GASP! Brings Diverse Carnage to Cultplex This June

The GASP! Horror Film Festival returns to Cultplex in Manchester from 27 to 29 June, showcasing an ambitious three-day programme of more than 30 premieres, in excess of 50 short films and nine feature presentations, capped by the annual Mystery Queer Classic. Now in its third year, GASP! expands its remit beyond horror into science fiction, fantasy and thriller, while maintaining its focus on work by filmmakers of colour, women, creators with disabilities and LGBTQ+ voices.

Highlights begin with the UK premiere of Welcome to Praeris, a visually arresting sci-fi thriller from Jérémy Ibraimovski that follows two survivors as they chase a shared dreamscape in a deserted world. It shares the opening night slot with The Lies of Our Confines, an inner-city horror set in the Scottish Highlands. Later on Friday, the festival’s first Short Film Showcase mixes body horror, anime-inspired fairy tales and supernatural dramas in bite-sized form. The night closes with a double bill of bloody homage-horror: the Evil Dead-inspired Run For Your Life! and Sean Kurosawa’s time-tangle splatter opus Girls Just Wanna Have Kill.

Saturday’s keynote feature is Chainsaws Were Singing, a high-camp Estonian slasher musical that blends car chases, chainsaw solos and a lesbian hedgehog into a backwoods extravaganza. The World Cinema Short Film Showcase that follows brings together work from Bulgaria, Korea, Sri Lanka and beyond, exploring witchcraft, survival horror and dystopian scenarios. The afternoon LGBTQIA+ Showcase highlights queer horror storytellers, from a micro-mystery in Under the Orphanage to the found-footage shocker abattoir_witness.AVI and the buzz-worthy Buzzkill, in which a jealous vibrator wreaks murderous havoc. Saturday evening brings the 30th anniversary screening of Tales from the Hood, Rusty Cundieff’s anthology addressing racial violence, and closes with the festival’s most talked-about found-footage hit, In Our Blood, produced by Morgan Freeman and Duncan Jones.

Sunday begins with The House on the Lake, a silent ghost hunt pitting priests and sceptics against vengeful spirits, followed by Melissa Flores’ short Strands. The Northern UK premiere of Aurélia Mengin’s Scarlet Blue offers a hypnotic descent into trauma and hypnosis. A Women in Horror Short Film Showcase presents fresh work from emerging directors, among them the tongue-in-cheek Sorry, the gothic comedy Lavenza and the unsettling tale Tasty Tongue. The festival concludes with a finale of Kaizô Hayashi’s restored noir-thriller The Most Terrible Time in My Life.

The full programme details and ticket information for GASP! Horror Film Festival 2025 are available now at gaspfest2025.eventive.org. With its blend of world premieres, rare restorations, immersive live events and boundary-pushing shorts and features drawn from across the globe, this three-day festival at Cultplex in Manchester promises to be a landmark celebration of queer, diverse and underrepresented voices in genre cinema. See you on 27–29 June for a weekend you won’t forget.