ABCs of Horror 3: "P" Is for Pontypool (2008)

Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?

The genre of the “zombie movie” has been used to deliver nearly every sort of social satire imaginable over the years, but rarely has it ever been applied so creatively, or so indirectly, as in writer Tony Burgess’ and director Bruce McDonald’s genre-splitting psychological horror film Pontypool. Of course, to their credit, neither the writer or director to this day defines or sees the film as belonging among “zombie cinema” at all–and rest assured, it features zero reanimated dead or classical, George Romero-style ghouls. What Pontypool has is something so much more heady and cerebral, a doomsday scenario of the sort that a professor of linguistics might have in the midst of a bad LSD trip. This is a horror film about communication, or perhaps more accurately, about the moment when we truly lose the ability to communicate and make sense of the world around us. But yeah, it’s also a zombie movie. Well, sort of.

Pontypool is gifted with one of the most perfect settings imaginable for a low-budget horror film: A small-town A.M. radio station, where the film’s small cast of characters have ample time to revolve around each other’s seemingly diametrically opposed personalities, hinting at the little gripes and grievances of a realistic daily struggle at the office. The single location format is perfectly situated for the way the story evolves with a steady, slow-drip of new information, as radio host Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) and his crew confront a series of reports that begin as unusual, turn confounding and then become increasingly horrific. So much of what is actually happening in the outside world is hidden from the viewer, leaving us knowing nothing more or less than what the characters at the station understand at any given moment: Something inexplicable has happened, and the sleepy town of Pontypool seems to suddenly be tearing itself apart. It’s a race to understand, even as the danger seems poised to invade this little bastion of civility.

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At the center of it all is Mazzy, brought to life by a performance from Canadian actor Stephen McHattie that quite honestly ranks among the greatest lead roles in the history of the horror genre. He was impeccably cast, no doubt first of all for his deliciously rough but mellifluous, gritty voice–deep, but humming on a specific frequency of vibration that makes it seem like you can feel his voice in your bones. His character is a button-pushing shock jock, one whose acerbic personality has likely cost him far better gigs over the years, slowly pushing him into this new role in a backwater little burg. We bear witness to the push-pull struggle between this charismatic but fading asshole’s strength of personality and the mounting reality of his own irrelevance or obsolescence, even as the world outside the station appears to be rapidly crumbling.

So, what’s actually happening out there? Would you believe it if I told you that the contagion causing such panic and eventual violence is actually linguistic in nature? Pontypool imagines a scenario where the English language itself has become a minefield, seeded with words and expressions that threaten to overthrow our minds. A certain word comes along and it trips the speaker up, sending them spiraling down a rabbit hole of obsession and increasing incoherence. Soon, the affected person–McDonald called them “conversationalists,” rather than zombies–becomes a raving madman, threatening to latch on to any other available source of language, with deadly results. Tellingly, it seems to be only the English language that is affected, leaving the rest of the world–and it’s Canada, so the French-speaking population is plotline significant–looking on in shock as the frothing hoard self destructs.

What Pontypool seems to suggest, reading between the lines, is that you can only abuse the notion of communication for so long before the lack of sincerity we have purposefully engineered comes back to bite us on the ass. Obliterate any desire to understand each other, and you might just forget how to do it–or even how to behave as a civil human. And when that kind of understanding breaks down, the social barriers against violence go with it. This theme feels even more pertinent now than it did in 2008, our current epidemic of willingly manufactured and consumed political misinformation having helped to build a veritable fantasy world or alternate reality within which a sizable chunk of the U.S. population now chooses to reside. It’s a prison of ignorance, but one without any need for jailers: The prisoners have reserved their own cells, and will fight tooth and nail if removed.

With that said, Pontypool, though decidedly bleak, isn’t entirely without hope. It holds out some faith that when our backs are to the wall, human beings might be pushed to put aside ego and programming, to take the risk inherent to genuine, empathetic communication with another person. It theorizes that perhaps we could “reprogram” ourselves, as it were, to defuse our worst ingrained tendencies and point our synapses in a more positive direction. That maybe, just maybe, we could live up to a human standard of civilization we haven’t met for quite a while.

But all philosophy aside, Pontypool is simply a film that crackles with tension and engrossing performances. It plays like the making of a terrifyingly effective radio drama, as if you’re there to see Orson Welles announce the arrival of Martian invaders, except this time it’s really happening. For the aesthete horror geek, it’s especially sumptuous as it plays with sound in the radio booth, presaging the sensory-driven horror of a director like Peter Strickland. Pontypool is a genuinely unique film, one that generates few if any direct comparisons. Does it have zombies? Basically, more or less, sure. But it also has much more to say as well.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.

ABCs of Horror 3: “P” Is for Pontypool (2008)