Cross over to the dark side at Toronto Film Festival's Midnight Madness

Although the Toronto International Film Festival, which kicks off in September, hasn't yet announced the full list of movies premiering there, features scheduled to be shown in the Midnight Madness series are out. The program is designed to highlight the finest weird, bizarre, and most outlandish action, cult, and horror movies around. Last year, the series screened Bobcat Goldthwait's violent black comedy God Bless America; Ben Wheatley's occult crime shocker Kill List; and Gareth Evans's deliriously action-packed thriller The Raid.

Ten films are scheduled to premiere and several of them sound like must-sees. High on the list surely has to be Martin McDonagh's highly-anticipated second feature, Seven Psychopaths, starring Colin Farrell, Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell, and Tom Waits. Don Coscarelli (Phantasm, Bubba Ho-Tep) is back with the genre-hopping John Dies at the End, with Paul Giamatti and Clancy Brown. Rob Zombie cranks up the satanic panic with The Lords of Salem, starring Sheri Moon Zombie (surprise, surprise) as a DJ who conjures up evil with a record. Aftershock finds director Eli Roth in actor mode (beware), playing an American tourist in Chile who survives an earthquake but who struggles to get out of the country afterward. And Barry Levinson makes his first foray into horror (unless you're counting Toys or Jimmy Hollywood) with the generically titled The Bay.