One of the defining aspects of today’s popular culture is its fragmentation. Popular music is divided into such infinitesimally small sub-genres that some bands move in and out of them with each album. In film and television, there is more of a mainstream. Most people can agree that something like The Truman
Show is a good movie. However, outside the realm of mainstream television and cinema, there are genres with fan bases as dedicated if not more so than those of the mainstream: science fiction, horror, fantasy and others.
Genre films and television exist in a separate sphere from the mainstream, but perhaps they ought not. Kim Poirier is a Canadian actress who has worked in mainstream and genre film and television and gained an appreciation of both.
Poirier, a native of Quebec who moved to Toronto during her early childhood, grew up acting. “I did 30 commercials growing up,” she said, “[and] lots of modeling and catalogue work.” She cut her teeth on the Showcase soap opera Paradise Falls as Roxy Hunter. “It was the best training I could ever have had,” she said. “[In] six months of work, we shot 52 episodes.”
After acting in Dawn of the Dead, Decoys and Decoys 2: Alien Seduction, Poirier became a recognizable face to science fiction fans and took an offer to host the Space channel show Hypaspace. “I think [my experience in sci-fi] was one of the big draws for the Space Channel,” she said, “because I had done Decoys, I had done Dawn of the Dead, [ . . . ] I had experience in the sci-fi genre.”
It was Poirier’s time hosting Hypaspace that solidified her place in genre film and television. “When I was hosting the show [ . . . ] I did my homework on all the big shows, like Battlestar Galactica, Stargate and Serenity,” she said. “I became well-versed within the genre, having to work at it every day.”
Though she always enjoyed horror films, Poirier has now come to enjoy and appreciate horror through her experience in them. She is particularly enthusiastic about special effects. “In Dawn of the Dead,” she said, “they sawed me in half, which was amazing. [ . . . ] They created a live, animated dummy of me. [ . . . ] It was just amazing, the work that went into creating this full, life-sized, animatronic dummy of me.”
Poirier, however, is not worried that her association with sci-fi and horror films will limit her ability to work in other genres. Her recent work suggests that she has no reason to worry about such a thing. She recently played Lucy Eklund in Winnipeg writer-director’s FOODLAND, and she is set to play Helen Gleason in a film called Four Saints, currently in pre-production. According to Poirier, “Four Saints is based on a true story about four women in World War I. It’s a wonderful script, and these women were part of the catalyst towards the women’s movement of rights and independence. It’s just such an inspirational story.”
Poirier’s genre-hopping approach to culture is one that should be taken by more consumers and producers of popular culture. Last year, octogenarian stage and screen actor Christopher Lee, a long-time symphonic metal enthusiast, released Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross, a symphonic metal historical opera in which he plays the titular role. It’s awful, but his openness, especially at his age, is admirable. The world would be a better place if we all watched both Stargate and Mad Men. Maybe not Stargate, but you see the point.
