Movies
Fantastic Fest ’11 Announces Second Wave Of Films
Fantastic Fast, Austin’s annual celebration of genre greatness, just added seventeen new films to its slate, along with a New York Asian Film Festival that will be comprised of four surprise 35mm screenings of Hong Kong exploitation flicks from the late 80’s and early 90’s!
Melancholia is probably the most high profile addition, but there’s a lot of very impressive films making their way into the line-up, including Nacho Vigalondo’s Extraterrestrial, Jaume Balaguero’s Sleep Tight, and Pastorela: A Christmas Play, which sounds like it could be this year’s feel good holiday event. I’m sure they’ll be at least one or two more waves announced before the fest starts, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for The Thing, The Skin I Live In, The Wicker Tree and The Theatre Bizarre.
Check out the full list beyond the break.
MOVIES ON FIRE: HONG KONG ACTION CLASSICS- presented by AGFA
The amazing Grady Hendrix of the famous New York Asian Film Festival will join us and introduce four surprise 35mm screenings of classic Hong Kong grindhouse gems (most not available on DVD) from Hong Kong’s exploitation heyday of the late 80’s and early 90’s, these movies are cinematic crystal meth: cheap n’crazy, they’ll spoil you for everything else. Designed to play to rowdy audiences who threatened mayhem if they weren’t delivered a dose of gonzo delirium every five minutes, they have a total disregard for three-act structure, Hollywood plotting and the lives of their stuntmen. Get ready to burn!
AARDVARK (2010)
Texas Premiere
Director Kitao Sakurai live in person
Director: Kitao Sakurai, Japan, 80 minutes
Larry (AARDVARK’s blind-since-birth protagonist) has an innate curiosity that lands him smack in the middle of a bizarre criminal underworld replete with mixed martial arts, intrigue, murder and pillow humping.
BLIND (2011)
US Premiere
Director – AHN Sang-hoon, Korea, 111minutes
A blind woman narrowly escapes from the clutches of a serial killer. When he circles back to get rid of any witnesses, the woman must rely on her other acute senses to identify and outwit the killer.
CALIBRE 9 (2011)
World Premiere
Director Jean-Christian Tassy & Producer Axel Guyot live in person
Director: Jean-ChristianTassy, France, 84 minutes
A city planner becomes strangely linked to a gun possessed by the soul of a dead hooker.
THE CORRIDOR (2010)
US Premiere
Director Evan Kelly live in person!
Director: Evan Kelly, Canada, 100 minutes
Five friends stay in a remote cabin for the weekend and uncover a supernatural anomaly in the woods.
EXTRATERRESTRIAL (2011)
US Premiere
Director Nacho Vigalondo and Producer Nahikari Ipiña live in person
Director: Nacho Vigalando, Spain, 90 minutes
A man wakes in a strange apartment after a long night of drinking. When his unfamiliar bedmate tries to usher him out, they both discover that spaceships are hovering over Madrid.
HEADHUNTERS (2011)
US Premiere
Director: Morten Tyldum, Norway, 100 Minutes
Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) is good at two things: hiring people and stealing from them. He’ll risk it all when he meets a former mercenary who owns a painting worth millions.
THE INNKEEPERS (2010)
Director Ti West live in person
Director: Ti West, USA, 101 Minutes
Luke and Claire work the desk at a quaint, failing hotel. On their last night, these two amateur ghost-hunters try to capture definitive proof that their workplace is haunted. THE INNKEEPERS kicks off a Ti West retrospective at the Alamo Drafthouse sponsored by the Austin Film Society.
LET THE BULLETS FLY (2010)
Regional Premiere
Director: Jiang Wen, Hong Kong, 132 minutes
The highest grossing domestic Chinese release ever, LET THE BULLETS FLY features the hilarious and bloody antics of a band of thieves traveling by train in this 1920s-set western satire. Writer/Director Jiang Wen stars opposite screen legend Chow Yun-Fat.
MELANCHOLIA (2011)
Regional Premiere
Director: Lars von Trier, Denmark, 130 minutes
The man who brought us Fantastic Fest hit ANTICHRIST creates a very different type of genre film – an incredibly personal science fiction story about the end of the world.
MICHAEL (2011)
US Premiere
Director: Markus Schleinzer, 96 minutes
Setting the record for the darkest of character studies, Markus Schleinzer’s compelling and surprisingly humorous directorial debut follows five months in the lives of a pedophile and the ten-year-old boy he keeps in the basement.
PASTORELA: A CHRISTMAS PLAY (2011)
World Premiere
Director: Emilio Portes Castro, Mexico, 90 minutes
Fantastic Fest again hosts another untraditional Christmas movie; this time Santa Claus is out and Satan is in. When Chucho (Joaquín Cosio) loses the beloved role of Satan in the town’s Christmas play and tries to reclaim the part, all hell breaks loose and an epic battle between good and evil begins.
PENUMBRA (2011)
World Premiere
Director Adrian Garcia Bogliano and Producer Andrea Quiroz live in person
Director: Adrian Garcia Bogliano and Ramiro Garcia Bogliano Argentina, 85 minutes
A beautiful young woman is trapped in her apartment with a nervous realtor and an expanding cast of unsettling characters in the latest from the director of COLD SWEAT.
SLEEP TIGHT (2011)
US Premiere
Director Jaume Balagueró live in person
Director: Jaume Balagueró, Spain, 102 minutes
The location is familiar (a vertical shaft Barcelona apartment building) but the story is markedly different in Jaume Balagueros (REC; REC 2) solo feature debut. Lonely doorman Cesar must do whatever is necessary to keep the neighbors from uncovering his dark, disturbing obsession for his favorite resident Clara.
SNOWMAN’S LAND (2011)
US Premiere
Director: Tomasz Thomson, Germany, 95 minutes
Tomasz Thomson’s SNOWMAN’S LAND is a bleak comedic thriller from Germany about an over-the-hill hit man who gets sent to the remote snow-covered wilderness to handle a job that may be his last.
THE SQUAD (2011)
World Premiere
Director: Jaime Osorio, Columbia, 107 minutes
Haunted by memories of their last mission, a feuding special ops unit is tasked to uncover the mystery of what happened at a desolate military base in this tense and claustrophobic South American thriller.
SUMMERLAND (2010)
North American Premiere
Director: Grímur Hákonarson, Iceland, 85 minutes
Oscar and Lara have an entirely normal family other than the fact that Oscar runs a haunted house in their basement and Lara speaks with elves.
YOU’RE NEXT (2011)
US Premiere
Director Adam Wingard live in person
Director: Adam Wingard, USA, 95 minutes
From the team behind the Fantastic Fest award-winning film A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE, YOU’RE NEXT traps a family inside secluded mansion in the middle of nowhere. Outside the home is a group of animal-masked killers who take a stab at making sure none of them leave alive.
Ghostface is back on the big screen this weekend… well, sort of… with the release of Scary Movie, which marks the Wayans brothers’ return to the horror spoof franchise for the first time since Scary Movie 2 back in the day. It’s likely to be the talk of the horror community for the weekend, but don’t overlook the other six genre movies that were freshly unleashed today.
Here’s all the new horror that released on Friday, June 5, 2026.
The horror spoof franchise is back with Scary Movie now playing in theaters!
Marlon Wayans (“Shorty”), Shawn Wayans (“Ray”), Anna Faris (“Cindy”), and Regina Hall (“Brenda”) reunite for the new Scary Movie, with the cast also including Dave Sheridan, Lochlyn Munro, Cheri Oteri, Chris Elliott, Jon Abrahams, Damon Wayans Jr., Gregg Wayans, Kim Wayans, Benny Zielke, Cameron Scott Roberts, Heidi Gardner, Olivia Rose Keegan, Ruby Snowber, Savannah Lee Nassif, Sydney Park, and Felissa Rose.
Twenty-six years after outrunning a suspiciously familiar masked killer (“Ghostface”), the Core Four are back in the killer’s crosshairs and no horror movie IP is safe…
Scary Movie will slash through reboots, remakes, requels, prequels, sequels, spin-offs, elevated horror, origin stories, anything with the word legacy in it, and every “final chapter” that absolutely isn’t. A whole lot has changed in the horror genre since the Wayans Brothers were in charge of the franchise; their involvement ended with Scary Movie 2 back in 2001!
Michael Tiddes (A Haunted House) directs Scary Movie 6 from a script written by Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, original Scary Movie director Keenen Ivory Wayans, Craig Wayans (Scary Movie 2), and Rick Alvarez (A Haunted House).
From IFC, shark attack movie Chum is now available on Digital.
Alice Eve (Haunting of Queen Mary) stars in shark attack movie alongside Eric Michael Cole, Jim Klock, Elle Haymond, Lisa Yaro, Johnny Gaffney, and Sarah Siadat.
This one sounds very similar to last year’s Dangerous Animals…
Here’s the plot: “A newlywed couple joins friends on a Mediterranean yacht excursion, only to find themselves caught between a predatory shark and a psychopathic killer in their midst-transforming a sun-drenched escape into a fight for survival.”
Jonathan Zuck directs Chum, from a script by Jonathan Zuck and Joe Leone.
Samara Weaving (Ready or Not 2: Here I Come) and Kyle Gallner (Strange Darling) come together in Carolina Caroline, a sexy crime thriller now playing in theaters.
It’s not a horror movie, mind you, but it’s worth a mention here all the same.
Kyra Sedgwick (Family Movie) and Jon Gries also star in the romantic crime thriller.
Director Adam Carter Rehmeier’s film stars Samara Weaving as Caroline Daniels, whose desire to leave her small Texas town brings her into the orbit of a charismatic con man (Kyle Gallner), and together they weave a path of crime and passion across the American Southeast.
Adam Rehmeier previously directed the films Dinner in America and Snack Shack.
Tom Dean wrote the screenplay for Carolina Caroline.
Similar to Steven Spielberg’s upcoming big screen blockbuster Disclosure Day, Signal One explores humankind’s enduring question: what if we aren’t alone in the universe?
The sci-fi thriller is now available on Digital.
Isabelle Fuhrman (Orphan), Josh Hutcherson (Five Nights at Freddy’s), David Thewlis (Harry Potter), Raoul Bhaneja (Possessor), Emma Ho (“The Expanse”), and Dennis Quaid (The Substance) star in Signal One from director Jonathan Sobol (The Art of the Steal).
When tech billionaire Sam Houston (Quaid) hires the brilliant computer scientist Annika (Fuhrman), she ventures to an isolated facility run by the brilliant, nihilistic creator of LITTLEMOUTH, a machine which can communicate with alien intelligence.
Annika soon learns some humanity-altering facts: that we are not alone in the universe, that alien intelligences are communicating around us at every moment, and that we are likely too primitive to even remotely understand what they are trying to tell us.
When the goal of the endeavor shifts from listening to talking back, the project rapidly devolves into chaos. With contact comes consequences, and soon Annika and the team must work to ensure the very survival of our species.
A schoolyard dare becomes an urban legend in the creepypasta-inspired horror anthology The Summoning. The indie film is now available on Digital from Brainstorm Media.
“A babysitting gig becomes a nightmare of urban legend when three teens summon Baby Blue. Survival depends on uncovering the past to escape a mother’s wrath from beyond the grave.”
Felipe Vargas (Rosario, Hive), Sergio Gonzalez, Brandon Piskorik, Corey Benson Powers, and Brian Sepanzyk direct the segments. Valeria San Martín, Justina Ceballos, Daniela Flombaum, Nannu Spannauss, Agustín Olcese, and Giovanni Onetti star.
The Summoning is written by Camilo Zaffora.
Happy Death Day actress Jessica Rothe stars as a mom struggling to keep her grip on her sanity and memory in the mind-bending Affection, now available on Digital at home.
In Affection, “Afflicted by a mysterious condition that resets her memory, Ellie becomes trapped in a cyclical nightmare with a man who claims to be her husband. She soon must uncover the horrifying truth of her existence—before she forgets it all again.“
Joseph Cross (“Big Little Lies”) and Julianna Layne (“Chicago P.D.”) also star in the sci-fi horror thriller. Affection marks the feature debut by writer/director BT Meza.
Daniel Kurland wrote in his review out of the film’s premiere, “Affection is steeped in existential questions and fears that plague modern society, while it embraces the ethos of the ’80s through bold body horror. Add to that Rothe’s revelatory performance, and Affection is a hidden gem that will connect with your mind, body, and soul.”
Lucile Hadžihalilović’s latest dark fairy tale, The Ice Tower, loosely reimagines Hans Christian Andersen’s fable “The Snow Queen,” and it’s now streaming on Shudder.
In the ’70s set film, “Jeanne, a 15-year-old orphan, witnesses the shoot of a film adaptation of the fairy tale The Snow Queen, and she becomes fascinated by its star Cristina (Marion Cotillard), an actress who is just as mysterious and alluring as the Queen she is playing.“
Clara Pacini stars as Jeanne. August Diehl and Marine Gesbert also star in The Ice Tower, and look for a cameo from director Gaspar Noé (Climax, Irréversible).
“For me, The Ice Tower solidified Lucile Hadžihalilović’s place amongst the most fascinating creators of fairy tales today,” said distributor Yellow Veil Pictures co-founder Joe Yanick.
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