The Scariest Movies Debuting at the SXSW Film Festival

COVID-19 has altered many aspects of all our lives. One thing that has undeniably changed since the start of the pandemic has been film festivals. Indeed, many movie theaters all over the country have been shuttered since the lockdowns began, and even among those that have remained open, far fewer movies saw release in 2020 than years past.

Fortunately, several festivals have found ways to keep the festival experience alive while safely socially distancing. One of those is South by Southwest (SXSW), which has gone to an online format that lets you “attend” screenings that are happening anywhere, right from the comfort of your own home.

So what scary movies can you look forward to when you pick up your SXSW membership this year? We’ve got a list of some of the creepiest films, documentaries, and shorts that are making their debuts at SXSW, if you’re brave enough to check them out…

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From writer/director Mickey Keating (Carnage Park, Darling) comes this eerie shocker about a woman who travels to a mysterious island community only to find herself “trapped in a nightmare.” Plot details remain scarce for now, but they had us at “mysterious island community.” Besides, the cast includes horror mainstays like Richard Brake and Joe Swanberg.

sxsw film festival — Photo Credit: Queensbury Pictures

Jacob Gentry was one third of the filmmaking force behind 2007’s cult hit The Signal, and now he’s back with the world premiere of Broadcast Signal Intrusion. Starring Harry Shum Jr. from Crazy Rich Asians, this sci-fi/horror movie is about a sinister conspiracy surrounding pirate broadcasts. Inspired by real-life broadcasts that invaded Chicago airwaves in the late ‘80s, this mind-bending film should keep audiences on the edge of their seats during SXSW’s Midnighters lineup.

Horror legends Barbara Crampton and Larry Fessenden headline this picture from director Travis Stevens, who previously helmed another festival midnight favorite, Girl on the Third Floor. This time around, Crampton plays a minister’s wife whose life is altered after an encounter with “The Master.” The change is accompanied by a growing body count, and may force her to choose between the life she knew, and a much stranger future.

This trippy-looking film from South Africa is making its world premiere as part of SXSW’s midnight slate, and it should pack plenty of chills for body horror fans, if the squirm-inducing trailer is any indication. It follows a park ranger who stumbles upon a survivalist and his son living off the grid, in the depths of an ancient forest. The man and his son believe they have come across a god that is older than humanity, and ready to awaken.

Shot in Wales and filmed in Welsh, this contemporary horror film from prolific television director Lee Haven Jones follows a single evening. A wealthy family and their neighbors gather for a sumptuous meal to try to hammer out a business deal that will allow them to mine the surrounding countryside. What they don’t expect is the mysterious woman who arrives to be their waitress, and whose presence will begin to erode their lives, with violent consequences.

This synesthetic horror show is making its debut on the world stage at SXSW. Jasmin Savoy Brown plays a sound engineer whose family was brutally murdered, and who has since come to find relief from her trauma in a most unusual way— through the sounds of human suffering. As she helps an aspiring musician win a competition in a mall, the macabre composition she’s been planning begins to come to fruition.

From Elle Callahan, director of previous festival fright favorite Head Count, comes this timely story of an alternative modern-day America where witchcraft is very real—and very illegal. A woman struggling with her own biases helps two young witches cross the border into Mexico, where they hope to seek asylum, in this returning film that made its debut at the 2020 SXSW festival, which was disrupted by COVID.

From The Witch to Midsommar, it seems that folk horror has never been more popular than the last few years. Viewers have been rediscovering lost classics, and new films, novels, and even games test the boundaries of the subgenre. Covering more than 100 films, from the beginnings of the subgenre to the present day, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched is the first feature-length documentary on the subject, and it’s making its world premiere at SXSW.

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Phil Gelatt, writer on the hit Netflix series Love, Death & Robots, teams up with Morgan Galen King for this rotoscope animated homage to films like Ralph Bakshi’s Fire and Ice. Told across several interlocking storylines, this grim, bloody, and haunting narrative taps into some of the same cosmic horror themes that Gelatt previously tackled in They Remain, while also giving viewers plenty of sword-and-sorcery crunchiness to chew on. The Spine of Night is debuting as part of SXSW’s Midnighters lineup.

A group of bus drivers from Dorset, England decide on an ambitious project: a homebrew stage adaptation of Ridley Scott’s Alien. Somehow, their hapless stage show—filled with “special effects requiring more luck than judgement”—takes them from their small town to London’s prestigious West End. Partially funded via Kickstarter, this documentary follows our plucky heroes as they try to adapt one of the greatest sci-fi horror films of all time to the stage—and survive the process.

When it originally premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2020, IndieWire called this film a “repulsive rape revenge thriller that flays toxic masculinity.” Now it’s making its Texas debut at SXSW, part of a slate of favorites gleaned from other festivals, while giving audiences a second chance at seeing one of the most violent and polarizing movies to hit TIFF in recent years.

SXSW isn’t just home to creepy features and documentaries; it also has a block of short films, including this spine-tingler about a young woman who encounters a creepy entity while playing a video game—with unsettling consequences.

An “aboriginal psychological horror,” The Moogai is the story of a family plagued by a child-stealing ghost. But is it real, or all in the mother’s head? And what will she have to do to protect her newborn child in this shivery short making its international debut at SXSW?

This animated short—the latest from artist and director Carolina Sandvik, making its North American debut—follows an expectant father who must grapple with a nightmarish new reality in the wake of a miscarriage, as it seems that something unexpected is growing within the mother’s blood instead…

A single act of violence on the North Yorkshire Moors comes back to haunt a gamekeeper who is mired in a stagnant world that cannot accommodate change in this eerie short from the United Kingdom, making its North American premiere.

This is an upcoming series, not a movie, but we just had to include it on this list after hearing all the buzz surrounding it. Amazon greenlit two seasons of this new horror series after hearing a pitch that left Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke’s heart “still pounding” an hour later.

From writer/producer Little Marvin, the first season of the series will follow a family who moves from North Carolina to an all-white neighborhood in Los Angeles in 1953, where they find themselves at the epicenter of “malevolent forces both real and supernatural.” Amazon Studios co-head called the new series “the perfect lean in, edge of your seat show for Prime Video customers,” and the first episodes will make their world premiere at SXSW.

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Scary Movies