Scottish Film Events: October 2025

The autumn film festival season is still very much upon us. You can read all about SQIFF (various venues, Glasgow, 27 Oct-1 Nov) in our October issue, and our Jali Film Weekender (Filmhouse, Edinburgh, 30 Oct-2 Nov) write-up will go online later this month, while in Dundee, the excellent Discovery Film Festival (25 Oct-2 Nov) returns with an eclectic mix of films from all over the world aimed at younger audiences; highlights look to be Folktales (2 Nov), a doc about a trio of teens who leave the city to enrol in a traditional folk high school in northern Norway, and Spanish sci-fi Jump!, about two brothers who discover a wormhole allowing them to travel to the past. Also look out for the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival (20 Oct-9 Nov), the Edinburgh Spanish Film Festival (1-19 Oct) and the London Film Festival (8-19 Oct), which brings some of its highlights on a tour of Scotland (GFT and Filmhouse, 8-19 Oct).

It’s also spooky season, the highlight of which is Dundead’s screening of the silent horror classic The Phantom of the Opera (1925) starring the man of a thousand faces, Lon Chaney, with a newly commissioned live score from jazz duo Andrew Wasylyk and Tommy Perman. The Dundead screening is at DCA on Halloween, but the film and performance are also on tour at Filmhouse (25 Oct), GFT (29 Oct), Hippodrome in Bo’ness (30 Oct) and Eden Court in Inverness (1 Nov).

Filmhouse also have a great horror lineup ahead of Halloween, featuring Dario Argento’s Tenebrae (23 Oct), John Carpenter's The Thing (26 Oct), Bong Joon-ho’s The Host (29 Oct) and Nic Roeg's Don’t Look Now (30 Oct). There’s plenty of horror, too, at the Trashfest all-dayer at Drygate in Glasgow (18 Oct). On the menu: The Guest, Idle Hands, May, Murder Party and a surprise film; and Leith Kino are showing Ana Lily Amirpour’s moody vampire flick A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Leith Depot, 26 Oct).

Johnny Guitar.

To mark the recent death of screen legend Robert Redford, Filmhouse are looking back over his glittering career in front of and behind the camera. The mini-season features his pair of mega-hits alongside Paul Newman (Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid [5 & 9 Oct] and The Sting [5 & 8 Oct]) as well as his multi Oscar-winning debut as director, Ordinary People (10 Oct).

Things get melodramatic over at Glasgow Film Theatre, meanwhile, with an epic season of melodramas running throughout October and November. The season is split into four parts. There’s What’s the Tea, Hollywood?, melodramas with a queer sensibility (think All About Eve, Johnny Guitar and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?); the mighty Invisible Women programme a season of Mexican melodramas, titled Stronger Than Love; there’s a series of feverish Tennessee Williams adaptations (think Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Streetcar Named Desire); and Too Much, the headlined strand that takes an overview of melodrama on film throughout cinema history, from Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows to Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven via Pedro Almodóvar’s Woman on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown. See glasgowfilm.org for details.