Toronto After Dark Film Festival: Zombies, Anyone? This Scardy Cat Soldiers Forth

The Zombies were out yesterday for the Toronto After Dark Film Festival (TAD). Showing its filial love of Zombies, TAD offered half-priced tickets to screenings of the Norweigan Nazi zombie film, Dead Snow, and the American zombie buddy comedy, The Revenant. Many Zombies accepted the offer and could be seen shuffling into the Bloor Cinema in pairs and groups.

As you know, I'm a self-confessed Scardy Cat, so I wasn't sure if I could make it through Dead Snow. Yes, I love zombies, and horror comedies, but I didn't want to embarrass myself in the midst of hard-core TAD-goers, so I was a bit aprehensive. Well, I didn't have to worry. Not only wasn't I the only Scardy Cat there, it was comfortingly cathartic to sit in a sold-out 800 plus seat theatre with people who really love their genre films.

Dead Snow is a Norweigian film about a group of med students who go to a remote cabin in the mountains for Easter break. Their cell phones don't work, they have hiked 45 minutes from their parking spots to the cabin, but all's good because they're in gorgeous, a pristine setting and they have beer. Well, they also find some Nazi gold and have incurred the icy wrath of an undead Nazi army. In classic horror movie mode the students start dying one by one, and that's when the gore and gaffaws start. Yes, I was scared, but I was also cheering along with the capacity crowd as the intestines stretched and blood splattered--really, what else can you do when someone is hanging on to dear life by zombie entrails?

The film will be released in North America, so look out for it. Advice to Scardy Cats like me: yes, you can take it. This film is up there with another favourite, the scary, employee team-building comedy, Severance--sorry, no zombies in that one, but there is a severed head and other nasty killings.

Zombie friends (left to right), Colin, Kenneth, and Roland, distracted from seeing their Zombie cousins on screen by the lure of as-yet-uncoooked meat at Acme Burger, paused in their pursuits to pose for me. Since my flesh was being fried by the 34-degree sun, I did not appeal to them and so was spared disembowelment.

Info: www.torontoafterdark.com Tickets are $12/$10 students (with proof of student status)

Photo Credit: Dead Snow photo courtesy of TAD; photos of Zombie Friends by donna g (thanks guys).