What Canadian Horror Tells Us about Our Deepest Fears

I used to be afraid of everything. Growing up, my family said there’s no such thing as ghosts; there are only demons, looking for a human vessel. If you see a ghost, they added, know this: it’s really a demon, and you mustn’t be frightened. That’s how they possess you.

The thinking went that fear is a lack of faith — spiritual weakness — and that’s all they need to take over your body and torment your soul for eternity.

As a child, I bought into this nonsense completely.

We all did. The devil was always afoot. My house might as well have been haunted. To get through the night, I developed a knack for suppressing apprehension, for steeling myself against the monsters that lurked in the hallway between where I slept and the bathroom.

I never got brave; I’m as jumpy as ever. I simply grew accustomed to the feeling of absolute terror.

Now that I know better, I like to watch horror movies. You name it, I’ve seen it, from Alien to Zodiac.

Scary is my favourite type of movie. My partner doesn’t really understand my obsession. I get the sense being afraid doesn’t make her nostalgic at all. Good for her, I suppose, but it means that I have to find some other outlet for all of my long-winded rants on the genre. Luckily, I write for The Tyee, and daylight savings will soon grant us another hour in the night for watching the undead roam the countryside.

In my encyclopedic viewing over the years, I’ve found that some of the best horror movies have come out of Canada. What’s that about? Do we live in a nation of absolute creeps?

We’ve been home to a robust canon of horror movies for decades. There’s Scanners. Screamers. Shivers. Spasms. Haunter. Hunter Hunter. And those are just a few.

Part of the country’s appeal is budgetary, obviously. The American dollar goes further up here, and horror movies are frequently made on the cheap.

“It’s the only genre of film that you can make without a big star. The genre itself is the star,” said Canadian horror director Jamie Bailey, whose upcoming slasher, Mickey’s Mouse Trap, sees the beloved Disney character stalk his victims in a haunted Chuck E. Cheese. (The Mickey Mouse of Steamboat Willie has finally entered the public domain.)

For decades, a great way for production crews to cut costs has been to film the movie in Canada. American horror directors have come to the Great White North time and time again, especially after the country established itself as a tax shelter.

Sam Wiebe described it this way in Montecristo magazine:

In 1974, Canada’s tax code was altered to allow foreign producers to deduct all investment in Canadian films from their taxable income. This resulted in the “tax shelter era,” when feature film production in Canada increased from three films in 1974 to a peak of 77 in 1979, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia.

While Ontario and Quebec were the chief beneficiaries, in the late ’70s, B.C.’s Social Credit government offered incentives to foreign productions as well. In 1978 and ’79, nine films were shot in B.C., including Bear Island, Klondike Fever, and The Changeling, which was produced by film exhibitor and Cineplex Odeon co-founder Garth Drabinsky, along with future Stargate television series producer Joel B. Michaels.

Vancouver is now known as Hollywood North in large part because of films like 1980’s The Changeling, which took advantage of not only the incentives, but the eerie, moody backdrop of the region.

The Changeling was filmed around Metro Vancouver, and the city is its best supporting actor. Vancouver plays Seattle, which is typical by now, and impossible to miss if you’re a local. The Granville Bridge is the star of the pitch-perfect rubber ball scene, in which George C. Scott’s John Russell tosses his late daughter’s ball into False Creek, only to see the ball bounce down the stairs of his house, which is haunted as all hell.

The Changeling also features shots of Robson Square, the Orpheum, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Gastown and YVR. A waterfront home in West Van is the star of a scene that evokes and quite clearly inspired the well-bound ghost of the Japanese horror classic Ring (1998) and its American remake, The Ring (2002).

The Changeling still holds up, 44 years later. Its influence on the genre is clear and the story is somewhat predictable as a result, but its beats and jumps are so well handled that it doesn’t matter. This haunted house story was the winner of the first-ever Genie Award for best Canadian film, and it remains one of the best horror films ever made. Don't take my word; take Martin Scorsese’s.

That's more than enough for The Changeling to be considered one of the most influential Canadian films of all time.

But it’s got competition, even within the horror genre.

Ghost stories ‘reflect the paranoias of our own age’

In Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling, the Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan argues that ghost stories are “a central way we build our personal and cultural myths.”

“Ghost stories are a kind of private history,” she writes. “And because ghost stories are really about the living, not the dead, they reflect the paranoias of our own age, the values of our own culture, the concerns of our own nation.”

Watch enough Canadian horror films — modern ghost stories — and one is inclined to agree. What do we fear here? The loss of control, the violent outsider, the land we now live on. Colonialism has traumatized even the settlers.

The first fear is present in Canada’s first horror film, The Mask (1961), a low-budget, 3D flick famously lampooned on Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

Unsettling and surreal, The Mask is a cult classic that clearly inspired the Jim Carrey film of the same name.

Yes, yes, I know the Carrey action-comedy was a comic book first, but even Mike Richardson's series is clearly indebted to the earlier tale of a magical green mask whose wearers go mad. Other critics have said the same thing.

The Canadian version of The Mask, which was later retitled Spooky Movie Show, grossed a tidy $1.5 million, proving that horror and, more broadly, cinema was worth the investment in Canada.

As for the second fear — violent outsiders — the slasher film genre owes its beginnings to Bob Clark's landmark, Canadian-made 1974 horror Black Christmas. (Ironically, Clark also directed A Christmas Story and Porky's. His range is pretty remarkable.)

Box office smashes like Halloween, Friday the 13th and Scream got their blueprint from Clark's eerie post-Roe sorority slasher (from the killer's point of view to the “final girl” trope to the call traced to inside the house), and for good reason: this one holds up.

Even for a jaded horror-watcher like myself, Black Christmas remains pretty creepy, and more than worth a watch for its smart and unsubtly feminist take on a genre that's now infamous for its lazy misogyny.

And we must give credit where credit is due: Canada had a hand in that too, serving as the backdrop for plenty more 1980s slashers, Prom Night, My Bloody Valentine, Terror Train and The Clown Murders chief amongst them.

Those are all fine, I suppose. But Black Christmas is better.

We’re just creepy, OK?

Plenty has been written on what makes Canada such a great vehicle for horror, from the bleakness of the landscape to the sense of isolation that so many parts of the country engender. Horror stalwarts like Robert Eggers utilized Canada to perfection in his 2019 film The Lighthouse, which was filmed on Cape Forchu in Nova Scotia.

This country just has creepy vibes: the bleakness, the vastness, the inclement weather. That's why The X-Files found its footing here, and why it seemed to lose its fastball once production shifted to Los Angeles.

One aspect that rarely comes up is our fear of a landscape we don’t really know and is not really ours, a land whose history and knowledge have been lost to the violence perpetrated against Indigenous Peoples.

Unsurprisingly, Canadian horror has tackled this too. Jeff Barnaby’s visionary Blood Quantum (2019) is a zombie movie set on a First Nations reserve in Quebec whose Indigenous residents are immune to the plague turning everyone else into flesh-eating “zeds.”

Soon, the reserve is a fortified compound besieged by twin threats: the flesh-eaters, for one, and the other survivors: white people, who bring their own baggage and tension.

Set in 1981, the film is inspired by the Listuguj salmon raids of the same year, when Quebec police raided the Listuguj First Nation reserve in a bid to drive out Mi'kmaw fishermen. Barnaby had all his actors watch Incident at Restigouche, a 1984 documentary about the raids that was filmed on his reserve when he was four, before they began filming Blood Quantum. This was crucial context for the film.

“In a classic horror sense, you’re supposed to be scared of zombies,” Barnaby told Seventh Row. “But in this sense, you’re not scared of zombies; you’re scared of white people.”

Zombie movies have long been a venue for direct social commentary of this sort, dating all the way back to George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). But it took a Mi’kmaq film director working out of Canada to make the connection to colonialism.

Barnaby, who died in 2022 at 46, was a gifted horror filmmaker whose feature debut, Rhymes For Young Ghouls (2013), won him Best Director at the Vancouver Film Critics Circle Awards. Growing up, Barnaby idolized Canadian film legend David Cronenberg, who may be the primary reason that Canada’s horror films are so consistently good, so cerebral and subtextually rich. He continues to set an immensely high bar.

Cronenberg, Canada's greatest director, has blown people's minds time and time again with his one-of-a-kind brand of body horror. Flicks as disturbing as The Fly, Rabid, The Dead Zone and Videodrome have inspired generations of filmmakers, including the Baron of Blood’s own two children.

Cronenberg’s son Brandon has already made his mark with his own brand of body horror in films like Possessor (2020) and Infinity Pool (2023). His daughter Caitlin, meanwhile, announced herself earlier this year with the debut Humane (2024), a typically Cronenbergian psychological thriller.

What a family that must have been to grow up in. Talk about a haunted house.

A terrifying nation

It's not just limited to one family, however. Cronenberg’s prominence and influence have made the horror genre a staple of Canadian cinema, setting the stage for the incredible run that Canadian directors are currently on.

America's haunted attic has been putting out gem after gem since the launch of the streaming service Shudder, which has gone out of its way to acquire and promote horror coming from Canada. That said, it hasn't had to search very hard — this country keeps pumping out excellent horror.

“We know that Canada has a really rich legacy of genre that dates back years, but it’s also continuously bringing us new and exciting visions,” Shudder's head of programming, Sam Zimmerman, told Playback magazine back in 2021. “[We want to] bring those films in and show them to the Canadian audience and our members across the world.”

This decade alone has seen the release of the criminally underrated, deeply fun Anything for Jackson (2020); the blood-spattered Nicolas Cage flick Mandy (2018), set in the Pacific Northwest; horror-comedies Slaxx (2020), Vicious Fun (2020) and the gleefully bugnuts throwback Psycho Goreman (2020); the innovative, experimental Skinamarink (2022); and this year's Sundance horror hit, In a Violent Nature (2024), which saw a brief theatrical run in the spring before debuting on Shudder in early October, just in time for Halloween.

The Ontario-filmed and set “ambient slasher” is Canadian through and through. This diabolical horror flick is deeply outdoorsy. Come in at the wrong point and one might be led to believe it’s a National Film Board nature documentary, as there’s no score, just nature sounds, no protagonist and next to no plot.

But the log-splitter scene makes it brutally clear what you’re watching.

Written and helmed by Canadian prosthetic effects wizard Chris Nash, In a Violent Nature follows Johnny, a dead man resurrected by a group of friends who find his haunted locket in the woods. And I do mean follows, as this film builds suspense by simply tracking Johnny’s long walk through the picturesque woods outside Sault Ste. Marie.

This particular area has even been used to unsettle the viewer before. In 1977’s Rituals, another cult classic, Canadian slasher, a group of doctors are stalked and killed in the very same northern Ontario woods.

“Not since Deliverance,” one Rituals reviewer said, “has the wilderness held such terror.”

Little wonder that Nash chose to shoot his film in the same place. In a Violent Nature’s setting, Nash has said, is a character in its own right.

“It was paramount for us that we feel like we’re in the woods at all points in time,” said Nash, “and that we get this feeling that we are isolated in a very expansive area, where you almost feel the threat of being alone in the woods by itself, without a big, old monster man with an axe hunting you down.”

Canadian horror, you’ve done it again.