Ashes of Doom
1970 · 1m · Canada
Directed by Grant Munro, Don Arioli
Genres: dark comedy, documentary, horror
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
A young woman smokes through a horror-movie setup until a vampire receives an unexpected reaction at midnight. The anti-smoking message hijacks genre expectations.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A one-minute PSA that weaponizes vampire mythology to ambush you with an anti-smoking sermon—the audacity of hijacking genre convention for public health is exactly the kind of subversive trolling that makes consensus film programmers squirm, and it *works*.
The film sits uncomfortably between documentary propaganda and horror pastiche, a formal collision that resists the clean lineage-work we prize; it's formally interesting precisely because it refuses to cohere into tradition.
The entire film hinges on that final beat—the vampire's reaction at midnight—where the genre machinery suddenly snaps sideways, and that single pivot point turns a 60-second public service spot into something with actual bite.