Sydney Underground Film Festival 2025: Zombies, Drag Queens, & Pastel Fever Dreams

Arts & Entertainment Film Festivals Screen

Chloe Sargeant
August 14, 2025

Image: Supplied

The Sydney Underground Film Festival (SUFF) is back this spring — and it’s bringing an avalanche of chaos, camp, gore, and pure cinematic anarchy to Dendy Newtown from 11–14 September.

Now in its 19th year, SUFF has built a fierce reputation for curating films that live far, far outside the polite boundaries of mainstream cinema. This is the festival where a tender queer romance might be followed by a psychedelic splatterfest, and where “experimental” doesn’t mean inaccessible — it means thrilling, unruly and unapologetically weird.

“Underground film at its best doesn’t just break rules — it reimagines what cinema can be,” explains festival director Nathan Senn. “This year, SUFF celebrates the artists who are doing just that: fearless female filmmakers, radical Australian auteurs, and emerging voices who aren’t asking for permission — they’re forging new cinematic languages.”

“The films in this year’s program are provocative, unruly, visionary; they unsettle and electrify in equal measure. At a time when sameness dominates, SUFF takes pride in being a home for the strange, the subversive, and the gloriously unclassifiable.”

Queens Of The Dead: Queens, Corpses & Camp on SUFF Opening Night

SUFF opens with the Australian premiere of Queens Of The Dead — the latest from breakout director Tina Romero, daughter of zombie royalty George A. Romero. This isn’t your average horror-comedy; it’s a glitter-splattered, zombie-infested drag spectacular. Set in a Brooklyn warehouse during a drag party gone off the rails — cancelled acts, flaring egos, and diva-level drama — the night takes a truly rotten turn when the undead storm the dance floor. The fight for survival is all guts, glamour, and glitter, with a killer cast including Katy O’Brien, Jaquel Spivey, Nina West, Margaret Cho, Cheyenne Jackson and Riki Lindhome.

SUFF Closing Night: Fucktoys

Rounding out the festival is Annapurna Sriram’s award-winning Fucktoys, screening with a post-film Q&A from the director herself. Shot on sumptuous 16mm, the pastel-coated chaos follows AP, a naïve hustler trying to lift a spiritual hex by coughing up $1000 and sacrificing a lamb. Her journey through the seedy streets of “Trashtown” is an absurdist road trip on a scooter — with the Tarot’s Major Arcana as the loose, mystical blueprint. It’s sexploitation with glamour, grit and a beating heart.

The beloved scented cinema of SUFF

SUFF is reviving its wildly popular “scratch and sniff” screenings with Jay Levey’s UHF (1989), starring “Weird Al” Yankovic as a dreamer turned unlikely TV station owner. Last year’s scented Female Trouble screenings sold out — expect this to go the same way.

Nostalgia takes a roller-skating spin with the 45th anniversary of Xanadu (1980), hosted by roller-disco renegade and Olivia Newton-John superfan Maynard. It’s a remastered, neon-drenched trip featuring Newton-John as a celestial muse on wheels, Gene Kelly in his final film role, and enough disco-meets-art-deco vibes to power a small city.

Docs, debuts, and the delightfully deranged

Documentaries include Coexistence, My Ass! — following Israeli-Persian actor-comedian Noam Shuster-Eliassi’s one-woman show in the middle of an escalating crisis — plus Yellow House Afghanistan, chronicling artistic resistance under Taliban rule, and Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt, which does exactly what you think.

There’s also the long-lost Sydney erotic feature About Love (1973), the psychosexual dark comedy Anything That Moves (2025), and the blood-drenched retro horror Pater Noster and the Mission of Light (2024).

Premiering in Australia are Yoshihiro Nishimura’s feverish Tokyo Evil Hotel and Jim Hosking’s surreal Ebony And Ivory, while NSW gets its first taste of Richard Eames’ neon-lit dystopia Skeleton Girls: A Kidnapped Society and the hilariously named The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man.

The shorts program is as bonkers and brilliant as ever — from the warped visions of LSD FACTORY to the much-loved TAKE48 Film Challenge, where filmmakers have just 48 hours to create a short from scratch. Expect mind-bending genre experiments, strange love stories, and bite-sized docs that punch way above their runtime.

Tickets start at $15, with multi-film passes available. If you’ve ever felt you needed a little more unpredictable’ in your life — or maybe wanted to leave a cinema a little more unhinged than when you went in — SUFF is your September pilgrimage.