South Korea’s Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival has set an 11-film lineup for the international competition of its 30th edition. Curry Barker’s smash-hit psychological horror Obsession and Jane Schoenbrun’s Cannes Un Certain Regard opener Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma are among the highlights of the selection.
The competition — rebranded “Bucheon Choice: World — Features” as part of a programming overhaul for this year’s milestone edition — is the festival’s flagship strand, deciding its top prize, the “Best of Bucheon.” Founded in 1997 and now among Asia‘s largest showcases for horror, fantasy and thriller cinema, BIFAN runs July 2-12 in Bucheon, just west of Seoul.
The lineup leans on recent festival-circuit standouts. From Cannes, alongside Schoenbrun’s meta-slasher — which reworks the 1980s summer-camp subgenre through a queer lens — comes Marion Le Coroller’s Species, a Midnight Screening body-horror piece about a high-achieving generation whose anxieties turn physical. From Sundance comes Makoto Nagahisa’s Burn, another portrait of anxious youth, and Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus, a Midnight entry fusing queer romance and horror through the language of Christian taboo. Obsession, a Toronto premiere that has since turned into one of the year’s unlikeliest box-office successes with rare, late-run weekend gains, traces how forbidden desire spirals into supernatural terror.
A queer sensibility runs through much of the selection, which spans countries including Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Spain, Ireland, Finland and Australia.
Two titles in the lineup will premiere at BIFAN: Kan Yamamoto’s Japanese horror Cursed Meme and NIKO, a Korea-Taiwan co-production set in a reimagined future Seoul that features Tiffany Young of K-pop group Girls’ Generation. Elsewhere, Finnish director Hanna Bergholm’s Nightborn — a postpartum folk-and-body-horror thriller — pairs rising actress Seidi Haarla with Rupert Grint, and Damian McCarthy returns with Hokum, an Irish-set folk horror that follows Oddity (2024), a prior BIFAN hit.
Also competing are Paul Urkijo’s The Night (Gaua), drawn from Basque witchcraft legend, and Avid Liongoren’s Zsazsa Zaturnnah, a Filipino animated musical adapted from the cult comic about a gay hairdresser who transforms into a female superhero.
BIFAN will hold a press conference on June 9 to unveil the remainder of its 2026 lineup. This year’s edition runs July 2-12.
BUCHEON CHOICE: WORLD — FEATURES (FULL LINEUP)
Burn, Makoto Nagahisa (Japan)
Cursed Meme, Kan Yamamoto (Japan)
Hokum, Damian McCarthy (Ireland, UAE)
Leviticus, Adrian Chiarella (Australia)
The Night (Gaua), Paul Urkijo (Spain, USA)
Nightborn, Hanna Bergholm (Finland, France, UK, Lithuania)
NIKO, Julien Birban Levy (Korea, Taiwan)
Obsession, Curry Barker (USA)
Species, Marion Le Coroller (France, Belgium)
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun (UK, Canada)
Zsazsa Zaturnnah, Avid Liongoren (Philippines, France)
