Four trauma-horror films

Stories centering on trauma have the potential to inject some complexity into horror/slasher flicks. In a genre where so many characters are slaughtered quickly and damn near anonymously, a film that focuses on the aftermath of surviving Jason or Freddy could be a welcome salve. But first and foremost, a genre pic has to deliver the genre-pic goods. So awful films like Halloween Kills (David Gordon Green [the contemporary Hollywood director with the most squandered career potential?], 2021) and Halloween II (Rob Zombie, 2009) constantly pull away the focus from the trauma story to revel in, wait for it, the quick and anonymous slaughter of characters.

Halloween Kills is particularly repulsive in this regard. Whatever weightiness may have been gained in the survival story (and not too damn much of that given the corny script co-written by Green and Danny McBride) is utterly extinguished by the exigency of requiring Michael Meyers to torture and slaughter a cast of hastily dispatched minor characters. And hooray for progress - an elderly interracial couple, a gay male couple, and a teen boy who wears a dress are all murdered after their allotted five minutes of screen time.

I've been told for years to watch the director's cut of Zombie's Halloween II and have fielded all sorts of claims for it. It's a de facto experimental/avant-garde film financed by Hollywood. It's neorealist. It's a profound mediation on class and trauma. It's one of the best films period of the 21st century. Me, determined to climb whatever mountain of drugs these people were on, I made it halfway through my second screening until my stomach could no longer take it. 

There's a level of commitment here lacking in Green's disaster. But again, Zombie must linger on ever-gorier murder which leaves less time to develop the trauma story, a story that offers little insight into trauma to begin with. And even more time is wasted during each slaughter since Michael (a dead ringer for Rob Zombie this time out) is beset by visions of his mother and his younger self carting around a white horse and imploring him to kill. I presume these are the putative experimental portions of the film. But Zombie tethers these visions tightly to Michael's point of view so that dream and reality are neatly compartmentalized according to the dictates of conventional continuity form. As such, the story remains drearily straight-forward. Then there's the godawful psychobilly band that plays not one, not two, but three (3!) songs (or so it felt like) in a late-second-act party scene. ARGH! 

And for those who couldn't care less about compelling stories of trauma and will brook no complexity or weightiness in their slasher flicks, I get it. I adore the time-wasting spontaneous outbursts of song in musicals and sex scenes in pornography; you dig the gore in slasher flicks (this is to leave out avant-garde films which are nothing but wastes of time to most moviegoers). And as with porn, the ante with gore must be perpetually upped. I applaud cream pies and speculum porn and my beloved The 1,000 Load Fuck (more info here and obviously NSFW!); you applaud a dying woman forced to watch Michael jam every knife in the kitchen into her already dead partner's back. And with all the seriousness I can muster, if such a scene helped you through any trauma, I think that's great for you. Hell, I'll even support federal funding for Halloween Kills in that case.

But I've done my due diligence with this genre and I can do so no longer. Life is nasty, brutish, and short and I still think the vast majority of horror/slasher flicks add horror to the world rather than illuminate or mitigate it. I still think they make the basest fundamental attribution errors, catering to a populace that finds the murder of eight people fascinating or even sexy but the murder of 8,000 unworthy of contemplation (a tendency satirized venomously in the terrific Hulu series Only Murders in the Building). I still think they're soul-draining and reactionary in their dread of difference and sexuality. I still find attempts to conceive of the final girl as a feminist hero risible and unimaginative. You have your prejudices and blind spots. I have mine. Allow me them, i.e., suggesting I see the theatrical cut of Zombie's Halloween II would be a sadistic act indeed. 

By glorious contrast, Lamb (Valdimar Jóhannsson, 2021) and Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021) are both horror films (also a slasher film in Titane's case!) that concern the trauma of losing a child but respect that narrative by diving deeply into each respective story, revealing myriad facets to the trauma along the way. Where the Halloween films are mind-numbingly paint by numbers, Lamb and Titane are outrageous and unpredictable. Therefore, I won't reveal any spoilers here. But both remind me of the most moving moment of my favorite television show, The Simpsons. 

In the 1997 episode "The Principal and the Pauper," Principal Skinner is revealed to actually be one Armin Tamzarian after the real Seymour Skinner arrives in Springfield. A flashback explains that Tamzarian and Skinner were in the Vietnam War together. When Skinner is missing in action and presumed dead,  Tamzarian comes to tell Skinner's mother Agnes the news. But instead, he pretends to be Skinner. Remarkably, Agnes pretends along with him. She tells him to go to his room and whispers, "Upstairs. Third door on the left." This was the apex of American postmodernism in the 1990s, positing that fakery and persona play were an unavoidable fact of life.

Similarly, Lamb and especially Titane are about the necessary lies we tell ourselves just in order to wake up in the morning (in this respect, they resemble M. Night Shyamalan's typically brilliant and consistently surprising Apple TV series Servant). Each story turn, no matter how preposterous, houses a touching moment in which damaged characters make do and still wind up making deadly mistakes. And because there is no need to keep a franchise alive with an indestructible murderer, Jóhannsson and Ducournau can afford to spend some time situating the madness into the textures of daily life. The characters and their milieus are given their due rather than their stories coming at us in half-assed chunks in between bouts of Michael Meyers' supernatural prowess.

A colleague recently warned me never to let anyone try to tell me films like the titles in the Halloween franchise contain some sort of profundity. I am relieved to finally be taking his advice.

Oh yeah and before I blissfully forget them forever, The Empty Man and Malignant sucked too.

Halloween II: C

Halloween Kills: D-minus

Lamb: A-minus

Titane: A-minus