The Raven (2007) - 2/4

In David DeCoteau's two subsequent Poe adaptations, House of Usher (2008) and The Pit and the Pendulum (2009), I was impressed by how DeCoteau mined Poe's wealth of symbols for psychosexual horror. The best Poe adaptations have exploited Poe's symbols, from Jean Epstein through Roger Corman up to DeCoteau. Both of those films were written by Simon Savory, who lends the films a playful creativity. The Raven, which was written by DeCoteau himself, lacks that playfulness. Poe's source material provides not symbols with which to explore the subconscious, but merely some motifs with which to decorate a mostly unremarkable '90s-style slasher.

What is remarkable about The Raven is how its slasher qualities seem to be a development out of a certain kind of drama pushed to its extremity. This is not to say DeCoteau set out to make a drama and accidentally made a horror film. DeCoteau's niche is horror. Though the horror precedes the drama actually, logically the drama precedes and erupts into horror in The Raven. The kind of drama The Raven pushes is what be called the bitch drama. This is not intended to be facetious. Nor is it intended to single out females. A bitch drama is a drama that consists entirely in the escalation of bitchiness between at least two people. The setting is usually a college, prep school, or high school. Moral ambiguity thrives in the bitch drama, as most characters perform some morally censurable acts. The film Jawbreaker is a good instance of a bitch drama. The film revolves around the three most popular high school seniors covering up a case of involuntary manslaughter. As one of the three has a conscience and as an outsider discovers what they've done, increasing acts of bitchiness exchange, mostly from the hands of Rose McGowan's character. Election and Cruel Intentions offer different and more mature forms of bitch drama. The essence is cruel scheming amongst young, proud, passionate people.

The Raven, too, is a bitch drama, even a homosexual bitch drama. But to be more accurate, it is the aftermath of a bitch drama. What happens to people like the Rose McGowan character of Jawbreaker if they never receive any formal discipline for their actions? What happens if the bitch drama is not resolved, but merely buried and ignored? The neat wrap-ups of bitch dramas make of their conclusions a false bottom. The Raven concerns two unpleasant young men, Roderick and Drake, who had one such bitch drama in prep school. Then they moved on, hoping to part ways perhaps. By unfortunate coincidence, they end up at the same college. What was buried bubbles up more vindictive and violent than ever: the bitch drama festers into a slasher horror. The catalyst is Roderick's graduation party, a masque ball he's hosting at a mansion famous for having been the site of a massacre during a masque ball years ago. Drake believes Roderick is hosting the party as an insult to him, though we only figure out why near the end. Now guests at the mansion are being murdered by a man in a raven mask with a blade shaped like a raven's talons. So this is the culmination of the bitch drama. Drake wants to ruin Roderick's party and issues death threats; Roderick is throwing a macabre, sinister party to offend Drake. Where bitch dramas sometimes include a death, The Raven is far beyond that. The cruelty has become a compulsion to kill all. The climactic reveal is a reveal of a bitchiness of truly perverse extremes.

The manner in which the slasher plays out is, however, unremarkable. There is a limited collection of attractive young men and a single female to be dispatched. Their personalities are scarcely if at all distinguished. And the raven is a most efficient killer. The protracted and aestheticized violence found in Italian slashers is not present here. The raven dispatches of each victim with a slash or two before they even have an opportunity to try running. The longest setpiece is also the most explicitly Poe-related sequence. The raven plays a recording of "The Raven" on phonograph while rapping on the victim's door. The possibility of an elegant setpiece proves as much a tease as the sex scenes.

DeCoteau's approach to softcore sex scenes, incidentally, is to always climax with the semi-removal of underwear. At least one of the men in the scene will have the back of his underwear flipped down to reveal his buttocks, but the front remains covering the genitals. This maneuver replaces penetration and orgasm in DeCoteau's films. This is peculiar, because it is unlikely sexually active people would be satisfied with this maneuver when it is just as easy to remove the underwear. DeCoteau's sexual setpieces, just like his violence setpieces, seem to end too soon and never engage the possibilities they raise.

There is very little of Poe left in the film. The raven itself is transformed into a psychopathological artifact of guilt that manifests itself physically in the raven costume. If there's anything linking The Raven with DeCoteau's House of Usher, it's the use of Poe's writing as a remedy for a character's psychological damage. But where House of Usher captured the rich subconscious of Poe's writings, The Raven remains mostly superficial. When one adapts a short poem like "The Raven", screenwriting invention is a necessity, of course. But one would expect an adaptation of a poem to at least be poetic. The most poetic aspect of The Raven is in the art design including all of the mansion's decor, the raven's costume and weapon, and the lovely, gothic matte that serves as establishing shot. There is also some poetry and some Poe in giving the raven the last word: nevermore.