Batshit crazy

The year is 1905. Thomas Richardson travels to a remote island to rescue his sister after she's kidnapped by a mysterious religious cult demanding a ransom for her safe return. It soon becomes clear that the cult will regret the day it baited this man, as he digs deeper and deeper into the secrets and lies upon which the commune is built.

Metal music, paint, and family are the passions of struggling painter, Jesse, who lives a happy life with his wife, and daughter. Things look brighter when Jesse finds a huge old house, in rural Texas, selling at a very low price, due to its mysterious past. They move in and Jesse converts the barn into a studio. But soon, his work starts taking on a new, darker flavour - and things get even more ominous when the hulking, unbalanced son of the former owners appears on the doorstep. Jesse's family won't be safe until they find a way to quiet the Devil himself.

Sara's a video artist whose work primarily explores the intimacy of lonely men. One online advert intrigues her so much, she replies, thinking she may have found the subject for her next project. She drives to a secluded house in the forest, where a man claiming be the advert's poster greets her; and as he said in the posting, he claims to be a serial killer (

In a lonesome house in the countryside between woods and cornfields live nine-year-old twin brothers who are waiting for their mother in the heat of summer. When she comes home, bandaged after cosmetic surgery, nothing is like before. The children start to doubt that this woman is actually their mother. An existential struggle for identity and fundamental trust emerges.

Will and Eden were once a loving couple. After a tragedy took their son, Eden disappeared. Two years later, out of the blue, she returns with a new husband... and as a different person, eerily changed and eager to reunite with her ex and those she left behind. Over the course of a dinner party in the house that was once his, the haunted Will is gripped by mounting evidence that Eden and her new friends have a mysterious and terrifying agenda. But can we trust Will's hold on reality? Or will he be the unwitting catalyst of the doom he senses?

When a harmless game between a married couple in a remote retreat suddenly becomes a harrowing fight for survival, wife Jessie must confront long-buried demons within her own mind - and possibly lurking in the shadows of her seemingly empty house.

After suspecting that their police officer neighbor is a serial killer, a group of teenage friends spend their summer spying on him and gathering evidence, but as they get closer to discovering the truth, things get dangerous.

A deaf and mute writer who retreated into the woods to live a solitary life must fight for her life in silence when a masked killer appears at her window.

After returning to his childhood home, a disgraced children's puppeteer is forced to confront his wicked stepfather and the secrets that have tortured his entire life.

Two Catholic schoolgirls Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton) get left behind at their boarding school over winter break as the other girls leave, where it's rumored that the nuns are satanists. Meanwhile, a disturbed mental patient Joan (Emma Roberts), an escapee, is picked up by a middleage couple (James Remar and Lauren Holly) who drive her on a determined trip to the same school, where the girls must face the supernatural and demonic possession.

There, but for the grace of God, goes Maud, a reclusive young nurse whose impressionable demeanor causes her to pursue a pious path of Christian devotion after an obscure trauma. Now charged with the hospice care of Amanda, a retired dancer ravaged by cancer, Maud's fervent faith quickly inspires an obsessive conviction that she must save her ward's soul from eternal damnation - whatever the cost. Making her feature-film debut, writer/director Rose Glass cannily lures the audience into this disturbed psyche, steadily setting up her veritable diary of a country nurse for an unnerving and ultimately shocking trajectory. Morfydd Clark (also at the Festival in The Personal History of David Copperfield) portrays the sanctimonious Maud with an intense stoicism that belies a disquieting vulnerability, as Maud desperately vies for absolution and solidarity from her embittered patient (an enthralling Jennifer Ehle, also at the Festival in Beneath the Blue Suburban Skies). Glass tenderly captures this relationship with an empathetic gaze that first assumes an ethereal, dreamlike atmosphere - but it isn't long before Maud's dogmatic candor incites an irreconcilable friction that spirals her mind into a suffocating confluence of creeping doubt and paranoia. As Glass tightens the screws on her misguided martyr, well-placed nods are made to religious horror forerunners like William Friedkin's The Exorcist, further contributing to the film's increasingly dread-filled malaise. And when this insidious fever climatically breaks, the consequences are devastating and terrifying in equal measure.

Amidst a wild flat meadow encircled by an Edenic lush forest, a couple have cocooned themselves in a secluded mansion that was not so long ago burned to the ground, devotedly restored by the supportive wife. Within this safe environment, the once famous middle-aged poet husband is desirous of creating his magnum opus; however, he seems unable to break out of the persistent creative rut that haunts him. Then, unexpectedly, a knock at the door, the sudden arrival of a cryptic late-night visitor and his intrusive wife will stimulate the writer's stagnant imagination. Little by little, much to the perplexed wife's surprise, the more chaos he lets in their haven, the better for his punctured male ego. In the end, will this incremental mess blemish, irreparably, the couple's inviolable sanctuary?

Outwardly, Reed leads a typical yuppie life living in a stylish apartment with his wife Mona and their newborn daughter, it afforded by a white collar professional career. But Reed has a need not only to kill, but kill in a specific way, with an ice pick. Rather than his initial target, he instead chooses as his victim an English speaking prostitute. On the pretense of an out of town conference, he leaves home, and instead checks into an upscale hotel, goes through the motions of the murder to ensure that that part of it goes off without a hitch, and hires his target prostitute through a service, the intended victim named Jackie. What Reed does not anticipate is that Jackie has her own agenda for their time together, which he at times believes is on her knowledge and acceptance of her fate at his hands. Regardless, what ensues is a psychological cat and mouse game between the two, it never clear who is the mouse and who is the cat.

Stained by the brutal death of a young woman, the tranquil and vacant New England mansion of the prolific horror authoress, Iris Blum, has become her silent prison. To take care of the ageing writer who suffers from chronic dementia, the property's manager hires the gentle and soft-spoken live-in hospice nurse, Lily Saylor; however, this is far from an ordinary job. Little by little, Lily's imagination will run wild, as shadowy sightings of eerie female spectres blur the frail boundaries between reality and fantasy, fable and truth. Iris has talked about man's coexistence with the spectral realm in her novels that chill the bone to the marrow. Could her secluded white house at the end of the road be an aerial limbo caught in the middle of life and death?

Following her aunt's death, Colleen and her daughters inherit her house. However, during their first night in their new home, murderers enter the home, putting Colleen in a situation where she must fight to save her daughters' lives. When the girls suffer a terrible trauma during the night, their disparate personalities diverge even further. The younger daughter, Beth, is said to become a famous horror author with a perfect family and life in Los Angeles, while her sister, Vera, can't cope, and loses her mind faced to an unshakable sense of paranoia. Sixteen years later the daughters and mother reunite at the house where Colleen and Vera continue to reside, it is then that strange events begin to take place.

Sawyer Valentini is a troubled woman who moves away from home to escape a stalker. Sawyer finds she is still triggered by interactions with men as a result of her experiences. She makes an appointment with a counselor at Highland Creek Behavioral Center. At her appointment, she unknowingly signs a release voluntarily committing herself to a 24-hour stay. She calls the police but they do nothing when they see the signed release. After physical altercations with a patient and a staff member, Dr. Hawthorne says she is being kept for seven more days. Another patient, Nate Hoffman, gives Sawyer an introduction to the place. Highland Creek is running a scheme to milk health insurance claims for profit. They trick people into voluntarily committing themselves as long as the patients' insurance companies continue to pay; when insurance claims run out, the patient is "cured". One day, Sawyer sees David Strine, her stalker, working as an orderly under the assumed name George Shaw. She has an outburst and is restrained. Her outbursts result in the repeated use of restraints and sedation..

In Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei's paranoid horror thriller "Cam," an erotic webcam performer finds her followers stolen by a doppelganger who hijacks her channel, pushes the sexual envelope further, and otherwise seems determined to destroy her life. Call it identity theft of a possibly supernatural kind.

For 19-year-old Jay, Autumn should be about school, boys, and weekends out at the lake. But after a seemingly innocent sexual encounter, she finds herself plagued by strange visions and the inescapable sense that someone, something, is following her. Faced with this burden, Jay and her friends must find a way to escape the horrors that seem to be only a few steps behind.