Restless tentacles at the TOHorror Fantastic Film Fest
Published: 16/10/2025
A cura di A. Wilk ed E. Del Medico
It was supposed to be a simple, light-hearted chat, to discuss the 25th TOHorror Fantastic Film Fest (21-26 October 2025) and to announce the partnership between EXTRA sci-fi festival Verona and the long-running Turin event. It turned into something very interesting that would have required much more space, so much (bloody) meat served on a rusty tray by Matteo Pennacchia, the festival’s organising director. Talking about cinema, art, festivals, genre and enlightening digressions on the subject with Matteo was an honour and a pleasure. To him, our darkest thanks.
TOHorror was founded in 1999 with the “baptism” of an exceptional cinematic godfather, Dario Argento. How did the idea of organising a festival dedicated to the horror genre come about?
It should be noted that none of the original founders are part of the festival’s current team, so at most, one can ask how we came up with the idea of picking up and carrying on the torch. As an “heir,” I can say that TOHorror was born in 1999 as a showcase for Italian underground filmmakers.
The 1990s were a difficult decade of readjustment in the history of horror cinema: the underground and low-budget scenes offered market outsiders alternative approaches that sought to uproot dominant uniformity — regardless of, and often despite, the limited resources available, or even the “successful” outcome of the work itself.
Organising a festival dedicated to that homegrown horror which expressed itself in the shadows and in garages meant giving space to bold young filmmakers, to the demands of an audience eager for new perspectives, and to the ongoing need to challenge (if not dismantle) certain mainstream systems of thought and action.
Over time, TOHorror’s flesh has undergone numerous Cronenbergian mutations, as is only fitting; it is no longer an event tied solely to national production or even strictly to horror. Yet its nature and intentions remain the same and, to quote Negazione, “the spirit continues”: after 25 years, we still strive to be a stubbornly independent and provocative festival, with films as our ethical and critical epicentre.
Matteo Pennacchia, organising director of TOHorror Fantastic Film Fest
Did the city of Turin, home to the National Cinema Museum, lend its support from the start? Did it contribute to the growth of the festival?
The audiences in Turin, definitely. The underground soul of Turin — with its experimental, antagonistic, and always somewhat troublemaking spirit — as well. Turin in its institutional incarnations… that’s a complicated matter, as it always is when discussing institutional support for culture (and for independent culture — a double somersault).
On the one hand, we have never sought any “official” accreditation. Artistic independence and self-management are non-negotiable conditions for TOHorror; compromises, formalities, and bowing to authority are not for us. Yet not having sought — and continuing not to seek — such recognition does not contradict the idea that Turin fails to properly support the essential protagonists of its own cultural heritage, first and foremost the independent film festivals, which represent an invaluable asset for the region.
For us, it is increasingly difficult and frustrating to operate with minimal resources, without guarantees of continuity — especially when, paradoxically, attendance and interest keep growing with each edition. An intelligent city should protect and support not only the cultural entities over which it can exercise some form of control, but also all the free entities that prove themselves to be of value to the community. In this sense, Turin is not an intelligent city, despite being known as — and proudly presenting itself as — the city of cinema.
We wouldn’t want TOHorror to take place anywhere else in the world, but no — (a certain sphere of) Turin does not support us as it should.
In a nutshell, could you describe the TOHorror audience? Is it mainly comprised of enthusiasts, curious individuals, Turin residents…?
At the end of the last two editions of TOHorror, each of which attracted around 4,000 attendees, we conducted anonymous surveys to gather information about audience satisfaction and composition. The most represented age group turned out to be between 18 and 35 years old — those strange mythological beings mentioned in chronicles, also known as “young people.”
A little more than half of the audience comes from Turin or the Piedmont region, while in recent years participation from other parts of Italy has grown considerably. Different social groups, students and workers, dedicated fans of the genre and general film enthusiasts… Beyond a few clearly defined conclusions, the essence is that we don’t have one audience, but many that come together — and that doesn’t sound bad to me.
The heterogeneity with which we try to build the festival lineup — which may in turn attract an equally diverse audience — should not be mistaken for a lack of research or rigor in our programming work (it’s not trawling, so to speak), nor does it reflect any desire on our part to please every taste — something we frankly couldn’t care less about.
This cross-sectionality, in its own small way, demonstrates how horror and the fantastic are still, today, living and vital creatures — agile, restless, and capable of reaching anywhere with their tentacles.
In Italy, horror is often considered a niche genre. Do you share this view? Or do you think there is a real Italian horror film culture with its own loyal following?
Both things, in a dualistic way. We’re a country where horror has (or had?) also been a pop-cultural phenomenon, with its own tendencies (the gothic…), its totemic directors (no need to name them…), and its unexpected popular successes (Dylan Dog…). A widespread horror film culture has taken root and endures.
If we look at the numbers, it doesn’t matter whether it’s niche or mainstream (though I doubt horror is such a negligible commercial niche); what matters is that the genre shouldn’t be confined to a niche a priori. In other words, it would be desirable that, by 2025, horror was no longer discriminated against — not that everyone has to like it, but that it’s no longer automatically categorized as inferior or unworthy, except when it’s deemed arthouse, or worse, “not horror.” I’m afraid that still happens.
For example: as I’m answering this interview, Zach Cregger’s Weapons has just been released in theaters, and I’ve already come across at least four enthusiastic online reviews claiming that the film’s strength lies in the fact that, I quote, “it’s not just a horror movie, but a bold and well-crafted work,” or “it’s much more than a horror film,” or “it goes beyond horror.” You get the idea? It’s a tiny example, but it reveals the persistence of a more or less latent snobbery even within cinephile and critical circles (both amateur and professional) where such an attitude should be absurd. And yet.
The spread of the term elevated horror — one of the stupidest labels ever coined — doesn’t help; it only serves to ennoble a supposed elite, to impose hierarchies on a genre that has no interest whatsoever in hierarchies.
TOHorror presents itself as an “International Festival of Cinema and Culture of the Fantastic.” What exactly do you mean by “culture of the fantastic”?
I think it’s difficult to define it exactly, and I don’t see that as a negative. From the personal — and perhaps heretical — perspective we adopt at the festival, the culture of the fantastic isn’t bound to the supernatural element (or the alien/futuristic elements within sci-fi: after all, it has become common critical practice to classify dystopia no longer under the “S” of Speculative fiction but under the “R” of Realism).
In the abstract, the fantastic lies in the subversive unease or shock caused by elements of implausibility or the disruption of planned order — phenomena that sometimes appear even in reality, not only in the realm (and codes) of the supernatural. It’s a suggestion more than a fact. It’s reality undoing the conformist.
Therefore, as selectors, while we often question the relevance of the films we evaluate, if they possess certain connotations we do not hesitate to pair fantasy, sci-fi, and horror works (and how many horrors don’t involve the supernatural?) with black comedy, the grotesque, thrillers…
Does that mean everything goes? No — because, as always, it’s not only about the narrative content. Formal solutions, linguistic choices, the ways in which cinematic grammar is used, symbolic networks and signs, reference imaginaries — all of these matter enormously.
The culture of the fantastic is porous and permeable; it absorbs many other cultural currents and regenerates along countless trajectories that TOHorror has so far tried to intersect. Cinema — especially horror — remains our main focus, but off-screen we have explored comics, literature, music, sideshow, theater, contemporary art, video games… Once we had a pathologist on stage. And outside the screening room, on the street, a freak hammering nails into his nose.
Every year, the festival features a different poster created by a different artist. Do you suggest a specific theme to the creator, or is there a particular creative process behind its production? And for the 2025 edition?
It’s tradition for each edition of TOHorror to be centered around a topic that we try to explore through mini-retrospectives or themed events. The poster follows the focus of the moment, and aside from that thematic indication, we leave complete freedom of execution.
This year, the focus is very sci-fi: the thematic protagonist is time travel, explored through different interpretative angles. Loops, paradoxes, alternate histories, diverging timelines, existential questions… To celebrate the 25th edition — above all, a significant temporal milestone — it was the perfect subject. Reaching this point safely since 1999 has truly been an adventurous Wellsian journey through time.
This time, the poster is all in the family: it was created by Tony Kelvin, aka Pixatonic Design, our longtime graphic designer. His wormhole will take us straight to the opening night on October 21, 2025.
What has been your favourite moment so far in your long journey with TOHorror?
It’s not a single moment — in fact, it begins with a single moment that then shaped an entire edition: 2022. The first year free from pandemic remnants… We approached the preparations for that edition with deep uncertainties: how would the past two years affect audiences, social gatherings in general, and especially those connected to cinema? These were anxieties common to all festivals and exhibitors at the time (and, frankly, it still doesn’t feel like a completely resolved issue).
We had invited Dave McKean to Turin, asking him to be the guest of honor. We were convinced he would throw our email straight in the trash. When he replied immediately with a yes, it was as if many knots had untangled all at once. That first laconic response — “Would love to,” and nothing more — and then the entire 2022 edition, which went wonderfully, are on the podium of my favorite moments. Perhaps emotional moments even before professional ones, but at TOHorror, the two aspects always coexist, for better or worse.
And the worst?
I’d say the cancellation of the 2020 edition. The festival was on a strong comeback after the excellent responses to the previous two editions. We began preparations, then Covid hit… During the first lockdown, amid the collective nervous exhaustion, while the world of film festivals (big and small) around us legitimately decided to hold online editions at will, we made the kamikaze decision to organize our 20th edition entirely in person. In the theater. There was never any debate. We prepared everything. We invested everything we had — which wasn’t much.
The lockdown ended in late spring. Summer passed in semi-normality. By early autumn, the festival was ready. We announced the program. The infection curve began rising again in September. The government introduced a curfew a couple of weeks before the festival’s opening. We quickly adjusted screening times to comply with curfew limits. Everything still worked. We were ready.
Three days before the opening (three days!), the government ordered the closure of cinemas, cultural venues, and entertainment spaces. In those moments, at the heart of an already miserable situation, it really felt like everything was over — not just the 2020 edition, but the very existence of the festival, and perhaps even the notion of “festival” itself — or even “cinema” — which seemed so crucial to me and for which we dedicated ourselves with TOHorror, however modestly. A trauma.
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Is there a horror film from 2025 that stood out to you in particular? If so, which one and why?
In addition to the films we’ve programmed, looking at extra-festival titles that have found (or will find by the end of the year) distribution in Italy: The Ugly Stepsister by Emilie Blichfeldt (scheduled for the upcoming Trieste Science+Fiction Festival, ed.). Because it’s a thoroughly contemporary horror film, without the usual gimmicks and tricks to which modern horror often succumbs—or aspires to.
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And what about your horror cult classics? What makes them special to you?
Nothing exotic: From Beyond by Gordon, Evil Dead by Raimi, In the Mouth of Madness by Carpenter, Bad Taste by Jackson, and on alternating days, Brain Damage by Henenlotter. They’re special in the most straightforward way: they were the first I ever saw, they shocked me, then weaned and educated me in the genre, opening the doors to everything else. They were my primary scene (alongside secretly peeking at The X-Files from the hallway at six years old while my parents were watching).
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As you know, at our festival we also deal with the “cousin” genre: what are your thoughts on science fiction?
All the best, and I wouldn’t even call it a cousin. Horror, thriller, and science fiction are more than related—they’re lovers. It’s an orgy. They remain genres that, at their best, willingly or not, are most capable of subverting the rhetorics of the present, including the present of cinema and visual consum(er)ism. They disrupt habits, literalness, and acceptability.
The technological evolution (and cognitive involution…) we live with means that today science fiction has an immediate relationship with its own, and our, times. It inhabits them. While this exposes it to the risk of unconscious ideological complicity (see Bandersnatch and the latest Black Mirror), it also potentially makes it a privileged observatory, if not an “infiltrator.”
I also tend to agree with those who say that sci-fi has, for some time, stopped imagining the future. It’s telling that the genre tasked with insisting (also) on the future can no longer—or no longer wants to—do so, or that when it does, it rarely presents hypotheses and mostly amplifies modernity and its parameters. It highlights the weight of a present stamped by pessimism, if not the end of the world, certainly the end of alternatives.
We know how difficult it is to organize an independent film festival. What is the biggest challenge in running one like yours? And what makes all this effort worth it?
Setting aside concrete financial problems, the main challenge is perhaps as introspective as it is “epochal.” It lies in constantly measuring oneself—24/7—against the position that cinema (both as a market and as an art form) and film festivals occupy within the social and media landscape of our times. With all their weight, agency, and crises.
None of us are saving the world, and we know it, yet we still bear public responsibilities regarding the ideas and discussions we aim to test through the films we show and the way we choose to present them. The challenge is to never give those responsibilities a moment’s rest. This doesn’t mean adapting or “keeping up,” which is nonsense, but questioning ourselves every minute—with responsibility and full awareness—about where and how to situate ourselves in a hugely complicated landscape.
What makes this effort worth living? The fame and power that come with it, of course.
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Do you have any unrealised dreams or projects for TOHorror?
Each team member would give different answers, and each would be right. If I may, I’ll give a double answer. Structural: the dream is to provide stability and sustainability to the festival, to ensure we no longer fear that every edition could be the last. Project-based: bringing fantastic and horror cinema into schools (middle and high schools) with TOHorror would be wonderful. There is far too little debate and activity around visual education, and as far as I’m concerned, about the role that genre cinema could play in it.
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Can you give us any previews of this year’s program? What can we expect?
We’ve already mentioned the focus: the lineup includes a brief, non-exhaustive retrospective of six titles that will take us on a journey through time with them (above all: the “cult” Southland Tales by Richard Kelly, for me one of the most significant films of the 2000s).
Then there’s the Freakshow section — our bizarre, extreme, borderline section — quite abundant: a sign of our irredeemably bizarre, extreme, and borderline days?
The feature film competition will be, as every year, our attempt to map the season and extract what seems to stand out: Latino-futurism with a knife between the teeth, existentialist vampire melancholy, a sweaty sleazy thriller, a macabre-erotic rotoscope cartoon, and much more… even a disarming horror rom-com.
Out of competition, there are tributes to undying love (Lynch), post-everything Japanese anime (Hello Kitty meets William Gibson), documentaries of touching subversive vindication (Troma vs Cannes), political statements made through goofing around (Deathstalker by Steven Kostanski)…
And then, a flood of short films, informal talks with authors, writers, and essayists, punk concerts, DJ sets, a fair amount of sleep to catch up on, surely a few hiccups, and an overuse of ibuprofen. That’s what to expect.
 
