Pontipool

Most horror films are about showing rather than telling, many often to their own detriment.

A monster or a killer pops out, and the audience gets to see firsthand how dangerous and horrific they are,

and it's rare for an effective horror movie or scene to be told secondhand.

Pontepool, a Canadian horror movie from 2008, based on a novel by Tony Burgess, takes a different

approach. Here, we're left much like the principal characters themselves, who have to piece together an ongoing horror scenario based on very limited information,

while confined to a single isolated location.

Telling rather than showing is definitely what's on offer here,

but that doesn't mean the film isn't interesting,

as the nature of

that horror scenario is quite unique.

Let's take a look.

The film opens with a radio broadcast in the small town of Pontipool, Ontario, from host

Grant Mazzie, in which he states that Mrs. French's cat, honey, is missing,

and no one has seen it until last Thursday when Miss Colette Piscene swerved her car to miss the cat

as she drove across a bridge. The bridge is a bit of a local treasure, known as Pont de Flac,

and he remarks that Colette sounds like coulotte, meaning panty in French, well, Piscene means Poole.

Flack also means pool in French, so Colette Piscene, or Pantipool in French, drives over Pont de Poul and swerves to hit a cat that has been missing in Pantipool.

He mentions that the writer, Norman Mailer, had an interesting theory about the strange coincidences

in the aftermath of the JFK assassination. He believed that before and after huge events,

physical details spasm for a moment, and when they come back into focus, they suddenly

coincide in a weird way, like a ripple effect.

...