We saw more than 20 movies at Fantasia International Film Festival this year and did not realize how bad it had gotten until we counted out loud. Meaghan landed around 23 or 24. Arthur was closer to 19 or 20. “Holy fuck. Okay. I thought it was like 12,” Arthur said, which is off by about eight movies and a week of sleep.
The 30th edition ran July 16 through August 2 in Montreal, and we are still catching up on rest. “So tiring,” Arthur said. Then immediately: “So worth it.” That is the whole festival experience in five words.
Every year we go in a little nervous the lineup will not have five films we love, and every year that fear turns out to be nonsense. This year was stacked. So we picked favorites, which Meaghan hated doing (“I hate ranking things, it’s so hard“), and then did anyway, complete with a secret list of honorable mentions she didn’t mention until we were already recording. Classic.
Here are the six Fantasia 2026 films that stuck with us, what they are, and why we liked them.
No Rest for the Wicked: A Queer Vampire Period Piece Unlike Anything We Have Seen
Kasper Kalle’s Danish feature is set in the Faroe Islands in 1862, in a small, superstitious fishing community where everyone knows everyone and nobody minds their business. Egor Venned plays Baldur, a young fisherman living with his devout mother Ásla (Sofia Nolsøe Mikkelsen). Then he pulls a Danish stranger named Helge (Pilou Asbæk) out of the water, and the quiet life he has been living stops being quiet.
What follows is a slow, gorgeous romance between two men who cannot be together in that place at that time, and a vampire film that does not behave like one. The lore around how these creatures get made is the part that got us. It takes an angle we have genuinely never seen before.
Meaghan put it on her list first for a reason. It is beautiful from start to finish, the cast is fantastic, and the chemistry between the leads is top-notch. The cultural texture of island life is a huge part of why it lands; you believe this community, which makes the pressure on Baldur feel real instead of decorative.
Arthur clocked the Robert Eggers energy immediately, and yes, it is that stark, dreamy, cold-to-the-bone kind of filmmaking. It picked up awards at Fantasia and deserved them.
Release status is the frustrating part. Meaghan’s understanding is that Denmark gets it on September 3, with nothing confirmed for North America yet. “If you wanna see it, go to Denmark, I guess,” Arthur offered, which is not the most practical advice we have ever given you.
Colony: Yeon Sang-ho Rebuilds the Zombie Movie From the Ground Up
Arthur’s first pick and Meaghan’s honorable mention, so this one is unanimous. Colony comes from writer-director Yeon Sang-ho, the man behind Train to Busan, its animated prequel Seoul Station, and the 2020 follow-up Peninsula. It is not set in that universe. It is a completely separate idea, and that is exactly why it works.
The setup: a biotech company holds a conference in a Seoul high-rise. Former scientist Suh Young-cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan) unleashes a bioterrorism attack inside the building because he believes humanity should evolve into something that communicates without failure, even if getting there means burning down civilization as it stands. Jun Ji-hyun (also credited as Gianna Jun) plays Se-jeong, a brilliant, isolated professor who ends up leading the survivors. The building gets sealed. Things go badly.
The hook is the infected themselves. They share knowledge. They learn from each other’s mistakes through spores, functioning as a hive mind rather than a mob, which means every escape plan the survivors come up with only works once. It is a nasty, smart, propulsive idea and Yeon stages it with real action chops.
Arthur’s favorite thing about it has nothing to do with the zombies.
The characters are making smart decisions.
He said, which is a thing he says constantly, in every episode, forever. Meaghan’s response: “every time there’s a character making smart decisions you’re like, Thank God!” But he is right. The people in Colony behave like people who want to survive, and the logic holds all the way through. “Am a sucker for zombies, but here we are,” Arthur admitted.
Meaghan went in half expecting repetition and did not get any. Colony already opened in South Korea back in May and became a serious hit there. Well Go USA brings it to North American theatres on August 28.
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Buddy: The Barney Horror Movie That Actually Earns the Hype
We both put this one on our lists, which caused a small incident. “It was on my list, thank you for stealing that,” Arthur said, and then had to go rearrange his entire top three.
Buddy is Casper Kelly’s feature debut, and if that name rings a bell, it is because he made Too Many Cooks, the eleven-minute Adult Swim short that broke everyone’s brain in 2014. He also directed the Adult Swim Yule Log movies.
Keegan-Michael Key voices Buddy, a bright orange unicorn hosting a squeaky-clean children’s show, with Cristin Milioti, Topher Grace, Michael Shannon, and Patton Oswalt rounding out the cast. The premise fits in one sentence: what if Barney was a horror movie?
We saw the international premiere at Fantasia, since up to that point it had only screened in the States, and we stayed for the Q and A afterward (there will be more from that on the site and socials). The comparison to Too Many Cooks is the right one.
Remember how that short took the opening credits of 80s and 90s sitcoms and let them rot in real time? Buddy does that with kids’ programming. Everything is uncanny and deeply wrong within minutes, and yet the recreation of the format is so accurate that it drags you straight back to being seven years old on the living room floor. Meaghan’s exact reaction:
Oh this is weird, it’s like when we were kids and we watched these shows, it’s insane.
It is also gorier than you are expecting. If you are walking in thinking this is purely a wink-wink comedy, it will correct you. There is a great twist about what Buddy actually is, and the hype it has been picking up since Sundance is earned. Buddy hits theatres on August 28, the same day as Colony.
Make a weekend of it, go see both of them!
Arthur suggested. We are going to.
Freaks Part II: Superpowers Without the Marvel Gloss
Arthur’s third pick, and the film that closed the festival with its world premiere. Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein wrote and directed, returning to their 2018 indie Freaks after the record-smashing run of Final Destination Bloodlines.
If you have not seen the first one, go fix that. Freaks is free with ads on Plex and rentable elsewhere. The core idea behind both films is a good one: if people really did develop powers, it would not look like Marvel. Nobody would build statues. People would be terrified and want them gone.
Freaks Part II follows Mary (Amanda Crew) and her daughter Chloe (Lorelei Olivia Mote) living on the road, hiding what they can do from the Abnormal Defence Force, a paramilitary unit built to exterminate people like them. Lili Taylor and Stephen Tobolowsky co-star.
Arthur’s pitch:
Think of it as X-Men, but darker, but also they are being the ones who are hunted.
The sequel’s big swing is generational. Children born to people with powers are getting stronger with every generation, and the abilities on display here are so much less tidy than comic book stuff.
One character freezes time inside a bubble. Another can implant themselves in your head so that what you are doing feels like your own idea. There is a character who can fly, except taking off requires such violent acceleration that it vaporizes everything within a radius. These are not safe powers, and the film never pretends they are.
Meaghan had no idea how they would expand something so contained and came out floored.
Freaks part two blew my fucking mind!
She said, and Arthur backed it up: “There were some scenes that were just wild.” Paramount picked the film up during the festival, with Elevation Pictures handling Canada. No date yet.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma: Jane Schoenbrun Made a Joyful One
Meaghan’s last pick, and Arthur’s biggest regret about only getting three slots. “This definitely would have been on my list if I could have had more,” he said, before pointedly bringing up the secret honorable mentions list again.
Jane Schoenbrun’s newest follows a young director handed the keys to the Camp Miasma slasher franchise after years of terrible sequels. When she seeks out the reclusive star of the original, the two of them fall into something bloody, obsessive, and very hard to describe politely. Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson lead, with Sarah Sherman, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Eva Victor, and Zach Cherry in the mix. It opened Un Certain Regard at Cannes before hitting Fantasia for its Canadian premiere.
Here is the part we want you to hear. If you have seen I Saw the TV Glow or We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and thought they were brilliant but heavy (they are, they are so sad), this is a completely different feeling.
It’s 180 degrees, it is completely different, it is super happy, fun, ridiculous.
Arthur said. Schoenbrun said repeatedly during the Q and A that this one came from a place of joy and love for the horror genre, and you can see that in basically every frame.
It makes fun of slasher tropes while loving them without a shred of irony. It is the feeling of watching your seventeenth franchise sequel, saying “that’s fucking dumb,” and having a great time anyway. Underneath the kills sits a real thread about finding joy in your art and figuring out who you are.
Meaghan has been thinking about it for two weeks straight and is now hunting down merch, because they are making action figures and t-shirts.
It’s gonna be a cult classic, instantly.
Arthur said. Agreed. It opened in theatres on August 7, with Canadian screens following on August 14, and our full review episode was the very first one we published for Fantasia.
The Leader: Two Enormous Performances Inside the Heaven’s Gate Story
This one is barely horror, and honestly it kind of is. Meaghan’s final honorable mention is Michael J. Gallagher’s dramatization of Heaven’s Gate, the UFO cult whose 39 members died in the largest mass suicide on American soil in 1997.
Tim Blake Nelson plays Marshall Applewhite and Vera Farmiga plays Bonnie Lu Nettles, the pair who convinced dozens of people they were extraterrestrial beings sent to guide humanity to the next level. The film tracks how it started, grew, and ended, with Jim Parsons strong as one of the most devoted members.
The performances are the reason to see it. Meaghan called them phenomenal, and the thing she keeps coming back to is the balance. It finds moments of levity without cheapening what happened to the people caught up in it, a very narrow line to walk with material like this. Arthur missed the screening and plans to catch up once it lands.
We have review episodes out for most of what we saw and are holding a few back until the bigger releases land. Buddy and Colony both arrive on August 28, which is a ridiculous day to be a horror fan. Beyond the festival circuit, 2026 has been an outrageously good year for the genre. “Building our top 10 at the end of this year is going to be impossible,” Meaghan said. Arthur’s forecast: a two-hour episode with 20 movies on it. Neither of us is joking.