Mentally Prepare

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.

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 (

When her mentally ill mother passes away, Annie (Toni Collette), her husband (Gabriel Byrne), son (Alex Wolff), and daughter (Milly Shapiro) all mourn her loss. The family turn to different means to handle their grief, including Annie and her daughter both flirting with the supernatural. They each begin to have disturbing, otherworldly experiences linked to the sinister secrets and emotional trauma that have been passed through the generations of their family.

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.

Joseph and his family live in the remote wilderness as fur trappers, but their tranquility is threatened when they think they are being hunted by the return of a rogue wolf, and Joseph leaves them behind to track it.

A refugee couple makes a harrowing escape from war-torn South Sudan, but then they struggle to adjust to their new life in an English town that has an evil lurking beneath the surface.

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.

A frustrated, angst-ridden teenage girl awakens something in the woods when she naively performs an occult ritual to evoke a witch to kill her mother.

Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor) are a young American couple with a relationship on the brink of falling apart. But after a family tragedy keeps them together, Christian invites a grieving Dani to join him and his friends on a trip to a once-in-a-lifetime midsummer festival in a remote Swedish village. What begins as a carefree summer holiday in the North European land of eternal sunlight takes a sinister turn when the insular villagers invite their guests to partake in festivities that render the pastoral paradise increasingly unnerving and viscerally disturbing.

On the trail of a missing girl, an ex-cop comes across a secretive group attempting to summon a terrifying supernatural entity.

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?

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.

After spending time in a mental institution, two devoted sisters return to the home of their father and cruel stepmother. Once there, in addition to dealing with their stepmother's obsessive, unbalanced ways, an interfering ghost also affects their recovery.

When elderly mother Edna inexplicably vanishes, her daughter Kay and granddaughter Sam rush to their family's decaying country home, finding clues of her increasing dementia scattered around the house in her absence. After Edna returns just as mysteriously as she disappeared, Kay's concern that her mother seems unwilling or unable to say where she's been clashes with Sam's unabashed enthusiasm to have her grandma back. As Edna's behavior turns increasingly volatile, both begin to sense that an insidious presence in the house might be taking control of her. With RELIC, first-time writer/director Natalie Erika James crafts an unforgettable new spin on the haunted-house movie.

A soon-to-be-stepmom is snowed in with her fiance's two children at a remote holiday village. Just as relations finally begin to thaw between the trio, strange and frightening events threaten to summon psychological demons from her strict religious childhood.

As the wavering cry of the foghorn fills the air, the taciturn former lumberjack, Ephraim Winslow, and the grizzled lighthouse keeper, Thomas Wake, set foot in a secluded and perpetually grey islet off the coast of late-19th-century New England. For the following four weeks of back-breaking work and unfavourable conditions, the tight-lipped men will have no one else for company except for each other, forced to endure irritating idiosyncrasies, bottled-up resentment, and burgeoning hatred. Then, amid bad omens, a furious and unending squall maroons the pale beacon's keepers in the already inhospitable volcanic rock, paving the way for a prolonged period of feral hunger; excruciating agony; manic isolation, and horrible booze-addled visions. Now, the eerie stranglehold of insanity tightens. Is there an escape from the wall-less prison of the mind?