Canada has been turning out films that push the storytelling, aesthetics, and genre conventions to their extremes since the dawn of time. Like Hollywood is to mainstream Cinema, Canada has become noted for having a cache of funny, interesting, hysterical, and downright weird movies. Part of this is clearly due to its generous film funding programs, strong independent filmmaking scenes, and open culture to experimental narratives. Canadian directors have continuously been dropping some of the most unforgettable, outrageous, and yet unique films in the world of Cinema, whether it be psychological horror, surrealist flicks, or absurdist writings.
The Cronenberg Effect: Body Horror and Psychological Nightmares
David Cronenberg is a name that has to be mentioned when it comes to unsettling Cinema. Using imagery of psychic and physical terrified metamorphosis, practically rendering the body horror genre with the Canadian director. In his 1983 movie Videodrome, a television executive finds a sinister broadcast that messes with the very nature of reality. Suppressed trauma materializes into monstrous offspring in The Brood (1979). In the most recent of the bunch, Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor (2020) carries on the legacy, combining sci-fi with extreme violence in an assassin story where the bad guys hack people’s bodies.
Surrealism and Absurdism: When Logic Fails
A number of Canadian films shun ordinary storytelling and transport their audiences into dreamscape, illogical worlds. In The Forbidden Room (2015), Guy Maddin’s first film as a director in over a decade, an amalgamation of myriad buried silent films erupts in a feverish paroxysm of has something to do with ‘sex,’ where narrative slippages and collapses heap one on top of the other. One of Maddin’s works, Archangel (1990), has characters who forget they are at war, which has a World War I story to it. The Saddest Music in the World (2003) is set around a beer tycoon with glass legs who runs a strange contest to determine the world’s most mournful song. The films are linear and abandoned for mood, atmosphere, and pure artistic expression.
Horror-Comedy Hybrids: When Scares Meet Laughs
WolfCop (2014) embraces its ludicrous premise of a small-town cop who turns into a werewolf and delivers gore and laughs in equal measure. Psycho Goreman (2020) is the story of two children who accidentally bring an alien warlord back to life and force him to do their bidding, resulting in grotesque but hilarious consequences. While Housebound (2014) is a New Zealand film, it became a cult film in Canada for its offbeat mix of haunted house horror and dry humor. Horror doesn’t always have to be serious to provoke an effect, and these films are proof of it.
Cult Sci-Fi and Mind-Bending Stories
To this day, Canada has a very rich history of producing sci-fi films that eschew traditional narrative for the sake of intellectual and psychological depth. In Cube (1997), the mind-bending minimalist survival story revolves around strangers waking up in a deadly puzzle-like structure. Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010) is a beautifully hypnotic, visually arresting sci-fi horror that leads you into a bad dream you can’t wake up from. But Pontypool (2008) is a film where language becomes a virus, and its citizens are transformed into violent monsters. Unlike the typical mainstream sci-fi, these films do not take us into some future worlds to explore, but they begin to manipulate our reality and our perception.
How Canada Continues to Influence Genre Cinema
Canada’s contribution to genre cinema is not just past; more remarkably, as evidenced here, it continues to influence the future directions of film itself in bold and new ways. To this day, the country is the hotbed for unconventional storytelling and filmmakers who are stretching the boundaries for psychological horror, such as Brandon Cronenberg (Infinity Pool, 2023) and Denis Villeneuve (Enemy, 2013).
In addition to its homegrown talent, Canada has also become Hollywood’s go-to filming location for its strangest blockbusters. The time has come when Vancouver and Toronto double as dystopian cities during the production of big, sci-fi films; when international studios come to shoot boundary-pushing projects here; when cancellations of local shows are swapping talk packages directly into ‘The 9th Circle,’ where the idiots of daytime TV are dead set on retaining their status as the worst show on television, presenting more hyperreality while reaping the revenues. The heart of Canadian Cinema is that it challenges the audience and makes them confront the bizarre. Canada’s weird films have left no doubt in terms of their mark on the wider hand of the global film industry, whether that’s through grotesque body horror, absurdist humor, or cerebral sci-fi.