Mexico’s premier horror festival is bowing to the lord of the underworld this year. Mórbido Film Fest returns for its 19th edition from October 28 to November 8, taking over 14 venues across Mexico City and the state of Morelos with an Official Selection of 40 features from 20 countries, plus 81 shorts chosen from 344 open-call submissions. As always, the festival lands squarely on Day of the Dead – and this time it’s leaning all the way into the season’s darkest mythology.
The eerie official poster, painted by Mexico City artist Marcos Castro, depicts Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec god of death who rules Mictlán, the underworld of Mexica and Nahua belief. The Aztec deity is a central figure in Mauricio Chernovetzky‘s Sacrificios, a haunting tale of a grief-stricken father who goes out to sea after his son’s death, only to find the boy alive on a remote island – and possessed of an insatiable hunger. The film will have its national premiere at the Museo Nacional de Antropología, one of several new venues this year.
The festival opens at the Cineteca Chapultepec with Adrián García Bogliano‘s Hablando con extraños (Talking to a Stranger), in which a mother who lost her son in a fire is stalked by a demon wearing the boy’s face. It closes on Sunday, November 8 at Cine Tonalá with two back-to-back screenings of Mario Dávila‘s Grandes Hits, a stylized, violent crossroads story of a retired hitman, a lycanthropic hermit and a desperate gigolo, with cast and crew in attendance.
Between those bookends, the marquee draws are a blasphemous one-two punch: Mórbido Classics presents the uncut 4K restoration of Ken Russell‘s notorious 1971 shocker The Devils, fresh off its world premiere at Cannes earlier this year, while the Global Section hosts the Mexican premiere of Takashi Miike‘s Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo.
Homegrown horror gets a big showcase, with 11 Mexican titles in the Official Selection. Highlights include Andrés Beltrán‘s El Diablo Sabe tu nombre, about documentarians investigating a deadly hospice fire and the volunteer believed to have died in it; Jack Zagha and Yossy Zagha‘s sewer-creature horror comedy Quince (Fifteen); and works-in-progress screenings of El Infinito and Roto. The restored 1983 animated sci-fi adventure Roy del Espacio also returns to the big screen.
Four of this year’s Sitges winners are on the slate: Joko Anwar‘s blood-soaked prison chiller Ghost in the Cell, Javi Prada‘s predator-turned-prey thriller Gummy, Cristian Ponce‘s late-night-broadcast haunting Familia teme enfrentar una nueva noche de terror, and Mike Mendez‘s documentary Dernsie: The Amazing Life of Bruce Dern. Other standouts include Zachary Wigon‘s Gothic governess nightmare Victorian Psycho, Ulrike Ottinger‘s The Blood Countess, Quarxx‘s plague horror The Ones Who Grieve, and Óscar Martín‘s convent vampire tale Upiro. On the documentary front, Zé do Caixão traces José Mojica Marins‘ five-decade relationship with Sitges, and Guía Paranormal de la Costa Brava follows author Mariana Enríquez on a ghost-hunting tour of the Spanish coast.
Special events include a screening of Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s Das Experiment for its 25th anniversary with the Goethe Institut Mexiko; Alex Kahuam‘s one-take thriller Failure! with a director’s conversation at Universidad Iberoamericana; and Silent Monsters, a Cinema Recomposed program from Tim League, Golden Hornet and the American Genre Film Archive. For the latter, seven composers aged 17 to 24 wrote new scores for silent horror shorts including Frankenstein (1910) and Häxan (1922), mentored by Mark Orton, David Wingo, Brian Reitzell and Nicoletta Nomicou. It screens November 8 at Cinépolis Diana.
In a first for the festival, a jury of four social media creators will pick a winning short from both the Global and Latin American sections. Meanwhile, outside the capital, Mórbido partners with Morelos’ Festival Miquixtli for screenings at Cuernavaca’s Jardín Borda and the Museo Morelense de Arte Contemporáneo Juan Soriano, plus travelling shows via the Carreta Cine Móvil from October 29 to November 1. Younger fiends get their own storytelling and screenings at Casa del Lago UNAM on November 7 and 8.
For schedules and tickets, follow @morbidofest on Instagram and X.
