Jason Isaacs’ New Vampire Movie Officially Arrives Just in Time for Halloween With a Chilling Sneak Peek

Hannah covers horror, sci-fi, and games at Collider, where she writes news and features, reviews new releases, and interviews the people who make them. She’s helping build out Collider‘s gaming coverage, with Pokémon as one of her specialties. If she isn’t writing about a monster, she’s probably watching one on a tape from her VHS collection.

Halloween movie night is getting another attraction, and this one comes with a pretty good reason to skip the carnival when it rolls into town. A mysterious traveling show might sound like a fun distraction during spooky season, especially when the alternative is sitting at home with your problems. Of course, accepting an invitation from strangers promising to make those problems disappear is usually how someone ends up in a horror movie.

Jason Isaacs has already given audiences plenty of reasons to distrust a charming man with something to hide. The Harry Potter and The White Lotus actor’s latest horror outing pairs him with Nell Verlaque, who previously had a holiday celebration ruined in Thanksgiving. This time, the danger comes from an attraction that knows exactly how to get vulnerable people through its gates.

Aura Entertainment’s Vampire Carnival arrives on VOD October 30, giving horror fans a new option to rent or buy the day before Halloween. Today, Collider is thrilled to bring you an exclusive sneak peek from the film. Directed by David Charbonier and Justin Douglas Powell, the supernatural thriller follows a grieving young woman who finds herself drawn to a traveling carnival that appears unexpectedly in her small town. Its promise of escape comes with a catch: the carnival opens onto a hidden world inhabited by vampires that feed on human despair. As she gets pulled further into the carnival’s illusions, she must confront the trauma she has been avoiding to have any hope of getting out. Otherwise, her visit could end with her becoming a permanent part of the show, which is a fairly convincing argument for staying home and watching someone else make questionable decisions.

Four of the largest communities on the planet, and four completely
different reasons to belong to one. Here is yours, what it would give you, and the argument you
would be having within a week.

You belong to the fandom that is really about comfort. Hogwarts
works on people because it is a place rather than a plot, and the pull is not the wizard war
so much as the corridors, the food, the weather and the sense that somebody is expecting
you.

• You are drawn to belonging, which is why this fandom sorted itself into houses within
  about five minutes and has never stopped.
• This is the most social of the four, and the one most likely to know which type every
  single person in your life would be.
• The books are built to be reread rather than analysed, and rereading is exactly what you
  do with things you love.
• The new HBO series is bringing the whole thing back one book at a time, which means the
  arguments are about to start all over again.

You belong to the deepest fandom on this list, the one where
somebody has always read further than you and is quietly delighted to say so. Middle-earth
rewards patience more than any other world in popular culture.

• You like the sense that the story you are reading is only the visible part of something
  enormous, which is precisely how Tolkien built it.
• This fandom takes adaptation seriously to a degree that other fandoms find slightly
  alarming, and it has good reasons for that.
• Your favourite thing about the books is probably the bit that is not action at all,
  which is the walking, the songs and the long goodbyes.
• Nobody here thinks heroism belongs to the powerful, and the whole story exists to make
  that argument.

You belong to the loudest and largest tent of the four, the one
where three generations are all watching the same thing and none of them agree about any of
it. That disagreement is not a flaw in this fandom, it is the main activity.

• You want something you can share with absolutely everybody, from a six year old to a
  grandparent, and this is the only one on the list that really does that.
• Nobody argues like Star Wars fans argue, and the argument has been running since roughly
  1980 with no sign of resolution.
• The pull here is sensory before it is narrative, since it is the sound design, the score
  and the look of a used and dented galaxy.
• You would be first in the queue, in costume, with strong opinions and a genuinely good
  time.

You belong to the thinking fandom, the one that turns up for the
argument rather than the explosion. Trek has always been a series of ethical problems in
space, and the people who love it love being asked what they would have done.

• You are an optimist in a way that is currently unfashionable, and this is the only major
  franchise still willing to say the future might be better.
• The best episodes are the ones where nobody fires anything, which is a sentence that
  makes perfect sense to this fandom and to nobody else.
• Starfleet Academy brought the franchise back to a classroom in 2026, which is
  appropriate, because Trek has always been a bit of a seminar.
• You would want the conversation afterwards more than the episode itself, and here you
  will always find somebody willing to have it.

Who Stars in ‘Vampire Carnival’?

Verlaque and Isaacs lead a cast that also includes Paulina Chávez, known for Landman, and Kieron Moore, whose credits include Boots and Vampire Academy. Eoin Macken, Alicia Sanz, and Cedrick Cooper round out the announced ensemble. Between its cast and its premise, the movie brings together familiar faces from slashers, supernatural horror, and television for a particularly unpleasant night at the carnival. Charbonier and Powell direct from a screenplay by Jason Filardi and Peter Filardi. The filmmaking duo previously helmed The Boy Behind the Door and The Djinn, two movies built around young protagonists trapped in situations that become increasingly dangerous. Their latest puts a grieving young woman at the center of a supernatural trap, with the promise of relief giving her a reason to walk straight into it.

The vampires’ unusual appetite is the hook here. A carnival offering an escape from grief becomes a much nastier proposition when the creatures behind it are feeding on the very feelings their visitors want to forget. For anyone filling the final opening in their Halloween watchlist, that is certainly an invitation to see what is hiding behind the spectacle.

Vampire Carnival arrives on VOD October 30. Watch our exclusive sneak peek above and stay tuned at Collider for more.