A wing and a scare
DQ hears from the cast and creative team behind Québécois crime drama Corbeaux (Crows) about how they blended horror, the supernatural and local folklore to tell this story of two detectives on the hunt for a serial killer.
More than 250 years ago, a woman named Marie-Josephte Corriveau was condemned to death after being found guilty of murdering her second husband.
Over the decades since she was hanged and her body was left on display in an iron cage for several weeks, she entered Québécois folklore as ‘La Corriveau,’ with her memory becoming distorted by questions over how many men she killed and allegations of witchcraft. But was she really a villainous serial killer, or was she actually the victim of injustice and misogyny at the hands of an unfair legal system?
The legend of La Corriveau has long been a subject of fascination in art and literature – and television is no exception, following the recent release of Québécois series Corbeaux (Crows) on local streamer Illico+.
Produced and distributed by Encore Television, the six-part series opens in the wake of a series of gruesome murders. Gabrielle, a rebellious young police officer who has recently arrived in the city, must team up with veteran detective Clémence to find the killer. But as the number of male bodies continues to grow – the victims are all found with crow bones in their mouths – they face a race against time to solve the case while also facing their demons, leaving them to consider whether ghosts are real and if they can return to carry out their revenge.
Blending a dark crime procedural with elements of horror – and the supernatural – the series was created by Pierre-Louis Sanschagrin (Contre-offre) who for many years had wanted to use the legend of La Corriveau as the basis for a television series. “It was the initial inspiration for the story,” he tells DQ. “It’s something I’ve been thinking of, so for a long time I’ve been asking myself how to drive a story starting from that point. But I was happy when I had the idea of an investigation and some crimes built around that historical event.”
From the outset, Sanschagrin partnered with director Stéphane Lapointe to create a drama with a central police storyline that was infused with horror, hoping to elicit strong emotions from the audience. “I wanted them to be frightened, to be scared, which are not the kinds of feelings you always feel when you’re watching a classical crime show,” the writer says. “So, yes, it was definitely part of the DNA of the show from day one.”
Yet Corbeaux isn’t in a rush to reveal its true intentions. “The story was built to start as if it were a classical show, but more and more the layers add up and you find out it’s something stranger and stranger,” Sanschagrin says.
Central to the story is the relationship between Gabrielle and Clémence, played by Mylène Mackay (Avant le crash) and Pascale Bussières (Transplant). Gabrielle initially seems cold and unempathetic and struggles to communicate with Clémence, who is nearing retirement from the force. But she’s also harbouring past trauma that will come to the fore during the course of their investigation.
“All writers work differently. For Corbeaux, I started to build the investigation first and then I started to think about which characters could fit best in that specific story,” Sanschagrin says. “Obviously there is a theme about violence to women, so I thought it was organic to put two women as the main characters so they could be affected more by the investigation and what’s going on.
“I tried to build two different characters that will clash but also complete each other. I wanted Gabrielle to be more intuitive and impulsive, while Clémence is more laid back and experienced, so Gabrielle has everything to prove and the other one is close to retiring. I thought it made a good, interesting dynamic for the duo.”
Reading the scripts, Bussières admits she was taken aback by the horror within the story, which is played naturalistically at the outset. “Even though the story shifts to a surreal tone by the end, to have this uncertainty about whether this is real or unreal really attracted me,” she says. “I like the distance in age [between Gabrielle and Clèmence] and the fact Clèmence doesn’t want to go out of this life [as a police officer] because she really likes it, and also it’s somehow a way to avoid the pain of her own drama. She probably sees part of herself in Gabrielle, and that reflection between the two is interesting. We had a lot of fun, Mylène and I, exploring that connection.”
“Gabrielle isn’t the most sympathetic person, and I had to work a lot on that,” Mackay notes. “I liked the tone between them, which is really psychological and realistic. What also interested me was the spiritual part of it, which is also part of my own beliefs. It’s something I’m questioning in life, like those souls – do they come back, and can you come back in another body and have revenge? We go into horror but the question at the end of the series really captivates me.
“To work with Pascale, who is such a wonderful actress, it was the best thing that can happen to you, so I was really happy. Stéphane and I have done four series together so I know he’s amazing and how he would go deep into everything, and he gave me that part because she’s really the opposite of my personality. She has no empathy, she’s a monomaniac, she’s really analytic. It’s a thriller also, so we get really into the thriller vibe. There are actually many different layers to it.”
That the series is inspired by La Corriveau wasn’t lost on the actors. “It’s amazingly feminist,” Bussières says of the series. “It’s revenge for the way women were the subject of corruption. I wasn’t aware she was suspended in this iron cage with crows coming to eat her. It was really exciting joining historical facts with very contemporary issues and questions about female sexuality.”
Writing the series proved to be particularly complicated for Sanschagrin, who employs flashbacks to reveal elements of the story as well as a structure that uses episode five to reveal to viewers the origins of the killings.
“The writing was very complex and challenging because I had to have the whole puzzle in mind,” he says. “There’s a big backstory, so it made the writing hard because we needed to find the layers between the characters. You also find out in every episode that there is another part of the story you didn’t suspect.”
“But when you don’t have lots of means, we have to work and work on the story,” producer Patrick Lowe says of making the most of the show’s limited budget. “The greater the story is, you will be able to have a great show. Pierre is a fantastic writer, and he worked a lot so that even though we have a great director and he did a fantastic job, it’s always the story, story, story.
The producer adds: “With what budget we have, it’s always a little miracle [a show is made]. People put in so much effort into every stage of the production, from the writing to post-production. It’s a little miracle each time.”
Working with director Lapointe, Sanschagrin found that one challenge of writing Corbeaux was conveying the right atmosphere. To make his point, he would suggest pieces of music or horror movie references, including The Shining and other titles based on novels by Stephen King. Lapointe reciprocated with his own influences, namely The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie and The Omen.
The director (Les Mutants, Faits divers) joined the project three years before shooting began, when Sanschagrin wrote to him outlining the idea for the series and asking if it would interest him.
“I liked the tone,” Lapointe says. “It’s very rare for television series here [in Québec] to go that deep into fear and horror, that are more psychological. I was very excited by that. Also, I was surprised the broadcaster gave the green light to that, because it’s a bit radical. It goes into fear with no escape and no smiles or distance [from the horror]. Shows like American Horror Story always have a smile or it looks a bit artificial. The actors dived into the horror of this. It was a great project. I love to direct actors, and we were capable of going very deep here. I loved that.”
Filming the series, he drew on 1970s horror to play with zoom and colours to create a psychological “strangeness” to the story, but always keeping it grounded in reality. “I didn’t want to make the things too artsy or too stylish. I wanted it to stay real and to be very connected and not to feel the distance as if it’s a stage play,” Lapointe continues. “I wanted to be as realistic as possible. But I also like it when all the elements are there to describe the interior of the character. I wanted the set and the music to talk about them, to use everything to describe their psychology. I didn’t want it to look like a joke or fake or artificial. The line is very thin, and it can look like a caricature or a joke when you play with spirits and witchcraft. So that was the challenge. I think we managed to do it.”
Series producers Lowe and Jaime Alberto Tobon were equally excited at the prospect of bringing horror to Québec. Filming for all six episodes took place over approximately 32 days, predominantly in Montreal but also in Pointe-Lévy, near Québec City, where the body of La Corriveau was raised after her execution.
“We wanted to build a show where the investigation was not only about one murder, but many murders in a short period of time,” Lowe says. “That was part of the DNA from day one, so we wanted the investigators to be under a very high level of pressure. People who watch the show feel that.”
“It was fun because we don’t have that kind of show very often in Montreal, so it was a different shoot,” Tobon says. “With Stéphane, we had to quickly find the hooks of the show. But after that, we had to deal with the money and everything. But even if it was a difficult shoot, and it was very emotional for the actresses, it was always fun. People were happy to come to the set. Post-production was also fun because then we could see everything. Stéphane put all the layers with the music. The show was getting better and better at every step of the production.”
On set, “we laughed a lot,” says Lapointe. “But it was necessary,” notes Bussières. “It was always a shock on set to arrive with a new body.The humour was there. We needed some comic relief. But the speed of the shoot was a big challenge. We had to do some complex scenes and complex storytelling in a very short time.”
That tight filming schedule included numerous night shoots and finished with two “intense” weeks filming at the police station. “They were all the big scenes with lots of lines. It was very tough,” Lapointe says.
Bussières picks up: “Even for us to understand the [murder investigation] board with all the pictures and all the information, we really had to understand what we were saying. It’s interesting but it’s complex to shoot.”
Corbeaux quickly won over Illico+ subscribers when it debuted in 2024, attracting the highest number of unique customers during its first month on the platform and securing the best completion rate for a first season last year. The team behind the series will be hoping for similar success among international viewers after it was selected for the Berlinale Series Market screenings during the Berlin International Film Festival in February this year.
“The cast is amazing and each of them delivers great, deep and true performances,” Lapointe says. “The way we treat the horror, the fear, it’s touching something. There’s something darker here.”
Mackay adds: “I had a lot of comments from people who are not horror fans who really got into the series, because there’s the human side, the feminist side, the female gaze. This is quite unusual.”
“It’s a very local story but also international because every part of the world has its own witches and hidden stories,” says Tobon.
“The subject of the show, violence against women, sadly it’s still happening. It’s also part of the message behind the spectacular story. There’s a real message and a real situation, a sad one. It’s part of what reaches people who watch the show.”
tagged in: Corbeaux, Crows, Illico, Jaime Alberto Tobon, Mylène Mackay, Pascale Bussières, Patrick Lowe, Pierre-Louis Sanschagrin, Stéphane Lapointe