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Midnight Master Colin Geddes leaves TIFF

Film Twitter was buzzing this morning with the news that Colin Geddes is leaving the Toronto International Film Festival.

Geddes joined TIFF in 1997 as a co-programmer on Midnight Madness, taking over the series from Noah Cowan the following year. Under his direction, the program gave Toronto’s most enthusiastic audiences the raw meat they demanded: Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever and Hostel, the premieres of the Underworld and Saw franchises, George A. Romero’s Diary Of The Dead and Survival Of The Dead.

But he also made a point of expanding their horizons, programming with French extreme horror (High Tension, Inside), Asian action blowouts (Donnie Yen in Flash Point, Tony Jaa in Ong-Bak) and left-field surprises like Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan, JCVD and Ben Wheatley’s merciless Kill List. (Wheatley returned to Midnight Madness last fall with Free Fire.)

In recent years, Geddes also branched out into the Vanguard program, which worked very nicely as a home for the movies that were either too calm or too cerebral for the ferocious Midnight Madness crowd, like Wheatley’s psychotropic period freakout A Field In England, Peter Strickland’s arty drama The Duke Of Burgundy and last year’s much-buzzed Colossal and The Bad Batch.

We talked about his work as a programmer, and the evolution of the horror genre, in a NOW cover story last fall. And now, after two decades of globetrotting, tastemaking and sleepless nights (fun fact: Geddes brought the French action thriller Sleepless Night to Toronto in 2011 the American remake is in theatres right now), Geddes is moving on.

“Twenty years seemed to be a good number to end on and give myself some new challenges,” Geddes told me in an e-mail this afternoon as he prepared to head to the Berlin Film Festival. “Plus with Sasha, my son, I am so looking forward to having my first stress-free summer and September in 20 years!”

Geddes will still be a part of Toronto’s cinema culture. He and his wife Katarina Gligorijević are the artistic directors of The Royal, where weird, enthusiastic genre programming has a home year-round, and he’s the curator of the Shudder streaming service, where you can find such exclusives as last year’s Midnight Madness closer Sadako Vs. Kayako.

As for Midnight Madness, it’ll be just fine. In a press release, TIFF said Geddes will “pass the baton” to Peter Kuplowsky, his programming associate for the past four years and a filmmaker in his own right, having produced the features Manborg and The Interior and Anna Maguire’s lovely Your Mother & I, which screened at the festival last fall. I’m very curious to see where he’ll take us in September.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

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