TIFF Announces Midnight Madness Slate

Midnight Madness, presented by Intrepid Travel, returns to TIFF with its signature slate of wicked wonders that are sure to delight and disturb the Festival’s devoted and raucous late-night crowd. The section closes out each night of the Festival with 11:59pm screenings at the (possibly) haunted Royal Alexandra Theatre, where the nocturnal faithful gather to…

Caroline C Ryan

July 24, 2025

2–3 minutes

Midnight Madness, presented by Intrepid Travel, returns to TIFF with its signature slate of wicked wonders that are sure to delight and disturb the Festival’s devoted and raucous late-night crowd. The section closes out each night of the Festival with 11:59pm screenings at the (possibly) haunted Royal Alexandra Theatre, where the nocturnal faithful gather to bear witness to the very best and most bizarre in contemporary genre and shock cinema. The 2025 edition features seven World Premieres and is bookended by two of the year’s most acclaimed midnight comedies courtesy of some seriously funny Canadians.

Midnight Madness opens with the Canadian Premiere of Matt Johnson’s Toronto-set Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Based on Johnson’s cult Viceland series, this hysterical, death-defying time-travel caper earned a standing ovation and a coveted Midnighter Audience Award at this past spring’s SXSW. Deeply steeped in late-aughts Toronto lore, its hometown screening is anticipated to levitate audiences into high orbit from the infectious laughter alone.

The closing film is Dead Lover, a zany, macabre horror-comedy from Canadian director Grace Glowicki. This madcap phantasmagoria has been celebrated in festival midnight sections around the world, and fittingly concludes its tour in Toronto as a welcome addition to the Midnight Madness canon.

The Festival’s wild side also features World Premieres of Normal, the latest shoot-’em-up from 2016 Midnight Madness People’s Choice Award recipient Ben Wheatley; Dust Bunny, the darkly whimsical directorial debut of prolific television showrunner Bryan Fuller (Hannibal, Pushing Daisies); and Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious, a frenetic martial arts thriller that assembles some of the genre’s fiercest fighters (whose combined credits include The Raid, Chocolate, and Everything Everywhere All at Once). Midnight Madness devotees can expect these star-studded genre thrills to complement the lineup’s bold independent visions, including Curry Barker’s terrifying Obsession, Aleksandar Radivojević’s profane thriller Karmadonna, Takahide Hori’s imaginative stop-motion fantasia JUNK WORLD, and perhaps the two most berserk alt-comedies to ever play the section: Nick Corirossi and Armen Weitzman’s The Napa Boys and Todd Rohal’s Fuck My Son!