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.

While yesterday’s dispatch also included a host of young women seeking solace in the supernatural, it’s a journey rife for exploration here at Fantasia: Witches, curses, folkloric tapestries woven through all the hormones, pain, and uncertainty of adolescence. So here we are, with another trio of tales designed to manifest the conjoined pains of lust, loss, and belonging.

First, we take a detour to the Catskills with one of Fantasia’s favorite families, the Adamses, who’ve been making quite a career out of their particular brand of family-band DIY filmmaking over the last few years. Parents John Adams and Toby Poser, along with daughter Zelda (and occasionally other daughter Lulu), write, direct, edit, score, produce, and star in their own works; and if you’ve seen “The Deeper You Dig” or “Hellbender,” you know they feel so much more vivid, layered, and terrifying than your typical homegrown horror. Their latest, “Mother of Flies,” might well be their most assured, and also their most personal.

Drawing from the emotional wounds of the family’s recent real-life battle with cancer, “Flies” channels that energy into a three-day jaunt deep into the woods for a father, Jake (John Adams), and his teenage daughter, Mickey (Zelda Adams), the latter of whom is dying of unknown cancer. Chemo and radiation have done nothing, so in desperation, the pair journey to the woodland home of the local witch Solveig (Toby Poser), who promises to cure her illness free of charge. However, it’ll take three days of ritual, faith, and deep ruminations on the thin veil between life and death.

From its opening minutes, “Mother of Flies” is a somber, meditative chamber piece, albeit one soaked in wood and blood and philosophical musings on the nature of death (delivered capably by Poser in frequent voiceover, as if casting a spell on us). When we first see her, she’s coated in blood, naked, writhing on the woodland ground; it’s evocative imagery of a type the Adamses revisit often in their work but which finds particular purchase here. Like so many folkloric witches before her, Solveig is herself a spurned woman, one cursed by loss and seeking both repair and revenge in her particular ways. The manner in which this intersects with Mickey’s journey, and the helplessness with which Jake watches this unfold, provides much of “Flies”‘s true terror.

It helps, of course, that the Adams Family seems truly accomplished and deft on both sides of the camera. All three leads share directing credit, and their moody cinematography (the bloody mix of mud, blood, and ritual) seeps you in a distinct sense of dread. John acquits himself well enough as the straight-man contrast watching such occultism unfold in front of him, but it’s the cautious desperation of Zelda’s performance, and the wily regality of Poser’s work, that carry so much of the film’s sense of unease. They’re aided capably by practical FX (some of which are provided by FX maestro Trey Lindsey), as piles of rocks and tumored fetuses and piercing brambles connect flesh to devilish covenant. It’s truly one to behold, especially as it builds to its cursed climax.

Feeling somewhat like Lucrecia Martel’s take on “Carrie,” Laura Casabé’s “The Virgin of the Quarry Lake” is a slower, but no less piquant, tale of adolescent longing and boiled-over rage. Set in Argentina in the sweaty summer of 2001 (complete with Internet cafes where people play “Quake II” or chat on ICQ), the film turns its bloody eye onto Nati (Dolores Oliviero, piercing eyes peeking out from above her ’90s-era choker), a sixteen-year-old girl whose teenage loins burn for connection with childhood friend Diego (Agustín Sosa). Her friends, Josefina (Isabel Bracamonte) and Mariela (Candela Flores), share that crush, but no one wants him more than Nati.

The problem is, he’s started spending time with twenty-year-old Silvia (Fernanda Echeverría), who self-stylizes as world-weary and effortlessly cool, with all her tall tales of debauchery from a London gap year and eclectic taste in music. Suddenly, Dani knows she cannot compete, and her jealousy burns as hot as the summer heat, much to the consternation of her world-weary abuela (Luisa Merelas). Driven to hormonal madness, Dani’s flames begin, in ways both mysterious and bloody, to manifest themselves in ways Silvia better watch out for, even as she tries to ingratiate herself with Diego’s friends by inviting them out to a nearby quarry lake with beautiful beaches and a tragic backstory.

There’s a casualness and ease to “The Virgin of the Quarry Lake” that makes it hard to firmly slam the genre label on it. Sure, Dani’s rivet-tight animus comes out in ways that feel supernatural, even teetering on magical realism (the power shorts out when she gets too horny, or a dare by a boy to kiss her to cross a bridge leads to her biting his lower lip clean off). But it’s leavened by the traditional rhythms of the coming-of-age story, of a girl trying to make sense of her emotions and manage the rise and fall of her first crush in a drought-stricken town that seems to be falling rapidly out of order itself. Olivero handles this capably, her fiery stare making manifest the female gaze; she’s short with her words, but her disappointment and frustration speak volumes. Her loudest communication comes in the crazy, bloody things that happen around her, from hit-and-runs to killer dogs summoned out of nowhere. These are things she may well be willing into reality, whether through incantation, the curses of a local bum, or her own white-hot desire.

It’s a dazzling if imperfect debut, finding some delightful notes among the queasy pacing as you get your feet under you about what genres Casabé’s playing in. But like “Flies” before it, it reaches a crimson crescendo that feels fitting for its aims.

As much as teen girls desire to love, they also wish to belong, which is where Ava Maria Safai’s fleet-footed horror comedy “Foreigner” comes in, spinning a “Mean Girls”/”Heathers”-esque tale of teen ingroup politics and throwing in a hefty dose of supernatural horror and assimilation dramedy. Yasi (Rose Deghan) is an Iranian immigrant who recently moved to Vancouver with her father (Ashkan Nejati) and grandmother (Maryan Sadeghi); like so many first-gen immigrants, she’s torn between the traditions of her home and the desire to fit in with the girls at school. Especially since this school’s designated Plastics, led by mean girl Rachel (Chloë MacLeod), keep making seemingly well-meaning but ignorant remarks to her (“You just look kinda Spanish”) that keep her feeling like an outsider.

She so badly wants to fit in, right down to studying episodes of “Friends” to learn English (the film, notably, gives us uncanny scenes of a “Friends”-like sitcom, which was probably a rights thing but instead furthers the disconnect she feels between what she’s watching and absorbing). But her grandest effort to belong at school comes with the decision to dye her hair blonde so that she can be more like Rachel and her gaggle of friends. But with every new step towards erasing her Iranian identity, a new demon awakens within her, one which her family will have to stop before it swallows Yasi entirely.

Safai’s first feature is charming in its scrappiness and relatability, even as a few wooden performances and some less-than-stellar effects by the end slightly dampen the results. As comedies go, it’s no great shakes; what jokes work are helped by Deghan’s wonderfully brittle and vulnerable performance, and, of course, Sadeghi’s broadness and wisdom as Yasi’s grandmother. But there’s a sweetness to its aims that makes it hard to dislike, especially in the we-put-on-a-show conceit of its closing credits (with director’s notes in the margins, thanking each crew member for how hard they worked). A film that feels less than the sum of its parts, but which has some deep-seated intentions and visibility at the roots.