Not quite midnight, and not so late that you’ll miss the last bus. But late enough for the programme to get a little bloodier, weirder and more experimental.

Some films just work better when you have already been at the cinema for a while, had too much coffee, lost track of what time it is and decided that yes, actually, one more film is probably a good idea.

So here are five films from the later end of this year’s programme. They are not really one neat genre section, which is partly the point. There is body horror, serial killers, cursed video games, livestream horror and, for reasons that become obvious fairly quickly, a skeleton delivering pizza.

Basically: the bloody, the gruesome, the experimental and the bit more chaotic end of the programme.

Blood Shine

28 October · 22:20 · Kino 1

A horror filmmaker goes to rural upstate New York because he wants some peace, some distance and presumably time to work.

Instead he meets Clara.

Clara is deeply religious, extremely intense and involved in a series of rituals that gradually become less spiritual retreat and more complete surrender of body and mind.

Blood Shine is one of those films that starts in one place and then keeps pushing further. There is folk horror in there, body horror, religious obsession, manipulation, intimacy, violence and a general feeling that things are absolutely not going to improve.

Directors Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks will attend the screening for a Q&A, so stay afterwards and ask them what exactly possessed them to make this.

Read more about Blood Shine →

Gummy

30 October · 22:30 · Kino 1

Mauro is a serial killer looking for his next victim.

At a roadside bar he meets Amaranta and assumes she will be an easy target.

This turns out to be a fairly serious miscalculation.

Gummy is nasty, violent and not especially interested in being polite about any of it. It takes the familiar predator/prey setup and keeps twisting it, with rubber man Javier Botet squeezed into the mix.

One for the people who occasionally complain that films at festivals are not horrible enough.

Read more about Gummy →

Game Over

31 October · 23:00 · Kino 1

The scariest film of this year? The poor festival director had to fast-forward.

After her sister dies in violent and mysterious circumstances, Rebeca starts looking into the game she had been playing and discovers an urban legend involving a bootleg cartridge and a creature called Goggi.

The sensible thing would probably be to stop investigating immediately.

She does not.

Game Over is very much in love with old-school creature horror: practical effects, prosthetics, animatronics, blood, jump scares and a monster that has no intention of staying inside the screen.

A cursed video game on Halloween night. Press play at your own risk.

Read more about Game Over →

Killing Time

1 November · 22:30 · Kino 2

A horror livestream channel needs a comeback after a previous broadcast ended very badly.

Their solution is to go to an abandoned psychiatric hospital and livestream from there.

Again: sensible decisions are not really the theme here.

Once inside, rival streamers appear, tensions rise and the distinction between performance, content and actual violence starts getting increasingly difficult to maintain.

Killing Time takes the machinery of a slasher film and drops it into livestream culture, where everything is content, attention is currency and even something genuinely terrible happening might just be good for the numbers.

Read more about Killing Time →

Big City Pizza

2 November · 22:30 · Kino 2

And then there is Big City Pizza.

Boney is a skeleton who delivers pizza.

That is already a reasonably good starting point.

The entire film is seen through his eyes as he makes his way across a city preparing for the Omniball Championship, meeting increasingly peculiar customers and getting dragged into situations that make an ordinary pizza delivery shift feel like a distant memory.

The film was created in Blender and animated as one continuous take, which is both technically ridiculous and very fun to watch once you realise what it is doing.

It is less bloody than some of the other films here, but possibly the hardest one to explain afterwards.

Read more about Big City Pizza →

So no, these screenings do not technically happen at midnight.

But they are late enough.

Come for one. Stay for another. Just keep an eye on the last bus.