20 Films We Can’t Wait to See at Tubi FrightFest 2026

Five days, dozens of films and the inevitable moment when two things you desperately want to see are playing at exactly the same time. Tubi FrightFest is almost back, bringing another enormous helping of horror, sci-fi, thrillers, documentaries and assorted genre oddities to London over the August Bank Holiday weekend.

Faced with a programme of more than 80 films, deciding what to watch can be almost as intimidating as anything on screen. So, for a special edition of our Half Hour of Horror podcast, Love Horror’s Tom Atkinson and Alex Humphrey were joined by fellow team member Darren Gaskell to dig through the 2026 selection and reveal the films currently sitting highest on their respective lists.

There are 20 choices between them, and they cover just about every corner of the genre.

20 films to look forward to at Tubi FrightFest 2026

Tom’s selections include Grind, an anthology tackling the horrors of modern working life through stories involving hustle culture, food delivery, online content moderation and unionisation. With a creative team including Brea Grant and Chelsea Stardust, plus Barbara Crampton among the cast, it offers the intriguing prospect of turning workplace misery into something considerably bloodier.

At the opposite end of the subtlety scale is Hungry. The premise alone probably tells you whether this is going onto your schedule: holidaymakers on a Louisiana airboat tour find themselves facing a killer hippo. Sometimes FrightFest calls for brooding psychological terror. Sometimes it calls for an enormous angry animal.

There is more restrained menace promised by Oddities, in which two friends accidentally kill their drug dealer before seeking refuge at a seemingly sleepy roadside antique shop, while The Nameless Ballad offers supernatural horror from Federico Zampaglione. Its struggling musician retreats to an Italian villa in search of inspiration, only for an ancient piano and other discoveries to send him towards obsession, visions and madness.

Tom also picks documentary Rubber Head: The Life and Monsters of Steve Johnson, looking at the special effects artist whose extensive career included work connected to films such as An American Werewolf in London, Ghostbusters, Predator, Poltergeist II, The Fog and Videodrome.

Alex’s choices take another route through the programme. Labyrinth promises deadly challenges as a group of strangers are judged for their previous transgressions, while Christopher Smith’s Spider Island brings arachnid horror into the mix.

He also makes room for documentary The Fright Stuff, which ventures behind the scenes of America’s haunted attraction industry, and South Korean supernatural horror Whispering Water. Then there is The Pitchfork Retreat, an anthology built around three writers travelling to a secluded island for a high-stakes horror writing competition, with a cast featuring several familiar genre faces.

And then there is Darren, who apparently decided five films simply weren’t enough.

His first batch includes Colony, Faces of Death, Charles Band documentary Full Moon Rising, practical-effects creature feature Gator Face and The Glorious Dead, the latest film from the Adams family. The latter particularly caught Darren’s attention for apparently combining zombie horror with a more character-driven apocalyptic approach.

His remaining picks demonstrate just how far FrightFest now stretches beyond conventional horror. Homebodies leans towards science fiction and follows two children in mysterious circumstances, while Imposters begins with an irresistible hook involving a woman entering a cave and returning with a blood-covered baby.

British black-and-white chiller The Peril at Pincer Point offers something more atmospheric, following a man sent to an island to capture a particular sound. Welcome to G-Town, meanwhile, brings an alien invasion to Glasgow and promises considerably less restraint with its splatter-comedy approach.

Finally, Darren selects You Are the Film, a 68-minute time-bending story involving two actresses and intertwined movies. At a festival where audiences can spend the better part of five days sitting in cinemas, the phrase “68 minutes” may itself qualify as a selling point.

The sheer variety of those choices says plenty about what FrightFest has become. What began at the Prince Charles Cinema in 2000 has grown into a festival capable of putting grotesque creature features, Korean supernatural cinema, effects documentaries, experimental sci-fi and intimate indie horror within the same sprawling programme.

That history forms a big part of our Tubi FrightFest special too. Before getting to this year’s films, Tom, Alex and Darren look back at their own experiences of the festival, from memorable screenings and interviews to some unexpected encounters with familiar faces.

We also dig into some of the stranger chapters in FrightFest history. There is the notorious film selected for the festival but never screened and Guillermo del Toro facing one of horror cinema’s famously demanding crowds, plus lots more!

Most importantly, there is plenty more discussion of the 20 films above, including why each made the cut and what we are hoping to discover when the lights go down.

Tubi FrightFest 2026 runs from Thursday 27 August to Monday 31 August, and members of the Love Horror team will be there throughout the festival. Tickets are available through the festival now: frightfest.co.uk/

So, whether you’re currently assembling a military-grade FrightFest schedule, wondering what might be worth taking a chance on or simply want an early look at some of the horror movies heading our way, watch or listen to the full Tubi FrightFest 2026 special edition of Half Hour of Horror below.

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