by Billie Anderson, Staff Writer

This past month, I had the opportunity to cover the Toronto After Dark Film Festival: a horror and science-fiction film festival that promises five nights of local and international content for thousands of horror fans every year. It was the perfect way to spend a week during the best month of the year. Each October, I make a huge list of horror films to watch–either for the first time or to revisit–and it’s exciting to be among the first audiences to see some of these flicks and to add them to my October watchlist. I’ve compiled here a list of all of the features I saw throughout the week. 

Restore Point (dir. Robert Hloz)

Restore Point marks a significant entry into the world of Czech cinema as the first science fiction film from the country since the 1960s. The film's premise is undoubtedly fresh–a person’s “restore point” is essentially a backup file of themselves created every 48 hours to allow them to be brought back to life. Audiences follow Emma Trochinowska, a special agent investigating the River of Life, an extremist group that is anti-restore point and is actively targeting members of the scientific team in charge of the technology. 

The film definitely leans more towards a police procedural rather than a deep dive into the profound implications of revival after death or the scientific intricacies of the concept. While not a bad choice, the narrative decisions left me craving a more profound exploration of philosophical themes that come along with the inability to die. There was also a subplot unexplored here that I felt had the most interesting questions relevant to our world today: what tech companies do we trust to access all of our information? What are these tech companies interested in doing with our bodies, identities, relationships, or livelihoods?

The film was a very pleasant surprise and I believe my first Czech film ever, but, with the focus on the crime narrative rather than the science-fiction, it just didn’t give everything it had the power to. 

Restore Point does not have a distributor or release date for North America.

It’s a Wonderful Knife (dir. Tyler MacIntyre)

What if It’s A Wonderful Life (1946) and Scream (1996) were re-imagined as a Christmas-themed horror-comedy? The result is a cringey-Hallmark movie where you get the satisfaction of watching the unbearable characters die in Tyler MacIntyre and Michael Kennedy’s It’s a Wonderful Knife, a festive concoction that's as entertaining as it is macabre.

The story centers around Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop), a high school student residing in Angel Falls, a whimsical play on Bedford Falls. With a star quarterback brother, a boyfriend, a best friend, and doting parents, Winnie's life seems picture-perfect. However, on Christmas Eve, a masked killer, bearing an eerie resemblance to an angel, embarks on a murderous rampage, claiming the lives of Winnie's friends. She survives, ultimately defeating the killer, but the trauma leaves her emotionally distant and despondent. The aftermath strains her relationships, leading her to wish that she had never been born. A twist of fate propels her into an alternate universe where she doesn't exist, and the killer is still at large. In a world where Winnie's intervention never occurred, the body count rises, and the murderer remains free. Winnie teams up with Bernie (Jess McLeod), a classmate and outcast, embarking on a journey of self-discovery, racing against time to restore the timeline.

The film deserves recognition for its seamless fusion of two very distinct genres. While the dialogue occasionally falls short (though a staple of Hallmark movies), and some jokes miss the mark, it remains true to the conventions of each genre while infusing its own unique twist. 

Though It's a Wonderful Knife may not ascend to classic status like its predecessors, it offers an alternative for those who prefer their holiday cheer a little more gorey. Plus, any comedy-horror with Justin Long is a win in my books. He shows up and I start hootin’ and hollerin’.

It’s a Wonderful Knife will be in select AMC theaters on November 10th and streaming on Shudder in December. 

Daniel’s Gotta Die (dir. Jeremy LaLonde)

Daniel’s Gotta Die is The Menu (2022) meets Glass Onion (2022) wannabe. Following the death of his father (Iggy Pop), Daniel (Joel David Moore) is named sole inheritor of the enormously wealthy Powell family estate. However, for a share, his estranged siblings–deadpan Mia (Mary Lynn Rajskub), "influencer" Jessica (Carly Chaikin), and addict Victor (Jason Jones)–must endure a family bonding weekend at their Cayman Islands beach house. Daniel's ecstatic at the potential for a reunion, but the siblings only have one thing on their mind: murder.

The film is surprisingly fresh, funny, and well-paced. The trailer did NOT do justice to what ended up being a witty, wacky, and ultimately deeply satisfying comedy-(almost)horror. Getting to watch Daniel move through meek to confused to righteously pissed off was perfectly structured and a dream to watch in an already hilarious cast. And while not every character moment or joke lands completely, there are more than enough successes in this film to make it something special and worth checking out. 

Daniel’s Gotta Die is a Crave Original Film, and will be available to stream on Crave in Canada late 2023.

The Deep Dark (dir. Mathieu Turi)

The monster movie of my dreams, The Deep Dark does nothing new: we follow a group of French coal miners in the 1950s that get assigned to escort a professor down to the deepest levels of their mine for his research. He’s in pursuit of a hidden secret of the catacombs far beneath the mine’s reach, and when they break through the floor at a location he designates, they unleash an unspeakable horror that knocks them off one by one. 

Turi establishes a Lovecraftian mythology for the central creature of Mok'Nor Roth, as one of nine beings in servitude to the Great Old One, Cthulhu. The multi-armed creature is wonderfully depicted practically via puppetry - with seven puppeteers controlling the extravagant monster. Much of the film is lit only by the miners' headlamps, with a particularly terrifying scene being lit by the occasional flash of a film camera. This film really surprised me; even before the creature is unleashed in the film's second half, The Deep Dark is already an incredibly claustrophobic film. The connections between Turi’s work and Neil Marshall's 2005 film The Descent are very evident throughout. The film features intense practical effects for violence and gore as the miners find themselves torn apart by Mok'Nor Roth. This all results in The Deep Dark being quite possibly one of the best subterranean horror films in quite some time. This one wins my pick of the festival, standing out above the rest.

The Deep Dark releases in theaters on November 29th in France, with an international release date planned for later next year. 

Lovely, Dark, and Deep (dir. Teresa Sutherland)

Lovely, Dark, and Deep opens with an enigmatic sequence featuring upside-down scenery shots that introduce us to Arvores National Park, a place with a chilling reputation for the largest number of unreported missing persons cases in the world. New park ranger Lennon (Georgina Campbell) has come to Arvores to uncover answers about her past, particularly her sister's mysterious disappearance when they were children.

At its core, the film tells the story of Lennon's quest to resolve a deeply personal loss, but it also explores the unsettling notion that the wilderness holds dark secrets, where the forest might demand sacrifices without explanation. The movie suggests that these mysteries of the wild should remain untouched. The film starts off with an intriguing hook, and Sutherland knows how to work the woods cinematically, but once the story tries to push into outright horror, things start to fall apart. The dream-like atmosphere is neither too intense to be scary, nor weird enough to feel like a descent into madness and paranoia.

I really wanted to like this, since slow psychological horror and the idea of not being given concrete answers to evil is something that normally intrigues me with horror films, but this one just didn’t do it for me. 

Lovely, Deep, and Dark does not yet have a release date. 

Founders Day (dir. Erik Bloomquist)

The Bloomquist brothers’ Founders Day has all the requirements necessary for a successful comedy-horror: a quaint suburban white-picket-fence of a town, a vaguely recognisable cast of exciting young actors, and a bold, defiantly themed new killer – sporting a gruesome rubber mask, a powdered wig, and, of all things, a gavel for a weapon.

It is incredibly familiar set-up, and the Bloomsquists’ attempts at theme and subtext are hilariously unsubtle to the point of almost parody (the film’s about America’s political polarization, if it wasn’t obvious from the title, the killer, or the main plot revolving around a heated local mayoral election). But none of these things hold Founders Day back from being a total riot of a watch for genre fans. The characters are over the top, the jokes are so cringey that they are funny, and the kills are so ridiculous that you can’t help cheering for the killer.

It’s hard and unfair to pick too many holes in a film that clearly loves the genre it’s imitating. If cheap accessible indies like Founders Day are the way the spirit of the slasher sub-genre lives on, then so be it. Especially when they’re as consistently fun and crowd pleasing as this one.

Founders Day will be released in North America later this year.