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“How-well-do-you-know-your-neighbours?” has become a bit of a thematic trope for thrillers and horror films. But the suburbs have always seemed a particularly rich setting when it comes to these sorts of creepy stories, offering an unsettlingly slick and uniform backdrop to mask unsavoury impulses that linger beneath the peaceful facade.

Red Letter Day, which Macgowan wrote, directed and produced, takes place in a neighbourhood in Calgary that is suddenly overrun with chaos and paranoia. Residents receive red envelopes from a mysterious organization. Each letter contains an assignment to kill a neighbour or risk being killed by said neighbour themselves. Aided by social media, the panic slowly but surely spreads as seemingly peaceful suburbanites begin to show their true colours.

“We’re constantly being pitted against each other, so people have these natural rivalries set up in their heads,” Magowan says. “So if there was a fuse lit, where they were given permission to let their darker side out, how many people would follow through with that? I don’t think there would be that many, but you would only need one to 20 before other folks would start following their lead.”

Still, it is a bit of a high-concept premise. So Red Letter Day, which opens Oct. 25 at the Globe Cinema, presents this acceleration to chaos with a darkly comic bent. We see the horror through the eyes of a family new to the cloistered community of Harrison Homes. Single mom Melanie (Dawn Van de Schoot) is hoping to create a stable life for her teens, including 19-year-old goth daughter Madison (Hailey Foss) and smart-alecky 17-year-old son Timothy (Kaeleb Zain Gartner). Timothy and Madison, perhaps possessing sharper instincts than their adult counterparts, see the new hood as a bit strange and soulless. When the red letters arrive at the Edwards house, the family is divided about how seriously to take them.