Celebrating thirty years this year, the Fantasia International Film Festival isn’t holding back for its 2026 lineup. The Canadian genre festival just revealed its second wave lineup, offering audiences plenty of choices — and of course, plenty of blood and guts.
The biggest highlight of the lineup is related to Cape Fear, Apple TV’s newest adaptation of the cult story that premieres this Friday. Fantasia audiences will get to see the series finale like no one else, with showrunner Nick Antosca bringing it to the big screen for its world premiere. According to Fantasia, a “special guest” will also be in attendance with Antosca — I wonder who that could be…
But along with serial killers, vampires are making this year’s festival their playground. Director Nicky Murphy mashes up the vibes of What We Do in the Shadows and The Hunger to create the bloodsucking horror comedy I Love Paris, about a musician who accidentally gets turned in the middle of a music video shoot. On the other side of things, Los Vampires tells a fictionalized, murder-filled story about the real filming of George Melford’s Dracula, the Spanish language version of the horror classic, shot overnight on the same sets used for the more famous Bela Lugosi version.
Major titles also screening at this year’s festival include Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, along with Alice Maio Mackey’s Our Effed Up World (produced by Teenage Sex director Jane Schoenburn), The Adams Family’s The Glorious Dead, Larry Fessenden’s Trauma, or Monsters All, and Someone’s Daughter, starring Heated Rivalry breakout François Arnaud.
Other second wave horror highlights include the New Zealand body horror comedy Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant, the Japanese supernatural film Never After Dark, the Greek Gothic film Motherwitch, the ‘80s erotic horror Corpus, an Ozploitation horror comedy called Penny Lane Is Dead, and Nightborn, starring Harry Potter alum Rupert Grint.
But Fantasia isn’t just a horror festival. They’re also screening numerous other genre films, including the buddy cop action movie Tokyo Burst: Crime City, the anime film Cherry and Virgin, and the Vietnamese war film Tunnels: Sun in the Dark, along with the animated Zsazsa Zaturnnah, documentary The Origin of Ultraman, and more.
The 20th annual Fantasia International Film Festival takes place in Montréal from July 16 to August 2. For more information on the lineup and to purchase tickets, you can check out their website.
