The Toronto After Dark Film Festival is back at the Bloor for a fourth year of deeply disturbed motion pictures, 18 in all, from the far shores of horror, sci-fi and thrillers. Dress as a zombie Sunday for half-price tickets. Hang with fans and filmmakers after the show at Paupers across the street.

Directors will be on hand – Scott Sanders (for opening gala Black Dynamite), Paul Solet (for closing gala Grace) and several others, including Strigoi (Monday, 9:30 pm; Rating: NNNN), the fest’s first world premiere.

Strigoi is Romanian (technically a Romania/UK co-production), and it isn’t like other vampire movies. Forget cheap shocks and teen sex. This is a serious and seriously black comedy about land, heritage in the blood and the rape of the country and people from the Nazis onward, with the vampires standing in explicitly for Stalinist ruling couple Nicolae and Elena Ceau?escu. 

Shortly after the villagers execute greedy landowners Constantin and Ileana Tirescu, young Vlad returns home and begins to investigate the death of drunk old Florin. Everyone knows, nobody’s talking, and the vampires lurk about, bloated, greedy and scary.

Vampire Girl Vs. Frankenstein Girl (Monday, 7 pm; Rating: NNN) is no Machine Girl – nothing could be – but there’s no shortage of preposterous excess on all fronts, from musical numbers to gore. 

The new girl in school is a vampire who falls for our cute but passive hero because of a gift of chocolate. This enrages Keiko, who heads the goth girl clique and whose father and the oversexed school nurse are playing Frankenstein in the basement. Pretty soon, Keiko becomes a girl of many parts, mostly taken from girls in the wrist-cutters and wannabe Afro-American clubs.

In The Children (Tuesday, 7 pm; Rating: NNNN), two families get together for Christmas at an isolated house. Something gets into the kids, and they start offing the adults. Things get worse when some of the adults figure it out and realize they have to stick it to their own adorable little moppets. 

What gives this above-average shudder value is that the children haven’t lost their personalities – they’ve just become goal-oriented. They’re sly, equally capable of making it look like an accident and playing on their parents’ nurturing instincts.