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If you know horror, you know Hobo with a Shotgun. The blood-soaked, neon-drenched cult classic that started as a fake trailer and somehow became one of the most beloved pieces of exploitation filmmaking Canada has ever produced. And if you know Hobo, you should know the name John Davies, the writer behind it.
Davies has spent years building his reputation in the world of wild, visceral, hit-you-in-the-gut storytelling, and now he’s bringing that same energy to the page. His debut novella, MAN VS BEAR, is out now. I sat down with him to talk about where it all started, how a kid from Dartmouth ended up here, and what he actually wants from the people who pick it up.
Dartmouth, Nova Scotia Was the Original Horror Film
Before there was Hobo, there was a childhood in Dartmouth, that Davies describes as amazing, and, well, something out of a fever dream. It comes up early in our conversation and it becomes clear pretty fast that the stories that shaped him aren’t exactly the kind you hear at most dinner tables.
“Horror and those more insane sensibilities of life are just very ingrained in me,” he says. He grew up in a place he describes as having a kind of Gotham City energy underneath its coastal pleasantness. There was a criminal who broke into women’s houses just to watch them sleep for years before anyone caught him. There were encounters in the woods, strange neighbors, and an underlying current of something just being a little off. “It’s like Florida,” he says. “These coastal worlds. They’re beautiful and pleasant, but for some reason the salt water turns some people crazy.”
He doesn’t say it with bitterness. He says it the way someone does when they’ve made peace with the fact that their early life handed them a really good archive of wild stories to pull from. All of that weirdness, all those characters and crimes and strange little encounters, ended up feeding into his work. It feeds into MAN VS BEAR too, even if the connection isn’t always obvious on the surface.
The Trailer That Started Everything
For those who weren’t around for the origin story, Hobo with a Shotgun began as a mock trailer. Davies and his longtime collaborator Jason Eisener grew up making films together, the kind of renegade, shoot-first, figure-it-out-later filmmaking that gets you nearly kicked out of college and also apparently leads to cult infamy. They were the kind of filmmakers who would drag generators up mountains and film things they had no business filming, because that was just how they operated.
The opportunity came when an announcement dropped on Ain’t It Cool News. Robert Rodriguez was running a competition, looking for grindhouse-style fake trailers to potentially include alongside his project. Davies and Eisener jumped on it. “We all just grew up loving and making films,” Davies says. “We had this renegade approach because we grew up as kids simply making films and going out having fun. Do what you gotta do to make a movie.”
The rest is cult history. That low-budget Canadian nightmare of a trailer became a feature, the feature became a touchstone, and here we are. But Davies was never content to just rest on one story. He’s a writer, and eventually the page called.
What Is MAN VS BEAR
The setup is exactly what you want from something coming out of Davies’ brain. Mitch Jamison is the lead guitarist for Psycho Dave and the Flying Monkeys, a heavy-metal band from Vancouver. After his unhinged frontman starts taking over his life, Mitch ditches the tour bus and disappears into the remote woods.
One drunken swerve later and a five hundred pound mother grizzly has him in her sights. What follows is, as the book puts it, just claws, teeth, and a final solo played on shredded flesh. It’s available right now in print and Kindle on Amazon.
Writing Like Steinbeck, Thinking Like a Grindhouse Kid
The tone here is a genuine surprise, and Davies knows it. This isn’t straight gore for gore’s sake. He was thinking about Steinbeck when he wrote it. Not in a pretentious way, but in the way that someone who grew up on exploitation and bleak literary fiction realizes they’ve been drawing from both wells the whole time.
“I’ve always loved those endings that really hit you in the heart,” he says. “The Hobo dies at the end. That kind of thing. Something that really suits you and makes you think.” MAN VS BEAR leans that direction. It has the monsters and the blood and the flavor of his exploitation sensibilities, but it’s working toward something that lands like a gut punch rather than just a gross-out.
He also stripped the book way down in revision. The first draft was twice as long, more literary, more textured. He cut it because he wanted something that reads like darker bubble gum pulp, the kind of thing that’s easy to burn through in one sitting but stays with you after. “I like something that just gets you really good, really fast, and lingers,” he says. “Get in, get out, trust the audience.”
From Page to Screen, Maybe
Since we’re on iHorror, I had to ask: if MAN VS BEAR gets a film adaptation, who’s directing it?
Davies doesn’t hesitate for long. He mentions Harmony Korine. He circles around Werner Herzog, the guy behind Grizzly Man, which, honestly, makes complete sense the second he says it. “I’d want someone who can go into uncomfortable territory artfully,” he says. “Something with a European flavor. Those films tend to go somewhere darker and walk it with more grace.”
There’s also a level of the book he’s careful not to spoil that deals with loss, children, maternal love, and the kind of tragic inevitability where you know by the end that the protagonist was never going to win. “It’s a bleaky tale,” he says, “but there’s a glimmer.” He says this with the tone of someone who has thought very carefully about where the line is between bleak and broken, and decided to land just on the right side of it.
What He Wants From You
Davies is actively building something here. He’s been showing up on Reddit, talking to readers, answering questions, doing the kind of street-level promotion he grew up watching rappers do with tapes out of car trunks. He takes that seriously.
“I want people who trust me to entertain them,” he says. “Give it a shot. Give me feedback. Stay interested. I’m going to keep putting stuff out. I just want an honest, entertaining relationship with a large audience.”
And for anyone who wants to read it but can’t swing the cost right now, Davies is offering the book for free. Just email request a PDF copy, and he’ll get it to you. The point is getting the story out, not gatekeeping it behind a price point.
To request a free PDF copy of MAN VS BEAR, contact John Davies at: [Extrapulpybooks@gmail.com] MAN VS BEAR is available now on Amazon. It is short, it is mean, and if Davies is right about where his work is heading, this is just the beginning of something worth paying attention to. Check out iHorror’s coverage of extreme horror fiction for more from the wilder corners of the genre.
