{"id":849255,"date":"2026-08-07T09:54:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T09:54:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/849255\/"},"modified":"2026-08-07T09:54:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T09:54:12","slug":"as-hollywood-searches-next-obsession-backrooms-tiff-curator-answers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/849255\/","title":{"rendered":"As Hollywood Searches Next Obsession, Backrooms, TIFF Curator Answers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAfter Kane Parsons\u2019 Backrooms<\/a> and Curry Barker\u2019s\u00a0Obsession<\/a> made box office history, Midnight Madness programmer Peter Kuplowsky has his own collection of Gen Z-fluent horror filmmakers competing to become Hollywood\u2019s next horror film sensations for the major studios to fight over at the upcoming Toronto Film Festival<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tTake debut feature director Joshua Giuliano who will open Kuplowsky\u2019s late night thrills and spills showcase with a world premiere for River, a survival slasher that brings together modern scream queens Jane Levy and Jessica Rothe in a dark tale about three estranged siblings reuniting to scatter their late father\u2019s ashes along a remote river, only to face a waking nightmare.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe film begins as a domestic drama between siblings, and then ratchets into one of the most suspenseful films I\u2019ve seen in years,\u201d Kuplowsky told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of unveiling his 2026 Midnight Madness sidebar lineup on Thursday. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tJonah Hauer-King and Kristine Froseth in \u2018The Face Of Horror\u2019.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Good Chaos<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis (film) feels very stripped down, very minimalist, and I could see it being in conversations with movies like Backrooms and Obssession because of how uncomplicated its machinations are. It is delivering on a very pure and primal genre experience and executed in a way that is going to elicit shrieks and screams and gasps from the audience,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

\n\tRiver hits Kuplowsky\u2019s sweet spot by beginning in one place \u2014 an estranged siblings drama \u2014 before the character conflicts and tension escalate and whip-saw the audience to the intended point of nerve-shredding engagement in Toronto. Midnight Madness also has a first look for Kick On, an action horror thriller from Nick Kozakis, and about a night of partying by four friends descending into a spiral of paranoia, violence and betrayals.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat might have been early on predictable for Kuplowsky with Kick On eventually turns wonderfully weird and deranged. \u201cThere\u2019s a level of ultra-violence and commitment to just visceral gag after gag subjected onto the characters that is going to be a quite breathless experience at midnight\u201d in Toronto, the veteran TIFF programmer added.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u2018Vintage Violence.\u2019<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tToronto Film Festival<\/p>\n

\n\tOther world premieres in the squishy and scary movie section include Anna Biller\u2019s plague-haunted ghost story\u00a0The Face of Horror, a follow-up to The Love Witch that stars Jonah Hauer-King, Kristine Froseth, Ellie Bamber, Bella Heathcote and Ben Radcliffe; and Eugene Kotlyarenko\u2019s Vintage Violence, an action comedy set in Japan and starring Cole Sprouse as a social media influencer touting priceless jeans. <\/p>\n

\n\tAnd Hollywood film buyers may want to stay up until the early morning hours in Toronto for films that bend more towards the absurd than jump scares, as with a world premiere for the latest film from Universal Language director Matthew Rankin, the documentary Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Brian Mulroney. His portrait of former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney is seen through a genre-bending collage of TV appearances and other archival material that becomes a fever dream of politics, propaganda and pop culture from the Winnipeg director and the National Film Board of Canada. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe\u2019s not scary. I do think his movies are freaky and they\u2019re bizarre,\u201d Kuplowsky observed. The same holds true for Matt Barats, an actor and comedian known for roles in Cash Cow, Inspector Ike and White House Plumbers and who is bringing to Midnight Madness his directorial effort, the Anchors Aweigh comedy for an international premiere.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u2018The Spiral.\u2019<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tToronto Film Festival<\/p>\n

\n\tMidnight Madness also booked Half, a vampire martial arts action thriller out of India from Golam director Samjad, which Kuplowsky bills as \u201cspeaking to an Indian cultural context \u2014 a curry Western vampire hybrid\u201d as it blends the grit of traditional spaghetti westerns with Bollywood themes.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s also an international premiere in Toronto after Venice for the Italian psychological thriller The Spiral from genre director Paolo Strippoli (A Classic Horror Story) and about a mother and daughter whose relationship spirals out of control after a shocking secret is spilled.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd there\u2019s a North American bow for Sabu\u2019s comedy Arrested Memory, which stars Taiwanese actor Ethan Juan and follows a detective with Alzheimer\u2019s Disease. Midnight Madness will close with Moon director Duncan Jones\u2019 Rogue Trooper, an animated comic book adaptation about a soldier, voiced by Aneurin Barnard, caught behind enemy lines with an offbeat platoon.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u2018Kick On.\u2019<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tToronto Film Festival<\/p>\n

\n\tShudder has already picked up the Midnight Madness opener River for its platform, with a theatrical release also planned. Otherwise, the remaining lineup are all acquisition titles up for grabs at TIFF.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut as Hollywood remains on the hunt for the next Obsession or Backrooms amid a gold rush<\/a> for online creators, Kuplowsky argues studio execs need to look beyond what\u2019s playing well on YouTube and other digital platforms to breakout horror filmmaking talent that understands genre movies and Gen Z audiences and who the major studios and streamers can work with.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou should be asking who are the filmmakers that we think we\u2019re excited about working with, rather than a film that is going to just recreate the formula to an exact T,\u201d he argued. \u201cWith Obsession, the film absolutely worked with an audience, and think they (Focus Features) found the right way to bring it to an audience. And I hope they\u2019ll continue to do that for films in the section,\u201d Kuplowsky said of his Midnight Madness lineup.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Toronto Film Festival is set to run Sept. 10 to 20.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After Kane Parsons\u2019 Backrooms and Curry Barker\u2019s\u00a0Obsession made box office history, Midnight Madness programmer Peter Kuplowsky has his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":849256,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[199186,49,48,75,68813,2559],"class_list":["post-849255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-backrooms","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-obsession","tag-toronto-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=849255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849255\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/849256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=849255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=849255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=849255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}