Halloween International Film Festival

The Historic Pioneer Theater, Downtown Manteo

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Halloween Daily News is excited to announce the resurrection of the Halloween International Film Festival in 2025, showcasing shorts and feature works from around the world that celebrate the strange, the unusual, and the horror of the most hallowed of seasons, taking place on the historic and haunted Outer Banks, North Carolina, home of America’s first unsolved mystery, the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island, at a legendary theater that dates back over a century.

The festival features three days of independent horror and Halloween-themed films from around the world, as well as networking opportunities and extensive media exposure, all taking place as the kickoff event for the town of Manteo’s Halloween Island festivities, during which area restaurants, bars, and businesses transform into Halloween pop-ups for October.

Films selected for the festival are shown on the big screen at The Pioneer Theater in Manteo, NC, including Q&A sessions with attending filmmakers, nightly meet and greets, photo ops on our Orange Carpet, an outdoor Halloween vendor market, and numerous Halloween Island festivities happening each day in easy walking distance throughout Downtown Manteo. Our iconic host venue dates back to 1918, originally showing silent films in the earliest days of moviemaking, later opening its current location in 1934, and is a truly independent cinematic landmark in itself.

Known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic, North Carolina’s Outer Banks is recognized as one of the most haunted places in America, with thousands of shipwrecks resting off the coast of these barrier islands. Roanoke Island, where the Pioneer Theater is located, is the site of the ill fated first English settlement in North America, and its more than 100 colonists that vanished without explanation in 1590, today referred to as The Lost Colony.