Jay Baruchel’s New Slasher Film Offers a Canadian Take on the American Nightmare

“We start on an Ontario license plate and then the first chyron is ‘America’ in bold—it's not subtle at all,” Jay Baruchel says to VICE about his new horror film Random Acts of Violence. “It's not an accident that our movie is about three Canadians, and a transplant Canadian who's actually American, going to the States, and having a bunch of bad shit happen to them.”

The film, directed by Baruchel from a screenplay he wrote with Jesse Chabot, stars Jesse Williams as comic book creator Todd Walkley, heading out on a road trip with his wife, publisher and assistant. Todd’s working on the final issue of his popular comic series Slasherman as the group travels through parts of the U.S. where the serial killer who served as his inspiration committed his crimes. But now the gruesome murders depicted in his comics are being re-enacted along their route.

Random Acts of Violence has the familiar slasher movie trappings—the road trip, the sketchy gas station attendant, the inept cops, the hero’s dark and traumatic past—but there’s a freshness to what Baruchel is going for too. A broad attempt to look at how violence manifests, not just within the film but in how we’re made to confront it as viewers.

“Once upon a time I would be able to just watch something crazy and gratuitous and get an itch scratched in the moment and then just go about my day. And at a certain point, it occurred to me that I should probably unpack some of that shit,” said Baruchel. “I was struck by a truth, which was that I could name all of these serial killers as if they were hockey players, and I could even name some of their stats like they were fuckin’ hockey players, but I was hard pressed to name more than a handful, if any, of the people that they fuckin’ murdered.”

That fascination with the exploits of killers plays out explicitly within the film too. Todd’s the star with the popular comic book, but his wife Kathy is working on her own non-fiction book about the real-life killings that inspired Slasherman, with Kathy asking the same questions as Baruchel about his own true crime consumption. 

We’re not pushed away from the violence or made to feel shame for our own enjoyment by any means, but it’s also hard to describe the murders in the film as titillating or exploitative—not that those descriptors have been historically well applied to horror. But Baruchel made a point of stripping down the choreography in moments of violence. 

He described a kind of musicality to real life, where we all function more or less in sync, to the same tune, as we go about our daily lives. “But then a car wreck happens, or a bar fight happens, and that music stops,” he said. “And now there's a music that the rest of us can't hear, and it's the music of the violent act that's happening, and you have no sense of how long it's going to go on for, and that's the real shit.” The film confronts us with what it means to be a spectator when that music suddenly changes. The violence is abrupt and chaotic.

There’s been more than enough finger-pointing and scapegoating in this broad debate already, with politicians dodging calls for basic legal necessities like gun control by asking willfully stupid questions about movie, comic book and video game violence, so it’s refreshing to see Baruchel leaving the threads open while asking the more compelling questions: Why am I interested in consuming all of this violence? How does it affect my worldview? Whose stories am I privileging?

And those very questions are impossible to separate from the film’s—and Baruchel’s—Canadianness. In the film, we’re following an American creator, now based in Canada, producing content based on American violence, sold to American (and almost certainly Canadian) audiences. That odd reflection of a split identity is absolutely true to the realities of Canadian cultural production, where a TV show might be produced by and for Americans but shot in Vancouver or Toronto with Canadian talent.

“We are, as Canadians, granted a perspective on that country that nobody else has—for better or worse, because I think we are fixated and obsessed with them,” said Baruchel. That obsession creates shared cultural touchstones. Our relationships to everything from food to politics takes on an American hue. Random Acts of Violence’s climax perverts a traditional Christmas dinner, making it a gory tableaux of horror, reminiscent of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s warped family dinner and grotesque reflection of the American Dream. These traditions—quintessential American cultural practices—are indistinguishable from our own, and yet it’s not our narrative. Not really.

“As a Canadian, I certainly notice a very palpable difference as soon as I cross that border, and it's an utterly arbitrary, fake border,” said Baruchel. “There really, in theory, shouldn't be a profound difference, and yet there is one, and you are just keenly aware of sharper elbows, the prevalence of firearms, the harshness of laissez-faire capitalism … And this is regardless of the fact that there are places there I adore, and some of the people in the world that are most dear to me are down there. But I'd be lying if I said I ever felt at home there, and further, I always have my guard up, and there is at least a suggestion of anxiety. It's always there.”

That’s the double bind of consuming American true crime and horror as Canadians. As our cultures blend with and are subsumed by those of our southern neighbours, the work of unpacking our obsession with violence is compounded with a troubling sense that we might also be importing a distinctly American nightmare.

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