Permanent Midnight: Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Smith, and More Bring the Creeps to TIFF's Midnight Madness

Permanent Midnight is a weekly Complex Pop Culture column where senior staff writer, and resident genre fiction fanatic, Matt Barone will put the spotlight on the best new indie horror/sci-fi/weirdo cinema, twisted novels, and other below-the-radar oddities.

In Toronto for the next eight days, while the potential Academy Awards darlings and other prestige dramas keep the critics and casual moviegoers enlightened during the day, the freaks come out at night. After hours, the lovably messed-up cinephiles will stay up at around 2:00 a.m. every night watching a variety of big-screen mayhem. They’ll see Samuel L. Jackson as the President of the United States fighting back against a bunch of homicidal terrorists in something directed by a Finnish dude. They’ll stare wide-eyed as Japanese rappers square off against the Yakuza in a raucous musical. They’ll defecate in their drawers while being introduced to cinema’s first sexually transmitted ghost. And, thanks to fanboy filmmaker extraordinaire Kevin Smith, they’ll see Justin Long turn into a part-man, part-walrus abomination.

And they’ll love ever crazy second of it all.

A highlight of the annual Toronto International Film Festival, the Midnight Madness program is widely regarded as the official launching pad for what’s next in worldwide independent horror, science fiction, action, and unclassifiable, genre-bending insanity. The gatekeeper of TIFF’s wildest section is Colin Geddes, a venerable key-master who’s given first-look platforms for beloved genre movies like Candyman, Cabin Fever, High Tension, Inside, Insidious, and The Raid: Redemption. And through those cosigns, he’s been largely responsible for igniting the careers of folks like Eli Roth (Hostel, Netflix’s Hemlock Grove) and Alexandre Aja (Piranha 3D, Daniel Radcliffe’s upcoming Horns).

But who in the 2014 lineup will reach those guys’ and films’ plateaus of success and acclaim? I spoke with Geddes at length about the most intriguing new movies in this year’s Midnight Madness slate, as well as TIFF’s Vanguard section, which Geddes also programs and covers genre fare that’s less batshit and much more artistically elegant.

Director: Kevin Smith

Stars: Justin Long, Haley Joel Osment, Michael Parks, Genesis Rodriguez

Official synopsis: Kevin Smith brings his comedic chops to a disturbing new milieu in this Canuck-baiting chiller about a popular podcast host who descends into straight-up madness when he heads north of the 49th parallel.

Colin Geddes says: This film is really a deal-changer for, and a reinvention of, Kevin Smith. For the longest times, he’s been kind of reinterpreting his Clerks mythology, but now, after Red State and now this, he’s going into a very different direction as a director, with what he wants to talk about and what kind of stories he wants to tell.

The less said about Tusk, though, the better. It’s a film that will really get under the audience’s skin very quickly.The one thing I’ll say about this film is that what really caught my attention is Kevin Smith’s devoted single-mindedness to weirdness—he gets right to it right away. It’s an uncompromised vision of weirdness, for lack of a better term.It was a film that I sought out. It’d been on my tracking list for year; I knew he’d been working on it. I reached out to various people who were involved with it to see if they’d be interested in showing it to us for Midnight Madness consideration. Kevin Smith actually came with a Blu-ray of the film to Toronto, to present it to us, and he let us know that we were the first audience to see it. He just told us to enjoy it and get back to him later. As soon as the film was done, I actually ran out on the street to find him. [ Laughs.] I caught up to him right as he was picking up the Blu-ray, and I told him that I really enjoyed it and wanted to invite him to TIFF.

I’ve been calling Tusk “this generation’s Human Centipede.” You’re going to run into people and say, “You know, did you ever see that film Tusk? That was fucked-up, right?” Because it has Kevin Smith’s name on it, it’s getting a wide release, but a lot of people are going to see this film and they won’t even be able to wrap their heads around it because it gets so weird and perverse. Tusk is definitely something no one’s seen or experienced before, and that’s part of the charm and magic of it. People who are used to what Kevin Smith has been are going to be taken aback by this one, in a good way.

Director: David Robert Mitchell

Stars: Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, Jake Weary, Olivia Luccardi, Lili Sepe

Official synopsis: Stuck with a sexually transmitted serial haunting after a romantic night out, a beautiful 19-year-old girl finds herself pursued by a legion of malevolent, lumbering phantoms that will pursue her forever—unless she passes the curse on to someone else.

Colin Geddes says: I actually saw It Follows before the Cannes Film Festival. I saw it before it got selected for Cannes, and I saw a very rough cut of it, and it didn’t have the final soundtrack on it. I fell in love with it right away, but, actually, when I first saw it, I thought it might play better in the Vanguard section than in Midnight Madness. But then when I saw it in Cannes as a tighter cut, and with the soundtrack on it, it changed my mind. I knew it’d play perfectly in Midnight Madness.

This film is just really fresh. The writing is fresh, and the set-up is really unique. It’s essentially about a sexually transmitted haunting. It’s just so new and unique in a world where you’re constantly seeing found-footage and zombie films just flooding the market. To see something where, this is really thought out, and this director is really trying something different, is what’s really refreshing about it. It’s definitely in a different era, and there’s been a lot of comparisons to John Carpenter’s films from the ‘80s, which I can see, but I think a lot of people are giving it that because of its musical choices. Some people have referred to the soundtrack as Goblin-esque, but it’s actually closer to a 1980s synth score, which is the film’s backbone, and that’s why people have gone to the John Carpenter comparison right away.

Director: Jaume Balagueró

Stars: Manuela Velasco, Paco Manzanedo, Hector Colome, Ismael Fritschi, Crispulo Cabezas, Mariano Venancio, Maria Alfonsa Rosso, Carlos Zabala, Cristian Aquino, Emilio Buale

Official synopsis: Confined to a high-security quarantine facility in the bowels of an ocean liner, a ragtag group of survivors fights for their lives against infected zombie hordes, in the long-awaited climax to the spectacularly popular Spanish horror franchise.

Colin Geddes says: This takes place right after [REC] 2. there are some references to [REC] 3: Genesis, and I know that some people didn’t like number three, but, for me, number three was those guys having taking the piss out of the series. They never expected it to go that far, so at that point they needed to just take a breather and really have a breath of fresh air. They wanted to inject some humor into it. This film, though, picks up right after part two and delivers a really fun, gore-filled, rage zombie ride.

Director: Jonas Goevarts

Stars: Maurice Luijten, Titus De Voogdt, Stef Aerts, Evelien Bosmans, Jan Hammenecker

Official synopsis: A troupe of young Cub Scouts find themselves stalked by a psychopathic huntsman who has riddled the forest with ingenious and deadly traps.

Colin Geddes says: This is one where I was aware of the project for about a year; I knew one of the producers, and then a teaser trailer that surfaced online was sent to my attention. I’ve been watching the film’s journey, and luckily when I got to see it the film delivered and paid off. It’s exciting to have a new, young director in horror, especially one from Europe. If I look at some of the programming decisions I’ve made in the past, I was able to introduce guys like Xavier Gens [Frontiere(s)] and Alex Aja [High Tension]—those are directors that no one had heard of, and those were more or less their debut films. To be able to debut a film from Belgium is really cool, too; this is also the first Flemish-language film that’s ever played in Midnight Madness. Those are exciting firsts to share with the audience.

The protagonist is a young, emotionally disturbed boy who goes off to a small cub camp, like a Boy Scout camp. The film is really able to pinpoint childhood fears and terrors, like when you’re sleeping in a tent and you hear noises outside, your imagination runs away with you. But in this case, the things outside the tent are far worse than anything the little boy could’ve imagined. So, really, it’s able to identify and pinpoint childhood fears in a really masterful way.

Director: Jalmaria Helander

Stars: Samuel L. Jackson, Onni Tommila, Ray Stevenson, Mehmet Kurtulus, Victor Garber, Ted Levine, Felicity Huffman, Jim Broadbent

Official synopsis: Trapped in the wilderness after Air Force One is forced down by a terrorist attacked, the President of the United States (Samuel L. Jackson) must rely on the survival skills of a 13-year-old woodsman.

Colin Geddes says: This is a film that knows exactly what it is. It’s equal parts A Most Dangerous Game and Escape from New York, but, most importantly, it harkens back to the Amblin Entertainment films of the ‘80s, stuff like The Goonies that were kid-powered but don’t necessarily need to be enjoyed specifically by kids. And just the premise of it—a 13-year-old boy on a hunting trip has to rescue the American President who’s being hunted by terrorists in a Finnish forest. Just from that plot description, I was done, done, done. [Laughs.] And then I heard it’s from the Rare Exports director and that the president is played by Samuel L. Jackson—just absolutely perfect.

Directors: Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead

Stars: Lou Taylor Pucci, Nadia Hilker, Francesco Carnelutti, Nick Nevern, Jeremy Gardner, Vinny Curran, Shane Brady, Chris “Cage” Palko

Official synopsis: Before Sunrise gets a supernatural twist in this tale of an American backpacker in Italy who falls in love with a beautiful young woman harbouring a dark, primordial secret.

Colin Geddes says: Spring is in the Vanguard program, so it’s something that’s a lot more refined. I don’t want to describe it as a “slow burn” because it’s not that kind of film. These guys, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, are the real deal. After Resolution, they went to Italy and did a film. The way I kind of sum this one up for people is, if you think Before Sunrise needed more of a supernatural edge, then this is the film for you. It’s a really smartly and maturely written film about relationships that then takes a sharp veer and detour into something very strange. It’s really exciting to see Justin and Aaron’s progression as filmmakers and storytelling. They have a really bright future ahead of them.

Director: Fabrice Du Welz

Stars: Laurent Lucas, Lola Dueñas, Stéphane Bissot, Edith Le Merdy, Anne-Marie Loop, Helena Noguerra, Pili Groyne, David Murgia

Official synopsis: French fear jockey Fabrice Du Welz (Calvaire, Vinyan) returns with this tale of star-crossed romance and straight-up carnage, based on the true story of 1960s “Lonely Hearts Killers” Martha Beck and Ray Fernandez.

Colin Geddes says: Fabrice du Welz has another new film that’s just now coming out in France, called Colt 45, and from the various things I’ve heard, it wasn’t a really good experience for him. There’s no director’s voice in that film, so he bounced right off that experience and made a very raw, edgy, and confrontational film that he did on his own terms. Alleluia is very much closer to the film that should’ve come after his earlier film Calvaire and not the film that came after his Vinyan, and that’s a compliment. It’s totally free and unrestrained in his visual style and storytelling.

It’s loosely based on an American true-crime story, the “Honeymoon Killers,” or the “Lonely Hearts Killers,” which has already been turned into two loosely based movie adaptations: The Honeymoon Killers [1969] and a film called Deep Crimson [1996], from Mexico. He’s drawing on interesting source material but doing it in this very wild and transgressive manner.

Directors: Taika Waititi, Jemaine Clement

Stars: Taika Waititi, Jemaine Clement, Rhys Darby, Jonathan Brugh, Cori Gonzalez-Macuer, Stuart Rutherford, Jackie van Beek

Official synopsis: Taika Waititi (Boy, Eagle vs Shark) and Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords) co-direct and star in this hilarious mockumentary about a trio of vampires living in a New Zealand suburb who struggle to adapt to life in the 21st century.

Colin Geddes says: People are going to have so much fun with this film. Part of the joy of picking What We Do in the Shadows for this year’s Midnight Madness is looking forward to the experience of sharing this with an audience who’s never seen it before. Or, at the same time, there’ll be audiences who’ve seen it before but are dying to see it again. I’ve had people tell me that they’ve seen it three times already at various festivals. It’s a film you can just go back into and rediscover the joy of it and enjoy watching other people discover it for the first time.

It’s a very Christopher-Guest-style mockumentary about these roommates who are vampires of various ages. It’s their day-to-day domestic lives and little things that will upset their domestic routines. It’s really fun, and it wasn’t what I’d expected at all. When I picked it, part of me picking it and part of me placing it near the end of the festival is, at that point, it’s just going to be such a breath of fresh air in the programming. It’s going to be a very different tone from everything they’ll have seen before in this year’s Midnight Madness lineup.

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Director: Peter Strickland

Stars: Sidse Babett Knudsen, Chiara D'Anna

Official synopsis: British filmmaker Peter Strickland follows his eerie festival hit Berberian Sound Studio with this dark melodrama about an amateur butterfly expert whose wayward desires test her lover's tolerance.

Colin Geddes says: This is a very hypnotic film. It’s a little piece of eroticism. It’s about the relationship between two very different women who have a kind of S&M relationship. They live in a world devoid of men. It’s very specifically devoted to kink—that’s what I’ll say for now. [Laughs.] But it’s in their late-1950s world that just doesn’t exist anymore, and Peter Strickland has done a remarkable job of bringing to life this universe that these two women have. And it gets very kinky and very perverse, but at the same time, it’s always kind of winking at the audience.

Some people have compared it to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, but I don’t really see that. I was looking at Strickland’s influences as various 1960s and ’70s European erotic and horror films. He’s channeling those a lot more than Bergman. It’s dipping into stuff that’s a lot more obscure and esoteric than Bergman.

Director: Matthew Kennedy, Adam Brooks

Stars: Matthew Kennedy, Adam Brooks, Paz de le Huerta, Udo Kier, Laurence R. Harvey, Samantha Hill, Conor Sweeney

Official synopsis: A one-time (and now one-handed) master film editor toiling in the cinematic sweatshops of 1970s Italy becomes the prime suspect in a series of brutal murders, in this loving tribute to/parody of the gory giallo thrillers of Mario Bava and Dario Argento.

Colin Geddes says: In many ways, The Editor is the underdog of this year’s lineup. It’s a low-budget Canadian film, and I rarely pick Canadian films, but what these guys have done is totally mimic that 1960s kind of Mario Bava/Lucio Fulci/Dario Argento giallo film from Italy. It’s a parody of that but also a loving homage. They really have respect and love for those films, but at the same time, they’re sending them up in a loving way. I’ve beens saying The Editor is kind of like the Zucker Bros., who made Airplane!, made a giallo comedy, a funny version of, say, Four Flies on Grey Velvet.

I’ve seen directors do giallo films today in all earnestness and seriousness and they don’t work—like, doing crazy scenes with filters and colors. They really don’t work unless you’re the directors of Amer and The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears [Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani], where there’s an actual devoted cinema art and craft to it. Unless you have that background and visual finesse to bring to it, usually the films are failures. The fact that these guys have made this film for the audience to laugh and have fun is what separates it from those other modern giallo films. When today’s filmmakers take the material completely seriously, more often than not it’s bad, because, even back in the ‘60s, these films were kind of a joke. The filmmakers knew what they were making.

Director: Sion Sono

Stars: Ryohei Suzuki, Young Dais

Official synopsis: Midnight Madness favourite Sion Sono (Why Don't You Play in Hell?, winner of the 2013 People's Choice Midnight Madness Award) ventures even further into uncharted cinematic territory with this yakuza-street gang-hip hop-musical epic.

Colin Geddes says: We selected Tokyo Tribe and placed it as Midnight Madness’ opening night film because it just made perfect sense. This film defies descriptions and expectations. It’s a hip-hop Yakuza gang battle warfare musical. [Laughs.] Like, there are full-on Japanese hip-hop musical numbers. The whole narration is told through this Greek chorus of Japanese hip-hop, or “J-hop,” voices. It’s so crazy and goes so over-the-top. It’s the perfect kind of bizarre, wacko opening night film.

Director: Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala

Stars: Susanne Wuest, Elias Schwarz, Lukas Schwarz

Official synopsis: In this atmospheric, nerve-straining chiller, two young twins confined to an isolated country house transform their resentment towards their mother into a fatal illusion about her identity.

Colin Geddes says: This one came to me from a German distributor I know, who has tastes that are parallel to mine. He said, “Yeah, you have to check this film out.” It’s produced by Ulrich Seidl, who’s an established Austrian art-house director whose films have played many festivals, including TIFF. He produced it but it’s directed by his wife and his nephew, which is a very odd pairing.

And it’s super creepy. Twin boys living in an isolated country home, running through cornfields and forests, spending the summer together, and then their mother comes home. She’s had some kind of facial injury, so she has bandages on her face, and she wants them to calm down so she can relax and recover. But the boys start to think that that might not be their mother, and they start to take action against this woman, who, in their mind, is clearly not their mother.This one was a surprise. I was tipped off to it, but once I saw it, I knew it was a sure thing right away.

Director: Dave McKean

Stars: Ben Daniels, Dervla Kirwan, Stephanie Leonidas, Michael Maloney, Maurice Röeves

Official synopsis: Renowned artist and filmmaker Dave McKean brings his distinctive blend of live action and gorgeously wrought animation to this dreamlike reverie about four people whose weekend idyll in an isolated English seaside home becomes an opportunity for spiritual healing.

Colin Geddes says: If you don’t think you’re familiar with the director, Dave McKean, you probably are more than you realize. He’s more renown as a comic book illustrator and designer. He worked with Neil Gaiman as more or less Neil Gaiman’s illustrating partner; he did the covers for Gaiman’s Vertigo comics, like Sandman. He also did Arkham Asylum as well.

He’s a very different kind of director, one who comes from a visual arts background. This is his second film. He’s been working on it for six years. This is a much more mature film than the stuff that plays in Midnight Madness, or even in Vanguard. It’s about a group of older friends who get together after a long absence in their friendships, and there’s all that kind of emotional baggage that each one of them has. Dave McKean brings it all to life with dreams, flashbacks, and hallucinations, that are told with stop-motion animation, traditional animation, and this whole magical-realist underlining to the storytelling. I think out of all the films I’ve selected this year, this is the one that made the most emotional connection with me.

Director: Mark Hartley

Official synopsis: Director Mark Hartley (Not Quite Hollywood, Machete Maidens Unleashed!) continues his delightful documentary disinterment of down-market movie detritus with this chronicle of the rise and fall of 1980s action-exploitation juggernaut Cannon Films, whose contributions to the cinematic canon include American Ninja, The Delta Force, Death Wish II and Masters of the Universe .

Colin Geddes says: Anyone who knows Mark Hartley’s work should know what to expect from this. The version I saw was missing the animated segments that’ll be in between the interviews, and that’s where it’s going to excel. Mark Hartley doesn’t just make documentaries—he makes wild, rock-n-roll docu-bonanzas. And he picks interesting material that hasn’t been mined before. Here, he’s looking at the legacy of Cannon Films, which brought us The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, the Death Wish sequels, and basically brought ninjas and break-dancing to screens all around the world. Cannon also defined what the blockbuster is today; if you look at any major American action blockbuster, from Con Air to The Expendables, all the roots of those films pretty much came from what Cannon was doing.