The 2020 lineup included 42 short films ranging from ghost stories and monster movies, to psychological and cosmic horror, as well as 7 feature length films.

The films selected for the 2020 Vancouver Horror Show portrayed the true breadth that the horror genre has to offer from the retelling of Stephen King’s Willa by Corey Mayne, to the unabashed, hilarious brutality of Deleted by Jon Flahr and Benjamin Schuetze, and the dreadful unease of the cosmic horror-inspired Duérmete Niño by Freddy Chávez Olmos.

The VHS 2020 lineup saw an assortment of ghost stories, possessions, and a variety of monsters that go beyond the traditional culprits of vampires and zombies. These films conjure up physical (or para-physical) entities that defy our understanding of reality, and bring us face-to-face with the unimaginable. A fridge-dwelling creature stalks its unassuming prey in Trevor Mirosh’s The Freeze, and a pair of Russian police officers investigate strange occurrences coming from a rural farmhouse in Maksim Kulagin’s Mopok. These films take us to a different world — one we’re happy to visit, but glad we can escape!.

Other films looked at closer-to-home horrors of the psychological variety with small town maniacs in David Émond-Ferrat and Isabelle Giroux’s You Don’t Know Me, or murderous adolescents in Shawn Driscoll’s Naughty.

Tech-horror (films that explore what happens when our beloved technology turns on us) as well as Cosmic Horror (films with heavy Lovecraftian influence) also made strong appearances in the 2020 lineup.

Whether your taste is psychological horror or creature feature, brutal gore or comic relief, the VHS 2020 lineup had something for everyone.