5 Films You Can’t Miss at Grimmfest 2026

October has arrived, Halloween is looming, and for UK horror fans that means one very important thing: Grimmfest is back.

Returning to Manchester’s Odeon Great Northern from 8th to 11th October, Grimmfest 2026 marks the festival’s 18th year of bringing horror, dark fantasy and assorted cinematic unpleasantness to the big screen. This year also sees Grimmfest operating as a BIFA-qualifying festival, while its continued membership of the Méliès federation gives European filmmakers another very good reason to have Manchester circled on the calendar.

But we’re mostly interested in the movies.

And there are a lot of them. Picking five from the programme isn’t particularly fair, but that’s festival life. From M?ori Gothic horror and Cypriot folklore to rampaging spiders and a French crime movie apparently determined to drag everyone involved directly into hell, these are five films we’re particularly excited to catch at Grimmfest 2026.

5 Films You Can’t Miss at Grimmfest 2026

Motherwitch

9th October, 12.40pm

Grief and ancient folklore are rarely a healthy combination.

Set in British-occupied Cyprus in 1882, Minos Papas’ Motherwitch follows Eleni, a bereaved painter who attempts to resurrect her dead children through ritual and art. Instead, she summons creatures from Cypriot mythology, including the child-devouring Lamia.

Cheery stuff for a lunchtime.

What makes Motherwitch particularly intriguing is how deeply it appears rooted in local culture and mythology. There’s Greek tragedy running through its veins, but also colonial history, motherhood, prejudice and the dangerous places grief can take somebody. Margarita Zachariou leads what sounds like a genuinely strange and emotionally bruising piece of folk horror.

And this is exactly the sort of film festivals are brilliant for. You walk in knowing almost nothing and hopefully emerge wondering what the hell you just experienced.

Marama

10th October, 4.45pm

If Gothic horror is going to survive another couple of centuries, filmmakers need to keep finding new perspectives from which to dismantle it.

Taratoa Stappard’s Marama looks ready to do precisely that.

Set in mid-19th century England, the film follows a young Maori woman fighting to preserve her identity in a world determined to suppress it. There are shades of Jane Eyre, Rebecca and Wide Sargasso Sea, but Stappard uses those familiar Gothic foundations to confront colonial exploitation and the historical treatment of indigenous people.

And frankly, we’re already sold on Ariana Osborne opposite Toby Stephens.

This sounds like Gothic horror with actual teeth, taking all those grand houses, repressed emotions and impeccably polite conversations and asking what bloody ugliness was being concealed underneath them in the first place.

Crawlers

10th October, 7.15pm

Sometimes you want complex meditations on colonialism and cultural identity.

Sometimes you want a building full of enormous bloody spiders.

Crawlers understands this.

Ángel Gómez Hernández’s creature feature traps the residents of the Paradiso Palms apartments inside during a deadly arachnid invasion, leaving their building manager as an unlikely potential saviour. Apparently the landlord hasn’t exactly kept on top of essential maintenance either, because even during a giant spider apocalypse somebody’s security deposit is getting screwed.

The fun here seems to come from balancing old-school creature-feature chaos with social satire and a surprisingly mean streak. At a lean 86 minutes, this sounds designed to grab an audience by the throat, throw spiders at them and get out before anyone has time to recover.

There’s also a filmmaker Q&A afterwards, assuming everyone isn’t still checking underneath their seats.

Never After Dark

8th October, 10.25pm

Now this one sounds creepy.

Writer-director Dave Boyle’s Never After Dark follows a travelling psychic who helps restless spirits cross over, only to encounter something far more powerful while investigating a remote house.

The setup might sound familiar, but the promise of old-school J-Horror mixed with temporal weirdness and survivor’s guilt makes this particularly interesting. Boyle has spent years working between America and Japan, and the film reportedly begins playing increasingly nasty games with time, memory and the protagonist’s own buried trauma as its supernatural mystery unfolds.

Ghost stories are often at their best when the haunting isn’t really the whole problem. Sometimes the living have brought enough baggage with them already.

A late night UK premiere at Grimmfest feels like pretty much the ideal way to experience this one.

Stronger Than The Devil

11th October, 7.30pm

And finally, something a little different.

Graham Guit’s Stronger Than the Devil begins with a father and son reconnecting after twenty years apart. Lovely. Heartwarming, even.

Unfortunately Dad appears to have brought violent criminals, sex traffickers and an increasingly catastrophic series of life choices along with him.

Melvil Poupaud leads the cast alongside Marine Vacth and Asia Argento in what starts as a blackly comic crime story before apparently descending into something far nastier. The big attraction here is unpredictability. Grimmfest describes a film that continually changes direction, shifting between comedy, crime, violence and outright darkness while dragging its characters further down the rabbit hole. We’re actually reluctant to know much more than that until we see it.

Festival discoveries are more fun when you’re slightly unprepared, and Stronger Than the Devil sounds like precisely the kind of film where reading the entire plot beforehand would ruin half the pleasure.

And that’s really the joy of Grimmfest.

You can spend one afternoon in 19th-century Cyprus, travel to Gothic England, get attacked by spiders, encounter something deeply unpleasant in a Japanese haunted house, then finish the weekend watching Asia Argento get involved with people you absolutely would not invite round for Sunday dinner.

Grimmfest 2026 runs from 8th to 11th October at the Odeon Great Northern in Manchester. Don’t miss your chance to see these films and all of the other fabulous features, shorts and Q&As at this year’s festivals. Get your tickets here: grimmfest.com/