From the cheaply made “tax-shelter” films of the 1970s to the latest wave of contemporary “eco-horror,” Canadian horror cinema has rarely received much critical attention. Gina Freitag and André Loiselle rectify that situation in The Canadian Horror Film with a series of thought-provoking reflections on Canada’s “terror of the soul,” a wasteland of docile damnation and prosaic pestilence where savage beasts and mad scientists rub elbows with pasty suburbanites, grumpy seamen, and baby-faced porn stars.

Featuring chapters on Pontypool, Ginger Snaps, 1970s slasher films, Quebec horror, and the work of David Cronenberg, among many others, The Canadian Horror Film unearths the terrors hidden in the recesses of the Canadian psyche. It examines the highlights of more than a century of Canadian horror filmmaking and includes an extensive filmography to guide both scholars and enthusiasts alike through this treacherous terrain.

Gina Freitag is an independent scholar and the founder of the Cellar Door Film Festival in Ottawa.

Gina Freitag's profile page

André Loiselle teaches film studies at Carleton University, Ottawa. His main areas of research are Canadian and Québécois cinema, screen adaptations of drama, and the horror film. He has published half a dozen books, including Le Cinéma de Michel Brault, à l’image d’une nation (2005). He is currently working on a new book project provisionally entitled Stage to Scream: The Performance of Villainy in Theatre and Film.

André Loiselle's profile page

‘These excellent essays identify precisely what sets the Canadian horror film apart from its American and British brethren…. Highly recommended.’

Choice Magazine vol 53:08:2016