Fantasia 2024: Horror Stories and Streaming Horrors
By Maurie Alioff -Québec Correspondent
(July 29, 2024 – Montréal, QC) As Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival 2024 forges ahead with its second week of screening genre movies to its wildly enthusiastic audience, I spoke to Artistic Director Mitch Davis. We talked during an ongoing public discussion of genre, especially horror pictures. Davis also zeroed in on the impact of streaming services on festivals like Fantasia, not to mention moviemakers themselves.
On his Facebook page, director-writer Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, the Canadian-made Affliction, American Gigolo, The Master Gardener), wondered why exceptionally talented directors like Ti West and Osgood Perkins (Tony Perkins’s son) seem to be relegating themselves to horror pictures. Shouldn’t they be breaking out into other kinds of stories? – the implication being that horror is some kind of low-rent endeavour.
Maxxine, the third part of West’s X trilogy is in theatres now as is Perkins’s Longlegs. Pearl, a prequel that stunningly merges Carrie, The Wizard of Oz, Disney films and 1950’s Douglas Sirk hyper-Technicolour melodramas, stars Mia Goth (pictured below), who recently talked to The New York Times about her commitment to horror. Goth has a Canadian connection: her seductive and scary role in Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool. “She has so much range,” says Davis about the actor who is the number one requested guest at Fantasia. “She’s so bold, there’s nowhere she won’t go.”
“I saw that,” Davis laughed when I brought up Paul Schrader’s controversial post. “Too talented to be making a genre film! The Director of Cat People! I love Schrader, but I think he’s also a little bit of a troll, poking a little bit there. I know what he is saying up to a point, but if you look at a great genre film, like a George Romero or Ari Aster film, there are genre movies that have a point of view, and are made with a really, really strong intent. They aren’t designed to be just roller coasters or horror horror. And when something is done so beautifully, as in Osgood Perkins’s Longlegs, so beautifully directed, great set pieces, great mythology, and great performances, it’s pure Cinema. How could you not love that?”
Davis finds the knock genre attitude inexplicable. Schrader, of all people, would be aware of West’s often ironic references to movie history and style in a picture like Pearl. Nor does Davis concur with Schrader’s argument that for many talented filmmakers like Perkins, genre is a ghetto.
“I don’t believe the ghetto quite exists anymore,” says Davis. “I feel that for top directors right now, if they want to make something non-genre, a lot of studio people would be listening to them. I think the ghettoization is a thing of the past.”
Clearly, internationally recognized and prize-winning directors like Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) and Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things) work deep into horror and other genres. “I don’t think the prejudice is what it was,” Davis points out, “even 15 years ago. When Jonathan Demme won an Oscar for Silence of the Lambs, nobody wanted to say it was a genre film. They were going on about it being a psychological thriller, not horror. Suddenly, you had slasher movies coming out calling themselves psychological thrillers.”
From an industry perspective, studios crave genre pictures. They are relatively cheap to make, and they play well all over the world. And for an independent, ambitious filmmaker, they are the easiest to finance.
“The concept is the star,” says Davis. “You don’t need celebrities. As long as you have a great idea, and an interesting mise en scène, where the imagery will speak for itself. It’s lower stakes gambling. With almost no money at all, you can have a really interesting perspective, and a visual language that brings something new to the table.”
The Canadian film industry has long dug into the genre, especially since David Cronenberg opened the door to the outer limits of horror with ultra-provocative themes. Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink, which screened at Fantasia last year is for Mitch Davis, one of the strongest Canadian movies in recent memory.
An experimental horror picture, Skinamarink, says Davis, appealed to “a generation that never watched an experimental film.” Delving into childhood trauma, “it’s a super low budget movie that made a fortune on its theatrical release. It had 15-year-old kids uploading YouTube videos. The style of filmmaking was completely new to them, and it blew their minds, the most talked about horror film in the period when it came out. For direction, sound design, and visual ideas, it’s a stunning debut.”
Like other festivals around the world Fantasia has faced severe challenges in recent years. Davis says the festival’s 2024 edition, its 28th, has been no less than a miracle. “It has become increasingly difficult to program a festival of this size, largely because of the way streaming companies have been engaging. They are acquiring so much genre early in a film’s life.” The streamers bypass festival screenings, except for the biggest and most illustrious. With the exception of horror-thriller specialty Shudder, “they decline every single invitation that we give them.”
This year, Davis continues, “a number of our priority titles were taken out of consideration partly because we happen just before several major festivals, and the films are on hold because of possible world premieres. That’s fine, but it harrows down the range of what’s available even further.”
Apart from the impact on festival programming, the platforms have had a toxic effect on indie moviemakers. Travelling from one event to another opened the world for them and created opportunity. “For eight months, sometimes a year and a half,” Davis explains, “they made friends in every city, and these were lifelong friendships, networking things, often resulting in collaborations. And on top of that, they would get insights and perspectives through watching their films in different countries with different audiences. There’s no amount of reading comments on message boards and review sites that could match that.”
Moreover, the streamers don’t showcase movies in a way that triggers and informs the audience. “The film just shows up anonymously without any real visibility,” Davis objects, “and five days later, falls off the radar. It’s a terrible way for a young filmmaker to introduce early work into the world. It certainly feels like they are being abandoned in most cases. “It’s absolutely gut-wrenching to see so many interesting talents have their films launched in that kind of a way – instead of in front of 1000 people falling in love with the film and hopefully with the filmmaker.”
Of course, the platforms do put their weight behind some pictures, and Davis (pictured) admires how they make films available to people who live far from city centres. He also loves how “streaming platforms get behind certain auterists like Mike Flanagan.” The prolific horror-meister (In Absentia, The Shining sequel Dr. Sleep, the re-make of The Haunting of Hill House) fascinated a packed Fantasia house the night he accepted the fest’s Cheval Noir career award.
“What Netflix has given Mike Flanagan is kind of a miracle,” Davis continues. “He can do really compassionate character driven pieces that are 12 hours long, slow burn character arcs dramas through a horror prism. His movies are bloody scary, individualistic, whisper quiet and so heartbreakingly tragic in the way they talk about loss. Netflix has the confidence to give Mike Flanagan extraordinary carte blanche to make these pieces, the most poetic genre works coming out of the US right now.”
Of the 125 features at Fantasia, Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s Steppenwolf typifies the mashup of content and form Mitch Davis and Fantasia’s programmers seek out. Lined up for a second screening near the end of the festival, Davis calls the Kazakhaction film “spectacular, like Mad Max directed by John Ford. Or a Kazakh The Searchers made by George Miller. It’s really out there and so bleak. So disturbing, it has this Post-Soviet nihilism to it that’s unbelievably unsettling.”
Since its inception in the 1990s Fantasia has been about introducing its audiences to provocative filmmaking that that gives them a visceral kick and often makes them think. Click here for more information about the 2024 Fantasia film festival.
Maurie Alioff is a film journalist, critic, screenwriter and media columnist. He has written for radio and television and taught screenwriting at Montreal’s Vanier College. A former editor for Cinema Canada and Take One, as well as other magazines, he is affiliated with the Quebec media industry publication, CTVM.Info. His articles have appeared in various publications, including Canadian Cinematographer, POV Magazine, and The New York Times. He is the Québec Correspondent for Northernstars.ca.
