As a lifelong fan of horror, I’d been longing to attend the Sitges Film Festival for a few years, but  for one reason or another I never had the chance. At last, with my best friend in tow, this year I jumped at the opportunity to experience the 59^th edition of the festival and secured seats for five screenings. While the festival started on October 8 and ended on October 18, I spent the long weekend of October 9-12 there, coinciding with Spanish regional and national festivities.

Sitges itself is a quaint coastal town with peaceful white streets that, in line with the film festival, were decorated with skeletons or monsters. Main streets were crowded with both locals and foreigners, and posters along the street announced the festival. This year, the main focus was the celebration of the 50^th anniversary of Carrie, alongside the recent rise of religious horror. A festive atmosphere hung over these streets, and T-shirts reflected a love of horror and fantasy cinema.

My friend and I stayed in a  hotel close to the three main venues premiering movies: Auditori Melià, Casino Prado Suburense, and L’Escorxador. Melià is the largest venue, L’Escorxador the smallest—it’s a former slaughterhouse, which feels appropriate for the festival. These venues are only a 10-minute walk away from each other, and you can enjoy nice views of the beach and sea on your way to Auditori Melià, and stop at stands selling merchandise, meeting points for fans, or just have a drink. There’s a street food area on a hill where food trucks sell expensive—albeit somewhat healthy—fast food, both salty and sweet.

Having familiarized ourselves with the area, we went to our first movie at Auditori Melià at 11pm: Joshua Giuliano’s River, starring Jany Levy and Jessica Rothe. Naturally, such iconic names and an intriguing premise—three siblings grieving over their dad’s death are stalked by a faceless killer on a river—had us hyped up in advance. Unfortunately, this first film was the greatest disappointment of our festival experience, but at least it made us hopeful that the next four movies would be an improvement! The problem lies not in the acting, which is great, as one would expect from the cast, but in the many plot holes and unexplored links. Scenes honoring previous classics can be easily detected, but River struggles to get its own story right in this mix of references, leaving viewers with many questions as to what the movie was about. It felt like it was trying to communicate something about trauma and the passing down of harmful ideas in families, but it was all diluted with predictable twists and illogical decisions. Its opening scene, however, is suggestively creepy and, for a slasher movie, innovative in its use of sound and voice. Sadly, the movie falls apart as it develops, leaving that excellent initial scene as an unconnected anecdotal moment.

After such an utter disappointment, we had our hopes up for our next movie: the Finnish horror comedy Punaista Lunta (translated as Red Snow), written and directed by Ilja Rautsi (who also has a writing credit in Hanna Bergholm’s latest, Nightborn). We believed a vampiric Santa Claus would cheer us up after the River letdown, and we were right: Red Snow was a romp. An teenage emo girl fantasizes about meeting Twilight heartthrob Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and being turned into a vampire to gain a sense of freedom—including freedom from her family’s boring annual Christmas Eve dinner. This year, however, dinner turns out to be more exciting, thanks to the intrusion of a middle-aged vampire-Santa and an armed man looking for revenge. All the funny, gory craziness one would expect from such scenario ensues, but the movie goes beyond that by playing with viewers’ cultural expectations and questioning patriarchal structures through witty dialogue, without losing any of its power. As the director himself said before the movie—and I’m paraphrasing here— if you like Christmas, you will love this movie. But if you hate Christmas, you will really love this movie.

We had a lot of free time until our next movie at 9pm, so we decided to go to the “zombie walk.” We had seen many people on impressive zombie makeup and costumes down the streets all day long, but time to parade around the town came at 7:30pm. Sir Peter Jackson himself inaugurated the event, although we never saw him because the streets were too narrow and crowded. The parade was a bit of a mess, with zombies mixing with ordinary people who were trying to move around the streets, so that you never knew where the parade started and who was part of it. Give how disorganized it all felt—and some attendees audibly complained—we decided to leave for dinner.

Then came our next film, Gregg Bishop’s The Heretiks. The venue was Casino Prado Suburense this time, which was nice; we had center seats for a change, at last. Bishop himself talked a bit about the movie and introduced some of its participants, including actress Kimberly Epstein—“not related,” joked Bishop. The movie itself was fun and straightforward, dealing with two adolescent sisters, Mabel (Ava Mae Seidensticker) and Ada (Josie Juliette Wert) and their inevitable disagreements on a Halloween night, paralleled with a quarrel between the “sisters” of a coven. One of them (Neve, palyed by Tess Williams) worships the goddess Null and wants to speed up her prophesied apocalypse, while the other one (Cai, interpreted by the abovementioned Kimberly Epstein) refuses to fulfill the prophecy and longs to embrace life. Cool magical fights follow, since the coven needs to sacrifice the young Mabel as an offering to Null in order to begin apocalypse, and Ada and Cai oppose this plan. Fantastic special effects, a fast-paced plot, and some bold narrative choices—which I will omit so viewers may be surprised themselves—made this film quite enjoyable, if maybe a bit conventional and predictable in general (you know, the old good vs. evil trope).

After dinner, our next film, practically the only one on October 11 at the ungodly hour of 12:45am, was the surreal Taiwanese animation Huanyíng lái dào duo lì zhi jia (translated as Welcome to Dolly’s House), directed by Rady Fu, Tree Muta, and Seven Ych. One of the first animated features from Taiwan, the movie deals with a YouTuber named Maria struggling to regain fame after a failed stunt, whose boyfriend is secretly cheating on her. To get public attention, she starts looking into a girl’s disappearance, and approaches famed dollmaker Dolly in search for clues. Maria and her boyfriend end up working for Dolly, and exploring her psychedelic mansion leads to surprising discoveries. Combining 2D animation with rotoscoping, the movie was visually rich, although the character’s movements may feel clunky for viewers unused to the technique. The first hour felt somewhat slow—it may have been exacerbated by the film premiering so late at night—building up tension while revealing the characters’ mental states. The preoccupation with the psychological effects of fame is reminiscent of Satoshi Kon’s classic Perfect Blue; this movie, however, is also concerned with the ideas of companionship and loneliness, and its third act clarifies everything about the characters and their relationships to one another, accelerating the pace significantly thanks to the inclusion of some surprising action scenes. Overall, Welcome to Dolly’s House was a beautifully strange movie that has hopefully paved the way for new ways of animation in Taiwan. Some of the team behind the movie was there, genuinely happy to present their work and handing out promotional lenticular cards at the end.

The rest of that Sunday was relaxed. In the afternoon, I visited the Miramar Building, which hosted interesting exhibition on the figure of the evil child throughout the history of horror film. This theme was chosen because 2026 also marks the 50^th anniversary of the Spanish film ¿Quién Puede Matar a Un Niño? (Who Can Kill a Child?), directed by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, whose work has always intrigued me but I have yet to explore. ¿Quién Puede Matar a Un Niño? predates the publication of Stephen King’s classic story “Children of the Corn” (1977) and has a strikingly similar plot: a couple of English tourists on their postponed honeymoon travel to a coastal Spanish town only to find that its only inhabitants are children, who follow a dark, mysterious force and rebel against adults. I can’t say how similar exactly this story is to King’s work, but the parallels are compelling.

Having reviewed the history of evil infants in film and had lunch, my friend and I decided to give the Brigadoon section of the festival—a free selection of documentaries, movies, and shorts— a shot. With a capacity of 80 viewers (10 of the seats were reserved for accredited viewers, however), this section usually takes place in Sala Llevant, a conference room inside the Melià Hotel. My friend and I caught the second screening of a series of independent shorts running for a Paul Naschy award: The Orange Circle by Mike Robinson, Feed the Dar by Rob Himebaugh, The Last Snow by Rodolphe Bouquet-Populus, and Breathwork by Erik Westerström. They were enjoyable, although The Orange Circle felt a bit repetitive. As a yoga practitioner, I was partial to Breathwork, which shows a yoga class gone wrong due to dark energies flowing in the air. The remaining two stories were set in snowy mountains: Feed the Dark deals with dangerous zombie transformations on a snow shelter and The Last Snow, the longest of the lot, had a plot that initially reminded me of Adam Green’s 2010 horror film Frozen, since it involved two skiers stranded on a chairlift. Thankfully it took a different, more supernatural direction.

Last but not least: on October 12, my friend and I went to the Spanish premiere of Anna Biller’s The Face of Horror. Having thoroughly enjoyed the director’s The Love Witch (2016), I was particularly stoked about this one. Biller herself went on stage and briefly explained some aspects of her new movie: it is a tribute to the Technicolor movies of the 1950s; it is based on a famous kabuki play called Yotsuya Kaidan (1825), but set in medieval England instead of Japan; it shows that misogyny and patriarchy have been around for ages (and, I would add, class and religion also play a big part in the film). The two hours that followed were possibly the most fun I had at Sitges.

The story concerns two beautiful peasant sisters (Eleanor and Beatrice, interpreted by Kristine Froseth and Ellie Bamber) and their fateful marriage to two handsome yet roguish knights (Edward and Richard, portrayed by Jonah Hauer-King and Leo Suter), who killed their father and who regard women as little more than objects. Greed, betrayal, and secrets eventually result in ghostly revenge. In line with Biller’s previous work, the movie is visually luscious and colorful, performances are theatrical and often over-the-top (triggering laughter among viewers), and the narrative incorporates intelligent dialogue and songs that engage in referential humor. While the movie is indeed set in medieval England, Biller uniquely treats current themes and concerns that resonate with modern audiences (perhaps most notably the power of beauty) without feeling unnatural given the historical setting. She adds another vibrant hit to her filmography.

Thus concluded my Sitges adventure, although at the time of writing the festival is ongoing. It was a fun jaunt and I look forward to experiencing more of it in the future, hopefully participating in other events. Likewise, I look forward to watching the movies that I missed and that were on my must-watch list, many of which looked incredibly bizarre. Hopefully they’ll soon be available on streaming services or cinemas. The festival program can be found here.