For many years the Toronto International Film Festival has been as overwhelmingly big and thrilling as a film festival can be. But with every new edition, TIFF seems to get even bigger and better. This year’s event, which runs from 4 to 14 September, has a packed Midnight Madness selection that includes the world premiere of Matthew Kennedy and Adam Brooks’s The Editor, a loving tribute to, or parody of, the gory giallo thrillers of Mario Bava and Dario Argento, alongside Jonas Govaerts’s promising Belgium horror debut Cub, and Kevin Smith’s bizarre Tusk.

In addition, the line-up features Sion Sono’s Tokyo Tribe, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, Hal Hartley’s Ned Rifle and Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe, all of which also screen at Etrange Festival in Paris, which takes place at the same time. Mark Hartley presents his latest documentary Electric Boogaloo, which chronicles the rise and fall of 1980s action-exploitation juggernaut Cannon Films, plus there will be another opportunity to catch the hilarious Vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, which arrives in UK cinemas in November.

Plenty more exciting titles are on show in the always superb Vanguard strand, including The Duke of Burgundy, Peter Strickland’s follow-up to his eerie Berberian Sound Studio, the Misery-style Spanish thriller Shrew’s Nest and The World of Kanako, a new stylish and provocative thriller from Confessions director Tetsuya Nakashima.

James Franco’s latest Faulkner adaptation The Sound and the Fury, Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini and Jean-Baptiste Léonetti’s The Reach, the eagerly awaited follow-up to his 2011 debut feature Carré Blanc will receive a special presentation, plus the most promising big hitters in the official gala section come in the form of Shim Sung-Bo’s high-seas adventure Haemoo, co-scripted by Bong Joon-ho, and Andrea Di Stefano’s debut feature Escobar: Paradise Lost.

In addition to the many world and international premieres on show, there are of course this year’s earlier festival favourites to catch up on such as Cannes winner Winter Sleep, David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, Xavier Dolan’s Mommy, Gabe Polsky’s Red Army about the Soviet Union’s dominance of ice hockey during the Cold War and Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, which also receives a gala screening at this year’s 58th BFI London Film Festival (8-19 October). Straight from Venice comes Ramin Bahrani’s superb dramatic thriller 99 Homes, atmospheric Austrian chiller Goodnight Mommy and The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer’s highly anticipated follow-up to The Act of Killing.

As a very special treat, the always exciting Cinematheque archive strand presents Winnipeg director John Paizs’ 1985 classic Crime Wave, which brilliantly apes the look of 1950s educational films and trashy crime movies, alongside Atom Egoyan‘s Speaking Parts and a painstaking restoration of Sergei Paradjanov‘s 1968 masterpiece The Colour of Pomegranates.

Watch the TIFF festival trailer: