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| Corpus Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
Fantasia 2026: our pick of the pictures There’s a reason why, after 30 years, Fantasia continues to be seen as one of the world’s top genre festivals. It’s not just about the big names, impressive though they are – this year opens with Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell, packs in brand new Kiyoshi Kurosawa film Kokurojo: The Samurai And The Prisoner, and also features genre legend Larry Fessenden’s monster mash Trauma Or, Monsters All. It’s that every year packs in a great selection of less obvious works which show off fresh talent and great ideas. Fantasia is the place to be if you want to check out what’s hot this year and whose work you’ll be hungering for in a decade’s time. It’s hard to pick favourites, especially with some sweet retrospectives to choose from too, but here’s our tasting selection for the feast in store.
Then and now: Ancestral Beasts & Gozu
Why do they say monsters aren’t real? Because most of the time, it’s true. For some people, however, there are very real horrors in the recent past, and the only way to find out who we are is to to face them. In Tim Riedel’s Ancestral Beasts, a young indigenous woman with deep anger issues moves into the house where her family was traumatised by the Sixties Scoop, and encounters a terrifying presence. In Takashi Miike’s 2003 curio, which plays like a Japanese take on Donald Cammel and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, a virginal gangster who may or may not be in love with the man he is hunting travels to a small town and gets caught up in its ancient fertility rites. Gozu explores a society still struggling with its identity in the aftermath of the moral crisis created by losing World War Two, while Riedel’s film, which contains strong autobiographical elements alongside some seriously scary scenes, addresses the generational trauma stemming from violence which most of Canada’s white residents are still barely aware of.
Telltale hearts: A Safe Distance & Corpus
Love leads our heroes in unexpected directions in these big screen feature débuts by directors Gloria Mercer and Corrin Evans. There’s more distance between him and the heroine of the first of these than her boyfriend makes an ill-advised proposal in the middle of the woods, but viewers will already have seen enough for her refusal to make sense. When he abandons her afterwards, her lack of hiking skills puts her in danger, until she falls in with a younger couple who represent a different kind of danger altogether – and, perhaps, a chance to discover her true self. The second also involves a trip into the woods for three young men who have been promised a party but find themselves in the company of three dangerous women. Complicating this is the deep unrequited love that one of them has for his friend, who is struggling with the objectification that comes with sudden success in his film career. The two films use different genre tropes, but both have a luminous beauty about them, and questions to ask about what satisfaction really looks like.
Infectious thrills: Colony & Pontypool
He may have directed Train To Busan, but you won’t catch director Yeon Sang-ho letting the Z-word slip into his latest tale of infection and apocalyptic violence, Colony; neither did Pontypool’s Bruce McDonald permit it as a description of his plague victims – they were conversationalists. Both these films deliver on mass panic, biting and blood, but they both have a lot going on upstairs, using the diseases they present us with to talk about issues around communication and the exchange of ideas. Focused on a radio station and the potential of that medium, McDonald’s film explores themes around colonialism and the power of language to change the way people think, as certain English words become infected but speaking French or Armenian remains safe. Yeon’s, meanwhile, is set in the traditional environment of a mall and office complex, but sees its survivors depend on their phones for communication whilst the infected are able to communicate information telepathically. It’s interested in viral information, misinformation, fascism and how we might hold onto our humanity in the real world.
Existential weirdness: Godhead & Sour Minnows
Already awkward characters have to deal with phenomena quite beyond the ordinary spectrum of their experience in the latest offerings from Mark Rapaport (producer of The Scary Of Sixty-First, director of Hippo) and Harrison Atkins (Lace Crater). The first film sees a troubled priest confronted by a pair of twins whose strange and brutal request puts him to the test. The second follows a young slacker who, after witnessing the odd phenomenon of six men licking the pavement – something he becomes increasingly convinced he was not supposed to see – begins to catch glimpses of a peculiar yellow thing which wears human bodies sometimes for its own unknowable ends. Both films oblige us to deal with worlds in which the familiar rules cease to apply, invoking the possibility of inescapable doom yet, in doing so, holding out the hope of a strange sort of liberation.
Hold on tight: Rubberhead: The Life And Monsters Of Steve Johnson & The Last Temptation Of Becky
Sometimes, at a genre festival, what you really want is everything, right now. Rubberhead may be a documentary but it takes viewers for a wild ride, telling the story of a special effects artist whose real life was as wild as his famous creations. It matches the pace of a career that took of explosively, gives you the chance to revisit some of the greatest creature features in history, and delivers all the highs and lows you’d hope for in a thriller. Then, if you prefer fiction, there’s the latest instalment in the adventures of the inimitable Becky, a young woman whose anger management issues and disregard for rules have made her an audience favourite. This time around she’s up against Nazis, and if that premise grabs you, you won’t be disappointed. Director Jenn Wexler (The Ranger, The Sacrifice Game) really makes it her own, pulling out all the stops. Try not to forget to breathe. On a big screen with a festival crowd, this will be at its very best.
