Hysteria Film Festival
Hysteria Film Festival is a festival dedicated to elevating genre cinema made by women and non-binary filmmakers, with a particular focus on horror, thriller, and dark genre work that centers female experience and perspective.
The name is a deliberate reclamation. "Hysteria" carries a long history as a medical and cultural label used to pathologize women's behavior, emotion, and dissent. A festival that takes that word for its title and turns it toward horror and genre cinema is making a programmatic argument: that the fears, rage, and psychological intensity historically diagnosed as hysteria belong on screen, and that women filmmakers have particular authority to put them there.
Genre cinema - horror above all - has a complicated and rich relationship with female experience. Women have been the victims, the final girls, the witches, the monsters, and increasingly the directors, writers, and producers who define how those archetypes function. Hysteria Film Festival positions itself at that intersection, curating work that examines and often subverts the ways horror and psychological-horror have historically framed women's bodies and minds.
Because the festival's founding details and exact location are not fully documented in publicly available sources, what can be stated with confidence is the festival's programmatic identity: it occupies a growing space within the horror film community that has gained significant traction in the 2010s and 2020s as female-led horror filmmaking has received increasing critical recognition. Events like Hysteria Festival are part of that ecosystem, creating dedicated programming contexts that allow women's genre work to be seen on its own terms rather than as a subcategory of a male-dominated genre circuit.
The programming at festivals of this type typically spans short films and features, with shorts receiving substantial attention as many emerging female horror directors work in short form before graduating to features. Documentary work about horror history, women's experience in the genre industry, and the cultural politics of fear and the body also fits naturally within this kind of programming.
Horror made by women directors has produced some of the most formally and thematically ambitious work in the genre over the past two decades. From intimate psychological studies to supernatural dread to body-horror that draws explicitly on lived female experience, this body of work has redefined what horror can say and how it can say it. A festival dedicated to platforming that work serves both as discovery engine and as advocacy - making the case through programming that the genre is richer and stranger when women control the frame.
The slasher tradition, folk-horror revival, and the broader horror renaissance of the 2010s have all been shaped by female filmmakers who brought new preoccupations to familiar forms. Themes of reproduction, bodily autonomy, medical violation, gaslighting, and domestic entrapment - all with deep roots in women's actual experience - have found expression in horror that is more than metaphor. Hysteria Film Festival creates space for that work to circulate and find the audience it deserves.
Festivals in this niche tend to build loyal communities quickly, because they serve an audience that is underserved by general horror festivals where male perspectives remain numerically dominant in programming. The horror fandom demographic skews significantly female, and that disconnect between the audience and the genre's prestige circuit has created space for events that explicitly center women's voices in the genre.
Whether Hysteria Film Festival runs annually or on a different schedule, and whatever its current host city, its identity as a platform for women working in horror and dark genre cinema connects it to a meaningful current in contemporary filmmaking. For a genre database like CaSTV, it represents a festival worth tracking as the landscape of gender and genre continues to shift.
