Curious Refuge AI Horror Film Competition 2026

The fourth annual AI Horror Film Competition from Curious Refuge, run with Epidemic Sound, put $12,000 in cash prizes behind films of three minutes or less, with AI in every shot, an original story and a score drawn from Epidemic Sound's library. Entries closed on October 9, the community voted for an Audience Favorite through October 28, and the winners premiered on Curious Refuge's YouTube channel on October 29. The judges were Shelby Ward, the school's co-founder, the AI filmmakers Verena Puhm and Spooky Dan, Backrooms executive producer Chris White and Dave Clark, chief creative officer at Promise Studios.

The $7,000 first prize went to Kagome by Sasha Fevralskaya, in which a five-year-old girl goes missing and a quiet night-shift worker goes home to a family of mannequins; the judges called it a film every AI filmmaker should study. Second place and $3,000 went to NIX by The Awarehouse Studio, a Swedish folk-horror tale of a water spirit who teaches a young man the violin, made with Dreamina as the pilot for an anthology of the folklore the team grew up with, which some judges compared to The Witch. Third place and $2,000 went to Nikita Guk's Trick or Trend, in which a girl borrows a prettier face from a roadside stand for Halloween night, and the community's Audience Favorite was Artem Krykun's John O' Lantern, about a pumpkin family that harvests human heads for pies and soups.