Experimental Film by Gemma Files is the horror novel that asks what happens when a failed film critic stumbles onto a lost piece of Canadian cinema history, and the answer the book gives is: nothing good. Published in 2015 by ChiZine Publications, the novel won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel, and reading it makes clear why the jury had little difficulty making that call. Files builds her horror from archival obsession, maternal guilt, and a figure from Slavic mythology so quietly wrong that the dread accumulates across hundreds of pages before it finally breaks open.
What the novel is about
Lois Cairns is a film critic and part-time teacher in Toronto. She's also a mother struggling with the demands of raising a son with autism, and her marriage is fraying under the weight of exhaustion neither she nor her husband knows how to share. At a screening, Lois glimpses footage projected briefly on a wall: silent film, a woman in white, something about the light that shouldn't be possible. Lois recognises the footage as extraordinary and begins chasing its origin, which leads her to Mrs. Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb, a woman who made a series of films in early twentieth-century Ontario and then vanished from the historical record entirely.
The research thread is genuinely compelling. Files clearly knows early Canadian cinema, and she uses that knowledge to make the fictional archive feel lived-in and real. Lois's investigation moves through film databases, university libraries, and conversations with elderly relatives of the long-dead Whitcomb. It reads less like a horror novel setting up its monster and more like a piece of literary journalism that happens to be circling something terrible.
The horror at the centre
What Whitcomb was filming, and what she may have summoned in the process, connects to Lady Midday: a figure from Slavic folk tradition who appears at noon in summer, brings heatstroke and madness, and asks questions you cannot answer. Files does something precise here. She doesn't treat Lady Midday as a monster in the conventional sense. The entity has no real motive beyond presence. It doesn't want anything Lois has. It simply is, and its attention is enough.
This is the same logic that makes the best cosmic horror function. The terror isn't violence. It's contact. And Files earns the comparison to that tradition without leaning on it as a crutch. The folk horror register, closer to Arthur Machen or Algernon Blackwood than to Lovecraft, suits the Canadian landscape and the early-cinema material far better than anything tentacled would have.
Readers who appreciated how The Cipher by Kathe Koja used a physical void as the conduit for something beyond understanding will find Files working similar territory, though with a warmer, more explicitly personal voice.
Lois Cairns as a protagonist
Lois is difficult, and Files doesn't flinch from that. She's self-aware enough to know she's difficult, which doesn't make her less so. She drinks more than she should. She resents being the primary caregiver for her son, then resents herself for the resentment. She pursues the Whitcomb research partly because it gives her a reason to be elsewhere, and she knows that too.
This makes her one of the more honest portraits of parenthood in recent horror fiction. The genre is full of parents imperilled by threats to their children. Files is more interested in the quieter horror of a parent who isn't sure she's equal to the job. That's not a comfortable read, and it's not meant to be. It's also what makes the novel's final movement, when Lois's family becomes directly endangered, land with genuine weight. You've spent enough time in her head to care whether she's capable of doing what needs doing.
Structure and style
Files writes in a mode closer to literary horror than to commercial genre fiction. Sentences run long. The novel includes excerpts from Lois's academic writing, fictional critical essays about Whitcomb, and extended passages of film description that ask the reader to trust the author's eye. Not every reader will. The pacing in the middle third is deliberate to the point of patience-testing. Files is building an atmosphere, not accelerating toward a set piece, and if you're reading for plot momentum, you may lose faith before the book earns it back.
It does earn it back. The final hundred pages are among the most genuinely unnerving sequences in Canadian horror fiction, and the climax doesn't resolve so much as it settles, the way a house settles: you're aware that something has changed position, and you don't entirely trust the structure now.
The novel's approach to formal experimentation, embedding critical texts and archival documents within the narrative, recalls House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski in its use of documents as both evidence and trap. Files is less maximalist than Danielewski, but the instinct is related: the archive is where the horror hides, and the closer you look at the record, the more the record looks back.
What works and what doesn't
The archival world Files constructs is the novel's strongest element. The fictional history of early Canadian cinema feels so thoroughly imagined that readers interested in the period may find themselves attempting to verify Whitcomb's existence. That's a significant achievement.
The autism subplot carries more mixed results. Files is evidently writing from close personal experience, which she has discussed in interviews, and the emotional honesty is real. Some readers will find the portrayal moving and specific. Others may feel the novel's handling of Lois's son Simon occasionally flattens him into a source of maternal guilt rather than a fully independent character. It's a tension the novel doesn't entirely resolve.
The prose is rich enough to sustain the novel's slower passages, but "rich" and "accessible" aren't synonyms here. Files writes for readers who are comfortable being challenged. If you came from John Langan's short fiction, which shares Files's interest in literary ambition inside horror's frame, you'll find the register familiar.
The verdict
Experimental Film by Gemma Files is a novel about what we leave behind when we look at something we shouldn't, and what comes back through the gap we opened. It's also a novel about the exhaustion of being a person who loves someone and isn't sure that love is enough. Those two things sit together in the book without either diminishing the other, which is a harder trick than it looks.
It won the Shirley Jackson Award because it does something the best horror fiction does: it uses the genre's conventions honestly, as vessels for real dread about real things. The monster is genuine. The marriage is genuine. The film archive is genuine. Files doesn't separate them into supernatural subplot and literary subplot. They're the same story, and Experimental Film is the better for it.