After the Year of ‘Obsession,’ TIFF’s 2026 Midnight Madness Lineup Promises a Scary-Good Bent Toward ‘Escalation’

Aug 06, 2026 - 19:15

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After the Year of ‘Obsession,’ TIFF’s 2026 Midnight Madness Lineup Promises a Scary-Good Bent Toward ‘Escalation’

It’s the question on everybody’s mind: will this year’s Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness introduce another “Obsession” level hit? The section’s beloved, long-time lead programmer Peter Kuplowsky is wondering the same thing.

In a Zoom chat earlier this week, Kupowlsky acknowledged that big question before the words were even totally out of my mouth. He laughed as I asked, “How many times today are you going to be asked, ‘What’s the next “Obsession” on this year’s slate?'” He genially hit back, “How many times have I looked into a mirror and said it three times?”

“Every programmer, when you put together a slate, wants so much success for the films that they assemble,” he told IndieWire. “I was so heartened and so excited to see the success roll out over the year. That’s lightning that you can’t expect a strike every year. But, at the same time, my only hope is that that success continues to shine a light on this section, on the talent that gets assembled every year, and that there’s a recognition that midnight movies are often made to break convention, to color outside the lines, to check the boxes that you didn’t even think existed yet.”

That’s part of why Kuplowsky believes that “TIFF and the Midnight Madness audience is one of the best control groups in the world to just watch a movie and have a chemical reaction in real time.” That’s the sort of thing the programmer believes can “then galvanize distributors and exhibitors to go, ‘This movie works. This movie works with an audience. So let’s put our full weight behind it.'”

He added, “I think that’s why so many people want to bring their films to Midnight. It’s why I relish bringing films to Midnight. And it’s what often rules my curation is, I want to find films that are going to create a chemical reaction with the audience, whether that’s uproarious praise, whether that’s uproarious fear, whether that’s divisiveness, but at least there’s some kind of provocation. We certainly achieved that with ‘Obsession,’ and I hope more films will follow in its successful way.”

So what is Kuplowsky looking for when putting together his always much-anticipated slate? (Or, yes, what’s perhaps the rubric for finding another “Obsession”?)

“I’m looking for interesting decisions, maybe even drop ‘interesting’ off that, I’m looking for decisions,” he said. “I’m looking for decisive choices on the part of the filmmakers, whether that’s the cast, whether that’s the crew or the director. When those decisions are either a provocation or a subversion, that usually makes me feel like, ‘OK, this is going to be interesting.'”

Kuplowsky still cherishes the lesson his programming predecessor Colin Geddes taught him: a Midnight Madness slate “should feel a little bit like a mixtape. You want to deliver a different experience every night. I don’t want the audience to get numb to one kind of movie. That’s why I don’t want 10 zombie films in a row or 10 martial art films in a row. I want it to have this ebb and flow of different flavors of Midnight movie.”

The slate for this year’s Midnight Madness very much speaks to that ethos, as Kuplowsky walked us through the 10 films that make up this year’s energizing movie mix tape. (And, as he was quick to note, “For buyers looking for an ‘Obsession,’ nine out of my 10 films are looking for domestic distribution.”)

“There’s a lot of hybridization across these films, where a film may begin with one tone and then become something else as it goes on,” he said. “‘River’ is a great example, which starts as something that is very much a movie about family and familial estrangement and then ratchets and ratchets and ratchets and becomes this nerve-shredding slasher. I think it’s one of the best masked killer films I’ve seen in years.”

“If there is an ‘Obsession’ in my lineup, or at least a Curry Barker in my lineup, I think Josh Giuliano is going to be a filmmaker that studios are going to want to work with,” he said. “He demonstrates incredible discipline and visual confidence in this film that is, maybe this is an obvious comp when it comes to slasher films, but it’s [John] Carpenter-esque. There’s just a real precision of filmmaking here.”

He also pointed to Nick Kozakis’ “Kick On,” which he called a “small Australian indie that begins kind of like the Alfred Molina scene in ‘Boogie Nights,’ and then that scene just doesn’t end. It just keeps going, and when it finally explodes into violence, it embraces this very Jeremy Saulnier, ‘Green Room’ siege movie, and you weren’t aware that the movie was even going to go that far when it first began. This is definitely a lineup of escalation, where I think all these films are escalating in ways that you didn’t expect when the film began.”

Another film of escalation? Paolo Strippoli’s “The Spiral,” which will debut at Venice before traveling to TIFF. Kuplowsky compared it to a classic “Twilight Zone” episode, with a real “classicism to the storytelling.” He added, “It literally takes place in a dark and stormy night. It is a character telling a story to another character. And with each turn of the story, the situation is escalating and worsening and getting more and more intense.”

Elsewhere, Kuplowsky pointed to a strong year for Japanese cinema, which has made its way into his own lineup. “I have two Japanese co-productions that I’m really excited about, the first of which is on opening weekend, ‘Vintage Violence’ by Eugene Kotlyarenko,” he said. “It is this outrageous yakuza-infused caper about denim, specifically about a cache of vintage jeans that is found by a social media influencer who goes to Japan to try and sell them and then runs a foul with the yakuza. Kotlyarenko is known for his collage of screen media, like social media and different digital devices kind of mediating his storytelling, and he does it again here, I think, to the best he’s ever done. It is super-refined and incredibly shot by Sean Price Williams.”

Kuplowsky said that film “rhymes well” with Sabu’s film, “Arrested Memory,” which he billed as “this amazing amnesiac cop film that is very much a self-conscious throwback to an era of Japanese crime movies of the late ’90s and early aughts that Sabu himself was a part of.”

Also on offer: Anna Biller’s “The Face of Horror,” a follow-up to her instantly iconic “The Love Witch.” Kuplowsky heralded it as “a consummate emulation of vintage aesthetics.” He added, “What I think is so fascinating about it is that, while it does create this camp effect, which I think is going to be absolutely infectious, at the same time, it never dilutes the underlying tragic melodrama of the story that she’s trying to tell, which I think is rather confrontational. … I feel like this is like the medieval Barbie movie, but Ken gets a little bit more just desserts, so to speak.”

And Kuplowsky is happy to be dipping into some nonfiction work as well, including two “quasi-documentaries” with Matthew Rankin’s “Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney” and Matt Barats’ “Anchors Aweigh.”

“Rankin’s film is certainly not a conventional documentary, it’s very much a culture jam remix film that details the political ascendancy of one of our infamous prime ministers,” he said. (For non-Canadians out there, he made sure to note that the “film traces a trajectory of conservatism that we have seen across the entire world.”)

The next night, Midnight Madness will host alt comedian Barats’ debut film, which Kuplowsky likened to “a Tim Robinson character was directing a John Wilson documentary.” He added, “It feels like a parody of ‘Sherman’s March’ at times. It is constantly just incisively hilarious and self-deprecating in an extraordinary way. … I really am excited to give him a major platform at TIFF because I think he’s a true discovery for anyone who enjoys Nathan Fielder, Bo Burnham, Conner O’Malley, that whole sort of wave of all comedy that we’re currently riding the crest of.”

The biggest film on the slate is likely Duncan Jones’ long-gestating “Rogue Trooper,” based on the influential “2000 AD” comic strip of the same name created by Gerry Finley-Day and Dave Gibbons. “You throw a stone, and you’ll find a video game that is ostensibly just mining the DNA of the ‘2000 AD’ anthology series and quite often specifically ‘Rogue Trooper,'” he said. “I thought it was terrific to see not only an adaptation finally of ‘Rogue Trooper’ in this way, but one that is completely unapologetic about its intense Britishness.”

Kuplowsky was also “really impressed” that Jones and his team were able to make a CGI motion-capture movie on an indie budget. “This is the kind of thing you always hear the James Camerons and George Lucases of the world talk about, where it’s like we’re creating this technology so that this can be actually achievable for independent creators, and rarely do you get to see it being done,” he said. “That’s the kind of innovation that I like to support in this section.”

“I always like to find a film like ‘Rogue Trooper,’ in which there’s going to be a degree of familiarity to the property,” he said. “Duncan’s an established genre filmmaker who’s made some classic genre films like ‘Moon’ and ‘Source Code.’ And even ‘Warcraft’ has a number of fans that think that film got a bad rap. So I love the idea of bringing Duncan to this audience.”

Check out the full lineup below: