The Scare Salon

The 2008 Canadian film Pontypool is one I kept seeing pop up on various internet lists of underrated horror movies, and even though the premise always sounded intriguing to me, for some reason I never got around to watching the thing until just recently, when I noticed that Shudder had added it to their lineup.

A stellar example of how to do a high concept on a very low budget, Pontypool is based on a 1995 novel called Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess, who also adapted his own story for the screenplay. The movie is something like an apocalyptic, infection-style horror, faintly akin to a zombie flick, but with an interesting angle you don’t really see in that subgenre; it also features a very small cast, and a claustrophobic setting that barely shows what’s going on outside the building where all the action takes place, but conveys almost all the events through dialogue, like a radio drama.

The great Stephen McHattie (Secretary, A History of Violence, Haunter, Come To Daddy) plays a shock-jock-type talk radio host named Grant Mazzy, who, it’s implied, was fired from his last on-air gig and is now haunting the morning airwaves at a tiny radio station called CLSY in the small, rural town of Pontypool, Ontario. At the very beginning of the movie, we get a wonderfully eerie foreshadowing of what’s to come when Grant, driving to work in the frigid pre-dawn hours, sees a frightened-looking woman outside his passenger side window, repeating some indistinguishable word (which I believe is “blood”) before seeming to vanish back into the snow.

When he arrives at the station, he greets his two co-workers, a young technical assistant and military veteran named Laurel-Ann (Georgina Reilly), and the show’s no-nonsense producer Sydney (Lisa Houle). Laurel-Ann seems shyly amused by Grant’s crotchety, dickish on-air shenanigans, while an exasperated Sydney wants him to stop stirring the shit and just tell their listeners about school closures and traffic updates, for crying out loud.

Grant grudgingly obliges at last, but soon enough, it appears that something mighty weird might be going on in Pontypool. While getting the live weather and traffic report from Ken Loney, who is ostensibly flying around in the station’s “Sunshine Chopper,” but is in actuality sitting on a hilltop in his old Dodge Dart, tells the gang back at CSLY that he’s witnessing a very strange event. A bunch of townsfolk, he says, have come busting out the side of a building, specifically the offices of one Dr. Mendez, and now appear to be engaged in some type of riot whose purpose is unclear.

Because there isn’t any official confirmation of this incident from the authorities, Sydney tries to get Grant to keep his mouth shut about it until they can figure out what’s going on out there. They don’t want to be irresponsible and report erroneous information, after all. As time goes on, in fact, Ken’s reports get more bizarre and horrific, at which point Grant starts to believe that they’re all being punked.

The trio at the station loses their connection with Ken for a while, and though other witnesses to the supposed riot call into the station to describe what they’re seeing, all of them get cut off or hang up before they can impart any verifiable scuttlebutt. A creepy message in French then inserts itself into the radio broadcast from somewhere, and when Laurel-Ann translates it, it seems somewhat nonsensical, but also specifically warns them not to translate the message from French into English. Oops, too late.

Meanwhile, Ken is able to get in contact with the station again, and tells them that the townspeople are going crazy and that he’s hiding out in a grain silo. His voice shaking with terror, he describes people chanting words and phrases over and over again, tearing other people limb from limb, and even engaging in cannibalism. Grant, Sydney, and Laurel-Ann are still not getting any news about the outbreak coming over the wire, and aren’t entirely sure what to believe, though at some point they do get an official declaration that Pontypool is now under quarantine.

A high muckety-muck at the BBC phones the station to get a first-hand report, as rumors about this outlandish series of events have already traveled across the Atlantic. Grant doesn’t really know what to tell the guy because they have no idea what’s going on themselves, but the BBC anchor keeps trying to tie the incident in with separatist terrorists, reporting the event to the world at large in those terms even after Grant specifically tells him that’s probably not what’s going on.

Shortly afterward, a frustrated and angry Grant attempts to leave the station, still thinking the entire situation is an elaborate hoax, but that theory is shot down pretty quickly when a bunch of Pontypool residents gather around the outside of the radio station, banging to be let in and repeating the trio’s words mindlessly back at them.

Just as Laurel-Ann has begun to show symptoms of whatever malady is overtaking the town—in her case, talking in roundabout, gibberish phrases and then standing with her head cocked, making a high-pitched keening noise—Dr. Mendez (Hrant Alianak) comes climbing in the window of the radio station, having escaped the earlier riot at his offices. He’s not entirely sure what’s happening either, but he’s seen plenty of the infected, and he surmises that the people of Pontypool are succumbing to some kind of virus that makes them violent and murderous, but that this virus is transmitted not through blood or air, but through certain words. He has also determined that the virus is only present in English, leading some characters to communicate in other languages (French and Armenian) in order to avoid spreading it further.

It’s an odd premise, but a unique one for sure, one that has a lot to play with thematically, especially regarding the power of words and communication, and the way misinformation can easily cause chaos. At the beginning of the story, Grant is very much in the shock-jock mindset, saying outrageous things in order to foster anger in his listeners, in the hopes that said listeners will share their attentive outrage with others. As the tale goes on, however, he seemingly begins to realize the importance of imparting truth, and the fact that silence is sometimes the best course of action. He also comes to the revelation that his careless pursuit of controversy may have been a significant factor in the spread of this particular word virus.

The movie gets a little more abstract after Laurel-Ann meets a particularly grim end, as Grant comes to the conclusion that the only way to break the virus’s hold on one’s mind is by essentially making oneself “un-understand” the particular word that infected you. Indeed, it seems as though some of the infected people knew this instinctively, as they desperately tried to repeat words until they lost their meaning and therefore their fatal allure, but the real supposed cure comes from redefining the words, not repeating them. Grant apparently cures Sydney, in fact, by replacing her trigger word, “kill,” with “kiss” instead. Once Grant and Sydney have worked out this theory, they take to the airwaves to try to cure the townsfolk, but it appears that it’s already too late.

While the concept of Pontypool is admittedly abstruse and might be a bit too pretentious for some, I thought the concept of a virus spread by words to be a metaphorically rich area for a movie to explore. I’ll admit that the post-credits scene is a tad baffling and the movie is overall pretty light on violence and gore (at least as far as what’s shown on screen), but regardless, this was a tense, well-acted philosophical horror story that used its closed-in setting and tiny cast to maximum effectiveness, playing out almost like an old-timey radio drama in the same line as Orson Welles’s infamous War of the Worlds broadcast from 1938. Pontypool, in fact, was actually performed as a BBC radio play, though a few changes were made to the ending.

In 2019, the same director, Bruce McDonald, released a spinoff fantasy film called Dreamland, which brought back Stephen McHattie as the alter-ego character he appeared as in the end credits of Pontypool (who was called Johnny Deadeyes). I haven’t seen it, but from the synopsis, it appears to be an entirely different story than Pontypool, dealing not with a zombie word virus, but with a vampire and a hard-boiled hitman. An actual direct sequel to Pontypool, tentatively titled Pontypool Changes, has supposedly been in development since 2009 but hasn’t materialized as of this writing.

If you like zombie movies but are sick of the same old shit and want to see an actual fresh take on an infection horror that also has an intellectual edge to it, then give Pontypool a whirl. Just try not to talk, and remember, Sydney Briar is alive, and kill is a beautiful morning.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.