The Best Horror Movies From The Tribeca Film Festival

A mother’s love knows no bounds in this shocker from Turkey, written and directed by Alphan Eşeli. The opening’s a keeper: A distraught woman gives birth to a mutant baby in the back of a mini-bus while her boyfriend barrels along a mountain road.

The squeamish guy immediately runs for the hills, but the lady’s maternal instincts take hold, and she begins nursing and caring for the terrible tot. Hazar Ergüçlü gives a fearless performance as the hatchet-swinging Mom who will do anything to protect her child.

Here’s a psycho thriller with a difference. A crazy poodle breeder (Glee’s cisgender actress Dot Marie Jones) lures a brilliant but struggling college student (Daniel Doheny) to her isolated home with the promise to fund his bee research.

Looking to continue her clandestine human breeding program, she forces the reluctant student to impregnate her beautiful “daughters.” This lovably twisted movie, directed and written by newcomer Alex Goyette, does a fine job of balancing tension with uneasy laughter. The gravelly-voiced Jones is an offbeat choice as the menacing breeder.

Fact is scarier than fiction in writer/director Michael J. Gallagher’s exposé into the mass suicide of the infamous Heaven’s Gate cult. Gallagher and his extraordinary, Oscar-caliber cast (especially Tim Blake Nelson and Vera Farmiga as the cult leaders) shed light on what went down with these UFO fanatics.

The grim subject matter (its most squirm-inducing scene is a castration) is leavened by some dark humor from the stupidity of the group’s bonkers beliefs.

Tribeca always digs up the best documentaries, and this one, produced and presented by horror guru Eli Roth, is no exception. Directed by Jessica Chandler, Death Boom unflinchingly dissects the funeral industry.

Roth lifts the curtain of the bereavement business to reveal the various methods used to dispose of lifeless bodies. However, major challenges lie ahead (dwindling cemetery space, toxic cremation fumes, etc.), as millions of the aging baby boomer population will soon be on the slab. Roth and company’s environmental solutions to this dilemma make a lot of sense in the end (no, not Soylent Green!).

The latest from ace documentarian Jeffrey Schwarz (Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story, Never Sleep Again: The Making of A Nightmare on Elm Street, I Am Divine) charts the troubled production of William Friedkin’s controversial Cruising.

That thriller, about a serial killer preying on NYC’s gay community, caused an uproar when it started shooting in the West Village. Schwarz’s fascinating doc goes into the big brouhaha in amazing detail, interviewing cast and crew, critics and other familiar faces like director Frank Henenlotter, movie reviewer Dennis Dermody and writer Armando Munoz.

The biggest jaw-dropper for me was the reveal that an Exorcist-bit-player-turned-murderer initially inspired Friedkin to write Cruising!

Allison Berg’s life-affirming documentary follows a drag theater company’s journey to put on a shadow cast presentation of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in their depressed former mining town of Rock Springs, Wyoming.

The diverse troupe is led by Kenny Starling as Frank-N-Furter, who realizes you get more with honey than vinegar while trying to win over the strait-laced town. It helps that one of his cast members also serves on the city council!

Prolific producer Steven Schneider (Paranormal Activity, Insidious, Hokum) sure knows how to pick ’em. Besides Breeder, he had this creepy mood piece from directorial novice Henry Chaisson playing Tribeca as well.

Audio engineer Joan (Sasha Frolova) returns to her ancestral home to look in on her estranged and bedridden father (Xander Berkeley of Candyman), an eccentric artist who survived a horrific fire in the film’s creepy opening.

Like Schneider’s other recent production Undertone, Recluse relies on a superb sound and music design to raise gooseflesh and keep us unsettled throughout. The movie has more skeletons in its closet than you can count, and makes it clear that Chaisson is a talent to watch.

Writer/director Gabriel Basso stars as a Travis Bickle in the making in this slow-burn psychological thriller. His reclusive character, Connor, is obsessed with an online influencer, who becomes an imaginary constant presence in his life.

The suspense of when/if Connor will descend into full-blown violent psychosis kept me engaged despite the film’s overlong running time, but I hung in there hoping the guy would get a grip. Iconoclast’s surprise last-reel turn had audiences split, but I dug it. I suspect Basso watched Clean, Shaven and Cronenberg’s Spider and Videodrome a few times.

Spanish writer/director Hugo Ruíz (One Night with Adela) returns to Tribeca with this gory thriller in which a paramedic endures a night to dismember. The paramedic gets mixed up with a couple of double-crossing low-rent criminals who kidnap him.

The thugs are after some mysterious MacGuffin that the EMT is forced to swallow to conceal it from a rival crime boss. Dante sports some Tarantino-esque twists, and the hyper actors dig into their roles with gritty gusto.

This wacky Canadian mix of horror, sci-fi and comedy, directed by first-timer Sam Scott, is a natural for midnight festival play. A constantly bickering indie rock band can’t seem to get their act together until they stumble upon an otherworldly guitar riff. Said riff opens up a portal to another dimension, and the consequences are literally head-blowing.

Canada’s go-to horror guy Julian Richings (Cube, Wrong Turn, The Witch, The Institute) livens things up as the interdimensional scientist Dr. Pretorius.

Halloween is over four months away, but Tribeca Fest got into the spirit early by scheduling three films with spooky-season themes. They make up our final three entries.

Once a “dumping ground of the disabled,” Pennsylvania’s former Pennhurst “State School and Hospital” has been repurposed as a haunted house attraction and ghost tour stop in recent years.

This disturbing documentary reveals the dark history of the institution, where thousands of patients with mental and physical disabilities were abused and exploited for decades. After closing in 1987, Pennhurst now offers people with disabilities the opportunity to perform in the retrofitted haunted house.

Directed by Nathan R. Stenberg, Mike Attie, and Katarina Poljak, this well-assembled doc explores how the treatment of the less fortunate has improved in our more compassionate age.

Kevin McCurdy’s Haunted Mansion, operating for nearly 50 years in New York State’s Wappingers Falls area, served as an inspiration for writer/director Lindsay Calleran’s Caity.

Her first feature is a touching coming-of-age story about a 16-year-old (Chiara Aurelia) who works with her recovering-addict father (Morgan Spector) to run the family’s Halloween attraction. As the haunt reopens its doors, Caity explores Sapphic love for the first time and must also deal with troubled Dad when his personal demons return.

Caity is both funny and sad as we watch our young heroine navigate life’s obstacles. But the (spook) show must go on…

In writer/director Ben Sottak’s Shudder-bound inaugural flick, an agricultural apocalypse has devastated the land. Lonely Halloween holiday enthusiast Pumpkin (Milly Shapiro) hopes that a few Trick-or-Treaters might show up at her spookily-bedecked home.

Some scavenging Walking Dead rejects do arrive with evil intent, and young orange-haired Pumpkin must defeat them, Home Alone-style. Spunky Shapiro (the star keeps her head this time!) elevates what could have been just another end-of-the-world slog.

That’s a wrap on Tribeca Fest ’26. Stay updated on the organization’s year-round activities at the official Tribeca Film Festival website.