Blood Countesses, Bad Babies and The Devils: Horror and cult movies at the LFF.
The 70th BFI London Film Festival’s genre programme is full of things that should probably be left alone: vampires waking up in Vienna, brides changing shape, babies developing a taste for raw meat, artificial intelligences running society and forests that swallow children whole.
Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), returning in a director’s cut reconstruction assembled from the original camera negative and presented according to his preferred 2004 edit, is the centrepiece of the CULT strand. A must-see for any cinephile, this is a major homecoming for a lodestone of cult British cinema.
Fifty-five years after its original release, The Devils still arrives trailing controversy. Oliver Reed plays Urbain Grandier, the 17th-century priest accused of bewitching a convent of nuns, while Vanessa Redgrave’s Sister Jeanne is consumed by an obsession that helps turn religious persecution into political theatre and collective hysteria.
Russell’s images remain ferocious: bodies twisted by desire and punishment, institutions rendered as grotesque machines, and production design that seems to have been dragged straight out of a fever dream. The reconstruction offers audiences the chance to see a notoriously compromised film closer to the version Russell wanted them to see.
It is a fitting anchor for a programme interested in what happens when bodies, families, identities and belief systems begin to disintegrate, letting all manner of monsters run free. And with that… let’s take a look at the rest of the cult, horror and fantastique films on offer.
Institutions, gender and the body
Ulrike Ottinger’s The Blood Countess casts Isabelle Huppert as Elizabeth Báthory, waking in present-day Vienna with her maid and pet bat. The film promises Gothic fantasy, comedy and theatrical excess, with Huppert playing an imperious undead aristocrat. One of European cinema’s most distinctive actors taking on one of history’s most notorious blood-soaked legends is, frankly, difficult to resist.
Anna Biller’s The Face of Horror travels back to 14th-century England. Eleanor is murdered by her husband, rises from the grave and joins her sister in pursuit of revenge. Biller’s The Love Witch (2016) became a cult sensation by recreating Technicolor melodrama with almost absurd precision while quietly dismantling the romantic fantasies beneath it. Her return promises more elaborate costumes, more stylised desire and another supernatural story in which women refuse to remain where patriarchy has put them. Biller has long been focussed on gender as her topic of choice. Careful audiences will be looking to see any signs of her notorious transphobia.
In Rubaiyat Hossain’s The Difficult Bride, wedding preparations become an increasingly aggressive campaign to remake Zaineen’s appearance. She is expected to become thinner, fairer and more conventionally bridal. Then her body starts responding in ways nobody can control.
Hossain’s films have consistently examined gender, class and social pressure in Bangladesh, and here those concerns move into body-horror territory. Beauty rituals become physical threats; the ideal bride becomes a site of revolt.
For a concentrated hit of bodily unease, there is the shorts programme Land of Hope and Gory. Shir Ariya, Lucy Luscombe, Max Vanderspuy, Sophia Di Martino (from TV’s Loki!), Rodolphe Bouquet-Populus and Emily Lawson contribute six films involving physical transformation, obsessive self-improvement, danger and grotesque appetites. If you want the festival’s most direct route to flesh behaving badly, maybe start here.
Family, marriage and monstrous intimacy
Hanna Bergholm’s Nightborn stars Seidi Haarla and Rupert Grint as new parents trying to build an ideal family life in the Finnish woods. Their plans are interrupted by a baby that appears to prefer raw meat to milk.
Bergholm’s debut, Hatching (2022), turned adolescent anxiety and family repression into one of recent horror’s most memorable creature features. Its bird-like monster was both revolting and strangely pathetic, which is not an easy balance to strike. Nightborn continues in that uncomfortable space between family drama, creature horror and very dark comedy. The baby may be monstrous. But can it, should it be loved?
Sarmad Sultan Khoosat’s Lali is a Punjabi-language comedy about two strangers brought together in an arranged marriage. Zeba is believed to be cursed after the unexplained deaths of two previous fiancés, while Sajawal arrives with his own problems. Their marriage opens into a supernatural story that shifts between comedy, romance and darker fantasy.
The film’s tonal unpredictability is part of its appeal. So is its regional specificity. There is something refreshing about a genre story that refuses to settle into one register, particularly when the marriage at its centre is already being treated as both social arrangement and possible haunting.
In Wicker, Olivia Colman plays an ostracised fisherwoman who orders herself a husband made of wicker. He arrives in the form of Alexander Skarsgård, which seems likely to complicate village life considerably.
Directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, the film sounds less like horror than a strange, tender fable about loneliness, exclusion and companionship. Still, a giant wicker husband entering a suspicious rural community carries certain associations. British audiences may find themselves waiting for the ritual singing to begin. Others may consider this the strangest fetish movie of the year, or the moment ‘romantasy’ fully broke out into the public consciousness.
Olivia Colman lends her voice to The Fox, Dario Russo’s gleefully outrageous Australian comedy about a talking fox who persuades a hunter to punish his unfaithful wife by throwing her into a magical hole. What follows is a series of transformations that turns marital resentment into literal shape-shifting.
Russo is best known for the cult television series Danger 5 (2012–2015), and The Fox promises the same straight-faced appetite for absurdity, genre collision and bad behaviour. Jai Courtney and Emily Browning lead the cast, joined by Colman and the late Sam Neill. Beneath the magical transformations there looks to be a savage joke about jealousy, ownership and the animal instincts lurking within “civilised” relationships.
Identity, embodiment and memory
Arthur Harari’s The Unknown stars Niels Schneider as a photographer who wakes inside the body of a woman he met the previous night. With Léa Seydoux also in a central role, the film explores identity, embodiment and the uneasy relationship between the mind and the flesh.
Duncan Jones’s animated Rogue Trooper adapts the long-running 2000 AD comic. Its bioengineered soldiers carry their personalities in chips after their bodies are destroyed, allowing memory and identity to survive in equipment, weapons and other soldiers.
Aneurin Barnard, Hayley Atwell and Matt Berry provide voices for a science-fiction adventure that combines military action with questions about consciousness and technological embodiment. Jones’s Moon (2009) and Source Code (2011) already established his interest in duplication, memory and unstable selves. This looks like a natural extension of those concerns, only with considerably more ammunition.
Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus Zero returns to the characters of Godzilla Minus One (2023). Set in 1949, it follows Kōichi, Noriko and Akiko as they attempt to rebuild their lives after the previous film’s devastation.
The first Japanese feature shot for IMAX, it will receive a BFI IMAX screening. Yamazaki’s earlier film restored emotional and historical weight to the monster movie, making Godzilla feel less like a franchise obligation than a national trauma with teeth (and atomic breath). The sequel is one of the festival’s most anticipated large-scale genre screenings. Expect destruction, certainly, but destruction with heart.
Technology, catastrophe and speculative futures
Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s Hot Spot takes place in a near-future society governed by sentient artificial intelligence. A private detective investigating a murder is drawn towards an insurgent group and a woman who may be a cyber witch.
Smoczyńska’s previous The Lure (2015), a musical about cannibal mermaids, announced a filmmaker with no interest in keeping genres in separate rooms. Hot Spot promises another collision of noir, dystopian science fiction and political rebellion, with enough visual strangeness to make the future look less sleek than feverish.
Ana Vaz’s Hanabi combines diary, political essay and speculative fiction in its account of life after the Tōhoku earthquake and nuclear disaster. Vaz’s work moves between ecological, political and personal registers, making this a particularly intriguing prospect for anyone interested in documentary forms that refuse to behave.
Leonardo Pirondi’s Tropical Fractals follows Brazilian archivists aboard a biodome spacecraft as they attempt to preserve the last remnants of life on Earth. Both films are concerned with survival, but neither treats preservation as a simple act of rescue. What gets remembered? Who gets carried forward? And what does it mean to archive a world that has already ended?
The fantastique and impossible worlds
Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters brings a different kind of cult energy to the Gala programme. Keke Palmer plays Corvette, an aspiring fashion designer who leads the Velvet Gang, a group of shoplifters targeting boutiques owned by fashion entrepreneur Christie Smith. When Smith steals one of Corvette’s designs, the gang’s anti-capitalist redistribution project becomes something more personal and considerably more ambitious.
Riley’s previous Sorry to Bother You (2018) turned corporate exploitation into a surreal, furious and gloriously unpredictable satire. I Love Boosters promises another fashion fever dream in which capitalism is both the target and the organising principle of the madness. With Palmer joined by Naomi Ackie, LaKeith Stanfield, Taylour Paige and Demi Moore, it has the cast, scale and political mischief to become one of the festival’s biggest cult propositions.
Brad Bird’s Ray Gunn is an animated alien noir set in an alternate 1939. Bird’s return to animation is notable in itself, given his work on The Iron Giant (1999), The Incredibles (2004) and Ratatouille (2007). The promise of a hard-boiled science-fiction world populated by extraterrestrials makes it one of the festival’s most immediately appealing galas.
LAIKA’s Wildwood follows a girl into a forest inhabited by magical beings after her baby brother is carried away by crows. The studio behind Coraline (2009), ParaNorman (2012) and Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) has made a speciality of beautiful, melancholy worlds in which childhood is never entirely safe. Wildwood looks set to continue that tradition, and should be one of the festival’s major family and animation highlights.
Nanni Moretti’s It Will Happen Tonight follows two people who are repeatedly separated and reunited through a romantic fantasy. Moretti is better known for intimate comedy and political drama; this move into a more overtly fantastical register promises to take his long-standing interest in relationships, repetition and emotional stalemate and place it somewhere dreamier, stranger and less bound by ordinary time.
The experimental programme pushes further into the impossible. Chronovisor concerns a Benedictine monk who claimed to have invented a machine capable of viewing any moment in history. A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra explores imagined realities and the possibility of existence after death.
These films extend the fantastique beyond conventional genre storytelling. Their impossible premises are not simply puzzles to be solved; they are ways of asking how reality is recorded, remembered and experienced in the first place.
A programme without fixed borders
Taken together, the programme moves from Gothic horror and body horror to science fiction, animation, comedy and experimental film. There are supernatural transformations, unusual families, artificial intelligences, ecological disasters and alternative versions of history. There are also several films that seem determined to make the question of genre somebody else’s problem.
Around its centrepiece of The Devils, the festival gathers filmmakers with strong cult, critical or popular followings: Hanna Bergholm, Agnieszka Smoczyńska, Takashi Yamazaki, Duncan Jones, Brad Bird and LAIKA. The result is a programme that feels less like a neat category than a haunted house with several entrances.
The 70th BFI London Film Festival runs from 7 to 18 October 2026.
Horror, Cult and Fantastique at LFF 2026
CULT
- The Blood Countess
- The Face of Horror
- Godzilla Minus Zero
- Hot Spot
- Ken Russell’s The Devils
- Nightborn
- Rogue Trooper
- The Unknown
Official Competition
- The Difficult Bride
Galas
- I Love Boosters
- Ray Gunn
- Wildwood
Love
- It Will Happen Tonight
Laugh
- Lali
- Wicker
Dare
- Chronovisor
- A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra
Experimenta
- Hanabi
- Tropical Fractals
Shorts
Land of Hope and Gory
- The Sorrows of Young Charlotte
- Meatmylk
- Fishbrain
- All Yours
- The Last Snow
- Man Eating Pussy