While the late screenings at the Dawson Film Fest are often known for their edgy or adult-only content, the Saturday night Strange Things Done screening offered a film fest first – a line-up completely made up of horror-type films, including a pair by Yukon filmmakers.
To make the screening even more special, Dawson’s own queen of burlesque, Chevonne of the Yukon, dropped by the Oddfellows Ballroom for a live performance to kick off festivities. Always a crowd favourite, Chevonne’s beauty-and-the-beast striptease got the crowd buzzing.
The it was on to the shorts. Several had been recently created for the Dead North Horror Film Challenge, and the Dawson screening represented their Yukon premiere. The films included: Subject Six by the Yukon’s David Hamelin and Neil MacDonald, a sci-fi thriller about a young girl exercising psychic powers to escape abuse at the hands of a research scientist; Cancún, a drama from Quebec’s Isabelle A. Girard, about a woman turning the tables on her abusive husband; Underground from Lesley Johnson of the Northwest Territories, about a pregnant woman watching her husband go mad with a mysterious gold fever; The Vast Forlorn, by Reuben Ward of Dawson, a dark work about a young drifter’s entanglement with a sinister group of townspeople; Sty by Árpád Hermán of Hungary, about a butcher-for-hire’s shocking encounter at a local pig farm; Hibernum by Guillaume Comtois of Quebec, about a young man and woman meeting at a remote wilderness home while an eerie presence haunts them; and Conibear by Jay Bulckaert and Pablo Saravanja of NWT, depicting two trappers in the far north pulled into a horrible nightmare.