Guillermo del Toro will receive this year's Cheval Noir Award, given each year to a master who's contributed a great deal of blood, sweat, tears, and movies. Films like Chronos, The Devil's Backbone, Crimson Peak, Hellboy, and Pan's Labyrinth have inspired countless filmmakers, and artists; del Toro's work has enthralled moviegoers for decades. There aren't many directors more deserving of this honor than del Toro, who I suspect will get a standing ovation at the event. -Michele "Izzy" Galgana
In A Valley of Violence - Ti West has made a Western! That should be enough of a reason to get anyone into the cinema, tout suite. That he has taken a horrific bent towards the genre and managed to get Ethan Hawke, John Travolta, Karen Gillan, Larry Fessenden and Burn Gorman all on board and brought back Jeff Grace (who scored West's superb House of the Devil and The Innkeepers) is a gift to film lovers. - Kurt Halfyard
ReAlive - From Spanish wunderkind, Mateo Gil, who wrote most of Alejandro Amenábar's films including Agora, Tesis and Open Your Eyes (akin to what Alex Garland was to Danny Boyle) prior to branching out towards directing, comes this sophisticated and cerebral science fiction film.
A man commits himself to cryogenic freezing in the hopes of curing a fatal disease with future technology, and wakes up 60 years later. The future is strange, and he has not entirely survived the resurrection process. Gil examines how the consequence of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein would play in the far future.
Could it be this years Ex Machina? I hope so. - Kurt Halfyard
Creature Designers: The Frankenstein Complex --- which will be hosted by director and former FX artist Guillermo del Toro --- is a trip down memory lane to the rock star days of special effects in films. After the screening, del Toro (who learned FX from Dick Smith) will host a master class on special effects! It'll be supremely fun for every monster kid in the audience lucky enough to be there. The doc plays July 15 at 6pm. - Michele "Izzy" Galgana
La Rage du Démon is a documentary centered around a 1897 film of the same name that has turned up once per century, causing homicidal hysteria among its audiences. Some scholars think the film is by Georges Méliès. Others attribute it to Victor Sicarius, a friend of Méliès who was reportedly quite versed in the dark arts.
The premise echoes John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns. Will we go mad? La Rage du Démon plays July 18 at 9:40pm. - Michele "Izzy" Galgana
I, Olga Hepnarova - A bracing look at mental illness and societies failures in understanding it, this biopic of sorts in a similar vein that Gus Van Sant's Elephant, or Dennis Villeneuve's Polytechnique were for school shootings, this film from the Czech Republic promises to be a difficult watch, but rewarding upon consideration. A change in pace for a festival that usually offers easy pleasures, there is no musical score here, and a large portion of the voice-over is from Hepnarová’s letters, verbatim. Sometime's you've got to get poignant and serious at Fantasia, and this promises to be the film that haunts those brave enough to step off the beaten paths in The Hall cinema for the more elusive J.A. De Seve Theatre. - Kurt Halfyard
The Dark Side Of The Moon - Two generations of German genre actors, Moritz Bliebtreu (Das Experiment, Soul Kitchen) and Jürgen Prochnow (Dune, Das Boot) in this pharmaceutical take on lycanthropy, cut throat multinational business, and morality tales in the forest. You simply cannot go wrong with this concept, nor this cast!
