Grimmfest 2025 at Odeon Great Northern

Grimmfest is a perennial highlight of Manchester’s cinematic calendar and an early Halloween treat. Returning to the Odeon Great Northern this October with four fear-filled days of scary movies, the 2025 edition of Manchester’s foremost genre film festival is promising twenty-one brand new features and more World and International premieres than ever before.

This year’s festival gets off to a strong start with the world premiere of festival directors Simeon Halligan and Rachel Richardson-Jones’ own brand new ‘Made in Manchester’ thriller Past Life, starring Jeremy Piven and Pixie Lott in a tale of repressed memory, regression therapy and unsolved 80s murders. While there is additional star wattage courtesy of Slumdog Millionaire‘s Dev Patel in Bryn Chainey’s elegant, retro-styled folk horror Rabbit Trap.

There are further throwback genre thrills courtesy of Lily’s Ritual, a tale of young witches and deadly rituals that lovingly harks back to the horror cinema of the ’80s and ’90s. Dawid Torrone’s Dead By Dawn places a group of actors as sacrificial victims in a homage to classic Italian giallo, while Paul Etheredge updates the “demon child” film as a well-meaning, middle-class white couple come to regret adopting a traumatised black child in The Other.

There are further throwback genre thrills courtesy of Lily’s Ritual, a tale of young witches and deadly rituals that lovingly harks back to the horror cinema of the ’80s and ’90s

Audiences can expect more slick satire in Abel Ferry’s Squealers, about a group of animal rights activists who find themselves hunted by murderous slaughterhouse workers. Parasitic, mind-controlling worms utilise the structures of patriarchal, fundamentalist religion in Sergio Pinheiro’s savage look at contemporary America, Wormtown. The corporate world is under attack in Jake Myers’ splattery satire Kombucha, a smug computer hacker learns his lesson in revenge thiller Syphon, and entertainment industry misogyny is the target of Pierre Tsigaridis’ Frankie, Maniac Woman.

More lighthearted thrills arrive with Emillio Portes’ pitch-black supernatural comedy Don’t Leave the Kids Alone and Daniel M Caneiro’s Deviant — a dark comedy about a Tinder user catfished into the worst Christmas of his life. There’s isn’t enough space here to do justice to Grimmfest’s entire programme, so follow the link to discover the full line-up. But it is worth pointing out Remington Smith’s gritty, neo-realist Landlord — which pits a black bounty hunter against a vampire — and Jordana Stott’s elegiac post-apocalyptic Western, Forgive Us All as further titles that catch the eye.