South African Horrorfest returns to Cape Town

Double, double, toil and trouble… Halloween isn’t just for the trick-or-treating streets of American suburbs and Hollywood haunted house exhibitions. While not nearly as big an event on the South African calendar, the spooky holiday has grown in some popularity on the entertainment scene in a few of the country’s cities, not excluding ye olde Mother City. 

If you’re on the hunt for thrills this horrifying season, make a return to cinema with the annual South African Horrorfest at one of the city’s most iconic landmarks - the Labia Theatre. Running the show for more than two decades, festival organiser and co-founder Paul Blom has put in a lot of work over the years to grow one of South Africa’s most niche film festivals, despite the lack of mainstream interest in the genre.

“I think Halloween is big enough here, but it will never get that big – we forget that South Africa is still pretty conservative and many people still believe it's an evil, satanic thing,” explains a cheeky Blom. “When we had, I think it was about the fourth festival, that we had some tannie wrote a letter to Die Burger [newspaper] and complained that, ‘We don't need this Satanic festival in South Africa’. There are still lots of people who are deluded about certain things, and I guess you can't do much about that, but it's not like they'll come to the Horrorfest anyway, so it doesn't really matter.”

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The last independent cinema

With a mix of Hollywood big hitters, silent film classics and local and international independent horrors, the South African Horrorfest has only ever had one home for 21 years, and for Blom, it was a no-brainer when he and his partner-in-crime Sonja Ruppersberg approached The Labia to host their nightmarish cinematic visions.

“The first time I went to the Labia, it was still like a theatre theatre, because first it was a ballroom for the Italian embassy and then they turned it into a kind of little concert hall type place that had these kids' shows. I think the first time I went there was in the 70s - it was like some magic show and I can't even remember, I was probably about 5 or 4 years old,” reminisces Blom. 

“And then when they turned it into a cinema, we watched so many movies there, - stuff like Apocalypse Now that you didn't get to see in the cinema, A Clockwork Orange, Purple Rain - I saw it there when that came out. Any and every movie that's screened at the Labia Theatre, we watched just as moviegoers.”

“It's kind of a renowned cinema around the world as well. It's been on some global lists of cool cinemas because it's so unique in general, you know? Just the way cinemas have turned into these kinds of multiplexes. It's still like a classic, old-school theatre, and it's kind of the perfect venue for our kind of festival.”

In the early 2000s, Blom and Ruppersberg made a short horror film that they didn’t know what to do with, and there were no film festivals in South Africa where they thought it could find an audience for “weird, off-the-wall movies” at that time. They first started out with some public domain titles like Night of the Living Dead and some experimental filmmakers, and it eventually grew into a local favourite event for October. 

“I can't imagine doing the Horrorfest like for 10 days in a mall somewhere with lots of tiles and shops and a noisy food court next to you. So it just worked out well.”

However, drawing audiences has always been a bit of a struggle, but their passion for the genre has kept them going strong.

The classic cinema experience vs streaming at home 

Finding audiences has also become a bigger issue in the streaming era. It’s no secret that the comfy couch, convenience of home and expensive movie tickets have put a massive strain on cinemas, but the industry has slowly clawed back some semblance of its former self since the pandemic. And one genre that thrives in the darkness of the theatre is horror.

“It's a communal thing,” explains Blom. “We’re always quite finicky when it comes to people just sitting on their phones and talking crap or, you know, eating popcorn with their mouth open right in your ear. There's some etiquette that you have to follow in the cinema. 

“But it's a communal thing when everyone watches a movie and experiences it together, gets a fright at the same time, and a kind of catharsis goes with that. It's just a fun experience to have a good audience. Obviously, at home it's more chill and you can take breaks when you want to. But when you go to the cinema, you are forced to pay attention 'cause, you can't just pause and rewind. I think, in a way, you kind of treat the movie with a bit more respect.”

One way that the South African Horrorfest capitalises on the cinema experience is through their more interactive annual shows - the Rocky Horror Picture Show audience participation screening and the silent film viewing with a live band. The former is the most popular event of the festival (already sold out but book early next year!), where the cult classic encourages the audience to interact with the film through dress-up, a variety of props (on sale beforehand) and verbal cues. While loads of fun for the audience, Blom is at times exasperated by the clean-up afterwards. 

The live soundtrack show, however, is far less messy, and offers a reimagining of silent horror classics for the modern era with The Makabra Ensemble, which includes both co-founders. 

“Just getting musicians together to create a new soundtrack to classic silent films, performing it to the screen while it's running, is just a very unique and cool experience, but it was also a bit daunting.

We've done 15 movies, from Frankenstein to Nosferatu to Dr Caligari, Faust, The Vampyr, Phantom of the Opera, and now this year we're doing The Golem, a classic 1920 German movie.”

The German Expressionist film follows a rabbi who brings a golem to life in medieval times in order to protect his Jewish community, and forms part of a trilogy where it’s the only surviving film. 

Other ghoulish highlights for 2025

There are two major local films on the slate for 2025, and both were filmed in a post-apocalyptic version of Cape Town. The instant cult classic Street Trash from Fried Barry director Ryan Kruger returns to Labia with a Q&A with the filmmaker himself, and is set to make you queasy with its gore-tastic effects as a group of homeless people fight against the tyranny of an evil mayor.

On the more straight sci-fi side of things, the festival will host Spelonk’s cast and crew, where a day zero Cape Town fight for survival in a world without water. 

On the international slate, the festival will have some pre-screenings of Hollywood horrors like the much-anticipated Shelby Oaks, opening with Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia and ending with The Toxic Avenger remake. Blom also recommends checking out the independent American film Devour, where there’s a high chance that the director will be able to attend the screening in person - a rare opportunity for the festival that Blom always tries to capitalise on.

Besides the films, there’s also a Bloody Parchment literary event at Exclusive Books in V&A Waterfront, where the book world of horror will be discussed by critics, authors and fans.

“So you've got literature. You've got music. And this year we are going to have like a kind of a horror movie pub quiz as well to kind of kick-start the thing,” adds Blom. “We also don't just include sort of mainstream, big studio movies - we struggle to get those - but we do need to get them just to kind of flesh it out. But for the most part, it's very interesting, independent filmmakers from all over the world, which you will absolutely not get to see anywhere else. It won't release here [in mainstream cinemas] and it also probably won't land on any of the main streaming services because it's such independent productions.”

“You know, people miss out on some of the really, really cool filmmakers who eventually might end up doing some superhero movie down the line, like the Lights Out director who went on to do Shazam, or like Sam Raimi who went from Evil Dead to Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. You've got these small independent filmmakers who end up making big things. We probably might get to see some of them at the Horrorfest and then you can tell people, ‘Yeah, I saw his crappy little first movie before he became a huge multi-million-dollar director’.

“It's just we love seeing interesting and unique movies that you won't get to see under normal circumstances, and hopefully the audience appreciates that as well.”

WARNING: The video below contains some pretty gnarly and graphic imagery. 

Here is the confirmed 2025 lineup at the Labia Theatre (unless otherwise stated) - and you can grab tickets as they become available here on Quicket.

Wednesday 22 October - 8:30pm - SHELBY OAKS (Horrorfest warm-up show a week before the official fest start; free advance screening - details at the Quicket page)

Tuesday 28 October - Horror Quiz night at The Armchair Theatre, Observatory 

Wednesday 29 October - 8:30pm - BUGONIA (official opening show - Advance Premiere Screening)

Thursday 30 October - 8:30pm - CHAINSAW MAN 

Friday 31 October (Halloween)

6:15pm - TBC

8:30pm - THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (audience participation screening - SOLD OUT)

Saturday 1 November

4:00pm - BLOODY PARCHMEMNT Literature Chapter (at Exclusive Books, V&A Waterfront) 

6:15pm - KARMADONNA

9:00pm - DER GOLEM (Live Silent Film Soundtrack Performance by The Makabra Ensemble & special guests - also the Halloween dress-up night)

Sunday 2 November

6:15pm - SPELONK (local production with cast & crew attending)

8:30pm - SHADOW REALM SHORTS FILMS Vol. 1 

Monday 3 November

6:15pm - THE CURSE 

8:30pm - THY KINGDOM COME (documentary on Satanism in France)

Tuesday 4 November

6:15pm - THE MANNEQUIN  

8:30pm - THEATRE OF HORRORS: The Sordid Story of Paris’ Grand Guignol (documentary)

Wednesday 5 November

6:15pm - WOLF MOON RISING

8:30pm - SHADOW REALM SHORTS FILMS Vol. 2

Thursday 6 November

6:15pm - DEATH CYCLE

8:30pm - HOW DARK MY LOVE (documentary on controversial artist Joe Coleman)

Friday 7 November

6:15pm - STRANGE JOURNEY: The Rocky Horror Story (documentary) 

8:30pm - THE TOXIC AVENGER 

Saturday 8 November

6:15pm - DEVOUR (directors set to fly in from the USA to attend)

8:30pm - SHADOW REALM SHORTS FILMS Vol. 3

Sunday 9 November

6:15pm - FRANKENSTEIN (special old-school 16mm Film Projection of the 1931 classic)

8:30pm - STREET TRASH (Director, cast & crew in attendance)