How to Horror with AIFF

With Halloween just a day away, many of us here at AIFF are now weeks deep into catching up on new horror releases and revisiting old classics to mark the season. To celebrate, we’re running down some horror favourites from AIFFs past to commemorate some of our creepiest in-person screenings, as well as offering a few suggestions on what fans of those films should check out next.

THE SUBSTANCE (dir. Coralie Fargeat) — AIFF 2024

Department store aisles of leg warmers and lamé aerobics wear must surely be picked through by now; The Substance, the most talked about film of AIFF 2024’s Late Night Visions program, is both the great new horror film of the season and an inevitable source of costume fodder coming to a Halloween party near you. The Substance is a film with exactly one idea and it heaves it around like a cudgel, beating viewers through states of amusement and irritation for north of two hours before arriving somewhere almost profound in its simplicity. The film insists that the fight against our own mortality runs marrow-deep, and it follows this theory to its most absurd conclusions right down to the final shot. If you didn’t catch it at AIFF this year or are ready for a re-watch, The Substance is streaming on MUBI beginning October 31.

If you liked The Substance, get grossed out by:

SOCIETY [1989] (dir. Brian Yuzna)

Film-lovers at AIFF may have walked into The Substance discussing that film’s grotesque reputation, but about as many left the film talking about Society — so strong were the comparisons, one couldn’t even make it to the lobby before making them. It’s true: Society is the meaner, grosser predecessor to the ostensible meanest and grossest film of 2024, and it culminates in just about the most unhinged 20 minutes yet committed to film. It was the directorial debut from Brian Yuzna, who’d previously produced cult greats Re-Animator and From Beyond with director Stuart Gordon and co-wrote Disney’s Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (a swerve, to be sure). Society isn’t currently available on streaming and its limited Blu-ray release is now selling for a small fortune, but you can check it out (in questionable quality) on YouTube. 

TIN CAN (dir. Seth A. Smith) — AIFF 2021

Tin Can is a horror-sci fi feature from the Atlantic filmmaking trio Seth A. Smith (director), Nancy Urich (producer) and writer Darcy Spidle (writer). The film, which earned awards at AIFF in 2021, tells the story of a parasitologist who awakes to find herself in an industrial, coffin-sized chamber, only to discover an invasive slime plagues the world outside it. Tin Can is a claustrophobic masterclass in tight-quarters filmmaking, constantly finding new ways to use its cramped setting to trap and unsettle its audience, and it just might be the best work of science fiction to come out of our region. It’s available to buy or rent on all the big platforms.  

For more scary sci-fi that goes small, check out: 

PHASE IV [1974] (dir. Saul Bass)

Saul Bass was an artist best known for his graphic design in title sequences for Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, the James Bond franchise and more. But in 1974, Bass turned his eye toward his one and only directorial effort, a generally overlooked little gem of sci-fi horror filmmaking called Phase IV. The film is a slow-burn story about hyper-intelligent ants who’ve somehow constructed towers in an abandoned housing development in Arizona. When scientists arrive to study the insects, a war breaks out between the ants and the perceived human aggressors. A box-office flop that stopped Bass’ directorial career in its tracks, Phase IV was ultimately deemed too strange for its own good, and that’s after the studio vetoed its psychedelic 2001-inspired finale. But it remains an endlessly interesting curio from one of film’s great visual pioneers.

TREEVENGE (dir. Jason Eisener) — AIFF 2008

In the tradition of Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, Atlantic Canada has its own double-duty holiday film: Jason Eisener’s horror short Treevenge. In it, a group of Christmas trees fight back against the families that have chopped and decorated them. Made by the team that would produce the Sundance breakout Hobo with a Shotgun, Treevenge is a grainy, pitch-perfect nod to the revenge thrillers of the ‘70s, like Rolling Thunder if it were told from the perspective of a downed balsam fir. The short’s opening synth essentially tosses your jack-o-lantern in the compost and inflates a reindeer in your front yard. It’s now viewable for free on YouTube.

For another exercise in style, check out:

BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (dir. Mario Bava)

It’s been a surprisingly notable year for Italian film legend Mario Bava, who’s otherwise been in a fallow period on account of having died over 20 years ago. For one, a lengthy and convincing homage to his work took up an early section of this year’s Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, bringing Bava to a broad audience and confirming director Tim Burton’s still got some life in him after all. Elsewhere, 60th-anniversary rep screenings of Bava’s Blood and Black Lace have brought renewed attention to one of his greatest works, and reoriented him in the conversation of great giallo filmmakers — the rankings of whom have largely favoured relative late-comers Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. With online fandom and a podcasting apparatus now fueling it, interest in the giallos of the ‘70s and ‘80s seems to be on a sustained rise, but it was in 1964 that Blood and Black Lace largely set the template for those later works to come, from the super-saturated colours to the surreally costumed black-gloved killer. An English-dubbed version of the film is available on YouTube.