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<\/p>\n\n\tI don\u2019t know why Zack Snyder went to TIFF to premiere his movie. Unless he filmed himself giving Prime Minister Mark Carney a life-saving blood transfusion while chanting \u201cFrom the river to the sea,\u201d the war thriller The Last Photograph was never going to win that audience over.<\/p>\n
\n\tThat audience is the film festival audience, a volatile, reliably left-of-center social media jumble of disgruntled film students, part-time activists\/baristas, laid-off drunk sports writers, couples therapy podcasters in denial about the furry husband, all of them believing they are the better Yorgos Lanthimos. <\/p>\n
\n\tBefore a filmmaker has a shot at playing the cutthroat politics of the studio system \u2014 where one joke in a Hollywood Reporter column can piss off the wrong person \u2014 they\u2019ve first got to win that weird-ass room.<\/p>\n
\n\tFor decades, film festivals cast themselves as cinema\u2019s refuge from Hollywood\u2019s worst commercial instincts. Now they\u2019re Hollywood\u2019s G League and, increasingly, its most unlikely horror marketplace \u2014 where aspiring auteurs compete with movie stars, gore gets dressed up as political commentary and the bloodiest movie on the screen can spark the biggest bidding war.<\/p>\n
\n\tFilm school used to be where you learned the craft and got noticed, but nobody\u2019s scouting student films at USC anymore. Today, the Gen Z George Lucas has to take his THX film onto the festival circuit to get discovered \u2014 where he\u2019ll find himself competing for attention with the premiere of the latest Mad Max extravaganza. A kid with a camera, a credit card and something to say is suddenly on the same playing field as a $40 million prestige picture starring two Oscar winners pretending to be broke.<\/p>\n
\n\tAs more actor-directors arrive at festivals with movies stuffed with famous friends, agents and studio executives sit in their parkas like NBA scouts, clocking which nepo baby can hit ideological free throws in front of a sold-out crowd of programmers and critics. Make every shot, and you get called up to direct Marvel. Miss one, and you\u2019re back to wearing a rubber suit for them.<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat\u2019s emerged is a schizophrenic marketplace where art and commerce have fused into The Substance. Hiding in the closet, like Demi Moore\u2019s unconscious body, is the quiet Japanese drama about a grandmother dying of cancer. Dancing out front is the festival darling of the moment: whichever horror film has everybody screaming this year. Get Out, Obsession, Megalopolis.<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\tInde Navarrette in the festival favorite Obsession. <\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tFocus Features\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n
\n\tThere is nothing wrong with playing horror or lowbrow genre films at prestigious film festivals. I certainly love them. At the least, it adds a sorely missing sense of humor and whimsy. After all, movies are supposed to be fun. <\/p>\n
\n\tThe problem is when the self-importance of festival political activism crosses wires with these horror nerds. As these dopamine chasers inflict their limbic systems on every film, cheering for lizard-brain human suffering, the Olds scramble to give all that bloodlust a higher purpose, laundering it into political statements right there in the Q&A. A horror filmmaker on a festival podium is suddenly facing a town square of Inquisitors, eager to intellectually vivisect the entertainment in search of some morally superior meaning. It\u2019s how body-horror humiliation rituals like The Substance get hyped into Greatest Movie Ever territory on the festival circuit, attracting a combination of prosthetic fetishists, fifth-wave feminists and theater-laugh exhibitionists.<\/p>\n
\n\tFestivals aren\u2019t rewarding leftist politics so much as wrapping gore in political language. By day, it\u2019s a cathedral of art and politics, handing out jury prizes under the ethical guidepost of Javier Bardem. By night, it\u2019s a meat market, serving face-peeling gore to the poors. Under the guise of Everything Is Political, we are indulging the most annoying audience in the world. It\u2019s a crowd that whoops at a decapitation, then posts on Bluesky how the decapitation interrogates colonialism.<\/p>\n
\n\tOf course, there\u2019s a less philosophical explanation for all this: Horror sells.<\/p>\n
\n\tIt\u2019s a brutal buyer\u2019s market. There are so many indie films that distributors can buy product for pennies on the dollar. The collapse of international television markets has only given the streamers more power. They budget infinite dollars for their own questionable \u201coriginal\u201d product, then make ruthless lowball offers for acquisitions. For indie investors, the pathway to getting their money back gets murkier by the day. It\u2019s shortsighted. Sure, the streamers are getting cheap content while filmmakers and investors absorb the risk, but it\u2019s not a sustainable market. The theory seems to be that there will always be another crop of suckers willing to pump money into the ecosystem, so the market will provide.<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\tZack\u202fSnyder at TIFF. <\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tFrazer Harrison\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
\n\tIn this environment, festival programmers hold immense power. They are effectively mini-studio heads now, and the agents treat them like it. Everyone pretends the films were chosen purely on merit, but the slate often reads Hollywood with a lanyard and a conscience. It is good business to publicly maintain the separation of church and studio, at least on paper. That prestige is what lets a distributor slap \u201cOfficial Selection\u201d on the poster and charge real money for a movie it acquired for roughly the equivalent of the price of a midrange Toyota Camry.<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd the branding works. Check the trades the morning after and see what actually made the headlines. It\u2019s the bidding war for the midnight horror movie: Netflix paying $17 million for It\u2019s What\u2019s Inside at Sundance, Neon matching it a year later for Together, Focus spending a TIFF-record $15 million on Obsession, buyers throwing eight figures at whatever made the Letterboxd crowd scream loudest in the dark. Every one of these sales is a commendable victory for independent filmmaking. But at Sundance, at least, it\u2019s a far cry from the institution Robert Redford set out to build. He dreamed of a temple for Cahiers du Cin\u00e9ma and woke up to find Fangoria running the gift shop.<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\tDemi Moore under a ton of prosthetics in The Substance.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of MUBI<\/p>\n
\n\tThe cinema gods love their irony. Of all the things festivals beg us to take seriously \u2014 the climate, toxic masculinity, the corporate fascism Mark Ruffalo wants to smash \u2014 the one thing they\u2019ve actually succeeded in elevating is the beheading. The slashing. The eye-gouging. The possessed guy shooting his brains out. Base-level schlock that teenagers once rented on DVD is now the most bankable product in the building.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe festivals set out to save cinema from Hollywood\u2019s worst instincts, and they ended up stuffing their bleeding intestines into tuxedos and slapping laurels on them. <\/p>\n