Director: Stephen Hall
The Gates is a 2026 horror film produced in Ireland and set in the fog-bound London of the 1890s. Running one hundred and eleven minutes, it confines nearly all of its action to a Victorian prison on the night a condemned man is scheduled to face the electric chair, and treats that single location as the pressure chamber for everything that follows.
What is The Gates about?
In the closing hours before his sentence is carried out, a condemned prisoner awaiting death by electric current turns the machinery of Victorian justice back against the institution holding him. As midnight nears, the warders, officials, clergy, and fellow inmates who share the prison's cold stone corridors discover that his final words carry a weight none of them prepared for. What opens as a routine execution inside a London gaol gradually gives way to a longer night, one in which the building itself seems to draw shut around everyone within its walls while the way out grows steadily harder to find. The story keeps its scope tight, following the people trapped together as ordinary procedure unravels into something they cannot control.
Cast & crew
The film is led by a veteran character actor long associated with fantasy and adventure cinema, supported by an ensemble of Irish and international performers cast as the prison's guards, officials, and inmates. Because the action stays inside a single period location across one night, the picture leans heavily on this ensemble to carry its tension, and much of its dread is built through performance in cramped, candle-lit cells rather than through open, large-scale action.
Context & significance
The Gates arrived in 2026 as part of an ongoing run of independent Irish horror productions, made as a period piece with an emphasis on gaslit interiors and 1890s costume and set design. Its premise draws on the late nineteenth century's preoccupation with capital punishment and with execution by electric current, a method that was newly introduced and widely debated in that era. The film situates itself in the supernatural-horror tradition rather than in straight historical drama, using the prison and the period only as the frame for its genre premise.
Where & how to watch
The Gates can be streamed on K-Time once you sign in with a free account, while the page you are reading now stays open to everyone. The title carries both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so you can watch it in its original English or entirely in Farsi, inside K-Time's Persian-language experience built for the Iranian diaspora.