Montréal's fantastic FanTasia Film Festival has just ended and with 35 or more films devoured by yours truly this year over a three week span, I've once again selected my favs in order to inflict, I mean bestow on Chizine readers my views about what's innovative and upcoming in our beloved dark field.

FanTasia offered up about 130 films, split as usual between Asian cinema and horror/fantasy/science fiction. I see mainly the H/F/SF films, and the Asian films when they overlap.

These are the most interesting films that I ran across:

FANtastic FanTasia, Montreal’s little genre film festival that could, has just ended. Fourteen years old and bigger and better than ever, FanTasia is an ecclectic mix of Asian films and horror/dark fantasy/fantasy/science fiction films with many a combination of both, shown over three weeks. All in all there are 120 films.

FanTasia Film Festival in Montréal has an odd name. You’d never know that most of the movies are horror films, but that’s the ‘fantastic’ part. About half are from Asian countries (the asia part), and the rest from other places around the globe. This festival—2008 was it’s 12th year—draws over 80,000 people during its three weeks every July. There are world premiers with directors, writers and cast members on stage to reveal some of the weird and funny situations that occurred during filming, and to answer questions.