gore-fest of a survival thriller set at a 1986 Australian beach party gone savagely wrong. And in Motherwitch, a grieving painter in 1880s colonial Cyprus strikes a Faustian bargain with dark feminine forces to bring back her lost children, blending folk horror with Gothic myth.
Documentaries from the Edge
Black Zombie traces the history of the zombie to its true origins, with writer-director Maya Annik Bedward examining how the transatlantic slave trade and the demonization of Haitian Vodou under colonial rule gave rise to the figure we know today. The Seoul Guardians offers a breathless, on-the-ground account of South Korea's December 2024 martial law crisis, when President Yoon Suk-yeol's attempted power grab sent elected officials scaling the National Assembly's walls to overturn the decree in real time. Rubberhead: The Life and Monsters of Steve Johnson spends seven years chronicling the practical-FX legend behind An American Werewolf in London, Videodrome, and Ghostbusters, in a warts and all portrait of a talented, self-sabotaging artist and the golden age of practical effects he helped define.
Official Closing Film
The festival closes with the world premiere of Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein's Freaks Part II, the hotly-anticipated follow-up to their 2018 indie sleeper-hit FREAKS and 2025's commercial and critical juggernaut, Final Destination: Bloodlines. Years after a traumatic escape, mother and daughter live on the run, concealing their powers from the Abnormal Defense Force, a paramilitary unit built to exterminate "freaks" like them.
The 30th edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival runs from July 16 to August 2, 2026. Screenings will be held in Downtown Montreal at the Concordia University Hall Building and J.A. de Sève cinemas, with additional events at Montreal's Cinéma du Musée. Consult the full programme, here.
Sarah Beall
Sarah Beall is a writer, editor, and creative who loves food, fun, and all things arts and culture. Her wanderlust has taken her to such places as São Paulo, Brazil, Seoul, South Korea, London, England, and New York, New York, and yet she’s always happiest playing tourist and living the good life in Montreal, the world-class city she’s called home for over 20 years.