Fantastic Fest 2026: 10 Under-the-Radar Movies HMU Is Tracking in Austin
Fantastic Fest 2026: The Under-the-Radar Movies HMU Is Tracking in Austin
Fantastic Fest has the kind of lineup where everyone arrives with a plan.
There are the premieres already carrying buzz, the filmmakers everyone wants to talk to, the secret screenings, and the movies practically guaranteed to have a line forming outside the theater. We covered plenty of those in our first Fantastic Fest 2026 preview.
But that is only half the fun.
Fantastic Fest has always been a discovery festival. Every year, something arrives with considerably less noise, plays to an audience that isn’t quite sure what they’re about to see, and suddenly becomes one of the movies people are talking about in the hallways afterward.
Those are the movies we’re looking for here.
Some are international discoveries. Some are strange enough that describing them almost defeats the purpose. Others simply have the misfortune of sharing a schedule with some of the biggest genre releases of the year.
With Horror Movies Uncut heading to Austin, here are some of the Fantastic Fest 2026 titles flying a little further under the radar that we’re tracking.
Ürei
One of the movies we’re particularly interested in championing comes from Kazakhstan.
Writer-director Yerkezhan Baizhan’s Ürei centers on a young girl staying with her aging grandmother in rural Kazakhstan, where what begins as an intimate family situation moves into increasingly supernatural territory.
We’ve already had an opportunity to see the film ahead of Fantastic Fest, and we’ll have considerably more to say once its embargo lifts.
What makes Ürei particularly exciting is also what makes an international genre festival valuable in the first place. Horror doesn’t have to come from the same handful of countries, operate according to the same filmmaking language, or continually recycle the same mythology.
Sometimes the movie you knew the least about becomes the reason you’re glad you came to the festival.
HMU will also sit down with Baizhan during Fantastic Fest, so expect considerably more from Ürei during our coverage from Austin.
Red Snow
A vampire posing as Santa Claus enters a family’s home.
That’s already enough to get our attention.
But Ilja Rautsi’s Red Snow adds another wrinkle: the family’s rebellious teenage daughter isn’t necessarily terrified by the discovery. She already dreams of becoming a vampire herself.
That gives the Finnish horror-comedy a potentially fun reversal of the usual home-invasion dynamic. The monster has entered the house, except someone inside might actually want what he’s offering.
Rautsi previously wrote Hatching, the 2022 Finnish body-horror film, giving us another reason to keep an eye on what he’s doing here.
Christmas horror is crowded territory. Finding a new doorway into it gets harder every year.
A bloodsucking Santa and a teenager considering joining him?
We’ll take a look.
Death of a Yellow Bird
Somebody finds an old VHS tape.
This being Fantastic Fest, we’re going to assume pressing play is a terrible idea.
Cody Calahan’s Death of a Yellow Bird, starring Ari Millen, uses that discovery as the doorway into a ghost story built around something buried in the past.
Analog horror has exploded over the last several years, which means VHS distortion and mysterious recordings alone aren’t enough anymore. The best versions use the format as more than an aesthetic. The tape has to uncover something worth fearing.
That’s what has Death of a Yellow Bird on our radar.
The Squirrel
Here’s where things get weird.
Markus Lehmusruusu’s The Squirrel takes place in a sterile future where nature has disappeared and human emotion is forbidden. Its central character designs robotic companion animals.
Then he encounters something his world isn’t prepared for.
A real squirrel.
That discovery begins pushing him toward emotions, nature, and ideas that the society around him has attempted to eliminate.
The Finnish science-fiction comedy makes its international premiere at Fantastic Fest, and its combination of dystopian science fiction, absurdism, and something as innocuous as a squirrel feels almost custom-built for a Fantastic Fest audience.
Sometimes rebellion starts small.
Apparently this time it starts furry.
Platypus
Kimberly keeps dreaming about a masked killer.
The problem is that the dreams aren’t staying dreams.
In Joshua Gratton’s Platypus, recurring nightmares involving a mysterious killer begin bleeding into reality as Kimberly tries to understand who, or what, is terrorizing the young people around her.
The Canadian film arrives with a deliberately lo-fi aesthetic and the kind of stripped-down genre premise that can easily disappear next to larger festival productions.
That might also be exactly why we’re interested.
Slashers don’t require massive mythology or cinematic universes. Sometimes all they need is a filmmaker with an idea, a killer worth remembering, and enough personality to make an audience lean forward.
We’ll find out whether Platypus has the bite to match the name.
Little Doors
Fantastic Fest’s Burnt Ends section is generally a pretty good indication that normal expectations should be left outside the theater.
Anthony Oberbeck’s Little Doors sounds perfectly at home there.
The 79-minute surreal comedy follows two socially awkward people who find one another in a barren post-apocalyptic world.
Then they discover a small wooden door embedded in the side of her body.
Naturally, the question becomes whether they should open it.
That’s the kind of sentence that makes us stop reading a synopsis because we’ve already heard enough.
At a festival where audiences can watch four or five movies in a day, there’s something appealing about a filmmaker getting in, doing something bizarre, and getting out in under 80 minutes.
Just maybe don’t open the door.
Girl in the Night
One of our more intriguing international discoveries comes from Slovenia.
Directed by Luka Marčetić, Girl in the Night follows an alienated petty thief whose stolen bicycle brings him into the orbit of a mysterious bruised young woman who emerges at night, fights crime, and claims to possess superpowers.
Whether she actually does is where things become interesting.
The film arrives in Fantastic Fest’s Main Competition carrying the kind of premise that could move between superhero story, dark comedy, and something considerably stranger.
It’s also one we’re intentionally trying not to know too much about beforehand.
Festival coverage can become an exercise in learning everything about a movie before sitting down to actually experience it.
Sometimes we’d rather just turn the lights off and see what happens.
Donkey Princess
If you know Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña, you probably understand why Donkey Princess landed on our list.
The Chilean filmmaking duo behind The Wolf House have already demonstrated a talent for transforming animation into something tactile, unsettling, and almost impossible to categorize.
Now Donkey Princess arrives at Fantastic Fest for its North American premiere following its world premiere at Locarno.
That makes another trip into León and Cociña’s handmade visual world an easy sell.
Fantastic Fest has always made room for films that challenge the boundaries separating horror, fantasy, animation, and experimental cinema.
Donkey Princess looks prepared to walk straight through all of them.
Compliance
Corporate damage control becomes found-footage horror in Kyle Mangione-Smith’s Compliance.
Megan Wilcox stars as Sam Cornell, a young crisis manager working for tech startup UVisit who is tasked with containing the fallout from a sexual-assault scandal threatening a multimillion-dollar deal. As she digs deeper, Sam becomes entangled in a much larger conspiracy involving a shadowy criminal organization.
Mangione-Smith tells the story through the digital surveillance systems surrounding his characters, including security cameras, webcams, and body cameras, giving the conspiracy-thriller framework a distinctly modern found-footage angle.
Lindsey Normington, recently seen in Anora, also appears in the cast.
That makes Compliance especially interesting for HMU. This isn’t just corporate paranoia played straight. It’s horror built around the uncomfortable reality that cameras, screens, and connected devices are already recording more of our lives than we tend to think about.
Sometimes the thing watching you isn’t supernatural.
Into the Sky
Trying to repair a broken marriage is difficult enough.
Being repeatedly abducted by an extraterrestrial force probably doesn’t help.
That’s the setup behind Into the Sky, which follows a man attempting to reconnect with his estranged wife while something mysterious keeps taking him away from Earth.
The cast includes Sam Richardson, Sofia Black-D’Elia, and David Cross, giving the science-fiction entry one of the more recognizable ensembles among this group.
More importantly, the premise suggests something slightly different from the usual alien-abduction movie.
Instead of simply asking what’s taking him, there’s another question underneath it:
Can you repair a relationship when the universe itself keeps pulling you away?
Fantastic Fest can get pretty dark.
Maybe the aliens are bringing relationship counseling.
One Short We’re Watching: By Yourself
Feature films understandably dominate festival conversations, but skipping the shorts is one of the easiest ways to miss filmmakers audiences may be talking about a few years from now.
By Yourself, written and directed by Elaine Frost and starring Zelda Adams, is one we’re specifically tracking.
Short-form horror leaves very little room to hide. A filmmaker has to establish a world, create tension, and deliver an idea without 90 minutes to figure everything out.
When it works, it can hit just as hard as anything playing in the feature lineup.
And at a festival built around discovering new genre voices, the shorts are part of the hunt.
The Best Fantastic Fest Movie Might Be the One You Haven’t Heard About Yet
That’s ultimately the gamble.
We can study the program, watch trailers, chase screeners, and build a schedule down to the minute. Then somebody mentions a movie while standing in line at the Alamo, plans change, and two hours later you’ve discovered the film you end up talking about for the rest of the year.
That’s Fantastic Fest.
Horror Movies Uncut will be in Austin beginning Thursday with reviews, filmmaker interviews, red carpets, daily dispatches, and plenty of discoveries we don’t know about yet.
The schedule is already packed.
We’re leaving room for it to surprise us.
Comments