The horror! The horror!

[trinityvixen]

Review of Deadgirl is finally up! It only took me most of a fortnight to bang out all the rough edges on that one. It's a seriously fucked up movie. I think they had a very fine line to walk with revolting the audience and keeping them watching, but they managed. Tricky, not always satisfying in every way, but when I saw it with feiran and darkling1 it kept us talking for a good hour or so.

Enjoy over at Tor.com!

Comments

[fairest.livejournal.com]

Nicely done! I did not envy you having to tackle the review on that one. :)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, me neither! Whew ::wipes sweat off forehead::

[saturn-shumba.livejournal.com]

Oh, if ONLY this movie would come to my town. *weeps quietly in a corner*

Good stuff, though! I appreciate your review, especially since Feministing blogged about the movie a couple of days ago blasting its sexism without even seeing it. They also cited a imdb.com summary of the film very obviously written by a 14 year old douchebag. Sigh.

Couple things (mostly related to the comments on that site):

1. It seems to be a requirement nowadays for someone to play the "I don't like horror cause I don't like depravity" card. I wish they would go away. I'm no hater of sunshine and lollipops, but I hate when people frown very seriously at horror movies, especially when the horror movie is trying to make a point.

2. Yes, you need to see I Spit On Your Grave. Is it highly uncomfortable? Yes. Is it fucking fantastic? Yes. Does something very bad happen to a dude's junk? Yep. (Weirdly, I have a collection of movies where that happens. IT WAS AN ACCIDENT.)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I hate when people dismiss stuff out of hand. I only do it if I have a balanced idea of what the thing is going to be about--if I have already seen the first Hostel, say, I can guess how Hostel 2 will play out.

1. The point of horror to witness depravity. The point of great horror is to learn something from it.

2. I am totally reaching for that one right the fuck now.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

That was better than any of the reviews I've ever written.

Tiny error correction: It's Noah Segan, not Segal.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Wow! Er, thanks! ::blushes stupidly red:: I don't agree, but I'm glad I made the cut in your opinion. I've no idea how you bang out so many reviews so quickly. That stuff is hard!

And I will try to go fix that error. Oops. Thanks for the nitpick.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

Well, it was certainly more analytical than the reviews I write anyway. We can both wish we wrote like one another in at least one aspect.

A topic of discussion, though: I was reading the comments and I noticed that you referred to horror wounds as being "penetrative" as sort of a psychosexual analysis and I did wonder about that. Similar to "phallic symbol", I often (but not always) feel like it's a pretty vague thing to assign to something. I mean, technically, if it's defined in three dimensions, any sort of straight line can be targeted as a phallic symbol. Similarly, I would say the majority of wounds possible on a person are penetrative in one way or another. What say you?

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

First off, no one would deny that horror frequently deals with issues with and fears about sex--sexual freedom, sexual repression, sexual politics. Sex and horror go hand-in-hand to such a degree that I made that (blatantly stolen from popular theses in film criticism) connection between horror and pornography. As porn has the "money shot," horror has the gore pay-off, seeing the stalk come to a bloody, spurty end. To top it off, the victim often makes almost orgasmic expressions when she is murdered. Look between faces from a porn actress and a horror scream queen, and you might have trouble picking out which is which.

So just as the knife/other implement of mortal destruction plunges into a usually female victim, she makes an o-face and there is then a gushing of bodily fluids. (That's even before taking into account that she has, in one way or another, probably broken some female behavior taboo as regards sexual expression.) The phallic nature of a knife is really irrelevant, though the penetrative aspect is important. Penetration is, by necessity, gendered in representation--i.e. it springs to people's minds as being a "masculine" or phallic aspect because that's what the natural organ for penetrating is, the penis. However, I am not claiming knives = penises but merely that penetration and fluid production are common to both porn and horror. These are also used to produce strong responses in the audience in both genres of film--in porn to titillate and in horror to repulse (and, unfortunately, also to titillate). A great way to provoke a strong response is to pull on one of two hugely important drives in the human animal: fight/flight or the urge to copulate. Horror primarily assaults that fear response, but it also plays to the sexual one in order to keep you interested.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

Sure, but, my feeling is that there have to be times, even when the same things are happening, when the symbolism just isn't really intended. I mean, knives stab. Even if I don't want to send that message, what you said seems to suggest that it's on screen anyway. It's the same with supposedly phallic symbols. Maybe when it gets ridiculously big, like a Dirty Harry style .357 Magnum, then I think the issue might mean more, but sometimes a gun is just a gun.

Obviously, this doesn't apply to Deadgirl but I see people throwing around symbolism all the time and at least 1 in 3 times I think it's pretty irrelevant/imagined/a stretch.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Believe me, I do sympathize. I had a girl in a high school class who could compare the sexless characters in any work to Freud somehow. It was the limit of her understanding as far as human psychology went. Sure, sometimes a knife is just a knife.

But it's easy to see frustrated sexuality being displaced into murder with the more famous on-screen killers, especially those of the 1970s-80s variety that seem to have endured the longest. Michael Myers' first kill was his older sister--she was naked at the time having just had vigorous sex with her boyfriend; the only woman to survive Halloween was virginal Laurie. (The sex-wanting/having friend and her boyfriend were both killed.) Freddy Kreuger was a child molester. Much of his stalking of Nancy in the first Nightmare on Elm Street seems like a clumsy rape attempt. (In Freddy vs. Jason, there are repeated Freddy-fucks-girl-to-death bits.) Friday the 13th is explicitly about punishing kids for having sex. Even when you get around to genre-savvy films like Scream, you have as much or more people being punished for sex as anything else (one of the killers is motivated by his mom leaving after his dad has an affair).

Are these the only examples? Oh hell no. There is lots of horror that isn't that overt. The Saw films are fairly asexual, which, believe me, is a rarity among the horror films that came out at the same time. But the blood gush = ejaculate imagery is pretty hard to shake a lot of the time, especially when the players--hot, young things--tend to be very scantily clad. A lot of the fun of a horror movie is the taboo satisfaction at seeing people murdered horribly. It's naughty. Porn plays on that same sort of vicarious thrill, just off a different spectrum, so they're of a kind, if different in the reactions they provoke. So even when horror isn't sexual--again, sometimes a knife is just a knife--it has this solidarity with sexual media through provocation.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

Well, I agree, but I'm still curious more about examples of horror movies that you would consider desexualized, like Saw. Take Halloween as another interesting example. Obviously, Laurie doesn't stop being Michael's sister at any point, but would you still say that the subtext is there in H20? I'm not necessarily saying it isn't (I also haven't watched it in awhile), but I do feel it's at least significantly less potent/relevant in that movie. I feel like the dynamic changes somehow (not so much -- by which I mean not at all -- in Halloween II).

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

I guess my question is basically "How strong does the symbolism have to be before it's relevant?" How much leeway is there for actual unintended symbolism. I mean, there are definitely people out there who are saying something about themselves unconsciously through their work, but there have also gotta be times where there's just something that seems to be there but is otherwise unsupported by the movie or seems random.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I guess my question is basically "How strong does the symbolism have to be before it's relevant?

Ah, really good question! I see what you mean. I think we're talking sort of at cross-purposes here but not really disagreeing. You can argue whether or not certain shots of spurting blood are meant to be analogues to money shots, and that's totally up for interpretation, especially about whether or not it's relevant to the story. For example, does making Michael Myers' a killer who kills whores first matter when he still tries to kill Laurie? Not to the characters in the movie, but if only virgins survive, the movie is making a statement about sex. There is perhaps no symbolism in movie's stabbing weapon (a knife is just a knife!), but there is a take-away message (to women, mostly) about not being sluts. Think of Kevin Bacon being arrowed to death in Friday the 13th--weapon is technically phallic (longer than it is wide), but the death is so overtly about sex (he is literally being killed for being sexual) that any subtext about penetration is unnecessary.

Why I come back to the porn/horror analogy time and again is because I know that horror evokes a gut reaction in me--a terror/revulsion but also a kind of pleasure. We do get pleasure in seeing some twisted shit in horror movies. The most famous people in horror are always the killers. There is a satisfaction to watching horror that is not unlike the sort you get from porn. You're most often a little bit scandalized or repulsed by porn, but it works on you just the same. So even when horror isn't torture or splatter porn, it can be kind of porn-y in its effects on your lizard brain. Different matter entirely from reading Freudian slips into filmmakers' shots, but also relevant to the broader issue of sex and horror.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Was Laurie being Michael's sister established in the first movie? I don't remember that. If it wasn't, I leave more room for complications if only because sequels really can muck up original productions and interpretations thereof. I also haven't seen many of the Halloween sequels, though I did see H20 some ten+ years ago. Don't remember it much, alas.

Hmm, desexualized horror. Difficult question. Saw is pretty much the only one in recent memory that seems to have focused less on punishing for sex so much as other deadly sins. Which may be why, despite the increasing ridiculousness of the sequels, the movies can still be somewhat interesting. Maybe The Ring? I don't remember that one too well, but the little girl was just evil full stop, right? (Which is different from evil son narratives like The Omen because there is often a mother-slowly-goes-crazy-over-the-evil-she-has-fostered plot line. A monstrous birth still equates with proof of fucking, usually with the mother doing something wrong.)

Zombie horror is one that tends to less sexual, if only because the films are usually so disgusting as to push the bile factor beyond the titillation. It should be more sexual, not less, with all the intimacy of biting and disease transmission in the way that vampire narratives are, but the typical zombie movie isn't sexy or even about sex at all. Obviously, Deadgirl is an exception there.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

Do you think it matters if the movie tries to tell you something different than any potential subtext? You made a comment about how Laurie is the virginal girl whether it affects the characters in the movie or not, but The Omen baby is a mistake, a mix-up at the hospital. Said guilt is still a topic touched on by the movie, but this and a few other factors tell the audience that it isn't even her kid (regardless of whether or not she should feel that kind of guilt in the first place).

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

If the movie is explicit, it's hard to contradict it. I am a firm believer in text first.

[ecmyers.livejournal.com]

Indeed, that was an excellent review/analysis. I think you could start teaching some of those horror courses. At least when you add those crap movies to your Netflix Instant Watch queue, you can say it's for "research."

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Thanks man. I'm glad I wrote it up because I already have a whole mess of movies to watch just from recommendations from the thread and other folks who've talked to me about it. Research, indeed!