Between a Rick And a Hag Place.

Our next tape off the pile is Igor Auzin's Aussie teleplay Night Nurse from 1978. Yet another distinct coverbox from back in the day. What was it about wheelchairs that makes them so creepy? From a horror marketing perspective anyway. Let's find out!

Looking for a clean break from her domineering boyfriend Rick (Gary Day), Prudence (Kate Fitzpatrick) takes a job as a live-in caregiver of a former opera singer known only as “The Diva” (Davina Whitehouse). Her employer seems welcoming enough, but the other servant of the house Clara (Kay Taylor), makes it clear she does not want to share.

Night Nurse is a fairly entertaining yarn. I did not know going in it was a TV movie, but in retrospect it makes sense. It has the clean, straightforwardness of a teleplay with barely any sharp edges to speak of. Despite that, it is still quite engaging. Prudence is a likeable character, even if she does come across as a doormat initially. Her artist boyfriend Rick is a douche of the highest order, yet she continues to bend to his will, even letting him weasel his way into the estate to paint the Diva's portrait.

Davina Whitehouse (left) & Katefitzpatrick in Night Nurse.

I feel her pain though, because once she's finally gotten away, she has to deal with the repeated abuse from her co-worker, Clara. Nothing she does is right, and something as simple as remembering the marmalade will get your pet goldfish murdered. Yet, she perservers because she knows going back to Rick is a step backwards.

Prudence & Clara (Kay Taylor) face off.

The story unfolds and once The Diva names Prudence as her new heir, that really gets Clara's blood boiling. It all ends in the cellar where Clara has a freak “ax-ident” and Prudence makes her escape. I was thinking of that Rube-Goldbergian end to the former help and that sequence is probably the one that stuck with young children who saw it on television. You know, “scary” TV movies that played in the seventies and eighties were pretty tame for the most part, but they usually had that one scene you never forgot.

Night Nurse was the fourth of ten films that Australia's Channel Seven commisioned from this production company so they were deep into pumping out content at this point. Whitehouse would later go on to appear in Peter Jackson's Braindead, and Kate Fitzpatrick has had a long, storied career that still continues to this day.

To conclude, this movie isn't going to get your blood pumping or anything, but it's still a decently acted and executed mystery. 

Horror Movie Guide: Alison's Birthday

The next unwatched listing in the Guide was Ian Coughlan's 1981 Ozploitation picture Alison's Birthday. I'd never heard of this movie and I'm pretty impressed that a film that was likely fairly obscure at that time (Movie Guide to Horror – at least the edition I owned – was published in 1985) was featured here. I'm happy that my childhood compendium was at least international. Check out this fucking cover box though! Spoiler, this does not happen and Satan isn't even involved.

Alison (Joanne Samuel) decides to go home for her nineteenth birthday, despite having been warned not to during a tragic séance three years prior. 

Alison's Birthday was proof positive of two things. First, nothing good comes from performing a séance and second; never, ever go against your instincts. Alison knows there is something off about her old homestead, but she ignores it because her Aunt and Uncle are nice, kind people. Even her boyfriend  Peter (Lou Brown), who drives her there in his glorified dune buggy, knows something's up when her relatives blow a gasket when they find out he's been invited to the “party”. Throw in some Celtic rituals, a hundred-and-three-year-old crone in the guest room and a Vulcan cult pinch and you've got yourself some standard folk horror.

Joanne Samuel in Alison's Birthday

It's funny, as soon as I saw the backyard Stonehenge, I thought to myself, “I wonder if this movie is in Kier-la's Woodlands Box Set” And sure enough, it is! It was also referenced in Mark Hartley's awesome doc Not Quite Hollywood, I'd just forgotten. Because well, it was over a decade ago and frankly NQH throws a lot of titles at you.

Alison's Birthday is definitely watchable fare, but it doesn't really have any surprises. I don't think that's even the movie's fault, it is merely that there are many other films that came before and after this that share similar elements. I see Rosemary's Baby – Bunney Brooks as Aunt Jennifer has mad Ruth Gordon vibes – as well as Halloween III and Skeleton Key for starters.

If I was a six-year-old Aussie and I saw this on late night TV, I know for a fact that some of the images within – Isabelle's midnight visit to Alison and that ending freeze frame – would have been burned into my brain, but as a cinephile who's ingested fourty-plus years of horror cinema, it's just aight.

The Guide seems to echo that sentiment, and I can agree that it does have a movie-of-the-week feel. But I still would have been satisfied to have spent a Wednesday night watching it back in the day.

Short of the Week #72: Waterborne

SotW returns with this 2014 Australian effort called Waterborne from Ryan Coonan. It's sure to tickle the fancy of zombie and marsupial lovers alike!

Gacha Gacha

Here's another Kickstarter worth taking a gander at if you're into either black humour and/or weird indie cinema. Last year you may recall an Australian film called Cat Sick Blues getting under my skin. Well, director Dave Jackson (who is now calling Japan his home) is campaigning funds for his new short, Gacha Gacha. Check out the pitch video below.

As troubling as Cat Sick Blues was I can't help but support fresh new voices in genre cinema, now matter how perverse they may be. Click here for more info.

THS's Short Of The Week

Probably not the most clever of names to be sure, but call it a work in progress. I wanted to kick off the first month of this by showcasing some of my favourite short films of all time. First is Spencer Susser's I Love Sarah Jane from 2008 - holy smokes this thing is ten years old now!

I'm a big fan of horror films that also explore coming-of-age themes and there are few that do it better than this. It's also an opportunity to see Mia Wasikowska before her rise to the Hollywood A-list. Enjoy!

Best Horror Shorts of 2017

As I indicated yesterday, I am now in a position where I watch hundreds of short films a year. When you attend a shorts block at a film festival, be aware that someone has spent countless hours pouring over submissions to give you the very best.

I likely broke a personal record this year having watched over three hundred for SFFF, two hundred (and counting) for HXFF plus the usual supplement of Little Terrors subs and regular festival viewings. I enjoy it and the feedback received when someone really digs a short you played is really rewarding. I obviously have to sit through a lot of not-great shorts, but surprisingly few are so abysmal that they break my spirit. No one sets out to make a bad short, so their heart's in the right place at least.

Today though I want to highlight some tremendously gifted filmmakers who really shone in the short film space this year. Though some of these were technically from 2016, most are currently still playing around the world.

First and foremost is Natalie Erika James' Creswick. This creeper from Australia has been tearing up the festival circuit after making a splash at Fantasia this year. I still marvel at how well the visuals and audio were mixed in this piece. Rumour is that James' is currently now working on a feature version so the future is very bright for her indeed.

A short that I absolutely adore that hasn't been seen nearly as much as it should is Dániel Reich's Recall. I'm not aware of it screening anywhere in Canada so I'm eager to show it at LT in 2018. Everything about this short is top notch and I imagine that the 20-minute running time is the only thing that has kept it from showing everywhere. I guarantee you will wish it was longer when the credits roll on it though.

For the third year in a row, Toronto filmmaker Justin Harding has directed a winner. Latched went so far as to play TIFF - the highest honour for a short, at least in the Big Smoke - with good reason. It has high production values, a playful tone that borders both on the whimsical and grotesque and a great cast. It is only a matter of time for Harding makes the jump to features.

Another great creeper I came across while screening shorts for Little Terrors was LA native Evan Cooper's The Armoire. It was some genuinely freaky imagery and an audio hook that will literally give you the shivers.

As crazy as it sounds, one of my favourite shorts this year was a Skittles ad. Fox really brought it when they broadcast some two-minute horrors during the Halloween season. Floor 9.5 is the perfect marriage of execution and economy.

Now there are shorts that are meant to scare, but there are also ones that aim to just entertain and I saw many of terrific ones this year. Chief among these were Mike Marrero & Jon Rhoads' Buzzcut and Joe Hitchcock's Stick To Your Gun. The former seeks to make a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon and the latter proves just how difficult personal grooming can be during the end of days.

Kelly Jane in Buzzcut

I also really like the world building involved in Adrian Selkowitz's Taste. A short that is funny and satirical while being incredibly well put together does not come around often.

In terms of short shorts, Greg Kovaks' Fun is just as advertised. Recalling the puppets of Kovak's classic short Tasha & Friends, this takes a loving stab at those kids' shows that encourage kids to talk  to the screen.

2017 saw an amazing numbers of solid animation shorts this year. So many were there that we at SFFF were able to put together an entire block of animations from around the world. The best (and coincidentally the most dour) was the Spanish stop-motion import Dead Horses by Marc Riba & Anna Solanas.

Lastly, there are the ones that go for the gross out, and none were better than Logan George & Celine Held's Mouse. If this tale about two junkies down on their luck attempting the yuckiest get-rich-quick scheme doesn't make you squirm, nothing will.

It's been one hell of a year! I think I got one more post in me before the ball drops so we'll talk then. Stay safe, kids.

Twinsies.

So now all of the hoopla over the premiere is behind me I can concentrate on some of the titles that have been screening at Toronto After Dark. I've decided that I'm going to focus on the indies of the fest this year. First up is Aussie Luke Shanahan's Rabbit.

Maude (Adelaide Clemens) returns to her childhood home in South Australia when she starts having visions about her missing identical twin, Cleo.

Rabbit had a very slow and measured pace so I don't know if it will appeal to everyone, but I liked it well enough. I dug that what appeared to be a backwoods horror tale actually opened up into something more captivating about halfway through. Shanahan's script inhabited a much more philosophical space that, despite perhaps not answering all the questions it posed, certainly elevated the material.

Adelaide Clemens as Maude in Rabbit.

Aesthetically, I liked everything about the film. The dark and blanketing score by Michael Darren had me right into it from the get-go and the locations and cinematography were both top notch. Shanahan definitely had a clear vision (right down to the colour palette) of what he wanted and it showed.

Having said that, the bulk of the reason this movie worked at all was its star Adelaide Clemens. Not only was she playing dual roles, but they also required a wide range of emotion. She kept me invested throughout, even during the stretches where I wasn't sure Shanahan was leading me. In addition to Clemens, the film was populated with a lot of wonderful and strange players with a lot of character to spare.

Rabbit was an intriguing tale, spearheaded by solid performance and presentation.

Trailer Tuesdays: Cassandra

I had intended to do a VHS Friday for Colin Eggleston's 1987 Aussie horror Cassandra, but it wasn't that hot so I'll just throw up the trailer for you. No harm, no foul.

Shorts Fantasia

As with previous years, I am wrapping up my Fantasia coverage with a rundown of the best shorts I saw while at the fest. This year was particularly strong and I wish I could have seen all of them, instead of just a sampling. Fortunately, I was there for not one, but two short programmes (Small Gauge Trauma & Born of Woman) so I did get the catch more than usual.

I saw a pair of creepers that really impressed me this year in Nico Van den Brink's Sweet Tooth and Adam O'Brien's Banshee. The former was super tight, had a brilliant setup and utilized some chilling beats involving technology. Banshee had some awesome effects and a conclusion where I was actually glad it went on after I thought it had ended. Scary shorts are the hardest to pull off and both these guys did some great work.

A short I saw a few months ago and was glad to see play here was Amelia Moses' Undress Me. With its university coming-of-age backdrop, it reminded me of Julia Ducournau's Raw and its university, only leaning more toward body horror than cannibalism. It ended rather abruptly (Moses revealed at the screening she only had ten minutes to get the last shot), but I think she got her point across.

A couple of films that featured great performances from young leads were Andrea Naida's Home Education and William Boodell's Born of Sin. Naida's piece takes the title's idea to the next level and, whether intentional or not, becomes a comment on the dangers of ignorance. Born of Sin took the mundane situation of a child waiting for their neglectful parent and turned it into something darkly whimsical.

On the animation side of things, there was the pitch black awesomeness of Marc Riba & Anna Solanas' Dead Horses. I loved the little creative touches in the stop-motion, like the shimmering of the boy's eyes and the look of the explosions. This was one that stuck with me.

Short films often offer glimpses into worlds that would make interesting features, as was the case with Santiago C. Tapia & Jessica Curtright's It Began Without Warning. Its Who Can Kill A Child? vibe packed a lot of madness into six minutes.

Lastly, my favourite short film of my trip was definitely Natalie Erika James' Creswick. It had pitch perfect tone, great performances and the best use of sound design I've seen in ages. Toward the end, there was a sequence in a workshed that was just terrific. Hopefully, you will get to catch this - and all those aforementioned - at a festival near you, or at least eventually online.

So, that's another year in Ol' Montreal done. Hope you have earmarked some of the titles I wrote about for future reference, as there were some corkers. I'll be taking a little break, but see you back here next week.

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Hey all! I've been enjoying the Double XP weekend of the Friday the 13th game - in between their overworked server crashes that is. Playing until 4am has caused me the first non-alcoholic hangover I've had in a while. Are you sick of the NES Jason skin yet? I, for one, can't get enough of his chip-tune serenades. But enough about my extracurriculars...

Two Sentence Adaptations.

Stage 13 has had the fantastic inclination to start a web series adapting Two Sentence Horror Stories. Since the TSHS sensation started several years ago, there have been many visualizations posted online - I even made one myself - but this is the first time there has been an organized attempt to produce them. This clip below is from “Guilt Trip” and it premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival earlier this week.

Return to Tall Oaks.

A couple of years ago, a tiny company called Bright Light successfully Kickstarted their movie villain board game Mixtape Massacre. Now, they have a new campaign for their expansion entitled Black Masque.

I've played mixtape Massacre and it is super fun. I like the flipped mechanic of playing as a killer and it's also a bit more accessible than the similarly themed Camp Grizzly - though I adore that game too. To contribute to the campaign (which has already reached its goal in less than a week) click here.

A Precarious Position.

One of my favourite short films from last year has just made its way onto Vimeo. Tim Egan's Curve brings forth an immediate intensity with almost nothing more than sound and performance. Hold onto your seat...

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Hey all. I've torn myself away from the Friday the 13th Game long enough to bring you today's post. Actually, I could probably do this while I wait to get into a match lobby (I keeed) but more on that later. For now, here's what I've got.

Zombies From Oz.

A trailer recently surfaced for the upcoming Australian TV series Wyrmwood.

I liked the original 2014 movie well enough. I think my only real qualm was that they opened the film introducing this really bad-ass heroine (Bianca Bradey, the gal who shows up at the end of the above video) and then she was chained to a wall for most of the movie -- coincidentally like Nandalie Killick does here. I was definitely won over by the end though.

What Are You Afraid Of?

AMC's horror streaming service Shudder is launching its original programming slate with a documentary/horror narrative hybrid called Primal Screen. Directed by Rodney Ascher (Room 237), Primal Screen explores why we are both attracted and repelled by what scares us most.

I'm into this. Primal Screen feels like an extension of Ascher's last doc The Nightmare, but I'm also getting Channel Zero vibe from it, as well. Primal Screen premieres this Thursday on Shudder.

Who Need Art Classes?

My friend Trevor directed me to this cool little art generator this weekend. Just go to http://fotogenerator.npocloud.nl, make a little doodle and this handy doodad will turn it into nightmare fuel right before your very eyes. Case in point...

Go ahead and try it. Fun for the whole family!

April Showers IV: Day Four

On Day Four of April Showers, I will finally talk about Dave Jackson's bizarre little indie Cat Sick Blues.

A troubled man named Ted (Matthew C. Vaughn) believes that taking nine lives will bring his beloved cat Patrick back from the dead.

I caught this at Fright Night Theatre a few weeks ago and it's been rattling around in my brain ever since. An extension of a short film I remember seeing a few years ago at Little Terrors, this effort from Down Under is very hard to get a handle on.

Matthew C. Vaughn as Catman in Cat Sick Blues.

Coincidentally, Cat Sick Blues does share several traits with Alice Lowe's Prevenge, the film I talked about yesterday. Both protagonists are dealing with loss, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake and share almost identical epiphanies when they reach their endgames. However, that's where the similarities end, as Lowe's dry humour was pitch perfect and Jackson's was more of a bad taste bonanza.

Cat Sick Blues' sense of tone is decidedly problematic. I've never seen audience laughter cut off so abruptly than I did here. On more than one occasion, I found myself just trying to get into the head space of how Jackson came up with some of this stuff. Apart from the brutal violence of the killings, Jackson also shined a light on the uglier side of Internet culture, which lead to its own set of uncomfortable moments. I say uncomfortable mainly because they were sadly all too true.

I think perhaps what made Cat Sick Blues hard to dissect was how it at the same time felt cheap, yet was also fantastically well shot. The hostel sequence where Catman (Ted's alter ego) goes on a Ted Bundy-style rampage to the tune of Mistabishi's Repulsion will never leave your head once it's in there. I was, somewhat begrudgingly, with this movie up to a point, but the tail end really dragged while it struggled to find a conclusion. I could've have done without the odd tangents that made up most of the last half-hour.

Cat Sick Blues is such a confounding piece because even though there was as much bad as there was good, I can't stop thinking about it. Catman was such an indelible figure, and it's troubling because characters that have this much resonance with me usually end up being future Halloween costumes. I mean, I've dressed up as Bobby Yeah and Peach Fuzz before, but I feel this one would get me arrested. So yeah, probably a no-go.

Rabbit Season.

In celebration of Women In Horror Month, I took the opportunity (thanks to Shudder) to watch Ann Turner's 1989 film Celia.

A young girl named Celia (Rebecca Smart) tries to cope with the chaotic world around her after the death of her grandmother.

This was a title I'd been meaning to see for some time after reading about in Kid Power! Fortunately, I remembered very little about it other than it was Australian and featured a little girl who may or may not be a psychopath.

I was a little blown away by this movie to be honest. Even though its label as a horror film is not really accurate– it's actually more of a coming-of-age drama – there are indeed parts of this movie that are like waking nightmares. Celia may seem mild at the onset, but I guarantee there were kids in Oz that saw this in eighty-nine and were scarred for life.

Happier times.

As you know, I gravitate to stuff where the child's perspective blurs the line between fantasy and reality. It's the crux of Guillermo del Toro's best work and another of my faves, Bernard Rose's Paperhouse. I'm also always interested in movies that portray places and periods I have little knowledge of. Nineteen-fifties Melbourne, with its equal intolerance of communism and the rabbit infestation, is as poignant then as it is now. It's funny how prejudice and persecution never seem to go out of style.

The performances are solid top to bottom, but most of the praise needs to be heaped on the young lead, Rebecca Smart. There is a tendency in films about off-kilter children to play the role with a cold and/or sharp malevolence (Patty McCormack in 1956's The Bad Seed and Isabelle Fuhrmann in 2009's Orphan are two good examples), but Smart plays it completely straight. Apart from being understandably withdrawn after the death of her grandmother, she is pretty normal and even incapable of lying in the first half of the movie. It seems to me that her darker actions toward the end were almost reactionary, rather than malicious.

I feel you, kid.

Director Ann Turner's confident direction is exceptional and her characters well written with equal importance given to both genders, even in a time when that wasn't the case. I was incredibly impressed with this movie and the more tragic sequences hit me like a ton of bricks. Celia may not be a horror film, but it affected me more than most straight up genre flicks made these days.

Shorts After Dark 2016

Toronto After Dark's mandate has always included showcasing short films from Canada and around the globe, and this year was no different. Here below were some of my favourites.

After his powerhouse of a short Point Of View last year, Justin Harding has followed it up with another winner. Kookie, anchored by a comically adept young lead in Ava Jamieson and the scariest cookie jar you've ever seen, delivers both the laughs and scares. Harding is killing it right now.

I was also glad that TAD played Greg Jeffs' It's All In Your Head. We programmed this at Fright Night Theatre last month and its wonderful turnabout is the precisely the reason I love watching short films.

The action short Olga from Quebec featuring veteran stuntwoman Naomi Frenette was easy for me to get behind. She absolutely kicked ass in this and I hope to see her in more projects soon.

Naomi Frenette in Olga.

The shorts programmers Peter Kuplowsky & Shannon Hanmer also served up heavy helpings of absurdity with the likes of Boy Toys, Astron 6's newest Divorced Dad and batshit wacko Greener Grass.

For me, the most visually resonant short that played this year was Tim Egan's Curve. Immediately putting the viewer in peril, it's a short that makes you feel physically uncomfortable.

And speaking of uncomfortable, there was also Anthony Cousins' When Susurris Stirs, but for a very different reason. If this one doesn't make you cringe, then you are made of stone. Also back this year, was Brit Oliver Park with his new chiller Still. He is another filmmaker who is mining gold from the home invasion subgenre boom.

Lastly, there was Dianne Bellino's beautiful stop-motion animation short The Itching. I don't think I've ever seen the plight of social anxiety better represented than it was here.

The Itching.

It was not only a strong year for shorts at TAD this year, but there was also a wide range of stories, themes and tone that hit us with a little bit of everything. Well done, guys!

Shorts After Dark 2015

In its tenth year, Toronto After Dark continued to showcase short films both homegrown and from around the world. Here were some of my favourites this year.

We were all saddened to hear about the passing of Roddy Rowdy Piper earlier this year. Thankfully, we were blessed to have this last hurrah in the form of the short film Portal To Hell where he plays a maintenance man whose building suddenly becomes a gateway to the netherworld. Piper has just as much charisma as he ever did in this, and it's impossible to watch without a big smile on your face.

Wunderkind Nate Wilson returned to After Dark with his newest short film, Fuck Buddies. It is amazing to me that at eighteen, he not only has this much of a grasp on gender relations, but also the confidence to have people act out this crazy scenario. This zany cross between rom-com and J-horror is quite remarkable in its ability to just keep getting more and more insane.

In the scares department, TAD brought forth Oliver Park's Vicious from the UK. It takes the standard woman home alone trope and throws in some of the creepiest visual set pieces I've seen in quite some time.

Rachel Winters in Vicious

The world of animation was not left out this year. I really dug Morgan King's short Exordium. Watching its use of rotoscoping gave me pangs of my days watching stuff like Heavy Metal and Wizards. Khoebe Magsaysay's Nihil was also a dazzling piece that reminded me of Ari Folman's The Congress and nineties video games Another World & Flashback. Both shorts are a feast for the eyes.

I was very glad to see two of my favourite short films this year - Point of View and Boniato - play the festival this year. Justin Harding and the Spanish trio of Andres Meza-Valdes, Diego Meza-Valdes & Eric Mainade should have long careers ahead of them if they keep bringing this amount of energy and intensity.

I didn't get to see everything at TAD this year, but I heard that Heir and I Am Coming To Paris To Kill You both played very well at the fest.

I also wanted to throw another one out here. This year, after getting swamped by the over eight-hundred submissions they received, the shorts programmers invited me to help pre-screen. I watched almost two hundred entries, flagging a bunch, but my favourite was this Aussie film from James Hartley called Twisted, which I have put below.

Trailer Tuesdays: Road Games

It was a long day of transit for me last Sunday. After I once again bid farewell to Fantasia, I was reminded of Richard Franklin's 1981 flick Road Games. Probably the least known of Jamie Lee Curtis' slasher credits, I think this film's “Rear Window on Wheels” conceit works really well. Enjoy!

Observance.

A lesser known title I took in this Fantasia was the world premiere of Aussie Joseph Sims-Dennett's Observance.

A destitute man named Parker (Lindsay Farris) takes a job spying on a woman. After several days cooped up in the ratty apartment across from her, the mystery behind his assignment incites a crippling paranoia.

Observance was a strange film that took a while for me to digest. It's one of those films that if, taken at face value, seemed to be straightforward, but upon further reflection you wonder if there wasn't more going on under the surface. The premise does have the Hitchcockian underpinnings of Rear Window, but Sims-Dennett's allegiances lie more with Roman Polanski. His 1976 film The Tenant was mentioned in the intro and Observance definitely shared a similar descent into madness.

The film's most powerful aspect was its underlying sense of dread. It was helped along by the score and set design, but Sims-Dennett just had a knack for portraying even the most mundane moments as threatening. This is a very important skill as when you're dealing with low-key psychological horror, successfully making it appear that more is going on than what you are seeing onscreen is a rare talent. It is also laid out in such a way to make you feel like you are right there trapped in that apartment with the protagonist.

Lindsay Farris as Parker in Observance.

Observance also has a very cool look. It reminded me a lot of Marc Evans' underseen (and decidedly mediocre) 2004 flick Trauma. It had the same decrepit apartment block facade that served the film aesthetically and metaphorically.

It is always hard to say where a meditative genre piece like Observance will end up once it is finished its festival run, but if it does pop up somewhere in the future and you like this sort of thing, give it a watch.

Best Horror of 2014

So, here we are again at the end of another year. I took a look back and threw together some faves, but I can’t help but feel that I’m missing something. There were a lot of horror titles that I didn’t get a chance to see, including Starry Eyes, The Borderlands, Kristy, Among The Living, Cooties, Berkshire County and Live, so this year feels a bit incomplete.

Sadly, the same goes for movie-going in general. I didn’t even do up a 2014 list for CAST because there were so many glaring omissions. Oh well, it just would have been Nightcrawler with a bunch of exclamation marks next to it anyway.

I don’t regret this though, as 2014 was a really great year for me creatively. I worked on a record number of projects and fulfilled a longtime dream of getting something into Toronto After Dark. And truth be told, I don’t think I watched less movies overall, just less new ones. The only thing I really cut out this year was gaming, but with Until Dawn and Uncharted 4 releasing next year, I plan to get back on that digital horse soon.

Anyhoo, here are my faves in no particular order.

It Follows
USA, Dir: David Robert Mitchell

I loved this flick. It's exactly the kind of thing I like to point to in regards to modern horror being alive and well. The success of its brilliant premise – that of a sexually transmitted haunting – was largely due to its classic urban legend-style simplicity. Anchored by a wonderful lead (Maika Monroe) and an unforgettable score by Disasterpiece, anybody who cares about horror should be flocking to theatres to see this when it releases wide in March.

The Babadook
Australia, Dir: Jennifer Kent

The massive hype about this film was well deserved. Used in tandem with all the great technical aspects that the genre has to offer, it was the perfect balance of psychological and supernatural horror. The story was much more layered than I was expecting, and actress Essie Davis was a real standout as the mother, Amelia. I really can’t wait to see where Kent goes from here.

The Guest
USA, Dir: Adam Wingard

Although this newest effort from Wingard & writing partner Simon Barrett was more of an eighties style action movie, damned if this wasn’t one of the most enjoyable films I saw at this year’s Midnight Madness. Dan Stevens is perfectly cast as the title character, emanating equal parts charm and menace. The synth accompaniment from Steve Moore was also another highlight in a year of great film scores.

The Harvest
USA, Dir: John McNaughton

I was really taken by McNaughton’s official return to the director’s chair after a ten-year absence. It's the type of story to which I really respond and the performances from young & old are stellar. I don’t know what kind of release this film is going to get, but I sure hope it doesn’t get buried like Joe Dante’s similarly themed (and rated) The Hole from five(!) years ago. Both films have a wonderful eighties, told-from-a-child’s-perspective sensibility that is severely lacking these days.

The Editor
Canada, Dir: Adams Brooks & Matthew Kennedy

I still have to smile knowing that this whole thing started out as a poster, just like the days of the home video boom that cultivated the very style that The Editor itself emulates. The movie is so much fun! Astron 6 infuses their comedic overtones into this love letter to Italian horror, creating a wonderfully absurd hybrid chock full of gore, girls and gut-busting ADR.

Honourable Mentions

I really dug Spring, Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead’s follow-up to 2012’s Resolution. First and foremost a romance – the popular byline is it’s a genre-centric Before Sunrise – I liked the character chemistry in this piece. Also, by moving their dialogue driven sensibilities from a stuffy cabin to the wonderful wide open vistas of Italy, Benson & Moorhead took a huge step forward visually.

2014 was good year for sequels, if you can believe it. The second installments of both The ABC’s of Death and Dead Snow eclipsed their predecessors and The Town That Dreaded Sundown was a beautifully shot, no-nonsense pseudo sequel that I think caught a lot of people off guard when it played Toronto After Dark.

At Fantasia this year, I caught a solid werewolf flick called Late Phases. It has a lot going for it, including a centered performance from Nick Damici and whacked-out creature effects from Bob Kurtzman. Think Silver Bullet by way of Bubba Ho-Tep!

Though its inclusion here maybe in part due to it still being fresh in my memory after playing Blood In The Snow, I was realy impressed with Nick Szostakiwskyj’s Black Mountain Side. Its pace will no doubt frustrate a good number of viewers, but I admired its commitment to the slow burn. I thought the cinematography was amazing and, in a real stroke of genius, the lack of a score only accentuated the isolation.

Worst of 2014? This might sound ridiculous, but I got nothing. I mean sure, Zombie TV was utter shit, but to be honest, I slept through most of it. No, seriously, I was really lucky this year, most likely due to staying away from mainstream fare. Although, even the few I did catch – Deliver Us From Evil for instance – were decent.

Lastly, I almost can’t believe it, but once again my list was largely domestic titles! Are we finally catching up with the rest of the world in terms of twenty-first century horror filmmaking?

I guess we’ll have to see what 2015 brings. Happy New Year everyone!