7 Films To Get Excited About at the Fantasia Film Festival 2024
A preview of the 2024 edition of the Fantasia Film Festival
Ever since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many film festivals moved their offerings online, I’ve been a regular virtual attendee of the Fantasia Film Festival out of Montreal. Attending in person isn’t feasible for me, but the festival’s virtual component has allowed me to see some of the best genre offerings of the past few years — horror movies, thrillers, offbeat comedies, and more — that I wouldn’t necessarily have had a chance to check out otherwise.
This year, the festival is taking place in person, but I’ll once again be covering it remotely. They have a phenomenal program this year, full of films from around the world, and after looking through their offerings, there are a solid 30+ films I’m hoping to be able to check out; for this preview, though, I’ve whittled it down to seven.
If you’re not able to make it to Montreal this year, the vast majority of these films will, of course, find their way out in other ways. Some will get wide releases — Fantasia will show the Hunter Schaefer-starring Cuckoo, for example, slated for theaters August 9th— while others may be more limited. Still, in this world where everything winds up on streaming, there’s a good chance these will all find their audiences.
So, with that in mind, here are seven films to keep on your radar in advance of this year’s Fantasia Film Festival!
1. Azrael (dir. E.L. Katz)
For my money, Samara Weaving is one of the best scream queens in the business. Between Ride or Die, The Babysitter, Mayhem, Bad Girl, and more, she’s never less than captivating. In E.L. Katz’s Azrael, a film about Weaving’s character escaping from a cult, she’s lost the ability to speak. In fact, the whole film is dialogue-less.
Weaving is also paired with Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, who I adored in this year’s FEMME. Based on that film, he can also communicate a world of emotion with just a look, meaning I am very excited to see him perform opposite Weaving.
2. Frankie Freako (dir. Steven Kostanski)
I really vibed with Steven Kostanski’s Psycho Goreman, a loving, profane homage to the glorious rubber-suited villains of things like Power Rangers. His follow-up, Frankie Freako, promises to be just as drenched in childhood nostalgia. This one is about a guy who accidentally invites a creature named Frankie Freako over to his house, and soon he’s overrun with little puppet monsters who make his life a living hell. The Psycho Goreman guy doing a riff on Ghoulies? I’m sold.
3. From My Cold Dead Hands (dir. Javier Horcajada)
I love a found-footage documentary. I think Garry Sykes’ LXHXN, which traces Lindsay Lohan’s rise and fall through interview and paparazzi clips found online, is a minor masterpiece. A couple of years ago at the Chattanooga Film Festival, I reviewed Joelle Walinga’s moving Self Portrait, which mined publicly-available security camera footage to take stock of a world that increasingly watches itself.
Javier Horcajada’s From My Cold Dead Hands examines the American obsession with guns by collaging videos he found on YouTube, having combed through hours of footage of people showing off their weapons, debating their legality, covering their uses and misuses, and more. This is the kind of thing I can already tell I’m going to love.
4. Haze (dir. Matthew Fifer)
Matthew Fifer’s 2020 film Cicada is a lovely, intimate portrait of a relationship, a beautifully-observed story of two gay people coming together through their respective traumas and learning how to connect anyway. I gave it a glowing review out of Outfest that year.
This year, he returns with Haze, a thriller about a gay man investigating the supposed suicides of queer patients at a mental hospital. Fantasia’s description of the film promises “a queer slice-of-life thriller with a somber, horror-leaning quality,” which sounds incredibly up-my-alley.
5. Rats! (dir. Maxwell Nalevansky, Carl Fry)
I admit that I don’t know much about the team behind Rats!, so this is a good case of a great festival blurb selling me on a film. (Also, that preview image…!) The movie apparently takes place in 2007, following a burnout trying to complete community service in Fresno, and when I see phrases like “trash auteurism” and a description like “an evil Sponge Bob flash animation bad-tripping off of laced Xanz that you watched on NewGrounds while your parents weren’t paying attention, back when you were 12 years old,” and I’m sold.
6. This Man (dir. Tomojiro Amano)
Last year, Dream Scenario imagined a world in which a nondescript man played by Nicolas Cage began showing up in everyone’s dreams. That took a kooky approach to the source material, a mysterious website created in the 2000s that purports to document a unibrowed man who people dream about the world over.
In the decades since the site’s inception, the urban legend of the dream man has spread around the world, and new Japanese horror film This Man takes the idea to a scary place. It seems like it’ll be fun to compare this to Dream Scenario, and to hear Fantasia tell it, the movie is so good that they wonder if it’ll bring J-Horror back into the worldwide consciousness the way it was in the 2000s. They’ve called This Man “unsettling, intelligent, shocking, and devilishly entertaining,” a bunch of words that sound great to me!
7. Witchboard (dir. Chuck Russell)
Carol Clover wrote about the 1986 film Witchboard at length in her seminal book Men, Women, and Chain Saws, and it’s as delightful as she makes it seem. It’s a trashy movie about a group of kids getting possessed by a Ouija board, but as Clover enumerates, there’s a ton of fascinating gender stuff going on in the movie, flipping and subverting usual possession-movie tropes to make a point about girlhood on film.
And now we’re apparently getting a remake?! The new version will star Madison Isenman, who I liked in Annabelle Comes Home and the (few episodes I watched of the) I Know What You Did Last Summer TV show, alongside Jamie Campbell Bower, who is great in Stranger Things and in Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1.
Horror remakes are hit or miss, but that’s exactly the fun of the genre, as I’ve written about endlessly… horror is folktale, and we can learn a lot about ourselves by examining the differences in the way we tell ourselves the same stories. Sign. Me. Up.
The Fantasia Film Festival kicks off on July 18th and runs through August 4th!
