Halloween Daily News has announced the resurrection of the Halloween International Film Festival. The festival, last held in 2020, will return in October 2025, showcasing shorts and features that celebrate the strange, the unusual, and all the horror and wonder of the most hallowed of seasons.
The three-day festival will be held October 2 through 4 at the historic, and reportedly haunted, Pioneer Theater in Manteo, North Carolina. The event will showcase independent horror and Halloween-themed films from around the world, as well as networking opportunities and extensive media exposure, all taking place as the kickoff event for the town of Manteo’s Halloween Island festivities, during which area restaurants, bars, and businesses transform into Halloween pop-ups for October.
Films selected for the festival will be shown on the big screen at The Pioneer Theater and include Q&A sessions with attending filmmakers, nightly meet and greets, photo ops on the Orange Carpet, an outdoor Halloween vendor market, and numerous Halloween Island festivities happening each day in easy walking distance throughout the town.
A portion of this year’s festival proceeds will be donated to A Pathway Forward, a locally based nonprofit charity supporting veterans.
Film submissions for the festival are now open on FilmFreeway. All Official Selections will receive publicity on HalloweenDailyNews.com, with many festival Q&As and panels to be broadcast to more than 80,000 subscribers on the Halloween Daily News YouTube channel, and will be exposed to a reach of more than a million genre fans through the expanded Halloween Daily News network and social media.
Founded in 2016, the Halloween International Film Festival is a FilmFreeway Gold-ranked festival. Previous Official Selections include “The Barn” (2016 Best Halloween Film and Best Feature Film award winner), “3 Dead Trick or Treaters,” “10/31,” “The Haunt” (2017 Best Halloween Film), “Haunters: The Art of the Scare” (2018 Best Halloween Film), “Epic Home Haunts” (2019 Breakthrough Filmmaker award winner), “Mass Hysteria” (2020 Best Feature Film), and “They Live Inside Us” (2020 Best Halloween Film).
Details on tickets, selected films, lodging discounts, and more will be revealed soon.
