TORONTO — A supernatural thriller starring “Harry Potter” alum Daniel Radcliffe, fresh frights from horror director Eli Roth, and a sex comedy from Japan’s Hitoshi Matsumoto are headed to the Toronto International Film Festival.
Radcliffe stars alongside Juno Temple in Horns, about a man who awakens from a drunken night to find he’s grown a pair of forehead projections that seem to have special powers.
The dark comedy, from The Hills Have Eyes director and co-writer Alexandre Aja, will make its world premiere in the festival’s Vanguard program announced Tuesday.
Roth will be at the fest with two films, including The Green Inferno, about a group of college students kidnapped by cannibals in the Amazon.
It will make its world premiere in the festival’s Midnight Madness program while Roth’s producing effort The Sacrament, helmed by Ti West, screens in the Vanguard series.
Matsumoto’s R100, billed as “a wild and hilarious trip into personal sexual fantasy,” will also be in the Midnight Madness series that will open with Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson’s All Cheerleaders Die.
The 25th annual Midnight Madness — TIFF’s late-night cavalcade of horror, action and fantasy — will also include titles from Japanese filmmaker Sion Sono’s Why Don’t You Play in Hell? and the debut feature of Hong Kong pop singer Juno Mak, “Rigor Mortis.”
Festival artistic director Cameron Bailey said they plan to announce one more Midnight Madness film as well as “some brilliant ideas” to mark the series anniversary at a later date.
“We’re still working on thousands, literally, thousands of last-minute details,” Bailey said of the fest, which last week revealed many star-packed titles, including TIFF opener The Fifth Estate.
“So we’ve got more announcements to come.”
The festival’s Doc slate includes Errol Morris’s portrait of Donald Rumsfeld in The Unknown Known, Penn & Teller’s art mystery Tim’s Vermeer, Chris Jordan’s look at trash-eating albatross in Midway, and Jehane Noujaim’s Sundance audience award-winning look at Egypt’s revolution in The Square.
Canadian-helmed docs include Barry Avrich’s Filthy Gorgeous: The Bob Guccione Story, Jody Shapiro’s Burt’s Buzz, Alan Zweig’s “When Jews Were Funny,” and Alanis Obomsawin’s Hi-Ho Mistahey!
Over in the City to City program, the world premiere of Yorgos Servetas’s Standing Aside, Watching will kick off a spotlight on financially challenged Athens. It follows a woman who moves to a small town from Athens but can’t escape the person she was in the big city.
Bailey touted this year’s City to City filmmakers as a new generation of Greek trailblazers who are creating works that are smart, challenging, bold and have a sense of adventure.
“These are filmmakers who are not going to sit down and just take it,” he said. “They have a voice and they want to express it.” The Toronto International Film Festival runs Sept. 5 to 15.