Popcorn Frights runs August 6–16 in Fort Lauderdale, and if there’s a bucket-list festival we haven’t managed to crash yet, this is it, eleven days, 116 films, and a guest list that includes a literal Djinn. We’re covering it from the other side of the planet, which means no popcorn, no Savor Cinema, no all-night Wish-a-Thon, just the lineup, and everything worth knowing before it raises the curtain.
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Already Bought, Already Dated
The End of Oak Street
David Robert Mitchell built his name on dread you can’t quite name, It Follows, Under the Silver Lake, and his $85 million Warner Bros. swing drops that same unease into 1980s suburbia. Oak Street gets ripped out of its own timeline and stranded somewhere unrecognizable, and the Platt family’s survival comes down to whether they can stick together. Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor lead, J.J. Abrams produces, Michael Giacchino scores it. Warner Bros. has it in theatres and IMAX August 14, deliberately timed to land during the back half of the Popcorn Frights itself.
Official image from Colony (2026), directed by Yeon Sang-ho and screening at Popcorn Frights 2026.
Colony
Yeon Sang-ho put zombies on the map with Train to Busan, went back for Peninsula, and Colony is the third trip to the well. A biotechnology professor walks into a conference where a rapidly mutating virus tears through the venue. The building gets sealed to contain it, and everyone inside has to survive the infected and each other. It’s already the second-biggest release of the year in South Korea, past 5.9 million admissions, and buyers pre-sold it to 124 countries before a single festival audience had seen a frame, that’s not hype, that’s the market betting on a director’s name alone. Well Go USA has it in US theatres August 28.
Drag
Two sisters attempt a simple burglary of a rural New York house. One throws her back out and gets stuck, immobilized, on the second floor. That’s the entire premise, and it was apparently enough to walk Drag out of SXSW with a 93% Rotten Tomatoes score. Lizzy Caplan (who we love) and Lucy DeVito play the sisters. John Stamos is the reason they should’ve picked a different house, Danny DeVito produces. It’s the film closing out 2026’s Popcorn Frights before Briarcliff gives it a proper wide release January 29, 2027.
Never After Dark
Dave Boyle wrote and directed this one, and it’s done the thing festival horror rarely manages: swept the room. SXSW’s Midnighter Audience Award, the Grand Jury Prize at Overlook, the Golden Raven in Brussels. Moeka Hoshi (Shōgun) plays a wandering medium summoned to an isolated house to face something she can’t guide anywhere, and partway through, finds out the real threat was never supernatural. Boyle’s already been tapped by Paramount for his next project off the strength of this one. Magnolia Pictures has it in theatres September 25.
Breeder
Alex Goyette’s feature debut premiered at Tribeca and got snapped up by IFC and Shudder within days — a deal that covers Australia, so this is one you’ll actually get to see. A broke college student takes a research-funding offer from an eccentric poodle breeder, and the catch is exactly as unhinged as that setup promises: she wants to breed him with her daughter. Dot-Marie Jones (Glee) is already being singled out for going all-in on the role. Theatrical release this fall.
Hot Pedigree
Marrow
Michael Ironside and Danielle Harris headline, with Mitch McLeod writing and directing. A disgraced true-crime podcaster invites a mysterious stalker onto her show for ratings, and becomes the next subject instead. It’s playing alongside a bigger Ironside moment at the fest, with the actor appearing in person for Scanners and Total Recall, so if body horror filtered through internet fame is your thing, build your schedule around this one. (World premiere.)
Sender
Russell Goldman’s feature debut expands his own 2022 short Return to Sender, and the premise should unsettle anyone who’s ever clicked “buy now” without thinking twice: a woman starts receiving a string of unnervingly personal packages from someone she can’t identify. Britt Lower leads, Jamie Lee Curtis produces and co-stars, and the supporting cast includes Rhea Seehorn and David Dastmalchian. It played SXSW to strong reviews out of Variety, Deadline, and IndieWire, and just picked up international sales representation ahead of Cannes, but still has no US distributor, which makes this one of the rarer “catch it before everyone else does” titles on this list.
Monstrous Me
Ariel Baska writes and directs this short, produced by Brea Grant and Lilly Wachowski, premiering as part of the Midnighters III block. Pedigree alone earns it a look before you know the premise. (World premiere.)
Demonetize
Alexander Boyd Watson’s horror-comedy sends up influencer culture with a straight face: out-of-work TV ghost hunters need a comeback, so they team up with a crew of social media stars to spend a night in one of the country’s most infamous haunted properties. Doug Jones plays the agent who talks everyone into it. It’s already built a reputation on the circuit as one of the most quotable films of the year, sitting somewhere between Bodies Bodies Bodies and pure schlock.
The festival that gave Caleb Phillips his short film award is now giving him a feature, that’s not a coincidence, that’s a pipeline.
Imposters
Caleb Phillips previously won Popcorn Frights’ own Scariest Short Film Award, now he’s back with his feature debut, a psychological nightmare built on relentless suspense and emotional devastation. Festivals love telling this kind of full-circle story about themselves, and it’s worth watching for that reason before the film’s even had a chance to prove itself.
Hallowarrior
Milly Shapiro broke out in Hereditary and now leads Ben Sottak’s Hallowarrior, following a Halloween-obsessed survivor navigating a post-apocalyptic wasteland where, mercifully and horribly, every day still is Halloween.
Debut / Buzz
Gator Face
Padraig Reynolds writes and directs this Southern Gothic throwback, shot deep in Florida’s swamps with real alligators and zero CGI or AI — a loudly-stated choice that’s clearly part of the pitch. A blood-soaked love letter to gritty ’70s horror, and the kind of practical-effects-first filmmaking that’s rare enough now to be a selling point on its own. (World premiere.)
Real alligators. Zero CGI. Popcorn Frights’ Florida Focus is still the only place doing horror the hard way.
Hen
Nico Scheepers writes and directs this stark, black-and-white Afrikaans horror, already carrying ten festival awards, including becoming the first African film ever to win the H.R. Giger Narcisse Award at Neuchâtel.
A man finds a boy locked in a wooden chest on an isolated farm, surrounded by bodies, and takes him home to his wife, and the boy is not what he seems. Critics keep reaching for Eggers and Ari Aster comparisons, and the trailer alone builds more dread out of silence than most films manage with a full score. (North American Premiere.)
Watch the trailer for Hen (2025)
Best Served Cold: How a Revenge Film Was Buried for Decades
Eric Zaldivar directs this documentary chasing the strange, decades-buried history of a lost cult revenge thriller called The Farmer. Equal parts comedy, mystery, and “how is this real,” with every outrageous beat reportedly true. (World premiere.)
Armageddon Road directed by Karen Lam screening at Popcorn Frights 2026.
Armageddon Road
Karen Lam writes and directs this darkly comic supernatural road trip, arriving for its US Premiere after already making the rounds internationally.
Broken Beak
Christian Carroll’s New Zealand-USA body horror lands its Southeast US Premiere here, a Kiwi-flavored entry for anyone chasing the year’s most unhinged practical work. This looks to be exactly that.
Woozy
Joey Bicicchi directs Emile Hirsch in this monstrous thriller, playing its Southeast US Premiere, Hirsch descending into vomit-soaked madness, which reads as either a warning or an invitation depending on your tolerance. Emile Hirsch plays Dusty, a man who’s engineered his entire life into dawn meditations, punishing workouts, obsessive routines, until Woozy tears it all apart.
It’s writer-director Joey Bicicchi’s feature debut, and it’s already being pitched as a choose-your-own-adventure through trauma, chaos, and a genuinely unhinged amount of vomit. Sounds like the kind of gross-out swing that either becomes a cult favorite or a midnight-slot legend.
Hollow Girls
Greg Swinson and Ryan Thiessen co-direct this true-crime thriller. The duo behind Hunt Her, Kill Her, the factory-set survival horror, bring that same stripped-back, high-tension style to a true-crime nightmare. Six teenage girls are lured by a classmate into a deadly trap, and what unravels is jealousy, kidnapping, torture, and murder. (World premiere.)
Savage Prey
David Ryan Keith writes and directs, working the same feral slasher terrain as his Redwood Massacre films (the sequel starred Danielle Harris). Set in the remote Scottish Highlands, a mother searches for her missing son and finds herself trapped. Marta Svetek leads, with Steve Weston and Chris Torres rounding out the cast. The trailer’s already out, and the tagline alone, “a parent is capable of unimaginable things”, tells you exactly what kind of maternal horror you’re signing up for. (World premiere.)
Watch the Trailer for Savage Prey
Unholy Night
We already caught this one at Fantasia, and we said what we said: “Unholy Night Is the Christmas Horror Comedy of the Season”, and it is. It’s also Michael Gabriele’s feature directorial debut, following his short Get Away, which won Fantasia’s Gold Audience Award back in 2023, so this isn’t a fluke, it’s a filmmaker who’s been building to this. Now it makes the jump to Popcorn Frights for its US Premiere, proof this one’s got legs beyond a single festival run. If you missed our full review the first time around, now’s your second chance to catch it, and ours to say we told you so.
Reviewed with hidden spoiler section.
Lenore
David Ward’s Australian entry is a genre-bending shocker getting its East Coast Premiere, worth flagging for anyone keeping an eye on where Australian horror is turning up on the international festival map this year.
David Ward writes (with Josie Hess) and directs his feature debut. A techno-gothic descent into parasocial obsession. In the basement of a suburban home, unemployed filmmaker Max Wren (Nicholas Jaquinot) makes a tribute to Lenore (Ruby Duncan), an online artist who’s vanished, and finds himself confronting a vengeful presence that seems to live inside his own edit bay.
Stitched together from Alexa footage, iPhone clips, DV and Hi-8 tape, it’s already been called a the chefs kiss in techno-gothic storytelling on the UK festival circuit. Critics drawing a straight line back to Poe’s obsessions with grief and isolation, filtered through the internet’s worst impulses.
Ear Worm
Ben Baraad’s short goes straight for a horror hook we’re shocked isn’t used more: the earworm. After wasting the day doom-scrolling in bed, Reed lands on a horrifying video of a mother murdering her baby while endlessly humming the same four notes. Soon, those four notes start creeping into every sound he hears.
Earworms have haunted pop culture before, Seinfeld’s George Costanza spent a week unable to shake “Master of the House” from Les Misérables, and horror TV has flirted with cursed songs from Buffy to Evil, but Baraad takes the bit and makes it literal, turning the thing stuck in your head into the thing coming to get you. (World premiere.) Can’t wait for this.
Some of these already have a release date. Most of them don’t. All of them deserve at least fifteen minutes of your attention
Catch the official website for Popcorn Frights via this link.
