October’s Best Weekend
Toronto After Dark 2025 brought horror and joy back to Toronto, honoring Adam Lopez’s legacy through a spirited and fan-filled return.
For nearly two decades, Toronto After Dark Film Festival has brought scares, laughs, and thrills to the city each Halloween season. From October 15 to 19, 2025, the festival once again occupied the Scotiabank Theatre, filling it with skulls, killer monkeys, gore, and plenty of joy.
This year’s edition carried an unmistakable sense of tribute. The festival’s founder, Adam Lopez, passed away earlier in the year after a long illness. A passionate lover of genre cinema, he built the festival to celebrate horror, sci-fi, and action films from around the world. Through his programming, his goal was always to bring people together: fans cheering as one, filmmakers sharing stories, and strangers turning into friends over a late-night beer. That spirit of community has always been Toronto After Dark’s beating heart, and this year proved that it’s still very much alive.
Now under the leadership of Peter Kuplowsky, TIFF’s Midnight Madness programmer who stepped in as Legacy Director, the 2025 edition felt like one Lopez would have been proud of. The program featured ten feature films and thirty shorts spanning the full spectrum of genre cinema. Peter and his team secured two major titles: Primate, directed by Johannes Roberts, and the long-awaited sequel Sisu: Road to Revenge, directed by Jalmari Helander. The rest of the lineup included a mix of Canadian and Ontario premieres from Italy, Canada, and beyond, blending creatures, revenges, vampires, zombies, and senior citizens making a horror film together.
I attended three screenings this year and had previously caught Hold the Fort at Fantasia earlier in the summer, and I can say that based on what I saw, and especially the atmosphere, I already look forward to the 2026 edition.
Below you can find my reviews.
