Horror from Canada

Why it matters

Canadian production incentives and filmmakers made the country a steady source of horror, from low-budget independents to co-productions with American studios.

The country is most associated with body horror, a strand that treats the human body as the setting for dread.

Canada's place in horror history is bound up with public money. The country's film industry grew in the 1960s and 1970s through government support, and some of the most distinctive horror of those decades was made with it. The result was a body of work that was low-budget, often controversial and strongly marked by the sensibility of individual filmmakers, most of all David Cronenberg. It also included films that anticipated later trends, including some of the earliest slashers.

The modern story of Canadian horror begins with funding. The Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC), established in 1967 with a budget of $10 million, was meant to build a domestic feature industry. A tax measure, the Capital Cost Allowance, offered investors in Canadian films a write-off; it was raised from 60 percent to 100 percent in 1974. This is often called the tax shelter era. It encouraged investment in commercially minded genre pictures, and horror was among the beneficiaries. A tax credit replaced the allowance in 1995.

Toronto was an important production center. Bob Clark's Black Christmas was shot there from late March to mid-May 1974 on a budget of about $686,000 and opened in the Toronto area on October 11, 1974. Its stars included Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder, Keir Dullea and John Saxon. Warner Bros. released it in the US in 1975 first as Silent Night, Evil Night, and then under its original title. Critics regard it as one of the earliest slasher films, and John Carpenter's Halloween was apparently inspired in part by a suggestion Clark made about a sequel.

David Cronenberg, born in Toronto on March 15, 1943, became the country's best-known horror director. He began with the art-house features Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970). His commercial horror breakthrough was Shivers (1975), made for roughly $180,000, with the CFDC providing about $76,500, and it earned some $5 million. It was followed by Rabid (1977) and The Brood (1979). The films caused controversy and drew attention to the question of whether public money should support such work. Together they established what came to be called body horror, a style in which the human body is the setting for dread. See David Cronenberg.

The 1980s were the high point. Scanners came in 1981, and Videodrome followed in 1983. Videodrome was a Canadian production distributed by Universal, the first Cronenberg picture backed by a major Hollywood studio. With a budget of around CAD 5.9 million, it earned about $2.1 million at the box office, and Rick Baker's makeup effects were curtailed by the budget. Its themes of television, violence and the effect of media on reality were later praised as prescient, and it became a cult film. The Dead Zone, also released in 1983, showed that he could work within a more conventional framework.

His best-known film of the decade is The Fly, released on August 15, 1986. Co-written by Cronenberg and shot in Toronto, it starred Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis and was produced by Brooksfilms, the company of Mel Brooks, and released by 20th Century Fox. The budget is reported at between $9 and $15 million, and it earned about $60 million worldwide. Howard Shore wrote the score, and Chris Walas and Stephan Dupuis won the Academy Award for Best Makeup. It was inspired by George Langelaan's 1957 short story and the 1958 film. Dead Ringers followed in 1988 and Naked Lunch, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs's novel, in 1991.

The film is listed in the library as a US and Canadian production, a reminder that the country's role was often as a partner. American studios used Canadian locations, crews and incentives, and Canadian filmmakers worked with American money. This arrangement has advantages: it brought in resources. It also raises questions of national identity that Canadian critics have long debated, since a film can be made in Toronto and set anywhere. Cronenberg's films often feel Canadian in their coldness and distance, but he has resisted simple labels.

A later generation continued the trend. Vincenzo Natali's Cube (1997) came out of the Canadian Film Centre's First Feature Project. It was shot in Toronto in 21 days on a single reused set, with a cash budget of C$350,000 supplemented by donated services, and it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the award for best Canadian first feature. It earned about $9 million worldwide, with its strongest showing in France, and led to the sequels Cube 2: Hypercube (2002) and Cube Zero (2004). Its premise of strangers trapped in a maze of cubic rooms shows how much could be done with limited resources.

What do these films have in common? Mostly, they treat horror as a clinical, intellectual matter, concerned with bodies, systems and institutions, and often with a detached tone. That is a generalization, and exceptions exist: Black Christmas is a warm-blooded stalker film with a strong sense of place. But the pattern is visible enough that Cronenberg has been described as one of the principal originators of body horror and as Canada's king of horror.

There is also a lesson here about how the economics of a national cinema shape its genres. Tax incentives and public funding made horror attractive to investors because it was inexpensive and could sell internationally without stars. That created a space for filmmakers like Cronenberg to experiment. Later changes in funding altered the picture, as the 1995 shift from the allowance to a tax credit shows.

To explore further, read the entry for The Fly and the franchise page, then the body horror page. The Movie Explorer can filter to Canada, and the 1970s and 1980s guides place these films in their decades.

Films from or co-produced in Canada