Pause and take a moment to process the immense and ominous presence of Kingston Penitentiary. Located on the edge of the city’s core, amidst some of Kingston’s most beautiful neighbourhoods and lake views, the vast Auburn-style prison is almost 190 years old and has housed many of the country’s most notorious prisoners.
Without a doubt, prisons are an important part of Kingston’s fabric – there are six other penitentiaries currently in operation. For creative minds, the juxtaposition of a seemingly pristine, historic city with a dark, mysterious underbelly creates a beautiful dynamic, for both the fictional and non-fictional opportunities it inspires. And within the arena of film production and filmmaking, there is no shortage of examples of artistic undertakings that make use of the penitentiary’s mystique, intimidating scale, and sizeable grounds.
After Kingston Penitentiary was decommissioned in 2013 (with inmates moved to other prisons in the region) and then re-opened to new cultural possibilities in 2016, location scouts, production managers, and directors have flocked to the city to explore and imagine what they might create and construct with KP as the backdrop.
“As soon as I saw that that was a possibility — there are other decommissioned prisons all over America — but this one is so unique that I was able to sell Taylor [Sheridan] and Paramount on shooting there … in the middle of a pandemic,” Hugh Dillon told The Whig’s Peter Hendra in 2021. “But they loved it. …The city has the architecture and the geography, and the history is so incredibly cinematic, it spoke to me even before I knew what [the project] was.”
Dillon – a Kingston local who first found fame as singer for the Headstones – was talking about Mayor of Kingstown, a gritty drama about the business of incarceration he’d had in his head for several decades before it finally came to fruition, first airing in 2021. The series stars Jeremy Renner, Dianne Wiest, and Dillon.
Alias Grace, a CBC series based on Margaret Atwood’s novel, tells the story of Grace Marks, an Irish servant who, in real life, was incarcerated in Kingston Penitentiary in the 1840s for the murders of her employer and his housekeeper. The prison scenes were shot at KP, and Canada’s Penitentiary Museum across the street was used as the warden’s house (which it was in reality after it was built in the 1870s). The series was written by Sarah Polley and directed by Mary Harron.
Team members at Improbable Escapes, an escape room company in Kingston, are experts at creating immersive worlds, so it wasn’t a big stretch to extend their expertise into the world of film. Over the past couple of years, the creative team now known as Visual Menace has worked on two feature films in Kingston – Angel Three and Den Mother Crimson. Melissa Eapen-Bell, who started Improbable Escapes in 2015 with Emma Rochon, says Visual Menace now provides a full-service art department to productions shooting locally.
For spy thriller Angel Three (2022), Visual Menace created a one-room set – a transport office in 1987 East Berlin – in Kingston Penitentiary and also used a cell in The Pen for the film’s prison scenes. “For that, we had to make sure we didn’t destroy any of the historical elements in the cell. It was a really interesting experience for us. Devon on our team did an incredible job of grunging up that set and making it look so disgusting but without damaging anything,” says Eapen-Bell.
To do this, she covered the walls with plastic wrap and used a drywall compound over the wrap to create a new covering that could easily be pulled off when they were finished shooting. Visual Menace also worked closely with Correctional Service Canada and teamed up with the carpentry shop at Collins Bay Institution (through a pilot project) to create the flats for the office set’s walls. “The inmates and those on parole/probation working in the shop built the walls – they were great people and really interested in what we were doing, and had knowledge of the building we were working in, which was very helpful.”
For Den Mother Crimson, an end-to-end Kingston production released in 2023, Visual Menace worked on a massive one-room set in the west end at James Media, transforming it into a vast sci-fi world, complete with tunnels and bifurcating door. Visual Menace also took part in the Slaight Music Video Showcase, which premiered at the 2023 Kingston Canadian Film Festival, working on a music video with Outpost 12 for the band Kasador.
Many stories, some eventually becoming films, have also been created within the prison walls. Serial bank robber Roger Caron spent time in many Canadian prisons, including Kingston Pen, Millhaven, and Collins Bay, and taught himself to write while serving time. His memoir, Go-Boy!, unveils life on the inside and his escape from Collins Bay (Go-Boy! is what prisoners yelled when another made a run for it). Filmmaker Rob Lindsay turned Go-Boy! into a documentary film.
