Psychos, Aliens, Hitmen, and Half-Vampires — Fantastic Fest 2026, Part Two

By the time the second half of Fantastic Fest rolled around, I had already spent four days with zombies, giant snakes, Vikings, murderous puppets, Chris Hansen, and considerably more bodily fluids than any reasonable person should encounter before Sunday night. The encouraging thing about Fantastic Fest is that this somehow does not narrow the possibilities of what the remaining four days can throw at you. If anything, the programming seems to become more belligerently eclectic as everybody gets more tired.

Monday alone offered a Victorian serial killer, a lavish piece of Technicolor-style gothic horror, and a secret screening involving doo-wop-loving extraterrestrials. The rest of the week eventually found room for Martin McDonagh on Easter Island, half-vampires pulverizing highway kidnappers, a ’90s serial-killer thriller mutating into an ’80s practical-effects nightmare, a pair of final girls playing sisters and, more personally, two movies involving people I actually know.

So, yes, the back half remained pretty Fantastic Fest.

‘Victorian Psycho’ and Maika Monroe

“Victorian Psycho” may be the movie that best understood the assignment. Zachary Wigon’s follow-up to “Sanctuary” operates in a similarly heightened register, except this time the material feels much better suited to his impulses. Maika Monroe plays Winifred Notty, a governess arriving at an imposing English estate in 1858 while harboring the sort of interior life that tends to cause problems for household staff. The movie is stylish, nasty and knowingly ridiculous, and Monroe appears to be having an enormous amount of fun finding different gradations of barely concealed psychosis.

Jason Isaacs and Ruth Wilson understand exactly what kind of movie they’re in and ham it up accordingly. The pleasure of “Victorian Psycho” comes largely from watching all of these performers occupy something pitched between prestige period drama and Grand Guignol without pretending those modes are incompatible. I liked it considerably more than “Sanctuary,” which often felt to me like a movie straining to announce its cleverness. “Victorian Psycho” has the confidence to simply be a stylish sicko object. Maika Monroe glowering beneath period costuming while everybody around her behaves like they’re trapped inside a particularly expensive fever dream is already a pretty strong foundation for a movie.

If “Victorian Psycho” uses period aesthetics as a playground, “The Face of Horror” practically builds a cathedral out of them. This was one of the most visually sumptuous movies I saw at the festival, with ornate compositions and a rich color palette that evoke Hammer horror filtered through Powell and Pressburger. Unfortunately, the movie is also way too long, and eventually all that visual splendor starts working against its dramatic inertia.

iPhone Face and the Zellner Brothers

I also ran into a problem I increasingly have with contemporary period pieces: everybody has iPhone face. You can surround someone with antique furniture, candlelight, and painstakingly recreated costumes, but occasionally an actor turns toward the camera and looks like they were checking Instagram five minutes earlier. “The Face of Horror” is so committed to constructing this lush old-world nightmare that every conspicuously modern presence becomes even more noticeable. There’s a beautiful, considerably shorter movie somewhere inside it.

Monday’s Secret Screening #2 turned out to be “Alpha Gang,” the Zellner brothers’ alien comedy populated by extraterrestrials who resemble ’50s greasers and move through a world of doo-wop, pompadours and aggressively peculiar comic rhythms. Chris Pine is the MVP, which is becoming one of the safest sentences you can write about a movie with Chris Pine in it. He has a gift for treating absurdity with total commitment without killing the joke by acknowledging it too aggressively.

If ‘Victorian Psycho uses period aesthetics as a playground, ‘The Face of Horror’ practically builds a cathedral out of them.

The movie is undeniably charming, and the Zellners remain very good at constructing worlds where sincerity and silliness occupy exactly the same space. My reservation is basically the reservation I have with some of their other work: there’s a lot of whimsy here and not necessarily much meaning underneath it. Sometimes funny aliens with pompadours are allowed to simply be funny aliens with pompadours, though, and Fantastic Fest is probably the ideal environment for discovering without warning that Chris Pine is going to spend your evening surrounded by them.

Tuesday was different because the movies became personal.

A Personal Connection

My friend Kev Dooley wrote and directed “Terms and Conditions,” a queer horror-comedy delight starring John Gholson, which played before “Mr. Creamjeans’ Hidey Hole.” The latter stars my friend Josh Griffey as the titular Creamjeans, with Josh also involved in writing the feature. That puts me in the obvious position of being a terrible person to provide anything resembling a disinterested critical verdict on either, so I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

What I can say is that “Creamjeans” is deeply DIY and proudly committed to gross-out midnight-movie absurdity, exactly the sort of handmade object that makes exponentially more sense with a Fantastic Fest crowd around it than alone on somebody’s laptop. There was something genuinely cool about spending a week sprinting between work from established filmmakers and then sitting down in the same ecosystem to watch friends get their movies onto the screen. Somebody else can write the reviews. I was just happy to see them up there.

By Wednesday, Martin McDonagh showed up to remind everybody that he remains Martin McDonagh.

Sam Rockwell Knows McDonagh’s Rhythm

“Wild Horse Nine” returns him to the mode that has defined a large portion of his career: extremely verbal damaged men, professional violence, bruised sentimentality and jokes that take measurable pleasure in making everybody uncomfortable. This time he has transplanted that machinery to Easter Island and threaded CIA intrigue through it.

Sam Rockwell remains one of the best possible actors for McDonagh’s dialogue because he understands that its rhythm is as important as the joke. John Malkovich, meanwhile, is fucking hilarious as a burned-out CIA operative trying to write his memoirs (a familiar zone for him), weaponizing that wonderfully alien Malkovich cadence against McDonagh’s increasingly elaborate dialogue.

The movie is very funny and consistently entertaining, even as it starts circling comic rhythms and ideas McDonagh has already explored more sharply elsewhere. There’s a feeling of watching somebody firmly back in his bag and realizing that the bag contains several things you’ve seen before. I’m not sure I minded. Familiar McDonagh is still a fairly strange thing compared with almost anybody else.

‘Half’ An Action-Lover’s Must-See

Then there’s “Half,” Samjad’s Malayalam-language vampire action movie, which plays like “Near Darkcrossed” with “Breakdown” before staging its fights with the velocity of an Iko Uwais movie. Ranjith Sajeev and Aiswarya Raj play half-vampire twins Ethan and Ivy, while “The Raid 2” veteran Very Tri Yulisman handles the action direction and fight choreography. 

The movie starts out surprisingly grisly, with a nasty highway encounter that initially suggests something far meaner than what eventually emerges. Once Ethan and Ivy start fighting back, though, “Half” transforms into something incredibly fun and occasionally sublime in its commitment to action-movie pleasure. The choreography is clear, physical and escalating, with every fresh group of idiots who attacks these two functioning as an opportunity to invent a new indignity for the human skeleton.

‘Creamjeans’ is deeply DIY and proudly committed to gross-out midnight-movie absurdity…”

My biggest frustration is that the movie never makes its vampire mythology quite as straightforward as I wanted. Rules breed creativity. Establish what these characters can and cannot do, give them limitations, then let the filmmakers find increasingly clever ways of working within them. “Half” occasionally treats its supernatural mechanics like something we can just intuit when I wanted the rules to become another tool in the action design.

Still, that complaint feels minor once the movie gets cooking. It’s lean, bloody and enormously entertaining. For action fans, it’s a must-see.

Jordan Downey’s ‘The Cycle’

My final day gave me one of those extremely Fantastic Fest double features where two movies have virtually nothing to do with each other until your sleep-deprived brain starts forcing them into conversation.

Jordan Downey’s “The Cycle” feels like a ’90s post-“Se7en” serial-killer thriller that has somehow collided with an ’80s practical-effects freakout. This is, needless to say, extremely my shit.

The movie has an appealingly unfashionable commitment to genre excess: grim police-procedural imagery, grotesque effects work and the distinct feeling that somebody rented a smoke machine and intended to get their money’s worth. There’s a version of “The Cycle” somewhere in the unholy middle ground between “The Empty Man” and “Malignant,” which is the version I kept wanting it to fully become.

It doesn’t quite get there. The movie is too long, and its biggest turn is telegraphed well before it seems to realize the audience has caught up. But I’m willing to forgive a lot from a movie this committed to tactile genre filmmaking. Practical effects possess an immediacy that no amount of polish can reproduce, particularly in a packed theater where you can feel everybody simultaneously trying to figure out exactly what disgusting thing they’re looking at.

And Finally ‘River’

Then came “River,” which solved a problem I did not know I had by casting Jane Levy and Jessica Rothe as sisters.

Its setup is about as clean as a slasher premise gets. Levy, Rothe, and Max Mattern play three estranged siblings who reunite after their father dies and take his ashes out on a remote river to scatter them at his favorite spot. Their boat breaks down, there’s no cell service and a faceless killer emerges from the woods. From there, their already fractured family reunion becomes a fight to get off the water alive. 

Whoever decided to cast Levy and Rothe as sisters deserves a raise.

Writer-director Joshua Giuliano understands the accumulated genre history those two actors bring with them. Levy and Rothe are not simply actresses who happen to have horror credits; they are faces audiences already associate with surviving movies that very badly want to kill them. Putting them together creates immediate shorthand before “River” has done much of anything else.

Clean and Fluid Filmmaking

Fortunately, the movie knows what to do with them. Giuliano takes that admirably stripped-down premise and directs the hell out of it. The filmmaking is clean and remarkably fluid, with set pieces that understand spatial geography well enough for the violence to become complicated without becoming incoherent. The killer is freaky, the violence lands, and Levy and Rothe have an immediately convincing sibling chemistry that gives the movie something sturdy underneath all the carnage.

Sometimes you just want filmmakers who know where everybody is standing before somebody gets murdered.

Hollywood apparently saw the same crowd-pleasing potential. “River” entered TIFF with Independent Film Company and Shudder already holding U.S. rights, but the reaction to its ‘Midnight Madness’ premiere triggered another bidding frenzy. Universal and Blumhouse-Atomic Monster ultimately moved in on a deal reportedly worth more than $10 million for U.S. and select-territory rights. 

Remembering Why Fantastic Fest is Special

The obvious comparison is last year’s TIFF ‘Midnight Madness’ breakout “Obsession.” Everybody in town spent this year’s festival trying to figure out what might become the next one, which is understandable considering Curry Barker’s tiny horror movie ultimately grossed more than $500 million worldwide. 

The closing party was an appropriately deranged punctuation mark on the whole thing, filled with monsters, food trucks, and a GWAR concert.”

I don’t think anyone can realistically reproduce the success of “Obsession” without finding a One Wish Willow and spending the wish on the box office. That movie’s trajectory borders on witchcraft. But “River” doesn’t need to make half a billion dollars to justify the enthusiasm around it. It has an incredibly simple hook, two final girls horror audiences already love, an imposing new killer and a filmmaker who knows how to stage a set piece. I can very easily see this becoming a crowd-pleasing success.

Between “River” and “The Cycle,” Fantastic Fest ended for me with two movies reminding me why the festival remains such a useful corrective to spending the rest of the year arguing about franchises, IP strategy, and awards prospects. Neither needs some grand defense of cinema. One is a practical-effects-heavy serial-killer monstrosity and the other knows that putting Jane Levy and Jessica Rothe in danger together is already halfway to a good idea.

The Closing Party and FF Experience

The closing party was an appropriately deranged punctuation mark on the whole thing, filled with monsters, food trucks, and a GWAR concert that was genuinely something to behold. I left Fantastic Fest soaked in fake blood and overwhelmed by the amount of genre madness I had digested over eight days: zombies, vampires, aliens, psychopaths, killer puppets, serial killers, time travel, giant snakes, and whatever the hell else had been thrown at me by that point.

But the thing I’ll probably remember most has less to do with any individual movie. Fantastic Fest is one of the few times every year when I get to be surrounded by this great, strange group of friends who I otherwise rarely get to see, all of us cramming into theaters, comparing notes in hallways, grabbing food between screenings, and gradually losing our minds together. There are plenty of genre festivals, but there’s something genuinely magical about this particular week and the little community that reassembles around it every September.

Eight days earlier, a murderous Victorian governess sharing conceptual space with doo-wop aliens, CIA operatives, half-vampires, and final-girl sisters might have sounded like a very strange way to spend a week. By the time I walked out covered in fake blood after GWAR, it just felt like Fantastic Fest.

Fantastic Fest ran from September 17th-September 24th at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar in Austin, Texas. Join us next year for future coverage.