Set in 19th Century Luxembourg, The Last Ashes captivates from its very opening sequence. Part period Western, part folk horror, it's a harrowing tale of revenge and systemic oppression, led by Sophie Mousel as fierce revenger Hélène. It never quite lives up to the promise of its gripping opening 20 minutes, but always compels. Move over The Northman, the Luxembourg-Woman is here.

Honourable Mention: Derelict, a gritty British version of the revenge thriller, featuring Suzanne Fulton as a very different kind of revenger.

Years after being party to the death of his childhood friend, a young man returns home to find his best pal's dad waiting, and harbouring a dangerous grudge. An unpredictable, inventive thriller, Schlitter impresses with a series of grotesque death traps, plot twists and bursts of shocking gore. What is a Schlitte anyway? All will become brutally clear.

Honourable Mention: Living a life of isolation due to his murky past, a man (Dean Kilbey, in his third FrightFest role, along with Derelict and Members Club) finds his life turned upside down when the titular Charlotte turns up on his doorstep.

FrightFest favourite Graham Skipper (The Leech, Sequence Break) returns with this ambitious one-man show, starring as the last man on Earth. Desperately trying to escape his loneliness, Wozzek attempts to save his sanity by reuniting with his dead wife (Christina Bennett Lind). Written, directed, starring and edited by Skipper, The Lonely Man With the Ghost machine is a bold, ambitious and deeply heartfelt apocalyptic drama, and one of the year's most original efforts.

Honourable Mention: The world around her may still be there, but Alter is no less isolated or lonely. Suffering from schizophrenia and depression, this fractured figure embarks upon a lynchian odyssey into the troubling, wild phantasmagoria of Aurélia Mengin's Scarlet Blue.

Running at a brisk 70 minutes, Mickey Keating's Invader doesn't waste much time. It doesn't even take its shoes off at the door before trashing the joint; drinking all your beers, smashing the finest china and pissing all over the toilet seat. Producer Joe Swanberg also stars as the titular invader. Home invasion at its most anxiety-inducing.

Honourable Mention: Those who found the above to be just a little too brash, Ghost Game gives a more conventional kind of home invasion movie, although its depiction of autism is just as questionable as Invader's own use of a certain serial killer trope.

Samara Weaving continues to be the horror heroine for our age with Azrael, in which she plays a doe-eyed survivor on the run from gun-toting cultists and a race of bloodthirsty forest-dwelling zombies. Set in a future in which mankind has gone mute to atone for its sins, Azrael is an action-packed, gore-soaked post-apocalyptic fable, grounded by another incredible performance from Weaving.

Honourable Mention: A sillier kind of apocalypse unfolds in Survive, in which a family find their world turned upside down when the oceans suddenly decide to go for a walk.

Bleeding and terrified, a woman (Willa Fitzgerald) flees through the woods, pursued by a shotgun-wielding maniac (Kyle Gallner) known only as 'The Demon.' Split into six non-linear chapters, this serial killer thriller explores how a sexy hookup turned into the fight for one woman's life. Featuring a striking use of colour and killer deployment of the song 'Love Hurts' (sorry Rob Zombie, this has now displaced Halloween II as the first place my mind goes when I hear it), Strange Darling is electric.

Honourable Mention: The Hitcher. It's my favourite chase movie of all time, nuff said.

This intimate documentary explores the legacy of Wicker Man director Robin Hardy through those who barely knew him - his own children. Using Hardy's great work to unpack themes of childhood abandonment and trauma, it's brave and unflinching - both a celebration of the monolithic work, and a mournful interrogation of its creator's motives.

Honourable Mention: The Wicker Man star Christopher Lee is celebrated in The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee, a joyful , irreverent celebration of the mighty actor's work. It may have been his favourite horror role, but The Wicker Man is barely a footnote.

Crawling from the house on his hands and knees, his wrists still bound and his feet chained, a man (Sterling Macer Jr.) shoves a desperate SOS into a handily-located mailbox. From there, one of the strangest true crime stories that never happened begins to unfold. Along the way, directors Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaughy answer all the questions about the US Post Office and 1980s synthesizers you never knew you had. Offbeat, exciting and gorgeously textured, Dead Mail is a work of precise and exacting vision.

Honourable Mention: Another strange mystery unfolds in A Desert, which follows a woman and her private detective as they attempt to find out what happened to her husband in the American Mojave.

Filmed entirely in the Irish language and set during the great famine, this folk fable follows a father and his daughter as they take on a caretaking gig at a remote country estate. Tempers fray when dad (Tom Kerrisk) injures his foot and Máire (Livvy Hill) insists that her ghost has returned. Between them, Kerrisk and Hill deliver two of the festival's most powerful performances. Overlook the plug sockets, this gothic horror is one of the year's chilliest.

Honourable Mention: A more splatterpunk look at the effects of childhood trauma, Traumatika will find no fans among those who believe the taboo subject should be approached with a sense of responsibility or good taste. It wasn't for me, but the extreme horror community may find value in its boundary-pushing acts of vulgarity.

Who could have expected Demi Moore to star in the most shocking body horror film of the past forty decades? Director Coralie Fargeat follows up 2017's Revenge with this unbelievably grotesque modern fairy tale - throwing hagsploitation, modern satire and body horror into a blender to come up with this bizarre combination of Barbie, Society and The Nutty Professor. Of all the films of this year's FrightFest, The Substance is the most.

Honourable Mention: No.