When Jen and Sylvia Soska talk about shocking people, both as identical twins growing up in their own imaginary world and now as rising Canadian directors, they don’t spare much detail.

“When we saw other people react fearfully when we held up spiders, that surprised us. Snakes and spiders in your hair, that didn’t scare us. They were real and existed in our lives,” Jen Soska tells Playback.

Which is just as well because the Soska twins, who call themselves “bad ass femme fatales,” see scary movies like their latest work, American Mary, as very real moving and audience-seeking parts of a commercial film industry they’ve embraced.

For this, the filmmakers thank their mother for telling them to pay attention to the man behind the curtain, as in The Wizard of Oz.

“When I was a little girl, I saw Edward Scissorhands as a cardboard cutout in the video store and I was so terrified and my mom saw me and said, Sylvia, you’re never scared of anything,” Sylvia Soska recalls of the Johnny Depp-starrer about a man who has scissors for hands.

Her mother immediately rented and showed the movie to the young twins to demystify its horror by illustrating how appearances deceive.

“What a perfect movie to illustrate how a man isn’t always a man, sometimes he’s a monster, and what looks like a monster is a man,” Sylvia Soska explains.

All of which today allows the Soska twins to weave even more sedition and seduction into their Canadian films, with the latest American Mary, the follow-up to their debut feature Dead Hooker in a Trunk, having had its Canadian premiere on Thursday night at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival.

“We’re the twisted twins,” the sisters declared to a capacity Hot Docs Cinema audience as they introduced American Mary in figure-hugging fetisch gear and summoned their best inner-Elvira, Mistress of the Dark personas.

“The big thing about a film like this is it only grows as much as the support it receives from you guys. Literally, Dead Hooker in the Trunk, if you guys wouldn’t have seen it, this wouldn’t be possible,” Jen Soska told the Toronto After Dark audience.

“If you guys weren’t in the theatre right now for American Mary, nothing would happen for us,” she added before announcing Anchor Bay Entertainment Canada had picked up the Canadian rights to their second movie.

Here, the Soska twins’ strategy is not only using promotional appearances at festivals and social media to build a following for American Mary ahead of its Anchor Bay release.

Their can-do pitch for American Mary aims to shake up the horror genre and appeal to their growing fanboy audience to sustain their careers.

“I would like horror to no longer be considered a sub-genre. I loved horror growing up. Edward Scissorhands, Alien, Poltergeist, these are films that had a huge impact on who we became, especially being women,” says Jen Soska.

American Mary, a body mod horror romp, tells the story of a disenchanted medical student played by Katherine Isabelle (Ginger Snaps) who enters the world of underground surgery, only to find more marks are left on her than on a freakish clientele.

Here the Soska twins’s revenge thriller pays homage to the Final Girl, a horror/thriller film trope about a girl or woman who confronts their killer, especially in slasher films.

“In almost every horror film, because the audience is more drawn to a woman being in danger than a man because of sexism, she’s always the one that overcomes extreme obstacles, kills the killer, and saves the day,” Sylvia Soska explains.

The directors are also tipping their hat to Asian and European horror films, while avoiding a gorefest.

The on-screen look for American Mary, which sees Isabelle in virtually every scene, is deliberately placid and beautiful, with a build-up of tension and, ultimately, a feeling of disgust and revulsion laid onto the audience.

“We just didn’t want to crank the music up and have a cat pop out. That doesn’t feel like horror to us,” Sylvia Soska explained.

That subversion even extends to the movie title.

“In Canada, it can’t be Canadian Mary, because especially in the film industry, if you want to be successful, you do have to go to L.A., you do have to play in the American market,” Jen Soska insisted.

Despite the recent success of homegrown genre pics like Antiviral, Hobo With a Shotgun and Splice, the Soska twins argued the local industry is hobbled by a sense that Canadians are too nice to be scary.

“There’s a stereotype that we’re sweet and polite and love our hockey, which is true. But we’re also really weird. We have a really strange sense of humour,” Jen Soska added.

Also mitigating again break-out success for Canadian film is its directors, women from Canada, being regarded as American stateside.

“You’d be surprised. They call us Americans. And they’re missing the point: American Psycho, Canadian female director (Mary Harron) and shot in Toronto,” said Sylvia Soska.

The directors bristle at criticism that a Canadian-shot movie is sub-standard.

“Everyone says that looks like it was shot in Canada. What does that mean? So was I, Robot, so was all the X-Men movies, what does that mean?” Sylvia Soska asked.

Anchor Bay snapped up the Canadian  rights to American Mary this week after the movie was first shopped in Cannes, sold to Universal Pictures International for four European territories, and returned to Canada to screen in Toronto this week.

The indie pic from Vancouver producer IndustryWorks Pictures will also screen at the Whistler Film Festival as part of its horror sidebar.

Photo via Twisted Twins Productions