A challenge to the producers of V/H/S and S-VHS

If you've been following the news out of Sundance, you probably heard that the found-footage horror sequel S-VHS debuted to strong reviews.  Many proclaimed the sequel to be stronger than the original V/H/S. One reviewer told me via Twitter that it felt like all the filmmakers involved with this installment had watched the Radio Silence segment in the first movie and went, "Got it." 

(In the interest of full disclosure, I'll state outright that I'm good friends with the team Radio Silence, who were responsible for the final segment in the original film. In fact, I interviewed most of them back when they were still called "Chad, Matt & Rob.")

Another viewer echoed that sentiment and said that in addition to S-VHS starting at the level of the Radio Silence short and building on that, there was no "accidental misogyny."  This got my attention, as a frequent topic on this blog is the sexualization of violence in horror films and the often-gratuitous nudity that accompanies that. I have to admit, when I saw V/H/S, I couldn’t help but notice the frequent uses of those tropes to a sometimes exploitative degree.

For those who haven't seen it, the original V/H/S is an anthology found-footage horror film made up of six segments by different directors. Pretty much everything good and bad about found footage can be found here.  Some segments are excellent, others range from terrible to pointless.  Out of those six segments, three feature female nudity – more than one instance of such in two of those segments. Of the remaining three shorts, two of those star male characters behind the camera who attempt to use it to leer at their female targets.

An aside to the teenage boys watching this who now have a reason to get the film on VOD – You’re welcome.

Look, I like boobs. Who doesn’t? I don’t see anything wrong with adding a little visual appeal to a film, and I’m well aware that topless shots add marketability to a project. I’d be lying if I said I never rented a movie to see boobs. When I was a teenager, I didn’t exactly watch Fast Times to see the riveting work of Judge Reinhold and Taylor Negron.

But there’s a certain point where a film contains so much leering it can’t help but feel excessively gratuitous. When two or three consecutive segments indulge in getting their female leads topless it’s not a huge leap to think that the filmmakers are taking as much advantage as their characters are.

Also of note, in all of the segments with female nudity also feature male protagonists whose attitudes range from “douchebag” to outright villainous. The Radio Silence segment is the only one that doesn’t deal with such male leads. In most of the other films, the men are presented as predators who get what’s coming to them. (But they were totally asking for it, amiright ladies?)

We’ve come a long way. It used to be that horror movies would punish the slutty girl for being sexually active. Now, it seems that the men get killed for their hormones, but not before they get an eyeful. (Or in some cases, a handful.)

I’ve seen interviews where the directors defend themselves against the accusation that the female nudity is gratuitous. Their position is that the point of the film is to punish these guys for their sleazy ways, not to celebrate them. Yeah, sure. You guys buy that, right? Maybe if it was a theme in one of the movies, but for five directors to arrive at that exact same message simultaneously? What’s more logical – that a quartet came up with the exact same feminist theme? Or that at least a few of these guys really just wanted some boobies in their short?

Oddly, if these works came from a female director, we could buy that as an intentional statement. But when men put forth that sort of feminist argument, it seems disingenuous. It sounds like some bullshit justification for the nudity. And if it’s not bull, then the message comes across as guys punishing themselves for their own sexual urges, as if they’re ashamed of or embarrassed by them.

Maybe I’m being unfair to some of these guys, many of whom were responsible for entertaining segments in the film. But when five out of six segments all tread on the same theme or very close to the same theme, what conclusion would you draw?

I'm glad to hear that S-VHS seemingly doesn't make this same mistake.  Since the reaction to this sequel almost certainly means that the producers are working on assembling their teams for a third installment, I'd like to issue a challenge to the V/H/S team.  For part three try to involve as many female directors as possible. Seeing six shorts from a group of male directors showcased some of the themes uppermost in their minds. It’d be interesting to see if there was a similar symmetry if the gender politics were completely skewed.

DJANGO UNCHAINED, the value of ultimate evil and the need for revenge fantasies

Often writers will be advised to create complex, multifaceted characters. "The villain is the hero of his own story," they are told. Often, it's considered undesirable to have an antagonist who's just evil for evil's sake. And that's true. I've read many a script where I was put off because the bad guy was just one-dimensionally evil.

But one genre where you can get away with that sort of writing is revenge fantasy. These are the sorts of stories that exist to give a cathartic release to the audience by allowing them retribution against a horrible evil.

I've said before that the lone virtue of Nazis is that they have provided storytellers with the ultimate unsympathetic villain. You need to create an antagonist that the audience is in no way going to feel bad for, no matter how brutally they are punished? Make him a Nazi. You need your hero to kill 50 guys to prove his badassery, but are worried about the moral quandary of the good guy indiscriminately murdering people left and right? Make them Nazis.

No one will ever complain about how horribly a film depicts Nazis. Their entire existence is a horrible depiction. If a film showed a Nazi party member raping an altar boy, killing a horse, beating a woman and torturing a kitten, is anyone going to step up and say that besmirches the good name of Nazis everywhere?

Of course not.

Now try that with a Catholic Priest.

The fact that Hitler is the go-to comparison in an argument when someone wants to demonize their opponent is pretty much proof that it's impossible to be unfair when painting Nazis as evil. There are only a handful of groups that share that sort of reputation. Having used Nazis in Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino turned to another decidedly un-protected class in Django Unchained - viscous slave owners.

It's interesting that Tarantino gets attacked for the violence in his films, but more often than not, the people who die horribly in his films totally deserve what's coming to him. Again and again we're shown the worst of humanity - slave owners who sell human beings as chattle. They beat them, they brand them, they whip them. In one uncomfortable scene, Kerry Washington's character is debased by being thrown naked in a hot box, then later is nearly stripped for the amusement of her owner, who takes particular glee in showing off the whip marks on her back.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays one of the more prominent slave owners in the film and his performance is a major highlight.  We're used to seeing him play mostly intense and serious characters, so it's incredibly enteraining to see him taking such glee in playing such a loathsome character.

It's interesting how Tarantino handles the violence.  All of the "evil" violence is handled in a serious, unsettling way.  There's no tongue-in-cheek when it comes to the slave whippings and brandings.  But when the victimizers get what's coming to them, it's classic over-the-top violence.  This isn't Unforgiven.  This is no meditation on the morality of violence.  It's evil people getting what's coming to them.

I'd posit that we need these revenge fantasies.  We want to see some kind of horrible retribution visited on the monsters who murdered six. Million. Jews. in the Holocaust.  We need to see the people who sold and whipped other human beings get a taste of their own medicine.  Do they deserve to die?  (skip to :20. Stupid YouTube won't let me set it to embed there directly.)

 
That clip is from A Time to Kill.  It's a fantastic film with a somewhat troubling morality behind it.  Two southern rednecks beat and brutally rape a young black girl.  Though the men are arrested, there's an excellent chance that they will go free.  Unable to cope with that, the girl's father, played by Samuel L. Jackson, guns them down in the courthouse.  The rest of the film focuses on the prosecution of Jackson's character for capital murder.

It seems insane that the grieving father could be punished for avenging his daughter while the men who beat her might have been able to walk around as free men.  The film asks us to sympathize with vigilante justice.  Nay, it demands we do so.

In the real world, as much as we might sympathize with Jackson's plight, those men never faced their day in court.  They never were found guilty and so the presumption of innocence is something they're legally entitled to.  In the real world, the hero of our movie is a premeditated murderer.  Does passion excuse that?  Think of the West Memphis Three - three innocent men who lost nearly twenty years of their lives to wrongful murder convictions where child murders stirred up passions as intense as those in A Time to Kill.

But that's the real world.  Why don't we shed a tear for the bastards in A Time to Kill?  Because in "movie world," we are omniscient.  We KNOW they did it.  We SAW them do it and if it was in our power, we'd strangle them with our bare hand.  As viewers we are witness, judge, jury and executioner.

That is the power of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained.  Those horrible evils are beyond our capacity to punish.  But through the movies, we can take back a little control, and for a few hours, we can live in a world where evil people will not escape justice.  Tarantino taps into our primal need for this and provides us with movies that make us feel.

Strive for this in your writing.  Seek powerful scenes and moments that speak to what an audience needs to see, what they need to believe in.  Django Unchained doesn't fetishize violence for it's own sake, or for simple shock value.  There is a clear purpose to Tarantino's methods.

The script that made me want to recommend psychiatric help for the writer

Lence asks:

What's the best script you've ever read? 

I'm truly at a loss for this one.  It's one of those cases where I read so much that a lot of it tends to bleed together.  I don't know if you can really put a "best script ever" label on anything because there are a lot of different ways to write a GREAT script. Indeed, I've read a lot of scripts that I really liked, many that I was passionate about for different reasons - and yet, asked to single out one... I just can't.

And have you ever read a script so bad it almost made you angry to read? 

Frequently.  I recall one instance where the development VP I was reading for at the time kicked a script down to me and it was one of the most generic pieces of violent drek I'd seen in a while.  The writing style was trying WAY too hard to be cool.  (I'm pretty sure there was a lot of Shane Black-type "talking to the reader.")  It was very low-brow and B-movie like.  In fact, you could have almost convinced me it came in from a non-pro query.  I struggled to find anything original or inspiring about the script.  On top of that, most of the characters didn't even have proper names.

I hated it, and told the VP so.  Turns out, she'd read ten pages and hated it so much she kicked it down to me so she wouldn't have to read it.  After I explained my reaction to the script, she apparently called up the exec who sent it to her and in so many words said, "Dude! What the fuck?!"

The exec said that this script was about to go into production and that the writers were going to be "huge!"  VP and I roared with disbelief over that one.  But in the end, the writers had the last laugh as they've gone on to work steadily, working on at least one franchise.

In our defense, I know of some A-listers who weren't especially impressed with their writing either and had some of the same issues we did.

And then there was one of the most vile, misogynistic pieces of violent writing I had ever read.  It was perverted, disgusting and disturbing to such a level that the only reason I ended up with the script was that the (female) reader who had to cover the first submission of this script refused to read it again due to being the product of a sick mind.

She was right. I googled the writer.  He was a studio exec.

As much as that deserved a rimshot THAT WAS NOT A JOKE!

The coverage that script provoked was some of the most unvarnished coverage I ever had submitted to these bosses.  Some of my employers enjoy it when I take a more Simon Cowell-like approach to shredding the truly terrible scripts, others have preferred a more measured, even take on it.  The bosses for this submission were among the more buttoned-up, but in my write-up, I only barely restrained myself from suggesting psychiatric help for the submitter.

A few months later, the script was resubmitted.  I had to read it again.  The fucker barely had changed anything - and he certainly hadn't toned down the misogyny or the violence.  Or the misogynistic violence.  I made sure when I wrote the synopsis that I included every last instance of such.

I'll put it this way.  He made I Spit on Your Grave look like Mary Poppins.  So I tore him a new one, then emailed my boss's assistant and said, "Look, this concept is NEVER ever going to get a Consider from anyone.  If we take it again, we're wasting our time and the company's money."  As I understand it, the message was conveyed.  In spades.

A few weeks later, the writer attempted to submit again.  He was unsuccessful.

I've probably written other scripts that were just as bad or worse, but few made me as violently angry at the writer as that.  Rarely have I ever felt I was looking into the mind of such a sick individual.

Psych 101 with scripts

I'm cheating a bit here, but there was a comment that came up in the discussion of the rape scene in The Last House on the Left. I responded there, but realized that given the age of the post, it's likely to go unnoticed.

Mr. Main Event asks:

I wonder if you, Bitter, have ever encountered a script where you seriously questioned the mental capacity of the writer? Have you ever read a script and thought, "this could be the next Eric Red" (http://www.hollywoodinterrupted.com/archives/seeing_red.phtml). I recently had an experience like that reading a script about (I'm not sure what the rules are on here, so I won't say the name) a hospital for the criminally insane where the power goes out and the inmates brutalize the staff in the most grotesque ways possible. I checked the address on the cover page and was relieved to see that the writer didn't live anywhere near me . . .

Oh yes, there have been several scripts where I seriously questioned the mental capacity of the writer. One in particular sticks in my mind and it was one of the most vile, reprehensible pieces of writing I had ever been subjected to. There are plenty of times I'm reading a disturbing scene and think "This guy has issues," but this is one of the few times I legitimately felt like I was getting a glimpse into the psyche of a truly sick individual.

And when we readers get something that loathsome, do you think we Google the writer and the script? You bet your ass we do!

Imagine my shock when this script - which makes the collective works of Eli Roth look like Care Bears: The Movie and was full of so much misogyny that it made female circumcision look like a bikini wax by comparison - was a Nicholl Fellowship Quarterfinalist!

This why when someone counters a bad review of mine by saying their script was a finalist in a contest, I don't give a shit. There's a reason that few Nicholls-winning scripts have actually been produced.Now maybe the year in question happened to be a pretty weak year for Nicholls submissions... but still, this was such utter sleaze that the script deserved to be burned after the first read and the ashes returned to the writer as a warning not to put pen to paper ever again.

Am I being too harsh?

(Yeah, it might be bad form to recycle comments as a new post, but I'm sure most of you have a half day, so consider this a half-post.)

Brutallity and rape in The Last House on the Left

24 hours after watching the remake of The Last House on the Left I was still trying to figure out how I felt about it. I'd skipped this one in theatres, but since thrillers and horror movies make up a lot of what I read for work, I try to stay on top of the big movies in that genre. A few years ago, I saw Wes Craven's original version of the film and was left with similarly mixed feelings. The movie was powerful on a gut level in many ways and the raw aesthetic only added to that. On the other hand, there were moments that seemed sadistic merely for its own sake and some oddly placed comic relief.

For those who don't know, the premise is that two teenage girls are brutally attacked after going to a motel room to hang out with a teenage boy. The boy's father, uncle and the father's girlfriend are none too happy about this when they return, as they are all wanted for the murder of two cops while helping the father, Krug, escape from the back of a police car. The girl's put up a fight, but one is killed after attempting to escape and her friend, Mari, is very brutally raped by Krug. She manages to make a run for it and tries to swin out via a nearby lake, only to be shot by Krug and left for dead in the water.

But when Krug and his crew find themselves without transportation, guess where they inadvertently take refuge? Mari's parent's home, with none of the parties initially aware of the connection. When the parents do find out, it's after they've put the foursome in the guesthouse and a storm has knocked out their phones. On top of that, they have no car, as Mari took the only one at the house. They're stuck on their own, with the fear that Krug's gang will figure out who they are.

It could be called a morality play, and a study in how far someone would go to take revenge on people who brutalized someone they loved. I'm fond of these sorts of premises - where an ordinary person is thrown into an extreme situation and how they deal with it becomes a true test of character. Hitchcock was one of the great masters of this, with films like North by Northwest.

It's a great question: if someone who raped and beat up your daughter was in your guest cottage and calling the police wasn't an option - what would you do? Do you hide and gamble that they don't figure out who you are? Do you consider that they might kill you even without knowing who you are? Do you take action out of self-defense? Or do you seize the opportunity for brutal revenge - eye for an eye?

How many times have the survivors of brutal crimes (or their families) said, "Just give me five minutes alone with the SOB responsible." Well, these characters have all night - what do you think they do?

But it wasn't those hard questions that troubled me - it was the fact that after so many years of horror films being an exercise in exploitative violence, Last House essentially hinges on a brutal, disturbing rape. It's not graphic in the sense that any nudity is shown, but the camera angles certainly are suggestive and Sara Paxton gives a more than convincing performance during the brutal scene.

The filmmakers understandably had a bit of a no-win situation here. If they didn't show the rape, or sanitized it, it might undercut just how vicious Krug and his men are supposed to be. It might compromise how much the audience identifies with the parents in the final act. After we bear witness to what Krug does to Mari, we want him dead. D-E-A-D. There's no denying there's a legitimate case to be made for provoking that reaction.

But the other side of it is that it's really hard to sit through the rape scene and regard it as entertainment. I can easily see some viewers - especially parents - transferring some of their disgust for Krug onto the filmmakers themselves. And that's such a gut level reaction that there's no debating the point with people who have it.

So this is the risk a writer takes should they put a graphic rape scene in their script. Sexual violence is bound to be more controversial than straight-up murder or assault. You want proof? Most of us wouldn't bat an eye at James Bond executing a female assassin in cold blood. They might even cheer. Can you imagine that reaction if instead of shooting her, he raped her?

And right about now, I'm guessing several of you are ticked at me for putting that image in your head.

Some of the worst scenes I have ever read were rape scenes; brutal, nasty acts of sexual violence that were ostensibly in the script to tell us what horrible people the villains were. Most of the time, they read like the writer's were getting their rocks off, creating some sort of demented fantasy. One particular scene was so bad that I have refused to read subsequent drafts of that screenplay when offered and the writer in question is the only writer who I refuse to read on principle. And I am NOT a squeamish person.

Ultimately, the rest of The Last House on the Left was so well-produced and the performances were so solid that I decided to give the movie the benefit of the doubt. It seems that they handled a difficult scene as best they could given the requirements of the plot. I read an interview with director Dennis Iliadis where he said he didn't want to cast an overtly sexy young starlet as Mari because he didn't want the rape scene to be enjoyable for the audience at all. I think that was a wise choice. Had he cast Megan Fox in the role, and shot it so she was more exposed, I can see all the hype for the movie boiling down to "See Megan Fox naked!"

Oh, darn. I just put the words "Megan Fox Naked" in a row. I can only imagine that'll really mislead a lot of Google searches. I just feel terrible that people looking for Megan Fox naked will be misdirected here because I happened to type Megan Fox naked. I hope they don't feel ripped off when they don't find Megan Fox naked here, because there is no naked Megan Fox here.

Anyway, as I said, the cast is uniformly excellent. Tony Goldwyn and Monica Potter do solid work as the parents, Riki Lindhome is quite creepy as Krug's girlfriend, while Aaron Paul is suitably scuzzy as Krug's brother. But the real reason to see The Last House on the Left is for Garret Dillahunt's performance as Krug, one of the nastiest villains put on screen in some time. You might not know his name, but you'll likely recognize Dillahunt as Russian gangster Roman on Life, the Cromartie/John Henry terminator on The Sarah Conner Chronicles, or as Tommy Lee Jones' deputy in No Country For Old Men. Dillahunt has an incredible range, and he puts it to use here - he's menacing without resorting to the sorts of shouting and over-the-top hysterics that most horror villains thrive on. He's able to turn on the charm when dealing with the parents, even as he laces his words in ways to remind his crew who's in charge. The wrong actor in this role would have destroyed this movie, no question.

However, I would be remiss if I didn't point out how wrong the final scene of the movie felt. Goldwyn has Krug at his mercy after knocking him out and he needs to rush his family to the hospital via boat. Obviously leaving Krug there to wake up and escape isn't an option - he's not going to give the guy who raped his little girl and attacked his family a pass. So he paralyzes Krug from the neck down and places his head in a microwave. After waiting for Krug to wake up and appreciate his fate, the father activates the appliance and exits, leaving Krug screaming as his head explodes.

Much like how I criticized Rachel Nichols' character in P2 killing her captor in cold blood, I had some problems with this last scene. It's a little too calculated for my tastes. It doesn't feel like something the father would do. I believe he'd beat Krug to death with his bare hands. I believe he'd slash his throat. I believe he'd shoot him several times and leave him to bleed to death. I don't doubt he wants to kill Krug and that he wants to make it painful.

But you're telling me that with time being of the essence, he's going to take the time to paralyze Krug, then sit around and wait for him to wake up, just so he can cackle at him and leave him in a semi-creative death trap? I don't quite buy it, and the exploitative image of Krug's head exploding is exactly the wrong note to end this movie on. That final scene forms our impressions as we exit the theatre or turn off our DVD. It's gore for gore's sake, and the problem is that it provokes one to revisit the rape scene in that context. For me, the exploitative violence here cheapens the other violence by association.

Does anyone out there have any thoughts on this topic? I'd love to know if others had the same issue as I did, or if they were less forgiving of the rape scene. Please, comment away.

Misogynistic violence against women

This is one of those things that is hard to describe, but you definitely know it when you see it. My “best” example of such a scene was one scene where a woman met her end by being sliced in half lengthwise, starting at her genitals. If it wouldn’t get me sued, I’d describe that whole sequence in detail just to put in context how truly nasty some scenes can be. Rape scenes are also walking a fine line. It’s possible to handle them tastefully, but I’ve read a few where it’s felt like the rapist is standing in for the writer’s own fantasies – the kind of scene that after you read, you need to take a shower to wash the dirt away.

After more than five years as a reader, I now know far too many ways to mutilate, subjugate and sexually degrade a woman. I’m by no means a feminist, and there are plenty of instances where I’ve read an act of violence committed upon a female character and haven’t raised an eyebrow at it. Don’t misunderstand me – I’m not saying you should never hurt, injure or kill your female characters. That would be equally sexist. The problem sets in when it feels like the victimizer in the scene is a stand-in for the writer’s own sick desires.

This is one of those subliminal things that’s hard to point out without using specific examples, and unfortunately, to show the worst/best examples of such writing would likely get me sued. As blurry as the line gets, it most frequently gets crossed when some sort of sexual element is added to it. A scene where a woman is stabbed and her throat is slashed probably wouldn’t set of any alarms – but a scene where a woman is stabbed, then raped as the attacker takes obvious glee in her pain is going to be more repulsive.

Any creative attacks upon the vagina are also likely to trigger this response. Rape is a hot button for a lot of people, and doubtlessly there will be stories where such an act will serve the plot. (The Accused and A Time To Kill immediately spring to mind.) If you’re just trying to write a “fun” slasher film, I’d be careful about adding rape in there. If you’re writing torture porn, then you’re just a sick son of a bitch and there’s probably no saving you.

Yeah, I said it. I get the impression that torture porn gets bought less on the strength of its script and more on the cynical view of, “Well, this can probably make money in this market.” It seems like that genre is on its way out, and I for one couldn’t be happier. I don’t recommend writing it, but I don’t think too many readers like those scripts either, so you really don’t have anything to lose.

And don’t take it personally if agents, producers and managers who read the script think that there’s something strange about it. Readers often fancy themselves dimestore analysts, and we tend to think that a sick script is the product of a sick mind.