Cutting Edge Horror and Classics Join Grimmfest’s 2026 Line-up

Manchester is preparing for four days of ghosts, spiders, folk horror, killer impulses and heavy-metal carnage as Grimmfest launches its complete 2026 feature line-up.

The festival’s 18th edition will bring an unusually premiere-heavy programme to the ODEON Great Northern this October, with John Carpenter’s The Fog opening proceedings in the company of Adrienne Barbeau and new films featuring Barbara Crampton, Asia Argento, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Alyssa Sutherland, Luke Hemsworth, Kevin Durand, Maribel Verdú and Belén Rueda.

Running from 8 to 11 October, Manchester’s International Festival of Fantastic Film is promising World, International, UK, English and Northern UK Premieres across a programme that moves from period horror and Spanish-language cinema to body horror, crime comedy and some particularly unruly heavy metal.

Carpenter’s 1980 supernatural classic The Fog will open the festival, with Barbeau attending to receive this year’s Grimmfest Lifetime Achievement Award and participate in a Q&A.

Period horror has a significant presence. Hammer returns with the Northern UK Premiere of Casey Walker’s Ithaqua, an 1800s frontier horror starring Hemsworth and Durand. Quarxx, previously at Grimmfest with Pandemonium, brings alternate-reality morality tale The Ones Who Grieve for its UK Premiere, while Minos Papas’ Motherwitch relocates and reworks the Medea myth in 1880s Cyprus. Taratoa Stappard’s Maori Gothic Marama, starring Toby Stephens and Ariana Osborne, receives its English Premiere.

A newly established Spanish-language strand, presented in association with the Cervantes Institute, contains five further films. Víctor Català’s 1970s-set Galician horror They Always Come at Night receives its World Premiere, while Cristian Bernard’s Under Your Feet, starring Maribel Verdú, makes its UK bow.

Director Jacob Santana has two films in the programme, both starring Belén Rueda. Haunted-house horror Evil Dress and psychological thriller Reversion, the latter co-starring Jaime Lorente, receive UK Premieres. Christopher Cartagena’s home-invasion thriller Disforia also has its UK Premiere, while Gustavo Hernández’s The Whisper arrives for a Regional UK Premiere.

Things become still less predictable elsewhere in the line-up. Ángel Gómez Hernández’s Los Angeles-set spider horror Crawlers, starring Matilda Lutz, receives its UK Premiere, while Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Evil Dead Rise star Alyssa Sutherland lead Kurt Martin’s The Room Below, which makes its International Premiere.

Lucky Cerruti’s small-town American nightmare Boxcutter receives its World Premiere, and Damien Fannon returns to Grimmfest with his debut feature Ivan. Expanding upon Fannon’s earlier short, the AI-centred body horror receives its International Premiere.

Dave Boyle’s Never After Dark, a ghost story incorporating temporal dislocation and survivor’s guilt, will have its UK Premiere. Asia Argento, meanwhile, leads Graham Guit’s multi-character crime comedy Stronger Than the Devil, also receiving its UK Premiere. It’s quite a jump from J-Horror to a breakneck crime comedy, but that sort of collision has long been part of Grimmfest’s programming character.

The Northern UK Premiere slate gets louder with Deathgasm 2: Goremageddon, Jason Lei Howden’s long-awaited follow-up to the heavy-metal horror comedy that played Grimmfest in 2014.

Tyler Savage’s Oddities, expanded from his Grimmfest 2023 short, brings Adrienne Barbeau back to the screen alongside Lilimar, Lovie Simone, Xander Berkeley and Will Oldham for a dose of Lovecraftian horror.

Brea Grant, Chelsea Stardust and Ed Dougherty tackle the gig economy in anthology Grind, starring Barbara Crampton, Matt Mercer and Rob Huebel. Kazakh filmmaker Aitor Zholdaskali’s Sicko [Auru] turns its attention towards influencer culture, social-media grifting and medical malpractice, while the Adams Family’s The Glorious Dead imagines the aftermath of the Rapture through the experiences of a small-town sheriff.

Rounding out the announced features is Steve Pink’s Terrestrial, a blackly comic crime story concerned with ambition, authorial delusion and toxic nerd culture. Even that isn’t quite the end of the line-up, however. Grimmfest says one additional surprise feature remains under wraps.

The festival’s short-film programmes, full guest roster and complete screening schedule are still to be announced. Grimmfest 2026 runs at ODEON Great Northern in Manchester from 8 to 11 October. Visit Grimmfest’s official website for further programme information and tickets: grimmfest.com