Terror-Fi 2025: new Predator, Sisu & Lanthimos headline NZ’s biggest genre festival

Terror-Fi, Aotearoa’s mightiest genre film festival, returns with heavy-hitting New Zealand premieres, homegrown horror, and talked-about flicks from the likes of Fantastic Fest, SXSW, Cannes, Toronto and Fantasia.

The fest kicks off in all three major cities with two opening night films on Wednesday 29 October. The programme then continues in Wellington’s The Roxy (30 Oct – 2 Nov) before hitting Auckland’s Capitol and Event Queen Street (6 – 9 Nov) and finishing in Christchurch’s Alice Cinemas and Silky Otter Wigram (12 – 18 November).

Ticket prices haven’t changed: $18.50 Adults & $16.50 Students, Seniors and Guilds. Hardcore Terror-Fi nuts will rejoice over the return of the Fan Badge which gets you into all 17 films (including the bonus screenings happening 5, 12 & 13 Nov) for $199, which works out at under $12 per film.

Wellington and Auckland tickets are now on sale (Christchurch will go live shortly). Head to the official website for more and read on for the full 2025’s full line-up.

The big NZ premieres & advanced screenings

Predator: Badlands (Advance screening)

Dan Trachtenberg’s excellent Prey sadly didn’t get a big-screen release in Aotearoa. Count us stoked, then, that his latest Predator follow-up not only gets the cinema outing it deserves but also delivers New Zealanders some hearty slices of pride—not only was the film shot here but it also stars local screen talent Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi (The Panthers) as the titular hunter sent to the galaxy’s most dangerous planet to prove himself to his clan.

Keeper (Advance screening)

Osgood Perkins has had a pretty good run lately. He scared the bejeebers out of audiences with last year’s box office-crushing horror Longlegs and made them chuckle earlier this year with splatstick comedy The Monkey. I wouldn’t expect any laughs out of this cabin-in-the-woods thriller, though. The teasers and trailers give very little away, which is just how we like it. Tatiana Maslany also stars in the film, reuniting with Perkins after she delivered the freakiest scene from The Monkey.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia makes its NZ Premiere as the first film of opening night, another warped tale about a high-ranking CEO (Emma Stone) kidnapped by two conspiracy-driven men who believe she’s secretly an alien. Sisu: Road to Revenge, the second opening night film also making its NZ Premiere, is the sequel to 2023’s joyous Finnish flick centred on one man killing a whole lotta Nazis. This will be your only chance to catch this wild action film in a cinema.

Edgar Wright’s The Running Man also makes its NZ Premiere at Terror-Fi, featuring Glen Powell in a dystopian (but not completely unfamiliar) America that sees him fighting for survival for 30 days as part of a televised game show, as does Zac Hilditch’s atypical zombie flick We Bury the Dead, starring Daisy Ridley and NZ’s own Matt Whelan in a story about a body retrieval unit after a military experiment goes horribly wrong.

Homegrown horror

Deathgasm II: Goremageddon (NZ Premiere)

A decade after Jason Lei Howden’s Deathgasm melted audiences’ faces to become a metal horror cult classic, he and stars Milo Cawthorne and Kimberley Crossman reunite for another round of shredding and splatter. The past 10 years haven’t been kind to Cawthorne’s Brodie—his music career hasn’t taken off and he’s lost his girlfriend Medina (Crossman). In a desperate bid to solve both problems, he uses black magic to resurrect his old band mates with the aim of winning a battle-of-the-bands competition. What could go wrong? Heaps. Heaps can go wrong. Howden, the producers, and stars will be there at the Auckland and Wellington screenings for a special Q&A.

Pop (World Premiere)

“This wasn’t supposed to be a true story, but it became one.” That eyebrow-raising sentence hints at the mania emanating from this fourth wall-destroying Aotearoa feature from prolific and inventive filmmaker Tim Hamilton. The story revolves around an American actor who comes to New Zealand to star in an indie flicks, only for the whole thing to descend into meta chaos when the Kiwi director’s unprocessed grief bursts out. Hamilton, the producers, and the stars will attend all the screening for a special Q&A.

Terror-Fi will also host the World Premiere and a Q&A of Mark Willis’s Blind Panic—a Kiwi crime thriller centred on an ex-con, his psychotic boss, and his blind neighbour—and the NZ Premiere + Q&A of Charlie Faulks’s Bloke of the Apocalypse—an animated father-son rural zom-com series playing for its entire 106 runtime at Terror-Fi—as well as a free short film showcase in Wellington featuring a range of genre shorts from Aotearoa and around the world.

Festival hits and genre gems (Fantastic Fest, SXSW, Fantasia)

Primate (NZ Premiere)

Terror-Fi’s closing night film comes from prolific horror director Johannes Roberts, and it’s already made festival crowds go ape. What was meant to be a relaxing reunion turns into pure terror when a group of young friends must defend themselves from the family pet chimp, who’s been bitten by a rabid animal. Not due in NZ cinemas for wide release until next year, you’ll want to jump on this one now while the buzz is still cooking.

The Legend of Ochi (NZ Premiere)

It’s been a long wait, but this adorable A24 girl-and-her-critter adventure finally makes its way to NZ cinemas—and Terror-Fi will be your only chance to catch it on the big screen. Set in a remote village that fears creatures known as ochi, a shy farm girl thinks otherwise when she encounters a baby one, wounded and stranded. Defying her village, she embarks on a dangerous quest to return the young ochi to its home.

And there are even more NZ Premieres hitting Terror-Fi this year: Nirvanna: the Band, the Show, the Movie is a time-travel mates-on-the-road comedy from indie auteur Matt Johnson (BlackBerry); Grégory Morin’s Flush is a race-against-time grotesque thriller that kicks off with a coke fiend trapped in a toilet stall; Julia Kowalski’s Her Will Be Done is a French folk horror that Screen International describes as “a tale of transgressive women in unwelcoming places, and what it takes to survive”; and Tolga Karaçelik’s Psycho Therapy casts the great Steve Buscemi as a retired serial killer-turned-marriage counsellor and disturbing source of inspiration for a struggling writer. There’s also a Terror-Fi Secret Screening for the bold and brave—all we know is that it’s a horror having its NZ Premiere and that it’ll be one of the first screenings in the world.