The Cinematheque

“You’re not sure whether you’re watching a movie or watching our movie!”

Richard Martin

In the late 1980s, Vancouver’s Richard Martin turned a million-dollar budget and a 25-day shoot into a scintillating meta-horror picture years before Scream would package a similar concept for the masses. Set in fictional Holsten, BC (a composite of Lower Mainland locales), Matinee concerns a grisly unsolved murder that transpires at the town’s inaugural horror-movie festival—and the threat, two years later, that the slayings will resume with its return. First-time feature director Martin, at once observing and ironically signposting the tropes of the stalk-and-slash genre, choreographs a giallo-steeped whodunit with a roll call of stock Sticksville characters, none above suspicion: the transplanted big-city cop, the teenage daughter desperate to blow town, the car-mechanic boyfriend at war with a jilted rival. Creative kills mirror death scenes in the films within the film (and films outside it, like Friday the 13th), yielding a nifty mise-en-abyme about the act of consuming horror movies. A brigade of future X‑Files actors fills out the cast.

Hosted by Harry Killas, curator of ​“The Image Before Us: A History of Film in British Columbia” (2015–2023). Post-screening Q&A with writer-director Richard Martin and select cast and crew.

“A Canuxploitation classic and a horrorphile’s delight.”

Kino Lorber