Horror Obsessive
Fantasia’s final lineup wave runs more than thirty titles deep, and most of the coverage around it is going to read like an inventory: action from Belgium, animation from Japan and Taiwan, a cringe-comedy from France, revenge dramas from South Korea. Buried in that sprawl, though, is one of the more interesting horror slates the festival has put together in years, and it deserves to be pulled out on its own.
A Giallo Comeback from an Unlikely Source
The clearest flex is Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell, his first feature in years and, per the festival’s own program notes, a work steeped in the visual language of Bava, Argento, and 1970s giallo, rendered through a fog-drenched, neon-soaked lens. Refn is not a director anyone associates with straight horror, which is exactly what makes this interesting: a filmmaker known for hyperstylized crime cinema turning his attention to a genre built on dread and color instead of violence and cool. Starring Sophie Thatcher and Havana Rose Liu, it is described as a hallucinatory death trip born out of Refn’s own experience with a medical near-death event, which tracks. The best giallo has always been personal obsession dressed up as style.
Two J-Horror Veterans, Two Different Registers
The bigger story for genre purists might be Takashi Shimizu showing up twice. Village of Eight Gravestones adapts the Kosuke Kindaichi detective novels into a folk-horror mystery about a family curse and a massacre that still haunts a rural village, while The Mouths follows university students who tempt fate at a supposedly haunted cemetery and get exactly what they went looking for. The festival’s program describes the latter as leaning on unsettling supernatural apparitions rather than jump scares, which is Shimizu’s whole career in one sentence: the Ju-On creator has always trusted stillness over shock cuts, and having two new films built on that same instinct in the same lineup says his instincts haven’t dulled.
What actually stands out to me, though, is a title with a fraction of the pedigree: The Last Footage, billed as Myanmar’s first found-footage horror film, shot entirely in first-person and unfolding in the haunted Wingabar Forest in close to real time. Found footage as a subgenre has been strip-mined by American and Japanese productions for two decades. Getting a version of it from a country whose genre cinema barely circulates outside pirated VCDs and online uploads is the kind of discovery a festival like Fantasia exists to make, and it is worth more attention than the giallo revival or the J-horror double feature combined.
The Rest of the Slate Worth Watching
Rounding out the horror-specific picks: When You Open the Door, from Japan Horror Award winner Eriko Katagiri, reworks werewolf mythology through the lens of feminine isolation, shot by Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s regular cinematographer Akiko Ashizawa. Recluse, the directorial debut of Antlers writer Henry Chaisson, sends a sound recordist back to her occultist father’s decaying house, with Xander Berkeley and Hippo star Kimball Farley in support. And Junction Row gives Katharine Isabelle a Lovecraftian creature feature to anchor, penned in part by Clown in a Cornfield author Adam Cesare.
None of these have the marketing weight of a studio horror release landing the same week, and that is precisely the point. A festival slate this size can hide its best horror in plain sight next to comedies and revenge thrillers. Fantasia runs July 16 through August 2 in Montreal, and for horror fans willing to skip past the noise, this year’s final wave has more worth seeking out than the header act alone would suggest.
Quick Takes
- Nicolas Winding Refn’s giallo-inspired Her Private Hell, starring Sophie Thatcher and Havana Rose Liu, headlines Fantasia’s final wave.
- Takashi Shimizu brings two new films, Village of Eight Gravestones and The Mouths, both rooted in Japanese folk and supernatural horror.
- The Last Footage is billed as Myanmar’s first found-footage horror film, shot in first-person inside the haunted Wingabar Forest.
- When You Open the Door reimagines werewolf mythology from Japan Horror Award winner Eriko Katagiri.
- Fantasia’s 2026 festival runs July 16 through August 2 in Montreal, Canada.
