Grimmfest 2026 Sets ‘Dracula’ 4K Restoration and Maika Monroe’s ‘Victorian Psycho’ as Opening and Closing Films

Grimmfest is adding two major genre titles to the bookends of its 2026 edition, with Hammer Films’ newly restored Dracula opening the Manchester festival and Maika Monroe-led Victorian Psycho closing out four days of horror and fantastic cinema.

The Manchester International Festival of Fantastic Film returns to the Odeon Great Northern from Oct. 8-11. Following the previously announced feature lineup, Grimmfest has now revealed its opening and closing selections along with three themed short-film programs spanning horror, science fiction, dark comedy, folk horror and cosmic terror.

Grimmfest will open with a special advance screening of Hammer Films’ definitive, uncensored 4K restoration of Terence Fisher’s 1958 Dracula, also known as Horror of Dracula.

Starring Christopher Lee as Count Dracula and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing, Fisher’s adaptation became one of the defining films of Hammer’s Gothic horror era. The new restoration was completed by Hammer Films and Silver Salt Restoration in collaboration with The Warner Archive Collection.

Of particular interest to longtime Hammer fans is the restoration of footage absent from widely available versions of the film for more than six decades. Material originating from reels associated with the original 1958 Japanese theatrical release reinstates footage removed from UK and U.S. versions by censors because it was considered too gruesome at the time.

Grimmfest audiences will get an early opportunity to see the restoration before its nationwide UK theatrical release beginning Oct. 16. A new UHD and Blu-ray box set is scheduled to follow Oct. 26.

The festival will then move from one era of Gothic horror to a contemporary reworking of it for its closing film.

Zachary Wigon’s Victorian Psycho will receive its UK premiere at Grimmfest, with Maika Monroe leading the adaptation of Virginia Feito’s novel. Feito adapted her own book for the screen.

The film combines Victorian high society, Gothic melodrama, horror and satire, with Monroe at the center of a story drawing on both classic literary traditions and more contemporary psychological horror. Grimmfest describes the film through influences ranging from Jane Austen, Daphne du Maurier and the Brontës to Sarah Waters and Bret Easton Ellis, while also pointing toward the heightened Gothic filmmaking of Crimson Peak.

Beyond its opening and closing films, Grimmfest has revealed three themed short-film programs for 2026. Collectively, the selections include two world premieres, two international premieres, one European premiere, 11 UK premieres, two regional premieres and three Greater Manchester premieres.

The first program, “Weirder Tales,” focuses on contemporary interpretations of classic weird fiction.

Bill Watterson, director of Dave Made a Maze, returns to Grimmfest with the UK premiere of Midnight City, written by and starring Yuri Lowenthal. The film uses the language of 1940s film noir before introducing a supernatural element.

Kelsey Bollig and Matthew DuVall’s Gothic Western creature feature The Bones Exist follows three gold prospectors confronting questions of faith and conscience alongside a more immediate carnivorous threat.

Cosmic horror moves into the slums of Rio with Nícolas Lobato and Thiago Tuchu’s Favela Amarela, in which visions of the lost city of Carcosa begin haunting a reluctant drug trafficker.

Kevin Ray and Matthew Fisher’s The Anchoress will receive its international premiere, following a medieval hermit whose encounter with a severely disfigured visitor introduces something seemingly impossible into his isolated existence.

Italian actor Franco Nero stars in the world premiere of Jacopo Marchini’s reimagining of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Terrible Old Man, while L.S. David and Miguel Solís combine rave culture and folk horror in the UK premiere of POV nightmare Anax.

The festival’s “Future Tension” program shifts toward science fiction and speculative horror, using contemporary anxieties as the foundation for increasingly hostile futures.

Among the selections is the world premiere of Paton Ashbrook’s Harvest, centered on a depressed woman who makes a dangerous bargain with an AI therapy device. JC Farris’ cyberpunk satire A Violent Flammable World will also receive its world premiere, imagining a society where maintaining sufficient credit becomes a literal matter of survival.

Other selections tackle corporate culture, ecological collapse and technology. François Choquene’s The Hiring Protocol transforms the employment process into a physically and psychologically punishing ordeal, while Emanu Garnheim’s animated Återsådd follows an astronaut confronting the consequences of trying to save a dying planet.

Kerry Glennon’s Raggot takes a more overtly splatter-driven approach, following a reconditioned military robot struggling with domestic servitude.

Grimmfest’s third shorts program, “Laughing in the Dark,” turns toward the longstanding relationship between horror and comedy.

The selection includes Fernando Alle’s puberty-themed gross-out Pimple, Will Wightman’s This Place Is a Shthole* and Natasha Halevi’s latest Super-8 installment in her “Cute Existential Dread” series, My Left Hand Is a Part of Me.

James III’s Day of the Dad mixes splatter with parental anxiety as a father attempts to keep his baby daughter asleep while chaos unfolds around him. Diogo Abrantes and João Rito’s Knitting Club sends a delivery driver into the company of three unusually friendly elderly women, while Pocongdorie follows Dutch-Indonesian siblings who discover that clearing out their late mother’s home involves more than removing her possessions.

The program also includes Jano Pita’s Open Mic, in which a struggling comedian’s anxieties become physical, and Pim Vogels’ Fatum, centered on an interview with a monstrous plutocrat that descends into surreal territory.

Closing out the shorts selection is Wannes Vanspauwen and Pol De Plecker’s Pithead, an unusual tale involving a stranded traveler, a black metal karaoke bar and a penguin.

Taken together, the newly announced programming gives Grimmfest 2026 a particularly broad cross-section of genre filmmaking. The festival will begin by revisiting one of Hammer Horror’s foundational works with material unavailable to most audiences for decades, then close with a new Gothic production led by one of contemporary horror’s most recognizable performers.

Between those screenings, the shorts lineup moves from Lovecraftian and cosmic horror through AI anxiety, dystopian science fiction, folk horror, creature features, splatter and supernatural comedy.

Grimmfest 2026 runs Oct. 8-11 at Manchester’s Odeon Great Northern. Weekend passes, day passes and individual tickets are available through ⁠Grimmfest’s official website.