Family problems and sound issues: 8 of the best films at Frightfest

This year’s FrightFest is nearly upon us – 83 feature films (including documentaries and retrospective titles) and 40 shorts, presented across two Odeon cinemas, five screens in London’s Leicester Square over an extended five-day summer bank holiday weekend. Everything on show falls within the realms of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. 

The eight films selected here are straightforwardly ones that I would recommend, and were originally chosen for that reason alone – but looking at them all together, it becomes obvious that certain motifs run through these films: a couple or a family dissolving under pressure, and forced to work through their issues via the visceral mechanics of genre; masculinity gone awry; being stuck in a rut despite a desire for change; and sound recordings that reveal something essential about the characters of those who make them or listen to them. 

It’s not difficult to see how these themes reflect the polarisations and patriarchies of our mediated existences today in a world – and news – dominated by Trump. Despite featuring a sound recordist, The Peril at Pincer Point is obviously the (in every sense) odd one out here, with its pure retro-styled deadpan idiosyncrasy failing to fit any scheme.

Sarah (Sarah Bolger) is alienated. An Irish woman in South Korea, and still learning the local tongue, she has moved with her husband Sungsoo (Sungsoo Yune) into a remote property where she is often left alone. After playing a record on an old gramophone discovered in the attic, Sarah becomes deaf to male voices, which drives the wedge further into her already brittle relationship with Sungsoo – amid news reports of multiple murders.

“I’m just sounding like a broken record,” Sarah tells her new female neighbour Eunbyeol (Ko Asung), alluding perhaps to Bolger’s similar role in Abner Pastoll’s previous A Good Woman Is Hard to Find (2019). Nervous, too, tracks a beleaguered woman on a delirious journey towards aggressive emancipation – and once this superb psychodrama hits its groove, attentive audience is rewarded.

 “This is our second chance,” says Marie (Jessica Rothe), “new baby, new home, new us.” She and her ex-cop husband Paul (Charlie Barnett) have moved to suburban woodland with their newborn Theo (Lee and Declan Bennett), hoping to patch up their untrusting relationship, but when little Theo disappears during a housewarming party, and the distraught parents hear of a nearby cave that can “help get back what you’ve lost”, their lives will change forever.

Starting like Pet Sematary (1989) but ending somewhere more like Things Will Be Different (2024), Caleb Phillips’s mind-bending sci-fi horror tracks a couple incapable of escaping their fundamental problems, and trusts the viewer to keep up with its dizzying narrative convolutions. These second chances are best watched more than once.

After his knowledge of a capacity for violence leads him to flee the beloved wife and child that he worries he might harm, Andy Gersh (Scott Poythress) takes a job as a security guard for a cult-like private university, and on his night shift discovers a creature in the basement that shifts form and tests character.

Josh Lobo’s follow-up to I Trapped the Devil (2019) plays like a brainwashing – or a deprogramming – as Andy’s alien encounters, night after night, help define who he is and what he can become, all against something rather less definable. Mysterious and elliptical, this will have you going around in mental circles, like Andy on his odyssey to be reunited with his family as a better man. 

Self-sabotaging sound engineer Joan (Sasha Frolova) is summoned back to the seat of her trauma, the remote estate where her younger brother died in a drowning accident, where her mother disappeared and where the estranged patriarch Lawrence Wyatt (Xander Berkeley), a celebrity artist, womaniser and “fucking psycho”, now lies in a near coma after a horrific burning incident. Using her sensitive microphones, Joan becomes convinced that there is someone else in the house besides long-term housekeeper Lydia (Toby Poser), Lydia’s adult son Todd (Kimball Farley) and the new nurse (Mia Vallet).

Henry Chaisson’s superb debut feature is a classic gothic with modern soundings. It is a murder mystery where everything comes back to questions of family and legacy, and where the rot within might just bring down the Wyatt name forever.    

Houston (Alexander McPherson) and Lise (Elsa Ames) are already divorcing when Houston is diagnosed with an advanced form of multiple sclerosis. Lise agrees to help him in his recovery from an experimental treatment, even as a gang of thrill killers comes looking for some funny games. Yet in his debilitation, Houston finds new strength.

Codey S. Wilson’s feature debut has the onset of Houston’s disease running in parallel with a home invasion, so that the internal pain of one finds physical expression in the bludgeoning aggression of the other. This unfolds at the intersection of The Strangers (2008) and Mandy (2018), as senseless masked murderers interrupt a couple’s sylvan idyll and let them find love again in a manner that lives up to Lise’s t-shirt, emblazoned with the words “Rock and Roll”. 

Lucy (Raelan Mackiewicz) and her nervous mother Mina (Marlene Mc’Cohen) have moved into an apartment, implicitly as refugees from a violent husband/father. Their new neighbour Dr John Seward (Eric Toms) looks out for little Lucy, even as the monstrous Dracula (Brenton Jones), dwelling in an underground sewer, also has his eye on her.

Set in today’s America, Chris Schwab’s radical update of Bram Stoker’s influential 1897 novel plays upon a disturbing subtext of serial killings and predatory pedophilia, and might leave you wondering if the Orlok-like beast is a convenient fiction on which horrifyingly human impulses are being projected. For this is a story of errant male desire and violence that cannot forever be kept down in the shadows.

One Sunday morning, recently widowed town sheriff Deb (Toby Poser) wakes to an unfolding apocalypse. The rapture, it seems, has already happened, with pets, livestock and some people vanished into thin air, with the dead – including Deb’s beloved husband Hank (John Adams) – rising, and with monstrous, meaty problems unearthing themselves for those left behind. Deb and her deputy Mikey (Zelda Adams) race from one surreal emergency to another, before Deb confronts both her fundamentalist mother (Judith Roberts) and a future that is decidedly female – and metal.

This latest from FrightFest fixtures the Poser/Adams family is more political in scope than their previous films, taking hardline Christian teachings at their uncompromising word, and seeing what remains for the literally woke. Unless, of course, Deb is still asleep, and this is all a nightmare of an America damned and doomed to itself.

At a career crossroads, hapless sound recordist Jim Baitte (Jack Redmayne) is assigned to find both “a sound unprecedented in the history of cinema” for a crab-themed monster picture, and its missing lead actress. Armed with some old-school gear, Jim is drawn into the legend of the curse that haunts Pincer Island, and proves more than willing to sacrifice everything if he can capture its sound on tape.

Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine’s retro-styled, utterly analogue monochrome marvel is set today, but constantly casts an eye back over cinema’s history. Madly remixing sitcom Toast of London (2012-) and the first two Pirates of the Caribbean sequels with the no-budget spirit of Roger Corman and the eccentric archaising of Guy Maddin, this surreal sea yarn is knowingly daft and wittily weird.

FrightFest 2026 takes place 27 to 31 August across both Odeon Cinemas, Leicester Square.