GRIMMFEST 2025 - THE ONLINE EDITION: BAD HAIRCUT, DEATH CYCLE Among Online Offerings in December

GRIMMFEST 2025 – PART 2 - THE ONLINE EDITION.

 

Don’t let the Halloween season end! Keep the scares going through to early December with Grimmfest! Manchester's International Festival of Fantastic Film celebrates its 17th anniversary this year by offering a little something extra!

 

You thought GRIMMFEST 2025 was all over in early October, but not this year!  Prepare yourselves for a truly terrifying home invasion. Grimmfest Part 2: The Online Edition; a long weekend of movie premieres for you to enjoy at home from the 5th – 8th Dec (UK only). 

 

Every year, the festival programming team shortlists way more astonishing, genre-shaking new movies than can possibly be squeezed into a live event. This year, we thought we would give UK horror fans an opportunity to catch some of those movies. Thirteen (Unlucky for some) feature film premieres, we really want you to see. 

 

An exceptional lineup that includes five international premieres, 3 UK premieres, 3 Northern UK premieres, and two Grimmfest 2025 favourites.

 

We kick things off with… 

 

Kyle Misak mixes high school coming-of-age comedy with no-holds-barred Yuppie Nightmare in the international premiere of BAD HAIRCUT.  A young man's desire for a cool new haircut backfires spectacularly when he finds himself confronted by a flamboyantly psychopathic barber. 

 

Writer-director Michael May (12 HOUR SHIFT, GHOSTS OF THE OZARKS) blends Lovecraftian folk horror with a haunting tale of trauma in WHERE DARKNESS DWELLS, as a young reporter’s search for a missing girl leads her into subterranean terrors and her own dark past. A Grimmfest International Premiere.

 

A psychopathic wannabe filmmaker catfishes ambitious would-be actors into an increasingly dangerous “real life” movie, in Adam Meilech's chilling meditation on creative manipulation and complicity, CONTENT, an International Premiere.

 

Two damaged men in search of love find themselves trapped within a limbo of their own past traumas in Joe Fria's chillingly claustrophobic and emotionally gripping exploration of love and prejudice, closure and sacrifice, SHADOWS OF WILLOW CABIN, an International Premiere.

 

A rural retreat from the ravages of a pandemic comes under threat from outsiders and something more elusive and mysterious, in Riccardo Cannella's lyrical post-COVID Folk Horror, THE HAVEN, an International Premiere.

 

Alex Herron combines modern social media mores, classic haunted house horror, and a harrowing confrontation with the guilty secrets of the not-too-distant past in the gripping DON'T HANG UP, a UK Premiere.

 

A reminder that Hans Christian Andersen's fables and fairytales are far darker and more disturbing than Disney ever dreamed of in ADORABLE HUMANS, Anders Jon, Michael Kunov, Kasper Juhl, and Michael Panduro's elegantly unsettling portmanteau of classic tales reinterpreted to emphasise the alienation and anxiety that so often inspired them, a UK Premiere.

 

An attempt to uncover the truth behind a supposedly accidental death leads to a reality-shaking confrontation with the self, in Luis Calderón's slippery and provocative psychological thriller, THE TREEHOUSE, a UK Premiere.

 

After the death of her sister, a young woman finds herself caught up in a criminal investigation and a biker vigilante. Gabriel Carrer (FOR THE SAKE OF VICIOUS) returns to Grimmfest with a brutally minimalist giallo-style revenge thriller, DEATH CYCLE, a Northern UK Premiere.

 

A traumatised young girl becomes increasingly obsessed by violent internet content, and by the mystery of a missing woman known only as Fish Tooth. Zack Ogle and Aaron Pagniano explore young love, lost hope, and the lure of the forbidden image in IT NEEDS EYES, another Northern UK Premiere. 

 

It's Final Girl versus Deus Ex Machina in a blood-splattered battle of wits. Matt Stuertz (Tonight She Comes) returns to Grimmfest, mixing meta cinema with metaphysics in the utterly outrageous HUMAN, which is having its Northern UK Premiere.

 

Plus, by popular demand, another chance to see two of the big audience favourites from this year's live event. Tim Connery's lyrical and location-specific reinvention of the classic EC style portmanteau movie as a dark hymn to his native Midwest, THE DRIFTLESS, which had its World Premiere at the live festival and now makes its International Online Debut. 

 

And Reaper Award Winner Dina Silva undergoes a cathartic confrontation with her demons in FRANKIE, MANIAC WOMAN, a characteristically unflinching evisceration of Entertainment Industry misogyny from Grimmfest favourite Pierre Tsigaridis (TWO WITCHES, TRAUMATIKA). 

 

For more info and tickets, go here: https://www.grimmfest.com/grimmfest-online/