They’re back! The annual rampage of genre filmmakers, industry and fans through Montreal’s cinemas and social centers has begun, as the Fantasia International Film Festival opens its 30th edition on July 16 with Nicolas Winding Refn receiving the Cheval Noir Career Achievement Award before presenting the Canadian premiere of his sumptuously visceral and neon-titled thrill ride “Her Private Hell.”

Refn burst onto the scene in 1996 with his influential feature debut “Pusher,” which marked Mads Mikkelsen’s first big-screen role, and “Pusher 3” had its North American premiere in Fantasia in 2006. His new feature film, his first in a decade, hits North American big screens on July 24.

“Coming back to Fantasia 20 years after the ‘Pusher’ trilogy and receiving this award is like going from black and white to color,” says Refn. Variety before the festival. “It’s a reminder that the journey is still on and it will only get better from here.”

Over 18 days, Fantasia presents an omnivorous global selection of 119 feature films and 400 short films in a variety of main and side sections, and presents Frontières, its enjoyable four-day co-production market and networking event, which has become a must-visit branded genre market destination in Cannes and Berlin and will also launch editions in Tokyo and Toronto this year. It has also become an important breeding ground for Fantasia’s own programming.

“Every company you talk to wishes they had more gender on their agenda,” says Fantasia artistic director Mitch Davis. Variety. “All mainstream festivals, including the big top-tier festivals, have their midnight and genre sections, and they also have genre in almost every other section of their lineup.

“In the early days of Fantasia, we knew everything that was coming out or coming out, but that has changed dramatically. The interesting thing now is that we have this channel with 30 years of alumni who keep us up to date with everything they have or know in development.”

In that spirit, Vancouver-based Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, who emerged from a breakout year (“Final Destination Bloodlines”) with a handful of studio projects, revisit their indie roots with “Freaks Part II,” premiering as the closing film to Fantasia.

The film picks up the story of teenager Chloe (Lorelei Olivia Mote), who can manipulate minds, and her mother (Amanda Crew) five years after the events of “Freaks,” the 2018 film that changed the career of the writing-directing duo.

“We have amazing memories from our first ‘Freaks’ movie screening at Fantasia in 2019,” says Lipovsky Variety. “We were surprised that there was a line for our little Canadian indie, which opened a lot of doors for us. So to return to Canada’s best genre festival and premiere the sequel of all our fellow freaks in Fantasia is a dream come true.”

“We’ve always loved genre films, so it’s exciting to see genre films break into the mainstream,” adds Stein. “Audiences are more hooked on the fun theatrical experience of going to see genre films in the cinema, sharing twists and surprises with a dark room full of strangers. It’s exciting that the festival’s journey begins in Canada, before continuing to the rest of the world.”

Jane Schoenbrun’s review of Queer Palm-winning slasher “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” which screens July 17 and opens in North America in August, is generating the most buzz. “People lost their minds when we announced it because Jane is the most interesting filmmaker of her generation, a true poet of the genre,” says Davis.

Schoenbrun and star Hannah Einbinder (“Hacks”), who plays a filmmaker obsessed with rebooting an outdated slasher franchise and reworking its original final girl (Gillian Anderson), will host the screening and participate in a conversation the following day.

Agnieszka Smoczyńska (“The Lure”)’s highly anticipated world-premiere dystopian thriller “Hot Spot” (Focus), starring Noomi Rapace as a rogue cyberwitch, is one of several high-profile Frontières alumni in this year’s lineup.

“It’s her largest-scale film to date, but it’s still the kind of film that only she could make: radical and experimental, and taking all kinds of gigantic risks with audiences,” Davis says. “It starts out as a futuristic crime thriller and a cautionary tale about AI surveillance, then turns into a stream-of-consciousness fever dream that gets crazier and crazier—she’s a rock star for our audience.”

Other notable Frontières alumni include Andrea Corsini’s “Ferine” (previously “Beasts of Prey”), which stars Carolyn Bracken (“Oddity”) as an art collector overcome by violent primal impulses and is one of two Fantasia films scored by legendary Italian composer Pino Donaggio (the other being “Her Private Hell”); Canadian Tim Riedel’s debut, “Ancestral Beasts,” a haunted house story that explores intergenerational trauma; Australian Mia’kate Russell’s debut, “Penny Land Is Dead,” a summer blood-fest set in the ’80s; and “Motherwitch,” by Minos Papas, a folk horror filmed in an abandoned village in Cyprus.

In addition to “Freaks Part II” and “Ancestral Beasts,” Canadian films premiering at Fantasia include: Casey Walker’s “Home Bodies” (twins living alone in an automated house receive an androgynous humanoid as a Christmas gift); “Insectasy” by Angus Silver; Ashlea Wessel’s debut, “Junction Row,” a creature feature starring horror icon Katharine Isabelle (“Ginger Snaps”); Seth A. Smith’s surreal take on the housing crisis, “Permanent Damage,” starring Stephen Dorff; and Michael Gabriele’s Christmas horror comedy “Unholy Night.”

Highlights of the popular Les Fantastiques Weekends du cinéma québécois section include the world premiere of Wiebke Von Carolsfeld’s film, “Someone’s Daughter,” which follows a lawyer (Pascale Bussières) and her former and increasingly sinister client (François Arnaud of “Heated Rivalry”) who are stranded together in the desert; “La Place,” by Louis Gobbout, in which an altercation over a parking lot takes on horrifying dimensions; and Harrison Houde’s dark comedy “Tight Lettuce,” co-written with actor Dakota Daulby (“Freaks,” “Longlegs”), who plays a young man dealing with his father’s drug addiction.

Davis notes that Fantasia audiences have also evolved over 30 years. “Today’s young audiences are primed for films that will shake them, films that they will have to work in some sense to interact with,” he says. “In times of crisis and massive global anxiety is when genre cinema tends to seep in.”