The Queer Screams Film Festival is returning for its fourth edition this coming August.

From August 14th to 16th, the horror festival will unveil 30 new queer genre films at the Clinton Street Theater in Portland, Oregon., while also featuring live drag and musical performances.

Bryan Fuller, best known for the genre series Hannibal, Pushing Daisies, and Star Trek: Discovery, will receive the 2026 Queer Screams Career Achievement Award, honouring a significant contribution to queer horror cinema and culture.

“From Oscar Wilde to Bram Stoker to Mary Shelley to Clive Barker, there is a long illustrious history of Queer storytellers using their experience as outsiders to tell the tales that frighten us,” Fuller said in a statement. “I am so honored to be included in this year’s Queer Screams, celebrating the aliens and the alienated in a community diverse in its solidarity.”

Queer Screams returns to Portland, Oregon, for its third edition, to celebrate the beauty and power of LGBTQ+ genre cinema. As part of this year’s festivities, Chucky franchise creator Don Mancini will be in attendance to receive the 2025 Queer Screams Career Achievement Award: Honoring Significant Contribution to Queer Horror Cinema & Culture.

Screenwriter, director, and producer Don Mancini will be honored at the fest with the 2025 Queer Screams Career Achievement Award: Honoring Significant Contribution to Queer Horror Cinema & Culture. That’s not all; the horror stalwart’s guest appearance also comes with featured screenings from the Chucky franchise.

Queer Screams is excited to announce that this year’s very special VIP guest is Don Mancini. Don Mancini is a screenwriter, director and producer. Best known for creating the CHUCKY franchise, Don is the recipient of the 2025 Queer Screams Career Achievement Award: Honoring Significant Contribution to Queer Horror Cinema & Culture.

The Scariest Things loves a great film festival. We particularly love film festivals that come to our neighborhood, and the latest one to arrive is the inaugural Queer Screams Film Festival, celebrating LGBTQ+ horror themes at the Clinton Street Theater in Portland from August 18-20! Highlights include actress Lynn Lowry presenting Shivers (1975) and The Crazies (1973) in which she starred, and Director Sam Irvin will be on hand to showcase Elvira’s Haunted Hills (2001), as well as a plethora of horror shorts, and a horror drag show!

The festival combines short and feature films from local, national and international filmmakers. The festival lineup offers a variety of horror genres—including zombies, vampires, demonic possession, cabin-in-the-woods slashers and stories of one-night stands which take terrifying turns. The films span a wide breadth of horror subgenres, but LGBTQ+ themes and representation ultimately link each film together. Those were the two requirements for entry into the festival. Films needed to be a horror-genre film containing LGBTQ+ representation, whether it be the characters on the screen or the actors and filmmakers behind it.

As festival organizer JT Seaton says, “Queer audiences gravitate toward horror films because we can identify with The Other—the outcast of society, in essence, The Monster.” It’s no coincidence that a gay filmmaker, James Whale, directed Frankenstein, one of the first horror films to take a sympathetic approach to its ostensible villain. And the array of short films, screening in five blocks over Saturday and Sunday, promise a similarly subversive approach.

Just imagine we’re all sitting at a table in a rawkin’ Portland bar and the jukebox is too loud and your horror pals try to catch up over plastic pitchers of Rainier and shots of Old Crow! Genuinely and sincerely, a huge thanks to Lynn Lowry and JT Seaton for being on the show.