Horror Movies for October 2020: #1 Pontypool

While I continue to balancing my time between watching TV and looking for a job, I realized I hadn’t written anything for a while. Like, a long while. And, what with it being the spooky season, I figured why not write about some horror movie recommendations? Let’s see how many of these I can write up before the 31st.

First up is the cult classic Canadian zombie film, Pontypool. Here’s the quick tl;dr:

• You should watch this:
  • If you like zombie movies, single room “bottle” movies, Canadian content, or radio stations
  • If you have 90 minutes to spend
• You should skip this:
  • If you don’t want your movies to have a lot of talking,
  • If you want a fast paced action movie

~~/~~

Pontypool, adapted from a novel by Tony Burgess and named after the unincorporated Ontario village where it takes place, is a Canadian zombie movie from a bit over ten years ago. Screened at TIFF in 2008 before a theatrical release in 2009, the film is about the staff inside a radio station as murderous zombies seemingly descend on the town and which complements its minimal cast with excellent writing and tone.

But primarily, it’s a movie about communication and isolation.

I’ll pause here and mention that there’s a twist with the zombies in this movie that I think is quite interesting and don’t want to accidentally spoil for you, if that’s something you care about. And it’s hard to say anything else about the movie without talking about the twist. But, learning the twist was a big part of why I wanted to watch it in the first place, so I’ll leave it up to you.

The basic beats are that recently disgraced-and-relocated radio shock jock Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), his station manager Sydney (Lisa Houle), and technical assistant and former soldier Laurel-Ann (Georgina Reilly), all work together in their station which operated out of the basement of the local church. One February morning they begin getting calls about “attacks” and “mobs” and then of horrors occurring throughout the town so unbelievable that they at first assume it might be some kind of hoax. As the day goes on, trapped in their station by a Valentine’s Day snowstorm, they learn that (1) it’s not a hoax, and (2) the virus that is turning people into mindless cannibals is spread through spoken language.
Which, y’know, is tough because they’re in a radio station.

Now, communication is sort of a common issue that comes up in horror movies and zombie movies especially. Apocalyptic graffiti, audio logs by regretful scientists, and cellphones losing their signal are all familiar pieces in these kinds of film. But this movie puts communication front and center. The characters work at a radio station, for one thing. Plus, like, the whole first minute or so is spent on a monologue by Grant about a missing cat and even played over one of those wiggly audio waveform visualizations. That’s it. Takes up the whole screen for a little bit over a minute, forcing you to focus and hear the words being said. If that doesn’t scream “communication is important in this movie” then I don’t know what would. And this wrestling with communication is something the movie carries from start to finish; from this opening audio wave, through the middle as they try and piece together what they can from government reports and their eye-in-the-sky “helicopter” weatherman, all the way through to the final scene.

Less prominent but still important is the film’s focus on isolation. The full isolation is several layers deep: Grant is alone and inside a sound booth, largely separated from Sydney and Laurel-Ann. This sound booth is inside a basement, which is inside a small town, which is in the middle of rural Ontario, in the middle of a snow storm. Grant starts the movie alone. First alone in his car then, for most of the movie, alone in the booth as he communicates electronically with Sydney and Laurel-Ann. He, a relative outsider new to the town, is physically separated from them, two longtime residents of the community with Laurel-Ann in particular being mentioned as the previous year’s Homecoming Hero. Sydney, who repeatedly butts heads with Grant, enters the booth as herself an outsider to the space to first try and reign in Grant’s big city shock jock take-no-prisoners approach and later, after they have grown closer, to hide from the zombies. Laurel-Ann, who Grant is shown getting along with pretty well, does not spend any extended period in the booth and is also the only member of the staff to openly succumb to the virus. Conversely, the zombies (or “conversationalists” as the director calls them) are almost universally in groups and mobs. There’s the “protest” outside the doctor’s office which results spectacularly in a waterfall of bodies once the walls give out, there’s the description of the horde that swarms the car such that the authorities lose sight of the vehicle for several hours, and of course the mob that surround the building when Grant steps outside to get some air. So, I guess, the two options the characters face are to either stay alone inside and live, or go outside and almost certainly die.

I can’t help but see similarities with the current global situation. I know that that can be said for a lot of zombie movies, but it rings true with this one even more so. And, I don’t know, something about the characters doing the best they can to share accurate information that might save lives, and trying to keep doing that for as long as they can just feels more impactful these days.

There’s a part close-ish to the end. They’ve now realized that the virus is spread through the English language and so Sydney and Grant load up some muzak to broadcast over the system because it doesn’t have any lyrics. Later on, after seemingly discovering the cure, instead of continuing to hide or deciding to flee the station, Grant insists as the military begins bombing the town that they stay for one last broadcast asking “do we really want to provide a genocide with elevator music”? I think it says a lot about the movie that the climax is someone in a sound booth shouting into a microphone. One of the things said during this final scene stuck with me more than it did the previous times I’ve watched this movie.

In his speech Grant reassuringly says:

“It’s just another day. […] The sun came up, you did what you did yesterday, and it’s exactly what you’ll do tomorrow.”

I’m pretty confident that this is something a lot of us in the back half of 2020 can identify with. As the pandemics and the politics and everything else that has made our lives this year much more different and difficult than we expected, I think this can be a comforting thought.

When Grant and Sydney are hiding in the supply room, there’s a brief time skip that jumps us from when they first get there to them having been there for quite a while. Within that gap the two of them have covered every inch of the supply room walls with written messages from one to the other, trying to figure out what the next step is. Despite the difficulty of the situation preventing them from communicating, they found a way around it because they knew they had to communicate in order to keep themselves alive, and this is underscored when they decide to stay and make their final broadcast. The movie tells us to find ways to keep communicating and to keep doing what you can to help. After all, to quote the move one last time:

“It’s not the end of the world. It’s just the end of the day.”

 

Wherever you’re going, get there safe.