Unspooling from 8-18 October, the Sitges – International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia will once again make waves with its wide selection of genre films, starting with movies from today and extending back in time to encompass classics, retrospectives and restorations. The festival will also screen documentaries, family-friendly works and special midnight showings. Sitges will once again play host to the ceremony for the Méliès d’Argent Awards for Best European Production as part of its membership of the Méliès International Festival Federation.

The Official Fantastic Competition, the main competitive strand of the festival with 36 works, boasts a collection of European co-productions. The section will open with the world premiere of Carlota Pereda’s survival-thriller Found Alive, starring US actress Chloë Grace Moretz and English thesp Rupert Friend. The Spanish filmmaker previously won the Goya Award for Best Fiction Short Film in 2019 for Piggy and collected the Méliès d’Or at Sitges for the short’s 2022 feature-length adaptation, Piggy. Films from past festivals that will play in this section include Paolo Strippoli’s The Spiral (Venice competition) and Kohei Kadowaki’s We Are Aliens (Cannes Directors’ Fortnight).

A variety of other movies will have their world premieres in the Official Fantastic Competition. Pavle Vuckovic’s Frost follows an introverted detective investigating the disappearance of a young girl in rural Serbia, only to learn that the villagers are hiding something about a fantastical creature from folklore. With a similar premise on paper to the Korean horror film R-Point (2004), Clàudia Serra and Paula Serra’s 11 follows a group cut off from civilisation, who suddenly discover that an extra person has joined them. Víctor Moreno will make his feature-length fiction debut with the existentialist science-fiction flick El exterior (see the news), set in a simulation for a mission to Mars. Daniel Romero’s The Daughters follows a young woman who is kidnapped, finding herself among other girls held captive and made to act like their captors’ daughters.

The festival’s Òrbita section, dedicated to 17 films with a genre style verging on the edges of the fantastic, features several well-known works from recent events. Eugene Kotlyarenko’s Toronto-premiered Vintage Violence, Sarah Arnold’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight-premiered Too Many Beasts and Alicia Scherson’s Tribeca-premiered Summer War will all vie for the section’s prizes.

Sitges’ section for experimental and boundary-pushing films, New Visions, will screen 28 works, including Dara Van Dusen’s A Prayer for the Dying, Natalka Vorozhbyt’s Demons, Pascal Schuh’s Interior and Rubaiyat Hossain’s The Difficult Bride. Animated features, including Manu Gomez’s Gregor and Quentin Dupieux’s Vertiginous, will also compete.

Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick will both receive the festival’s Grand Honorary Prize and present their new film, Family Movie, a horror-comedy created with the couple’s children, Sosie and Travis. Sir Peter Jackson will also receive the same award while presenting the new 4K restoration of his 1992 zombie comedy Braindead. The Time Machine Award will go to contemporary horror master Robert Eggers and the Méliès Career Award to Chilean-Spanish filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar.