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London Journal of Canadian Studies
Article
The Words Change Every thing: Haunting, Contagion and The
Stranger in Tony Burgess’s Pontypool
Evelyn Deshane1,* and R. Travis Morton1
How to cite: Deshane, E. and Morton, R. T. ‘The Words Change Everything: Haunting,
Contagion and The Stranger in Tony Burgess’s Pontypool.’ London Journal of Canadian
Studies, 2018, 33(5), pp. 58–76. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ljcs.2018
v33.005.
Published: 14 November 2018
Peer Review:
This article has been peer reviewed through the journal’s standard double- blind peer- review, where both the
reviewers and authors are anonymized during review.
Copyright:
© 2018, The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution License (CC-BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted
use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited •
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ljcs.2018v33.005.
Open Access:
London Journal of Canadian Studies is a peer-reviewed open access journal.
* Correspondence: evelyndeshane@gmail . com and rtravismorton@gmail . com
1 University of Waterloo, Canada
LONDON JOURNAL OF CANADIAN STUDIES, VOLUME 33
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Abstract
In 2018, O Canada’s lyr ics were made gender neutral. This change comes
at a time when certain key public figures refuse to use gender neutral lan-
guage. The linguistic tension and ideological divide within Canada cre-
ates a haunted feeling around certain minority groups, leaving every one
feeling out of place. This article examines how viral ideas and word choices
spread through media technologies via the ‘word virus’. We use the fig-
ure of the zombie to show how the word virus becomes bad ideology, one
that spreads and takes over certain spaces and enacts the presence of the
insider/outsider. To reflect on ‘word viruses’ gone awry, we borrow and
build on scholarship from the emerging field of hauntology made popu-
lar by Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon. Ultimately, we pres ent Tony
Burgess’s horror novel Pontypool Changes Every thing turned Canadian
horror film Pontypool as a speculative case study, since Burgess’s texts
suggest that what is more infectious than the zombie- outsider is the
insider’s own language, which identifies and labels the outsider. By pos-
iting a pos si ble cure for the word virus within Pontypool, the film adapta-
tion suggests that the ways in which we cease becoming infected with
bad ideas is not to stop speaking or isolate ourselves through quarantine,
but deliberately seek out the stranger in order to challenge and change
the meaning of words.
Keywords: hauntology, gender neutral language, transgender, commu-
nities, Canadian horror, film adaptation
The Words Change Every thing:
Haunting, Contagion and The
Stranger in Tony Burgess’s Pontypool
Evelyn Deshane and R. Travis Morton
59
The Words Change every Thing
Introduction
In 2018, O Canada’s lyr ics were made gender neutral in order to foster
and facilitate a more inclusive national image, yet the changes were not
entirely well- received by those in government or in the larger public
sphere. Similarly, when Bill C-16 was passed in order to prevent discrim-
ination against gender identity on the Canadian Charter of Rights and
Freedom, numerous politicians and Canadian figures voiced their dissent
quite publicly. The linguistic tension and ideological divide within Can-
ada creates a haunted feeling around certain identity groups, especially
that of the transgender or gender nonconforming person who is the
assumed subject of much of these policy changes, but these tensions also
fracture the national public sphere and leaves every one inside Canada’s
borders feeling infected, aicted, haunted, or merely ‘out of place’. Our
paper examines the connection between haunting and contagion through
the spread of ‘word viruses’ in certain forms of media and how these
viruses attach themselves to specific identity groups, creating a divide
between communities. We build on scholarship from the emerging field
of ‘hauntology’
made popu lar by Jacques Derrida, Avery Gordon and Ann
Cvetkovich, and we situate these ideas through an examination of the
Canadian horror film Pontypool and the novel on which it is based called
Pontypool Changes Every thing. Tony Burgess’s novel, and especially the
Bruce McDonald film adaptation which Burgess also wrote, changes the
locus of infection so common in zombie films from the bodily to the ideo-
logical, from the bite of the stranger to the use of a familiar word. In doing
so, Pontypool suggests that what is more infectious than the zombie-
outsider is the insider’s language, and how we as a community have labe-
led the outsider as such. Moreover, by positing a pos si ble cure for the ‘word
virus’ contagion within Pontypool, the film adaptation suggests that the
ways in which to avoid becoming infected with bad ideas is not to isolate
through quarantine or prohibit speech, but instead deliberately seek out
the stranger and change the meaning of the word itself. Rather than pro-
hibiting any kind of speech – be it a gender- neutral pronoun or something
far more odious – we should attempt a facilitated discussion between
groups, identities and those deemed ‘out of place’.
The History of Queer Hauntings
Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx has been the basis for much of the
work being done in the field of ‘hauntology’. It is his chapter on ‘the
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conjuring trick’ that pres ents the issue of speech prohibition most suc-
cinctly. Derrida writes that
[a]n articulation assures the movement of this relentless indictment.
It gives some play. It plays between the spirit (Geist) and the specter
(Gespenst), between the spirit on the one hand, the ghost or the rev-
enant on the other. This articulation often remains inaccessible,
eclipsed in its turn in shadow, where it moves about and puts one
o the trail.
In eect, ‘the conjuring trick’ is language. To name a debate creates
a debate, and breeds the haunted ontology of its subjects. Those who feel
represented are rearmed as real, while those who are ignored or silenced
perpetuate a ghost story and are removed from the debate. When the
national public sphere, as represented by the Canadian Charter of Rights
and Freedom and Bill C-16, provokes such a change, divisive debates
spring up within its public. Public intellectual Jordan Peterson and Cana-
dian politician Don Plett are examples of those who have criticized the
amendment, and while neither amendment will be changed anytime soon,
every one in Canada ( whether they agree or disagree with these rulings)
begins to feel haunted. It is no longer a personal feeling as if ‘time is out
of joint’; it is perpetual, never- ending and all- encompassing. Every one
feels the ghost in this story, which means that no one, and every one, is in
disagreement. It is those who are in the minority, however, who bear a
more complicated legacy in the field of hauntology.
In Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and So cio log i cal Imag-
ination, she examines ‘how paying attention to ghosts can, among other
things, radically change how we know and what we know about state ter-
ror and about slavery and the legacy of American freedom that derives
from it’. One of the many ways she does this is through an examination
of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a ghost story about slavery, which is Morrison’s
attempt to give voice to the ‘sixty million and more’ who were lost before
the slave trade even began. It is to these lost bodies – those who eec-
tively died during travel, in a liminal state of being not free but not yet a
slave – that Morrison dedicates her novel, and it is these bodies which
represent the cogent out- of- place- ness that a ghost story represents.
To research the ghost story is to also make oneself out- of- place, since
‘[f]ollowing the ghosts is about making a contact that changes you and
refashions the social relations in which you are located’ and it also queers
a person’s sense of time, since they now ‘strive to understand the con-
ditions under which a memory was produced in the first place, [then]
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The Words Change every Thing
toward a countermemory, for the future’. In this way, the ghost story is
phenomenological, spiritual, psychological, fictive, and, as Morrison ech-
oes, is a story bound up in trauma, especially that of an entire people
that occurred under slavery. Though Gordon is careful to caution that,
‘[h]aunting is not the same as being exploited, traumatized, or oppressed’,
there is a definitive correlation in Morrison’s Beloved where Beloved’s pres-
ence in the text and her initial death – her time being made out of joint –
certainly ‘involve[d] these experiences [of being oppressed] or is produced
by them’. Furthermore, as Morrison develops in Playing in the Dark:
Whiteness and Literary Imagination, the ghost of slavery as an institution
continues to aect the United States through its constant national defini-
tion in the concept of freedom, since freedom can only exist with the
notion of slavery lurking in the background. Gordon and Morrison both
connect the idea of haunting to prohibition, especially the prohibiting of
a speech- act or story, and especially if institutions, such as the US govern-
ment, continue to perpetuate this silencing. By not talking about the
past, the past does not cease to exist, but is repressed and made latent –
forced ‘into the shadows’. ‘To write stories concerning exclusions and
invisibilities is to write ghost stories’ Gordon says, and ‘to write ghost sto-
ries implies that ghosts are real, that is to say, that they produce material
eects’.
In the context of our essay, we wish to examine the ‘material eects’
left by ghosts as words, be they hate speech, identity labels, or pronouns
with complicated histories. For Tony Burgess’s novel Pontypool Changes
Every thing and Bruce McDonald film adaptation Pontypool, the haunted
legacies of certain words are transformed into contagious word viruses,
which spread throughout a small town in Ontario called Pontypool and
to the rest of Canada. It is this change from haunting to contagion which
we argue is brought about through new media technology and the disper-
sion of communities through these technologies. Whether it is an iso-
lated radio room in Pontypool where the three main characters are trapped,
or the news media misrepresenting the public’s outcry to the 1938 War
of the Worlds’ broadcast, or through online communities which Jordan
Peterson and his online followers subscribe to, words continue to leave
material eects which our article attempts to trace and analyze. By
using some words and not others, or by forgetting the legacy associated
with certain terms, a haunting persists and changes the way in which
acountry is shaped, along with the families and communities in that
country. Moreover, to even say that the debate surrounding Bill C-16 or
the national anthem is simply about pronouns is to misrepresent or
misinterpret the complicated legacy of queer hauntings, since the only
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pronouns in question are pronouns for bodies that may seem as if they
are mismatched – i.e. transgender or gender- nonconforming bodies.
In An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Publics, Ann
Cvetkovich describes what she calls ‘low- level “insidious” ’ traumas which
target the ‘everyday sexual lives in which the vulnerability of bodies and
psyches is negotiated’ in par tic u lar. In a way, these are smaller ghosts
that are barely seen but always felt, and when compared to public and
national trauma, can often be pushed aside; they are thought of as a nui-
sance, rather than a serious issue, which is precisely what happens to the
debate surrounding gender neutral pronouns. To not be read as their
gender identity, and then to have their request for that identity rejected
through the use of the unrequested pronoun, means that transgender or
gender nonconforming students experience ‘the everyday life of queer
trauma’ as Cvetkovich pres ents it. Their daily lives, names and identities
become haunted through repeated and sustained negative interactions,
something of which is represented in the community itself through their
use of the ‘dead name’ (sometimes stylized as deadname) as a term. The
dead name is the birth name of the trans person; when used after tran-
sition (be it social or medical or other wise) has occurred, it is called being
‘deadnamed’, ‘deadnaming’, or simply being called by a ‘dead name’.
This term best encapsulates the traumatic feeling of being misgendered
by a largely cisgender public sphere, according to the trans community,
but it also conjures a ghost in the same way that being forcefully misread
also does. To conjure this ghost from the past has serious consequences
for the everyday existence of the trans person, both theoretically and
practically. It can be dangerous for a trans person to be deadnamed since
they may not be completely out to those who may hear the former name,
and this conjuring could lead to consequences such as vio lence and/or
loss of employment. Theoretically, however, using the term ‘dead name’
within the community replicates the cisgender public sphere’s initial
trauma; it sustains the haunting, rather than working towards healing it.
Similar to Peterson’s refusal to use gender neutral pronouns, calling a
person by their dead name conjures a ghost, but so does calling it a dead
name. These words perpetuate the same discourse; they are all ‘conjuring
trick[s]’. These words do also not allow the past to become integrated.
Instead of the birth name being viewed as a relic, a part of the self that
once used to exist but how now changed, the past has been erased and is
prohibited from speaking.
These speech- act prohibitions do not alleviate the burden of trans-
phobia, much like Gordon and Morrison note of other prohibitions that
do not alleviate the legacy of racism and slavery, so Canada, and especially
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The Words Change every Thing
the trans people inside of its borders, continue to feel haunted, even in
light of these recent changes to the national anthem and Bill C-16. The
genderqueer students in Jordan Peterson’s classes, for instance, along with
trans people who are detained at Canadian borders or who were issued
duplicate voting cards in Canada’s 2018 election still regularly deal with
the everyday life of queer trauma often conjured through their dead names
or misuse of pronouns. In the age of new media, these community frac-
tures and hauntings only continue to grow.
Word Viruses
The material eects of words shift from a haunting to a contagion through
a mixture of technology and prohibition. Prohibited speech in the name of
social cohesion – such as the gender- neutral lyr ics for O Canada or Bill
C-16 – creates a quarantined space where a lack has defined its borders.
By claiming that there is no more ‘ free speech’
for someone like him-
self due to these new amendments, Peterson (and others who may
agree with him) perpetuates the idea of speech slavery, a rhe toric which
derives its power from the same haunted ontologies that rob transgender
and gender nonconforming people of their rights. As this fracture grows,
these prohibited words – and the ideological messages attached to them–
spread as if they were viruses, eectively turning a haunting into a conta-
gious culture. A ‘word virus’, then, is how ideology itself is made manifest
through certain words and/or phrases, which can then be transferred
through the use of a technological advancement to groups of people –
sometimes entire communities – which then fuses them together with a
sustained belief system they continue to practice through the use of the
phrases themselves. Canadian author Tony Burgess’s transmission of a
zombie virus spread through words (rather than through bodily contact)
in Pontypool and its novel Pontypool Changes Every thing is the best exam-
ple of the word virus in action. While the novel version contains many dif-
fer ent protagonists and a far bleaker outlook on how the word virus is
spread, the filmic adaptation best represents the fear of an ideologically
coded language virus and how this virus can be combated through new
meaning- making practices in integrated, diverse communities. In Ponty-
pool, DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) and his two coworkers, Laurel-
Ann (Georgia Reilly) and Sydney (Lisa Houle), receive messages about an
incoming zombie invasion from their trac- copter reporter, Ken, along
with a garbled message broadcasted from a French station, and even from
the BBC, but they do not believe it is real. Eventually, Laurel- Ann is infected
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and dies from the illness, while Grant and Sydney survive after taking Dr
Mendez, a doctor who specializes in the virus, into the studio. It is through
Dr Mendez, a stranger- outsider, who realizes the virus is a word virus, and
not spread through typical means of contamination. His discovery shifts
the tone of the movie from an everyday Southern Ontario Gothic tale of
a small town turned ravenous swarm into an intelligent exploration on
the ways in which we can use – and abuse – language.
Pontypool’s plot closely mirrors – and subsequently inverts – the
apocryphal 1938 case of the War of the Worlds broadcast. In the novel,
H.G. Wells tells a rather straightforward story of a Mars invasion; the sto-
ryline was then adapted and presented for a modern American audience
in the form of news bulletins. It was this format – as news, rather than
as a radio play – which confused the population the most, but the num-
bers of people who were confused or panicked is vastly overestimated. It
was the newspaper industry, rather than the population, which created–
then propagated – the mass hysteria narrative; the news created and
then spread a word virus. By creating an invasive narrative about an inva-
sion, the aliens became an easy meta phor for what ever ‘stranger danger’
could be felt in the social milieu. Indeed, many subsequent horror films
that dealt with contagion or invasion were thinly veiled meta phors for
spreading malicious ideas, be they racial in equality (Night of the Living
Dead), communism (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) or technological
pro gress (The Thing). Zombies in par tic u lar have become synonymous
with invasion meta phors, since the zombie represents ‘a recognizably
human (if not familiar) figure that devours the living’. Furthermore,
when zombies swarm, these narratives ‘display an explicit fear of a for-
eign invasion’, especially in relation to racial politics in the United States.
The zombie as a meta phor represents the tension between who is insider/
outsider in a par tic u lar community, and the zombie as a horde, swarm,
or pack represent the mounting fear of ideological take over especially as
time moves on.
In Pontypool Changes Every thing and Pontypool, the figure of the
zombie is used to make a direct connection to ideology as infectious, but
instead of using the bite or wound to spread the infection, a word or phrase
bears the weight of transmission. In the novel and movie, the outbreak is
spread through certain words and phrases (not always the same from per-
son to person), which then causes aphasia in the victim, and subsequent
death and destruction. Those who perish are usually devoured by others;
the zombies are interchangeably called zombies or cannibals in the novel
and film. One of the more fascinating parallels in the novel between the
zombie- cannibal figure is the evocation of the real life serial killer Ed
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The Words Change every Thing
Gein who ‘redecorated his farm house with body parts’. When Les, one
of the several oscillating main characters of the novel, discovers that the
local high school wants to do a play about Ed Gein (rather than his more
traditional favourites), he refers to the ‘cannibal thing’ as just another
prob lem he has to deal with during the day. Later on, when Les is in a
police station, the narrator describes him as being unaware of ‘a growing
number of people in Ontario [who] are now also giving the murder’
along with ‘vicious gangs of cannibals [who] are moving on the police,
sweeping through like a system of weather, snatching up large parts of the
population’. While this last quotation clearly displays the connection to
Pontypool’s pre de ces sors in the zombie genre, the conflation of the can-
nibal to the zombie is fascinating in terms of what it means for consump-
tion. Rather than consuming flesh, the cannibals and zombies in Burgess’s
world are Ed- Gein- like figures who merely ‘redecorate’ with body parts;
they collect and redistribute, rather than consume and infect. Indeed, the
gore associated with Ed Gein – one of the main sources of the slasher
archetype in cinema – is reduced to a shticky high school play; a ‘dram-
aturgical inevitability as a home- shopping network sketch’, thereby ren-
dering all bodies and gore associated with them jokes. Instead it is
Burgess’s treatment and description of the ‘word virus’ as the true source
of contagion in his text that is truly terrifying to the members of Ponty-
pool and makes both the novel and film stand out amongst the horror
genre filled with gore and destruction. In the novel, Burgess describes the
word virus as having
hid silently for de cades up in the roofs of adjectives, its little paws
growing sensitive, first to the modifications performed there; then,
sensing something more concrete pulling at a distance, the virus
jumped into paradigms. It was unable to reach the interior work-
ings of the paradigm, however, due to its own disappearance near
the core. The viruses bit wildly at the exterior shimmer of the par-
adigms, jamming se lection with pointed double fangs. A terrible
squealing ripped beneath the surface of the paradigms as they were
destroyed. The shattered structure automatically redistributed its
contents along syntagma, smuggling vertical mobiles across hori-
zontal ropes. What was in the air had to travel as ground and the
virus sauntered right into these new spaces, taking them over. Rad-
ical spaces evolved to compensate. Negative space became a for-
tune telling device. Positive space arched its back painfully, now
pocked horribly by the frenzied migration of vehicles into the
ground.
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His description is deliberate and invokes precisely that combination
of ideology, prohibition and transmission to groups. In this description,
words are the virus, but they are also the technological vehicle which
are used to spread the ideological message, ‘the exterior shimmer of the
paradigms’. This is significant since new media technologies – such as
the radio station itself – may help facilitate transmission/infection to a
broader population, but these technologies can be shut o or ignored
without actually eradicating the true source of infection. The solution to
the spread of the ideology virus, then, is to break apart the words that
bear the full weight of transmission and change their meanings, some-
thing which Grant figures out in the final act of the movie. Because of
this, we use the film adaptation as a speculative case study in which to
examine how the film represents – and then inverts – the typical con-
struction of the insider/outsider, but also for this innovative solution the
film pres ents. Rather than prohibiting speech through quarantine, the
main characters realize that they must change the meanings of the words
themselves – which means questioning and changing the ideology that
binds them.
Pontypool as Case Study
From the very beginning of the film, the audience defines the town Pon-
typool through sound. The adaptation pro cess from the novel to the film
has made the aural focus of the virus transmission pro cess that much
more obvious and sonic. Burgess’s description of the virus ‘in the air’ now
has to ‘travel . . . right into these new spaces, taking them over’ and these
new spaces of the cinema screen must be dominated by auditory chatter
in order to construct Pontypool from ‘negative space’. The opening title
sequence is a pre- tape Grant Mazzy has done about Mrs French’s missing
cat, which is played over a screen that gradually spells Pontypool out of
sequence. The jumbled letters jumble the meaning of the word itself – the
first comprehensible word we are given is TYPO – and this disorientation
is furthered through Grant’s endless chatter over the mic, along with the
visual equivalent of what his voice sounds like. The first scene after the
title sequence is Grant driving and being accosted by a woman he does
not know and who will not answer him ( later on, she becomes a zombie
in a horde). When Grant shows up at the radio station, he encounters his
own pre- taped voice outside. When fi nally on the air himself in real- time,
he continues his own endless monologue, sometimes enticing both
Sydney and Laurel- Ann to also contribute to the conversation – until, of
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The Words Change every Thing
course, the zombie outbreak becomes audible and Sydney refuses to have
it on the air.
The tension between silence/prohibition and excessive information/
chatter is also made quite clear through the opposing figures of Grant
and Sydney. While Grant represents endless chatter in the name of ‘full
disclosure’, Sydney appeals to prohibition in the name of ‘professionalism’
and peace- keeping. When reports of the zombie invasion become frequent
and alarming, Sydney insists that they should not worry the members of
the small community unnecessarily with news reports which may not be
real; instead she fills the dead- time with weather updates, trac, school
closures, and a previously scheduled per for mance of Lawrence of Arabia.
Pontypool has been made through sound, but only what is permitted to
become sound. As Sydney remarks, Pontypool is filled with gossip: Mrs
French’s cat is one of many stories which are reiterated in order to con-
struct a sonic image of Pontypool, since the filmic audience will never
actually witness the town itself. When the three workers are informed they
are under quarantine, Pontypool as a town and as a movie becomes con-
fined to the radio room itself, and each one becomes a representative
member of the community.
It is after the quarantine when the notion of the ‘outsider’ first
appears as a solid concept – or at least, a cogent voice on the phone.
Though the three leads hear about the invasion of the medical hospital
where Dr Mendez works, and where the first swarm was spotted over the
phone, Sydney refuses to play it in its entirety. Similarly, the French mes-
sage they receive over the air is translated and broadcasted, but then
ignored. The BBC newscaster’s report on the invasion manages to get on
the air, but it is discredited when they bring up ‘separatist terror groups’.
Sydney writes the report o as an outside country not understanding
Canadian politics. Furthermore, the only townsperson from Pontypool
giving the radio station information is Ken from his ‘trac copter’. He is
discredited when Sydney reveals that Ken is not actually in a he li cop ter,
but in his car and playing sound eects; later on his credibility is eroded
even further when Sydney reveals that he was actually a pedophile. This
reveal is made after he has died over the phone, and after Laurel- Ann has
become infected with the word virus. Though they know that the inva-
sion is real at this point, Sydney continues to distance herself from the
validity of the experiences they are having through discrediting of Ken.
From the very beginning of Pontypool, it is the outside world’s interpre-
tation of the emergency happening in Pontypool that’s doubted, rather
than the radio broadcaster’s creation of an invasion that scares the
townspeople.
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When Dr Mendez climbs in through the win dow into the radio sta-
tion, he becomes the perfect symbolic visualization of the outsider/invader
and a beacon of ‘stranger danger’ during this crisis. Mendez is also the
only non- white character we have in the film, though his racial identity
remains ambiguous in the source text. Dr Mendez is one of the few char-
acters who appears in both the book and the film, but the novel does not
give him much physical description. The only insights into Mendez’s per-
sonality come from Les’s internal monologue (‘He’s a bit loony, isn’t he?’)
and from one scene when Dr.Mendez performs ‘loose little dances’ around
the bodies of cadavers so he can distinguish himself as ‘not being dead’ in
the zombie carnage. These small descriptions, in addition to his non-
white (or racially ambiguous) surname, code him as a character out of
place in the small town setting of Pontypool, something on which the film
builds when it depicts him as breaking into the radio station. Since it was
also Mendez’s clinic which was the focal point for the invasion, he becomes
the centre of the swarm and the embodiment of the virus – at least on the
surface. While Mendez acts as the alien- outsider, he brings knowledge of
the virus. Indeed, it is his status as a body out of place – as the only living
survivor in a wreckage of zombie death – which gives him the experience
to figure out how the virus is transmitted and spread. The ‘stranger dan-
ger’ of the alien outsider lessens – not because his body or racial ambigu-
ity has been resolved necessarily, but because his ‘passport’ and credentials
have passed the test.
It is at this point in the narrative when we realize that the En glish
language – and whiteness – is symbolic of the invasion. As the woman who
first refused to speak to Grant in his car is found in a zombie horde, and
as Laurel- Ann’s communication breaks down with the virus, the audi-
ence’s notion of the stranger is summarily revised: the stranger is not
those who are bodily di er ent, but those who refused to connect. The
stranger also becomes sutured to the State/government itself through
Laurel- Ann’s depiction, since she was once a soldier overseas and has
recently returned. It is also the State/government who places the town
under quarantine, and who later destroys the radio station under the guise
of protecting the community. The inversion of the alien- outsider is fur-
thered when Grant and Sydney realize a zombie has gotten inside the
radio studio and are forced to kill it; the zombie is a child from a previous
per for mance in the radio booth earlier that day of Lawrence of Arabia, and
the child has been in brown- face for the per for mance (along with the two
adults and other children). The brown- face per for mance goes un-
criticized by the characters in the film, though Grant is highly uncomfort-
able with their presence in the studio. Since the per for mance interrupts
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The Words Change every Thing
the time he could have spent on- air talking about the virus, however,
Grant’s discomfort could either be a need to speak again, or apprehension
about the bad praxis of brown- face. Either way, we view the brown- face
per for mance as a deliberate way to counter and challenge the audience’s
assumption about the insider/outsider, similar to the introduction of
DrMendez’s character. The audience is primed to see Mendez as a ‘body
out of place’ and as Sara Ahmed notes, these bodies out of place often
become conflated with the ‘could be terrorist’ due to their inability to be
integrated into the community. This is not the minority’s fault, but rather
gestures to these larger ideologies of racism, sexism and nationalism
which label certain bodies as belonging and others as not. Mendez’s racial
identity remains ambiguous in the film, though he is eventually integrated
into the community, while the children and adults’ brown- face identity
remains clearly a (rather o- putting) mask and one that ends up becoming
deadly when the child turns zombie. During the per for mance, the child
that later attacks Grant and Sydney showed signs of aphasia by uttering
‘par par par’; just before it attacks them, it mimics and repeats what Syd-
ney has just said, thus marking it as infected. The Lawrence ofArabia per-
for mance then becomes representative of the small- town ethos: whiteness
that pretends to be strange and exotic as a way to entertain and feign inclu-
sivity, but they only become infected with these haunted legacies of colo-
nialism, imperialism and racism, and then tries to pass them onto others
through new media technology, such as the brown- face radio play.
As Jasbir Puar notes, building on the work of José Esteban Muñoz,
there is a narrative of the ‘double- agent’ or ‘terrorist drag’ that occurs
when gender markers on documentation, such as the passport, do not
match the body. The transgender or gender non- conforming body is
one that is intensely ‘out of place’ – especially in a small town. Since
small towns, or the ‘south’ in the horror canon, are typically seen as a place
of regression, atavism and ‘patriarchy run amok’, queerness is often pun-
ished or demonized. Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre or the
inbred desire of The Hills Have Eyes are quin tes sen tial examples; the first
example of Leatherface also draws its inspiration from the real life source
of serial killer Ed Gein. As stated earlier, Gein is evoked as the ‘cannibal
thing’ that is part of the small town life Les (and others) must now deal
with, even when it’s merely a high school play. In the horror genre, the
small town is especially dangerous for the way in which it twists non-
normative forms of embodiment into monstrosity, and in the smaller sub-
genre of literary horror known as Southern Ontario Gothic, the small
town becomes the source of ‘cabin fever’ for its protagonists. The cabin
fever for which Southern Ontario Gothic writers (such as Timothy
LONDON JOURNAL OF CANADIAN STUDIES, VOLUME 33
70
Findley, Margaret Atwood, and Alice Munro) are known deliberately
hinges the horror on the lack of communication; it is ‘uncommunicative
husbands’ or an inability to understand the depths of the wildness which
causes ‘strange projections and psychological grotesqueries [to] spring up
and rapidly grow to unmanageable proportions’. With Tony Burgess’s
novel and film, the small town is depicted as regressive due to its bad ide-
ology (as made manifest in brown- face), but it does not focus on the body
as the point of infection. Instead infection happens through the ways in
which language can be used, understood or misunderstood.
Laurel- Ann’s infection, among all others, demonstrates the connec-
tion between the normative body, invasive ideology, and community
bonds the best. Her aiction is invisible until she speaks, and when she
does, she is unable to be understood as she breaks down into aphasia. She
then follows her non- aicted coworkers to a sound- proof recording stu-
dio where they seek quarantine. While they are safe, she is unable to be
heard, recognized or validated. When she is unable to pass on the lan-
guage virus, she dies vomiting a stream of blood onto the glass in an
almost desperate outpouring of inner bodily turmoil. As the film contin-
ues, Laurel- Ann’s outsider status is further exacerbated as we receive
several shots of her twisted, gory mouth – this is the place where bad
ideology could not be spread, but desperately wants a community. Ponty-
pool also makes a claim that while the zombie horde is definitely a com-
munity (one which Laurel- Ann could not join since she did not pass on
the virus), it is one that is as sick in the words they use. One of the first
messages the radio station receives about the invasion is in French. The
translation (by Laurel- Ann), is as follows:
For your safety, please avoid contact with close family members and
restrain from the following: all terms of endearment such as honey
or sweetheart, baby- talk with young children, and rhetorical dis-
course. For greater safety, please avoid the En glish language. Please
do not translate this message.
The message implies that those with whom we are intimate are those
most easily infected, since we share discourse communities and common
understandings with them. Instead of fearing the stranger, then, Ponty-
pool suggests we should learn to revere the stranger since they will force
us out of own discourse communities, ideologies and perhaps our preju-
dices. This point is furthered through the contrast of Mendez’s character,
the small child, Laurel- Ann, Ken in his trac copter and the woman from
the beginning. We are prone to see Mendez as the stranger right away, but
71
The Words Change every Thing
then he is redeemed precisely because of his strange status and his cre-
dentials. In contrast, the others are perceived to be familiar or at least
belonging in Pontypool, but they are the ones who are actually violent:
the woman hits Grant’s car, Ken is a pedophile, Laurel- Ann vomits blood
and the child wounds Sydney. It is here – when Sydney becomes infected
because of the word ‘kill’ and not the child’s bite – that Pontypool changes
the standard zombie trope of invasion and makes it into a haunting.
The horror of the movie – voices over the phone, the horde/herd,
the warnings – all come through sound, rather than gore. In this way, Pon-
typool positions itself as both a zombie and ghost story. Indeed, it is the
sound of the zombies makes them into literal poltergeists, as the term pol-
tergeist is from two German words roughly translating into ‘noisy spirit’.
That ‘noise’ which disrupts their spirits is precisely ideology, the sticky par-
adigms and parasitic speech patterns of Tony Burgess’s novel adapted to
the screen. Even as Laurel- Ann becomes infected and the zombie horde
emerges, so much of the horror is conveyed aurally rather than visually.
The audience becomes aware that she is infected through her mangling
of sentences and alliteration, which marks the beginning of aphasia and
the first symptom of the illness. After repeating several iterations of
‘Mr.Mazzy’s missing’ she then mimics a tea kettle, like someone earlier in
the film mimicked windshield wipers. When all words fail her, she bangs
and taps on the glass trying to be let inside the soundproof booth. Even
as Laurel- Ann begins to bleed from her mouth, the horror of her transfor-
mation is in the sonic quality of her banging and the sound of her retch-
ing. The other zombies are similar: it is their sound, not their bodies, which
scare the viewers and those trapped inside the radio station. Much of this
has to do with the restraint of the filmic scene itself, since almost the entire
film is shot in the radio studio. The film’s focus of sound is also what turns
the mere words into a vehicle for viral transmission. Sound is part of the
technology of the word virus, since words written down do not have the
same power of infection; words must be spoken in order for the virus to
pass on.
Sydney’s infected word ends up being ‘kill’, precisely because she has
forced many people into silence; she has ‘killed’ many of Grant’s stories
before they could be uttered, in eect, killing all sound before it could go
on the air. As the film escalates, and especially as Dr Mendez also becomes
infected and they cannot maintain a conversation outside of En glish,
Sydney changes her mind about who is outsider/insider, what intimacy
means and what speech acts are allowed – as has Grant. Grant once used
to espouse ‘full disclosure’, but his forced silence for the sake of social order
leads him – not to a gory ruin like Laurel- Ann or a zombie horde full of
LONDON JOURNAL OF CANADIAN STUDIES, VOLUME 33
72
mindless chatter – but towards a solution, a way to ‘disinfect’ language.
In Grant’s case, to ‘disinfect’ the word means to change the ideology behind
it, and if ‘kill’ is what infected Sydney, then Grant must find a way out of
this repetitive discourse loop. He goes through a variety of alternative
meanings for ‘kill’ but ‘kill is kiss’ is the only one that resonates. He turns
to Sydney, his counterpoint for most of the film, and closes all distance
between them by chanting ‘kill is kiss’ until they really do embrace. All
forms of strangeness are removed in this act; there is no outsider; and for
a moment, there is no language.
This cure works. By changing the meaning of the word, Grant ena-
bles Sydney to reverse the infection, but it also changes the relationship
between the two of them. Instead of remaining on opposing sides, or
declaring one of them as correct, they simple change the meaning of the
debate and the situation they have been forced into. They broadcast their
cure to the rest of the province, though their transmission is eventually
stopped by commands from a French ocer. They are told to cease what
they are doing, since the military believes it is spreading the infection.
Grant accuses the disembodied voice shouting commands of ‘always kill-
ing scared people’ and then declares that ‘we were never making sense’.
His Network- esque monologue echoes his discovery, while also making it
mundane; this was just an average day in Pontypool, where bad ideolo-
gies run wild, but where maybe, instead of killing the enemy- outsider, we
kiss them instead. While the French military counts down to the final act
of quarantine and silencing of Grant and Sydney, however, the audience
gets one last kiss between them.
We are, in theory, not supposed to know what happens, though it
is heavi ly implied Grant and Sydney do not live. However, kill does not
mean kill anymore, so perhaps – like the end credit sequence of the film
implies– Sydney and Grant have run away and fallen in love instead.
Either way, Sydney’s infection and eventual cure through Grant’s ges-
tures represents our final position in this paper, which is that prohibition
does not work, nor does constant information (such as we get in the age
of new media). Instead we must focus on the words themselves and what
messages they carry ‘silently for de cades up in the roofs of adjectives’ in
order to remove a legacy of haunted history from our communities.
Conclusion
Near the end of Pontypool, the national anthem comes over the loud-
speaker. It is a sudden and stark interruption; one that draws the zombies
73
The Words Change every Thing
towards Grant and Sydney, and renders them vulnerable to danger. To
stop the imminent attack, they take a hammer to the loudspeaker; they
fight the noise, rather than the horde. In this way, the national legacy of
Canada has let them down, rather than the population inside the coun-
try’s borders, even if they are equally infected and aicted. The scene
reminds us of the changing words in the anthem in 2018. While it looks
like pro gress, to some it looks like prohibition, and to others, both look
like the same thing. In order to make the places in which we live habit-
able, Tony Burgess’s Pontypool Changes Every thing, and especially its film
adaptation Pontypool, suggests we cannot ignore the country’s previous
haunting, or even the stranger- outsiders who seem aicted. Instead we
must live with the ghosts, zombies and strangers, and learn to speak to
them in a language we both understand, in order to bring better ideas
alongside the bad.
Notes
1 John Paul Tasker, ‘Senate passes bill to
make O Canada lyr ics gender neutral’,
CBC News. 31 January2018, http:// www
. cbc . ca / news / politics / anthem - bill - passes
- senate - 1 . 4513317.
2 Casey Plett, ‘For transgender Canadians,
Bill C-16 is symbolic— yet meaningful’,
Macleans, 19 June2017, https:// www
. macleans . ca / opinion / for - transgender
- canadians - bill - c - 16 - is - symbolic - yet
- meaningful / .
3 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology:
Orientations, Objects, and Others, (NY:
Duke University Press, 2006), 141.
4 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, (New
York: Routledge, 2006), E- Pub, 30.
5 Pontypool (Bruce McDonald, 2008).
6 Tony Burgess, Pontypool Changes
Every thing, (Toronto: ECW Press, 1998).
7 Ahmed, Queer, 141.
8 Derrida, Specters, 30.
9 Derrida, Specters, 156.
10 Lisa Cumming, ‘Are Jordan Peterson’s
Claims about Bill C-16 Correct?’, The
Torontoist, 19 December2016 https://
torontoist . com / 2016 / 12 / are - jordan
- petersons - claims - about - bill - c - 16 - correct.
11 Casey, ‘For transgender Canadians’.
12 Shakespeare qtd. in Derrida, Specters, 18.
13 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting
and So cio log i cal Imagination
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008), 17.
14 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York:
Vintage), 1987, 1.
15 Gordon, Ghostly, 22.
16 Gordon, Ghostly, xvi.
17 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark:
Whiteness and Literary Imagination
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992), 20–27.
18 Gordon, Ghostly, 17.
19 Gordon, Ghostly, 17.
20 Gordon, Ghostly, 17.
21 Cumming, ‘Are Jordan Peterson’s
Claims?’.
22 Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings:
Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Publics
(London: Duke University Press,
2003), 29.
23 Cvetkovich, Archive, 15.
24 Sam Reidel, ‘Deadnaming a Trans Person
Is Vio lence— So Why Does the Media Do
ItAnyway?’, The Establishment, 6 March
2017, https:// theestablishment . co
/ deadnaming - a - trans - person - is - violence
- so - why - does - the - media - do - it - anyway
- 19500eda4b4.
25 Reidel, ‘Deadnaming a Trans Person’.
26 Derrida, Specters, 156.
27 Lisa Scott, ‘Gigi Gorgeous Allegedly
Detained in Dubai for being Transgeder’,
Global News, 10 August2016, https://
globalnews . ca / news / 2875688 / gigi
- gorgeous - allegedly - detained - in - dubai - for
- being - transgender / .
LONDON JOURNAL OF CANADIAN STUDIES, VOLUME 33
74
28 Julien Gignac, ‘ “It’s super infuriating”:
Trans voters react to receiving registration
cards with their former names’, The
Toronto Star, 4 June2018, https:// www
. thestar . com / news / gta / 2018 / 06 / 04 / its
- super - infuriating - trans - voters - react - to
- receiving - registration - cards - with - their
- former - names . html.
29 Cumming, ‘Are Jordan Peterson’s
Claims?’
30 H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds (Mineola:
Dover Publications, 1998).
31 Jeerson Pooley and MichaelJ. Socolow,
‘The Myth of the War of the World’s
Panic’, Slate . com, 28 October2013,
http:// www . slate . com / articles / arts
/ history / 2013 / 10 / orson _ welles _ war _ of
_ the _ worlds _ panic _ myth _ the _ infamous
_ radio _ broadcast _ did . html.
32 Ahmed, Queer, 142.
33 Night of the Living Dead (GeorgeA.
Romero, 1968).
34 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip
Kaufman, 1978).
35 The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982).
36 MikelJ. Koven, Films, Folklore, and Urban
Legends (Mary land: Scarecrow Press, Inc.,
2008), 39.
37 Koven, Films, 92.
38 Ed Gein was a Wisconsin serial killer from
the 1950s who murdered two women, but
was more known for his grave robbing
and farm house filled with items made
from corpses. He is the basis for many
slasher serial killers, such as Norman
Bates, Bualo Bill, and Leatherface. See
K.E. Sullivan for more. K.E. Sullivan, ‘Ed
Gein and the figure of the transgendered
serial killer’, Jump Cut: A Review of
Con temporary Media, (No.43, July2000).
39 Burgess, Pontypool, 19.
40 Burgess, Pontypool, 19.
41 Burgess, Pontypool, 101.
42 Burgess, Pontypool, 19.
43 Sullivan, K.E, ‘Ed Gein’.
44 Burgess, Pontypool, 19.
45 Burgess, Pontypool, 147–148.
46 Burgess, Pontypool, 147.
47 Burgess, Pontypool, 148.
48 Sydney’s reference to the BBC’s
assumption of a separatist terrorist group
is one way in which Pontypool works
towards a unified version of Canada,
where Quebec’s separatist past is
ameliorated (or outright forgotten,
depending on perspective). We see the
film as positive to Quebec’s past. The
French language is represented as a way
in which the population can beat the
language virus, at least temporarily. Even
when the French ocers obliterate
Pontypool at the end of the film, there is
no assumption that these ocers are
Quebec separatists: ocers are speaking
French because it is a viable solution to
the En glish word virus transmission, and
because it is one of Canada’s ocial
languages. A more thorough reading
could be done juxtaposing the image of
the terrorist in the film (US vs. Canadian
perspectives perhaps), but for the most
part, the ‘could be terrorist’ as Ahmed
views it is not a French separatist in this
film, though outsiders – like the BBC – try
to interpret it this way.
49 Ahmed, Queer, 140–142.
50 Burgess, Pontypool, 78.
51 Burgess, Pontypool, 131.
52 Ahmed, Queer, 140–142.
53 It is impor tant to note that the author,
Tony Burgess, is one of the adults in
brown- face. Since he also wrote the
screenplay, we argue that his presence
here – of all places – in the film is meant
to act as a way we are to deconstruct his
authority as author of the novel. This is
partly why we focus so much on the film,
rather than the novel version of the
storyline, since we read Burgess’s implied
deconstruction of his authority as him
revising his initial text.
54 Ahmed, Queer, 140–142.
55 Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages:
Homonationalism in Queer Times,
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2009), xxiii.
56 Ahmed, Queer, 141.
57 Clover, Carol, J., Men, Women and
Chainsaws: Gender In Modern Horror
Films, (NY: Prince ton University Press,
1992), 125.
58 Sullivan, ‘Ed Gein’, 38.
59 Burgess, Pontypool, 19.
60 William Toye and Eugene Benson,
‘Southern Ontario Gothic’, in The Oxford
Companion to Canadian Lit er a ture (2 ed.),
(Oxford University Press, 2006), n.p.,
Digital.
61 Toye and Benson, Oxford Companion, n.p.
62 Burgess, Pontypool, 147.
75
The Words Change every Thing
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(Prince ton, NJ: Prince ton University
Press, 1992), 125.
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about Bill C-16 Correct?’, The Torontoist,
19 December2016 https:// torontoist
. com / 2016 / 12 / are - jordan - petersons
- claims - about - bill - c - 16 - correct.
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Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Publics
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
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Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx, (New York:
Routledge, 2006)
Gignac, Julien. ‘ “It’s super infuriating”: Trans
voters react to receiving registration
cards with their former names’, The
Toronto Star, 4 June2018, https://
www . thestar . com / news / gta / 2018 / 06
/ 04 / its - super - infuriating - trans - voters
- react - to - receiving - registration - cards
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Macleans, 19 June2017, https:// www
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- meaningful.
Pooley, Jeerson and MichaelJ. Socolow. ‘The
Myth of the War of the World’s Panic’,
Slate . com, 28 October2013,
http:// www . slate . com / articles / arts
/ history / 2013 / 10 / orson _ welles _ war
_ of _ the _ worlds _ panic _ myth _ the
_ infamous _ radio _ broadcast _ did . html.
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(Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
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Vio lence— So Why Does the Media Do
It Anyway?’, The Establishment, 6
March2017, https:// theestablishment
. co / deadnaming - a - trans - person - is
- violence - so - why - does - the - media - do - it
- anyway - 19500eda4b4.
Scott, Lisa. ‘Gigi Gorgeous Allegedly Detained
in Dubai for being Transgender’, Global
News, 10 August2016, https://
globalnews . ca / news / 2875688 / gigi
- gorgeous - allegedly - detained - in - dubai
- for - being - transgender.
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transgendered serial killer’, Jump Cut:
A Review of Con temporary Media,
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Note on Contributors
Evelyn Deshane received an MA from Trent University and is cur-
rently completing a PhD at the University of Waterloo. Her creative and
non- fiction work has appeared in Plenitude Magazine, Briarpatch Maga-
zine, Strange Horizons, Lackington’s, and Bitch Magazine, among other
LONDON JOURNAL OF CANADIAN STUDIES, VOLUME 33
76
publications. Her most recent proj ect #Trans is an edited collection about
transgender and non- binary identity online.
R. Travis Morton is a PhD candidate in En glish Lit er a ture at the Univer-
sity of Waterloo. His research areas include game studies, linguistics,
po liti cal theory, American Lit er a ture, horror fiction, and folklore studies.
He completed his MA at Trent University, where he wrote his thesis on nar-
rative structures in video games on Bethesda Studios’ Fallout 3. His dis-
sertation involves in de pen dent survival horror games with a special focus
on Slender: The Awakening and the proliferation of online folklore.
Conflict of Interests
The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interests with this work.
