Montreal’s landmark genre festival Fantasia turns thirty, with a programme full of exciting things clawing out of the ground.
This 30th edition runs 16 July to 2 August: more than 125 features, over 200 shorts, Refn opens it a decade after his last film, The Neon Demon. Shimizu is honoured with two new films. The Final Destination: Bloodlines duo gleefully celebrate their roots with a return to the micro-budget mutants they left behind. And Miike’s nightmare-logic yakuza flick Gozu, long lost to distribution-rights hell, screens again.
There’s a lot here to turn your head, but here are a top twelve that will practically unscrew it from your shoulders:
Our Top Twelve Suggestions
(alphabetically!)
1. Beasts Clutching at Straws — dir. Hideo Jojo
Not a remake of Kim Yong-hoon’s 2020 Korean noir, Beasts Clawing At Straws, but an adaptation of the same Keisuke Sone novel. The narrative engine we loved is intact: a mislaid bag of 100 million yen, a nobody who decides to keep it, and a widening menagerie of lowlifes converging on it from every direction. Pitched as a neo-noir black comedy with manga-panel violence. The Korean version had a multi-stranded chronology-hopping story with lashings of sudden death, coming across as a pitch-black version of a Guy Ritchie crime escapade – only without the annoying mockney smugness (i.e. much better). Can this Japanese version top it?
2. Buddy — dir. Casper Kelly (International premiere)
The Too Many Cooks man, now with a budget. An orange unicorn hosts a 1999 Barney knockoff, voiced by Keegan-Michael Key with a mixture of syrup and menace, as his amnesiac child co-stars start to notice their clubhouse is a cage. Meanwhile Cristin Milioti is sure she once had a child everyone has forgotten. Buddy opened Sundance and lit up the room with its dayglo mix of felt and dread. Welcome to the terror of pure evil – with singalongs!
3. Freaks Part II — dir. Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein (World premiere, Closing Film)
The closing film, and the festival’s best joke about genre economics. Lipovsky and Stein made one of the decade’s biggest horror hits, then spent the winnings on a sequel to Freaks, the 2018 mutants-next-door thriller almost nobody saw. Amanda Crew returns as Mary, on the run with her daughter. Handed the keys to anything, this directorial duo drove back to the small strange thing they built. A bold statement!
4. Gozu — dir. Takashi Miike (Retrospective)
Miike’s 2003 yakuza nightmare, restored and supplied via Radiance Films. The rights to Gozu had, according to many, long ago ended up with the actual yakuza, and nobody wanted to negotiate. Apparently someone had now sorted it, and one of the strangest films of the 2000s – a road trip into the id via a cow-headed man and cinema’s most notorious birth scene – can circulate again. On a big screen, this is guaranteed transcendence – or psychic annihilation.
5. Her Private Hell — dir. Nicolas Winding Refn (Canadian premiere, Opening Film)
The most divisive film here opens the festival, which tells you Fantasia knows its crowd. Refn’s first feature in ten years took a long ovation and vicious reviews at Cannes: one critic swore off him for life, others called it a masterpiece. Fog-drowned future Tokyo, Sophie Thatcher hunting her father, Charles Melton hunting his daughter, a killer called the Leather Man between them. Her Private Hell crawls around its own screen, pastiches Argento and Refn himself, and has Pino Donaggio on score duties. A phantasmagorical journey into cinema, desire, fear, and dissociation… We are fascinated.
6. Jim Queen and the Quest for Chloroqueer* — dir. Nicolas Athané and Marco Nguyen (North American premiere)
Bobbypills’ first feature, and a Cannes Midnight title with Caméra d’Or and Queer Palm nominations. A virus called Heterosis is turning gay Paris straight; Jim, deposed king of the Gym Queens, crosses the Marais with one loyal twink to find a cure. This cheeky animated marvel explores status and cruelty inside a community built by the excluded. Jim Queen looks like Steven Universe on poppers, and nothing else in the programme sounds like it. *The subtitle is missing from the Fantasia listing… maybe the marketing people had second thoughts!
7. Never After Dark — dir. Dave Boyle
Boyle, of Man From Reno and Netflix’s House of Ninjas, delivers his first horror and it’s a knockout. Moeka Hoshi is a wonder as a medium, trailed by her sister’s ghost, called to a house whose rogue spirit breaks every rule of the trade. An hour of exquisite J-horror chamber work, then a reversal we will not spoil turns it far crueller. This got the Midnighter Audience Award at SXSW, and raised the roof when we saw it at Overlook. In fact it triggered a smart watch alert that the noise levels were threatening my hearing. Well, believe the noise.
8. The Peril at Pincer Point — dirs. Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine (Canadian premiere)
The big British film of the festival. Kuhn and Stratton-Twine shot their improvised debut in luminous monochrome on a budget of effectively nothing. A layabout London sound recordist (Jack Redmayne) is sent to the spectral island of Pincer Point to capture a sound big enough to rescue a tyrant director’s creature feature, and finds the local legends auditioning to come true. Well reviewed out of SXSW, this is giving The Wicker Man by way of Guy Maddin and Roger Corman – the film to come to for formally inventive folk horror weirdness. They had £2 and a dream! And they made it work!
9. The Samurai and the Prisoner — dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa (North American premiere)
Kurosawa’s least Kurosawa film? This is a lavish Shochiku period piece, in which the rebel lord Murashige (Masahiro Motoki) faces a run of impossible murders inside besieged Arioka Castle, and the only mind sharp enough to solve them belongs to the enemy strategist (Masaki Suda) rotting in his dungeon. This is a Sengoku Columbo meets a 1578 Manhunter, wrapped around something sadder: leadership as solitary confinement, with faith weaponised by the state.
10. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma — dir. Jane Schoenbrun (Canadian premiere)
In Schoenbrun’s follow up to I Saw The TV Glow, a director (Hannah Einbinder) hired to revive a rotting slasher franchise falls into delirium with its reclusive original scream queen (Gillian Anderson). This could have smirked, but instead it is sincere, restless and frightening about desire, the thing that classic slashers always half-hid. Its Cannes premiere scored the Queer Palm, and it caught screams of delight from the SXSW London crowd when we saw it. Get ready for Little Death, and their incongruous air vent mask.
11. Village of Eight Gravestones — dir. Takashi Shimizu (World premiere)
A detective arrives in a the village where his grandfather committed a massacre, and encounters hostile locals, strange rituals, and bodies stacking up faster than he can investigate them. This is a spin on Seishi Yokomizo’s Yatsuhaka-mura, a cursed-village case for detective Kosuke Kindaichi, hero of 77 novels and stories and Japan’s nearest thing to Holmes. Nomura filmed it famously in 1977; handing it in 2026 to the maker of Ju-On tilts it from whodunit to folk horror. His haunted-cemetery chiller The Mouths screens alongside, for maximum Japanese dread.
12. When You Open the Door — dir. Eriko Katagiri (World premiere)
Katagiri directorial debut is this Japan Horror Award winner that reworks the werewolf film as a parable of feminine isolation, wherein a woman is drawn out of her life, into the woods, toward a shrine ritual kept by elderly maidens. Shot by Akiko Ashizawa, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s regular, in mist and silhouette. This promises to be an exciting ride into the new wave of Japanese Horror.
Bubbling Under
Six more we liked the look of…
Blaise — dirs. Dimitri Planchon and Jean-Paul Guigue. Cannes ACID’s funniest film, per Première: Planchon animates his own comic into a deadpan satire of conformity, with an inert teen mistaken for a revolutionary. Uncanny-valley faces, scat-jazz score, and Frenchness beyond parody.
Corpus — dir. Corrin Evans. Body horror in 1998 New York nightlife, co-written, produced by and starring Lily Cowles: a photographer follows his unrequited love to an upstate manor where three women are waiting. Erotic and surreal.
The Last Footage — dir. Arkar Soe Oo. Billed as Myanmar’s first found-footage horror (and possibly the first Burmese genre film to reach the international festival circuit at all?), this purports to be a nightmarish night all captured in a pair of Zuckerbergesque smart glasses,
Levitating — dir. Wregas Bhanuteja. Indonesian trance possession folded into a coming-of-age sports drama that keeps slipping into the supernatural. Warm and strange.
Motherwitch — dir. Minos Papas. Folk horror in 1880s colonial Cyprus: a painter destroyed by the loss of her children bargains with chthonic forces to undo it. Grief and myth collide – with lovely practical effects.
Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant — dir. Thunderlips (yes, Thunderlips!). New Zealand splatter in the early-Jackson manner, as a tentacle fetish goes too far. This took Sundance by storm, in part because it’s improbably sweet under the slime.