TIFF Interview: Midnight Madness Programmer Peter Kuplowsky Shares His Top Picks

The Toronto International Film Festival is a haven for film lovers. Directors, actors, and fans alike flock to the 10 day festival (running Sept 5-15) for some of the newest and most exciting films the industry has to offer. The Midnight Madness program is a genre fan’s dream, serving innovative and transgressive cinematic experiences with something to delight every interest.

The section’s programmer, Peter Kuplowsky — who has been at the helm since 2017 — has established a career championing genre cinema and outsider art at various international film festivals, including Toronto After Dark and Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas.

Kuplowsky has also worked as a producer on a number of short and feature films, including Manborg, The Interior, The Void, the Z is for Zygote segment in The ABCs of Death: Part 2, and the short film adaptation of Dave Eggers short story Your Mother and I.

I had the chance to speak with Peter about this year’s Midnight Madness lineup, the community of genre cinema, and his top recommendations for TIFF 2019.

Kelly McNeely: I’m excited for this year’s Midnight Madness, you’ve got a great lineup!

Peter Kuplowsky: Thank you so much, I’m excited too! I was a little self-conscious before the announcement just because of how many unknown entities there are in this lineup. But I’ve been really appreciative of the feedback so far; people seem really excited to discover some new voices.

KM: I was really excited and surprised to see Crazy World on there, because I know Who Killed Captain Alex is one of those films that not everyone knows about, but it’s such a phenomenal contribution.

PK: Yeah! I mean it’s one of the themes that kind of emerged by accident, but then when I saw the content was there I wanted to really try and do something with this idea of community directors that made themselves on screen — as you can see in Blood Quantum, The Vigil, and Crazy World.

With Who Killed Captain Alex, a big part of why I wanted to include one of their films in the lineup is I’m so interested in the idea of original filmmaking, filmmakers, and film systems that exist outside of mainstream infrastructures and institutions. And the idea that this is a community of filmmakers and an audience that are constantly making content for each other and entertaining each other. Recently, that content has now been contextualized for the western world and it’s developing an audience.

I find that so remarkable, and I think it’s a testament to the openness of genre audiences and the flexibility of imagination. The idea that you need all these resources to make a movie is a bit of a fallacy. Really you need enthusiasm, creativity, and personality. And that’s what these films have in spades.

The big hope – I can’t confirm it yet – but we’re in the process of ensuring that the filmmakers themselves are able to attend TIFF and that we actually have live narration for the world premiere of this international version of Crazy World, which would be so exciting.

I have never actually experienced a live narrated Ugandan action film, and I think that idea is really interesting. The tradition came from how their audience was watching American films, because they weren’t subtitled or dubbed, so they needed someone in the room to contextualize it. So the idea that now that their films are going out into the world, they decided to package them with a Ugandan interpreter to sort of contextualize its world too. I’m really looking forward to closing out the lineup with this kind of celebration of a cinema that doesn’t necessarily get as much attention as other quadrants.

Crazy World via TIFF

KM: I didn’t know you were planning on doing the live narration, that’s so cool!

PK: And that’s something that I hope we can deliver on. The issue has really come down to getting the Visas approved, but we’re in that conversation process and, you know, every part of my body is crossed in hopes that that happens.

KM: On that note, what gets you really excited about a film?

PK: Genre film doesn’t have to be generic, and usually the best genre cinema are the ones that take the familiar formula but are injecting new variables into it. So for me, I’m always interested in seeing something new that I haven’t quite seen before, because the variables are so distinct. But even more simply — and this doesn’t even necessarily apply to movies for the Midnight Madness section — I always just wanna see decisions, and that sounds glib, but I find that sometimes there’s an arbitrariness to the pieces that go together in movies sometimes.

I wanna see a film where I really feel like I’m being guided — I don’t mean this like a single director, even, I mean that the alchemy of all the elements of the movie really feels like there’s not a piece out of place. Everything feels like it’s part of an aesthetic project. That’s something that personally always excites me.

In the Midnight Madness context, the things I look for are momentum and attitude, and something that I feel like is transgressive. It’s breaking a convention or a parameter that is expected. Because that, to me, is what constitutes the difference between a Midnight film and a regular genre film. That there’s this element to it that’s doing something new.

KM: Is there a film you wish you could have had for the lineup that you couldn’t get your hands on?

PK: I track so many films, sometimes years out from them ever being made, so there’s always stuff that it simply isn’t ready. A recent example is a movie that I’m now glad that I didn’t see and subsequently invite, because no one can see it. I was tracking The Hunt, but they were telling me that it wasn’t going to be ready because they were doing a lot of last-minute reshoots on the film, and now no one can see it.

KM: This is a tough question, but if there’s someone who can only see three films at Midnight Madness this year, what are the must-see movies?

PK: I’ll maybe frame it like this; there are certain films that I don’t think are going to need a lot of help with regards to hype. I don’t think anyone needs me to say anything else beyond the words Richard Stanley, Nicolas Cage, and HP Lovecraft and not be interested in Color Out of Space. So movies like that maybe don’t need help.

There are a couple of titles I feel I may want to mention, just because there’s so many first-time filmmakers and unknown entities. One film is The Platform, a Spanish feature from Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia — a first-time filmmaker. Per your question earlier about what gets me excited, I was watching screeners and this came on. I think it was after midnight, so I was expecting to watch the first 20 minutes and finish it in the morning, and I was rapt for the entire 90 minutes. I was so excited, because I didn’t know where the movie was going. It’s a science fiction prison movie that absolutely belongs in the pantheon of Stuart Gordon’s Fortress, or Vincenzo Natali’s Cube, and it’s so economically put together.

It kind of reminds me of the prison room sequence of the Japanese movie Symbol meets The Raid. Because there’s visceral, grotesque action at times, there’s really really brilliant satire; it’s doing so much with very little means in such a creative way with really brilliant performances. I think this is going to be one of the true hidden gems of the lineup that people are going to talk about.

On a similar note, a film that I strongly encourage people to check out is The Vast of Night. It’s another first-time filmmaker, it played Slamdance and so impressed me there that I really wanted to give it a huge platform and a big screen like TIFF. So the comparisons I’ve been making are American Graffiti meets Miracle Mile meets Pontypool; the performances are brilliant, the filmmaking is really wild, I think it’s going to be really inspiring to indie filmmakers to realize what you can accomplish with just a very creative production design.

One of the things I like about Vast and Platform are that they’re genre movies that really prove that the foundation is in the script; make sure your script is rock solid. Because there are moments in The Vast of Night where really the camera is just honing in on a single performance and letting that actor just have a conversation with someone and it is so tense and so creepy and so atmospheric, and yet there isn’t conventional genre elements like explosions or big action. But I’m so impressed by the suspense that the film creates.

And I also want to flag Saint Maud as well. I’ve been comparing it to Raw in terms of the slow-burn Midnighter movie. I think the two performances that sort of anchor the film — the relationship between Morfydd Clark and Jennifer Ehle — are really, really fantastic. It’s super cringey in the way that sometimes slow-burn Midnight films can be, where it’s kind of stabbing you along the way while soaking you in this atmospheric dread and it sort of blows up in a big moment. So those are three movies that might not be on people’s radar.

But I would definitely also toss in that if you’re looking for scary in particular, The Vigil is the film to see. It’s basically the Jewish Exorcist [laughs]. That’s not even my words, those are the words of a Jewish friend of mine who happened to see the film and was like, “now I know how Catholics felt when they watched The Exorcist”. They’re relating it to the mythology and demonology, like, far too much. So that’s a scary movie.

KM: Are there films that you’re really excited about that are in other programs at TIFF?

PK: I cannot wait to watch The Lighthouse again with an audience. I think the thing that people might not expect is that it’s really funny. Maybe it’s my perverse sense of humor, because I thought that Hereditary was really funny [laughs]. I liked The Witch but I LOVE The Lighthouse, so I can’t wait to see that again.

I would also urge people to check out Synchronic which is by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead who have been on the genre circuit for the last decade now with Resolution and Spring — which was at TIFF — and The Endless. And if you like any of those movies, it’s very much in that tradition of very conceptual sci-fi that kind of creeps into the movie in a really original and unique way.

And one other movie! This definitely won’t be on people’s radar so I do want to suggest it, it’s called Jallikattu. It’s an Indian horror… not a horror film per se, but it’s incredibly visceral. I’ve been jokingly referring to it as the Indian Jaws. It’s about a bull that’s escaped the slaughter and starts ravaging this Indian village. It’s one of those movies that’s like when Steven Soderbergh watched Mad Max: Fury Road and was like “I don’t understand how people aren’t dead” [laughs] that’s kind of my reaction to this movie. I was just so blown away by the sheer scale of production and the energy and momentum.

KM: I’m curious, what do you think is the most underrated film of the past year that’s flown under everyone’s radar?

PK: Every summer I don’t see anything, because I’m just watching the next year’s lineup. This isn’t a genre film – and I’ll come up with a genre film in a second – but I think Patrick Wang’s A Bread Factory Part I and Part II is the best American movie to probably be made in the last decade, I think it’s an extraordinary work. I call it Twin Peaks with just the folksy parts and none of the darkness. But let me think of something that might make more sense to recommend to iHorror [laughs]. I mean it’s at the Festival, but Parasite by Bong Joon Ho has definitely done it again, he’s pretty great.

Something that I honestly would have considered programming at Midnight Madness absolutely is Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum. Everyone’s excited about the Joker film, I’m excited to see it too, but we already got our Joker movie, and it’s The Beach Bum. This movie basically purports a world in which Batman doesn’t exist, and if Batman doesn’t exist, the Joker would just be a hedonistic, charismatic dude, that did stuff he wanted to do and burned money. It would be super chill. I really, really think that movie was completely slept on. I know it’s not purely genre, but it is chaotic [laughs]. It’s certainly chaotic, and it’s up to the audience to decide whether that’s good, neutral, or evil, but it’s definitely chaotic.

KM: What’s your favorite part of the job? I know that’s a very broad question, but what really gets you excited about doing what you get to do?

PK: I think my favorite part — there are aspects I like in every stage of the process — but my favorite part is watching the film with the audience. It’s something where I feel very privileged as a programmer; very few programmers get to watch the movie they’ve selected with the audience. I’m so fortunate that because the films are at midnight, there’s nothing else going on. That’s the end of everyone’s day, and in effect, when the movie ends, it’s the end of my day. So I am just there and I sit with the audience and relax, and I’ve always loved that audience so much.

The reactions at Midnight Madness are the reactions of an audience that made me excited to go into film festival programming to begin with. Especially when it’s a film that I personally really like, but I haven’t played anything like that at Midnight Madness before, and I’m not sure how it’s going to work. The filmmakers are definitely often very nervous, but I’m nervous too. I feel excited when something works well with the audience and that when we all kind of become one spirit in watching the madness.

KM: That’s something that I absolutely love about the Midnight Madness experience is that you really have that sense of community, that everyone’s there to have a good time and be supportive of the film. It’s unlike any other audience when you go to a movie theatre.

PK: I think for a lot of people, myself included, it’s worth going to a Midnight screening simply to get the rare experience of attending an event where everybody wants to be there. When you go to the multiplex, seeing movies is not always a decision made by people because they want to see a movie, it’s often a decision that’s made to like, kill some time. We don’t know what else to do today [laughs]. So the level of engagement is so much more diminished.

Midnight Madness is a rare opportunity where you can be in a room of 1200 people and everybody wants to be there. Everybody wants to have a good time, and everybody is really open to having a good time. It really is one of the most open and generous audiences a filmmaker can hope for and an audience member can hope to be in.