The latest edition of the Toronto International Film Festival kicks off this Thursday and brings with it a plethora of buzzy new premieres and screenings.
TIFF 2026 spreads its horror beyond the Midnight Madness programming section this year, with special Primetime spotlights on upcoming horror series Below, Carrie, and Crystal Lake. Ken Russell’s The Devils new restoration features in TIFF’s Classic series, and they’re saluting recent horror hits with Special Event screenings for Obsession and Hope. That doesn’t touch on the brand new premieres.
Read on for 5 can’t-miss horror screenings to catch at TIFF 2026.
Half
Action meets horror in this genre hybrid that sees twin siblings Ethan (Ranjith Sajeev) and Ivy (Aiswarya Raj) seeking revenge after marauders brutalize their bodies and leave them for dead. What their attackers don’t realize until far too late is that their target happened to be half-vampires who will use the cover of night to enact ultra-violent retribution.
Vampires in the desert is a winning combo, and Half is poised to deliver crowd-pleasing carnage at TIFF from writer-director Samjad and choreographer Very Tri Yulisman (The Raid 2, The Night Comes for Us). So much so that it’s already set to play at Fantastic Fest later this month.
Inherit
The Medium and Shutter filmmaker Banjong Pisanthanakun is back with a new possession horror chiller. Davika Hoorne (A Useful Ghost) stars as a grandma possessed by a demon in what TIFF calls “her most magnetic role yet.“
Hoorne plays Woranart, who returns home 50 years later without a trace of aging. That’s likely because she’s possessed by a centipede spirit seeking a new host: Woranart’s 18-year-old granddaughter, Oui (Baipor Thitiya Jirapornsilp).
River
This midnighter sees genre favorites Jane Levy (Evil Dead) and Jessica Rothe (Happy Death Day) plunged into a survival horror scenario. It follows three estranged siblings who reunite in their hometown after the death of their father. They set out to scatter his ashes at his favorite spot on a remote river, but when their boat breaks down, the trip devolves into a waking nightmare.
Max Mattern (“Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy”) and Dane DiLiegro (Prey) also star in the film, which marks the feature debut of writer-director Joshua Giuliano.
The Spiral
A Classic Horror Story filmmaker Paolo Strippoli turns the screws on a desperate mother (Jasmine Trinca) as she confesses a series of Faustian bargains to her estranged daughter (Romana Maggiora Vergano) in what the fest describes as a riveting morality chiller.
Divided across four chapters, Strippoli and Salvatore de Chirico’s script “perversely ratchets each episode with discomforting confrontations of decidedly bourgeois anxieties, revealing a canny critique of the lengths people will go to combat an undesirable destiny, and who they’re willing to have shoulder the burden.”
Trees Are Watching
Ecological horror blends with the psychological in the new horror movie from Iranian Kurdish auteur Bahman Ghobadi (Half Moon, Turtles Can Fly).
Eva Green (Penny Dreadful, Nocebo) stars as “Darya, a writer obsessed with the spiritual resonance of trees, returns to her hometown of Mardin with her deaf daughter and grows haunted by past memories of Spin and Nihal, twin sisters she knew as a child. Residing in their former family home — which is bordered by mass deforestation save for an ominous pair of trees planted for each sister — Darya’s unease is suddenly exacerbated by nightly visitations of a malignant entity that takes a seemingly benign form: a chair made from local timber.” Sanity wanes. Murat Yildirim also stars.
Stay tuned for Bloody Disgusting’s TIFF 2025 coverage.
