The busiest and best time of the year for Warped Perspective is just around the corner again, as the Fantasia International Film Festival gets ready to celebrate its 30th anniversary. Covering Fantasia has become a regular fixture for the site and it’s always genuinely very exciting: it’s often an opportunity to see world premieres of titles which will then go on to make huge waves throughout the rest of the year, such as with last year’s Undertone (then still titled The Undertone), the heart-wrenching supernatural horror of Good Boy and a film which went on to make a significant impact at Celluloid Screams later in 2025, as well as being one of Darren’s favourites, It Ends.
But what about this year?
The festival has been revealing its selected titles over the course of the past few weeks, so for absolutely all of the information that’s now out there, you’d do best to head over to the official site. However, from this site’s point of view, here are just a few of the titles which are most interesting – at least a few of which WP hopes to be covering in a few short weeks. Welcome to genre film Christmas: here are ten Fantasia titles to watch out for.
Her Private Hell
Opening the festival with this Canadian Premiere, its director Nicolas Winding Refn will also be receiving the Cheval Noir Career Achievement Award: his return to filmmaking, Her Private Hell, is a surrealist story of intersecting journeys through a futuristic, mist-obscured city. Influenced by the director’s own experiences with loss and mortality, Her Private Hell (starring Sophie Thatcher) promises a neon-hued, giallo-coded cinematic experience, best served by the big screen.
Village of Eight Gravestones
Another Cheval Noir recipient this year, Takashi Shimizu (Ju-On) will be premiering his two newest films at the festival. One of them, Village of Eight Gravestones, speaks to the director’s love of Japanese pop and pulp culture, as well as his tenacity in bringing strange, often unsettling mystery to the screen. In the film, a young man named Tatsuya is travelling back to his rural village home following the death of his mother, from whom he was long estranged. On his way, he encounters a private detective, Kindaichi (a popular fiction character in Japan featuring in no less than 77 novels). Kindaichi has been looking for Tatsuya, both to intercept him and to inform him of a long-fomenting hatred for him and his family in the village, after his grandfather committed a violent historical atrocity; as such, the people waiting for him at his destination are going to be none too pleased by his arrival. Part mystery and part massacre, Village of Eight Gravestones is a folk horror of sorts, full of lively characters and bizarre ideas.
Permanent Damage
There’s another kind of journey at the heart of Permanent Damage, but this time, an escaped convict, Tommy Gods, has a met his match in a cruel landlord – marking another quirky exploration of modern social issues by director Seth A. Smith, as the film takes on America’s wealth and housing crisis. Boasting a knockout cast – including Stephen Dorff – and the expected, often darkly comic treatment of its topics, the film receives its World Premiere at the festival.
Junction Row
Now here’s a title which has ‘Warped Perspective’ written all over it: Ginger Snaps actor and horror genre darling Katharine Isabelle plays Juno, a recovering addict who makes the difficult decision to leave everything behind in pursuit of a fresh start. But when Ruby (Natalie Brown) goes missing, Juno is forced to head back to Junction Row, their old housing compound, to determine what has happened to her, facing down all of the bizarre changes which have taken place there in her absence. Fantasia has always gone a bundle on creature FX and cosmic horror, and Junction Row could well stand as one of this year’s notable examples spanning each of those genres.
The Last Footage
The country of Myanmar may be mostly known for its recent, complex and often traumatic political issues, but so far as genre cinema goes, it has until now been a completely closed book. Step forward, writer/director Arkar Soe Oo, with Myanmar’s first found footage horror film, The Last Footage: it will be receiving its World Premiere at Fantasia this year. With its first-person perspective, and in eschewing some of the more puzzling aspects of ‘found footage’ (who is editing this and where is that music coming from?) the film promises to be a return to the basic tenets of the genre, unfolding in the darkening Wingabar Forest…
Buddy
Has it ever crossed your mind what would happen if the cutesy, life-affirming mascots of children’s TV and film ever just went off-script and started stalking the children they are meant to love, educate and protect? With a recent slew of now copyright-free cartoon characters making it a priority to head off on murderous rampages (from Winnie the Pooh to Popeye), it seems like the world – or, okay, a very select group of film fans, actually – is perhaps oddly ready to be chased and murdered by characters from their childhood memories; perhaps Buddy is an adjunct of that, with its own fictional world-building and the titular Buddy deciding to axe-murder his way through the world built within the cutesy confines of a kids’ TV show (in response to writer/director Caspar Kelly’s own remembered envy at the kids who got to appear on TV).
Bowels of Hell
It’s certainly not the first time Fantasia has found itself concerned with the smallest room, but where Flush kept its eye trained fairly squarely on the human tragedy unfolding in its toilet stall setting, Bowels of Hell promises – or maybe threatens – more scatological detail entirely. Set in a São Paolo apartment block (and directed by Brazilian experimentalists Gurcius Gewdner and Gustavo Vinagre), it boasts a range of gross-out kills (watch out when you need to answer the call of nature in this cinematic universe) and a bit of social satire, for good measure.
Los Vampires
More-than-passing fans of the vampire cinema genre may well be familiar with the Spanish Dracula of 1931 – itself a compelling, and for some viewers, superior version of the Universal film of the same year. In a similar way to how Shadow of the Vampire imagines the backstory of the Nosferatu shoot – albeit adding its own layers of compelling supernatural content – Los Vampires focuses on the very human relationships and interactions between the two titular stars of each Dracula film, sharing sets and scripts in the pursuit of two completed projects (although anonymising the key players here, as a mark of respect to them both). As much a tribute to an old way of filmmaking and a lost generation of film stars as a hitherto-unexplored character study, Los Vampires promises an immersive and thought-provoking take on its subject matter.
The Glorious Dead
They’re back! The Adams Family have been making films – which have been featuring on this site – for some years now, and their latest offering promises another, hefty dose of the meaningful strange as a sheriff and deputy (Toby Poser, Zelda Adams) awaken one day to an unrecognisable world – one where old rules and old familiarity have all just – disappeared. People are missing. Pets are missing. Then, the dead start rising. Creating an allegory of a discomfiting, alienating modern existence which may hit close to home for those bearing witness to the confected divisions erupting all around us, The Glorious Dead will doubtlessly balance dark humour against stark horror in ways which have by now become an Adams Family staple. The film receives its World Premiere at the festival.
Motherwitch
Part Gothic fairy tale and part bleak colonial history, Motherwitch follows the fortunes of bereaved parent Eleni, who – after the senseless loss of all three of her children – forges an alliance with a sentient, feminine force, hoping to get them back. Filmed on location in an abandoned settlement in Cyprus (a country which has been contested and divided for generations), the film blends human loss with the darker threads of mythology and tale-telling, offering something magical – but riven with unease.
And there is so much more: Parisian vampires; New Zealand tentacle horror; Gillian Anderson in an imagined slasher franchise; Finnish parenthood horror; reimagined feminist Ozsploitation; Japanese werewolf horror; Yeon Sang-ho doing cannibalistic survival cinema, and a dancing virus which threatens to take over the world…
The festival starts on July 16th, running until August 2nd. Festival screeners will start to appear just after the festival begins, so expect Warped Perspective coverage to begin very soon after that. Seen something listed you’d love to read more about? Get in touch on social media – it might well be possible!