The cast of Super appear at the film screening's Q&A. (Submitted by Sachin Hingoo)

NOTE: This entry was submitted Sept. 19.

By Sachin Hingoo, citizen contributor

Writing for the Midnight Madness blog is one of the many volunteer hats I wear at TIFF and it's certainly my favourite. As Roger Rousseau intimates in his post, the midnight screenings are a very different animal than the usual picture of the festival. We have a red carpet, of course, and this year it's been more star-studded than most with the likes of Josh Hartnett, Woody Harrelson, Ron Perlman, Hayden Christensen, Thandie Newton, Liv Tyler and Ellen Page.

But Midnight Madness isn't -- and shouldn't be -- about the big celebs. The best films I've seen in this programme have had no "famous" actors at all. In a lot of ways, the brainchild of Noah Cowan (now programmer for the Bell Lightbox) and his successor Colin Geddes is more about the directors and writers that are creating some of the most interesting projects out there right now.  Past films that have graced the screen at the old Uptown Theatre (now, sadly, a condo) and, since 2004, the Ryerson Theatre have been Saw, The Grudge, Haute Tension, Borat, and Ichi the Killer, all of which went on to define and redefine genre cinema.

Writing for the blog has given me an outstanding opportunity to see these films grow organically and find distribution, like James Gunn's phenomenal Super, which was one of the first films at TIFF to be picked up. It's moments like these that really make TIFF special to me, and the Midnight program in particular. It's always nice to see the underdog make good.