A Guide to The Brotherhood Series

Introduction: A DeCoteau Primer

I have been convinced for some time that David DeCoteau's films are only as good as their screenplays. There are some directors who can take a weak, thinly-plotted, or uninteresting script and transform it into a very good film. These directors are artists. There are other directors who are merely competent and can ascend no farther than the quality of the text. They don't add or subtract much of anything. I am tempted to reduce DeCoteau to the latter category--were he not so puzzling to me! He's one of the most prolific directors in the world, very independent, has recognizable obsessions (particularly muscular young men in white underwear), and yet defies any efforts to consider him an auteur.

Let's look at what DeCoteau does bring to his films. He brings his oscellating dutch tilts, what we might call 'canoe cam' (he does have Canadian citizenship), or perhaps we could refer to the technique as 'flying dutchman.' Whatever it is, the technique has been in DeCoteau's repertoir for a long time and is used in nearly every film from the late '90s onward, most obsessively and memorably in Totem (1999). What DeCoteau is notorious for, however, is his insistance on featuring young men in white underwear. Several films blatantly display the young men frolicking in their underwear, rubbing themselves, indulging in gratuitous shower scenes in which they soaplessly rub their chests and abs for inordinately long periods of time. If this visual style varied with each film, were honed for interesting effect, we could call it an auteurist style. After all, DePalma's uses his split-screen technique as obsessively as DeCoteau's uses his canoe-cam. However, DePalma's split-screens always tell us more than what we're seeing; DeCoteau's canoe-cam just makes things wobbly and, yes, a little otherwordly. Nothing else.

A more subtle and, to my knowledge never critically-discussed feature of DeCoteau's work is an obsession with blandness. What seems like sheer narrative carelessness is so consistent in DeCoteau's work, regardless of the screenwriter, that it has to be a wilful trait of DeCoteau's. Every character in a DeCoteau film is cardboard, or worse, a silhouette of a cardboard cut-out. There's little distinction in depth amongst the characters; the distinction is rather one of affability. Perhaps this is why DeCoteau so consistently leaves us spend half the narrative with a set of characters, as though they were the protagonists, only to kill them whenever the monster or slasher shows up. His choices of 'protagonists' are often so counter-intuitive that he is either one of the most inept storytellers in cinematic history or he genuinely sees no important distinction between one character or another. The characters that stand out, are most interesting (which isn't saying much) and affable, are dispatched unceremoniously, while the blandest and least-developed of the characters, characters who get very little narrative time or are fairly unpleasant, very often survive to the end.

Ordinarily a filmmaker so committed to surface innocuousness is, as Robin Wood was arguing back in the '70s, on a subtler level subverting conventional norms. Look as one might into DeCoteau, however, and convention is rarely if ever subverted. DeCoteau's ideas of conventions may well have come from Revenge of the Nerds. There are jocks, nerds, preps and outsiders, and they all exist in their separate but colliding universes. Never in a DeCoteau film does anyone rise above his or her stereotype. That would require characterization. The weird, creepy outsider always does turn out to be weird, creepy and maybe even evil, as in Ancient Evil (1999). Turns out those jocks and cheerleaders were right! Of course they were; they're heroes. And the supercilious preps? Soul-stealing vampires, of course; just as we thought. Rarely has any filmmaker been so committed to, not merely using stereotypes, but upholding stereotypes and following the notion of their correctness to the bitter end. His narratives allow no opportunity for their subversion; the end for each character can be read clearly in the beginning of his films.

Perhaps, one might argue, that this is all a part of DeCoteau's worldview. He simply sees the world as a collection of boring stereotypes, the few moments of excitement provided by hunky men in white underwear or a friendly airhead. A pessimist, he thinks interesting, nice people are destined to die, and those with whom we form a bond will soon be snatched from us. Or perhaps, as I think is more likely, he rarely gets a good screenplay and when he does is more interested in a cheap production with a decent payout than making an entertaining film that'll earn a good payout. So he throws some pecs-and-bulge into a makeshift plot. Of course, were this an aspect of his style, it wouldn't be so bad: perhaps his auteurism is to be found in visual innovation, I'd ordinarily say. But, as argued above, he doesn't bring much visual style to his films either. What we're left with is a director with a few unvarying idiosyncrasies adapting whatever scripts with little contribution in terms of quality.

The Brotherhood series exemplifies this fact quite well. The series is bound together by a loose theme, namely the desire to be a part of something greater than oneself. Each film concerns the tensions amongst young men to join groups and yet remain individuals in some fashion, and each film begins on a new permutation of this notion. Each film, too, features some courtship by an individual or group to induct others into a group. Despite relatively similar IMDb ratings in the 2.5-3.5 range, the quality of each film in the series varies widely. (The generally low ratings can be attributed to the homoeroticism of DeCoteau's films. More on that later.) The fourth entry stands far above the rest of the series and the third entry is egregiously bad. Yet both are written by the same people--the puzzlement of DeCoteau's films continues. Did he have an off day or did the writers? As many DeCoteau films as I've seen, around two-dozen, I still find the man inscrutable. At any rate, I offer here brief, relatively shallow reviews of each Brotherhood film.

The Brotherhood (2001) - 3/4

The first, and one of the strongest, entries in the series, The Brotherhood concerns two very likable young college roommates, one a jock who actually isn't much of a joiner and the other a stereotype nerd who envies those who have the opportunity to be joiners. The jock attracts the attention of the leader of a frat, who decides he wants the jock's body. That is to say, he wants to steal the jock's soul and inhabit the body himself. As the jock is inducted deeper and deeper into the sinister frat, losing his affable personality in the process, his nerdy friend teams up with a sexy co-ed to rescue him.

What made this start to The Brotherhood series so strong is its reliance upon character-based drama rather than typical horror tropes. Though it does come down to bloodshed, the tensions are mostly worked out in dialogue and emotion. The characters could hardly be called deep, though they're more developed than DeCoteau's usual set of characters, developed to the point that their actions are consistent and we see a development in their psychologies. What is absent in depth is supplied in likability, as both of the protagonists are very likable and attractive.

The characters are explicit about the categories of 'jock' and 'nerd', but the 'jock' begins more interested in studying than partying. He takes to his nerd friend, who is curiously enough the leading exponent of the categories, and they form a loose fraternal relationship together. The intrusion of an attractive woman and the need to belong are ultimately dissatisfying alternatives to the brotherly bond of male friendship and the need to be one's own person.

The Brotherhood 2: Young Warlocks (2001) - 2.5/4

The themes of the first Brotherhood film are reworked, making the group not an exclusive set of privileged students, but rather a band of outsiders disliked by (most) other students and principal alike. Enter a new 'kid' with a proposal that amounts to a warlock pyramid scheme: he's been inducted by one warlock and received power; now he will induct them and give them power and he in turn gets even more power--if only they kill off a few people they hate. Unfortunately one of the outsiders, a cute twink with a crush on a jock's girl, has a conscience and faces the warlock's wrath.

Young Warlocks continues The Brotherhood's approach to horror by focusing on supernatural character drama that results logically enough in murders than in beginning with any fixed horror tropes. The 'jocks' are personality-less bullies who stalk the schoolgrounds looking for outsiders to bully. The young hero has tensions with fitting in on the one hand, and is becoming alienated from his friends for his reticence to join the warlock on the other. The drama isn't quite as good as in the first film, however, as the characters aren't as likable nor are their personalities nearly as developed.

As far as the 'goods' go, the young men aren't quite as attractive in this film as they are in the first. One of the jocks (Greg Lyczkowski) and the protagonist (Sean Farris) stand out, but we're usually left looking at the teutonic Forrest Cochran, a Cherub-faced Aryan who looks a good ten years older than everyone else in the highschool. Incidentally, that the film is set in a highschool makes enjoying the beefcake perhaps a little less comfortable than the college setting of the first film.

The Brotherhood III: Young Demons (2003) - 1/4

Easily the worst entry in the series, Young Demons abandons the Brotherhood formula (until now) of dealing with drama and instead goes the route of a cheap, poorly-paced supernatural slasher. A highschool student gets to use the school afterhours on weekends, where he prepares a roleplaying game, complete with LARPing, that anyone is welcome to participate in. This time, however, a man in a knight costume is actually killing the players. Fortunately a jock decides to play with the nerds this time, 'cause he wants in the level 6 elf mage's fire-resistant loincloth. So he can rescue the nerds, or at least a hot female nerd.

The action consists of the characters wandering the school while the knight randomly appears in a cloud of smoke and dispatches one student after another. These students have the thinnest of characterizations, ranging from 'friendly jock' to 'friendly nerd', or even to 'evil nerd.' They're present to be murdered and to wander around in underwear. So we don't care that the knight is dispatching them. All that's left to care about is that they're amusing or nice to look at, but they're not really either. Not even the LARPing, which one would think easy to ridicule, provides much amusement, as the mage has cast a Tolerance spell on the audience. Yes, some male students use the opportunity of falling in blood, for instance, to take a shower, rubbing their pecs and abs soaplessly for several minutes. Then they're murdered. Were the random, scarcely-diagetic beefcake particularly attractive, this might make the film enjoyable for studwatchers. However, they're not quite as aesthetically pleasing as they ought to be.

Where the other Brotherhood films provided drama and in that drama enough space from action and plot for beefcake setpieces and interesting moments, Young Demons is just devoid of that space. It forces a few such moments that are unsuccessful for reasons of unattractiveness and inappropriateness, but the Friday the 13th action is the dominant force in the film and that force is spectacularly uninteresting.

The Brotherhood IV: The Complex (2005) - 3.5/4

Somehow, following The Brotherhood III, DeCoteau and the same writers pull the series out of the muck with the best, most ambitious entry in the series. Leaving the usual settings DeCoteau inhabits--so he can re-use the locations, el cheapo--The Complex is set at a prestigious, private military college. The locations and props used for the film are attractive, complex, and interesting in their own right. Even more amazingly, they're inhabited by interesting characters and feature in a decent, well-paced story.

The plot concerns a child prodigy who, having reached college age, lands himself in the prestigious college just to please his naval officer dad. Unfortunately for him, as the Standard DeCoteau Opening--in which an attractive young man is pursued by a group of attractive men and killed in what amounts to a symbolic homosexual gangrape--reveals, there is something sinister afoot at the college. A secret society known as The Black Skulls have the whole complex in a grip of terror and are interested in inducting the young genius into their fold.

The 'child prodigy' could well have been an annoying character, but Sebastian Gacki has quite a lot of charm and succeeds in pulling the role off very well. The character is likable, intelligent, and does the job of protag-ing very well. The villains have a sufficiently interesting backstory to keep Gacki's character probing and the audience guessing until the end. However, it's the film's setting that elevates it and out of which its other virtues mostly arise, divided between a creepy, underground bunker and the sumptuous, mahogany-panelled main building of the college. A military strategy room and a nice bomb prop add to the film's more elaborate design. If DeCoteau splurged more often, The Brotherhood series may be better in general.

Of course, DeCoteau doesn't splurge because he aims for a common denominator, the target audience that will watch his films for the eyecandy. The Complex offers several moderately attractive young men in their underwear, naturally. It also offers a very sexy lady in hers, namely April Telek (the stripper from the "Pilot" episode of Millennium). While the eyecandy is good, one wishes DeCoteau would be this ambitious more often: eyecandy is always best enjoyed embedded in a good film, and The Complex is a good film.

The series's idea of joining and belonging receives its most complex treatment in this entry as well. Gacki's character has joined a naval academy, but is largely uninterested in joining the navy, let alone a secret society. Not only is he at odds with the secret society, but he's also at odds with a group of bullies that are themselves at odds with the secret society. Ultimately he has no real friends, no circle in which to belong; the film ends with Gacki embarking on a solitary quest to track down all the Black Skulls. Not only does he refuse their courtship and evade the symbolic rape (murder) that would follow his refusal, but he becomes the pursuer and they the victims. He's found his purpose as a decided anti-joiner, and individual of self-reliance to the end.

The Brotherhood V: Alumni (2009) - 2/4

With the title 'Alumni', I expected this episode to be a continuation of The Brotherhood IV. No such luck, however. In fact, Alumni scarcely even fits the theme of The Brotherhood, as it really has nothing to do with joining or fraternity; it simply happens to contain a group of youths, some of whom are male. Their being together is not a voluntary group. In fact, Alumni is a riff on the old I Know What You Did Last Summer plot. A group of high school seniors play a prank after the prom, leaving the prank's victim dead. Years later the whole group are summoned, not having seen each other in a long time, back to the school by mysterious notes. Soon their dark secrets bubble up while they're systematically killed.

We know how such a plot ends long before it does: one of the supposed victims must actually be related to the original victim and is getting revenge. The most interesting aspect of the film is that all of the characters had a perverse relationship of one sort or another with the victim; not necessarily sexual, just that they all hated him for one strange reason or another. Several seemingly inconsistent flashbacks of the murder and its aftermath punctuate the action, like a homoerotic b-movie Rashomon. But even this isn't terribly interesting, as we have no reason to care about these people or who's killing them. The only character worthy of any interest is Amy, a "large-boned" girl whose relative lack of dialogue gives her a mystical sort of otherworldliness, like she stands aloof from these characters and wishes she were in a film directed by Wes Craven instead.

If a DeCoteau film, as a rule, asks the audience to find pleasures outside of the plot, Alumni is a major failure. The setting is another uninteresting school (colleges and high schools abound in DeCoteau's filmography), whose architecture is only moderately distinctive. The eyecandy is decent, primarily on the homoerotic side. DeCoteau goes a little further in this film by providing a gay make-out scene between two attractive, buff guys.

The Brotherhood VI: Initiation (2009) - 2.5/4

The Brotherhood series returns to its roots in this entry, the last as of writing, to delve deeper into fraternity life. In this case, nearly every character, including the protagonist, are already in or trying to join a fraternity. So the tension isn't so much between joining or being an individual, but in maintaining one's individuality and dignity within a group. Because Initiation is all about an elaborate hazing ritual in which the initiates are subjected to two days of torment at a wilderness camp.

The main character is the son of the fraternity's founder. He loathes participating in the initiation, has no desire to be in a fraternity, but wants all the benefits a fraternity conveys. He doesn't seem like much of a party animal and he already has a girlfriend, so it's unclear what those benefits are supposed to be. Still, that's his thin motivation and he's sticking to it. While he arouses the ire of the frat leaders by mouthing off, they fret over a past initiate who disappeared after particularly cruel treatment. Then the killings start.

There's something exceptionally cheap-feeling about this entry, as though DeCoteau's budget were what he could find at the bottom of his cardigan pocket. Each time the killer readies to kill, moves, scratches an itch, or snaps a twig DeCoteau launches into a montage of the killer's eyes and hands--the same shots, over and over again. The setting, moreover, is pretty much an old shack in the woods and trees.

So what's DeCoteau to do? Amp up the eyecandy, of course! If Alumni suffered from too much plot and not enough extra-narrative material, Initiation corrects the wrong big time. The plot is as minimal as can be--a crazy guy in the woods is killing everyone--and the boys-in-tighty-whities motif is cranked up to 11. In this movie, DeCoteau doesn't just find a few choice setpieces for the boys--I wouldn't quite call them 'young men' this time--to rub their pecs and abs for a few minutes; no, he strips them in the first 15 minutes and never lets them put their clothes back on again for the whole movie. For nearly an hour these teenage boys run around the film set, by which I mean the woods DeCoteau rented for $10 a day, wearing nothing but their underwear and tennis shoes. They run in underwear, get hosed in underwear, flee in panic in underwear, get murdered in underwear, and sometimes even do some murdering themselves--in underwear. The idea is brilliant, but the execution really demanded studly men and not scrawny teenage boys.

Coda

So what do we learn from watching all The Brotherhood movies? There are some consistencies that seem to be a part of DeCoteau's worldview. DeCoteau never shows a positive side to joining. Being a part of a school, college, or fraternity is always innately dangerous. Joining subgroups within a school or college is even worse. Groups hunt, pursue their members, in elaborate courtship rituals. The frat leader of The Brotherhood, despite resistance from the jock, persists in the hunt, even overruling objections from his frat brothers. Victor Thanos in The Complex, similarly, will not take the rebuffs of Gacki's character and is willing to be insulted and humiliated while spinning his web to catch him. As Gacki makes a clear move of refusal, the only option left open is, instead of courtship, rape. Should one willingly submitting to the courter's partnership, it will culminate in a sort of death, becoming undead and without a will of one's own. Even the personality of the willing joiner alters. Should one refuse the courtship, the victim will be cornered by the group and killed, brought to death unwillingly. The willing partnership is the surrogate for sex in The Brotherhood series, and in all of DeCoteau's homoerotic films, because murder is clearly a surrogate of rape. So in DeCoteau, eros is really transmuted to thanatos; erotic love is conceivable only in death, entered willingly or forcefully. To join a group is always to be penetrated (in The Brotherhood, joining the group involves a pin-prick), to have one's individuality invaded, and with that to die.

Overall, the Brotherhood series has been devalued not just for its low budget but also for catering to a viewing audience that we still can't imagine as an ideal audience. I don't mean we can't imagine such an audience because we're homophobes, but because maybe there really is no ideal audience for DeCoteau's films. One wonders if treating men as eyecandy can ever have the same effect on women or gay men that treating women as eyecandy has on men. If certain feminist analyses are correct, the very notion of 'eyecandy' is patriarchal, and not a form of pleasure shared by women or gay men. On the other hand, I myself enjoy the aesthetic value of beautiful male bodies. But do I enjoy it in the same campy way we enjoy seeing Linnea Quigley do the Virgin Dance of the Double Chainsaws in Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers or the her naked tomb dance in Return of the Living Dead? We're invited, in these b-movies, to be salacious and to be slightly amused at ourselves for being so. I'm not sure where DeCoteau's tongue is, but it certainly isn't in his cheek when he has his boys prance around in underwear--except, perhaps, in Initiation. On the other hand, DeCoteau is too timid, or too cheap, to show us full-frontal male nudity, which makes what he is showing too tame for interested parties and too wild, or should I say too gay, for uninterested parties.

So DeCoteau has found an interesting niche in which he continues to labour, a niche he really began carving out with his early '80s feature Dreamaniac. But it's a niche that is consistently rated low partially by its own target audience and partially by an alternate audience looking for a laugh. It's a shame, because The Brotherhood and The Complex are both enjoyable and well-made low-budget horror movies. They have no ambition to be great indie films; they merely entertain as a cheesy '80s horror flick, like Slumber Party Massacre, might do. Were it not for the perceived homoeroticism of the films, they would certainly be rated higher. As it stands, they are viewed to be laughed at, camp against their will.

However, as evidence by The Brotherhood series, DeCoteau's concern for making the films good and fun for whomever he imagines his audience to be seems lacking. The films' quality diverges widely. Why is The Complex quite good while Alumni and Young Demons are quite awful? Did DeCoteau just happen to have a few extra bucks to spare? Did his screenwriters just luck out and write him a decent story? I don't know. But I want to make a challenge. Mr. DeCoteau, should you be reading this, I put it to you that with the budget and deadline you have for your films, I could make a more financially and critically successful, audience-pleasing film. And with half the budget and a longer shooting schedule, I'm confident I could do the same. You put up the budget, I'll give you a movie. What would that prove? Only that you, Mr. DeCoteau, could do better if only you cared more.

A Phenomenological Viewing of Scalps (1983)

The first shot of Scalps is of a hideous, aged Indian's face gazing angrily at us from the darkness. He leaps, showing a young man's body wearing blue jeans. Suddenly we see a man beheaded with gory detail of his hands catching at the gushing blood. We don't know the victim, at least not yet. The action and characters are totally abstract. It is a montage beginning in pure malice and ending in heinous violence.

Cut to a desert road over which rides a dusty old pick-up. We're now given a location for the abstract prologue: the desert. The next shot answers our suspicions: It shows a man in black robes with the head of a lion. We have no idea where he is in the desert, only that he is there and his rising is a response to the arrival of the truck. The score, consisting of long, droning synth chords is ominous and menacing. The shots of the truck suggest the driver, an old man, is being watched from all angles of the desert, and by the lion-headed man; but the oblivious driver drives on. The man parks, pulls out a shovel, and heads toward some chosen spot. The lion-headed man snarls. The man approaches a cave. We see him at the entrance from within, seeing him as an intruder. After puttering around at the cave mouth, he is overwhelmed with the urge to slit his own throat and does so, despite resistance. Only after this do we get the opening credits.

Some films have no prologues, some have one, but not many have a whole two prologues. Scalps is, needless to say, a very peculiar film. Unsurprisingly, it has never found much of an audience. Upon release, it was Siskel & Ebert's 'Dog of the Week' and maligned for its viciousness. The main audience for the film today, namely Fred Olen Ray fans, will be surprised to find none of the playfulness that characterizes his camp b-movies like Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988), Beverly Hills Vamp (1989), or Evil Toons (1992), with their abundant, contrived tits-'n'-ass and silly violence, or even less facetious efforts like Deep Space (1988). In contrast to the playfulness of his later films, Scalps is mean-spirited and nihilistic, its gore, unlike the rubber arms and transparent blood of Chainsaw Hookers, is intended to horrify. Perhaps standing out most, however, is the violence to women, which is fairly extreme in Scalps and which only features in Chainsaw Hookers in catfights; most of the violence in that and Ray's other films of the time is done to men, by women. Ray himself has said he didn't find Scalps fun and wouldn't want to make another film like it. Whatever audience the film might have left, such as those looking for a bodycount slasher will be frustrated by its atmospherics and such oddities as the unexplained, lion-headed man.

Part of the reason for Ray's distaste for his own film and its general oddness is the egregious distributor interference Ray alleges--and it's easy to believe him looking at the resultant film. The first prologue I noted contains footage from what is the penultimate death of the film and is therefore quite a spoiler. It also happens to be a spectacular beheading sequence, at least for 1983. If the distributor wished to catch the audience from the first few seconds and promise lots of horrifying stuff, that's a good way to start. The second prologue, probably Ray's own, contains the much tamer death of a nearly bloodless throat-slitting. The distributor clearly wanted to make what is a strangely atmospheric slasher less plodding, so they wouldn't have to give out any refunds to bored patrons. Even adding the gory first prologue didn't satisfy them, however. The shots of the lion-headed man are, Ray claims, mostly added by the distributor and were taken from test footage never intended for the final cut. Even the superimposition of the old Indian sorceror's head was added. In short, the bulk of the film's peculiarities are the results of extreme (unheard of to such a degree) interference from the distributors.

Ultimately, however, it really doesn't matter whether Fred Olen Ray or the distributor put the lion-headed man on screen; what matters is how the phenomena of the film affects me, or you, and understanding the film's effects. Scalps doesn't have any 'meaning', at least not in the traditional sense. But it does have a phenomenological process and both how that process functions and how affects us reveals something. So let's get back to the film.

After the two prologues, the first establishing an abstract malice and violent force, the second establishing the otherwordly inhospitableness of the desert, the narrative movement begins. After the oddness of the prologues, we now are placed in normality: normality of location, action, and narrative. A disorganized archaeology professor, we learn, is preparing a less-than-legal 'field trip' into the desert, where he and his graduate students will actually be digging in Indian territory. Unable to go himself yet, he sends the students--three males and three females--ahead. So we meet the characters, see them in their ordinary university environment, and begin what is a standard "dead teenager" plot in which we fully expect a maniac to slaughter most of the group.

The shot beginning the second act is of the students' car exiting a tunnel, with the camera mounted on the car. We, along with the students, are exiting the normality of the university and the modern, civilized world in which it's located and entering the mysterious vistas of the desert. The sole outpost of civilization, as in any horror film, is the gas station. This is the point where they will be warned not to go on and must decide whether or not to pay heed; of course, these are city folk and they pay cash, not heed. The more mystically-inclined of the group, lone-wolf D.J. looks down at an old, Indian man on the shop steps and is assaulted with a vision of the glowing-eyed old Indian sorceror from the second prologue. The old Indian later warns the group that the desert is a dangerous place and they must stay away from the place of the blackened wood. As he explains that it is the burial ground of many Indians who met violent ends, we see shots of nearly all the students' deaths from later in the film. The Warning Scene, in a horror movie, is supposed to suggest a choice to the protagonists. But by accompanying the Warning with flashforwards to the characters' deaths, we're being shown they have no choice; there is a certain inevitability to their deaths. They were dead the moment they exited that tunnel. So, apart from D.J., the group assumes the blackened woods is the place to go and off they head into the Other World of the desert.

Entry into the desert is greeted with the ominous music from the second prologue, the droning synth chords suggesting untold menace in spite of D.J.'s claims that the desert is beautiful. We see a shot of an Indian spirit wielding a bow. (In fact, it appears that this is a shot of the Indian sorceror-possessed body of one of the students from later in the film, taken out of the timeline. That he could be watching the students enter the desert is, therefore, particularly ominous and menacing, their deaths particularly inevitable.) The students drive past the abandoned truck of the man who died in the second prologue, left behind like the husk of a dead insect. As the camera pans left, we see what the students don't: the dessicated remains of the man, the skull's jaw wide open in an eternally silent scream. The students are going beyond this point, into a realm of death where the living have no business.

After this slow, atmospheric drive through the desert, they arrive at a spot where they decide to park. One of the girls notices a buzzard in the sky and believes it's a buzzard they saw earlier that followed them the whole way. D.J. agrees that it is the same buzzard. Again, the suggestion is that they are already dead. Nature knows what they don't. The tensions suggested are between culture and nature, the land of the living and the land of the dead. As D.J. bangs some metal sticks together, making primitive, percussive music under the blaring sun (shot from a very low angle), shots of the hideous Indian from the first prologue and of more gory violence to the students are cut in. They are in a realm of relentless, powerful nature, reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975); and a land where death, not life, holds sway.

From here, the tensions in the film's structure--between the malice and violence found in the first prologue and the ethereal, ominous sense of doom found in the second prologue--begin to conflict and the film is admittedly somewhat messy. On the one hand, the trappings of any Friday the 13th knock-off are present: a group camping in the wilderness, tents, attractive co-eds, sex (or at least the potential for it), and soon graphic violence. On the other hand, elements of the mysteriousness found in the second prologue still come through. In the dark, around the camp fire, the students notice a drumming. As they put their ears to the ground, they hear the traditional Indian music more clearly. This is unsettling as it is. They are in the middle of the desert where they saw and heard no-one, and yet there is this sudden music, as though a whole group are present nearby. One of the couples decide to look for the source of the music. They find a camp set up with a camp fire, but no-one is present in the camp. As the male student looks into the fire, the ghostly head of the Indian sorceror appears for a while, chanting with the drums; then the fire explodes in the student's face.

After the couple returns, the male of the couple is changed. He refuses to acknowledge the existence of the camp and is verbally abusive to his girlfriend. He has, with the explosion of the camp fire, been possessed by the sorceror. From this point onward the spirit of the first prologue begins to take dominance over that of the second. The man takes his girlfriend out for a walk, where hits her, rapes her, and ultimately slits her throat and scalps her. Her friends eventually grow concerned and find her in a search. While the others frantically plan out what to do, D.J. grows peculiarly resigned to their fates. More ominous music plays as D.J. tells the group the possessed friend gave her a talisman and said he'd return. (This is actually foreshadowing: when the first possessed student is killed, the Indian sorceror 'returns' by possessing D.J..)

Now the classic bodycount slasher is set up. There is a violent monster loose and it is going to inflict violent deaths on all the young adults. One of the remaining males heads to the abandoned truck seen earlier and is clubbed by the possessed student, now physically resembling the Indian face from the first prologue. There is an insert One of the remaining girls is shot full of arrows. Finally, the remaining male kills the possessed student, but is beheaded with a trowel by the newly-possessed D.J.. This beheading is the one seen in the first six shots of the film. So the destinies of the students have been completed. By journeying into the land of the dead, they have joined the dead.

The main action of the film over, we get an epilogue. The professor who sent them out into the desert comes to check in on them. He enters a tent and falls out with an arrow in his eye socket. We're taken into the tent where we find the possessed D.J. clanking her metal sticks together, shots of the gory, dead bodies accompanying each clank.

The living are no longer intruding into the land of the dead. Nature has swallowed up civilization and science, with its limited ways of seeing, of understanding what constitutes truth. Only D.J., who looked beyond the restricted worldview of the modern world, is preserved. And if we look beyond the approved ways of seeing a film, as I've tried to do in this analysis, we can see that Scalps is a unique and powerful film. If we bring a standard approach to viewing Scalps, as with many other unconventional films, we, as the excavators in the film, are destined to fail.

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* - Please note that in Canada the term 'Indian' is used to refer to 'Native Americans', even on a legal level. The term 'native' carries connotations of primitivity that are more offensive than an ancient error of geography.

Hanger (2009) - 2/4

Aristotle claimed that comedy is ideally populated by our inferiors. If that were true in degree as well as in kind, Hanger would be the greatest comedy ever written. As it stands, it is a sporadically amusing comedy disguised as a horror film, more juvenile than any Wayans, National Lampoon, or Adam Sandler comedy and far more intent on disgusting the audience.

Knowing Hanger is a comedy from the beginning may just help in appreciating it. If one expects a horror film, the over-the-top squalor of pimps, prostitutes, victims of disfigurement and mutation, murder, rape, feces-flinging, fetus-ripping, turkey-slapping, amongst many other surprises I'd rather not spoil, immediately strikes one as ridiculous and forced. The Book of the Courtier (which I'm fairly certain has never, ever been mentioned in a review of a Ryan Nicholson film before) recommends the perfect, entertaining courtier practice the art of 'sprezzatura'. Sprezzatura is the practice of making all of one's hard-earned skills and abilities, like musicianship and joke-telling, appear totally spontaneous. The effort behind the activity should be disguised. The grotesque, grimy squalor of Hanger is without spontanaeity. Harmony Korine's squalor shows sprezzatura; Ryan Nicholson's certainly does not. Its sheer ridiculousness, however, is quite effortless. And I can't deny I laughed a partially-forced and partially-surrendered laugh many times throughout.

The film concerns a boy named "Hanger", so-called because his mother's pimp ripped him from her womb with a hanger. Hanger works at a junkyard sorting recyclables with his roommate, a disfigured, tampon-fetishist Asian. Together they watch porn, drink beer, avoid getting raped by the local (disfigured, of course) homosexual, and spy on the always-masturbating, porn-star boss's daughter. Meanwhile, Hanger's dad contrives to get revenge--at last!--on the pimp who killed Hanger's mother.

More an exploration of a particularly squalid, morally vacuous milieu of perverse sexuality and disfigurement than a narrative, Hanger is nearly an unintentional art-film, as non-narrative as Last Year in Marienbad, but with more shots of floppy artificial penises. What could be padding in another film is, in Hanger, most of the film. The revenge plot only occasionally gets in the way of seeing the boss's daughter masturbating or the Asian digging through the trash for porn and tampons.

What Hanger all adds up to is hard to say. The disfigurement is distributed wildly. Hanger necessarily is disfigured and has prosthetic and make-up effects. But the Asian, played by a Caucasian, also has heavy make-up effects and a prosthetic. Hanger's father has a huge, prosthetic nose and, in most of the film, age make-up. The pimp, a black man played by a white man, has a prosthetic nose as well as make-up. Nearly every man, except the boss of the junkyard, is treated to some sort of make-up effect disfigurement. The women, with two exceptions, are undisfigured, leaving their porn-star-perfect faces as intact as their silicon tits. Were the distribution of the disfigurement not so random, one could read something about the ugliness of human nature in Hanger or something about perversion and the subconscious. But I can discern no real pattern. Hanger, the Asian, and Hanger's dad are all rancid people in their own ways, as are the pimp and the film's lovely whores. The disfigurements are just hideous ornamentation upon a world of ugliness and vileness. It's a world where there are just a lot of ugly, awful people and the rest are beautiful, awful people. They all have strange minds that don't quite work right and a total absence of moral reasoning.

For whatever reason, it's this last point that makes it all so funny for me. This is somehow more post-apocalyptic than any Mad Max movie; this is post-human sludge-porn that marries the absurdist bleakness of Samuel Beckett and his casts of degenerates with the gleeful foulness of John Waters, but does so ineptly and with a $2000 camcorder. Hanger is a very stupid movie, but I like it. I would rather not, but I like it.

Monstrous Creativity: Jeepers Creepers I (2001) & II (2003)

(This essay contains spoilers. Watch the films first.)

The Jeepers Creepers films concern a monster known as 'The Creeper.' The Creeper 'sleeps' for twenty-three year stretches, then emerges for twenty-three days to 'feed', namely upon humans. I really like The Creeper. He's easily one of the most interesting monsters in modern horror film cinema. If we delve into what makes him so interesting, we'll also discover what makes the Jeepers Creepers films more than just fun monster movies; they're also works of art.

The first thing notable about The Creeper--before we ever notice he's a monster--is that he drives a truck. This first point is curious enough. Very few, if any, horror film monsters proper (i.e. physical creatures of non-human nature) drive vehicles. They attack, push, turn over vehicles; but they don't drive them. Driving a vehicle is a learned human activity, involving developed skills and knowledge. Just how far The Creeper's skills and knowledge go is demonstrated in his ability to terrorize the brother-sister protagonists of the first film. The brother, Darry (Justin Long), comments that his assailant is driving some sort of 'souped-up' truck. And indeed, it does appear The Creeper has some knowledge of mechanics, enough to 'soup-up' his truck. But by far the most remarkable thing about his truck is the false vanity plate reading, 'BEATNGU.' That's "Be eating you!", perhaps a play on The Prisoner's "Be seeing you!", telegraphing to the victims he terrifies on the road that he'll be devouring them later. Not only is The Creeper a skilled driver and mechanic, but he also has a keenly perverse sense of humour.

This isn't simply an attempt to mislead the audience in the first half of the film. While it does lead the audience to expect a human villain, subsequent developments suggest a greater significance to The Creeper's humanoid traits. After their encounter with The Creeper on the road, the siblings turn back to the house, actually a church, where they saw The Creeper disposing of bodies down a pipe. When Darry enters the pipe, he finds an elegant, arched subterranean lair where the walls and ceiling are covered with patterns of wax-preserved, stitched-together corpses. At one point in the series, this is described as a horrific approximation of the Sistene Chapel. To be compared to Michelangelo is pretty high praise. However horrific and ghastly the creation, it is indeed very inventive and, in a perverse way, beautiful. This aspect of The Creeper's lair has its effects as far as horrifying the audience goes, but it also shows us The Creeper is an artist. The idea Salva is developing as the narrative reveals more about The Creeper is the monster-as-artist, the possibility for something Other to be capable of creation, not just destruction.

Historically, in monster movies, the monster is a particularly non-creative force. Nosferatu's/Dracula's advances on Lucy are only capable of adding her to the legions of the undead. The Mummy's only imagined union with his chosen woman is, similarly, eternity in living-death, not both alive but both mummies. Frankenstein's monster depends upon his creator, the baron, to make him a woman with whom to live in permanent non-productivity. Creativity is reserved for the living and the 'normal'. Anything monstrous can only destroy. King Kong never builds anything, but he destroys plenty. Dracula, the Mummy, and Frankenstein's monster all take lives. The same applies to the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Romero's zombies, etc.. The rule in horror cinema is that the monstrous cannot create, but can only destroy. The body that conforms to the norm alone is capable of creation.(1)

Given such overwhelming consistency, one wonders why monsters are always represented as inherently destructive. One of the more interesting answers to this question comes from Linda Williams. In her famous essay "When the Woman Looks," she argues that "the monster's power is one of sexual difference from the normal male...the feared power and potency of a different kind of sexuality..." Williams argued that the monster and the female were bound together in their shared otherness from male, phallic sexual power. Since only phallic power can beget, then the monsters are inherently non-creative. However, most of the monsters are male. King Kong, Dracula, the Mummy, the Creature, and Frankenstein's Monster all wanted women, and they wanted, presumably, to fuck those women. That doesn't seem to be a very different sexuality from mine at all! I, too, would have wanted to fuck Fay Wray and Zita Johan in their prime. The sexual difference between the monster and a heterosexual adult male's is that his would be productive and the monster's would not. The monsters, as I pointed out above, consummate their sexuality not in the creation of new life, but in death or violence of some form. So what we can conclude, tweaking Williams's ideas, is that monsters are monstrous not in their sexual difference but in their sexual sterility. (This is more consonant with James Whales's ideas anyway, particularly as presented in The Old Dark House, in which the insane family occupying the house is distinct from their guests in their totally non-productive family form.) They seek relationships that are inherently non-productive and, in the conservative mind, non-productivity is equal to non-creativity.

What Victor Salva does with The Creeper, while he is solidly within the history of traditional horror film monsters, is acknowledge that non-productivity does not preclude creativity. The Creeper is a monster that bears no offspring and is a cause of death and destruction, but he's also an artist. He's such an active artist that one wonders when he takes the time to create his art. If he only has twenty-three days awake to do his artwork on top of all the killing he has to do, then he's a very fast craftsman. Perhaps his twenty-three years of sleep gives him a lot of time for creative thought.

The second film in the series, in which The Creeper targets a busload of high school football players, elaborates further on The Creeper's artistic nature. His weapons are all carved from bone, wrapped with skin, and inlaid with teeth. The Creeper's eye for detail is such that he purposely chose the tattooed skin on Darry's abdomen for the centre of his shuriken. We also see a knife with elaborate scenes carved into the bone handle. But by far the most interesting aspect of The Creeper elaborated in the sequel is his method of feeding, which is itself creative.

The Creeper's 'feeding' isn't performed for the same biological purpose as animal feeding. The Creeper terrifies his victims, smells some odor given off from them while afraid, and by doing so determines which of his victims have particularly choice body parts. When he captures and kills his victims, he doesn't consume the body part and absorb its nutrients as animals would; rather, he assimilaltes the body part whole. In the sequel, The Creeper removes one boy's head and transforms it into his own. He does the same with Darry's eyes in the first film. What's interesting to me about this behaviour is that The Creeper is not just creative, but self-creative. He's able to be an artist of himself by composing his own body out of body parts he finds the most attractive (for reasons unknown to us). The only unchanging body parts are the arachnid-like structure on the back of his head, resembling a face-hugger from the Alien franchise, and his wings. The arachnid creature is, presumably, the 'naked' Creeper, which assembles its body from choice parts. What The Creeper does in this assembly is create its own identity, its way of representing itself to others. Its identity comes not from the point-of-view of others defining it by its difference or monstrosity, but from its own positive self-defining meeting the point-of-view of others.

Jeepers Creepers is not the first of Salva's films to contain this theme. Salva's first feature, Clownhouse, is also concerned with monstrous creativity of a sort. Clownhouse concerns a group of psychopaths who escape from confinement, put on clown costumes, and terrorize a group of children, one of whom is particularly afraid of clowns. We scarcely get to see the escaped psychopaths as themselves. What we see is them invading the clown tent at the circus and applying cosmetics, creating their own identity, as it were. They use creativity to create their identity as scary clowns. They also take a twistedly creative approach toward terrorizing the film's children. Jeepers Creepers just expands and deepens the theme, transforming the psychopaths to a genuine monster and the craftlike creativity to artistry.


It is difficult to take this discussion further without bringing in biographical details on writer-director Victor Salva. Ordinarily biography is best left out of criticism, either because it's speculation read into the film or it's simply not enlightening. In the case of Salva, I think it is both significant and enlightening. Salva, while making Clownhouse, sexually abused the twelve-year-old star and videotaped it. He was reported, tried, and served his jail time. Ten years after Clownhouse, he finally got to make another feature. He even got to make a film for Disney, Powder. This film was boycotted and resulted in protests instigated primarily by the victim, by then an adult, and his family. Each film he's made since has met with some protests by people who believe a convicted pedophile should never be allowed to work again.

That's as much as need be said for our purposes. What we see is that Salva is what is often referred to in our society as a 'monster.' Anyone who abuses a child is 'monstrous'. Perhaps, however, his alternative and distinctly non-productive sexuality (homosexual and pedophilic) is part of what suggests a 'monster' to our society. While I have heard Roman Polanski called a monster very rarely, I have heard it frequently used for Salva. Polanski, despite sexually abusing a twelve-year-old girl, has had wives and has two children with his present wife. Salva, who also sexually abused a twelve-year-old, has never been married and has no children. The difference is one of productivity.

So, like The Creeper and so many other classic movie monsters, Salva is non-productive. But like The Creeper and unlike so many other classic movie monsters, Salva is highly creative. In an interview, he refers to his films as his children. (2) This is very important, because creativity for Salva is allowed to substitute--perhaps very satisfactorily--for productivity; this is true both in his life and in his films. So with The Creeper, Salva is representing a very interesting aspect of who he is: a (social) monster who is also creative, a monster who is an artist, creating darkly beautiful art and creating himself in the process. Seeing the monster-as-artist in the film means seeing the possibility of artistic creation as a substitute for biological creation, artistic creation as a means of recreating oneself: in his films, Salva creates himself insofar as he shows us he is not a monster, but a creator of a different order.

As an amusing turn-of-the-tables, the denouement of Jeepers Creepers II shows the film's major protagonist, a father (Ray Wise) whose child was taken by The Creeper, charging kids to view the sleeping Creeper nailed to a wall of his barn. What's interesting about this is the total lack of creativity in the father's sideshow moneymaking. He's productive enough: he had two children and still has one. But he can only display the Creeper, a self-made work of art, rather than make his own art. Why should biological creation without artistic creation be any less monstrous than artistic creation without biological creation?

But I promised that delving into biography and how Salva reflects himself, the creator of perverse art, in The Creeper would be enlightening. Finally, I want to address this. What seeing the film's relationship to Salva himself makes us ask is just what the protestors of Powder never asked themselves: why can't the monster's art be accepted, even if we don't accept the monster? The Creeper, of course, has to kill to make his art. The Creeper is biologically a monster. But Salva doesn't and isn't. His 'monstrosity' is social only and in creating his art he can also recreate himself. He kills no-one in the process and as I've argued, and am clearly convinced of myself, Salva's films have merit as works of art. There is a possibility of separating moral concerns about the creator from the aesthetic concerns of the created art. Perhaps some are afraid that accepting the monster-as-artist means failing to see him as a monster any longer, failing to see a non-procreative creativity as monstrous.

The Jeepers Creepers films are not masterpieces. They succeed very well as entertaining monster movies, the first being particularly skillful in audience manipulation and the second containing some fantastic monster-slaying action. As penetrating works of art, they are occasionally vapid or confused. The homophobia subtext of the second film is particularly striking as such. It is in the character of The Creeper, a character into which Salva has clearly invested much of himself, that the films show great depth and insight about human concerns of monstrosity and art, and their possible co-existence. (3)

(1) There are, of course, apparent exceptions. Science-fiction horror films tend to rely, in fact, upon the horrible productivity of the monster. The Alien films in particular feature the horrific chestbursters, alien young bursting from the human bodies in which they've been implanted. Inseminoid, as the title implies, is about nothing other than an alien force that impregnates human women. There is, too, a large body of cinema--both animated and live-action--in Japan in which demons and/or aliens capture, rape, and impregnate busty human women. The most fruitful argument to deal with this objection is that in these films the very productivity of the aliens itself, which uses rather than complements human creativity itself is destructive and repulsive. It's production through destruction rather than creation. But that argument must wait for another essay.

(2) "Interview with Victor Salva," by Mike Gencarelli, www.mediamikes.com. Sept. 24, 2011.

(3) Jeepers Creepers III has been conceived and I am eagerly awaiting its birth to see how well it meshes with the ideas explored in this essay.

We're All Perverts: Viewing Incubus (1982)

The very first shot of Incubus, over which the opening credits appear, begins in total black; the camera pulls out gradually revealing that we are looking into the iris of a brown eye; the eye blinks twice. Why are we beginning a film about a sex-demon in an eye? Perhaps we are being promised that we will see, in what follows, what this eye has seen; but that would only be a valuable promise if we could detect that the eye had seen something horrible. Since the eye could be said to look entranced or in love just as well as horrified, something else must be communicated in this choice. Other films use similar techniques: Blue Velvet (1986), after a brief prologue, takes us into the severed ear for a devious nightmare until we emerge from the protagonist's ear at the coda. In Blue Velvet, we understand we are being taken into the mind for a cinematic nightmare. In Incubus, rather than entering an eye in the first shot, we are in fact emerging from the eye. Only in the final shot do we re-enter the eye. The procession isn't into a subjective realm and back into an objective one, but rather a projection of the interior, subjective onto the exterior, objective world. What we witness in this film, the first and final shots seem to tell us, is a drama of projection: what happens when minds project their dreams onto the real world. Let's see if this interpretation bears out.

The plot of Incubus concerns a young man named Tim who has begun to have nightmares about a woman being tortured by hooded men in a dungeon demanding 'Tell us!' He screams, "Leave her alone!" and awakes in a sweat. Each time he has one of these dreams, a local girl or woman is brutally raped, sometimes to death, and any man interfering is murdered. Tim gradually begins to worry that he's responsible for the deaths, though he doesn't know how. His mysterious grandmother (Helen Hughes) seems to suspect him as well. Meanwhile, a recently-moved surgeon, Sam (John Cassavetes), tries to protect his 18-year-old daughter, Tim's girlfriend, from the menace and work with the sheriff (John Ireland) to find the culprit.

The first, and most obvious, case of 'projectionism' in this plot description is Tim's dreams. His dreams are of a sadomasochistic nature. Later in the film he describes the procedure as a 'battle of wills', with the tortured woman laughing and the torturers amping it up to break her. Both parties involved are taking some sort of pleasure from the proceedings. The full nature of Tim's dreams remains nebulous throughout the film, however. At times he seems to see the victims in his dreams, but later the 'players' of the dream are identified as his grandmother's family and his mother; at other times the dreams seem to be unrelated to the victims other than always occurring in conjunction with a rape. Whatever the case, the cruel and slightly incestuous sexuality of Tim's dreams are projected onto real people in the real world through the incubus.

The brutality of the rapes is exceptional: each woman's uterus is ruptured by the force of the rape and (it is implied, though not stated) the size of the creature's penis; one woman's windpipe is split, suggesting she was both vaginally and orally raped; and in some cases the woman are filled with what Cassavetes calls an "incredible" amount of semen, so much "even the hemorrhaging couldn’t get rid of it"; and nearly all of the women die as a result of the rape alone. Though we never see any actual rape, the shots of the women screaming, in one case rendered in a relishing slow motion, along with Cassavetes's solemn descriptions of ruptured uteruses and gallons of sperm, are disturbing enough.

The key to Tim's projectionism, and perhaps to the whole film, is, of course, his relationship to the incubus. The incubus never does, and perhaps isn't even capable, of attacking until Tim has one of his dreams. The dreams themselves come upon Tim uninvited, leaving open the question (as far as the narrative goes) of who is having the greater influence over who. Either way, Tim's conscious participation in the world must cease before the incubus can begin its rapes. While Tim is conscious, the incubus is an earnest newspaper editor named Laura Kincaide. She seems to be entirely unaware that she is the incubus and is capable of leading a fairly normal life. Tim's consciousness keeps her in balance, as it were; he's like a superego operating on an id. When he is overtaken by his dreams, the intelligent and thoughtful woman becomes a demonic rapist: pure, uninhibited desire is set loose. If consciousness is participating in the world as it is, without imposing our fantasies upon it, then when Tim becomes unconscious, he loses his grasp between his dream world and the real world and the incubus is free to enact his masochistic dreams/desires upon the world--particularly upon women, as they are the locus of his erotic urges. Therefore, the template this relationship between Tim and Laura sets up is one of latent, perverse desires becoming active without limit.

What we want to see now is whether this template has any repetition amongst the film's characters. I think it does. There is a shot during the first rape-murder scene where a young man goes to his truck. We see on his front bumper a sign reading, "Galen: 150 years of boredom." Galen is the name of the small town. Apparently its occupants view the town as very uneventful. What's curious and important about this silly bumper sticker is what it reveals about the distinction between the surface and what's hidden. Everyone in Galen has secrets. Again, much like in Blue Velvet, beneath the pleasant surface of the small town are hideous perversions and secrets we normally never acknowledge. Every character we spend significant time with is shown to have some secret. Tim has his dreams. Agatha Galen (Tim's grandmother) has both the secret of Tim's origin and her family history. Her family, the Galen's, were witch-hunters and when they went a-hunting during the last slew of incubus attacks, they killed a supposed witch who give birth to Tim. She also give birth to a girl, Laura, who was sent out for adoption elsewhere. Laura's big secret is, of course, being the incubus. Even the sheriff is hiding the unsolved slew of incubus attacks and that the source of his appointment as sheriff is Agatha.

The biggest surprise, however, is the secret harbored by Sam and his daughter Jenny. Sam hints, though never confesses, that he murdered his last girlfriend, Julie. After his wife died, he got an 18-year-old girlfriend and began neglecting his daughter. When he caught Julie cheating on him, he fought with her. He said she 'managed' to get away, so he chased her down and feels guilty over it. He never states the results, but we get teasing flashbacks of a woman lying on the ground in the rain, covered in blood. He later tells Laura that Julie is dead. Presumably he murdered the girl, then moved to a small town in hiding. That Sam murdered a young woman would be bad enough, but there is also a creepily incestuous tone to his relationship with Jenny. The very first scene in which we meet Sam, not knowing who he is, he is entering his home, going upstairs, and looking at a woman exiting a shower totally naked. We realize only later that the girl he looked at is actually his daughter. He doesn't want her to have a boyfriend. She promises to never leave him. They kiss on the lips. This doesn't mean he's ever molested his daughter; it just means that, like Tim's dreams, Sam has this perversion in his hidden life.

Everyone in Galen does have a perverse hidden life. 'Galen' is, in fact, Swedish for 'crazy'. And in the Freudian sense, this is correct: everyone in Galen is crazy. To be perverse is to veer from normality, to be crazy to some degree. Ordinarily we moderate our perversions, inhibit which of them we allow to enter into the world. What this all amounts to is a sort of vision of the world (with Galen standing in for the whole world) as perverse. Everyone is a pervert. There is no-one alive who does not have perverse desires of one sort or another--whether incestuous, masochistic, sadistic, or anything else--usually beneath the surface. We inhibit them out of a sense of dignity, propriety, morality, spirituality, or any number of other values.

Complementing this vision is the moral: what happens if we uncheck those perversions, let them reign uninhibited? It is through and in the character of the incubus that hidden, perverse desires become revealed and even actualized in the world of the film. And through the incubus, we find sex, cruelty, and death inextricably bound. The distinction between eros and thanatos, as it were, depends upon the distinction between our fantasy life (which may be as perverse as we like) and our real lives (which must be inhibited). Sex without limitation consumes its participants; infinite sex is death. Sexuality has its creative power when limited, ordered by form.

The most powerful moment in Incubus, the finale, illustrates this point very well. Sam has Laura, Jenny, and Tim in his house. He's preparing to induce Tim's dream in order to interrogate him and learn its secrets. Before starting, Jenny approaches him and tells him she's going to get some rest. Here director John Hough gives us an important and intricate shot: as Jenny heads to her room upstairs, the camera tracks and pans to follow her progress up to and into her room at the top of the stairs; the camera then pans to Sam and tracks back toward him; Sam looks toward the kitchen, leading the camera to pan toward the kitchen in time to see Laura emerge with a trey of coffee; Laura enters a doorway near the kitchen and the camera pans to look past Sam into the living room; Laura meets the camera's focus in the living room and exits the doorway Sam is looking through to talk to Sam; Sam tells her he would like her to go upstairs to see Jenny and she agrees to do so. This could have been handled much more easily with editing. Hough chose to choreograph the shot for a reason, namely, to link Jenny's and Laura's destinations. Both are going to end up in her room. Laura is sent to Jenny's room by Jenny's father. He has a desire to protect her, yes. But he also has that subtly incestuous relationship with Jenny. It is the tension between the surface desire (protective father) and perverse desire (sexual interest) that leads to the film's great tragedy.

As Sam interrogates Tim, he urges Tim to "Bring it through the door. Let it come through the door." This suggestion of penetration coincides with the incubus's penetration of its final victim. Tim sees the victim in his dream, finally; instead of his mother's face, he sees Jenny's. Tim rushes upstairs with a knife Agatha gave him and tries to kill Laura, but Sam interferes and Tim stabs himself. Laura hugs Sam, asking him to never leave her. As they embrace, he sees over her shoulder Jenny's body lying in bed, bleeding profusely from between her legs. Laura, the incubus, raped her as he was interrogating Tim. He sent Laura to the room; he induced Tim's dream; he's responsible for his daughter's death.

Sam's hidden desire to fuck his daughter was brought into the real world by the incubus. Despite all his conscious efforts to protect his daughter from all harm and, for that matter, sex, his activities resulted in her being raped to death. The tragedy is of Greek proportions, with bodies littering the stage, piercing dramatic irony, and disturbing sexuality haunting the spectator long after.

The final shot is a zoom into Sam's eye. He blinks twice, then the camera zooms into the black of his iris until we see nothing but black: the black of our hidden, perverse desires. The vision the film expresses is a moralistic one, viewing unrestrained sexuality is inherently deadly. We may all be perverts, but we have fantasies for a reason and they should remain fantasies. In the sexual free-for-all of the early '80s, these notions would have seemed very reactionary; it's not surprising the film was loathed by critics upon release. A case of bad timing, I suppose: had Incubus been released when the AIDS epidemic gained enormous attention in the mid-'80s, it may have struck the same critics as an insightful critique of uninhibited sexuality. AIDS, after all, did much as the incubus did insofar as equating limitless sex with death.

Just because Incubus has a strong vision underlying its artistic choices does not mean its a perfect film, of course. Some of the film's creative decisions are questionable. Particularly the repetitive, cruel rapes. The first rape shows only the result: a traumatized girl. The second rape doesn't just show, but dwells upon the terror and agony of the rape victim, a 40-something museum curator with children. The point, by now, is already made. The third rape is at least dramatically justified, as Hough constructs the film so as to make the audience believe Tim is the incubus. (He's always running out of a scene just before a rape.) However, the fourth rape is unnecessary and, being so near the climax, only interferes with the film's pacing. Perhaps realizing this, Hough tries some virtuosity with the final rape setpiece to make it more exciting. Particularly, he amps up the gore. But there's also a stylish shot in which the camera is attached to the bottom of a wheelchair, so we see a body through the gap of a bathroom door before the girl in the wheelchair does. I have a suspicion that Hough was influenced by Argento's gialli films, where stylish murders punctuate the detective action. But in those films, the murders can continue throughout the film because the characters murdered are related to the plot. These rape-murder scenes are of previously unknown characters. They add horror to the film, but never suspense. We have no idea who the rape victims are. A couple playing around a lake, a museum curator, some girl visiting a Bruce Dickinson concert in town (!), and finally a man and his two daughters at a farmhouse.

Still, one could argue that the final rape of a girl in a wheelchair is an act of particular perversion. One could also argue that each rape victim had someone who desired to rape her. The first victim was called a 'bitch' by her boyfriend before the rape. The second victim had a wimpy husband. The third victim was at a metal concert; the stage performance was an enactment of Samson and Delilah with a song about a 'two-timing' woman. And the fourth victims were, like Sam and Jenny, daughters with a single father. Though the rapes might not be dramatically ideal, they can be seen as adding to the picture of a perverse Galen.

Overall, whether one agrees with the main thrust of the vision in Incubus, the film's vision is certainly consistent and interesting. Hough, whose horror films are generally underrated, has made a fascinating work of art with this film, magically managing both very sleazy subject matter with a very serous, diginified tone.