What to Expect at Toronto After Dark

The Toronto After Dark Film Festival launches today, and offers eight epic nights of cinematic mayhem, with more zombies in attendance than your usual theatre experience (unless you’re sitting through a Miley Cyrus flick…ouch).

Toronto After Dark (TAD) Film Festival is one of the world’s leading showcases of new horror, sci-fi, action and cult films. The critically acclaimed event, now in its 6th year, showcases films and cinematic shorts from around the world. With last year’s festival attendance at nearly 10,000 enthusiastic film fans, it was also voted runner-up for Best Film Festival in the city. TAD features over a dozen films and 20 screenings across eight thrilling nights at the Toronto Underground Cinema, a venue rapidly becoming the place to go for awesome cult and cinema events in the city. Each of the films are new, independent and innovative works, the type of which are rarely given a chance to be viewed on the big screen.

An event unlike any other, Toronto After Dark also brings thousands of film fans together during the festival to meet outside of the screenings. They present the annual Toronto Zombie Walk, a three-hour event where people from all over Toronto dress up as withered corpses while weaving and lurching through the streets. With over 6,000 in attendance at last year’s walk alone, and prizes for best dressed, it continues to grow each passing Halloween season.

TAD also hosts packed nightly social events including gala parties at Nocturne night club (where you can meet the actors/writers/directors of the flicks) and pub social nights at the Tequila Bookworm, where fans can head out, meet other fans, and discuss the feature films over pints between the week’s opening and closing nights.

The final lineup of featured films includes a number of hugely buzzed genre movies, beginning with the scary supernatural tale The Innkeepers from acclaimed horror filmmaker Ti West. Also on the list is Sundance sensation The Woman, an outrageous new horror film from Lucky McKee, about a suburban family that decides to ‘domesticate’ a woman found living in the wild.

The festival is also announcing two world premieres, including Lloyd Kaufman’s Father’s Day, in the vein of Hobo With a Shotgun, as well as War of the Dead, a thrilling new zombie flick with hordes of undead terrifying a group of soldiers trying to complete a secret mission during World War II. Other festival hits include VS, which sees a despicable super-villain forcing a group of young costumed crusaders into playing a series of impossible-to-win games where the penalty for losing is death; vampire lovers can sink their fangs into Midnight Son, a dark and gritty look at a young man’s descent into the world of drinking blood; while dark sci-fi fans should check out The Corridor, an award-winning new film about a disturbing energy force discovered in a remote forest by a group of friends, and the dark implications it has for them all.

A more light-hearted fare comes from Manborg, a fun homage to cult sci-fi action films of the 80s, a la Robocop and Terminator. Meanwhile, Some Guy Who Kills People adds healthy doses of black comedy to the serial killer horror genre that shouldn’t be missed.

Finally, for pure adrenaline-rush seekers, Absentia, possibly the most chilling new horror film of the year, and the award-winning mountain-climbing dark thriller A Lonely Place to Die, which has drawn comparisons to the hit thriller The Descent.

No matter what type of scary movie fan you are, there’s something for everyone at TAD, guaranteed to scare the pants off you – or at least have you semi-shiver once or twice – and prep you for next weekend’s Halloween circuit.