AxWound - Gender in the Horror Genre - Shock & Awe: New Wave Exploitation at the Hammer Museum (A Review By Jenn Swann)

Shock & Awe: New Wave Exploitation at the Hammer Museum
A Review By Jenn Swann

Speakers at this panel discussion, an event sponsored by the Los Angeles Film Festival, included Craig Brewer, writer/director of Black Snake Moan and Hustle & Flow, Eli Roth, writer/director of Hostel and Cabin Fever, and Jack Hill, writer/director of classic feminist flicks like Switchblade Sisters, Foxy Brown, and Coffy.

Moderator FX Feeney first asks about how music influenced the films of each writer/director. Craig Brewer immediately recalls the Memphis rap and blues he had been listening to while conjuring up the gruesome imagery for Black Snake Moan, a screenplay written before Hustle & Flow. Brewer remembers seeing the radiator, feeling the thrashing of chains, and hearing that unmistakable yell with

every blues note. The funkadelic wah-wah guitar of Skip Pitts and the unmistakable high-hat pulsation of Willie Hall defined some of the most suspenseful moments of Brewer’s films.

Music is such a determining factor in Eli Roth’s films that he admits to cutting scenes to the rhythms of certain songs, and then scoring the scenes once they’re cut. Although budget-constrains can greatly limit the choices for a film’s soundtrack, all the filmmakers agree that “Low budget’s fun,” as ‘70s icon Jack Hill puts it. “The great thing about low budget,” Roth says, is that it forces you to think into the look of the film.

FX Feeney addresses the visual imagery in each film, which often depicts the problems, fears, and anxieties one experiences only in dreams. Growing up, Roth used his father, a psychoanalyst, as a resource to help decode his dreams. “I’ve always written down my dreams,” Roth says. All the panelists agree that movies are the closest conscience representation of the feeling of dreaming, and horror movies can most closely represent the feeling of a nightmare. In fact, the imagination can be infinitely more powerful than anything else.

As for violence, Roth reminds horror filmmakers to always think of the audience and to remember that violence is like a cooking ingredient. Too much violence may look cartoony, while not enough may leave an audience unsatisfied. While filming, Roth shoots as much footage as possible, and makes the major decisions while editing, sensing when he’s getting bored with certain shots. For example, “Too many shots of a dick is boring,” he says, constantly predicting what his audience expects from him. For Roth, movies are a constant torment with his audience, an alluring game of striptease in which he only reveals a little at a time.

Roth remembers being traumatized by The Exorcist at six years old and knowing that he wanted to be a director after seeing Alien a year later. Along with his quickly growing obsession for horror movies came his compulsion to vomit in every theater. His childhood horror sickness helped him churn and spew his goal as a director today: to make as many people vomit upon seeing his films as possible. Roth cites Robert Rodriguez, Peter Jackson, David Lynch, and Quentin Tarantino (at one point referring to him as evangelical) as his heroes, and says he greatly enjoyed directing the fake movie trailers like Thanksgiving for Grindhouse. He reveals one of his dream projects: directing an entire movie of fake trailers entitled Trailer Trash.

Some of Roth’s films have been classified as “torture porn.” People are “replacing violence with sexuality,” Roth claims, as marketers have placed his films in a sub-genre of pornography instead of a sub-genre of horror. “The way we look at films like this changes over time,” Jack Hill says, remarking that his women’s liberation film, Switchblade Sisters, was once (little known to him) distributed as a lesbian cult film by a marketing company. Hill jokes that perhaps because the film was about friendship and caring between women, it must have been a lesbian cult film.

While many of Brewer’s films include rich biblical imagery, all three of Roth’s films have been officially condemned by the Catholic Church. Roth reasons that people get caught up with the violence in movies, while disregarding the heart and thought put into the movie’s main messages. He says that in Hostel II, the way the tourists treat the hookers in Amsterdam is how they get treated in the end; the men that treated the women as meat become meat themselves. When Roth promoted the movie in Europe, he says that nobody even asked about the violence. In fact, many European women even hailed Hostel II as a feminist film, proving again that views of these films not only change over time, but also change in different countries and cultures, making film and its impact very personal to each viewer.

Aside from the scares, the shrieks, and the occasional vomiting, if nothing else, horror movies reflect the corruption of the society we live in today, which is why Roth finds it ironic that religious groups have targeted him. “They’re the ones who put cocksuckers like Dick Cheney and Haliburton in power!” he says, referencing a chain of command he calls the “American sewer system.” Roth, however, is no Anti-American. He proudly professes his gratitude to the MPAA for allowing him to clarify the difference between art and pornography, two growingly indistinguishable subjects. He recalls a time when he needed to explain to the MPAA that a penis was not used in his film in a sexual way, but as a means of getting revenge. “The rapist is getting punished!” he pleaded.

Although Eli Roth, Craig Brewer, and Jack Hill sometimes feel depressed about the horror/exploitation genre and the multi-million dollar action flicks that so often stomp these low-budget films in their shadows, they all stay hopeful that people will always go see and respond to a great movie, no matter what the genre. All three filmmakers are thankful for getting the opportunity to make the movies they love to make, even when they do come out alongside blockbusters trilogies like Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Fantastic Four. What we can do, as horror fans and filmmakers, is continue to go to theaters and see movies that make us vomit, that make us yell furiously at the screen, and cower anxiously under our chairs, and to continue writing and directing movies that people will be so baffled by that they will have to create new sub-genres like “torture porn.”