Before the late SCI-FI-LONDON Oktoberfest (tentatively named SCI-FI-LONDON: EAST) in Stratford on the weekend of November 9-11, the other slightly more popular film festival with London in its name, will be happening all over the city from 10-21 October. Obviously we moved to November to give them a chance.

With its new Aussie artistic director Clare Stewart, the festival has, for the first time in years, made a deliberate effort to cater for genre fans with one of the many new programme strands dedicated to cult films, and there are some beauties on show too. Three films I'm looking forward to are Doomsday Book by Kim Jee-woon (who made the fantastic Asian western The Good, The Bad, The Weird) and Yim Pil-sung (Hansel and Gretel), which is a triptych made up of the stories of a Buddhist robot, a zombie-like outbreak and a meteor heading towards Earth.

Antiviral is the feature debut of Brandon Cronenberg (son of David), which looks at celebrity culture. The other film is John Dies at the End, which got rave reviews at the recent Toronto International Film Festival. The newly instigated strand also includes the latest from the prolific Takashi Miike. Other films in this strand include documentaries and plenty of gore.

Outside of the Cult strand, there are more mainstream genre films including the opening night film, Frankenweenie, a new stop-motion horror homage from Tim Burton. The highly acclaimed Robot and Frank, and magical reality, Beasts of the Southern Wild, which won awards at both Sundance and Cannes, are both worth a look too.

Of course, there is plenty more to explore at the festival amongst the new strands, many of which cross over into our favourite genres. Tickets go on sale to the general public from Monday 24 September, and are on sale now for BFI members. www.bfi.org.uk/lff

Just remember to save some money for tickets to the SFL Post Apocalympic fest in November.