The Carpenter (David Wellington, 1986)

The importance of Canadian cinema to the first wave of stalker films is well known by now, with the prototype Black Christmas (and the back story of how the genesis of the idea for Halloween came from Bob Clark when he and Carpenter were classmates), then classic entries My Bloody Valentine, Terror Train, Prom Night, Graduation Day and The Visitor. In anticipation of the Vinegar Syndrome release of the Blu Ray restoration of The Carpenter, Fantasia feted the film with a digital screening of the restoration (which looked about as good as you would expect a low-budget 1988 film to look). The Carpenter is a lesser known Canadian horror oddity that comes at the tail end of the first slasher phase and distinguishes itself from all slashers with its blend of romance and fantasy. Alice is recuperating from a mental health breakdown and is being nursed back to reality by her more than distracted husband Martin (Pierre Lenoir), a college professor who has a stray eye for his female students. While Martin is off at work Alice is left to oversee the house renovations, which are being conducted by a less than competent construction team. One night she hears banging and goes to the source of the noise, the basement, where she sees a lumberjack shirted hunky worker, exploitation favorite Wings Hauser, who sadly passed away eight months after Fantasia, March 15, 2025, working away diligently. Is he part of the contracting team and working overtime? Or is he a ghost from the house’s past? Or is he the sexually frustrated Alice’s sexual fantasy projection?
When one of the hired hands tries to rape Alice, Hauser comes to the rescue, sawing off both his arms (unconvincingly staged with the actor’s arms obviously bulging under his shirt). Alice looks on with a bemused expression, wondering (as us) if what she sees is really happening. A social/business visit from the local sheriff serves as gratuitous plot exposition as he gives Alice the backstory on the house’s malevolent decades old history. A carpenter named Ed Burt went heavily into debt attempting to renovate the house. When he could not continue covering the costs Burt killed a series of repossession men in a very violent fashion. Burt was convicted of murder and sentenced to execution by electric chair (was this on influence on Wes Craven’s Shocker perhaps?). Is this obsessive carpenter from the past Wings Hauser, or is he somehow possessing him? The film holds off on resolving this until the end.

Another aspect that sets this film apart from most slashers is its anti-gothic visual style, with most of the scenes playing out in high key low contrast diffused lighting, and a suburban/rural setting that takes advantage of sunlight streaming through window curtains. While most slashers are set in a realist world, The Carpenter introduces a supernatural component with the ghost story nature of the murders. Fantasy projection or not, Ed is a ghost, and traditionally the stalker film shies away from supernatural killers (save aspects of Michael Myers, Jason, Shocker, Chucky). After Burt kills a house burglar, a discussion between Alice (Lynne Adams, a dead ringer for her more famous younger sister Brooke) and Hauser ensues, Alice standing high on the staircase landing, Hauser seated on the floor below her. The tone of the scene could easily slip into a melodrama without missing a beat. The music is soft, the cutting highlights the shared empathy between the characters, and the dialogue is personal and seductive without being obvious. Ed laments the failed work ethic of the “modern world.” We almost forget there is a corpse of a man lying next to Ed, who slots his drill into him to “prove” how men have gone “soft”. In true slasher fashion, the kills are carried out with tools appropriate to carpentry (staple guns, drill, saw, etc.).

Bringing in the melodrama is theoretically appropriate if you reference Linda Williams' famous essay on body genres 1 which aligns pornography, horror and melodrama as genres that each dependent on emitting physiologically affective emotions on its audience: to arouse (pornography), scream (horror), cry (melodrama). Where melodrama and horror and this film also align is the fantasy space which feminists have argued as a real viewing space for woman watching melodrama in the 1940s and 1950s. Williams asks, why would women put up with watching these films where women suffered so much, sacrificed themselves for their children or ‘man’, or did not get the hunky man they desired? Because, she argued, these films open up ‘structures of fantasy’ whereby female audiences could fantasize attaining the things they were unable to achieve in the realistic space of the narrative. Likewise The Carpenter is all about Alice creating her own fantasy spaces and somehow it all ends up in reality, but one they can safely walk away from. 

The filmmakers even blend in Alice’s fantasy of violent eruption when she clumsily lets a can of paint on the mixer machine spray red paint all over her light colored dress and face. She calmly returns home carrying shopping bags looking like she just murdered five people, to be confronted by her husband’s pregnant student lover. The fantasy blood soon becomes real when Ed murders her husband’s lover. Appropriately, Ed becomes unambiguously real with the presence into the narrative of Alice’s sterner, realist sister Barbara, who doesn’t hide her hatred of her brother-in-law, who truth be comes across as one of the vilest male characters ever written. My sense is that writer Doug Taylor (a Montreal native who was present at the Fantasia screening) and David Wellington (who was actually in my cohort of Cinema students at Concordia University in the mid 1980s) could only take their subversion of the horror genre only so far, and remove any ambiguity from the end when the two women realize that the house acts as a voodoo doll for Ed. Smash in a wall and Ed feels the pain. So they escape and kill the monster by setting the house on fire, which leads to a satisfying ending where the two sisters walk toward the foreground while the house burns in the far background (a la Suspiria) and poor burning Ed crawls along the front lawn proclaiming his love for Alice.

Although some of the feminist bite is removed by taking Ed out of Alice’s projected fantasy and into material presence, it is still feminist if you read the text as one where both male archetypes, the modern man (her husband) and the 1950s Americana male (Ed) are both ugly extremes of toxic masculinity, none more so than the young worker who tries to rape her when he knows she is home alone. In fact every male character is negative: the skittish paint store owner, the slap happy doctor, the buffoonish sheriff. The film benefits from a nice electronic score by Quebec pop star Pierre Bündock, who was also present at the screening. In the introduction he mentioned how he was more than happy when he was told how much he would get paid to compose the music, $7000.00, which was more than he expected. He went out and bought a Korg 1 synthesizer which he used to compose the score, which he did only on the basis of the script. Which is surprising given how well it works to the different mood settings of the film. He also said that given his lack of experience –this was his first score-- he took inspiration by studying the music only from Street Trash, Basketcase and Toxic Avenger. Good trash pedigree there!

Dark Match (2024, Lowell Dean, Canada)

Dean’s latest feature shows a move away from the more comical, tongue in cheek tone of Wolf Cop and Wolf Cop 2. Dark Match has moments of comedy woven into the characters and depiction of professional wrestling but the story and violence is played for keeps. The layering of pro wrestling with satanism seems a natural fit, given the common ground shared by pro wrestling, heavy metal music, and horror films. But the pairing usually goes heavy metal and horror, so this tag team feels fresh. The main characters are wrestlers being managed by an independent, slightly opportunistic manager/agent Spencer (Michael Eklund), whose team at S.A.W. wrestling (a play on RAW) include a motley bunch of wrestlers, Canadian actress Sara Canning as Kate the Great, Steven Ogg as a rough and tumble Joe, physically imposing Ayisha Issa as Miss Behave (hard to imagine Kate the great would have any chance of beating her, dwarfed by her), Mo Adan as Enigma Jones, Jonathan Lepine as Thick, to Thin (uncredited), and wrestler Chris Jericho as the Prophet, the leader of the cult. The ‘dark matches’ are staged in a hotel arena and only the current combatants are able to attend the fight, the others are hidden in their rooms. The reason for this is that the fights are all staged so that one of the wrestlers dies in a ritualistic manner as an act to complete a satanic resurrection. Or we assume. Each fight is set off in an environment reflecting the elements: Inferno, Earth, Water, etc. Miss Behave and Steven Ogg’s character are off again on again partners. Once the wrestlers are at the site they are treated to bizarre food choices (lots of meat), drugged and groomed for the matches. We learn that the cult may in fact be a diversion from the real purpose of the fights: they are being filmed as snuff films sold to foreign markets for big money (this is the 1980s after-all). But the story seems to have a tension between the snuff angle and Prophet, who seems committed to the cult aspect. We learn that the favored Kate the Great is his daughter, and he is upset when she dies at the hands of Miss Behave. The film ends as a battle Royale between Prophet and Joe. Prophet has the upper hand until Enigma Jones comes back from the seeming dead and Miss Behave rescues Joe (Steven Ogg). They are met outside by Spencer, and drive off to safety. Until the road below them trembles and cracks open to unearth a 12 foot tall demon, who Miss Behave is all set to challenge, with the film fades to black. The cinematographer for this is Karim Hussain, which I did not know until the credits. It doesn’t have his usual colorful look as Dean went for a more somber palette, but the look is strong throughout. Filmed mostly in Edmonton.

Scared Shitless (2024, Vivieno Caldinelli, Canada)

Scared Shitless is another star turn for Steven Ogg, as a proud plumber Don, with a germaphobic son Sonny (Daniel Doheny). Sonny seems to have developed this phobia after his mother died from a rare germ. Don wants to help his son conquer this fear by bringing him on as an assistant for his next job at a  large apartment building. They are greeted at the desk by the attractive young Patricia (Chelsea Clark), whose parents are in the process of selling the building to help pay for her father’s medical treatments (this must be the US and not Canada). The building’s Pandora’s Box of horrors is set up in a prologue where a mad scientist Dr. Robert, played by the gentle manager from Superstore, Mark McKinney, has created a murdering parasitic organism as part of a nebulous Project X, overseen by Professor Cummings (played by thin man Julian Richings, who seems to be cropping up in everything, and with 240 credits, I guess he is).

The parasite is bubbling under an aquarium and attacks the curious Professor. The lab burns to the ground and Dr. Robert escapes with his papers and a living specimen. Dr. Robert comes across as the most mild mannered of your proverbial “I am God” scientist, but the effects are the same. Robert lives in the building Don and his son are working in, and when the creature eventually kills its maker and slips into the toilet, Pandora’s Box is open. The star of the show is clearly the practical effects, by creature FX designer Steven Kostanski, who is an Edmonton based effects artist and director who has directed many horror, science-fiction and effects heavy films, including Psycho Goreman, The Void, Manborg, Father’s Day, an episode of V/H/S/94 and The Leprechaun Returns. The creature is a slug-like (or phallic if you will) parasite with a flower like clover mouth with teeth that slithers, jumps, and bites. The size is perfect for moving through pipes and toilets.

What sells the film is the winsome relationship between father and son, with Ogg eating up the role of your every guy plumber who is as brave as he is dumb. The fledging romance between Sonny and Patricia seems necessary and played just this side of straight. Scared Shitless plays up the genuine scare factor of plumbing, with the sounds, smells, leaks, grime, and overall unease that is always unsettling to the average home owner. Do we really know what slithers inside our pipes? It is surprising that more films have not taken advantage of this inherent queasiness. I can think of Unknown Origin (1983, with Peter Weller in a war against a rat) and Peter Weir’s The Plumber (1979).

The first kill in the apartment is the best, and most squeamish, at least for males in the audience. A large man sits on his toilet reading. A cut to an impossible viewpoint of his hanging testicles from inside the toilet does not auger well for the poor man, as the parasite bites off his penis and testicles (later retrieved by Sonny in an examination of the sceptic tank). A kinky elderly couple who spice their sex life up with some fetish role playing on their anniversary are the next victims. The cheery Mrs. Applebaum (Marcia Bennett) who is always ready to offer food and coffee hangs on long enough but is eventually sacrificed (though her dog is spared). Don and the dog are thought to be killed in Mrs. Applebaum’s bathroom, when he sacrifices himself to let Sonny and Patricia leave. But this is not the kind of film that kills off its sympathetic characters. Sonny’s stomach medicine (generic Pepto Bismol, Bismuth –cleared by their lawyer, says director Cardinelli!) ends up being the kryptonite as it burns through the parasites, who are fast breeders and leave behind their larva-like sacks of eggs in the bowels of the toilets. Sonny takes over from his Dad as the hero and together with bait Patricia manage to stuff a huge bag of Bismuth in the mother parasite, set the building to explode (securing the insurance money Patricia will need for her Dad) and exit just in time.

The paramedics bring out one living person, of course Don. A post credit scene of eggs dropping out of the city sewer dump with the Toronto skyline in the background sets up a sequel. The director and writer mentioned 1980s horror as an influence, especially the 1988 Blob remake, but oddly seemed unwilling to admit the more obvious and natural progenitor, David Croneberg’s Shivers. The single set location that ends with the threat spreading to the city, the slug like design of the parasite, the way the slug comes out of the plumbing to attack, the kinky elderly couple, are all elements the two films share in common.

Kryptic (Kourtney Roy, 2024, Canada/UK)

Chloe Pirrie plays a dual role of Kay Hall, a veterinarian, and Barbara Valentine (the name relates to the color red, which relates to the red riding hood cape seen as a prop), a cryptozoologist who has gone missing in the pre-story.  Jeff Gladstone plays Kay’s control freak husband Morgan, Jason Deline plays the other important male character, hunky Caleb, who is a bartender and lothario. Alia Rusu-Tahir is a trans actress who plays enigmatic Sasha, and then there are a series of other female characters Kay meets and interacts with along her nebulous journey of self-discovery, most for some reason with ‘S’ names, Sarah, Starla Northstar, Sally, along with Sasha.

The film begins with Kay off on a hike to Krytpic Peak as part of a walking club but (like Red Riding Hood) goes off from the tour’s path and sees a torn red cape hanging off a tree branch. An area known as Blue Vale Lake is a cryptozoologist hot spot for sightings. She seems to catch a brief glimpse of a Suca, the mythical cryptid noted to be inhabiting the area. From this point on Kay (or is it Barbara?) seems to be an amnesiac or suffering from some form of temporary memory loss and has to relearn who she is. Although this could also be caused by mushrooms she sees in the forest (like in the Canadian horror gem, End of the Line, 2007).  She goes to her home and learns she is a veterinarian. She sees a picture of herself with a man, her husband. She hears someone trying to break in and leaves through the basement. Later it is established that this person breaking in to her house may have been herself in another timeline.

Kay catches a news item that claims she or someone who looks a lot like her, Barbara Valentine, is a cryptozoologist who has gone missing. A TV interview with the man from the picture in Kay’s pledges his undying love for her missing wife to the TV audience. Pirrie is excellent as the lost soul Barbara/Kay, projecting the right dose of lost innocence and woman in search of her true self. Kryptic relies largely on the wondrous natural backdrop of the BC mountains and forests, shot from all angles and distances, to wrap the story up in a sense of mystery and the unknown. Barbara’s residual effects from her brush with the monster go beyond just memory loss. At times her eyes reflect a shimmering star-like light that may be the image of the monster retained on her retina (perhaps a nod to the age old and wrong persistence of vision theory that explains how we can see moving images). We get rapidly cut flashes of her subjective recall of the monster. Hair, teeth, blurring movement. Mucus drools from her orifices. Sexual desire produces pure body horror moments that recall The Untamed and Possession, or the shunting scenes from Society. Bestial like sex.

Some of Kay’s encounters with strangers gives the film an interesting rite of passage feel; rather than moving the plot anywhere these encounters feel like a dream-like journey of self-discovery. In an encounter with a female magician (Jennifer Copping) at the hotel bar, they dance and nearly come to kiss. Kay/Barbara wears a shimmering magic cape and follows a woman she had spied fellating Caleb (nod to In the Cut) into the toilet. She traps her in a toilet stall and attacks her. We only see the action from the bottom of the adjoining stall, but we assume the attack was painful and maybe fatal. She bonds with an inn owner Sally Antoine (Patti Allan), meets fellow monster hunter Starla Northstar (Pam Kearns) who lost her daughter to the woods many years ago. A few scenes later Kay seems to encounter the missing daughter in the woods. It seems the woods are peopled by missing souls who were sucked into the void of the forest by the Sooka.

Later at a trailer park community she meets Johnette (Christina Lewall) whose experience with a Suca trying to crash into her trailer has made her a pariah in her community. Kay is invited to a local trailer party, gets drunk, dons the cape and dances seductively as if she were alone. She is seduced by Caleb (or date raped), but leaves him on the ground as a whimpering, mucus covered man in a confused state. Johnette’s trans daughter Sasha likes Kay and bonds with her over their shared ‘difference’. She and her mother are sure that Kay visited them before to ask about her cryptid encounter, but Kay has no memory of this. Could it have been Barbara or Kay in another timeline?

As a Cryptid film Kryptic is highly original and unique, unlike any other of its type. Instead of focusing on the search for the cryptid it turns inward and depicts the affect of contact on the human. And it brings in cosmic horror into the equation with the plot inclusion of portals that the Sooka moves around in, making it harder to sight. Kay eventually returns to her doting husband, who soon turns back to his suffocating self, washing her, putting her in their honeymoon dress and placing her in ostensibly a house cage. He has her help with gardening, then freaks out when she gets her hands dirty. Sex is complicated. Morgan has issues. While Morgan is the controller in the real world, he succumbs to her in the bedroom, but a wimpy man is not what Barbara craves (hence her attraction to Caleb). Barbara tells him flat out that he is the reason why she left, and is set to leave again. Morgan tries to stop her by smashing in her car window. Barbara calmly drives into him, knocking the stuffings (literally) out of him. She is freed of him once again. The final scene sees Barbara don her red riding hood cape and venture back to the original sighting. Is this her final release or is her journey starting all over again? The space around the ground where the portal is begins to show signs of atmospheric disturbance, before cutting to a close-up of Barbara’s face and shining eyes. At one point when Barbara drives away from the party she veers from a woman in the middle of the road, herself dressed in white. Is this an homage to the end of The Haunting, where a woman crashes into a tree to avoid the ghost like female figure crossing the road? Or is it the structural signal of a time loop, where variants of her identity cross over with other aspects of her self. Could it be portals that generate other time lines? This is a film that is true to its title, leaving the larger plots elements open for the audience to filter out and ruminate on.

Only during a second viewing of the film did I notice the film’s palindrome structure. First it is Kay Hall looking for Barbara; we see a newspaper clipping “Barbara Valentine Missing Cryptozoologist”; then about halfway through, Kay refers to herself as Barbara and she sees a newspaper story announcing, “Kay Hall Missing Cryptozoologist”. The film can be seen either as a Persona-style shift where one character merges with another. Or it is a time looping of the narrative where we see the same temporal moment but from a different perspective, triggered by the early moment where Kay rushes out of the house as someone is breaking in; and the same action filmed from outside, where we see Barbara in her red riding hood, throwing a pail through the veranda door. A similar moment occurs when Barbara is driving away from the trailer park and almost runs over herself in the middle of the road, only here she is dressed in white. Another reading sees the time loop a result of the portals in the forest. Or the encounter with the Suca being a destabilizing factor in the time space continuum.

There is an important scene between Sasha and Barbara in the woods, where we see Sasha has similar light in her eye, and she likens them as both being different and that they must stick together. Sasha says, (paraphrasing) “we’ll really show them what it means to encounter a monster.” They are both seen as ‘monsters’ by society, Barbara as a strong woman, Sasha as a trans woman. This relates perfectly to the Linda Williams essay “When the Woman Looks”, from 1984, in which she notes how in classic horror film the woman is not allowed to desire the look, to hold the gaze, and when she looks at the monster there is a moment of self recognition in their common ‘difference’: the monster for their monstrosity (sexual power, strength, social status, etc.) and the woman for her second class state in patriarchy. But in later horror films there is a switch where this difference, rather than being a bad thing, is a strength. Woman finds strength in her difference (in her sexual power, her ability to give life, the strength in her lack of a penis). This plays out in the film. Why are only women affected by the Suca? Or why does the Suca only go after women? Why are the missing people all women? As we learned in the Q & A with first-time photographer turned director Kourtney Roy, Suca (Suca) mean ‘bitch’ or ‘female dog’ in Russian. Why are all the women ‘Karb’ (Kay + Barbara) encounters have names starting with ‘S’ (Starla Northlight, Sally, Sasha, Sarah)?

As a final observation, the close-up on Karb’s eyes feels very similar to the ending of Possession, with the striking, strobe-lit close-up of Isabelle Adjani and her striking eyes. I would line this up with the earlier noted influence of Persona, and note how these two films, especially Persona, have become such influential markers for recent femme-themed or female directed horror and psychological dramas. I would also throw into this cinematic cultural pot, the influence of Kier-la Janisse’s critical-autobiographical study of female neurosis and female identity, The House of Psychotic Women (2012, 2nd revised edition, 2022).

Cube (1997, Vincenzo Natali, Canada)

This was surprisingly the first time seeing this Canadian SF-Horror classic, in a new 4K restoration, as part of Fantasia’s bestowing of the Canadian Trailblazer award to Vincenzo Natali, who seemed genuinely moved and appreciative when accepting the award. His longtime collaborator and actor David Hewlett was on stage with him. The film stands the test of time with its simple yet effective production design conceived on a miniscule budget of under $400,000 and what was then innovative premise which has gone on to influence dozens of video games, films and TV shows. Although it should be noted that the premise is a derivation of the 1972 Young Adult SF novel House of Stairs by William Sleaton, which pits five young protagonists in an M.C. Escher like puzzle prison of labyrinthian staircases as part of a government controlled exercise in social dynamics. Although it is true that there have been many variations on its basic futuristic survivalist story in recent years (The Maze Runner, The Hunger Games, The Giver, Allegiant, Ender’s Games, House of Stairs) that owe something to Natali’s version of the premise, rather then the novel per se. These stories have remained popular and can be seen in adult variations, with such films as Logan’s Run (1976), Escape Room (2019), The Platform (2019), Circle (2015), Coherence (2013), Triangle (2009), Vivarium (2109), the Saw franchise, etc. Natali does give his overall aesthetic design a twist on the usual “bright” “white” aesthetics found in dystopian films (think 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968, Solaris, 1971, THX-1138, 1971, The Andromeda Strain, 1971) that go for a cerebral, distant ambiance, by color coding the inner cubes in more vibrant colors, red, green, blue.

What feels fresh about the film today is the political aspect of the casting. The epilogue sees a man, Albertson (Julian Richings), waking up to find himself in a cube like prison. He searches for a way out but quickly becomes victim number one which is perhaps the film’s best kill, as a grid of thin steel wires intersect across the room, splicing the man into even squared sections. It is always a good way to introduce violence early in a film because it trains the audience to expect it again, and even if the violence never comes, it is in the back of our minds. The set of characters are quickly formed and include an escape artist Rennes (Wayne Robson), a police officer Quentin (Maurice Dean Wint), a young female university student Leaven (Nicole de Boer), a jittery female doctor Holloway (Nicky Guadagni), a sullen architect who keeps to himself at first Worth (David Hewlett) and a mentally challenged young man Kazan (Andrew Miller). As per these stories, we learn about them little by little, realizing that there will be surprises along the way. Rennes, the escape artist, dies first, in a brutal acid spray injected into his face. Quentin, a black character, becomes the self-appointed leader, by dint of his cop pedigree and physical size and forceful nature. Alpha male if you will. This dynamic recalls Duane Jones in the 1968 masterpiece Night of the Living Dead, but as much as we want this progressive trait to persevere, Quentin hides a dark, violent, sexist side and ends up being the antagonist, the villain. Holloway confronts him about his violent nature, implying that this is why his wife left him. We learn that Worth is part of the design team who worked on the outer shell of the prison, knowledge the team hopes to exploit. When Kazan enters he is quickly tagged as a major liability, and Quentin is the first to assume this, while the doctor Holloway becomes protective of him. Leaven lacks confidence given her lowly status as a student, but her skill at math makes her an integral component of the team by being able to decode the numbering system on the door jamb of each entry point to know which cubes are traps. They mathematically figure out the cube path to take to get at the outer perimeter where they can hopefully escape.

A tense scene sees them negotiate across the ceiling of a cube trap triggered by noise. When they arrive at what looks like the outer perimeter they string along clothes to create a rope they can use to drop down and search for an exit point. The volunteer is Holloway, who is left hanging and at the mercy of Quentin, who lets her fall to her death. The biggest character twist is having Kazan, thought to be a liability, become a Rain Man autistic idiot savant, and their saviour as his gifted ability in math leads them through safe cubes to the exit. In a surprisingly downbeat turn, Quentin kills Leaven and Worth, and in turn is killed himself, which leaves only Kazan as the survivor walking out into a blinding white space into an unknown future. We never learn with certainty who is pulling the strings of this sadistic governmental trap, although the implication (and most often read of the film) suggests it is implicated in the military-industrial complex. Worth does offer an answer, although we can not be sure he is right: [it is] "an accident... a forgotten perpetual public works project". The machinery still functions, but no one remembers why. As one character explains: "There is no conspiracy. Nobody is in charge. It's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan. Big Brother is not watching you".

Notes

1. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Summer, 1991), pp. 2-13 ↩

Volume 29, Issue 6 / June 2025 Festival Reports   canadian cinema   fantasia international film festival   slasher film   steve ogg   vincenzo natali   wings hauser