One of the best things about Fantastic Fest is the programming team’s willingness to import hits from other festivals. It’s actually the fest where I finally caught up with “Anora” last year, believe it or not, and some of the biggest FF films this year launched at Cannes too, including Oliver Laxe’s stunning “Sirat” and the prize-winning “The Plague.” TIFF darlings like “Obsession” and “Honey Bunch” were arguably even more well-received here in Austin. So this dispatch is built around three films that have played at a trio of other fests: Toronto, Fantasia, and Edinburgh.

The Toronto one is the best of the three (although only by a small margin). Debut director Taratoa Stoppard has taken a genre that’s built on stories of place and people who stand on a ground filled with buried secrets and has used it to tell a story of Indigenous subjugation and colonization as a whole. “Mārama” uses the structure and visual language of Gothic Horror to tell a story of discovery and empowerment, and it’s a phenomenal debut, a confident piece of work that takes a familiar genre and makes it feel perfect for the story its telling. With excellent costume and production design—both essential for the Gothic Horror genre—and a striking lead performance, it’s a movie I expect to gain momentum as it continues its fest circuit, including the Chicago International Film Festival next month.

A Māori woman named Mary (Ariaana Osborne) receives a note from a man in Whitby that promises the truth about her family. She takes a difficult journey of 73 days, only to discover that the man is dead. The writer’s brother Nathaniel (Toby Stephens) takes her in and asks her to take care of his granddaughter Anne (Evelyn Towersey), who is also of Māori lineage. Nathaniel’s home is filled with Māori artifacts and signs of an obsession with the culture that seeks to own it instead of understand or respect it. A sequence in which an employee of Nathaniel’s does a Māori dance complete with fake bloodshed that makes the culture look like brutal warriors is one of the best of the year: a scene of wealthy idiots taking something pure and deforming it for their own entertainment. Mary’s response to the cultural insult is unforgettable.

“Mārama” is more than just a story of appropriation as the increasingly terrifying visions send Mary spiraling into the truth about her sister that the note promised but only something more powerful than mankind could reveal. Stappard has a strong sense of the genre, refining an atmosphere of dread instead of relying on jump scares or loud noises. And Osborne is key to the film’s success, turning in a multi-faceted performance that captures grief and fear, but also resilience.

The latest from the Adams family has already been covered here but let me join the rising chorus of love for “Mother of Flies,” a deeply personal story of witchcraft and survival from one of the most impressive filmmaking units in the genre. Even as much as people loved films like “The Deeper You Dig” and “Hellbender,” there seemed to be a bit of a curiosity around the Adams production team. If you don’t know, father John Adams, mother Toby Huser, and daughters Zelda and Lulu Adams do everything on their productions: starring, writing, directing, camera, editing, catering, you name it. And that DIY approach made for a bit of “othering,” a sort of “isn’t that neat” aspect of watching their films. That should end. They need to be considered not just as an answer to a horror festival trivia question but as some of the best filmmakers in the genre today, especially Zelda Adams, who becomes a more striking, confident performer with every outing. She gives one of the best performances of the year here in any film, anywhere, even the ones where the creators weren’t related.

Zelda plays Mickey, a college student dealing with a mortality diagnosis due to the cancerous tumor in her stomach. With no options left, she answers the call of a healer named Solveig (Poser), someone who lives in a house deep in the forest that appears like it has emerged from the earth and root. Of course, she’s a witch, and she promises Zelda and her father Jake (John Adams) cures if they take this difficult journey with her. Jake is skeptical, but Solveig sees sadness in him that needs curing too, and the trio begin a psychedelic journey that seems wedded to hundreds of years of witchcraft. At the same time, we see flashbacks to a long time ago that fill in Solveig’s background. Maybe she truly is immortal?

“Mother of Flies” uses Argento-esque visuals that tie Solveig’s practices to something that feels like it pre-dates civilization. Maggots wriggle, snakes slide, and bodily fluids spew forth. They deftly keep us wondering what Solveig’s end game might be. Is she actually trying to save Zelda? Is she the good witch or the bad witch? It’s a moving allegory for any treatment for cancer in that one never knows if the torture of something like chemo will actually work. Why not try something else? Something ancient?

Poser is good at actually underplaying what could have been a caricature, but the MVPs here are John’s fluid editing and Zelda’s grounded performance, one that keeps us with her through the film. She’s subtle in ways that other performers wouldn’t consider, giving the piece a resigned melancholy instead of the overplayed image of a cancer patient fighting against the dying of the light. Toby’s editing slides in and out of the past and the present, showing us startling images just long enough before moving on to something else. These creators are talented in every way one can use that word, and that would be true even if they weren’t working with their most loved ones.

Finally, there’s one of the most striking examples of “one for them, one for me” in my critical life. Ben Wheatley made the “Nobody” riff “Normal” for TIFF and made the more personal “Bulk” for Edinburgh and now Fantastic Fest. Perhaps turned off by his experience on “Meg 2: The Trench” as well, he’s gone back to basics here, making a black-and-white sci-fi thriller that looks like it was shot on a weekend for what Ben had in his pocket. If “Meg 2” was an attempt at a crowd-pleaser, this is a crowd-annoyer, a surreal experiment in DIY filmmaking that has a few good ideas buried in a script that circles the same drains so many times that it almost visually and audibly runs out of ideas, beginning to question its own existence right in front of your eyes.

“Bulk” exists as a film that could almost be watched on repeat, meaning things like rising action, a climax, or tension are non-factors. It drops you into the story of a man (Sam Riley) who looks like he’s been kidnapped by characters played by Alexandra Maria Lara and Noah Taylor. They tell him that he’s in a house that basically allows jumping between multiverses, parallel realities that could look like the future or past. It allows Wheatley to get downright goofy with some genre parodies that include futuristic battles made up entirely of miniatures and cut-outs hanging from strings and to put Taylor in an outfit that makes him look like a caveman. There’s even a fight with a rock monster.

A filmmaker as ambitious as Wheatley making a movie that feels inspired by what he saw in the middle of the night on black-and-white television sounds more fun than it is in practice. The characters start to reference the experiment with Lara saying that there are only about 56 minutes left before the end of everything right around when there’s the same time left in the film, and that all of this will be wrapped up in 90 minutes. “Anything longer seems like an indulgence.”

The truth is ALL of “Bulk” seems like an indulgence. And the 90 minutes feel like 180. I’ve defended Wheatley’s flights of formal fancy before and would rather see him playing in his imagination here than junk like “Meg 2,” but that’s in theory more than practice. I can be happy Wheatley is trying stuff like “Bulk” and still regret being experimented on by it myself.

Fantastic Fest is an interesting combination of known quantities and unexpected discoveries. Everyone has an idea what something like “Black Phone 2” or even “Primate” is before they use their pass to score a ticket for it, but a lot of the schedule also consists of premieres that can feel more like throwing a dart at a schedule. Maybe this will be good? To varying degrees, all three in this dispatch are.

“Colors” meets “Sinners” in Ryan Prows’ intense “Night Patrol,” one of the most buzzed Fantastic Fest premieres of 2025, like it or not. Love it or hate it, and I heard from people in both camps, this brutal genre flick had people here talking about it, and that’s sometimes all that really matters when your audience is seeing five movies a day. You want to stand out. It’s an audacious genre film, a movie with a great pitch: What if the corrupt cops of an LAPD task force were actual vampires, sucking off the blood of the community they’ve sworn an oath to protect?

The director of “Lowlife” launches his film out of a cannon in the opening scenes as we meet Wazi (RJ Cyler) and his girlfriend sharing a moment in the middle of the L.A. night. Police officers approach the vehicle, demand that she gets out of the car, and then one whose clearly in charge (played by wrestler C.M. Punk) instructs the new guy named Hawkins (Justin Long) to shoot her in the head. He complies, setting a dark tone for a film that is willing to go there in terms of violence, language, and racial commentary.

The next day we learn that Hawkins is partners with one of the LAPD that may be a rare good apple named Carr (Jermaine Fowler), who, of course, is the now-on-the-run Wazi’s brother. Their mother (Nicki Micheaux) still lives in a place called the Courts, preaching the values of her ancestors as protection, using Zulu imagery and practices to help her people. She hands out pamphlets to gang members, and places African totems on the fences around her house. It turns out they will come in handy.

After his initiation into “Night Patrol,” Hawkins discovers the truth about the elite squad, and a secret about his family relation to the group. He also undergoes a pretty gnarly, bloody transformation. Prows digs right into some fun practical effects and gallons of the fake red stuff, and Long is truly up for the challenge. You know those sequences in movies when the ordinary guy becomes a bloodsucker for the first time? The shaking, the terror, the transforming, etc.? Long is basically forced into one of those for half the run time here, and he gives a physically daring performance that’s unlike what is usually asked of him. He’s great. Almost everyone is good in “Night Patrol”—the “Master” of the group who I won’t spoil feels a bit miscast to me—but it belongs to Long.

Prows has a lot of ideas that he’s willing to fearlessly deploy, but the movie gets a little messy in the final act, as chaos descends on the Courts, and we lose a sense of geography and continuity. It becomes hard to tell who’s going where, who’s still alive, and who’s found safety. At one point, some key characters seem to be running out only to end up on a couch again. And then the final scenes are even clunkier. And while “Sinners” is a tough bar to reach, it does feel like “Night Patrol” raises some ideas about race and law enforcement without as much to say about white culture literally sucking the blood of minorities and their cultures as Coogler’s masterpiece.

Still, this is an original, ambitious piece of work that IFC should be able to turn into a buzz generator to start 2026.

A film that started to make that buzzy noise in Austin in the days before its premiere is Rod Blackhurst’s demented “Dolly,” which is basically an homage to Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” complete with a Leatherface-esque monster, twisted family, and grainy film stock. Co-writer/director Blackhurst is clever enough to literally place a signpost early in the film to make it clear that he knows you’re starting to suspect the Hooper connections, and you’re not wrong.

Chase (Seann William Scott) and Rachel (an excellent Kate Cobb) are taking a hike to a scenic overlook, where Chase is going to propose to his longtime girlfriend (although we know she’s not sure she’s going to say yes). On the trail to the view, they find some creepy dolls, most broken, some nailed to trees. That they don’t immediately run back to their car is a bit of a movie contrivance, but that’s the contract viewers sign with a movie called “Dolly.”

It’s not long before Chase and Rachel meet the title character, a hulking beast played by a wrestler named Max the Impaler with a bloody dress and a doll mask on its face. Only making breathing and squeaky, sorta-baby noises, Dolly is nightmare fuel, especially after she captures Rachel, and tries to make the poor woman her new “daughter.” This means a crib, diaper change, and, yes, feeding. “Dolly” flirts with what was once called torture porn as Rachel’s plight gets more and more disturbing, but Blackhurst knows just how long to carry out his grossest ideas before giving viewers a break.

His vision is twisted but also sometimes funny in its ridiculousness, making for a film that’s well-balanced tonally, even if it feels a little slight on plotting. I get the sense that Blackhurst and his team would like to turn this character into a franchise and if this relatively self-contained, small-cast version is just the introduction for the bigger and better adventures of Dolly, it’s a memorable one.

Finally, there’s Diana Mills Smith’s “Dinner to Die For,” which played as a part of the low-budget Burnt Ends program at Fantastic Fest. It’s a single-setting, cheaply-made piece of thriller filmmaking that feels a bit like a short that’s been barely stretched out to feature (and it’s only 75 minutes), but Smith has ability that’s worth keeping an eye on. She knows how to keep a three-character piece moving, even if I wanted another unexpected course or two on this fixed menu.

Shamilla Miller is solid as the intriguing Hannah, a chef who has been forced into the relatively unsatisfying work of food photography. You know the fancy shots that accompany overpriced cookbooks, which she wishes she could write herself. Her friend Evan (Steven John Ward) keeps coming over to try her cuisine and watch true crime episodes with her, clearly putting in the time because he hopes to escape the friend zone. When a new neighbor named Blaire (Nina Erasmus) catches Hannah’s eye, Hannah starts an unexpected role play with Evan, suggesting that she could invite Blaire over for a bit of dinner and a bit of murder. Is she just playfully incorporating their true crime obsession into flirtatious banter? That’s what Evan presumes at first, and he plays along, until he starts to worry.

“Dinner to Die For” probably should have been a short or given a bit more meat to fill out to a feature. It’s a film that takes too long to find another gear and then feels kind of like it rushes to its ending just as the stakes are raised, although Smith does get a few fantastic shots in her climax that had the audience at the Fantastic Fest premiere cheering. It matters, especially for films like these, when the last bites are the best ones.

Fantastic Fest, a wonderfully inclusive and unpredictable event every September in Austin, turns 20 this year. To launch the 20^th edition on Thursday night, one of the co-founders started shouting “Chaos Reigns!” into a microphone, refusing to stop until everyone in the theater stood up and chanted along with him. It was a great reminder of the spirit of this fest, one of community, and, well, chaos.

And then, I don’t think coincidentally, I saw two movies that most of the Bible Belt would call downright blasphemously chaotic. From a chimp ripping people’s faces apart to the unabashed lunacy of Brian Yuzna’s follow-up to a horror masterpiece, night one of Fantastic Fest also had an interesting dynamic for my specific double feature, in that one film won’t be out until 2026, and the other was initially released 15 years before this fest launched. One could almost consider the 20 years of FF the connection between the two. That and some gnarly kills.

Johannes Roberts introduced his creature feature/monster movie “Primate” with the playful hope that it would make up for his generally reviled “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City.” Yes, it does top that slightly over-hated film through its excellent makeup effects and a few committed performances. It eventually gets pretty gnarly (and arguably kinda cruel in its brutality), but it suffers because it takes way too long to get there, feeling much longer than its brief runtime. Still, those who enjoy seeing the lost art of faces turning into red goo will eventually have a good time with what is essentially a throwback to an era when makeup reigned supreme over CGI.

Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) returns to her Hawaii home for summer break, where she reunites with sister Erin, dad Adam (Troy Kotsur, bringing much-needed warmth to a cold movie), and their pet chimpanzee Ben. She’s brought a couple of friends for a little party while her author dad goes off to a book signing event, but they don’t know that Ben was bitten by a rabid mongoose the night before, and, well, it’s about to get weird. After Ben attacks, the teenagers strand themselves in the pool—chimps can’t swim—and try to figure out how they can possibly escape the strong clutches of this killer primate.

Roberts struggles a bit with tone, crafting a single-location survival thriller that turns into a slasher movie with a chimp instead of Jason Voorhees. To say that Ben is irrationally smart in his stalking of these teenagers would be an understatement, but this is the kind of film that demands suspension of disbelief, something that’s easier to do at FF than it might be on Paramount+. I don’t mind giving into a movie’s concept if it’s executing it well, but I kept finding myself outside of “Primate,” trying to figure out things like why this million-dollar home doesn’t have an alarm with a panic button. It’s a product of slack pacing in the middle, which is really just killing time before the flesh-rending chaos of the final act. That’s when “Primate” truly reigns.

Another story of evolutionary violence unfolds in Brian Yuzna’s insane “Bride of Re-Animator,” a movie that’s even wackier than you remember in a new 4K restoration. A sequel to Stuart Gordon’s brilliant 1985 film “Re-Animator,” this one doesn’t replicate the Lovecraftian tension of the original, but that’s a high bar to meet. It works better than many ’80s and ‘90s horror sequels by virtue of Yuzna and writers Woody Keith & Rick Fry’s willingness to go where most Hollywood movies refuse to go. It’s not every day you see a flying head with bat wings or an arm & a leg fused together and become sentient and homicidal. And don’t forget the creature that’s just an eyeball with five fingers for legs. (“Alien: Earth” inspiration, maybe?) It’s really clunky at times, but it’s impossible not to admire the sheer ridiculousness of “Bride of Re-Animator,” and Austin was the perfect place to re-launch it.

Loosely based on episodes of the serialized story Herbert West-Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft, “Bride of Re-Animator” catches up with Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) and Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), continuing to play God. Dan is still apprehensive, grieving the loss of Meg from the first movie and the imminent death of a patient he’s become attached to, but West is full Frankenstein, seeing every human body as potential grist for his mill. Combs is wonderfully deranged in this movie, getting laughs from the FF crowd with some of his memorable line readings that sometimes make him look like Jim Carrey played a mad scientist. He’s the best thing about the movie, but he’s surrounded by an ensemble that rarely matches his temperature. Abbott is a particularly flat performer.

What’s not flat is the make-up and effects work that looks even better in 4K. When “Bride of Re-Animator” gets to its super-bloody final scenes, the entire movie feels unhinged in a way that can be best appreciated at Fantastic Fest.

May there be at least 20 more years of this kind of chaos.