FrightFest 2025 Full Line-up

FrightFest 2025 returns to London’s Odeon Luxe Leicester Square from 21 to 25 August with a heady mix of world premieres, restored classics and electrifying genre films. And excitingly, this year Love Horror will be media partners for the event!

The festival opens with the UK premiere of James DeMonaco’s The Home and closes with Kurtis David Harder’s social-media nightmare Influencers, bookending five days of horror, fantasy and dark fantasy across seven screens. Full Festival Passes go on sale Saturday 12 July at noon, with day tickets available from Saturday 19 July.

Opening night sees comedian-turned-thesp Pete Davidson as Max in The Home, a tense tale of community service gone wrong at a retirement home under siege by unseen terrors. The closing night screening of Influencers brings Shudder’s hit series to the big screen as social-media chameleon CW manipulates followers into perilous games of FOMO. These two high-profile premieres are joined on the main screen by returning festival favourites and celebrated filmmakers. Erik Bloomquist brings his latest cult chiller Self-Help to Leicester Square. Simon Rumley returns with the brutal Crushed. The Adams family inject witchy folk horror into Mother of Flies, a spiritual successor to their own Hellbender. Joe Begos wreaks carnage in Jimmy and Stiggs, presented in its full form with new Eli Roth footage. Neil Marshall screens his newly restored 4K print of The Descent alongside original cast members.

Other UK premieres include the riotous reboot The Toxic Avenger, the probing documentary A Serbian Documentary on the scandal of A Serbian Film, and Japanese visionary Toshiaki Toyoda’s surreal fantasy Transcending Dimensions. Seth Daly’s home-invasion horror The Rows and Mercedes Bryce Morgan’s domestic thriller Bone Lake follow, as does Terry Castle’s serial-killer drama What She Doesn’t Know. The McManus brothers offer mind-bending sci-fi in Redux Redux. Gerard Johnson explores London’s underworld in the neon noir Odyssey. New blood delivers fresh frights in Bamboo Revenge, where nature itself strikes back, and Cognitive, a smart sci-fi shocker on AI gone rogue. Camp horrors Hold the Fort, teen-targeted Marshmallow and twisted comedies Night of Violence and the French shocker Flush round out the main screen.

A quartet of world premieres expands the bill with Chris Marrs Piliero’s deepfake thriller Appofenaiacs, Jeffrey Primm’s whodunnit 213 Bones, Vatanyu Ingkaviat’s explosive Tomb Watcher and the stalk-and-slash homage The Red Mask.

Discovery strands spotlight emerging talents. From the US come the giallo-tinged revenge shocker Death Cycle, Matt Stuertz’s visceral body horror Human, Tim Cruz’s clawed-up cult Don’t Let the Cat Out, punk-poetic Pig Hill, occult ritualism in Blood Shine, Get-Out meets Candyman in Noseeums, dream-scapes in Parasomnia and Dani Barker’s wild comedy-horror Five. British entries feature Samara Weaving in Borderline, Patrick Rea’s serial-killer clown spree Super Happy Fun Clown, Keith Boynton’s woodland mayhem The Haunted Forest and folk horror The Arborist by Andrew Mudge.

Further North American imports include David Medoff’s corporate satire Kombucha, Jackie Earle Haley in twisted satire Your Host, mannequin-mayhem The Mannequin, nihilistic In a Cold Vein, deadly Cover, relentless slasher The Only Ones, classic shocker reimagined in A Blind Bargain, offbeat comedy-horror Portal to Hell, unsettling suspense The Other People and Will Canon’s rural Pied Piper tale The Confession.

Homegrown hits appear in the Brit strand with gory fairy tale Bambi The Reckoning and Matt Harlock’s cerebral shocker Blockhead. Four First Blood world premieres from the UK include Tom Pickering’s thriller He Kills at Night, Luke Tedder’s mystery The Caretaker, Villablanca’s iPhone-shot Healing Andy and Natasha Tosini & Stephen Staley’s ghost story The Haunting at Jack the Ripper’s House.

International selection continues with Alice Maio Mackay’s tender queer horror The Serpent’s Skin, Parish Malfitano’s witch-poetry Salt Along the Tongue, Canada’s murderous couple drama Sick Puppy, Ava Maria Safai’s immigrant thriller Foreigner, New Zealand’s grotesque The Weed Eaters, Norway’s body-identity drama Above the Knee and Spain’s agoraphobic horror El Instinto. Documentaries probe genre icons in Captured Souls: In Conversation with Graham Humphreys, mockumentary Where Is Juan Moctezuma?, avant-garde pioneer in The Degenerate: The Life & Films of Andy Milligan and a 50th anniversary study of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in Sane Inside Insanity The Rocky Horror Phenomenon. Animation strands bring Latvia’s werewolf trial fantasia Dog of God and Korean chills in Gill.

FrightFest 2025 promises a festival of extremes, from high-octane premieres to rediscovered classics, all under one roof in central London. You will not want to miss it!

Full festival passes on sale from Saturday 12 July, noon and day passes and single tickets on sale from Saturday 19 July, noon via frightfest.co.uk.