Let’s say this: Rebecca De Mornay was the sexiest of many psycho characters afoot at this year’s Sitges 43, more officially known as the Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantastic de Catalunya. The actress, who takes the lead in Darren Bousman’s remake ofMother’s Day (think Saw, retrofitted for Martha Stewart), struck leggy poses in her leopard-print dress during closing night festivities last Saturday, received a coveted Time Machine trophy (“It looks like an electric chair … I’m so honored!”) and lent some international movie star glam to a festival whose stalwart attractions are typically hidden behind heavy make-up or smeared in fake blood.

With hundreds of movies screened around the clock over 11 days in this seaside resort town a half-hour south of Barcelona, this marathon is all about connoisseurship of every sort of genre film, with an emphasis on horror and thriller. Think Austin’sFantastic Fest is cool? This is where they got the idea.

The boundlessly congenial programmers love to give recent (and soon to open) American multiplex fare a prominent platform for European premieres. Let Me In bowed here, with kinder-vampChloe Moretz and BFF Kodi-Smit McPhee killing the Spanish press with cuteness, though even those show-biz kids were upstaged by the twin sisters who posed, hand-in-hand, for the festival’s marketing materials (posters, T-shirts, coffee mugs). That homage to The Shining, subject of a 30th anniversary tribute, may have been the scariest display at the fest – not least when the girls came out onstage opening night, sending a collective spine-tingle through the audience. The longer view from this cinematic Overlook offered an early forecast of what rough beasts will come slouching into cinemas in the coming year.

An unlikely such menace is Rainn Wilson (TV’s The Office). Playing a jilted mope with a will to power in James Gunn’sSuper, his transformation into the divinely inspired Crimson Bolt spells doom for evildoers (that means you, Kevin Bacon!) and puts movie queue butting-in-liners on notice. This wrench-wielding vigilante parable will probably be lauded as “the realKick-Ass,” but its odd blend of ultraviolence, sentimentality and good old American vulgarity makes the film a strange hybrid too unique to easily encapsulate. Any film that sympathetically spoofs Christian broadcasting, features gratuitous instances of tentacle rape, and gives the world an oversexed Ellen Pagescreaming obscenities as she blows away baddies in Supergirl drag gets me all gushy.

Super reflected a trend at Sitges this year, where the most satisfying fare featured fresh comic twists on burned-out formulas. Eli Craig’s crowdpleasing Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil flips the script on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as a pair of peaceful, beer-loving redneck hunting buddies (Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine) fend off a crew of axe-wielding college kids. The restrung slasher tropes are fun, but it’s the sketch comedy chemistry between the fuzzy-faced leads that makes it click.

Finland’s answer to Tucker & Dale, Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, also finds ominous intent in unexpected places: Santa Claus. Turns out Father Christmas is some sort of quasi-Satanic demon, who’s been kept buried deep in a mountain, his ghastly, wizened elves an army of derelict old men, hungering for the blood of children. When an American exporter unearths Santa for sale in the West, all hell breaks loose – and only a child can save the day. It sounds dopey, but director Jalmari Helander – who accepted his best film honors via iPhone video from a snowy forest – has terrific fun poking at Scandanavian stoicism, not unlike the Coen Brothers in Fargo, and tweaking holiday lore. In a like-minded vein, Jerome Sable’s promising The Legend of Beaver Dam, winner for best short, harks back to the campfire stories that have animated everything from Friday the 13th toThe Blair Witch Project. And then it erupts into a giddy musical, as the nerdy kid vanquishes evil and gets the girl.

There no such wish fulfillment in Stake Land. Jim Mickle’s post-apocalyptic indie is a low-budget answer to The Road, with tons more visceral action and none of the poetic meandering that puts audiences to sleep. As the vamp-slaying Mister (Nick Damici) and the kid he rescues (Connor Paolo) make a risky journey to the security of the northern territories, they pass through a dark mirror of an America that might come to exist if religious fundamentalism partnered up with, say, a mysterious contagion. Could Sarah Palin be a virus from outer space? (The film screens Wednesday, Oct 27, in New York as part of the Film Society at Lincoln Center’s Scary Movies series).

Mickle’s vision of a near-future gone berserker (the most aggressive breed of Stake Land’s wolf-like bloodsuckers) is at least grounded in presumptive reality. Over in Japan, they’re lacing the wasabi with LSD. Yoshihiro Nishimura’s Helldriveris a delirium of Day-Glo video effects and eyeball-popping action – exactly what you’d expect from the mastermind of Tokyo Gore Police. The film is less obliged to narrative coherence than the master monster-maker’s previous exploits, though with the alien-like presence of Eihi Shina (Audition) as a villain, plot complexities might only be an obstruction.

Sion Sono, whose tortured Catholic teenage upskirt-peeper romance Love Exposure was a fantastic circuit favorite last year, was back with Cold Fish, also produced by Sushi Typhoon – the low-budget Tokyo genre studio that is releasing a slew of new flicks for American consumption next year. The set-up is brilliant: a chance meeting between two exotic fish shop owners leads to bloody mayhem when one of them turns out to be a bullying, remorseless serial killer. The story’s slow, excruciating build to the big reveal is played for cringe-inducing black comedy (the killer is a glad-handing blowhard whose impositions include raping his rival’s wife and inducing him to unwittingly assist on a kill). As the tone turns darker, though, the film devolves into a nihilist rage-fest that appears to have no greater point other than “Life sucks, so die already, bitch.”

Takashi Miike, a guy who knows from rage, goes back to the old school with 13 Assassins. It’s a saga the Crimson Bolt could love, as a crew of samurai plot the demise of the rogue Lord Naritsugu. The final 40-or-so minutes boast an intense, dizzying battle scene, as the assassins take on a small army they’ve trapped like rats in a maze-like village. It’s the kind of movie-movie excitement Shaw Brothers fans drool over, and represents the prolific Miike at his technical best.

Though a tender-hearted moviegoer might hope to see a film without a bodycount at Sitges this year, those were tough to come by. The visionary element that delivered several of last year’s highlights (Dogtooth, Amer, Enter the Void) was absent, save for Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. The surprise Cannes Palme d’Or winner was something of a surreal palate-cleanser between blood feasts. Its blissful, free-associative animism encourages viewers to go with the flow as the title character’s gentle, deathbed reveries evoke visions of prodigal sons gone Yeti, forests full of sexually alluring ghost monkeys, and magic catfish who know how to treat a woman right. That the film appears to have been shot entirely on a pawnshop camcorder only adds to the appeal, making even the most, uh, fantastic occurrences look like part of a home movie.

Such respites aside, this was the bloodiest of the four years I’ve attended Sitges, violence a universal language that united every country and tongue. In some cases, graphic sexual horror could serve as a metaphor for institutionalized national malaise – as it does in A Serbian Film and The Life and Death of a Porno Gang, one DePalma-slick, the other Pink Flamingos-shaggy, both anatomizing Serbian social ills through the prism of pornography gone shockingly wrong. More often, such context was for wimps.

The Spanish Carne de Neon (Neon Flesh), an ensemble actors’ fest featuring the irrepressible comic chops of Macarena Gomez, celebrates lowlife camaraderie with a Guy Ritchieflourish, but treats human trafficking as a punch line. No bueno. Far better was the home-invasion drama Secuestrados (Kidnapped), a taut, unflinching thriller that makes Hollywood fare like Panic Room look like My Little Pony. The Mexican-Spanish Atrocious, a no-budget handicam spooker shot at a desolate estate in Sitges, turns the Blair Witch template into a family vacation to hell with surprising effectiveness, squeezing new blood from an idea that should have been exhausted a long time ago.

Sitges 43 did not lack entirely for the fanciful. The Swedish filmThe Sound of Noise offers a disarming riff about a tribe of post-punk acoustic pranksters who create public noise spectacles as a political act, while being pursued by a tone-deaf police detective. It’s sort of Blue Man Group meets The Situationist Anthology, a clever sonic romance that will probably be in heavy rotation on Bjork’s tour bus.

A playful sense anarchy also pervades Our Days Will Come, the debut film by French director Romain Gavras (son ofCosta-Gavras), a tour-de-force for European superstarVincent Cassel. Part coming-of-age saga, part Hommes Gone Wild, the story yokes Cassel’s dangerously freewheeling shrink to an emotionally disturbed lad (Olivier Barthelemy) whose red hair makes him the object of schoolyard ridicule. The film’s obvious antecedents (My Favorite Year, Scent of a Woman, Good Will Hunting) in cross-generational male bonding comedy are less significant than the bipolar spree Cassel’s beaky satyr makes of the premise – don’t get caught dead in a hot tub with this guy – and Gavras’ willingness to follow it all to the end, leaving viewers in a place they never anticipated.