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Fantastic Fest 2026: ‘Death of a Yellow Bird’ Leaves a Man Alone with a Camcorder and a Voice
Black Fawn

It can be challenging to find new ways to spin Found Footage. Many have done it, using things like Screen Life or mockumentaries to get scares from in-world recorded videos. Mashing it will technology as a conduit to connections to the supernatural, there arises other ways to squeeze terror from lenses and blinking red lights. That’s what Death of a Yellow Bird does, using a VHS camera and old videos as a medium between the living and the dead.

Ari Millen (sprinting to his moniker as a Canadian Horror Darling) leads as a man who has chosen to refuse treatment for his cancer and to visit his childhood home to gain a sense of closure. Digging through family relics, he dusts off some home movies that take him back to a time with his late younger brother, Danny. While his family is trying to pluck him out of his dour exploration, he falls deeper into his dark project when he discovers that Danny seems to be able to communicate with him through the retro camcorder. Speaking in code, as ghosts often do, Danny seems to feed him cryptic information trying to coax him to find the truth about his death. Flashes of a sparkling childhood, a mother with memory issues, and a sneering father, raise questions of reality, truth, and what levels of grief any one of us is able to accept.

This project was very personal for writer director Cody Calahan, as well as his lead. They used their art as a gateway to explore their challenging experiences in the way a camera was a gateway to another world. It feels baked into the story, how a man is in turmoil during his supernatural experience, willing to forgo anything rational on his quest for closure.

“The team behind Undertone” is an apt label, even though the creatives are different (Calahan produced that one, and his usual collaborators from Black Fawn worked somewhere on both). Like that horror banger, this one focuses on a single seen character in a trauma filled childhood home whose only connection to the outside world comes via phone call. Similarly, the lead is left to their own devices, often trying to find real-world corporeal connections to the audio that gets to them through their devices. But Millen’s character is doing something very different, dealing with sadness more than fear, as he focuses his energy on solving something instead of running from it.

It’s “grief” horror, but Death of a Yellowbird is using a medium mashup to explore that. There are jump scares, some brooding moments, and it’s all part of a slow burn leaving its lead to discover something more terrifying than the reality already set up in its opening. Videos are yellow tinted and shiny, the present is blue tinted and grim, and the movie revels in the lead slowly pulling those images together.

Death of a Yellow Bird had its world premiere Fantastic Fest 2026

Tiff 2026: The Treaty 6 Team is Definitely Not The Mighty Ducks in ‘Smudge the Blades’

When describing the iteration of his decade-in-the-making hockey movie, Cody Lightning explained how his comedy morphed into a dramedy the more he explored the heavy concepts related to his story. For young indigenous hockey players, racism, sexism, drugs, poverty, and the like informed the themes of his story which altered its genre.

And though they’re ultimately on different ice rinks, his story has a lot in common with everyone’s favourite story of an underdog hockey team, The Mighty Ducks. A messy, begrudged coach, a coed team, a player who’s outgrown the league, and a league they have to try to live up to all inform the story of both of these teams, but with the Cree creator steeping his in indigeneity, there are marked differences in themes and tone.

The Treat 6 Blades are a struggling rag tag group. Their skillset is spread and they experience overt racism from the league and their rough coach (Ed Helms, playing against type as a harsh retired hockey player raining terror upon his team). When they’re kicked out of their league for playing rough (one bad hit is all it takes for a team of indigenous youth), they band together with a scrappy new coach in it for all the wrong reasons. The kids have big dreams that they hope hockey can deliver to them, so losing a league spot is an unfathomable hit. They’ll have to rely on their coach to straighten himself up and then them so they can have a chance at battling on the ice in a world where fairness isn’t an option.

Though the team and coach are scrappy and rag tag, this is hardly a comedy story. The kids’ parents struggle with drugs, money, and views on sexuality. The kids themselves are forced to manage that on their own, if that means begging for their equipment back from a pawn shop or bearing the weight of being a family’s golden goose. Lightning’s story is often pitch black, and he resists even a quip on the ice for levity.

But that’s the story he’s telling, something different from the snappy funny indigenous hockey tales peppered into Letterkenny or Shoresy. He’s not shying away from a bleak reality, he is using hockey to portray it and also to create a space of hope and light for the youth on his screen.

The hockey scenes don’t always look smooth or professional, though some of the actors are hockey players first. But there’s a distinct awareness of shooting (film, not pucks) on the ice, and scenes in the rink look slick though naturalistic. Much of the drama takes place in a dingy bar, a chipping locker room, or a rink’s parking lot which will feel like familiar locales for life for anyone who’s been a youth chasing the show (or anyone who’s consumed other hockey flicks like Goon). The story feels true and honest and gives hope to young people up against odds they might not be able to overcome.

Smudge the Blades isn’t a feel-good underdog sports story, but it shares that DNA. It’s a sometimes bleak but otherwise beautiful story about team sports and how they create found family, opportunity, and camaraderie in a world where you’re asked to shoot from the red line.

‘825 Forest Road’ is as Imperfect and Endlessly Cozy as Stephen Cognetti’s Other Spooky Movies
AMC Networks

Maybe “cozy,” isn’t the first word that comes to mind when thinking of the Hell House LLC franchise, but they certainly fit the bill for lots of horror fans. In a take for another piece and another day, Stephen Cognetti’s found footage movies tap into that coziness sweet spot of parallel play and immersive theater (even in a meta way in the third installment). Veering from the found footage style, Cognetti’s latest, 825 Forest Road, holds onto the cozy spooky air of his earlier films. But with that, comes some of the usual missteps.

Similar to the Hell House LLC movies, 825 Forest Lane is location based and involves a haunted menace attached to a particular home. This is the home that Maria (Elizabeth Vermilyea who will be familiar to franchise fans) and Chuck (Joe Falcone) are moving into with Chuck’s struggling sister, Isabelle (Kathryn Miller). Chuck is attempting to swoop in for Isabelle in perhaps an attempt to reconnect with her after she suffered the loss of their parents. Shortly after relocating to the too-good-to-be-true home away from the bustling city, the group starts to notice strange goings on and prying eyes from concerned neighbours. Chuck starts to investigate the story of Helen Foster, a ghost who haunts the area, pushing its residents to suicide. With Isabelle as a risk for self harm, the group works to find the location of Helen Foster’s missing home at 825 Forest Road to break the curse before it comes for their small family. Told in small parts- from each of the main characters’ perspectives- the audience learns more about how they have arrived at the cursed locale and how they are trying to protect themselves and each other.

The multi-perspective structure isn’t quite Rashomon, but it functions well enough to give the audience breadcrumbs about what is happening in each of the characters’ rooms, though it cuts off some story elements for no real narrative reason. It pays off the most for the leading women when the story ends up a bit of a tale of supporting each other. If I were perhaps to give it too much credit, I’d nod to the feminist subversion of the perspective switch in how it tosses out the lead skeptic of the bunch in favour of a new view of the women supporting each other in their difficult experiences. Then there’s the “mental illness horror” of it all, which isn’t completely egregious but probably is tired and potentially objectifies the issue by using it as an easy entry point. It’s ideas about suicide and depression are potentially outdated, but they do tap into similar themes from movies like Smile about suicide as a contagion and depression befalling a generation of young people.

While this is his first feature outside of Hell House LLC, it’s very much a Film by Stephen Cognetti. Yes, there’s the haunted locale, but there’s also a lot of familiar scares including live streaming gags, moving mannequins, and creepy piano tracks. The haunted home locks them in to torment them, and there is the deterministic plot built around the characters’ old art. So, this movie isn’t breaking any molds nor is it a campaign for the creator’s versatility, but it is perhaps more evidence that his movies can adapt a familiar style to make more media for those looking for a comforting fright. It has the same quality of Things Heard & Seen where it perhaps doesn’t all stack up to a flawless narrative, but it allows for the sweater-clad-tea-sipping comfort of someone bopping around a small town thinking about a ghost. The Hell House LLC movies often forecast their own scares with talking heads which allows the audience to comfortably brace for scares that feel like controlled burns. 825 Forest Road is a feature length version of that.

So, will this latest Shudder haunted house have you begging your friends to fall in love with the newest ghost, or making comparisons to the best of Mike Flanagan’s work? Perhaps not. But if you’re the type of person who likes the terror that comes with invisible guard rails and the right amount of nightmare fuel, 825 Forest Road is shrieking to be added to your regular list. What can I say? I’ve already watched it twice.

825 Forest Road streams on Shudder April 4, 2025