Fantastic Fest 2026 Preview: The Horror Movies HMU Can’t Wait to See in Austin
Fantastic Fest 2026 Preview: HMU Returns to Austin With ‘Resident Evil,’ ‘Victorian Psycho,’ ‘Carrie’ and a Deep Horror Lineup
Since 2013, Horror Movies Uncut has had the privilege of covering Fantastic Fest, a festival we consider the best film festival in the United States. This week, we return to Austin for Fantastic Fest 2026 and another run through one of the most unpredictable genre lineups on the calendar.
Once again, Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar will serve as home base. The formula that has made Fantastic Fest essential remains intact: major studio releases sharing screens with independent discoveries, international genre cinema, documentaries, retrospectives, anniversary screenings and movies that arrive in Austin almost completely under the radar before becoming some of the festival’s biggest stories.
For HMU, that mixture has always been the point.
Our Fantastic Fest coverage extends well beyond simply watching movies. We will be on the red carpets, conducting interviews with filmmakers and talent during press days and following the stories developing throughout the festival. The Final Cut will also return with its Fantastic Fest editions, delivering shorter daily episodes with reactions, conversations and updates from Austin.
There is also another element of Fantastic Fest that has become increasingly important over the past five or six years. The festival has evolved into a meaningful marketplace for genre filmmaking. Features find distribution. Shorts get picked up. Filmmakers find new opportunities. Talent that entered the week relatively unknown can leave Austin with considerably more attention.
That makes Fantastic Fest a place where HMU is always looking beyond the obvious. Breaking news, acquisitions and emerging filmmakers matter just as much as the biggest red carpet of the week. Whether it is homegrown Texas talent, filmmakers arriving from elsewhere in Latin America or international directors bringing something audiences have never seen before, there are always discoveries to be made.
Fantastic Fest 2026 also feels particularly interested in horror.
The festival has always operated across the entire genre spectrum, but recent editions have sometimes leaned heavily into fantasy, absurdism and other corners of genre filmmaking. This year, there is a noticeable emphasis on getting scary again. Monsters, slashers, vampires, body horror, supernatural nightmares and plenty of movies that appear designed specifically to wreck a midnight audience are scattered throughout the program.
We are more than ready for it.
Of course, the movies remain the main event, and there are a lot of them on HMU’s radar.
Resident Evil immediately sits near the top. Zach Cregger’s new interpretation of the franchise serves as an opening-night attraction, bringing one of horror gaming’s most recognizable properties back to theaters. Everything we have seen from the trailers and promotional footage has increased our curiosity about what Cregger’s vision of Resident Evil actually looks like when stretched across an entire feature.
With Cregger expected in Austin and the movie beginning its wider theatrical rollout around the festival, Fantastic Fest gives us an opportunity to get our eyes on it early.
Opening night also brings a considerably larger creature with Beware Boiúna.
Mike P. Nelson is a familiar name to Fantastic Fest audiences, and his giant-snake movie arrives as a significant Lionsgate production. There is one unavoidable question hanging over it: how does another giant-snake movie establish its identity in a landscape where Anaconda already occupies so much cultural territory?
That is not necessarily a criticism. It is exactly what makes Beware Boiúna interesting. We want to see what Nelson brings to the creature-feature formula and whether the film can establish a monster personality of its own.
Play House comes with an entirely different kind of anticipation.
Filmmaker Nicolas Jon Curcio emerged from Fantastic Fest’s Fantastic Pitches initiative, and HMU caught up with him at SXSW while he was deep in the process of getting the project together. Seeing Play House arrive at Fantastic Fest makes it more than another movie on the schedule. It gives audiences and aspiring filmmakers an early look at what the Fantastic Pitches pipeline can actually produce.
Its premise also enters increasingly crowded territory involving childhood entertainment, puppets and corrupted nostalgia. That means the central question for us is simple: what makes Play House different?
If Fantastic Pitches is going to become a genuine pathway from concept to feature, projects like this establish the bar. That makes Play House one of the festival’s more interesting films to watch beyond what happens on screen.
Then there is Victorian Psycho.
Maika Monroe has assembled one of the strongest genre résumés of her generation, and looking beyond the success of films like Longlegs reveals an actor who has consistently allowed herself to explore different corners of horror and genre cinema.
Victorian Psycho looks like an opportunity for Monroe to have some fun with that reputation.
There is something almost punk-rock about what we have seen from the movie, combining a period setting with carnage, attitude and chaos. It has the potential to occupy the place Sisu: Road to Revenge did for us last year: the movie where you walk into the theater ready to bang your head and have a ridiculous amount of fun.
Bloody Tennis is another major target.
The Shudder-bound film immediately brings to mind some of the psychological obsession of Black Swan, but there is also something about its setup that recalls sports manga and anime built around elite academies, brutal competition and athletes pushed toward increasingly treacherous extremes in pursuit of perfection.
We want to know exactly how violent this tennis affair gets.
The combination of sports, hallucination, competition and grotesque horror makes Bloody Tennis exactly the kind of movie that can thrive with a Fantastic Fest audience.
Jordan Downey’s The Cycle offers something considerably different. Downey has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to push genre material into strange places, and pairing that sensibility with what appears to be a noir-inflected mystery immediately has our attention.
Deborah Ann Woll is another reason we are watching closely. She has spent years moving comfortably through genre television and film, and seeing her enter Downey’s world makes the project even more intriguing. Knowing how far Downey has been willing to take his previous work, including his contributions to the V/H/S universe, there is every reason to wonder whether the mystery is only the beginning.
Joko Anwar’s Ghost in the Cell is an automatic priority.
Anwar remains one of HMU’s favorite working filmmakers, and we do not say that lightly. There is a creativity and imagination running through his films that continually separates his work from more conventional genre filmmaking.
Moving that sensibility into a prison setting is an irresistible proposition.
We have already been hearing strong reactions surrounding Ghost in the Cell, and Fantastic Fest will finally give us an opportunity to experience what Anwar has constructed for ourselves.
Adam Egypt Mortimer’s Pathetic Fallacy might be one of the festival’s biggest wild cards.
What initially appeared difficult to categorize becomes much more interesting once its psychedelic approach to grief and the afterlife comes into focus. The story follows a man attempting to bring his late wife back, opening the door for Mortimer to explore loss through the kind of heightened genre filmmaking that has defined his work.
Travis Fimmel and Natasha Lyonne join an ensemble that also includes Jessica Rothe and Kid Cudi, giving Mortimer an intriguing group of performers to place inside that increasingly surreal world. After seeing audiences respond to Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, there is clearly room at Fantastic Fest for filmmakers willing to approach grief, identity and horror through unconventional aesthetics. Pathetic Fallacy could be one of the festival’s more unusual discoveries.
Posthumous is another title firmly on our radar. Its combination of mystery and analog aesthetics gives it several elements we are immediately drawn toward, and it is exactly the type of movie that could surprise people once the festival gets moving.
Then there is River.
We have been tracking this one for a while, and the reactions coming out of TIFF have only raised expectations. People leaving screenings have been talking about River as one of the year’s standout new slashers. When the Fantastic Fest lineup originally dropped, it was one of the first titles that caught our attention.
Now we get to find out whether the hype is justified.
Half might be even higher on our list.
A vampire road movie is already an easy way to get HMU interested, but everything we have heard surrounding the film has pushed it into our most anticipated tier. Fantastic Fest programmer Annick Mahnert putting her stamp on something tends to get our attention, and her selections have rarely steered us wrong.
Vampires. Road movie. Fantastic Fest. Sign us up.
One film we are particularly excited to dig into is The Glorious Dead, the latest from John Adams and Toby Poser and the family-run filmmaking collective behind Hellbender, Where the Devil Roams and Mother of Flies. Zelda Adams, Toby Poser and Lulu Adams star in a story about a sheriff and her deputy who awaken to a transformed world where bloody chasms have erupted from the earth, grotesque flesh-born creatures roam the landscape and the recently dead are getting back up. The Adams family’s handmade approach to horror has made them one of the most distinctive independent voices working in the genre, and this is exactly the kind of filmmaking Fantastic Fest is built to champion. The Glorious Dead makes its U.S. premiere in Austin, and we are especially excited to sit down with the team during press day.
FlapJax is another handmade wild card we have been watching closely. Rocko Zevenbergen’s sci-fi horror comedy, co-written with Estevan Muñoz, follows an overzealous fast-food manager who unknowingly helps an alien race execute a deadly scheme by serving customers a mysterious new menu item. Zevenbergen cites Ozu and Cronenberg among the film’s influences, which is already one hell of a combination. Its mixture of alien horror, fast-food absurdity and grotesque imagery makes FlapJax one of the odder opening-weekend entries and exactly the kind of world premiere that can find its audience at Fantastic Fest.
Godmother has also moved well beyond the “maybe we can fit it in” portion of our schedule. Directed by John Veron and co-written with Alanah Pearce, the film stars Paige Evans and Cameron Cuffe as Theo and Colby, a couple whose romantic weekend in the High Desert takes a turn after they encounter two seemingly friendly retirees with much darker intentions. Those retirees are played by Dee Wallace and Bruce Davison. Getting two genre veterans with that much history together in the same horror film immediately makes Godmother an easy priority for us, with Riley Dandy also among the cast.
The deeper lineup is where things become almost impossible to manage.
Death of a Yellow Bird, Girl in the Night, Future Tense, The Heretiks, I Have Proof, Jollyface, Kung Fu Deadly, Little Doors, Magick Mtn., Mr. Creamjeans’ Hidey Hole, No Way Down, Platypus, A Prayer for the Dying, Red Snow, The Swallow, Five More Minutes and Attack on Paradise are among the movies somewhere on our radar.
We are also curious about The Birthday Party and The Blood Countess, while Anna Biller’s The Face of Horror is another major attraction. We are big fans of Biller’s work, and getting the opportunity to see what she has created here makes it an easy addition to the schedule.
That depth is why Fantastic Fest remains so difficult to preview. The film you spend months anticipating might be great, but the movie you knew almost nothing about 20 minutes before the lights went down could become the one you spend the next year telling people to watch.
And we certainly have not forgotten Carrie.
Mike Flanagan’s new interpretation of Stephen King’s story will bring its first two episodes to Fantastic Fest, and this is one of the screenings with the potential to generate conversations well beyond the festival.
The idea of revisiting Carrie White in the modern world immediately raises questions about how bullying itself has changed. Social media, smartphones and the permanence of online humiliation create an environment fundamentally different from the one surrounding earlier versions of the story.
What does isolation look like now? What happens when cruelty no longer stops when someone leaves school? How does a character like Carrie exist in a culture where humiliation can be recorded, uploaded and repeatedly experienced?
Those are far more interesting questions than simply whether another adaptation can recreate familiar moments from King’s story, and having two episodes gives Flanagan room to begin establishing what his version wants to say.
Those are also exactly the kinds of conversations HMU wants to have in Austin.
Fantastic Fest has never been about watching only the biggest movie in the room. Some of our best experiences since beginning coverage in 2013 have come from walking into a screening knowing almost nothing and walking out having discovered a filmmaker, actor or story we cannot stop talking about.
That hunt begins again Thursday.
Expect reviews throughout the festival on Horror Movies Uncut, interviews with filmmakers and talent, red-carpet coverage, daily footage from Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar, social updates, acquisition news and Fantastic Fest editions of The Final Cut. We already have several interviews lined up, including our press day with the team behind The Glorious Dead, and there will undoubtedly be more stories waiting once everyone gets to Austin.
We will also be following the connection between Fantastic Fest, HMU and BloodStream throughout the week as films move through the festival and into the larger genre ecosystem.
Thirteen years after HMU first started covering Fantastic Fest, that remains what makes the trip worthwhile.
The big movies bring everyone to Austin.
The movies nobody saw coming are often why we leave wanting to come back.
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