After Kane Parsons’ Backrooms and Curry Barker’s Obsession made box office history, Midnight Madness programmer Peter Kuplowsky has his own collection of Gen Z-fluent horror filmmakers competing to become Hollywood’s next horror film sensations for the major studios to fight over at the upcoming Toronto Film Festival.

Take debut feature director Joshua Giuliano who will open Kuplowsky’s late night thrills and spills showcase with a world premiere for River, a survival slasher that brings together modern scream queens Jane Levy and Jessica Rothe in a dark tale about three estranged siblings reuniting to scatter their late father’s ashes along a remote river, only to face a waking nightmare.

“The film begins as a domestic drama between siblings, and then ratchets into one of the most suspenseful films I’ve seen in years,” Kuplowsky told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of unveiling his 2026 Midnight Madness sidebar lineup on Thursday.

“This (film) feels very stripped down, very minimalist, and I could see it being in conversations with movies like Backrooms and Obssession because of how uncomplicated its machinations are. It is delivering on a very pure and primal genre experience and executed in a way that is going to elicit shrieks and screams and gasps from the audience,” he added.

River hits Kuplowsky’s sweet spot by beginning in one place — an estranged siblings drama — before the character conflicts and tension escalate and whip-saw the audience to the intended point of nerve-shredding engagement in Toronto. Midnight Madness also has a first look for Kick On, an action horror thriller from Nick Kozakis, and about a night of partying by four friends descending into a spiral of paranoia, violence and betrayals.

What might have been early on predictable for Kuplowsky with Kick On eventually turns wonderfully weird and deranged. “There’s a level of ultra-violence and commitment to just visceral gag after gag subjected onto the characters that is going to be a quite breathless experience at midnight” in Toronto, the veteran TIFF programmer added.

Other world premieres in the squishy and scary movie section include Anna Biller’s plague-haunted ghost story The Face of Horror, a follow-up to The Love Witch that stars Jonah Hauer-King, Kristine Froseth, Ellie Bamber, Bella Heathcote and Ben Radcliffe; and Eugene Kotlyarenko’s Vintage Violence, an action comedy set in Japan and starring Cole Sprouse as a social media influencer touting priceless jeans.

And Hollywood film buyers may want to stay up until the early morning hours in Toronto for films that bend more towards the absurd than jump scares, as with a world premiere for the latest film from Universal Language director Matthew Rankin, the documentary Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Brian Mulroney. His portrait of former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney is seen through the prism of TV appearances and other cultural touchestones.

“He’s not scary. I do think his movies are freaky and they’re bizarre,” Kuplowsky observed. The same holds true for Matt Barats, an actor and comedian known for roles in Cash Cow, Inspector Ike and White House Plumbers and who is bringing to Midnight Madness his directorial effort, the Anchors Aweigh comedy for an international premiere.

Midnight Madness also booked Half, a vampire martial arts action thriller out of India from Golam director Samjad, which Kuplowsky bills as “speaking to an Indian cultural context — a curry Western vampire hybrid” as it blends the grit of traditional spaghetti westerns with Bollywood themes.

There’s also an international premiere in Toronto after Venice for the Italian psychological thriller The Spiral from genre director Paolo Strippoli (A Classic Horror Story) and about a mother and daughter whose relationship spirals out of control after a shocking secret is spilled.

And there’s a North American bow for Sabu’s comedy Arrested Memory, which stars Taiwanese actor Ethan Juan and follows a detective with Alzheimer’s Disease. Midnight Madness will close with Moon director Duncan Jones’ Rogue Trooper, an animated comic book adaptation about a soldier, voiced by Aneurin Barnard, caught behind enemy lines with an offbeat platoon.

Shudder has already picked up the Midnight Madness opener River for its platform, with a theatrical release also planned. Otherwise, the remaining lineup are all acquisition titles up for grabs at TIFF.

But as Hollywood remains on the hunt for the next Obsession or Backrooms amid a gold rush for online creators, Kuplowsky argues studio execs need to look beyond what’s playing well on YouTube and other digital platforms to breakout horror filmmaking talent that understands genre movies and Gen Z audiences and who the major studios and streamers can work with.

“You should be asking who are the filmmakers that we think we’re excited about working with, rather than a film that is going to just recreate the formula to an exact T,” he argued. “With Obsession, the film absolutely worked with an audience, and think they (Focus Features) found the right way to bring it to an audience. And I hope they’ll continue to do that for films in the section,” Kuplowsky said of his Midnight Madness lineup.

The Toronto Film Festival is set to run Sept. 10 to 20.

The Zurich Film Festival will honor Oscar winner Martin McDonagh with its A Tribute To … Award in recognition of his outstanding contribution to cinema at its 22nd edition in September.

McDonagh will accept the award in person during a gala premiere of his upcoming black comedy Wild Horse Nine, starring John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits, and Parker Posey, following its world premiere in Venice.

“Martin McDonagh is one of the most exciting auteur filmmakers of his generation. He is a master of dark comedy and character writing…  His wonderfully curious characters never fail to draw us in, and he has a remarkable gift for manoeuvring them into absurd predicaments through screenplays of exceptional wit and precision,” said Christian Jungen, CEO of the Zurich Film Festival.

“McDonagh’s talent for eliciting complex and nuanced performances from his actors is a defining hallmark of his distinctive style. Wild Horse Nine is no exception and, in our view, one of the standout films of the season. We have had the privilege of screening several of Martin McDonagh’s earlier masterpieces, and we are delighted to honor his outstanding contribution to the art of cinema.”

Set shortly before the 1973 Chilean coup, Wild Horse Nine stars Malkovich and Rockwell as CIA agents Chris and Lee who set out to Easter Island from Santiago, where they are stationed alongside their boss and bureau chief, MJ (Buscemi). Amongst the Island’s iconic statues, as the longtime partners wrestle with their dark pasts and present conspiracies, Chris’s newfound bond with a pair of rebellious students, played by Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas, threatens to send everyone’s trip to this remote paradise sideways.

London-born filmmaker and playwright McDonagh gained attention behind the camera with his Academy Award–winning short Six Shooter, before going on to direct and write critically acclaimed features In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and The Banshees of Inisherin.

Past recipients of Zurich’s A Tribute To … Award include Noah Baumbach, Edward Berger, Paolo Sorrentino, Wim Wenders, Olivier Assayas, Claire Denis, Michael Haneke, Oliver Stone, Maïwenn and Luca Guadagnino.

The 22nd Zurich Film Festival runs from September 24 to October 4.

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav says staffers are working “extremely hard” and staying focused despite uncertainty about the fate of the company’s pending merger with Paramount.

Speaking to Wall Street analysts on the company’s second-quarter earnings call, Zaslav said he had assumed “it was going to be quite challenging” for employees to tune out the noise and maintain morale. But during visits in recent weeks to various European offices, Zaslav, said, he was struck by the “work ethic” he encountered.

“The overall culture of this company and the work ethic of the company has been inspiring,” Zaslav said. “The focus has been that this is a great company, and that how do we take advantage of every day we’re here and try and focus on the best performance possible, but also this idea of, what stories will we tell?”

Announced in February, the $110 billion merger drew lawsuits last month from attorneys general of 12 states as well as the Writers Guild of America. The suits contend the transaction violates antitrust laws, with the WGA also arguing it will harm entertainment workers. A judge this week set a March trial date, leaving both companies to soldier on in the meantime, barring an out-of-court settlement.

“We’ve been trying to drive the value of the company to deliver to PSKY and to [CEO David Ellison] the best company possible,” Zaslav replied when asked about the potential scenario of the deal falling apart and WBD resuming its prior plan to split into two companies. “The company is performing at a very high level. And we have every expectation that the transaction will close, and that the company will be performing even better than the plan that we presented to PSKY when we did our deal.”

Prior to his comments, WBD reported lackluster results for the second quarter, with revenue sandbagged by summer movie flop Supergirl and the lack of NBA telecasts.

If the Paramount deal does end up being completed, it will give Warner its fourth corporate owner in the past decade. Successive acquisitions by AT&T and Discovery Communications have not been fruitful despite the company controlling prestige assets like Warner Bros., HBO and CNN.

Recent media reports have indicated that executives at WBD, as is often the case at companies about to be acquired, are exploring their career options rather than waiting and taking their chances with new management. In what many observers considered a warning shot, the company last month sued Amazon for allegedly poaching HBO marketing executive Pia Barlow. The lawsuit accused the tech giant of “hurriedly seeking to pirate away a number of contracted employees” from WBD.

“It has been challenging, and our focus has been, how do we drive a stronger company, meet and exceed our business plan, and deliver a stronger and higher-growth company, to PSKY and David,” Zaslav said on the earnings call. He added that he was impressed by “the way this company is performing, and you look at the close to 40,000 people coming in every day.”

It is “unusual,” Zaslav continued, for energy levels to sustain during a period of corporate tumult. “We’re lucky, and I think that we have an unusual set of employees that really love these assets. As long as we’re here, we’re gonna be working hard every day.”