On a Sunday evening in mid-October, the Cape Breton Regional Library and a local partner abbreviated as SSCC will haul a projector into a craft cidery on Nepean Street and screen a movie that was made, in large part, by the people sitting in the room. The film is The Legend of the Psychotic Forest Ranger, and the venue is Island Folk Cider House at 52 Nepean Street in Sydney. The movie starts at 6:30 p.m. and runs until about 8:30 p.m. It is free, it is open to the public, and it is billed as a way to kick off spooky season.
The choice of film is not random. The Legend of the Psychotic Forest Ranger is a 2011 Canadian horror-comedy written and directed by Brad Mills, and it is one of the more affectionate artifacts of Cape Breton's do-it-yourself film culture. It was shot over 23 days in Cape Breton, features an all-Nova Scotian cast, and its teenage victims get stranded not in some generic American backwoods but in the woods of Cape Breton Island. When the film premiered, it did so to a sold-out midnight crowd, and it went on to be an official selection at the Atlantic Film Festival, with further screenings planned in Sydney, Halifax, Montreal and Ontario.
The premise is deliberately, proudly stupid in the way that the best 1980s video-store horror was stupid. Four teenagers take a wrong turn down an abandoned road, run out of gas, and end up stranded in the middle of the woods. The cast is assembled from the genre's stock company: the jock, the joker, the blonde, the paranoid brunette. A forest ranger stops by to warn them that a prowler has been spotted nearby. Then people start disappearing, one by one, and the survivors come up with increasingly absurd explanations for where their friends have gone. Eventually an axe-wielding killer with a grudge against litterbugs and unpermitted campers works his way through the cast, delivering one-liners before each kill.
What makes it work, according to the reviewers who have championed it, is that the wooden acting and stilted dialogue are not accidents. They are the point. One reviewer described it as one of the more successful throwbacks to the golden age of cheap video horror, a movie that could easily have been produced thirty years earlier, and noted that the demonic ranger manages to be genuinely funny while still carrying the menace of a slasher icon. Another called it a loving and knowledgeable homage to the almost assembly-line gore fests of the 1980s, made by people who clearly grew up renting them. The film's own promotional material pitches it to fans of The Evil Dead, Sleepaway Camp and 80s grindhouse slashers, and the cover art was designed by Dude Designs, the artist behind posters for Hobo With a Shotgun, Father's Day and They Live. There has even been talk of a sequel.
Screening it in a cidery rather than a theatre is a fitting second act. Island Folk Cider House is a locally owned and operated craft cidery that brews with 100 percent Nova Scotia apples and describes itself as celebrating the rich and radical culture thriving on Cape Breton Island. Its flagship cider is called Good Company, named in honour of good times with good people, and its tasting room is built around the idea of pulling up a chair and meeting someone new. The cidery sits in the north end of Sydney, a short walk from the water, and it has become a regular host for live music and community gatherings. Pairing a homegrown cult horror film with a homegrown cider operation is about as Cape Breton as an October night gets.
The library's involvement is part of a broader pattern. The Cape Breton Regional Library runs free programming across its branches year-round, from documentary screenings to concerts to workshops, and it has been steadily pushing events out of the stacks and into the community. In the days around this screening, its calendar includes a documentary on Edgar Allan Poe at the Baddeck branch and an all-ages concert at the McConnell Library in Sydney. The Cider & Cinema night is the same instinct applied to a different room: take the library's mandate to share stories, put it somewhere people already want to be, and let the audience bring a glass.
For anyone who has never seen the film, the appeal is partly novelty and partly local pride. It is a chance to watch a Cape Breton-made slasher in a Cape Breton-made cider house, surrounded by neighbours, on a night when the woods outside town are getting dark earlier. The movie begins at 6:30 p.m. on October 18, 2026, at Island Folk Cider House, 52 Nepean Street, Sydney. Admission is free.