Somewhere between Nick Tomnay’s short The Host and his big-name Hollywood expansion of it, The Perfect Host, exists the perfect psycho-killer protagonist: A control-freak so delusional that he fails to cause real harm.
David Hyde Pierce plays him well in the 2011 version of the story, and the role gives him a broad range of comic scenes through which to express his plethoric range of tics and obsessions, but the film is awkwardly elongated by the addition of two subplots to the original, that are matched in uninterestingness only by incomprehensibility. Graeme Rhodes, Pierce’s black-and-white predecessor from 2001, offers just as much without the constant, branded reminder that YOU ARE NOW WATCHING A MOVIE. He’s a giddy, neurotic delight, the perfect foil to the initial connivance and subsequent confusion of his crime-doin’ victim “John” (played by Craig Elliott).
That real horror can be found in delusion is nearly unmined territory. The 25-minute version here ends abruptly, and viewers are left wanting more. You’ll find far too much of it in the full color re-do, but you’ll probably watch it anyway.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about just how important The Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1998) – and that’s it’s name, “Ringu” was devised by DreamWorks to differentiate it from the 2002 remake – is to contemporary horror. You can see its influence in all sorts of recent releases; Mama (Andreas Maschietti, 2013) is particularly steeped in J-horror tropes, The Ring especially. Everything spooky and uncanny about 2000s horror seems to come from Nakata and his fellow J-horror filmmakers. But it was also a huge shift in how people thought about horror. Non-American films have always played a pivotal role in the horror genre as a whole, but, a number of English and Italian horror classics were co-produced by American studios or distributors, and were, of course, in English. The gialli of Bava and Argento were marginal, even within the genre; drive-in and grindhouse fare in the 1970s when horror was moving into the mainstream of public consciousness, and into the multiplexes. Although Bava’s 1971 film Twitch of the Death Nerve (known under several other titles, including Bay of Blood) or Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) seem to directly prefigure the slasher films, for example, John Carpenter, Sean Cunningham, and co. have never, to my knowledge, acknowledged an influence. (And, indeed, I spoke with one critic who had interviewed them extensively, and his report is that the Americans claim to have never seen any of the Italian films.)
The Ring marked the first time that the center of gravity of the horror genre really moved outside of the United States, although the US took a couple years to catch on: The Ring‘s appearance coincides with the release of two of the most profitable horror movies of the last few decades, The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) and The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999), along with an influx of studio money into horror and horror-ish projects like House on Haunted Hill, The Haunting, The Mummy, Stir of Echoes, Stigmata, etc. Motivated, I can only guess, by the great success of the Scream franchise, the end of the decade saw the studios throwing a bunch of expensive, unconvincing CGI effects at big movie stars, and providing big-budget marketing campaigns to back them up. The Sixth Sense featured a big movie star, Bruce Willis, and was backed by indiewood studio Miramax. It would make an obscene amount of money. The Blair Witch seemed to open up another possible path, a horror cinema that returned to the no-budget independence that produced the now-canonized masterpieces of the genre in the 1970s. Of course, Hollywood learned from Blair Witch not that it should seek out innovative independent projects, but that it should focus more on internet marketing. Shyamalan, meanwhile, continued to make “event” movies that hang on a gimmicky premise and, although he still has his champions among critics, he is no longer the bankable name he once was. More important than that, however, is that Hollywood never figured out how to replicate The Sixth Sense‘s success. Even with such excellent Shyamalan-esque films as The Others (Alejandro Amenabar, 2001) and The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo Del Toro, 2001), Hollywood seemed to move on quickly, growing preoccupied with importing monsters and other tropes of horror into action movies and teen-oriented movies (including supernatural romances, obviously).
The Ringprovided a path away from the morass that plagued horror at the turn of the millennium, and not just because of its aesthetic value – though it is, of course, incredibly effective and quite beautiful at times. Its worldwide success was not the singular, unrepeatable event that Blair Witch was, nor was its appeal focused on the celebrity auteurship of director Hideo Nakata, as The Sixth Sense was. The Ring introduced a style, a way of conveying creepy atmospherics, that could be built on by other films from Japan. But it also made room, somehow, for films that have almost nothing to do with its style. Without Ring, Kenji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale or Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer and Happiness of the Katakuris probably wouldn’t have received the international attention they did. Similarly, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s surrealist horror films might have been consigned to the art house if The Ring didn’t help to create an audience for J-horror around the world.
ith the arrival of VCDs and DVDs, The Ring and other J-horror films were able to reach a broad global audience. The success of these films would help to create an audience – and a brand – for international horror in America, Britain, and elsewhere in the west (i.e. not the only places with money, but places that have a lot of money), and that would pave the way not just for other Japanese films, but also for films from Thailand, South Korea, even France. A demand and for non-English language horror films emerged and became, at least among modestly budgeted productions, commercially viable. If J-horror established a creative center for the genre outside of the US (and proved that there was an audience for non-English language horror in the English-speaking world), the idea/brand of the “Asia Extreme” film[1] helped to establish horror as a fully international genre in the 2000s. That is to say that the horror fan – and the horror filmmaker – would be just as enthusiastic and informed (if not more so) about current productions from across the globe as in his or her own country, and that the exchange between films that defines the genre freely crosses boundaries. The viewing habits of horror fans in the digital age ensures that the genre maintains a fully international character without neglecting the specificities of national cinemas. [2] There is really no way of the “torture porn” genre as being the product of any one nation: its DNA is equal parts Miike, Park Chan-wook, Lucio Fulci, and Wes Craven, and its initial offerings come from South Korea, France, and America (where two Australians expanded a short film into Saw in 2004). Similarly, the “found footage” films, seemingly a delayed attempt to follow up The Blair Witch Project, is both studio (Cloverfield) and independent (Diary of the Dead), and if the style’s signature franchise (Paranormal Activity – the first film was directed and produced by an Israeli, btw), the brilliant [REC] films are produced in Spain, and in Spanish. I don’t want to go overboard here, but so much of this could happen because The Ring helped to establish an audience for kinda weird “foreign” movies, sometimes even very arty ones. Distribution outlets for smaller, non-American horror films encouraged and funded further genre productions, etc etc.The Ring is also a singular phenomenon, however. It’s been remade in several different countries, has had four (now five?) sequels/prequels in Japan, and one in the US, and the image of its ghost, Sadako, face covered in wet, stringy hair, has become as iconic as Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees. Something about both the concept, gimmicky though it is (it slams together several urban legend-type stories, though it never quite feels incoherent), and the image of that ghost, is powerful enough to have really dug itself into the genre’s foundation.
Why did Ring burrow so deeply into the genre’s collective imaginary? I’ve been thinking through the technological aspect recently. For one thing, it was perfectly poised on the precipice of digital technology, dealing primarily with analogue – VHS, celluloid photography, telephones before the transition to cell phones had become ubiquitous – but using it to express concerns more specifically about the digital. The images on the videotape are produced not through indexical photography but are generated spontaneously by the ghost Sado. The rapid proliferation of the video’s curse, spreading like a virus (to quote the title of the South Korean remake of the film[3]), reflects not just anxiety over the digital spread of information but a geographically dispersed digital presence. The film is largely built around a traditional mystery narrative, in which the reporter Reiko attempts to decode the video’s cryptic images in order to find the originating source. Once she has discovered Sado’s identity and linked her with the videotape, the film narrows its mystery to one of location: Reiko frantically attempts to find Sado’s body so that the ghost can be put to rest and, assumedly, the vengeful spirit soothed before she falls victim to the curse. Of course, the discovery of the body does nothing to halt the curse’s deadly progression: there is no physical location to which the curse or the images on the videotape correspond. Furthermore, Reiko and her son are only spared because they participate in the continued spread of the images and the curse they bring with them; they survive because they make a copy and show it to another. Not dissimilar to another late-90s film that was initially successful but became a hit on dvd (although, course, The Matrix franchise saw considerably greater success), The Ring articulated a new set of anxieties associated with the digital age. The ghost and its threats follow a digital logic, plaguing a set of victims stuck in analogue thinking, and it is perhaps not a coincidence that The Ring would become one of the releases that established Tartan’s successful and influential “Asia Extreme” dvd label at the time that the dvd viewing and collecting was becoming widespread.
[1] Joan Hawkins and Chi-Yui Shin have written about the ideological and aesthetic limitations of Tartan’s Asia Extreme DVD label. In general, the company’s film choices do not necessarily reflect the best or even most popular films of their home countries – some of these releases were outright flops at home. In general, as Joan Hawkins has argued, international distribution favors gimmicky premises and exploitation plots, while removing the films from the specific national context in which they originated. This process overlooks certain kinds of filmmakers and give simplified, distorted pictures of diverse national cinemas. See Hawkins (2009) and Shin (2008). Certain kinds of films, and certain filmmakers,
[2] Indeed, the trend has been to identify and celebrate national movements, grouping contemporaneous genre filmmakers together under rubrics like, for example, J-horror or “New French Extremity.”
Sometime during May 2011, while the rest of the Austrian national swim team was off tanning themselves, or splashing water at each other flirtatiously, or whatever else swimmers might get up to at a Florida beach on a bright warm day, 19-year-old Jakub Maly, like any boy a quarter of his age might, began digging a hole. He worked at it really hard and made it super deep and it was totally cool. Lifeguards are quoted as never having seen anything “of this magnitude. Not even close.” Folks were impressed.
Maly wasn’t satisfied, however, because, like males of most ages, he believed the perfect hole can serve only one purpose: to grant his body physical entry into some sort of unknown bliss, a previously unimaginable pleasure that would make whatever pending risks worthwhile—although, subtext: they could not possibly befall him. He was 19! A professional athlete! The world at his feet! He had dug the perfect hole! A 7-foot deep and 6-foot wide chasm of mysterious delight! Of his own making!
So he got in it.
“Then,” as King told ABC News reporters—she also works with Pompano Beach Fire Rescue—“the walls caved in on him.”
The sand pit covered Maly’s head, and there was a period when he couldn’t breathe. After about an hour of struggling to get out of the actual pit into which he had actually dug himself, he realized he might perish. In the perfect hole.
But the Austrian national swim team called in King and about 59 other rescuers, and together they dug him out of the sand after another hour of panicked efforts. He was sent to hospital, released, and flew back to Austria with the rest of his team.
There’s a lesson there. For moviegoers as well as movie characters: The perfect hole will always be ruined by getting in it.
Joe Dante, who seems like a really nice guy, hasn’t learned this lesson. Clearly, he’s got a wide-ranging approach to comedy and horror (glimpsed in Piranha and Gremlins, but all over the brilliant Matinee), which is utterly joyful. It’s equally clear he’s not so much engaged in gender or racial politics, which is why a lot of scenes involve white young ladies in bikinis, which is fine, as I’ve got nothing against bikinis, but maybe sometimes women in swimwear can also talk. Or perhaps the fully clothed slightly older lead males could refrain from same for like five seconds. There are options. Whatever. (Now, Dante also did some uncredited work on Rock’n’Roll High School and created the kind of awesome Movie Orgy, so credit where credit is due, but fully one quarter of Piranha is boob so I couldn’t exactly let it go without saying something.)
Dante’s approach and its drawbacks combine in the kind of uninteresting 2009 release The Hole (tagline: “It knows your deepest fears”) which is, OK, a thinly veiled acknowledgement that Joe Dante doesn’t know what the fuck is going on, woman-wise, but still. The plot is this: Two brothers, DIVORCE VICTIMS, are forced to move to a new house by their mother. While exploring, they find a hole in the deepest recesses of their basement and so they get in it? And it knows everything about them? And conjures all their fears which are actually really boring 1980s movie tropes like laughing clown dolls and evil fathers coming back to life and giant floating tile floors? That it’ in 3D sort of just proves my point.
Sample dialogue:
Younger brother: “Hey, do you want to come look at our hole?”
Female love interest with no other personality traits besides adolescent jugs and hair: “What is it?”
Boy of slightly younger than 19 but still you get the point: “We got this hole, it’s no big deal.”
I am pretty sure our female foil then—literally offering nothing onscreen besides a reflection of what these dudes are up to—then jokes, “Oh, is this what guys do in whatever town you two are from? Sit around all day playing with your holes which are clear stand-ins for sex parts in this movie? My sex parts?” Well, she said something like that, for sure.
Point being: Holes are amazing, there’s no denying it. But when even the half-assed lead teen girl character that’s clearly a stand-in for confused adolescent desire in your underwritten hole-exploring narrative can see through it as a sexual metaphor, the best plan is to declare the hole perfect, and then walk away.
This small handmade film from recent MFABA Bianca Giaever is a subtle exploration of fear and its eradication, as well as a deeply charming and effective story well worth your immediate attention. (Hattips: Elizabeth Crane and Jessica Speer).
I’m currently finishing up a longer essay for publication on 21st century horror films and keep running up against the problem that a number of the films that seem to be integral to the conversation are not exactly horror films. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Park Chan-wook, 2002) or Ichi the Killer (Takashi Miike, 2000), for example, have more in common with the gangster genre. The “extreme” label – whether referring to Tartan’s somewhat randomly inclusive “Asia Extreme” dvd releases, the “New French Extremity,” or to any number of independent releases for which the denomination seems simultaneously like euphemism and grandstanding – masks a blurring of the boundaries around horror that is shared by some of the most visible, successful American horror films of the era: Saw and Hostel were (and are) received as horror films, but they share little with the neo-slasher films of the 1990s or the Japanese ghost films produced around 2000. Sympathy and Ichi, or Battle Royale (Kenji Fukasaku, 2000), like Saw (James Wan, 2004) and Hostel (Eli Roth, 2006), are marketed and appeal to horror audiences. What draws all these films together, and what nudges them towards the category of “horror” despite some resistance by horror fans, is a focus on the body. More specifically, all these films focus on bodily abjection, on the pain and suffering of victims, often presented quite graphically. “Torture porn” and “extreme” films (whether from Japan, South Korea, or France) import the sort of graphic, individualized violence associated in the 1980s with horror films (slashers in particular) into films that are less affectively invested in the sudden shock or dread that once characterized horror. However, the affective charge of this type of graphic violence puts these stories – whether they’re about sadistic gangsters or schoolchildren forced to kill one another – into similar enough territory with the horror film that they are frequently categorized as such. These are gore or splatter films that put bodies on display and rely on these abject spectacles to jolt the audiences, and it is the emphasis on that affect – and its realization through spectacle – that nudges such films into the realm of horror.
Among the harshest critics of these tendencies was the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis, whose distaste for the films of Park Chan-wook led her to declare that, “given the body count and sadistic violence in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy, it’s no surprise that Mr. Park’s largest fan base may be those cult-film aficionados for whom distinctions between high art and low are unknown, unrecognized and certainly unwelcome.”[1] Dargis goes on to bemoan that “once, a film like this, predicated on extreme violence and staying within the prison house of genre rather than transcending it, would have been shot on cardboard sets with two-bit talent. It would have had its premiere in Times Square. The fact that Oldboy is embraced by some cinephiles is symptomatic of a bankrupt, reductive postmodernism: one that promotes a spurious aesthetic relativism (it’s all good) and finds its crudest expression in the hermetically sealed world of fan boys…. In this world, aesthetic and moral judgments – much less philosophical and political inquiries – are rejected in favor of a vague taxonomy of cool that principally involves ever more florid spectacles of violence. As in, “Wow, he’s hammering those dudes with a knife stuck in his back – cool!” Or, “He’s about to drop that guy and his dog from the roof – way cool!” Kiss-kiss, bang-bang, yawn-yawn. We are a long way from Pasolini and Peckinpah.[2]” Dargis, a perceptive and particularly astute critic, articulates better than other detractors precisely her misgivings: these films aestheticize violence in such a way as to – dangerously, in her opinion – remove them from the moral context that she associates with “high art” filmmakers who similarly used extreme violence and other unpleasant displays to shock viewers. It is this – what she sees as a refusal to engage the moral dimensions of violence – that seems to demarcate the otherwise unhelpful distinction between “high” and “low” cinemas. Joan Hawkins, in her discussion of Park and Dargis’ response to his films, convincingly builds on her arguments from her book Cutting Edge that the separation between art films and exploitation has never been as great as critics seem to think. As Hawkins notes, Dargis’ obvious nostalgia obstructs her understanding of the relationship between horror and the avant-garde. Part of Hawkins’ larger project has been to argue that avant-garde explorations of shock, violence, and gore should not be understood as being fundamentally different from their less culturally respectable genre cousins. It is clear that Dargis’ ire is raised not just by the films’ shocking content, but by their high-cultural status. For her, the allegiance to genre and to generic stylishness negates (or indicates a lack of interest in) a serious consideration of the moral implications of violence.
Park’s aesthetic, which Dargis characterizes as cool and distant, does indeed subsume violent display to narrative purposes more than others. Further, his bloody spectacles are more clearly composed, part of a meticulous mise-en-scene that announces itself – through the relatively static, tableau-like arrangement of characters, often directly facing the camera – as a composition. Park’s reliance on violence seems to consciously push against the “coolness” of such stylized presentation. In her review of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Dargis describes “an autopsy knife cutting into the child’s naked torso” as “[resembling] a brush moving against a canvas.” The scene to which Dargis is referring depicts the autopsy of a young girl who has just died from an accidental drowning, overseen by her grieving father, who quickly breaks into tears. The emotional brutality of the scene is, I would argue, not negated by the aestheticization. Rather, the “coolness” of Park’s style is in direct conflict with the emotional intensity of the scene; the camera’s apparent lack of empathy draws attention to itself in such scenes. In Oldboy, as protagonist Oh Dae-su fights his way out of a hallway filled with thugs, the camera slowly tracks alongside Dae-su in a medium long shot, following his gradual, uneven progress through the crowded space. The shot last nearly three minutes as Dae-su and his enemies attack each other with a ferocious, graceless brutality, the camera following impassively, concerned only with the protagonist’s placement in the frame and not otherwise responding to his vicious successes or painful failures. This bravura, much-heralded sequence, once again elaborates Park’s signature style of juxtaposing brutal images with detached presentation. The films themselves, however, do not align themselves perfectly with the camera and, by the extremity of the contrast calls attention to the disparity between the emotional and physical brutality of the events and his carefully composed, coolly aestheticized style.
There’s sheer terror to be found in the rapesploitation Act Of Vengeance, but it’s not where you think it’s going to be. Also billed as Rape Squad, the 1974 film from Robert Kelljan is about a group of women who, realizing they’ve all been attacked by the same hockey-masked man demanding they sing “Jingle Bells” as he sexually assaults them, gang together and seek revenge. The all-star cast includes Caligula‘s Anneka di Lorenzo, Richard Pryor’s ex-wife Jennifer Lee, and Hullabaloo dancer Lada Edmund, Jr.. The thing is, everyone comes off as sort of—playful.
With a modern eye, it’s hard to figure out where the scary is even supposed to be: the rapist is jocular and likeable, the “victims” largely self-assured and, for the bulk of the film, empowered. The skimpy trendy costumes—which often come off as the victim is facing the screen—and the cheesey score—which often comes on as the former comes off—mark the film exploitive, for sure. And sexual assault of any kind is certainly horrible. But this rapist spouts off one liners to undercut the horror, calling his attentions “making love,” explaining to his victims that they’re “with the best”—even in a peak moment of suspense demanding one repeat: “Thank you, mr. Rapist, for choosing me.” She does and, honestly, no one even tries for traumatized. The rape scenes are all lavish and overly sincere, our attacker more akin to a would-be wife-swapper at a dinner party. The assault scenes—even the sole vengeful one in which the rape squad ties up a perpetrator and pours a bottle of liquid on his crotch marked “acid”—are played as if the word rape stood for an abstract concept with no physical manifestation. Like kids today playing Cowboys and Indians when Wild West movies haven’t been screened in decades: the right symbols are all there, but what could they possibly mean?
Let me tell you what those symbols might stand for. A couple friends went out drinking at a bar earlier this year and got roofied. One got sick—violently ill, in fact. So spent the night on the couch of the other. She had become manic and unpredictable throughout the night, but the friends that had driven them home felt sure that, once placed in bed, she would sleep it off. They left, the two pals safely tucked in separate beds for the night.
In Act Of Vengeance, the horror emerges between sexual assaults, in moments of relative peace and safety. As an on-screen officer ticks off a list of nasty but salaciously termed predicaments in which previous rape victims have found themselves under his breath, for example, the latest rape victim becomes increasingly aware that the entire squadroom is enjoying the show. “Isn’t there a policewoman that can question me?” she finally demands. Then after a grueling physical examination, another excuse for violation, the rape survivor overhears an officer say behind her back: “I wish that’d happen to me sometime. I’d just lay back and enjoy it.” A final humiliation comes when the police ask her to view a lineup with the other victims, a pointless exercise they admit is only to prove to the uppity ladies that the perpetrator will never be caught. Or, no, wait: the final final humiliation comes when our lead’s boyfriend accuses her of stepping out on him and fabricating the whole rape story. It could have come off as quaint, if women hadn’t complained to me of each of these scenarios, in 2012.
The horror here is that the backdrop to an exploitative story about a serial rapist—the moments between the horror—haven’t changed in 38 years.
My friends were drugged in advance of a sexual assault that never happened. I was supposed to visit them the day before their trial was to start. All night long the night before, I had the worst nightmares I’ve ever had in my life. I was besieged with chest palpitations, sweating profusely, with a deep-seated paranoia I couldn’t control. Twice I woke up gasping for air; twice I went back to bed with my heart clenched tightly, my mind grasping at any thin narrative that might not lead to nightmares.
Because here is the thing: a certain percentage of people, after taking Rohypnol, experience a psychotic break. One of my friends woke up in the middle of the night and violently attacked the other. The victim here—if we can use the term to refer to only one of them—refused to press charges. The attacker—if by that we mean either of the two now involved—had no memory of what had happened.
Still, the state saw an opportunity for a conviction in a violent crime case, and pressed charges, planning to disallow mention of drug use, which would complicate, if not frustrate, their story. The trial was to begin the day after I planned to visit, and my intention was to cover it as a reporter.
The case has now been dropped, after 10 months during which the intended target of a sexual assault prepared to defend her actions in court. This was in 2012. It is still true, today, true that rape itself pales when faced with the culture that surrounds it, and that the evil of rape is not borne exclusively by the rapist.
A 1973 horror film seemingly centered on the premise that certain sexual fetishes are, in and of themselves, terrifying, The Baby is the story of a 21-year-old man who sleeps in a crib, sucks his thumb, wears a diaper, and sucks on women’s breasts when he’s hungry. The phrase “paraphilic infantilism” doesn’t make an appearance in the dialogue—but that’s because the there is too much going on in the hairstyle region of one of the other characters, Germaine. She’s Baby’s sister, and Baby is his only name (played by David Manzy of Herbie Rides Again), and Germaine is busy meddling in the unfolding tension between their mother and Baby’s social worker, Ann. Now it should be obvious that people named Ann will always steal the show, but in this case she also becomes obsessed with Baby and steals him, too—despite the overprotective, overbearing, overacting of Baby’s mom and his two hypersexed sisters, the other one being named Alba. Alba is more conventionally sexy—that is, she is blonde and pert and smoothly skinned, so we are treated to an upskirt shot while she mounts the stairs (get it?), and a bizarre scene in which her own sexual fetish is revealed, of having her partner burn himself in some fire for a long time before she will get with him.
Somehow, Ted Post’s film is only rated PG, a rating that relies on a textual reading of the sexual fetish of paraphilic infantilism as some form of mental retardation. That is, we’re supposed to read Baby as a baby, which is actually a little bit great because it allows Manzy’s voice to be overdubbed with a real baby’s for no discernible reason except to veil the clear sexual overtones that would otherwise be glaringly obvious to even a real baby. The film also has an amazing score, totally undue the film itself, which sees plenty of opportunity to cut loose during a plot resolution that seemingly takes 97,889,798 hours to unfold. And here it is: Ann wants Baby as a plaything for her own secret stash of manchild. So don’t worry, it’s not sexual at all! It’s actually way more fucked up than that.
Infected Kat, played by Jenna Jameson. She is actually a better dancer once zombified.
Zombie Strippers is a movie that I watched. Had I not been compelled recently by another piece of writing to critically engage with this film, believe you me, I never would have. Not because I am a prude, in either the sex way or the gore way, nor because I have forgotten how to write, or am trapped under a heavy object, or unable to access the internet. Also not, truly, because I fear either Jenna Jameson or real zombies, sex workers or not. Only because this is a “film” notable only for its zeitgeisty title and surprising, subsequent, boringness.
I know what you are thinking. You are thinking what I was thinking a few months ago: Zombie strippers! What can go wrong! The person who is saying this movie is boring has no sense of humor, and is clearly stupid, to boot! I will watch it, and laugh heartily, and possibly also become scared. Well dear reader, let me tell you something: I wish I were you. You know why? Because after this little scenario unfolded in my own life, I petulantly went ahead and watched Zombie Strippers, although I had been warned not to, convinced that the world was wrong and that the sheer hilarity could not help but come through given the title and all and now I am sad that I did it, but you are happy because I am going to save you the ten minutes you might otherwise devote to realizing I am right by explaining to you exactly what happens in this movie: a stripper is infected with a zombie virus. She refuses to give up her job and, uninterestingly, the clientele of her strip club is thrilled by her new stiff and awkward moves, which are a little bit janky but mostly regular “sexy”, which probably says more about the clientele of strip clubs being desperate for interesting entertainment than it does about this film’s ability to make social commentary about same. Other strippers are infected with the zombie virus. Jokes are made, and fall flat. Some are notable only for extremely offensive racism. Literary allusions are sprinkled about as if by someone who had never heard of books. Clients get eaten. The army is involved. Shootout, resolution, end credits. Cue your bitter disappointment.
(I hesitate to mention this, but of our small viewing party, one of us was so filled with resentment after watching that this person took to Twitter-stalking Jenna Jameson, who had recently endorsed Mitt Romney for president. Explanation for a shitty film? Just deserts? Further evidence of psychosis? Who can say.)
But a piece I came across recently on The Good Men Project website has me thinking about Zombie Strippers again. Not because it was an interesting film, but because of my firm belief that anyone who claims it was an interesting film is not only wrong, but not very bright. I won’t here launch a critique of The Good Men Project on the whole, the self-proclaimed “glimpse of what enlightened masculinity might look like,” that wants to be a website, a media empire, and a social movement. That’s for folks more engaged in defending a particular notion of feminism than I. I will say that I think it’s a good idea, a website that is also a social movement about gender inequity grounded in male participation, although I have never read anything on this one that wasn’t deeply misogynist and sex essentialist. This was no exception.
My rule of thumb is, don’t link to it unless you genuinely want people to read it, which is one reason the short essay makes such a good companion essay to Zombie Strippers: If you are a good person, there’s not a reason on earth you should experience it for yourself. More or less, the piece aims to present eight lessons about men gleaned from horror movies. These are wholly predictable and one could easily pull the exact opposite lessons from the exact same films if one wanted: “Trust your buddies,” for example, “Look after your mum,” and “Looks ain’t everything.” The lessons are excuses to name horror movies the author, one Ally Fogg who apparently also writes for the Guardian, thinks are cool, and indeed the piece was a Halloween tie-in from earlier this year.
Yet Fogg’s introductory paragraphs are more disturbing than any of the flesh-crumbling ooze-dripping images that accompany his flick pics: he calls forth Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, first explaining what he picked up from it—gender is performative—and then segueing quickly into a joke about how Butler is boring. “Her books would be so much more engaging with a gratuitous shower scene and a couple of spectacular decapitations,” Fogg writes. From then on (and this is in the second paragraph) the piece becomes his excuse for jokes of the Take My Wife Please, Zombie Overlord variety, so it is difficult to discern whether or not much thought was put into its writing at all. So I say with some sense of barking up the wrong tree that if you are going to be so thoroughly dismissive of the notion of gender performativity, that you might not “get” gender. And, indeed, Fogg goes on to claim that everything he knows “about gender” he “learned from trashy horror movies.” By omission, he is also implying he knows a lot “about gender” but that assumption quickly dissipates. He notes an apparent cannon of “feminist horror movies: Alien, Cat People, Ginger Snaps,” (these are good movies that do have fascinating themes related to gender, but as we’ll see below, that’s a pretty far cry from “feminist”), claiming that feminists have learned much from them. This, he charges, is unfair: “Much less has been written on what the genre tells us about men and masculinities,” he concludes. It’s laughable, but only if you’ve ever read feminist critiques of the genre. To respond to this perceived omission, that men have been left out of horror, Fogg suggests: “You might conclude that men have got better things to be doing with their lives,”—than the mass of outspoken feminists, who sit around watching slasher movies all day, sucking up all the available space for horror film theory?—“but I’m living proof that at least one of us does not.”
Having trouble keeping up? Allow me to recap: Judith Butler is considered important, but is actually boring. Feminists have gleaned much from horror movies, and it’s high time men had their chance. Also, there are essential characteristics about feminists that I, the author, can note and dismiss, but men are interesting and unique individuals. These feminists—all they do is sit around watching horror movies! Most men are probably above that, but I will sink to the feminists’ level. Some squirrel somewhere will eventually climb even the wrong tree, and a dog’s bark is then justified: There is something really wrong with the way this guy thinks about gender—and about horror films.
Robert Englund and Roxy Saint, in Zombie Strippers. Why yes, that’s a woman holding a boom mic in the back there.
In proof: the penultimate life lesson Fogg shares with us is: “Sex workers are people too. Even when they are zombies. Key text: Zombie Strippers.”
“The most ball-bustingly feminist trashy sexploitation flick ever made, “ he calls it, explaining: “in order to become better at their work, they [strippers as yet uninfected with the zombie virus] quite literally dehumanize themselves, by choice. Whether or not it looks like a smart choice to you or me is irrelevant. Should you be so bold as to try to ‘save’ them from themselves, you’re likely to end up as a zombie stripper supper.”
It’s cute, the way he tries to incorporate pro-sex-worker rhetoric into his enjoyment of Jenna Jameson’s pole-dancing scenes, and perhaps a tad defensive. The problem is that he’s totally blind to the two structures that are actually enforcing the dehumanization of the strippers: the management of the club where the strippers dance, and the film in which it is depicted.
The club—mismanaged by desperate-seeming overseer Robert Englund—quickly notes the increase in profits that comes from employing strippers that are zombies, and fosters a situation in which more employees can infect themselves, even going so far as to hiding the corpses of their clients’ meals from outside detection, ensuring continued profits from the club’s secret zombie-friendly labor practices. (I didn’t entirely go for this NYT piece “A Zombie is a Slave Forever”, but the way zombies operate in labor history really shouldn’t be overlooked here.) The strippers, in fact, feared for their jobs even before the zombie virus struck: when it became clear zombiness was condoned, both by clients and by management, of course some chose to keep their jobs and infect themselves.
[T]he supply side of prostitution market (people in the sex trade) are often there in the first place because they lack other viable or comparable economic options, and the reduction of the demand (and hence the price of sex) does not change that circumstance. If many sellers of sex do not have comparable alternatives to selling sex, they will be stuck trading sex for money even if the demand (and hence the price) goes down. That is, supply in prostitution market is downwardly inelastic.
Now, we’re switching metaphors a bit here: Koyama’s arguing about the problematic End Demand movement, which supposedly targets the customers of commercial sex but instead primarily harms laborers by driving down the price, and increasing health and safety risks. See here:
[These] policies will have two other consequences for the sellers beyond the loss of income, both of which are harmful to the people who either consensually or unconsensually engage in the sex trade. First, they lower the seller’s bargaining power, which is the ability of each side of the transaction to “take the business elsewhere.” When the number of buyers decreases, it leaves sellers with a smaller number of potential buyers to negotiate with, and buyers with a larger number of potential sellers. In a market environment like this, buyers can easily find other potential sellers who might agree to a more beneficial (to the buyer) deal, they have a greater bargaining power that they can take advantage of. Sellers on the other hand cannot afford to lose the business by insisting on a favorable deal, and are pushed into arrangements that are less safe or comfortable, such as engaging in unprotected sex or performing acts they consider degrading.
The metaphor holds: End Demand legislation forces sex workers to take increasing risks with their own health and safety in order to continue working in the industry. As if, in a fictional environment, they had agreed to infect themselves with the zombie virus for same.
Still, as I recall the film, Fogg’s dead wrong: No one attempts to “save” the strippers from zombification; nor does anyone attempt to “save” them from stripping. (Although one sweet young Midwestern thing does reconsider her options a few times, and I may just not remember a minor plot point or two, because the film really was that boring.) But the strippers are also presented as hateful, unkind, and dehumanized—even before the first one goes zombie. No one seems to care about them at all, and customers and management alike aim to take advantage of the women, both before and after infection, and both sexually and economically. It’s trashy, true. But feminist?
There’s just no case for reading Zombie Strippers as an empowered narrative of sex worker’s rights, especially when actual organizing in the industry faces bigger hurdles than whether or not you can convince a rabid co-worker to bite you between pole-dances. “In most cases, at the first sign of dancers getting organized, a club will just make working there impossible for them,” Melissa Gira Grant writes at the Atlantic. “Legally speaking, it’s retaliation, sure—but who is going to enforce the National Labor Relations Act at the tip rail? (And if you do know who, spread the word. So far only one union represents a strip club in the United States.)”
The Good Men Project is not concerned with sex workers’ rights—that’s clear. And the site/movement would be wholly uninvested in a notion of “feminist” that not only represented, but was represented by, women in the industry. The film industry is not unlike a strip club: individual workers may be feminist, but the club itself is not unless the female workforce shares in profits and management decisions.
Having Jenna Jameson involved is an OK way to start. Whatever. But having a woman in something isn’t enough to call it feminist, whether or not that woman is a porn star. True, there are other women in it (and other porn actors). The film even passes the Bechdel test—barely. (The women do talk to each other about something other than a man, even if it is only the rules of the club and the man they are set by, and the way the customers, who are men, react to the zombified dancers.) But let’s give it to ‘em: the film’s trying for some kind of women-led narrative.
Still, of the 68 actors in the film, only 19 are women; Jay Lee directed, wrote, and produced the thing; the rest of the production team includes five men and two women—none of whom are Jenna Jameson. I could go through the rest of the crew, but you get the picture: the women here are called upon mostly to take their clothes off. (A few play awkwardly sexualized agents from a bio-military force I won’t go into.) The behind-the-camera labor force is 80% male; the actors they control are 70% male. Onscreen, female characters talk to each other about the things that men do, if not men exactly, before agreeing to grave concessions in health and well-being in order to stay employed in a job in which there are no safety nets. Offscreen, profits from their exposure—of skin, at first, then of rotting skin—benefit mostly (and at the top levels, all) men.
If this is feminist, I’d prefer to go zombie, any day.
Over the past few months, on tour with my book that is partially about ghosts, I’ve been asked to address what I like about horror films. I get the question from three varieties of folks, the first most frequently: feminists who cannot understand why I would willingly consume rampant misogyny. Sure. I get that. Also: cultural and film critics who know my work on independent publishing, Southeast Asia, women’s rights, marketing, and art history and believe horror films to be less worthy of serious attention than these other subjects. (Note that I’m sort of with them on this one, too.) Finally: horror fans, who subdivide into two further categories: men, many of whom are interested in hearing from someone else on their favorite genre, but most of whom really are not, and women, who have no further questions for me except to ask for the URL of this site.
It leaves me in the sort of awkward position of my horror film criticism only making sense to those who already see what I do: A place to look, gleefully and sometimes far too closely, at how humans treat each other in fantasy and without oversight or retribution. Horror film is where we can watch power in the process of corruption, until it becomes evil—unadulterated, and without excuses. Horror films show us who, in our collective cultural imaginary, we endow with the ability to harm, to save, to fail, or to survive. It is a space where body integrity is not assured anyone and where the range of props for inducing otherworldly or far too corporal experiences is constantly expanding. Horror films allow for endless experimentation of the imagination, beyond morals, beyond ethics, where the solitary measure of success is whether an audience loses composure while watching. Comedian friends claim their arena is the only one where a palpable emotional response is the goal: so, however, do strippers. Horror films—or haunted houses, when available—are, in truth, the same. Sexual desire and laughter, however, have their boosters, many of whom are not considered amoral.
But the horror genre revels in the abject, and no one has ever lodged a solid, believable defense for deliberately scaring the shit out of people. I won’t, here, either, but I can try to explain why it’s worth thinking about. And I’ll do it by describing a horror film I didn’t at all enjoy, Human Centipede II: Full Sequence.
The first film in the now-trilogy established the series as a study in the abject—but kind of a pure one, in that it was easy to ignore unless you were interested in the genre. In other words, Tom Six’s Human Centipede was disgusting, but brought out more about the human condition in the film’s scorning as an object of ridicule than it did via artistry or narrative. It portrayed a vile world where a single overeducated and commanding man accrued enough power to mutilate three people out of sight from the rest of the world. People were revolted, but it does serve as something of a metaphor for how we allow men to, ha ha, operate. The film was pornographic, in the sense that people watched it and apparently got pleasure out of it—some, obviously sexual. It was medically believable enough, although more disgusting than scary, and mildly distressing if ultimately hollow and empty. But there was nothing new about it, including that it reminded film boards that censorship might be a good idea, which happens occasionally in film history, and is why the first cut of the second in the franchise was banned in the UK. Anyway my point is that Human Centipede was a horror movie—it explored and elicited fear—but it was not a very interesting one.
Human Centipede II, however, offers significantly less to get your mind around. The thin veneer of medical believability from the first in the series is gone; the crimer this time is a psychopathic parking lot security guard with no interest in medical knowledge save that gained from his obsession with the first film. It seems to me that the shots cut earlier, and are therefore less gory; certainly the use of a hammer and stapler to perform major reconstructive surgery is suspect at best, and one quickly loses the logic of the finer points in the narrative. In fact, the film’s star Laurence R. Harvey plays select moments for laughs, seemingly randomly, as when he gleefully induces his 12-bodied creation to shit into each others’ mouths. “[T]he ceaseless deluge of bodily functions starts to feel less like a confrontational film and more like the project of a poop-obsessed 14-year-old,” Scott Weinberg wrote in the Guardian, assuring the Brits that they were missing nothing of interest. Truly: the film loses quite a bit in the blatant desire to disgust—it even reintroduces some color, just to mark the difference between shit and blood. Fecal matter flies at the camera, and it is brown. When the laxatives Harvey’s character Martin administers kick in, brown runs from the anuses of the victims. There is also a rape, equally logicless. Who could buy this plot or technique for long enough to feel fear?
No one seems to, putting Tom Six on the fast-track to win a Most Boring Director Ever contest. Martin is affected—disgusted by the world, even. OK. Clearly excited by his creation, we are to understand that it is all that he has ever had that is his own. His father abused him sexually, his mother emotionally if not also physically. (Her only spoken lines are when she explains how she wants to kill them both.) Martin has a psychiatrist, who also abuses him sexually. Martin is mentally retarded, and does not speak in the film—yet he has a phone, and people are constantly returning his calls, so there are some consistency issues. Martin’s only beloved companions are a pet centipede and its literary avatar: a scrapbook he has compiled based on repeated viewings of the first film, a document that acts as his blueprint for the events of the second. There is nothing about this film that’s not insipid. No one pretends otherwise.
So I can’t really make the argument for Human Centipede II that I can for its predecessor: This is maybe not even exactly a horror movie. Except it is, because horror is where abjection goes when it fails to fit in anywhere else.
Still, it’s a hard film to take seriously, although some apparently manage. Those that do seem to have allowed the embrace of the abject to crawl under their skin, and are overlooking the film as a cultural product and instead viewing it as—I don’t know, a documentary? Of course there are always going to be crazy people in the world, but Laurence R. Harvey’s Facebook page has 1,417 “Likes” as of this writing, approximately ten times as many as the brilliant Angela Bettis. This may in itself not be so disturbing, but the enthusiasm of those “Likes” kinda is: several of his fans are downright obsessed with him, leaving graphic sexual comments on the wall of the page. Others are bitter, insulting the actor’s looks, demeanor, and activities without acknowledging their artifice. It’s actually disturbing, more so than the film itself. More than one fan details a sexual obsession with the overweight, mute, poop-obsessed asthmatic; some engage in arguments over who is best suited to receive his love.
Of course these folks are not in love with Martin the character nor Harvey the actor, not really. Which is almost the saddest part of the whole thing. They are playing out a drama on social media that expresses a devotion to the elsewhere scorned, an absolute embrace of what no one else desires.
I don’t want to put a metaphor to Human Centipede II that was never there to begin with (lest you think it worth viewing, which it isn’t) but these are people that live in dark places in the world, and stay hidden most of the time. You have to remove a rock or open a damp cellar door to see them, at which point they scurry out with their too many legs and uncomfortable noises.
I do not mean to be dismissive: these are people that identify with the abject. They are actors in our culture, and presumably harbor the potential for political engagement, and certainly maintain a strong voice in cultural politics. It is, occasionally, a voice I must express disagreement with. But they are people.
It is an argument that should strike a chord with feminists, whose job, after all, has always been to organize among the dispossessed. It’s not a popular way of thinking about a women’s rights movement at the moment, but a feminism that does not offer the abject a place to go when they don’t fit in anywhere else is as logicless as Human Centipede II.
Not in a creepy way, or, like, a sad way. And not in a way that should worry you. It's not like that. We just think horror movies are totally cool, but also could be even more cool if we told you some things about them. Also, they are good for providing tips, because our day jobs are as murderers.
2 oz whiskey
3/4 oz grenadine syrup
3 1/2 oz Mountain Dew
Pour the whiskey and grenadine into a cocktail shaker half-filled with ice cubes. Shake well, and strain into a highball glass filled with ice cubes. Add Mountain Dew. Run for your life.
