Faith in horror: 6 features testing credulity at FrightFest 2025

Despite its dark themes, horror is a genre for optimists. To find its occasional treasures, devotees must trawl through a lot of trash, all the while keeping the faith – and this is perhaps never truer than at horror-dedicated festivals, whose programmes, though carefully curated, tend to highlight, through sheer volume, the genre’s repetitions and flaws. Over the long August bank holiday weekend of this year’s FrightFest, the most committed viewers can potentially see 25 features out of an overall selection of 70, and their choices will often be dictated not only by their own prejudices and advance research, but also by dumb luck and – yes – blind faith.

With its tendency towards the otherworldly, the supernatural and the fantastique, horror – perhaps more than any other genre – demands belief, or at least suspension of disbelief, from viewers willing to go along with its overt fictions. So it is perhaps unsurprising that issues of faith and doubt, of God(s) and demons, prove so persistent in the genre, modulating and mirroring our reception.

Here are six films from this year’s FrightFest that revolve around issues of faith, including my festival favourite Mother of Flies.

On the streets of Bangkok where foreigners sometimes abuse animals and children for their own depraved entertainment, a devout priest (Steve Oram) has his faith sorely tested when his young daughter goes missing. For his New Testament ideas of forgiveness collide with Old Testament notions of retribution, while viewers too are confronted with their own uncomfortable place in a consumer chain of exploitative spectacle and ‘torture porn’.

Rumley draws on the infernal descent of Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (1979), while also revisiting the crush videos of his contribution to The ABCs of Death anthology (2012) and the misdirected revenge in his Red White & Blue (2010). But the focus here is decidedly theological, as humans bring about their own moral and spiritual disintegration while an invisible God (or at least writer-director) moves in mysterious ways behind the scenes.

An atheist hitman (Ryuhei Matsuda) is hired by a woman (Haruka Imo) to find her missing brother (Yosuke Kubozuka) and to kill the cynical yet powerful finger-collecting guru (Chihara Jr) responsible for his disappearance. This set-up to Toshiaki Toyoda’s ‘cult’ movie may sound like a (cosmic) joke, but in fact establishes the shifting ground for a strange spirit war which constantly challenges our grip on its layered realities.

Working out exactly who is alive or dead, who dreaming or awake, who in the heavens or a coma, who approaching God or merely being gaslit, conned and bamboozled, will utterly entrance the viewer (Kenji Maki’s exquisite cinematography helps). It is a widescreen odyssey through time and space that has all the transporting, transdimensional features of cinema itself. Meanwhile Erik Bloomquist’s Self-Help (2025), also at FrightFest, explores similar themes in a more earthbound fashion.

Dunn (Trey Holland) is a ‘good person’ who just wants to help, but he is also despised for his freelance work calling in medical debts. So when he meets fellow debt collector Chip), who just happens to be a demon (voiced by Richard Kind) arrived on Earth – via a laundromat portal – to claim the soul of Dunn’s ‘good’ dying neighbour Mr Bobshank (Keith David), Dunn decides to repackage the debt and to redeem Bobshank’s, or perhaps his own, soul.

Woody Bess fills his feature with so much schlubby, deadpan absurdity and wrong-footing narrative surprise that its more serious questions (about what morality, eschatology and personal transformation might mean in a broadly secular world from which God is absent) are smuggled in undercover – like a devil hiding in the guise of a possessed person. Theology is rarely this funny.

In a small 17th-century Livonian village, locals bridge the gap between their two polarised institutions – a holy church and an unholy tavern – by drinking, and hearing apocalyptic prognostications, in both. A young novice, treated like a dog by the priest, finds himself and enjoys rites of passage in his encounters with a strange old man claiming to be a werewolf returned from hell. Meanwhile a vengefully liberating orgy of licentiousness is about to be visited upon the oppressive hypocrisies of the church.

Lauris and Raitis Ābele’s rotoscoped marvel is simultaneously a rejection of organised religion, and an affirmation of the spirit world. It is also a surreal and sexy romp – and a soaring flight of fancy improbably rooted in a historic cause célèbre

Will Cannon’s Texan gothic opens with the suicide (by drowning) of a priest, before focusing on his daughter, the widowed single mother Naomi (Italia Ricci), returned to her childhood home and confronted with a confessional tape and a murder mystery that stage her own struggles with belief in God and the Problem of Evil.

Pivotal to the film is an “old-school, straight from the Bible” baptism, administered by a renegade priest (Terence Rosemore) to a desperate woman rediscovering her faith. But this religious frame clashes with the more folkloric mythos of the Pied Piper (here relocated to backwoods Texas), and with a long American history of injustice, betrayal, false promises and bad faith, always leaving sink-or-swim debts for the next generation to pay.

Terminally ill and with nothing left to lose, Mickey (Zelda Adams) is entirely open to submitting herself to a ritual cure offered for free by Solveig (Toby Poser), a forest-dwelling witch who reached out to the young adult through a dream. Mickey’s single father Jake (John Adams) is more sceptical, and knows that everything comes at a price. Both prove right, in the Adams/Poser family’s latest exploration of powerful women, maternal love and death overcome, forming a natural thematic trilogy with their earlier Catskills-set The Deeper You Dig (2019) and Hellbender (2021).

This revolves around issues of belief and surrender, and ends with an explicit assertion of faith. Yet its religion, if that is even the right word, is not the Christianity of America’s colonists, but something more primal and pagan embedded in nature, where Puritanical witch hunts and the patriarchal impulses that fuelled them give way to something altogether more motherly.

FrightFest 2025 takes place 21 to 25 August across both Odeon Cinemas, Leicester Square, London.