The 59th International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia had a thesis, whether it intended one or not: the body that creates life is also the body most available to horror. Parturition, postpartum depression, the monstrous infant, the pact-making mother — these weren't scattered coincidences across a busy programme, they were a coherent obsession. The festival's evil-kiddy exhibition at the Miramar Cultural Centre, marking the 50th anniversary of Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's Who Can Kill a Child?, provided the organizing frame, tracing the subgenre from The Bad Seed (1956) through Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist to the present day. The competition winners confirmed the trend. Marion Le Coroller's Sanguine — best feature — follows a medical intern whose disfiguring skin condition places it squarely in the gloopy French body-horror lineage of Julia Ducournau's Raw and Coralie Fargeat's The Substance. Finnish director Hanna Bergholm's Nightborn puts Rupert Grint in the hapless-husband role as folk-horror seeps into his depressed wife's bond with their newborn. Turkish director Alphan Eşeli's Mutter: The Diary of a Mother opens with a father abandoning his Eraserhead-adjacent infant in the woods, anchored by a strong central performance from Hazar Ergüçlü that keeps the social and economic reality of single parenthood in focus even when the imagery goes full Lynch. The best actress award went to Jasmine Trinca in Paolo Strippoli's The Spiral, a diabolical-pact film whose real prize is Valeria Bruni Tedeschi as a soigné Mephistopheles in a trenchcoat — exactly as entertaining as that sounds. Benoît Magimel took best actor for Léa Mysius's The Birthday Party, a home invasion thriller built around maternal menace in which Magimel oozes in a series of sleazy white suits. Casey Affleck's Company offered a structural surprise: a Russian-doll narrative that begins as frontier western and morphs into supernatural thriller, with a female protagonist at its centre. The festival's margins held plenty worth tracking. Javier Ruiz Caldera's 5 More Minutes found genuine new territory in the time-loop subgenre, its tone sliding from light into Timecrimes-dark in a way that earns the genre reference rather than just invoking it. Takashi Shimizu returned to J-horror form with The Mouths, a cursed-tree story that grows progressively more disorienting — a reminder of what made The Grudge land. Sabu's Arrested Memory, a Taiwanese-Japanese co-production, played its Memento-style amnesiac cop premise for deadpan comedy through kidnapping, drug deals, and car chases. The late Sam Neill provided the voice of a magpie in Dario Russo's The Fox, an Australian folk yarn with Olivia Colman voicing a wily talking fox and Jai Courtney in the cast — bawdy, unabashedly full-frontal, and reportedly a lot of fun for those who made it to the screening. The 4K restoration of Jimmy Wang Yu's 1976 Master of the Flying Guillotine — with its krautrock soundtrack — was the scheduling casualty most worth mourning. But the clear standout of the festival, and the one with immediate practical relevance for UK audiences, was Joko Anwar's Ghost in the Cell. It takes the full prison-film toolkit — riots, brutal guards, shivs, sexual threat — and layers in a supernatural curse, arty splatter, interpretative dance, a pointed commentary on Indonesian corruption, and, most unexpectedly, genuine warmth. That combination shouldn't cohere, but it does. It's available on UK digital platforms from 26 October. A third of the competition titles were directed by women, which at a genre festival in 2025 is still worth noting — not as a quota achievement but as a curatorial signal that horror's most interesting formal experiments right now are coming disproportionately from directors who approach the genre's primal materials (birth, body, violation, possession) from inside the experience rather than at clinical remove. The programme bore that out.
