Main Theme – Ghost in the Feed
A media archaeology of technological terror and desire
The theme programme of Imagine Fantastic Film Festival 2026 focuses on the anxieties and desires that arise with each new form of media technologies. Entitled Ghost in the Feed, the programme examines five stages of media technology from the last century: the emergence of broadcasting, the VHS era, the early years of internet, the world of a constant online feed and our current immersive times. The festival examines these stages through films, talks, an immersive programme, an exhibition and more.
Ghost in the Feed excavates the buried anxieties and uncanny desires embedded in our media technologies, treating each format not just as a delivery system but as a haunted artifact with its own aesthetic fingerprint and psychological resonance. The programme 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 can be directly linked to today’s panic surrounding algorithms. The transgressive body horror of Cronenberg’s ‘new flesh‘—where television signals literally infected human tissue—reappears today on social media.
We’re not just afraid of what technology does—we’re haunted by what each medium’s specific aesthetic feels like. The programme treats cinema as a séance, summoning the ghosts of dead and dying media to understand how their particular textures, limitations, and affordances shaped our collective unconscious. By placing Videodrome (1982) alongside Red Rooms (2023), Imagine stimulates dialogue across decades, revealing a persistent human fear: the loss of self, truth, and reality to the glowing screens we’ve invited into our own homes.
At Imagine 2026, Ghost in the Feed also creates conversations between generations. The Gen X cinephile who remembers the tactile dread of a mysteriously unlabeled VHS tape; the Millennial who experienced the internet transform from utopian playground to corporate panopticon; the Gen Z viewer navigating horror through deepfakes and disappeared stories. Each generation believes their relationship to technology is unique, but we’re all possessed by the same ghosts—they’re just transmitted through different machines.
The programme is made up by Five Frequencies of Fear, each dealing with the peculiarities of its media technology. Entire programme following soon!
Frequency 1: The Broadcast Possession
Radio & TV colonise the soul
The initial terror of mass media: the disembodied voice or hypnotic image entering the sanctity of the home, transforming private space into a receiver for political manipulation, corporate nihilism, or supernatural evil. Here, the horror emerges from the media’s claim to authority. These films capture the specific dread of broadcast media’s one-way transmission, where the familiar becomes uncanny.
- Main film: History of the Occult | Historia de lo Oculto – Cristian Ponce – Argentina 2020
Frequency 2: The Cursed Cartridge
VHS and the viral materiality of images
With VHS, fear becomes tactile, graspable, exchangeable. The tape is a physical object that can be touched, hidden, passed hand to hand like a secret or a disease. This frequency embraces the material decay of analog formats—the tracking errors that suggest reality itself is misaligned, the degraded image that implies corrupted memory, the mechanical hunger of VCRs that seem to devour as much as display.
- Main film: Videodrome – David Cronenberg – USA 1982
Frequency 3: The Digital Séance
The early internet as liminal space
This frequency captures the specific uncanniness of the nascent web (late 90s-early 00s), a vast, anonymous space that felt both empty and overcrowded. The aesthetic is defined by waiting—for pages to load, for downloads to complete, for someone to sign on. The horror emerges from connection that reveals only deeper disconnection, networks that isolate, communication that creates silence.
- Main film: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair – Jane Schoenbrun – USA 2021
Frequency 4: The Algorithmic Possession
When the feed feeds on us
Today, the horror is no longer a ghost in the machine but the machine itself—invisible architectures that shape desire, fracture identity, and monetize suffering. These films confront our current reality where the haunting has become environmental, the possession consensual, the horror profitable.
- Main film: Red Rooms | Les chambres rouges – Pascal Plante – Canada 2023
Frequency 5: The New Flesh (Imagine Expanded)
Immersive media and the dissolution of reality
In 2026, for the first time, Imagine Expanded becomes an integral part of our main programme, creating a natural fifth frequency that explores the newest stage of media evolution: the collapse of the frame itself. Read more about this frequency on the separate Expanded theme page.
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FANTASTIC THEMES
Imagine Fantastic Film Festival has multiple sections: a general genre-wide film programme, a special yearly festival theme, a country or cultural focus and an Expanded/immersive programme. Read more about this year’s themes through the blocks below.
