Introduction
I love Fantastic Fest! It is my favorite eight days of the year. Every year, I walk into the festival carrying this massive amount of pent-up tension and anxiety from the previous year. Then, sometime during the first 30 minutes or so of that first film, my body hits its moment of zen. I relax, the outside world disappears for a while, and I feel at home. Home, in this case, is the South Lamar Alamo in Austin, Texas, surrounded by a large number of like-minded souls, all of us waiting to experience a great collection of genre films.
Most of my first two days this year have been spent watching horror, which seems to have become the dominant genre at the last few Fantastic Fests. That’s certainly not a complaint. Horror is a big reason I come here, and there is something particularly fun about experiencing these movies with a Fantastic Fest audience. So, with two days down and plenty more movies to come, here are some thoughts on the early horror screenings I’ve watched at Fantastic Fest 2026.
Resident Evil
This was a very nice start to the festival. I knew Resident Evil was coming out the next day, but director Zach Cregger and star Austin Abrams were in attendance, which made the screening feel a little more special. This was a fun movie. Is it as good as Barbarian (2022) or Weapons (2025)? No, but it’s a solid film. I also believe this is a much closer adaptation of the games than the seven previous Resident Evil films were.
Bryan is a medical courier who is tasked with making a delivery to Raccoon City General. Along the drive into the remote Raccoon City, Bryan encounters a series of increasingly crazy occurrences. Each one gets a little more extreme and a little more intense. That being said, Bryan’s reactions are surprisingly realistic and, at the same time, pretty funny. Austin Abrams isn’t really your typical action-horror leading man, but that’s part of what makes the movie work. You care about Bryan because he seems like a regular guy who has found himself in a completely insane situation.
The effects are great, and so are the victims and monsters. I especially liked some of the more unique creatures. The humor is mostly gallows humor with a little slapstick thrown in, but it never works to the detriment of the film. The camerawork is excellent, and the movie rarely stops to catch its breath. It just keeps running at a crazy pace. I might need to watch Resident Evil again. With everything Cregger throws at you, I have a feeling there are quite a few things I missed the first time around.
Beware Boiuna
Where Zach Cregger succeeded with Resident Evil in merging horror and humor, director Mike P. Nelson does not have the same success with Beware Boiúna. This is a by-the-numbers monster movie. In fact, it is so by the numbers that I found much of it predictable. I think the actors tried really hard to make a good film, but the writing and plot let them down. I was rooting for Boiuna, to tell you the truth.
A Doctors Without Borders-like medical mission is traveling through the backwaters of Colombia. At one of their stops, they run into a group of sketchy ne’er-do-wells led by Logan Marshall-Green. His men are pretty inept, and after a confrontation between one of them and the women from the medical mission leaves the man dead, Marshall-Green’s character takes off after their boat looking for revenge.
Both boats eventually end up in an isolated offshoot of the river where, according to local legend, Boiuna lives. Boiuna, it turns out, is a damn big snake. What follows is a very messy experience that leaves nearly everyone dead — darn it — before the movie settles into something resembling Jaws (1975), with the survivors trying to deal with the giant predator hunting them.
I really didn’t enjoy much about this movie besides the snake. The story is bad and relies far too heavily on familiar Hollywood horror tropes. There were very few surprises, and I never became particularly invested in any of the characters. That’s a pretty big problem for a monster movie because if you don’t care whether the people survive, you start cheering for the monster. By the end, that’s exactly what I was doing. I was a little relieved when Beware Boiúna was over.
The Glorious Dead
Last year I totally enjoyed Mother of Flies (2025) from the Adams family, and I really enjoyed The Glorious Dead. The Adams family, Toby Poser and John Adams, along with daughters Zelda and Lulu, make some mighty fine horror films. Toby and John co-write and direct this one. Toby Poser plays Sheriff Deb, who is awakened on her day off because she is needed. Once she begins investigating a series of oddities occurring in her jurisdiction in the Catskills, things get progressively stranger. It seems that a fairly large number of people and animals have simply disappeared.
There is something very real, in a rural sense, about Sheriff Deb, and Poser’s performance is great. Deb never swerves too far into crazy thinking despite the increasing strangeness of her day. That performance, along with Zelda Adams as Deputy Mikey, helps ground everything happening around them. Their dialogue is great and feels real.
I loved this film. I enjoyed the plot and dialogue, and I loved the location. The Catskills setting helps bring across the sense of loss that Deb and Mikey have to deal with throughout their day. I especially loved the almost calm and relaxed way these two characters discuss the possibility that the end might actually be near. The situation becomes increasingly bizarre, but their reactions remain wonderfully matter-of-fact. The heavy soundtrack really worked for me as well. Everything about this film looked and sounded great, and once again the Adams family manages to make a horror movie that feels distinctly their own.
The Glorious Dead was picked up for distribution by Shudder following its Fantastic Fest showing, so keep an eye out for this one when it arrives on the platform. You definitely won’t regret it.
Victorian Psycho
Victorian Psycho is the super fun, bat-shit crazy horror film that you have been waiting for! Wait, what? Haven’t you been waiting for a rollicking good Victorian-era horror film? Well, you should have been, because that is Victorian Psycho in a nutshell. Director Zachary Wigon has made a very fun movie. Maika Monroe is delightful as both the Victorian psycho of the title and our humble narrator.
Synopsis
Governess Winifred Notty (Monroe) has been hired by the Pounds family (Jason Isaacs and Ruth Wilson) to educate their soon-to-be-of-age son, Andrew, as well as their rather dismissed daughter, Drusilla. Winifred never really hides what she is. It isn’t quite out in the open, but she is a strange bird from the get-go. You might seriously question the Pounds family’s judgment in hiring her.
From nearly the moment of Winifred’s arrival and her unfortunate encounter with the manipulative gardener, you get the feeling this isn’t going to end well for anyone. Winifred quickly realizes that this is going to be yet another unfortunate work experience, and she seems to be on a mission for either family acceptance or the family’s doom. Maybe both.
Discussion
This movie just cooks. It has fantastic pacing. The story is fun, intense, and horrific, frequently all at the same time. The acting from the entire cast is wonderful, with Maika Monroe absolutely fantastic in the lead. I also loved the naïveté of Winifred’s sole friend, the nurse Miss Lamb, played with wonderful zeal by Thomasin McKenzie. The scene-stealer, though, is Evie Templeton as Drusilla. She brings this creepy young lady to full, crazy life and seems perfectly at home in Winifred’s increasingly bizarre world.
The local countryside and Victorian-era home are equally beautiful and dreary, creating the perfect backdrop for Winifred’s odd experiences. The setting looks gorgeous while still giving you the feeling that something horrible could happen at any moment. Victorian Psycho is just a fun movie. It’s weird, funny, violent, and completely committed to what it is. I look forward to watching this one again when it hits a local theater.
Godmother
I am not sure about the title of this film, Godmother. I don’t know where it comes from in the context of the movie because there is never a godmother present. In a strange way, that sums up the film pretty well. I don’t really know what the point of the movie was. It might play better streaming somewhere at home, but Godmother did not wow me at Fantastic Fest.
Couple Colby and Theo, along with Theo’s crazy sister Katie, rent a lovely B&B in the middle of the Mojave Desert from the sweet Martinsons, played by Dee Wallace and Bruce Davison. Colby has serious romantic plans for the trip, only to discover that his girlfriend has invited her sister along. Katie is a little too much fun for the considerably more conservative Colby. The Martinsons are weird, to say the least, and Colby’s reactions to Katie are a little over the top. Really, everyone acts a little strange. Then people start disappearing, and the actual plot begins to reveal itself.
The whole thing felt like a discarded episode of Supernatural, except someone decided to write out all the parts featuring Sam and Dean. There just isn’t much to like here. The acting is bland. The writing is bland. The effects have a very low-budget Roger Corman feel, although without much of the charm that often made those movies fun.
In fact, Godmother reminded me of a 1970s B-movie that couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a TV movie of the week or something destined for the bottom shelf of the video store. Instead, it plays everything down the middle and ends up as a watered-down, mostly unsuspenseful horror film. I did enjoy Riley Dandy as the crazy sister, Katie. She brings some much-needed energy to the movie and was easily the bright spot for me. Unfortunately, one bright spot wasn’t enough.
That’s it for my first couple of days at Fantastic Fest 2026. I’ll be back soon with more thoughts on the films I’ve seen. I’ll also be venturing beyond horror and checking out a few of the other genres the festival has to offer. There are still a lot of movies to go!
