We’re proud to present our main festival theme and artwork for Imagine Fantastic Film Festival 2026, which takes place from 29 October – 8 November in LAB111, FilmHallen and HAL West in Amsterdam.
Our main festival theme this year is titled Ghost in the Feed and explores the anxieties and desires that resurface with every new form of media technology. The programme focuses on five stages of media technology over the past century: the rise of television, the VHS era, the early years of the internet, the world of the constant online feed, and our current immersive times. The festival examines these stages through films, talks, an immersive program, an exhibition, and more. NOAST (@mr_NOAST) made this year’s amazingly glitchy artwork.
About Ghost in the Feed
Ghost in the Feed takes a deep dive into our media technologies, right where our greatest fears and uncanny desires are stored. The program demonstrates that our fear of and fascination with technology is nothing new, but rather recurring—a spiral in which each technological revolution revives old anxieties and sparks new obsessions. The dread of 1960s TV brainwashing is linked to today’s panic surrounding algorithms. The transgressive body horror of Cronenberg’s ‘new flesh’—where television signals literally infected human tissue—reappears on social media today.
We’re not only afraid of what technology does, but of how the aesthetics of each medium feel. Ghost in the Feed uses films like a séance, a way to summon the ghosts of dead and dying media and investigate how their specific textures, limitations, and characteristics have been absorbed into our collective subconscious. By pairing Videodrome (1982) with Red Rooms (2023), Imagine creates a decade-spanning dialogue that exposes a universal fear: the loss of our identity, our truth, and our reality to the glowing screens we have willingly brought into our homes.
We also want to spark intergenerational conversations: the Gen X cinephile who remembers the tangible dread of a mysterious, unlabeled VHS tape; the Millennial who watched the internet transform from an utopian playground into a corporate panopticon; the Gen Z’er who discovered horror through deepfakes and vanishing stories. Every generation is convinced they have a unique relationship with technology, but they’re all possessed by the same ghosts— it’s just the medium that keeps changing.
Frequencies of Fear
The Ghost in the Feed-theme consists of five ‘Frequencies of Fear’, each focusing on the specific characteristics of a particular media technology.
- Frequency 1: The Broadcast Possession focuses on the rise of radio and television, centering on the fear of voices and images invading our living rooms. The key film is History of the Occult (2020).
- Frequency 2: The Cursed Cartridge explores the VHS era, where images seem to become tangible, transferable, and even contagious. The iconic key film within this frequency is David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1982).
- Frequency 3: The Digital Séance dives into the early days of the internet, when chatrooms, forums, and slow connections created a mysterious and sometimes alienating digital world. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) takes center stage.
- Frequency 4: The Algorithmic Possession investigates the current reality of social media, algorithms, and online identity. Award-winning thriller Red Rooms (2023) serves as the starting point.
- Frequency 5: The Embodied Void shifts the focus to immersive technologies such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. Within this frequency, which is part of Imagine Expanded, the central question is what happens when the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds become increasingly blurred.
Besides Ghost in the Feed, we have many more theme programmes and specials in store for you at Imagine this year. We’ll be adding more information after the summer, so keep an eye on our website and socials.
