Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet (2009) - 2/4

Blood Night may just give The Legend of Hell House a run for its proverbial money in the bathetic motive department. The climax of Hell House reveals that the eldritch horrors have been unleashed by a severe case of Little Man Syndrome. Blood Night reveals from the beginning that a horrendous mass murder and a possible haunting were both triggered by menstruation. When little Mary Mattock had her first period, she brutally murdered her parents. Locked away for a decade, raped by a night guard, impregnated, and parted from her child, her next period triggers a mass murder in the asylum resulting in many a decapitation and her death. Hence Blood Night, the in-film unofficial holiday that celebrates the bloodbath Mary Mattock wrought as well as the bloody cause of her insanity. Of course, during a Blood Night celebration, killings begin again. Silly as it may seem, there have actually been documented cases of menstruation-induced homicide (e.g. Sandie Craddock). But it's a particularly strong menstrual cycle that reaches out from beyond the grave.

What's most interesting about Blood Night is the unique culture it creates for its small town with the Blood Night legend. The eight-minute pre-credits sequence very economically gives the entire Mary Hatchet story. A series of newspaper clippings during the credits reveals how Blood Night developed out of Mary Mattock's story. It's a town-condemned phenomenon amongst the local youth, partially an opportunity for widespread mischief, partially an excuse for drunken parties, and partially a cover for indulgence in the macabre. Most of all it's a means of dealing with a traumatic event. Just as individuals find means, which are frequently unhealthy, of dealing with trauma, so do communities. Where adults employ rituals of solemnity, youths tend to employ irreverence, trivializing traumatic events with silly songs, stories, games, and so forth. In Blood Night the irreverence consists in visits to the cemetery, Mary masks, pranks, jokes and parties. Writer-director Frank Sabatella's finest touch is to show an online Flash game based on Mary Hatchet. Marys pop up from behind headstones throwing axes and the player stops the Marys by throwing tampons. It's just the sort of facetious game that would be made from such a legend. Adults are often disdainful of the way youths deal with trauma; but solemn rituals or playful rituals are both still rituals, still a response to the trauma by means of repetition. However we may perceive the playful rituals as disrespectful, they have the same repressive effect as the solemn ones.

In the milieu of Blood Night a group of high school seniors led by Alex (Nate Dushku) take a ouija board to Mary's grave. Creeped out by the stories of cemetery keeper Graveyard Gus (Bill Moseley) and the planchette's apparent uncaused motion, they wind down at a house party with drinking, jokes, and sex. Then the heads start to roll. This is a very interesting structure; I can't recall seeing that exact structure in horror before: the tongue-in-cheek celebration of a traumatic legend is transformed into a horrific re-enactment of the original trauma. In one scene a girl tells a harrowing story that ends in a punchline. In some sense the opposite is being inflicted on these teens. For treating the traumatic event as a punchline, they're being inflicted with the trauma. Their attempts to repress the trauma with mirth has ultimately been transformed into its return. Nevertheless, the structure isn't outside of tradition. Mario Bava's films, especially the masterpiece Black Sunday, are often structured around a legend of some traumatic event. The structure can be found in films as diverse as Pete Walker's slasher The Flesh and Blood Show and the family-friendly Hocus Pocus. Someone somehow aggitates the original and dormant trauma, causing its return. In Black Sunday Asa is revived by the accidental spill of blood. Suddenly the town and family that have tried to forget her are placed face to face with the original horror. In the context of the story this is an evidently bad thing as deaths result. On a holistic level, however, it's very good: The trauma's return is the opportunity to face it head on and destroy it once and for all. Usually the one who disturbs and leads to the trauma's destruction is an outside influence, like the doctors in Black Sunday. Sometimes, as in Hocus Pocus, it's a local. The outside intervention tends to support the need for assistance, perhaps even indicating the role of a therapist. When the resolution of the trauma is the work of a local, the message is usually one of self-sufficiency and independence. Either way, the trauma, as in Blood Night, is never over until it has been confronted.

The trip to the cemetery and the use of the ouija board are standards in the structure of trauma-aggitation. Many horror films, especially haunted house films, are structured around an original trauma. Ouija boards and séances are frequent causes of the return of the trauma. They aggitate it and cause it to resurfance. In Mario Bava's Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga an incantation resurrects the legendary sadist Baron Blood, for instance. In Blood Night it's not so clear that the ouija board works. The film skirts around and plays with supenaturalism, but undercuts its own structure with the anxiety of female sexuality. It is not so much the ouija board as the mounting eroticism of the party, during which a porn movie is shown and multiple couples go off to bedrooms, that aggitates the trauma. Menstruation and pregnancy take the thematic place of conjuration and necromancy. Mary's menstrual rage in the pre-credits sequence gives her superhuman strength sufficient to decapitate victims seemingly without a weapon. She targets both men and women. Yet Blood Night undeniably expresses an anxiety about the unique powers of female sexuality, the capacity to bear children and the millennia of mysticism surrounding female fertility. This is a feature Blood Night shares with Ginger Snaps or in an inverse way with Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. In Ginger Snaps budding female sexuality becomes really and allegorically lycanthropy. Valerie is a more subtle case, where Valerie's first period invites a bewildering train of psychosexual terrors in the form of vampirism. All of these films show the anxiety men have been expressing since the Pandora's Box myth. Most interestingly, characters themselves in Blood Night are mistakenly convinced they're in a standard trauma-aggitation structure as they team up with Graveyard Gus to try appease the spirit of Mary.

The collision of these two structures is fascinating to see, as is the characters' own confusion about which structure they're in. However, it doesn't necessarily produce an entertaining horror film. The first ten minutes of Blood Night are highly economical, setting a high bar for the rest of the movie that it doesn't quite meet. Post-credits, we're immersed in several dialogue-heavy scenes of teenage banter and storytelling until the middle of the movie. When violence does start, it seems too fast and too disordered. A lot of characters have been set up at this party and many of them are decapitated in a short time. The transition from levity to brutality left no development. There is no emotional engagement with either terror or horror. The climax is a chase sequence in which the victims disperse and the axe-wielding maniac stalks each individually until a select few remain. There's very little in the way of tension or suspense even during this scene. Sabatella is more interested in the resulting gore effects than the build-up. Perhaps it's not surprising for a film so afraid of female sexuality that the climax is preferred to the foreplay.

Speaking of gore, Blood Night makes the mistake a good many low-budget horror films make. Zombie films make this mistake more than any others, but slashers like Blood Night come second. The mistake is focusing on the gore. Gore is more effective when glimpsed rather than scanned. Compare the ridiculous scene of spider's ripping latex flesh in Fulci's The House by the Cemetery with the machete-to-the-skull in Cannibal Ferox. Ferox is much more effective. I can think of a few reasons. For one, when we focus on the gore, we the audience have time to rationalize it and detect its flaws, to say to ourselves, "It's just latex." Moreover, the natural response to disgusting images is to look away. If the camera is an extension of the audience's eyes into the film work, the unnaturalness of the camera's obsession with gore makes us suspect: we wouldn't focus on it so were it real! A film like Cannibal Ferox shows the gore-event in a second and quickly cuts to a horrified woman captive looking away. Gore effects are, paradoxically, more effective the less they are shown. Blood Night shows the neck stumps of beheaded victims and their rolling heads far more than it should.

One of Blood Night's major pulls for genre fans will be its two Horror Stars, Bill Moseley and Danielle Harris (of Halloween IV and V fame). Moseley has always distinguished himself by putting his all into a performance, no matter how vapid the material. In Blood Night he has been cheated of any interesting dialogue, alas. He is given a ghost story that is intended to sustain a sense of menace, but it doesn't work. Harris is also given a story of a lighter tone and it consequently works better. Her fans may be pleased with how her role develops. Curiously enough supporting actor Billy Magnussen steals every scene he's in as Eric, the fun and friendly party guy. Hopefully this won't be Magnussen's last foray into the genre.

Ultimately Blood Night is just too scattered in tone and ideas, never quite concluding anything. Its strength is in the perverse small town customs it builds up around the Mary Hatchet legend and the people who celebrate it. Unfortunately the plot takes over and takes these people down the pathway of ineffectual gore and violence, rushing toward an artificial set of conclusions.