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Netflix’s Dead Talents Society is a Taiwanese horror comedy centered around the daily struggles of ghosts whose afterlives are far from easy. The Rookie was a newly deceased young girl who tried to make sense of the afterlife with her best friend Camilla. The duo were often referred to as the ‘small-timers’ because they lacked the talent to scare humans. They survived on the offerings made by their families, and they preferred staying out of the limelight. But things took a turn when The Rookie suddenly started to glitch. As it turned out, if the families of the ghost got rid of any of their prized possessions, then the ghost had only a month before they completely disappeared. The certificate of ‘Hard Work’ was The Rookie’s most cherished belonging, and her sister had accidentally thrown it away along with other recyclable items. This resulted in the glitch, and...

Chicago – The 19th Edition of the Asian Pop-Up Cinema (Apuc) kicked off on March 20th, 2025, with excitement for the Opening Night film “Dead Talents Society.” Appearing on behalf of the film were director John Hsu and Taiwanese star Chen Bo-Lin. Hsu sat down for a Podtalk, Chen was interviewed on the Red Carpet.

APUC19th is the first competitive festival in its 10 year history, will continue through April 13th. For tickets, schedules, films and information, click APUC19. For this weekend’s upcoming line-up, click on APUC19 Calendar.

Filmmaker John Hsu & ‘Bright Star’ Chen Bo-Lin of ‘Dead Talents Society’

Photo credit: AsianPopUpCinema.org

“Dead Talents Society” takes place in the after life, where a ghost’s value is determined by the fear they instill in the living. When ghost talent agent Makoto (Chen Bo-Lin) meets a rookie (Gingle Wang) with weak scaring abilities, he convinces his client – forgotten superstar Catherine (Sandrine Pinna...

China’s box office continued to be dominated by “Ne Zha 2,” which grossed RMB471.9 million ($65.5 million) over the Feb. 28–March 2 weekend, bringing its cumulative total to $1.98 billion, according to Artisan Gateway. The Cococartoon release is closing in on the $2 billion milestone with sustained audience interest.

“Ne Zha 2” also continued to set new benchmarks in Imax. The animated phenomenon added $7.6 million in Imax earnings over the weekend, bringing its cumulative total in the format to $144 million. The film has now surpassed 15 million Imax admissions in China alone, making it one of the top four most attended Imax movies of all time globally. Since the start of the Lunar New Year period, Imax titles have collectively reached a cumulative total of $160 million, with “Ne Zha 2” accounting for the lion’s share of that figure.

In second place, As One Production’s “Detective Chinatown 1900” added $6.9 million to its total,...

Here on Bloody Disgusting we’ve published multiple articles (find them all here) covering *our* favorite horror movies of last year, but it’s always interesting to take a look at year-in-review roundups from other places as well. Letterboxd, for example, kicks off each new year by spotlighting the previous year’s top hits, and their full 2024 Year in Review is now live.

As always, films are broken up into various categories based on highest user ratings, including the 10 Highest Rated Horror Movies of 2024. That list is unsurprisingly topped by Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, which just barely became a 2024 release when it was unleashed in theaters on Christmas Day. Other films, well, you might be surprised to see them make the list.

Here are Letterboxd’s 10 Highest Rated Horror Movies of 2024:

1) Nosferatu 2) The Substance 3) Dead Talents Society 4) Bramayugam 5) Chime 6) Alien: Romulus 7) Exhuma 8) I Saw the TV Glow 9) Your Monster 10) Strange Darling...

“Dead Talents Society,” directed by John Hsu and co-written with Kun-Lin Tsai, is a refreshing and playful take on the horror-comedy genre that expertly blends elements of East Asian folklore with contemporary societal concerns. The film introduces us to The Rookie, a humble teenage ghost who is portrayed by Gingle Wang and who grapples with the existential prospect of being forgotten by her family age.

In a world where ghosts fight for visibility and importance, she must perfect the art of scaring the living to ensure her afterlife—a haunting license, if you will. This narrative concept sets the setting for a series of humorous misadventures and reflects our modern fixation with fame and social media.

As Hsu walks us through this strange afterlife, the film skillfully portrays modern youth’s pressures. It captures a generation grappling with the demands of visibility and the fear of obscurity, much like the...

Lou Ye’s Wuhan-set Covid drama An Unfinished Film took top honours at the 61st Golden Horse Awards, winning both best film and best director, while fellow mainland Chinese director Geng Jun’s LGBTQ+ black comedy Bel Ami won a hat-trick of prizes including best actor.

John Hsu’s Taiwanese supernatural comedy Dead Talents Society snatched the most prizes, walking away with five awards mostly in the technical categories.

Scroll down for full list of winners

The best narrative feature award for An Unfinished Film was presented by Golden Horse Awards chairman, renowned DoP Mark Lee Ping-bing and Hong Kong New Wave director Patrick Tam.

The Brooklyn Horror Film Festival has unveiled its audience and jury award honorees for its 2024 edition, which ran from Oct. 17-24 at Nitehawk Cinema’s Williamsburg and Prospect Park locations.

Taking home the best film and best ensemble awards from the Dark Matter Jury was “Dead Talents Society” from writer-director John Hsu. The comedy horror, starring Bo-lin Chen, Sandrine Pinna and Gingle Wang, follows a ghost who joins a supernatural talent agency in hopes of becoming an urban legend.

Emma Benestan won best director from the Head Trip Jury, which honors films that deviate from the typical horror formula. Her film, “Animale,” follows a young bullfighter who begins noticing disturbing changes after a violent incident in the ring. Cast members include Oulaya Amamra, Damien Rebattel and Vivien Rodriguez.

For the Shorts Jury, Grace Rex’s script for “The Shadow Wrangler” took home best screenplay. Following an audiobook narrator tortured by...

Exclusive: In the midst of the successful festival run of his sophomore feature, the supernatural horror comedy Dead Talents Society, Taiwanese writer-director John Hsu has signed with Sugar23 for management.

Premiering to critical acclaim in the Midnight Madness section of this year’s Toronto Film Festival, where it was the runner-up for the Midnight Madness Award, Dead Talents Society takes place in an afterlife where ghosts gain recognition by scaring the living, with the ultimate goal of becoming urban legends. The film won both the Audience and Best Director Awards at Fantastic Fest, as well as the People’s Choice Award at Sitges, and was recently nominated for eleven of Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards, the most of any film this year.

Hsu’s feature directorial debut, the psychological horror Detention, is set during Taiwan’s White Terror era of the 1960s. The story follows follows two students, Fang Ray-shin and Wei Chong-ting,...

How do you reinvent movies about ghosts? This is how. One of my favorite discoveries from the 2024 Sitges Film Festival is this delightfully kooky, hilarious, charming, clever film from Taiwan called Dead Talents Society. It can be labeled as a horror comedy, but it's so much more than just that. This first premiered at the 2024 Taipei Film Festival in Taiwan earlier this year, then screened at TIFF and Fantastic Fest before sliding into Sitges. It's another one of these indie gems films that I'm glad I took the time to watch, because amidst so many mediocre and forgettable horror films in 2024 (sorry but too many of them are awful), this one really stands out. Directed by John Hsu, Dead Talents Society is a bit of a Beetlejuice remix - it's not the only new Beetlejuice movie this year! Ghosts are the main characters – people who have died in horrible ways...

John Lithgow, Geoffrey Rush and Kristine Froseth won top acting awards at Spain’s prominent Sitges Fantasy Film Festival, which wrapped its 57th edition on Oct. 13.

Making a sweep of the fest with three awards was Austrian Best International Feature Oscar entry “The Devil’s Bath” by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. Drawn from historical facts, the Austrian-German co-production is described by Variety critic Jessica Kiang as a “story so pitilessly bleak you may want to look away; the filmmaking craft is so compelling that you can’t.” The historical horror drama, which vied for the Berlinale Golden Bear in February, follows Agnes, a depressed newlywed, who instead of committing suicide, considered taboo by her Christian community, commits a crime that would lead to her execution. The “suicide by proxy” practice was said to be common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in German-speaking Central Europe and Scandinavia.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong...

Having played TIFF and Fantastic Fest, Dead Talents Society is the latest from director John Hsu, and I’ve just seen his rad Taiwanese ghost horror comedy at Hawaii International Film Festival. Hsu’s last feature was the great 2019 period horror film, Detention. Dead Talents Society is out from Sony, so you shouldn’t have an issue seeing it after its festival run, especially since the film is a lot of fun. You could look at the film, in part, as sort of a modern, All About Eve in the world of haunting. But I’m getting ahead of myself. In the afterlife, ghosts compete with each other on who can scare humans the most. However, the bigger prize is who can also be captured scaring people on...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Life after death proves to be equally competitive as the earthly one in John Hsu‘s barmy comedy “Dead Talents Society” in which ghosts fight each other for their right to exist. Their world is controlled by pretty much the same rules as those we live by – one has to be seen and acknowledged to gain respect, and the influencers dictate the trends. Even in the afterlife, there is too much work for anyone’s liking but possessing talent is everything. If you don’t have it, tough luck – you’ll be gone faster than you can say “second chance”.

Dead Talents Society is screening at Hawai’i International Film Festival

Hsu returns to the world of ghosts after his big cinema success “Detention” (2019), this time in a much different manner. He departs from being completely sinister to mock the entertainment industry and our addiction to it by referencing several...

The nominations for the 61st Golden Horse Awards were announced last week. Considered the “Chinese-language Oscars,” the awards showcase films made in Mandarin, Cantonese, or other Chinese dialects. This year’s nominations included a diverse range of movies from Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and Singapore.

John Hsu’s supernatural comedy “Dead Talents Society” topped the nominations with eleven total nods. The film tells the story of ghosts competing to haunt humans in an imagined afterlife. It received nominations for Best Feature Film, Best Director for John Hsu, and Best Original Screenplay. “Dead Talents Society” has already won audience awards at festivals like Toronto International Film Festival, where it was the runner-up in the Midnight Madness category.

Two other films, Tom Lin’s “Yen And Ai-Lee” and Geng Jun’s “Bel Ami,” followed closely behind with eight nominations each. These movies, along with Ray Yeung’s “All Shall Be Well...

John Hsu’s Taiwanese supernatural comedy Dead Talents Society has scored 11 nominations for the 61st Golden Horse Awards, followed by Tom Lin’s Yen And Ai-Lee and Geng Jun’s Bel Ami, with eight nods each.

Dead Talents Society and Bel Ami are among the five films competing in the best film category, along with Ray Yeung’s All Shall Be Well, Yeo Siew Hua’s Stranger Eyes and Lou Ye’s An Unfinished Film. The same five films are also running in the best director category.

They reflect the overall representation at this year’s Golden Horse Awards, with the participation of Hong Kong,...

John Hsu’s horror comedy Dead Talents Society heads the race for this year’s Golden Horse Awards with 11 nominations, including Best Narrative Feature, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress for Sandrine Pinna.

The film, set in a fictional underworld where ghosts can linger in the mortal realm by competing to haunt humans, is produced by Taiwan’s Activator Co, Sony Pictures International Productions and several other local companies.

It was followed in the awards race by Tom Lin’s Yen And Ai-Lee and Geng Jun’s Bel Ami, which both received eight nominations.

Dead Talents Society and Bel Ami are both nominated for Best Narrative Feature, along with Ray Yeung’s All Shall Be Well, Yeo Siew-hua’s Stranger Eyes and Lou Ye’s An Unfinished Film. All five of these films are also nominated for Best Director.

Best Leading Actor nominations include King Jieh-wen (A...

Comedy-horror “Dead Talents Society” picked up 11 nominations for the Golden Horse Film Awards, making it the most acclaimed title among the 169 films in contention for the prestigious Chinese-language prizes.

“Yen and Ai-Lee” and “Bel Ami” both received eight nominations, putting them in a tie for second place. Recent Venice competition film “Stranger Eyes,” from Singapore’s Yeo Siew Hua received six.

Five films compete for the best narrative features award: John Hsu’s “Dead Talents Society,” Ray Yeung’s “All Shall Be Well,” Lou Ye’s “An Unfinished Film,” Geng Jun’s “Bel Ami” and “Stranger Eyes.” The same five also contest the best director award.

Nominees for best leading actor are: King Jieh-wen (“A Journey in Spring”), Chang Chen (“The Embers”), Yau Hawk-sau (“The Way We Talk”), Wanlop Rungkumjad (“Mongrel”) and Zhang Zhiyong (“Bel Ami”). Chang is a previous winner in the category.

Nominees for best actress are: Patra Au Ga-man...

"The best horror weekend of the year returns to high altitude! Telluride Horror Show is back for its 15th edition, announcing its entire lineup and schedule for October 11-13, 2024 in the world-famous mountain resort town of Telluride, Colorado."

With more than 50 films, this year's Telluride Horror Show is packed with enough goodies to satisfy any horror fan this Halloween season, including Presence, The Creep Tapes, Get Away, Dead Talents Society and much more. From its impressive guest lineup, to features, and shorts, take a look at the full lineup below and head over to the official website for information on attending: https://www.telluridehorrorshow.com/

Special Guests

Rachel Harrison

Guest Author

Rachel Harrison is the national bestselling author of So Thirsty, Black Sheep, Such Sharp Teeth, Cackle, and The Return, which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. Her short fiction has appeared in Guernica,...

Our friends at the Telluride Horror Show down in Colorado have revealed the lineup for this year's event. Celebrating it's fifteenth year it's the best weekend you can ever have during spooky season in the Centennial State.    This year, Steven Soderbergh's Presence will close out the weekend while festival faves like A Desert, Dark Match, Daddy's Head, Dead Talents Society, Parvulos, The Rule of Jenny Pen and The Soul Eater are among the list of feature films playing this year.    The weekend always includes an author's program and this year our friend Grady Hendrix will be joined by another author whose works I've read, Jeremy Robert Johnson.  Other books I'm going to have to read now come from other guest authors including Rachel...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Held at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar in Austin, TX, Fantastic Fest is known as the largest genre film festival in the United States. From horror to action, wacky comedy, and everything in between, Fantastic Fest offers something for every genre film fanatic. At this year’s Fantastic Fest, we at FandomWire saw 34 feature films, and we have decided what we think are the five best films we saw — from restorations to new releases.

After we share our top five films of Fantastic Fest with you, we will also share our thoughts on some of the other films we saw at the festival, so be sure to keep reading!

Related Terrifier 3 Fantastic Fest Review — Bloody Threequel Attempts to Overexplain Its Mythos FandomWire’s Top 5 Films of Fantastic Fest 2024 5. The Guest Dan Stevens stars in the action thriller The Guest, opening in September.

Okay, this might be cheating because we knew...

John Hsu's Dead Talents Society is a cutesy and buoyant Taiwanese horror-comedy guaranteed to put a smile on your face. It's far funnier than frightening, with shades of Monsters, Inc., Beetlejuice, and The Influencer. John Hsu and Kun-Lin Tsai write the afterlife as a corporatized competition for virality, where your soul's worth is tied to its profit-grossing scare tactics. J-Horror influences inspire scare sequences, but the film is more interested in finding humor behind the scenes as "professionals" carefully architect each haunt's logistics. Imagine Sadako vs. Kayako but as a Christopher Guest sports comedy. Hsu values lighthearted entertainment over frights in a soulful way, which might not work for everyone, but ends with a climactic showdown event that brings everything together.

Gingle Wang stars as Cho Hsiao-lei, a novice spirit who is afraid of “glitching” into oblivion. If your living relatives forget your existence, you disappear like a bad...

Ghosts usually come with a fair bit of baggage in the movies: A tragic romance leading to an even more tragic suicide, maybe, or a howl for justice from a murder victim from beyond the grave. The protagonist of “Dead Talents Society” has no such tale attached to her untimely (and embarrassing) death, and this is where her problems begin. John Hsu’s frightfully entertaining Taiwanese horror-comedy imagines a world where the dead are just as beholden to the pressures of fame as the living, and an industry has grown around ambitious apparitions building their personal brands. Urban legends live forever, and forgotten ghosts literally disappear — so get out there and scare ‘em good, kid!

There’s obvious potential for media satire baked into the concept, and co-writer and director Hsu includes scenes of talk shows, ceremonies, and gala events where the undead stars come out to celebrate the afterlife awards season.

This year, Toronto International Film Festival was back. TIFF typically kicks off the North American fall festival season alongside Telluride, but it has had a rocky past couple of years. The pandemic in 2020 put a temporary pause on in-person festivities, and 2021-2022 featured a tentative rollout of hybrid festivities. Though 2023 committed to total in-person attendance, the SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023 limited the amount of American celebrity presence on the red carpet; festival buzz too had been similarly muted. This year’s edition, however, witnessed the famed festival in full swing. With 278 films in this year’s programming, the 2024 edition of TIFF was jam-packed with Berlin/Cannes favorites, Awards season’s to-be-darlings, and of course, a good chunk of independent cinema.

Among the Asian cinema contenders, Korean and Taiwanese cinema have held an especially strong presence this year. There were nine Korean and Korean-adjacent entries – almost 100% more than in 2022, when there were...

This year’s Toronto International Film Festival comes to a close, with Zhao Tao (who starred in Jia Zhang-ke’s “Caught by the Tides”) and Malala-produced haenyo documentary “The Last of the Sea Women” recognized. Notably, Taiwanese cinema also fared very well this year. The two Taiwanese films at the fest have been strong runner-ups for awards — including John Hsu’s supernatural comedy “Dead Talents Society” for the People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award and Sylvia Chang for “Daughter’s Daughter.”

But without further ado, here are the rest of the awards:

“Dead Talents Society” by John Hsu

People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award presented by Rogers is: The Substance, dir. Coralie Fargeat | United Kingdom/USA/France

The first runner-up is: Dead Talents Society, dir. John Hsu | Taiwan

The second runner-up is: Friendship, dir. Andrew DeYoung | USA

People’s Choice Documentary Award presented by Rogers is: The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal,...

The Brooklyn Horror Film Festival has unveiled the lineup for its 2024 edition, which runs from Oct. 17-24. All films will be screened at Nitehawk Cinema’s Williamsburg and Prospect Park locations.

Opening with Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy’s crime thriller “Dead Mail,” Bhff will feature the North American premieres of Tiago Teixeira’s erotic body horror “Custom,” Phillip Escott and Sarah Appleton’s late ’90s horror documentary “Generation Terror” and Sasha Rainbow’s “Grafted” starring Jess Hong.

Films receiving their world premieres at Bhff include Izzy Lee’s directorial debut “House of Ashes,” the queer science fiction adventure “Psychonaut” and “Lilly Lives Alone” starring Jeffrey Combs.

“Fear in Focus” is set to return for Bhff 2024, with this year’s rendition centering around horror films from Spain. The sidebar program will feature a 35mm screening of “The Blood Spattered Bride” and a showing of the Spanish version of “Dracula” with...

Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck starring Tom Hiddleston is this year’s surprise winner of Toronto International Film Festival’s 2024 TIFF People’s Choice Award, a historically reliable bellwether of an Oscar nomination.

Over a sample pool of the last 15 years, all but one People’s Choice winner has gone on to garner a best picture Oscar nomination, and several – like 12 Years A Slave, Green Book and The King’s Speech – have won the top prize at the Academy Awards.

Yet The Life Of Chuck presents an anomaly – it currently lacks a US distributor. Buyers had been circling...

Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck starring Tom Hiddleston is this year’s surprise winner of Toronto International Film Festival’s 2024 TIFF People’s Choice Award, a historically reliable bellwether of an Oscar nomination.

Over a sample pool of the last 15 years, all but one People’s Choice winner has gone on to garner a best picture Oscar nomination, and several – like 12 Years A Slave, Green Book and The King’s Speech – have won the top prize at the Academy Awards.

Yet The Life Of Chuck presents an anomaly – it currently lacks a US distributor. Buyers had been circling...

Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck picked up the top People’s Choice honor Sunday at the Toronto Film Festival as its 2024 edition wrapped with renewed celebrity heat but still in the shadow of Venice and Cannes.

The Stephen King novella adaptation stars Tom Hiddleston, Mark Hamill, Karen Gillan and Chiwetel Ejiofor in a genre-tripping film about embracing hope in the face of tragedy and had a world premiere in Toronto. Flanagan in a statement thanked TIFF for the top audience award prize: “I’m absolutely overwhelmed. We’re so grateful that The Life of Chuck connected with audiences in such a powerful way, but never expected this.”

The second runner up for the People’s Choice Award was Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, a queer crime musical headed to Netflix that earned the jury prize in Cannes for the director, while the titular lead Karla Sofía Gascón became...

The 44th running of the Hawaii International Film Festival presented by Halekulani will open with “Tinā,” an uplifting drama film that marks the feature directorial debut of Miki Magasiva, and close with Sori Fumihiko’s “Hakkenden: Fiction and Reality.”

In between, the festival will pack in 92 features and 114 short films, major awards for guests including Jimmy O Yang, Hong Kong’s Sandra Ng and documentary filmmaking star Stanley Nelson.

“This year, we have the largest selection of Hawai`i films in competition in the festival’s history, are presenting multiple films that explore Indigenous perspectives, narrative sovereignty, and the nurturing of cultural identity, and additionally, we are launching a new spotlight showcasing the best in television,” said Beckie Stochetti, Hiff executive director.

Hailing from New Zealand, with dialog in English and Samoan, “Tinā” sees Anapela Polata’ivao (“Our Flag Means Death”) portray a well-respected and gifted vocal coach endure family tragedy...

Have you ever wanted to be so wrapped up in your partner, it’s as if you could just melt into them? Well, filmmaker Thibault Emin is taking that sentiment to the extreme — with a horrifying twist.

Emin makes his directorial debut with “Else,” a body horror romance feature about a strange epidemic that causes the infected to melt into their surroundings. Emin is a French director and screenwriter, who is expanding his 2007 short film “Else” into a feature that has been more than 15 years in the making. He co-wrote the script with Alice Butaud and Emma Sandona.

“Else” will have its world premiere at TIFF as part of the Midnight Madness program. The film is a sales title and hails from France and Belgium.

The official synopsis reads: “Introverted and uncomfortable in his own skin, Anx (Matthieu Sampeur) does not consider himself an obvious partner for Cass (Édith Proust...

Fall festival season picked up this last week with Venice and Telluride, and now Toronto is just around the corner, from 5-15 September 2024. This year, we’re seeing an exciting number of festival-favorite auteurs return, including Jia Zhang-ke (“Caught with the Wind”), Kiyoshi Kurosawa (“Cloud”), Mohammad Rassoulof (“The Seed of the Sacred Fig”), and Hong Sang-soo (“By the Stream”). For those who are in Toronto and are interested in the older classics, TIFF Classics offers some delectable 4k restorations of South Asian and Iranian selects this year, including Raj Kapoor‘s classic “Awara” (1951) and Sohrab Shahid Saless‘ “Time of Maturity” (1976).

In addition to these, genre films seem to make up a healthy number of Asian selections this year. Korean blockbuster star Hyun-bin returns in Woo Min-ho’s latest historical spy movie, “Harbin,” and Tumpbal Tampubolon‘s “Crocodile Tears” promises a “slow-burning suspense thriller.” Three of the infamously-campy Midnight Madness screenings...

Brace yourself, Canada, “The Substance” is coming.

The explosive body horror film starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, directed by French heatseeker Coralie Fargeat, has been set to open the Midnight Madness section at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

“Substance” follows Elizabeth Sparkle (Moore), an Oscar winner who commits the high crime of aging in Hollywood. Relegated to a morning fitness show, Sparkle’s world closes in on her when opportunities dry up — until a mysterious stranger offers her the titular substance, a chance at a more perfect version of herself. Sparing any spoilers, Qualley comes into play as the idealized version of Moore. The pair learns that coexisting ain’t easy in Fargeat’s violent fantasia.

Also on the lineup, veteran music video and film director Joseph Kahn will show “Ick,” a tribute to ‘80s creature features starring former TV Superman Brandon Routh and “American Beauty” actor Mena Suvari.

The North American premiere of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance starring Demi Moore will open Toronto International Film Festival’s (TIFF) Midnight Madness section.

Fargeat’s debut feature Revenge premiered at TIFF in 2017 and she returns with her body horror that became one of the most talked-about films in Cannes.

World premieres include Andrew DeYoung’s comedy Friendship from Fifth Season and BoulderLight Pictures starring Kata Mara and Paul Rudd; and sci-fi Ick with Mena Suvari and Brandon Routh directed by Joseph Kahn, whose battle rap drama Bodied won TIFF Midnight Madness People’s Choice Award in 2017.

The roster includes Kenichi Ugana’s The Gesuidouz,...

“The Substance,” Coralie Fargeat’s body horror film starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, will be the opening night film in the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness section, TIFF organizers announced Thursday.

The Mubi film will make its North American premiere at TIFF after having its world premiere in the main competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The extremely graphic and gory film, in which Moore’s character undergoes a treatment that creates a younger and “more perfect” version of herself, won the Best Screenplay prize from the Cannes jury and stirred up awards talk for Moore’s unhinged performance.

“The Substance” is one of 10 films in the Midnight Madness section, which in the past has showcased films including “Pearl,” “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” “Titane,” “Assassination Nation” and the 2017 reboot of “Halloween.”

Other films in the section include two past Midnight Madness directors, Joseph Kahn...

Exclusive: In yet another of a recent string of intriguing local-language projects, Sony Pictures International Productions is teaming with Taiwan’s Activator to co-produce paranormal comedy Dead Talents Society. Spip has also acquired worldwide distribution rights in addition to closing a deal for global remake rights.

Directed by John Hsu (Detention), the feature is based on his short film which he also wrote (check it out below). The premise centers around ghosts who strive to be the most successful and famous stars in the underworld through their scare tactics and performances amongst the living. The end goal is to become the spookiest of urban legends.

The film is set to start production in 2022 and slated for a theatrical release in Taiwan via Sony Pictures Releasing Taiwan in 2023.

Bolin Chen (In Time With You) and Sandrine Pinna (Yang Yang) are set to star. Award-winning Taiwanese filmmakers Lieh Lee, Aileen Li and...