Pontypool in a Post-Truth Era: Fake News, Disinformation and Why its Radio Zombies are More Prescient Than Ever

“Stop understanding what you are saying. Stop understanding and listen to me!”

This Pontypool (2008) review and editorial contains mild spoilers for the film Pontypool.

It’s an indictment of the homogeneity of the zombie film that, every time one does things a little differently, it gets lauded as a “reinvention of the subgenre” or “a fresh twist on stale old tropes”. Yet, while films like 28 Days Later (2002), Zack Synder’s 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake and Slither (2006) all had success in reshaping the scope of what zombies could do and be, there’s one lesser-seen, low-budget zombie film of the same era that provided a truly novel take – Pontypool (2008).

Pontypool unfolds over a single day, and more or less in a single location – a radio station in the eponymous Canadian village of Pontypool, Ontario. We follow shock jock Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), his station manager Sydney (Lisa Houle), and technical assistant Laurel-Ann (Georgina Reilly) as Mazzy reads the news, reports on the weather, and – much to Sydney’s chagrin – goes off-piste to editorialise on a range of social and political issues. Yet, as the day progresses, Mazzy finds himself bringing an entirely different bit of breaking news to his listening audience – increasingly disturbing reports of violence, murder, and even cannibalism, unfolding right there on their doorstep in sleepy Pontypool.

So, why are Pontypool’s zombies such a revelation? Because, unlike the traditional zombie, the infection (it’s described by Mazzy as a virus) doesn’t spread through the usual physiological vectors, like blood, spit, or bites. It spreads through words. And it’s this simple but upending idea that means that, even 17 years on from the film’s release, this idea remains not only powerful – but more prescient than ever.

A decade before Donald Trump would turn the concept into a depressingly ubiquitous one, Pontypool takes aim at “fake news”, highlighting the importance of media literacy and underscoring the horrifying ease with which disinformation spreads in a globalised world. In Pontypool, the zombie – a popular social and political allegory for filmmakers for almost a century – represents the perils of social media mobs and keyboard warriors. Similarly, the ease with which the virus is spread through speech reflects the attenuating influence of echo chambers and clickbait media on our ability to retain independent thought – to understand the agendas behind the news we’re consuming, and parse what’s real from what’s only designed to sway and subvert us.

The forums we flock to, the algorithms we’re fed, the marketing that’s so cleverly and purposefully ‘tailored’ to our preferences by avaricious advertisers – these are as dangerous as any virus, fictional or otherwise, because they work more insidiously. Media illiteracy offers no incubation period we can Google, no obvious or immediate symptoms we can self-identify through an ill-advised online search: yet in the end, its damaging effects are on par with those of Pontypool’s word-inflicted zombie-creating virus. We have become a mindless, shuffling mob, more interested in going after our fellow humans than listening to and understanding them.

This last concept – of understanding – is one Pontypool interprets in literal terms. In the film, the virus only spreads not solely when certain words are heard, but when the listener understands them. Our susceptibility is inevitable, inexorable – tied into the semiotic structure we’re tapped into, like a zombie hive mind, since birth. Perhaps, Pontypool pontificates, it’s this – the inherent desire we feel to be a part of something, to have a community we feel we belong to based on our upbringing and culture and dialect – that makes us more susceptible to disinformation. Or is it simply that we’re beaten over the head so relentlessly and repetitively with these opinions that they take on their own perverse veracity? The way the zombified Laurel-Ann repeatedly runs into the wall of the sound studio, searching for a victim, finds Pontypool literally exploring this idea.

Opinions and false statements are shared, disseminated, and proselytised, and, when they’re done so by a large enough horde, they enter the realm of factdom. The spread of Pontypool’s virus – which consumes the small Ontario town over the course of a day – is quick because that’s how it happens in our online world. It takes much less time to read a headline, be outraged, and fire off the link to five people you know than it does to read the article, digest its arguments, and make an informed decision on its contents. Like the infected words in the film, reaction subsumes reality; the false and divisive ideas gain traction as they’re spread. Actual facts, by contrast, end up stuck in the mud, then spinning their wheels, before being abandoned; static and forgotten.

Stephen McHattie as Grant Mazzy in Pontypool (2008)

What’s more, Pontypool goes to great lengths to tell us that the virus is only transmitted through the English language (hence why characters begin speaking in French, or Armenian, to circumvent exposure). Through this twist, Pontypool can even be spun as a warning against the dangers of cultural assimilation. Think of the world of biology, for example, where bottleneck events have limited a population’s genetic diversity. Among other setbacks, these groups suffer from a reduced ability to withstand events like disease, which spreads easily among populations with small gene pools. Similarly, Pontypool’s virus – which is only curtailed by its characters’ ability to speak other, non-English languages – underlines the importance of that social and cultural heterogeneity when it comes to facing down and surviving a crisis. We need diversity; we need difference.

Again, the zombie allegory is a particularly prescient one here – yes, it spreads through words, but it also has profound physical and psychological effects on its victims, as they’re transformed from ordinary townfolk to raving, homicidal maniacs with a taste for human flesh. Heck, Pontypool even skewers right-wing talkback radio, with Grant Mazzy’s flamboyant, anti-establishment tendencies a faint pre-echo of modern-day figures like Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin. Mazzy is infinitely more likeable, but the parallels are there.

Beyond all this, it would be remiss to leave out a word on the quality of Pontypool as an enjoyable, engaging horror experience. It’s not perfect – the film’s colour palette is overwhelmingly grey and washed out, like a cross between Sin City and a forgettable Season 7 episode of The Walking Dead – but, in a decade not known for its stellar genre output, Pontypool shines. (This was, if you’ll remember, a film that came out alongside inferior zombie attempts such as Colin, Doomsday, Quarantine, Dance of the Dead, Outpost, the much-maligned Day of the Dead remake and, of course, Zombie Strippers.) Yes, some of the film’s idiosyncrasies – the near-constant cross-chatter of different voices, for example, or the lack of more riveting zombie action – can grate, but they also add to the film’s unsettling, dread-inducing atmosphere. The blizzard outside traps the film in an uncomfortably cloistered, claustrophobic atmosphere in a nod to its forefather, Night of the Living Dead. While the performances, particularly those of real-life married couple McHattie and Houle, strike the right balance between realism and off-beat comedy – with enough zaniness to offset that grizzled, overcast visual palette.

But ultimately, Pontypool works best when viewed as social commentary, as a metaphor for media and a handbook for navigating life in a post-truth era. Like the besieged and beleaguered denizens of Pontypool’s radio station, we scrabble to make sense of a ceaseless input of data and drivel. Like its zombies, we shuffle on: regurgitating information we’re forcefed while turning on factions we don’t like or identify with.

Pontypool is a tale of how an event or interaction – that could be as small as reading a headline or responding to a social media post – takes on a much greater significance, and how each word we type or speak casts a much longer pall than we might ever have pause to consider. But it’s not all bad. Because ultimately, Pontypool is a story of hope; of commitment, in an age of deepfakes and dead ends, to the uniquely human capacities to deduce and decide for ourselves. Pontypool’s ending – the film, that is, not the radio play – gives us cause for optimism; suggests that there is a way to cut through the noise. Perversely, the day in Pontypool is saved only when words are misinterpreted, repurposed as something other than what they were intended for – fiction being, contrarily, truth’s last bastion and bulwark against a world that can feel like it’s made of lies.

But more pressingly, Pontypool’s overriding message is that, if bad ideas can spread – like the real-world pandemics we’ve become so horribly familiar with in recent years – then, well…why can’t good ideas spread, too?

That, alone, is hope enough.

Want more zombie horror analysis? My reviews of Braindead (1992), Night of the Living Dead (1990), The Video Dead (1987), Handling the Undead (2024) , and The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974) – also known as Let Sleeping Corpses Lie – should hit the spot.