Noviembre Fantasma extends its universe with the addition of Curtas

2026.09.28

The seventh season will once again offer new audiovisual content focusing on genre cinema, available free of charge via the platform.

Autumn once again opens up a gateway to the fantastical world of Noviembre Fantasma, the collaborative project bringing together five of the leading horror and fantasy film festivals in the country. The initiative this year marks its seventh season with the addition of Curtas Festival do Imaxinario de Vilagarcía de Arousa, alongside the San Sebastian Horror and Fantasy Film Festival, Fancine – Malaga Fantasy Film Festival, TerrorMolins – Molins de Rei Fantasy Film Festival, and Isla Calavera – Canary Islands Fantastic Film Festival City of La Laguna.

The inclusion of the Galician event serves to extend an alliance founded with the aim of to sharing content, audiences and experiences beyond the dates and venues of each festival. As in previous seasons, Noviembre Fantasma will bring together a selection of talks, gatherings and other audiovisual offerings linked to fantasy and horror, making a sample of each festival available to genre fans anywhere in the world.

All these videos will be available free of charge on the platform noviembrefantasma.com

Programme

The collaboration will this year be stepping outside the boundaries of the platform itself, thanks to a presence at Sitges Industry 2026, where Noviembre Fantasma will on 10 October be organising a round table discussion in the Sala Noray function room at the Hotel Meliá Sitges: "The glocal incubator: from the realm of Noviembre Fantasma to the global screen". The gathering will address the value of local identity and regional folklore in an increasingly uniform international audiovisual market, along with the role of festivals in detecting new talent and showing a commitment to concepts rooted in their local territory, before they are commercially consolidated. The session will be moderated by Rocío Moreno, programme coordinator at Fancine, and will involve Kiko Morah, programme organiser at Imagine Fantastic Film Festival in Amsterdam; Josemi Beltrán, director of The San Sebastian and Fantasy Film Festival; Luis M. Rosales, director of Curtas Festival do Imaxinario; and Glòria Massana, coordinator of TerrorMolins.

For its debut at Noviembre Fantasma, Curtas will be serving up five proposals addressing in particular the world of comics, illustration and audiovisual creation. Noted illustrators Jorge Fornés and Enrique Vegas will be the stars of a gathering dedicated to the ninth art. Meanwhile, Luis Camacho will be presenting “HP Lovecraft: Zoomorphic Manual", in which the illustrator offers a compendium of the visual evolution of the writer's nightmarish creatures, monsters and ancient deities. Meanwhile, Jaime Martín will be embarking on a personal journey "From the Urals to the Pyrenees". The Galician festival's programme will likewise include a meet-up with filmmaker Richard Stanley, entitled "Filming Madness", and a masterclass by the Argentine comic artist and illustrator Arial Olivetti, focused on watercolour painting techniques.

The San Sebastian Horror Festival will be venturing down various avenues of genre creation. Its content will include the talk "From Body Horror to Queer Horror", tying in with the leitmotif of the 37th edition, along with an interview with filmmaker Ramón Saldías, director of Karate vs. Mafia. The Basque offering will be rounded off with a delve into Japanese fantasy through the yokai created by Fuego Fatuo Art, the artistic pen-name of Álvaro Herranz.

For its part, TerrorMolins will be presenting two activities at Noviembre Fantasma which specifically play with the hazy border between reality and fiction. Víctor Navarro, a specialist in game studies, will be delivering "Playable found footage and cursed pixels: from the Blair Witch to Cursed Demo Discs and Backrooms”, looking into the way in which the codes of found footage are transferred to the world of videogames. And film critic Antonio José Navarro will also be delving into such narrative mechanisms with "When horror pretends to be real: Found Footage and Mockumentary", dedicated to these two formats.

Isla Calavera will once again be presenting audiences with figures closely linked to the history of fantasy and genre film. Its contribution to this new season will feature interviews with Lone Fleming, Christopher Lambert and Tom Berenger, three performers with lengthy and very different cinema careers, who will be visiting the Canary Islands Fantastic Film Festival City of La Laguna.

Lastly, Fancine will be drawing on the theme of its 36th edition, "Programmed to Love", to explore one of the most fertile and disturbing relationships in fantasy cinema: the combination of love and monsters. Filmmaker Ángeles Huerta, director of The Open Body, will be serving up "Monstrous Love in 5 Matches", a journey through monster romance cinema, and the way in which the genre has depicted desire and otherness through relationships which break with convention. The talk is organised together with the SGAE Foundation, and will be moderated by Emilio R. Cascajosa. Fancine's contribution will be rounded off with the masterclass "Draw your own path" by illustrator Pedrita Parker, and a session by Francisco Fernández de la Vega, a professor at the University of Extremadura and director of the Artificial Evolution Group, focusing on the interaction between humans and machines to optimise creativity in art and music. As is now traditional, there will also be a place for music at Noviembre Fantasma with the regular soundtrack concert, one of the most eagerly awaited features of the Malaga festival.

About Noviembre Fantasma

Noviembre Fantasma was set up in 2020 against the backdrop of the pandemic lockdown, as a way of forging closer ties between genre festivals, and allowing some of their activities to travel far beyond their respective venues. What began as a response to an exceptional situation has gradually established that it is here to stay, building a shared forum through which to showcase fantasy and horror, build up new audiences and give the content a lifespan beyond the duration of each festival itself. The inclusion of Curtas now opens up a new stage for this network, extending its regional presence and strengthening the exchange among festivals with distinctive identities but a shared desire to champion diversity and the capacity of genre cinema to enter into dialogue with other creative idioms, formats and disciplines.