Screaming Room 2026

The Screaming Room returns for its 2026 edition as part of MidSummer Scream, running Friday, August 7 through Sunday, August 9, 2026 at the Long Beach Convention Center. Presented by HorrorBuzz, the festival gathers a weekend of curated horror short films and the filmmakers who made them, treating the short form as a serious venue for the genre's most inventive new work.

This year's program comprises fifteen themed blocks and more than seventy short films, drawn from filmmakers working across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The selections range from the psychological and the supernatural to the animated, the comic, and the frankly grotesque — each block assembled as its own curatorial arc rather than a loose reel. Alongside the main program, the BloodBat Film Competition returns as a 48-hour race staged over the convention weekend, and the festival closes on Sunday with the Screaming Room 2026 Awards, presenting the audience selections from each block and the jury's Jack-O'-Lantern, Mary Shelley, and Palme D'Gore honors.

Every film screened here takes a permanent place in the Screaming Room archive, a catalog built to outlast the weekend and to stand as a lasting record of the work and the artists behind it.