By Mo Moshaty

At Berlinale 2026, horror arrives wearing many faces: the feral gaze of nightmarish children, secrets buried so long they’ve begun to rot, the claustrophobic dread of cell blocks, the unstable terrain of sleep and waking, and bodies pushed to their breaking point by weight-loss nightmares. These films move through fear as inheritance, discipline, and desire, where terror doesn’t announce itself; it seeps.

Die Blutgräfin (The Blood Countess)

Decades after her mysterious disappearance, the Blood Countess re-emerges in modern-day Vienna, where she reunites with her devoted underling, Hermine, to track down a dangerous book with the power to destroy all evil – including all vampires such as themselves. The duo embark on a scavenger hunt through the city’s magnificent historic sites, and conscript the countess’s melancholic nephew – a vegetarian vampire named Rudi Bubi – and his psychotherapist as they expand their search to Bohemia. Meanwhile, a pair of vampirologists and a police inspector remain hot on their trail … Filmmaker and visual artist Ulrike Ottinger reinterprets the vampire myth as a sumptuous adventure tale full of morbid black comedy.

By: Ulrike Ottinger (Director, Screenplay), Elfriede Jelinek (Screenplay) with Isabelle Huppert, Birgit Minichmayr, Thomas Schubert, Lars Eidinger, André Jung – 119′ Minutes, Austria, Luxembourg, Germany 2026

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Filipiñana

The Alabang Country Club is a 74-hectare compound with enough facilities to keep the creme-de-la-creme of Philippine society distracted and insulated from the country’s socio-political problems. Among its facilities is the driving range where 17-year-old Isabel works as a tee-girl. Despite being new to her job, she starts slipping away from the driving range to explore the lush greenery of the surrounding golf course, which reminds her of the hometown she has left behind. On the course, she spots Dr. Palanca, a man in his 60s who is the club’s president. Isabel develops an infatuation with him and, eventually, has the chance to meet him when she is tasked with returning a golf iron he has left behind. Isabel explores the various alcoves of the country club’s facilities, looking for Dr. Palanca, but is unable to find him. Instead, she uncovers a clearer, deeply disenchanting portrait of the country club and of Dr. Palanca himself.

by Rafael Manuel (Director, Screenplay) with Jorrybell Agoto, Carmen Castellanos, Teroy Guzman, Carlitos Siguion-Reyna, Nour Hooshmand – 100 Minutes, Singapore, United Kingdom, Philippines, France, Netherlands 2026

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Ghost in the Cell

A high-security prison under the yoke of a tyrannical warden is rocked by a spate of gruesome murders, with victims’ bodies put on morbidly spectacular display. Who is the perpetrator, and who will be the next prey? Between spontaneous dance-offs and sudden prayers, kinetic fistfights and Kierkegaard invocations, hapless inmates scramble for cover. Overcoming internal gang rivalry, they unite to decipher the motive behind the killings and pacify their invisible, otherworldly enemy. In Ghost in the Cell, Indonesian genre wizard Joko Anwar crafts a gleefully grotesque horror-comedy that is disarming in more ways than one. Featuring a teeming ensemble of goofy characters on the verge of breakdown, the film shuttles nimbly between levity and graphic brutality, producing laughter that often gets stuck in the throat. Making emphatic use of primary colours, Anwar lends his twelfth feature a painterly force, but with cheeky references to ecological plundering and worker exploitation, he also augments it with an irreverent, political edge. Yet this is no ‘elevated horror’, just pure genre fireworks.

By Joko Anwar (Director, Screenplay )with Abimana Aryasatya, Endy Arfian, Bront Palarae, Morgan Oey, Lukman Sardi – 106 Minutes, Indonesia 2026

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Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

A “man from the future” enters a diner in Los Angeles. What initially looks like a stickup soon turns out to be a much stranger proposition: he has to recruit the exact right combination of people from the customers present to embark on a nighttime mission to save the world from an artificial intelligence. It requires only a little persuasion and the “gentle” threat to blow up the entire joint for him to secure the volunteers. This motley crew then plunges itself into a dystopian adventure in a constant race against time. With zombie teenagers, robot dolls run amok, and all manner of other bizarre things on the rampage – Good luck, have fun, don’t die!

by Gore Verbinski (Director), Matthew Robinson (Screenplay) with Sam Rockwell, Juno Temple, Haley Lu Richardson, Zazie Beetz, Michael Peña – 134 Minutes, Germany, USA 2025

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Lord of the Flies (2025, Series)

Adapted from the 1954 novel by William Golding, Lord of the Flies is the story of a group of young schoolboys who find themselves stranded on a Pacific island following a deadly plane crash during a nuclear war. In an attempt to remain civil, the boys organise themselves, led by Ralph and supported by the group’s intellectual, Piggy. But as the youngest members begin to share sightings of a terrifying beast, hunter Jack begins to wrestle for leadership. Jack Thorne’s adaptation marks the first time “Lord of the Flies” has been brought to television. Faithful to the original novel, the series delves further into the book’s emotive themes: human nature, the loss of innocence, and boyhood masculinity. Each of the four episodes is titled after a character at the core of the story – Ralph, Piggy, Simon, and Jack – offering a subtly different perspective on the boys’ collective plight and the manner in which they cope with their predicament.

by Marc Munden (Director), Jack Thorne (Screenplay) with Winston Sawyers, Lox Pratt, David McKenna, Ike Talbut – 115 Minutes, United Kingdom 2026

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Monster Pabrik Rambut (Sleep No More)

Factory owner Maryati exploits her employees with excessively long shifts, luring them with incentives to make them prioritise productivity and greed over sleep. Putri is convinced that, because of this, her mother, who worked in the factory, committed suicide. Her sister Ida, however, believes that their mother died from being possessed. She thinks that whenever the workers grow weak from exhaustion, a dark and evil figure emerges and takes possession of their bodies. To prove her theory, Ida decides to work day and night in the factory so that she, too, will become possessed and can see for herself the being that she believes seized their mother’s body. The sisters have a younger brother, Bona, who was born with a special gift that enables his wounds to heal quickly whenever he is injured. As the sisters investigate their mother’s death, a ghostly figure searching for an ideal body seeks to take advantage of Bona’s gift, putting him in danger. The three siblings now must bravely confront their own weaknesses and find strength in their faith in each other to overcome the terror that threatens their family.

by Edwin (Director, Screenplay), Eka Kurniawan (Screenplay), Daishi Matsunaga (Screenplay) with Rachel Amanda, Lutesha, Iqbaal Ramadhan, Didik Nini Thowok, Sal Priadi – 96 Minutes, Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, Germany, France 2026

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AnyMart

Sakai is the assistant manager at a convenience store; his working days are determined by routine. Without any hint of emotion, he deflects the annoying customers and follows the rigid rules that the store owner imposes on the staff. When the ambitious Ogawa is employed part-time, Sakai increasingly begins to question his role in the system. The monotonous world of the AnyMart gradually unravels until the boundary between life and death eventually becomes dissolved by the ghosts called forth by consumerism. Carried by current young Nippon stars, this feature debut by commercial filmmaker Yusuke Iwasaki, himself a son of a long-term store owner, uses a crazy mix of off-beat horror, socially critical drama, and absurd comedy to hone in on fears about work as well as the feelings of powerlessness towards society, with which the younger generations increasingly see themselves confronted. In the midst of a sea of power lines and grey apartment complexes, the convenience store becomes a heterotopia. Is there still hope in the cold world of late capitalism, or must we eternally haunt the sterile aisles of the AnyMart, like chickens packed in plastic?

by Yusuke Iwasaki (Director, Screenplay) with Shota Sometani, Erika Karata, Masahiko Nishimura – 88 Minutes, Japan 2026

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Saccharine

When first-year medical student Hana runs into an old friend who has lost so much weight she is almost unrecognisable, Hana is introduced to the world of weight-loss pills. Her quest for a slimmer body is spurred on by her crush, Alanya, a fitness influencer and personal trainer at Hana’s university gym, who convinces her to take part in a twelve-week “body transformation” programme. Unable to afford the expensive pills, Hana brings one of the samples she has been given free-of-charge to the university lab. She tests the pills and makes a surprising discovery about their contents that leads her to begin stealing bones from the cadaver she is dissecting in her anatomy class. And while the pills seem to be very effective, and her body shrinks, Hana quickly finds herself being haunted by a ghost that grows in size and strength as her waistline slims.

by Natalie Erika James (Director, Screenplay) with Midori Francis, Danielle Macdonald, Madeleine Madden, Robert Taylor, Showko Showfukutei – 112 Minutes, Australia 2025

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Yön Lapsi (Nightborn)

With dreams of starting a perfect family, Saga and her British husband Jon move to the isolated house deep in the Finnish forest where Saga spent much of her childhood. But as soon as their baby is born, despite the reassurances of everyone around her, Saga knows something is terribly wrong. As their marriage starts to crack and Jon struggles to support his wife, only Saga suspects the disturbing truth about their newborn child.

by Hanna Bergholm (Director, Screenplay), Ilja Rautsi (Screenplay) with Seidi Haarla, Rupert Grint, Pamela Tola, Pirkko Saisio, Rebecca Lacey – 92 Minutes, Finland, Lithuania, France, United Kingdom 2026

Together, they trace horror as a condition rather than an event: rooted in control, surveillance, inheritance, and the erosion of autonomy. This is cinema that asks the viewer to sit with discomfort, to read between gestures and absences, and to recognize how terror takes shape in the everyday long before it ever announces itself. We’ll see you there!

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