I’ll go out on a limb and say that I have practically no love for rock radio, so I write this with something of a biased voice.

The roar so prevalent on Edmonton’s mainstream rock standby 100.3 The Bear has grown to sound like an industrial toilet flush to me—so much so that I find my wondering about the people on the other side of the speakers, and if they really like what they play.

100.3 The Bear touts itself as Canada’s number-one rock radio station, boasting the boost and break of Nickelback and other regrettable dreck like Linkin Park and the redundant Finger Eleven. 

Ugh. But it was also at The Bear that I recently got back in touch with Lindsey McNeill, an old acquaintance from high school. She’s a neo-feminist who dresses up like Nosferatu and makes short films at FAVA. She also works for The Bear, and according to her, Fearless Fred is an environmentalist with a soft spot for Rachmaninoff.

McNeill is the remarkable, petite girl in reception that doles out the station’s prizes. Oftentimes, the starry-eyed rig pigs who win pairs of tickets to upcoming events will offer her the other one (some chiefly to see her again). Now, Lindsay, what to make of all those Guantánamo-esque torture contests Paul Brown keeps running?

The Bear hasn’t been Lindsey’s only adventure in radio; she used to be with CJSR, and it’s this drastic contrast that prods me to ask her, “So why are you working for The Bear?”

“For our first bonding experience, my co-workers and I went to see a snuff film at the Black Dog,” she retorts.

In her other life, McNeill is a worker of the unreal. On her lunch breaks, she takes out her smooth-writer and notebook. The scribbles from her pen become the frames of a film; her subjects include death, loss, fear—and the fear of further death and loss. She asks the viewer if the dead hold more emotional viability than the people alive and kicking around us. She might wake up suddenly at 3 a.m. to jot something down, knowing full well she’ll have to wake up at 6 a.m. to bear the brunt of The Bear’s morning radio antics.

“There are times where I want to stab myself in the eye with my letter-opener, and times where my face hurts from all the forced smiles”, she says from her desk, flashing a sideways smile as she thinks of liquid latex and spirit gum.

But as night falls: dissolve to a scene of some hideous reptilian shape wriggling out from underneath a derelict mattress occupied by two entangled lovers. The beast’s skin practically tears as it escapes the tight squeeze between fabric and floor. It reaches with ghastly claws to the mingling tongues and throats, and then amidst the mounting tension someone in the background yells, “Cut!” 

Dressed quite literally to kill, McNeill plays the preying vampire in Travis Barton’s film Trespassing, shot on location at FAVA. Other than that, I’m unable to glean much information about the production from her. Instead, McNeill placates me with a tale of poorly aimed gore from a different project: “I was in a zombie film recently, and a jet of blood was supposed to hit me dead-on, but it missed by about a foot. I wasn’t pleased.”

Like Jacques Tati or Roman Polanski, McNeill knows the importance of theatrical experience to a filmmaker. She has a background in modern dance, and was one of the first in her earlier film studies groups to consciously incorporate movement into her projects. You can see traces of the former dancer in the way her monster fans its fingers and shrugs its shoulders. 

“There are times when I’m fearful that I will forever be a weekend filmmaker,” she laments, “becoming more complacent and comfortable with the daily grind to not worry about how I’m going to pay my rent. However, there’s also many surprising benefits about my job, like meeting people in the radio industry. And the free stuff.”

It’s two incongruent worlds of dudebros and death-throes that McNeill casually sweeps through. Who would ever suspect what creatures lurk underneath the skin of the sweet girl at the reception desk? McNeill is a testament to the Walter Mittyish notion that wherever there’s a desk, there’s usually a daydreamer.