The subtitle of this paper is a reference to Carl Sagan's 1995 book The Demon Haunted World in which he advocates rationalism as a way of dispelling the superstition that still haunts the modern world. In the work of Canadian horror writer Gemma Files, demons, and other supernatural creatures, really exist but haunt the world because most people dismiss them as superstition. Many of these beings are predatory and the few humans who know of their existence realise that humanity is not necessarily top of the food chain. Because of this a rationalist world-view is inadequate, and a wider definition of nature – one that acknowledges and, therefore, accommodates the supernatural - is required for survival.

In this paper I discuss Files' 2014 collection of interlocking short stories We Will All Go Down Together and her novel Experimental Film (2015) which is set in the same universe, with the majority of events in both taking place in modern-day Toronto. The former focuses on clans of 'supernatural' beings, who dwell on the margins of consensual reality but regularly infiltrate the human world, while the latter deals with the attempt by a forgotten demonic figure from Slavic folklore to re-enter reality. Both texts involve investigations into missing people and so intersect with crime fiction, a genre grounded in rationalism; however, that the disappearances involve 'supernatural' events, and that some of the investigators are magicians or psychics, places them in the tradition of the 'occult detective' sub-genre which requires a movement beyond the limits of a rationalist world-view.

The interactions with the human world by 'supernatural' beings, and the tension between a rationalist world-view and the truth about such beings – that they exist outside of the conventional taxonomy of nature - is central to Files' work. She also addresses the myth of Canada as the United States' better mannered, more peaceful neighbour in both texts, and in the essay 'Under These Rocks and Stones', We Will All Go Down Together's afterword, in which she writes:

Toronto and Ontario can be exactly as scary as anywhere more exotic, if you know where to look … scarier, maybe. Because, on the surface, it all seems so pleasant.(375)

As I show, Files uses the horror genre's capacity for estrangement to debunk the myth of 'Canadian-ness' from a postcolonial perspective and reveal the brutal reality of Canada's history – and its present – which the myth conceals, just as her investigators confront the occult truth of nature that rationalism denies.