Horror aficionados, delight! The Toronto After Dark Festival returns this year for a twentieth anniversary celebration of all things spooky on celluloid. Founded in 2006, TADFF is an annual showcase of the latest and greatest in horror cinema, ranging from big Hollywood spectacle to ingeniously low-fi short films.
This year’s edition features fourteen premieres alongside thirty-three genre shorts, running from October 14-18 at the Scotiabank (né Paramount) Cinema (259 Richmond St W) and CineCycle (129 Spadina Ave).
The big ticket item, pun intended, is the premiere of Whalefall, the gloriously silly Jawsalike about a scuba diver (newly minted Scream King Austin Abrams) devoured by a whale, his desperate efforts to escape juxtaposed against flashbacks to his father (Josh Brolin). So long as the film resists putting a gritty, slowed-down cover of “When You Wish Upon a Star” on the soundtrack, we’re expecting to have a great time. For what it’s worth, Abrams has been on an absolutely killer run lately with Weapons and this year’s utterly fantastic Resident Evil, and it’s great seeing him get more mainstream work like this one.
Beyond Whalefall, we’re excited about some of the maple-blooded content coming our way, including Sam Scott’s Turn It Up!, the story of a struggling indie band turning to a cursed melody for fame, and No Longer Humans, from Toronto director Luca D’Andrea, which promises to cover quite a bit of territory in its “queer coming-of-age love story about a world in which death no longer exists.”
International fare includes Drag, starring Party Down’s Lizzy Kaplan alongside Lucy DeVito as a pair of sisters who break into the home of a wealthy artist (John Stamos), only for everything to go wrong. If that sounds like a fun riff on 2016 insta-classic Don’t Breathe, then you’re right: let’s just hope that Drag 2 doesn’t turn the villain into some kind of weird tortured antihero.
TADFF will also be marking a transition, in this, the first year without its beloved and passionate founder Adam Lopez, who sadly passed away in 2025. New artistic director Adam Bovoletis, founder of the Toronto Insomniac Film Festival, which showcases low-budget/DIY filmmaking, has promised to honour Lopez’s spirit as he shepherds the festival into a new era. We’re excited to see what he has in store for us.
***
Check out the complete TADFF lineup and buy tickets here.
