A disagreement about the level of blood and gore in Skinwalkers was one of the things that kept the Ontario-made werewolf picture on the shelf eight months longer than expected, say its producers. There was also trouble mounting an expected spring release and, more recently, the unappealing prospect of opening amid the buzz of The Simpsons Movie.

The film, about a 12-year-old boy caught between two groups of warring werewolves, came out Aug. 10 but was originally due in December 2006. It was then pushed back to March, July and then August.

Producer Don Carmody (Silent Hill) says the film was delayed at first because its American distributors – Freestyle Releasing for theatrical, and Lionsgate for home entertainment – wanted it to be rated R. Freestyle is the distribution arm of After Dark Films.

‘Lionsgate and After Dark had been distributing pretty hard Rs, including Saw and Hostel…they felt that we should try to punch Skinwalkers up, and add some new scenes with harder elements,’ Carmody explains. ‘While we didn’t agree, we reshot and added some scenes.’

He says when the producers and distributors tested the R version with a core audience of fanboys, they realized Skinwalkers worked better as a PG-13.

‘We were never going to be a Hostel or a Saw, because the picture wasn’t designed that way, and we were just going to alienate our audience,’ he says.

‘It’s not a standard horror,’ agrees coproducer Dennis Berardi of Toronto-based FX shop Mr. X, which handled all the CG effects and animation for the film. ‘We’re a bit of a retro movie in the classic sense of the older horror films like [John Carpenter’s] The Thing.’

Skinwalkers is rated a PG-13 by the MPAA in the U.S. and carries the similar 14A rating in Ontario. It was further delayed as distributors deliberated over a suitable release date.

Carmody says After Dark’s promo campaign wasn’t ready in time for March, and that the film wasn’t generating enough buzz ahead of its rescheduled July 27 release because of the hot summer box office.

‘The summer has been very odd…all the major tentpoles have been holding like mad. The Simpsons was so powerful that nothing opening opposite it was tracking,’ he says, adding the makers are happier with the Aug. 10 date, though they got fewer screens.

‘We’re not in great theaters…I’m not downtown in Toronto, which makes me crazy,’ Carmody says.

Skinwalkers had a rough opening weekend, managing a meager US$565,000 south of the border, where it played on 737 screens, according to Variety. It did not place on the weekend’s top 10 chart. The film made $2,076 on two screens in Quebec.

Maple Pictures declined to provide numbers for English Canada.