Content Warning: You can probably guess this after having clicked through the image attached to this post, but there are some images contained in this article that are not safe for work. Or at least my work. If these images are acceptable to be viewed at your work then I envy you, Reader.

Though it falls between the more high-profile film festivals like Cannes, Sundance, Venice, and Toronto, the Fantasia International Film Festival that happens every summer in Montreal always plays a large part in setting the tone for horror for the upcoming twelve months by highlighting some of the most anticipated films from all over the world. It was the first place I saw films like Skinamarink, where I was first introduced to the wonderful work and DIY sensibility of the Adams family (who picked up the Audience Award for their newest film, Mother of Flies, this year), and which has informed my tastes and my own horror tics for years. Covering it as press, it’s become a summer tradition to touch down virtually in Montreal and avail myself of its delights, even–and especially–if they tend towards the creepy and cringe*. 

To look at some of the selections in this year’s 29th edition of Fantasia, you might discern that the year to come in horror is an especially filthy one, and that’s true of two selections in particular – Becca Kozak’s Sugar Rot and Annapurna Sriram’s Fucktoys. These are debut features for both filmmakers, that – even more than the stuff I usually watch – I would wait until the kids are long asleep to fire up, lest I have some complicated explanations to make. But nevertheless, they’re two films that I think I would be proud for them to watch and dissect when they’re just a bit older.  

Becca Kozak is not fucking around in her new film, Sugar Rot, but it might outwardly appear as though she is. Literally candy-coated, but employing literally stomach turning gore and depictions of violence and brazen sexual assault, Kozak’s portrayal of a girl named Candy whose pregnancy is slowly transforming her into ice cream gives new meaning to the term ‘sickly sweet.’ Sugar Rot is a relentless onslaught of sweet sensory saturation, and when every scene layers bitterness, sourness, and subversion on top of that hot pink sundae it provokes a particularly effective revulsion in me.  There is just something about, and I hope I’m not alone in this, voraciously consuming one’s own bodily excretions that just plain gives me the ick.

Candy (Chloë MacLeod) works two jobs – by day as an ice cream slinger at the town’s sweet treat emporium Sugar Rot, and by night as a stripper deemed both too fat and too flat (neither criticism being warranted, because they never are) to earn much money or a primetime shift onstage. In both workplaces, Candy is subject to relentless ridicule and pressure to make herself more attractive to men. Sugar Rot is owned and operated by Barbie (Michela Ross) who is married to the town’s plastic surgeon, Dr Herschell Gordon (Charles Lysne) and avails herself of his treatments on a seemingly recreational basis. She is constantly harping on Candy to do the same. Until one day when Candy is sexually assaulted by town’s creepy ice cream delivery man. This catalyzes a transformation in Candy where she is impregnated with…something that is also causing her to embody the “you are what you eat” cliche and first excrete and then become a syrupy ice-cream-like substance. This makes her irresistible to everyone she encounters and she is slavered over by everyone in town, particularly men. And when Candy’s only option for an abortion is Dr. Gordon, who has moral objections to the procedure despite filling his own wife with all manner of unholy silicone-based augmentations, she’s left with no choice but to see the pregnancy through.

Sugar Rot is, more than anything, a Pepto-pink pipe bomb that immolates its audience in ice cream, blood, slime, and any number of other fluids in the name of blowing up the patriarchy and the male gaze. Everywhere that Candy finds herself in Kozak’s film, she’s glowered at until the creepy guys and gals that literally objectify her and, rabid for a taste, force their way in and start literally consuming her. MacLeod brings a hard-edged softness to the character that feels appropriate for a protagonist that has to endure the physical and emotional trauma and bullshit that Candy does. Tough and resistant to the pressures of a patriarchal society while also showing her vulnerability to its insidious charms, temptations, and aggressions of both the micro and macro varieties.

Nigel Joycey’s cinematography is all too happy to put you way too close to the grotesquery on display, and Kozak’s colour palette is filled with bright shades that are giving Lisa Frank energy even as the things you’re watching are objectively repulsive. Soundtrack-wise, Sugar Rot is packed wall-to-wall with Canadian punk like Dayglo Abortions and Daddy Issues, the latter of whom play themselves and perform in the film. It feels extremely DIY, as you’d want a punk-forward movie to be. There’s also a kind of hopelessness and inevitability to the proceedings that drops the film squarely into horror territory, no matter how bright the colours are.

Being the kind of forward-thinking sicko that I am, I double-featured Sugar Rot with Annapurna Sriram’s Fucktoys and that turned out to be the best Fantasia-related decision I have made in a while. Fucktoys is a film so relentlessly chaotic that it will shuffle your brain like a well-used deck of tarot cards. Just like Sugar Rot it owes some of its aesthetic and tone to the work and grindhouse sensibilities of John Waters, Gregg Araki, and Russ Meyers but is also very much its own unclassifiable thing.  At a breakneck pace of only 100 minutes and immeasurable conceptual and physical ground to cover, it seems impossibly stuffed to the point of excess. But if you know me, that’s exactly how I like it.

Sriram is the lead in her film, playing AP, a sex worker who plies her trade in the burnt-out post-apocalyptic Louisiana of Trashtown that evokes nothing so much as Rachel Talalay’s magnificent and criminally underrated Tank Girl (1995), a personal favourite. AP gets her tarot read by local mystic and rapper Big Freedia and is informed that she’s afflicted with a curse that will require the ungodly sum of one thousand dollars to lift. This sets AP on an adventure, commencing with a strategy session between AP and her bestie Danni (Sadie Scott) that takes place as they both pee on a mutual client, as one does. A whirlwind of characters and setups follows that’s every bit as charming and surreal as Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), if Pee Wee (RIP) was a trash-talking dominatrix whose name was quite a bit more literal. 

As with Sugar Rot, Fucktoys feels very DIY and also references the grindhouse sensibility with its 35mm presentation. It’s both dreamy and gritty and is the perfect road movie for people like me that fawned over Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker and films like it. Unlike Sugar Rot, though, there’s a much more hopeful and, though you might not believe me, almost idealistic view. Sriram and her cast all tap into a vein that is decidedly trashy (just look at that poster) but there’s a charming core underneath that helps you buy into the world she’s created. As unapologetically dirty as it might be, Trashtown and all surrounding locales that AP and her pals traipse through in Fucktoys are ultimately places where everyone is accepted for who they are. I’m quite sure this is what every conservative weirdo pictures when he utters that “this is the world that leftists want” retort just after seeing a trans flag or a gender-neutral bathroom and just before his brain short-circuits. And while it’s reveling in its sex-positivity and inclusivity (as are we), Fucktoys is also a razor-sharp rebuke of capitalism and the exploitation of the young.

I think it’s pretty neat that Fantasia featured two forthrightly feminist debuts that both strike at the heart of capitalism, the patriarchy, the male gaze, and the idea of “good taste.” And watching these two films back-to-back made for the kind of film festival experience that’s all too rare, where you’re rushing from screening to screening of wildly different films in a very compressed period of time. I cover Fantasia virtually, so there’s no physical rushing around in this case but juxtaposing films in this way, even if it’s mostly by my own design, opens up my thinking about subtext and parallels. Outside of these two selections, I also watched movies at Fantasia like Jody Wilson’s The Bearded Girl and Mickey Reece’s Every Heavy Thing which both deal with the patriarchy, the male gaze, and male aggression in unexpected ways, and ways which are as different from Sugar Rot and Fucktoys as they are from each other. Like most of Fantasia’s lineup, they would all make tremendous midnight movie fare, and set an appropriately filthy and gorgeous tone for the year to come.

*cringe in the most complimentary and thematically-appropriate way, of course.

If Sachin Hingoo was transformed into the last thing he ate a lot of, he would be a pepperoni stick. He is unsure if this would be a favourable outcome.