FANTASIA 2026 - THE FIVE I NEED TO SEE
- Gerald Morris
- Jul 14
- 3 min read
The Fantasia International Film Festival turns 30 this year, running July 16 through August 2 in Montreal. That's over 125 features and more than 200 shorts crammed into eighteen days. If you have never paid attention to Fantasia, here is the pitch: it is the largest genre festival in North America, and it operates almost entirely outside the machinery that dominates the fall circuit. No campaign consultants. No Telluride-to-Toronto handoff. Just horror, sci-fi, animation, kung fu, and a large volume of films that resist easy categorization.
I love it precisely for that reason. The weird indie stuff that plays Montreal in July has a habit of showing up everywhere else later, usually after somebody at a distributor watches a packed house lose its mind at the Hall Theatre and decides to write a check. Fantasia is where you find the movies before the discourse finds them. For the second year in a row, I am going to be covering the fest remotely, and here are the five titles I’m itching to see the most.
Casper Kelly made Too Many Cooks. He made Adult Swim Yule Log. Now he has a theatrical feature debut about a homicidal dinosaur mascot who traps children inside a '90s kids TV show he can bend at will. Keegan-Michael Key voices the dinosaur. Cristin Milioti anchors the thing, with Topher Grace, Michael Shannon, and Patton Oswalt filling out the cast, and newcomer Delaney Quinn (If I Had Legs I'd Kick You) in the lead. It played Sundance and SXSW earlier this year and comes to Fantasia as an international premiere on August 1. I have been waiting on this one since January.
Two sisters break into a jerk's remote house in the woods. One of them throws her back out mid-heist. Then the owner comes home, and the owner is John Stamos. Lizzy Caplan and Lucy DeVito play the sisters in this debut feature from Raviv Ullman and Greg Yagolnitzer, produced by Danny DeVito. It hit SXSW in March and lands at Fantasia July 25 for its Canadian premiere. An 86-minute dark comedy with a premise that simply either sings or collapses, and everything I have read says it sings.
Hanna Bergholm's Hatching was one of the sharpest debuts of 2022, and her follow-up takes the same interest in maternal horror somewhere considerably nastier. Seidi Haarla (Compartment No. 6) and Rupert Grint play a couple who move to rural Finland, have a baby, and discover the baby is turning into a troll. It premiered at Berlinale in February and arrives at Fantasia July 22 as a North American premiere, with Shudder attached. Word on the street is that Haarla's performance is the reason to show up.
Nicolas Winding Refn's first feature in ten years opens the festival on July 16, preceded by his Cheval Noir Career Achievement Award. It already played Cannes this spring to, let's just say, mixed reviews (?). Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton headline a giallo-inflected fever dream set in a fog-choked future city where the mist brings a serial killer with diamond-studded gloves. Pino Donaggio scored it, which is a sentence I did not expect to type in 2026. Neon has it. Refn movies split rooms down the middle, and I am fully prepared for that. I want to see it anyway.
Jane Schoenbrun won the Queer Palm at Cannes for this, and the reviews out of the Croisette were the loudest of any genre title this year. Hannah Einbinder plays a filmmaker obsessed with rebooting a transphobic slasher franchise and recasting its original final girl, played by Gillian Anderson. Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner produced. MUBI is releasing it in North America in August. After We're All Going to the World's Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun has earned the benefit of every doubt. This has been one of my most anticipated of the year as a whole, and it's the ONE title I cannot wait to check out while covering Fantasia this year.
My coverage either here or on YouTube (or both) will be coming soon. Check out Fantasia’s website for the full slate of all things weird and wonderful this time around.
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