ArtsJon Mann’s Popsy is the only Canadian flick screening at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ celebration of the author’s famed ‘Dollar Babies’Popsy is the only Canadian flick screening at the Academy’s celebration of the author’s famed ‘Dollar Babies’Morgan Mullin · CBC Arts · Posted: Nov 19, 2025 7:00 AM EST | Last Updated: 9 hours agoListen to this articleEstimated 6 minutesThe audio version of this article is generated by text-to-speech, a technology based on artificial intelligence.Jon Mann (right) and Popsy star Avery Winters-Anthony on the set of Popsy. (Courtesy Jon Mann)If Jon Mann spent his entire childhood sleeping with one eye open, it’d be hard to blame him.The Fredericton-born, Halifax-based filmmaker inherited a love of Stephen King stories at an impressionable age before falling headfirst into the creepy-crawly world of M. Night Shyamalan. (He still remembers seeing The Sixth Sense as a kid: “Thank God we went to a matinee and it was still bright out when we came out of the theater,” he remembers thinking.) “I had a very good childhood, I had nothing to be afraid of,” he says with a laugh, recalling the hair-raising horror flicks his older sisters often rented, that he’d watch, too. “But, just, when my imagination gets its hooks into something, I can try and spin it the best way I can.”Horror remained a fascination for Mann, who is happy to see the genre having a bout of mainstream success.: “I think that there is a big swell happening in horror right now,” he says, pointing to films like Sinners and Long Legs as examples. “It’s like horror movies are cool again, because they are getting back to that zeitgeist moment of being able to hold a mirror up to society.” Mann would know: He’s showing his horror short, Popsy as part of a screening at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. (That would be the same Academy behind the Oscars.) on Nov. 19. The film will run as part of a celebration of Stephen King’s Dollar Baby program — in which filmmakers could buy the rights to adapt a King short story for a dollar — the screening sees Mann’s short film selected alongside five other projects created during the program’s five-decade run. He’s also the only Canadian filmmaker on the bill. Avery Winters-Anthony in Jon Mann’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Popsy (Courtesy Jon Mann)“The fact that the Academy is recognizing Stephen King, who is like a sub-genre of horror on his own?” he begins. “That is such a huge, bust-down-the-door moment for the genre and for him… I would be so stoked if that was happening and I had never made a Dollar Baby before. So, if you add on top, that I’m a part of it? It is just the biggest honor of my career so far.” Popsy, the short based on a King story of the same name, isn’t Mann’s filmmaking debut. In fact, before filming and releasing it at the Atlantic International Film Festival in 2019, he was carving a path as a documentary filmmaker, working on a movie near Miramichi, N.B.One day on set, while filming a documentary about residential schools, one of the interview subjects broke down during filming: “I left that interview with a crisis of faith about movies. Because after having that conversation that was so real, and she was crying and really being vulnerable to me, I was like: ‘Movies are bullshit. I hate movies. I’m never going to another movie in my life. It’s all fake,” he explains. “Something triggered in me during that week of filming, that it was like: ‘Okay, if you’re going to tell stories, then it needs to be worth everybody’s time. And it better teach people something, and it better make them question anything.”In making Popsy, Mann puts on a clinic in how a horror film can make people question how they see the world. King’s 12-page short story follows a gambling addict who abducts a child to pay off his debts (“obviously a bad guy, the kid’s the victim, classic storytelling, whatever”, Mann explains). Without spoiling it, it’s safe to say wires get crossed and stakes get raised. “I was trying to get the audience, whether they knew it or not, not to be able to stereotype who the bad guy was going to be in this film. And it kind of turns out that they’re all bad, except for the kid,” Mann says. “And I think that that’s also kind of the world we live in right now: That most monsters are men.” For Mann’s frequent collaborator (and Popsy lead) Rob Ramsay, it isn’t that surprising that the short would wind up on the Academy’s radar. Or, for that matter, that his longtime friend — they met as undergrads at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B. — would make the move to horror films. Ramsay says he knew his friend had what it takes to “make it” in Hollywood after reading one of Mann’s scripts. At the time, Ramsay was already working as an actor in Los Angeles. “I think it was like 10 or 15 pages of a pilot he had written,” Ramsay recalls. “I read a lot of auditions, I read a lot of scripts, I read a lot of sides. And you can just tell when you read something [good]: It just sort of pops off the page. ”Actor Rob Ramsay (left) and director Jon Mann hang out on the set of Popsy. (Courtesy Jon Mann)Ramsay adds that Mann’s work “feels familiar but different, at the same time. It makes you feel comfortable when you’re watching something. But also, like, ‘Oh, I’ve never seen this before’.” “I think another thing you always hear, regardless of where you are, like, LA, New York, Toronto, whatnot, is: Tell authentic stories. And that resonated with us early,” Ramsay says. “And so we were like, ‘Okay, well, what do we know? We know New Brunswick. And we know Nova Scotia. And we know the Maritimes, and so why don’t we try and found all of our stuff in the culture… of the Maritimes.” He adds: “Who’s to say Popsy isn’t set in Fredericton?” “At the end of the day, it’s all horror. That’s what I keep coming back to: Every movie has stakes. And if those stakes were happening to you, you’d be horrified by them,” Mann says. As he sees it, it’s almost an evolutionary response that draws us to watch scary movies. “I think that fear is a very positive emotion: We need that release, that cortisol release.” He adds: “There are no other genres that will make you scream, will make you laugh, will make you cry, all within 90 minutes. Then you come out, and the world is still bright, and it’s a little bit better, because what you watched terrified you and made your imagination run wild.” ABOUT THE AUTHOROriginally from rural New Brunswick but based in Halifax for almost a decade, Morgan Mullin is a freelance journalist with bylines in Chatelaine and The Globe and Mail. A Polaris Prize Juror, she covers music, arts and culture on the east coast—primarily at local news site The Coast, where she is Arts Editor. She can be found on Twitter at @WellFedWanderer.
A $1 Stephen King adaptation is this Fredericton filmmakers ticket to Hollywood
