Quelle Horreur!

A scene from the Quebec horror film Sur le seuil. Courtesy Alliance Atlantis.

English-speaking Canada has had a long tradition of horror movies, from our most prominent auteur David Cronenberg to oddities like Black Christmas, the Prom Night franchise and Terror Train. But for whatever reason, Quebec’s robust French-language film culture has shown little interest or affection for the horror genre. That is, until now.

Thanks in large part to the phenomenal success of two upstart film festivals in Montreal, producers and distributors are beginning to take note of the huge popularity of fright films, and of their considerable box-office potential.

Mitch Davis, a curator at Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival and a film producer, says he’s still puzzled as to why horror remained so neglected in his home province for so long. “Quebec box office take for horror films often far outdoes what those same titles make in English Canada,” he argues. “On the production end, I think a lot of local producers had an odd sort of bias or snobbery against genre films, which is pretty outrageous when you consider that a great deal of the most influential sparks from the dawn of cinema had deep roots in fantasy, from Edison’s Frankenstein up to early German expressionism.”

There were, of course, some notable exceptions, including Cronenberg’s harrowing tale of urban infection and paranoia Rabid (1977), which was shot in Montreal, and even cheeseball landmarks like Visiting Hours, the 1982 hospital slasher starring none other than William Shatner. But like English Canada, where Cronenberg was long dismissed as a cinematic black sheep, prejudice against the genre was the reality in Quebec. “This bizarre cultural blind spot was also reflected in the near complete absence of genre cinema at the Montreal World Film Festival,” says Davis. “Until the mid-’90s, it was almost as if our collective love for this kind of filmmaking was one of the dirty secrets of our province.”

Davis says it was out of this neglect that the Fantasia Film Festival was born in 1997. The fest was the brainchild of Montreal businessman Pierre Corbeil, and Davis was thrilled to be a programmer in that inaugural year, his specialty being horror movies. “The buzz at the time was, ‘Does Montreal really need another film festival?’” recalls Davis. “For whatever reason, none of the other film festivals had the slightest interest in acknowledging even the artiest, most personal sides of the genre, non-commercial films that had managed to find homes in A-list festivals elsewhere.”

What Corbeil, Davis and the rest of the Fantasia crew were not ready for was the amazing success of the festival. Even in its first year, the event drew thousands, with virtually every screening selling out and lineups of eager horror film enthusiasts winding around the block. The Fantasia organizers haven’t looked back. “Last summer we had over 75,000 people,” says Davis. “When those films are given a chance and the time is spent to make people know that they’re out there, audiences are interested in seeing something radically out of the norm.”

Fantasia attracted further attention when Alliance Atlantis, Canada’s largest film distributor, decided to premiere key high-profile horror films there, recognizing the festival’s ability to generate crucial word of mouth. The Blair Witch Project got its first screening there, in 1999. But a key turning point for local blood-and-guts films arrived in 2003, when Sur le seuil (Evil Words), a gruesome horror film based on a novel by Quebec writer Patrick Senecal, premiered at the festival. Sur le seuil featured Patrick Huard as a writer tortured by his ability to write murderous fictional accounts that eventually play themselves out in reality. So horrified by his knack for predicting the grisly ends of innocent people, he cuts off his fingers to stop the madness. Sadly, he still has his thumbs, which enable him to scrawl down other stories that soon become true.

A scout for Dimension Films, a division of Miramax, was in the audience for Sur le seuil’s premiere. Before the festival closed, Dimension had purchased the English-language remake rights for the film.

“It used to be that Americans who were interested in finding remake material went to Japan and Korea for horror,” says Nicole Robert, who produced Sur le seuil. “Now Quebec is in their target range.”

And from the local film community? “I’ve certainly been getting a lot of calls from people who are eager to show me their horror screenplays,” says Robert.

In 2002, scream-flick fans got another shot in the arm, this time with another film festival. But the key difference with the Spasm Festival is that it screens only home-grown horror, science fiction, suspense and fantasy short films. “I could see there were a lot of people who loved this genre,” says founder Jarrett Mann, “and there were a lot of people who enjoyed making them, too.”

Local films done on the cheap may not sound appetizing, except when one considers that ultra-low-budget filmmaking conditions and unknown actors have often been staples of some of the very best horror movies anywhere. “What strikes me about many of the films that we’ve screened is that there are a lot of funny spoofs, but just as many serious entries,” Mann contends. If there is a key difference in the Quebec horror cinema, it's that they spill an awful lot of blood, perhaps a reflection of the province's Catholic heritage (on occasion, this connection between blood and Catholic imagery is made explicit).

A scene from the Quebec horror short, Crimson. Courtesy Spasm Festival.

Easter weekend sees a celebration of the best of the Spasm Festival at Montreal’s repertory house, Cinema du Parc. Among the lineup is La fin du neoliberalisme (The End of Neoliberalism), a hilarious short in which a rabid clown (who looks suspiciously like Ronald McDonald) chases after a businessman; Pedigree, a gorgeously shot, deeply disturbing film about distant memories of child abuse that happens to be steeped in Catholic imagery; and Crimson, a silent vampire movie about infidelity among the bloodsucking set.

One of the most ambitious short films screening is Le Bagman, an especially gory spoof of every low-rent horror franchise of the past decade, from Candyman to Jeepers Creepers. The unstoppable Bagman -- a slasher who wears a brown paper bag over his head at all times -- takes on an entire group of high-kicking youth, all of whom meet dismal ends trying to do in the anti-hero.

“We basically set out to make the goriest, bloodiest movie we possibly could,” says Jonathan Prevost, who co-directed and co-wrote the film with Anouk Whissell and Francois Simard.

“We love horror, and we had all made horror films in high school before we’d ever met,” Prevost recalls. “We were especially into the gory films of Peter Jackson, like Dead Alive.

“Spasm festival has been a big help for us. And we showed the film at Tromadance, the alternative film festival held in Utah at the same time as Sundance. [Troma founder and filmmaker] Lloyd Kaufman loved Bagman, he just raved about it. We were thrilled,” says Prevost. In April, a Bagman DVD will be released. Work has commenced on a feature-length version.

“I really don’t know why horror hasn’t taken off sooner in Quebec. But I’m just glad it’s finally getting its due.”

The Best of the Spasm Festival will be held Friday and Saturday, March 25 and 26, at Montreal's Cinema du Parc. The Fantasia Film Festival will be held July 8 to Aug. 2.

Matthew Hays is a Montreal writer.