At Whistler Film Festival, Hunting Matthew Nichols plays with true-crime genre to scary effect
Producer-screenwriter Sean Harris Oliver toys with reality as “documentary” crew follows story of two missing teens into the deep, dark woods of Vancouver Island
Hunting Matthew Nichols.
Whistler Film Festival screens Hunting Matthew Nichols on December 7 at Village 8, with members of the filmmaking team in attendance
IN 1999, A LOW-BUDGET indie horror flick called The Blair Witch Project scared the bejesus out of millions of movie-goers—and somehow managed to convince them that they were watching something real.
A quarter of a century later, another genuinely chilling twist on the found-footage movie, this time made in B.C., is getting set to make its home-province premiere at Whistler Film Festival on December 7. And as authentic as Hunting Matthew Nichols’ story of a sister searching for a brother and his friend who disappeared in the Vancouver Island woods feels, its creative team realizes the game has changed.
“In 2024-2025 it’s really hard to hide certain elements of a script,” says Sean Harris Oliver, the well-known Vancouver playwright and screenwriter who produced and penned the script for Hunting Matthew Nichols, creating the story with director Markian Tarasiuk. “Back when Blair Witch did it, they hid that the actors were actors, and they pretended that it was all real. And it was easier to do that because, basically, IMDb didn’t exist.”
Instead, the film team has developed a website with “case-file evidence” and other extras adding to Hunting Matthew Nichols’ central story. “To us, that's just a long-form fictional narrative where we’re adding extra elements to the appreciation and entertainment that audiences can have, and that all exists in a fictional world,” says Oliver. “And then at the same time, we’re doing interviews with people and talking to press, and we’re explaining how we made it.
“But now, even, sometimes when I get out of a screening,” he adds, “I'll have some people go, ‘But is that based on a true story? Was it based on someone that went missing?’”
That believability of the faux documentary speaks volumes to the skill of the filmmakers who pulled it off. It may be in part because true-crime fans Harris and Tarasiuk also drew stylistically from intricately crafted small-screen true-mystery series like Making of a Murderer, The Jinx, and Murder on Middle Beach. Still, despite their affection for the genre, they take Hunting Matthew Nichols into unexpected, eerie realms that we’re loathe to reveal here.
Oliver is perhaps best known on the local arts scene as the playwright of critically acclaimed theatre works like The Fighting Season and Redpatch (the latter cowritten with Raes Calvert). He and Tarasiuk are both grads of Studio 58, and the friends came up with the original idea during games of tennis together, often over by Granville Island. “We just were always bouncing the ball around and Markian had this notion for telling a true crime story that went in a different direction,” Oliver explains.
They started building a story that played out like a detective mystery and drew on found footage. In the film, missing teens Matthew Nichols and Jordan Reimer were amateur filmmakers who had a camcorder and left a stack of VHS tapes when they disappeared 20 years ago. But a lost video emerges that has deeply unsettling new evidence, sending sister Tara Nichols on a quest to solve what happened, weighing in with direct-address “interviews” throughout the film. It also has redramatizations, and even a hauntingly animated sequence that traces the origins of a local myth that Matt and Jordan became obsessed with. Intermixed are drone shots over the foreboding woods, and location shoots by Tarasiuk and his team as they follow Tara along Matt and Jordan’s path.
During their downtime postpandemic, due to the writers strike, the pair really hunkered down to push their ambitious, genre-pushing idea to fruition—and sticking hard to their idea of setting it amid the vast woods and roiling seas of the West Coast.
Sean Harris Oliver.
“There were a lot of people that wanted us to change the location and not shoot in Canada, saying ‘No, you should set it in the United States,’” Oliver says. “And we’re like, ‘No, absolutely not.’ This has been tied to Vancouver Island and to this particular location for a reason: it’s spooky. The woods are big, there's water, there’s ocean. People go missing on Vancouver Island. There’s no way we’re changing it.”
Early in the filmmaking process, they decided Tarasiuk would use his own name—a choice that lends to the verisimilitude of what goes on in the story.
“We realized that eventually, with a lot of crime documentaries, that the camera starts to turn back and reflect on the people that are making it,” says Harris. “So then we decided, ‘Oh, like, if you’re actually directing this film, why don’t you just play the director in the movie? The camera is going to have to turn around, and you’re going to have to be there. So you shouldn’t really be playing a character; you should just be yourself directing the film.’”
Oliver gives a lot of the credit for the film’s authenticity to the actors, from Susinn McFarlen as a grieving mother to Christine Willes as a hardened but empathetic investigator. Miranda MacDougall is also a standout as Tara Nichols, driven to find her brother with palpable obsession and angst, believable even in the supposed interview sequences.
Amid the tension there are also some genuine laughs in Hunting Matthew Nichols. At one point Tara is caught trying to scarf down a sandwich before she does her interview; other times, the camera swings around to capture what Oliver dubs the director’s “WTF reaction” to some of the outrageous things he’s capturing on film.
“It does offer these great moments where the camera leaves the scene and sort of turns around on itself and shows characters authentically reacting to a situation where they’re shaking their head in disbelief,” Oliver says, adding he and the crew would be howling behind the scenes. “And it’s such a fun way to play in cinema.”
The laughter, the faux interviews, the crime-doc craft, and the supernatural evil that may or may not lurk in the woods: this B.C. film team has rolled together something that toys with genre in ways that end up being utterly unique.
And yes, there are overt references to Blair Witch Project—the ‘90s blockbuster constantly inspiring the boys who go missing to head out with their camcorder into the deep, dark B.C. woods.
“There is that element of kids goofing around on a video camera trying to make movies,” Oliver reflects. “And, you know, I do think that Blair Witch really did inspire a whole generation of young people to do that. Markian was of that age—he's definitely inspired by that notion of Blair Witch, that you get a camera just go with it and shoot anything.” 
Related Articles
