Greg Klymkiw’s 5 Favourite Canadian Horror Films
(October 16, 2024 – Ontario) Horror movies are in my DNA. When my mother, a hockey wife, was living in Detroit with my father, who was the backup goalie and trainer for the Red Wings, she accompanied another hockey wife to a movie.
Not just any movie.
Here she was, pregnant with her first child (me, of course) and the movie this young, innocent north-end Winnipeg gal was dragged to see was Don Siegel’s Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956).
And Mom was terrified. It wasn’t just the movie, though Siegel’s tense tale of alien spores creating identical facsimiles of mankind would have been enough, these hockey wives found themselves walking back to the hotel, at night, on the empty, dark streets of Detroit.
I was hooked. From early childhood and onwards, horror movies consumed me like no others.
Canadians have always made great horror movies. One can probably point to our isolation as a nation and our proximity to the big, bad United States of America, but whatever the reasons, we have always delivered the goods and then some.
In alphabetical order, here are my five absolute favourite Canadian horror movies:
American Mary (2012)
Directed by the Vancouver-based identical twin sisters Jen Soska and Sylvia Soska, I am happy to go so far as to say that this is the most delightfully sickening, vomit-inducing piece of body horror ever made. Mary (Katharine Isabelle) is a medical student who moonlights as a surgeon, performing body modification upon a steadily growing clientele of freaks. Eventually she wields her scalpel ever-so deftly upon a scum-bucket who becomes the target of her revenge. And boy, does he deserve it.
I first saw this film at its premiere showing during the Toronto After Dark genre film festival, founded by the visionary Adam Lopez. To say that the cinema was packed with hundreds of shocked spectators is an understatement. Plenty of shrieks were to be had and when the end title credits unspooled, thunderous applause greeted the Soskas as they took to the stage.
Black Christmas (1974)
Oh my poor mother. I still have no idea how I convinced her to take me to see this movie when I was 13 years old, but I did and we clutched the seat handles in our local cinema all the way through Bob Clark’s groundbreaking slasher classic. In a sorority house full of babes, a psycho makes endless obscene phone calls and murders the women one by one over Christmas. The terrific cast includes Margot Kidder, Olivia Hussey, John Saxon, Keir Dullea, Andrea Martin, Art Hindle and Doug McGrath.
I eventually attended a magnificent screening of an actual film print during the Cinéfest in Sudbury. John Saxon was in attendance for an extended Q&A and a few of us joined him for dinner where he regaled us with a whole whack of stories about the making of the film.
Blood Quantum (2019)
This unique zombie movie was enough to make me break into several cold sweats, and I loved it so much that I sat through it twice. Set on a Native reservation in which the Indigenous population is immune to the deadly virus that transforms the rest of the world into bloodthirsty zombies, a great cast leads the way as White folks seek refuge from the scourge of the undead.
Brilliantly directed by the late Jeff Barnaby, he sadly left this world after dying from cancer. His previous feature, Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013), tackled the subject of residential schools and we must use our collective imagination to wonder what great work was in store. His films survive and provide so much influence upon new generations of Indigenous filmmakers.
Septic Man (2013)
Any movie that opens with a weepy babe (Nicole G. Leier) taking a severely punishing crap replete with dulcet echoes of spurting, plopping and gaseous expulsions whilst said babe alternates twixt the release of putrid fecal matter with cum-shot-like geysers of stringy rancid vomit launching from within her maw, splattering triumphantly upon the grotesque tiles of a dimly lit toilet adorned top to bottom in slime, sludge, blown chunks and excrement, should be enough to alert viewers they’re in for one mother-pounder of a wild ride into the deepest pits of scatological horror hell.
Septic Man, from the talented Canadian horror auteur Jesse Thomas Cook and screenwriter Tony Burgess takes the cake (of the urinal variety) for serving up one heaping, horrific platter o’ genre representation of the real-life deadly water contamination that occurred several years ago in the bustling Southern Ontario burgh of Walkerton – known around the world for the horrific E-coli contamination of its drinking water.
Shivers (1975)
A deadly blood parasite infects a Montreal high-rise and turns its residents into bloodthirsty homicidal sex maniacs. Hilarious and horrifying, it should come as no surprise that it’s directed by Maestro David Cronenberg.
Allow me to leave you with the following: a corpulent woman approached a young man and moans, “I’m hungry! I’m hungry! I’m hungry for love!”
On that note, I’m hungry, too. I’m hungry for Horror. Canadian horror, of course.
Note: Click on the titles, watch the trailers (if you dare), learn more about the cast and crew of these 5 Canadian horror films. Greg Klymkiw. Ukrainian-Canadian Journalist, Screenwriter, Script Consultant, Filmmaker
