If your idea of an autumn getaway involves the lights going down and something terrible happening on screen, Edmonton has you covered. Northwest Fearfest, the city's annual horror and genre film festival, returns to Metro Cinema from Wednesday, October 14 to Sunday, October 18, 2026, with five days of new releases, retro favourites, restored classics and short films.
The 2026 lineup leans into premieres and sneak peeks. Among the new titles is The Last Temptation of Bucky, directed by Jenn Wexler and featuring Neil Patrick Harris, which follows a woman who goes undercover in Poland to infiltrate a family running an inn at the Wolf's Lair, one of Hitler's WWII bunkers, after learning of a plot to spark a Fourth Reich. Then there's Unholy Night, a Christmas-set horror in which a family's festive dinner is crashed by a reanimated grandmother with murder on her mind. Fans of action-horror hybrids get God Skin, a Street Fighter-style sci-fi thriller about a delivery rider who enters a brutal underground arena where experimental tattoos grant extraordinary powers, all to save his dying mother.
New films are only part of the programme. The festival also schedules restorations and anniversary screenings, giving genre fans a rare chance to see older horror on a proper big screen rather than a laptop. The full slate of films is listed on the festival's website.
Tickets come in three flavours. All-access passes are on sale now for $129 plus fees and taxes, covering every film in the festival plus opening and closing night screenings, special events and classes. If you'd rather pick and choose, four-pack passes (four tickets to films of your choice) and individual tickets haven't gone on sale yet, with prices still to be announced. Select individual tickets are expected to go live on Wednesday, September 23.
Metro Cinema sits in the historic Garneau Theatre at 8712 109th Street NW, a single-screen vintage venue that suits a horror festival nicely — old buildings, dark rooms, that sort of atmosphere. Screenings run at varying times across the five days.
For travellers, this is a good excuse to pair a city break with something niche. Edmonton in mid-October is firmly into autumn, so you can stack the festival against crisp river-valley walks, the city's coffee shops and its growing food scene during the day, then settle in for back-to-back scares at night. Horror fans travelling from outside Alberta could reasonably plan a long weekend around the Thursday-to-Sunday stretch of the programme and still catch a solid chunk of the lineup.
If you're tempted, the move is straightforward: grab the all-access pass now if you want everything, or set a reminder for late September if you'd prefer to cherry-pick individual screenings. Full programme and ticketing details are on the festival's website and social channels.
