Canadian psychedelic pop group the Poppy Family once sang about evil growing in the dark, where the sun never shines. Now Jason Hewlett is putting a spotlight on one of Canada’s darkest tales through both a documentary and a book.
The 1971 hit “Where Evil Grows” aside, the Kamloops resident has been fascinated by Wendigo lore since he picked up an Incredible Hulk comic in the late 1970s. That early spark led to his book Heart of Ice, released October 6, and the companion documentary Tracking the Wendigo, which launches on Small Town Monsters’ YouTube channel October 26.
“They complement each other nicely without nulling the effect of one or the other,” Hewlett said during an October phone interview. “You’re not going to feel, ‘Oh, that was just the same thing.’”
Hewlett worked on the project with fellow Canadian Paranormal Society founder Pete Renn and team member Olivier Asselin. Their segment doesn’t appear in the book but serves as a wraparound in the film, adding about half an hour of extra content.
Given the sensitivity of the subject, as the Wendigo is often considered taboo within Indigenous communities, Hewlett included the perspective of Alisia Perrault-Werner, who is Cree, in Tracking the Wendigo. He connected with her while visiting investigator Morgan Knudsen in Edmonton and researching Wendigo history at Fort Saskatchewan.
“She could talk about it from her perspective, and I got that on film, but she was the only person I could,” he recalled. “They don’t like talking about it, and what I really learned is they just don’t. They believe even talking about it could draw it out.”
What surprised Hewlett most was how many people believe in the entity, and that its lore has even appeared in Canadian criminal history. On December 20, 1879, Swift Runner (Ka-ki-si-kut-chin) was executed at Fort Saskatchewan after being found guilty of murdering and consuming his family: his wife Charlotte, six children, brother-in-law and mother-in-law. Lieutenant-Colonel Hugh Richardson presided over the trial.
Historical records of so-called Wendigo psychosis, rooted in Algonquin oral traditions, appear throughout Canada’s westward expansion into Saskatchewan and Alberta. But pop culture also influenced modern interpretations — chiefly through Algernon Blackwood’s 1910 novella The Wendigo.
“They believe it’s a real presence in the woods, whether it’s something that possesses you or something that turns you into the monster,” Hewlett said. “It was never portrayed as a monster until Blackwood’s book. Before that, it was more psychological, like a possession story.”
As pop culture continued to borrow — and sometimes misappropriate — the legend, the Wendigo took on different forms. The modern image of a gaunt, deer-like humanoid with antlers stems partly from Blackwood’s influence and films like Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo and the 2021 movie Antlers. The 2015 video game Until Dawn reimagined it as a skeletal, rake-like creature.
As Hewlett concludes in Tracking the Wendigo, the entity exists in a strange middle ground —not quite cryptid, not quite spirit, and doesn’t fit neatly into any one category.
It’s also something deeply Canadian in origin. Hewlett said Small Town Monsters director Seth Breedlove admitted the Wendigo isn’t as well-known in the U.S. as Sasquatch or lake monsters.
“This might introduce a lot more people to the idea of what it is because we go into the deep history of it,” Hewlett said. “For a cryptid, it’s one of the few that crosses over into law. There have been real Canadian court cases where that was the defence.”
If Hewlett’s learned anything, it’s that the final lyrics from that Poppy Family song — “And now it seems to be that every time I look at you evil grows in me” — feel hauntingly appropriate for the Wendigo.
Tracking the Wendigo premieres October 26 on Small Town Monsters’ YouTube channel. The book Heart of Ice is available on Amazon.