Sitges Film Festival 2026 — 59th edition

Brian De Palma's Carrie came out in 1976. Sitges is marking its fiftieth by putting it at the centre of the 59th edition of the festival, which runs from 8 to 18 October 2026 — eleven days, in a seaside town of narrow streets that spends the rest of the year not looking like a horror festival at all.

That is the pitch, and it is worth taking literally: the whole town gets taken over, not one arts centre in it.

What is actually programmed

The festival's own announcement for the 2026 edition sets out four strands beyond the competition: a retrospective of fantastic classics, an exploration of Asian genre filmmaking, a tribute to Spanish cinema's contribution to the genre, and the Carrie anniversary. Alongside them, the SGAE Foundation and the festival are running the second edition of the Josefina Molina Award for the best fantastic feature screenplay by a woman, a single prize of €10,000.

The dates are confirmed by the town's own tourism board, which also carries the two things that make the festival visibly different from a normal one: the Zombie Walk, and the King Kong Area of stalls and stands that colonises the seafront.

Where the screens are, and one you should not count on

The main room is the 1,380-seat Auditori inside the Meliá Sitges hotel, out at Aiguadolç — a fifteen-minute walk east of the old town, which surprises people who booked in the centre expecting everything to be within three streets. Screenings also run at Cinema Prado, which is where the first fantastic-cinema week was held in 1968 and is the closest thing the festival has to a birthplace.

The one to check rather than assume is El Retiro, the other historic society hall, which has appeared on festival venue lists for decades. Its own site records that renovation work began on 4 May 2024 — the hall stripped back to Miquel Utrillo's 1916 vaults after a false ceiling from 1970 came out — and publishes no reopening date. Don't build a schedule around it without confirming.

Don't miss the walk between venues at night. Sitges is small enough that the gap between an Auditori screening and a Prado one is a walk along the seafront rather than a transfer, and the Passeig de la Ribera during festival week, banner-lit and full of people arguing about a film, is most of the reason to come here rather than stream the same titles in six months.

October in Sitges is also still Sitges: Parrots and the Joan Tarrida strip are ten minutes from the Prado and do not go quiet because there is a festival on.