Sommaire pour #4: HorrorWood North de RUE MORGUE

BROWN AND ORANGE PATTERNED CARPET. IT DECORATED THE HALLWAYS LIKE A PAISLEY RASH IN THE TORONTO APARTMENT COMPLEX WHERE I GREW UP – an abstract bridge between the psychedelic ’60s and the emerging order of ’70s futurism. The buildings themselves were, despite their Soviet-style brutality, an inviting, middle-class community that seemed designed to embrace the brand of socialism that was fashionable at the time. And though only a child, I intuited that they were emblematic of Canada, a young country with promise, somehow free of the violence and malaise that gripped our post-Watergate/Vietnam American cousins to the south. Who would suspect that this shiny new world I inhabited would prove to be such fertile ground for horror? Certainly no one at the time would ever think that the kinds of…

THIS IS IT – THE FILM THAT STARTED IT ALL. CANADA’S VERY FIRST FEATURELENGTH HORROR MOVIE, 1961’s black-and-white The Mask, is a little-known flick that has never achieved the popularity or recognition it deserves. Besides being the first Canuck horror film ever made, it’s also the first Canadian-produced movie to achieve widespread distribution by a large American studio; it’s the first Canadian film to be shot in 3-D; and finally, it is arguably still one of the strangest, most inventive flicks ever to come out of Horrorwood North. The Mask begins with a young woman being chased by a man through a wooded area and then strangled. The next day, the same young man, one Michael Radin (Martin Lavut), visits his psychiatrist, Dr. Allan Barnes (Paul Stevens) and agitatedly tells…

DURING THE LATE 1960S AND EARLY ’70S, FAMILIES WERE BOMBARDED ON a nightly basis with television news reports of the war in Vietnam. In the midst of this came a film that, instead of glorifying the bloody conflict in Southeast Asia, chose to question the cost of America’s involvement: Bob Clark’s 1972 classic, Deathdream. The film begins with a pair of soldiers who, amidst the blasting of machine guns and explosions lighting up the nighttime sky, are trying to steer clear of enemy fire when they are suddenly hit. Cut to the brightly lit dining room of the middle-class Brooks family: Charles (John Marley), his wife, Christine (Lynn Carlin) and their daughter Cathy (Anya Ormsby). Their dinner is interrupted by a knock at the door, and a soldier informs Charles…

THE POSSESSION OF VIRGINIA A.K.A. LE DIABLE EST PARMI NOUS (1972) STARRING DANIEL PILON, LOUISE MARLEAU AND DANIELLE OUIMET DIRECTED BY JEAN BEAUDIN Journalist Paul Dwyer (Daniel Pilon) gets more than he bargained for when he investigates the suicide of a friend: his cat is poisoned, his home is ransacked and Virginia (Danielle Ouimet), a young woman who worked in his dead friend’s antiques shop, is found hanging from a rope in a church – all while a strange old woman seems to lurk nearby. Most copies of this hard-to-find, Montreal-shot flick are sourced from a heavily edited, English-dubbed version that, in addition to removing scenes of sex and gore, also leaves the film with numerous plot holes. A NAME FOR EVIL (1973) STARRING ROBERT CULP, SAMANTHA EGGAR AND SHEILA…

YEARS BEFORE PAMELA AND JASON VOORHEES AND A HOST OF OTHER DEMENTED AND DISFIGURED INDIVIDUALS DECIDED TO USE A forest as their slay ground, a little 1977 Canadian-made film titled Rituals featured a group of men relentlessly stalked by a mysterious killer. But unlike those later films – which included the Friday the 13th series and The Burning – the environment in Rituals proves to be just as much a danger to the men as to the deranged assassin himself. Harry (Hal Holbrook: The Fog), Mitzi (Lawrence Dane: Scanners), Marty (Robin Gammell), Abel (Ken James) and Marty’s brother D.J. (Gary Reineke) are five doctors whose yearly vacation takes them to a remote, wooded area of northern Ontario known as the Cauldron of the Moon. That night around a campfire, the…

FOR BETTER OR WORSE, THE MAJORITY OF CANADIAN HORROR PRODUCTIONS ARE KNOWN FOR THEIR LOW-BUDGET LOOK AND FEEL. An exception to this is the elegant 1980 chiller The Changeling. One of the most effective entries in the haunted house subgenre, the film tells of composer John Russell (George C. Scott: Dr. Strangelove, Patton) who, after witnessing the deaths of his wife and daughter in a tragic winter traffic collision, moves to Seattle to try and move on with his life. Taking up a university teaching position, Russell rents a large, old mansion from the local historical society, but soon finds that he is not the only one there. In addition to being awakened each morning at 6 a.m. by a loud thumping noise that rumbles throughout the house, Russell hears…

FOLLOWING 1980’S PROM NIGHT, DIRECTOR PAUL LYNCH WOULD GO ON TO HELM ANOTHER HORROR FLICK: the lesser-known Humongous (1982). Working with Prom Night screenwriter William Gray, Lynch approached distributor Avco Embassy Pictures (which would be renamed Embassy Pictures in 1982) with the concept for Humongous. “We had talked with Avco Embassy and said, ‘This is the kind of film we would like to do,’” recalls Lynch. “So we put together Humongous and we pitched it to them. And they hemmed and hawed, until finally they said yes. They needed a [producing] partner in Canada. Peter [Simpson] wasn’t interested; he had gone on to do bigger-budget films like Melanie. So, I was introduced to Tony Kramreither, and he was interested in doing it. We ended up making it in the summer…

FOR HORROR FANS WHO WERE TOO YOUNG TO GET INTO CINEMAS TO SEE the latest Rrated slasher adventures of Freddy or Jason, the 1987 creature feature The Gate was a worthy substitution. But just because it was PG-13, didn’t mean it was strictly kid’s stuff. In fact, unlike the similarly-rated but comedy-laced Gremlins (1984) and Critters (1986), The Gate manages to amp up the suspense and scare factor quite a bit. When an old tree is removed from his backyard, young Glen (Stephen Dorff) notices a geode – a hollow rock with a crystal-lined centre – drop from the roots of the tree. In searching for more of the objects, he and best friend Terry (Louis Tripp) dig up the (now filled-in) area where the tree used to be. Unfortunately,…

KILLING IN THE NAME OF GOD OR RELIGION HAS BEEN THE THEME OF A NUMBER OF HORROR FILMS OVER THE YEARS, including Ken Russell’s highly controversial The Devils (1971) and the Bill Paxton-directed Frailty (2001). With the 2007 indie release End of the Line, director Maurice Devereaux (Slashers) takes the concept and gives it an inventive twist. It’s nearly midnight, and a psychiatric nurse, Karen (Ilona Elkin) and a young man, Mike (Nicolas Wright) are taking the subway home, only to be stranded aboard the darkened train when the power goes out. They are joined by a kindly-looking older woman who tells them she was afraid of being alone. Moments later, the lights come back on and, after receiving a message on her pager, the seemingly nice old lady pulls…

GRACE (2009) STARRING JORDAN LADD, STEPHEN PARK AND GABRIELLE ROSE DIRECTED BY PAUL SOLET Madeline Matheson (Jordan Ladd) is eight months pregnant when she and her husband Michael are involved in a car accident. Michael is killed, but Madeline survives and is taken to the clinic of her midwife friend, Patricia (Samantha Ferris), where the unborn baby is pronounced dead. Despite this, the woman insists on carrying the baby to term, and weeks later she gives birth at home to a girl, whom she names Grace. The baby appears to be stillborn, but shortly afterward is discovered to be alive. Mistrustful of doctors, the woman refrains from taking the newborn to the hospital. But the baby – who gives off a foul odour and is developing a rash – cannot…

ONE OF THE MOST DELIRIOUSLY TWISTED FILMS TO EVER COME OUT OF CANADA, 2011’s Hobo with a Shotgun is not a movie for all tastes. With its over-the-top gore gags, profanity-laden dialogue and complete disregard for cinematic taboos (in one scene, a villain uses a flame-thrower to roast a busload of children), the film has few equals. Hobo’s eponymous hero (Rutger Hauer) is a train-hopping vagabond searching for a place to call home. He arrives in the ironically named Hope Town, but his dreams of a new start are soon dashed when he witnesses a wave of violent crime, including a public decapitation carried out by a psychopathic kingpin called The Drake (Brian Downey) and his two bloodthirsty sons, Ivan (Nick Bateman) and Slick (Gregory Smith). When the maniacal Slick…

IN A NOT-SO-DISTANT FUTURE, CELEBRITY WORSHIP HAS REACHED SUCH A frenzied state that high-end clinics exist to infect people with diseases harvested from the most popular of public figures – allowing them to experience the same illness afflicting their favourite idol. Stone-faced Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) works for the Lucas Clinic, a centre where clients can choose from a selection of “designer viruses.” To earn some extra cash, the young man has been smuggling out the copyright-protected viruses from the heavily secured facility by administering the infectious agents into his own body and later re-selling them on the black market. When he’s sent to collect a sample of the illness that has stricken beautiful young starlet Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon), he also injects himself with the same disease. But…

WITH THE ESTABLISHMENT OF RUE MORGUE CINEMA, RM FOUNDER AND PUBLISHER RODRIGO GUDIÑO branched out beyond the world of print into the realm of filmmaking. His first directorial effort was the 2006 short film The Eyes of Edward James, about a man who undergoes hypnotherapy to unlock repressed memories of the night his wife was murdered. Gudiño followed this up with another short, The Demonology of Desire (2007), a twisted tale of a disturbed girl whose desire to be loved goes in some very dark directions. The following year, he teamed up with Vincent Marcone (of the band Johnny Hollow) to codirect a third short titled The Facts In the Case of Mister Hollow, which centres on a chilling photograph. Gudiño then made his feature debut with 2012’s The Last…

13 EERIE (2013) Starring Katharine Isabelle, Michael Shanks and Brendan Fehr Directed by Lowell Dean 5150 RUE DES ORMES (2009) a.k.a. 5150 Elm’s Way Starring Marc-André Grondin, Normand D’Amour and Sonia Vachon Directed by Éric Tessier AFFLICTED (2013) Starring Derek Lee, Clif Prowse and Michael Gill Directed by Derek Lee and Clif Prowse ALTITUDE (2010) Starring Jessica Lowndes, Julianna Guill and Ryan Donowho Direct by Kaare Andrews BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW (2010) Starring Eva Bourne, Michael Rogers and Scott Hylands Directed by Panos Cosmatos BLACK ROSES (1988) Starring John Martin, Ken Swofford and Sal Viviano Directed by John Fasano BLEEDERS (1997) Starring Rutger Hauer, Roy Dupuis and Jackie Burroughs Directed by Peter Svatek BLOOD RELATIONS (1987) Starring Jan Rubes, Lydie Denier and Kevin Hicks Directed by Graeme Campbell BLOOD SYMBOL…

IT MAY BE SURPRISING TO LEARN, BUT CANADA HAS AN IMPRESSIVE TRACK RECORD WHEN IT COMES TO PRODUCING HORROR MOVIES. Since the country’s first full-length horror film (1961’s The Mask), Canadians have produced some of the most fascinating, provocative, offbeat and revered fright flicks ever made. That’s why Rue Morgue is devoting its fourth supplement to the world of Canadian genre cinema. Within the pages of Horrorwood North you’ll find interviews with some of the most influential figures in Canadian horror – the directors, writers, producers, actors and composers who have put Canada on the horror-movie map. You’ll find spotlights on some of most striking films from the Canuck horror canon, plus dozens of reviews and much more. But you might be asking yourself, “What’s so special about Canadian genre…

PLAYGIRL KILLER (1966) STARRING WILLIAM KERWIN, JEAN CHRISTOPHER AND ANDRÉE CHAMPAGNE DIRECTED BY ERICK SANTAMARIA Bill (William Kerwin) is an artist with a bad habit of murdering his models. On the lam for killing a young woman (with a harpoon gun!) who didn’t sit still when she posed for him, he finds himself at the mansion of Arlene (Jean Christopher), a young woman whose father is away for the summer. Arlene hires Bill as a handyman and tries to seduce him, but also falls victim to the artist’s homicidal impulses. Bill decides to remain in the house to lure other young woman there to model for him. Shot in Montreal, this deliciously sleazy trash-fest features singer Neil Sedaka (who also gives a performance) in a small role. THE VULTURE (1967)…

ONE OF A HANDFUL OF BLACK MAGIC CULT-THEMED FILMS TO EMERGE FROM Canada, the underrated 1973 thriller The Pyx may, at first glance, appear to be little more than a riff on Rosemary’s Baby (1968). The film was, however, already prefaced by a 1959 novel of the same name by Canadian author John Buell. Produced by Julian Roffman (The Mask), the film begins with the apparent suicide of a woman (Karen Black: Burnt Offerings, Trilogy of Terror) whose white gown-clad body is seen spiraling downward from the penthouse balcony of a Montreal high-rise. Detective Sergeant Jim Henderson (Christopher Plummer: Murder by Decree) and his partner, Pierre Paquette (Donald Pilon: The Uncanny), examine the corpse and find she is wearing an inverted crucifix and holding a pyx – a small metal…

PROLIFIC PRODUCER AND DIRECTOR IVAN REITMAN IS A HOUSEHOLD NAME to generations of movie fans, thanks to blockbuster comedies such as Animal House, Ghostbusters and Kindergarten Cop. But before he worked with John Landis, Bill Murray and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Reitman made his living as a producer on such low-budget Canuck genre classics as David Cronenberg’s Shivers and Rabid, and William Fruet’s Death Weekend. More than a decade before Ghostbusters became one of the highest grossing films of 1984, Reitman directed a Canadian comedy-horror flick titled Cannibal Girls. Notable for being one of his first directorial efforts (previously, he had helmed a 1969 short titled Orientation and the 1971 comedy Foxy Lady) and the early teaming of future SCTV cast members Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin, Cannibal Girls also has the…

THE LITTLE GIRL WHO LIVES DOWN THE LANE (1976) STARRING JODIE FOSTER, MARTIN SHEEN AND ALEXIS SMITH DIRECTED BY NICOLAS GESSNER Rynn (Jodie Foster) is a precocious thirteen-year-old whose parents never seem to be around. She turns away anyone who asks to see her father, including landlady Mrs. Hallett (Alexis Smith) and her pedophile son, Frank (Martin Sheen). Mrs. Hallett finally forces her way into the house under the pretense of retrieving some jars she left in the cellar, but something in the basement frightens her and she’s killed when the cellar door whacks her on the head. Enter Mario (Scott Jacoby), a boy who falls for Rynn and helps her conceal Mrs. Hallett’s death. When Mario falls ill and Rynn goes to the hospital to visit him, Frank discovers…

CANUCK FILMS OFTEN DISPLAY A TALENT FOR SHOWCASING THE COUNTRY’S BLUSTERY WINTERS AND VAST, varied landscapes. Whether it’s dense wilderness of snow-covered trees or barren stretches of blinding white prairie, our inhospitable weather and cold, snowy terrain has been put to good use in such homegrown horror pics as Cannibal Girls (1973), Deranged (1974) and an obscure Alberta-shot wendigo flick from 1981 called Ghostkeeper. Vacationing in the Rockies, Jenny (Riva Spier), her boyfriend Marty (Murray Ord) and her friend Chrissy (Sheri McFadden) are out for a day of snowmobiling when an accident prompts them to seek refuge at a nearby lodge during a blizzard. Though seemingly abandoned, the creepy building turns out to be inhabited by a strange old woman (Georgie Collins) and her son. The apparent caretaker of the…

IF YOU’RE A FAN OF CANADIAN HORROR CINEMA, CHANCES ARE YOU’VE COME ACROSS THE NAME PAUL ZAZA. As one of Canada’s most prolific film composers, his scores have appeared in such Canuck chillers as Prom Night and its three sequels, My Bloody Valentine, Ghostkeeper, American Nightmare, Curtains and The Dark. Born in Toronto in 1952, Zaza began studying piano at the age of four and graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Music (previously known as the Toronto Conservatory of Music) in 1970. An avid rock fan, the teenaged Zaza played bass in a Toronto production of the hit musical Hair, and was subsequently given the opportunity to tour as bass player with the superstar group The 5th Dimension in the early ’70s. Setting up his own recording studio in 1972,…

PROLIFIC ENGLISH-CANADIAN ACTOR DAVID HEWLETT CAN TRACE HIS CAREER BACK TO HIGH SCHOOL, when he appeared in student films by future Splice director Vincenzo Natali. Since his breakout role in Pin, Hewlett has appeared in dozens of movies and TV series, including Cube, Splice and Stargate SG-1. What do you remember about Pin’s casting process? The casting was gruelling. I didn’t really think about it being my first lead, that this was a big thing, so that helped me. I remember the wonderful casting agent, Stuart Aikins, coming out of the room after I did my audition. I thought I had been amazing, but he whacks me over the head and goes, “That was brilliant! We couldn’t see a fucking thing, keep your head up!” My head had been down…

MURDER BY PHONE A.K.A. BELLS (1982) STARRING RICHARD CHAMBERLAIN, JOHN HOUSEMAN AND SARA BOTSFORD DIRECTED BY MICHAEL ANDERSON A young woman picks up a ringing telephone and begins to convulse and bleed from her eyes before a blast sends her flying backward. Her death is officially attributed to a heart attack, but science professor Nat Bridger (Richard Chamberlain) doesn’t buy it. Meanwhile, others across the city are suffering the same fate when they pick up their phones, and Bridger finds that someone with a homicidal grudge is murdering people by sending lethal bursts of energy across phone lines. GRAVEYARD SHIFT (1987) STARRING SILVIO OLIVIERO, HELEN PAPAS AND CLIFF STOKER DIRECTED BY GERARD CICCORITTI In this highly stylized take on the vampire flick, Stephen Tsepes (Silvio Oliviero) is a bloodsucking cab…

PRODUCER STEVEN HOBAN HAS BEEN THE DRIVING FORCE BEHIND SOME OF CANADA’S MOST INTRIGUING GENRE FARE. Besides the Ginger Snaps trilogy, Hoban’s credits include Blood & Donuts (1995), Splice (2009), Haunter (2013) and Wolves (2014). Hoban has recently turned to directing, helming an episode of the TV series Darknet and a segment of the 2014 anthology film A Christmas Horror Story. Can you tell me a bit about the genesis of Ginger Snaps? Before we made [the 1992 short film] Half Nelson, there was another film that John [Fawcett] and I were developing called Leave of Absence, which was about a woman who transforms, [but] not into a werewolf. We had spent a lot of time working on that, but the Canadian Film Centre ended up rejecting it. That’s when…

SKINWALKERS (2006) STARRING JASON BEHR, ELIAS KOTEAS AND RHONA MITRA DIRECTED BY JIM ISAAC A thirteen-year-old boy who’s half-wolf and half-human has the power to end the curse of lycanthropy for two warring werewolf clans. One pack coexists peacefully with humans; the other group, which pulls double duty as a motorcycle gang, relishes the thrill of hunting people and the taste of human flesh. The evil werewolves – or skin-walkers, as they’re called in Native Indian folklore – will do anything in order to find the boy and kill him before he can relieve them of their shapeshifting abilities. FIDO (2006) STARRING CARRIE-ANNE MOSS, BILLY CONNOLLY AND DYLAN BAKER DIRECTED BY ANDREW CURRIE After a radiation cloud reanimates the dead and turns them into flesh-eating zombies, a company called Zomcon…

MONSTER BRAWL (2011) STARRING DAVE FOLEY, ART HINDLE AND ROBERT MAILLET DIRECTED BY JESSE THOMAS COOK Eight monsters – the Frankenstein monster, a female vampire, a werewolf, a witch, a mummy, a zombie, a Cyclops and a swamp creature – battle it out in a series of graveyard wrestling matches. Short bio segments are featured for each monster, ringside commentary is supplied by Sasquatch Sid Tucker (Art Hindle) and Buzz Chambers (Dave Foley), and Lance Henriksen provides voiceover during matches. Wrestling fans will appreciate appearances by Jimmy Hart and Kevin Nash. ANTISOCIAL (2013) STARRING MICHELLE MYLETT, CODY THOMPSON AND ADAM CHRISTIE DIRECTED BY CODY CALAHAN It’s December 31st and criminology student Sam (Michelle Mylett) accepts an invitation to a New Year’s bash thrown by a friend and his housemates. Once…

WHILE THERE’S NO SHORTAGE OF WOMEN IN FRONT OF THE CAMERA IN HORROR FILMS, BEHIND IT is another story. Genre filmmaking is still male-dominated, but there are a handful of women who are making strides to change that. Among them are Vancouver-born sisters Jen and Sylvia Soska. The identical twins, who founded their own company, Twisted Twins Productions, made a name for themselves with their first feature film, the 2009 DIY flick Dead Hooker in a Trunk, which was produced on a micro budget of only $2500. The film, in which two sisters (played by the Soskas) and their friends discover a prostitute’s corpse in the trunk of their car and try to find a way to dispose of the body, earned kudos from many horror and exploitation fans for…

CANADA DOES NOT SHARE THE UNITED STATES’ LONG-STANDING TRADITION OF WEREWOLF COMEDIES – or werewolf movies at all, for that matter. Sure, we have the trio of Ginger Snaps films, which all have some dark humour, but the Americans have been far more prolific with The Werewolf of Washington (1973), Teen Wolf (1985) and its sequel, Full Moon High (1987), Cursed (2005) and the classic UK-lensed An American Werewolf in London (1981). So, the prize for the first-ever Canadian werewolf comedy goes to 2014’s WolfCop. Moulded in the style of ’80s horror-comedies, WolfCop is the story of a small-town policeman – the aptly named Lou Garou (Leo Fafard) – who drinks too much and, to the chagrin of the police chief (Aidan Devine), doesn’t share the same work ethic as…

IF YOU’RE READING THIS, IT’S SAFE TO ASSUME YOU’VE LOGGED MORE THAN A FEW HOURS WATCHING SUCH CANADIAN HORROR CLASSICS AS Shivers, Rabid, My Bloody Valentine and Happy Birthday to Me. All of these Canuck genre staples, along with some of the country’s best-known filmmakers, can trace their roots back to a Montreal-based outfit known as Cinépix. Cinépix was founded in 1962 by Montreal-born producer John Dunning (who died in 2011 at age 84). Dunning had spent most of his life around movies, working at his family’s theatre in a variety of capacities. Shortly after he formed Cinépix, Dunning partnered with André Link, a Hungarian transplant with experience in booking and film sales. “John was a distributor for cinema and I was working at one point in the capacity of…

INSPIRED BY THE GRISLY DEEDS OF PLAINFIELD, WISCONSIN MURDERER AND GRAVEROBBER ED GEIN, 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remains one of modern horror’s most iconic films. Also released earlier that year was a much more accurate take on the crimes: Deranged (made in ‘73), an incredibly chilling, overlooked cult classic that has never received the recognition it deserves. The project got off the ground when Tom Karr, a concert promoter for the likes of Led Zeppelin and Rod Stewart, became acquainted with writer/actor/makeup artist Alan Ormsby (Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, Dead of Night) and expressed a desire to produce a film about the murderous body-snatcher. Collaborating with actor Jeff Gillen (who had also appeared in both Children and Dead), Ormsby wrote the script and co-directed the film with…

ONE OF THE MORE UNUSUAL TRAJECTORIES HAS GOT TO BE THAT OF FILMMAKER WILLIAM FRUET. BORN IN 1933 IN LETHBRIDGE, ALBERTA, FRUET STARTED IN THE CANADIAN FILM INDUSTRY IN FRONT OF THE CAMERA, WITH A ROLE IN THE 1963 FILM DRYLANDERS before embarking on a career as a writer, director and producer. His first co-writing credit was for the iconic 1970 Canadian drama Goin’ Down the Road, which told of two friends from Nova Scotia who travel to Ontario in the hopes of making a better life for themselves in Toronto, only to ultimately abandon their city lives. Making the shift to directing, Fruet helmed the highly acclaimed 1972 drama Wedding in White before moving into genre film territory with 1976’s Death Weekend. Despite the critical lambasting he received for…

GANADIAN ACTOR MICHAEL IRONSIDE HAS BUILT A CAREER OUT OF PLAYING SADISTIC VILLAINS and tough-guy heroes. The Toronto-born Ironside has appeared in more than 200 movies and TV shows since he made his screen debut in 1977. Here are four of his most memorable turns in Canadian-produced horror films. SCANNERS (1981) STARRING STEPHEN LACK, JENNIFER O’NEILL AND PATRICK MCGOOHAN DIRECTED BY DAVID CRONENBERG In his breakout role, Ironside is Darryl Revok, the psychopathic leader of a renegade group of genetically mutated humans called “scanners” – people who can telepathically inflict pain, injury or death on others. Wanting to use this power for the destruction of humankind, Revok has an opponent in Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), a powerful young scanner who has been recruited to find and destroy him. VISITING HOURS…

FOR SLASHER FANS, 1981 WAS A MILESTONE YEAR WITH A MULTITUDE OF RELEASES such as My Bloody Valentine, The Prowler, The Burning and highly anticipated sequels to Halloween and Friday the 13th hitting movie screens. One of the more distinctive entries to emerge from the subgenre was the overshadowed Canadian title Happy Birthday to Me. Glossy and sophisticated, yet deliciously trashy and over-the-top at the same time, the Montreal-shot film is an anomaly. With its melodramatic acting and plot overflowing with twists and turns, it feels like a blood-soaked throwback to the thrillers of the ’50s and ’60s. Imbuing the movie with a classic, stylish feel was late British filmmaker J. Lee Thompson, the Oscar-nominated director behind such highly-regarded cinematic gems as 1961’s The Guns of Navarone and 1962’s Cape…

PLAGUE A.K.A. THE GEMINI STRAIN (1978) STARRING DANIEL PILON, KATE REID AND CÉLINE LOMEZ DIRECTED BY ED HUNT In this Toronto-shot riff on The Andromeda Strain, a research assistant at McNaughton Labs defies her superiors and conducts an unsanctioned experiment that leads to the creation of a deadly bacterium. The contagion infects and kills its creator before moving beyond the laboratory walls through the facility’s ventilation system. A quarantine is promptly imposed, but a local schoolteacher (Céline Lomez) who unknowingly contracts the disease turns out to be an asymptomatic carrier and spreads the contagion to the general populace as she’s pursued by authorities. It’s up to scientist Dr. Bill Fuller (Daniel Pilon) to come up with a cure for the plague before it threatens the entire human race. DEATH SHIP…

TERROR TRAIN (1980) STARRING JAMIE LEE CURTIS, BEN JOHNSON AND HART BOCHNER DIRECTED BY ROGER SPOTTISWOODE It’s New Year’s Eve and a group of medical students, including Alana (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Doc (Hart Bochner), are having a masquerade party aboard a train, complete with entertainment by a magician and David Copperfield. But a masked maniac begins killing the partygoers one-by-one, always donning the costume of his most recent victim. Who is slashing their way through the group? And does it have anything to do with the cruel prank that once landed former student Kenny Hampton (Derek McKinnon) in a mental hospital? THE PIT (1981) STARRING SAMMY SNYDERS, JEANNIE ELIAS AND SONJA SMITS DIRECTED BY LEW LEHMAN This fantastically strange movie tells of twelve-year-old Jamie (Sammy Snyders), who is bullied…

DEVOID OF FLESH-EATING ZOMBIES, UNSTOPPABLE MASKED SLASHER BOOGEYMEN AND SUPERNATURAL CREATURES, home invasion films are certainly within the realm of possibility. Perhaps that’s what makes them all the more disturbing to audiences. One of the lesser known but more unusual and unsettling entries in this subgenre is the 2005 offering The Dark Hours. When a no-nonsense psychiatrist named Samantha Goodman (Kate Greenhouse) learns that her brain tumour has grown so large that it’s untreatable, she attempts to tell her distracted writer husband, David (Gordon Currie), about her condition by heading unannounced to their isolated, snowbound cottage in the woods – where he is staying for the weekend with Samantha’s younger sister, Melody (Iris Graham) to finish work on his latest book. Once at the cabin, the three pass some time…

ONE OF THE MOST RIVETING AND UNUSUAL GENRE FILMS TO BE RELEASED IN RECENT YEARS is 2008’s Pontypool, directed by celebrated filmmaker Bruce McDonald (Highway 61, Hard Core Logo). Based upon the 1995 novel Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess (who also wrote the screenplay), the film features Stephen McHattie (Death Valley, Haunter) as a grizzled ex-shock jock named Grant Mazzy, who arrives one cold winter morning at his radio announcing job in the small town of Pontypool, Ontario. At first it seems the top news of the day will be a snowstorm, but it soon evolves into something much worse. Shortly into his show, reports begin coming in detailing sudden irrational behaviour by the town’s citizens; and later, of eyewitness accounts of inexplicable, horrific killings taking place across the…

DEMENTED. DEPRAVED. DELIRIOUS. DISTURBED. DEBAUCHED. These are just a few of the apt terms one could use to describe the output of five-man Canadian filmmaking collective Astron-6, which includes such off-the-wall offerings as Father’s Day, Manborg (both 2011), and the recently released The Editor. The group – which is composed of filmmakers Adam Brooks, Matthew Kennedy, Conor Sweeney, Steve Kostanski and Jeremy Gillespie – has been working together since 2007, when they began pooling their resources to make faux film trailers and no-budget shorts. They include Inferno of the Dead – which sees a young couple attract a quartet of Italian-styled zombies who, instead of eating them, want to hang around them day and night – and H.I.Z. (Erection Der Zombi), about a camp counselor who contracts and transmits an…

SINCE IT WAS LAUNCHED IN 2008, THE GUELPH, ONTARIO-BASED BLACK FAWN FILMS HAS BEEN MAKING MOVIES AT A BREAKNECK PACE. Their filmography includes Cody Calahan’s 2013 neo-zombie flick Antisocial and the 2014 supernatural horror thriller The Drownsman, helmed by Black Fawn principal Chad Archibald. The company recently inked an ambitious deal with Breakthrough Entertainment to produce eight films over the course of two years. Archibald explains how they do it. How did you come to form Black Fawn Films, and why specialize in horror? We grew up loving horror films and just fell into it. We slowly realized that horror doesn’t need huge names to sell. It’s about the concepts, the thrills and the scares. It’s a world that doesn’t have to be realistic. If we want a social media…

BOOKS: Beard, William. The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg Revised and Expanded. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Inc., 2006. Buell, John. The Pyx. New York: Originally published in 1959; Popular Library movie tie-in edition, 1973. Neiderman, Andrew. Pin. New York: Pocket Books, 1981 Nowell, Richard. Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. Pevere, Geoff and Greig Dymond. Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey. Scarborough: Prentice Hall Canada Inc., 1996. Pratley, Gerald. A Century of Canadian Cinema: Gerard Pratley’s Feature Film Guide, 1900 to the Present. Toronto: Lynx Images, 2003. Rodley, Chris, ed., and David Cronenberg. Cronenberg on Cronenberg. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1st ed., 1992. Vatnsdal, Caelum. They Came from Within: A History of Canadian Horror…

THIS PROJECT HAS BEEN A LONG TIME IN THE MAKING, AND THERE ARE DEFINITELY PEOPLE WHO NEED TO BE THANKED FOR THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS. Firstly, my sincere gratitude to Rue Morgue Editor-in-Chief Dave Alexander for showing an interest in the project and Rodrigo Gudiño for publishing it. A huge thank-you goes to my editor April Snellings, for her constant help and encouragement; fellow Rue Morgue writer and Canuxploitation.com founder Paul Corupe for his superbly written afterword and assistance with answering questions and providing some of the films discussed within; and Vincenzo Natali for penning the marvelous foreword. A special thank-you must go to Ron McKenzie for interview and transcribing assistance; to Aaron Moore and Brett McNeill for transcribing assistance; to Vanessa Furtado for the great layout and Andrew Wright for the…