[Indicative date: the festival will take place in April 2027, though possibly on a different weekend]
Le Frisson qui vient is a festival powered by the association Le Cinéma qui vient, founded in April 2026. The association’s mission is to bring cinema to rural areas and to offer high-quality artistic programming to territories with limited access to cultural experiences.
The Festival’s Core Principles
— Showcasing new voices
Le Frisson qui vient is a discovery-driven festival. We seek out first features, second films, and works created outside established circuits—films that don’t tick the “right” boxes. Innovation, boldness, and surprise are our guiding principles.
— Reinventing genre
Genre cinema has its codes. We are interested in those who dare to bend them. What matters to us is fear as it has not yet been seen: emerging from a frame, a sound, an image, or the unspoken. The kind that settles in before anything even happens. Each edition of Le Frisson qui vient is a laboratory—a mapping of what the genre can still invent.
— Atmosphere over gore
We do not program gore films. This is not a moral stance, but an aesthetic one. The kind of thrill we champion is built through atmosphere, tension, and ambiguity. The most lasting fear, in our view, is the one the viewer constructs themselves—in silence, between two shots, in subtext, in what remains off-screen.
— Doing more with less
Some of the most important films in horror history were made with very limited means: a handheld camera, a forest, a night. Constraints foster invention, and invention can yield remarkable results. In this spirit, Le Frisson qui vient awards each year a Found Footage Prize, paying tribute to a form that turned limitation into its own language.
— More than a festival
Le Frisson qui vient is as much an experience as it is a screening event. The festival is conceived as a work in itself: recurring characters appear, voices emerge from the darkness, fragments of narrative accumulate year after year. At the edge of a medieval castle, you discover not only a program, but a universe. We cultivate uncertainty—the very source of the thrill. Each edition reveals a little more. And compels you to return…
