For the first time, TIFF is awarding a top prize to a Midnight Madness selection. Announced moments ago in a conference room at the Hotel Intercontinental, the recipient of the Midnight Madness Cadillac People's Choice Award is Sean Byrne's The Loved Ones, the 'Dark Horse' of this year's lineup.

There was heavy competition, from neo-noir vampires in Daybreakers -- which was the runner-up for the award -- incubated demons in [REC]2, stop-motion toys on amphetamines in A Town Called Panic and absolute absurdism in Symbol. But as far as the Midnight Madness audience is concerned, Byrne's tale from down under tugged, pulled and stabbed at the heart-strings of the audience. With a fork.

It's an unprecented move for a genre film to receive such accolades at one of the world's most prestigious film fests, and we're hoping it leads to a bright future for this fresh, fun and gory film. The MM blogging team wishes to congratulate Sean Byrne and his entire cast and crew for this award.

This just in from Sean Byrne himself:

"I just received the best wake-up call of my life informing me THE LOVED ONES had received the Midnight Madness Audience Choice Award (and I'm still pinching myself!).  The MM audience is the most educated, passionate and hardcore horror audience I've ever encountered, which makes receiving this award an especially great honor.  Team LOVED ONES thanks Colin for hunting down our 'darkhorse', his team of bloggers for so kindly spreading the word and, finally, we thank you, the MM audience for voting for us!!!  You ROCK!!!  I can't wait to come back with another film that goes straight for the jugular!  Sweet dreams!!!"

Sean Byrne (Writer/Director, THE LOVED ONES)

In the video below, MM programmer Colin Geddes shares details on the long selection process for this year's films. But this year the Madness goes well beyond Midnight! He's programmed a large selection of films in other categories, like Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Johnnie To's Vengeance, Gaspar Noe's Enter The Void, among others. 

Yet another set of Midnight Madness picks, courtesy of Brad Miska of Bloody Disgusting:

Another year, another 10 incredible genre film selections, Midnight Madness is the pinnacle of my year. Forget any other film festival, the Toronto International Film Festival is so jammed-packed that even the MM line-up overflows into the full festival. One of most exciting parts of our coverage is that every year Colin asks me to tell him my 3 most anticipated films and why, which leaves me staring blankly at the full line-up for about an hour trying to make up my mind. While each and every film has a special something about it, there were three films this year that stood out from the pack and are a MUST for ol’ Bloody Disgusting.  More...

More Madness picks, this time from Tim League, founder of Fantastic Fest and the Alamo Drafthouse!

A Town Called Panic

I became a fan of the Belgian TV version of this show since I first heard of it on Twitch. Watch a few of the original language episodes online and this will only marginally prepare you for the manic, surreal adventure that awaits. This stuff is pure brilliance.

Symbol

Japanese TV comedy legend Hitoshi Matsumoto's BIG MAN JAPAN was one of my favorite films from 2 years ago at midnight madness and he's back with more jaw-dropping insanity with SYMBOL. You will never guess where this outlandishly bizarre film will lead.

REC 2

Spanish directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza blazed onto the scene in 2007 with the knuckle-biting, lo-fi zombie mock-doc REC. I've yet to see the full film, but the operatic trailer literally raised goose-bumps on my arms when I first saw it. I can't wait to check it out.

We are graced with the presence of the great Grady Hendrix: writer, raconteur, programmer of the New York Asian Film Festival, and always, always the coolest guy in the room. There's this rumour going 'round that TIFF ends on the 19th of September, but make no mistake -- TIFF ends whenever Grady leaves Toronto. Here's what he thinks you should see:


MIDNIGHT MADNESS PICKS

ONG BAK 2 - on-set shenanigans reached critical mass during the shooting of teeny tiny action star, Tony Jaa's, big fat directorial debut. The production went massively over budget, the shooting schedule stretched on into infinity and Jaa vanished at one point, rumored to be visiting a guru in the forest, or praying in seclusion, or hiding with his parents. Midnight deals were made, negotiations were presided over by police chiefs, and kidnap rumors swirled until everyone hugged and made up and Jaa agreed to go back to work. The resulting film is a jungley fever dream, as primitive as the pounding of the tom toms, full of leering close-ups and populated by a gallery of grotesques, like something Guy Maddin would have nightmares about after an evening spent watching Thai action films and eating spicy sausages. Massive and inarguable, ONG BAK 2 is a dreadnaught of a movie that crushes everything in its path. Is it good? That's debatable. But is it entertaining? Aw, hell yeah.

A TOWN CALLED PANIC - Midnight Madness usually seems to play host to Asian action movies, gory horror flicks or satirical send-ups of fanboy genres like gory horror flicks or Asian action movies. So when a straight-up surrealist comedy like A TOWN CALLED PANIC comes along it needs people to buy tickets. Produced by the French, A TOWN CALLED PANIC almost completely erases classic French fuck ups like the Maginot Line from memory and it's tenser than PSYCHO, more romantic than CASABLANCA and has far less Bruce Willis than ARMAGGEDON. Rescuing stop motion animation from the twee hands of Henry Selick, ATCP is the kind of movie that lives on in your brain after you see it like a happy memory. Or a tumor.

SYMBOL - what's the matter with Japan? Why are Japanese people so weird? Unknown. But further investigation is required. Said investigation begins with SYMBOL, a further spelunking into the fifth dimension after movies like THE TASTE OF TEA or FUNKY FOREST: THE FIRST CONTACT. Hitoshi Matsumoto previously directed DAI NIPPONJIN, a movie that never got hailed the way it should have since it was, after all, a masterpiece. Deciding to go for a full-on attack on audiences, Matsumoto has taken off the gloves and now refuses to play nice, blasting our faces with the kind of surrealist crazy-pants filmmaking that leaves audiences thinking, ZOMG JAPAN!!! Plus, masked wrestlers.


FAVE FOUR NOT IN MIDNIGHT MADNESS

ACCIDENT - Soi Cheang is the best Hong Kong director you've never heard of. Starting out shooting digital video doodles before his deeply moving gothic gentrification romance, DIAMOND HILL, broke him into the mainstream he went on to do horror (HORROR HOTLINE: BIG HEAD MONSTER) and action (DOG BITE DOG) giving everything his own brutal stamp and rich visuals. Now comes ACCIDENT, produced and given an impeccable high production value sheen by, Johnnie To (VENGEANCE) and it's a movie that has been in post-production seemingly forever. Starring the under-rated and overly-tanned Louis Koo and the vampirically sexy Richie Jen, it's about hitmen who make their hits look like accidents, before they start having accidents themselves. With a soundtrack by the incomparable Xavier Jamaux (SPARROW) if it's not one of the best Hong Kong movies of the year, it's certainly going to be one of the best looking.

BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS - Weirdo Herzog remakes Abel "No One in America Will Finance My Movies" Ferara's BAD LIEUTENANT? Done. Especially since crying, naked, penis-flashing Harvey Keitel has been replaced by Nic Cage and His Amazing Hair Plugs. Shot to look like a Lifetime Movie, this promises to be an eyeball scorcher. Any movie that contains the line, "Shoot him again, his soul is still dancing," deserves to be the break-out, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE-sized hit of this year's TIFF.

VALHALLA RISING - Nicholas Winding Refn made the PUSHER trilogy and for that alone he is a God. But now he's turned his attention to Vikings who, as we all know, are the new pirates, who were the new ninjas, who were the new aliens, who were the new robots, who were the new vikings (waaaay back in 1955). So it all comes full circle. Misty, muddy, bloody and bare-knuckled, VALHALLA RISING isn't just the greatest name for a death metal band ever. It's also one of the best-looking movies in this year's TIFF line-up.

BARE ESSENCE OF LIFE - the bloodless write-up on the TIFF website doesn't even start to indicate how strange and great this movie is. Kenichi Matsuyama, the teen heartthrob from DEATH NOTE and DETROIT METAL CITY, plays a retarded farmer who falls in love with a teacher who just moved to his hick town from Tokyo. A completely boring opening 45 minutes lulls you to sleep before the movie begins to throw brain removal, ghosts and more at your face. Despite how boring it seems, it's one of the weirder movies in this year's TIFF and it deserves something - tap-dancing dogs in front of the theater, a big awesome poster, good word of mouth - to lure audiences in.

More Madness Picks -- this time from Rue Morgue Magazine's Managing Editor Dave Alexander. He programs Rue Morgue's monthly Cinemacabre screenings at the Bloor Cinema and also runs MSN's Blogtastic Voyage, where he just ripped Halloween II a new one.

"I guess I just can’t get enough of the undead, because this year’s Midnight Madness line-up has me excited about zombies and vampires:

George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead

You aren’t much of a horror fan if you aren’t excited about the idea of a new George A. Romero zombie movie, and, following the Toronto-shot Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead (another MM premiere, of course), Survival drops the first-person camera conceit of Diary but remains set in the same world. Sounds good to me.

As a huge fan of dusters (J.T. Petty’s horror-western hybrid The Burrowers was one of my favourite MM movies), I’m particularly intrigued by this one because Romero has described as being basically “a western.” Horses, gut-munching, headshots and cowboy hats – giddy-up!

[REC 2]

Even when his films don’t completely work for me (I’m thinking of Darkness and Fragile), there are still fantastic moments in Jaume Balagueró’s movies – usually ones where terrifying things are creeping around in the dark.

When he teamed up with Paco Plaza to make [REC] everything seemed to fall into place and the result was a tight little zombie movie with loads of tension and claustrophobic scares. I’m up for round two of that, especially with a midnight crowd.

(And, if you want to see some of the best stuff that both of these guys have done, I recommend 6 Films to Keep You Awake, which is sort of the Spanish version of Masters of Horror – each of them has a fun horror film in the series.)

Daybreakers

Australia’s Sperig Twins made a name for themselves with 2003’s Undead, a zombie movie with big ideas and a polished look that was much bigger than their budget would suggest. Now they’ve got a more dough, more experience and stars such as Ethan Hawke, Willem DaFoe and Sam Neill, so it’s time to what they can do after six year of working on the project.

Plot-wise, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi vampire movie about humans as endangered species in a society where bloodsuckers run the show has loads of possibility. And the twins aren’t afraid to get gory, so at the very least I expect to see some gratuitous bloodshed and exploding vamps."

Yikes! It's been a fast, crazy year and TIFF is finally upon us. While you'll soon hear about the goings-on behind the scenes and my take on some of the films playing at Midnight, I'll spare you for now. Instead, I'm curious to know what everyone else is excited about. Over the next ten days I'll be checking in with local writers and genre industry folk to see what kind of midnight snacks they plan on cooking up.

Jason Anderson writes for EYE Weekly (among numerous other outlets), where his review of Polytechnique accounts for one of the best things I read this year. Word on the street is that he once got into a fist-fight with Lee Marvin and lived to tell the tale. That story intimidates me so I've never asked him to confirm or deny. Instead, I asked for his Top Three Picks:

1. George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead: I'm hoping George's zombie epic no. 6 is like Temptation Island... except the contestants eat each other!

2. Symbol: Looks set to be a combination of Dai Nipponjin and Beckett's Endgame -- and they said it couldn't be done!

3. [REC] 2: I demand the very shakiest of shaky-cams!

What films are you most looking forward to?