Over 10 days, Imagine Fantastic Film Festival offers the latest and best in science fiction, fantasy, horror and related genres.

We are back for this 40th (!) edition with a program to be proud of. It’s our third year in the FilmHallen, LAB111 and Galerie Beeldend Gesproken.

In addition to feature films and short films, the 2024 programme consists of four pillars: the annual theme program (1984 Re:Imagined), our country focus Myths of the World (Djinn), Imagine Expanded (Interfaces of Reality) and Imagine Industry. On top of that, we’re celebrating our 40th birthday this year!

40 years of Imagine

Imagine turns forty years this year! Come celebrate the past four decades with us. We’re organising a few festive events for our 40th birthday such as a classic film and a quiz. Keep an eye on the website for titles and more information. 

We are celebrating our 40th birthday this year. Who could have imagined that in 1984? Not founder Jan Doense, who organised the first Weekend of Terror that year, in the now demolished Alhambra cinema on the Weteringschans in Amsterdam. The Weekend of Terror lasted for nearly a decade. After a short break, the festival returned with a new name: Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival. A weekend turned into a week and then ten days, and an intimate horror party turned into a more ambitious and broadly programmed festival for fantastic film which, besides horror, also made space for science fiction, fantasy, anime, martial arts, cult, and everything in between. 

AFFF didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so in 2008 it was renamed Imagine, the name we still use today. For clarity, we re-added the word Fantastic in 2022. The past ten years saw a further broadening of the programme, with the addition of themes like Fantastic Fashion, Nature Strikes Back! and Fantastic Alchemy, digital programme Imagine Expanded and Imagine Industry, our initiative for professionals. Our educational branch blossomed, and we joined forces with exciting new partners inside and outside of Amsterdam. Ever since its start as a horror party for the fans by the fans, Imagine has changed colour and shape regularly, and we still strive to reinvent ourselves. 

And then there’s the people! We would be lost without our loyal visitors and volunteers, and many big names in fantastic film have visited our festival over the years. We fondly recall meeting guests like Roger Corman, Paul Verhoeven, Tim Burton, Rutger Hauer, Lindy Hemming, Neil Jordan, Dario Argento, Terry Gilliam, Wes Craven, Udo Kier, Ray Harryhausen and Dick Maas. The list is long and nice.  

Since 1984, the festival has also managed to adapt to major changes in the industry: we started out in the VHS era, saw the rise and fall of DVD and Blu-Ray, embraced the arrival of digital cinema and mourned the loss of 35 mm, witnessed the decimation caused by piracy and the rise of the streaming platforms. Each time, we managed to react to changing circumstances that called for new artistic and commercial choices. 

We don’t know what the future will bring (and we like that!). But with a bit of imagination we can be sure that Imagine will always remain a shapeshifter, and that despite our age, we’ll never become too respectable.