Another Fantasia Film Festival has come and gone, and this year I challenged myself to watch EVERY HORROR FILM ON THE PROGRAM! Sadly, I failed this mission. Of the 125+ feature films (many were animation, action, drama, etc), I managed to watch 29, many of which were by first time directors, made on shoestring budgets and even shot on film! I left the festival physically exhausted but spiritually uplifted by all the talent, creativity, and depravity (complementary) showcased throughout the festival.
Delusion-Driven Horror: A Recurring Theme at Fantasia 2025
This year, the theme du jour was delusion. Many of the films I saw featured characters questioning their reality or stubbornly adhering to their less-than-grounded worldviews. Emma Higgins’s SWEETNESS (nailing the teen-girl aesthetic) and Steve Pink’s TERRESTRIAL tackled these themes head on. MOTHER OF FLIES, by festival favorites The Adams Family, and IT ENDS, from first timer Alex Ullom, were both crowd pleasers, telling stories about people forced to reckon with their strange realities.
A personal favorite of mine this year was the divisive sexploitation film FUCKTOYS, a stunningly luscious and grisly feature shot on 16mm by first time writer-director Annapurna Sriram. Using Tarot as inspiration, Sriram lays out a perfect parable about the cycle of exploitation in ways that will cut deep. Alex Philips explored similar themes in his trashy, other-worldly ANYTHING THAT MOVES, following a sex-worker whose clients keep dying. And then there was Addison Heimann’s horror-comedy TOUCH ME, which combines a trippy aesthetic with a story about exploitation and tentacles!
Truly Terrifying Horror Films: Paranoia and Unease
The truly scary films at Fantasia Film Festival for me were THE WAILING by Pedro Martín-Calero, and THE UNDERTONE, by first time director Ian Tuason. Both films invite you to sift through shadows and white noise in order to discover nightmares of the past, and both films left me with a deep sense of paranoia and unease. LURKER also left me with a similar feeling. Though there’s nothing paranormal about the first ever feature by writer Alex Russell, real life violence is just as terrifying.
While I enjoyed the big headliner films like EDDINGTON and TOGETHER, I definitely preferred the more experimental labors of love that filled out the festival’s program. A GRAND MOCKERY (from Adam Briggs and Sam Dixon) and Mickey Reece’s latest EVERY HEAVY THING serve wholly unique nightmares using a more experimental kind of storytelling. Julie Pacino’s debut feature, I LIVE HERE NOW delves deep into female trauma using Lynchian blues and reds. And LUCID (by Ramsey Fendall and Deanna Milligan) leans heavily into hallucinatory visuals, thanks to an impressive art department!
Camp and Chaos: Horror with Social Commentary
No Fantasia Film Festival would be complete without a host of movies about camp and chaos. The Troma Entertainment documentary OCCUPY CANNES is a real gem for any horror historian, while Tina Romero’s debut QUEENS OF THE DEAD is guaranteed to please any fan of drag culture. Films like NOISE (Kim Soo-jin) and NEW GROUP (Yûta Shimotsu) are a riot, mixing great horror sequences with real world social commentary. DOLLHOUSE is also a wonderfully creepy surprise, serving excellently crafted horror within a well-trodden genre. Alice Maio Mackay’s latest feature THE SERPENT’S SKIN is a joyous ode to all our favorite paranormal 90s TV shows, and I appreciated that I got a taste of Kazakh folklore with Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s KARAKH SCARY TALES.
PS: Special shout out to some of the (many) incredible short films! My favorites this year were Methuselah, Whitch, Steak Dinner, and The Disphoria. These filmmakers should all be on your watchlist!