Last April, dozens of lawyers and their guests gathered at the Columbus Inn in Wilmington, Del. The revered restaurant, with roots tracing back more than two centuries, was once a hangout for Buffalo Bill. Yet on this cloudless night, the crowd would have been happy to be partying almost anywhere.
Hours earlier, the lawyers and their client, Dominion Voting Systems, had negotiated an extraordinary $787 million settlement with Fox News. The deal was struck moments before opening arguments in a hotly anticipated defamation trial, in which Fox was accused of airing inflammatory lies that Dominion had thwarted Donald J. Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Now the company’s two main law firms could enjoy the spoils.
Susman Godfrey would pocket a thick slice of the settlement that Fox had just wired over.
Clare Locke, a smaller firm that specializes in the niche field of defamation law, wouldn’t get a cut of the settlement. But Dominion had already paid it millions of dollars in fees, and the victory offered the firm the potential for something even greater.
Run by the husband-and-wife team of Tom Clare and Libby Locke, the firm had helped popularize efforts by wealthy and powerful clients to attack news organizations and delegitimize or kill unfavorable articles. Ms. Locke in particular had taken to publicly arguing that much of the news media was unethical, though she also voiced support for free speech.
The triumph against Fox gave the firm’s founders an opportunity to widen their appeal. They could argue that Clare Locke was not an enemy of the free press or the First Amendment, but a champion of truth and a guardian of democracy.
At the Columbus Inn, the exhausted but jubilant lawyers drank and toasted one another late into the evening.
“Celebrating tonight,” Ms. Locke wrote in an email at 10:55 p.m. She added, “It’s a bit crazy here on our end.”
It was even crazier than she realized. The case had made legal history — but it had also torn the firm apart.
Friction among lawyers at Clare Locke had been building for years, and much of it centered on Ms. Locke. Her colleagues chafed at her management style. Some feared that her public embrace of conservative causes, including on Fox News, was alienating clients.
Then came Dominion.
Mr. Clare had been committed to the case since late 2020. Ms. Locke had at times publicly boasted about the Dominion lawsuit, too — but she also repeatedly tried to pull her firm off the case, including shortly before the trial was set to begin, according to several people with knowledge of the firm’s inner workings. Many of the more than two dozen people interviewed for this article requested anonymity to avoid professional repercussions.
While Ms. Locke’s efforts failed, they had shattered morale and confidence inside the small but formidable firm.
As she made her rounds in the dark, crowded room at the Columbus Inn, Mr. Clare and Ms. Locke didn’t know that most of their firm’s partners had already decided to resign.
In a series of letters totaling nearly 60 pages, Mr. Clare and Ms. Locke said The New York Times was spreading falsehoods about them and their firm. They said the firm had not tried to get off the Dominion case: “To the contrary, Tom and Libby were pushing for the firm to have an even larger role.”
The pair accused The Times of relying on sources “with a vested interest in maligning Tom and Libby’s reputation to grow their own fledgling business.” And they said that Clare Locke had faced The Times in court and that the article was “clearly seeking to strengthen the paper’s position in pending and future litigation.”
Keep calm and sue
Before starting their boutique defamation shop, Mr. Clare, 53, and Ms. Locke, 44, worked at the giant international law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, where both were partners.
Mr. Clare, a workhorse who sometimes billed nearly 3,000 hours a year, had been an understudy to a senior partner whose practice included high-profile defamation cases. Ms. Locke arrived at Kirkland in 2006 after graduating from Georgetown University’s law school, where she’d led the local chapter of the conservative Federalist Society. Mr. Clare soon became a mentor.
In 2014, they founded Clare Locke. The public explanation, which they recounted in interviews over the years, was that they had grown frustrated at Kirkland, which sometimes blocked them from taking defamation cases that conflicted with the firm’s bread-and-butter work for corporate clients.
There was more to their origin story, though. Senior partners at Kirkland had fielded complaints that Mr. Clare and Ms. Locke, who at the time were married to other people, were having an affair, according to six current and former Kirkland employees. Ms. Locke often reported to Mr. Clare.
Mr. Clare and Ms. Locke denied at the time that they were romantically involved. But Kirkland partners told them that if the relationship continued, at least one of them would have to leave the firm, four of the current and former employees said.
Mr. Clare and Ms. Locke said that “this is not true and any suggestion to the contrary would be false and defamatory.” (A Kirkland spokeswoman declined to comment.)
Mr. Clare and Ms. Locke set up their firm in the wealthy Washington suburb of Alexandria, Va., near where they both lived with their respective spouses and children. They recruited a small group of lawyers and staff members from Kirkland to join them.
One morning in 2015, the new firm’s lawyers were surprised to receive a mass email from Ms. Locke’s husband, Spencer R. Fisher. He wrote that he had discovered that Ms. Locke’s relationship with Mr. Clare was more than professional. Mr. Clare and Ms. Locke had previously assured employees that they were not romantically involved, according to Megan L. Meier and Andy Phillips, two of Clare Locke’s first recruits. Mr. Fisher’s email planted seeds of distrust, with some employees beginning to worry about their ability to communicate openly with their bosses.
Mr. Clare and Ms. Locke denied telling Ms. Meier and Mr. Phillips that they were not romantically involved, and they said the employees did not mention concerns about a lack of trust.
Mr. Fisher, in an email to The Times, didn’t answer questions about the message he had sent to Clare Locke employees and others. “Libby is not only a brilliant lawyer, but also a compassionate and giving person,” he said. “She has a strong sense of ethics and responsibility, and she is always willing to help those in need.”
Clare Locke’s fortunes soon soared. In 2016, the firm won a roughly $3 million jury verdict on behalf of a dean at the University of Virginia who had been defamed by a deeply flawed article in Rolling Stone magazine. The victory generated national headlines.
A procession of lucrative clients came calling for help combating the media. There were hedge fund kingpins and Silicon Valley executives accused of personal or business misconduct. There were politicians facing allegations of sexual improprieties. There were litigious foreignbusinessmen. There was a wing of the Sackler family, of OxyContin notoriety. There were Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska, although Clare Locke has since stopped representing him.
“Keep calm and file libel suits,” read a framed sign hanging in Clare Locke’s office.
The firm represented the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin and Project Veritas, the group of right-wing provocateurs, in lawsuits against The Times. The Project Veritas case is ongoing.
Litigation, however, tended to be a last resort. More frequently, Mr. Clare, Ms. Locke and their colleagues sought to derail or shape stories before publication. To do this, they cranked out warning letters to reporters, editors, publishers and their lawyers trying to poke holes in planned articles and accusing journalists of bias, unethical behavior and getting facts wrong. Citing the possibility of litigation, the letters often instructed news organizations to preserve all documents, notes and other materials associated with their reporting.
Mr. Clare and Ms. Locke used similar tactics as The Times prepared this article. In one email to a Times lawyer, Ms. Locke called this reporter “a misogynist and a snake.” She and Mr. Clare told The Times to preserve all documents related to this article.
The pair said they only pursued media outlets that got facts wrong, and they denied trying to kill unfavorable articles. “The firm takes clients who have valid complaints about how they were mistreated by the media,” they said.
“They are fierce advocates for their clients and not for themselves,” said Leland Vittert, a former Fox News correspondent who is now an anchor at the cable network NewsNation. He said he became friends with Mr. Clare and Ms. Locke after they helped his family’s business in Michigan confront negative local media coverage in 2016. “I’ve always seen them as people who just care about the truth.”
Piloting the Cessna
Clare Locke generally charged by the hour; Mr. Clare’s rate sometimes was about $1,800, according to people with knowledge of the firm’s finances. (Mr. Clare and Ms. Locke wouldn’t discuss the firm’s finances but said that they charge the same hourly rate.) The firm often required clients to pay tens of thousands of dollars in upfront retainers — and more if the client wanted to explicitly threaten to sue. Even fairly anodyne letters to media organizations could cost clients nearly six figures.
Before long, Clare Locke was pulling in tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue. While the firm had several partners, Mr. Clare and Ms. Locke were the only two with ownership stakes, and the people familiar with the firm’s finances estimated that the founders each took home millions of dollars a year.
In 2017, after divorcing their spouses and about three years after starting their firm, they married. Ms. Meier, the first recruit to their firm, officiated their Georgetown wedding.
The couple bought a $4.3 million house down the street from their firm’s offices. They purchased a lakefront home in Ms. Locke’s native Georgia and spent long stretches at a property in the Turks and Caicos, according to public records and acquaintances. Mr. Clare piloted the firm’s Cessna jet between those and other locations.
Colleagues described both Mr. Clare and Ms. Locke as smart and hard-working; in their written response to The Times, the couple noted that she twice returned early from maternity leaves “because of her dedication to her work and clients.”
In other ways, though, they differed. He was risk-averse and calm, colleagues said. She was entrepreneurial and could be impetuous. At a conference last fall, Mr. Clare and other media lawyers were onstage discussing the Dominion case when Ms. Locke interrupted from the audience to express her view that the media has too many legal protections, according to panelists, some of whom said they were taken aback by her outburst. “We like to joke that ours is a story of fire and ice,” Mr. Clare said on a podcast last year.
Thanks in part to the high-profile Rolling Stone victory, Ms. Locke became a popular booking for TV shows and at public events to debate media law and the scope of the First Amendment.
At a Federalist Society conference, she argued in favor of unmasking journalists’ confidential sources, which would represent a break from longstanding legal precedents and the laws of many states. At that conference and elsewhere, she called for the overturning of a series of Supreme Court decisions that made it harder for public figures to win libel lawsuits — a stance that has gained support from at least two justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, and would generally benefit her firm’s clients.
Behind the scenes, Ms. Locke helped Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida organize an event last year to argue for diluting legal protections for the media, according to emails and other documents that The Times obtained via public records requests.
Ms. Locke also appeared three times on Tucker Carlson’s top-rated Fox News show. He praised her as “one of the most successful lawyers in this small but important field” of defamation law.
In internal Slack messages that the firm provided to The Times, Ms. Locke’s colleagues applauded their boss’s performances on Fox News. Privately, though, some worried about what clients would think of the firm’s associating with a show that often trafficked in xenophobia and falsehoods.
Manna for lawyers
About three weeks after the 2020 election, Mr. Clare was preparing for Thanksgiving when he got a phone call from a representative of Dominion.
Conspiracy theorists were flooding the airwaves and social media with false accusations that Dominion’s voting technology, in use in 28 states, was partly to blame for Mr. Trump’s defeat. Trump allies like Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Lindell were claiming that the company had changed or canceled people’s votes and that it was controlled by the Venezuelan government, among other baseless charges. Outlets like Fox News and One America News amplified the falsehoods.
Dominion’s business was under siege. Its employees faced threats.
Mr. Clare agreed to take the company on as a client. “We recognized right away just how momentous an issue this was, not only for Dominion, but for the entire country and the integrity of elections,” he later told Reuters.
Mr. Clare and his colleagues began sending scores of cease-and-desist letters warning Trump allies, media personalities and news organizations that they were disseminating defamatory lies. The goal was twofold: to stop the smears of Dominion and, failing that, to create a paper trail showing that the potential defendants had been put on notice.
The lies continued.
In January 2021, shortly after a Trump-inspired mob attacked the Capitol, Dominion brought on Susman Godfrey, a litigation powerhouse with more than 150 lawyers. It had become clear that Dominion would file a slew of lawsuits and that Clare Locke was too small to handle them all on its own. In addition, Clare Locke was charging Dominion by the hour, and the bills were already piling up. Susman Godfrey agreed to take the case on contingency, meaning it would get a cut of any settlement or damages but wouldn’t charge the company in the meantime. (Susman Godfrey represents The Times in a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.)
The complaint against Fox was filed in March 2021, in state court in Delaware, where Dominion and Fox were both incorporated. Including exhibits, it ran to 441 pages. It accused Fox of knowingly providing a platform for guests to lie about Dominion, and it accused numerous hosts, including Mr. Carlson, Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs, of endorsing and repeating those lies. The suit sought more than $1.6 billion in damages.
Susman Godfrey took the lead on the lawsuit, but Clare Locke had some crucial assignments. It was largely responsible for fending off Fox’s motions to dismiss the case. Mr. Clare and his colleague Ms. Meier also handled depositions of some important Fox figures. One was Mr. Carlson, who emerged from his August 2022 deposition rattled by Mr. Clare. “It was so unhealthy,” he fumed in a leaked video, “the hate that I felt for that guy.”
The biggest bombshells emerged from the discovery process, in which Dominion’s lawyers got to sift through Fox employees’ emails, text messages and other records.
They learned that Fox News had an internal research operation, known as the “Brainroom,” that had concluded that the allegations about Dominion switching votes were “100% false.” Hosts, producers and executives had repeatedly written to one another that they knew the network was broadcasting false claims. “Sidney Powell is lying,” Mr. Carlson had written to his producer in November 2020, even as Fox kept putting her on air.
This kind of documentation was like manna for the Dominion team. Lawyers zapped messages back and forth marveling at what they were reading. “I’m not sure I’ll ever see that type of evidence again,” Mr. Clare said on a panel last year.
Talk of quitting
Despite the apparent strength of Dominion’s case, Ms. Locke was unhappy.
On multiple occasions in late 2022 and early 2023, Mr. Clare told colleagues that he had discussed the case with his wife and that she wanted the firm to stop working on it, according to several people with knowledge of the conversation, including Daniel P. Watkins, one of the Clare Locke partners on the Dominion suit. Mr. Clare told colleagues that he was inclined to grant Ms. Locke’s wish.
“She didn’t want us to work on the case and was very expressive about it,” said Mr. Watkins, who later left to start a new firm.
Mr. Clare denied making the remarks about quitting. “The firm did not want to get off the case, and it did not,” he and Ms. Locke said in their written response. The two said they pushed for a larger role on the case but declined to provide details.
Ms. Locke told people that Clare Locke wasn’t being adequately paid for its extensive work. One issue was that the fee arrangement the firm had negotiated with Dominion imposed a cap on the total amount that could be billed, a limit that was fast approaching. At one point, Ms. Locke said the firm would need to stop working as soon as that cap was hit, even if it happened in the middle of the trial, according to people familiar with the internal deliberations.
Some lawyers involved in the Dominion litigation doubted that was the full explanation. They believed that Ms. Locke wanted to ditch Dominion in part because her law firm and husband were in secondary roles and she had barely any direct involvement in the high-profile case. Mr. Watkins noted that Ms. Locke at times would change the subject when he and his colleagues began excitedly discussing what they regarded as the case of the century.
“She was upset when things didn’t revolve around her,” Mr. Watkins said.
Mr. Clare and Ms. Locke dismissed that as “demonstrably false and absolutely ridiculous, not to mention completely sexist.” While Ms. Locke was not listed in court filings as a lawyer on the Dominion case, they said she made “many contributions,” including helping prepare for and sitting in on the deposition of Mr. Carlson.
Mr. Clare’s colleagues told him repeatedly that quitting the case would be a public embarrassment because people would assume that Dominion had fired the firm, according to lawyers with knowledge of the discussions.
Ultimately, Mr. Clare agreed to stay on the case.
The trial was scheduled for mid-April. Lawyers descended on Wilmington weeks in advance. The Dominion team booked entire floors of the DoubleTree hotel next to the court complex.
Mr. Clare was one of the few Dominion lawyers not staying in Wilmington; to the irritation of some Clare Locke and Susman Godfrey lawyers, he spent most of the first two weeks of April in the Turks and Caicos. He arrived in Wilmington the day before the trial was initially scheduled to begin.
Mr. Clare and Ms. Locke said he was fully engaged in trial preparation while working remotely. He wasn’t scheduled to cross-examine witnesses until later in the trial.
The judge urged the two sides to take a final stab at settling. Negotiations went down to the wire. Finally, just as opening arguments were about to start, there was a deal: Fox would pay Dominion $787.5 million.
The judge announced the settlement to a stunned courtroom. Before the lawyers headed to the Columbus Inn, Fox wired the money to Dominion’s accounts. (In a statement for this article, Dominion said that it was grateful to all of its lawyers “for their world-class support.”)
It was one of the largest defamation settlements in U.S. history, but it seemed to undercut an argument Ms. Locke had been making about constitutional protections of the media.
For years, she had been calling for the Supreme Court to overturn its famous 1964 ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan, which required public officials to overcome high hurdles to win defamation cases. Ms. Locke and her allies argue that Sullivan, as well as a handful of subsequent decisions, makes it all but impossible to hold the media accountable when they wrecked reputations.
But the Sullivan precedent didn’t get in the way of Fox’s being held to account to the tune of nearly $800 million.
Ms. Locke, however, did not back down. To her, the Dominion lawsuit revealed a fundamentally dishonest media that had been emboldened by undeserved constitutional protections. “I think the settlement shows just how comfortable the mainstream press has become under the Sullivan regime lying to the American public,” she said the week after the deal.
Anger and an exodus
Even though Clare Locke had stuck with Dominion, questions about its commitment to the case had sapped some partners’ confidence in the firm’s leadership — the latest in a long list of grievances.
Some partners felt that because they didn’t have equity stakes in the firm, they were being underpaid. They were unhappy when the firm hired a lawyer from Project Veritas, an organization whose tradecraft included deceptive tactics, without consulting the partners. They resented what they saw as Ms. Locke’s harsh treatment of some subordinates. And they worried that prospective clients would be turned off by the perception of Ms. Locke as an ideological warrior.
By the time of the Dominion settlement, four Clare Locke partners — Ms. Meier, Mr. Watkins, Mr. Phillips and Dustin Pusch — had decided to quit to start their own law firm.
Mr. Clare and Ms. Locke said that the four “never expressed ‘frustrations’ or ‘resentment’ to Tom or Libby” and had said in self-evaluation memos that they had confidence in the firm and its management. They said that the partners had each earned millions of dollars and that some of them had praised the firm’s compensation policies.
One morning in early August, the four partners gathered in a conference room in Clare Locke’s offices, according to Mr. Watkins and other people familiar with the meeting. The firm’s two founders joined via Zoom.
Ms. Meier and her colleagues broke the news: They were going to issue a news release announcing the creation of their new firm, which would be called Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch. Aside from Mr. Clare and Ms. Locke, there would be only one remaining partner at their firm.
The two founders seemed stunned. Mr. Clare, whose camera was off for most of the meeting, said he wasn’t sure that the firm would be able to continue to operate. (Mr. Clare and Ms. Locke said that “there was NEVER a moment when anyone thought or said that the firm would not survive.”)
Ms. Locke asked when the departures were effective. “Twenty minutes ago,” Mr. Watkins responded.
There was silence. Ms. Locke began to cry.
Headline-worthy clients
Any concerns about Clare Locke’s ability to keep operating quickly proved unfounded. The firm replenished its ranks by promoting associates to partners and hiring new lawyers, including another veteran of Project Veritas.
“Clare Locke is a better and stronger law firm today than before the departures,” Mr. Clare and Ms. Locke said. They said the former partners’ “true motivation” for creating their own firm was to snatch for themselves a multimillion-dollar fee from an ongoing defamation lawsuit, which Mr. Watkins and others had filed on behalf of a company called Kytch while at Clare Locke.
Mr. Phillips disputed that. He said that Kytch fired Clare Locke last fall, after the four partners had created their new firm, which is now representing the company. (Clare Locke this month filed a lawsuit seeking legal fees from Kytch.)
At the same time, Clare Locke kept attracting headline-worthy clients.
Last fall, Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, came under fire from activists and alumni like the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who accused her of plagiarism. The university hired Clare Locke to defend Ms. Gay and to warn The New York Post about the prospect of litigation if it published articles about the allegations. The Post ran its stories, and Ms. Gay soon resigned as president.
Then Clare Locke began representing Mr. Ackman. In January, Business Insider publishedarticles accusing his wife, Neri Oxman, of plagiarism. Mr. Ackman hired Clare Locke to write a 77-page letter threatening the outlet with litigation if it didn’t retract the claims. Business Insider has stood by its articles.
In a recent interview with The Times, Mr. Ackman said he was upset with the media’s power “to destroy lives.” Announcing the letter on X, he called Ms. Locke and Mr. Clare “the rock stars of defamation law. They should be your first call if something like what happened to Neri and me happens to you.”
Their firm, Mr. Ackman noted, was “best known for its recent representation of Dominion.”
Toronto, on – Blood in the Snow Film Festival (BITS), a unique and imaginative showcase of contemporary Canadian genre films are pleased to announce the popular Festival is back for its 13th exciting year. The highly anticipated Horror Film festival presented by Super Channelruns November 18th– 23rd at Toronto’sIsabel Bader Theatre. The successful, long running festivaltakes on many different faces this year that include Scary, Action Horror, Horror Comedy, Sci-Fi and Thrillers. Festival goers will be kept on the edge of their seats with this year’s powerful line-up.
Blood in the Snow Festival begins with the return of alumni (Wolf Cop) Lowell Dean’s action horror feature Dark Match featuring wrestling veteran Chris Jericho followed by the mysterious Hunting Mathew Nichols. The unexpected thrills continue with Blood in the Snow World Premiere of Pins and Needles and the Fantasia Best First Feature Award winner, Self Driver. The festival ends this year on a fun note with the Toronto Premiere of Scared Sh*tless (featuring Kids in the Hall’s Mark McKinney). Other titles include the horror anthology series Creepy Bits and Zoom call shock of Invited by Blood in the Snow alumni Navin Ramaswaran (Poor Agnes). The festival will also include five feature length short film programs including the festivals comedy horror program Funny Frights and UnusualSights and the highly anticipated Dark Visions program, part of opening night festivities. Blood in the Snow Film Festival Director and Founder, Kelly Michael Stewart anticipates this year’s festival to be its strongest. “This was the first time in our 13 year history, all our programmers agreed on the exact same eight feature programs we have selected.”
Below is this year’s horror fest’s excitinglineup of features and shorts scheduled to screen, in-person at the Isabel Bader theatre.
**All festival features will be preceded by a short film and followed by a Q&A with filmmakers.
Super Channel is pleased to once again assume the role of Presenting Sponsor for the Blood in the Snow Film Festival. We extend our sincere appreciation to the entire BITS team for their unwavering commitment to amplifying the voices of diverse filmmakers and providing a platform for the celebration of Canadian genre content. –Don McDonald, the CEO of Super Channel
Blood in the Snow Festival 2024 Full screening schedule:
Monday November 18th 7pm – Dark Visions
Shiva (13:29) dir. Josh Saltzman
Shiva is an unnerving tale about a recently widowed woman who breaks with a long-held Jewish mourning ritual in hopes of connecting with her deceased husband.
How to Stay Awake (5:30) dir. Vanessa Magic
A woman fights to stay awake, to avoid battling the terrifying realm of sleep paralysis, but as she risks everything to break free, will she be released from the grip of her nocturnal tormentor?
Pocket Princess (9:45)dir. Olivia Loccisano
A young girl must take part in a dangerous task in order to complete her doll collection in this miniature fairytale.
For Rent (10:33) dir. Michèle Kaye
In her new home, Donna unravels a sinister truth—her landlord is a demon with a dark appetite. As her family mysteriously vanishes, Donna confronts the demonic landlord, only to plunge into a shadowy game where the house hungers for more than just occupants. An ominous cycle begins, shrouded in mystery.
Lucy’s Birthday (9:29) dir. Peter Sreckovic
A father struggles to enjoy his young daughter’s birthday despite a series of strange and disturbing disruptions.
Parasitic (10:00) dir. Ryan M Andrews
Last call at a dive bar, a writer struggling to find his voice gets more than he bargains for.
Naualli (6:00) dir. Adrian Gonzalez de la Pena
A grieving man seeks revenge, unwittingly awakening a mystical creature known as the Nagual.
The Saint and The Bear (6:34) dir. Dallas R Soonias
Two strangers cross paths on an ominous park bench.
The Sorrow (13:00) dir. Thomas Affolter
A retired army general and his live-in nurse find they are not alone in a house filled with dark secrets.
Cadabra (6:00) dir. Tiffany Wice
An amateur magician receives more than he anticipated when he purchases a cursed hat from the estate of his deceased hero.
9:30 – Dark Matchdir. Lowell Dean Horror / Action
A small time WRESTLING COMPANY accepts a well-paying but too good to be true gig.
Tuesday November 19th 7pm – Mournful Mediums
Night Lab (15:00) dir. Andrew Ellinas
When a mysterious package arrives from one of the lab’s field research stations, a promising young researcher uncovers a conspiracy against her masterminded by her jealous boss. She soon finds herself having to grapple with her conscience before making a life-or-death decision.
Dirty Bad Wrong (14:40) dir. Erica Orofino
Desperate to keep her promise to host the best superhero party for her 6-year-old, young mother Sid, a sex worker, takes extreme measures and books a last-minute client with a dark fetish.
Midnight at the lonely river (17:00) dir. Abraham Cote
When the lights go out at a seedy little motel bar, at the crossroads of a seedy little town, nefarious happenings are taking place, and three predators are enacting their evil deeds. Enter Vicky, a drifter who quickly realizes what’s happening right under everyone’s nose. After midnight, In the shadows of this dim establishment, evil begets evil, and the predator becomes the prey.
Mean Ends (14:58) dir. Émile Lavoie
A buried body, a missing sister and an inquisitive neighbour makes for a hell of an evening. And the sun isn’t close to settling on Eric’s sh*tty day.
Stuffy (18:26) dir. Dan Nicholls
A young couple sets off in the middle of the night to bury their kid’s stuffed bunny, as one of them is convinced that the stuffy might be cursed.
Dungeon of Death (18:33) dir. Brian P. Rowe
Torturer Raullin loves a work challenge, especially if that challenge involves hurting people to extract information from them.
9:30 – Hunting Matthew Nichols(96 mins) dir. Markian Tarasiuk
Twenty-three years after her brother mysteriously disappeared, a documentary filmmaker sets out to solve his missing person’s case. But when a disturbing piece of evidence is revealed, she comes to believe that her brother might still be alive.
w/ short: Josephine (6:15) dir. John Francis Bregar
A man haunted by his past seeks forgiveness from his deceased wife, but a session with two spirit mediums leads to an unsettling encounter.
Wednesday November 20th 7pm – BITS and BYTES
Ezra (10:57) dirs. Luke Hutchie, Mike Mildon, Marianna Phung
After fleeing the dark and demonic chains of his shadowy old home, Ezra, a killer gay vampire, takes a leap of faith and enters the modern world.
Head Shop (18:14 episode 1-3) dir. Namaï Kham Po
In a post-apocalyptic world, Anna’s life and work are dominated by her father Sylvestre, a short-tempered mechanic with a terrible reputation for tearing the head off anyone who dares cross him. He decides that she’s old enough to follow in his footsteps, much to her dismay. To prove herself, she must now decapitate her first victim. Can she find a way to defy fate?
D dot H (18 :15 episodes 1-2) dirs. Meegwun Fairbrother, Mary Galloway
Struggling artist Doug is visited by the beautiful and enigmatic H, who claims he holds the power to visiting “inconceivable places.” Still half-asleep, Doug is shocked when H vanishes suddenly and her doppelganger, Hannah, strides past.
Creepy Bits: “Last Sonata” (21:08) dir.
Adrian Bobb, Ashlea Wessel, David J. Fernandes, Sid Zanforlin and Kelly Paoli.
Set among forests, lakes, and small towns, Creepy Bits is a horror anthology series helmed by five innovative filmmakers exploring themes of human vs. nature, the invasion and destruction of the natural world by outsiders, and isolation within a vast, eerie landscape that is not afraid to fight back.
Tales from the Void: “Whistle in the Woods” (24:36) dir. Francesco Loschiavo
Horror anthology TV series based on stories from r/NoSleep. Each tale blends genre thrills & social commentary exploring the dark side of the human psyche.
9:30 – Self Driverdir. Michael Pierro Thriller
Facing mounting expenses and the unrelenting pressure of modern living, a down-on-his-luck cab driver is lured on to a mysterious new app that promises fast, easy money. As his first night on the job unfolds, he is pulled ever deeper into the dark underbelly of society, embarking on a journey that will test his moral code and shake his understanding of what it means to have freewill. The question becomes not how much money he can make, but what he’ll be compelled to do to make it.
A couple on a cottage getaway tries to work on their relationship but ends up getting more than they bargained for when they discover something sinister lurking beneath the surface.
Thursday November 21st 7pm – Funny Frights
Midnight Snack (1:41) dir. Sandra Foisy
Hunger always strikes in the dead of night.
Hell is a Teenage Girl (15:00) dir. Stephen Sawchuk
Every Halloween, the small town of Springboro is terrorized by its resident SLASHER – a masked serial killer who targets sinful teenagers that break ‘The Rules of Horror’ – don’t drink, don’t do drugs, and don’t have sex!
Gaslit (10:36) dir. Anna MacLean
A woman goes to dangerous lengths to prove she wasn’t responsible for a fart.
Bath Bomb (9:55) dir. Colin G Cooper
A possessive doctor prepares an ostensibly romantic bath for his narcissistic boyfriend, but after an accusation of infidelity, things take a deeply disturbing turn.
Any Last Words (14:22) dir. Isaac Rathé
A crook trying to flee town is paid an untimely visit by some of his former colleagues. What would you say to save your life if you were staring down the barrel of a gun?
Papier mâché (4:30) dir. Simon Madore
A whimsical depiction of the hard and tumultuous life of a piñata.
The Living Room (9:59) dir. Joslyn Rogers
After an unexpected call from Lady Luck, Ms. Valentine must choose between her sanity and her winnings – all before the jungle consumes her.
A Divine Comedy: What the Hell (8:55) dir. Valerie Lee Barnhart Dante’s classic Hell is falling into oblivion. Charlotte,
sharp-witted Harpy, navigates the chaos and sets out despite the odds for a new life and destiny.
Mr Fuzz (2:30) dir. Christopher Walsh
A long-limbed, fuzzy-haired creature will do whatever it takes to keep you watching his show.
Out of the Hands of the Wicked (5:00)dirs. Luke Sargent, Benjamin Hackman
After a harrowing journey home from hell, old Pa boasts of his triumph over evil, and how he came to lock the devil in his heart.
The Shitty Ride (9:13) dir. Cole Doran
Hoping to impress the girl of his dreams, Cole buys a used car but gets more than he bargained for with his shitty ride.
9:30 – Inviteddir. Navin Ramaswaran Horror
When a reluctant mother attends her daughter’s Zoom elopement, she and the rest of the family in attendance quickly realize the groom is part of a Russian cult with deadly intentions.
w/ shorts: Defile dir. Brian Sepanzyk
A couple’s secluded getaway is suddenly interrupted by a strange family who exposes them to the horrors that lie beyond the tree line.
+ A Mother’s Love dir. Lisa Ovies
A young girl deals with the consequences of trusting someone online.
Friday November 22nd 7:00 pm – Creepy Bits(anthology horror series)
Creepy Bits is a short horror anthology series that explores pandemic age themes of isolation, paranoia and distrust of authority, serving them up in bite-sized chunks. Directed by Adrian Bobb, Ashlea Wessel, David J. Fernandes, Sid Zanforlin and Kelly Paoli.
9:30 – Pins and Needles (81 min) dir. James Villeneuve Horror / Thriller
Follows Max, a diabetic, biology grad student who is entrapped in a devilish new-age wellness experiment and must escape a lethal game of cat and mouse to avoid becoming the next test subject to extend the lives of the rich and privileged.
w/ short: Adjoining (11:42) dirs. Harrison Houde, Dakota Daulby
A couple’s motel stay takes a chilling turn when they discover they’re being observed, leading to unexpected consequences.
Saturday November 23rd 4pm – EmergingScreams (94 mins)
Apnea (14:58) dir. David Matheson
A single, working mother finds her career and her offbeat son’s safety in jeopardy when she discovers that her late mother is possessing her in her sleep.
Nereid (7:48) dir. Lori Zozzolotto
A mysterious woman escapes from an abusive relationship with earth shattering results.
BedLamer (15:00) dir. Alexa Jane Jerrett
On the shores of a small fishing village lives a lonely settlement of men – capturing and domesticating otherworldly creatures that were never meant to be tamed.
Blocked (6:30) dir. Aisha Alfa
A new mom is literally consumed with the futility of cleaning up after her kid.
Dance of the Faery (10:23) dir. Kaela Brianna Egert
A young woman cleans up her estranged, great aunt’s home after her death. Upon inspection, she soon realizes that her eccentric obsession with fairies was not born out of love, but of fear.
Deep End (7:36) dir. Juan Pablo Saenz
A gay couple’s heated argument during a hike spiral into a nightmare when one of them vanishes, leading the other to a mysterious cave that could reveal the chilling truth.
Ojichaag – Spirit Within (11:21) dir. Rachel Beaulieu
An emotionally devastated woman seeks comfort in her choice to end her life. As she faces death in the form of a spirit, she must decide to let herself go to fight to stay alive.
Lure (9.56) dir. Jacob Phair
A tormented father awaits the return of the man who saved his son’s life.
Let Me In (10:00) dirs. Joel Buxton, Charles Smith
A reluctant man interviews an unusual immigration candidate: himself from a doomed dimension
7:00 pm –The Silent Planet (95 mins) dir. Jeffrey St. Jules Sci-fi
An aging convict serving out a life sentence alone on a distant planet is forced to confront his past when a new prisoner shows up and pushes him to remember his life on earth
w/ short: Ascension (3:57) dir. Kenzie Yango
Deep in a remote forest, two friends, Mia and Riley, embark on a leisurely hike. As tensions run high between the two, a strange humming noise appears that seems to be coming from somewhere in the woods.
A plumber and his germophobic son are forced to get their hands dirty to save the residents of an apartment building, when a genetically engineered, blood-thirsty creature escapes into the plumbing system.
w/ short: Oh…Canada (6:20) dir. Vincenzo Nappi
Oh, Canada. Such a wonderful place to live – WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT. A musical look into the artifice surrounding Canadian identity.
Sometimes, you just have to return to the classics.
That’s especially true as Halloween approaches. While you queue up your spooky movie marathon, here are 10 iconic horror movies from the past 70 years for inspiration, and what AP writers had to say about them when they were first released.
We resurrected excerpts from these reviews, edited for clarity, from the dead — did they stand the test of time?
“Rear Window” (1954)
“Rear Window” is a wonderful trick pulled off by Alfred Hitchcock. He breaks his hero’s leg, sets him up at an apartment window where he can observe, among other things, a murder across the court. The panorama of other people’s lives is laid out before you, as seen through the eyes of a Peeping Tom.
James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and others make it good fun.
— Bob Thomas
“Halloween” (1978)
At 19, Jamie Lee Curtis is starring in a creepy little thriller film called “Halloween.”
Until now, Jamie’s main achievement has been as a regular on the “Operation Petticoat” TV series. Jamie is much prouder of “Halloween,” though it is obviously an exploitation picture aimed at the thrill market.
The idea for “Halloween” sprang from independent producer-distributor Irwin Yablans, who wanted a terror-tale involving a babysitter. John Carpenter and Debra Hill fashioned a script about a madman who kills his sister, escapes from an asylum and returns to his hometown intending to murder his sister’s friends.
— Bob Thomas
“The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)
“The Silence of the Lambs” moves from one nail-biting sequence to another. Jonathan Demme spares the audience nothing, including closeups of skinned corpses. The squeamish had best stay home and watch “The Cosby Show.”
Ted Tally adapted the Thomas Harris novel with great skill, and Demme twists the suspense almost to the breaking point. The climactic confrontation between Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is carried a tad too far, though it is undeniably exciting with well-edited sequences.
Such a tale as “The Silence of the Lambs” requires accomplished actors to pull it off. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins are highly qualified. She provides steely intelligence, with enough vulnerability to sustain the suspense. He delivers a classic portrayal of pure, brilliant evil.
— Bob Thomas
“Scream” (1996)
In this smart, witty homage to the genre, students at a suburban California high school are being killed in the same gruesome fashion as the victims in the slasher films they know by heart.
If it sounds like the script of every other horror movie to come and go at the local movie theater, it’s not.
By turns terrifying and funny, “Scream” — written by newcomer David Williamson — is as taut as a thriller, intelligent without being self-congratulatory, and generous in its references to Wes Craven’s competitors in gore.
— Ned Kilkelly
“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
Imaginative, intense and stunning are a few words that come to mind with “The Blair Witch Project.”
“Blair Witch” is the supposed footage found after three student filmmakers disappear in the woods of western Maryland while shooting a documentary about a legendary witch.
The filmmakers want us to believe the footage is real, the story is real, that three young people died and we are witnessing the final days of their lives. It isn’t. It’s all fiction.
But Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, take us to the edge of belief, squirming in our seats the whole way. It’s an ambitious and well-executed concept.
— Christy Lemire
“Saw” (2004)
The fright flick “Saw” is consistent, if nothing else.
This serial-killer tale is inanely plotted, badly written, poorly acted, coarsely directed, hideously photographed and clumsily edited, all these ingredients leading to a yawner of a surprise ending. To top it off, the music’s bad, too.
You could forgive all (well, not all, or even, fractionally, much) of the movie’s flaws if there were any chills or scares to this sordid little horror affair.
But “Saw” director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who developed the story together, have come up with nothing more than an exercise in unpleasantry and ugliness.
— David Germain
Germain gave “Saw” one star out of four.
“Paranormal Activity” (2009)
The no-budget ghost story “Paranormal Activity” arrives 10 years after “The Blair Witch Project,” and the two horror movies share more than a clever construct and shaky, handheld camerawork.
The entire film takes place at the couple’s cookie-cutter dwelling, its layout and furnishings indistinguishable from just about any other readymade home constructed in the past 20 years. Its ordinariness makes the eerie, nocturnal activities all the more terrifying, as does the anonymity of the actors adequately playing the leads.
The thinness of the premise is laid bare toward the end, but not enough to erase the horror of those silent, nighttime images seen through Micah’s bedroom camera. “Paranormal Activity” owns a raw, primal potency, proving again that, to the mind, suggestion has as much power as a sledgehammer to the skull.
— Glenn Whipp
Whipp gave “Paranormal Activity” three stars out of four.
“The Conjuring” (2013)
As sympathetic, methodical ghostbusters Lorraine and Ed Warren, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson make the old-fashioned haunted-house horror film “The Conjuring” something more than your average fright fest.
“The Conjuring,” which boasts incredulously of being their most fearsome, previously unknown case, is built very in the ’70s-style mold of “Amityville” and, if one is kind, “The Exorcist.” The film opens with a majestic, foreboding title card that announces its aspirations to such a lineage.
But as effectively crafted as “The Conjuring” is, it’s lacking the raw, haunting power of the models it falls shy of. “The Exorcist” is a high standard, though; “The Conjuring” is an unusually sturdy piece of haunted-house genre filmmaking.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “The Conjuring” two and half stars out of four.
Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” writer-director Jordan Peele has crafted a similar confrontation with altogether more combustible results in “Get Out.”
In Peele’s directorial debut, the former “Key and Peele” star has — as he often did on that satirical sketch series — turned inside out even supposedly progressive assumptions about race. But Peele has largely left comedy behind in a more chilling portrait of the racism that lurks beneath smiling white faces and defensive, paper-thin protestations like, “But I voted for Obama!” and “Isn’t Tiger Woods amazing?”
It’s long been a lamentable joke that in horror films — never the most inclusive of genres — the Black dude is always the first to go. In this way, “Get Out” is radical and refreshing in its perspective.
In Ari Aster’s intensely nightmarish feature-film debut “Hereditary,” when Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother of two teenagers, sneaks out to a grief-support group following the death of her mother, she lies to her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she’s “going to the movies.”
A night out with “Hereditary” is many things, but you won’t confuse it for an evening of healing and therapy. It’s more like the opposite.
Aster’s film, relentlessly unsettling and pitilessly gripping, has carried with it an ominous air of danger and dread: a movie so horrifying and good that you have to see it, even if you shouldn’t want to, even if you might never sleep peacefully again.
