Six horror movies starring the 6ix
With wall-to-wall horror films on tap everywhere for Halloween, perhaps you are finding it hard to pick one. Why not go local? Toronto stands in for other cities in a good many horror movies, everything from Resident Evil to Saw II to George Romero’s Land of the Dead, but there are plenty of spooky retro horror films that make no bones about their Hogtown setting, and are all the more frightening and immediate because of it.
Here are six of the best, a trick-ortreat mix of schlocky B-movies, lurid locality and truly terrifying tales: Black Christmas (1974) Get a jump start on the holiday season mayhem with this disturbing slasher film from the normally serene director Bob Clark, best known for fare like Porky’s and A Christmas Story. A madman terrorizes a sorority house at the University of Toronto, first pestering them with a series of goosebump-inducing phone calls, then murdering them as their fellow students leave for the Christmas hol- idays. It pretty much laid down the template for the slasher genre (erroneously credited to the much more celebrated Halloween), but instead of a suburban backdrop, it’s got bleak U of T architecture in wintertime, peppered with strong and classy protagonists. Avoid the 2006 remake. Killer Party (1986) Helmed by Canadian genre maverick William Fruet (often name checked by Quentin Tarantino as one of his favourite horror auteurs), Killer Party manages to rise-above its gummy ’80s slice ’n’ dice contemporaries to become a little more fun and closer in spirit to the post-modern horror favoured in the 1990s. Some seriously creepy moments are maximized by using the neighbourhoods surrounding U of T, much in the same way Black Christmas did. Really Weird Tales (1987) Years before it raised the bar of highquality television series, HBO created this horror-comedy anthology series from the makers of SCTV that tested so poorly they abandoned it as a film with three segments that aired in Canada on First Choice Superchannel. Starring the likes of John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara, Jayne Eastwood, Don Lake, Sheila McCarthy and many more, it’s a veritable who’s who of 1980s Canadian film and TV. Candy stars as a truly bananas snake oil salesman in the second, and best, segment. Perhaps the dark Canadian humour and eerie location filming alienated the HBO audience, but it remains a fascinating curio. Videodrome (1983) There is no creepier Polaroid of Toronto in the early 1980s than David Cronenberg’s prophetic Videodrome.
Videodrome, The film is a harbinger of the rise in shocking, violent content and its distribution via new technologies (here it’s VHS, Betamax, UHF and pirate satellite), while Cronenberg uses local broadcast legend Moses Znaimer as a base for intense “Civictv” programmer Max Wren (played to boiling point by James Woods). Toronto’s Citytv, still infamous for its erotic “Baby Blue” screenings and coarse populist programs, informs much of Civictv, “the one you take to bed with you.” Instead of standing in as an unnamed U.S. city, Toronto plays itself — there’s even a cameo from a 504 Queen streetcar — amidst the techno mayhem and gory splatter effects. The Brood (1979) Cronenberg’s meditation on divorce is as bizarre as it is unsettling, making a barren and frozen Toronto circa 1979 seem the most terrifying place on Earth. A scene in which monsters attack a teacher at Brown Public School on Avenue Rd. near St. Clair Ave. W. remains as horrific today as it must have been then, including for the young child extras in the scene — many of whom attended the school at the time. Deadly Eyes (1982) Based on gonzo British horror writer James Herbert’s The Rats, Deadly Eyes is possibly the most bonkers Toronto movie ever made. Giant rats, raised on contaminated corn, terrorize the city: first managing to embarrass a local politician during a presser on the importance of subways, then attacking Spadina’s old Golden Harvest theatre in the middle of a kung-fu fest.
Lots to enjoy here, whether it’s watching dachshunds and terriers in rat costumes spray fake blood all over the TTC’s abandoned Lower Bay station platform, or trainspotting the use of the TTC’s Hawker Siddeley H1s, H2s and H4s.
Directed by Robert Clouse (who popularized Bruce Lee in the slightly less kooky Enter the Dragon) and costarring Scatman Crothers ( The Shining).