Unbridled horror
No time like bewitching hour for this genre
Screenings in t he Midnight Madness program of the Toronto International Film Festival typically start at 11: 59 p. m. to avoid that whole 12 a. m./p. m. confusion. But in the cinematic version of the old tippler’s motto, it’s always midnight somewhere.
This year ’ s midnight screenings — “the best in action, horror, shock and fantasy,” according to the festival guide — include a lads-inperil tale from Britain ( The Ritual), some Nicolas Cage craziness ( Mom and Dad, directed by Brian Taylor), and James Franco’s The Disaster Artist, about the making of the 2003 cult film The Room.
But don’t worry if midnight is past your bedtime. There are horrors aplenty throughout the festival, from gothic tales like The Lodgers ( twin orphans inhabit a haunted manor in 1920 Ireland) to prestige cinema from Oscar nominees Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water, a Cold War monster tale) and Darren Aronofsky ( Jennifer Lawrence in mother!).
There’s also foreign- language creepiness from Spain ( Veronica), Germany ( the Netflix series Dark), Finland ( Euthanizer) and Norway ( Valley of Shadows and Thelma, the latter recently named as that country’s foreign- language Oscar candidate this year.) And Canada’s Adam MacDonald delves into the occult with Pyewacket.
There’s even a mini- zombie trend taking place outside the Midnight Madness imprimatur. Robin Aubert’s Les Affamés ( The Ravenous) imagines a zombie outbreak in the Quebec countryside. The Cured, starring Ellen Page, scrolls forward to when the plague is over and the formerly infected try to reintegrate into society. And Jon Landis’s landmark music video for Thriller gets a 3D re- release, alongside a new making-of documentary.
Peter Kuplowsky, the festival’s newly minted Midnight Madness maven, was thrilled by the frightening riches available to TIFF this year. “There was a record number of zombie films this year,” the 31- year- old says. “But all of them were more interested in being dramas, not engaging with the formula in a typical way. It’s fully gone mainstream. We actually have prestige zombie movies.”
As a result, he says, he was able to stock his program’s 10-film cupboard with a variety of programming, and let the fest soak up the rest. “I wanted the Midnight Madness program to feel a little more dangerous and unhinged and deranged,” he says, noting that many of the non- Midnight titles are, for lack of a better term, respectable. “Affamés didn’t need to live in Midnight,” he says by way of example. And why has horror spread like a red stain across the festival’s programming slate? “People l i ke something that’s familiar, but they also like being surprised. And that surprise can be shock and being scared.”