The curtain is opening again as your puppeteers of fear, the Soho Horror Film Festival, returns this November. The award winning festival is here to announce their biggest ever line-up. Spread over two weekends and boasting distinct film line-ups, the festival returns to the Coldharbour Blue Cinema, Brixton for its big screen theatrical event, followed by a 4 day long home-invasion of unique screenings online. Ready to take over your minds are over 75 of the very best films from the farthest reaches of contemporary genre cinema, so we ask the question: are you their audience or their puppets now?
Opening the festival in bombastic fashion will be the International Premiere of giant spider shocker Don't Move. A painkiller in these challenging times, horror comedy as a subgenre runs particularly rampant through this year’s line-up, so it is fitting to raise the festival curtains with the debut feature from the team behind Impractical Jokers. And while there’s plenty of laughs, don’t go thinking you’ll escape this screening without show-stopping skin-crawling creepy crawlies in the flesh.
Sides will further split from The Fox, an unhinged and jet black Aussie comedy which among many things features Olivia Colman as the fully practical titular puppet, and the late Sam Neill as a particularly vulgar magpie. The funniest vampire film since What We Do In The Shadows is here with I Love Paris, Nicky Murphy’s acerbic take on A Star Is Born as a French rapper refuses to let her newfound blood lust get in the way of festival headlining fame. Penile trauma and femme fury unite with the European Premiere of Heath Benfield’s cum-pendium Mr Creamjeans’ Hidey Hole, while the Hallmark Channel romantic dream get abducted and probed in the International Premiere of Evan Buxbaum & Drew Mylrea’s gooey Into The Sky.
Not to let frights take a backseat, the festival will present the UK Premiere’s of Alison-Eve Hammersley’s media mystery Erie, where found footage finds fear in the forest. The vast expanses of a fog covered ocean is a breeding ground for the ghosts of our past in Hangashore, while modern day paranoia and spectral Jeff Bezos are part of the Jamie Lee Curtis produced powerhouse Sender. A romantic getaway poses the question: what’s scarier, the devil you know and trust, or the devil you don’t and rust, in John Veron’s twisted desert folk terror Godmother.
Jumping around both the globe and history is always a film festival must, and spanning this year’s theatrical event are 17th century Basque demonics in Paul Urkijo Alijo’s The Night. We also journey into the bible-belt for fanatical fundamentalism that puts the ‘holy’ in ‘holy fuck’ with festival fave Mark H Rapaport’s Godhead, and to Greece for a dive into the scathingly stark reckoning of domestic nightmares in the UK Premiere of Louiza Zouzias’ Be a Good Girl. Then it's back to the pre-medieval fantasy epics of swords and sandals for Kylgor In The Grisly Abyss, which cannot guarantee that no puppets were harmed in the making of this movie, before jetsetting all the way down under for the theatrical festival’s closing night film, the European Premiere of Michael Schwarz’s bleeding heart slasher The Only One.
For those that can’t make it to the depths of London, the festival also boasts a unique and expansive virtual lineup that is somehow even more funny and fear filled. There’s extraterrestrial carjacking in punk rock The Vanishing Tour, a downward spiral in pursuit of self-love in Jackie Kelly’s remarkable Hag, along with a nihilistic and violent fight for survival through Korea’s criminal underbelly in Lee Dae-han's Debone. Reality and sitcom TV blur in Truman Show like hypnotics in Life At Sandys, Chedey Reyes' gonzo The Thing in the Fog finds two pilots trapped in a cosmic storm of campy terror, and real life horrors in The Haunting Of Pennhurst, a nuanced documentary of mental illness and disability reclamation in the world of Halloween haunts. It's influencers vs ghost hunters in the Doug Jones starring future classic Demonetize, Dusty Saunders answers the question of what if Gaspar Noe made a Pixar movie in the bonkers animation Big City Pizza, there's an exquisitely snarky and unpredictable whodunnit in The Daughters of the Domino, and genuinely shit pantingly scary footage found in This House is Totally Haunted. All of which will be receiving their UK Premieres at the festival.
There are exclusive online opportunities to watch recent festival favourites, including Kyle Mangione Smith’s nightmare surveillance nasty Compliance, Annabella Rich showing off how staggering the UK indie genre scene can be with her deeply moving The Death of Us, and fresh from its World Premiere is the atmospheric and haunting love letter to 70s ghost stories They Always Come at Night. There is Invoking Scream, the black metal tinged sequel to a 2023 lost footage Chilean chiller. The virtual premiere of Stewart Sparke’s aquatic monster mashup Dead Reset will form the centrepiece of a festival strand focussing on video games in horror, that will also feature a live interactive choose-your-own-adventure horror film from Jason Trost called AFAR, and an expansive panel on the intersection of this subject and a secret retrospective screening of an unseen video game adaptation classic. And drawing both aspects of the festivals together, the virtual event will also platform a strand on theatrical horror that will feature a special preview of Severin’s brand new documentary Theatre Of Horrors: The Sordid Story Of Paris’ Grand Guignol, and the UK Premiere of Kaitlyn Boye’s twisted two handed showstopper Break A Leg.
And if all of that wasn’t enough, the festival will also play stage to over 50 of the genres best short films that include the latest from Caye Casas (director of the infamous The Coffee Table), The Worm which stars Leviticus breakout Joe Bird, Emily Bennet’s The Crying Man which features genre legends Toby Poser and Larry Fessenden, alongside the usual bounty of stripper priests, time travelling bin bags, dinosaurs, demon summoning kittens, and of course plenty of exploding penises.
So cut the puppet strings, and get yourself to Soho Horror Fest 2026, as tickets, festival passes and online passes are on sale now! The Soho Horror Film Festival will run from 20th-22nd November at the Coldharbour Blue Cinema in Brixton, London. The online Sohome Horror Film Festival will run from 26th to the 29th November. Full details on all the films on show, festival accessibility and ticket options can be found at www.sohohorrorfest.com
Comments