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Several films screening at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival explore the idea that teen girls are not alright, including The Serpent’s Skin, Foreigner, and Lucid.

Read on for my capsule reviews of all three films.

The Serpent’s Skin

Scripted by Alice Maio Mackay and co-writer Benjamin Pahl Robinson, The Serpent’s Skin follows trans girl Anna (Alexander McVicker) as she moves to the big city. There she meets weird, but decent Danny (Jordan Dulieu) and goth tattoo artist Gen (Avalon Fast), sleeping with and befriending both as a dark, serpentine power begins attacking people. Think The Craft meets Scanners.

Mackay’s bold colour scheme, elliptical editing, and counter culture attitude are all present in The Serpent’s Skin, but the narrative moves at a more deliberate pace than her previous films, which allows the characters time to breathe between set pieces.

Featuring genuine chemistry between McVicker and Fast, the return...

Montreal — Producer and media executive Kevin Healey and Viral Nation’s Head of Programming Paul Telner have boarded the feature adaptation of Spencer Zimmerman’s satirical body-horror thriller “Headcase” ahead of the short film’s world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival.

In “Headcase,” which screens July 26 before the world premiere of Kurtis David Harder’s “Influencers,” a desperate influencer (Siobhan Connors) hits a man (Pat Moonie) with her car while filming content and decides to make the most of the dead man to ensure her brand goes viral.

Zimmerman, whose previous films include the 2023 Leo Award-winning short “Darkside,” is currently a junior producer at busy Vancouver genre studio Oddfellows, where he is supervising production and running set. He recently worked on Osgood Perkins’ “Longlegs,” “The Monkey,” and the upcoming Perkins film “Keeper.”

Moonie presented Zimmerman with the idea for “Headcase” last fall and they co-wrote the script. A tight team of creatives,...

Lucid Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival

A struggling artist tries to simulate her creativity with a drug, only to find that there are things in her subconscious that she was never supposed to know about, in Lucid. Screening at the Fantasia International Film Festival, it’s a multi-layered film expanded from their original short by Deanna Milligan and Ramsey Fendall, starring Caitlin Acken Taylor in the lead role with her younger sister, up-and-coming star Georgia Acken of The Sacrifice Game, playing her younger self. Deanna, Ramsey and Caitlin met up with me early in the festival, all extremely excited and eager to talk about their work – despite a production process which was anything but straightforward.

“I didn't want to make a feature at all, says Deanna. “I had put my foot down about it because people kept telling me that we should do that. And Ramsey wanted to do it,...

While the oeuvre of Toronto director David Cronenberg, the maestro of body horror, has inspired generations of Canadian filmmakers (including his progeny) and continues to do, Montreal’s Fantasia Festival and its Frontières Market event put them face-to-face with the global genre community – not to mention rabid local audiences – in a red-carpet-free cinema hotzone.

10 years in the making, Félix Dufour-Laperrière’s “Death Does Not Exist” (“La mort n’existe pas”), his third animated film and the only Canadian feature to world-premiere at Cannes this year, receives its North American and local premiere July 17.

Dufour-Laperrière has made all his animated films with the same small team out of the Montreal studio he runs with his brother Nicolas. “We’re coming from the Quebec film scene, which has a strong relationship with documentary, animation, alternative fiction, alternative means of production,” he told Variety.

“The subject matter [of ‘Death Does Not Exist’] might be difficult, but it is made with total honesty,...

“Lucid,” a handmade horror film about a frustrated ’90s art punk’s trippy quest for inspiration, first emerged at Fantasia as a participant in Frontières’ 2022 Shorts to Features lab and is returning to Montreal next week fully metamorphosed.

Ahead of the Canadian film’s world premiere on July 21 in the Fantasia International Film Festival’s Septentrion Shadows program, “Lucid” co-directors Deanna Milligan and Ramsey Fendall have shared the trailer in exclusivity with Variety.

“Frontières gave us the chance to test-drive the surreal and handmade tone, sharpen our vision, and connect with a kind, yet brutally honest, community of genre lovers who didn’t flinch when we pitched them a Fried Chicken Monster,” Milligan told Variety last week.

“Making art and indie film is an act of rebellion,” she said. “We had to create this film outside traditional industry structures, and we were able to get through production thanks to an...

“The Hour of the Sorcerer,” “Zombie Meteor” and “Bloody Mary” feature among a powerful lineup of 16 titles at the 2022 Sitges Fanpitch, an anticipated pitching event for sci-fi, fantastic and horror features and series.

Sitges Fanpitch runs Oct. 10-13 at the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia, a Mecca for fandom worldwide.

The pitching session comes as genre is building for independents as one of the two pillars of a residual theatrical film business and sci-fi and fantasy remain a top original production choice on Netflix and other platforms.

Sitges Fanpitch frames emerging talent. Only five are not first-time directors, most notably Argentina’s Cristian Ponce, behind “Sorcerer,” whose “History of the Occult” was the highest-rated horror title for Letterboxd’s 2021 Year in Review.

Genre is ever more broadening its artistic options. Fanpitch’s sci-fi offer, for example, take in critiques of stereotypes of ableism (“Newfall”) and the social wealth gap (“Reboot”), sci-fi,...

Frontières International Co-Production Market – back to an in-person event after four online editions – has unveiled this year’s projects, including 18 titles in its official selection, all in advanced development stages or now financing.

Ranging from the highly personal to absolutely outlandish, they make for a varied lineup. It is packed by female-centered stories, from “Camp,” about a woman so dependent on her new friends that she fails to notice their sinister agenda, to “Beasts of Prey,” “Bugul Noz,” “Jane” or Canadian offering “Bloody Bunny” by Kat and Karissa Strain.

“There simply aren’t enough women in the film industry, especially the indie film scene in Canada, for us to draw on as mentors and collaborators. We hope ‘Bloody Bunny’ can play a part in the change we would like to see,” they said, calling it a film “for women by women.”

Mètis filmmaker Laura Tremblay will produce, while the directors...

[Still from Lucia Forner Segarra's Dana.] Every year, I look forward to seeing what the Fantasia programming team has curated for their many shorts programs, and every year since its inauguration, the Born of Woman shorts program has blown me away. This year's collection of women-directed short films is especially impressive, and is a benchmark in such showcases. This year, Fantasia highlights works from women creators in Canada, the U.S., Sweden, Italy, and France, often taking big swings that pay off quite well. Common themes are trauma, sexual violence, murder, assault, and revenge. These are the things we live through --- or not --- as women. First up is Lucid by Deanna Milligan, Canada. A little long at 17 minutes, but the film does need...

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