The Blood in The Snow Film Fest: Great grade "Eh" horror on grade Z budgets

By Jim Slotek

Since time immemorial – or at least since the ‘70s – “nice” Canadians have quietly provided the world with a steady source of cheap, gory horror movies. Prom Night, Black Christmas, Ginger Snaps, all the early Cronenbergs, etc.

And of the estimated 80 festivals that unspool annually in Toronto, I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for Blood in The Snow, which has bared its fangs annually since 2012, and which from Thursday to Tuesday at the Royal Cinema. On any given night, low budgets, feverish creativity and sometimes innocence of style combine for an unpredictable experience.

Olunike Adeliyi is a flesh-eating immortal in She Never Died.

Certainly, I wasn’t prepared for last year’s closer, Winnipeg filmmaker Danishka Esterhazy’s Level 16. It’s a sharp, remarkably tense Orwellian, Handmaid’s Tale-ish nightmare set in a prison-like school-for-girls, where the students are raised with ‘50s-style social hygiene films and old movies, and are kept in line with depictions of the outside world as a post-apocalyptic nightmare. The review Original-Cin’s Thom Ernst wrote earlier this year, still gets read as viewers discover it on streaming services.

Aleks Paunovic: Wait, I’m supposed to be 17?

The year’s festival kicks off with Puppet Killer, one of the most left-field spoofs of the slasher film genre I’ve ever seen. You know how, in so many horror films, “teens” are played by actors in their 20s or even 30s? In what can’t be anything but deliberate casting, director Lisa Ovies (who used to run a children’s acting school) gives us an even older cast, including – as the 17-year-old Jamie, whose childhood puppet Simon still haunts him – hulking 50-year-old Aleks Paunovic.

Paunovic (who’s played Julius in the TV series Van Helsing and whose stubble could be used to clean pots) gives a grinning, gee-whiz performance replete with the kind of sex-obsessed, faux teenage trash talk scriptwriters like to imagine comes out of the mouths of Gen Z. To hear it come out of the mouths of much older cast-members makes them sound developmentally challenged and underlines the inanity unfairly attached to teens in horror films and other genres.

This is the main gag in the movie, though there are also call-backs to the inevitable tripping and falling one does when running for your life through the woods, ominous music punctuated by someone putting their hand on a shoulder a la the last sentence in so many Goosebumps chapters, and blood a’plenty. What can I say? I laughed.

The best news that fans of Canadian-made horror can hear is that Audrey Cummings has a new film. The Canadian Film Centre grad, who has impressed me ever since 2015’s babysitter-in-peril film Berkshire County. Here, she offers She Never Died, a female-centric reboot of Jason Krawczyk’s 2015 He Never Died (in which Henry Rollins played a weary immortal).

In the new version (which I’ll review in more detail when it’s released in Toronto December 6), American Gods’ kickass actress Olunike Adeliyi is another invulnerable, grim street dweller, who subsists on cannibalism (mainly fingers), and tries to victimize only bad guys. A no-longer-by-the-book senior cop (Peter MacNeill) tracks her down and decides to direct her energies to the scumbags who have it coming the most.

Other budget-conscious bloodbaths on the Blood in The Snow schedule: 

-Paul Tanter’s The Nights Before Christmas, a sequel to his 2017 film Once Upon a Time at Christmas, which presented a murderous Santa and Mrs. Claus.

-Dead Dicks by Montrealers Chris Bavota and Lee Paula Springer is about a nursing student who visits her bipolar brother Richie’s apartment to find his dead body in the same flat where he is apparently still alive. Further complications follow.

-The werewolf thriller Hunter’s Moon by Matthew Campagna.

-And the festival closer, Z by Brandon Christensen, starring Bates Motel’s Keegan Connor Tracy, about a family whose son has a very scary imaginary friend.

Click here for more info and tickets to the Blood in The Snow Film Festival.