Demon

What a difference six months makes. Back in the summer, the world of film was all gloom and doom. Television was great; the movies were terrible. One respected critic even speculated that someday the world would look back at 2016 as “the year that movies died.”

Fantastic Fest’s annual programming offers some of the most exciting genre films from around the world, and every year there are a few horror films which stand out among the rest, inevitably landing on year-end top 10 horror lists when they eventually hit theaters. Fantastic Fest 2014 brought us The Babadook and It Follows, two of the greatest horror films of the past year, and this year’s festival is no exception with intensely great offerings like The Witch, The Devil’s Candy, Crimson Peak, February, The Invitation and more.

Seven days before Demon made its U.S. premiere at Fantastic Fest 2015, its director, Marcin Wrona, died in a hotel room in Poland. He was 42 years old. The preliminary autopsy indicates Wrona committed suicide. If Wrona was alive and well, Demon would still be a brilliant film, an impressive and inventive blend of psychological horror and sardonic comedy. But his suicide casts the entire film in a whole new light, and adds even more poignance to the already heart-rending story of a seemingly happy man who succumbs to an inexplicable breakdown at his wedding.