Director: Patrick Lussier
Cast: Jaime King (Sarah), Michael Roberts McKee (Jason)
Director: Kevin Greutert
Cast: Sebastian Pigott (Brad), Jon Cor (Ryan), Anne Greene (Dina)
Director: Steven Quale
Cast: Jacqueline MacInnes Wood (Olivia)
In Saw 3D, two men and a woman are trapped inside a storefront window. Each is strapped to a circular saw, with Brad and Ryan facing each other and with Dina suspended above them. Either man could save himself and Dina by pushing the saw so that it will cut through and kill his opponent, as she encourages each in turn to do. However, when the men realise Dina has slept with both of them, they decide she isn’t worth saving. Taking their seemingly justified revenge against the ‘lying bitch’, they allow the saw to slice through Dina. Indeed, the punishment Dina receives appears apt for a two-timing woman. Instead of being an innocent angel above them, she has used her sexual wiles to manipulate them into thinking she loves them. The emergence effect of 3D emphasises her breasts pushing out of her pink top as the men look up at her from below, and the saw cuts through her bare midriff as a fitting punishment for this female double-crosser, as if to divide her between the two men she has cheated on. ‘I think we’re breaking up with you, Dina,’ Ryan quips sardonically. And yet, despite the moral condemnation of Dina, the 3D also makes us feel physical compassion for her. As the saw draws nearer and nearer to her, we see its spinning blade jutting out at her from her point of view, just as we also see the saw blades approaching Brad and Ryan from their perspectives. Thus the scene has us share Dina’s fear of bodily injury as well as Brad and Ryan’s. As the saw cuts into Dina’s stomach, blood splatters on the two men’s faces and into ours, as the arterial spray seems to shoot out of the screen and into our laps. We may think that Dina deserves to be judged and executed, but the 3D forces us to face the fact that, in feeling that way, we, too, have blood on our hands.
The sight of that approaching saw makes a lacerating impression, reminding us of how often 3D horror is an ophthalmologist’s nightmare of assaults on our vision. Later in Saw 3D, a woman is clamped to a metal platform that gradually rotates so that her eyes are brought closer and closer to the pointed ends of two steel rods. We view these sharp spikes projecting outwards towards us as seen from her point of view. Eventually, a shot of the woman in profile shows the spikes piercing her eyeballs and penetrating her skull through her eye sockets. This is the scene that garnered the film a Golden Raspberry Award nomination for the ‘Worst Eye-Gouging Misuse of 3D’, but by horror-movie standards, the scene is effective in its slow build-up of fear and its squishy and splatterrific climax. ‘In eye-popping 3D’ was the tagline for this Saw movie.
It is no accident that 3D horror films often include assaults on characters’ eyes, which are stand-ins for our own ocular orbs. Cartoon characters are sometimes shown with eyes extending outwards on their stalks – a figurative way of depicting their shock and surprise at something they’ve just seen. And the startle effect in 3D horror is typically created by objects jumping out at us from the screen, as if in mirror image of our own distended eyeballs. In My Bloody Valentine 3D, teens are being terrorised by a pickaxe-wielding killer wearing a gas mask and miner’s helmet. Sarah’s eyes bug out in fright when she sees a man in a gas mask, but as he removes it, his laughing face reveals him to be merely a boy named Jason who was throwing a scare into her. However, this brief comic relief is then disrupted when a pickaxe, having been swung and sunk into the back of Jason’s head, pushes his eye out of its socket towards the viewer, with his eyeball stuck on the pick’s point. This literally eye-popping moment displays the shock felt by Jason, Sarah and us as we suddenly realise that the real killer is standing behind Jason, having put out his eye and darkened his vision for good, intending to come for us next. The killer smashes a light bulb with his pickaxe and then shines the headlamp on his miner’s helmet directly into Sarah’s eyes and ours, creating a blinding effect with the bright beam of light. ‘You can’t get closer than this’ – the movie’s tagline – suggests that these attacks on characters’ eyes are a way of doubling 3D horror’s assault on our own gaze, of bringing us nearer to ocular injury and destruction.
In regular ‘2D’ films, the screen acts as an invisible ‘fourth wall’ separating spectators from the action, securing us in our position as mere onlookers. The jump scares of 3D are often achieved by breaking the fourth wall, with the shattering of glass as one way of having objects seem to burst out at us through the screen. In My Bloody Valentine 3D, the killer hurls his pickaxe at the windshield of a truck in which a terrified Sarah is seated. The axe embeds itself in the fractured glass, with the point of the pick poking through at us in an emergence effect, just inches from Sarah’s eye. By appearing to break forth from the screen and invade our viewing space, the 3D projectile targets us as part of the onslaught, inducing bodily fear for our safety. In another scene, a car with two teens in it crashes in the woods. The pointed end of a large tree branch breaks through the front windshield, causing them to duck, and then it smashes through the rear window glass, causing us to duck. As noted by Boxoffice, ‘Horror is a perfect genre for 3D because it amplifies the terror by allowing audiences to be fully immersed in the environment.’109
By breaking the frame and thrusting pointy objects at our eyes, 3D pop-outs work to physically involve us, but at the same time they distance us, too, by reminding us that we are only watching a movie. After wincing at the sight of characters being pierced and impaled, we can laugh in relief at the realisation that our eyes and bodies are still intact, that we are apart from – and not a part of – the mayhem on screen. Viewing 3D horror, we are alternately absorbed by and disconnected from the fear and suffering we witness. During the laser eye surgery of a young woman named Olivia in Final Destination 5 3D, she is so nervous that she twists the head of the teddy bear she is holding until one eye pops out. Our laughter fades quickly as we watch from her point of view as the laser gun above malfunctions, sending a searing beam of red light down to slice into her eye. Half blinded and reeling in panic, Olivia staggers around the room, and in a ‘banana peel’ moment of high comedy, her shoe slips on the teddy bear’s fallen eye. Less humorously, this causes her to fall out of the window and smash into the windshield of a car below, the impact of which leads her own eyeball to pop out and roll towards us into the street, where it stares at us, pupil dilating, before being crushed by a passing vehicle. Looking destruction in the eye, we may feel that ‘Death has never been closer’ (as the film’s tagline puts it), but we can also say that death seems further away from us than ever, something we can watch and laugh at, for her eye is not ‘I’.110
Director: Alexandre Aja
Cast: Steven R McQueen (Jake), Kelly Brook and Riley Steele (Nude Swimmers), Gianna Michaels (Parasailing Woman), Jerry O’Connell (Derrick)
Lecherous leering and punishing guilt go together as surely as teens and horror, and 3D films are no exception. In this film, teenage Jake watches through the window of a glass-bottomed boat as two nude women perform an undulating ballet together underwater. But while he enjoys the eye-popping sight of curvaceous flanks and bodacious ta-tas, his ears receive a phone call from his mother, who is also the town sheriff. His head is thus divided between bulging video of jiggling flesh and intrusive audio which interrupts his visual pleasure. What Jake would love to do is dive in and ogle these ‘naked honeys’ up-close, but another diver who does plunge in ends up being attacked by piranhas. As we see his severed eye float towards us in a pop-out effect, a passing piranha gobbles it up – no more leering looks at women for him!
In another scene, an excited Jake uses a phallic camcorder to film the ‘flying ta-tas’ of a woman parasailing. Feeling guilty, he misses the moment when her breasts pop out of her bikini top and then protrude below the surface of the water, as seen from below by ravenous piranhas. Here the film asks us to consider whether the male craving for mammaries – the reduction of women to meat – might not be that different from the piranhas’ predatory hunger. Now that we have seen her topless, why not bottomless as well? As if in sardonic answer to our voracious sexual appetite, when the parasailing woman is again lifted out of the water, she is bottomless in the sense that her lower half has been eaten away by piranhas. Unlike the guilt-ridden Jake, wannabe pornographer Derrick has no qualms about his sexploitative lust for female flesh. It seems fitting, then, that when the piranhas devour his lower half, one of the razor-toothed fish spits out his severed penis at us in the viewing audience, as if to castrate our ogling eyes.
Director: John Gulager
Cast: Danielle Panabaker (Maddy), Katrina Bowden (Shelby), Jean-Luc Bilodeau (Josh), Meagan Tandy (Ashley), Paul James Jordan (Travis)
In the classic slasher films, teens are often killed just before, during or after sex, as if their deaths are provoked by a fear of parental punishment, internalised guilt or adolescent anxiety about each other’s unfamiliar bodies. Piranha 3DD deals with the latter, prompting us to consider what difference 3D makes when it comes to the female fear of penetration and the male dread of dismemberment. While female friends Maddy and Shelby are sitting on a jetty with their spread legs dangling in the water, they are frightened by piranhas swimming up towards them. As the girls flee, two of the wooden boards on the pier begin to separate, leaving Shelby with her legs straddling an open expanse of water. From her terrified point of view, we look down to see one of the phallic fish leaping out of the water towards her crotch in a ‘cominatcha’ effect. In another scene that has Shelby and her boyfriend, Josh, skinny-dipping together in the lake, she says, ‘I just felt something against me. Is that you? … Ow! What are you doing?’ Underwater, we see piranhas thrusting themselves forward towards us and between her legs, accompanied by a noise that sounds like a baseball going into a catcher’s mitt. By representing intercourse as penetration by a piranha, the film both acknowledges female fears of the male sex and defuses those fears by making them seem absurd. 3D exaggerates the terror, augmenting it only to diminish it.
The piranha turns out to be an equal opportunity symbol when it comes to anxiety over erotic activity. In a scene where Shelby and Josh make love, ripples in her belly indicate a piranha swimming around inside her as if it were a deadly sperm deposited there by him. Then a crunching sound, followed by an ‘in-yer-face’ view of the piranha attached to the end of Josh’s erection, shows his fear of Shelby’s sex as a vagina dentata. After this shot of the protruding piranha, we see Josh grab a knife and swing it downwards in a self-castration with blood spatter coming at his face and ours, confronting us with the deadly consequences of sex with Shelby. ‘What the hell did you do to me?’ he accuses her. And yet the dismemberment of Josh is so over the top that it discredits the very fear it depicts. By literalising the female sex as a man-eating piranha, the film pokes fun at gynophobia, as in the later scene where Shelby quite blatantly says, ‘Josh cut off his penis because something came out of my vagina.’
In another scene, kinky Ashley handcuffs her boyfriend, Travis, and then uses her teeth to undo the drawstring of his shorts prior to having sex. When the van they are in begins to sink into the lake, he is trapped by the cuffs and subjected to attack by sharp-toothed piranhas, resulting in a 3D ‘out-of-the-screen’ shot where he thrusts the bloody stump of his flesh-eaten arm out at Ashley and at us. The scene brings into sharp relief the male fear of women as the devouring and castrating sex while also making ghoulish fun of this fear.
Director: Joe Dante
Cast: Chris Massoglia (Dane), Nathan Gamble (Lucas)
Director: Dario Argento
Cast: Unax Ugalde (Harker)
Director: Douglas Aarniokoski
Cast: Katrina Bowden (Danni), Melanie Scrofano (Rachel), Paz de la Huerta (Abby)
Director: Gil Kenan
Cast: Kyle Catlett (Griffin)
While most stereoscopic scares involve sudden protuberances jutting out from the screen, a more subtle use of 3D can induce a deeper sense of creeping dread. In Poltergeist 3D, when a boy named Griffin backs slowly away from a mysteriously rolling baseball, a supernaturally stacked house of cards looms in the extreme foreground just behind his shoulders, making us feel that some evil entity has crept up on him and is about to topple his happy home. In another scene, Griffin looks down to see a red ball on a string being drawn between his legs and behind him, where it is revealed to be a retractable nose that snaps back into place on the face of a spooky clown. As the terrified boy bends down to watch the ‘ball drop’ between his spread legs, leading to an inverted shot of his world turned upside-down, the 3D emphasises the physicality of his experience, positioning us to share his pubertal fear of bodily changes.
3D can heighten our proprioceptive awareness of our bodies in an eerie or perilous space. When Griffin peers into a dark closet, it seems to recede into the far depths as if trying to suck him into the unknown. In The Hole 3D, brothers Dane and Lucas enter a closet and discover a ladder whose rungs seem to stretch upwards into endless night, figuring the fears they must face and surmount. In Dracula 3D, following an attack by the vampire, a weakened Jonathan Harker struggles to descend a spiral staircase, as the additional spatial amplitude of the steps twisting away below him helps to convey his disorientation within this unfamiliar and hostile place. Unlike the intrusive images of negative parallax (objects that appear to pop out in front of the screen), these ‘extensive’ effects deploy 3D in a more subtle way, using stereoscopic vision to convey a sense of sinister space opening up behind the screen and pulling the viewer in. According to the creators of The Hole 3D, their goal was to ‘think how far in to the picture can we go’:111 ‘If this is a scary [place] with fear all around, you want the fear to be all around the theatre – and the best way to do that is to make [viewers] feel like they’re in the picture. So most of the 3D is not the “throwing things out of the screen” 3D – it’s a “drawing you into the picture” kind of feel.’112
The dual capability of 3D – to bulge in your face or to extend into depth of space – can be disturbingly ambiguous, for it is not always clear what is near and what is far or where the threat is coming from. In Poltergeist 3D, when a tree branch breaks through a window into Griffin’s bedroom, the boy runs out of the room, closing the door behind him. The mirror on the back of the door shows us the tree’s claw-like hand reaching out for him, and it appears to be simultaneously protruding from the screen to grab us and extending into the space beyond the closed door to grasp Griffin. The tree’s reach knows no bounds; its menace is everywhere. When Lucas in The Hole 3D peers out of his bedroom window at night, his abusive father appears to be standing outside in the dark – or is it his father’s reflection in the window that the boy sees, which means the menacing man is standing right behind Lucas in his bedroom? Further depth is added to this scene when we realise that Lucas could grow up to become a violent man like his father, as figured by the stereoscopic overlay of his father’s reflection upon his own in the window. Finally, in Nurse 3D, as Danni is Skyping with her friend Rachel, the laptop monitor shows Abby, a crazed nurse with a hypodermic needle, creep up behind Rachel’s back. ‘Rachel, look behind you!’ Danni warns, frantically motioning with her hands as if she could somehow reach behind her friend to ward off the threat. But despite the three-dimensionality of the image that makes Rachel and Abby seem present in the flesh, they are far removed from Danni, as the camera shows by arcing around to a side view of the laptop screen to reveal the empty space behind it. This confusion between surface and depth becomes even worse when we realise that Abby is really stalking Danni, so as Danni peers at her laptop monitor, she might as well be looking into a mirror and warning herself about the crazed nurse coming up behind her with that needle. Threatening objects on the screen are actually closer than they appear.
Director: Hideo Nakata
Cast: Hitomi Kuroki (Yoshimi), Rio Kanno (Ikuko), Mirei Oguchi (Mitsuko)
Director: Walter Salles
Cast: Jennifer Connelly (Dahlia), Ariel Gade (Ceci), John C Reilly (Estate Agent), Pete Postlethwaite (Superintendent), Matt Lemche and Edward Kennington (Boys), Dougray Scott (Kyle), Tim Roth (Lawyer)
Yoshimi is a single mother whose recent divorce has required her to return to work. When she is repeatedly late to pick up her five-year-old daughter, Ikuko, after school, Yoshimi’s dereliction triggers memories of her own neglectful mother, which she herself is afraid of becoming. This fear begins to haunt her, taking form as the ghost of a girl, Mitsuko, who used to live in the apartment above Yoshimi and Ikuko. When Mitsuko’s mother abandoned her, the unsupervised girl ended up drowning in the building’s rooftop water tank. Now, as Yoshimi spends less and less time with her daughter due to work, a damp stain on their apartment ceiling begins to leak, with water drops gradually building to a virtual downpour. The warm baths Ikuko used to take with her mother turn into cold tears as the child feels increasingly abandoned, and the ghostly arms of Mitsuko reach out in an attempt to drown Ikuko in the bathtub. Yoshimi believes that the only way to save her daughter, Ikuko, is to become a full-time mother to Mitsuko, and so Yoshimi dies in the flooding waters so that she can spend eternity as a ghost caring for the ghost girl. Needing and possibly wanting to work but unable to do so without feeling that she is a neglectful mother, Yoshimi fails to find balance in her life. To avoid becoming like her often-absent mother, Yoshimi swings to the opposite extreme, sacrificing her entire life to motherhood. To make up for the past maternal neglect suffered by Mitsuko and by Yoshimi herself when she was a child, Yoshimi becomes the spiritual ideal of a mother – a woman always there for her child, but in a sense never there for herself, for any aspect of life beyond motherhood, and thus a kind of ghost self.
However, the film’s epilogue suggests that the future may hold something different for women, a way beyond the two extremes of negligence or self-sacrifice. When Yoshimi gives up her life to become a mother to Mitsuko, Ikuko is ostensibly left without maternal care. And yet when Ikuko grows up to be a teenager with desires for a life that includes but also exceeds motherhood, she begins to understand the dilemma her own mother faced. Even though her deceased mother has not been physically present in her life, Ikuko comes to believe that she has always spiritually been there, watching over her – much as working mothers are still a presence in their children’s lives, even when those women are at work. In this way, the film gestures towards a time when children of working mothers will not feel so abandoned, and when those mothers themselves will not feel such self-mortifying guilt.
Beyond the challenge of balancing work obligations with single motherhood, newly divorced women may also have to contend with the fear that they and their daughters have been rendered more vulnerable to predatory males. This additional dread is explored in the Hollywood remake of Dark Water, where mother, Dahlia, and daughter, Ceci, encounter a series of men who may or may not pose a sexual threat. An unctuous real estate agent is suspiciously positive about the building and overly avuncular with Ceci. The building superintendent says that some ‘pervert’ must have snatched the girl who used to live in the apartment above Dahlia and Ceci’s, but he himself can’t wait to watch porn videos on his lunch break. Some teenage boys, who leer at Dahlia in the laundromat, have broken into that girl’s upstairs apartment and are doing mysterious things in the dark. Later, Dahlia thinks she sees her ex-husband Kyle paying these boys, who are perhaps part of a plan to drive her crazy so that she will be declared an unfit mother and he can have custody of their daughter. Their acrimonious divorce has left Kyle angry and vengeful, and he seems to be stalking Dahlia, having stubbed out his phallic cigarette on the elevator button for her floor. At the custody hearing, Kyle claims that Dahlia’s father was ‘physically abusive’ and that she is ‘mentally unstable’ and subject to ‘paranoid delusions’. Dahlia does not deny the history of abuse, and her anxieties about men could be due to paranoia, especially given that, in the end, Kyle appears to be benevolent enough, and Dahlia’s kindly lawyer seems to help her learn to trust males again. However, the fact that we find out that the lawyer lied to her (about spending time with his family) makes us suspect that her fear of men is not entirely unfounded …
Director: Jee-woon Kim
Cast: Su-jeong Lim (Su-mi), Geun-young Moon (Su-yeon), Jung-ah Yum (Eun-joo), Mi-hyun Park (Mother), Kap-su Kim (Father)
Directors: Guard Brothers (Charles and Thomas Guard)
Cast: Maya Massar (Mother), Emily Browning (Anna), Arielle Kebbel (Alex), Elizabeth Banks (Rachel), David Strathairn (Father), Jesse Moss (Matt)
In The Uninvited, after some time spent in a mental care facility following the trauma of her mother’s death in a fire, teenage Anna returns home. She and her sister Alex are appalled to find that their mother’s former nurse, Rachel, is about to marry their father. This woman, who is acting as though she is essentially already their stepmother, is the one they suspect of having murdered their mother. Anna is haunted by the sound of her invalid mother’s bell ringing for help that never came, and Anna later remembers that on the night of the fire she spied her father and Rachel having sex. It seems to Anna that her mother’s illness was basically caused by Rachel’s usurpation of her role as wife and mother, and when the sickly mother returns as a charred ghost to point an accusing finger, the sisters are convinced Rachel set the fire that finally killed her. On the night of the fire, Anna had been with her boyfriend, Matt, about to have sex for the first time, but she went home when she sensed there was something wrong with her mother, only to find the wicked Rachel in lascivious congress with her father while her mother burned. When the sisters later discover a vibrator in Rachel’s room, they are disgusted by this evidence of their wicked stepmother’s inordinate desire, so excessive that it extended to their father. And when Rachel has Anna try on a pearl necklace which her stepmother claims she inherited from a former invalid client, Anna fears that Rachel wants to choke her with it, to get rid of the daughter just as she eliminated the mother in order to take total possession of the father. To confirm Rachel’s culpability in the mother’s death, Anna makes a date with Matt so that he can tell her what he saw that night, but when he comes to her in her bedroom, he is only a broken-backed ghost. The next day, he is discovered to have died from a fall – one that Anna suspects was caused by Rachel to prevent him from revealing her guilt. Fearing for their own lives, the sisters become distraught. Rachel jabs Anna with a needle, causing her to black out, and when she comes to, she finds her stepmother’s bloody body in a dumpster, with her sister standing nearby, holding a knife. Anna explains to her father that Alex had to do it because their stepmother was trying to kill them. Her father says that Alex is dead – she died in the fire that killed their mother – and Anna sees that in fact she herself is the one holding the knife.
This revelation prompts us to revisit the film’s events from a different perspective. Anna leaves the party before her boyfriend can have sex with her so that she can go home to her father, to whom she is overly attached. It is Anna, not her mother, who is jealous of Rachel’s being with her father – a jealousy inflamed when she spies the two of them making love on that night in the main house. When Anna walks to the nearby boathouse where her mother lies in her sickbed, it is not to answer her mother’s bell, but to fill a can with gasoline so that she can burn down the main house with Rachel in it. When she is interrupted by her sister Alex’s arrival on the scene, Anna ‘inadvertently’ leaves the gas tank dripping and a candle lantern precariously placed on a table’s edge. When the lantern falls and the gas catches fire, the resulting explosion kills both her mother and her sister. It is not Rachel who failed to nurse the mother that night, but Anna who didn’t answer the call for help. Rachel isn’t the one who wanted the mother and sister out of the way; it is Anna who killed them so that she could have her father all to herself. Anna’s lust is exorbitant, desiring her own father. Anna covets the maternal necklace, wanting to be in her mother’s place. Anna is accused by her mother’s ghost, who is conjured up because the daughter is haunted by her own guilt. Repressing the terrible truth, Anna causes Matt’s fatal fall so that he will not tell her what she doesn’t want to know. Finally, even though her stepmother was just injecting her with a sedative to calm her down, Anna knifes her to death, not in self-defence but to remove the final obstacle separating her from her father. ‘I finished the job I started’ are Anna’s words as she is taken back to the mental hospital.
Instead of admitting her own unacceptable desires, Anna denies them by projecting them onto a ‘wicked’ stepmother, whom she blames for them while unconsciously acting them out herself. Anna’s sense of guilt gives her glimpses into the reality of the crimes she is actually committing, but ultimately her conscience is too weak for her to move much beyond solipsism and psychosis. If reality finally disturbs her fantasy, this is due less to internal promptings than to external factors such as her father’s intervention. By contrast, in the original version of this family tragedy – the Korean film known as A Tale of Two Sisters – there is more reason to hope that the surviving sister will recover her sanity.
Like its American remake, the K-horror original has two sisters, Su-mi and Su-yeon, who blame their stepmother, Eun-joo, for their mother’s death and who fear that this woman will be coming after them next. When Su-mi discovers blood on her sister’s bed, she fears the worst, but it turns out to be the younger girl’s first menses. The stepmother and Su-mi also get their periods at this same time. After the chirping of Eun-joo’s pet bird interrupts the sisters as they attempt to whistle their mother’s favourite song and the bird is then found dead in Su-yeon’s bed, the enraged stepmother locks the younger sister up in a wardrobe, where Su-mi finds her and lets her out. Later, when Su-mi sees Eun-joo beating a blood-soaked sack, she believes that her stepmother has closed Su-yeon up inside it and is now brutally punishing the girl. As Su-mi works frantically to free her sister, Eun-joo attacks. Su-mi defends herself by grabbing a nearby pair of scissors and impaling Eun-joo’s hand with them, but her stepmother then attempts to crush her with a statue of a figure that has its hands covering its eyes. At this point, the father intervenes to save Su-mi – from herself.
For this film contains a double reveal: not only is Su-yeon a figment of Su-mi’s imagination (her sister is actually dead), but Eun-joo is imaginary as well (the stepmother is alive, but in another location). Afflicted with dissociative identity disorder, Su-mi has fantasised these two other personalities, bringing her sister back as an innocent victim so that she herself can save her, and conjuring up a wicked stepmother to battle and blame for her sister’s suffering. Like the statue with its hand-covered eyes, Su-mi has wilfully blinded herself to certain harsh truths she would rather not see. What really happened is that their mother hanged herself in the wardrobe, and when Su-yeon found her and tried to take her down, the girl pulled the wardrobe over on top of herself. Eun-joo was just about to help the suffocating child when Su-mi, not knowing about her mother’s death or her sister’s peril, began to berate the stepmother about taking the mother’s place, leading Eun-joo to decide not to save Su-yeon, who ended up perishing under the weight of the wardrobe. When Su-mi found out about the role she herself played in her sister’s death, she could not bear the truth. And so she replaced it with a more comforting fantasy where she is the rescuer, freeing her sister from the wardrobe and the sack, and where her stepmother alone is the guilty aggressor, confining Su-yeon within those suffocating enclosures and trying to crush Su-mi with a statue.
But with her father’s help, along with the proddings of her own conscience, Su-mi gradually begins to see through the fantasy and face the truths hidden behind it. There were not three simultaneous periods but only one – Su-mi’s. Su-mi killed the bird found under Su-yeon’s bedcovers, just as Su-mi was partially responsible for her sister’s death by smothering. Not only does she feel implicated in her sister’s demise, but Su-mi also suffers from survivor’s guilt. It is she herself, not some wicked stepmother, who threatened to bring the statue down onto her own body as if she could thereby be crushed the way her sister was under the wardrobe. And it is Su-mi, not Eun-joo, who stabbed her own hand with the knife, lacerating herself in remorse over her sister. These truths about herself are painful to confront, but by acknowledging them, Su-mi has the chance to overcome her paranoid schizophrenia, to stop blaming imaginary others and deal with her own guilt. According to writer-director Jee-woon Kim, ‘I wanted to say that if you examine all the unknowable misfortune that comes upon you, it’s all within yourself. You look for all of these things generated by your own deficiency and ambiguity, certain desires, [falsely finding them] in the outside world and in others, and [you] even come to hold a feeling of hostility [towards other people], but when you look back it’s all inside of you.’113 At the film’s end, after some time spent in a mental hospital, Su-mi still grabs the real Eun-joo’s wrist in a hate-filled grip, but then she lets her go, as if realising she can no longer lay all the blame on a wicked stepmother. Su-mi must leave comforting fairy tales behind and enter real life.
Director: Tom Six
Cast: Dieter Laser (Heiter), Laurence R Harvey (Martin)
A human centipede is composed of people surgically sewn together, lips to anuses, so that they form one gastrointestinal system, with the excrement passed by one person becoming food for the next and so on down the line. After giving a very brief explanation of why anyone would want to ‘commit this atrocity’ of bringing to life such a monstrous idea (‘He is insane’),114 reviewer Roger Ebert famously called the films ‘reprehensible, dismaying, artless, and an affront to any notion, however remote, of human decency’.115 According to writer-director Tom Six, ‘I came up with the idea when I was watching television with some friends. I saw one time a very nasty child molester, and I told my friends they should stitch his mouth to the ass of a very fat truck driver as a punishment for him.’116 The Human Centipede begins when a mad surgeon named Heiter abducts a truck driver just as the man is about to defecate in the woods, but if being on the receiving end of excrement is intended as a punishment, why does the doctor then choose two naïve young women to serve as the rear of his centipede? They are closer to being innocent children than they are to resembling a child molester. Is the centipede about punishing the guilty or torturing the innocent? In his DVD audiocommentary, Six often expresses sympathy for the suffering of the young women (‘Imagine being in a situation like this where this sadistic, maniacal doctor chases you’; ‘Imagine waking up like this, attached to someone’s asshole’),117 yet Six himself came up with this fiendish idea and he is the one making the characters, the actresses and the audience suffer.
In The Human Centipede 2, a middle-aged man named Martin soils his bed after having a nightmarish memory of his father molesting him when he was a child (‘Stop them tears; you’re just making Daddy’s willy harder’). It’s not clear whether this abuse consisted of enforced fellatio, rimming or anal rape, but the trauma of the experience seems to have arrested Martin’s sexuality at the oral and anal stages of development. A chubby man with a baby face who often wears only white underpants that look like a diaper, Martin masturbates, sucks his finger and defecates while watching a video of The Human Centipede, for the abuse has linked his sexuality to oral and anal violence. Martin keeps a pet centipede, whose ‘phallic’ bite he associates with the ‘sexual abuse by his father’, as a psychiatrist explains. Identifying with his aggressive father in order to feel less like a helpless victim, Martin tries to construct his own human centipede in imitation of Dr Heiter in the video. The project also gives Martin the chance to take revenge on his father by victimising others in ways that he himself was hurt. Thus Martin kidnaps a man with a centipede tattoo who had called him a ‘little cocksucker’, breaks the man’s teeth with a hammer and staple-guns his lips to an anus to form part of a human centipede. No longer crying tears like a baby, Martin aspires to achieve the detachment and control exhibited by Dr Heiter, whose experiments can be compared to those of the pitiless Dr Mengele in the Nazi death camps. ‘I have a very dark vision on humanity,’ Tom Six has said. ‘When wars happen … we turn into monsters. Human beings kill out of pleasure. People are very sadistic.’118 To differentiate his vision from the more sentimental and redemptive view of humanity presented in a movie like Schindler’s List, Six brings colour into The Human Centipede 2 – a movie which is otherwise in black and white – only in the scenes of coprophagia: ‘While Spielberg uses the little red dress and the girl, I use the brown diarrhoea.’119
In the end, Martin fails to attain the hardheartedness of a stone-cold sadist. Unlike Dr Heiter’s surgical cutting and careful suturing in a clinical setting, Martin’s more frantic and frenzied approach to constructing his human centipede involves hacking away at his victims with kitchen knives and duct-taping their front and hind parts together in a filthy warehouse. When Martin then wraps his own erection in barbed wire and rapes the rear end of the human centipede, he may be trying for a sadistic superiority and detachment, but he also inflicts torment and degradation on himself, in effect sharing his victims’ suffering and becoming one with the pain-wracked centipede. In a sense, Martin has never stopped being that traumatised child abused by his father, and no amount of agony inflicted on others has lessened his own, or blocked him from feeling at least some empathy for their suffering. To Martin’s (and Six’s) moral credit, the last thing we hear in the movie is the sound of an infant crying. The Human Centipede 2 is a film of vicious depravity – and of tears.120
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Cast: Antonio Banderas (Robert), Elena Anaya (Vera), Jan Cornet (Vicente), Susi Sánchez (Vicente’s Mother), Bárbara Lennie (Cristina)
Robert has been practising illegal and unethical surgery on Vera, performing transgenetic grafts of pig cells onto human DNA. Thus, she is literally the guinea pig for this horror-movie mad scientist. But what if Robert’s operations improve Vera, making her skin tough enough to withstand terrible burns (and emotional rejections) while also still allowing her to feel the gentlest caresses? Is being half-human and part-pig too high a price to pay for what could be physical (and psychological) evolution? Robert’s skin transplants also change her face into that of his deceased wife, so Vera is cut to fit his desire to ‘reanimate’ a dead woman. He keeps Vera captive in his house and watches her on closed-circuit monitors, making her a prisoner of the way he sees her. Yet Vera also seems to enjoy being looked at, as if she finds pleasure in being the admired object of his gaze at her as a beautiful woman. This, however, could be a ruse on her part, playing into his fantasy of her until she can seize the opportunity to escape its trap.
It turns out that Vera was once a young man called Vicente, who was given unwanted sexual reassignment surgery by Robert. Vicente wakes up one morning to find himself castrated and the recipient of a vaginoplasty, along with a woman’s face and breasts. Is this the ultimate horror for a man? Certainly, Robert intends the forced sex change as revenge. Flashbacks reveal that Vicente was a womaniser who even offered drugs to a lesbian co-worker to get her in the mood when she rejected his advances. Then, after meeting Robert’s daughter at a party, Vicente ignored her fragile psyche and pressed himself upon her in what amounted to a rape. In retaliation, Robert surgically removed the offending organ from Vicente so that he could never take advantage of another woman in that way again. Furthermore, Vicente, who now has the female body of Vera, is himself raped by Robert’s brutish brother and thus experiences what it is like to be on the receiving end of such violence.
Fighting against his enforced feminisation, Vera/Vicente at first rips up the dresses given to him and kisses a newspaper photo of his former male self, nostalgic for that state of being. But then he starts to don high heels and women’s attire. Is he merely acting the part in order to seduce Robert and make an escape from that man’s fantasy of Vicente as a female, or is Vicente beginning to live the fantasy himself and enjoy being part woman? When Vicente eventually shoots Robert, the violent use of a gun could be interpreted as Vicente’s reassertion of his masculinity, and the last line of dialogue in the film has him saying ‘I’m Vicente’ to his mother, apparently hoping that she will recognise him inside his female body and attire. And yet, having walked in their shoes and having felt in his own body what women have suffered, Vicente seems to look with new understanding at his mother and his female co-worker, Cristina. Moreover, Vicente’s way of reclaiming his male identity is peculiar. ‘Do you remember this dress?’ he asks Cristina, referring to the female outfit he is wearing. ‘Six years ago, I said I’d give it to you … You said if I liked it so much, I should wear it myself.’ So Vicente reaffirms his masculinity by reminding Cristina how much she thought he liked dresses? Vicente’s former occupation was as a women’s clothing designer in his mother’s shop. Could all his past womanising have been a defence against being thought an effeminate mama’s boy? Perhaps in the end he has moved beyond raping women as a macho defence, beyond his horror at castration, to embrace the female within himself. Rather than living a transgender nightmare, he might find happiness in being between genders – neither wholly male nor completely female, but some of both.
Directors: Soska Sisters (Jen and Sylvia Soska)
Cast: Katharine Isabelle (Mary), David Lovgren (Dr Grant), Jen and Sylvia Soska (Demon Twins), Paula Lindberg (Ruby), Travis Watters (Husband)
Mary is a medical student who wants to become a surgeon and be accepted into that patriarchal profession. Hoping to please her professor, Dr Grant, she agrees to meet him at a party, but there he drugs and then rapes her on a bed in a back room. On operating tables, women who receive cosmetic surgery are also anaesthetised and penetrated by men like Dr Grant, their female bodies made over to conform to male-defined norms of feminine beauty, so Mary’s rape can be seen as further extending patriarchal control over and violation of women. Unwilling to play the passive victim, Mary has Dr Grant kidnapped. After penetrating him with a syringe, she proceeds to mutilate his genitals, to amputate his arms below the elbows and his legs below the knees, and to hang his torso from suspension hooks stuck through the skin on his back. By these means, Mary seeks to launch a physical strike at his psyche, for Dr Grant’s body no longer fits the image he has of himself as a phallically dominant male. By being repeatedly ‘castrated’ or ‘feminised’, he now fails to match the masculine ideal; his body projects the very opposite of what he intended it to mean.
By contrast, Mary begins to practise voluntary body modification on women who come to her for help in expressing themselves, such as the ‘Demon Twins from Berlin’ who want her to put phallic horns on their foreheads and to remove and then reattach their left arms after they have exchanged them with each other. The twins want their bodies to show their sisterly solidarity and devilish defiance of patriarchy. (The twins are played by the film’s writer-directors, the Soska Sisters, whose compassion for outsiders comes from personal experience: ‘Being identical twins, we’ve always been looked at as a walking punch line – we’re freaks, so something we have in common with the body mod community is that people look at us and jump to conclusions,’ says Jen Soska.)121 Another woman, Ruby, has her nipples and labia removed and her vagina sewn up. ‘No one looks at dolls in a sexual manner,’ she explains, and when Mary guesses that this is ‘because they don’t have all their parts’, Ruby affirms, ‘A doll can be naked and never feel shy or sexualised or degraded. That’s what I want.’ Mary practises genital mutilation on both Dr Grant and Ruby, but in his case the operation is nonconsensual and takes him away from the image he wants to project, whereas she desires the surgery as a form of self-expression. Certainly, women have had quite enough of being told what they should and shouldn’t want, but it is hard not to wonder whether Ruby’s extreme body modification might be an overreaction to the male gaze. She may no longer be sexually objectified, but what about her own female pleasure? The nullification of her own erogenous zones seems like a high price to pay for freedom from demeaning and intrusive men’s eyes.
Similarly, when Mary takes Dr Grant’s scalpel and uses it on him, has she not stooped to the level of her patriarchal oppressor and become a rapist herself? At the end of the film, after the operation she performs on Ruby, Mary is herself confronted by someone else seeking revenge: Ruby’s husband. Furious at the discovery of his wife’s sealed vagina, he attempts to reassert phallic control by stabbing Mary in the belly, near her female sex. Mary manages to sew up the wound, closing herself off against further male attacks, but she dies in the process. Whatever may be the proper answer to male dominance and control, the film suggests that it is not to become as hardened and desensitised, as alienated and violent, as the oppressor.
Director: Brandon Cronenberg
Cast: Caleb Landry Jones (Syd), Sarah Gadon (Hannah), Nicholas Campbell (Boss)
Thirty-seven years after David Cronenberg practically defined body horror with Shivers (aka They Came from Within, 1975), his son Brandon makes his own directorial debut with this innovative entry in the genre. In a near future where celebrity worship has run amok, fans are no longer satisfied with visual images of their idols, so they pay to eat meat steaks grown from the human cells of their adored stars. In this way, the film critiques celebrity culture as a form of cannibalistic consumption, the reduction of spiritual significance to mere flesh devoured by fans whose insecurity amounts to a hollowness that they are forever trying to fill with fresh meat. Other fans pay to be injected with celebrity viruses so that they can share the same afflictions suffered by the famous, engaging in a ‘bodily communion’ with the stars they would otherwise only see on the screen and worship from afar. ‘She’s perfect somehow, isn’t she? More than perfect, more than human’ – this is the way salesman Syd pitches a viral sample from star Hannah Geist, showing a client photos of the fair-skinned blonde beauty. But the Hannah herpes virus that Syd offers to sell and inject into one side of the client’s mouth mars the very idea of perfection that this star is supposed to embody. Furthermore, when Syd approaches a sleeping Hannah with a syringe to draw a sample of another virus from her veins, the needle he sticks into her arm and the funereal flowers around her suggest a rape/murder, as if ‘the penetration shots in this indirect eroticism that exists in the fan-celebrity relationship’ are destroying the very idol he worships.122 Syd then injects himself with this new Hannah virus in the hope of achieving immortality by means of her transcendent beauty, but instead finds himself connected to her in a way he never intended, coughing up blood and dying of the same disease.
Syd could learn from this joint affliction to stop idolising and exploiting celebrities. His corporate boss, who says that ‘celebrities are not people; they’re group hallucinations’, is wrong. As Syd discovers through his corporeal connection with Hannah, behind the stars ‘as social constructs, as deities who exist purely in the cultural consciousness’, there are ‘flesh and blood human beings’ like himself,123 with a ‘frail, decaying body that dies’,124 as Brandon Cronenberg puts it. But rather than recognising their shared vulnerability and mortality, Syd devises an Afterlife Capsule resembling an iron lung to keep Hannah’s remaining tissues alive. While the visual image of her flawless beauty continues to inspire worshippers worldwide, her tissues will be injected and infected with viruses to be sold to her foolish fans. In the last we see of Syd, he penetrates Hannah’s cell-cloned arm with a scalpel, putting his mouth to the wound to drink the death he still believes will give him immortal life.
Director: Larry Fessenden
Cast: Ron Perlman (Ed), Zach Gilford (Maxwell), James Le Gros (James)
Ed works as team leader for North Industries, an oil company with plans to drill in the Alaskan wildlife refuge. Ed’s godson, Maxwell, is a young man new to the team. Out in a blizzard of snowflakes, he is frightened to see spectral shapes like a ghostly herd of caribou charging at him. Maxwell tries to convince his godfather that the drill site is ‘haunted’ by ‘something out there that’s trying to drive us out of here’, but Ed won’t listen. Increasingly distraught and disoriented, Maxwell ends up walking naked onto the tundra and dying of fright and hypothermia, his frozen body found near the drill site. Maxwell’s nakedness is his desperate attempt to re-establish a rapport with the land which, though once his home, now seems foreign to him ‘like a familiar friend acting strangely’.125 What Maxwell sees as spooky and supernatural is really just the natural world from which he has become alienated, fearing it as a vengeful ‘other’ because he no longer feels at one with it. As writer-director Larry Fessenden explains, ‘People crack up and come up against their own limits, which are the limits of their own imagination to integrate with the natural system.’126 Maxwell’s vaporous visions of vengeful caribou are entirely natural in origin. A piece of wood and some caribou antlers lying on the tundra remind us that oil consists of fossilised flora and fauna, once-living creatures that have been crushed. Now, due to human-caused global warming, the tundra’s permafrost is melting, emitting ‘sour gas’ or toxic fumes from its fossil-fuel deposits. The ghosts of the caribou haunting Maxwell are thus literally there, the vapours from their dead bodies rising from the tundra to poison the humans who have been destroying the environment.
But Ed, despite being disturbed by the death of his godson, writes it off to cabin fever, much as he dismisses the thawing permafrost and atmospheric vapours as fluke abnormalities. Even when the ice literally melts under Ed and he falls into freezing water, he still denies that it is due to climate change. The worse things get for the drill team and the more exposed they become to nature’s wrath, the more Ed doubles down on his old beliefs and tries to force a path to start the drilling anyway. ‘What’s needed out here is a pipeline and a base camp and a couple of wells. That’s what God wants,’ Ed says. Yet, as Fessenden notes, Ed’s ‘sort of gung-ho, stick-to-it, all-American attitude is not sufficient’127 when nature itself has turned against humanity, punishing us for having ruined our own homeland. According to James, the movie’s despairing environmentalist, ‘There is no way home … This is the last winter – total collapse. Hope dies.’ The Last Winter imagines a worst-case scenario – it ends in apocalypse – to scare us into doing something about climate change before it is too late. As Fessenden comments, ‘We don’t want to wake up in horrible super storms ... We don’t want to have wars over the last drop of water ... We don’t want to live in a horror film. We want to go to them at the movies – and come out, and have a sweet and beautiful life.’128
Director: M Night Shyamalan
Cast: Mark Wahlberg (Elliot), Zooey Deschanel (Alma), Frank Collison (Nursery Owner), Betty Buckley (Lady Hermit)
In defensive reaction against humanity’s heedless destruction of the planet’s natural resources, trees and plants begin to fight back by emitting a neurotoxin that causes people to commit suicide. Science teacher Elliot, his wife, Alma, and some friends flee from Philadelphia to the Pennsylvania countryside in an attempt to find a safe haven from ecological disaster. Here are seven environmental messages – or inconvenient truths – told by this eco-horror film:
1. What goes around comes around. Construction workers who build over the natural environment are led to jump off skyscrapers; men who prune trees hang themselves from them; and those who cut grass with lawnmowers end up lying beneath the blades.
2. It is foolish to think that natural forces can be easily confined, tamed or domesticated. A lion in a zoo rips off the arms of a human keeper. Trees in a park prompt strolling visitors to freeze as if suddenly confined and then fall to the ground like dead leaves. Parks are like zoos for trees. By placing such severe limits on the green world, we put ourselves in peril.
3. Environmental crises are not like enemy invaders, so the answer is not for humans to band together and launch a counterattack against nature. The more damage we do to the planet, the more we destroy our own habitat, like the soldier in this film who fires his gun and ends up shooting himself.
4. A human world too removed from nature is not a home, as Elliot finds out when he cannot eat the plastic food or drink the fake wine that has been laid out for show on the dining table of a model home that is part of a new housing development. His attempts to establish a more respectful relationship with nature also fail when he realises that the indoor tree he is talking to is artificial. There is no substitute for healthy interaction with the real thing.
5. Humans can live in harmony with nature and each other, carefully husbanding natural resources so that there is enough for everyone to share, or these resources can be irresponsibly depleted and we can fight to the death over them. A nursery owner and his wife nurture plants and save the lives of Elliot and Alma, who respectfully request a ride to safety. By contrast, when two teenagers try to kick in the door to a house, its inhabitants, who are holed up inside and denying anyone entrance, shoot the boys dead. A lady hermit initially allows travellers to take refuge in her house, but is eventually overcome by fear that they will steal from her. In refusing them hospitality, she denies her own humanity and ends up beating her head bloody against the walls of her house. Just like the destruction of nature, the abrogation of the social contract is a kind of suicide.
6. Survival may well depend on recognising that there are no ‘other’ people and no world of nature ‘outside’ of our own. When Elliot tries to interest his science class in the disappearance of honeybees, one self-absorbed teenager can’t see past an obsession with his own good looks. (He perhaps reminds the teacher of his own younger self, especially considering that Elliot is played by Mark Wahlberg, who was formerly known as underwear model Marky Mark.) But ‘no bees’ means no more pollination of plants, which means no more food for animals or humans, so the bees are us. Elliot and Alma survive because they commit to the larger human family, caring for an orphaned girl as if she were their flesh-and-blood daughter. They also survive because, instead of communicating via cell phones and hiding in houses, they walk outside to physically embrace each other under the trees, thus acknowledging their interdependence with the natural world.
7. Whether it be the collapse of bee colonies, the depletion of the ozone layer, or some airborne neurotoxin, there is much we don’t know about the cause of environmental disasters. But just as science offers hypotheses, so eco-horror films provide possible models for understanding and responding to ecological threats which seem beyond our ability to explain. In one of the movie’s last images, after nature’s wrath has ended (for now) and humans have returned to happier living, we see a sign on a restaurant saying ‘OPEN – PINE DELI’. Imagine a world where trees and people coexisted in peace …
Director: Jamie Blanks
Cast: Jim Caviezel (Peter), Claudia Karvan (Carla)
Peter and Carla are a wealthy urban couple who drive their SUV on a camping trip to a forest near a beach in an isolated part of Australia. Nature’s Grave can be seen as an ‘animals attack’ film where the local fauna fight back against the humans’ invasion of their territory. The film could also be viewed as an extended example of the pathetic fallacy where the surrounding environment expresses human emotions, such as lightning representing the vacationing couple’s anger at each other, or dawn depicting a moment of hope for their marriage. But a reading of Nature’s Grave as an eco-horror film sees all of its relationships – man and wife, human and animal, creature and environment – as interdependent biosystems, with damage or pollution in any one part negatively affecting the whole. Prior to their trip, Carla has responded to Peter’s sexual interest in another woman by having an affair, followed by an abortion of the foetus that may or may not have been Peter’s. The trip is an attempt to ‘revitalise’ their relationship, but when Peter puts his hand between her legs as they are lying on the beach, Carla rejects his advances, still angry at him over his adulterous impulses. Her subsequent attempt to masturbate alone in their tent is interrupted by sounds of a manatee pup wailing for its mother – cries which haunt Carla throughout the film and which are related to her own guilt over the abortion. Here the film suggests an ecological connection between disturbances in the life cycles of humanity and the manatee, a spooky ‘supernatural’ affinity which is actually just the natural bond all creatures share as parts of the earth’s ecosystem.
Earlier in the film, Peter carelessly discards a plastic bag, and the couple finds a dead manatee pup washed up on the beach, wrapped in a similar, non-biodegradable plastic. While swimming, Peter is shadowed by a dark shape in the water, which he then shoots at, discovering it to be a mother manatee. Though apparently dead, this creature will haunt Peter for the rest of the film, seeming to creep up on him when he is not looking, the way guilt over the damage he has caused to Mother Nature and to Carla gradually overcomes him. Feeling rejected by his adulterous wife and unmanned by her abortion, Peter tries to reclaim his masculinity through phallic domination of nature: flicking away a lit cigarette onto the forest floor, chopping at a tree with an axe, and shooting ducks with a rifle. But rather than impressing his wife, these macho antics only alienate her further, which in turn increases his anger at her. These marital tensions culminate in a night-time scene where Peter, feeling threatened by what he fears is the mother manatee, fires a harpoon into the dark and accidentally spears his wife through the throat. Thus, Peter’s previous shooting of the manatee rebounds on him and his own, for an attack on nature is an attack on humanity. Weeping in remorse at the sight of what he has done, Peter takes panicked flight from his wife’s dead body, but as he attempts to drive away, the SUV keeps going in circles, returning him to the site of his crime, forcing him to face the fact that what goes around comes around. At the start of the film, when he first drives into the forest, Peter ignores the posted signs and heedlessly runs over a kangaroo. At the movie’s end, while attempting to flag down a truck, Peter is crushed by the oncoming vehicle, himself becoming roadkill.
Director: Carter Smith
Cast: Jonathan Tucker (Jeff), Jena Malone (Amy), Shawn Ashmore (Eric), Laura Ramsey (Stacy)
Two vacationing American couples – Jeff and Amy, Eric and Stacy – take some time off from partying at their luxurious Yucatán resort to do some sightseeing in this exotic locale, trekking into the depths of a dense rainforest to find ‘an ancient Mayan temple off the beaten path’. Blithely ignoring the warnings of the local tribes, whose language and customs these tourists haven’t bothered to learn, the group walks all over the indigenous vines like a mini-onslaught of deforestation. Unlike the natives who built the temple, the group fails to show respect for nature as something sacred. Since their destructive invasion has disturbed the equilibrium of the ecosystem, the balance must be righted, and so the natives ‘quarantine’ the Americans by forcing them to remain at the temple site until they either self-destruct or learn their lesson and no longer pose a threat to nature. The group is ill-equipped to survive their eco-educational ordeal. Despite their contempt for the native water supply, which they consider to be ‘contaminated with human faeces’, the group has brought very little bottled water to supplement their plentiful tequila. Prior to their arrival, a team of European archaeologists have been excavating the site, violating the land, and one of their corpses is found penetrated by and overgrown with vines, having been reclaimed by nature. But rather than learning from this example of the violator violated, the Americans just want a way out and so they look for the man’s cell phone, which they think they hear ringing. Yet this turns out to be the plants mimicking the phone’s sound, as if mocking the tourists’ belief that they could use their sophisticated technology to ‘conquer the wilderness’ and escape from the ecological trap they have put themselves in.
Alienated from nature, the group is also at odds with each other, failing to achieve an external or internal harmony. The tourists bring with them all the fears and doubts bred by civilisation, and rather than using their time in nature to resolve the tensions threatening group cohesion and psychological integrity, they split apart even further under the stress. Back at the resort, Amy has been somewhat aloof from Jeff, happy to have him go off sightseeing without her. When they end up trapped at the temple, the rift between them grows greater. On the morning after a night in which Stacy at least tries to comfort Eric by masturbating him, Amy sits apart from Jeff, who stands with his back to her and with his organ in his own hand as he urinates on the vines. At odds with nature, they are also estranged from each other. While at the resort, Stacy has proposed playing a card game of war, and has engaged in a bet with Eric – the winner to give the other oral sex – over whether or not Amy will ‘cheat’ on Jeff by kissing another man. Now, at the temple, Stacy’s competitiveness grows into paranoid jealousy that Amy will pursue Eric, Stacy’s boyfriend. As the three of them are going to sleep in the tent, Stacy takes manual possession of Eric, masturbating him in Amy’s presence. On another night, Stacy thinks she hears Amy’s moans of passion and accuses her and Eric of betrayal. Amy has actually been weeping, and the noises of her crying are mimicked by the vines to sound like moans, which is to say that Stacy’s own jealousy has caused her to hear them this way, because there are no vines. There is only Stacy at war with herself, divided from her better nature. ‘It’s just everywhere. It’s in my head,’ she says about the threat of the vines, not realising that they are outside and inside because nature is a part of her. Stacy’s discordant relation to nature is also shown when her fears of sex and pregnancy get the better of her. Imagining that she sees a vine snaking under the skin of her leg (‘I can feel it moving’), Stacy yells for her boyfriend to ‘get it out!’ Then, as Amy holds her and tells her to ‘keep breathing’, Stacy hears the vine shriek like a crying baby as it is pulled out of her.
Estranged from Mother Nature and from her own nature as a mother, Stacy begins cutting into herself with a knife, and when Eric tries to stop her, she stabs him in the fury of her madness. And yet, just when it seems that the group will break apart and self-destruct rather than learn the lesson of interdependency, their suffering brings a new awareness. Too far gone to recover, Stacy begs to be put out of her misery, with her cries of ‘Kill me!’ echoed by the vines, as if nature itself agrees with this course of action. In pleading with Amy to kill her, Stacy offers herself up to death so that her friend may live, and as Amy puts an end to Stacy’s discordant cries, the Mayan natives standing outside the temple seem to accept this human sacrifice. It is as though, in dying, Stacy takes all the antagonism with her, leaving Amy free to establish a more harmonious relation to nature. Similarly, Amy’s boyfriend, Jeff, lets himself be killed in order to ensure Amy’s escape, thereby proving the strength of his love for her. They have progressed from being a group of arrogant, self-centred tourists to becoming people with some humility and natural compassion. By showing these tourists that they are the invaders, the consumers and the parasites, the vines have taught their lesson.
Director: Shane Carruth
Cast: Amy Seimetz (Kris), Shane Carruth (Jeff)
Far from being a typical horror film, Upstream Color is long on vague dread, supplying numerous potential reasons for fear, but short on definite explanations. A young woman named Kris undergoes a traumatic experience with elements of kidnapping and extortion, alien abduction, cult indoctrination, sex slavery, involuntary surrogate motherhood, invasive organ harvesting, and genetic experimentation. By not clarifying which – if any – of these events has occurred, the film maintains a pervasive doubt. This results in a free-floating anxiety and a paranoid dread that something terrible could happen at any moment, but it also creates the hope that what has happened to Kris may be more psychological than real and thus might be mentally surmountable, even ultimately positive, rather than permanently crippling.
Admittedly, there are aspects of her peculiar experience that seem horrific. At one point, Kris sees a worm crawling under her skin and tries to cut it out with a knife. After her ordeal, Kris awakens with no memory of what happened and finds that she no longer has a job or any money. Moreover, she thinks she’s pregnant, but a doctor tells her she is not and that internal damage means she can never have a child. Fortunately, Kris then meets Jeff, a young man who appears to have suffered the same kind of eerily inexplicable experience, also depriving him of his job and former social identity. As traumatic as these losses are, they also force the young couple to let go of preconceived notions and see the world anew. As writer-director Shane Carruth explains, he wanted to ‘strip’ away these characters’ ‘understanding of who they were’ and ‘what they thought of the world’ so that they would have to ‘adopt a new narrative’ and ‘try to rebuild and follow through on that no matter how foreign it seemed’.129
And it is fair to say that their life after the ordeal often does seem quite foreign. For example, when two pigs nuzzle nose to nose in a corral, Kris and Jeff get the urge to pair-bond. After the sow is impregnated, Kris feels as though she herself is with child, and when the sow’s piglets are later taken from her and drowned, Kris starts diving to the bottom of a pool to pick up pebbles and deliver them to the surface, as if trying to rescue the piglets. As the boar and sow, bereft of their offspring, huddle together in sadness and fear, Jeff and Kris curl up in an empty bathtub, holding each other close against an outside world which they, too, find hard to understand. Thus, there appear to be strange affinities linking humans and animals, as if the characters are being affected by things at a distance from them.
This sense of inexplicable influences upon our behaviour can be frightening since it suggests something more than just our individual wills controlling our destiny. The film implies that there are unseen forces forging ecological connections beyond our current comprehension. Saying that he wanted his movie to ‘put us sort of in the mind of biological processes’,130 Carruth notes the real-life existence of ‘parasites that burrow into the heads of wasps and ants and make them fly erratically or climb to the top of trees and throw themselves off in order to benefit from something else, maybe a fungus on the forest floor. And then that fungus maybe benefits from the parasite.’131 Upstream Color begins with some worm-like parasites being scraped off a plant. These are then implanted in Kris, where they gestate until being transplanted into a sow that gives birth. The piglets are drowned in a river, where their decomposing bodies emit a substance that leaches into the root systems of plants, which grow more worm-like parasites. The three-stage life cycle of this parasite, moving it through people, pigs and plants, is one explanation for the strange symbiosis between the human couple and the swine. It is terrifying to think that some mysterious force could so drastically alter one’s life, but when childless Kris takes an adopted piglet into her arms at the end, the smile on their faces suggests that life may offer equally unexpected compensations.
Directors: Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez
Cast: Heather Donahue (Heather), Joshua Leonard (Josh), Michael Williams (Mike)
Heather, Josh and Mike are three student filmmakers who go off to make a documentary about a local legend involving a murderous witch. From their sarcastic comments, it’s clear that these kids don’t take any of this seriously. They just want fame from the movie, and maybe to be safely spooked while having some fun on a Halloween adventure. Their condescending attitude towards superstitious people suggests that they also see themselves as investigative reporters debunking silly myths. But as they shine the light of their camera on various strange occurrences, they are disturbed to find things becoming less and less clear. One interviewee describes the witch as a vaporous mist rising from the river, while in another account she is covered in hair that is half human and half horse. The witch’s unsettling ambiguity extends to her victims as well. Late in the film, Heather finds a small lump of torn flesh wrapped in some of Josh’s bloody clothing, but it’s not clear what bit of the body this is or whether it was ever part of Josh.
Heather is the documentary’s director and she also helms one of the two handheld cameras. As Mike tells her, ‘It’s like looking through the lens gives you some sort of protection from what’s on the other side’ – the night forest and the supernatural. But in fact the camera’s light, like their flashlight beams, barely penetrates the dark woods around them, revealing piled-up rocks and stick men hanging in trees that remain mysterious in their meaning. Moreover, sounds of inexplicably snapping twigs and strange cries in the night create the fearful impression of terrible events occurring off-screen, just beyond the camera’s view. Rather than gaining knowledge and control through the camera, Heather is trapped behind it, squinting to see what its light only half-reveals and shrinking in fright at what might be coming at her from the edges of the frame. In the end, it seems that Heather is attacked, for the camera she was holding is knocked to the ground and, as if through its viewfinder, we see it struggling – perhaps like Heather’s dying eyes – to refocus the image in its sights. A cut to black then plunges her and us into final obscurity.
Part of the mystery of The Blair Witch Project is that we never see the Blair Witch or any ghostly projection of her. We hear about people possessed by her, like Rustin Carr who would take two kids to his house in the woods and have one of them face a corner while he killed the other one so that Rustin would not have to feel ‘the eyes watching him’. Could it be that the real horror of this film involves three naïve young people who venture into the wilderness and who, spooked by their unfamiliar surroundings, become increasingly paranoid and possessed by their own fears, turning on each other? Heather is in charge of reading the map, but when the group gets lost, the guys begin to suspect her of deliberately keeping them in the woods in order to do more filmmaking. Josh hears a strange cackling in the night, as if it were Heather laughing at them. The next day, he films Heather in the forest and ‘jokes’ that she might be the Blair Witch. Disgusted by Heather and her map, Mike kicks it into a creek and starts laughing at her. More and more disoriented, the three find themselves going in circles, chasing their own tails. When Heather hears an eerie groan, it sounds like her own fearful moaning, and the children they hear crying in the night might as well be themselves. Later, Mike warns Heather to stop filming Josh while he is crying, and an angry Josh shoves a camera in Heather’s face, causing her to weep in distress. At the end, prompted by Josh’s calls for help (‘Please, follow my voice!’), Heather and Mike enter an abandoned house, where Mike turns to face a corner while Heather is attacked by an assailant we never see. Were all three of them victims of the Blair Witch? Were Josh and Mike possessed by the witch into luring Heather to her doom? Or were the two guys angry at Heather and just pulling a trick on her, playing on her sympathy (for Josh) and her fear (why is Mike facing the corner?) in order to throw a Blair Witch-inspired scare into her? Finally, it could be that all three of them are playing a trick on us, leaving us with this frightening found footage of their apparent demise in order to make money off this movie.
Director: Oren Peli
Cast: Micah Sloat (Micah), Katie Featherston (Katie), Mark Fredrichs (Psychic)
Micah and his girlfriend, Katie, live in a two-storey tract home in suburban San Diego. ‘Kiss the camera,’ Micah says, pointing his camcorder at Katie; despite her protestations, he wants to film her performing a striptease and the two of them having sex. Katie begins to feel stalked by an eerie presence, but it’s not clear whether what is haunting her is a voyeuristic demon or Micah’s spying camera. ‘It’s looking at me,’ she says about the camera when Micah sets it up on a tripod to film them while they sleep at night, and she later comments fearfully about the nocturnal demon, ‘I can feel it watching me.’ Reviewing the overnight footage on the morning after, Katie sees her bedsheet billow as if an invisible shape is getting under the covers with her, and she recalls that she ‘felt him breathing’. Katie recounts a ‘horrifying’ memory of when she was an eight-year-old girl and a ‘breathing’ demon used to visit her in bed at night. This buried memory of sexual abuse by her father seems to come back to her now that she is being psychologically abused by her boyfriend, Micah.
Ironically (given that Micah with his intrusive camera is the leering demon haunting Katie), he tries to capture the evil spirit on film. Disturbed by sounds of rumbling, rattling and creaking that could be coming from the ceiling, floor or walls, Micah attempts to gather ocular evidence that will pinpoint the source. He pours talcum powder on the floorboards in order to make thudding footsteps visible, but the results are not clearly discernible. Like the white noise on his television screen, whatever is haunting them cannot be observed and mastered by his gaze. It cannot be captured by his camcorder because, as Katie tells him, ‘You and your stupid camera are the problem.’ Instead, like Katie herself, the haunting presence must be listened to and understood. In one scene, Micah’s camera zooms in on Katie, attempting to bring her into focus and to record what she is whispering, but the microphone fails to register her words, so intent is he on visual mastery. The banging on the walls and the sound of fingernails being dragged down them could be heard as Katie’s unconscious attempt to communicate how caged she feels by Micah, but he doesn’t hear her. Her car keys that mysteriously drop on the floor are a sign of her desire to leave him. The glass that breaks over his face in the photo of them as a couple shows her growing anger at him. The Ouija board, which Micah has insisted on getting despite Katie’s objection that it frightens her, bursts into flames just like the house that burned down when she was a girl. In both cases, the fires are Katie’s surreptitious way of fighting back against an abusive father and boyfriend.
‘These hauntings, they feed off of negative energy,’ a psychic warns them, ‘so if there is something negative going on here, it will help spur on the haunting.’ But Micah is in denial about the part he has played in the couple’s domestic discord. Asked what their relationship is like, he answers with an oblivious ‘It’s good.’ Because Micah refuses to temper his controlling and domineering gaze, Katie eludes and strikes back against it, eventually becoming so furious at him that she is entirely ‘possessed’ by her anger. His camera has watched her at night, so now she stands and gazes down at him while he is vulnerable and sleeping in the bed. Then her screams draw him out of the bedroom and into the hallway where he does battle with something unseen. We hear thudding footsteps – like those of the demon on previous nights – approach the bedroom, and as Micah’s corpse is thrown at the camera, Katie is revealed standing in the doorway. She crawls over to Micah’s body, smiles, and then lunges at the camera with a demonic expression on her face. He didn’t listen, and now he’ll never see her again.
Director: Matt Reeves
As Manhattan is attacked by a giant monster, a woman witnesses her brother die. ‘Will somebody please, please tell me what just happened?’ she begs. ‘I mean, it came from nowhere! And he was there and then he was gone!’ As a result of the rampaging creature, ‘one of the skyscrapers collapses’ and ‘we see the wall of debris from the collapse start to radiate outward – right toward us’.132 As this moment from the screenplay makes clear, the monster is a metaphor for the 9/11 terrorist attack, and this movie, for better or worse, represents one way for America to deal with the trauma. As heinous and indefensible as the terrorists’ actions were, these men were human beings like us with faces and families, motives and histories. We are less likely to understand or prevent such attacks if we dehumanise the perpetrators and view them merely as murderous monsters, like this film’s creature, which could be an invading alien, a marauding dinosaur, a predatory insect or a raging sea beast. The monster also sometimes resembles an old man staggering around, trying to hold himself up with canes, but this caricature of Osama bin Laden as decrepit does not help us understand the anger or the intelligence of a chief terrorist. Flakes fall from the giant monster’s back and turn into spider-like assailants that bite human beings, infecting them with a virus that eventually causes them to explode. This narrative of falling flakes, spider bites and viral contagion tells us nothing about what motivated the men who followed bin Laden’s orders or about how people become radicalised into serving as suicide bombers. ‘It was eating people! It was eating everyone!’ a woman exclaims about the monster, but whatever the terrorists were, they were not cannibals. When the creature decapitates the Statue of Liberty, leaving the headless body standing in New York Harbor, we are reminded of the beheadings on the jihadist videos. Yes, the terrorists may ‘hate our freedom’, but to tar them as evil tyrants and to whitewash ourselves as freedom-loving innocents does not help us see what they believe we have done to them to provoke their attacks.
And yet, while Cloverfield may be politically problematic, it does speak to certain emotional needs in the aftermath of 9/11. While most of us saw the attack on the news videos that were ceaselessly replayed on television, we do not know what it was like to actually be there. As a film that purports to be home-movie footage shot by persons as they experienced the attack, Cloverfield bridges that gap between video and reality. (We have a similar desire to know about the subsequent Iraq War, which only a small minority of soldiers lived first-hand. As director Matt Reeves notes, Cloverfield was in part inspired by ‘footage online of troops in Iraq’, where ‘you could hear the bombs getting closer and these guys were screaming in the tent, and you actually saw the leg of this table they were hiding under, and it was very visceral and really frightening’.133) The events of 9/11 were felt as a loss of innocence for America, which had never before been invaded from outside in this way. Cloverfield marks this loss by having video of the monster’s attack overwrite previously shot footage of an idyllic day at Coney Island – a carefree time that, following the devastation in New York, may never be lived in the same way again. Yet, despite the deaths of almost all the main characters, the film also shows New Yorkers acting courageously and attempting to save each other out of love, as we’d like to think we would have done. Portions of the old footage representing past happiness can still be glimpsed in the gaps between scenes of carnage wrought by the attack, suggesting that some foundation for hope may not be entirely inaccessible.
Directors: Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani
Cast: Cassandra Forêt (Child Ana), Bianca Maria D’Amato (Mother), Bernard Marbaix (Grandfather), Delphine Brual (Housekeeper), Charlotte Eugène Guibeau (Adolescent Ana), Marie Bos (Adult Ana), Harry Cleven (Taxi Driver)
Directors: Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani
Cast: Klaus Tange (Dan), Ursula Bedena (Edwige), Jean-Michel Vovk (Detective), Hans De Munter (Doctor), Sam Louwyck (Dermont), Birgit Yew (Dora), Anna D’Annunzio (Barbara)
Featuring bold colours, gloved killers and sensual women in peril, these two films pay homage to the 1970s’ Italian giallo genre and form a diptych, with the first focused on the sexual maturation of a troubled female, and the second on a male’s sexual anxiety stemming from his childhood trauma. In Amer, a child named Ana peers into forbidden rooms and, too young to understand what she is seeing, ends up shocked by her premature discovery of the facts of life and death. Looking into her parents’ bedroom, she spies them having sex and misinterprets their passion as a violent encounter, for her mother’s moans and writhing seem like suffering. In another room, Ana views the corpse of her age-wrinkled grandfather laid out on a bed, while behind a third door she sees the elderly housekeeper veiled in the black of mourning and lying on her bed, as if mortified by the old man’s demise. Ana pries a pocket watch from the dead fingers of her grandfather, who seems to clutch it as though holding on to the last precious minutes of life. Her foot then gets caught in the watch chain, which has become wrapped around a bedpost as she is trying to escape the grip of the black-gloved housekeeper’s hand, and she also imagines her grandfather’s bony hand reaching out as if to drag her into the grave with him.
The sight of these shocking bedroom scenes – one of sex that looks like violence, another of death that seems to threaten the living – causes confusion in Ana’s mind, which forms a disturbing link between desire and dying. As she matures into an adolescent, Ana finds herself attracted to and yet fearful of men, such as some sweaty, muscular bikers with their outthrust motorcycles. As she sneaks peeks at them, she is reminded that certain sights are still forbidden when she is slapped in the face by her mother, who is either protective or jealous (of her daughter’s youthful appeal). Her mother’s prohibition adds to Ana’s sense that sex is something dangerous and frightening.
Some years later, Ana returns as an adult to her childhood home, where she must finally face the fears first instilled in her there. An ambiguous ending leaves it unclear whether she ultimately conquers or succumbs to them. The leather-gloved and leering taxi driver who takes her to her home possesses a knife. That night, the driver comes back, and when gloved hands unsheathe a straight razor and threaten her with it, Ana is afraid of being penetrated by the blade, so she kills the man. But once the driver is dead, another man – a phantom figure in black – appears to menace Ana, who strikes out in self-defence at him, only to reveal that the gloved hands are in fact her own and that she has cut her own wrists with the blade. In the film’s last shot of Ana’s dead body laid out on a bed in the morgue, we see that, unable to vanquish her fear of her grandfather’s corpse, she has become one. Unable to dissociate sex from violence, she has ended up a victim. Her fear has not only led her to murder the driver, a guiltless man; it also proves suicidal. And yet, just before the film cuts to black, Ana’s pallid face is infused with living colour again and her eyes begin to open. Instead of actually committing homicide and suicide, Ana may have been playing out a fantasy that brings her to a moment of self-realisation freeing her from her fear. By imagining the innocent driver’s stabbed body and her own slashed wrists, Ana may have come to see that hers are the hands filled with menace, that all she really has to dread is her own fear. With this eye-opening recognition, she can now go on to live her life.
Whereas Amer begins with its female protagonist’s childhood trauma, The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears only gradually works its way around to revealing what shocked its male protagonist when he was a boy. Adult Dan returns from a business trip to find that his wife, Edwige, has disappeared from their apartment. Eventually, her decapitated head is discovered with a gaping wound within the hair on its top. As Dan investigates to determine who did it, he encounters other male characters – the Detective, the Doctor, and a landlord named Dermont – who all seem to be versions of Dan himself. The Detective tells Dan about a previous case involving a husband’s search for a vanished wife, but in that case ‘it wasn’t she who disappeared; it was he who was afraid of disappearing’. Could the murder of Dan’s wife also have something to do with Dan’s own fears? Dan hears about the Doctor, who interrupted intercourse with his wife, Dora, because he was afraid someone was watching him from above. There was a mural of a woman painted on the ceiling, and the Doctor drilled a hole through her head hair. The Doctor then went to the apartment above and peered down at Dora through the hole, as one drop of blood also fell on her face. As she reports, ‘I saw an eye staring at me, filled with hatred, madness, fear.’ Dan’s last clue comes when the Detective tells him about a lovemaking scene involving the landlord, Dermont, and a woman named Barbara. As she is moving on top of Dermont, her body grinds broken glass into his, cutting him open. Then, as she is straddling him during sex, she removes her spiky hair-pin and is just about to stab it down into the top of Dermont’s head when the Detective shoots her with his gun.
The mystery is solved when we realise that all these exaggerated fears regarding threatening women stem from a trauma that occurred in Dan’s (and these other men’s?) past. As suggested by the film’s title, The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, which presents the perspective of an uncomprehending boy, the young Dan did not know much about the facts of life. The sight of a girl bleeding between her legs shocked him because he did not understand menstruation or the difference between boys and girls. Misinterpreting the blood as a sign that the girl had lost her penis, Dan began to fear that he might lose his own, and the female sex became connected in his mind with castration anxiety. When the boy saw a model spreading her vulva in a pornographic magazine, it looked like a red eye staring balefully at him, threatening to turn his own sex into a ‘bloody hole’. Scared by this prospect, Dan has grown into an adult afraid of contact with the female sex. It seems that, in defence against this fear of castration, he has raised his knife erect and used it to stab his wife within the hair on her head, as if he can thereby prove his own potency and also, with the phallic knife sticking out of her gash, return her ‘lost penis’ to her. For his wife’s sake, it’s too bad Dan hasn’t been able to face his own fears earlier. If he had realised sooner that his gynophobia was rooted in nothing more than a misunderstanding about a menstruating girl, he might have moved beyond a violent defensiveness, resulting in the stabbing of his wife, to see that he was never really in danger from her. Just as the Detective needs to investigate his own fears, and the Doctor needs to heal himself, so husband Dan must overcome a feeling of traumatised masculinity in order to love his wife.
Director: Peter Strickland
Cast: Toby Jones (Gilderoy), Cosimo Fusco (Francesco), Antonio Mancino (Santini), Jozef Cseres (Massimo), Pál Tóth (Massimo), Fatma Mohamed (Silvia), Chiara D’Anna (Elisa)
Gilderoy lives a peaceful life in pastoral Dorking, Surrey, with his mother. His normal employment is as a sound engineer on nature documentaries, but when he travels to Italy to mix sounds for a movie called The Equestrian Vortex, the film turns out to be a gothic horror production like Dario Argento’s Suspiria or Mario Bava’s Black Sunday. Not only that, but Francesco, the film’s producer, is verbally abusing the actresses who are dubbing the characters’ voices, and the film’s director, Santini, is sexually molesting them. Francesco’s and Santini’s assaults are strikingly similar to those by inquisitorial priests within the film, who vilify as ‘whores’ and sexually torture women they accuse of being witches. Although Gilderoy sympathises with the women both on- and off-screen, he is gradually drawn into the vortex of male sadism surrounding him. He starts off in a rather removed position behind the mixing board, criticising his male colleagues for their misogynistic movie, but when the Foley artists are sick, Gilderoy takes their place, creating such customised sound effects as plucking stems out of radishes to represent a witch’s hair being pulled from its roots, and hacking at watermelons with knives and smashing them with mallets to aurally simulate the stabbing and crushing of female flesh. Although he baulks at squirting water into a sizzling pan to sound like a witch’s vagina being penetrated with a red-hot poker, by the end of the film he, too, has become cruelly invasive: he hikes up the volume on a female dubber’s headphones to an unbearable level so that she will be forced to emit a convincingly terrified scream.
But is Gilderoy really the innocent abroad, corrupted by foreign misogynists? There is reason to believe that the evil has its roots closer to home. After persistent attempts to get reimbursed for his plane fare to Italy, Gilderoy is finally told that there was no such flight. ‘Did he ever leave his garden shed in Dorking?’ asks writer-director Peter Strickland,134 as we begin to wonder whether this entire Italian trip is a fantasy concocted by Gilderoy, who is actually still in the English garden shed which he uses as a makeshift sound studio. The fantasy is a cover for a terrible truth about himself that Gilderoy has avoided facing. ‘You English, always hiding,’ Santini tells him – or, rather, it is Gilderoy half-realising this fact about himself, since there is no Santini. The Gilderoy who goes to Italy is actually a false double for the real Gilderoy in England, which is something that his unconscious tries to tell him by creating so many ‘mirror’ characters in his fantasy. There are two Foley artists, both of them named Massimo. There are two actresses, Silvia and Elisa, playing the same movie character, Teresa, and Gilderoy keeps getting them confused with each other and with the character they portray. Gilderoy himself is duplicated, sometimes speaking English while unable to understand Italian, and at other times speaking fluent Italian, as if he were in the movie (which movie? the horror film or the fantasy about the Italian dubbing studio?).
At one point in the film, Gilderoy listens to a woman’s screaming voice on tape from one of the dubbing sessions, while he (and we) are looking at a photo of the garden shed near his mother’s house. There appears to be a mismatch between sound and image – but is there? Later, a shot of a woman’s screaming mouth cuts to tomatoes in a whirring mixture, and some of the red liquid splatters out onto Gilderoy, who turns to look at his ‘bloody’ face in a mirror. Later still, there is female screaming on the audio track as Gilderoy is plunging a knife into a cabbage to simulate the sound of a witch being stabbed in the horror film. Thus, the film implies that Gilderoy stabbed his mother in the shed and then developed an elaborate fantasy that conceals the truth from himself but also gradually allows him to reveal it. Stabbing a cabbage is silly and harmless, and Gilderoy focuses on the sound of the act to distract himself from the horrible sight of a woman being knifed. He tries to separate audio from video, so the woman’s scream floats free of any anchor in an actual female. It could be Silvia or Elisa or Teresa getting stabbed – anyone but his own mother, just as the knife could be wielded by Francesco or Santini or Massimo – anyone but himself. But because Gilderoy has a conscience that plagues him with guilt, he keeps replaying the scream in search of its true source, his mother, and the sound of the stabbing repeats until it loops around as linked to the image of his own hand on the knife. As Strickland says, ‘The whole film itself is based on the loop structure and eating its own tail.’135 In the end, the film loops around to its beginning as frames of the Italian horror film burn up during projection, revealing through the hole Gilderoy’s own English country home, the site of the actual horror he committed.
Director: John Carpenter
Cast: Will Sandin (Boy Michael), Sandy Johnson (Sister), Tony Moran and Nick Castle (Adult Michaels), Jamie Lee Curtis (Laurie), Donald Pleasence (Psychiatrist)
Director: Rob Zombie
Cast: Daeg Faerch (Boy Michael), Hanna Hall (Sister), Malcolm McDowell (Psychiatrist), Tyler Mane (Adult Michael), Scout Taylor-Compton (Laurie)
At the beginning of the original Halloween, six-year-old Michael puts on a clown mask and stabs his teenage sister to death in her bedroom after she has had sex with her boyfriend. Fifteen years later, he escapes from a mental institution and begins stalking and slashing other teen girls and their boyfriends. If Michael has a motive for his killings, the characters do not speculate about what it is. This leaves open an extremely wide range of possibilities as to what the threat of Michael represents – in his own mind and in that of others. Does he begin as a naïve child just playing a Halloween prank, dressing up as a clown and not realising that the knife he stabs his sister with can really kill? When the boy is unmasked after the murder, his face looks innocent. Does his eventual shock at what he has done so traumatise him that he becomes obsessed with repeating it, acting it out again and again without ever being able to deal with it so that he can stop? Note that, when he returns as an adult murderer, he steals his sister’s headstone from her grave and puts it on the bed above the dead body of another teen girl he has just killed, and then he begins to stalk a third girl named Laurie.
Laurie is a virgin and seems quite leery of boys, despite the fact that all her female friends appear to be engaging in carefree sex with their dates. For the more conservative and repressed Laurie, Michael’s knife attacks on fornicators could represent her fear of penetration as violent and deadly, or her fear of punishment for premarital sex. Due to his boyhood stabbing of his sister, sex and violence have become confused for Michael as well, and it could be that his knife thrusts at women are his perverse way of expressing desire. Sexual feelings that have been disturbed by trauma (in Michael’s case) or repressed by guilt (in Laurie’s case and possibly Michael’s, too) can come out as violence. ‘She and the killer have a certain link: sexual repression,’ says director John Carpenter.136 Referring to the scene where Michael, who has been trying to stab Laurie, drops his knife and she picks it up to counterattack, Carpenter states that ‘the one girl who is the most sexually uptight just keeps stabbing this guy with a long knife. She’s the most sexually frustrated’ and ‘all that repressed sexual energy starts coming out’.137
As informative as such musings may be, the characters within the film don’t achieve these insights. Rather than viewing Michael as a psychologically damaged human being in need of help, they tend to depersonalise and demonise him. Perhaps it’s understandable that a young boy would refer to him as ‘the boogeyman’, but even Michael’s psychiatrist – in what has to be a low point for the profession – diagnoses him as ‘purely and simply evil’. ‘This is not a man,’ the doctor says, but something that has ‘the Devil’s eyes’. Michael’s expressionless white mask, his relentless stalking and his superhuman strength all make him seem inhumanly evil. (Even his otherwise ordinary name, Michael Myers, comes to seem eerily resonant through the strange doubling of its initial syllables.) Someone who kills without cause is someone beyond cure – indefinable and thus unstoppable. The psychiatrist fires six bullets at point-blank range into Michael, causing him to fall from a balcony, but later ‘the boogeyman’ has disappeared from the spot where he landed. The film concludes by showing us a series of places where Michael did his stalking and killing – all empty now but still haunted by the sound of his breathing. As an indestructible force of supernatural evil, he could be anywhere – or everywhere.
For those who believe that human monsters are made and not born bad, the Halloween reboot will come as a welcome change. A prequel as well as a remake, this film devotes almost an hour to delving into Michael’s backstory, revealing the environmental factors that influence him to become a killer. On the Halloween night when his sister is supposed to babysit him, she leaves ten-year-old Michael alone to go upstairs and have sex with her date. When the boy later dons the mask her date had been wearing and enters his sister’s bedroom, it is clear that he feels neglected and starved of attention. Michael has been disturbed at school by bullies making lewd comments about his stripper mother – comments which both shame and excite him. When he sees the scantily clad body of his sister lying in bed, he is confused between incipient lust and a desire to punish her for ‘promiscuous’ behaviour, which reminds him of his mother’s. Michael’s stepfather has also been belittling him as a ‘faggot’, giving rise to an urge in him to prove his manhood. All these influences help to explain why, when his sister slaps him for staring at her body, Michael stabs her with his phallic knife.
The film then gives considerable screen time to the months Michael spends in therapy, but his apparently well-meaning psychiatrist must be strikingly incompetent for he never seems to explore the root causes of his patient’s mental illness, nor does he appear to prescribe any particular course of treatment. Instead, like the psychiatrist in the original film, this ‘doctor’ begins to talk about how ‘Evil is here. It’s walking amongst us.’ He calls Michael ‘a soulless killing machine’ and even implies that he may be ‘the Antichrist’. However, by having the psychiatrist get rich off a book called The Devil’s Eyes that he writes about Michael, this film tends to discredit the doctor’s religious and supernatural explanations, suggesting that he is more interested in fame than in helping his patient.
Psychological insight returns when the remake departs from the ending of the original. Instead of having Michael continue his violent acting out with no understanding of the reasons for his knife attacks and thus little hope of ever stopping them, the new film suggests that all of Michael’s repeated stabbings have actually been an attempt by him to achieve self-knowledge and gain mastery over his own behaviour. As he realises when he sees the teenage Laurie, it is not a desire to kill that has been driving him, but rather a need to connect, to receive love. Michael does not stab Laurie. Instead, because he recognises her as his own baby sister now grown up, he takes off his killer’s mask and shows her a photo of the two of them when they were young, appealing to her to recognise him. Tragically, Laurie has been told nothing about the brother she once had, and so, viewing him merely as a threat, she picks up his knife and stabs him with it. In the end, feeling rejected by his own sister, Michael steadies her hand so that she can fire a bullet into his brain. He doesn’t want to live any longer without his sister’s love, which is all he really wanted from his older sister when he entered her bedroom many years ago. People may see him as the embodiment of evil, but soulless monsters don’t commit suicide.
Director: Meir Zarchi
Cast: Camille Keaton (Jennifer), Anthony Nichols (Stanley), Gunter Kleemann (Andy), Richard Pace (Matthew), Eron Tabor (Johnny)
Director: Steven R Monroe
Cast: Sarah Butler (Jennifer), Jeff Branson (Johnny), Andrew Howard (Storch), Chad Lindberg (Matthew), Daniel Franzese (Stanley)
A combination of rape-revenge and hillbilly horror, I Spit on Your Grave has caused controversy in both its versions. Each tells the same basic tale: a young woman from the city rents a cabin in the country, where she is gang-raped by local men; she then turns the tables on them and wreaks vengeance. But the versions differ in a number of significant ways.
There is negative stereotyping of rural natives as redneck hillbillies in both films, but the men in the original movie are ignorant in an almost childlike sense and seem less aware of the immorality of their actions. Stanley and Andy make whooping sounds, throwing a rope to lasso Jennifer’s canoe as if they were children playing a game of cowboys and Indians. They laugh while chasing Jennifer through the woods before proceeding to rape her – an act they commit gleefully, as though it were equally unserious. In their stupidity, they appear to have convinced themselves that, as a ‘loose’ ‘city’ woman, Jennifer will welcome the rape. Although Matthew is the only one among them who is truly mentally challenged, he seems to stand for the rest of them, for they are all in a sense developmentally disabled. ‘You want to be a man, don’t you?’ they say, encouraging Matthew to have intercourse with her, and indeed they all seem to be boys whose sex with her occurs in front of their buddies because they feel the need to prove to the others and themselves that they are men. Matthew, wearing boys’ tube socks and smiling in self-satisfaction while he rapes her, exemplifies their arrested development.
By contrast, the men in the 2010 remake are more conscious of their own evil. Before forcing her to fellate his gun, Johnny debases Jennifer by having her show him her teeth, knowing full well that she is not a horse. As evidenced by his calling her a ‘stuck-up city bitch’ and a ‘big-city, cock-teasing whore’, Johnny’s rape of her is motivated by class resentment and covetous desire, not by childish ignorance. Moreover, the remake adds a new character, Storch, who is the rapists’ ringleader. As an older man and a sheriff, Storch should and does know better. Frisking her as an excuse to feel her up, offering her help as a pretext to assaulting her himself, and raping her anally because he enjoys her pain, Storch is a corrupt and perverted adult, not a boy.
The depiction of Jennifer, the rape victim turned avenger, is also different in the two films, particularly after the assault. The 1978 version has Jennifer go to church and ask God for forgiveness in advance of her revenge, as she feels guilty, knowing the sinfulness of what she is about to do. Jennifer then uses her sex appeal to seduce each of the men, luring them all to a violent demise. While there is a certain poetic justice to this (they treated her like a whore and so she whores herself to get back at them), it is disturbing to see her adopt their degrading view of her as a sexual plaything – and to see her continue to link sex and violence as they did. ‘Come on, killer,’ Johnny encourages Matthew during the rape when he is unable to ejaculate. Afterwards, Johnny equips Matthew with a phallic knife and sends him off to actually kill her, but he can’t do that either. ‘I was chosen to kill you and I didn’t,’ Matthew laments to Jennifer, holding up his knife. ‘You will this time,’ she assures him, and draws him into having intercourse with her. At the moment of his climax, she strangles him to death with a noose around his neck. This disabled young man, whose ‘friends’ have led him to confuse coming and killing, penis and knife, is further taken advantage of by Jennifer, who plays on his ignorance to bring him to an eroticised end. And, for her revenge on Johnny, Jennifer gets naked with him into a bathtub where she gives him a sensual massage (‘God bless your hands,’ he says), masturbates him to climax, then severs his sex organ with a knife, afterwards sitting in a chair near the red carpet she was raped on while he bleeds out. Once again, despite the poetic justice (the violator is violated, red for red), the film implies that Jennifer has descended to the level of her rapists. Her bloody revenge indicates that she continues to ‘see red’ and has not overcome the trauma of being assaulted. They forced her into a confusion of sex and violence, and revenge only mires her deeper in it rather than helping her to find a way out. The half-smile she gives at the end of the movie may suggest she’s achieved some satisfaction through her castrating vengeance, but she guiltily knows that God has not blessed those hands. They are damned.
If the original Jennifer’s revenge is realistic and guilt-ridden, the remake presents it as fantastic and conscience-free. After escaping from her rapists by falling – martyr-like with arms spread – backwards into a river, Jennifer rises again as an almost supernaturally divine avenger. To Matthew, she appears as a kind of ghost. ‘Are you sure you’re not dreaming?’ she asks. In this version, Matthew is so stricken with remorse over his part in the rape, which is greater than in the original film, that even he seems to think he deserves to die for what he has done, so her vengeance on him appears divinely justified. As for her killings of the other assailants – voyeuristic Stanley has his eyelids dragged open with fishhooks so that crows can peck out his eyes; oral rapist Johnny has his teeth broken with a metal bridle and is castrated by equine-emasculating shears; and anal rapist Storch is violated with his own shotgun, which is then triggered to explode in his ass – these executions are so elaborately contrived that they seem to be the work of some avenging higher power and not the acts of a real woman. It is as though some righteous deity were acting through Jennifer to bring poetically just retribution to these rapists. Certainly, there is little sense that Jennifer’s moral character is being further damaged by these actions or that she has any reason to feel guilty about them. When Storch tells her, ‘I’ll see you in hell,’ we may wonder for a moment if the movie wants us to consider whether she belongs there, too, given the terrible things she has now done, but when he then adds ‘I’ll rape you in hell’ and ‘you’re just a piece of meat’, we realise that we’re expected to cheer his demise. In this version, when Jennifer gives her half-smile at the end, we are not supposed to worry about the decline in her morality or mental health. We’re expected to share her smirk of satisfaction at a violent job well done.
Director: Kimberly Peirce
Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz (Carrie), Portia Doubleday (Chris)
When Stephen King, author of the novel Carrie, heard there was going to be a remake of the iconic 1976 film, he asked what was on everyone’s mind: ‘The real question is why, when the original was so good?’138 Director Kimberly Peirce decided to make her version both more realistic and more mythic – two interesting goals that sometimes end up working at cross purposes. To make the story more realistic and contemporary, the teenage Carrie is now a victim of cyberbullying. When she gets her first period in the shower and fears she is bleeding to death, the other high-school girls not only pelt her with tampons while shouting ‘Plug it up!’, they also film her humiliation with a smartphone and post the video on YouTube. On the night of the senior prom, when bully Chris and her posse of mean girls arrange to have pig’s blood dumped on Carrie, the video of her bleeding in the shower is played on giant screens in the gymnasium, adding to her shame and abasement. Given that news reports have familiarised us with the pain endured by misfits and outcasts who are persecuted via social media, Carrie’s suffering feels real to us and we empathise with her. But ours is also a world of mass shootings like the one at Columbine where two high-school seniors murdered fellow students, so when Carrie begins to deploy her killing powers in the prom massacre, she risks losing our sympathy. To retain it, the film attempts to portray Carrie as having been so victimised by bullying that she snaps, striking back at her tormentors with a mad fury. ‘I wanted to make sure she doesn’t have actual control,’ Peirce has said, ‘because I thought that if she had actual control, then she could be more liable for what she does at the prom’, particularly ‘in a post-Columbine world’.139
And yet the Carrie we see at the prom, telekinetically lifting a kindly gym teacher to safety while crushing, burning and electrocuting her specific student enemies, often seems very much in control, and this could be because the film also wants to present her as a mythic superhero. Co-scripted by Marvel Comics writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (of Fantastic Four and Spider-Man fame), the movie has been described by Peirce as ‘a superhero origin story’.140 Speaking of Carrie’s prom massacre, Peirce has said that ‘the audience is meant to get behind these kills and want to cheer for them. By and large that happened, and I think that’s because you love Carrie and you feel a sense of justice to the revenge that she’s taking.’141 While it’s easy to applaud movie superheroes who use their mythic powers to defeat the dastardly villains, it is much harder to cheer the sight of a high-school girl deliberately killing many of her classmates, even if they did bully her. In real life, the escalation of violence by a vigilante avenger is unlikely to solve the problem of bullying – and may even exacerbate it by perpetuating a cycle of viciousness and revenge. By making Carrie a more realistic character, the movie makes it hard for us to enjoy the violence she commits, and that’s a good thing.
Director: Alexandre Aja
Cast: Cécile de France (Marie), Maïwenn (Alex), Philippe Nahon (Trucker), Andrei Finti (Father), Oana Pellea (Mother), Marco Claudiu Pascu (Brother)
Everyone knows that, at the end of a slasher film, the Final Girl defeats the killer. But what if the Final Girl is the killer? In her own mind, 20-something Marie spends most of the movie trying to save her girlfriend, Alex, from a murderous male trucker, only to have it revealed near the end that Marie has a split personality: the killer she has been fighting is really herself.
That trucker is both Marie’s worst nightmare and a strange wish-fulfilment fantasy, for even though he threatens Alex, he also removes the obstacles separating Marie from the woman she secretly desires. The two friends are staying at the home of Alex’s parents in the French countryside. As night falls, Marie, who has gone outside for a smoke, glances at an upstairs window and catches sight of Alex naked in the shower. Once back inside, Marie pleasures herself in bed, a scene that is cross-cut with shots of the menacing trucker pulling up outside the house. ‘In a way, she’s calling – in her fantasy – the killer,’ says director Alexandre Aja. ‘She’s masturbating and, at the same time, the killer arrives.’142 The killer strikes down the family dog and decapitates Alex’s father. Earlier that day, when Marie first arrived at the door with her friend, Alex had assured her, ‘Don’t worry – he doesn’t bite,’ and her father had said, ‘Are you talking about me or the dog?’ Now the killer violently removes both watchdogs that might keep Marie from Alex. The killer then cuts Alex’s mother’s throat and shoots her brother. Earlier that night, Alex, who is rooming on the same floor as the rest of her family, has shown her maternal instinct by putting her little brother to bed, while Marie is left alone in an attic room. Now the killer puts an end to heterosexual marriage and mother-son bonding so that Marie can have Alex to herself. Alex is interested in a guy who already has another girlfriend, so Marie conjures up a serial murderer who will scare her friend into her arms by showing her what men are ‘really like’. The trucker cuts Alex’s face out of a family photo and puts her picture up next to those of all the other women he has had his way with. The trucker also takes the severed head of a woman who looks like Alex and uses it to perform fellatio.
These frightening images of a man sexually objectifying and fragmenting women should, Marie figures, draw Alex to her in female solidarity, except for one thing: Marie is the one doing these terrible things. So intent is Marie on attaining the object of her desire that she has unwittingly become as possessive and violently penetrative as the patriarchal villain she conjured up. Thus, we see Marie-as-the-killer pursuing Alex with a power saw while saying, ‘I’m gonna take care of you, Alex.’ ‘Take care’ in what sense? Marie’s kind of covetous love is more menacing than protective. In the last we see of Marie, she is in an insane asylum, repeatedly saying to Alex, ‘I won’t let anyone come between us any more.’ Marie never realises that the key obstacle between her and her beloved was herself.
Director: Paul Etheredge-Ouzts
Cast: Andrew Levitas (Chaz), Matt Phillips (Tobey), Hank Harris (Joey), Dylan Fergus (Eddie), Bryan Kirkwood (Jake)
Hellbent is one of the first slasher films to feature overtly gay characters. Despite the disclaimer by writer-director Paul Etheredge-Ouzts that ‘the sexuality of these characters is wholly incidental’,143 the fears and desires of the gay community can be seen as a central concern of the film. In the opening scene, two men meet in a cruising park and then hook up in a car. One man brings coloured balloons, suggesting his interest in a playful encounter. The other man, while receiving oral sex, looks up at the moon, implying a desire for romance. However, the scene ends with the second man being decapitated during fellatio by a killer, as if the fear of being ‘castrated’ by a stranger picked up in the park overwhelms any hopes of fun or love. The rest of the film rings changes on this central conflict between desire and dread, as played out through the lead characters, four young friends named Chaz, Tobey, Joey and Eddie.
Pill-popping, hard-drinking and bisexual Chaz is all about the joys of promiscuity. He’ll swallow anything or anyone. Chaz is the life of the party, and the film celebrates his joyous abandon while also being afraid of where his openness to all comers might lead. As Chaz, high on Ecstasy, is dancing with multiple partners in a club, he does not even notice when the killer begins slashing his torso, eventually cutting his throat. The gyrating clubbers dance on, heedless of his headless corpse on the floor – a nightmare of partying with everyone, but being connected to no one, as Chaz himself used to be.
Fit and buff Tobey, an underwear model, is tired of being wanted for his body alone, so he dresses up in drag to see if he can get someone interested in his wit and intelligence. But after being dismissed all night long, a desperate Tobey eventually reveals his chiselled chest to a man, who turns out to be the killer. The horns on top of the killer’s devil mask and the sickle he wields reveal his arousal at the sight of male flesh, and the blade’s penetration of Tobey’s body indicates Tobey’s despair at the thought that he will never be more than a sex object, a piece of meat for the taking.
Virginal Joey, garbed in S/M fetish gear, is snubbed by a varsity football player, who follows him into a restroom for what Joey fears will be a gay bashing. When the guy instead gives him his phone number, Joey is overjoyed at having met the man of his dreams – only to have the killer take the guy’s place, manhandle Joey, and penetrate him with his blade. Joey finds that his attraction to a tough guy, his flirtation with being the bottom in an S/M scenario, has turned from masochistic delight to a victim’s dead-end.
Will nice-guy Eddie’s cruising of a tattooed biker lead him to a similar fate? The biker, Jake, pushes Eddie down and handcuffs him to the bed – signs of dominance that could be delicious or dangerous. Eddie’s desire to keep risk within safe limits (Jake agrees to use condoms) gives way to fear of anal rape, which is figured when the killer sticks his blade up to Eddie’s eye and then pokes it out (the eye is artificial, due to a prior accident). In the end, care and commitment conquer fear when Jake and Eddie join together to defeat the killer and tend to each other’s wounds. But the film leaves us with one last image of castration anxiety – the killer, still alive, holds Eddie’s eye between his teeth – as a haunting reminder that fear never really dies.
Director: Drew Goddard
Cast: Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford (Engineers), Anna Hutchison (Jules), Chris Hemsworth (Curt), Kristen Connolly (Dana), Fran Kranz (Marty)
Five college kids go to an Evil Dead cabin near a Friday the 13th lake where they get attacked by a Texas Chain Saw-like family. Seeming to fit the formula of a ’70s or ’80s slasher film (‘You think you know the story’ is the movie’s tagline), The Cabin in the Woods is actually a meta-horror film that critiques the genre. The unsuspecting youths are being electronically monitored by engineers in a control room, who deploy subtle means, such as pheromone mists and slight rises in temperature, to influence their behaviour. Thus Jules, despite being a brainy female pre-med student, is overcome with whorish lust for Curt, who starts to assert his dominance like an alpha-male athlete, even though he is on an academic scholarship. Pressured to conform to the stereotypes of ‘slut’ and ‘dumb jock’, Jules and Curt proceed to have sex, while the leering engineers watch them voyeuristically on monitors. A zombie then appears to skewer Jules’s hand with a blade (a symbolic rape) and then to cut Curt’s throat (a kind of castration). Soon afterwards, the engineers cheer and party while a zombie is torturing and trying to kill another woman, Dana (the ‘virgin’), for it turns out that this entire scenario is a recurrent ritual whereby young blood is spilled to appease the Ancient Ones – old gods who demand the sacrifice of youth.
These old gods and the ageing engineers are like the audiences at slasher films who first peep at and then punish the randy teen characters. As co-writer Joss Whedon has said, ‘It’s so ingrained in our society that this is the normal course of horror entertainment and that there is this weird obsession with youth and sex, and at the same time this very puritanical desire to punish it that I think is unseemly and really, really creepy.’144 The engineers with their video voyeurism are not so different from the zombie father who watches girls undress through a one-way mirror. As the engineers (and horror-movie audiences) spy on teen sex, they are filled with frustrated lust and envious rage. The old take delight in punishing the young for enjoying the sex they themselves can no longer have. Because watching ‘the cutting of the flesh’ makes them get a trouser ‘bulge’, the engineers (and slasher-film viewers) are no better than the ‘zombified, pain-worshipping, backwoods idiots’ who are the movie’s monsters. When Dana hits the ‘purge’ button and turns these monsters on their masters so that the zombies kill the engineers, she is really only hastening the ancient system’s own self-destruction, for if the old feed off their young, none can survive. Another youth, Marty (the ‘fool’), is told that he and Dana must die or the Ancient Ones will destroy all of humanity. But Marty is no fool. Realising that only a monstrously immoral world would make such an inhumane demand, he refuses to shoot Dana. If that means the end of everything, so be it. It is better to die making a decision his conscience can live with. As director Drew Goddard says, ‘If, to save the world, you have to execute your friend, you should say no.’145
Director: Hideo Nakata
Cast: Rie Ino’o (Ghost Girl), Nanako Matsushima (Mother)
Director: Gore Verbinski
Cast: Daveigh Chase (Ghost Girl), Naomi Watts (Mother)
Both the original Japanese Ringu and its American remake, The Ring, begin with teenage gossip about the urban legend of a cursed video, which, once seen, leads viewers to die of fright within one week. As one teen girl tells another this story, she says that she herself saw the video a week ago and then she pretends to die, taking advantage of her worried friend’s sympathy in order to throw a scare into her. However, the girl who plays this ‘campfire tale’ prank really does die, which suggests a connection between the curse and people who lack compassion for others. Indeed, the video has been created by the vengeful ghost of a girl rejected by her adoptive parents and left to die at the bottom of a well. In Ringu, characters call this girl ‘a monster’ and speculate that she may have been the spawn of a sea-demon father who ‘wasn’t human’. To most watchers of the video, the ghost girl also appears as a vision of supernatural evil, climbing out of the well with her long, damp hair covering her face, except for one creepily staring eye. Because we do not see her whole face, she looks dehumanised, an object of fear rather than a person worthy of sympathy. Interestingly, in the week before they die, those who see the girl with the obscured face in the video begin to view their own faces as blurred or distorted in photos, and (in The Ring) they begin to scribble out other people’s faces. Before she died, the girl at the bottom of the well saw its cover closing above her, obscuring the sun and effectively effacing her life. Now the video’s victims seem to see what she saw as their eyes stare at a frightening vision of encroaching darkness, their own self-effacement. Much as recounting an urban legend spreads fear through the rumour mill, so watching the cursed video seems to spread people’s fear of dying, as if seeing the horror of what happened to the abandoned girl leaves people fatally traumatised. In the film’s scariest scene, the ghost girl in the video crawls out of the well and then through the television screen to attack a viewer, as if images themselves can take on corporeal form and literally kill.
But instead of scaring each other to death with televisual ‘chain letters’ of fear, what if we watched with some empathy? What if seeing what the girl saw became an opportunity to feel what she felt? This is what a female journalist and mother tries to do, investigating the images in the video as clues to understanding the girl’s suffering, then overcoming her own fear of death (she has seen the video, too) by going down into the well and clasping the girl’s corpse to her bosom. By recovering this abandoned child and showing sympathy for her as a person (and not some demon-spawn), the mother seems to lift the curse, for she does not die within a week of having seen the video.
To believe that a vengeful spirit can be appeased by human understanding is a hopeful view, but these films ultimately refuse such optimism. Rather than including the ghost girl within the community of suffering humanity, they demonise her as irredeemably evil. After the mother cradles the girl’s body, her own son tells her, ‘You weren’t supposed to help her. Don’t you understand…? She never sleeps’ – she is supernatural and relentlessly malevolent. When the girl’s ghost tries to take possession of the son in The Ring Two, the mother repudiates her – ‘I’m not your fucking mommy!’ – and then pushes her back down the same well from which she had earlier recovered her body. The mother’s action thus repeats the girl’s parents’ original rejection of her and implies that they were right. It turns out that the mother’s earlier compassion for the girl did not lift the curse. Instead, the only way to avoid death after viewing the cursed video is to make someone else watch it before the week is up. This implies that, in order not to become the victim of a trauma, one should become a victimiser, identifying with the aggressor and inflicting that same trauma on somebody else. It is hard to imagine a more pessimistic ending – or one more despairing and destructive of humanity.
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Cast: Kenji Mizuhashi (Taguchi), Kumiko Aso (Michi), Kurume Arisaka (Junko), Koyuki (Harue)
Director: Jim Sonzero
Cast: Jonathan Tucker (Josh), Rick Gonzalez (Stone), Kristen Bell (Mattie)
Taguchi works in a greenhouse with other 20-something friends, but he leaves behind their companionship and loses his link to nature when he shuts himself away in his darkened apartment, spending all day on his computer. Kairo means ‘circuit’, as in the human circulatory system or Internet connectivity, and Taguchi is lured by the promise that if he ‘plugs in’ to the Web, he will overcome loneliness and be connected with other people. However, what he finds, after the on-screen greeting of ‘Would you like to meet a ghost?’, are webcam images of other online users, sitting alone in front of their monitors and looking lethargic and depressed, drained of life. Taguchi’s monitor also shows him images of himself looking at a computer screen of himself looking at a computer screen of himself, as if his life were receding into the Internet, making him a mere ghost of his former self, now trapped in virtual reality. When his friend Michi visits him, she sees Taguchi standing behind a hanging plastic curtain, a virtual presence, there but not there, cut off from her and the real world. Michi sees another computer-enthralled friend, Junko, lose her identity to the machine and become a black smudge of her former self, eventually breaking up into bits and bytes that float away into the ether. And a computer expert named Harue finds herself flickering between actual views and pixelated images of herself to the point where ‘real’ life and ‘reel’ life become indistinguishable. Lured by the false promise of connectivity, Harue exclaims, ‘I’m not alone,’ and then shoots herself in the head, after watching an online user kill himself in the same way on her computer screen. With these scenes, the film refers to the phenomenon of hikikomori where adolescents withdraw from society by taping out the light from their rooms and spending their lives hunched over computers. Youths have also engaged in suicide pacts, live-streaming their deaths via webcam to other online users who are thereby invited to join them in the cyberworld beyond.
Although they are both techno-horror films, Pulse, the Hollywood remake of Kairo, differs from the Japanese original in a number of revealing respects. The youths in Kairo grow increasingly isolated and eventually fade away into their cyberworlds. The 20-somethings in Pulse are a gregarious bunch, so it is hard to view them as threatened by loneliness. When one of them texts another while they are sitting at the same table, the telecommunication does not make us fear that the friends are growing apart. Rather, the gap between them seems humorous and easily surmountable, if they just put down their cell phones and talked. Rather than gradually dispersing into the ether, the youths in Pulse die sudden, spectacular deaths, less out of suicidal despair and more because they are attacked by aggressively evil ghosts. Josh is assaulted by a grotesque spectre with an elongated face that literally sucks the life’s breath out of him. Stone is infected with a disease that manifests as an ugly rash spreading over his body. Mattie is menaced by a writhing mass of arms that threaten to pull her into the virtual world, which resembles a hell full of tormented souls. It is rarely clear what, if anything, links these ghosts or what they have to do with the particular threat represented by the Internet. ‘We took it up a few notches,’ director Jim Sonzero said in comparing his amped-up version with the original, noting that he also wanted to give the story ‘more structure’ so that it would not be so ‘lethargic’ or ‘glacial’.146 Effects designer Gary Tunnicliffe added that each of the deaths in Pulse has ‘a different tone’ so that ‘it wasn’t the same thing over and over again’.147 It’s a long way from the original where all the youths die essentially the same quiet death, their anomie and disconnection from society leading them to fade away into the Internet. For Kairo director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, ‘Ghosts are beings that lack human emotion and personality. They’re human-like, but all the emotional elements of a normal person are missing. They’re empty shells. That’s what scares me when it comes to ghosts.’148 In Kairo, ghosts are us after we have been drawn into the Web, whereas in Pulse, ghosts are evil techno-spirits trying to invade our human world. Unlike the in-your-face attacks and killings by the ghosts in Pulse, the closest Kairo gets to a spectacular death is a view of a woman, positioned way off in the distance, who dies by leaping from a water tower, with the camera showing her entire fall to the ground. With this scene, Kurosawa makes a point about how many suicides are barely even noticed, with people just dropping away from society and perishing in despair. By holding the woman’s body in frame all the way down and showing her hit the ground, he emphasises the fact that this is a loss of life, the presence of a real person who is no more.
Director: William Malone
Cast: Stephen Rea (Pratt), Gesine Cukrowski (Jeannie)
Pratt is a serial killer who live-streams his slayings on a website where viewers can choose the tools of torture he will use to penetrate female flesh. Those watching thus become accessories to murder, their sadistic desires enacted by the killer’s hands, their eyes as cold as the camera’s. But one of Pratt’s victims, a young woman named Jeannie, begins to haunt the Web, appearing as a seductive avatar to ask PC users, ‘Do you like to watch?’ and ‘Do you want to hurt me?’ Users who answer ‘yes’ then have the tables turned on them, for instead of getting to identify with an aggressive serial killer, they find themselves being tortured by whatever it is they most fear. For the haemophiliac Jeannie, this was being made to bleed, so Pratt’s knives were especially terrifying to her. Much as her protective skin was ruptured, so the interface shielding users from the violence they are watching on-screen is breached when this vengeful ghost punishes them for their snuff-movie voyeurism.149 One female viewer, who has a fear of insects, is made to watch in horror as her own computer gets a bug, with cockroaches crawling out of her hard drive and all over her helpless flesh. Another user becomes so immersed in her viewing of violence that her worst fear is realised: she drowns. The mind of a third watcher is overwhelmed by the torture he’s seeing and his system crashes, leaving him dead from a collision in an out-of-control car. In each case, before dying, users see their own faces reflected back at them from the computer screen as if in a distorting mirror, revealing their true moral ugliness.
Before taking a scalpel to one victim, Pratt, who calls himself the Doctor, tells her, ‘I’d like to say I can feel your pain, but I can’t … I know what I should feel. I just can’t.’ It could be that the self-diagnosis here is accurate and that underlying Pratt’s sadism is a desire to feel empathy for his victims, but his fear of vulnerability gets in the way, prompting him to become an aggressor instead. Whatever the reasons for this physician’s inability to heal himself, Jeannie’s avenging ghost does get him to suffer some of the pain he has inflicted on others. ‘Time to feel’ and ‘Time to die’ she tells him with her screaming, violated mouth, and her ghost becomes a train barrelling out of the video screen towards Pratt’s now-vulnerable eye.
Directors: Catherine Hardwicke, Chris Weitz, David Slade, Bill Condon
Cast: Kristen Stewart (Bella), Taylor Lautner (Jacob), Robert Pattinson (Edward)
When a werewolf and a vampire are rivals for your love, which do you choose? There are aspects of male sexuality which appear during adolescence that can seem monstrous and frightening (yet strangely sexy) to girls. The growth of body hair, increased muscle mass, a voracious appetite and a tendency to hunt in packs can liken some teen boys to lycanthropes. Others have bushy eyebrows, mesmerising eyes, full lips and penetrating teeth that make them resemble vampires. Seventeen-year-old Bella must decide between lupine Jacob and vampiric Edward, who are competing for her affection.
Jacob is associated with the physical realm. His body heat warms her on a freezing night. ‘Let’s face it: I am hotter than you,’ he tells the undead Edward. Jacob’s musky odour attracts Bella, and his powerful physique protects her as he runs through the forest, carrying her in his muscular arms. Noting how often Jacob’s bare torso is exposed, Edward wonders, ‘Doesn’t he have a shirt?’ ‘I can sense how I make you feel, physically,’ Jacob tells Bella, and she straddles the back of his motorcycle as if in anticipation of riding this hunky heartthrob. A Native American, Jacob is often backgrounded by green mountains and blue lakes, offering Bella a connection to the land and its natural freedom, an opportunity to run with the wolves. In marrying him, she would get to join the Quileute clan, becoming part of their tribal family and experiencing the joys of being a wife and mother. Yet Jacob’s physicality is also something she feels as a potential threat. In his passion, he presses her with unwanted kisses, making her fear that his carnivorous desire for her will lead to rape. Is he a savage who will ravage her? ‘The wolves have no control,’ Edward says disdainfully, and Jacob himself apologises for the ‘inner animal thing’ that he has unleashed.
In contrast to Jacob and his carnal appetite, Edward maintains an almost spiritual self-restraint. Whereas brawny Jacob has tan skin and dark hair, Edward is slim, blond and pale-faced – more angelically beautiful than handsomely masculine. His body is so pure that it sparkles in the sunlight. A ‘vegetarian’ vampire, Edward controls his bloodlust and abstains from penetrating Bella before marriage. By preserving her virginity in this way, he offers her a soulful communion unsullied by lust, an idealised pleasure with no physical pain. By becoming this spiritual kind of vampire with Edward, Bella would be able to remain young for ever, living out the girlish fantasy of a never-ending fairy-tale romance. But this absence of attention to her body disturbs Bella, for she is a woman of flesh and blood who desires sexual fulfilment. She chafes against the bonds of enforced chastity, finding anaemic Edward to be too ‘pure’ and withholding, whereas Jacob is too hot-blooded and hungry. Edward, speaking of having penetrated multiple women in the past before learning the value of abstinence, tells Bella, ‘It might be too late for my soul, but I will protect yours.’ Yet Bella doesn’t accept the argument that premarital penetration would mean that, once having experienced such physical pleasure, she would no longer be able to control her bloodlust and would consequently thirst for other men besides Edward. ‘Everyone says that once I’m changed, all I’m going to want is to slaughter the whole town!’ Bella scoffs. ‘When we first taste human blood, a sort of frenzy begins and it’s almost impossible to stop,’ Edward warns, but Bella wants a man ‘body and soul’, not just body (Jacob) or soul (Edward). She is looking for a balance between vegetarian and vampire, between were- and wolf.
In one scene where Bella and Edward are in close physical proximity, she thinks she sees him ‘leaning away’ from her and ‘averting his face like he smelled something bad’.150 But Edward later tells her that, rather than being disgusted by the odour of her human flesh, he found it so powerfully alluring that, in order to avoid taking her then and there, he had to leave the room and slake his thirst elsewhere as a way of relieving himself. However, whether Edward is so refined as to be above fleshly temptation, or so repressed that his barely contained desires threaten to erupt as violence, he is a problem for Bella, who wants neither an ascetic angel nor a vicious vampire, but someone who will pierce her with love.
Director: Jonathan Levine
Cast: Nicholas Hoult (R), Dave Franco (Perry), Teresa Palmer (Julie)
As a zombie, R is one of the undead, but he is also an emo/goth teen boy who, despite having adopted the dark hair, pale face and heavy eyeliner of his ghoulish brethren, suffers deeply in his alienation from regular human society. Neither a ghoul nor a regular guy, R is an awkward adolescent who wanders aimlessly with no clear orientation, in contrast to Perry, a square-jawed, GI Joe-type who knows how to use a gun and to please his girlfriend, Julie. When R satisfies his hunger for Perry by consuming his brains, it’s not clear whether sexually ambivalent R desires the other boy or wishes to identify with him – to desire Julie in the way Perry does. ‘I just want to feel what you felt,’ R says to Perry while eating him, before smearing some of Perry’s blood and grey matter on Julie’s face as if that could help R transfer his desire from the boy to the girl. Like a stuttering Romeo who can’t get past the first letter of his name, R keeps stumbling on his first date with Julie, trying to walk and talk the part of a typical boyfriend. Taking her for a ride in a red convertible (the ‘cool guy’), playing her vinyl records (the ‘hipster’) and shaking a snow globe with figures of a couple holding hands inside (the ‘romantic’), R tries on different roles, but he never quite seems to fit any one of them. ‘Stop shrugging,’ Julie tells him, frustrated at times by his indeterminate nature; ‘it’s a very noncommittal gesture’. ‘You can be whatever you want,’ she assures him. But when he asks, ‘We can, right? You and me?’, R hears the ghost of Perry saying, ‘It’s not gonna happen, lover boy – not after you tell her you ate her ex,’ as if reminding R that his desires will always be too queer to settle for one straight part.
And yet Julie also seems to like the fact that R is so different from the resolutely macho Perry. She appreciates that he is sensitive and sentimental as well as protective of her. In one complexly gendered scene, Julie and another girl give R a makeover as if he were one of their female friends on a sleepover, but their goal in applying foundation and blush is to help him pass as a regular guy when he goes to meet Julie’s father. R ends up looking feminine and manly, sensitive and virile, and the girls like his queer undecidability, telling him, ‘You look hot!’
Director: James Wan
Cast: Tobin Bell (Jigsaw), Leigh Whannell (Adam), Cary Elwes (Lawrence), Mike Butters (Paul), Paul Gutrecht (Mark), Shawnee Smith (Amanda)
This film’s Jigsaw killer cuts puzzle-shaped pieces of skin from the bodies of his victims. The film itself is a fragmented narrative of puzzle pieces that fit together to connect different meanings of ‘saw’: to see and to cut. Two men, Adam and Lawrence, have each been chained by the ankle at opposite ends of a room, in the middle of which lies a gun. Watched by a camera in the wall, Lawrence must use a hacksaw to sever his own foot, crawl to grab the gun, and shoot Adam, or else Lawrence’s wife and daughter will be killed. Jigsaw’s stated aim is to get Lawrence to prove how much he values his family, but in fact Jigsaw is looking forward to watching Lawrence fail, for that will justify the killer’s cynical view of humanity’s faults and his cruel desire to mete out punishment for them. Jigsaw wants to see that hacksaw slicing through flesh. His is a sadistic kind of seeing that enjoys others’ suffering, the cuts inflicted upon them. As one detective comments after noticing a peephole through which the killer spies on his victims, ‘Looks like our friend Jigsaw likes to book himself front-row seats to his own sick little games.’ Although most sports fans root for their team to win, perverted Jigsaw gets excited over the prospect of people losing his games, as he is turned on by death and destruction.
After a man named Paul makes a half-hearted suicide attempt using a straight razor, Jigsaw creates a game where Paul has to escape from a roomful of razor wire. Ostensibly, this is Paul’s chance to prove how much he really wants to live, but his most strenuous efforts lead only to a fatally lacerated stomach, so the game seems rigged, as if designed to confirm that people are basically self-destructive. Another man, Mark, has been feigning illness to receive benefit cheques, so Jigsaw devises a game where Mark has to take sickness seriously. In order to obtain the antidote to a slow-acting poison in his system, Mark, whose body has been smeared with a flammable substance, must open a safe before a candle sets him on fire. But rather than cheering Mark on to success, Jigsaw wants him to go up in flames so that all the people he ‘burned’ with his fakery will have their vengeance. Jigsaw isn’t out to rescue or reform people; he seeks retribution and revenge. A drug addict named Amanda is locked in a ‘reverse bear-trap’ that will rip her head apart if she doesn’t slice open the belly of her drug dealer to obtain a key to the lock. While this game may seem designed to force her to overcome her dependency on the dealer, Jigsaw fully expects to see Amanda cut open the man, choosing her own survival over the other’s life – and she does.
Thus, while outwardly civil and altruistic, politely explaining how his games are for people’s betterment, Jigsaw is actually sadistic, punitive and vengeful. Jigsaw’s hypocritical duality can be seen in his avatar, Billy, the ventriloquist’s doll through whom he speaks. The dapperly dressed Billy, who wears a tuxedo and bow tie, also has glaringly judgemental red eyes and lunatic spirals on his cheeks. It could be argued that all the victims who play Jigsaw’s games become his ventriloquist’s dummies, for they serve as the means by which he commits his acts of homicide or self-destruction. Jigsaw himself kills no one; he induces others to do that for him.
But Saw ends with a character who finds the ingenuity and courage not to play entirely by Jigsaw’s rules. Lawrence is being punished for desiring a woman other than his wife and for working so much he neglects his daughter. As we noted above, in order to save his family from being killed, Lawrence must saw off his chained foot so that he can reach a gun and shoot his chained cellmate, Adam – these are the rules of Jigsaw’s game. But unlike the guilt-ridden and self-mortifying Paul, Lawrence does not commit suicide. He severs his foot at the ankle, but is careful to use his shirt as a tourniquet to tie off his leg so that he will not bleed to death. Lawrence picks up the gun and shoots Adam, but unlike the homicidal Amanda, Lawrence (who is a doctor) avoids killing his victim, for he is careful to aim at non-vital organs. By finding a middle way between homicidal anger and suicidal despair, Lawrence plays along with Jigsaw’s game but makes his own terms, refusing to accept that murder and self-mortification are the only allowable outcomes. Whereas Jigsaw sees others sadistically, enjoying the cut, Lawrence views Adam with sympathy, feeling his suffering as being similar to his own and wanting to alleviate their shared pain. ‘Your aim in this game is to kill Adam,’ Jigsaw tells him, but Lawrence wins the game by rewriting the rules.
Director: Eli Roth
Cast: Derek Richardson (Josh), Jay Hernandez (Paxton), Barbara Nedeljáková and Jana Kadeřábkova (Slovakian Women), Jan Vlasák (Josh’s Tormentor), Petr Janis (Paxton’s Tormentor)
What fuels the horror in Hostel is a never-ending cycle of victimisation and revenge. US college students Josh and Paxton are backpacking through Europe, alienating locals by displaying an arrogant sense of entitlement (‘Kiss my American ass’) and reducing local women to flesh in a meat market (‘I hope bestiality is legal in Amsterdam because that girl is a fucking hog’). At a brothel, Paxton fist-bumps another male friend as the two of them are simultaneously serviced by a prostitute, and after Josh and Paxton both score with two Slovakian women in adjoining beds, Paxton congratulates him on his sexual conquest by stating, ‘Mission accomplished.’ However, as with President Bush’s declaration of victory in Iraq, this claim of phallic triumph over the female sex proves premature, for the two women sell the American guys to an organisation called Elite Hunting, which caters to rich people who pay to torture and kill captured victims. These two domineering males are now forced to submit to violation by others, as the women turn the tables on them. Relishing her revenge, one woman taunts Paxton by saying, ‘I get a lot of money for you, and that make you my bitch.’ Like the women displayed for male consumption at the brothel, Josh and Paxton join other men being marketed to rich sadists who pay to abuse their flesh. ‘These guys’ who were ‘making fun of the hookers in the window’ now ‘become the meat’, comments writer-director Eli Roth.151 As their flesh is penetrated by scalpels and drills, Josh and Paxton are given the opportunity to feel what it is like to be on the receiving end of phallic violence, to experience something similar to the pain they themselves inflicted on the females. And yet a sense of shared suffering does not lead to sympathy, for when Paxton escapes from the torture house, he in turn takes revenge on the two Slovakian women who sent him there by deliberately running them over with a car. ‘This gets the biggest applause in the movie,’ Roth notes,152 as viewers gain vicarious enjoyment from Paxton’s act of vengeance.
In the scene where Josh is tortured by a client of Elite Hunting, he protests to his tormentor, ‘I didn’t fucking do shit to you!’ But Josh has been chosen because he is American. The fact that those of his nationality fetch the highest price on the torture market suggests that some see Americans as the worst offenders on the world stage, worthy of the most terrible punishment. Thus, Josh is illegally abducted and taken to a secret prison in an Eastern European country, as if in retaliation for the US government’s ‘extraordinary rendition’ of people to ‘black sites’. Josh is stripped of his clothes, hooded, and shackled to a chair, where he is dominated, dehumanised and sexually humiliated like the Abu Ghraib captives who were subjected to ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques by US military personnel and the CIA.
When Paxton is in the torture chair, he appeals to his tormentor’s common humanity (‘I know you don’t want to do this’) and even tries to forge a bond with the man by speaking his native tongue, but the other’s vindictive hatred overcomes any sense of compassion and he charges at Paxton with a chainsaw, severing two of his fingers. After escaping and finding his way back to civilisation, Paxton has the chance to end the cycle of violation and vengeance. Yet when he catches sight of the man who tortured and killed Josh, he follows him to a restroom stall where he ‘waterboards’ him in the toilet and slices off two of his fingers, taking revenge for the loss of his own (and for the loss of the Twin Towers on 9/11?). As Paxton lifts the man’s head out of the toilet, he sees his own face reflected in a chrome fixture right next to the man’s, giving Paxton the opportunity to recognise that he himself is becoming the torturer who subjects the other to terrible suffering. But Paxton proceeds to slit the man’s throat, in retaliation for the earlier cutting of Josh’s.
After he is killed, Josh’s body is burned, resulting in smoke and ashes that pour from a chimney, and Eli Roth has compared the Elite Hunting torture facility to Auschwitz and its crematorium. Within the movie, attention is called to the fact that Josh is Jewish, and Paxton’s tormentor is, pointedly, German. When Paxton kills Josh’s torturer – an execution that occurs in a restroom marked ‘Herren’ (German for ‘men’) – he is taking revenge for all the Jews exterminated by the Nazis. (In the World War Two film Inglourious Basterds, Roth himself plays a Jewish soldier who beats Nazis to death with an American baseball bat.) The Iraq War, 9/11, World War Two – the reasons for revenge recede ever backwards in time, just as they seem to reach forever into the future.
Director: Pascal Laugier
Cast: Morjana Alaoui (Anna), Catherine Bégin (Mademoiselle), Mylène Jampanoï (Lucie)
A young woman named Anna is held captive in an underground torture chamber. There she is force-fed gruel while shackled to a chair with a hole in the seat and a pail below for her waste matter. At other times, she is repeatedly slapped, punched and knocked to the floor, and then lifted to her feet for it to happen all over again. Finally, she is clamped to a metal contraption and skinned alive, resulting in the excruciating exposure of her muscles and veins. Anna’s torment is ordered and funded by a secret society of wealthy and elderly people who subject her to ‘pain’ and ‘total deprivation’ in the hope that she will ‘transcend’ this world and be granted a martyr’s vision of heaven, which would prove that there is an afterlife. The society’s leader, a grande dame known as Mademoiselle, hears Anna’s dying testimony about what she saw that ‘lay beyond death’. Mademoiselle then tells a fellow member of the sect to ‘keep doubting’ and proceeds to shoot herself in the head.
It seems likely that Mademoiselle shoots herself in despair because Anna has told her that she saw nothing: she did not witness any life beyond this one. But this does not mean that no heaven exists. It merely shows that Mademoiselle was unable to obtain empirical proof of it. A thoroughgoing materialist, Mademoiselle places value on the things of this world – her luxury car, fine clothes and physical existence – and her longing for an afterlife is fuelled by a desire to extend these things. She has no spiritual values and so she fails to see that belief in an afterlife is not a matter of empirical evidence but of faith. Although she is old enough to be a grandmother, Mademoiselle does not nurture or guide young women into adulthood for, in her view, ageing is just one more step towards death. Instead, she selfishly sacrifices girls like Anna in a futile attempt to extract a vision from them of how Mademoiselle herself can attain eternal life beyond death.
Before Anna was captured, she had tried but failed to save her beloved Lucie, another victim whose physical and mental wounds Anna had soothed and tended for years. As Anna dies, the vision she is granted is of Lucie. Anna’s compassion for Lucie’s suffering, her belief in the enduring strength of their relationship, has given her faith in an afterlife where the two of them will be reunited.
Director: Marian Dora
Cast: Zenza Raggi (Brauth), Frank Oliver (Katze), Pietro Martellanza (Heinrich), Janette Weller (Melanie), Patrizia Johann (Anja), Margarethe von Stern (Clarissa)
The question of ‘why?’ hovers over this film of characters committing a depraved litany of atrocious acts – scatological, sacrilegious, penetrative, eviscerating – to frequently emetic effect. Brauth, Katze and Heinrich are three middle-aged men who torture women – Melanie, Anja and Clarissa – at an old house in a secluded valley far removed from civilisation. Some indication of the men’s motives can be gleaned from an early montage linking shots of dolls, animatronic puppets and real people, such as when we cut from a guy in a wheelchair shaking his head to an animatronic boy moving ‘his’ mechanical head. We then see the half-destroyed head of a female doll attached to the bones of an animal carcass. These shots convey the men’s shocked realisation that human bodies are made of matter that decays and becomes inanimate in death. Ranting about how, these days, ‘cripples’ have more rights than a ‘normal’ person, Brauth walks up to the wheelchair-bound Clarissa, rips out her colostomy bag, and then sticks his finger in the excremental hole, causing her to scream in pain. Brauth’s goal is to deny her human dignity, to show that she, like everyone else, amounts to nothing more than waste matter. But it is he who is reducing her to such, acting as a degrading force to keep her from claiming her dignity, which her disability has never before stopped her from doing. Later, Brauth tells the women that, nearby, there is a slaughterhouse where ‘brute men’ work. His violent rape of shrieking Anja is then cross-cut with shots of a squealing pig being stuck with a knife by a butcher, as if to imply that brutal forces rule the world and that a woman is nothing more than meat. However, it seems as wrong to assume that the workman who kills the pig is a brute and a sadist (who knows what he’s feeling about the pig?) as it does to equate sexual desire with violent predation. Only in Brauth’s mind does it appear so.
The men actually seem afraid of forming an amorous connection with a woman because they would feel too much the pain of its loss were it to end. ‘Your kiss is as poisonous as a spider’s bite,’ Brauth tells Melanie when she tries to show him a little affection, and the melancholy Katze thinks, ‘Do not entice me with gifts of love,’ as these will only be taken away, since he believes that ‘forever through tears will I see the sun’s light’. Indeed, much of the men’s extreme violence can be understood as a desperate defence against empathy of the kind that Katze shows when, seeing a snail’s erect eye-stalks sliced off, he feels himself suddenly struck with blindness. The men cannot love when they are so overwhelmed by fear of losing their beloved’s body or their own physical ability to make love – a fear seen in a series of shots linking Brauth’s penis to a worm, followed by a worm-ridden skull touched by Melanie.
In the end, Brauth stabs his friend Heinrich in the gut and Katze eviscerates him. As Heinrich is thrown onto a bonfire to be burned alive, Katze has Anja masturbate him to orgasm while he enjoys the sight of his friend’s head as it is charred to a skull. Director Marian Dora has described his film as one of ‘violence, hatred, madness, and depravity’.153 The men commit violence in an effort to avoid feeling empathy or loss, so strong is their hatred of death. But the men’s violence is a kind of confused madness, for it brings on the very death they fear, as in the killing of their friend Heinrich. Finally, the men try to find a depraved enjoyment in watching others suffer and die, but every perverse climax only brings them closer to their own denouement and demise. They end up in love with death, whereas if they weren’t in such dread of the body’s eventual disintegration, they could see it as a reason to live and love every moment of being.
Director: Edgar Wright
Cast: Simon Pegg (Shaun), Nick Frost (Ed), Kate Ashfield (Liz)
Underachiever Shaun and his slacker buddy Ed must somehow summon the energy to fight the ‘slow and shambolic’ zombies that are attacking North London. Here are four funny moments from this film and how their humour adds meaning to the movie:
1. Shaun picks up a cricket bat, swings it to make a few tentative hits against a zombie, and then bashes the creature to the ground with a frenzied series of blows as he ends up covered in blood spatter. Quintessentially British, cricket is a civilised game played by genteel people – here repurposed to devastating effect. It is a proud moment for a nation sometimes disparaged for its effete politeness and weak civility. Brits can play by the rules or, if necessary, turn savage in their own defence.
2. To head off an onslaught of the flesh-eating ghouls, Ed reaches for whatever is at hand, including wanting to hurl Shaun’s vinyl records at them. But even under threat of death, Shaun is hesitant to part with any albums from his prized collection and insists that Ed select carefully among them, weaponising only Shaun’s least favourite records. The overvaluing of pop albums is ridiculous – until we pause to consider that music is part of what makes life worth living, that it is one aspect of the humanity we are fighting for. Whether or not the songs saved by Shaun – New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ and Prince’s ‘Sign o’ the Times’ – are necessary for the survival of civilisation is perhaps debatable.
3. When one character accuses Shaun of endangering others by having a pointless argument with his ‘boyfriend’ Ed, Shaun replies indignantly, ‘He’s not my boyfriend.’ Immediately afterwards, Ed slides Shaun a beer, and Shaun tells him, ‘Thanks, babe,’ and gives him a wink. The fact is that Shaun’s guy time with Ed has been a problem for Shaun’s girlfriend, Liz. Although Shaun finds his bromance with Ed fulfilling on its own terms, which involve playing video games, smoking dope, and downing pints at the pub, these laddish activities do tend to detract from other things he could be doing, like having sex with his girlfriend.
4. As Ed is playing a video game, Shaun encourages him to reload. ‘I’m on it,’ Ed says, and fires at enemies on the video screen. ‘Ooh, nice shot,’ Shaun compliments him. Later, as the two of them are facing the zombie apocalypse, Ed hands Shaun some shells so that he can reload his rifle. ‘I’m on it,’ Shaun says and fires, hitting a zombie in the head. ‘Ooh, nice shot,’ says Ed. Having been told that their gaming is a pointless slacker pastime, Shaun and Ed can now boast that all that sofa loafing actually prepared them to save the world. Before, the time they spent together was considered a waste and a distraction from their social responsibility to others. Now the two of them can stay leagued as best friends while simultaneously serving the needs of society. If only the real world were a first-person shooter game and its problems could be solved by two bros firing at them …
Director: Ruben Fleischer
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg (Columbus), Woody Harrelson (Tallahassee)
In this film, the apocalypse is caused by a mutant strain of mad cow disease that spreads to humans, turning them into zombies. This funny-horrible scenario extrapolates from an existing threat, viral contagion, and hysterically imagines that it has led to the end of the world. It is the kind of fear a child might have, one whose expectation that cows are there to provide us with sweet milk and fresh meat has been brutally dashed. At one point in the film, the human survivors begin smashing all the items in a shop. As co-screenwriter Rhett Reese explains, ‘Part of the joy of the post-apocalyptic landscape … is that there are no rules. You can do things like walk into a store and break everything, which is something we always wanted to do as kids.’154 Throwing a tantrum of destruction becomes an outlet for grief and anger over the loss of loved ones turned zombies. In another scene, the survivors find actor Bill Murray still alive and he re-enacts for them a hilarious scene from his 1984 movie Ghostbusters – until he is accidentally mistaken for a zombie and shot dead. While nostalgic for a time when fighting the undead was funny, the survivors increasingly fear that everything now is deadly serious, that there is no return to humour or hope. One member of the group, Columbus, who has always had a fear of clowns, ends up smashing an attacking zombie-clown with a sledgehammer as if to prove that his sneaking suspicion was right all along: there never was anything to laugh about because the world is really a hostile place. Another survivor, Tallahassee, is gleeful when he finds a cache of big guns with which to mow down the zombie hordes, implying a teenager’s view that the best way to deal with the world’s threats is to shoot them as callously as targets in a video game. Tallahassee does retain a love of Twinkies, and his fond memory of this childhood treat suggests that he may still have a soft spot open to forming a human connection with someone. However, it could be that his sentimentality is merely the flipside of his violence. Can a person really gun down hundreds of beings who still resemble people and then turn with love towards another human being?
Director: Burr Steers
Cast: Lily James (Elizabeth), Matt Smith (Collins), Sam Riley (Darcy), Bella Heathcote (Jane), Jack Huston (Wickham)
A mash-up of Regency-era romance and zombie action/horror, this film works to deconstruct the traditional opposition between the sexes, showing that women can have masculine traits. Elizabeth Bennet is both a society lady trained in ballroom dancing and a master at musketry and swordsmanship. Under her dainty dress, she wears an ankle dagger. While the conventional Pastor Collins, when he proposes to Elizabeth, expects her to ‘retire [her] warrior skills as part of the marital submission’, more open-minded men find themselves strangely drawn to her unusual combination of genteel refinement and zombie-smiting ability. Darcy, for example, is ‘oddly attracted’ to her. ‘He doesn’t want to like Liz Bennet, but there’s something there. And when he sees how much she’s kicking ass, it really does something to Darcy’s insides,’ according to Sam Riley, the actor who plays him.155 Elizabeth holds her own against Darcy both in verbal sparring and in crossing swords, and she even saves him on the zombie battlefield, a gender reversal that has him swooning with desire as much as he is rising to conquer her. By making Elizabeth into a skilled warrior as well as a refined lady, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies depolarises the genders to provide a twenty first century take on Jane Austen’s nineteenth-century novel (or perhaps it brings out the latent feminism already in the original work).
Unfortunately, the film retains the book’s class stratification and even exacerbates it. Rather than deconstruct the opposition between rich and poor by showing the potential nobility of the latter (and the not-infrequent venality of the former), the movie champions aristocrats as the representatives of humanity against the lower classes as subhuman zombie hordes. The most threatening zombies we see are from the lower orders – a hulking field labourer, a creepy group of hungry orphans, and grasping ghouls reaching up from graves in a potter’s field (a burial site for the anonymous poor). In one scene, where an undead tradeswoman attacks Elizabeth and her sister Jane, the aristocratic ladies shoot the woman’s head off and then Jane kicks the decapitated corpse back down into a ravine. In this way, a working-class uprising is decisively put down. The sisters get to be masculine, but the poor don’t get to be rich. Elsewhere, Jane is particularly disturbed by the sight of a working-class zombie mother holding a zombie baby, and in a statement recalling paranoid attitudes to the procreative activities of poor people, we are told that ‘the undead will always multiply faster than the living’.
There is one aristocrat, Wickham, who tries to bridge the gap between the zombie masses and the haughty humans. Rather than human brains, he has been trying to pacify the ghouls with pig’s brains, which suggests that if the hungry poor were only given at least something to eat, they might not feel so driven to gobble up every aspect of high society like a mob out to destroy all art and intellect. Wickham even has the poor zombies going to church and learning to exercise some moral restraint over their appetites. But the aristocrats brand Wickham a traitor to his own kind, and they fear him as an Antichrist leading hordes of the risen undead to swarm their great estates and destroy their humanity. What ‘humanity’?
109 Steve Rothenberg in Phil Contrino, ‘Marketing Horror in 3D: Exhibitors Will Have the Opportunity to Bring 3D Fans and Horror Fans Together with My Bloody Valentine’, Boxoffice, January 2009, p. 15.
110 For discussion of all five Final Destination films (2000–11), including further consideration of their 3D aspects, see Douglas Keesey, ‘Seeing Your Own End: Prefigurations of Death in the Final Destination Films’, in The Pleasures of the Spectacle: The London Film and Media Reader 3, edited by Phillip Drummond, London Symposium, 2015, pp. 88–99.
111 Visual effects supervisor Robert Skotak in ‘The Third Dimension’, The Hole 3D Blu-ray DVD, Entertainment One, 2011.
112 Director Joe Dante in Jason Pollock, ‘The Chud Interview: Joe Dante (The Hole)’, Chud, 28 September 2012, http://www.chud.com/109874/tchud-interview-joe-dante-the-hole/.
113 Jee-woon Kim in Hyung-seok Kim, Kim Jee-woon, Seoul Selection, 2008, p. 118.
114 Roger Ebert, ‘The Human Centipede’, RogerEbert.com, 5 May 2010, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-human-centipede-2010.
115 Roger Ebert, ‘The Human Centipede 2’, RogerEbert.com, 7 October 2011, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-human-centipede-2-full-sequence-2011.
116 Tom Six, Audiocommentary, The Human Centipede Blu-ray DVD, IFC Films, 2010.
117 Ibid.
118 Tom Six in Rich Juzwiak, ‘“I Don’t Like Human Beings”: A Chat with The Human Centipede’s Tom Six’, Defamer, 21 May 2015, http://defamer.gawker.com/i-dont-like-human-beings-a-chat-with-the-human-centi-1706049658.
119 Tom Six, Audiocommentary, The Human Centipede 2 Blu-ray DVD, IFC Films, 2012.
120 The horror of sadistic enjoyment and masochistic suffering is also explored in Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer (Koroshiya 1) (2001). For discussion of this film, see Douglas Keesey, Neo-Noir: Contemporary Film Noir from Chinatown to The Dark Knight, Kamera Books, 2010, pp. 143–5.
121 Jen Soska in ‘American Mary: Interview with Filmmakers Jen and Sylvia Soska’, in Horrorwood North, edited by James Burrell, Marrs Media, 2015, p. 125.
122 Brandon Cronenberg, Audiocommentary, Antiviral Blu-ray DVD, MPI Media Group, 2013.
123 Brandon Cronenberg in ‘Antiviral: Interview with Writer/Director Brandon Cronenberg’, in Horrorwood North, edited by James Burrell, Marrs Media, 2015, p. 123.
124 Brandon Cronenberg, Audiocommentary, Antiviral Blu-ray DVD, MPI Media Group, 2013.
125 This line is spoken by a Native American character who is shown as having more understanding of why nature is striking back. For further discussion of the ‘national uncanny’ – ‘the return of what a country has repressed in order to establish its identity as master’ – see Douglas Keesey, ‘Weir(d) Australia: Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave’, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, vol. 8, nos. 3–4 (1998), pp. 331–46.
126 Larry Fessenden in The Anatomy of Fear: Conversations with Cult Horror and Science Fiction Film Creators, edited by Chris Vander Kaay and Kathleen Fernandez-Vander Kaay, NorLightsPress, 2014, p. 136.
127 Larry Fessenden, Audiocommentary, The Last Winter Blu-ray DVD, Shout Factory, 2015.
128 Larry Fessenden in Neda Ulaby, ‘“Eco-Horror”: Green Panic on the Silver Screen?’, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 14 June 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91485965.
129 Shane Carruth in Mark Allen, ‘Shane Carruth Answers All Our Questions about Primer, Upstream Color and The Modern Ocean’, The Awl, 4 April 2013, https://theawl.com/shane-carruth-answers-all-our-questions-about-primer-upstream-color-and-the-modern-ocean-b4deabb40de0#.4hkj7k4xx.
130 Ibid.
131 Shane Carruth in Eric Kohn, ‘Shane Carruth Explains Why Upstream Color Isn’t So Difficult to Understand and Talks about His Next Project’, IndieWire, 3 April 2013, http://www.indiewire.com/2013/04/shane-carruth-explains-why-upstream-color-isnt-so-difficult-to-understand-and-talks-about-his-next-project-39752/.
132 Drew Goddard, Cloverfield Screenplay, 8 June 2007, p. 38.
133 Matt Reeves, Audiocommentary, Cloverfield Blu-ray DVD, Paramount Pictures, 2008.
134 Peter Strickland, Audiocommentary, Berberian Sound Studio DVD, MPI Media Group, 2013.
135 Ibid.
136 John Carpenter in Todd McCarthy, ‘Trick and Treat’, Film Comment, vol. 16, no. 1 (January–February 1980), p. 24.
137 Ibid., pp. 23–4.
138 Stephen King in Jeff Labrecque, ‘Stephen King Sounds Off on New Carrie Remake’, Entertainment Weekly, 20 May 2011, http://www.ew.com/article/2011/05/20/stephen-king-carrie-remake. For in-depth discussion of the original 1976 Carrie, see Douglas Keesey, Brian De Palma’s Split-Screen: A Life in Film, University Press of Mississippi, 2015, pp. 92–105.
139 Kimberly Peirce in Romain Raynaldy, Carrie Updated to Troubled America’, Rappler, 18 October 2013, http://www.rappler.com/entertainment/movies/41645-carrie-2013-remake-kimberly-peirce.
140 Kimberly Peirce, Audiocommentary, Carrie Blu-ray DVD, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2014.
141 Ibid.
142 Alexandre Aja, Audiocommentary, High Tension Blu-ray DVD, Lionsgate Films, 2010.
143 Paul Etheredge-Ouzts in ‘Backlot Featurette’, Hellbent DVD, TLA Releasing, 2006.
144 Joss Whedon in Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon, The Cabin in the Woods: The Official Visual Companion, Titan Books, 2012, p. 42.
145 Drew Goddard in ibid.
146 Jim Sonzero in Director’s and Designer’s Audiocommentary, Pulse DVD, Genius Products, 2007.
147 Gary Tunnicliffe in Director’s and Designer’s Audiocommentary, Pulse DVD, Genius Products, 2007.
148 Kiyoshi Kurasawa, ‘The Making of Pulse: Behind-the-Scenes Footage’, Kairo DVD, Magnolia Home Entertainment, 2006.
149 In another example of techno-horror, the 2002 film demonlover has a character literally drawn into the scene of a torture porn video. For discussion of this movie, see Douglas Keesey, Neo-Noir: Contemporary Film Noir from Chinatown to The Dark Knight, Kamera Books, 2010, pp. 145–7.
150 Stephenie Meyer, Twilight, Little, Brown, 2005, p. 23.
151 Eli Roth, Director’s Audiocommentary, Hostel Blu-ray DVD, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2007.
152 Ibid.
153 Marian Dora in ‘Interview Marian Dora – Réalisateur de cinéma extrême’, Sadique Master, 12 March 2014, http://www.sadique-master.com/interview-marian-dora-realisateur-de-cinema-extreme/.
154 Rhett Reese in Adrienne Gruben, ‘Nut Up or Shut Up: Touring through Zombieland with Screenwriters Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick’, Examiner, 1 October 2009, http://www.examiner.com/article/nut-up-or-shut-up-touring-through-zombieland-with-screenwriters-rhett-reese-paul-wernick.
155 Sam Riley in Cheryl Singleton, ‘On Set: Love and Bloodshed in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’, Fangoria, 5 February 2016, http://www.fangoria.com/new/on-set-love-and-bloodshed-in-pride-and-prejudice-and-zombies/.