Thirty Years of the Weird: Fantasia’s 30th Edition Is a Genre-Preservation Feast
There is no film festival on earth quite like Fantasia, and this summer the great Montreal genre carnival turns thirty. From July 16 through August 2, it returns to Concordia Hall and its neighboring cinemas with a final wave of programming that shoves the lineup past 125 features and 200 shorts, which is less a schedule than a dare. I cannot cover all of it. Nobody could. But I can tell you where the treasure is buried, and for a physical media obsessive, this year the map practically draws itself.
Two Devils Get Their Due
The 30th edition hands its Cheval Noir Career Achievement Awards to two filmmakers who could not be more different and could not fit the festival better.
The first is Nicolas Winding Refn, the Danish provocateur behind Pusher, Bronson, Valhalla Rising, Drive, Only God Forgives, and The Neon Demon, a filmography that reads like a neon-soaked rap sheet. Refn opens the festival in person as his new feature Her Private Hell makes its Canadian premiere. More on that in a moment.
The second is Takashi Shimizu, the Japanese horror master who spun a direct-to-video ghost story into the Ju-On phenomenon, gave the world The Grudge, and became the first Japanese filmmaker to top the US box office when he directed the American remakes. He is not coasting on a franchise he built two decades ago, either. He arrives with two brand-new films: the world premiere of the folk-horror mystery Village of Eight Gravestones and the North American premiere of the supernatural chiller The Mouths. A master still actively swinging is the best kind of honoree.
Bookended by a Fever Dream and a Freakout
The opening and closing films tell you everything about Fantasia’s range. It opens on Refn’s Her Private Hell, his first feature in years, a hallucinatory neo-noir soaked in the colors and cruelty of Bava and Argento and fronted by a genuinely exciting young cast: Sophie Thatcher of Yellowjackets and Companion, Charles Melton of May December, Havana Rose Liu, and Kristine Froseth. Refn has described it as a deeply personal film shaped by his own brush with death, which is not a sentence you expect bolted onto a giallo, and is exactly why I want to see it.
It closes on the world premiere of Freaks Part II, from Canadian duo Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, who followed their 2018 sleeper Freaks by directing last year’s record-shattering Final Destination: Bloodlines and are now returning to their own mutant sandbox. The sequel is pitched as a fierce anti-superhero thriller about a mother and daughter on the run from a paramilitary force that hunts people like them, with Lili Taylor as the villain and, reportedly, the most inventive gore in a Canadian film in years. From a giallo fever dream to a splatter-soaked chase, that is the entire festival in two bookends.
The Retro Slate Is Basically an AndersonVision Shopping List
Here is where I get excited, because Fantasia Retro, the festival’s showcase of restorations and rare prints, has this year assembled a slate that looks like it was pulled straight out of our review queue. Nearly every boutique label we obsess over is premiering a rescue.
Vinegar Syndrome brings the world premiere of its new 4K restoration of Forty Deuce, Paul Morrissey’s grimy 1982 snapshot of pre-gentrification Times Square, featuring an early Kevin Bacon reprising his Obie-winning stage role. Severin Films, meanwhile, is celebrating its own 20th anniversary at the festival, board-game launch and all, while premiering a 4K restoration of Studio Q, a 1980 Mexican meta-cinematic oddity so far ahead of its time that people call it the grandmother of The Truman Show. Arrow rolls out a new 2K of the 1973 Shaw Brothers brawler The Delinquent. Shout Factory premieres a fresh 4K of the 1988 Chow Yun-Fat actioner City War. Radiance resurrects Takashi Miike’s gloriously indescribable Gozu. And Canadian International Pictures unearths Metal Messiah, a long-lost 1978 Canadian glam sci-fi rock opera from the director of The Gate, which is a sentence that should be tattooed on the heart of every cult-film lover.
If you have ever spent a July hitting refresh on a boutique label’s storefront hoping to snag a slipcover, this stretch of the program is your Coachella.
A Patron Saint of Preservation
Which brings me back to Refn, and to why his award feels like the thematic keystone of the whole edition. Refn is not merely a stylist. Off set, he has spent years championing forgotten filmmakers, funding restorations, and curating neglected work, and he runs byNWR.com, a streaming home for the obscure rescues he and his team resurrect, which he describes as a living digital museum. Honoring a director who treats preservation as a calling, at a festival simultaneously premiering a dozen loving restorations from the labels that keep genre memory alive, is the kind of alignment that does not happen by accident. Fantasia knows exactly what it is celebrating this year.
Everything Else in the Big Tent
I promised I could not cover it all, and I meant it, but a few more flares deserve to go up. Buddy, the Sundance sensation from Too Many Cooks madman Casper Kelly, casts Keegan-Michael Key as a homicidal children’s-show mascot and stacks the bench with Cristin Milioti, Michael Shannon, and Patton Oswalt, courtesy of the producers of Weapons and Companion. Jim Queen serves up a gleefully filthy queer apocalypse by way of French adult animation. And Fantasia hands its Indie Maverick Award to Don Hertzfeldt, the two-time Oscar nominee whose short Rejected helped invent the entire grammar of internet humor, which is both a tremendous honor and a slightly terrifying thing to be held responsible for.
Why Thirty Years Matters
The easy thing to say about a festival anniversary is that it survived, and Fantasia has, gloriously. The better thing to say is that it has spent three decades being right. It championed Miike and Refn and a hundred others before the mainstream caught up, and it has always understood that genre cinema is not the lesser room in the house but the room where the most interesting people are drinking. This year it doubles down by honoring the preservationists, the restorers, the people who flatly refuse to let the weird stuff vanish. If that is not worth thirty candles, nothing is.
The full lineup is live now, and the party continues after the festival with a five-week retrospective at the Cinémathèque québécoise. Clear your calendar and pace yourself, because thirty years in, Fantasia still programs more good movies than any one person can reasonably survive.
