The 2022 Fantasia International Film Festival has commenced, and as always, I am excited to attend as a Film Critic on behalf of HorrorBuzz. Fantasia International Film Festival has continuously been my most highly anticipated film festival to cover ever since I first had the pleasure of attending in 2020, where I was introduced to its ever eclectic mix of international cinema.
There are a number of films that I am eager to screen and review during this year’s festival run. I am a huge fan of South Korean thrillers and Japanese horror, and Fantasia International Film Festival consistently has a substantial amount of stories from these and many other countries/genres. The content featured in the Fantasia International Film Festival lineup ranges from cool and cerebral narrative dramas to absurd and experimental films — horror and science fiction make a grand showing this year, with perhaps the most horror, thriller, and sci-fi choices I have seen yet from this festival.
One of the films I a most excited to cover at this year’s festival is Next Exit — written and directed by Mali Elfman and starring Karen Gillan of Doctor Who and Oculus fame, this film appears to be a haunting hybrid of science fiction and ghost story. Yet another science-fiction and horror hybrid that looks even more interesting is Adrian Bobb’s The Fore-men, which is to be a post-apocalyptic thriller that takes audiences on an adventure to solve the mystery behind the catalyst for a horrific global event.
Writer/director Syeyoung Park’s film, The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra, looks totally weird and I am totally into it — mixing monster horror with fantasy, this film, I am sure, will prove to be an interesting watch. Also, as a big fan of The Wailing and many other South Korean horrors and thrillers, I am looking forward to watching and reviewing Kang Park’s horror-thriller Seire starring the undeniably talented Seo Hyun-woo of the 2020 TV show Flower of Evil.
In a similar vein, South Korean horror-thriller Missing is sure to be a great film — I’m thinking The Chaser (2008) meets Taken (2008) — and I look forward to bringing what looks to be an intense action-thriller story to the HorrorBuzz audience. Furthermore, we are of course fans of fantasy and witchcraft and so I cannot wait to review writer/director Mariel Sharp’s witchy horror Where the Witch Lives, and potentially what appears to be a supernatural horror movie titled Moloch, written and directed by Nico Van den Brink. Fantasia International Film Festival, of course, is not the kind of festival to shy away from features that snobby film buffs might deem borderline ridiculous. I remember watching a kaiju movie and a number of hysterical comedies, and one that looks particularly interesting from the 2022 lineup is horror-comedy Hairsucker, which is sure to be hilarious and will fit in perfectly with our other horror picks from the 2022 Fantasia International Film Festival lineup.
Year after year, Fantasia International Film Festival amazes me with one of the most diverse lineups of any film festival I cover — I know to expect the unexpected from the talented visual artists selected to screen their features. The above-mentioned features are but a few of the horror, sci-fi, and fantasy films that looked interesting, but I believe these films will not only be a joyous adventure to watch but will also pique the interest of our readers before these incredible films become available in wider releases.
