MotelX, Portugal's sole festival dedicated exclusively to horror cinema, is celebrating its 20th edition by expanding its reach and ambition. Running from 3 to 13 September 2026, the festival has grown to span 11 days for the first time, presenting more than 170 films from over 40 countries across two venues including the newly added Cinemateca Portuguesa alongside Cinema São Jorge. The festival's directors say their ultimate goal remains finding truly nerve-shredding cinema that can still unsettle audiences in an era when horror has become mainstream entertainment.
The midnight movie slot once served as a reliable barometer of horror's cultural vitality. Yet that tradition appears to be fading. Pedro Souto, co-director of MotelX, recalls that when the festival began as a film club in 2003, their first cinema screening—Takashi Miike's Ichi the Killer—drew a packed house. Today, midnight showings struggle to fill seats. During a recent screening of the gore-soaked Indonesian kung fu film Ikatan Darah, the theatre was only half full, with scattered chuckles the only sign that the old midnight spirit persists.
Horror, however, has simply migrated into daylight hours. The genre's explosion across the 2010s and 2020s, coupled with blockbuster box office success, has allowed MotelX to flourish. The festival's visual identity—a howling figure in inflatable PVC and the signature X logo—adorns billboards throughout Lisbon. At the opening ceremony, a towering birthday cake featuring the same figure emerging from a lake of gelatine "blood" was demolished by attendees within 20 minutes. Most screenings draw substantial crowds, predominantly composed of festival-goers dressed in what might be described as "goth Decathlon" style: dark singlets, shorts, and visible tattoos.
How did Portugal's horror cinema tradition develop?
Portugal had virtually no domestic horror cinema tradition until recent decades, a legacy of state suppression. MotelX emerged from a private film club that catered to the country's growing appetite for dark cinema in the 1990s. João Monteiro, the festival's co-director, explains that suburban life offered limited entertainment options beyond cinema and video rental shops, where members spent countless hours discovering horror films like the seventh instalment of Friday the 13th. "It was our initiation, like when kids in tribes become adults," Monteiro reflects.
The Estado Novo regime had actively discouraged horror production, restricting filmmakers to comedies or nationalist narratives centred on Lisbon. Research by the festival's founders identified only approximately 25 films between 1910 and 2007 that could be classified as horror—a stark contrast to neighbouring Spain, which experienced a mini-boom during the late Franco years. Foreign imports, including Hammer films and occasional giallo productions, arrived heavily censored.
What is MotelX doing to build Portugal's horror scene?
The festival is actively working to fill the historical void through multiple initiatives. An award for the best unproduced screenplay encourages new Portuguese voices, while programming emphasises domestic work, though most remains in short-film format. Simultaneously, MotelX functions as a conduit for horror cinema from around the world, irrigating the local scene with international perspectives and techniques.
This year's programme includes several standout selections. Mohammad Reza Ardalan's Poultry Farm, an ultra-grim Iranian film, exemplifies the festival's curatorial vision. Souto and Monteiro had no prior knowledge of the work when a sales agent they had previously collaborated with offered it for screening. The film emerges as a richly characterised slow-burner following a young Iraqi-Kurd recruit working in a chicken farm's sheds, where secrets embed themselves as stubbornly as rocks pried from the earth. Rooted in Iranian social realism, it navigates the boundaries between noir and horror with considerable skill, scrutinising a quasi-feudal society and the immigrants subjected to its structures.
What films are defining this year's festival?
The opening selection, Drag, functions as a horror-comedy antidote to conventional zombie narratives. Starring Lizzy Caplan as an inept burglar who injures her back while stealing "rich people's shampoo" and must be painstakingly extracted from a crime scene, the film employs excruciatingly painful obstacles that evoke Wile E. Coyote cartoons—until the sinister owner, portrayed by John Stamos as an abstract-expressionist artist, arrives to deliver musings on the male gaze.
Corrin Evans's Corpus, set in the 1990s, centres on a grungy photographer and small-town dealer invited to a party at an upstate New York mansion by his it-boy model ex-boyfriend. Evans, who previously worked as an intimacy coordinator for MaXXXine, demonstrates clear fascination with the decade's club scene through extended hangout sequences. The film transcends self-conscious hipsterdom and discovers natural rhythm during its carnal second half, when sexual onlookers and objects merge to suggest something intriguing about desire's nature.
The 1968 Estonian witch-panic classic Libahunt (Werewolf) presented a challenge: no English-language subtitles were available at the Cinemateca Portuguesa screening. Yet the cinematography's incantatory flair communicated effectively, and the experience yielded an unexpected benefit—learning the Portuguese word for werewolf, lobisomem, should one find oneself in Lisbon during a full moon.
Pagan themes, though increasingly familiar in contemporary horror, receive fresh treatment in the Basque-language portmanteau Gaua (Night), a lush production with rich design that indulges occultist audiences with a full-on flying pandemonium finale. The film occupies territory adjacent to the work of Robert Eggers and Ari Aster.
Laura Casabé's The Virgin of the Quarry Lake stands as an impressive, febrile supernatural coming-of-age narrative that proves nearly as damning about Argentina as Poultry Farm is about rural Iran. Set in 2001 during a Buenos Aires of blackouts and standpipes, the film follows Dolores Oliverio, who is moping, petulant, and ruthless as she fends off a worldly rival for her childhood sweetheart. Dario Russo's The Fox, by contrast, makes no pretence of profundity regarding small-town Australia. The film cheerfully admits that little wisdom emerges from its droll cautionary relationship fable about a jilted hunter named Nick (Jai Courtney) who ignores the Antichrist rule by trusting a weird talking fox voiced by Olivia Colman—though Sam Neill's potty-mouthed magpie proves equally untrustworthy.
What challenges remain for horror cinema?
One significant gap in the festival experience is the absence of truly frightening films, though this observation derives from sampling only a three-day portion of the programme. Souto identifies discovering such nerve-shredding work as MotelX's holy grail. Monteiro, however, suggests a paradox: as Portugal matures into embracing the macabre, locating genuinely unsettling cinema has become more difficult. "I think we become adults today," he reflects. "We don't fear horror films. We have no nightmares. I'm trying to find films that can still make me feel as I did in the beginning, like when I first saw Alien. Because right now, it's impossible."
The broader context of horror's cultural ascendancy underscores this challenge. The 20th edition features more than 145 screenings in addition to the over 170 films from more than 40 countries, reflecting the genre's global vitality. Yet saturation may have dulled the medium's capacity to genuinely disturb. The festival's role has evolved from simply presenting horror to audiences starved for the genre to curating work that might still penetrate contemporary desensitisation.
What happens next?
MotelX continues its mission of encouraging Portuguese horror production while promoting horror cinema from around the world. The 20th edition runs through 13 September 2026 at Cinema São Jorge and the Cinemateca Portuguesa. Beyond the annual festival, MotelX operates as a year-round initiative, maintaining a monthly midnight screening series at Cinema Nimas in Lisbon that extends the festival's activity and community engagement throughout the year. The closing film for this edition is Fall 2: Deadpoint, bringing the expanded programme to a conclusion.
