Interviews
[TIFF] Meet the New Midnight Madness Programmer, Peter Kuplowsky!
“I probably end up looking at well over 300 films for the section.”
Horror fans who have yet to experience Midnight Madness should add it to their bucket list. It’s easily one of the most accessible genre festivals in the world held in a massive theater with over 1,000 other genre maniacs. We’ve been blessed to have been covering the Toronto International Film Festival’s genre program since Alex Aja’s High Tension premiered in 2003. We were even more blessed to have such a gracious host in Colin Geddes, who was the Midnight Madness programmer for 20 years, building it up from scratch. With Geddes moving on to work with AMC’s Shudder, he was replaced by Peter Kuplowsky, who has been by Geddes’ side for years. TIFF’s Midnight Madness is one of the most important horror events of the
TIFF’s Midnight Madness is one of the most important horror events of the year, and being that there’s have a new face behind the program, we here at Bloody Disgusting thought it would be exciting to speak to him about his rise to power.
Kuplowsky is a film curator, content producer, writer and hat enthusiast based in Toronto. Since 2005, he has established a career championing genre cinema and outsider art at various international film festivals, including Toronto After Dark, Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, and the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness program. Over the past few years, Kuplowsky has helped develop and produce a number of critically acclaimed short and feature films with emerging filmmakers that he supported on the festival circuit as a programmer. His credits as a producer include Manborg (2011), the concluding segment Z is for Zygote in the anthology film The ABCs of Death: Part 2 (2014), The Interior (2015), The Void (2016), and the short film adaptation of Dave Eggers short story Your Mother and I (2016).
“Having worked with Colin Geddes on the last four editions as his programming associate, it was a very organic transition and my overall strategy wasn’t too dissimilar to how Midnight has been programmed in the past,” Kuplowsky tells us about how he approached taking the helm. “A bulk of the work is navigating the festivals and markets leading up to the summer (Berlinale, SXSW, Cannes) and tracking titles by reading trades and checking in with sales agents and Industry peers. Of course, there’s also the roughly 200 submissions that are sent to TIFF that specifically request Midnight Madness consideration (the fest overall receives thousands more). Between direct submissions and the films I am tracking, I probably end up looking at well over 300 films for the section.
“One challenge I had this year was that the submission pool for Midnight substantially ballooned with the retirement of the Vanguard programme. Some of the films that would have historically gone to Vanguard were now vying for Midnight, and I wanted to find a home for them, while still preserving a “midnight” sensibility.”
The Crescent image courtesy of TIFF
Even though Geddes has moved on, Kuplowsky still conferred with his mentor on this year’s epic lineup, which includes Downrange, The Crescent, The Ritual, Revenge and more.
“I conferred with Colin more than a few times while putting together this lineup, and it helped reinforce some of the lessons he had imparted to me as his programme associate. He taught me that it’s important to remember that as much as a programme should and will reflect a curator’s personal sensibilities, the audience’s interests and expectations should always be taken into account. When I was first pre-screening for Colin, I was sometimes quick to negatively judge a film that didn’t align with my own proclivities and Colin would often wisely remind me to put a film in the context of their intended audience. That what might not work on a small-screen by yourself might actually play gangbusters on the big-screen and in front of 1200 people. I definitely have tried to keep that in mind while arriving at my final 10 this year.”
Kuplowsky speaks to what we can expect from this year’s program:
“Midnight Madness is actually not strictly a “genre” programme, and never really has been – Dazed and Confused, Dogtown and the Z-Boys, Borat are all Midnight Madness alumni,” he points out. “I decided to continue that tradition by including films about alternative subcultures and outsiders like Bodied and The Disaster Artist. The former has a transgressive, electric edge that I think will charge an artist, the latter is a hilarious, but sincere celebration/exploration of a filmmaker that the “midnight movie” community has come to embrace in recent years.
The Disaster Artist, courtesy of TIFF
“Furthermore, when it comes to the genre films I have included, one can expect to see a lot of experimentation with form and style,” he adds. “I suppose you could describe Let the Corpses Tan as a kind of western, but directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani collide so many disparate techniques and images that I guarantee you’ve never seen anything quite like it. Ditto, for The Crescent, which applies a very unconventional approach to a traditional haunted house film.
“Also, expect a rare break in tradition: I’ll be starting ONE Midnight Madness selection before Midnight: Brawl in Cellblock 99, he reveals. “I think the film escalates to an absolutely deranged climax that’s kind of reminiscent of The Story of Riki-Oh but for the first hour it is more of a sober crime drama. In fact, I don’t think it really becomes a true “midnight movie” until the hour and 7 minute mark exactly, so, therefore, I have decided to start my intro at 10:45 PM and the film at 10:53 PM, so that that when the clock strikes Midnight, so does the movie!”
Kuplowsky also reflected back to some of his favorite Midnight Madness presentations:
“The first Midnight Madness screening I ever attended was SPL in 2005 and it remains among the most memorable screenings. I was so in awe of the audience’s energy and enthusiasm, and that Sammo Hung was actually there on stage with Colin really blew my mind.
He continued, “I’m an ardent fan of Asian cinema so The Host, Symbol, The Raid, and Why Don’t You Play in Hell? are definitely among my favourites. I also vividly remember the premiere of Stuart Gordon’s Stuck and rushing the stage with a clamshell of Robot Jox in hand. Colin saw me and generously ushered Stuart Gordon my way for him to autograph it with both his signature and the immortal motto “crash and burn”. (Thank you Colin!)”
Ritual image courtesy of TIFF
“As I mentioned, I’m really happy with what I think is a programme that has a rather diverse range of sensibilities and aesthetics, but I’m particularly excited about the emerging filmmakers,” he says of what he’s most proud of. “Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge is a really promising debut, and I’m so thrilled for David Bruckner to finally get a crack a feature film with The Ritual after a decade of absolutely stellar anthology segments. Ditto for Sôichi Umezawa whose Vampire Clay is his first feature after years of working an FX makeup artist in Japan – genre fans might be familiar with his amazing segment in ABCs of Death 2: Y is for Youth.
“I have a lot affinity for Seth A. Smith’s The Crescent too. I think it is among my biggest risks in the section since it is a slow-burn horror that forgoes traditional shocks for an eerie atmosphere and psychedelic imagery. In an earlier iteration of TIFF it would probably have been a Vanguard, but then again Eraserhead is one of the original Midnight films, and so I don’t think “midnight cinema” need always be high-energy shocks and thrills. It can be something more deliberately paced and quietly surreal.”
Who is Peter Kuplowsky, really? He tells us his own personal favorite horror films:
“The Haunting (1963) and Alien are perennial favourites,” he reveals, “as well as anything directed by Larry Cohen and John Carpenter. As far as eccentric deep cuts go, I’m a big fan of The Carrier, 3615 Code Père Nöel and Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You. I adore Nobuhiko’s Obayashi’s Hausu and think The Collector and The Collection should be regarded as contemporary American horror classics.
The 42nd Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 7 to 17, 2017.
Festival ticket packages start at $105. See all the Midnight Madness films using your 10-ticket regular flex pack. Purchase packages online at tiff.net/tickets, by phone (416.599.TIFF or 1.888.599.8433), or in person at TIFF Bell Lightbox until August 13 while quantities last.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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