Ivan Kavanagh's 2014 film The Canal reminds us that dread, carefully cultivated and forcefully deployed, powers a great horror film. The Canal combines the methodology, supernatural and psychological horror, and family drama of The Shining with the basic premise of Sinister. Our protagonist, David, is a film archivist who receives a reel whose footage shows a horrific murder committed in 1902 in the house he lives in with his young child, Billy, and his wife, Alice. Predictably, after watching the footage, a series of strange and horrible events begun to occur, including the mysterious death of Alice. Swamped in grief, David starts to feel threatened by strange noises and ghostly apparitions. Throughout, the audience questions what exactly is the cause: is it really ghosts connected to the 1902 murders or is it David's mental deterioration? Are any of these happenings real? And was Alice's drowning really an accident?
Like The Shining, The Canal features a male protagonist who, after being subjected to intense stress (Jack Torrance's writer's block, cabin fever, and recovery from alcoholism and David's discovery of his wife's affair), is haunted by his desire to escape from that stressor. Jack Torrance, for example, sees a ballroom filled with ghosts where he falls off the wagon, and David perceives that he is the victim of malevolent ghosts to avoid acknowledging that he is the real perpetrator of his wife's murder.
At heart, The Canal is a family drama. Its horror is propelled by the the David's deep anxiety regarding the family structure that is dissolving before his eyes. He worries that he will lose his wife to another man. He worries that once his wife has died, he will also lose his son. David's desperate attempts to protect his family are what we hope will redeem him. However, the film's conclusion uses those same sacred familial bonds to endanger David's son, proving that evil truly does live at home.
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