Preview: Tier One Films
Fantastic Fest’s 21st edition opens with as strong a top-end slate as the festival has ever assembled, anchored by studio-backed genre swings that all happen to be arriving from filmmakers with real track records. This Fantastic Fest 2026 Preview highlights the titles that will draw the crowds and the headlines, spanning a franchise reinvention from the hottest horror director working, a Stephen King series adaptation, an awards-season outlier from a filmmaker who has never missed, and a pair of creature features bookending the entire week. What ties them together is scale, since every entry here is arriving with a studio behind it and a wide release already on the calendar. These are the seven films from this year’s lineup that we consider essential viewing. Fantastic Fest 2026 runs September 17–24 at Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar, Austin, Texas.
Plot descriptions throughout are drawn from Fantastic Fest 2026’s official lineup announcement, with all opinions and analysis our own.
Resident Evil
September 17 - Zach Cregger - Opening Night World Premiere
The first film on our list is the one we’re most excited about on the entire slate, Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil, arriving off the back of Weapons and Barbarian, two of the best modern horror films, as one of the most anticipated genre releases of the year. Rather than adapting any single entry in the games, Cregger has built an all-new story following Bryan, played by Austin Abrams, a medical courier who unwittingly finds himself in a non-stop race for survival as one horrifying night collapses around him in total chaos. The choice to hand this franchise to a filmmaker whose entire appeal is structural unpredictability is exactly the swing this property has needed for years, and Cregger’s proven instinct for building dread before detonating it should translate enormously well to the material. Resident Evil is shaping up as the biggest genre event of the fall and an obvious centerpiece for Fantastic Fest 2026.
Wild Horse Nine
November 6 - Martin McDonagh - Special Screening
The second film on our list is easily the biggest outlier of the entire festival, and we’ll admit up front that Martin McDonagh doesn’t exactly scream Fantastic Fest, but we’re not about to complain about it either, as Wild Horse Nine is one of our most personally anticipated releases of the entire year. Wild Horse Nine reunites McDonagh with Sam Rockwell alongside John Malkovich in what Searchlight is positioning as one of its major fall awards plays, and given how consistently McDonagh’s work blends pitch-black comedy with genuine violence, the fit is far less strange than it looks on paper. Coming off In Bruges, Three Billboards, and The Banshees of Inisherin, this is a filmmaker who has never once missed, and any new McDonagh feature is an automatic priority regardless of the venue. Its inclusion here is the clearest sign yet that Fantastic Fest’s 21st edition is casting a wider net than usual, and it’s among the two or three titles most worth building a schedule around.
Carrie
October 7 - Mike Flanagan - U.S. Premiere
Third on our list is one of two television entries on the slate, as Mike Flanagan brings his Prime Video adaptation of Carrie to Fantastic Fest for its U.S. premiere. Flanagan has spent the last decade establishing himself as the most reliable adapter of Stephen King working today, and expanding Carrie into a full series gives him room to explore the material with time even 1976 film masterpiece and its various remakes never had. That extended runway is what makes this so intriguing, since Flanagan’s greatest strength has always been the slow, character-driven build rather than the shock, and few King stories reward that approach more than this one. Getting a first look with a Fantastic Fest crowd before the series reaches Prime Video is exactly the kind of event screening this festival does better than anyone, making it one of the highest-priority titles of the entire week.
Victorian Psycho
November 13 - Zachary Wigon - North American Premiere
Fourth on our list is one of the most intriguing period genre swings of the year, as Zachary Wigon’s Victorian Psycho brings Maika Monroe to a remote gothic manor in Victorian England as an eccentric governess whose arrival stirs increasingly justified suspicion that she isn’t at all what she seems, in one of the most intriguing trailers of the year by far. Adapted from Virginia Feito’s novel, the film pairs a genuinely nasty premise with a period setting that should give its violence a very different texture than the contemporary horror dominating the rest of the slate. Monroe has quietly become one of the most reliable performers working in the genre, and giving her a role built entirely around controlled menace rather than survival is exactly the kind of casting that makes this feel like a potential breakout. Victorian Psycho is one of the titles we’d most recommend prioritizing, as it seems tantalizing, horrific and cool.
Beware Boiúna
October 2 - Mike P. Nelson - Opening Night World Premiere
The fifth film on our list is the one opening the entire festival, as Fantastic Fest alum Mike P. Nelson returns with Beware Boiúna, a creature feature following a group of medical volunteers in the Amazon whose mission collapses into a fight for survival against Boiúna, the legendary giant snake known as the mother of the waters. Nelson has built a real reputation for lean, mean genre filmmaking, and pulling from South American mythology rather than recycling another generic monster gives this one a genuine hook the subgenre has been badly missing. The cast is stacked with Kiana Madeira, Jessica Rothe, and Logan Marshall-Green all leading, and early word suggests a tightly wound pace with far more twists than a straightforward creature picture typically bothers with. Lionsgate opening the festival with this feels like a real statement, and it’s easily one of the most purely fun-sounding titles on the slate.
The Swallow
TBD - Kevin Kölsch & Dennis Widmyer - World Premiere
Sixth on our list is the film closing out the festival, and it comes from the team behind Starry Eyes and 2019’s Pet Sematary, with Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer delivering The Swallow, a brutally efficient, effects-forward survival horror. The premise is beautifully simple: a group of teenagers break into a fenced-off area of the woods during a camping trip and find themselves terrorized by a sentient, quicksand-like sludge, a genuinely nasty creature concept that lends itself perfectly to practical effects work. Grace Van Dien leads the cast, and everything about this positions it as an old-school throwback in the best possible sense, a creature feature built on craft and escalation rather than concept alone. Kölsch and Widmyer have never made a boring film, and closing out the festival with this feels like exactly the right note.
Full Phil
TBD - Quentin Dupieux - World Premiere
Rounding out our first tier is the first of two Quentin Dupieux films on this year’s slate, with Full Phil arriving as a brand-new cut of the director’s English-language debut, starring Kristen Stewart and Woody Harrelson. Dupieux has been a Fantastic Fest mainstay for years, and watching one of the most reliably strange filmmakers alive make his first film in English with a cast this significant is about as intriguing a proposition as the festival offers. His absurdist, deadpan sensibility has always translated well to genre audiences, and Stewart in particular feels like an inspired match for the kind of committed weirdness Dupieux demands from his performers. Getting a new cut of it at Fantastic Fest, ahead of any wider release plans, makes this one of the more unpredictable and genuinely exciting screenings of the entire week.
Preview: Tier Two Films
Where the first tier is built on scale, this second grouping is built entirely on directors, the international filmmakers whose names alone justify a ticket regardless of what the logline says. This is where Fantastic Fest has always distinguished itself from the rest of the fall circuit, programming Bertrand Mandico alongside Anna Biller alongside Joko Anwar without ever treating any of them as niche. These nine films skew heavily European and heavily strange, spanning hyper-pulp Italian pastiche, animated fairy-tale nightmares, vampire mythology, and a second Dupieux entry for good measure. If Tier One is what you’ll see in theaters within a few months anyway, Tier Two is what you’ll only get here.
Roma Elastica
December 23 - Bertrand Mandico - North American Premiere
Leading off our second tier is Bertrand Mandico’s Roma Elastica, in which the French cinema maestro teams with Marion Cotillard to broadcast a daring hyper-pulp transmission straight out of 1980s Italian cinema. Mandico has spent his career building some of the most visually maximalist and formally reckless films of anyone working today, and pairing that sensibility with an actress of Cotillard’s stature is exactly the kind of collision this festival exists to platform. Everything about the description suggests a film operating entirely on its own logic, which in Mandico’s hands has always been the point rather than the problem. Its North American premiere makes this one of the most singular tickets of the week.
Vertiginous
TBD - Quentin Dupieux- U.S. Premiere
The second Dupieux entry on the slate is Vertiginous, a lean 67-minute take on the simulation hypothesis rendered in early Y2K graphics and delivered with the director’s trademark deadpan wit. Turning a genuinely heady philosophical premise into an absurdly funny mirror of contemporary life is exactly the trick Dupieux has been perfecting for two decades, and the lo-fi aesthetic sounds like a perfect match for the material. The fact that Dupieux has two entirely separate films on this year’s slate speaks to both his prolific output and his standing with this particular festival. It’s a short, strange, and almost certainly hilarious way to spend an hour.
The Face of Horror
TBD - Anna Biller- U.S. Premiere
Anna Biller returns with The Face of Horror, a gloriously lurid ghost story about a vain knight, an inconvenient wife, and a marriage built on murder, proving that betraying your wife may only be the beginning of the problem. Biller’s work on The Love Witch established her as one of the most meticulous stylists in modern genre filmmaking, obsessively recreating period aesthetics while using them to smuggle in genuinely pointed commentary. A period ghost story built around marital violence is exactly the register she operates best in, and at 120 minutes it sounds like her most expansive work yet. Its U.S. premiere here is one of the auteur wing’s clearest highlights.
The Birthday Party
TBD - Léa Mysius- North American Premiere
Léa Mysius brings The Birthday Party to Fantastic Fest, following Nora as she turns 40 and receives three uninvited guests who claim she isn’t who she says she is, unraveling her carefully constructed life in the process. Mysius has become one of the most exciting voices in contemporary French cinema, and the identity-thriller premise here sounds like fertile ground for the kind of psychological precision her work has always carried. Turning a birthday party into an interrogation of self is a genuinely great hook, and one that should play beautifully with a festival crowd. It’s among the strongest international titles on the entire lineup.
The Blood Countess
October 29 - Ulrike Ottinger - North American Premiere
The Blood Countess brings Elizabeth Báthory into present-day Austria as a recently reawakened vampire pursuing an ancient artifact that could destroy her family, from legendary avant-garde filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger. Ottinger has spent decades operating well outside the commercial mainstream, and seeing her turn that sensibility toward one of horror’s most enduring historical figures is a genuinely thrilling proposition. Báthory has been adapted countless times, but almost never by a filmmaker this formally experimental, which is exactly what makes this feel essential. At 119 minutes and premiering in North America here, it’s one of the most distinctive titles of the week.
Donkey Princess
TBD - Cristóbal León & Joaquín Cociña - North American Premiere
From the team behind The Wolf House comes Donkey Princess, set in a kingdom where love has been declared a plague, and follows a princess who travels across different realities to find love, confront grief, and attain individuation. León and Cociña produce some of the most genuinely unsettling animation being made anywhere, using stop-motion and mixed-media techniques to create images that feel closer to nightmares than films. Applying that approach to fairy-tale structure sounds like a perfect fit, and the fact that this is a five-country co-production speaks to how much international support their work now commands. This is easily the most formally adventurous title on the slate.
Ghost in the Cell
October 2 - Joko Anwar - North American Premiere
Indonesian genre visionary Joko Anwar delivers what’s being billed as his most deliriously ambitious film yet with Ghost in the Cell, a blood-soaked fusion of supernatural horror, prison thriller, martial arts action, and pitch-black political satire. Anwar has been steadily building one of the most exciting genre filmographies in the world with Satan’s Slaves and Impetigore, and a project this maximalist sounds like the natural escalation of everything he’s been working toward. Blending four genres this disparate could easily collapse in lesser hands, but Anwar has more than earned the benefit of the doubt. This is exactly the kind of international discovery Fantastic Fest was built to deliver, personally the most interesting tier two plot of the entire festival.
The Spiral
October 8 - Paolo Strippoli - U.S. Premiere
Paolo Strippoli brings The Spiral to Fantastic Fest, in which Alice’s estranged mother arrives with a confession about a twenty-year-old bargain, setting off a chain of consequences across a 115-minute runtime. Strippoli has been quietly building a reputation as one of the more interesting new voices in Italian horror, and a premise built around inherited debt and family secrets sounds like a natural fit for the slow-burn dread his work trades in. The Italian-French-Belgian co-production status suggests a scale beyond what he’s worked with previously. It’s one of the sleeper titles most worth seeking out.
The Ones Who Grieve
TBD -Quarxx- North American Premiere
Closing out our second tier is Quarxx’s The Ones Who Grieve, set at the end of the 19th century as a mysterious plague spreads across the countryside and a young woman living under the tyranny of her deeply religious father fights to reclaim her freedom. Quarxx made a real impression with All the Gods in the Sky, a film that pushed body horror into genuinely uncomfortable emotional territory, and applying that sensibility to a period setting about religious control sounds enormously promising. Folk horror rooted in real historical oppression tends to hit far harder than its purely supernatural counterparts. At 116 minutes and premiering in North America here, it’s the perfect closing note for the auteur wing.
Conclusion
Fantastic Fest’s 21st edition is exactly the kind of lineup that reminds you why this festival occupies the position it does on the fall circuit, balancing genuine studio muscle against filmmakers most festivals wouldn’t know what to do with. Between Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil, Mike Flanagan’s Carrie, and Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, the top of this slate is as commercially significant as any genre festival has assembled in years, while the auteur wing quietly stacks Bertrand Mandico, Anna Biller, Ulrike Ottinger, and Joko Anwar into a single week in Austin. That range is the whole point, since a festival built entirely on headliners would be redundant with what’s already coming to theaters, and a festival built entirely on discoveries would never draw the crowds that make those discoveries matter. With 35 world premieres, 21 international and North American premieres, and 14 U.S. premieres across the full program, the sixteen films above represent only a fraction of what’s actually screening, and history suggests at least a few of the titles nobody is talking about yet will end up being the ones people remember.
Fantastic Fest 2026 runs September 17–24 at Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar, Austin, Texas, and if the last twenty editions are any indication, the best film of the week is probably one that isn’t on this list at all.
