Tag: Fantasia Fest

Out of Fantasia Film Festival, Eriko Katagiri’s When You Open the Door moves at an agonizingly glacial pace and guns for the feeling, tone, and approach of Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, but it fails to move or provoke in any significant way. It’s poetically dreary without the weight of real, affecting lyricism…

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First-time director Nick Taylor brings special effects makeup artist Steve Johnson’s life and work to pulsing vitality in a brand new documentary. Out of Fantasia Film Festival, Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson peeks behind the curtain for an intimate glimpse into all the ups and downs of the business and Johnson’s personal…

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Out of Fantasia Film Festival, Arkar Soe Oo’s The Last Footage packs every found footage cliché into its 88-minute runtime and fails to generate any level of fear. Many filmmakers believe found footage films are quite easy to make—give your friends a camera and shoot. Easy peasy, right? As we’ve seen with other indie films…

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1990s media (film, television, etc.) portrayed New York City as a sticky, sweaty, and thrilling concrete jungle of sexual liberation and pure abandon. It makes sense, then, that filmmaker Corrin Evans places her story during the peak of post-grunge and Lilith Fair, a period which saw youth growing increasingly reckless in their pursuit of freedom…

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Out of Fantasia Film Festival, Michael Gabriele’s Unholy Night twists together the campiness of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, the cheery terror of Krampus, and the sobering aftertaste of Camille Griffin’s Silent Night. In recent years, the pool of well-made Christmas/holiday horror films has expanded—Silent Night Deadly Night (2025), Christmas Bloody Christmas, and Advent Calendar among…

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Out of Fantasia Film Festival, Angus Silver’s Insectasy aims for bizarro eroticism, but it neither gets gross and weird enough nor sexually charged enough to arouse the senses. Its sticky 1960s and ’70s aesthetic, from its carefully peculiar zoom shots and visual crackle, rips from the classics such as Dark Argento’s Phenomena (also referencing its…

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Out of Fantasia Film Festival, Casey Walker’s Home Bodies robotically shuffles between homage and a sleepy The Twilight Zone carbon copy. Sci-fi thrillers can so easily fall into the Black Mirror trap, or better yet feel too indebted to the Rod Serling-created television show to carve out a unique place of their own. As such,…

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Out of Fantasia Film Festival, Tim Riedel’s Ancestral Beasts follows a well-trodden path of familial roots, burying the past, and learning to move on. But it fails to generate anything meaningful and fresh for the conversation. It arrives in the world merely as an amalgam of better films with more gripping performances, better scripts, and…

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Out of Fantasia Film Festival, Kasper Kalle’s No Rest for the Wicked adapts the 1884 short story, Manor, written by German author and out gay man Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, and spins a beautiful and tragic, stunning and despairing, and poetic and terrifying love story. Kalle, who co-wrote the script with Rasmus Birch, examines the vilification…

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Out of Fantasia Film Festival, Wiebke von Carolsfeld’s Someone’s Daughter arrives like a hive of angry bees in a hot tin roof. Von Carolsfeld, who co-wrote the script with Doug Taylor, mines the rape/revenge genre with a fine-tooth comb. She pulls on threads found in Promising Young Woman and Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge, which in turn…

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Out of Fantasia Film Festival, Makoto Ueda surprises with his directorial debut, You Are the Film. At a time when theatrical tentpole films push creative and thematic boundaries, seeing an independent film follow suit with its own unique spin on genre storytelling is quite refreshing. Ueda ambitiously ventures into a mind-melting space to explore themes…

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Out of Fantasia Film Festival, Ian Faria’s Big Break is sure to be a romping crowd pleaser. The film mines the comedy/horror chops of genre titans such as Josh Ruben, Patrick Brice, and Mark Duplass. Written by Sam Lanier, it incisively cuts into the dog-eat-dog world of Hollywood and the strain that fame puts on…

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Fantasia Film Festival‘s 30th edition is less than two weeks away! It seems just like yesterday that the 2025 festival took place. This year’s lineup might be the best yet, with countless films ranging from vintage slashers to bone-rattling psychological thrillers, promising to blow the minds of horror audiences. When it comes to narrowing down…

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