Are rats cute, creepy, or a matter of genre? That’s the sort of debate you have at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival — a warm-and-whacky annual event in New York City that expanded rapidly for its 10th edition.
Co-founded by creative director Justin Timms, this gonzo celebration started a decade ago as a quaint movie club in the backroom of a bar. Now, it’s a ten-day affair held at several different venues with an estimated 5,000 guests in attendance for 2025. That’s a 20 percent increase since last year and proof that buzz for Brooklyn Horror is building scary well.
“Rats, much like horror, are deeply misunderstood,” said Timms, who champions plenty of weird art you could describe that way. This year, Brooklyn Horror gave top accolades to Mickey Reece’s “Every Heavy Thing,” Emilio Portes’ “Don’t Leave the Kids Alone,” and “Last Call,” a short film directed by Winnie Cheung. Read the exclusive Brooklyn Horror Film Festival winners announcement below.
“There really wasn’t a festival like this in New York,” said Timms. “There’s the New York City Horror Film Festival, but they show more strictly defined horror movies — and Scary Movies at Lincoln Center is back, but that’s a much smaller program. So, there are other horror festivals, but they’re just not programming all of the kinds of films that we’re interested in.”
Brooklyn Horror recruited IndieWire to its panel of expert judges this year. That group — which also included voices from prominent genre brands like Vinegar Syndrome, Fangoria, MPI Media, Alter, and more — toasted not just the scariest cinema but the most out-there media of all kinds. That’s important to Joseph Hernandez, the senior programmer and director of community development who has been working alongside Timms since the festival’s inception.
“The mainstream perception of horror goes back to the ‘80s to that explosion of slasher sequels, and that’s what really helped form the image of what a horror movie is today,” Hernandez said. “Ever since then, true horror fans have been trying to explain that the genre world is so much more than that.”
The three categories in competition at Brooklyn Horror 2025 included the annual shorts contest; the Dark Matter lineup, for features grounded in serious subject matter; and the Head Trip section, for features that expand your mind. The winners from the 10th-anniversary year demonstrate just how far you can stretch the definition of an award-worthy film — in the best way.
“What worries me most is that people will stop taking big swings,” said publicist Justin Cook, when asked about his hopes and fears for the genre landscape going forward. Cook just joined Brooklyn Horror Film Festival a few years ago, but he knows what’s cutting-edge. “There should always be movies out there that take big swings. Some work for me personally. Some do not. But I will always respect a big swing.”
Asked about the best movie debate he’s had at Brooklyn Horror so far, Cook hauled off and asserted a hot take he heard earlier this week: Rob Zombie’s “Halloween” is… more entertaining than John Carpenter’s original?! Programmer Tori Potenza is a recent addition to the team too, and it’s those kinds of moments that transformed them from a visiting film critic to a yearly organizer hungry for more.
“The community is the thing that made me love this festival so much,” said Potenza, noting that many of the most important conversations in genre veer toward Dark Matter. “When you look at the history of horror, there’s so much that’s either in the subtext or the actual text that’s about marginalized communities. We are representing that history by honoring people who didn’t always have the chance to be behind the camera and tell their own stories.”
“Horror is a very wide prism that can be so many things and we’re just constantly trying to reflect that in our program every year,” agreed Hernandez. “We are a genre film festival and we’re very proud of our ongoing mission to continue to stretch that definition.”
When Brooklyn Horror first got started, the infamous pizza rat video from 2015 had just gone viral. The rodent has served as the fest’s unofficial mascot ever since, but it took a decade for Timms to finally stop by a Spirit Halloween and pick up the animatronic that’s stealing the spotlight in all of this year’s photos. The rat is called Pepperoni and his agent “demands he be credited by name,” said Cook.
But to quote the truest internet meme I’ve read in recent memory, “The worst person you know is somewhere saying, ‘I’m passionate about uplifting community.’” Not so at Brooklyn Horror, where Timms avoids taking credit and instead heaps praise on his organizers and volunteers… while waxing poetic on the redemptive quality of rats. Popping sponsored Gushers in red wine (an off-the-menu secret you found here first!), the creative director shared his favorite conversation from this year’s Brooklyn Horror as well.
Recalling a chat he had with Leviathan Award winner Ernest Dickerson, who got distracted on his way to the bathroom during a screening, Timms said, “He forgot he was waiting, and completely out of the blue, he wanted to tell me about this Japanese horror movie he saw on YouTube. He said it’s so good I need to watch it. So, you know I will.”
Read on for all the winners (and some of their reactions!) at the 10th Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.
Dark Matter Jury Awards
Best Feature: “Don’t Leave the Kids Alone”
“On behalf of everyone at ‘Don’t Leave the Kids Alone,’ we would like to thank the jury of the Dark Matter section, Matt Barone and everyone who make the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival possible and everyone who took the time to attend the screenings. Thanks for inviting the film, fighting for the theatrical experience, nurturing horror audiences, bringing together international films and colleagues of the forbidden genres. And last but not least… ¡Viva Brooklyn Horror Fest y el Cine de Terror!”
—Emilio Portes, director
Best Director: Paolo Strippoli, “The Holy Boy”
Best Performance: Olivia Taylor Dudley, “Abigail Before Beatrice”
Best Screenplay: Aleksandar Radivojevic, “Karmadonna”
Best Cinematography: Cristiano Di Nicola, “The Holy Boy”
Best Practical FX: Mio Chiba and Tokhiko Endo, “Incomplete Chairs”
Head Trip Jury Awards
Best Feature: “Every Heavy Thing”
“What an honor. It’s been my lifelong goal to buck the formula of every kind of movie so it’s galvanizing to receive this award which celebrates just that.”
—Mickey Reece, director
Best Director: Yûta Shimotsu, “New Group”
Best Screenplay: Avalon Fast, “CAMP”
Best Performance: Tipper Newton, “Every Heavy Thing”
Best Editing: Simon Glassman, “Buffet Infinity”
Best Cinematography: Eily Sprungman, “CAMP”
Best Sound Design: Johnny Blerot, “Buffet Infinity”
Shorts Competition Jury Awards
Best Short: “Last Call”
“I’m grateful to the festival, the jurors, and everyone who embraced the shadows of this film. This honor belongs to the cast and crew, whose artistry and devotion brought to life the strange, the unsettling, and the hauntingly beautiful metamorphosis of ‘becoming.”
—Winnie Cheung, director
Best Director: Kylie Aoibheann, “The Dysphoria”
Best Performance: Nicole Elliot, “Jeff”
Best Special FX: Sharp FX, The Dysphoria
Best Screenplay: Louise Flaherty & Neil Christopher, “The Gnawer of Rocks”
Best Sound Design: Jack Goodman, “Eonian”
Best Art Direction: Danny Christopher & Sarah Ball, “The Gnawer of Rocks”
Best Editing: Marcus Fahey, “Daddy is a Hunter”
Home Invasion Award: “Rebrand” (dir. Edoardo Ranaboldo)
Special Jury Mention for Filmmaker to Watch: Nathan Ginter, “Overgrown”
The Leviathan Award
Brooklyn Horror’s first and only tribute award, was created in 2023 to honor the luminaries of horror and acknowledge their monstrous contributions to the genre.
The 2025 Leviathan Award goes to the multitalented Ernest Dickerson, whose prolific career as a cinematographer and director has given horror fans a surplus of greatness on screens both big and small. With his trailblazing run of feature films and TV show episodes dating back to the 1980s and spanning to the present day, Ernest Dickerson has helped to pave the way for the likes of Jordan Peele and Nia DaCosta by showing that horror cinema knows no color lines nor cultural barriers.
The 10th Brooklyn Horror Film Festival runs through October 25 in New York City. Check showtimes.