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I had to rest up, if only a little bit, before I could put pen to paper this year. September weather in Toronto was volatile as ever, and complimentary cocktails were far less appealing than the Lavazza coffee bar in the press lounge. This TIFF was about self-improvement, whether on-screen by way of a neon green injection that births a younger double or a mysterious spa treatment extracted from crustaceans that promises endless youth.
For me, it meant a more realistic schedule and avoiding the usual propensity to take in as many midnight screenings as possible leading to inevitably dozing off in a horrific back half screening or looking like a light gray potato sack if caught on the Letterboxd social channel.
I started my festival with David Gordon Green’s return to comedy, Nutcrackers, which kept me awake enough for the opening Midnight Madness film, The Substance. Coralie Fargeat’s second feature (after fan favorite, Revenge from 2017) is a metallic pink body horror nightmare that utilizes bright green for Re-Animator style injections as much as for infected wounds. Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley star as two parts of the same whole, the former birthing the latter after desperately engaging in a mysterious drug protocol that cracks her in half to form a more perfect version of herself.
Fargeats’s film is an easy metaphor for the desire to stay young and beautiful, especially for those who work in front of a camera, and highlights the desperation many women experience forcing them to do whatever it takes. With nods to horror giants and gorgeous gross-out gags, The Substance will keep even the drowsiest late-night viewer awake by eliciting a room full of audible winces as a needle is shoved into a weathered injection site.
On the opposite end of the festival schedule was an unlikely companion to Fargeat’s opus by way of Max Minghella’s Shell. Also making his sophomore feature, Minghella has seemed to take something from his turn in Jigsaw cosplay, pivoting from his musical drama to this zany body horror throwback.
Borrowing from off-beat ’80s and ’90s horror comedies like Death Becomes Her, Beetlejuice, and the work of Paul Verhoeven, Minghella crafted another social satire about a woman’s desire to be ageless. Led by the “she can really do it all” Elisabeth Moss and a hall-of-fame villain performance from Kate Hudson, Shell pits well-meaning women against each other in the chase for endless beauty.
As an aging actress, Samantha (Moss) participates in a mysterious med spa procedure that uses lobster DNA to bring an eternal glow, and with that, more movie roles. Fans of the bygone era will have fun comparing the monster designs from these gonzo-gory cohorts, and fans of horror films past will revel in the nods to a Wes Craven cold open.
Zealots for throwback zany horror comedy were certainly not limited to these brazen installments in TIFF’s genre showcase. One of my favorites of the festival comes from Taiwan: John Hsu’s Dead Talents Society. It’s hard to describe this spooky darling without sounding like you’re describing Beetlejuice — In order to remain in the afterlife, the dead are forced to work and successfully haunt the living. But this feature has a discernibly different tone, choosing different scares, blood gags, and topical snappy jokes about modern social media and internet usage. Believe it or not, this hilarious master of afterlife worldbuilding also centers around an aging actress desperate to remain relevant when a younger ghost steals the warm glow of her spotlight.
For those looking for satire beyond 2024’s pull toward stories of women aging out of relevance (The Last Showgirl, Nightbitch… it transcends genre), there are plenty of laughs to be had at Joseph Kahn’s Ick. Kahn is notoriously unafraid to come for everybody, a reputation earned for his irreverent and provocative Bodied and Detention (of 2011, not to be confused with John Hu’s from 2019).
In his quirky middle finger of a movie, he pits a working-class hero (Brandon Routh) against a Lovecraftian beast taking over his town with its gooey appendages (“love the tentacle,” you might say). Kahn’s magic is making jokes at everyone’s expense while never being a gutless “centrist.” Instead, he lampoons the modern inclination to turn real-life turmoil into morality speech contests. With more in common with films like Cooties, and his own filmography, Ick only throws back to the 2000s to highlight his star-quarterback-turned-science-teacher’s inability to outgrow his past. Dropping needles all over ’90s pop punk highlights and casting Mena Suvari as a withering love interest is inspired.
And if we’re talking about words spoken by aging high school hotties, everyone who is anyone was at the premiere of Heretic. Scott Beck, Bryan Woods, and the A24 logo brought the whole gang to see Hugh Grant in his villain era. Grant spends the runtime tormenting two Mormon missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) with tired debate talking points about theology. If there is a hell, it’s certainly a man with a few books forcing you to debate him on the most basic elements of a belief system, whether or not it’s within the walls of his torture labyrinth.
If there’s such a thing as “zany fatigue,” TIFF also delivered on more somber horror. There was The Girl with the Needle, a dower black and white period piece loosely based on the Dutch serial killer, Dagmar Overbye. Through the eyes of Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), Dagmar is a would-be savior for pregnant women experiencing the poverty of a world war, until her grim true actions are revealed. Inspiration is taken from Tarkovsky and German expressionism; the film is filled with more stunning imagery than heart.
Another period piece about poverty, Hold Your Breath, chronicles the similar struggle of mothers trying to protect children, this time from hunger and the threat of dust in 1930s Oklahoma. Genre darling, Sarah Paulson leads with a dynamic performance only challenged by Ebon Moss-Bachrach.
There was also Presence from Steven Soderbergh, a ghost story told through a singular POV that adds a striking layer of cinema veritas to what would otherwise be an energetic haunted house tale. Presence feels like the fourth in a Soderbergh sub-genre that includes Unsane, Side Effects, and Kimi, a grouping of films stripped down and zeroed in on a particular narrative point of view. The best parts of Presence are in the mundane and realistic reactions of a struggling suburban family experiencing the supernatural.
For another somber genre fave, The Shrouds was my favorite of the fest (competing with the aforementioned Dead Talents Society). David Cronenberg uses his signature brand of blending technology and the human body to tell a story about his own grief. His striking meditation on love and loss is built around his belief that the human self is within the body, and he examines that through an avatar in Vincent Cassel as Karsh, a widower who invented the titular technology to have a live stream of the dead in their graves, allowing loved ones to experience the next best thing to crawling in the ground with them.
In many ways, his beautiful feature transcends genre (which he described in a Q&A with the audience as “marketing”), blending elements of his signature body horror with drama and black comedy to craft something uniquely Cronenbergian. I saw The Shrouds on my last day of the festival and spent the remaining hours thinking about it, and how quickly I was going to order lunch from United Bakers (a Toronto Jewish icon Karsh shouts out in an emotional scene).
I mentioned that TIFF 2024 was about self-improvement, but it was also about reflection. Reflecting on what truly makes us valuable (is it our beauty and youth? Is it the warmth our bodies bring to our loved ones?) and reflecting on horror giants of the past and the joy they and their emulators can still bring us. Whether that means reflecting on the works of Stuart Gordon and H.P. Lovecraft, chronicling the evolution of David Cronenberg, or remembering the magic of ’80s Lo-Fi in the dreamy murder friendship love story, Dead Mail, this year’s genre programming was a beautiful reminder of horror films of the past, present, and the bright future. With filmmakers unafraid to challenge norms, the outlook is good.
