The Vancouver Horror Show Film Festival returns for its ninth year, and its first wave has a fine Halloween-season hook: a 19th anniversary screening of Trick ’r Treat with writer-director Michael Dougherty in attendance. The presentation also includes a new 4K restoration of Season’s Greetings, the animated short that first introduced Sam before he became one of modern horror’s best-known little monsters.
Four features have been announced so far. Hammer Films brings Ithaqua to B.C. audiences, with Luke Hemsworth starring in a frozen 19th-century Canadian outpost besieged by hunger, cold and an ancient flesh-eating evil. It marks Hammer’s first original monster in 60 years. You can read our review here, as we got an early look during London’s Fright Fest. An interview with director Casey Walker can be read here.
The other B.C. premieres are Edwin’s Indonesian body-horror nightmare Sleep No More (image below), set inside a crumbling Jakarta wig factory, and the Adams Family’s The Glorious Dead. The latter comes from the DIY filmmakers behind Hellbender and follows a sheriff and deputy through a very bad day where blood flows from taps, people vanish and the dead refuse to stay down.
VHS will also host the world premiere of the B.C.-shot sci-fi mystery Encryption. Alex Zahara and Megan Charpentier play an uncle and niece following clues he left behind before memory loss, leading them toward Cryp-Tech, a secretive organization hiding something distinctly otherworldly.
Dougherty will take part in an onstage conversation about moving from original genre work to studio films such as Krampus and Godzilla: King of the Monsters. The festival’s creator programming also includes The First Five Minutes of Horror, with Zach Lipovsky, Eli Craig, Rachel Talalay and editor Greg Ng; an indie-horror distribution panel with Sean Harris Oliver and Kurtis David Harder; and the return of the live table-read series, featuring Karen Lam and Dennis Heaton.
More features, shorts, guests and events will be announced as the festival approaches.
Vancouver Horror Show Film Festival Trailer 2026
(Coming Soon)