Stephen McHattie stars as disc jockey Grant Mazzy in Bruce McDonald's zombie thriller Pontypool. (Maple Pictures)

Bruce McDonald, the Toronto director behind such scrappy Canadian classics as Roadkill (1989), Highway 61 (1991) and Hard Core Logo (1996), has never taken the conventional path. This is the man who, upon winning Best Canadian Feature Film at the 1989 Toronto International Film Festival (for Roadkill), announced that he was going to use the prize money to buy his crew a big chunk of hash.

Ten years in the making, Pontypool was always, to quote director Bruce McDonald, "almost there," and seemed destined to languish in development hell.

It’s not surprising then that McDonald’s latest film, Pontypool, defies easy categorization. Set in and around a small-town Ontario radio station, the film is an anti-zombie zombie movie, one in which the chaos that erupts is heard but not seen, where the undead were never really dead to begin with and the infected townspeople spend less time munching on people’s flesh than they do messing with their minds. Instead of spreading through flesh wounds, this particular virus spreads through the spoken English language, rendering infected people utterly incoherent.

During a recent interview, McDonald exuded palpable enthusiasm while describing the film’s source material: Pontypool Changes Everything, the wondrously trippy novel by fellow Ontarian Tony Burgess. McDonald likens Burgess’s book – a mind-blowing mixture of autobiography, cultural theory and linguistics – to the work of counterculture writers William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. “It had that freewheelin’ spirit to it, but with this organizing, the-English-language-has-been-infected-by-a-virus kind of thing, which I thought was just kind of crazy.”

The concept was so compelling to McDonald that he sought Burgess out at a book reading, and promptly optioned the novel for the price of a Kinder egg. But while McDonald and Burgess became fast friends, Pontypool Changes Everything’s journey from page to screen wasn’t anywhere as easy or as swift.

During an eight-year gestation period, in which Burgess wrote numerous drafts of the film’s eventual screenplay, a number of producers, co-writers and editors expressed interest. Yet Pontypool was always, in McDonald’s words, “almost there,” and seemed destined to languish in development hell.

Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald, whose pictures include Hard Core Logo and The Tracey Fragments. (Maple Pictures)

Then CBC Radio producer Greg Sinclair came calling. Scouting around for people with ideas for radio dramas, he phoned McDonald, who pitched a number of projects, including an adaptation of Chester Brown’s graphic novel about Louis Riel. But when Sinclair phoned back, it was the language virus idea that intrigued him most.

Burgess hunkered down for one more rewrite. As McDonald explains, the radio medium helped to inform the stripped-down film version. “We just moved aside everything we’d ever written, moved aside the book and all the screenplays, and said, ‘Let’s take this totally clean with just the language-virus thing, so we thought of like, OK, it’s for radio, radio drama … Orson Welles.”

Using Welles’s famous broadcast of H.G. Wells’ story The War of the Worlds as a model, Burgess came up with a draft that centres on three principal characters working at a radio station in a church-basement, who are reporting on a mysterious plague that’s causing the increasingly incoherent citizens of Pontypool, Ont. to riot in the streets of their normally sleepy town.

In the midst of fleshing out the radio drama project, McDonald started to feel the filmmaking itch. “I thought, well, they’re gonna give us a little bit of money for Tony to finish the script, for us to get some actors to record it, in a radio station, probably. I’m thinking, Well, why don’t I just get my sister’s video camera and shoot it and I’ve got a million, right? So suddenly that created a possibility, it was like we could shoot a movie within the next couple of months, rather than the next couple years.”

In another fluky turn in Pontypool’s unpredictable history, McDonald found his “million” — i.e. a willing investor — while chatting one night outside Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern. “At the time, I thought this guy was full of s--t, because we were both a couple of beers in, but he kept coming back, and I thought, Well, there’s nobody else lining up, so let him loose. Bizarrely, he knew a guy who knew a guy and a few months later, we were actually shooting this.”

And so, after nearly a decade, Pontypool is finally in theatres. And it was well worth the wait. The film version is being touted as a thinking person’s zombie flick. Though he is happy to talk about zombie-film genius George Romero – fondly recalling how the original Night of the Living Dead inspired him to shoot a super-8 zombie movie entitled Our Glorious Dead back in high school – McDonald is quick to note Pontypool’s emphasis on atmosphere, not gore.

A scene from Pontypool. (Maple Pictures)

The film’s modest budget and cramped setting went a long way toward helping him achieve this aim. Using little more than his small band of game actors, tight close-ups of characters’ faces and crisp sound design to build a mounting, relentless air of claustrophobia and dread, McDonald has come up with one of the most spare, focused movies of his career – a horror film where the most terrifying moments occur off screen in the viewer’s imagination.

This is fitting, given that Pontypool’s primary concerns involve the slippery inner workings of the human mind. As it becomes increasingly clear to the staff at CLSY radio that the virus is being spread through the English language, it is up to the film’s hero, a Don Imus-style shock jock named Grant Mazzy (played with gusto by character actor Stephen McHattie) to use his brainpower to get at the root of the outbreak.

This being a Bruce McDonald movie, the grizzled, renegade hero must resort to some truly anarchic, punk-rock means in his last-ditch effort to find an antidote. If some of this sounds high-brow, it is — but don’t despair. While Pontypool lends itself to multiple theoretical and allegorical interpretations, it’s also damn scary fun.

As McDonald says, “It’s kind of crazy, but a good crazy, and kind of smart, and kind of like high end meets low end, you know?”

Pontypool opens March 6.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.