Vancouver Island-Shot Mockumentary “Hunting Matthew Nichols” Is a Spooky Love Letter to B.C.

A B.C.-made mockumentary just got its Canadian theatrical release (on April 10, 2026), two years after debuting at the Newport Beach Film Festival.

Hunting Matthew Nichols, a Canadian indie film by Winnipeg director Markian Tarasiuk, tells the story of Tara as she tries to find answers that might lead her to brother, who disappeared on Vancouver Island 20 years previous. A documentary team follows her journey, and what audiences see is the making of that documentary in a found footage style.

Now finding a home in theatres locally and nationally, the film originally made waves when it won Best Found Footage Feature and Best Editing at 2024’s FilmQuest, as well as Best Director at the 2024 Blood in the Snow Film Festival in Toronto.

The film starts off with a rather unsettling statistic splayed across a black screen that says  “Vancouver Island has the highest number of missing persons per capita in Canada. Nearly twice the national average.”

This is a real statistic Tarasiuk drew inspiration from.

“That’s a true statistic,” says Tarasiuk, “and because this was an exercise in reality, that was one more way of bringing this movie closer to that line of reality that I was going for with the project.”

Part of that realism in this faux documentary comes from being filmed on location on Vancouver Island. The Island is a beautiful place, but there’s a darkness that most people don’t get to see, evidenced by the aforementioned statistic. Capturing that vibe was a necessity for the filmmakers.

“I described the island and the forest as the other character in this movie because it has a very specific feeling,” Tarasiuk details. “All the shots of Vancouver Island at the start of the film have sun in them. All the shots at the midway point are all cloud and rain. That is Vancouver Island to me, that it’s got the sun when you go there in the summer on a sunny day, the most gorgeous place in the world, and we talk about that at the startup like it’s God’s country, it’s gorgeous, but then if you experience Vancouver Island in the winter, it’s a very different feeling. It is claustrophobic. It’s heavy, it’s dark and it’s hard to be there, especially now adding the isolation [of some of those communities] on top of it.”

The core of the film’s theme, though, is family; There’s an undying persistence of one sister to get to the bottom of what happened to Matthew Nichols. Sometimes answers only lead to more questions. Tara’s confrontation when she questions new revelations turned out to be Tarasiuk’s favourite scene, even without the scares.

“I love horror. I love genre bending, but that scene to me is dramatic, and it feels like a play,” he says. “That’s where I come from, is the theatre, so being able to direct that scene and see these two actors just sit across from each other and act the way they did and have that argument was my favourite thing to watch.”

So, viewers will probably be asking: Is this the end of Matthew Nichols? Not so, says Tarasiuk, who’s working on a sequel. 

“The answers are out there,” he says. “People say Vancouver Island is very haunted because of this opening to the underworld, it’s the gateway. And that’s our tie into the lore of [a sequel]; what we wanna get more into is: Why is Vancouver Island so spiritual?”

Hunting Matthew Nichols is currently screening at

• SilverCity Victoria Cinemas
• The Vernon Towne Theatre