Haunted House FearFest® has thrown open its doors for its 2026 main season, running virtually from October 5 through October 31. The year-round festival and entertainment brand organizes its entire program around a single shared world, a haunted house with rooms to explore, each one holding a different kind of fear. This year’s lineup brings together more than 40 selections across horror film and indie games, pulled from creators around the globe.
A House With Rooms, Not Just Categories
Instead of splitting films, games, and creator interviews into separate tracks, FearFest organizes everything by room. Films live in the Creepy Kitchen. Indie horror games wait in the Basement. Conversations with the people behind the work happen in the Mirror Room.
Festival Director Renee Huff designed it that way on purpose. Each room, she says, is meant to pull audiences deeper into the house rather than just sorting content into a menu. A film can lead to a game, which can lead to an interview with the creator behind it, turning the festival into something closer to exploration than a straightforward watchlist.
The Creepy Kitchen: This Year’s Film Lineup
The Creepy Kitchen’s nominees span a wide range of horror, from a 13-year-old’s festival debut to a Vietnamese supernatural tale to an animated revenge story with a surprising amount of heart.
Among the most notable entries is CAPTURE, written and directed by 13-year-old Max Tretta, marking his first appearance at a film festival. The short features actress and producer Tiffany Shepis, known for genre credits including Victor Crowley and Night of the Demons, and is produced alongside Sean Tretta, whose television work spans 12 Monkeys and Star Trek.
The rest of the lineup reaches well beyond the US. Thanh Phong Ngo’s *Silent Incantation comes out of Vietnam, while Canadian animator Reva Trikha’s WREN follows a vampire hunter who comes face to face with the woman she thought she’d lost. Rounding out the selections are Jenny Waldo’s Twofer and Elaine Chu’s Text Me Back, Dammit, the latter brought into the festival through outreach to the Film Fatales filmmaking community. Chu’s prior work includes the Gravitas-distributed The Purgation, along with shorts that have screened on Shudder and Roku.
What Did We Watched
We streamed three of the festival’s recommended shorts ahead of this feature. Here’s how they landed.
Text Me Back, Dammit
This short puts a supernatural spin on modern dating anxiety. It’s funnier and more tender than its premise suggests. Over twelve minutes, Mark spirals after his one-night stand, Don, vanishes without a word. What starts as the ordinary urge to get a reply curdles into genuine dread. Mark checks his phone obsessively and leaves a voicemail, just hoping to hear back.
The dread pays off when Don shows up in Mark’s apartment the next night. He explains that Mark’s own words, chanted three times in frustration, brought him back from the dead. The film leans into the double meaning of “ghosting” and turns it literal. But what lingers isn’t the twist so much as the quieter material underneath it: grief, loss, and the strange comfort of closure, even when it arrives from beyond the grave. It isn’t the scariest thing in the lineup. Still, it finds something unexpectedly human in a silly premise, and that’s where its charm lives.
Capture
CAPTURE gets a lot of mileage out of a simple, unsettling idea: that danger doesn’t always look dangerous, and trust can be the thing that gets you killed. In just six and a half minutes, the film builds real tension without leaning on jump scares, letting dread accumulate scene by scene until its final moment recasts everything that came before. Given a runtime shorter than most trailers, that’s a tough trick to pull off, and the film manages it by trusting its audience to sit with discomfort instead of rushing to startle them. It’s a tight, confident piece of horror filmmaking, and a striking debut for a director who’s only thirteen.
Wren
WREN packs an entire emotional arc into five animated minutes. The story follows a vampire hunter working through grief and rage after her wife, Selene, is murdered, only for her hunt to collide with Selene herself: resurrected as a vampire and caught mid-attack on another victim. The action is sharp and fully committed, but the film’s real strength is the ending, which trades violence for tenderness without feeling like a tonal whiplash. One exchange between the two women, a simple “You look so different,” does more emotional work than most horror shorts manage in triple the runtime. WREN earns its place in the lineup by being both a competent action piece and a genuinely moving one.
The Basement: Indie Horror Games
Downstairs, the festival’s game showcase covers a wide stretch of horror styles. Ashes mixes graphic-novel panels with interactive puzzles around a murder mystery, while What Killed Rachel offers a handcrafted psychological horror adventure. 13 MASCA blends deduction, surveillance, and survival into a liminal-space horror experience, and Dead Stop-No Vacancy leans into VHS-era aesthetics. BrokenLore: UNFOLLOW takes a more grounded approach, using a first-person psychological horror framework to explore social media and bullying through a surreal, nightmarish lens.
The Mirror Room: Meeting the Creators
Beyond films and games, the Mirror Room, FearFest’s interview series produced with the Looks Creepy Cool Podcast, sits down with horror creators to talk about the work behind the work.
This season’s guests include filmmaker Daniel Byers, whose Appalachian folk-horror feature Dark Hollow lands in theaters this September. His first narrative feature, Eradication, released as a Tubi Original, and his screenplay Paradise picked up a jury award at the 2023 Austin Film Festival. The Mirror Room also welcomes the team behind City of Masks, a British gothic romantic thriller heading to UK and Irish theaters through BUFF Studios ahead of Halloween. Directed by Andrea M. Catinella, the film reimagines Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera with a cast whose credits include Barbie, EastEnders, and Silent Witness.
Tickets and Access
Haunted House FearFest runs virtually through October 31. Individual Creepy Kitchen film tickets are available for $4, or horror fans can grab a $35 Festival Pass for broader access across the program. Full ticketing and the complete Creepy Kitchen lineup are available at HauntedHouseFearFest.com
And while October is the festival’s main season, the House doesn’t close when Halloween ends. FearFest runs programming year-round, adding new films, games, and interviews to its existing rooms, or opening new ones entirely.
