Abner Pastoll’s NERVOUS and Marion Le Corroller’s SPECIES to open and close 27th edition.

NERVOUS

Be prepared for a terrifying, record-breaking selection of World, International, and UK premieres as Tubi FrightFest 2026, the UK’s No.1 horror & fantasy film festival, returns to the Odeon LUXE Leicester Square and the ODEON Luxe West End for its annual five-day celebration of nerve-jangling eeriness, hair-raising shock, and epic scares. This year’s line-up highlights the genre’s transforming landscape and reflects the amazing span of progressive global genre filmmaking.

The opening night of the festival has a distinctive Asian flavour with the World premiere of NERVOUS, Abner Pastoll’s subversive, cross-cultural tale of psychological alienation and dangerous obsession. Shot entirely in South Korea, the film’s narrative is specifically rooted in the disorientating cultural and physical terrain of the Korean countryside and reunites Pastoll with his A Good Woman Is Hard To Find star Sarah Bolger, who plays a woman losing her ability to hear men’s voices. As her grip on reality starts to fracture, paranoia, hallucinations, and dangerous desires spiral out of control. The director and cast will be attending.

SPECIES

The closing night film is the UK premiere of SPECIES, an exhilarating Gen Z shocker. French writer-director Marion Le Corroller’s debut feature is a darkly comic sci-fi body-horror with a deeper allegorical message about workplace burn-out. Its unique body-mutation sequences are created by special make-up effects designer Pierre-Olivier Persin, who won an Oscar for The Substance.

Running from Thursday, 27 August – Monday, 31 August, Tubi FrightFest will showcase a record-breaking eighty-two features across five screens, including the popular ‘First Blood’, Documentary, and Retrospective strands. This year, there are 24 world premieres from 16 countries spanning four continents.

TICKETING INFO

Full festival passes for the stalls and Royal Circle will be on sale from noon on 18 July. The Stalls and Royal Circle seats this year are priced at £265.  The Festival passes in the Circle have been priced at £ 225, the same as in 2025.

Day passes are Thursday £36, Friday and Saturday £72, Sunday and Monday £60.  Day passes and single tickets at £14.99 will be available from noon on 25 August. The free passholder Discovery Screen tickets will, as usual, be released about a week before the festival begins.

To help ensure past sales this coming Saturday run smoothly, please do not try to buy tickets in multiple browsers with multiple tabs open. Yes, this helps you grab tickets, but it also lets someone else grab the same tickets, so it's a race to get through the process and check out. I had a few complaints last year of people going through the process to be told that somebody else got their tickets. Please keep it to one browser.

Expect a 4% ticket fee added to pass sales and a one-off. There is a £1.29 fee per ticket on single-ticket sales. These charges from our bank are for clearing credit card transactions and charges from the ticketing company that we use. None of this money comes our way.

Our now-traditional warm-up quiz on the eve of the festival is confirmed. Join us at the Phoenix Artist Club, 1 Phoenix St, London WC2H 8BU. Doors open at 6.30 with the quiz starting at  8.00 pm. The quiz should be finished by 10 pm, with the winners announced by 10.30 pm.