By Wes Frank
Inside TIFF’s Midnight Madness, where the crowd is half the show.
Every hobby has a moment where it stops being something you do and becomes somewhere you belong. Mine came right around midnight on King Street West, when more than a thousand strangers yelled “Arrr!” at an anti-piracy warning and I couldn’t stop laughing. These were my people. I just hadn’t met them yet.
Let me back up.
I came to movies late. But once I was in, I was all the way in, and for a new movie buff in Ontario, TIFF is the big one. You see films before they’re released. You rub shoulders with celebrities. And you might be in the room the night a future cult classic is born, which is less hypothetical than it sounds. Last year a small horror movie called Obsession premiered in TIFF’s Midnight Madness program, sold to Focus Features for a reported $15 million and went on to gross close to half a billion dollars. Everyone in that theatre gets to say they saw it first, forever. I wanted in on that.
I went to four screenings this year. Three of them were Midnight Madness. Those are the ones I can’t stop talking about.
The after-party of film festivals
If TIFF’s gala premieres are the wedding ceremony, Midnight Madness is the after-party, the one where the ties come off and somebody’s uncle ends up in the pool. It’s the festival’s late-night genre program: ten nights of horror, action and gleeful weirdness, every screening starting at 11:59 p.m. at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, a 1907 playhouse that TIFF itself describes as allegedly haunted. (Of course it is.)
The crowd is completely unhinged, and I mean that as the highest compliment available. Picture a playoff crowd where everyone came for the decapitations. They hoot through the pre-show. They holler at every kill. And they have rituals.
Ritual one: when the anti-piracy warning hits the screen, the whole theatre yells “Arrr!” in unison, like a room full of pirates. It’s a long-running TIFF tradition, and the midnight crowd commits to it completely. Ritual two: during the “that’s a wrap” volunteer promo, the girl on screen signs off with “It’s a burrito,” and a thousand adults scream it along with her like it’s the chorus of “Sweet Caroline.” None of this should be funny. All of it is. The rowdier the room got, the harder I laughed.
A regular premiere asks you to sit quietly and appreciate. Midnight Madness asks you to join in. It’s more of an experience than a screening, and if you’re a horror junkie, I 100% recommend it.
The midnight advantage (and the 4 a.m. bill)
An underrated perk of seeing movies at midnight: Toronto is asleep. I drive in from Kitchener, which usually means traffic, a parking hunt and a rate that makes you question your life choices. At that hour, none of it applies. No traffic. A lot directly behind the theatre with open spots every time I went. I was in and out like a bank heist.
But every perk sends a bill, and this one arrives around 4 a.m. Do the math: a five-minute intro with the director and the host (programmer Peter Kuplowsky), 90-plus minutes of movie, a 30-minute Q&A, then the drive home. The movies start on time. They just don’t end anywhere near your bedtime. Some nights I wasn’t in bed until four. Worth it, but go in with your eyes open, since they’ll need to stay that way.
About that giant line outside
The first thing you’ll notice at the theatre is a line. A long one, with people camped on the sidewalk like it’s a sneaker drop. It was there for every one of my screenings, and it took me a while to figure out what it was for.
It’s the Rush line, and it works like flying standby. When a screening sells out, people without tickets wait outside. About 15 minutes before showtime, staff count the empty seats and sell them to whoever is at the front. Nobody in that line is guaranteed a thing, which explains why it’s always far longer than the number of seats that open up.
Now the part that matters if you’re holding a ticket: one of those empty seats could be yours. TIFF’s own rule of thumb is that 15 minutes early already counts as late, and if you get turned away for being late, there’s no refund. So think of your ticket as a reservation with a deadline. The upside of the system is a theatre that’s always packed, which is half the fun. The downside is that you can lose your seat no matter what you paid for it. Be early. It’s the cheapest insurance in the city.
I was early every time and walked straight in. About 30 minutes before each screening, the cast does a red carpet right outside the theatre and poses for photos. For a guy from Kitchener, it was a legitimately cool dose of Hollywood.
One seating note, learned the hard way. The Royal Alex opened in 1907, and the dress circle seems to have been built for people from 1907. It’s tight, and my legs were sore by the time the credits rolled. The orchestra level is roomier with a much better view, and that’s where my money is going from now on.
After the credits, the director, the cast and some of the crew come out for a Q&A. A few of them had trouble putting their thoughts into words, and I get it. All three of my midnight films were world premieres, so the actors were watching the finished movie for the first time right alongside us, in front of a screaming crowd, well past 1 a.m. I’d be speechless too.
What I watched
Four movies: three at midnight, one at the Scotiabank Theatre.
River was my favourite. It’s a slasher from first-time director Joshua Giuliano, and it opened this year’s Midnight Madness. Three siblings (Jane Levy of Evil Dead, Jessica Rothe of Happy Death Day and Max Mattern) take their late father’s boat down the river to scatter his ashes. The boat breaks down. They’re stranded. And somewhere out there is a masked killer who appears to be doing this purely for the love of the game. It’s quick, it’s fun and it’s practically begging for a sequel.
Kick On is an Australian action thriller from director Nick Kozakis, who has said he wanted it to hit like “John Wick cracked out on meth.” Four friends get thrown out of a club, go looking for coke to keep the night alive and end up trapped in the apartment of a mob boss’s son with no way out. There’s a lesson in there about knowing when to call it a night.
Half, from director Samjad, is a gory vampire action movie out of India and a small piece of history: it’s the first Malayalam-language film ever to play Midnight Madness. A twin brother and sister, both half-vampires, hunt down the highway crooks who robbed them and ended their human lives. The fight choreography comes from Very Tri Yulisman of The Raid 2.
The Surgeon was my Scotiabank screening. Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh plays a brilliant, recently retired surgeon who gets kidnapped and forced to operate on a crime boss (Martin Freeman). Once she realizes nobody plans on letting her leave alive, the scalpel comes out. It’s an Irish production, shot in Dublin, and it was written and directed by Roshan Sethi, a practising oncologist in real life, which explains a lot about the surgical detail.
The Scotiabank had a completely different energy. It felt polished and professional. Midnight Madness felt grimy by comparison, which is exactly the point.
Next year
I’m already plotting. The plan: get a TIFF membership, rent a place in the city for a few days and do this properly. Hunting for last-minute tickets is a grind, and members get to buy before the public, which means first dibs on the exact movies I want in the exact seats I want. (Orchestra. Always orchestra.)
On day one I got talking to a former Blumhouse producer who told me he’d watched 15 movies at the festival the year before, sometimes several in a single day. Some people would call that exhausting. I call it the dream.
I went to TIFF to watch movies. I came home having found the people who watch them the way I do. See you at 11:59.
Wes Frank writes at wesfrank.com. He also runs WesGPT (@WesGPT), a YouTube channel with 65K subscribers where he builds AI agents for people and companies looking to automate their work and life.
Photos by: Wes Frank