It might seem strange that prolific horror movie director and editor Rob Grant would turn his attention during the pandemic to filming a coming-of-age film set in Canada in the 1980s.

But the overlap between the John Hughes films like The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller’s Day off and a slasher flick isn’t that far off.

“A good teenage coming-of-age story has a lot to do with horror movies in the sense that for a teenager, a lot of your concerns are kind of life or death,” said Grant.

That sense of fighting to find life underpins Grant’s latest work, This Too Shall Pass, which is having its Alberta premiere at the 2025 Calgary Underground Film Festival.

The premise for the film is that a 16-year-old Simon Benson lives two lives—one as a Mormon in upstate New York, and the other as a lover of rock and roll, the occasional joint, and girls—and that leads him to take a road trip across the border into Canada.

The film came about in 2021, as a result of Grant looking to do something different.

“I reached out to my manager and said, ‘what can I do here?’ [He said] have you thought about just writing something for now, and he introduced me to our now producer on the film, Michael Baker, who was Simon at 16, who had questions about his his life in the Mormon church, and then went on this crazy weekend with his friends that kind of turned into the basic plot of the movie,” he said.

The horrors of being a teen in the 1980s

He said that writing it like a horror film, where the elements of social status, relationship status with the opposite sex, and all of those elements that are so common in the genre also opened up the film in a different way.

It also helped Grant to flip the usual cliche, where road trips inevitably end up somewhere in the United States.

“For the actual Simon, it was a Canadian trip, and I tend to like to introduce, always introduce a bit of international flavour to my movies. I felt that having it move from the states to Canada opened it up a little more,” Grant said.

“Especially for the late 1980s, it made things a little better for me. Rather than sticking out in Canada, I also got to play with the opposite tropes of all Canadians are nice people, which is something that me and my other producer, Mike Peterson, really wanted to explore as well.”

A little bit of true-to-life as well for Grant, saying that as a director, he’s had more problems making films in the Canadian film industry than in the US.

“I just wanted to give myself a little bit of a little middle finger,” he said.

He said Canadian audiences were likely to find that very funny.

“‘Are Canadians not very fucking nice?’ That’s like one of the favourite and the biggest laughs in the movie. It does help that it was shot in Calgary, so a bunch of the crew will be very kind to it,” Grant said.

Undeniably Canadian, and Calgarian

Grant said that filming in the city was anything but the middle finger.

“My last three have all been there, so I love filming there. The crews are super sophisticated, they’ve all been trained and grew up on the major shows… they’ve got these great shops. Then they’re not jaded, like some of the other markets like Vancouver and Toronto, that are only kind of mainly service industry now,” he said.

“They still want to make interesting stuff. They still got it.”

What audiences will get with This Too Shall Pass is an instantly authentic look at the 1980s, including an all-star cast that fits the look of teens of the time.

“We got really lucky in that we had our casting director, Coco Kleppinger, came on board and got what we were going for, and understood that we also didn’t want to cast the 25 for the 18-year-old or the 25 for the 16-year-old.”

The film features rising star Maxwell Jenkins, who played Will Robinson in Netflix’s Lost in Space, alongside Vancouverite Ben Cockell, whom has played characters on multiple episodes of both Goosebumps and Superman and Lois. The cast is rounded out by Jeremy Ren Taylor (It, Big Sky), Aidan Laprete (The Pitt, The Wild), and Katie Douglas, who is also starring in CUFF 2025 closing film, Clowns in a Cornfield.

“I don’t know whether it’s just the state of what kind of films are getting made right now, but when we started putting the script out to agencies, we got a lot of excitement from the talent that wanted to audition, because they’re like, ‘oh, we don’t see scripts like this very often anymore,'” Grant said.

“I think that was a good validation for us, that we had written something that resonates with the younger audiences. I think we got lucky in that the talent was recognizing some interesting stuff that we were trying to do in the script.”

Grant said that when audiences in Calgary get to check out the film at CUFF, they’ll get the same kind of feeling that he got when he first saw Stand By Me and films of the like.

“There’s a lot of personal me in this movie, and I kind of feel like it’s come across on the screen. A lot of the same neuroses and problems and worries that I have in life are in Simon’s character, but I feel like they’re universal fears that we all kind of face,” he said.

This Too Shall Pass plays at the Globe Cinema on April 26, at 6:30 p.m., with Grant and local cast and crew in the audience for a Q&A session following the movie. Tickets are on sale at www.calgaryundergroundfilm.org/2025/this-too-shall-pass.