South Korea’s Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival has set an 11-film lineup for the international competition of its 30th edition. Curry Barker’s smash-hit psychological horror Obsession and Jane Schoenbrun’s Cannes Un Certain Regard opener Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma are among the highlights of the selection.
The competition — rebranded “Bucheon Choice: World — Features” as part of a programming overhaul for this year’s milestone edition — is the festival’s flagship strand, deciding its top prize, the “Best of Bucheon.” Founded in 1997 and now among Asia‘s largest showcases for horror, fantasy and thriller cinema, BIFAN runs July 2-12 in Bucheon, just west of Seoul.
The lineup leans on recent festival-circuit standouts. From Cannes, alongside Schoenbrun’s meta-slasher — which reworks the 1980s summer-camp subgenre through a queer lens — comes Marion Le Coroller’s Species, a Midnight Screening body-horror piece about a high-achieving generation whose anxieties turn physical. From Sundance comes Makoto Nagahisa’s Burn, another portrait of anxious youth, and Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus, a Midnight entry fusing queer romance and horror through the language of Christian taboo. Obsession, a Toronto premiere that has since turned into one of the year’s unlikeliest box-office successes with rare, late-run weekend gains, traces how forbidden desire spirals into supernatural terror.
