Horror Movies and Politics Are Killing Film Festivals

I don’t know why Zack Snyder went to TIFF to premiere his movie. Unless he filmed himself giving Prime Minister Mark Carney a life-saving blood transfusion while chanting “From the river to the sea,” the war thriller The Last Photograph was never going to win that audience over.

That audience is the film festival audience, a volatile, reliably left-of-center social media jumble of disgruntled film students, part-time activists/baristas, laid-off drunk sports writers, couples therapy podcasters in denial about the furry husband, all of them believing they are the better Yorgos Lanthimos.

Before a filmmaker has a shot at playing the cutthroat politics of the studio system — where one joke in a Hollywood Reporter column can piss off the wrong person — they’ve first got to win that weird-ass room.

For decades, film festivals cast themselves as cinema’s refuge from Hollywood’s worst commercial instincts. Now they’re Hollywood’s G League and, increasingly, its most unlikely horror marketplace — where aspiring auteurs compete with movie stars, gore gets dressed up as political commentary and the bloodiest movie on the screen can spark the biggest bidding war.

Film school used to be where you learned the craft and got noticed, but nobody’s scouting student films at USC anymore. Today, the Gen Z George Lucas has to take his THX film onto the festival circuit to get discovered — where he’ll find himself competing for attention with the premiere of the latest Mad Max extravaganza. A kid with a camera, a credit card and something to say is suddenly on the same playing field as a $40 million prestige picture starring two Oscar winners pretending to be broke.

As more actor-directors arrive at festivals with movies stuffed with famous friends, agents and studio executives sit in their parkas like NBA scouts, clocking which nepo baby can hit ideological free throws in front of a sold-out crowd of programmers and critics. Make every shot, and you get called up to direct Marvel. Miss one, and you’re back to wearing a rubber suit for them.

What’s emerged is a schizophrenic marketplace where art and commerce have fused into The Substance. Hiding in the closet, like Demi Moore’s unconscious body, is the quiet Japanese drama about a grandmother dying of cancer. Dancing out front is the festival darling of the moment: whichever horror film has everybody screaming this year. Get Out, Obsession, Megalopolis.

There is nothing wrong with playing horror or lowbrow genre films at prestigious film festivals. I certainly love them. At the least, it adds a sorely missing sense of humor and whimsy. After all, movies are supposed to be fun.

The problem is when the self-importance of festival political activism crosses wires with these horror nerds. As these dopamine chasers inflict their limbic systems on every film, cheering for lizard-brain human suffering, the Olds scramble to give all that bloodlust a higher purpose, laundering it into political statements right there in the Q&A. A horror filmmaker on a festival podium is suddenly facing a town square of Inquisitors, eager to intellectually vivisect the entertainment in search of some morally superior meaning. It’s how body-horror humiliation rituals like The Substance get hyped into Greatest Movie Ever territory on the festival circuit, attracting a combination of prosthetic fetishists, fifth-wave feminists and theater-laugh exhibitionists.

Festivals aren’t rewarding leftist politics so much as wrapping gore in political language. By day, it’s a cathedral of art and politics, handing out jury prizes under the ethical guidepost of Javier Bardem. By night, it’s a meat market, serving face-peeling gore to the poors. Under the guise of Everything Is Political, we are indulging the most annoying audience in the world. It’s a crowd that whoops at a decapitation, then posts on Bluesky how the decapitation interrogates colonialism.

Of course, there’s a less philosophical explanation for all this: Horror sells.

It’s a brutal buyer’s market. There are so many indie films that distributors can buy product for pennies on the dollar. The collapse of international television markets has only given the streamers more power. They budget infinite dollars for their own questionable “original” product, then make ruthless lowball offers for acquisitions. For indie investors, the pathway to getting their money back gets murkier by the day. It’s shortsighted. Sure, the streamers are getting cheap content while filmmakers and investors absorb the risk, but it’s not a sustainable market. The theory seems to be that there will always be another crop of suckers willing to pump money into the ecosystem, so the market will provide.

In this environment, festival programmers hold immense power. They are effectively mini-studio heads now, and the agents treat them like it. Everyone pretends the films were chosen purely on merit, but the slate often reads Hollywood with a lanyard and a conscience. It is good business to publicly maintain the separation of church and studio, at least on paper. That prestige is what lets a distributor slap “Official Selection” on the poster and charge real money for a movie it acquired for roughly the equivalent of the price of a midrange Toyota Camry.

And the branding works. Check the trades the morning after and see what actually made the headlines. It’s the bidding war for the midnight horror movie: Netflix paying $17 million for It’s What’s Inside at Sundance, Neon matching it a year later for Together, Focus spending a TIFF-record $15 million on Obsession, buyers throwing eight figures at whatever made the Letterboxd crowd scream loudest in the dark. Every one of these sales is a commendable victory for independent filmmaking. But at Sundance, at least, it’s a far cry from the institution Robert Redford set out to build. He dreamed of a temple for Cahiers du Cinéma and woke up to find Fangoria running the gift shop.

The cinema gods love their irony. Of all the things festivals beg us to take seriously — the climate, toxic masculinity, the corporate fascism Mark Ruffalo wants to smash — the one thing they’ve actually succeeded in elevating is the beheading. The slashing. The eye-gouging. The possessed guy shooting his brains out. Base-level schlock that teenagers once rented on DVD is now the most bankable product in the building.

The festivals set out to save cinema from Hollywood’s worst instincts, and they ended up stuffing their bleeding intestines into tuxedos and slapping laurels on them.

This story appeared in the Oct. 7 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.