by Hunter Bush and Allison Yakulis, Staff Writers

The Fantasia Festival is celebrating the impressive milestone of 25 years (a quarter century!) of incredible international programming. Félicitations! Last year’s turbulence necessitated virtual screenings of its films, giving us Americans here at Moviejawn unprecedented access to this Canadian film fest. This year Fantasia is adopting a blended strategy, with most of its films available for screening virtually as well as providing in-person screenings to Quebecois cinephiles and visiting film buffs. As you can imagine, we were thrilled to hear it - although plane tickets still weren’t in the budget, staff writers Hunter Bush and Allison Yakulis are thoroughly enthused at the thought of exploring this year’s offerings and reporting back on the wild, wonderful, and weird films from around the globe that will be featured from August 5 through August 25. Check out what is on the program for this year, especially some of the films we’re most looking forward to below, and if anything piques your interest as well, you can purchase a ticket from the Fantasia Festival | Program and get in on the action from the comfort of your living room!

The fine folks at the festival have a few highly anticipated offerings this year, albeit mostly available as in-person screenings. James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad is screening in-person the night before the official start of the festival. Fantasia’s opening film will be the world premiere of Brain Freeze, a homegrown zombie flick from Quebec that will also be available for virtual streaming August 9th. To close out the festival, the latest Takashi Miike film The Great Yokai War: Guardians will be shown as an in-person screening (particularly appropriate, as it’s the sequel to The Great Yokai War, Fantasia Festival’s opening film of 2006).

This year sees a schedule dotted with an assortment of animated films of various styles. Look forward to Hunter’s takes on the Ghibli-adjacent The Deer King, the puppet craft horror comedy Frank & Zed, and the mixed-media stop motion Mad God (from Oscar winning effects legend Phil Tippett!). Or explore Fantasia’s Axis category for even more animation or mixed media options for your own viewing pleasure.

This also seems to be a big year for “night” and “house” movies, as you’ll see in the coming weeks with Hunter covering Midnight in a Perfect World and Allison discussing Midnight, Glasshouse, and the pattern-codifying The Night House! There’s also a moody-looking haunted house urban exploration via scuba diving flick called Deep House that we each strongly considered but just missed being in our respective top 10 picks. Most of these seem on the spooky side, which you should know is right up our alley! And if you’re counting homophones, there’s Richard Bates Jr.’s King Knight, about the husband and wife leaders of a modern day coven trying to clear up something in his past! Seems kooky!

One of the coolest aspects of the festival is the assortment of restoration screenings of films as varied as 1967 surreal French spy thriller The Unknown Man of Shandigor, the year 2000 adaptation of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, or Mill of the Stone Women - the first Italian horror film made in color in 1960! The opportunity to see these films - and others, appealing to a wide swath of cinephiles - in a cleaned up, revitalized version is a real treat!

Keep checking back with Moviejawn in the coming weeks for short summaries of our experiences with these and other films on Fantasia’s program, as well as some longer deep-dives on any titles we find particularly enthralling.

This is only our 2nd year experiencing the Fantasia Festival but it’s something we’ve quickly come to look forward to. The support that Fantasia gives to international films and filmmakers cannot be ignored and for us personally to have the opportunity to be exposed to such a wide variety of creative visions is incredibly special. Congrats to Fantasia on 25 years showcasing genre films from around the world and bravo à vingt-cinq ans supplémentaires!