Le Bel Écran is a monthly column about Quebec's screen culture from a local perspective.
The first time I remember seeing Montreal in a horror film was in David Cronenberg's Rabid. The film follows a young woman who undergoes an experimental surgery that causes a vampire-like hunger, leaving her to wander Montreal in search of blood. Even though the film was released in 1977, locations like Guy-Concordia metro station, an apartment building on St. Mathieu and the Cavendish Mall remained relatively unchanged. And through them, the film captured landscapes familiar in my own nightmares.
It's strange to yearn for the city you live in to be a horror location, but watching Rabid was like having an itch I couldn't scratch. By then, I'd seen many Quebec films and even more horror films but Montreal remained a rare locale for the latter. For all the richness of Quebec cinema, horror was relatively underrepresented.
The reason for this appears to be essentially quite simple: For most of Quebec film history, the majority of films have relied on government funding. Bureaucrats make financial decisions based on risk; not just in terms of money but optics. One year before Rabid, a different Cronenberg movie, Shivers (also shot in Montreal) was partially funded by the Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC, now known as Telefilm). The movie, about parasites that turn residents of an apartment complex into bloodthirsty sex fiends, was their largest financial hit to date.
A journalist writing for the magazine Saturday Night wrote about Shivers under the headline, "You should know how bad this film is. After all, you paid for it." The film's artistic value (or lack thereof) was debated in Parliament. The CFDC was created less than ten years earlier and was already under threat. Whether it was official policy or not, it became clear that funding horror was a liability.
Rémi Fréchette, a local filmmaker and former critic, breaks down these early decades of horror in Quebec. "When we talk about the early Quebec horror films, it's often very Catholic, breaking down oppression and religion. There really aren't very many films though, the first one I can think of is Le diable est parmi nous from 1972." In the 1980s, "with filmmakers like Yves Simoneau and Jean-Claude Lord you saw way more genre films, but not a lot of horror. Often it would be fantasy or comedy films infused with horror elements in films like Dans le ventre du dragon and Karmina."
The shackles began to loosen around the year 2000. Fréchette has his own theory as to why this shift begins to happen: the increased appreciation and opportunities for short films in Quebec. "I'm not an academic, so I can't say it's only that, but for me it's clear that around the year 2000 a lot of filmmakers were suddenly making a lot of different types of films," he says. Fréchette himself began making short movies in high school during this period, mostly genre films.
He found community and support in Kino, a film movement founded in Montreal that offers resources, workshops and screening opportunities for short filmmakers. "There's no financing, it's all about helping each other," he says. "There was a period where I was able to make almost one film a month."
Even more opportunities to make horror films started to emerge around the mid-point of the 2010s. "Obviously, Les affamés de Robin Aubert, which won the best prize at the Prix Iris, was huge," he says. Les affamés is a zombie film set in rural Quebec that plays with the conventions of the genre all the while exploring questions of identity and alienation in the province. "There's of course this auteur angle, but it's still a zombie film. It really opened up a lot of doors and helped change things to the point where people are willing to accept the genre a lot more. A filmmaker like Ariane-Louis Seize, who made Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, probably could not have made her film 20 years ago."
Fréchette's most recent film, Tie Man, is a buddy cop film about a disfigured vigilante and a policewoman who join forces in a film that pays homage to poorly dubbed American action films with a horror twist. Privately funded with a small budget, the movie (like many of Fréchette's films) exists outside the typical financing model.
Last month Tie Man screened at Fantastic Fest in Austin, the largest American genre festival, along with another more typical Quebec horror film, Peau à peau by Chloé Cinq-Mars, a psychological thriller about a mother suffering from post-partum depression whose sense of reality collapses. The two films represent two sides of the same coin: the type of horror films that receive funding... and those that do not.
That said, Fréchette is far from bitter. He understands why many of his films -- which have boundless energy and creativity, but lack perhaps the gravity typical of so-called "important cinema" -- struggle to find government financing. "There's always this problem with horror films, in that they're not considered to be very serious," he says. "If in Quebec we're only able to finance twenty filmmakers a year, I understand the lack of desire to finance horror, because it can be seen very poorly. They're taking into consideration not just box-office success but looking for films that will screen at major festivals like Cannes or Berlin." Jokingly, he adds, "I know my films aren't meant for those types of festivals."
While there still might be a lot of work in creating opportunities for genre filmmakers of all kinds, there has certainly been progress. There are not only more opportunities for filmmakers to work in horror but there's a greater selection of films for audiences, from auteur-driven horror to crowd-pleasing experiences. After decades on the margins, horror in Quebec is no longer an anomaly, it's increasingly a part of our cinematic culture.