FilmQuest 2026 Unveils Star-Packed Lineup and Launches Genre Film Market
FilmQuest, the genre film festival in Provo, Utah, has revealed a 2026 lineup headlined by Jamie Lee Curtis, Rhea Seehorn, David Dastmalchian and more than a dozen other names from across horror, sci-fi and independent cinema. The 13th edition runs October 22–31 at the Velour Live Music Gallery in downtown Provo, with VIP passes already on sale and individual screening tickets set to follow once the schedule is finalised in late September (Variety).
Founded and directed by Jonathan Martin, FilmQuest programmes horror, science fiction, fantasy and adjacent work. The festival has been named three times to MovieMaker's "25 Coolest Festivals in the World" list, according to its own website (FilmQuest).
The announced cast list reads like a genre roll call. Alongside Curtis and Seehorn, the 2026 selections feature Lizzy Caplan, Britt Lower, Lucy DeVito, John Stamos, Kathleen Quinlan, Alex Essoe, Lou Taylor Pucci, Sylvia Hoeks, Luke Hemsworth, Kevin Durand, Michael Pitt, Adrienne Barbeau, Barbara Crampton, Dee Wallace, Bruce Davison, Jacob Bertrand, Connor Paolo, Caylee Cowan and Brady Noon (Variety).
Several titles arrive with premiere credentials. World premieres include Johnny Coffeen's The Avalanche, starring Alex Essoe and Lou Taylor Pucci; Josh Logan's The Relic: Dragon; Jacob Schwarz's Whiskey Throttle; and Christian Everhard's The Crawling, starring Will Brittain and Katherine Hughes. North American and U.S. premieres include Carson McKinnon's Mother & Me! with Caylee Cowan and Brady Noon, Mark H. Rapaport's Godhead, and Nick Taylor's documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson. Russell Goldman's Sender — starring Britt Lower, Rhea Seehorn, David Dastmalchian and Jamie Lee Curtis — lands as a regional premiere (Variety).
The biggest structural change this year is the launch of a genre film market alongside the festival. The market will curate 20 to 40 additional feature films specifically for distribution and sales — a move that positions FilmQuest not only as a screening event but as a meeting point for buyers, sales agents and producers looking to place finished films with distributors (Variety).
For context on the festival's scale: the 2026 edition drew 2,942 film and screenplay submissions, a 26% increase over 2025, from 70 countries. Final selections represent 38 nations. Screenplay finalists were the top 20% of unproduced scripts in feature and short categories, judged by professional third-party readers. New for 2026 is a Pilot Screenplay competition, which adds the top 25% of long-form and short-form pilots to the slate (FilmQuest).
The festival also runs a virtual cinema this year, with select titles screening exclusively online through streaming partner EO Flix / CineLot. Award nominations are scheduled to be announced in September 2026 (FilmQuest).
FilmQuest is operated by Film & Arts Festival, Inc. The 2026 edition is the 13th instalment of a festival that last year ran from October 23 through November 1, 2025.
