TIME EATER Dark Visions Short Film Program – Monday Nov 17 – 7pm

BITS is a festival that prizes the short form, so it’s hard to whittle it down to only a few standouts, but Ryan Couldrey’s Time Eater was my favourite of all the shorts I saw in the lineup. This film induced such a palpable feeling of dread that I found it almost unbearable to watch at times (that’s a complement) and the lead Jane Moffatt (who also appears in the opening night feature Son of Sara) – as a woman with undiagnosed dementia left to babysit an infant – gives a performance that is both terrifying and heartbreaking.

HEIRLOOMS Playing before SON OF SARA – Monday Nov 17 – 9:30pm

Dan Abramovici’s Heirlooms also shares an actor with the opening night feature Son of Sara, in this case its lead actor Chloe Van Landschoot, who is really put through the ringer in this double bill! Heirlooms – about a woman who hopes to find closure by restoring her late mother’s ornate antique wardrobe – has my vote for the scariest of the shorts in this year’s program.

FOREIGNER Narrative Feature – Tuesday Nov 18 – 9:30pm

In this success story from the BITS Development Lab (it was first pitched at the 2023 edition), a shy Persian teen named Yasimin vies for acceptance and popularity, even at the expense of her personal and cultural identity. This is such an exuberant, funny, scary, wacky film that has some serious fun with the stock formation of high school villainy: Queen Bee and matching mean girls – a triptych of smiles, beaming with menace, who encourage Yasimin to dye her hair blonde. But this superficial change carries baggage that is both metaphorical and literal, and she finds herself in the black void of the chthonic imagination, counteracted only by the sweet sincerity of her kooky dad and grandma, who are shielding her from some trauma in the family’s past and aim to save her from her destructive impulse to assimilate. Would make a great double bill with Australian bildungsroman Girl Asleep (2015).

OM-I-NOUS: “Radioactive” Bits and Bytes Web Series Program – Weds Nov 19 – 7:00pm

This episode of the digital series Om-i-nous by Canadian horror royalty George Mihalka is set in a small radio station over the graveyard shift and was written by none other than Tony Burgess – the man behind the novel Pontypool Changes Everything (and its celebrated screen adaptation). Burgess’ continued misadventures in broadcasting this time see a demonic presence unleashed into the airwaves when the popular nighttime host ignores the warnings of a mysterious caller.

NASH THE SLASH RISES AGAIN! Documentary Feature – Friday Nov 21 – 7:00pm

Purportedly taking his name from the killer in the Laurel and Hardy silent film Do Detectives Think? (1927), outsider musician Nash the Slash was easily recognizable by his stage costume – black tails, dark glasses and a face completely covered in surgical bandages – rendering him a musical counterpart to Claude Rains’ Invisible Man. Around the time I was starting my first film festival in 1999, Nash was touring with his original scores to various silent horror films – something he was already doing in his earliest years. Beginning his career in an apartment behind the projection booth at Toronto’s 99 cent Roxy Theatre (making him “the literal phantom of the theatre” one interviewee quips), horror cinema and dark spectacle were always infused into Nash’s music. His mix of classical string instruments, pedals, feedback, analog drum machines and looping created a unique one-man orchestra, his onstage audacity (he counted “God of Hellfire” Arthur Brown as an important influence) accentuated by expressionistic lighting and stage design by a young Stephen Pollard. The documentary is at turns punchy and atmospheric, with a cadre of commentators from pop culture historians like Paul Myers, fellow musicians ranging from Cam Hawkins (Nash’s founding partner in FM) to Gary Numan and Danielle Dax, and a whole host of OG Toronto scenesters, and brimming with enough retro Toronto streetscapes and archival media to make analog fetishists like myself drool. Highly recommended!

THE YELLOW WALLPAPER Emerging Screams Short Film Program – Saturday Nov 22 – 4:00pm

It may be a stretch to compare this shot-on-film student short to Meshes of the Afternoon, but there was something in this that tapped the dream logic of Deren’s film while also visually recalling 1970s New England indie horrors like Let’s Scare Jessica to Death or Walter Ungerer’s The Animal. Even with a markedly low budget the filmmaker manages to convey the optical strangeness of the titular wallpaper from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic short story and keep the focus on female interiority (cleverly only ever showing the husband’s hands or disembodied voice) in a way that is both economical and highly effective. I’d be very interested to see what this filmmaker could do with more resources.

For the complete Blood in the Snow lineup, see their website HERE >>