Toronto After Dark brought us two nights of horror, zombies and the like. This was the first year for these “Summer Screenings,” back at the now renovated Bloor Cinema, and they were a great success.

The first screning was the zombie comedy Juan of the Dead, which I saw at TIFF last year. (You can read my spotlight on the film here). Definitely an audience favourite. I was able to watch The Pact and V/H/S from  this four-film series.

The Pact, director Nicolas McCarthy‘s debut feature, introduces us to sisters Nicole (Agnes Bruckner) and Annie (Caity Lotz) who are dealing with the death of their mother. They return home just in time for their mother’s funeral. Annie is a recovering drug addict and Nicole is the tough, “I don’t need this now” type. On her first night back, Annie ‘disappears’ and Nicole is left to deal with her absence and other bizarre happenings in the home. Eventually, Nicole realizes she’s dealing with some kind of poltergeist or entity in her mother’s home.

As we follow Nicole on her mission to find Annie and deal with whatever or whomever is in the house, we get some creepy, scary moments. Nothing we haven’t seen before yet the combination of camera angles and pacing add to that nervous feeling you get when watching something scary. The Pact is McCarthy’s first effort and although ‘safe’ in some aspects of the genre, it is still a well-executed film.

V/H/S was hyped as the “scariest movie of the year” and with that in mind I was ready for some major jumps during the film. The film is a horror anthology comprised of a series of films of  the ‘found footage’ variety. Director Adam Wingar created the set up for the film: a group of guys hoping to make money by videotaping themselves sexually assaulting women on the street are hired to break into an old man’s house and find a VHS tape.

The guys not only find one VHS tape but several; each tape revealing many strange and sometimes gruesome events…

Tape 1: The Signal (directed by David Bruckner) shows us three guys who ending up spending the night with the wrong ‘girl’. In Tape 2: Second Honeymoon (directed by Ti West) we see what is a vacation tape from a young couple, but  things start to go array after the appearance of another ‘unknown’ girl. Tape 3: Tuesday the 17th (directed by Glenn McQuaid) is the common story of a group of horny twenty-somethings headed to the lake only to find something they were not planning for. Tape 4: The Strange Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Young uses Skype (directed by Swanberg) to give us a scary tale of a girl chatting with her boyfriend miles away via webcam while strange beings visit her at night. In the last tape: 10/31/98 (directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin) we see a  group of friends looking for a Hallowe’en party but they end up in the wrong house and stumble int something they were not meant to witness.

Although not the “scariest movie”, V/H/S does give us a few scares. I personally enjoyed the first and last vignette in the series. There is a bit of the ‘shaky camera’ in the film but I survived it just fine. V/H/S will certainly please horror audiences; it certainly pleased the 700+ of us that filled the Bloor Cinema.