Cabin Fever

Harlan Pyne (Aidan Devine) has issues with his psychiatrist, Dr. Samantha Goodman (Kate Greenhouse). Photo Ken Wan. Courtesy Capri Films.

Considering all the awful things that tend to happen there in the movies, it’s hard to comprehend why anyone would spend the night in a remote cabin in the dead of winter. (Worse yet, the Jacuzzi always seems to be on the fritz.) Yet characters invariably end up in creepy sites that are just as confined. Released last weekend in the nation’s theatres, Paul Fox’s grisly and efficient thriller The Dark Hours is just the latest Canadian movie to take place in a lonely spot out in the woods.

Another recent Canadian indie, Cassandra Nicolaou’s Show Me, set its nastiness in a very un-homey cabin. Earlier one-set wonders like Cube, Blood and Century Hotel also made the most of very limited spaces, taking place largely in a single setting that is often entirely cut off from the outside world. Though filmmakers attribute the trend to the restrictions inherent in low-budget Canadian filmmaking — especially with The Dark Hours, Show Me and Cube, all three products of the Canadian Film Centre’s Feature Film Project — this claustrophobic tendency may have deeper roots. Indeed, Canadian cinema might have a permanent case of cabin fever.

Samantha Goodman (Kate Greenhouse), the heroine of The Dark Hours, is just looking for a getaway from the city. An imperious psychiatrist with a brittle bedside manner, she clearly needs the vacation. Not long after she joins husband David (Gordon Currie) and sister Melody (Iris Graham) at the cabin, two unexpected visitors drop in for some hot toddies and torture. Harlan (Aidan Devine), a former patient of Samantha’s out for revenge, torments the trio with the help of his nutcase toy boy Adrian (Dov Tiefenbach). Samantha and the grizzled elder psycho vie for the upper hand in a series of games that grow sicker by the second. The tension ramps up to a finale that is as devious and gruesome as any horror fan could hope for. In fact, The Dark Hours racked up audience awards at genre-movie festivals in Austin, Edinburgh and Pusan, South Korea.

Fox has already attracted considerable buzz for his next movie, Everything’s Gone Green, based on a script by Douglas Coupland and shot in Vancouver. But the Toronto-based filmmaker’s ambitions for his first feature were intentionally modest. Originally hashed out with writer Will Zmak over drinks in Calgary in 2002, The Dark Hours was conceived as a production that could take full advantage of the limited resources available through the Feature Film Project, which offers new filmmakers up to $500,000 to make their movies.

“We wrote it within very do-able parameters,” says Fox. “We didn’t want to stretch our means and risk having something look not quite right. We kept the practical side of it in mind, even in terms of what kind of story it was supposed to be.”

Their aim was to make a psychological thriller in the style of early Roman Polanski or of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) — something, as Fox says, “that was a little more challenging than movies about teenagers getting chased around by knife-wielding, mask-wearing psychos.” Obviously, forcing the characters into such a confined space was a tactic that could yield considerable dramatic tension. Fox describes the cabin as “the central space” both for the story and the film’s hectic, 18-day shoot. As a precedent for movies that take place principally in one space, he points to Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, a 1944 film in which Allied sailors share a boat with a cagey Nazi.

“This is not as extreme, but it’s the same sort of idea,” says Fox. “We have to always ask ourselves what we can do to make this visually interesting and compelling, and never make people feel like they’ve had enough of that space. We have to reinvent it as the film progresses.”

Fox does so by tweaking the colours, lighting effects and camera angles as The Dark Hours barrels toward its bloody finale. Not only does he maximize the cabin, but the decision to minimize the number of locations means there was more money for one thing no horror movie should be without: decent gore. “ It would’ve been disastrous to have a couple of those key moments look crappy,” says Fox.

Strained relations between David Goodman (Gordon Currie) and his wife, Samantha (Kate Greenhouse). Photo Ken Wan. Courtesy Capri Films.

The Dark Hours derives much of its tension from the characters’ desperate isolation (in the forest, no one but the woodchucks can hear you scream). Yet the reasons behind Fox’s choice of setting were principally economic. Indeed, the film capitalizes on the budget constraints in a slick and ingenious fashion.

The same could be said of Vincenzo Natali’s Cube (1997), a Feature Film Project production that went on to become an international success. A science fiction thriller about a futuristic prison, Cube may be the most intensely claustrophobic film ever conceived in this country. (The innumerable rooms of the prison were all redressed and relit variations of the same set on a Toronto soundstage.)

“Cube was definitely a child of necessity,” says Natali. “The idea did in fact derive from my need to shoot a one-set movie.” Though he is reluctant to describe this as a Canadian phenomenon, it’s “definitely a low-budget one.”

This predilection for confinement could have a deeper resonance. Steve Gravestock, a programmer of Canadian films for the Toronto International Film Festival, often sees low-budget movies that utilize a minimum number of locations. “When you’re dealing with usually younger filmmakers, they’re always trying to play with that,” he says. “Initially that’s because of budgets, but I do think there are variations on it in films that weren’t just dictated by economics.”

He suggests this tendency is present even in movies that seem mobile. For proof, he cites two cornerstones of English Canadian cinema: Don Owen’s Nobody Waved Goodbye (1964) and Don Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road (1970). “There is that trapped sense,” says Gravestock. “They’re always in these rootless locations that wind up as traps, like the boarding houses in both films. Even when the films have bigger budgets or larger scopes, that motif often ends up being there.”

Higher-profile examples of this funnelling effect include Denys Arcand’s Decline of the American Empire (1986), where the emotional pyrotechnics take place at a lakeside cottage, and David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988), the second half of which plays out in an increasingly decrepit apartment. Whereas American movies always seem to find new places in which to roam, the Canadian tendency may be to travel toward small cells where the characters finally have it out.

Crying werewolf: Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning. Courtesy Seville Pictures.

This scenario crops up so often in the stories we tell, it may be hardwired in our skulls since the days when European settlers first began to contend with the country’s often hostile conditions and sheer vastness by holing up as best they could. Northrop Frye and Margaret Atwood noticed as much in their pioneering studies of Canadian literature. As Gravestock notes, themes like “embattled survival” and situations in which characters are isolated in the wilderness crop up in Canadian cinema just as often. Even Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004), the third film in the Canadian werewolf horror series, uses tropes Susannah Moodie might have recognized. “It entirely takes place in the encampment,” says Gravestock, “and to go outside the encampment is to be preyed upon by nature because of the landscape, the climate or the whole unleashed id of the werewolf thing.”

This affection that Canadian filmmakers have for cabins, encampments and other cut-off spaces is so predominant, another new movie spoofs it in its very title. Dylan Akio Smith’s recent feature about a group of would-be swingers on a weekend retreat, The Cabin Movie is one of the few examples of Can-claustrophobia that milks the setting for comedy rather than thrills.

Even if the Canadian cabin-movie subgenre may never qualify for its own shelf at Blockbuster or Rogers, it remains surprisingly fertile territory for industrious and imaginative filmmakers who are unwilling to be daunted by monetary limitations. As long as there are camera operators willing to brave a night in the middle of nowhere, Canadian directors will have somewhere to set their nightmares.

Jason Anderson is a Toronto writer. His new novel, Showbiz, is out now on ECW Press.