Just shy of three decades into their history of showcasing some of the best of international genre cinema to a Montreal audience, Fantasia returned with a cavalcade of dastardly delights. July 2025 brought the latest installment of the beloved Canadian film festival, boasting some stellar global frights, local screams, and haunting retrospectives. While the Canadian and Quebec audiences were treated to some new-to-them frights with flicks like Together and Eddington, there were even fresher horror hits that audiences should look out for. Here is the best horror from this year's edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival.
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Burning
This Rashomon style tale of reflections in the aftermath of a fire drenched home plays with subjective truth and the virtues of understanding. Director Radik Eshimov, from Kyrgyzstan, has made a departure from his time in mostly television comedy production to tell a few versions of one scary story. Crowded in a local convenience store, three community members recount the versions of events that they believe led to a woman setting her own home ablaze. “Who really started the fire?” is the choice question for those in the store, and this haunting three-part fright will try to find the answer.
Burning (or Ot) leaves a collection of people to recount the time leading up to the fire in the home of Asel (Aysanat Edigeeva) and her husband, Marat (Ömürbek Izrailov). The pair is grieving the loss of their young child and hoping to raise another, supported by Marat's visiting mother, Farida (Kalicha Seydalieva). There is fleeting trust between the trio, and each's perspective is tested by those around them willing to listen to it.
By playing with subjective truth and perspective to pluck fear from the ordinary, Burning ends up having a lot in common with movies like Attachment and even The Burbs. Secondhand tales from those who are certain of their version of the truth leads to misunderstandings that play with different scares which allows this movie to transcend subgenres by spending portions of the movie playing with many of them. There are djinn, there's gaslighting, there's witchcraft, possession, and snatching babies from presumed ill mothers. Its finale renders it a surprisingly feminist story about who often gets believed and what onlookers tend to think about women behaving strangely.
Influencers
One of the more anticipated titles out of the festival came by way of the sequel to Shudder's 2022 hit, Influencer, which broke out of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. The uninitiated need look away to avoid spoilers, but for those in the know, last we saw of our villain, she was stranded on a remote island in Thailand after being bested by the titular would-be victim.
For her return, Casandra Naud is back as CW, this time in the South of France with a new love interest. Things turn sour when the pair is bumped from their room by, you guessed it, an influencer. Influencers plays with what we think we know about CW to suggest we're perhaps seeing the beginning of her horrors before reminding us that her most recent survivor of her wrath is on her tail. CW is as slippery as a person can get, able to disappear to remote locations and freely cross borders to escape not just the law, but any set of focused eyes. But, with influencers being her targets, there are more and more opportunities for her face to end up online, and with a survivor closing in on her, she isn't just a mysterious woman but a recognizable one being shown by someone with a large social media following.
This second installment seems bloodier than the first and has even more victims closing in on a frantic CW, which should please fans of the original. Though it sometimes gets a bit lost in its growing story which doesn't leave as much space for Madison to be the foil, it does create more opportunities for CW to wild out, which is what keeps this one plucky and exciting.
Mother of Flies
MOTHER OF FLIES (2025) The Adams Family, no, not that one, is back with more scares in 2025. The mother-father-daughter trio (or quad if we count all who appear) has been bringing the terror to festival screens for years with the likes of Hellbender, Hell Hole, and The Deeper You Dig. Their newest is a story of a young woman with cancer who turns to necromancy in an attempt to heal herself. Of course, her journey is bloody, scary, and dark.
In one of her more haunting performances, Toby Poser stars as a spooky necromancer who reaches out to the young girl in a dream, promising to cure her of the “crab” inside her. Desperate and with nothing to lose, Mickey (Zelda Adams) takes her father (John Adams) to a cottage a mile outside of nowhere to meet Solveig (Poser) and give it a shot with a haunted last ditch effort. Solveig is almost impenetrable, speaking in cryptic maxims and seemingly unwilling to eat or properly feed the pair. Her rituals are scarier and more painful than what Mickey seems to have experienced in horrific hospital stays, and the days are marked with flashes of Solveig's torments.
Mother of Flies feels like one of the more self-assured installments in the family's lauded filmography, leaning so far into Poser's believability and taking a somewhat novel approach to the view of witchcraft in the New World. It delicately balances the idea of a vengeful witch as a villain and a victim in a way that is somehow hopeful as a Halloween tale while being as terrifying as one from Devil's Night.
Blazing Fists
Though not strictly speaking a horror movie, it's impossible to reflect on the best genre and horror hits out of this festival without mentioning Takashi Miike. Miike had three projects play at this festival, an anime series, a drama inspired by real events called Sham, and this action thriller about young convicts sucked into the world of gang crime while trying to become professional fighters.
Ikito and Ryoma meet in “juvie,” where they each claim to have ended up by unjust means. They bond when a former detainee turned professional fighter speaks at their center, inspiring them to hone their skills to build the sort of future he did. And while their skills shine through at the boxing gym, creating promise of a new career, the two continue to be dragged back into the gangland that pushed them into the system in the first place. This story of loyalty, found family, and the enveloping nature of the criminal justice system is a stellar outing from a genre master. While it doesn't look like a horror movie, there is no shortage of stylized gore, and the tone is at times reminiscent of the surreal and teeth rattling Miike flick, Yakuza Apocalypse.
While Sham is maybe a larger departure from the horror genre, it's worth mentioning as a companion piece to Dream Scenario and the upcoming After the Hunt. Miike, arguably most well-known for his immensely unsettling Audition, has breached genre barriers for surrealist horror comedies, action movies, and dramas. Blazing Fists comes with Miike's sense of drama and even more bags of blood, and Sham is an anxiety riddled thriller with its take on a teacher wrongfully accused of abusing a student.
The Well
Coming off the success of his hockey documentary, Black Ice, Hubert Davies showed up to the festival with his first narrative feature. This thriller is about survival in a post-apocalyptic time where humanity is experiencing the existential threat of a collapsing environment. Beyond the lack of resources is the looming threat of a fatal disease that's born of unclean water. The Devine family lives well enough in the woods with access to a clean water supply, but their way is threatened by the arrival of an outsider who claims to have known them before societal collapse.
Scarce resources are (not literally, of course) ripe for mining scary tales from, especially as the conversation becomes more prescient. Davis seems to want us to fear real life threats as opposed to supernatural ones and explores that in his science-fiction debut. If Fallout shed its plucky tone and smiling lead, it might look like The Well, especially as Sarah (Shailyn Pierre-Dixon) breaches the borders of her idyllic but limited life to bear the challenges of the outside world on the verge of complete collapse. She's no choice but to trust Jamie (Idrissa Sanogo) when they are whisked back into his shanty town, which is controlled by the seemingly measured but ultimately ruthless Gabriel (Canadian horror regular, Sheila McCarthy). The narrative shines when it compares the green view of the young to the hardened one of the adults. Gabriel and Sarah's parents alike are armed with the knowledge of the world before, and the Devines use it to protect their family, whereas Gabriel uses it to feign knowledge and spirituality for control.
In some ways, it's an interesting companion piece to 28 Years Later when one considers humanity doing its best at the end of the world. And one needn't work too hard to connect to a metaphor about scarce resources in the time of a dwindling pandemic.
Hellcat
Lena awakes to find herself in the back of a moving trailer. A disembodied voice emanating from a disembodied canine head informs her that she has been attacked, and he's bringing her to the only doctor who can help her. She has about an hour, and she has to trust him and keep her heart rate down lest her infection spread too quickly.
Of course, being asked to stay calm while being carted in the back of a strange trailer with locks and the sounds of screams is like being asked not to think of a pink elephant. So Lena tries desperately to escape while the audience tries to decipher what the real hazard is.
Hellcat is a fast paced chamber piece, and not just because it takes place in a single trailer that's whizzing across a highway. The movie sets a clock for Lena's presumed survival and leaves her to escape, which may or may not be to her detriment. Reminiscent of 10 Cloverfield Lane, Lena and the audience are left to work out whether the trucker is correct about a hard-to-fathom looming threat, just a violent nut, or both. The whole thing is massively elevated by the fearless physical performance of Dakota Gorman as Lena, who is able to drag the audience along with her on her journey of fear, doubt, ruthlessness, and no-nonsense survival tactics.
Hellcat specifically asks the audience not to comfortably grasp its subgenre until the very end, leaving viewers to play along with the reveals as they're handed to them. It keeps the otherwise simple story interesting and gives us more time to try to understand the impossible actions of everyone in the trailer.
Noise
While not the metric of this list, Noise is comfortably the scariest thing to breach the boundaries of this festival (though perhaps tied with another sound based feature later on this list). Set in an apartment building and built around spooky neighbors and violent confrontations, this fright from Korea chucks scares at the audience from every direction, including above and below.
After listening to her sister's persistent complaints of noisy neighbors, Joo-young arrives home one day to find her missing. As she is hearing impaired, Joo-young can't be sure of what her sister has been struggling with, but her souped-up hearing aid seems to bring her closer to the noise. Frantically trying to find her sister, Joo-young is tormented by a loopy neighbor also haunted by similar sounds, and an apartment governing body that does not seem to care.
Noise haunts a determined woman in her own home, leaving her to race against time to rescue her sister and avoid becoming a victim of whatever is rap-rapping on her apartment's floors. There's something extra terrifying about the horror that breaches the walls of your safe space, so making Joo-young's apartment the home of her scares is incredibly disorienting. Villains come not just by way of supernatural scares, but also a passive governing board and a neighbor so exhausted from noise interrupting his sleep, that he becomes desperate enough to turn violent (been there!). The crafty use of sound design brings the audience into Joo-young's world and the whims of her assistive devices which creates an even more firsthand and immersive horror experience. It's one that might require shaking off for anyone who's been awoken by thuds only they'd qualify as bumps in the night.
The Undertone
Nina Kiri's Evy hears something suspicious in UNDERTONE (Credit: A24) Is “Headphone Horror” a thing? Maybe it should be with titles like The Sound of Violence, White Noise, and arguably, The Vast of Night. In what's another one of the scariest flicks out of this year's festival, a pair of podcast hosts are tested by a listener-submitted set of audio recordings. Evy (Nina Kiri), who plays the skeptic opposite her open-minded cohost, Justin (Kris Holden-Ried), is a little more susceptible to the spooks of these audio recordings as she is fighting for sleep in the hours between providing palliative care for her mother. The podcasting duo maintains an air of skepticism, but they're tested when the haunted happenings seem to spill from the audio recordings into Evy's real life.
This is the debut feature from Ian Tuason, more known for his work as a science fiction author, and it's a confident first outing. The Undertone lives and dies by its sound design, and there's no shortage of special audio moments that make this movie special and terrifying. Tuason's camera creates a sense of isolation and dread by making sure never to show faces outside of Evy and her mother's, and often shooting Evy from behind or in the distance which creates a haunting sense of vulnerability. Perhaps by virtue of what might have been limited resources, Tuason's ingenuity shines through as he uses his single location for his own benefit. Evy might leave the house, but the camera doesn't, which leaves the audience to fester in the bone-chilling seclusion that borders on claustrophobia.
With Evy as the skeptic played against a more willing Justin, and the two falling deeper into the internet-search rabbit hole the audio takes them into, The Undertone manages to capture the feeling of experiencing Paranormal Activity (or cohorts like The Fourth Kind) if it were in audio format. Evy is the audience member who reassures herself that what she is witnessing is just a hoax crafted for entertainment, but is skepticism enough to protect anyone from the malevolent supernatural?
