As Stephen McHattie says, Pontypool really is “an odd combination of things.” Shot in a church basement in the Junction only a few months back and hastily being readied for its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival next weekend, the latest feature by Bruce McDonald has the trappings of a low-budget thriller, i.e., some blood, some zombified folks, a little bit o’ cannibalism and mob violence and the ominous presence of McHattie himself as Grant Mazzy, a cowboy-hatted talk-radio host faced with the news of many strange goings-on outside the station’s doors one wintry morning.

But as the rangy Nova Scotia–born actor notes over the phone from his home northwest of Toronto, the real scares are happening on a level that few of Pontypool’s genre brethren even strive to reach. “It’s structured as a horror movie,” says McHattie, “but I don’t think it is that. It really depends on audience participation much more than ghosts screaming ‘boo’ at you.”
Pontypool is definitely a different species of animal, both in terms of content and form.

Naturally, McDonald and writer Tony Burgess were bound to come up with something weird seeing as their source material is Burgess’ 1998 novel Pontypool Changes Everything. Full of hallucinatory violence and post-structuralist chicanery, this thoroughly deranged tome details the origins and effects of a virus that lies not in its victims’ blood but their words and minds. Imagine Roland Barthes’ version of the end of the world, and then set it in small-town Ontario.
McDonald and Burgess spent most of a decade developing a movie version, but as the duo note in recent interviews, the project was bound to be a hard sell given its inherently anarchic nature. “People always had trouble with the scripts,” says Burgess. “Part of that you invite because you hand them this deliberately problematic script, so are you going to be surprised when people say, ‘You should turn it into this and that’ or ‘Do this and then let us read it’ or ‘Never darken our doorstep again’?”

McDonald remained confident that the essential ideas were sound, if a little difficult to explain. Says the director during a break from post-production duties, “When I tell people, ‘Oh yeah, it’s about how the English language gets infected with a virus,’ they say, ‘Wha?’ But it catches their attention. I tell them again and maybe go on to say, ‘Yeah, yeah, the first words to be infected are terms of endearment — sweetheart and honey and sugar.’ They’re like, ‘What the fuck?” But people seem genuinely curious because it’s such a crazy idea.”

Crazy ain’t the half of it for a story that trades in highfalutin concepts about language, perception and cognition. And after spending so many years in development, it seemed likely that a movie of Pontypool — like McDonald’s even-longer-in-­gestation adaptation of Chester Brown’s Ed the Happy Clown strip — would never get made.

But then came two fortuitous developments. The first was a call from CBC Radio to McDonald to see if there was anything he’d like to develop as a radio drama. With Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds as a model, Burgess spun out a whole other incarnation of the Pontypool saga, this time from the perspective of a radio host struggling to understand the chaos erupting outside the station doors. The two men discovered that the idea of staging it in such close quarters and keeping most (though not all) of the carnage at a remove provided a clear framework for the story’s more unruly ideas while emphasizing its linguistic preoccupations.

They also realized this radio drama could be a great movie. “We thought, ‘Wow, if we can pull it off as the story of one person sitting in front of a desk, we could do it with one camera for 50 bucks!’ After 10 years, we just wanted to do something with it. You put in so much work and you just want something to happen, small or big.”

Instead, there was a second fortuitous development. After a chance meeting between McDonald and a film producer outside the Horseshoe Tavern one night in February, it was very suddenly go-time for Pontypool. Made on McDonald’s hastiest production schedule since 1989’s Roadkill, the movie was shot in May and early June in the former Victoria-Royce Presbyterian Church near Dundas and Keele.

Working with a privately financed budget that he puts at a “half-mil,” McDonald obviously had more flexibility (and opportunities for splatter) than he could have afforded for $50. Consequently, the almost-finished version I saw a few weeks back is convincingly slick and beautifully shot on the new Red One HD camera by Mirolsaw Baszak, McDonald’s DP on Roadkill and Highway 61.

But as in so many great horror tales, the freakiest moments exist in the spectator’s imagination. “I love the idea of turning it around,” says McHattie. “Usually in a movie you’re seeing everything — that’s the whole point. Here, it was us seeing nothing but describing it to you. It was really exciting to try that because it kind of goes against what movies are about now, especially now that so much is possible with special effects.”

With its closely confined space and sense of mounting dread, Pontypool fits more firmly in the cinema-povera tradition of Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, Val Lewton’s horror productions of the ’40s, Roman Polanski’s early features and John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13. And besides the potency of the ideas, the other main reason it works so well is that this small-box setting contains an actor with big presence.

Though well-known for his stint as Elaine’s psychiatrist boyfriend on Seinfeld and his superb supporting turns in A History of Violence and The Rocket (he also stars in next year’s Watchmen), McHattie has rarely been seen in such a meaty leading role. McDonald — who first worked with the actor on an episode of Emily of New Moon — says that some people in the business he spoke to were initially unsure of the choice. As the director says, “A lot of people see him more as the ‘I’m gonna smash your fucking face in’ type.”

But seen here opposite Lisa Houle and Georgina Reilly — who more than hold their own as Grant Mazzy’s producer and technician, respectively — McHattie gets to be “funny, scary, really vulnerable and even romantic,” McDonald says. “He’s a kind of true alpha male — he’s got that grrrr. You could probably switch him with Bob Dylan onstage these days and no one would know the difference.”

While McHattie doesn’t say whether he’d ever like to be Dylan’s stunt double, he does describe his Pontypool experience as very satisfying. “We just had a blast doing it,” he says. “We’d all walk into that little church basement every day — it was like going on a trip. Nobody else came in or out much. I mean, on the sets of most movies now, the outside world comes into them so much. I’ve been in scenes on big movies where in the middle of the rehearsal an actor will receive a call on his cellphone and actually answer it!” McHattie laughs. “All those little intrusions make a difference. So this was much more of a homegrown thing.”

And thanks to their efforts, this city may finally have the movie apocalypse it’s always deserved.