In August 2024, the Fantasia International Film Festival will celebrate its 28th edition. Located in the heart of beautiful Montreal, Fantasia is a cultural and professional destination point, and since its first edition, the festival’s ever-growing popularity has attracted the attention of the international film industry alongside a legion of attendees from across the world. Every facet of the filmmaking chain is increasingly represented with in-person delegates at the festival: directors, actors, producers, studio representatives, distributors and festival programmers, who get to experience the legendarily enthusiastic, taste-making audience of Fantasia.

FantasiaFestival.com/en

Some highlights of horror films playing this year!



The A-Frame

Donna (Dana Namerode, WHAT JOSIAH SAW), a talented pianist, is crushed when she is diagnosed with a form of bone cancer that directly affects her hand and her ability to play the piano. Her life takes a dramatic turn when the doctor recommends amputation as the only solution to preventing the spread of the disease. This shifts her life from one filled with music, joy, and friends, to a series of hospital visits, group counseling sessions, and… quantum physics. After exhausting all other options, Donna is presented with a final chance to keep her hand. Enter Sam (Johnny Whitworth, LIMITLESS), a mysterious black-market scientist, who holds the key to solving all of Donna’s problems. However, when ambitions get high and egos go unchecked, Sam’s intentions come into question.

From AI DJs and cloning dogs to virtual reality and robots performing surgeries on grapes, H. G. Well’s future seems closer to our reach than ever before. With his newest feature film, THE A-FRAME, Calvin Reeder (THE OREGONIAN, THE FIELD GUIDE TO EVIL) challenges this idea of so-called progress by questioning the morality of these advancements. With old-school genre sensibilities made fresh, Reeder establishes himself as a writer/director to watch as he navigates such touchy subjects with extreme empathy and a sense of playfulness. Through trippy visuals and practical effects, Reeder’s direction infuses THE A-FRAME with buckets of emotion (and blood), grabbing both your heart and your eyes. Made more poignant by its relatable cast of characters including Namerode, Whitworth, Nik Dodani (TWISTERS), and Phillip Andre Botello (ALL JACKED UP AND FULL OF WORMS), THE A-FRAME delivers a gripping sci-fi thriller with a pitch-black sense of humour, cautioning its viewers that every miracle comes at a price that you may not be willing to pay! - Vincenzo Nappi



Dark Match

Lowell Dean, who made the cult hit WOLFCOP and came to Fantasia with WOLFCOP 2 in 2017, is back with the World Premiere of DARK MATCH, starring wrestling legend Chris Jericho!

Indie wrestling can be tough. Despite the hardcore fanbase, there’s little money to be made. That’s where Rusty Bean’s (Jonathan Cherry, SUPER GRID, WOLFCOP 1 and 2) gaggle of small-time wrestlers come in. Amid fighters duking it out over chances with talent scouts, Rusty gets a mysterious call offering $50K to bring headliners Miss Behave, aka Nick (Ayshia Issa, TRANSPLANT, UNITÉ 9), Kate the Great (Sarah Canning, SUPERHOST, THE VAMPIRE DIARIES), and Mean Joe Lean (Steven Ogg, THE WALKING DEAD, WESTWORLD) to a private event called “The Dark Match.” It’s too good to pass up, so, along with their rival fighters, they arrive at a secluded compound to a scene of bacchanalia, or as they learn, “Lupercalia,” headed by a mysterious leader called The Prophet (WWF/WWE eight-time champion, Chris Jericho). It’s Party Central as the athletes indulge in drinks and drugs, leaving them guiltily disoriented and uneasy the morning after. Things get stranger leading up to the match, and Nick knows something’s amiss. Armed guards spark alarm bells, and the team learns they’ll fight for more than a big payday.

Dean goes in for demonic fun with his latest offering, enlisting Jericho and a fantastic cast. Along with Issa (a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu World champion), Ogg, and Canning, you’ll see genre fave Michael Eklund (THE DIVIDE, CONTINUUM) and Leo Fafard of WOLFCOP fame. This edge-of-your-seat horror set in the late ’80s wrestling heyday puts you ringside with a demonic cult and battles on the ropes to stay alive. Dean’s return to Montreal with Jericho will conjure rabid fans and a devil of a good time! – Carolyn Mauricette



Hell Hole

In the Adams Family's celebration of the classic creature-feature, an American-led fracking crew working deep in the Serbian wilderness find themselves at odds with government assigned environmental advisors. When they get approval to drill, the workers uncover the unimaginable: a dormant parasitic monster entombed deep in the frozen rock. Now awakened, it tears through the mining facility in search of the perfect host.



Scared Shitless

Meet Don (Steven Ogg, THE WALKING DEAD, DARK MATCH) and Sonny (Daniel Doheny, BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR, DAY OF THE DEAD), a father and son dealing with the loss of Sonny’s mother. It hasn’t been easy for them, and Sonny’s grief manifests as germophobic tendencies. Don’s a plumber, and to help Sonny work on his newfound fear, he insists that his son tags along on a job for a little unofficial exposure therapy. They head to the Palmer Estates Apartments, also home to Professor Robert (Mark McKinney, KIDS IN THE HALL, SUPERSTORE), a government scientist who has smuggled a top-secret—and live—experiment into the residential building after an explosion destroys his clandestine lab. The blue-collar duo thinks this crapper call is a one-and-done, but when Professor Robert’s pet project escapes and starts to eat the residents, this routine job becomes a total shit-show!

With stellar creature design by Canadian practical FX boss Steve Kostanski, SCARED SHITLESS is a gore-filled horror-comedy driven by Ogg, Doheny, and Chelsea Clark (GINNY AND GEORGIA, THE PROTECTOR), who co-stars as Patricia, the building night manager and voice of reason. Helmed by director Vivieno Caldinelli, whose breakout short PORTAL TO HELL starring the late Roddy Piper had audiences cheering for the working everyman, he’s back to champion the unsung maintenance worker. Known for his comedic skills, with SEVEN STAGES TO ACHIEVE ETERNAL BLISS, THIS HOUR HAS 22 MINUTES, and BARONESS VON SKETCH on his resume, Caldinelli joins forces with writer Brandon Cohen and producer Lewis Spring to create an ’80s-inspired creature feature tailor-made for Fantasia’s audience. – Carolyn Mauricette



Soul Eater

A pair of quite different investigators arrive in Roquenoir, a town in the French mountains, and wind up approaching the same case from two different directions. Commander Elisabeth Guardiano (Virginie Ledoyen, 8 FEMMES) has been sent to look into a married couple’s grisly murder, and Captain of the Gendarmerie Franck De Rolan (Paul Hamy, DESPITE THE NIGHT), from the “department of alarming disappearances,” intends to track down a group of missing children. Their missions turn out to be linked, and one of the elements tying them together is “The Soul Eater,” a local bogeyman legend intended to encourage kids not to wander off into the woods. This creature may not be a myth after all, and as strange details about that double killing come to light and more bizarre deaths occur, Guardiano and De Rolan are drawn toward discovering a shocking truth.

THE SOUL EATER is something of a change of pace for directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo. As opposed to their previous films, from the modern classic INSIDE to 2021’s THE DEEP HOUSE, this is less a straight-up horror film than a morbid procedural mystery/thriller, albeit one with graphic, brutal flashpoints and significant undertones of the occult. Adapting the popular French novel by Alexis Laipsker, scriptwriters Annelyse Batrel and Ludovic Lefebvre deliver a series of reveals and reversals that up the tension and the stakes for its dual protagonists. Each is motivated by different personal demons that inform the driven performances by Ledoyen and Hamy, and Maury, Bustillo, and cinematographer Simon Roca elicit bleak, forbidding atmosphere both within the terrorized community and in the forests surrounding it. The emphasis is more on suspense than shock for quite a while, punctuated by direct and visceral moments of bloodshed—until a final act in which the true, tragic scope of the horror is revealed. – Michael Gingold