{Overlook Film Festival 2026} The Overlook Film Festival Turns Ten and Delivers Its Best Year Yet

Ten years in, the Overlook Film Festival has figured out exactly what it wants to be, and this year’s edition once again in the magic and nightmare filled city of New Orleans made that case more convincingly than any before it. Nearly 8,100 attendees packed into America’s most haunted city for four days of genre cinema, 25 sold-out screenings, and the kind of communal weirdness that makes the horror world so rich and diverse. It was, by every available metric, the festival’s biggest year. It was also one of its best programmed.

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The feature film Audience Award went to Focus Features’ Obsession, Curry Barker’s wish-fulfillment horror about a lovelorn 20-something whose novelty toy wish goes predictably, catastrophically sideways. Opening night selections don’t always earn that level of crowd enthusiasm, so when a festival opener wins the popular vote, it means something. Barker’s film clearly connected, and the audience response says a lot about the Overlook crowd’s appetite for relationship horror done right.

The juried prizes told a different story, and a more interesting one. The Grand Jury Prize for Feature went to Dave Boyle’s Never After Dark, a ghost story built around a medium for hire and the apparition haunting a remote country home. The jury’s citation is worth sitting with: they called it “the best J-horror film of the last decade,” and then immediately noted that it was made by an American. That’s a hell of a compliment and a hell of a caveat (more on Caveat later).

The Scariest Feature Award went to Taratoa Stappard’s Mārama, a Māori Gothic set on 1859 North Yorkshire moors, following a Māori teacher who travels to a wealthy whaler’s manor and finds something far worse than she anticipated. The jury framed it as a horror film about colonialism, which it clearly is, but the framing they chose (“the cruelty and violence of colonialism…seen through the eyes of Indigenous women”) suggests something more formally accomplished than the description might imply. Gothic horror and colonial history have always been adjacent; Mārama sounds like it’s doing something pointed with that proximity.

The jury also issued a Special Jury Mention for Midori Francis’s performance in Saccharine, Natalie Erika James’s body horror about a medical student who takes a mysterious weight-loss drug and ends up somewhere and someone she doesn’t know. Francis’s work in the film is what makes the citation notable. Body horror of this variety lives or dies on the central performance, and the jury recognized that the goopy, sickening mechanics of the thing only work because Francis earns them.

On the short film side, the Grand Jury Prize went to Lee Lawson’s Man Eating Pussy, a sci-fi/horror hybrid the jury praised for “the uniqueness and audacity of its vision.” Lawson’s own statement about making the film “out of a need to reclaim space within horror as a female filmmaker” is exactly the kind of context that makes a short film win feel like it matters beyond the festival circuit. The Scariest Short went to Alex Jacobs’ Ghoststory, a lo-fi, experimental analog piece that apparently followed audiences home.

The Overlook also used its tenth anniversary to expand its programming footprint with the new Side Shows section, a strand for genre-adjacent films that feel right for the audience even when they don’t fit neatly into horror. The Audience Award there went to Kenji Tanigaki’s action film The Furious (Lionsgate), and the lineup also included Ben Wheatley’s Normal (Magnolia), starring Bob Odenkirk as a sheriff uncovering dark dealings in his town, and Jorma Taccone’s Over Your Dead Body (IFC), an action-comedy in which Jason Segel and Samara Weaving spend a romantic getaway plotting to kill each other. Side Shows is a smart move for a festival that’s always attracted a crowd for whom “horror adjacent” is as appealing as horror itself.

The festival’s Master of Horror Award went to Rick Baker, legendary makeup artist and seven-time Academy Award winner, who presented a 45th anniversary screening of An American Werewolf in London. If you need any additional context for why Baker receiving that award in that room makes sense, you probably aren’t reading this publication. The Crypt Keeper serving as Grand Marshall of Shudder’s Second Line Parade, with voice actor John Kassir alongside, is the kind of programming flex that makes Overlook feel distinct. You’re not getting that at any other genre festival in this country.

Ten years in, Overlook has earned its reputation as the place where genre cinema gets taken seriously by the people who actually love it. This edition made the case for why that matters.