State of Horror Address: The SyFy Channel

    The SyFy Channel has something in common with Nixon. I don't mean the fact that they've both made the supergator battle the megashark. I mean no-one ever admits to loving made-for-SyFy movies, yet there they are. Someone has to be watching them. A few people may obsessively watch them out of pure, overwhelming hatred, much as I do my neighbors. But most must watch them with the love a husband shows his agred, arthritic wife as he watches her drool in her sleep. Or the love a committed stalker shows the D-list celebrity who doesn't know he exists.

    Where Nixon is rightly despised for his hideous holiday sweaters, however, what is it about made-for-SyFy movies that rankles the cankles of horror and sci-fi nerds? Could it be that they use CGI instead of giving work to chronically underemployed monsters, like the sasquatch and Eric Roberts? Or are they resented for recycling plots in a time when we've grown tired of sorting our plastics from our cardboards? Maybe the problem is a sense of general low quality, not General Lokualitay the trusted Nixon defense secretary, but the lack of concern for the audience's sophisticated blue cheese and caviar tastes.

    Modern tastes demand a certain verisimilitude. Not Vera Sommilee-Tood the trusted Nixon secretary of labor, but the approximation of reality. Modern audiences want a superconda they can believe in, one that looks, sounds, tastes and plays footsie like a real superconda would. If they can't find a superconda, a megagator, or even a damn-dats-hugeamander, as the great Hitchcock personally tranquillized and wrangled ultragulls for The Birds, there are other options. The benchmark for practical effects was set by Carpenter's The Thing, Spielberg's Jurassic Park, and Cameron's Revenge of the Titanic. When you watch Jurassic Park, you imagine you could ride, pet, or get a happy-hour drink with the t-rex. But apparently these effects are only practical if you have a hundred million, not Italian Lira or Japanese Yen, but good ol' US green to spare.

    But can't our computer overlords satisfy our verisimilitoris? Or is the CG-spot just a myth? We readily received Lawnmower Man into our hearts, even if it resembles Deep Blue's checkmate vomit. And nobody minds that Anthony Perkins was a poorly-rendered polygon in Psycho. But it was new then. Since then we've been spoiled by The Mist, The Host, and motion captured apes named 'Andy.' Like Paris Hilton's vagina, we want big, expensive things. And if we must have illusion, we want it to be of expensive things being destroyed. Hence David Copperfield's most famous illusion, "Corporate CEO Sodomy."

    So, it seems that we, like Peris Hilton's vagina, have become too sophisticated and needy to enjoy good ol' fashioned American Dyna-Mation. Not Dinah-Mae Shunn, the Nixon press secretary, but original special effects of b-movies, the wonderfully imaginative clay models our grandparents tried to tell us look realistic. Or the highly-ineffective rear-screen projections of giant turkey vultures--are we too good for them now? Because made-for-SyFy movies are in the grand, old tradition of the over-reaching American B-movie that had more hopes you were drunk than they had budget or talent.

    But we didn't have to be drunk to enjoy The Giant Gila Monster. We had a sense of fun. And that same fun awaits us in the likes of Rage of the Yeti--you'll find it right beside Yancy Butler's cocaine money. If anything, these movies have gotten better because there's about twenty minutes less of scientists arguing with military guys. Because these days scientists have proven that blowing things up is better.

   That's why we're watching these movies. Not because Lou Diamond Phillips has to eat or Yancy Butler needs her blow, but because they're pure, American B-movie fun. With that comes a lot of bad dialogue, plot drag, occasionally silly monsters, and disbelief so suspended you've defiled the graves of its ancestors. But if you're a horror nerd, you know it's worth it.

    And here's something the SyFy Channel doesn't have in common with Nixon. I'm not referring to Nixon's delicious, secret raspberry jam recipe. I mean the SyFy Channel is not a crook. They uphold their end of the bargain, not just with Yancy Butler's nose candy, but with intentional, B-movie fun. Maybe you can't imagine a good game of Scrabble with the Sharktopus, but you sure can join the 'Oh! Shit!' guy in enjoying the megashark eat a Boeing 737, and you can join the supershark in agreeing it's appropriate he right a tank with legs. Because that's the B-movie tradition Nixon didn't want us to have.

    That's why I'm--well, not exactly proud, but at least moderately pleased to say, "I voted for SyFy!"

P.S. Nixon's jam secret is the pinch of nutmeg.

American Horror: Studying Argento's Trauma (1993)

All of Argento’s films are deceptive. I don’t refer only to the narrative techniques he uses to mislead the viewer like a street magician, though they offer an interesting parallel. I refer rather to the appearance of simplicity or even superficiality that masks the often ambitious complexity of his films. Trauma may be one of Argento’s most complex and ambitious. Trauma appears on first viewing to be a convoluted narrative littered with a mess of characters and saved only by the obvious efforts at the elabAurate stylistic techniques for which Argento is known; on repeat viewings it reveals itself to be a very deliberate homage to America.

‘Homage,’ however, may not be the right word. Trauma was, or at least was intended to be, an important step in Argento’s career. Had it been successful, Trauma would have moved Argento into Hollywood. Difficult though it might be for Argento fans to imagine him as an American filmmaker, there is ample evidence that going to America is just the career trajectory Argento had been planning for some time. He had four years prior produced Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Argento’s previous film, made just two years before Trauma, is Two Evil Eyes, an anthology film made with Romero. Trauma at last was Argento’s own American horror movie. What Argento does with Trauma is not just pay tribute to his favourite American horror filmmakers, or even the history of the Amrican horror film—though he does that—but uses the opportunity to engage the very idea of America, or at least his idea of American, perhaps one formed primarily from viewing American horror films. Trauma is not just an American horror film, then, but in its self-conscious American-ness is an American horror film about American horror films.

What we want to do in analyzing Trauma is understand what Argento has to say about America. And to do so we have to begin by interrogating the film’s self-consciousness. The best starting point, then, is the very surface, the film’s cast and crew. Given Argento’s admiration for Romero, it’s no surprise that for his first American film he acquires Tom Savini’s services for make-up effects. Piper Laurie is cast in the role of the psychotic mother, an unmistakable and intentional parallel to her role in Brian De Palma’s Carrie. Brad Dourif, of horror and cult film fame, also plays a small role. With this casting Argento makes a deliberate effort to provide audiences with cues to the film’s American-ness and with these cues he places Trauma within the history of the American horror film.

This casting has deeper significance, furthermore, by paying tribute to particular and influential—and to Argento, it seems, thematically important—American horror filmmakers. Savini, of course, provides Trauma a link to the quintessentially American horror films of Romero, whose films are perhaps second only to Hitchcock’s in establishing the modern horror film. De Palma for his highly-stylized, Hitchcockian horror thrillers is often seen as the closest American correlate to Argento, albeit even more Hitchcockian and, I think, more talented. Dourif calls to mind both One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for the electroshock therapy motif it shares with Trauma and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, a film Argento admires enough to reference favAurably over Eraserhead in Do You Like Hitchcock? So Argento is not just placing his film in the history of the American horror film, but of the very best, most important American horror films, ones that scrutinize aspects of American life.

That Argento’s perception of American and what characterizes it is largely mediated by American films, particularly the films of a few key filmmakers, would therefore be a fair statement. Trauma is a comment then on the idea of America that itself is a comment upon the American cinematic perception of America. The films in American horror history to which Argento draws attention are therefore necessary ciphers for decoding the vision Argento expresses in Trauma. How plot and Argento’s personal style and ideas interact with these influences provide the means whereby Trauma is understandable in its complexity.

The plot of Trauma concerns a young girl, Aura, who is rescued from suicide by David, a graphic designer for a news station. When Aura believes both her father and medium mother suffer a double murder at a maniac’s hands, she flees to her hero, David. While he gives the teen a place to stay and tries to help her overcome her anorexia, they become sexually involved. This infuriates David’s girlfriend, who turns Aura in to her psychiatrist, Dr. Judd. Soon the killer is trying to get at Aura in the mental hospital. David rescues her before the maniac can get to her and they begin trying to solve the murders. By looking into a victim’s storage locker they find a clue that all the victims were doctors or nurses at the same hospital. Each potential victim they try to talk to refuses to communicate and is murdered. Finally, Dr. Judd and the killer invade the David’s house at the same time. While he pursues Judd, the killer escapes with Aura, leaving a bogus suicide note behind. The trunk of Judd’s car is found to be full of heads, so he is presumed to be the killer. David is plunged into despair and drug addiction, believing Aura dead, until he notices by pure chance a woman wearing Aura’s bracelet. He follows her to the house of the killer where the little boy has been snooping throughout the film. There David discovers Aura is being held. While investigating the house, he is incapacitated in a nursery dedicated to ‘Nicholas.’ He awakes in chains. The killer is revealed to be Aura’s mother, Adriana, who was traumatized when her son, Nicholas, was accidentally decapitated during labor. Though the trauma was repressed by electroshock therapy, it spontaneously erupts, sending her on a decapitation spree. Aura’s memory is clarified now. She realizes she saw not her parents’ heads in two hands, but her mother holding her father’s head. Adriana readies to kill Aura and David, but is prevented by the neighbor boy, who lowers the decapitation device from a hole in the ceiling and turns it on, decapitating her. The police arrive to question David and Aura. The movie ends as a girl dances to reggae on a balcony.

Beginning with the general, what generic structures and tropes can we identify in this plot summary? I think what we find is a fusion of the slasher with film noir. The complex and extensive plotting, though uneven in execution, derives particularly from the noir tradition of films like The Big Sleep and especially The Seventh Victim. In many noirs, including those mentioned, innocent, young girls with psychological issues draw men into the roles of hero and detective, and into a world of perversion and murder. This is just what Aura does for David. One of the elementary events that begin the plot is David rescuing Aura from suicide. His efforts to rescue her bring him into the mystery of her mother’s decapitation murders.

The American genres of horror and film noir were both born from the import of German Expressionist filmmakers to America. Noir was really crystallized in the horror-crime films of Val Lewton, however. These films begin with Cat People and reach perfection in The Seventh Victim. Both of these films are important, not just for the horror and American cinema, but for Argento in making Trauma. Indeed, Argento names the film’s psychiatrist “Judd” after the only re-used character in the Lewton films, Dr. Louis Judd, psychiatrist of both the ‘cat person’ of Cat People and the titular character of The Seventh Victim.

In Lewton’s films, Judd is a particularly interesting character for his moral complexity. He has a tendency to take the cases of strange and alluring females. Once he takes them as patients, they tend to go ‘out of circulation,’ as it’s put. He himself is highly intelligent, emotionally detached, perhaps diagnosable as a narcissist. He strives to genuinely help his patients, however, despite his unorthodox methods. He is ultimately a good person with amoralistic and libertine values; a person who casts himself too prominently in the lives of his patients with the best of intentions. At war with his narcissism is his tragic hero complex that leads him to his doom.

The Judd of Argento’s film, who could conceivably be a descendent of Louis Judd (and without a doubt is his cinematic descendent), similarly takes on the cases of the alluring women, Aura and her mother Adriana, with unorthodox techniques and strange behavior. And he, as his forbear had done, casts himself too prominently in their lives. This Judd, we realize from his introduction wearing a neck brace in the film’s early séance scene, knows all along that Adriana is a murderer. Throughout the film he wears the neck brace only when Adriana is near and functions fine without it so long as she’s not present. He is ensuring his head remains where it belongs, at least physically. He also very likely knows she faked her own death. For this reason Judd subjects Aura to a psychotropic berry. In his effort to sharpen Aura’s hazy memory of her parents’ murders, we realize, he’s trying to discover what has become of Adriana. He doesn’t have to wait long, because Adriana breaks into the clinic to kill the nurse and get Aura. Judd presumably finds her and, in order to help her, keeps her murders a secret. He even puts the decapitated heads in his car truck when he drives her to get Aura from David’s lakeside cabin. He dies for his trouble, however, just like his grandfather, the great Louis Judd dies in Cat People for getting too close to his patient.

I have digressed at such length on the subject of the two Judds because I believe the connection between Cat People, the first and greatest horror-noir, and Trauma is intentional and an important element in Argento’s conception for Trauma. Both films, Trauma more explicitly, attribute the sudden burst of violence from a non-violent person to the awakening of something repressed, a trauma. For Irena, in Cat People, the trauma is her belief in her cursed genetic lineage, which entails becoming a vicious cat whenever she is in a sexual relationship. For Adriana, it is the much more real trauma of her son’s gruesome death during birth and the electroshock treatment designed to repress the memory of this event. Irena’s trauma is excited by her new husband, who has convinced her to marry him and to consummate the relationship. Adriana’s trauma is excited by an unknown event, though the first scene of the film, a short and seemingly out-of-place shoebox theatre vignette of the French Revolution with historically-accurate decapitations, may have been the innocent spark.

In both films, moreover, there is a sexual component to the trauma. Irena is afraid of sex and of how it may transform her into a monster. Adriana’s trauma occurs at a much later stage of the reproductive process, namely birth, but is nevertheless sexual. Argento’s homage to De Palma, all of whose horror films are predicated upon sexual confusion in some form, is not so trivial in this light. Nor is Piper Laurie’s casting, for, in De Palma’s Carrie, her role is a mother whose religious fanaticism psychosexually retards her daughter until the repressed energy is released in psychokinetic mayhem. Her character in Trauma is similarly repressive to both herself and her daughter.

But the real significance of the link to Cat People is Argento’s view that all of American horror and noir is predicated upon the notion of trauma, a first, repressed trauma, the escape from which is violence and death. From the early, great, and truly American horror that is Cat People on through Romero and De Palma and Lynch, psychosexual repression and trauma appear, Argento seems to suggest, as the essential characteristics of American cinematic violence.

Perhaps it is for this reason that Argento begins the film with the French Revolution vignette. The vignette links the idea of decapitation with that of revolution. And America, unlike, say, Canada, begins with revolution, the Revolutionary War in particular. America achieved its freedom with revolutionary violence. Argento could be suggesting America’s revolutionary beginning was a historically traumatic event that continues to motivate America’s sexual ills, drugs, anorexia, and violence. More likely, however, Argento is suggesting decapitation as a revolutionary act. Adriana’s decapitations are her revolution against her own trauma and externally-enforced repression. The scene in which the boy next door sees the first victim’s head supports this view. He sees the African-American woman’s head in a pan, her dreadlocks getting snipped by the hands of the killer. The shot of the head, with its particularly ordered dreadlocks, intentionally resembles paintings of Medusa’s head--particularly Rubens's, which contains the salamander motif Argento employs in Trauma--a motif Argento would return to in The Stendhal Syndrome. The decapitation is thus linked to the triumph of Perseus over Medusa. And Medusa’s petrifying stare, which the boy notes, isn’t unconceivably intended to be the electroshock therapy designed to repress but not destroy traumatic memory. This is not, however, to be confused as a pro-violence statement from Argento, but a representation of the mindset of Adriana, who does believe that in violence there is liberation.

 What we see, then, is that there is some complexity to what Argento is saying about America. He is not merely noting the importance of trauma or of violence, but using the idea of trauma to express his view of America. And he seems to see America, or rather the American people, as being generally traumatized. David admits to having been a heroine addict and returns to drug abuse when Aura goes missing. This is to say nothing of his sexual relationship with a troubled and vulnerable sixteen-year-old girl. We discover no further background regarding this character, but he is clearly ‘troubled,’ which, for Argento—and Freud, for that matter—suggests some past trauma.

Aura’s trauma, however, is of much greater concern to Argento. While anorexia afflicts males and females in many parts of the world, it does represent a particularly American sort of disorder, a reaction to the conflict between American abundances and American vanity/perfectionism. Anorexia is really a reaction against a parent, however, particularly, as Argento has one of the film’s minor characters explain, a domineering mother. Aura’s mother, Adriana, certainly runs the household, ultimately not just castrating but decapitating Aura’s father. When Judd administers the psychotropic berries to Aura, a major and traumatic event she recalls is walking in on her mother and Judd mid-coitus. If Adriana represents Aura’s dark side, as Argento claims she does in a DVD featurette, she also represents America’s dark side. Let’s see how.

Adriana, as discussed above, is herself not free of trauma. Indeed her trauma is the main force moving the whole plot. Adriana’s trauma is the loss of her son in birth. The trauma can only fester because it has been repressed by shock therapy. When it is reawakened—we don’t know for sure how, but as stated above I suspect it is the revolutionary shoebox play and I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to suspect Judd intentionally set that play up—then she reacts to the trauma with violence and vengeance. Where Aura’s response to trauma is violence against herself, an excessive self-criticism, Adriana’s violence is toward others. She struggles to cope with the trauma by destroying those who participated in its cause, for only in these terms does she see the possibility of liberation from her trauma. Both reactions to trauma are doomed to failure. The difference is only that one results in the death of oneself and the other in the death of others.

This is why I think we can say Argento sees Adriana as America’s dark side. As Argento seems to see America as a traumatized nation, Adriana represents its violent, aggressive, domineering aspects as a reaction to its own revolutionary trauma. The alternative reaction to that represented by Adriana, however, cannot be Aura, for that reaction is no healthier. It must be the other influence in Aura’s life, David. His approach to trauma, while originally as self-devastating as Aura’s, is ultimately balanced between reaching out to help others and artistic expression as a graphic designer. 

What we find, then, is that David represents the bright side of America, the side of America that deals with its own, peculiar traumas in Dawn of the Dead, Carrie, and Blue Velvet as much as in its global relief efforts. Violence can be liberating for Argento, but it must be used correctly. In American cinema, through fantastical violence, horror purges and purifies, and so helps the nation deal with its own trauma and the individual traumas of its citizens.

Similarly, by the conclusion of Trauma, Aura has been liberated of her ‘dark side.’ The voyeur boy living next to Adriana finally comes into action and rescues the protagonists. A message to the audience is sent that it is the voyeurs, the filmgoers, who save the day, who conquer the dark side and trauma. By viewing horror films like Dawn of the Dead, Carrie, Trauma, and especially the American films of Hitchcock, by enduring the horror, we emerge as Aura and David purged.

In this way, therefore, Argento places Trauma within the lineage of American horror films while simultaneously commenting upon the nature of that lineage. A great deal of complexity is required to work out these ideas in a horror film, bound as it is by generic conventions. Thus is Trauma so convoluted for a film of its type. This complexity does sometimes interfere with the momentum of the pace and obscures the narrative moves, requiring from the viewers more effort to comprehend. Nevertheless, for these same reasons, Trauma rewards multiple viewings and reminds viewers that Argento’s films ought not to be taken superficially or trivially.

Two-Headed Shark Attack (2012) - 2/4

“Two heads means twice as many teeth!” is the pithy quip of dialogue that sums up the brilliant idea behind Two-Headed Shark Attack, a new sharksploitation motion picture from The Asylum. The Asylum, a production company infamous for blockbuster rip-offs and intentionally hackneyed plots, is, along with the SyFy network, the champion of increasingly preposterous sea monster movies. Sharktopus may be SyFy’s most absurd film so far; Two-Headed Shark Attack is The Asylum’s, a film so abstracted into self-parodical irony, it’s a metaphor for itself alone.

A highly nebulous pretext about a field-trip is intended to explain why a menagerie of d-cup bikini bimbos and ‘roid-guzzling muscle-heads are on a yacht together. Unfortunately the doubtless highly-educational cruise is interrupted by the central plot, namely the two-headed shark’s attack upon the keel, leaving the motley crew stranded on a sinking atoll.

Duality is the leitmotif governing the Two-Headed Shark Attack narrative. The shark has two heads, so there are two survivors, two humongous hooters on each girl, two boats for douchebags to get eaten in. Starring Charlie O’Connell, the film’s duality cries out for the presence of Jerry O’Connell. Few films have done so since Season 5 of Sliders, but this is one. Instead, Charlie is joined by Carmen Electra, whose purpose in the film is to sunbathe the hell out of the deck. Even the shark’s medium of existence is dual, sometimes CGI and sometimes a huge, rubber head whose teeth bend when the flailing actors touch them.

Before nearly everyone is eaten, we are treated to every form of stupid decision, lesbian kissing, a few unleashed melons, terrible acting, and a total waste of whatever talent Charlie O’Connell can lay claim to as his lightly-grazed leg so debilitates him that he is condemned to foreground reaction shots like shouting, “They’re in danger!” whenever a shark eats someone.

The problem with Two-Headed Shark Attack is that, while two-headed sharks are possible, as are Carmel Electra’s leatherette buttocks, the film’s abstractions take us too far beyond the realms of fun, into the realms of pure this-oughta-be-fun ideas. Nevertheless, the farthest realms of shark possibility have yet to be explored and I hope The Asylum is ready to launch that expedition. J.G. Ballard’s The Shark Exhibition, about a cult of shark-attack survivors exploring the sexual possibilities of shark wounds, rows of disordered teeth in flesh, and the notion of being devoured, needs to be adapted. Salman Rushdie’s Islamasharks, in which Muslims train sharks to destroy the Miss America pageant, is a thoroughly cinematic novel waiting to be filmed. And, last but not least, Jose Saramango’s The Sharking, in which all the world’s bankers suddenly become sharks is the non-too-subtle social commentary The Asylum is ideal to carry out. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Wolf Town (2010) - 2/4

A group of youngsters take a road trip to a local ghost town where they are attacked by an unfriendly wolf pack. They have to use their ingenuity to defeat the wolves, hiding in the abandoned buildings of an old mining town. Not a terribly inspired plot. Wolf Town would be a fairly indistinct, low-budget animal-attack movie were it not for a few admirable quirks that made me want to write about it.

The most impressive of Wolf Town’s features is, oddly enough, its psychological realism. The film’s psychology is, in fact, infuriatingly realistic. In countless films, a total wimp like Shaun in Shaun of the Dead becomes an ass-kicking badass the moment a real threat shows up. Perhaps we all believe really intensely in the fight-or-flight response or, as I think, we believe the world works like video games. If we’re really good at Resident Evil and have shot enough zombies, we’ll be ready for a real zombie threat. I suspect the people who spend all day playing Resident Evil would do little more than defecate and die when the real zombies showed up. Lazy, videogaming nerds like to believe they have inner badasses just waiting to come out, but they don’t: a pussy is a pussy is a pussy is a pussy, as Gertrude Stein never said. It’s curious how this implicit belief is one also shared by the conservatives who think video game violence can translate into real violence. Both are wrong, of course. Video games and real life threats are totally unrelated.

The protagonist of Wolf Town, Kyle (Levi Fiehler) is a pussy, as his friend tells him. He’s so afraid to ask a girl out, he contrives the road trip just to do it. He’s humiliated when he sees her with Rob (Josh Kelly), an alpha male sort of guy who did ask her out. When Rob says ‘Let’s just go to Vegas’, Kyle is ready to back down. When the wolves arrive, Kyle remains a pussy who whines and cries, while Rob remains an alpha male, barking out orders and making decisions. This is psychological reality. Meek guys like Kyle do not become alphas whenever a tense situation arrives. And as much as the film’s sympathetic focus on Kyle may make us dislike Rob, and as tedious as overconfident people are, someone has to make the decisions and Kyle is clearly not up to it. This is the psychological realism I admire in Wolf Town. It’s very refreshing, even while it’s infuriating. We want Kyle to man up, but he, like many of us, can’t just do that: it’s not who he is.

That said, there is a feeling of cheapness to Wolf Town. What budget Rebel did have was probably spent on the ghost town setting, a charming concatenation of shacks with an inexplicably intact saloon. The sense of cheapness is probably due to the wolves clearly being huskies and alsatians with a bit of fur-paint, and we rarely see more than two on screen at any given moment. On the one hand, director John Rebel deserves praise for using real animals instead of CGI. On the other hand, the use of real dogs does limit what he can do. We’ll never see a wolf injured in any way on screen, for instance, nor will be see them performing impossible jumps.

Rebel settles for editing the dogs wherever they need to be, giving the wolves a strangely mystic quality. This mysticism would be egregious were it not pervading the whole film. The dogs don’t just try to scare their victims off; they disable their car and steal their cell phones. The film’s subtext is one of nature vs humanity. The wolves just want a space to be without human interference, a place that belongs to nature. It’s a line of argument I don’t think carries much weight, whether in Wolf Town or in Avatar, because humans and their activities are a part of the natural order; but it is what it is.

Wolf Town is a mildly entertaining way to pass eighty minutes, especially for wolf-lovers. But the film does drag. However praiseworthy the real dogs and psychological realism may be, Wolf Town could have done with a ton of CGI wolves getting chopped to pieces by a bunch of badass nerds. In a film like this, fun is more important than realism.

A Psychoanalytic Look at Organizm (2008)

Originally a made-for-TV movie that got new life on DVD and Netflix, Organizm is a beautifully perverse film that flew under the radar for that reason. The lot of made-for-TV movies is to fly under radars, because so much has to be flown under the radars of the producers and censors. With Organizm, writer-director Richard Jeffries gets away with a lot. This is a film in which the ‘obligatory sex scene’ is the protagonist coating a newly-widowed woman’s naked body with his own blood, and in which the climax is basically a death-by-fisting. If we’re to see all this film has to offer, however, we shall have to go through it carefully, and, I think, with the aid of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is not always the ideal tool for approaching a film, but this film in particular is structured around it and the perverse treasures it has to offer are best found using it.

The plot is deceptively simple, even hackneyed. A high school teacher warns military officials that they must not disturb the old base they’re destroying, because his mother told him so the night she killed herself. The army takes him seriously and investigates, causing a cancerous mass to explode from a body into a sea of tendrils that spread over the base and begin growing at an exponential rate. The teacher and a female soldier discover the developer of the tentacular organism is his father, a Russian scientist who defected to the USA. The shared genes gives the teacher an in-built vaccine for the organism. He realizes he must plunge his blood into the organism’s source, his father’s body, in order to kill it. He does so and it dies.

What is interesting in this plot is its gradual progression deeper into the subconscious. We begin with the pure, conscious facticity of the present: tendrils swarming military artillery and invading a bowling alley, where a soldier tries to flee and fails. This is the diseased, apocalyptic present, a present in extreme conflict. We then rewind thirty-three years to a boy being terrified by his disturbed mother. She warns him to remember “sublevel 3, vault 12” at all costs, carves it into his hands, and sashays out to kill his father. If the present is the consciousness in conflict, then the flashback we’re given is to the source of the trauma that would eventually erupt into the diseased state we see thirty-three years later. We’re given the two extremities of consciousness that matter; in between is the period of festering in the subconscious, metaphorically ‘sublevel 3, vault 12’.

We then join the high school teacher (Jonathan Schaech) on his way to the army base. We realize that he is the little boy we saw. Therefore, this film is to be his psychodrama. He has heard that the base is to be destroyed, so he comes to warn the Colonel that there is something that should not be disturbed. When he busts in, he’s captured, but by the intelligent records experts who decide his story is worth hearing, despite the Colonel’s objections. They are going to plumb the depths of sublevel 3, vault 12. It is this exploratory action that releases the disease into consciousness, that causes the eruption of the tendrils into the light of day. What they discover in the vault is a man’s pickled body with a horrendous, spreading growth on his chest. From this body the tendrils spring.

What’s interesting thus far is the teacher’s relationships to father figures. We know that when he was a child he witnessed the death of the man he thought was his father. When he arrives in the town where the army base is located, he tries to get the attention of an old man, who simply walks away without answering. The Colonel in charge of the army base is difficult to get in touch with, and, when he is reached, doesn’t want to deal with the teacher. He tries to reach out to older men instinctively, and finds it impossible to have a meaningful connection with them.

The teacher’s difficulty with father figures is important to note because of the next major plot point. As the teacher escapes with a female solder who just lost her husband to the rampaging tentacles, they speak to the old man who shunned the teacher earlier. They discover through him that the body at the source of the tendrils is a Russian scientist and that this scientist is the teacher’s real father. The source of the eruption of the diseased consciousness and the reason for the childhood trauma, then, is the teacher’s biological father. The repressed horror at the heart of his subconscious is the father.

The teacher and soldier run from the growing tendrils to a school where they watch an old film reel. The reel shows the Russian scientist discussing his work, explaining that his quest for the ultimate biological weapon ended in his own body. His own tissues were growing at a phenomenal rate, consuming any energy at all, from fire to nuclear radiation. At the same time, the teacher is infected and successfully fights off the tendrils, turning his blood into an instant tendril-cide. However, we’ve just learned that the tendrils are, literally, his father’s body, meaning that tendril-cide is a sort of patricide.

Now the teacher and soldier realize they have to go to the body at the source of the tendrils and kill it. To protect the soldier, the teacher coats her in his own blood, but the imagery is that of a newborn covered in birth-blood. They then fly a helicopter to the base, landing in a disturbing terrain of all tendrils. They are plunging into the subconscious, to the repressed monstrosity of an absent father. In a stroke of excellent set design, the tendrils swarm the closer they come to the center.

As they do this, the threat of bombing looms. The military plans to drop nuclear bombs in hopes of destroying the tendrils. Curiously, the Russian scientist described the US military as his new father, enriching the interplay between patricide and infanticide already at play in the film.

Finally the teacher confronts the body of his biological father, simultaneously alive and dead, present and absent. In the center of his father’s chest is what is unmistakably a throbbing, pulsing anus out of which all the tendrils grow. As perverse as any Greek myth, the teacher thrusts and knife into his father’s heart-anus and digs, metaphorically fucking his father. He then slices at his hands, drawing blood, and thrusts both hands into the orifice, in an act that can be best described as fisting his father to death.

Meanwhile, the soldier is sidetracked by the discovery of his husband in some sort of amniotic sack. Clawing with her hands, she digs the sack open, giving birth to her own husband in a way, but washing the protective blood off her own body in the process, leaving herself vulnerable. Fortunately, the father dies from the fisting just in time. The trauma has been overcome in facing the repressed, subconscious absent father that the disturbed mother so desperately tried to repress in sublevel 3, vault 12.

Not everything in Organizm makes sense to me. I don’t even mean the chronology, which would make the obviously late-thirties teacher in his fifties. I mean it’s not really clear how the tendrils form an amniotic sack and what the interplay of birthing imagery in this film really amounts to. I don’t think the psychoanalytic structure of the film means it’s a film filled with great depth: what good is reiterating Freud, really? This is a film made more with the subconscious than with the conscious. Its beauty is in how perverse it all is in representing diseased consciousness. From the reproductive imagery of the tendrils, through the birthing imagery, and the anal father-son fisting imagery of the conclusion and the anti-oedipal implications of such, the film is just perverse in the story its images tell, whatever the cheesy plot may be.