loved horror. My therapist would say it’s because I suppressed a lot of my emotions as a kid and can achieve catharsis only by consuming extreme and graphic material. My bisexual friends would say it’s because I’m a Scorpio.
Either way, I’ve seen so many horror films that I’ve grown desensitized. Just the scariest stuff gets a rise out of me. Over the past decade, there’s been a lot of scary stuff.
The success of directors like Robert Eggers ( , ), Ari Aster ( , ), and Jordan Peele ( , ) has sparked a renewed interest, among producers and audiences alike, in original horror tales—not sequels or reboots or spinoffs but genuinely fresh scary stories. Just take a look at the past three years and you’ll find a number of new hits with outsized impact; , , , , , and are all carefully crafted and managed to slip out of their genre bubbles and into the cultural consciousness. Despite their merits, most of these movies failed to frighten me.
I search far and wide to stimulate my amygdala and often come up empty handed. But I’ve found myself turning to a new class of independent Canadian filmmakers feeding into that appetite for new horror stories—and making me feel something. to talk about Canadian horror, or even Canadian cinema, without the word “Cronenberg” escaping your lips.
I recently watched David Cronenberg’s 1996 film, , for the first time. It follows a group of symphorophiliacs—people who get off on car crashes. It’s horny and strange, bathed in.