At this year’s Popcorn Frights Film Festival, John Carpenter’s classic “The Fog” will play as artificial “fog” pumps into the theater. Another movie, the Christmas-themed slasher “Silent Night, Deadly Night” will screen with “snow” streaming from the rafters.
And that’s just inside the theater.
Outside, the festival will show the 1980s splatterfest “Nightmare Beach,” about an insatiable killer preying on Spring Breakers, at night on Fort Lauderdale beach, a frisbee toss from its filming location.
At a time when deep state cuts have slashed arts funding, horror movies have proven to be a frighteningly resilient business in South Florida — and the proof is in Popcorn Frights, a defiantly indie horror bash that has inexplicably become Broward County’s biggest film festival.
The scarefest returns for its 11th edition on Aug. 7-17, with 74 feature-length, short and virtual-only films from 20 countries, including 15 world premieres featuring stars such as Harvey Guillén, Sydney Sweeney, Elisabeth Moss, Kate Hudson and Iggy Pop. Roughly half the lineup is populated with classic creature-features (“The Phantom of the Opera,” “Cujo”) and yesteryear celebrities that lure nostalgic fans to experience films they wouldn’t ordinarily watch.
If you ask Popcorn Frights’ cofounder Igor Shteyrenberg, the festival — loud, unapologetic, immersive, weird — is South Florida itself, holding up a cracked mirror to our strange times.
“Florida is a living breathing horror movie and our festival is a reflection of us,” Shteyrenberg says. “It takes a certain kind of insanity to embrace Florida insanity, and our audiences are not silent. They shout and scream and laugh and cry, because horror movies are visceral experiences. You internalize all this pent-up fear and anxiety of living in South Florida, and horror draws it out of you.”
But here’s the plot twist: Popcorn Frights doesn’t scream profitability. It’s for-profit, receives no county or state funding, and was Frankensteined to life with $500 by two horror junkies, Shteyrenberg and Marc Ferman, who say they’ve taken no salary since it began in 2015. Instead of confining its festival to the dead heat of August, Popcorn Frights throws screenings all year long, often free, including sneak previews of first-run features. (Prime example: “Weapons,” premiering Aug. 8 in theaters, will screen exclusively at the festival two days earlier for free.)
What makes the festival Broward’s biggest are its one-off shows at Savor Cinema Fort Lauderdale and Cinema Paradiso Hollywood. These have brought its total 2025 screenings to 184, and dozens more will be screened after the Popcorn Frights Film Festival, especially near Halloween, a self-promotion tool that plants the idea that Popcorn Frights exists year-round, Shteyrenberg says.
‘Florida is a living breathing horror movie and our festival is a reflection of us. It takes a certain kind of insanity to embrace Florida insanity, and our audiences are not silent. They shout and scream and laugh and cry … You internalize all this pent-up fear and anxiety of living in South Florida, and horror draws it out of you.’ — Festival co-founder Igor Shteyrenberg
That’s more than its closest competitors combined. The Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival screened “over 100 films and documentaries” in 2024, according to its press release, while the Fort Lauderdale edition of OUTshine Film Festival says it screened 62. Each nonprofit receives county grants.
“All our screenings build buzz and urgency and FOMO (fear of missing out),” Shteyrenberg argues. “Because we have the coolest stuff first [like early movie premieres], it builds anticipation and awareness, and makes our festival a cultural leader in horror. Our screenings don’t make money. They’re investments, and we reinvest every penny back into the festival.”
For its efforts, Popcorn Frights has scared up accolades including:
- In October, MovieMaker Magazine listed Popcorn Frights among the “coolest film festivals in the world” for championing classics, indies and Florida-grown filmmakers.
- Its popularity at Popcorn Frights and support by The Advocate magazine helped Fort Lauderdale native Erynn Dalton land a U.S. distribution deal for 2023’s “Big Easy Queens,” a horror musical about voodoo, zombies and drag queens, through streaming on Hulu, according to Dalton
- The 2024 Popcorn Frights horror-thriller standout “Lizzie Lazarus” also landed a U.S. distribution deal by Cineverse (the “Terrifier” franchise), according to its director, Aviv Rubinstien.
‘Driven by two crazy people’
Scary cinema’s success in Broward bears out nationally, too. Horror has become Hollywood’s fastest-rising film genre, tripling its market share from 4.87% in 2013 to 14.11% in 2025, according to The Numbers, a movie-industry data service.
This year, horror accounts for 17% of North American ticket sales, according to Comscore box-office data. One of those trendy terrors is “Sinners,” director Ryan Coogler’s juke-joint vampire thriller, which grabbed $278.6 million domestically to become one of Hollywood’s highest-grossing horror films.
And when horror flourishes in Hollywood, it oozes down to South Florida, helping indie veterans like Shteyrenberg and Ferman grow Popcorn Frights’ footprint and gaining sponsorships from Fangoria, IFC and Paramount.
The 41-year-old son of Russian Jewish parents, Shteyrenberg was born near Chernobyl in Soviet-occupied West Ukraine but emigrated to the United States at age 5, he jokes, “to avoid becoming one of the next X-Men.” After graduating from the University of Southern California’s film school in Los Angeles, he worked at the Miami International Film Festival briefly and became director of the Miami Jewish Film Festival in 2013.
As for the festival’s co-creator, Ferman, 51, is a “T-shirt and jeans-kinda” music promoter who cut his indie cred in the ’90s running records to club DJs. In his spare time, he rented out Miami’s O Cinema theater to play his favorite movies, like “Aliens” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”
After seeing each other at preview screenings, the pair finally met, almost cinematically, in the dark theater of a horror midnight matinee at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas. Ferman’s first impression of Shteyrenberg: He didn’t dress the part of a horror-obsessed fanatic.
“[Igor] mostly wears slacks and a buttoned-up shirt, and he’s very well-kept, so I actually thought he was pretty conservative,” Ferman says with a laugh.
In 2015, they decided to split the tab on a $500 mini-festival of four new distributor-less horror indies and called it Popcorn Frights.
“At first we were like, ‘Let’s see who shows up,’” says Ferman, of North Miami Beach. “I wanted to get to a place where, if it was a movie you’d hadn’t seen before, we’d wink and say, ‘Wait until you see this.’ And if they trusted our opinion, they’d think, ‘If these guys picked it, it must be special.'”
A year later, they closed with 34, and since 2018 Popcorn Frights has only taken place in Broward County. Last year’s 10th Popcorn Frights screened all movies for free, paying back fans who put up with their opinions that long, Shteyrenberg adds. This year’s near-sold-out Popcorn Frights is expected to reach 13,000 in attendance. (His Miami Jewish Film Festival almost quintuples that, reaching 58,500 in 2025.)
“It’s driven by two crazy people,” Shteyrenberg says. “We get no grant support. Who’d ever give money to a genre festival? So we don’t answer to anyone. We could throw drag shows for LGBT horror films, which we did two years ago, and we’re doing it again for a screening this year.”
The summer of Lloyd
You’d have to squint your eyes to see his face pressed up against the glass of The Daily Planet, but iconic horror director Lloyd Kaufman has a cameo in this summer’s “Superman” movie.
It’s a familiar place for him. The co-founder of horror studio Troma Entertainment has always stood in the background, yet his influence on the mainstream is seismic: filmmakers Peter Jackson, Quentin Tarantino, James Gunn and “South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker all credit his influence.
Now Kaufman, 79, is touring in support of “The Toxic Avenger,” which is a reboot of his 40-year-old Troma classic of the same name, set for theatrical release on Aug. 29 with Peter Dinklage and Elijah Wood. (He’s a producer and has a cameo in the new film.) Kaufman is the marquee guest of the 11th Popcorn Frights, in town to host a Troma Trivia night, sit on a Fangoria-sponsored panel and screen two movies including “Mr. Melvin,” a re-cut that splices his two “Toxic Avenger” sequels into one movie.
While he appreciates the mainstream attention now, it matters less to Kaufman than conventions and horror fests like Popcorn Frights.
“It’s a big deal to be invited here,” he deadpans. “Even if my autograph is probably worthless.”
At Popcorn Frights, Kaufman’s films are not categorized as good or bad movies, nor as camp or schlock — instead, they’re part of a “safe space for all demented visions,” Shteyrenberg says.
And that’s what appeals to Nicole Talbot, of Coral Springs, a Popcorn Frights superfan since 2017. Raised on a horror diet of “Candyman” and Stephen King’s “It,” Talbot, a server-bartender, tries to schedule Friday nights off “to escape and sit in a theater with horror lovers I know.”
That Popcorn Fright’s audiences are 65% women makes her feel even safer.
“Anybody could just grab 30 random movies and tell a bunch of people to watch, but they really try to make every showing unforgettable,” she says. “Marc and Igor are open to the idea that anyone can love or make horror, regardless of gender.”
IF YOU GO
WHAT: Popcorn Frights Film Festival
WHEN: Aug. 7-17
WHERE: Savor Cinema Fort Lauderdale, 503 SE Sixth St.; Cinema Paradiso Hollywood, 2008 Hollywood Blvd.
COST: $13+ for individual screenings, $144.70+ for all-access badge via Eventbrite.com
INFORMATION: 305-573-7304; PopcornFrights.com
