That was a dark omen I read on a stranger’s poster board last week as I walked Festival Street at the 51st Toronto International Film Festival, heading to a Midnight Madness screening while the fate of Hollywood hangs in the balance of a looming merger.
The more film festivals I attend, it’s always the midnight section that appeals most to me, often providing a cathartically camp beacon in an algorithmic Hollywood, which manages to out-absurd our current dystopia and deliver a rush of cinematic dopamine for at least the film’s runtime.
And one year after the Midnight Madness debut of Curry Barker’s Obsession, which rocked the box-office with numerous broken records to the tune of $516M (on a reported $750K budget), many in the industry are curious what low-budget breakout will be the next hot acquisition to put butts in seats at the local AMC. That means a lot of exhausted cinephiles and industry types trying to make it to 2am in order to scope out the next big indie hit that might come from the genre-driven section.
The first title to spark a bidding war out of this year’s festival was from none other than the Midnight Madness section, with IFC unloading Josh Giuliano’s River to Blumhouse/Universal in a $10M+ deal, following interest from Sony, Focus, Paramount, A24 and Netflix.
River seems to follow the tried-and-true format that made Obsession a success, offering a stripped-down horror experience that relies on performance, character and story over a big splashy (every pun intended) blood rig or over-stylized attempts to reinvent the kill.
In River, written and directed by Giuliano, three siblings (Jessica Rothe, Jane Levy and Max Mattern) reunite to spread their estranged father’s ashes on the river where he spent most of his time. When their boat gets stuck under a bridge, a pair of masked killers begins stalking them from both sides of the river, forcing them into a fight for survival as they process their family trauma.
With little more than a motorboat and a West Virginia pond, Giuliano and his cast managed to deliver a uniquely chilling slasher. “We shot 14 of the 22 days on the water, 12 of those 14 days were shot on a fishing pond that was doubling as our hero location, which was the actual river with the bridge, which was the Monongahela River in West Virginia,” he recalled.
“The fishing pond was like 20 miles away from that. But it was all real outdoor locations,” added Giuliano. “None of it was shot in the tank. Even the night stuff was shot in the pond and in that river, and so it just made life incredibly difficult for them and the crew.”
Rothe shouted out DP Nick Matthews for working with Giuliano to create “such an incredible cinematic language for this, but they captured it in such a beautiful way.”
And with a credit scene that gives audiences a time jump and a major cliffhanger, Giuliano says he has “no formal plans for a sequel at this point, but my mind is always spinning in that direction.”
If moviegoers aren’t primed for another slasher franchise, there’s another fun mix of genre with writer/director Eugene Kotlyarenko’s Vintage Violence, which steers more into romantic-comedy territory, albeit with a fun, blood-splattered action quality.
In Vintage Violence, Carter (Cole Sprouse) is an urban explorer who finds a haul of rare denim in a mineshaft. When Izumi (Kiko Mizuhara) invites him to unload the merchandise in Tokyo, the pair ends up in the crosshairs of the yakuza in a twisty, high-octane trip through the country’s thriving denim market.
Taking inspiration from the direct-to-video spirit of Japanese V-Cinema, Kotlyarenko thinks aspiring filmmakers in Hollywood could learn something from the country’s indie market.
“I mean, you have the studio mergers, but you also have very strong voiced independent films making a splash, like Obsession. So, I think we’re actually in a really good place to revitalize bold voices,” he explained. “The history of American cinema is actually very similar to Japanese cinema. There’s no state support, so it’s about people who really want to entertain audiences and have a strong voice.”
Kotlyarenko continued, “So, that’s why I love that cinema … When there’s limitations, you have to be inventive. And I think the film industry has recently pushed people, that if they wanna say something personal, they do have limitations. That’s where you get movies that break out, because audiences wanna see new stuff. They wanna see experimental stuff, as long as it’s entertaining, and a lot of entertainment people have been kind of pushed out of the center. So, we’re actually at an amazing, energetic, fun moment for American cinema. So, let’s all learn from each other.”
One aspect that has driven the success of many a midnight movie, while becoming somewhat of an offense to mainstream audiences, is the rise of a new era of “camp” cinema. But don’t make the mistake of describing Anna Biller’s The Face of Horror as such.
Inspired by the Kabuki ghost story Yotsuya Kaidan, The Face of Horror stars Jonah Hauer-King as Edward, a corrupt knight who is haunted by the ghost of his late wife Eleanor (Kristine Froseth) after leaving her for noblewoman Isabel (Bella Heathcoate).
While many today embrace camp as the antithesis to mainstream swill, a major factor that made Biller’s The Love Witch a cult classic 10 years later, she rejects the term in describing her work. Despite the vibrant technicolor aesthetic, heightened performances and soapy plotlines, she sees the latest in her repertoire as serious and operatic, a sincere tribute to respected filmmakers of generations past.
“The funny thing about me is that I’m not trying for camp at all. And so, I think when you play it really big, it instantly reads as camp, because it reads as melodrama and it reads as so over the top, that it reads as kind of a joke about something, but it’s not. I’m trying to do tragedy here,” explained Biller. “But the stakes are that high in Kabuki theater. I’m taking from Kabuki theater, Noh theater, I’m taking from Visconti, Pasolini, operatic directors. And if the audiences today read all that as camp, then they do. I can’t help that.”
Regardless of Biller’s artistic intention, the question remains if her passionate brand of moviegoers will translate to the box-office. Although The Love Witch played fewer than 25 theaters upon its 2016 debut, will audiences’ cravings for something different be enough to secure a wide release for The Face of Horror a decade later?
While these three midnight standouts show potential as the next box-office sleeper hit one year after Obsession, TIFF also awarded its People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award on Sunday to Canadian director Matthew Rankin’s Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney, a trippy satirical documentary about the country’s 18th prime minister.
First runner-up was Italian director Paolo Strippoli’s The Spiral, in which a woman’s estranged mother shows up on her doorstep with a sinister story that explains an incident in their past. Third place was Japanese director Sabu’s Arrested Memory, a crime caper about a detective with dementia who unwittingly wanders off with a multimillion-dollar ransom, sending cops and criminals on his trail.
This year’s Midnight Madness lineup also included some gems in the form of Half, Indian director Samjad’s martial arts-infused western about twin half-blooded vampires who wage a gory war against desert hijackers; Kick On from Australia’s Nick Kozakis, in which four friends are plunged into a drug-fueled night of mayhem after crossing a mobster’s son; and Rogue Trooper, British director Duncan Jones’ animated adaptation of the comic books about a clone soldier who goes to battle with the help of three personalities uploaded to his equipment.
All of the above manage to shirk cinematic conventions and provide a unique movie-going experience as distributors seek to bring something new to an already booming year at the box-office. With the Hollywood studio system headed for a tailspin, could now be the time for midnight movies to come out of the dark and into the marquee lights?
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