The seventh annual Anomaly - The Rochester Genre Film Festival has emerged! Join us for 15 programs that promise a thrilling escape through 13 feature films and 34 short films for all 5 days! Disappear with us, and experience the best genre cinema from around the world, November 5-9, 2025 in downtown Rochester, NY!
TICKETS / PASSES
Individual Tickets: $13 General Admission
($11 for students and seniors)Full Festival Pass: $130
Discounts available on select films/tickets/passes for students and seniors.
See Ticket Details for more information.
VENUES
Our 2025 Festival Enchanted Grove: The Little Theatre (Theatre 1): 240 East Ave, Rochester, NY 14604. PARKING INFO
Thursday, November 6: Cannonball screening is at The Dryden Theatre: 900 East Ave, Rochester, NY 14607. PARKING INFO
Other ”Excursion” (Event) locations vary.
Jump to a day: WEDNESDAY 11/5 • THURSDAY 11/6 • FRIDAY 11/7 • SATURDAY 11/8 • SUNDAY 11/9
Click/tap a poster to jump to a film program. • Scroll down for full list of films.
Full Festival Passholders: Pass Pickup & Baked Potato Bar
5:00-5:45pm (directly preceding Timestalker)
Location: The Little Theatre (Theatre 1 Lobby)
Come pickup (and decorate!) your pass, mingle with your fellow film-buffs, and enjoy a complimentary baked potato bar before we kickoff opening night! (Passes can still be picked up all festival long.)
Dust Bunny
A dark and thrilling fairy tale adventure.
Little Aurora has a monster under her bed. It’s big, it’s furry, and most terrifying of all, it’s hungry. When her worst fears come to pass, and the creature eats her family, Aurora hires her mysterious neighbor — who seems to know a thing or two about killing things — to help slay the beast once and for all. The first feature film from Bryan Fuller (Pushing Daisies, Hannibal), Dust Bunny is John Wick by way of Roald Dahl in Fuller’s trademark lush, romanticized vision, as our young heroine learns to face her childhood fears. More details & tickets
USA / 2025 / 1 hr 46 mins
Content Warnings: violence, gun violence, child endangerment, flashing lights, frightening scenes
PRECEDED BY
The Traveler & The Troll
A Traveler stops to rest in a clearing of a long haunted forest. They soon learn they are not alone and have stumbled upon the lair of a terrifying troll who demands gifts for passage.
USA / 2025 / 9 mins
Content Warnings: blood, violence
Night Stage
A kinky and queer erotic thriller of hookups and murders.
Aspiring actor Matias and golden boy mayoral candidate Rafael embark on a secretive affair after a late-night meeting on a hookup app. Their trysts quickly take a risky turn as the pair discover a shared fetish for amorous encounters in public places. As their dreams of fame and fortune begin to seem within their grasp, they can’t stop their private kicks from becoming a threat to their increasingly public personas, and the danger doesn’t stop there. More details & tickets
Brazil / 2025 / 1 hr 57 mins
In Portuguese with English subtitles
Content Warnings: flashing lights, blood, gun shots, nudity, sex, violence
PRECEDED BY
One Night Cherub
While Nick waits for his app hookup, Rod, to show up, a demonic cherub tries to kill him.
USA / 2024 / 7 mins
Content Warnings: gore, sex, blood
Pre-Film Excursion
5:00-7:00pm (directly preceding Cannonball)
Location & Details: To be announced!
Cannonball
Anomaly x The Dryden Theatre’s annual collaboration screening presents a rare 35mm print of an under-seen genre film, found deep in the vaults of the George Eastman Museum’s extensive collection!
Thursday, Nov 6 • 7:30pm
The Dryden Theatre (900 East Ave, Rochester, NY)
A rowdy cross-country road race action-adventure.
PRESENTED ON 35MM FILM! An underground, illegal coast-to-coast race pits competitors from all walks of life against each other - each with their own unique reasons for crossing that finish line first... at *any* cost. Prepare for surprising wit and propulsive action, barreling straight down the road to an explosive finale. When there are no rules of the road, anything is fair play... Starring David Carradine. More details & tickets
PRECEDED BY
Evenly Matched
This short documentary explores the culture and community of the competitive trading card game Yu-Gi-Oh! Following seven people who have never played before, and thrown into an overly complicated and confusing card game, how important is community to how learn new skills?
+ FILMMAKER Q&A with Evenly Matched director Troy Tedeschi.
USA / 2025 / 14 mins
LOCAL FILMMAKER
Freaky & Funny Friday Shorts
Short stories... with long shadows. From student films to professional productions, and covering a delightful and dark variety of genres, we invite you to walk with us through the woods and have an adventure or two. We promise you’ll get home. Eventually.
(11 short films•1 hr 34 mins) More details & tickets
Film still from Temporal Takedown
Invasion '53
A man-eating alien crashes a suburban cocktail party.
USA / 2025 / 10 mins
Content Warnings: flashing lights
Blossom Needs a Ride Home
After defeating a bloodthirsty maniac, Blossom needs a ride home. What a hassle.
USA / 2025 / 9 mins
Content Warnings: mutilation, gore, blood, gunshot, abduction, torture, references to cannibalism
Seance for the 'Gram
Three influencers stage a fake seance live for their followers, but the consequences are all too real.
USA / 2025 / 11 mins
Content Warnings: blood, violence, vaping, glitching, jump scares, mutilation
Tiny Bites!!!
A young child discovers herself in a world of sweets beyond her wildest imagination. But everything isn't as it seems.
USA / 2025 / 2 mins
Content Warnings: gore, violence, blood
LOCAL FILMMAKER
A Perfect Match
Bridget has no luck with men, so when a friend advises her to change her strategy, and she meets Andrei — awkward, shy and strangely dressed — she decides to invite him home. When mutual awkwardness gives way to frankness, have the pair found what they have been looking for all this time?
Russian Federation / 2025 / 15 mins
In Russian with English subtitles
Content Warnings: flashing lights, blood, implied possible violence
Bathroom Spider
When a callous jerk breaks a young woman's heart, she turns to her resident bathroom spider for advice - with horrifying results.
USA / 2025 / 3 mins
Content Warnings: spider
Sketchy Characters
After unknowingly drawing a murderer, an aspiring artist becomes the only source of evidence in an ongoing case.
USA / 2025 / 10 mins
Content Warnings: blood, violence
LOCAL FILMMAKER
Shadow Dancer
An underestimated tap choreographer must fight her surreal and violent hallucinations in order to keep her grip on reality before she loses the biggest opportunity of her life.
USA / 2025 / 5 mins
Content Warnings: stalking
Temporal Takedown
A woman with mysterious time freezing powers infiltrate a dirty car workshop in hopes of gaining information about a nefarious gangster. The mechanics are not compliant to her request and an epic and time-bending fight ensues.
Norway / 2025 / 8 mins
Content Warnings: violence
THE DEAD OF WINTER
After an affluent man leaves a rough sleeper to die in the cold on Christmas Eve, he's haunted by a figure that may be a vengeful spirit - or his own guilty conscience.
UK / 2025 / 12 mins
NORMA
A fantastical, dark comedy horror with romance, Norma attempts to move on from her many exes, only to discover her last boyfriend has swallowed the key to her safe. And Norma isn’t one to let her exes get away...
USA / 2025 / 9 mins
Content Warnings: decomposing corpses, gore, vomit, grave-robbing
A Useful Ghost
A ghostly, genre-bending romance.
A grieving young widower is shocked to discover his wife’s spirit has been reincarnated in the form of a vacuum cleaner — one of the many household products built in his family’s failing appliance factory. Absurd and strangely sweet, A Useful Ghost finds surprising depth and satirical bite in a story examining what value a society finds both in the living and its dead. More details & tickets
Thailand, Singapore, Germany, and France
2025 / 2 hr 10 mins
In Thai and Lao, with English subtitles
Content Warnings: death, blood, violence, sex, nudity
PRECEDED BY
Empty Jars
In an old and decaying house that serves as a residence for students, the new manager falls in love with a charismatic ghost. Together they conspire to possess the body of one of the young residents.
Chile / 2024 / 21 mins
In Spanish with English subtitles
Reflection in a Dead Diamond
A surreal pastiche of Eurospy visuals and 60s pulp novel vibes.
An ex-international spy and man of mystery is spending his retirement at a glamorous hotel in the French Riviera - when he begins to suspect mortal enemies from his past are resurfacing to once again cause mayhem. But is everything he sees real? Or just the multi-faceted reflections of obscured truths and glittering fictions intermixed in an unreliable narrator's deteriorating mind? More details & tickets
Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg / 2025
1 hr 27 mins
In English, Spanish, Italian, French, and German with PARTIAL English subtitles
Content Warnings: violence, torture, nudity, body horror
PRECEDED BY
DRAINOMANIA
Unaware that her relationship is at a crossroads, lovable daydreamer Katie fails to complete a simple task at her girlfriend's request: to clean the bathroom. As a result, Katie finds herself swirling into a fever dream that could tear her apart, or maybe bind them together forever.
USA / 2025 / 15 mins
Content Warnings: blood, violence
Strange & Spooky Saturday Shorts
Enter our hut and let us reward you with a batch of strange and fabulous bite-sized tales from storytellers near and far. Please don’t worry about having too much. We want you nice and full and plump… with stories of course.
(10 short films•1 hr 36ms) More details & tickets
Film still from Amira
Frankenbabes From Beyond The Grave!
Frankenscience and religious ideology reanimate a cohort of recently deceased fetishists to create the perfectly subservient woman only to unleash hell on the patriarchy.
USA / 2025 / 6 mins
Content Warnings: dismemberment, blood, gore, violence
Sweet & Crunchy
A beloved school teacher decides to do away with her least favorite student on Halloween.
USA / 2025 / 2 mins
Content Warnings: implied violence, child endangerment
Reciprocity Failure
After their father's death, a photographer comes home to make amends with his sister, only to discover that she hasn't been entirely alone.
USA / 2025 / 14 mins
Content Warnings: flashing lights, grief
LIVE.com
Late at night, two girls discover a voyeuristic website with horrifying consequences.
USA / 2025 / 10 mins
Content Warnings: flashing lights, stalking
LOCAL FILMMAKER
Cruelty
A young trans woman is chased into a junkyard while being followed home late at night. Trapped among the heaps of scrap she must outwit her predator and summon the strength of a goddess in her desperate fight for survival.
USA / 2025 / 9 mins
Content Warnings: blood, gore, jump scare, violence
AMIRA
In the XVIII Century there's a music school where it's always dark...
Spain / 2025 / 15 mins
In Spanish with English subtitles
Content Warnings: blood, gore, dismembered body
EVIL DINNER
On a Friday night, a young man immerses himself in his world of heavy metal and excesses, relaxing at home. But everything changes when a mysterious shipment arrives at his door in the shape of an innocent pizza box.
Spain / 2025 / 6 mins
Content Warnings: gore, goo
Skeeter
Every party has a buzz kill.
USA / 2025 / 4 mins
Content Warnings: goo/puss, blood, gore
dont.4get2smile
After receiving a chilling call about a classmate’s unexpected death, a social-media-obsessed teen is followed by a mysterious account. Worried that it's all connected, she begins to fear that the account’s reach extends far beyond the limits of her phone screen.
USA / 2025 / 10 mins
Content Warnings: jump scares, flashing lights
Tether
On the first day of her job running a remote, isolated space station, Mickie (Geffri Maya, "All American: Homecoming") receives mysterious transmissions and must quickly unravel their meaning with the help of a passing spaceship Captain (Ming-Na Wen, "The Mandalorian," "Mulan"), or an untold number of lives could be lost.
USA / 2025 / 14 mins
Content Warnings: flashing lights
By Design
A satirical, dark, one-of-a-kind experience of furniture-based transfiguration.
Middle-aged Camille (Juliette Lewis) feels unseen, unheard, and unappreciated until she encounters an exquisite chair one day, and wishes so hard in her malaise that she herself could be as cherished as this object is. Camille wishes so hard in fact that she literally becomes the chair, leaving her discarded body behind. With bizarre dream logic and the occasional dance number, By Design examines what kind of life one would have to lead in order to prefer being an inanimate piece of wood, and what that says about what the world values and what (or who) it does not. More details & tickets
USA / 2025 / 1 hr 31 mins
Content Warnings: attempted sexual assault, kidnapping, violence, blood
PRECEDED BY
REDDENING
At the intersection of contemporary performance and experimental fiction, four good friends travel through time and space for an alchemical and sensuous celebration full of phantasms.
Finland / 2024 / 15 mins
Content Warnings: goo, flashing lights
Mother of Flies
A grotesque and poignant dark fable of finding the true cost of a miracle.
In the latest uncanny tale from the masterfully macabre filmmaking clan the Adams family (Anomaly 2021’s Hellbender), a young woman with a dire illness and her bewildered father travel into the deep woods in a last ditch attempt to beseech a witch for a cure. Suffused with folkloric flavor, and with roots reaching deep into the place where humanity meets nature, this is an enigmatic fairytale about excavated truths and the painful transformations necessary to traverse the road and find hope. More details & tickets
USA / 2025 / 1 hr 32 mins
Content Warnings: gore, sacrificed animals, necrophilia, stillborn birth, dead baby, vomit, body horror
+ FILMMAKER Q&A with actress Zelda Adams.
PRECEDED BY
Vowels
Ava needs to record a self-tape but her speech impediment keeps getting in the way.
USA / 2025 / 6 mins
Content Warnings: gore, self-harm, blood
A lo-fi fantasy RPG.
Conor Marsh lives a solitary and secluded life with his dog, Sandy, in 1987 Baltimore. One day he receives an advertisement for OBEX, a new, state-of-the-art computer game that promises an escape from his humdrum reality. The gameplay doesn’t quite live up to those expectations, but when Sandy goes missing, Conor must venture deeper into the strange world of the game to win her back. Written, directed, and starring Anomaly alum Albert Birney (Strawberry Mansion), OBEX is a charming, handcrafted blend of fantasy, science fiction, and dark comedy about the epic quest to find connection in an isolated digital age. More details & tickets
USA / 2025 / 1 hr 31 mins
Content Warnings: bugs, flashing lights, agoraphobia, blood, violence, vomit/goo, karaoke, doggie endangerment
+ RECORDED FILMMAKER Q&A with director Albert Birney, specifically for Anomaly.
PRECEDED BY
Blue Light
A married couple’s relationship runs into trouble when a new personal computer arrives in their home to which they begin to express their desires and troubles through song.
USA / 2024 / 14 mins
Anything That Moves
Saturday, Nov. 8 • 10:45pm
18+ (No one under the age of 18 will be admitted without parental supervision)
An erotic, blood-soaked ride full of transgressive joy.
Moving through a city suffused with grindhouse aesthetics and giallo vibes, sex-worker Liam bikes from job to job, providing divine experiences of the flesh to a variety of eager patrons. But when a depraved serial killer starts to target his clients with gory brutality, Liam must prove his innocence and find the murderer before corruption overtakes his world. More details & tickets
USA / 2025 / 1 hr 21 mins
Content Warnings: body horror, blood, violence, gore, full frontal nudity, sex, slurs, incest, homophobia, flashing lights
Due to content, this screening is 18+
PRECEDED BY
Star-Crossed
A beautiful young woman craving connection risks revealing her true nature—only to fall for the wrong man, igniting a night of passion, poor decisions, and consequences you can't sweep under a rug.
USA / 2025 / 14 mins
Content Warnings: blood, tentacles
In The Mouth
A surreal and deadpan dark comedy.
Neurotic and reclusive Merl can’t bring himself to leave the house, even with cash running low and his landlord constantly dropping by to demand the rent he owes. And if that weren’t enough for Merl to worry about, a giant double of his own head inexplicably sprouts out of his front lawn. Desperate for a solution to his troubles, Merl takes in a roommate but winds up getting much more than he bargained for. Inspired by writer-director Cory Santilli’s very real experience with agoraphobia, In the Mouth is a strange, funny, and deeply personal story about finding the strength to confront the things that truly scare us. More details & tickets
USA / 2025 / 1 hr 24 mins
Content Warnings: violence, blood
PRECEDED BY
Manny Wolfe
It’s 1947. Manny Wolfe is an actor exhausted by Tinseltown. He also happens to be a real werewolf. After nonstop rejection, Manny gets a job. Unfortunately he's been typecast in a creature feature. Will Manny choose the big Hollywood role at the price of his own dignity and artistic integrity?
USA / 2024 / 15 mins
Content Warnings: discrimination
Beyond the Drumlins
Folklore meets cosmic horror in the deep woods.
An ill-fated expedition of academics travel into an ancient forest, none of them knowing that they will soon face confusion and chaos as overnight one of their number disappears. Inevitably the party members will each become lost, in one way or another - hearing voices and seeing hallucinations, wandering through the terrifying unknowableness of nature... and their own mind. More details & tickets
USA / 2025 / 1 hr 35 mins
Content Warnings: blood, suicide, flashing lights, violence, vomit
LOCAL FILMMAKER
PRECEDED BY
SIMON
A unique video game character, created by a 13-year-old child in a life simulator, narrates the unfortunate story of his life from the moment he was generated. Full of hatred and resentment, he will seek answers about its world and the malevolent “God” that controls it.
I Am Frankelda
A phantasmagoric celebration of spooky creativity.
The first theatrical stop-motion feature produced in Mexico tells the story of Frankelda, a 19th century writer whose macabre and fantastical stories are simply ahead of their time. Society doesn’t appreciate Frankelda’s boundless imagination until she’s whisked away to a magical world just beyond on our own, inhabited by the monstrous creatures brought to life within the pages of her stories. They need her help, and her talent for storytelling might be the key to saving their world, as well as her own. More details & tickets
Mexico / 2025 / 1 hr 53 mins
In Spanish with English subtitles
Content Warnings: cartoon violence, parental death, one big spider
PRECEDED BY
Melvin the Devourer
A projectionist vs a 35mm film-eating troll. Written by Melvin. Starring Melvin.
USA / 2025 / 12 mins
Content Warnings: hallucinating, confrontation on live tv
LOCAL FILMMAKER
It Ends
An existential road-trip horror.
Four twenty-something friends on a late-night food run suddenly find themselves on a wooded, seemingly infinite road without a single turn or exit in sight. If they stop their car, they’re descended on by desperate, shrieking souls lurking in the surrounding forest — and they definitely seem to mean them harm. As their situation grows more dire, the friends soon learn that the true terror comes from not knowing what lies down the road ahead.
#4 on Letterboxd’s list of 2025’s Top-Rated Horror Films!
More details & tickets
USA / 2025 / 1 hr 27 mins
Content Warnings: violence, jump scare, flashing lights, minor blood, death
PRECEDED BY
Hope
In the aftermath of a global pandemic, two grieving souls find solace in one another and attempt to recover what was once lost.
Bahrain / 2024 / 19 mins
In Arabic and English with PARTIAL English subtitles
Content Warnings: blood, violence, gore
Closing Night Pizza Party
9:00-10:00pm (approx.; directly following Universal Language)
Location: The Little Theatre (Theatre 1 Lobby)
Our annual tradition! Following our Closing Night Film, stick around for a free, laid-back pizza party celebrating the conclusion of this year's festival! Open to all ticket-holders of It Ends and all Festival Passholders.