Every year, Toronto’s Midnight Madness section sends festivalgoers stumbling out of the Royal Alexandra Theatre at some ungodly hour, half-delighted and half-traumatized. Last year, that section produced “Obsession,” a film that went on to become the highest-grossing festival acquisition ever after Focus Features snapped it up. So when TIFF unveiled its 2026 Midnight Madness slate on Thursday, the question hanging over the announcement, as Variety put it, was simple: does this lineup have another “Obsession” in it?
Ten films make up the section this year, all screening at 11:59 p.m. at the Royal Alexandra — a venue Midnight Madness regulars half-jokingly insist is haunted. Programmer Peter Kuplowsky is once again curating, and the festival runs September 10 through 20.
Opening night belongs to “River,” a slasher from first-time director Joshua Giuliano starring Jane Levy and Jessica Rothe as siblings hunted by a faceless killer. Closing things out is Duncan Jones’ “Rogue Trooper,” adapted from the British comic strip, with Aneurin Barnard playing a genetically engineered soldier out for revenge. In between: Anna Biller finally follows up 2016’s cult favorite “The Love Witch” with “The Face of Horror,” a 14th-century ghost story about a cheating widower haunted by his dead wife, played by Kristine Froseth. Jonah Hauer-King stars as the widower.
There’s range here beyond straight horror. Cole Sprouse headlines “Vintage Violence” as a denim manufacturer who somehow ends up entangled with the yakuza in Japan — described by early coverage as a zany action-comedy rather than anything genuinely frightening. Paolo Strippoli, the Italian director behind “A Classic Horror Story” and “The Holy Boy,” brings his psychological thriller “The Spiral” to the section. And per TheWrap, director Samjad’s “Half,” an Indian horror-action hybrid, is being pitched internally as a curry Western with echoes of Kathryn Bigelow’s “Near Dark.”
The section is also getting a bigger runway than usual this year. Two special screenings will run ahead of the official midnight lineup, including Na Hong-jin’s sci-fi thriller “Hope” on September 9, the night before TIFF opens. “Hope,” starring Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung and Jung Ho-yeon, arrives in Toronto carrying momentum from its premiere at Cannes earlier this year, according to JoBlo.
Thursday’s reveal wraps up a week of section-by-section rollouts from TIFF — Docs and Shortcuts on Wednesday, Midnight Madness on Thursday — ahead of the festival’s full schedule going live on tiff.net on August 11, per Awards Radar.
Whether any of these ten find the same afterlife “Obsession” did is, as always, the part nobody can predict from a press release. That’s usually the whole appeal of staying up past midnight in Toronto to find out.
