Maple Syrup Massacre is a monthly series where Bloody Disgusting dissects the themes, conventions and contributions of new and classic Canadian horror films.
The first two installments of Maple Syrup Massacre – on Backcountry and Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning – focused primarily on thematic preoccupations within Canadian national cinema. For this entry, we’re shaking the narrative up to explore the production side of the equation with a focus on the country’s historical reluctance to engage in genre, using Vincenzo Natali’s iconic feature film debut, Cube. The timing is apt given that we are currently in the midst of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which is where Cube made its (award-winning) debut 22 years ago in 1997.
There’s often a tension at work in the production of genre films, in part because of respectability politics and the broader public’s perception of what constitutes “worthwhile” or “legitimate” art (see: the cancellation of The Hunt as part of a witch hunt by the President to shift the blame away from gun violence onto more easily demonized forms of media). This has resulted in a relationship between filmmakers, the government-operated funding agencies and Canadian audiences that is strained at best, and outwardly hostile at worst.
There’s arguably even more discomfort when the controversial art being made is publicly funded, which is the dominant funding model for filmmakers in Canada. Consider a government-funded agency being held accountable for making horror films in a nation that is already marginally uncomfortable with allocating public funds to filmmaking of any kind.
As a nation, Canada has a reputation for making “prestige” (read: art cinema) films. This stems from the origins of our feature filmmaking industry, which grew principally out of the National Film Board (NFB) in the early 60s. At the time the NFB’s mandate was solely to make documentary shorts (and only documentary shorts). It is only because rebellious risk-takers like Don Haldane, Don Owens, and Gilles Groulx experimented with the form and length of their films that the NFB wound up with feature-length, realist dramas (1963’s Drylanders, and 1964’s Nobody Waved Goodbye and Le Chat dans le sac respectively). Their actions were not condoned at the time, but eventually, fiction features were regularly funded, though they were nearly always issue-oriented dramas (never genre).
This is the reason that David Cronenberg and the Tax Shelter Era of the mid-70s to the early-80s are so important in Canada’s filmmaking history. While there were other, earlier attempts at making genre films (the most notorious being a 1961 surrealist 3D horror film called The Mask, which we’ll discuss in a future entry), it wasn’t until 1975 when Cronenberg made Shivers (or The Parasite Murders) and American producers rushed North to take advantage of tax breaks that Canada suddenly began regularly producing low budget genre films.
There may be nothing quite as Canadian as the drama that came to a head over Shivers. In brief: Cronenberg’s debut feature featuring sexualized parasitic worms that infect the residents of a Montreal apartment complex was an utter scandal. Blame outraged Canadian film critic Robert Fulford for publishing a piece in Saturday Night magazine (think: Time magazine); he used his cultural capital as one of the nation’s pre-eminent film critics to denounce the film’s content and the fact that it was <gasp> funded by public money. The resulting furor was so significant that the funding model that enabled the film to be made was debated by the Canadian government in the house of Parliament!
Never mind the fact that Shivers was one of the few Canadian films that managed to turn a profit. <files nails>
Alas this controversy and the varying quality of most of the Tax Shelter films, several of which were deemed so bad that they were never released, left a black mark on the idea of genre filmmaking. The general consensus boiled down to something akin to this: if this is what Canadians are capable of producing when they try to be commercial – subpar American schlock – then we should stick to prestigious art cinema. The classic Canadian inferiority complex (and a healthy dose of elitism!) had reared its ugly head.
The legacy of these events has been a contentious displeasure with any so-called “populous” film (ie: a film with explicit commercial appeal, like horror films!). As a result, outside of Cronenberg’s early output and the Tax Shelter Era, horror films were rarely, if ever, produced in Canada…until the late 90s.
This is where Vincenzo Natali and Cube come in. By the mid-90s, the political and moral dilemma around commercial feature filmmaking in Canada had swung back to more progressive temperaments, and policies were being put in place to actively encourage filmmakers to make films that would sell well internationally (the Canadian film market remains quite small, and as a general rule we tend to hate our own products because they’re considered inferior).
Natali’s feature film debut is both a prime example of savvy genre filmmaking with huge international appeal, as well as a model of financial efficiency. Working on a slight $350K budget, the production team made only one full-sized “cube”, as well as one partial cube that could be used for point of view shots when characters look into the next room. The film’s signature visual design was achieved using five sliding colour panels to create the illusion of a multiplicity of different rooms, each distinctively colour-coded and containing different booby-traps that must be mathematically decoded by the prisoners trapped within. The technical element is deceptively simple, but elegant in its execution.
What makes Cube such a notable Canadian film is not just its stunning production design on a shoestring budget, but its status as a publicly funded (via the Canadian Film Centre) genre film that won awards (Best First Feature at TIFF) and raked in great box office (nearly $9M worldwide). The film is a great example of a small budgeted film with obvious genre elements and broad international appeal; its longevity as a cult property confirmed that there was a market for interesting Canadian genre films.
Following the film’s reception in 1997, Canadian cinema welcomed a new wave of genre films and auteurs – some bad (2004 Species rip-off Decoys) and some good (2000’s Ginger Snaps). It is unlikely, however, that those films would have had the financial support of funding agencies or interest from international markets were it not for Cube, which blazed a trail by proving that there was a demand for – and a profit to be made from – Canadian genre films.
