Unnamed Footage Festival 2026: 10 Most Anticipated Films
This year’s festival looks like a banger!
If you’re a found footage freak, you’re not gonna want to miss this year’s Unnamed Footage Festival, taking place in San Francisco and remotely from March 24-29. Tickets are currently on sale, and the lineup looks like a sickeningly delirious bloodbath. It was a blast last year, and the ninth annual festival is shaping up to be just as much of a head-spinning roller coaster. There are so many tasty treats—Alan at Night is a bewitching good time, and Heritage, which I saw super early, is not to be missed.
Scrolling through the full lineup, there are countless films just waiting to frighten you (perhaps literally) to death. Ahead of the festival later this month, here are the 10 most anticipated films of the event. What are you most excited to see?!
American Guinea Pig: Slaughter of the Swine
Directors: Stephen Biro and Eric Fox
The fourth film in the American reboot of the infamous Japanese series (the first of which was famously reported to the FBI by Charlie Sheen, believing it was a genuine snuff film), Slaughter of the Swine is framed as FBI footage of a depraved religious ritual. Featuring 60 minutes of some of the most intense gore you’ve ever seen, the film is a masterclass in gore effects, with depictions of violence, torture, and abuse that make The Human Centipede look tame.
Florida, Man
Director: Evan Jordan
Evan, a filmmaker from Mississippi, catches feelings for a gal he meets at a found footage film festival in San Francisco. They decide to make a movie together, exploring the haunted landscapes of Evan’s family history in the swamplands of Florida. Old wounds are reopened, and generational trauma reveals itself to be perhaps the scariest part of this attempted mockumentary that ends up being a little too real. The line between fiction and reality has never been slipperier, the southern accents have never been thicker, and the real feelings have never been more complicated than what you’ll see in FLORIDA, MAN.
Welcome Back to My Channel
Director: Jorrden Daley
When influencer Suki Ren brings her American boyfriend, Leo, for a romantic camping trip in her home-country of Australia, things take a sinister twist; first when Leo’s douchebag friend Cass makes an appearance, pranking Suki with a fake corpse hanging from a tree. Things take an even worse turn when the trio is beset by a gang of backwoods cannibals who want to turn the three into their next meal.
Zebra Hooves
Director: David Dawson
A hypochondriac heads to the Wisconsin Dells to get out of his head and relax. He’s instructed by his doctor to record video diaries of his anxiety symptoms, but soon finds something sinister in the Midwestern air—his own demons and a bad time. David Dawson (Flesh Games, Leech) returns with his magnum opus, using his unique “incel noir” style to tell a mature story about male loneliness, mental health, and the isolation of Middle America.
This House Is Totally Haunted
Director: Sean Nichols Lynch
When a team of ghost hunters travel to a backwoods cabin, they find themselves facing off with a cult survivor, his strange manservant, and a haunting that may or may not be real. Featuring twists, turns, and some excellent jumpscares, This House is Totally Haunted will keep you locked in from beginning to end.
From the award-winning filmmaker and UFF24Hr alum (The Ceremony Is About To Begin) Sean Nichols Lynch is back with his latest Found Footage film, This House Is Totally Haunted, and the title really says it all. Filled with Bay Area local talent that convincingly played their characters, this traditional found footage feature is set up with authentic jump scares, enjoyable comedic moments, and surprises nobody saw coming.
Primal Darkness
Director: Dillon Brown
With the Tahoe Joe trilogy complete, Dillon Brown (Tahoe Joe, Ghost, The Summer We Dies) returns to found footage with his most intense film yet. Hoping to kick off the second season of his series with a bang, hunting influencer Cole Harrington travels into the wilderness of Northern Nevada in search of a mountain lion that’s been menacing local livestock, but when he finds a camera belonging to a pair of missing hikers his hunting expedition becomes a fight for survival with something much more dangerous than a simple wildcat. While his Tahoe Joe films embrace the goofiness of the regional cryptid, PRIMAL DARKNESS is pure horror, using the isolation and emptiness of Northern Nevada—and the area’s numerous abandoned mines—to craft a bleak tale of survival that is not to be missed.
Frogman Returns
Director: Anthony Cousins
In the sequel to his hit creature feature, Anthony Cousins (Frogman, Scare Package) delivers another buffet of frights and frogs in this creature-feature sequel. Featuring new and familiar faces alike, FROGMAN RETURNS picks up where Frogman left off. Delving into the lore of the Loveland Frogman, this sequel cranks everything up to eleven, guaranteeing a froggy fantasy filled with more frogmen than you can wave a magic wand at. Frogs aside, Cousins’ background as a cinematographer shines through in this film FROGMAN RETURNS adopts a far different style than its predecessor, eschewing the tracking lines and static of a Hi8 for crisp, digital look, that lets it show off its amazing practical effects creatures. Hail Frogman!
We Put the World to Sleep
Director: Adrian Țofei
Adrian and Duru get lost in the characters they play in an apocalyptic film and embark on a secret mission to end the world for real. What follows goes beyond their wildest imagination.
If you haven’t seen Adrian Țofei’s 2015 feature Be My Cat: A Film for Anne, stop reading and watch it right now. If you have seen it, you’ll know that Țofei is a master of the bizarre, and his newest film is no exception. The middle film of a spiritual trilogy that includes Be My Cat and the upcoming Pure, WE PUT THE WORLD TO SLEEP expands his confrontational style into something far more expansive. Shot over nearly a decade across Romania, Türkiye, and Ukraine, the film merges autofiction and layered reality games into a constantly shifting perspective piece. Rather than simply revisiting the confessional intimacy of Be My Cat: A Film for Anne, Țofei widens the frame to challenge what “captured reality” even means.
Infirmary
Director: Nicholas Pineda
When Edward, an ex-marine, takes a job as a security guard at the abandoned Wilshire Hospital, he expects to face long nights and the occasional vagrant, but instead finds himself thrown into a nightmare. Scheduled for demolition, the former mental hospital is a maze of labyrinthine hallways, and Edward’s night is only made worse by a mysterious prowler, a sinister hospital administrator, and a slew of medical dummies that refuse to stay put. As tension mounts, Edward’s new job turns into a terrifying fight for survival with forces he can barely comprehend. Nicholas Pineda’s directorial debut is a found footage tour de force, sporting a stellar central performance from lead actor Paul Syre (Smoking Tigers, Badly in Love) and an unforgettable locale, INFIRMARY is sure to delight found footage fans looking for a scare.
Content
Director: Adam Meilech
Shown exclusively through real phones, laptops, drones, and doorbell cameras, CONTENT follows a seemingly polite director whose commitment to “authenticity” curdles into obsession. Shot for under $3,000 by a scrappy team of University of Arizona film school alumni, Meilech’s debut feature is an independent found footage satire of online performativity. Using real screens, real locations, and a crew that often doubles as the cast, the film leans into immediacy and voyeurism to capture the hyper-online world we inhabit. Rejecting the notion that phones and text threads are “un-cinematic,” CONTENT weaponizes the familiarity of webcams and front-facing cameras – placing us directly in the gaze of a stalking, maniacal filmmaker and daring us to look away.
