Fantastic Fest 2024: Here are 5 films we’re most hyped for

B-Sides & Badlands is heading to Fantastic Fest for the very first time – virtually, of course! While we’ll have serious FOMO for many of the in-person screenings, like Terrifier 3 and Never Let Go, we’re still pretty jazzed about what the virtual block will have in store this year. The lineup, both in-person and remote, looks absolutely stacked, with many treats sure to scratch that terrifying itch like no other.

This year’s festival runs from September 19 through the 26th. Check out the lineup, ticket info, and much more here.

Below, B-Sides & Badlands handpicks 5 feature films we absolutely can not wait to see.

Binary

Body horror has long been a genre for filmmakers and artists to explore the way our physical selves reflect, excite, terrify, and reject the ways we understand our own identities and our sensory experiences of the world around us. David-Jan Bronsgeet’s BINARY, while by no means the first movie to explore trans-ness and its relationship to body horror, is notable for explicitly depicting the story of a trans woman and the sometimes terrifying and violent ways in which she regards herself.

Nisha is on the verge of gender-affirming surgery, but as the day of her procedure approaches, she experiences increasingly strange and violent visions. An immigrant from Pakistan working as an exotic dancer in the Netherlands, Nisha finds her identity is an issue for some of her clientele and a fetishizing draw for others. Even her coworkers and friends seem confused about how she wants to be known, expressing certain amounts of concern about her impending surgery.

Coupled with the demonic signs following her around, Nisha begins to fear her operation may unleash something otherworldly onto Earth. As the intensity of her visions increases and the demonic presence she senses gains a foothold in the physical world, violence and the manifest destruction of the self take hold in righteous fury and terrifying self-actualization.

Chainsaws Were Singing

Maria is having one of the worst days of her life. Her parents died. Her dog, too. She was fired from her job. She was beaten by thugs in the street. But all of her troubles melt away when she locks eyes with Tom in the midst of his suicide attempt. Soon, the gobsmacked young lovers are hand-in-hand, bounding across sun-dappled meadows and expressing their undying love through song. Their courtship is cut short when a spree killer with a chainsaw and his own musical backstory takes Maria captive to feed his grotesque family of cannibals, consisting of his overbearing mother, artistically inclined little brother, and incestuous cousins Pepe and Kevin.

Vowing to come to his lady’s rescue, Tom teams up with Jaan, a goodhearted, goofy passerby with nothing but time on his hands and a song in his heart. The two head deep into the woods, embarking on a madcap quest full of blood, guts, and toe-tapping show tunes. Along the way, they’ll encounter some trigger-happy, pastry-loving cops, a helpful little hedgehog, a shitload of exploding cars, and a cult that worships a talking fridge full of nauseating contents. Nearly 10 years in the making, this bastard child of Stephen Sondheim and Lloyd Kaufman is an utterly indescribable Estonian odyssey.

Dead Talents Society

Being dead is no picnic. In fact, ghosts face a perpetual competitive struggle to become scary or risk permanent disintegration. The most successful ghosts gain celebrity status in the underworld, compete for annual ghosting awards, and are hosted on late-night talk shows. A ghost’s reputation and standing out among the undead prove just as important as the urban legend that their hauntings foster out in the real world.

This all comes as a terrifying shock to our heroine, a young woman known only as the Rookie, who discovers that she must create a spectral persona for herself in order to earn her haunting license if she wants to avoid a one-way ticket to oblivion. While her first audition is a disaster—that’s right, prospective haunters must perform their intended scares before a formidable jury—the Rookie is taken in by a sympathetic gang of spectral misfits, led by one-time pop idol Makoto (Chen Bolin) and Catherine (Sandrine Pinna), a fading diva whose title as Golden Ghost winner has been usurped by her ambitious protégé, Jessica (Yao Yi Ti). They hole up together in a dilapidated hotel room, where they strive to scare its infrequent patrons, and as a group, they vow to help our fledgling frightener hone her act before the 30-day deadline drops.

MadS

A french club kid wakes up from a night of partying looking to score, whether that’s with the latest drug or romantic conquest. On his way back home, he encounters an escaped patient who alters the course of his life. MADS is one-shot, one crazy night horror blast that rages like an after-hours party, rich with lived-in performances that rival any of the visual inventiveness on display.

The Draft!

Five college students—the jock, the nerd, the pretty one, the rich one, and the popular one—embark on a weekend trip to an isolated cabin. When they arrive, a mysterious older man gives them a cryptic warning about staying there, and later, strange and mysterious events begin happening around them. As a genre aficionado, I’m going to assume you’ve seen this setup more than once. The director of the film you are watching, Yusron Fuadi, has seen this before as well.

Without spoiling too much, this blend of CABIN IN THE WOODS, SCREAM, and a Kurt Vonnegut novel takes multiple dizzying turns as the danger and the body count grow. THE DRAFT! is full of gruesome kills, bizarre plot contrivances, and an ever-shifting cinematic geography. This Indonesian horror-comedy is well-versed in the genre’s tropes and cinematic grammar, and delights in subverting and honoring them in equal measure. A fist-pumping, inspirational ode to the challenges of filmmaking and a no-holds-barred, gruesome kill machine

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