On Halloween afternoon, the community room at Brownell Library in Essex Junction will go dark, and the scariest filmmakers in Chittenden County will be teenagers with phones, borrowed cameras and a deadline. The library's Teen Horror Film Festival runs from 2 to 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 31, 2026, at 6 Lincoln Street, and it works like this: teens in grades 6 and up submit their own short horror films in advance, the library screens them for an audience of their peers, and then that audience votes on which one is the most terrifying of them all. The winner takes home a $50 gift card to Essex Cinemas.
The rules are few but firm. Films must be sent to the youth desk at [email protected] by Oct. 28 to be considered, and each entry is capped at ten minutes. That deadline is the whole architecture of the thing: a week before Halloween, the submissions close, and whatever exists at that moment is what plays. It is a format that rewards nerve over polish. A ten-minute limit and a phone camera are, historically, exactly the conditions under which teenage horror has thrived.
What makes the event unusual is less the movies than the arrangement around them. This is not a library screening a studio film for passive patrons; it is a library handing the projector, the microphone and the ballot to its own teenagers. The judging is done by the room, not by a panel of adults, which means the prize goes to whatever actually makes a room full of fourteen-year-olds flinch. The library frames the invitation with a wink: ready to scare your friends and terrify your neighbors? The program is made possible by the Friends of Brownell Library, the volunteer fundraising group that has supported the institution since 1967.
That the festival happens at Brownell at all is a small piece of local history. Essex Junction's first public library was established in 1897. In 1913 the library moved into the space now known as Lincoln Hall, which had begun life as an early nineteenth-century tavern at the Five Corners intersection where the roads from Burlington met. In the 1920s a local businessman named Samuel Brownell financed and helped design a new building for the collection, and the library that opened in 1926 carried his name. The Lion's Club refurbished the basement as a youth library in the early 1960s, the village added on in 1970, and a major renovation completed in 2001 with support from Essex Junction taxpayers and large grants from the Freeman Foundation and the Kolvoord family added the community room and expanded the shelves. The building the films will screen in is thus the third or fourth incarnation of a library that the town has been rebuilding for itself for well over a century, and the room showing the movies is younger than most of the filmmakers.
The town around it has changed too. Essex Junction was incorporated as a village in 1892 and became Vermont's tenth city on July 1, 2022, separating from the town of Essex. Through all of that, the library has stayed at the corner of Lincoln Street, serving Junction residents and, through the HomeCard network, borrowers from across Chittenden County.
There is something fitting about a horror festival in a building with this much accumulated history. Libraries are already the classic setting for a certain kind of ghost story, and a 1926 building with a 1960s basement youth wing and a 2001 addition has plenty of corners to imagine things lurking in. The films themselves are a genre with a long teenage pedigree. The handheld, made-with-friends horror short is the form that launched a thousand careers, and the pleasure of it is that it requires nothing but a camera, a friend willing to be chased, and the willingness to be a little ridiculous in service of a good scare.
The prize, a gift card to Essex Cinemas, is a nice loop: the winner gets to go sit in a real theater and watch someone else's horror film, having just proven they can hold a room themselves. Essex Cinemas bills itself as the hometown movie theater, and for one afternoon the hometown theater's currency is being handed out by an audience of the filmmakers' neighbors and classmates.
For families in Essex Junction, the timing is close to ideal. Halloween 2026 falls on a Saturday, which means the festival occupies the dead center of the afternoon, before the trick-or-treating begins and after the last of the daylight has been squandered on ordinary Saturday errands. Teens who want to enter should get their films to the youth desk by Oct. 28; teens who just want to watch, boo, cheer and vote can simply show up at two o'clock. Costumes are not required, but on this particular afternoon at this particular library, they would not be out of place.