Dead of Night Film Festival | Love Horror film reviews and news

Merseyside’s dedicated celebration of things that go bump, bite and behave very badly after dark is preparing to reopen the cinema doors. The Dead of Night Film Festival has revealed the first wave of its 2026 programme, with vampire zombies, body horror and an eclectic batch of independent shorts among the films heading to Southport this October. And this is only the beginning, with six features and more than 30 shorts promised across the complete two-day event. Returning on 10 and 11 October, Dead of Night will once again take place at the Southport Bijou Cinema. The independent festival specialises in horror, fantasy, science fiction and thrillers, with a particular emphasis on giving filmmakers a theatrical platform for work that can struggle to secure conventional cinema distribution. Three of this year’s six feature films have now been confirmed. Dead Reset is the first, joined by Vampire Zombies from Space, a title which wastes admirably little time establishing what audiences are dealing with. The initial feature announcement is completed by the considerably less coy F**k My Son. All three films run for around an hour and a half, although exactly where they will sit across the weekend schedule has yet to be announced. The short-film selection is already much broader, with 13 titles included in the first wave. Those are Chair, Pizza Panic Party, Sapling, Eeohtoh, Fiesta No Mas, Necrosectos, Grandma’s Thirsty, The Beneath, Tele XXX, It Draws Closer, The Belly, The Deep Vessel and Day of the Dad. It is a pleasingly peculiar collection of titles on paper, though the festival is keeping further details about the films for later. With more than 30 shorts due to screen in total, a substantial part of the 2026 programme is still under wraps. The remaining three feature films are also yet to be revealed. The festival’s stated aim is to support independent filmmakers by putting their work in front of genre audiences in a theatrical setting. It is a straightforward idea, but an increasingly important one when so much independent genre filmmaking is encountered at home. There is still something different about watching a strange little horror film in a darkened room with 74 other people, particularly when nobody quite knows what they are about to see. Southport Bijou Cinema provides the appropriately intimate setting, with its 75-seat auditorium equipped with an Optoma 8000-lumens projector and 5.1 surround sound. Dead of Night was also included in Dread Central’s ‘The Best Horror Festivals 2022’ list. Awards presented by the festival cover Best Feature, Best Short, Best SFX, Best Score and Best Poster, giving both feature and short-form filmmakers opportunities for recognition across the weekend. The Dead of Night Film Festival takes place at Southport Bijou Cinema on 10 and 11 October 2026, with the complete programme set to be revealed on 5 September. For more information and tickets, visit: filmfreeway.com/TheDeadofNightFilmFestival/tickets

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