Yellowknife’s Dead North festival screens northern horror

You might not want to hang the Dead North film festival trophy up on your living room wall—it features the head of a bloody, half-eaten polar bear.

But more than 20 aspiring northern filmmakers were proud to take home the “Zombear” awards after the festival wrapped up last weekend in Yellowknife.

Winning short films at the Dead North film festival receive trophies featuring half-eaten Zombears. (Photo by Patrick Kane/Courtesy of Dead North film festival)

For eight years, organizers from the Artless Collective film studio in Yellowknife have devoted months of their time to mount this northern horror film festival. It’s called Dead North because its entries are filmed in the North, in the dead of winter, and, of course, the focus is on horror.

“We’re a robust people here in the North and we’re able to do things other people can’t,” festival organizer Jay Bulckaert said in an interview from Yellowknife.

Festival organizers described this year’s festival entries as “filled with butt portals, dog gods, killer snowmen, animated Frostbite, lazy mob(p)sters, frozen caribou heads, murderous hair clogs, cursed guns, restaurant ghosts, civil war cannons, creepy dolls, tree monsters, kitties and, yes, finally a film about a Zombear.”

The 46 films that made it into the festival came from Dawson City, Tulita, Fort Smith, Inuvik, Hay River, Dettah, Norman Wells, Iqaluit, Cambridge Bay, Yellowknife and Sweden.

The poster for the 2020 Dead North film festival features this giant, King Kong-sized polar bear under attack.

The top film was a short called “The Drummer” by Jennifer Hunt-Poitras, Norbert Poitras and Chantal Dubuc.

The film features a drummer who wants to turn his life around. The film’s description says “Johnny Molner hopes a gig will turn his life around, but what if it’s already too late?”

Bulckaert said the Dead North award team reviews and votes on which films are Zombear-worthy before the festival, over three days of deliberations.

“When we watched Jenn’s film, the entire room were blown away,” Bulckaert said. “I don’t want to ruin it for people, but there is a twist at the end and she does quite an expert job. When it’s revealed you feel different about the same whole film. It was visionary and unique the way she pulled it off.”

Also among the Dead North entries was Iqaluit’s Inuksuk High School film club’s “Extra Credit.” It’s about kids staying late after class who get a reminder about their school’s rules, and the consequences for breaking them.

“It’s really good, watched it three times. Every time I watched it, it got better every time,” Bulckaert said. “It’s basically like a retelling of Breakfast Club, but with a horror vibe. They try to escape detention and progressively get knocked off as they break the rules: A boy is chewing gum but then we see him with his face covered with gum and he can’t breathe.”

Kent Driscoll, the film club’s coach, said the club members wrote, filmed, cast and produced the film. The Inuksuk Drummers and Dancers provided the original sound track.

Student members of Inuksuk High School’s film club in Iqaluit work on makeup props for “Extra Credit,” their entry in the Dead North film festival. (Photo courtesy of Kent Driscoll)

“I stayed as hands-off as possible,” said Driscoll, a broadcaster for APTN in Iqaluit. “Basically, they would have an idea, I’d write it down and say ‘OK, what next.’ I do play the voice making announcements in the school.”

And from Cambridge Bay came “Nakimayuq” from Sarah Jancke and Ipeelie Ootoova, on a wintertime hunting trip that takes a bad turn.

Bulckaert said their film, whose title means “rabies” in Inuktitut, was a “unique take on the zombie genre—which is hard to do.”

“It’s a great idea. It seems like it’s a zombie but it’s actually that these guys get attacked by a fox and they get rabies,” he said.

The film was in Inuktitut only. Dead North has a special Zombear award for Indigenous films to encourage more submissions from Nunavut.

Dead North also wants to do a northern tour, which will include a visit to Nunavut, Bulckaert said.

“Nunavut has always been on our radar. We have to get there and let people know what it’s all about so they can be involved,” Bulckaert said. “Nunavut stories are amazing on camera.”

In 2016, John Main, now MLA for Arviat North–Whale Cove, won a Zombear for best sound design for “Uiri.”

About 40 films from Dead North have gone on to festivals including ImagineNative, the Fantasia Film Festival and Blood in the Snow, and have been screened in other countries, including Estonia, France and Serbia.

Agents from the south regularly come to the Dead North festival in Yellowknife, which they say is … cold.

Filmmaker Kirsten Carthew’s 2014 Dead North-winning short, “Fish Out of Water,” is now being made into a feature film about how, in a frozen and mutated post-apocalyptic world, a young girl tries to survive. Warning: it’s guaranteed to make you jump.