The British horror comedy Lesbian Vampire Killers is just one of a number of genre films premiering at the 2009 Fantasia festival in Montreal. (Fantasia)

There's a touch of ambiguity in a movie title like Lesbian Vampire Killers, which is making its Canadian premiere at Montreal's Fantasia festival this month. Is this British horror comedy about lesbians who are vampires or lesbians who kill vampires? Either way, prospective viewers pretty much know what they're in for. And that's the way they like it, especially when they come looking for a humorous take on the vampire genre, rather than another teen melodrama with bloodsuckers like the monstrously successful Twilight.

Now in its 13th edition, Montreal's Fantasia festival has become North America's premier festival of genre film -- from horror to sci-fi to action to just plain strange.

Now in its 13th edition, Fantasia has become North America's premier festival of genre film. As a result, it's one of the most hallowed sites for any director to debut a new work — provided the movie can be described as horror, science fiction, fantasy, action, martial arts, anime, extreme or just plain strange.

But those filmmakers know that they're facing viewers who know the ins and outs of the category at hand – these are the kind of nerds who have protracted discussions about how fast a zombie should move. Every genre and subgenre comes with its own rules: werewolf movies must feature fast-growing body hair; action movies must have exploding cars and roundhouse kicks; science-fiction epics must showcase fashion-forward silver wardrobes.

These are just a small sampling of the expectations when thrill-seeking Montrealers converge on Fantasia, where this year, they'll find everything from a Korean vampire hit (Park Chan-wook's Thirst) to the directorial debut of France's most notorious contemporary novelist, Michel Houellebecq (The Possibility of an Island), to plenty more movies with titles almost as lurid as Lesbian Vampire Killers.

The unique challenge for the genre filmmaker is somehow delivering the essential elements – sometimes while paying homage to the movies that established those prerequisites – while finding ways to be novel. Indeed, the most satisfying examples are quite conservative in many respects, but thankfully not without their wild streaks.

Kim Yoon-Suk's thriller The Chaser plays with the conventions of the serial-killer film genre. (Fantasia)

Assaulting genre conventions has become a specialty of Korean filmmakers. No cinematic standby is safe from their devious machinations, be it the revenge thriller (Oldboy), the ghost story (A Tale of Two Sisters) or even the monster movie (The Host). Fantasia audiences had the chance to savour the latest example this weekend when Thirst had its North American premiere (it's out in August in Canada). The recent Cannes prizewinner is Oldboy director Park Chan-wook's florid, unpredictable yet mournful reimagining of the vampire movie. Catholic imagery and themes of sin and guilt are understandably prominent in this tale of a devout priest who develops strange powers and a need for the red stuff. Matters grow even more complex when he meets a sexually alluring but unstable woman who puts the fatal in femme fatale. Park flouts many rules of the vampire flick in order to get to the dark, sticky core of the genre and explore both its most spiritual and most carnal predilections.

Another Korean hit making its Canadian premiere is Kim Yoon-suk's The Chaser, a bruising and riveting thriller that begins with the familiar tropes of so many serial-killer movies since Se7en – including the killer in question, a mild-mannered type who dispatches prostitutes with a chisel to the head – but soon blazes into parts unknown. One fascinating difference between Kim's film and its Hollywood counterparts is the portrayal of police investigators. The American varieties are usually determined and intrepid (if attractively flawed), but here they're cantankerous, corrupt and barely competent.

Hyped as the festival's most stomach-churning offering, Robert Masciantonio's ultra-grisly Neighbor attempts to flip the usual gender roles in torture movies like the Hostel and Saw cycles by deploying an attractive, deceptively cheerful woman as the chief tormentor. Unfortunately, the movie plays like a coarser version of Audition, another woman-empowering shocker by Japanese maverick Takashi Miike. Paul Solet's American indie Grace is a rather more elegant addition to the small but uniquely disturbing subgenre of the natal horror movie – anyone who's had nightmares about Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, David Cronenberg's The Brood or the savage French hit Inside will want to give Grace a wide berth (or should that be "birth?"). And for those who prefer their evil tykes to be of preschool age, the pipsqueaks in the genuinely terrifying British thriller The Children far outdo their predecessors in Village of the Damned.

Medical students learn not to mess with flesh-eating Nazi zombies in the Norwegian horror flick Dead Snow. (Fantasia)

With its mixture of yuks and yuck, the genre-mash known as the horror comedy offers a kind of respite from all the nastiness. Tommy Wirkola's Dead Snow travels from its native Norway to make its Canadian debut at Fantasia. In it, a group of young medical students heads to a remote cabin for a getaway, a setup that even one of the film's characters recognizes from Sam Raimi's Evil Dead movies. Such self-parodying gestures are the vernacular of the horror comedy – unfortunately, many of the best jokes have already been made several times over. But when Wirkola lays off the winks and nudges and amps up the carnage — thanks to a platoon of flesh-hungry Nazi zombies — Dead Snow nearly matches the most gruesome achievements of heroes like Raimi and the pre-Tolkien Peter Jackson.

Having already made a vampire musical (Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter) and paid homage to Sam Peckinpah (The Dead Sleep Easy), Ottawa filmmaker Lee Demarbre has no option but to get his gore on. The story of a mad director who kills in order to supply his production with extra realism, Smash Cut is packed with cinematic in-jokes and appearances by horror icons such as Michael Berryman, the baldy in the original version of The Hills Have Eyes. Sloppy but endearing, Smash Cut captures the sleazy, DIY spirit of its biggest inspiration, the pioneering gore-fests of American director Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Patrons who don't care about the cinematic tradition Lewis established with the likes of Blood Feast might prefer the less trammeled territory staked out by Michel Houellebecq. Adapted from his own 2005 novel, The Possibility of an Island is a science-fiction film, albeit of a headier variety than the kind George Lucas prefers – think Solaris, not Ewoks. A parable about a Raelian-like sect that develops cloning technology, The Possibility of an Island is a sometimes confounding but admirably sincere inquiry into what it means to be human. It yields the kind of startling images and insights that have grown rare in the sci-fi genre.

Houellebecq also fulfills an all-important science-fiction precept by revealing some of the sartorial options we can expect in the future – white, flowing robes and shaved eyebrows is a look we can get behind. I'm sure Fantasia's bravest devotees are already wearing it.

The Fantasia Festival runs to July 29 at the Theatre Hall Concordia in Montreal. See www.fantasiafestival.com for a schedule.

Jason Anderson is a writer based in Toronto.