The UK’s premier horror film festival is back!
Tubi FrightFest, now in its 27th year, runs from Thursday 27 to Monday 31 August at the Odeon Luxe Leicester Square and Odeon Luxe West End, and this edition is shaping up to be its most ambitious to date.
The headline number is 82 features across five days — a record for the festival — including 24 world premieres drawn from 16 countries across four continents. The sheer geographic spread is arguably the story here: FrightFest has long been more internationally minded than its Bank Holiday weekend setting might suggest, and this year’s programme reinforces that reputation emphatically.
Opening night sets the tone with the world premiere of Nervous, the new film from Abner Pastoll (A Good Woman Is Hard to Find), shot in South Korea and reuniting him with his lead actress Sarah Bolger. The film centres on a woman who begins losing her ability to hear men’s voices, and is described as a cross-cultural psychological thriller with an undercurrent of dangerous obsession. Also on opening night is Colony, the latest from Yeon Sang-ho, the Train to Busan director whose earlier films Seoul Station and Train to Busan will also screen in the festival alongside the new work — a nice piece of programming that gives audiences context for where he’s come from.
The Asian strand is particularly strong this year. Indonesian filmmaker Joko Anwar brings Ghosts in the Cell, a genre-bending horror-comedy that was among the standouts at this year’s Berlinale, while Salmokji: Whispering Water arrives fresh from becoming the highest-grossing Korean horror film of all time. Cult Japanese titles Crazy Lips and Gore from Outer Space have also been restored and will screen from new prints.
Elsewhere, Christopher Smith returns with Spider Island, an eight-legged satirical horror; James Nunn’s survival thriller Hungry drops tourists into a Louisiana bayou with a territorial hippo in pursuit; and anthology film The Pitchfork Retreat — produced by the team behind the Terrifier franchise — includes a final screen appearance from Candyman star Tony Todd.
Closing the festival is the UK premiere of Species, French director Marion Le Corroller’s sci-fi body horror about workplace burnout, featuring practical effects work from Pierre-Olivier Persin, who took both an Oscar and a BAFTA for his work on The Substance.
Check out the full programme here, and get your tickets now!
