GASP! Horror Film Festival 2025 at Cultplex
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
GASP! Horror Film Festival has been building steam for a couple of years now and the festival returns for 2025 with another packed three-day event dedicated to celebrating diversity in genre cinema. The festival is back at Manchester’s Cultplex with three days worth of horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and thriller films from people of colour, women, people with disabilities, or members of the LGBTQ+ community.
This third edition is scheduled to run from 27 – 29 June and features nine features and over 50 short films for audiences to dig their fangs into. From a late night double bill of outré splatter films — including the ominously titled Girls Just Wanna Have Kill — to award winning Estonian horror-comedy Chainsaws were Singing, there’s films on show that you won’t see anywhere else.
Other brand new feature titles include Aurélia Mengin’s Scarlet Blue, a slice of queer art house cinema that explores issues of mental health through a tale of mysticism and hypnosis. The sinister In Our Blood promises a different take on found footage horror as a documentary project takes a turn when one of the subject goes missing. While The House on the Lake promises silent horror as a team of ghost hunters fight to cleanse a remote cabin of its demons.
As mentioned, there are also plenty of shorts on the slate, and the festival has showcases dedicated to World Cinema, LGBTQIA+, and Women in Horror, each packed with new talent. There are opportunities to look back too, as GASP! presents rarely screened 1995 black anthology classic, Tales from the Hood and the restoration premiere of Kaizô Hayashi’s 1994 The Most Terrible Time in My Life, which follows a private detective who becomes embroiled in a gang war in Yokohama.
Plus, there’s the now annual Mystery Queer Classic to look forward to in the late night Saturday slot — start guessing now.
