{Fantastic Fest 2026} Play House (2026) Captain Kangaroo Wants to Murder You

Nicolas Curcio won last year’s inaugural Fantastic Pitches competition, a partnership between Fantastic Fest and indie studio Chroma that hands one aspiring filmmaker $100,000 in production funding along with a guaranteed premiere slot at the following year’s festival. Play House is proof the gamble paid off in a big way.

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Elliot (Will Harrison) is directionless after a breakup with his girlfriend Cath (Jessica Sula), his mother has just passed, and out of his plentiful hobbies, he’s a master of exactly none of them. So Elliot does what any quarter-life-crisis person would do. He buys a dilapidated fixer-upper that’s been rotting for decades, telling himself the purchase represents commitment and responsibility, maybe even a way to win Cath back. Instead, under the ancient water heater that may or may not be haunted, he finds numbered VHS tapes of a children’s show nobody’s ever heard of, Mr. Morton’s Monster Alley, hosted by a puppeteer (James Urbaniak) whose forced smile gets more unsettling with every episode he watches.

There’s a real rawness to the humor running through this film that keeps it from ever feeling too polished or too calculated for its own good, and the show-within-the-film aesthetic Curcio builds for Monster Alley is genuinely great, unsettling in a way that stays fun rather than tipping over into pure misery. It’s Mr. Rogers Neighborhood if the war turned Rogers into a pyscho instead off a helper. Curcio has talked openly about growing up on weird 90s kids’ TV, shows like Rocko’s Modern Life that read as unintentionally disturbing when you revisit them as an adult, and that specific DNA is all over Monster Alley’s design. VHS as a format feels very much in right now across horror generally, but Play House earns the gimmick rather than just leaning on its nostalgia alone. The puppet work throughout is genuinely excellent, tactile and gross in exactly the right proportions.Its Avenue Q by way of The Black Phone.

Elliot is wholesome enough as a lead that you find yourself rooting for him almost against your better judgment, though he and Cath as a couple don’t entirely make sense on paper, functioning more as a plot engine to get Elliot into the house than as a fully believable relationship the film wants you to invest in emotionally. What does work beautifully, and unexpectedly, is the vocal work behind the monsters themselves, which channels a melancholy not unlike the Peanut’s characters appear to be on the verge of crying all the time (or at least Charlie Brown feels this way), real sadness hiding underneath something grotesque and cartoonish. There’s a genuinely great creepy kid scene tucked into the middle stretch of the film that had the whole theater tense, and the jump scares land throughout, with one in particular landing so cleanly the crowd audibly reacted. I’ll admit I missed the exact detail linking the tapes back to the house’s own basement on a first watch, but the character work more than compensates for it. Elliot’s likability actually grows as the film progresses, which isn’t always a given in a horror lead, and by the midpoint I was fully on his side even as things got worse and worse for him.

There’s also a full musical number buried in here that’s a total, unexpected delight, the kind of swing that shouldn’t work tonally but somehow does. Ironically, for a film this visually inventive and clearly the product of real craft, Play House ultimately plays out like an old-school creepypasta. We get the different tapes all built for an audience raised on exactly that kind of bite-sized internet horror storytelling. It’s not just a kids-in-peril story either. There’s a nastier, blacker vein running underneath all the nostalgia, and the bad guy at the center of it is genuinely great, with Urbaniak clearly relishing every second he gets behind that forced puppet-show smile.

Play House had its World Premiere at Fantastic Fest on September 19, marking the first film funded through the festival’s new Fantastic Pitches program, with a guaranteed theatrical run via Alamo Drafthouse waiting on the other side. Go out and support genuinely homegrown genre filmmaking like this while you still can, because this is exactly the kind of scrappy, personal project Fantastic Fest was built to champion. Tickets and the full schedule are at fantasticfest.com/film-guide.