You’d have to travel many miles for a more concentrated array of frights than the one assembled each year by FrightFest, the UK’s biggest horror film festival. Even in a year already replete with classy horror flicks, the line-up for August’s five-day fest looks like a seriously unsettling one. Gorehounds, midnight movie aficionados, cult-heads and more casual horror fans are catered for across 69 films and five days and nights between August 22-26.

But what are this year’s proper FrightFest frighteners? The cortisol-inducing films that will lurk in your nightmares? We asked festival co-founder and all-round horror maven Alan Jones to pick five gnarly cuts that will give even the hardiest movielover pause. Book them if you dare.

They are:

  1. Test Screening
  2. A Desert
  3. Strange Darling
  4. Shelby Oaks
  5. Charlotte