20 Years of Fantastic Fest’s Best Movies and Premieres

Now approaching its 20th gathering, Fantastic Fest has become the undisputed home for genre cinema in North America. Fans and studios alike know that if they want an early peek at the best (or at least weirdest) in new horror and science fiction, they have to come to Austin.

Fantastic Fest didn’t build that reputation overnight. Instead the festival has built a long track record of showing great movies, and on a number of occasions hosting the North American or U.S. premiere of legendary films. To celebrate the festival’s 20th birthday, let’s take a moment to look back at the best film to premiere at each year of the festival. In most cases, these movies had their North American premiere, even if they showed up at Cannes or a different international fest first. In a few cases, the movies made it to the Toronto International Film Festival a bit earlier, but Fantastic Fest got to show the film in the U.S. first. And in all cases, the movie is just absolutely magnificent.

2005: Maléfique

Those looking at this list might assume that Fantastic Fest had to scrape the bottom of the barrel for its inaugural season, which is why the French horror flick Maléfique takes the top spot for 2005. But Maléfique deserves more than to be dammed with faint praise. A surreal bit of Clive Barker-esque horror, Maléfique follows white collar criminal Carrere (Gérald Laroche) as he joins with three other inmates to learn a secret magical ritual that will earn him his freedom. Writers Franck Magnier and Alexandre Charlot balance the protagonists’ well-observed oddities with solid character work, resulting in a film that’s at once moving and upsetting.

2006 – The Host

It is shocking that in just its second year, Fantastic Fest got the U.S. premiere of The Host, screening it four days before the New York Film Festival (but a few weeks after TIFF). Even more than his previous features, Barking Dogs Never Bite and Memories of Murder, The Host captures Korean director Bong Joon Ho‘s singular style. The Host features a giant monster who emerges out of the Han River and captures a teen girl (Go Ah-sung), the sort of thing that you’d find in any kaiju film. But Director Bong turns his attention to the complicated dynamics of the girl’s family, leaving room for stand-out performances by Song Kang-ho and Bae Doona.

2007 – There Will Be Blood

As impressive as it is that Fantastic Fest had the U.S. premiere of The Host, the fest pulled a real coup when it got to debut the Paul Thomas Anderson masterpiece, There Will Be Blood. Anderson’s loose adaptation of the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair represented a giant leap in the director’s skill and aims. Aided by an incredible score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, There Will Be Blood is easily one of the best movies of the 21st century. In a towering performance, Daniel Day-Lewis plays Danielle Plainview, an oil prospector who becomes a magnate after striking it rich. He runs afoul of twin brothers Paul and Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), the latter a passionate and duplicitous revival preacher. Through Plainview and Eli, Anderson takes an incisive look at American mythologies around capitalism, God, and so-called manifest destiny. And it’s brought to life by some of PTA’s most daring filmmaking.

2008 – Sauna

At its heart, Fantastic Fest is about independent and foreign genre movies, so it’s fitting that it followed a pair of big name premieres with a great film from overseas. Such is the case with Sauna, the Finnish horror film from director Antti-Jussi Annila and writer Iiro Küttner, which made its U.S. premiere at Fantastic Fest. Set at the end of the Russo-Swedish War in 1595, Sauna is rich on atmosphere and dread, as brothers and Knut and Eerik (Tommi Eronen and Ville Virtanen) seek a magical sauna to purge themselves of their sins on the battlefield.

2009 – Antichrist

Someone scanning this list might think that, as cool as these movies are, they’re not exactly the outsider art that one expects from Fantastic Fest. For its fifth anniversary, the festival gave fans a film both prestigious and extremely aggressive. On the surface, Antichrist sounds like the sort of quiet drama that one would find at Sundance or SXSW, the story of a husband and wife (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, billed as “He” and “She”) dealing with the death of their child. Because it comes from Danish provocateur Lars von Trier, Antichrist is most assuredly not a standard indie drama. Yet for all of its nihilism, Antichrist is somehow deeply moving, retaining an emotional truth beneath its cruel imagery.

2010 – Let Me In

Before he brought emo-noir to Gotham City in The Batman and before he got biblical in the Planet of the Apes franchise, Matt Reeves had the unenviable task of remaking the Swedish smash Let the Right One In for American audiences. Reeves more than succeeded with Let Me In, a movie that translated the original’s themes so well for English speakers that it stands on its own next to the Swedish film. Reeves gets compelling performances from Kodi Smit-McPhee as a lonely 12-year-old in 1980s Los Alamos who finally gets a friend in the form of a child/immortal vampire (Chloë Grace Moretz). Between the remake’s keen sense of time and place, and outstanding performances from the leads and character actor greats such as Richard Jenkins and Elias Koteas, Let Me In has charms all its own.

2011 – You’re Next

On one hand, one might argue that a straightforward slasher movie doesn’t deserve to stand next to titanic films like There Will Be Blood and The Host. On the other hand, You’re Next is an exceptionally well done slasher, one that embodies the best the genre has to offer. Working with a cast that includes Mumblecore mainstays such as Ti West and Joe Swanberg, writer Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard play with genre tropes to build up and subvert audience expectations. By the time all the secrets are revealed, actress Sharni Vinson gives us one of the all-time great final girls, making You’re Next an incredibly satisfying genre exercise.

2012 – Holy Motors

Lots of movies at Fantastic Fest are weird, but few reach the utter absurdity of Holy Motors, from French director Leos Carax. Star Denis Lavant gives a virtuosic performance as several characters who might in fact be the same person, all created in response to encounters that a rich man has throughout the course of his day. While it’s impossible to explain the plot of Holy Motors, the pure cinematic playfulness of the movie satisfies even viewers allergic to artsy-fartsiness.

2013 – Ninja: Shadow of a Tear

In a better world, martial artist Scott Adkins would be a household name. Between his genuine charisma and mastery of onscreen action, Adkins follows in the footsteps of Bruce Lee and Arnold Schwarzenegger as action stars who are also proper movie stars. No film better demonstrates Adkins’ star power than Ninja: Shadow of a Tear, directed by Isaac Florentine. The sequel to 2009’s Ninja, Shadow of a Tear is filled with both melodrama and incredible fight sequences. Adkins handles both with aplomb as expatriate Casey Bowman, who goes on a mission of revenge after his wife’s murder.

2014 – John Wick

Given the labyrinthine world of assassins and bravado filmmaking that became the franchise’s calling card, it’s easy to forget the details of the original John Wick, which was directed by Chad Stahelski and David Leitch. Yes, the first movie does have multiple assassins—played by ringers such as Willem Dafoe and Adrianne Palicki. And yes, we do make our first visit to the Continental, the posh hotel for assassins and underworld figures operated by the, ahem, continental Winston (Ian McShane) and Charon (Lance Reddick). But there’s a purity of plot to the original film, in which Keanu Reeves‘ infamous killer shoots and punches his way to a Russian mobster and his son to get revenge for the latter killing his dog. Simple though it may be, John Wick laid the emotional foundation on which the rest of the sprawling world and its droll operatics were built.

2015 – Green Room

As these past few entries show, the mid-2010s were a good time for action fans coming to Fantastic Fest. But rarely have the action entries been as grim and immediate as Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room. The film stars Anton Yelchin and Alia Shawkat as members of a punk band who, in an act of financial desperation, agree to play a Nazi club in woods of Oregon (they didn’t realize it was full-on skinheads until they reach the actual green room). After witnessing a murder, the band must battle their way through an army of white supremacists, led by Patrick Stewart at his most menacing. The movie’s domestic relevance has only become eerier since its U.S. premiere.

2016 – Split

One of Fantastic Fest’s chief draws are its Secret Screenings, in which audiences don’t learn what they’re watching until the movie begins. Rarely has a film captured the ethos of the screenings better than Split, which made its world premiere at Fantastic Fest, complete with M. Night Shyamalan in attendance. Fans went in knowing next to nothing about Split, in which James McAvoy gives a barnburner of a performance as a man whose multiple personalities capture a trio of girls (including Haley Lu Richardson and Anya Taylor-Joy) to sacrifice to his powerful new persona. They especially didn’t know about the shocking twist that Bruce Willis would show up at the end as David Dunn, making Split a surprise sequel to Unbreakable! Miraculously, that also somehow didn’t leak all over social media before the film’s theatrical premiere three months later.

2017 – Tigers Are Not Afraid

Tigers Are Not Afraid isn’t the biggest movie to make its debut at Fantastic Fest, but it is one of the best. Written and directed by Issa López, who went onto make True Detective: Night Country, Tigers Are Not Afraid is one of the more effective instances of using horror to comment on social traumas. Set in an unnamed Mexican city, the film focuses upon a group of children orphaned by violence between warring drug cartels. After her mother goes missing and she joins the group, Estrella (Paola Lara) begins seeing apparitions in the form of her lost parent, which drives the children further into the gangs’ orbit. As with the early works of Fantastic Fest favorite Guillermo del Toro, Tigers Are Not Afraid shows how monsters can be a reprieve from a reality more frightening than anyone could imagine.

2018 – Suspiria

Some cringe at the very idea of remaking the idiosyncratic Italian movie Suspiria. How could anyone improve on Dario Argento‘s colorful and nonsensical tale about witches operating a dance school? Luca Guadagnino found a way, by moving so far in the opposite direction of Argento that his Suspiria serves as an echo of the 1977 original. In place of the original’s frustratingly threadbare plot, Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich overburden their take with incident, making a movie just as confusing as Argento’s. In place of the technicolors of the original, Guadagnino uses brutalist grays to give the film its own distinctive look. Throw in a well-deployed Dakota Johnson in the lead and Tilda Swinton playing three different characters, and this Suspiria stands on its own.

2019 – Tammy and the T-Rex (Full Restoration)

Just as important as the new movies that have their debut at Fantastic Fest are the restorations that the festival premieres. Such is the case with the inexplicable Tammy and the T-Rex, which director Stewart Raffill originally shot as an R-rated horror comedy but had to change into a family film to cash in on Jurassic Park-mania when it hit theaters in 1994. In 2019, Fantastic Fest revealed the fully restored version of Tammy and the T-Rex, finally allowing viewers to properly enjoy the story of a cool teen (Paul Walker) who continues to romance his girlfriend (Denise Richards) after having his brain put into the body of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.*

*(It was also nice to spotlight this oddity when the best film of this year, Parasite, had already played at two other U.S. film festivals and a host of international ones before FF.)

2020 – The Stylist

Like everything else in the world, COVID-19 changed the way Fantastic Fest operated. Instead of an in-person event, Fantastic Fest 2020 happened virtually and, as a result, far fewer films participated. But that left room for some hidden indie gems to stand out, including the beguiling horror film The Stylist. Directed by Jill Gevargizian, who co-wrote the script with Eric Havens and Eric Stolze, The Stylist stars Najarra Townsend as Claire as a stylist who kills and scalps her victims. Both moving and upsetting, The Stylist is exactly the type of film that a festival can highlight.

2021 – The Black Phone

Things still hadn’t returned to full power in 2021, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at Fantastic Fest’s 2021 lineup. Even under a restructured format, Fantastic Fest hosted the world premiere of several great movies, none more so than Scott Derrickson’s adaptation of the Joe Hill story, The Black Phone. Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill expand Hill’s story by adding ’70s nostalgia and genuinely compelling characters, none more so than Ethan Hawke as the mysterious killer known as the Grabber.

2022 – Werewolf By Night

On one hand, it is perverse to choose a Disney movie (well, TV special) as the best premiere at Fantastic Fest. On the other, Werewolf By Night is very good, and very much of interest to attendees. Composer Michael Giacchino turns in his directorial debut with an adaptation of ’70s Marvel Comics, done in the vein of classic Universal and Hammer horror. Gael García Bernal and Laura Donnelly shine as good hearted wolfman Jack Terrier and monster hunter Elsa Bloodstone, respectively. But the real star of the show is Harriet Sansom Harris, who steals/devours every scene as an evil mistress of ceremonies.

2023 – Saw X

Saw X was a true surprise, in more ways than one. Firstly it was the last of four Secret Screenings at the 2023 festival, marking the movie’s North American premiere. Second of all, Saw X is shockingly good, not just a step up from the lackluster Jigsaw and Spiral: From the Book of Saw, but one of the best entries in the franchise. Director Kevin Greutert pulls off the feat by embracing Saw’s best qualities: a twisty timeline; Tobin Bell’s performance as compelling central character John Kramer; and plenty of gross out traps. Set sometime between the events of Saw and Saw II, Saw X recovers Kramer’s moral fury, making for a nasty but satisfying film.

2024 – V/H/S/ Beyond

The V/H/S/ series has always had a home at Fantastic Fest, so it’s fitting that the best entry in the anthology franchise would get to debut in Austin. Beyond sticks to the same formula as other movies in the franchise, filled with short films by various directors, all presented as a series of video tapes discovered by some unlucky soul. Beyond may take a more sci-fi approach than its predecessors, but its incredible offerings—including Virat Pal and Evan Dickson’s story about a killer robot in Bollywood, and a surreal meditation directed by Kate Siegel and written by Mike Flanagan—make it a standout in both the V/H/S/ series and in Fantastic Fest history.

Fantastic Fest 2025 runs from September 18th-25 in Austin, Texas