Film at Lincoln Center announces the lineup for Scary Movies XIV, the 14th edition of New York City’s premier showcase for the most vital voices in contemporary horror and genre-bending cinema from around the world. Running August 12 through August 20, the 16-film festival will premiere new works alongside special presentations of spine-tingling classics and rediscoveries conjured from the dark recesses of midnight-movie lore, with filmmakers and special guests appearing for post-screening Q&As.
Since its founding in 2002, Scary Movies has offered moviegoers the cathartic treat of experiencing world-class suspense, gore, and terror of all stripes on the big screen, celebrating film’s boundless capacity to probe the creepiest corners of the human psyche, and inviting audiences to confront their most visceral fears in the company of dedicated fellow thrill-seekers.
Buddy (2026), the surreal, gleefully deranged big-screen debut from “Too Many Cooks” creator Casper Kelly, will open Scary Movies XIV on August 12. Centered on a 1990s children’s TV show that descends into mayhem, Buddy features an ensemble cast including Cristin Milioti and Topher Grace, with voice performances by Keegan-Michael Key and Patton Oswalt. Closing the festival is Sean Mannion’s The Threshing (2026), a chilling tale of a couple who join a tight-knit agricultural community and must navigate the sinister reality of the secluded commune’s rituals.
“With boundary-pushing horror films and genre offshoots breaking box-office records and shaking up the American industry, audiences today have resoundingly backed the hypothesis that there will always be an appetite for art that scares us—even and especially when compounding global crises confront us with real-world terrors on a daily basis,” said Madeline Whittle, Programmer, Film at Lincoln Center. “Since its inception, Scary Movies has been proud to champion emerging and established directors from around the world whose films harness the power of sound and image to guide us through the darkness, and the visionary filmmakers in this year’s lineup do exactly that, chilling our blood and thrilling our senses, and teaching us something about ourselves in the process.”
The Scary Movies XIV lineup offers a gripping slate of films, led by four North American premieres including Carlos Conceição’s body horror Bodyhackers (2026); Meekaaeel Adam’s supernatural folk horror The Trek (2026); and two gripping psychological thrillers: Evar Anvelt’s Something Real (2026) and Josef Brandl’s Superbuhei (2026). The festival will also present the U.S. premieres of Raymond St-Jean’s sinister family mystery Veins (2026) and Callum Devlin’s horror-comedy The Weed Eaters(2026). Rounding out the lineup are the New York premieres of Family Movie (2026), co-directed by Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, which stars the co-directors alongside their children Sosie and Travis Bacon; Raymond Creamer’s spin on prenatal anxiety horror in Goody Goody (2026); Dan Boyle’s supernatural chiller Never After Dark (2026); and Noah Stratton-Twine and Jake Kuhn’s folk horror The Peril at Pincer Point (2026).
Retro horror enthusiasts can look forward to three brand-new 4K restorations, one of which—John McNaughton’s infamously controversial and relentless Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2026—will be presented in its world premiere. The lineup also includes the 25th-anniversary screening of the supernatural psychological horror Wendigo(2001), written and directed by Larry Fessenden; Brian Damude’s Canuxploitation neo-noir Sudden Fury (1975); and the world premiere of a new 35mm print of Daniel Goldhaber’s techno-horror Cam (2018).
Organized by Madeline Whittle, Programmer, Film at Lincoln Center.
Acknowledgments:
Alex Gootter, Michelle Halac, and Mike Perry (Hollywood Entertainment)
“Scary Movies XIV” is sponsored by MUBI, the global streaming service, production company, and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema.
Tickets will go on sale on Thursday, July 16 at 12pm, with an early access period for FLC Members starting on Wednesday, July 15 at 2pm. Tickets are $18; $15 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $13 for FLC Members. Festivalgoers can also save $2 on each ticket with a 3+ Film Package or the $120 All-Access Pass ($99 for FLC Members).
For the Opening Night screening of Buddy and Closing Night screening of The Threshing, audiences may purchase a film-only ticket at standard price or a ticket that includes access to a post-screening party for $25; $22 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $20 for FLC Members. All-Access Pass holders receive access to both parties along with screenings. Party tickets are excluded from the 3+ Film Package.
FILM & DESCRIPTIONS
All films screen at the Walter Reade Theater (165 W 65th Street)
Opening Night
Buddy
Casper Kelly, 2026, U.S., 95m
New York Premiere
Viewers might know Casper Kelly as the mad-genius Adult Swim auteur responsible for 2014’s viral sensation Too Many Cooks, among other fever-dream spoofs of vintage pop-culture weirdness. With his first foray into big-screen feature filmmaking, Kelly embraces a larger canvas, applying his gleefully deranged sense of humor to the uncanny, oppressive cheerfulness of a ’90s soundstage-set kids’ TV show. The plucky young live-action characters of “It’s Buddy!” pass their days (or rather, episodes) laughing and learning in a brightly-hued analog playhouse—until the titular host, a charismatic orange unicorn, turns unexpectedly violent, and the show’s hermetically sealed fantasyland descends into gore-spattered mayhem. The result is an unhinged satire in which Kelly’s trademark flair for surreal black comedy reaches dazzling new heights, here abetted by a pitch-perfect ensemble cast that includes Cristin Milioti, Topher Grace, and the voice-acting talents of Keegan Michael Key and Patton Oswalt. A Roadside Attractions release.
Wednesday, August 12 at 7:00pm – Q&A with Casper Kelly
Closing Night
The Threshing
Sean Mannion, 2025, U.S., 90m
North American Premiere
Informed by the director’s own experience moving cross-country with his wife to work on a regenerative farm in Colorado, Sean Mannion’s sophomore feature brilliantly capitalizes on the lived-in authenticity of its location setting, and takes its place alongside contemporary genre classics Raw and Midsommar as a wickedly penetrating satire about the pitfalls of toeing the line when ideological commitment comes into conflict with personal choice. Struggling writer Franklin (Jean-Louis Droulers) gamely accompanies his idealistic partner Gwyn (Simone Grossman) when she accepts a coveted position living and working with an insular utopian farming collective, whose members are driven by a zealous, sustainability-minded philosophy with guidelines for existing “in harmony” with nature. Under the watchful eye of their newfound community’s unnervingly intense leader (Jared Kemp), the couple’s bond is tested as they navigate the commune’s unorthodox, dubiously humane—and increasingly ominous—practices. A Yellow Veil Pictures release.
Thursday, August 20 at 6:30pm – Q&A with Sean Mannion
Bodyhackers
Carlos Conceição, 2026, Portugal, 83m
Portuguese with English subtitles
North American Premiere
For his English-language debut, Angola-born writer-director Carlos Conceição (Tommy Guns, ND/NF 2023) deploys Cronenbergian body horror and a moody, noir-inflected aesthetic to darkly satirical ends, skewering the capitalist obsession with commodifying the body, and indicting the culture’s complacency in enforcing artificial beauty standards. Denver Blake (McCaul Lombardi), an anti-corporate activist working to uncover the cosmetics industry’s nefarious secrets, is knocked off his axis when he meets Renée (Joana Ribeiro), a perfectionistic dancer who confides in him about an all-consuming compulsion to “improve” her body with endless surgical and quasi-therapeutic interventions. Smitten and fascinated, Blake follows her through the looking glass into a cult-like, erotically charged underworld of black-market body modification, where he soon falls under the spell of Renée’s charismatic plastic surgeon, Dr. Pollard (Elina Löwensohn), whom Blake fears might not have her patient’s best interests at heart.
Tuesday, August 18 at 9:15pm – Q&A with Carlos Conceição
Cam
Daniel Goldhaber, 2018, U.S., 35mm, 95m
World Premiere of 35mm Print
Alice Ackerman (Madeline Brewer), an ambitious rising star on the adult cam site where she performs under the moniker Lola_Lola, makes a comfortable livelihood catering to the outré fantasies of her hordes of anonymous admirers, earning their love and loyalty with regular live streams of graphically provocative roleplay. When Alice discovers that she’s been locked out of her account—and that the person or entity responsible is continuing to post what appears to be real live-streamed footage of “Lola,” created without Alice’s involvement—she embarks on a desperate, dangerous bid to wrest back control of her carefully cultivated virtual persona from an unseen adversary. Director Daniel Goldhaber and screenwriter Isa Mazzei are back in the news with Faces of Death, their fictional reimagining of the same-named 1978 shocker, and Scary Movies XIV is proud to world-premiere a newly struck 35mm print of the duo’s first collaboration, which anticipates our present moment—marked as it is by the proliferation of deepfake technologies and deep-seated cultural anxieties around the slippery nature of online identity—with razor-sharp prescience. A Blumhouse release.
Thursday, August 13 at 9:00pm – Q&A with Daniel Goldhaber and Madeline Brewer
Family Movie
Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick, 2026, U.S., 87m
New York Premiere
Jack and Ellen, a veteran independent filmmaker and his actress wife, have built a passionate but precarious cottage industry producing microbudget genre movies on their small-town family farm—and drawing on the talents of their now-grown children, Trent and Ula, to help fill out a tiny crew of stalwart collaborators. The clan is mid-shoot on their latest project, a schlocky Corman-esque vampire scarefest, when crises begin to accumulate: funds are dwindling, their leading man is AWOL, an antagonistic neighbor stubbornly refuses to cooperate with production protocols… and then Jack stumbles upon a dead body that somebody’s hidden in the barn. Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick co-direct and star alongside their real-life children, Sosie and Travis Bacon, and a stellar supporting cast of familiar character actors to deliver a campy send-up of B-movie slasher flicks that doubles as an ode to the scrappy resourcefulness and do-or-die ingenuity of DIY filmmaking.
Wednesday, August 19 at 6:30pm – Q&A with Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick
Goody Goody
Raymond Creamer, 2026, U.S., 80m
New York Premiere
First-time feature director Raymond Creamer puts a diabolical new spin on the evergreen subgenre of prenatal anxiety horror with his pressure-cooker account of a home birth gone terribly wrong. Experienced midwife Sarah (Colleen Foy) reluctantly agrees to assist an expectant couple with an ill-advised all-natural delivery at their remote wooded property—but when a howling snowstorm traps them inside and cuts them off from aid, it’s not long before her apprehensions are vindicated. As the night wears on, a series of alarming and mysterious complications begin to disrupt the delivery, and Foy’s Sarah convincingly channels the mounting dread of a well-meaning caregiver caught between her patient’s demands and her own better judgment. Meanwhile, gothic-glam indie darling Samantha Robinson brilliantly embodies an all-too-recognizable brand of parental arrogance in Goody, the soft-spoken and serenely obstinate mom-to-be, whose stubborn conviction that she alone knows what’s best for her unborn child is put to the gruesomest of tests. A Shudder/IFC Films release.
Friday, August 14 at 6:45pm
Monday, August 17 at 9:00pm
New 4K Restoration
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
John McNaughton, 1986, U.S., 83m
World Premiere of 4K Restoration
Decades before the explosion of true-crime podcasts and streaming miniseries invited casual viewers to contemplate the obscure inner lives of murderers and rapists, director John McNaughton shocked unsuspecting audiences with his unflinching, profoundly bleak character study of one such enigma, loosely inspired by the real-life case of Henry Lee Lucas. Between the film’s festival premiere in 1986 and a delayed theatrical release four years later, criticisms around the dearth of distribution opportunities available to films like McNaughton’s helped motivate the creation of the MPAA’s NC-17 rating in 1990. Michael Rooker is hypnotically opaque as Henry, an itinerant ex-con who shares a cramped Chicago apartment with his old prison friend Otis (Tom Towles) and Otis’s sister, Becky (Tracy Arnold), eventually involving them in a heinous and apparently random killing spree. Writing in Film Comment, the critic Dave Kehr observed: “McNaughton suggests that suspense is just sentimentality—a bit of wishful thinking that we're better off without. Real horror exists without suspense, without thrills, without any physical release. It is emotion with no place to go, and Henry allows no escape.” To mark the groundbreaking film’s 40th anniversary, Scary Movies is honored to host McNaughton in person for the world premiere of a brand-new 4K restoration. A Dark Sky Films release.
Sunday, August 16 at 6:30pm – Q&A with John McNaughton
Never After Dark
Dave Boyle, 2026, Japan, 105m
Japanese with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Bilingual American director Dave Boyle taps into the finely honed rhythms and brooding atmospherics that distinguish contemporary J-horror at its finest with his virtuosically assured sixth feature, his first produced and shot entirely in Japan. Airi (Moeka Hoshi), a mild-mannered psychic medium, travels the countryside peddling her services as a dispeller of unsettled spirits that linger on the earthly plane. Her mettle and mastery are put to the test when she accepts a job at an isolated hotel, where the mother-and-son proprietors enlist Airi’s help to cleanse the building of a hostile supernatural presence that won’t leave its inhabitants in peace, taking the form of a ghoulish, gaping man (Mutsuo Yoshioka) to terrorize the living. Airi is a consummate professional and a skilled clairvoyant, receiving encouragement and advice from her own benevolent ghostly companion, but as she’s pulled deeper into the mystery of the hotel and its secrets, she soon discovers that she may not be prepared for what she’ll find. A Magnolia Pictures release.
Saturday, August 15 at 6:30pm – Q&A with Dave Boyle
Wednesday, August 19 at 9:00pm
The Peril at Pincer Point
Noah Stratton-Twine, Jake Kuhn, 2026, U.K., 83m
New York Premiere
Paying homage to the lo-fi handmade artistry of classic independent genre fare and riffing on the spooky maritime lore of old, first-time collaborators Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine teamed up to direct a barnacle-crusted tale about the lengths to which a committed craftsman will go to realize his boldest artistic ambitions. When Jim Baitte (Jack Redmayne), an eager but undependable sound recordist, is dispatched by his megalomaniacal director to gather an audio mix “unprecedented in film history” in hopes of salvaging their faltering film production, Jim leaps at the opportunity to prove himself, eagerly setting off for the fog-shrouded island of Pincer Point. Upon his arrival, his already daunting task is immediately complicated by a mysterious missing person’s case—which may or may not have something to do with the troubling local rumors of a spectral vessel haunting the surrounding waters, piloted by a phantom captain and manned by the restless spirits of the island’s wayward youths….
Thursday, August 13 at 6:30pm – Q&A with Noah Stratton-Twine and Jake Kuhn
Something Real
Evar Anvelt, 2026, Estonia/Lithuania, 113m
Estonian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
The first directorial effort from colorist Evar Anvelt is a pulse-pounding thriller about the perils of striving for connection and authenticity in our hypermediated world, adapted by Martin Algus from his own 2018 novel. Early on, Anvelt establishes a predator-prey dynamic between two men situated on opposite sides of a stark socioeconomic divide: Leo (Jan Uuspõld), a lonely, porn-addicted family breadwinner who surreptitiously trawls an online dating platform, seeking an escape from his downtrodden bourgeois existence; and Karl (Kristo Viiding), a hardened con artist newly released from prison, who will do whatever it takes to achieve the material prosperity he craves. Soon enough, Karl’s seemingly foolproof blackmail scheme devolves into a merciless, dog-eat-dog fight for survival, and the two men are locked in a cutthroat collision course, their fates now inextricably linked. Anvelt, who cites early Scorsese and the Safdie brothers as key influences, directs the film with a queasy, claustrophobic intensity, framing his characters in tight close-ups that magnify every emotion, and methodically ratcheting up the tension to fever pitch.
Tuesday, August 18 at 6:15pm
New 4K Restoration
Sudden Fury
Brian Damude, 1975, Canada, 92m
U.S. Premiere of New 4K Restoration
Just one year into Canadian cinema’s golden era of “tax shelter movies,” during which the country’s government made sweeping moves to incentivize independent investment in homegrown film productions, director Brian Damude burst onto the scene with Sudden Fury, his pitch-black, no-holds-barred early entry in the era’s burgeoning Canuxploitation genre that is ripe for rediscovery five decades later. En route to a rural getaway, tensions mount between on-the-rocks married couple Fred (Dominic Hogan) and Janet (Gay Rowan) as they bicker over one spouse’s harebrained real-estate investment scheme and the other’s possible infidelity. When an accident leaves their car stranded in a ditch with Janet inside, gravely injured, Fred leaves her for dead, angling to cash in on his wife’s inheritance—until a good-samaritan passerby (Dan Hennessey) sets out to rescue her, only to find himself caught in the crosshairs of Fred’s sociopathic machinations.
Restored in 4K by Canadian International Pictures in 2026, from the original 16mm A/B camera negatives and master mix magnetic track.
Saturday, August 15 at 9:15pm – Q&A with Brian Damude
Superbuhei
Josef Brandl, 2026, Germany, 108m
German with English subtitles
North American Premiere
The psychic distortions of loneliness, alienation, and paranoia—and the Freudian existential terror of encountering one’s doppelgänger—are active ingredients in the mordant first feature from Josef Brandl, an accomplished art director and set designer who’s helped shape the evocative visual language in films by Wes Anderson and Steven Spielberg. Jesse (Oliver Korittke), a gloomy recovering alcoholic, spends monotonous days managing the in-store bar at a drab suburban supermarket, and gloomy nights at home with his cashier wife, whose patience for Jesse’s morose outlook has long since run thin. It’s unclear to her whether he’s sliding into a relapse or merely going insane when he begins to suspect that he’s being stalked by his own evil twin brother, whom he’s convinced is dead-set on assuming Jesse’s identity and taking over his life. With this premise, Brandl brews a heady, destabilizing concoction of uncanny horror and bone-dry humor to depict a man on the brink, whose demons—whether real or imagined—just might be catching up with him.
Sunday, August 16 at 8:45pm – Q&A with Josef Brandl
The Trek
Meekaaeel Adam, 2026, South Africa, 105m
English, Afrikaans, and Khoekhoegowab with English subtitles
North American Premiere
“What if the land, no longer passive, could rise and write its own history?” This question, intoned in Khoekhoegowab by an unseen witness, opens the debut feature from South African cinematographer Meekaaeel Adam, and sets the scene for what’s to come. In the mid-19th century, a family of Dutch-Afrikaans homesteaders sets out to cross the inhospitable terrain of the Kalahari Desert along with their backer, a boorish Brit whose avarice and bigotry loom large over the journey. Faced with the threat of starvation and a dwindling water supply, they join forces with a taciturn Khoen stranger, though his presence does little to relieve the family’s growing unease at the sense that something potent and sinister lurks in wait. Drawing inspiration from the evocative motifs of traditional folklore, Adam unspools this “Western-horror” parable against the austere, otherworldly landscape of South Africa’s rugged Northern Cape, the perfect backdrop for a haunting, haunted meditation on the brutal legacies of settler colonialism.
Sunday, August 16 at 3:45pm – Q&A with Meekaaeel Adam
Veins / Nervures
Raymond St-Jean, 2025, Canada, 96m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
The treacherous emotional terrain of reconnecting with one’s roots is fodder for a deeply unsettling—and surprisingly poignant—work of bio-horror from Quebecois director Raymond St-Jean and screenwriter Martin Girard, re-teaming after their 2023 thriller Dusk for a Hitman. Twentysomething Isabelle (Romane Denis) braces for a difficult reunion when she and her new girlfriend arrive at her childhood home for a long-delayed visit with her parents, from whom she’s been estranged since coming out. Sure enough, the vibes are off, but not for the reasons she’d anticipated: her mother, strangely indifferent, delivers the news that Isabelle’s father has been dead for three days. Perturbed by her mother’s odd behavior, and wary of the kind but secretive doctor next door who had been charged with her father’s care, Isabelle’s search for answers leads her down a strange and unpredictable path of discovery, forcing her to face uncomfortable truths about herself and the family she left behind. An IndieCan release.
Saturday, August 15 at 4:00pm – Q&A with Raymond St-Jean
The Weed Eaters
Callum Devlin, 2025, New Zealand, 80m
U.S. Premiere
Armed with an airtight concept and the carefully budgeted spoils of a successful crowdfunding campaign, New Zealand director Callum Devlin assembled a dedicated team of co-conspirators and fellow multihyphenates to produce his narrative directing debut, a rollicking horror comedy in which four stoner friends discover that the munchies and murder don’t mix… or do they? Chaos and cannibalism ensue when Jules (Alice May Connolly) decamps to North Canterbury farm country with her new boyfriend and his buddies for a toked-out, middle-of-nowhere New Year’s retreat. To their delight, a search of the rental property turns up a hidden stash containing a peculiarly potent strain of weed, and they all settle in for a weekend of high-altitude revelry—but when an accidental death leaves the intoxicated crew scrambling to dispose of incriminating human remains, it’s only a matter of time before the situation spirals dangerously, deliciously out of control. A Yellow Veil Pictures release.
Friday, August 14 at 9:00pm
Saturday, August 15 at 2:00pm
New 4K Restoration
Wendigo
Larry Fessenden, 2001, U.S., 91m
Larry Fessenden—founder of the downtown production outfit Glass Eye Pix, and the city’s reigning maestro of uncompromising, fiercely independent genre fare—returns to Scary Movies for a 25th anniversary celebration of the landmark 2001 chiller that might be his most influential work to date. Erik Per Sullivan stars as Miles, the watchful 10-year-old son of photographer George (Jack Webster) and therapist Kim (Patricia Clarkson), whose life is irrevocably altered in the course of a snowbound upstate vacation. Driving through icy woods to a borrowed cabin, the close-knit family of Manhattanites are rattled when their car hits and injures a deer, attracting the ire of three local hunters who’d been tracking it for sport and profit. As his parents struggle to establish a fragile peace with their disgruntled neighbors, young Miles takes an interest in the story of the Wendigo, a voracious shapeshifter from Native American mythology. This sequence of events sets the stage for a formative encounter with vengeful nature and the elemental—yet indelibly human—mechanics of violence, unfolding across a wintry Catskills landscape that Fessenden’s 16mm camerawork infuses with an otherworldly glow. An IFC Films release.
4K restoration from the original 16mm camera negative by Vinegar Syndrome.
Monday, August 17 at 6:30pm – Q&A with Larry Fessenden
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2 comments:
Happy birthday, Jason! Alles Gute! And thanks for brightening my day five times a week (give or take).
Do you still use the email address jadams77@gmail.com?
I would like to discuss a somewhat personal matter with you. – Lorenz
Thanks for the birthday wishes! That's my email, yes
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