Night of the living horror fans: Neuchâtel Fantastic Film Festival is the temple of Cult
For 25 years, the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF) has transformed the lakeside Swiss city into a gathering place for horror, science fiction and fantasy fans. Celebrating its silver anniversary this July, it remains Switzerland’s only major festival dedicated entirely to genre cinema.
Over the years, the NIFFF has built a community held together by rituals, inside jokes and traditions passed from veterans to newcomers. The festival’s geography helps create this intimacy. Within a radius of just 500 metres, visitors can move between cinemas, exhibitions and a park transformed into a village-like space with food stands and bars. Like many Swiss festivals, the NIFFF benefits from the small scale of its host city: everything is within reach, encouraging encounters and familiarity.
The festival’s sense of community also extends beyond the cinemas. At this year’s edition, spectators escaped the 34°C heat one morning by jumping in for a swim in Lake Neuchâtel, exchanging stories about a shark sculpture supposedly hidden beneath the water.
Bruce, a shark sculpture created for the 2007 short film Choc au LacExternal link, which was screened at the festival the following year, does exist. But it actually lies 22 metres below the surface of the lake – in a neighbouring city. At the NIFFF, the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred both inside and outside the cinema.
Rituals and festival lore
Audience participation has become one of the NIFFF’s trademarks. Spectators riff with each other and shout recurring catchphrases during the advertisements in the lead-up to films. According to the festival’s artistic director, Kate Reidy, this reflects a distinctive genre culture.
“This isn’t something unique to the NIFFF,” she says. “It exists at other genre film festivals where audiences are much more engaged, feel freer to express themselves and play with their own references. What’s unique here is that the audience has developed its own rituals around the entire block of pre-screening advertisements.”
At the NIFFF, the unusually long block of advertisements shown before each screening has itself become part of the performance. Some of the jokes hark back to past festival favourites. Ever since S.S. Rajamouli‘s action-packed saga Baahubali was first screened in 2016, a shout of “Baahubali!“ is invariably heard now at every screening at the festival, prompting the audience to answer in chorus.
Other rituals draw on cult cinema. In the brief moment when the audience is sitting in darkness before the film starts, someone calls out the famous line from the French comedy RRRrrr!!!External link (2004) – “Ça va être tout noir!” (“It’s going to be pitch black!”) – before the rest of the audience replies as one, “Ta gueule!” (“Shut up!”).
Certain advertisements have also become annual fixtures. During an ad for the Film de Minuit by Swiss public broadcaster RTS, audiences recite the dialogue along with the screen before joining together for the final scream.
New catchphrases emerge almost every year. During the first days of the festival, spectators test jokes and references to see what catches on. By the weekend, a contagious effect has taken hold, and some of these have become part of the shared repertoire. For Roxane, a 26-year-old who is training to become a teacher, it was natural to join the ritual: “I saw people shouting funny things at the screen. So I thought: I can shout funny things at the screen too.”
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A community built around genre cinema
But rituals alone cannot sustain a festival. They require an audience willing to embrace them. At a time when cinema attendance has declined across Europe, the NIFFF continues to fill theatres for daytime screenings – and that during the week.
Antonio, a 61-year-old bank employee, has been attending the event for 15 years. “The first year, I only came for half of the festival, just to see what it was like. I enjoyed it so much that from the following year onwards, I took vacation for the whole thing,” he says.
While spectators range from teenagers to retirees, the festival attracts a particularly large young audience: in recent years, people under 35 have accounted for around 47% of attendees, according to the festival’s2025 annual report. “For people in this region, it is an annual rendezvous, something that has been passed down from one generation to the next,” Reidy says. “People who came when they were younger have since brought their own children, who have in turn become volunteers.”
She also believes the genre itself helps explain its strong appeal among younger audiences. “Genre cinema particularly interests a young audience, probably because it explores social, political, philosophical and existential themes, and because it allows people to experience a form of catharsis around anxieties or feelings they may have, but in a playful form,” she says.
The festival’s communal spirit was especially visible during the anniversary screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. French filmmaker Bertrand Mandico, this year’s guest of honour, whose phantasmagoric, transgressive and gender-fluid films have earned him a devoted following, was struck less by the film itself than by the audience.
“There’s something very permissive about this film,” he says. “Its structure is unusual: highly musical, very free. And above all, the audience ends up taking ownership of it. The film literally transforms the cinema into a cabaret. People allow themselves to do things they probably wouldn’t elsewhere. It’s a bit like a carnival. There’s this idea of transgressing your own identity, or at least playing with that transgression. What really moved me was seeing a younger generation arrive in costume, knowing all the rituals surrounding the film […] while sometimes discovering the film itself for the very first time.”
Stories that keep the NIFFF alive
This connection between genre cinema and the local community is strengthened by the region’s wider culture of fantastic film. The NIFFF does not exist in isolation: it is part of an ecosystem that includes events such as La Chaux-de-Fond’s Plan 9External link festival, all of which helps to make the region a fertile ground for genre cinema.
And while the festival’s roots are firmly local, its identity extends beyond Neuchâtel. As a member of the Méliès International Festivals Federation, the NIFFF is connected to a global network of genre festivals, including festivals such as the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of CataloniaExternal link and Mexico’s Morbido Fest.External link
Ultimately, what keeps the NIFFF alive is not only its programming, but the collective imagination that surrounds it. A shark sculpture becomes local mythology, a line from a forgotten comedy becomes shared ritual, and each generation of spectators adds new references to the festival’s evolving memory.
The origins of these traditions are difficult to trace. Long-time attendees believe many began with volunteers encouraging audiences to warm up before screenings, but over time they became part of the festival’s own folklore. For Reidy, this constant reinvention is at the heart of the NIFFF’s identity. “People try to understand the why and how, but for me the main thing is that people tell each other stories.”
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Edited by Catherine Hickley/dos
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