The Night Driver Opens Screamfest, Sean Cunningham Aboard

Screamfest will open its 2026 edition with the world premiere of The Night Driver, a road-stalker thriller starring Josh Lucas, Alyssa Milano and David Arquette. Deadline reported the festival’s first wave of titles this week. Screamfest runs October 6 through 15 at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

Lucas plays Hurdis Jones, a traveling pharmaceutical salesman who survives an encounter with a killer on a back road and then spends the rest of the film being stalked across the country and framed for the murders left behind him. Milano plays his wife, Cheryl. Arquette plays Detective Hank Granger, who tries to prove Hurdis is innocent while the FBI builds a case that he is the one doing the killing.

The Genre Résumés in the Car

Arquette is the most familiar face here to this audience: he played Dewey Riley across five Scream films, from Wes Craven’s 1996 original through the 2022 requel that killed him off. Milano’s horror credits run further back than most people remember, to Embrace of the Vampire in 1995 and Fear in 1996. Lucas is the outlier, a leading man who has spent most of his career outside the genre, which is usually a good sign for a movie that needs its protagonist to seem ordinary before things go wrong.

Who Is Behind It

Sean S. Cunningham, who directed the original Friday the 13th, is among the film’s producers. Bloody Disgusting reported his involvement in January 2023, when the project was in pre-production alongside his other development slate. Director Jeremy Weiss, making his feature debut, told the outlet at the time that having Cunningham produce “feels like a dream come true.”

Weiss directs from a screenplay by John Cork, with Bloody Disgusting reporting that Jeff Locker handled a rewrite. The film shot in and around Las Cruces, New Mexico, and wrapped in September 2025. No trailer has been released and no U.S. distributor has been announced.

Peter Deming Gets the Career Award

Screamfest is also honoring cinematographer Peter Deming with a Career Achievement Award. Per Dread Central, the citation covers Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks — he drew an Emmy nomination for the 2018 episode “Part 8,” which is arguably the most frightening hour of television anyone has shot — plus Evil Dead II, Scream 2, 3 and 4, and Drag Me to Hell.

That is a nice piece of programming symmetry, whether or not anyone planned it. The man who made Friday the 13th has a film opening the festival, and the man who shot Evil Dead II takes the honor at the same festival. Two of the load-bearing walls of American horror, in the same building, inside the same ten days.

The Rest of the First Wave

Screamfest announced eighteen features in this batch: eight world premieres, six North American premieres, one U.S. premiere and three West Coast premieres. The full list is 213 Bones, Abandoned, Apocalypse Z: A New World, The Caged, The Exit State, Grow, Insecta, Nervous, The Night Driver, NINE, Once Upon A Time In A Horror Movie, Postmortem, Processing Charlie, Serena, Slay, Still Ohio, Valley View Motel and Wounds.

For more on the Cunningham corner of the genre, see the ‘Crystal Lake’ trailer, and on the Arquette corner, Courteney Cox on directing ‘Scream 8’.