Unique distribution model benefits local filmmaker’s found-footage flick

Sneaking into Winnipeg’s Scotiabank Polo Park cinema last weekend like a cunning, silent demon, the low-budget horror film Hunting Matthew Nichols managed to succeed, reaping more than double its budget throughout North America thanks in large part to actor-director Markian Tarasiuk.

Tarasiuk, 33, is a Winnipeg-born Ukrainian-Canadian artist whose parents met performing in the Rusalka dance ensemble. (It doesn’t get more Winnipeg than that.)

Evidently inheriting the performance gene, Tarasiuk was performing on the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre stage by age 14 in the 2007 production Over the Tavern. By the age of 18, fresh out of River East Collegiate, he enlisted in the prestigious Vancouver theatre school Studio 58.

Currently dividing his time between Vancouver and Los Angeles, Tarasiuk has gained dozens of screen credits since then, but his work in Hunting Matthew Nichols — which he also produced — feels more personal, inspired by the terror he once felt seeing the found-footage thriller Paranormal Activity at Kildonan Place cinemas in 2007.

“My dad had to get me into that movie,” Tarasiuk says in a phone interview. “And I think I saw it three times in theatres because it was my first experience with found footage, and I had not seen that type of movie being done before.”

Between that and sneaking a viewing of his older sister’s Blockbuster rental of The Ring, Tarasiuk was primed early for terror with a foot in video-spawned reality.

“This movie definitely picks up on my influences, especially the ones of when I was young,” says the filmmaker, who won Best Director at 2024’s Blood in the Snow horror film festival.

“What really scared me back then still resonates and scares me today.”

Like Paranormal Activity, Hunting Matthew Nicols is a faux-documentary. It’s about a young documentarian (Miranda MacDougall) who sets about trying to discover the fate of her long-missing older brother, Matthew, and his friend Jordan, who disappeared into the Vancouver Island wilderness decades earlier.

Having an outsider’s perspective of the West Coast helped Tarasiuk establish the film’s mood of heavy menace.

“It was a very different energy shift,” he says of the move from Manitoba to British Columbia. “It has to do with the landscape, the people. One thing I remember clocking very vividly when I moved out here was that there’s a heaviness to the air that is not present within Winnipeg.”

He attributes that atmosphere partly to the gloomy weather, but also the “haunting, heavy, historic quality” of the B.C. forests.

“And then on the island, you add the isolation to that, and the missing-person statistics. I don’t think Vancouver Island has been, in cinema, painted with this brush that I think I’ve painted in this movie.”

In the spirit of Canada Film Day today, it is worth celebrating the film’s success, however modest it may seem, especially in the context of a Canadian indie with no distributor. The film’s producers negotiated directly to exhibitors throughout North America. And apparently, the plan worked.

“We just crossed $600,000 for the weekend, which to a lot of people (doesn’t seem like much) in the metrics of Hollywood box office where we think about millions and millions of dollars, but for a Canadian film with no distribution to cross that amount in a weekend is unprecedented. I don’t think it’s ever happened before,” says Tarasiuk of his movie, which won Best Found Footage Film at Utah’s Filmquest festival, which celebrates genre movies.

“Winnipeg came out for the hometown people,” he says, referring to himself, his co-star Ryan McDonald and animator (and Tarasiuk’s cousin) Nicholas Luchak.

“(Scotiabank Polo Park) was the No. 4 theatre in North America for us in terms of sales this last weekend, so Winnipeg really showed up and I hope will continue that through this weekend.”

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