Mid-summer can only mean one thing in the gorgeous Canadian city of Montreal. Bagels. This Toronto connoisseur of the baked torus feels no traitorous feelings to nod at the feats of Montreal’s bakers. We all have our merits, and this time of year usually means a salty narrow everything bagel interrupting the usual Toronto style lunch. Oh, also, there’s a genre festival.
Fantasia, to which it’s lovingly referred, is a glowing weeks-long genre festival attracting sickos and the curious to a local theater to see what strange cinema the world has wrought. There were returns of the usual suspects, like the Adams clan bringing The Glorious Dead, and retro and repolished screenings of Canadian great Pontypool and Japanese titan Gozu.
The fest opened with Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest, Her Private Hell, and closed with Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein’s follow-up, Freaks II. Between those bookends is a cavalcade of genre delights, and the best horror movies among them are rounded up here.
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Home Bodies
HOME BODIES (Credit: VVS Films) Good Ontario boy Casey Walker has recently been known in Canadian genre circles for producing films. But he’s triumphantly returned to directing with Home Bodies, a stripped-down sci-fi that evokes some of Canada’s horror greats.
At a screening of Undertone, someone described how Canadian horror tends to play in liminal spaces, which called attention to things like Cube and Skinamarink. If the Cube hive needs another film to line up behind, it’s this story of a duo locked in a smart house.
Red (Emma Ho) and Blue (Ian Ho) are a sibling duo who live like the children of a neurotic parent. They wake up at the same time, do the chores assigned to them, consume their daily meals, and watch their daily episode of television. Things are mundane and strict, but safe, though Red – the teen girl – grows bored and tired of playing childish games with her brother.
Taking her position as the older sibling, she often obliges, as she morphs slowly into a cranky teen who would rather stay in bed. For their metaphysical father, a voice behind a door that gives them instructions, crabby teenage years are the exact right time to raise another person, so on their latest “Noel,” the kids are given a new humanoid to play with.
Pal (Ess Hödlmoser), a blank slate of a person, is now their responsibility — a creepy thing Blue wants to reject, and Red is desperate to care for. Pal’s daily routine isn’t like that of the other two, which exposes Red to new adult frights and the burden of caring when Blue begins to rebel.
Home Bodies looks like a creepy science fiction liminal nightmare, and it blossoms into something like Vivarium, where the panic of forced parenthood creates a bizarre mess. Emma Ho is particularly incredible as a teen girl struggling with the bizarre happenings, balancing extreme naiveté with powerful human instincts so well.
It’s not one where the twist or reveal matters much beyond satiating someone begging for a reason behind the strangeness. It’s more a haunting and frustrating story about the human experience under control and surveillance.
Ancestral Beasts
Elyse (Morgan Holmstrom) returns home to an unexpected mess as tension mounts in ANCESTRAL BEASTS. Filmed in studio on Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Photo by John Wapioke. Image courtesy of Michif Koonteur. This Cannes platform project-turned-horror feature uses Red River Métis heritage for a psychological horror story. Exploring themes of mental illness and modern struggles with an ancient or ancestral monster, the story of a young woman struggling with her place in the world becomes one of extended connections, chosen family, and the messy ways our coping mechanisms can affect others.
The film zeroes in on the experience of Elyse (Morgan Holmstrom), a young woman struggling at work and living with her difficult sister sometime after their mom passed at the hands of either her own illness or a supernatural entity.
Wanting a break, Elyse runs from her and her sister’s shared apartment to her late aunt’s abandoned home to try and shake something loose. But she finds she can’t outrun her own dark thoughts, nor the monster they seem to summon.
Extended family and chosen friends come into play a lot in this story as Elyse seems to be struggling on her own, then relying on the other people she collides with who see behind her mask. It tries for a nuanced take on things like suicidal ideation and how reactions to trauma can affect others, finding explanations for the behaviors of antagonists. The sisters’ relationship is rough, but they seem tied to a monster that they need to work together to fight.
It’s not the tightest crafted horror, but it weaves an Indigenous story about land and home ownership and extended family into “mental illness horror,” and the stellar performance of Morgan Holmstrom props it up.
No Rest for the Wicked
NO REST FOR THE WICKED (Credit: Charades Films) This is the kind of movie you want to melt into. No Rest for the Wicked takes place in the 1800s on a remote Faroe Island. It’s implied that things are a bore for the religious zealots in their sleepy village, but things change when a mysterious stranger floats up and into the life of Baldur (Egor Venned) and his island mates.
Baldur is initially vexed by the confusing wiles of the older sailor, Helge (Pilou Asbæk), who takes temporary residence with him and his mother, but things change when he is taken by his magnetism. Baldur, who has never seen beyond the punishing island boundaries, falls quickly for the man with fantastical stories and kempt facial hair.
When Helge is swept into a whaling mission with the other local men, Baldur is held back by his concerned widowed mother. His love sent to the sea is thus sent to his death along with the others, leaving Baldur to beg with blood for his return.
The story of pining becomes a supernatural one where a vampiric infection seems to spread through the un-rotted corpses, making men with new hungers for blood and romance.
Vampirism as a metaphor for queerness is a common horror theme, and it’s painted across this spooky island love story evocative of tales of illicit romance. No Rest for the Wicked is sometimes languid and not always encompassing, but the sexiness and rawness of the love between the two leads makes it something you’ll want to wrap yourself in.
The Last Footage
THE LAST FOOTAGE Credit: (ATwentyThree) The gems of this festival always come by way of international sneak attacks. It’s impossible to distill a country’s cinema tastes down to the movie that makes it across the water to us for this festival, but those films do offer a unique view into the film stylings of a different nation.
This year, Myanmar showed up via The Last Footage, a shiny found footage story about a haunted forest visited by some sparkly young people.
Mixing elements of “cabin in the woods” and rural horror with witchy found footage, the movie weaponizes POV shots for weird, spooky delights. A gaggle of friends looking for their next great adventure is talked into visiting the rubber plantation inherited by a member of the group. Initially reluctant, the group boards a bus to their strange locale, ignoring the warnings of a drunk uncle and calamities like a broken-down bus and stories about unexplainable fatal fires.
When they arrive, they’re met by a babbling woman who's been doing strange witchcraft in the house, and everything is ramped up when the boy with them goes missing. Desperate to find him, and more desperate to survive, the gang clunks around the woods managing the demands of a woman who claims to know how to gain dominion over the forest’s beasts.
Using the shiny 4k of smart glasses is an inspired way to tackle modern found footage, though the clarity does sometimes show too many seams in the horror action. It’s perhaps with intention that a beast fighting an old woman would look bizarre point-blank in reality, but it sometimes spills the horror into a bit of camp comedy (it often feels like watching someone walk through a kitschy haunted house). But listen, for all I know, that’s Myanmar’s version of a scare from Evil Dead.
Godhead
GODHEAD (Credit: Alief) “Experimental” fell off my tongue a few times throughout the festival. It applied mostly to the Adult Swim alum feature, Dance Freak, but it wasn’t exclusive to it. Both that and Godhead are presented in black and white, sure, but they also feature dated aspect ratios and strange lens choices.
The unusual visual style of Godhead is impossible to ignore, but what stands out are its themes about religious dogma, humanity’s worst impulses, and competing levels of villainy.
It opens on a priest (Al Warren) raising a boy in a micro-cult, convincing him the outside world is unsafe and exposing him to a strict reading of the bible. But the father’s seeming malintent is not where the conflict comes from. Instead, it’s when he’s challenged by a pair of chaotic siblings.
“Firstborn” (Sarah Coffey) and “Secondborn” (Kimball Farley) are tracksuit-clad twins who insist one of them is the true Holy Spirit. They trap the father, forcing him to decide which of them is the true spirit, insisting he must kill one of them by morning, sending them to the heavens.
You’d think a gaslit and trapped child would be big enough fish to fry, but the father becomes somewhat of the protagonist against the manipulative Firstborn, and therein lies the fun of the film. Who is more evil in a faceoff between the two bad actors? Godhead uses religion as a doorway into a conversation about evil, godliness, and human complexity.
It’s not always easy to watch, and it plays to the extreme when it doesn’t quite have to. Still, the whole thing feels like a tiny offshoot of 28 Years Later’s Jimmy brigade in a way that might tantalize a horror fan looking for a philosophical exploration of perverted dogma.
