Astrolatry, an American indie horror film about a severed, sentient penis going on a killing spree, just landed a spot in the Cannes Frontières Buyers Showcase for May 2026. That’s the market section where films still in post-production get pitched to distributors.
So yes, in a few weeks, buyers are going to sit in a room at Cannes and get sold on a creature feature whose creature is a detached human penis. The Frontières lineup drew from a record 124 submissions this year. Astrolatry made the cut.
What Astrolatry Actually Is
Writer-director David Gordon (a DP by trade, with 14 feature credits including the Shudder original 825 Forest Road) is making his fiction feature debut with this one. The film follows Elliot, a chronic masturbator obsessed with a beauty cream model. His obsession curdles into violent delusion, eventually ending in an accidental self-castration (Variety specifically warned “the sensitive” about that scene).
The severed penis becomes sentient and starts killing people. Gordon describes it as a “modern reimagining of Maniac, directed by Ken Russell,” which is a pretty efficient logline if you know what either of those references means. He also told Variety the film “seeks to satirize the ‘nice guy’ trope and toxic masculinity by positioning them as parallel phenomena both leading to the objectification of others.”
So something is going on underneath the premise beyond pure shock value. Ethan Daniel Corbett (Faces) leads as Elliot, and the film is targeting a Fantasia 2026 world premiere after Cannes.
The Film That Already Did This
Before Astrolatry gets there, it’s worth knowing that this concept has already been made into a feature, just from a completely different direction.
Popran, from Shinichiro Ueda (One Cut of the Dead), came out in Japan in January 2022 and had its North American premiere at Fantasia that same year.
The setup: Tagami, an arrogant manga platform CEO, wakes up one morning to find his penis has detached, grown wings, and is flying around Tokyo at high speed. He’s given six days to catch it with a butterfly net before it disintegrates permanently.
The film is not really horror; it’s a comedy-drama built around an absurdist premise, but it operates in the same conceptual space as Astrolatry, just with the tonal dial turned all the way in the other direction.
What Ueda does with the premise is use it as a road-movie engine. Tagami’s flying penis gravitates toward locations tied to his past, which forces him to confront everyone he’s wronged on the way up: his former business partner, whom he pushed out, his ex-wife, and his parents, whom he stopped visiting.
Critics were split on whether it fully delivered; some found it warm and funny, others thought the dramatic payoffs didn’t match the premise’s energy, but nobody questioned the commitment.
The concept is completely earnest.
The contrast between the two films is actually the interesting part. Popran’s penis flees from its owner’s toxicity; it’s running away from a man who built his whole identity around a hollow version of masculinity.
Astrolatry’s penis is the threat. One is a fable about a man trying to reclaim his humanity (and his anatomy). The other is a nightmare where male obsession detaches from its host and goes feral. Same device, completely different horror.
Popran is currently streaming free on Plex. It’s worth 96 minutes of your time before Astrolatry shows up on the festival circuit this summer.