I’ve always 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 (The Witch, The Lighthouse), Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar), and Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us) 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; Pearl, Barbarian, Smile, Talk to Me, Longlegs, and The Substance 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 who feed into that appetite for new horror stories—and make me feel something.
It’s impossible to talk about Canadian horror, or even Canadian cinema, without the word “Cronenberg” escaping your lips. I recently watched David Cronenberg’s 1996 film, Crash, for the first time. It follows a group of symphorophiliacs—people who get off on car crashes. It’s horny and strange, bathed in black and slick with sex. Crash came twenty years into Cronenberg’s career and a decade after his masterpieces Videodrome and The Fly. It isn’t strictly a horror movie, but like most of Cronenberg’s stuff, it unfolds like a nightmare. The movie flips between extended sex scenes and brutal, overlong, elaborate car crashes. It works because it is the product of a master unwilling to compromise his vision just to make his work more palatable. Like with its subject matter, it’s impossible to look away.
But another Cronenberg has become Canada’s premier curator of slow horror. David’s son, Brandon, has built an impressive filmography over the past decade. 2020’s stylish Possessor, about an assassin who kills by possessing others’ bodies, was lauded as a sophisticated and original work of art. But I was floored by 2023’s Infinity Pool. That film follows James, a flailing author on vacation with his wife. He becomes acquainted with a group of American tourists who pay to clone themselves and use their replicas for increasingly hedonistic ends. They kill and fuck their way through the fictional country of Li Tolqa. James finds himself circling a whirlpool of depravity, unable to find his way out. He forgets himself in the fog of sex and violence and doubled selves. Infinity Pool is an unreserved, invasive examination into our most sickening and primal desires. It explores what it might be like to give in to unimaginable urges and lays bare the consequences. By the end, I was dizzy and shaken. I felt filthy. I felt like I needed a hot shower and a lengthy therapy session. It had done its job.
Like Infinity Pool, Skinamarink is an unfettered look into the mind of a director with a keen sense of what scares us most. There’s virtually no dialogue, no pans, no motion. The movie is nothing more than a series of stagnant shots of a suburban house, overlaid with digital grain. There is no score and nothing happens, really. There is ostensibly a plot: two small children, siblings, find themselves alone in their house, convinced something evil is in there with them.
There are stretches of the movie where you’re staring at a toy phone, waiting for something to move. Longer still are the periods when you’re staring at a wall. To the untrained eye, Skinamarink, which came out in 2023, is a 100-minute slideshow: pointless and boring and definitely not scary. But in the stasis lies true terror. With each shot, the house grows more nightmarish. The halls stretch impossibly long, and the furniture and toys and lights and television take on an eerie aura. For a while, you’re watching nothing happen, and then you watch the windows and doors fade away, and you watch the parents slip out of existence, and out from the silence and nothingness comes an evil noise, and you’ve never heard anything like it but you’re certain it’s the cry of something sinister, some creature from the void that has sucked the light from the world. Skinamarink captures that sheer, unbridled terror of being a scared little kid waiting for a monster to jump out of the closet. Director Kyle Edward Ball understands that the most powerful fear is that of a child for the dark.
I was fortunate enough to see the movie in a theatre, without phones or extraneous noise or other distractions. When I recommend the film to people—which I have done on numerous occasions, with a feverish urgency—I tell them to put their phones in a different room, make sure nobody else is in the house, and turn out all the lights. Skinamarink works only if you are totally locked in. It is not out to entertain you; it has much more ambitious aims.
The movie wants to displace you, destabilize you, replace all the bits in you that believe there is a benign and maybe even good order to things and instill in you a horrifying belief that this world is actually made of only two things: terrified children and the thing which terrifies them—the Unknown. The film tapped into my most primal fears and unsettled that scared kid in me.
In a Violent Nature is another slow yet terrifying story. The 2024 film deals with a clichéd slasher premise: a supernatural killer stalks horny teens cooped up in a cabin in the woods. The conceit of the film is that almost the entire movie is shown from the point of view of the killer. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, this could have been a cheap gimmick. But director Chris Nash had a grander vision. “We always wanted to treat this almost like a nature documentary,” Nash told USA Today. “It’s lulling you into a sense (that) the danger isn’t quite there.”
That lulling made for a theatrical experience I’ve never had before. A slasher movie is typified by a few tropes, one of which is the jump scare. You follow the hero as they’re stalked by the killer, who could pop up at any moment. Jump scares do nothing for me—too often, horror movies confuse surprise with fear.
Fortunately, In a Violent Nature has none. Instead, it reverse-engineers them. We watch in real time as our killer, Johnny, clomps through the Ontario wilderness, locating his victims one by one. We see him identify and then stalk his prey. He is patient but deliberate: in the world of In a Violent Nature, to be seen by Johnny is to die an inevitable, brutal death.
I haven’t been able to shake one particularly gruesome scene. Johnny comes upon his next victim at the crest of a cliff. What follows is shockingly violent and involves a hook, bowels, and a body snagged on a tree branch. An endless conifer forest dapples the background. Birds chirp. If it weren’t for the dangling body, it’d make for a great Group of Seven painting.
Slashers prey on one of our basest, animalistic fears—that a bigger, stronger predator will kill us, and that we are nothing more than a defenceless target. By flipping the traditional cat-and-mouse slasher structure, by putting us in the cat’s perspective instead of the mouse’s, In a Violent Nature tapped into that fear more deeply than any other slasher I’ve seen. I was reminded that just off the highway is a terrifying world where apex predators kill things that are smaller than them. And I was forced to consider the thin barrier between civilization and nature. And how easy it would be for something to hunt me.
These movies do not aim merely to shock. Instead, they upheave the tried-and-true rules of horror to unlock a more profound fear in the viewer. By taking their time, by jettisoning the jump scare, and by immersing you in the singular universe of their directors, these films exemplify what slow horror can accomplish. It can make you uncomfortable, hypnotize you, then flay away your hardened exterior until you find you’re a whimpering child, having forgotten what it was like to not be afraid.
