10 Canadian Horrors Far More Original Than Those From America
2. Pontypool
As we've already seen with Fido, making an original zombie film in the current climate where film viewers are surrounded by hoards of the undead is a tricky proposition. Just as Fido went back to the 1950s for its inspiration, so does the even more original Pontypool look to even further in the past. Presented as, and indeed simultaneously produced as, a radio show, Pontypool's obvious primary influence is the infamous 1930s radio broadcast of The War Of The Worlds that created widespread panic among its audience. Adapted by Tony Burgess from his own novel Pontypool Changes Everything, Bruce McDonald's film originally had an even more boldly experimental concept with the visuals nothing but a soundwave of the radio broadcast's audio. It's probably to the film's benefit that McDonald decided to go for something slightly more conventional in filming the inside of the radio station where shock jock Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) broadcasts his show with producer Sydney (Lisa Houle) and technician Laurel-Ann (Georgina Reilly). The confines of the radio station while a blizzard swirls outside are a good small scale claustrophobic environment where little tensions between Grant's edgy radio persona and Sydney's protectiveness can grow and the vaguely defined crisis outside can be heard to develop in incoherent incoming reports that neither the characters nor the audience can trust to be reliable. The truly creative element, though, is in the nature of the zombie plague itself. Like many modern zombie pictures, McDonald insists that Pontypool's spreading viral rage infection is not zombie-ism and for Pontypool this may hold true. Here the virus is spread through language (something of a problem in a radio broadcast), meaning the film enjoys playing with words losing and gaining meaning. In this sense, the only film that Pontypool can be seen to resemble is oddball Greek drama Dogtooth in which a child is told "zombie" means "a small yellow flower".
