If you haven’t been checking in with us lately, we’ve been covering the 28th Fantasia Film Festival here in Montreal! The festival ran from July 18th until August 4th, 2024 and included everything from screenings to workshops to book launches. Overall, there were more than 125 features and 200 shorts shown throughout the festival.  In the end, we were able to attend screenings of 12 features and 6 shorts, but we also attended \’Her Horror Legacy\’, a panel discussion on women directing horror, and got to interview the cast and director of Witchboard (2024) on the red carpet!  In this article, we’ll recap our entire experience at Fantasia, and we’ll also include reviews for the shorts we got to see, talk about the panel Adriana attended, and get her thoughts on the remastered version of Cube that she also got to see at the festival!  July 19 Carnage for Christmas dir. Alice Maio Mackay Adriana: Carnage for Christmas was a strange but fun way to start off the festival, given that it’s the middle of summer! It was a cool introduction for me to Alice Maio Mackay, who I am still flabbergasted is only 19 years old and already has five features under her belt. Anyway, this was a fun, ultra-low-budget Christmas slasher with some interesting visuals and some solid performances. Read my full review for more thoughts on this Australian holiday slasher! Elves on the Edge (Short) dir. Abby Lloyd Adriana: This short, in which a horny, Brooklyn-based elf gets it on with a Christmas tree after getting into a fight with her bandmates, is just as weird as it sounds! Writer/director/editor/star Abby Lloyd and her collaborator and composer Chris Retsina were in the house to introduce the short and provide some insight. It was apparently shot in two days on a true, self-funded, nothing budget. Gotta respect the hustle, even if the short wasn’t necessarily my thing. It was, however, the perfect accompaniment to Carnage for Christmas. Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo)  dir. Alexandre de La Patellière, Matthieu Delaporte Shea: I started things off with a bang with the French film, The Count of Monte Cristo! There was a lot to like about this one, too. It was the longest of all the movies I saw at Fantasia this year, but you don’t feel that length at all. The timelessness of the story, the great production value, and some captivating performances make this a movie worth your time. This is one of the most adapted stories of all time and even when it’s not being adapted directly, the themes and beats are used in plenty of other movies. Somehow, in spite of all that, this movie manages to feel fresh and was a great way to kick off my first Fantasia experience. Read the full review for more of my spoiler-free thoughts!  July 20 Shelby Oaks dir. Chris Stuckmann Shea: This was my most anticipated movie of the whole festival! I’ve followed the writer/director of this movie, Chris Stuckmann, on YouTube for nearly fourteen years. Chris announced that he was making his first feature and eventually went to Kickstarter to get the funds he needed to finish his movie. For helping ignite my passion and love for cinema, I was more than willing to back the movie on Kickstarter and support Chris on this journey. After finally getting to see the movie at its world premiere, I’m happy to report that I was pleased with it! It wasn’t a perfect movie, but this is a great movie to start a career off with. I was most impressed with the confident direction from Stuckmann, because this didn’t feel like a feature debut at all. His genuine passion and love of film is apparent throughout Shelby Oaks, and I can’t wait to see what he makes next! Check out my full review for more of my spoiler-free thoughts! July 21 Dark Match dir. Lowell Dean Shea: You probably know by now that I love movies, but you might not be aware that I’m also a big wrestling fan (and so is my brother Ty). This horror movie is about a small town wrestling promotion that gets a gig in a town off the beaten path that turns out to be the home to a cult.  The movie stars some personal favourites of mine, including WWE legend and current AEW wrestler Chris Jericho and GTA 5 and Better Call Saul cast member Steven Ogg. This was also a Canadian production, to boot. So to say I was stoked for this one would be an absolute understatement, and boy did this one not disappoint! Writer/director Lowell Dean brought a purity of vision and a singular focus to this movie that paid off in spades. This isn’t meant to be some piece of high art, but it completely succeeded at what it was trying to do and what it wanted to be. The Fantasia crowd was fantastic at every screening I went to, but this was one of two theatrical experiences at the festival that will stick with me forever. The crowd was eating up every moment in the movie and that rowdy enthusiasm added to the wrestling movie experience we were watching together. If you’re not a wrestling fan, though, there\’s more than enough here that you’ll still love (as long as you love over-the-top characters and brutal gore)! For my full spoiler-free thoughts, check out my review.  Hell is a Teenage Girl (Short) dir. Stephen Sawchuk Shea: Before Dark Match began, we were treated to a short film called Hell is a Teenage Girl. I admit, I’ve seen very few shorts in my life but the few that I did see at Fantasia did not disappoint, including this one! This one had a very Blumhouse vibe to it, as it matched the tone of a lot of the horror movies that the studio has produced over the years. This was a fairly standard horror/comedy/slasher, but the