Katherine Stefanski, star of the indie horror film The Haunt, won Best Performance at the 2017 Toronto International Spring of Horror and Fantasy Film Festival on Sunday.
The annual festival, in its second year, screened ten feature films from the horror and sci-fi genres at the historic, downtown Imagine Cinemas Carlton over the weekend (April 7th – 9th). The Haunt, a “no-budget”, Canadian horror film, was competing against feature films from around theworld, including the UK, Peru, Belgium, the Russian Federation and the United States.
But it was Stefanski’s performance as the mentally-unstable Maggie that caught the attention of the festival judges. Stefanski, a native of Toronto, is featured in almost every scene of The Haunt as her character battles a psychotic relapse involving a ghost-hunting TV show and a haunting in her own apartment – a terrifying figure with a plastic-bag covered head.
“Katherine breathed life into Maggie without any of the perks, even by low-budget standards. We had a two-man crew consisting of me with a video camera and the producer with a microphone on a broom stick. Katherine had no trailer, no makeup-and-hair, and most of the time she had no other actors to keep her company,” says Haunt director David Paul Scott. “And much of
her performance is without dialogue. It’s actually amazing to watch.”
