New French Extremity

New French Extremity is the term coined for the series of transgressive films produced in France and Belgium in the last decade including works by auteurs Gaspar Noe, Claire Denis, Catherine Breillat, Francois Ozon, as well as individual titles such as Baise Moi, The Pornographer, Intimacy and In My Skin. These films, which have received considerable international attention, are characterised by a desire to shock, although critics are divided as to whether the deliberate breaking of taboos in these films is linked to a genuine desire on the behalf of the film-makers to shock audiences into political consciousness.  A number of distinguished horror films have been linked to the movement: Haute Tension, Frontiere(s), Inside, Martyrs, Seitan, Them and Calvaire.

Despite the emergence of the French  and Belgian horror film in recent years, Martyrs’ director, Pascal Laugier is quick to disabuse us of any notion that the horror genre has become part of French mainstream cinema:  ‘My country produces almost 200 films a year but there are only 2 or 3 horror films. It’s still a hell to find the money, a hell to convince people that we are legitimate to make this kind of film in France.’

This is, of course, reassuring as it suggests that the New French Extremity Movement (and the horror films within it) provides an alternative to French National Cinema, a challenge to national identities. But to what extent can these films in themselves be considered ‘progressive’? Certainly their tradition seems to be that of Bunuel, Franju, Clouzot – the tradition of French ‘shock’ art and literature originated by De Sade, Artaud, Bataille  – a tradition problematic  in itself, anchored as it is in the philosophy of nihilism, an extreme scepticism that denies all human values, all human forms of communication,  and therefore the possibility of progressive change. There is, to boot, a disturbing undercurrent of fascism in many of these films (Noe’s work strikes me as particularly problematic – especially in his treatment of homosexuality). This is, of course, not peculiar to French cinema – the whole ‘torture porn’ subgenre is redolent of it. However, the New French Extremity movement, can, I believe, be seen most significantly as a response to the rise of right-wing extremism in France during the last ten years (as personified by the figure of La Penn), a response that film-makers are in the process of working through.

Of all the horror films attached to the movement, Frontier(s)(2007) is perhaps the most progressive-minded. The plot concerns a family of degenerate murderers, led by a former (and still practicing Nazi) who imprison and torture a group of young people on the run who stumble into the family’s inn on the Belgian border. Set against a backdrop of Paris riots following the fictional election of an extremist right-wing candidate into the French presidency, Frontier(s) clearly functions as a political allegory about a degenerate-regressive ‘old guard’ set on annihilating the young.  The fact that the young people are a mix of races and sympathetically portrayed emphasises the Nazi undercurrents of the torture that they undergo at the hands of the elders. Director Xavier Gens explains that the story for Frontier(s) “came from events in 2002 when we had presidential elections in France. There was an extreme right party in the second round. That was the most horrible day of my life.”

The capture-torture motif of Frontier(s) is also central to Martyrs(2008), but in this film the political intentions are less overt, more ambivalent and ultimately nihilistic. The film begins with a young girl, Lucie, as she escapes from a disused abattoir where she has been imprisoned and physically abused by mysterious captors.  From there the film develops into a tale of friendship:  Lucie - tormented by ‘survivor guilt’ - is taken into care in an orphanage where she meets Anna, who attempts to help her.   Up to this point, Martyrs appears to be about the phenomenon of parents imprisoning their children in order to abuse them - a’ la Fred West and Josef Fritzl - and its psychological effects on the victims. But then Martyrs makes a sudden volte face as the mysterious captors are revealed to be a society of aged super-rich inflicting torture on young women in a bid to discover the secrets of the afterlife.  This shift in story direction comes across as muddled and confused (and somewhat unconvincing), and while there is no doubt that Martyrs is a visceral piece of work, this confusion about what it is trying to say, together with its unremitting bleakness, ultimately detracts from it being a better film. The overall impression is one of nihilism –  ‘putting the audience through it’  seems to be the film’s raison d’etre.  Martyrs is currently being remade by Daniel Stamm, director of The Last Exorcism (another film that falls down its final moments due to an ‘ideologically’ confused ending), who claims to be reworking the film to give ‘a glimmer of hope’.

Whereas Martyrs falls somewhere between a progressive and nihilistic vision (it does, after all, explore the notion of a degenerate older generation abusing its young), Inside (2007), falls into the category of reactionary horror film because of its dread of the woman’s body.  It concerns the attack and home-invasion of a young pregnant woman, by a mysterious stranger (played by Beatrice Dalle) who seeks to take her unborn baby. The film presents pregnancy and motherhood in a wholly negative light. Firstly, in Beatrice Dalle’s character is the personification of the ‘psychologically disturbed mother’ who would seek to harm another in her obsessive need for a child to replace the one she lost. Then there is the depiction of childbirth itself as something to be loathed (shown in the film as an impromptu Caesarian performed with a pair of scissors). Inside is a perfect case study in what Barbara Creed called the ‘Monstrous-Feminine, and a reminder that transgressive horror does not necessarily mean progressive or even subversive horror.

The horror films of the New French Extremity, then, can be seen as an off-shoot of the torture porn subgenre, and like 1930s horror films such as The Raven (1935) and The Black Cat (1934) pre-occupied with sadism and torture imagery, reflecting the rise of fascism in an era of economic collapse.  As the European Debt Crisis deepens it will be interesting to see what direction the movement takes; whether it will continue apace or lose its impetus in the face of industry recession and increased censorship.

Scala Forever!

If you are in London between now and the 2nd of October check out this series of screenings in honour of the Scala Cinema Club. Follow the link for details:

http://scalaforever.co.uk/

The Scala was,  for me, London's best repertory cinema and a mecca for cult/underground film fans. Some of the films I first saw there were: Tetsuo, Santa Sangre, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Cafe Flesh, Thundercrack!, Faster Pussycat Kill Kill! Singapore Sling and many more. The Scala did some great double & triple bills. I remember seeing Eraserhead with Blue Velvet and two early Lynch shorts: The Grandmother and Alphabet; a fantastic DePalma triple of Body Double/Dressed to Kill/Blow Out, and I saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre there at least three times (on a grainy 16mm print - all that was available as the film was still banned in the UK at the time) paired with Motel Hell and The Hills Have Eyes. One of the great things about the Scala was that, as a cinema club, the films were uncertificated. Their crowning glory was their regular all-nighters. I particularly remember an Argento all-nighter(Suspira/Inferno/Tenebrae/Opera) which I stumbled out of with a blinding headache but exhilarated (probably as much from the occasional whiff of dope that wafted across the seats as from the films -I'm not a big Argento fan). Some people would bring sleeping bags and doze through films they didn't care for.

My first visit to the Scala was in 1986 when I travelled to London for a movie marathon that started with a 70mm screening of Aliens at the Odeon Leicester Square, followed by a trip to the Cannon Wardour Street for the first run of Romero's Day of the Dead, and then after a few pints in the West End it was off to the Scala for a Romero all-nighter of Night/Martin/Dawn/Creepshow and The Crazies. The seedy ambience of the Scala (and its unbelievable repertory of films) was a revelation. As I headed home on the train early the next morning, bleary-eyed but happy, I vowed to return to this amazing cinema, and when I later moved to London I did - many times.

In 1993 The Scala Cinema Club went into receivership after losing a court case following an illegal screening of A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick and Warner Brothers did cult movie fans a big disservice.

Now film clubs and rep cinemas such as the Ritzy in Brixton are hosting a programme of screenings in the spirit of the old Scala Cinema Club, including a 'Scala Day' of documentary, talks and discussion on the future of repertory cinema, at the Scala itself on Saturday 17th September.

Ira Levin


In my post on The Last Exorcism, I cited The Exorcist as one of the few novels to hit the three points of what I call the ‘horror triangle’: in other words the story works on supernatural and psychological levels, but there is an additional sociological subtext present. I would include Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby as one of those few novels alongside The Exorcist to function on all three levels.

Stephen King described Levin as a storyteller whose tales are constructed with ‘the precision of a Swiss watch’, and Rosemary’s Baby is certainly a first rate psychological/supernatural thriller. But consider that novel alongside his other work, such as The Stepford Wives, and you have social/political comment par excellence.

Written in 1967 and inspired, at least in part, by celebrity Satanist Anton LaVey, Rosemary’s Baby cleverly keyed in to a growing interest in the occult (as popularised by rock groups like The Rolling Stones), mysticism and psychedelic ‘experience’. This seeking meaning in alternative religions has been described by scholars such as Joseph Laycock as ‘folk piety’, a symptom of the breakdown of traditional religion in the modern age combined with a residual desire to believe in the spiritual. In Rosemary’s Baby, to Levin’s credit, we never really know if Rosemary is truly experiencing the supernatural or simply some form of personal and group hysteria. This is admirably reinforced in the film by Polanski’s refusal to show the ‘demon child’ at the end; we are forced to experience events subjectively through Rosemary’s point of view (in both the film and the novel). The effect on the viewer/reader is powerful.

It was perhaps too powerful for Levin’s liking: he is one of the few novelists to despair at the success of his own work, regretting that Rosemary’s Baby might have helped perpetuate Christian fundamentalism in America (although he joked that he didn’t regret it enough to return the profits from the book). Levin saw himself as a Progressive and the socio-political ‘message’ of The Stepford Wives is more up-front (he quotes Simone De Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’ in the forward). Intriguingly, Levin develops the feminist subtext of Rosemary’s baby in the later novel. We can see this as coinciding with the rise in second-wave feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The feminist subtext of Rosemary’s Baby is, of course, already clear for those who want to see it: Rosemary’s body is controlled by the patriarchy (in this case her husband, the male –led witch coven and Satan) for the purposes of reproduction.

In The Stepford Wives, the woman’s body itself is cloned and replaced by that of a cyborg, such is the ‘threat’ presented by the individual identity of woman to the patriarchy of the story. Rosemary was quite content to be a wife, home-maker and mother but the heroine of The Stepford Wives has to turned into an android before she accepts her lot: Joanna has an identity beyond that of housewife; as befitting a liberated woman of the 1970s, she has aspirations of her own (as a photographer). Levin makes the feminist message the main discourse of The Stepford Wives and underplays the ‘thriller’ aspects.

But more than that: in the town of Stepford, Levin represents the politically regressive provinces that exists in the suburbs of American and British cities; the land of Parent-Teacher Associations and Christian groups who campaign vociferously against the ‘permissive society’. These ‘Stepfords’ exist, and for this reason it may be that, of the two novels, The Stepford Wives emerges as the more enduring work.

Jeff Lieberman

Jeff Lieberman (perhaps best known for Squirm, 1976) remains a critically neglected director within the horror genre. Although admittedly not in the same ‘league’ as Romero, Craven, Carpenter, Hooper, Cronenberg etc., his films are like the mortar between the bricks of these film-makers, extending and enriching sub-genres within horror cinema. Squirm is one of the best ‘creature features’ derived from Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963); Blue Sunshine (1978) (a true progressive horror film in its depiction of 1960s ideals destroyed from within by self-serving opportunism) spans the ‘invasion-metamorphosis horror’ gap between Shivers (1975) and Dawn of The Dead (1978), paving the way for the latter; Just Before Dawn (1981) picks up and develops the tropes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1976) (although the conscious influence on Lieberman was Deliverance, both the book and the film) and Satan’s Little Helper (2003) riffs intriguingly on Halloween (1978).

His films bristle with intellect. Lieberman is not an originator or a genre innovator; he is a magpie who steals from the nests of other directors. But the treasures he steals glister brightly, and he displays them magnificently.

Perhaps more than any other director, Lieberman has the ability to crystallise the essence of a subgenre in a single striking image.

In Blue Sunshine, we have the psychotic babysitter stalking her young charges with a large knife; her ‘invasion-metamorphosis’ is signified by her bald head – her ‘possession’ by the visual reference to Rosemary’s Baby (1968).

Babysitter with a knife: Blue Sunshine (1978)

In Just Before Dawn, there is the stunning moment where our heroine fends off her backwoods attacker by thrusting her fist down his throat (an inversion of the rape/violation imagery redolent of the ‘urbanoia’ film, notably the gun-in –the –woman’s-mouth scene in The Hills Have Eyes).

A fist down the throat: Just Before Dawn (1981)

In Squirm, we have three such moments, each encapsulating the three stages of narrative progression in the ‘nature rises up against us’ subgenre: proliferation – the scene where worms infest the face of the antagonist, Roger; besiegement – where the worms threaten to erupt from a showerhead on to our unwitting heroine (also, of course, a sly nod to Psycho – linking via The Birds to Hitchcock – see what I mean about the keen intellect?) Finally annihilation – when the worms invade the house and Roger sinks into them like a man disappearing into quicksand.

The worms claim Roger: Squirm (1976)

These iconic moments encapsulate the narrative conventions of their subgenres (the ‘nature horror’, the ‘backwoods horror’, the ‘zombie-metamorphosis horror’) unlike any other. Perhaps that’s why, despite a lack of recent critical attention for the films, these images featured so often in the horror film books and magazines of the 1970s.

It is a measure of the neglect in which Lieberman currently stands that his films have received patchy distribution on DVD.  Only Just Before Dawn and Satan’s Little Helper are available on UK cert R2, the former transferred from a very shoddy print. The American R1 of Just Before Dawn is of similar poor quality but includes a ‘Making of’ and interviews with cast and crew.  MGM released Squirm in 2003 on R1 only. The transfer is good (although the night scenes are a bit murky). Blue Sunshine is available in a double disc presentation from Synapse films on R1 (and a similar Dutch R2). This set includes a bonus CD of the film’s soundtrack, together with an early Lieberman short, 'The Ringer', and a substantial interview, ‘Lieberman on Lieberman’, which is a must for anyone wanting more information on this important director - very little exists on him any elsewhere.

Pete Walker

Although he has been retired from film-making since the mid-1980s, Pete Walker made a rare live appearance in a Q&A at the British Film Institute in 2009 (see video of the Q&A below). Best known for his ‘terror’ films written with David McGillivray (House of Whipcord, 1974, Frightmare, 1974, House of Mortal Sin, 1976), Walker loved to cause controversy by taking pot shots at the pillars of the British establishment such as the church, the penal system and the family. His films came out at a time when Britain was going through something of a sexual revolution thanks to the social reforms of the 1960s Wilson government, which saw a relaxation of laws on abortion, homosexuality and divorce. The inevitable moral backlash that followed this in the mid-1970s, led by people like Lord Longford and Mary Whitehouse, threatened a return to Victorian values and it was this that Walker and McGillivray kicked against in their wickedly enjoyable films.

Despite the cultural importance of Walker's films, which is only now becoming fully recognised thanks to Walker scholars such as Prof. Steve Chibnall, Walker is modest about his own achievements.  “The films were never as good as I wanted them to be," he says, "not enough money or time”. He was, however, a director of considerable skill. House of Mortal Sin, in particular, shows a mastery of the camera few ‘exploitation’ directors achieve in their careers.

Walker started making ‘terror’ pictures in the early 1970s after several years making soft-core sex films. Although profitable, he found the soft porn film rather boring because “the sex stopped the plot”. A gifted raconteur with a background as a stand up comic in the final days of music hall, Walker wrote the scenarios for many of his films. In his collaborations with McGillivray, Walker decided the storyline and McGillivray scripted the scenes. An admirer of Hitchcock, Walker always included a set piece murder in his films and his best work showcases his skills in creating suspense sequences, such as the first murder in The Comeback (1980).  

When the British film industry all but collapsed in the 1980s, Pete Walker quit film-making to go into property development, buying and refurbishing cinemas. It was the biggest loss to the British horror film since the death of Michael Reeves.

Michael Reeves

While researching Shocks to the System I decided to go on a pilgrimage to Knightsbridge, London and look at the homes of Michael Reeves.

In the tradition of ‘psycho-geography’ I wanted to see if I could gauge something of Michael Reeves’s mental state towards the end of his life by ‘tuning into’ his surroundings at the time.

For anyone who may not be familiar with Michael Reeves, he was the director of two of the most important British horror films of the 1960s, The Sorcerers (1967) and Witchfinder General (1968). He died from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills during a period of depression shortly after making these films. He was 25 years old.

Michael Reeves had a privileged background – public school, trust fund – and a passion for filmmaking that translated into two powerful (and controversial) meditations on the nature of violence as intrinsic to the human condition. The schism between comfort/darkness, homeliness/alienation seemed to pervade his life as much as it did his films, and the startling contrast between his two Knightsbridge homes – although situated only a few streets apart – seems to bear this out.

23 Yeoman's Row

Reeves’s first home at 23 Yeoman’s Row, where he lived from 1964 to 1969, is a quaint three storey cottage on a quiet little cul-de-sac off the busy Brompton Road, just a short walk from Sloane Square. Reeves owned this house himself but shared his occupation of it with friends. He lived in the second floor rooms and the third storey housed his office. Looking up from the street at the small dormer windows, it struck me that this was an incongruous place to have written the scripts for The Sorcerers and Witchfinder General,  films that brilliantly capture the dark underside of the Swinging Sixties.

According to John Murray’s biography, Reeves was very happy in this house, receiving lots of visitors, including Lee Marvin and Don Siegel, and enjoying a family-like atmosphere with his friends. It was here that he would endlessly screen The Killers (1964) – Siegel was his idol and it is clear to see Siegel’s influence on Reeves in terms of the lean and mean trademark style that Reeves was himself to adopt as a director.

A few doors down on Yeoman’s Row there is a steakhouse that Reeves frequented with friends (Reeves was generous to a fault: this led to him acquiring various hangers-on, which eventually contributed to his decision to move house). The steakhouse is now called ‘Frankies’ and is owned by Frankie Dettori and Marco Pierre White. On the corner is a pub, the 'Bunch of Grapes', where it is easy to imagine the young Michael regaling friends with talk of films and his plans for productions.

After the release of Witchfinder General, Reeves found himself the subject of a critical savaging at the hands of morally outraged film reviewers, including Alan Bennett. This and his battle with the censor, John Trevelyan, left him feeling that both he and his film had been misunderstood, and caused Reeves to fall into a deep depression.

19 Cadogan Place

It was during this period of despair that Reeves sold the Yeoman’s Row property and moved into the top flat at 19 Cadogan Place. In stark contrast to the homely family cottage at Yeoman’s Row, the Cadogan Place building is a strange Tudor-style apartment building of red-brick and stone with black leaded bay windows. It has a brooding feel, not unlike the apartment buildings that you might find in a Roman Polanski film. In short it is exactly the kind of place that you would expect a tormented young director of horror films to live.

Reeves resided in the top floor apartment, isolated from the rest of the world. His depression left him reclusive and withdrawn; he would leave the flat only to visit his psychiatrist and to take his meals at the Carlton Tower hotel across the road, literally a minute’s walk from his front door. He might see the occasional friend, but by his 
own admission he had become 'a hermit'.

His girlfriend at the time, Ingrid Cranfield, has published a moving account of his final days, At Last Michael Reeves. In it she describes Reeves as self-absorbed, melancholy, unable to shake off his bewilderment at Witchfinder General’s hostile reception. 'Witchfinder represented Michael’s deepest- held principles.' she wrote, 'It was his manifesto,championing peace against violence, justice against persecution, morality against sin, good against evil. It was an exposé of his soul. And nobody understood.'

One wonders if the isolation of living alone in the Cadogan Place apartment also contributed to his continuing depression, and if he had stayed in the more communal environment of Yeoman’s Row might he have recovered. Who knows? - Michael Reeves was found dead in the Cadogan Place apartment on 11 February 1969. The loss to British Cinema was immense.

Michael Reeves on the set of Witchfinder General (1968)

Tony: London Serial Killer

A recent British film that shows the effects on the psyche of economic hardship is Tony: London Serial Killer. Directed by Gerard Johnson on a budget of £40k the film is shot on location in Dalston, Hackney (very close to where I live as it happens) and follows the life of the socially inadequate Tony as he tries to connect with the people around him in the bleak urban environment of London’s East End. Unfortunately the only way he seems able to do this is through murder.

The film has been compared to Taxi Driver and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer as a study of social alienation and in my opinion is worthy of the comparison. At the heart of the film is a startling performance by Peter Ferdinando as Tony, a character loosely based on real life London serial killer, Dennis Nilsen. But whereas Nilsen, by all accounts, was a dominant personality, Ferdinando plays Tony as a timid, passive-aggressive rather ‘nerdish’ man who vents his anger and frustration by quietly, and sometimes unexpectedly, hammering, strangling and suffocating his victims to death.

Like Nilsen though, Tony seems both sexually and socially confused – one is never quite sure of his orientation – if he has one – and over the course of the film we see him variously trying to make sexual/social contact with a prostitute and a gay man who picks him up in the pub he frequents. What Tony clearly is though, is desperately lonely, and the great insight of the film is that it makes clear how human relations suffer in such dire economic circumstances. The only people Tony encounters are all equally desperate as he is and see him as someone to use and abuse. In a darkly humorous sequence, Tony tags along with two junkies as they go to score some heroin and then invites them back to his flat for a beer and a smoke. However by the time the two scag-heads have zonked out on the settee, Tony has had enough and out come the plastic bag and duck tape.

The theme of exploitation is extended to the portrayal of authority in the film. In one of the most effect sequences, Tony (who perhaps not surprisingly is long-term unemployed) is sent for an interview by the job centre to work as a billboard man for a tanning shop. The owner of the shop wants Tony to work fourteen hours a day for a pittance and threatens to have the Job Centre cut off his benefits if he refuses. In the next scene Tony visits an east European prostitute who rebukes his offer of five pounds for a ‘cuddle’. The clever juxtaposition of these two scenes deftly underlines the exploitation that faces people like Tony and the prostitute who are living on the fringes of society.

Although Gerard Johnson shies away from labeling Tony as a horror film, preferring instead to describe it as a work of social realism, the film quietly gets under the skin. Less overtly shocking than Man Bites Dog, the shock here is ideological and thus creeps up on you. As Tony wanders aimlessly through Kings Cross at the end destined only to repeat his actions, I was left wondering if in Tony: London Serial Killer I had seen the true face of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’.

Hitchcock

The photograph is of St Ignatius Church, Stamford Hill in London. It is Alfred Hitchcock’s alma mater and located at the bottom of my road as it happens. Hitchcock attended the Roman Catholic school adjoined to the church (it is not there any more sadly) in 1910.

I like to think that young ‘Alfie’ might have passed by my house once or twice – sandwich in hand – while on his way to the park for his lunch hour or perhaps to walk along the River Lea. Perhaps he might have glanced in my window as he passed. Maybe, if he had a friend who lived on my road, he might even have popped in for a cup of tea and a Swiss roll - who knows?

Although Hitchcock never publicly disparaged his Catholic upbringing (unlike Bunuel) there is no doubt it influenced his films. He has said St Ignatius taught him ‘a strong sense of fear and guilt'. The film that combines both to the greatest effect is, of course, Psycho (1960). In that film, Marion (Janet Leigh) suffers guilt to the point of neurosis. She steals money from a rich vulgar man who probably won’t miss it but her conscience won’t rest until she makes the decision to return it. By that time however, her fate is sealed because Norman Bates has set his sights on her. Hitchcock’s genius in that film is to connect Marion’s neurosis with Norman’s psychosis. They are both products of the socialisation process gone wrong. Normal has an Oedipal fixation on his dead mother and Marion has a guilt-fixation on hers.

 Hitchcock also said that he learned ‘Jesuit reasoning power’ at St Ignatius, and his rigorous approach to storytelling and film-making probably started here. So all-in-all his Catholic education was something of a double-edged sword.

St Ignatius is now enjoying a surge of popularity thanks to the influx of Polish and Spanish speaking people into the area. Hitchcock, of course, moved to Hollywood, and spent most of his life living in Bel Air.  When I was in Los Angeles I stopped by to have a look at his house at 10957 Bellagio Road - to return the favour if you will. How the other half lives.

The Last Exorcism

The Exorcist is fairly unique in that it is one of the few novels to cover all three points of what I call the horror triangle. By that I mean that it manages to combine socio-political, psychological and supernatural interpretations in one story.

Most horror stories, if they are any good, only cover two points of the triangle: Psycho, for example, is psychological and socio-political (Norman’s psychopathology is shown to be a result of his upbringing, a failure of the socialisation process) but the story has no supernatural element: Norman is not ‘possessed’ by the dead spirit of his mother, at least not in a supernatural way. Night of the Living Dead, has a supernatural (or science fiction) basis but the horror functions on a socio-political level rather than a psychological one (at no point are the zombies suggested to be figments of Barbara’s imagination).

Even if The Exorcist (the novel rather than the film) at times threatens to collapse under the weight of its own ambiguity (Is Reagan possessed or is she suffering from a psychological disorder? Could it be a disorder brought on by the divorce of her parents? Neglect by her career-minded mother? Teenage rebellion in the age of the generation gap?) it remains one of the most frightening horror stories because it can be interpreted in any of these ways.

The Last Exorcism -  one of the better of the recent crop of Exorcist-inspired films - tries to achieve the same level of ambiguity as to whether the possession victim is truly possessed or suffering from a mental illness, but it also attempts a discourse on the ‘possession’ phenomenon itself as a social (rather than psychological or spiritual) problem. This is an interesting and potentially progressive development in the sub-genre of ‘demonic possession films’, although it ultimately presents a dilemma for the film-makers that they are not prepared to resolve.

Throughout history, exorcism, has, of course, been used as a particularly brutal form of repression, especially in Africa, parts of Asia and some Christian fundamentalist communities in the United States. The ‘possessed’ person (more often than not a woman) has ‘transgressed’ the rules of that society in some way and the occasion of sin has been blamed on an evil influence. However, what constitutes ‘sin’ in these cases of ‘spirit possession’ is often anything that threatens the patriarchal power structure. ‘The Jezebel Spirit’, for example, ‘one of the most common spirits in operation today’ according to one Christian fundamentalist website, ‘seeks to emasculate all men, and divest them of their authority and power over others’ and is ‘the daughter behind feminism.’1

Returning to The Last Exorcism, the ‘Jezebel’ in this case is a young pregnant girl in Louisiana, who is suspected of having been sexually abused by her father. The blame for the incest is being laid at the feet of the victim rather than the abuser, the film suggests, with ‘spirit possession’ masking the truth.

What is intriguing about The Last Exorcism is that it initially seems to want to debunk the belief in possession and discredit the fundamentalist values that underlie it. Cotton, the exorcist in the film, actually does not believe in possession and takes part in the ‘documentary’ to expose the fraudulence of exorcism. From there the film goes on seemingly to condemn the belief, obscuring as it does true social evils (in this case poverty, incest, rape). Using the ‘mock-documentary’ format reinforces this apparent agenda of exposing exorcism as a social issue that needs to be tackled. The film faces a problem, however, as it still wants to maintain the ambiguity of whether Nell is actually possessed or not. This presents the film-makers with a dilemma – if Nell is truly possessed the potentially progressive agenda of the film is lost. If she is not possessed but psychologically ill due to abuse, then this will surely disappoint the horror audience and the box-office will suffer.

Ultimately the film attempts to 'resolve' this dilemma by side-stepping it completely and presenting a third ‘explanation’. I won’t reveal what it is for those who have not seen the film, but I found the conclusion somewhat unsatisfactory and rather a loss of nerve on the film-maker’s behalf.  A shame for a film which, for most of its running time, attempts to break new ground. Still, miles ahead of The Rite.

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1 http://www.albatrus.org/english/church-order/women-matters/jezebel_in_our_society.htm