Once upon a time, on a sad Valentine, in a place known as Henniger Mine.
A legend began, every woman and man, would always remember the time.
And those who remain, were never the same, you could see, the fear in their eyes.
-The Ballad of Harry Warden
No one will ever agree on what the first slasher film was. If you’re looking for a film with the most coherent collection of elements that would later be codified as the genre we know today, there are a number of pioneers from which to choose.
There’s Andrew Stone’s drunk and wobbly The Decks Ran Red from 1958. Then there’s Mario Bava’s 1971 Twitch of the Death Nerve, a staunch refusal from the maestro to indulge in his usual bursts of primary colors and luscious comic framing. And don’t forget Tobe Hooper’s 1974 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which introduced audiences the world over to the harrowing delights of the body count movie in a way more vicious than any that had come beforehand. And then there’s Bob Clark’s wry and haunting Black Christmas from the same year, a movie in which the camera assumes the point of view of a killer of sorority girls, gathered together over a holiday.
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The suspects are myriad, the troubles of the female characters only begin with a psychopath, and the authorities are useless. It’s everything the slasher film would become. Four years later John Carpenter would direct Halloween, using all of these perimeters, and the rest was history. No one will ever agree on what the first slasher movie is. But I’m prepared to say that Canada made the most interesting.
The advantage of being a young nation, in the eyes of a world of colonizers, is that it can be easy to document achievements. Indeed it was only a few dozen years after Canada as it is frequently understood today (that is to say English speaking Canada) was ‘founded’ that the first films were made by Canadian artists (1913’s Evangeline, to be precise). Thanks to the small number of artists working in film in Canada, there weren’t that many production models to choose from. By the time Bob Clark made Black Christmas, you could still basically count on one hand how many horror films had been made north of the 49th parallel. David Cronenberg alone would nearly double the country’s output (though he never made anything as straightforward as a slasher film).
The Beginning of Canadian Horror
It is thus easy to pinpoint a number of important firsts, such as the first Canadian horror film, 1961’s The Mask, celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. The Mask is a trippy marvel, the kind of psychedelic oddity America was churning out by the dozens around this time (see: William Cameron Menzies’s The Maze, Albert Zugsmith’s Confessions of an Opium Eater, Roger Kay’s The Cabinet of Caligari, George Blair’s The Hypnotic Eye).
In the film, a disembodied voice tells a man to steal a tribal mask from a museum and put it on. Once it’s on he sees a netherworld of hideous visions and they demand that he start killing people. It took the Canadian film industry 50 years to make its first out-and-out horror film. Then, 15 years later they practically invented the modern horror film as we know it. Not too shabby for a country with ten percent of the population of the United States.
The Mask was directed by Julian Roffman, who a few years earlier had been contributing to Toronto’s crop of beatnik cinema. This was an impulse, typically, borrowed from American movies, but Canadians made theirs with a more genuine edge. While the likes of The Rebel Set, Daddy-O, or Kitten With a Whip are not without interest, they lack the verité danger of Sidney J. Furie’s A Cool Sound From Hell, or the sadism at the heart of Roffman’s The Bloody Brood, both 1959.
The Bloody Brood can be said to be the first grammatical step towards a national horror cinema. Peter Falk plays a beatnik rabble-rouser who witnesses an old man dying of a heart attack and decides he likes the feeling it gives him. He feeds a delivery boy a sandwich filled with glass and is on the lookout for his next victim when the boy’s brother comes looking for revenge. The Bloody Brood is impressive. But The Mask is — and not for the last time in Canadian horror — something that feels beamed in from another dimension. The film is a fairly straightforward supernatural potboiler. Until its heroes put on the mask and suddenly we’re in a psychotronic purgatory of Papier-mâché and dry ice. The film was in 3D, but you don’t need glasses to get the extrasensory charge of the visuals.
The next horror film was 1967’s Playgirl Killer (in color!) written by and starring Southern drive-in fixture William Kerwin and his brother Harry. Kerwin’s involvement is crucial if only because it introduces a pattern – that of the emigre calling the shots.
Transplants And Canadian Genre Filmmaking
In 2009 I drove across the east of Canada collecting interviews shooting a documentary called Superconnected. It was about the indie music scene that had emerged after 9/11. I kept seeing the same names in the liner notes of every album cover and couldn’t help, as a starry-eyed teenager staring down the barrel of adulthood, but fantasize that these guys had it all figured out. For the most part, artists indulged/confirmed my suspicions that no matter the great geographic distance, there was a kind of unity that seemed to reach across the vast expanses of the country.
Amy Millan and Evan Cranley from the band Stars gifted me a Canadian flag still hanging in my apartment. One interview, however, didn’t quite go as planned. Toronto DJ duo MSTRKRFT did not mince words about what it felt like to be an artist in Canada. “…there’s this system in place…you have to gain a certain amount of success abroad before anybody will take you seriously,” “For a lot of Canadians you have to define yourself by how un-American you are…Canada doesn’t have an identity like America does. We’re not a melting pot. We’re a mosaic…People from Toronto don’t like people from Montreal. People from Montreal don’t like people from Toronto. Nobody likes people from Vancouver. Nobody likes people from Halifax. We all hate each other.”
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Bob Clark, director of Black Christmas was American. Sidney Furie, born in Montreal, and Roger Spottiswoode, born in Ottawa, both moved to England at the first sign of success. George Mihalka, director of many a Canadian genre film, was from Hungary. Peter Carter, director of Rituals, was born in Hertfordshire, England, while Prom Night director Paul Lynch hales from Liverpool and Happy Birthday To Me helmer J. Lee Thompson was from Bristol. Curtains director Richard Ciupka was a Walloon, Cannuck genre outlier Mario Azzopardi was from Malta. Indeed barring some of the Prom Night sequel directors, it does at times seem like the whole slasher boom was the work of transplants; judged, just as MSTRKRFT had told me, by their successes elsewhere.
Perhaps fittingly when slasher movie fever gets its claws in the Canadian film industry, the most prominent thematic hobby horse has to do with the identities of writers and directors.
How They Stacked Up Against American Slashers
After Black Christmas came Rituals, a movie meant to be a kind of response to Deliverance, an arthouse movie with a British New Waver at the helm (Jimmy Carter was a fan!), that nevertheless incorporated a number of ideas and attitudes that would come to define tawdrier grindhouse movies. Rituals, directed by TV veteran Carter, had no such aspirations. It’s the tale of five rich, city boy doctors (one of them is openly gay, which both speaks to the film’s blasé modernity and to its idea of urbanity) whose weekend fishing trip is rudely interrupted when a crazed Vietnam vet steals their shoes. The boys don’t need much encouragement to fall into bickering and backstabbing. The killer Vietnam vet stalking them in the woods hardly lifts a finger to ensure their doom.
The foundational American slashers that followed, John Carpenter’s Halloween and Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th, are much more about the malevolence of the killer. The attitude of most Canadian teen horrors in the 80s is more likely attributed to the success of Brian De Palma’s Carrie. Though it’s off-model it would prove an equally important precedent for the most important social dynamic found throughout the next decade’s slashers: In Canadian slashers, your friends are just as likely to kill you as your enemies.
“Once every year, as the fourteenth draws near, there’s a hush all over the town.
For the legend they say, on a Valentine’s Day, is a curse, that’ll live on and on.
And no will know, as the years come and go, of the horror from a long time ago.”
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Despite Black Christmas staking a claim on the genre’s identity four years prior, it wasn’t the runaway success that Halloween proved to be. In its wake, the Canadian film industry sprang into action trying to cash in on its success. Unlike the Italian film industry (which did the same), however, the Canadians produced one work after another with identities nearly impossible to classify. Prom Night in 1980 was the first true Canadian slasher movie, born out of capitalist necessity alone. The film stars Halloween’s Jamie Lee Curtis as one of a group of five teens responsible for the death of a classmate when they were kids. In the present, prom night approaches and someone keeps calling them, telling each of them that they’ll be sorry for what they did that day five years ago.
The movie’s body count and scares don’t begin in earnest until roughly the midway point of the movie. Beforehand, much of the runtime is dedicated to the high-wire act of surviving high school. Director Paul Lynch seems less interested in any semblance of verisimilitude in capturing the average high school experience (Curtis was old enough to vote by now and her classmates look even older) than he was in capturing a sort of dissociative, elemental high school purgatory. The Canadian environs lend themselves to alienation. The town, the cliffs, the empty building where the little girl is murdered; the cavernous high school itself; they’re all bigger and more atmospherically charged than your average backlot or Southern California suburb.
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Producer Daniel Grodnik had the bright idea while Curtis was still in Canada to nab her before she could leave for Australia to make Road Games. His idea? Halloween on a train. Roger Spottiswoode, who’d been working in America under the likes of Sam Peckinpah and Walter Hill, returned home to make his directorial debut, Terror Train. It’s as atmospheric as Prom Night but trades chiaroscuro claustrophobia for the misty vastness of Lynch’s suburban misery. The film is notable for featuring magician David Copperfield in a crucial supporting role, but the whole thing works far better than perhaps anything with that logline ought to. Spottiswoode was able to talk one-time Peckinpah favorite Ben Johnson into taking the part of the conductor and Stanley Kubrick’s photographer John Alcott provided the eerie images. It’s just about the classiest cash-in one could dream up.
That, as we’ll see, was the Canadian approach. The work was disreputable and second-hand, and so a lot could be scribbled surreptitiously in the margins. Lynch’s next horror, for instance, would be 1982’s Humongous, a sort of remake of Carter’s Rituals. Some teens crash their expensive yacht on a scorned island and are hunted by its sole occupant, a freakish giant born of a horrible assault years prior and hidden from polite society. It sounds on its face like nonsense. But Lynch has a field day shooting it, his technique as ferocious, experimental, and visible as 70s De Palma. If trash there must be, it will linger.
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Little else explains the rash of meta-horror movies that become a staple of this period. Mario Azzopardi’s deliciously cynical Deadline is the urtext, looking like some bizarro mash-up of 80s Ken Russell and Kubrick’s The Shining. Except, of course, it predates them. Stephen Young plays a novelist called Stephen Lessey (he’s basically Stephen King) whose next work is overdue. As he writes it he falls out with his wife, ignores his attention-starved kids (one of whom is played by Cindy Hinds from David Cronenberg’s The Brood), and hears hundreds of complaints from his critics. As he writes he starts to envision the events of his next work. Soon he can’t tell them from his own waking life.
Richard Ciupka’s 1983 Curtains has the plot of a normal slasher (six girls in a house compete for a role in a new movie as they’re killed off by an unknown stalker) but it’s mostly an essay on realism and performance. Samantha Eggar fakes having herself committed as a way to audition and one of the girls has her boyfriend pretend to break in and assault her to prepare her for a scene in the movie.
George Mihalka’s Eternal Evil follows in 1985 in which a director can’t follow up his last success until he starts astral projecting, and then suddenly isn’t content making trash commercials anymore. It also quotes Roffman’s The Bloody Brood, making it a kind of break-up song to Canadian genre film and the very few opportunities for innovation it provided its longest purveyors. The Stephen King-style artist’s self-portrait was almost as omnipresent as the everyday slasher film.
“Twenty years came and went, and everyone spent, the fourteenth, in quiet regret.
And those still alive, know the secret survives, in the darkness, that looms in the night.
For the legend they say, on a Valentine’s Day, is a curse, that’ll live on and on.”
Of course, it wasn’t all funhouse mirror images of the Canadian film industry. Some of the strongest and strangest works to emerge from the slasher film boom seemed to be designed to succeed through purposeful absence and pointed prodding at the same time. J. Lee Thompson, the director of The Guns of Navarone and Cape Fear, was brought north to direct Happy Birthday To Me, which is just as convoluted as any slasher film in the telling. It’s the diction that’s so crystal clear.
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The Canadian slashers were, by and large, moody and angular. They were overcome by the backdrops provided by the offbeat and ancient landscape of the hinterland. Thompson’s handwriting is as sturdy as if he were still directing Gregory Peck, a reupholstering of a degenerate space, all brightly lit rooms and neatly decorated interiors. Canadian veteran William Fruet’s Funeral Home unusually gives as much time and attention to the dotty old woman who runs the inn where the characters keep getting slaughtered as it does to her sexy young granddaughter who’s ostensibly the POV character. The effect is rather like if Friday The 13th had spent half its time with Betsy Palmer’s Mrs. Voorhees.
Jean-Claude Lord’s abrasive, take-no-prisoners Visiting Hours has the bluntness of something by Ruggero Deodato. Lee Grant plays an outspoken feminist broadcaster who is targeted by a sexual sadist (Michael Ironside relishing the mostly silent part, playing it with the malicious glee of a young Conrad Veidt) out to silence her. The depiction of Ironside’s character as a kind of sexual deviant seems to be culled from Christopher Plummer’s gay bank robber in Daryl Duke’s The Silent Partner from 1978. The film seems designed to be deliberately less offensive (and indeed it hinges on the teamwork of three women overcoming their superficial differences to fight a common male evil) but it nevertheless lingers like a shallow wound. The most impressive of them, however, and the one that has had the deepest cultural footprint has to be Mihalka’s My Bloody Valentine.
And Then There Was ‘My Bloody Valentine’
Celebrating its 40th anniversary, My Bloody Valentine was a massive disappointment and a cudgel used against horror movies in general. It’s also something like an instant, yet modest. cult hit. The film was heavily cut and released on VHS and laserdisc in a censored form. For years the fan count grew, just in time for Lionsgate to buy the rights to the title for an uninspired 3D remake, they released a cut with some of the gore put back in. It inspired the name of the first mainstream post-rock band who are, like the movie, still massively popular. It is, with hindsight, the crowning achievement of the Canadian slasher boom. Mihalka’s outsider view of Canada attuned him to the things about its setting and characters that were too frequently given short shrift by other genre filmmakers.
While Prom Night, Deadline, Funeral Home, and Happy Birthday To Me seemed to purposefully sand off their cultural touchstones. My Bloody Valentine is the most self consciously Canadian of the bunch. The accents are all curdled, aimless vowel sounds and thrown away consonants. The film has a theme song written by Paul Zaza and sung by Irish tenor John McDermott that is all but a direct rip-off of Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the most famously Canadian song ever written. The milieu is working-class poor and the setting is a seaside mining town and when they aren’t covered in soot, they’re dressed for a kegger. And perhaps most tellingly, the movie hinges on a man who wanted to make a big wheel of himself out there in the world but came back a failure to find his girl spoken for.
Horror History: MY BLOODY VALENTINE Was Released Back in 1981
Paul Kelman is T.J. Hanniger, who like any number of the directors making films to compete with My Bloody Valentine, left home to make a name for himself. That didn’t happen and now he’s back with his tail between his legs, forced to admit he’s not too big and important for the town of Valentine Bluffs. Right when he chooses to come back to town, the murders start.
A woman is killed before the opening credits by a man in head-to-toe mining gear (if not the most iconic of the slasher movie outfits, Jason Voorhees’ hockey mask must be given the title, it’s certainly the coolest) and soon townsfolk are people killed left and right; their hearts ripped out and left for the local sheriff to discover. The suspected killer is Harry Warden, who was trapped in the mine years and years back and resorted to cannibalism to survive. He went on a small killing spree to claim the lives of those responsible for the cave-in that forced him to eat human flesh.
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In the present (the flashback structure seems to have been lifted from Prom Night) the miners have a hard time staying down by law when TJ tries to return to work underground. He wants to win back ex-girlfriend Sarah (Lori Hallier) from an old friend and co-worker Axel Palmer (Neil Affleck) at the same time, which splits the miners’ allegiance. The spare but meaningful time given to the romantic subplot feels more earnestly played thanks in no small part to the depressive but gorgeous expanses surrounding the little passion play.
The drama of TJ and Sarah can’t help but feel small compared to the endlessness of every vista and indeed the horrifying crucible of the miner murders, but Mihalka draws the dynamic carefully. Yes, this doesn’t seem like much…but this is all they’ve got. Their lives revolve around going to work in the ground and coming back up to whoever will have them. The land, the salt air, their dirty hands, it’s all real. You can feel the desperation of trying to get this one thing right, same as you do the immediacy of being trapped in a mining corridor with a man with a mask and a pick-ax trying to kill you. Of all the Canadian slasher films, this is the one that aims to stay with you. It’s the blood-soaked answer to The Deer Hunter or Slap Shot.
“And no one will know, as the years come and go, of the horror, from long time ago.
In this little town, when the fourteenth comes ’round, there’s a silence, and fear in the air.
Remember the morn, that the legend was born, all the shock, and the horror was there.”
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The slasher movie boom was over in Canada before it really got cooking. Not a single straight horror film was produced in 1984 and then producers spent the next few decades playing catch-up. The Prom Night movies don’t become a franchise until after the second film, an unrelated movie starring Ironside in 1987. The films represent something much closer in spirit to the Roger Corman-stewarded Slumber Party Massacre movies than the A Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th series, shifting tones and signifiers whenever convenient and staying more fun for their willingness to kick the canon (my personal favorite is the jokey third one). After years of making idiosyncratic work David Cronenberg, maybe Canada’s most respected film artist, accidentally produced a rival series when Scanners (…also starring Ironside) produced four sequels, each uninteresting in its own way.
Other would-be horror franchises (Xtro, Food of the Gods, Witchboard, The Amityville Horror) would fly up north to shoot on the cheap but nothing grew a vestigial Canadian identity. It isn’t until the post-Scream Ginger Snaps movies that Canada once again produces a teen body count movie that rivals its international competition. Canadian/US co-production Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil poked fun at the conventions of slasher films but doesn’t have much of a specific Canadian identity beyond its pastoral locales and working-class heroes. In 2014 Xavier Dolan would fleetingly pay homage to Canuxploitation redneck dramas with his movie Tom at the Farm, which picks up on the latent and not-so-latent homophobia baked into so much Canadian genre.
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Part of what makes movies like My Bloody Valentine, Humongous, and Curtains so interesting and indeed lovable is that they all seemed to meet a very specific niche in the market, but did so with enormous personalities, before leaving and taking the momentum to continue making similar products with it. Canada had a need for slasher films because the market demanded them. Some artists with similar backgrounds at the right place at the right time arose to do the job, efficiently and singularly. Then everything fell quiet just as soon after. The best Canadian genre films, whether that’s Brandon Cronenberg’s 2020 laconic nightmare Possessor, or Black Christmas way back in 1974, seem to truly come from nowhere and defy explanation. Why this and why right now? Thankfully those questions tend to drift when the images of suffering, of biblical violence, are meted out against the undying Canadian landscape.
The follies and pride of men who think they can conquer time, that they can cheat destiny, painted as if the ant-like humans under apocalyptic skies in a John Martin canvas. It’s the unique character of that land that links all of these disparate works more than time or need. It’s the land taken by colonizers and abused with industry; the land that will outlive dreams of conquest and the petty bickering of doctors, miners, and sorority girls. The Canadian people may, as I was told in that interview with MSTRKRFT all those years ago, internally struggle to create a national identity outside of cultural absences. But to this outsider with a Canadian flag on his wall, there is no mistaking Canadian land and identity for anything else.