See the introduction and full slate here.
This week we tackle one of my favorite horror sub-genres, as William Fruet's 1976 flick Death Weekend proves that Canadians too know how to dress up and break into a house for nebulous reasons:
While Marcus Dunstan's 2009 sort-of-Saw-spinoff The Collector offers more heavy handed spider metaphors than you can possibly tolerate:
Once again, we have to talk about horror's woman problem. Death Weekend and The Collector are very different films, with very different styles and themes, but they share something: they both, like many horror films, use the female body as a site of horror, upon which men work out their rage and anxiety and even boredom. Men suffer in these films too, but women's suffering is the point. Without the torture of women, these two films wouldn't exist.
What makes so many films like this, ones full of women suffering over and over in increasingly violent ways, so difficult to watch, is that while they wouldn't exist without suffering women, they exist for men. Women get to be scared, get to feel pain, get to be tortured, but mostly so that men can feel things about it.
Home invasion stories are often about the fear of the outside world, of the rubes in your rural vacation home who hate you for what you have, or the servants who have copies of your keys and do who knows what with them. Our homes are where we're safe, where we rule, but the barriers are more porous than we'd like to admit. We're afraid that what we have can be easily taken away.
At the same time, home invasion stories are capable of flipping this narrative, and rather than inviting our sympathy with the invaded they nurture our contempt for them. The invaded are wealthy and isolated; they hoard money and possessions and even safety while those outside do without. These films exploit our desire to see the wealthy punished.
I'm a good socialist, and am ordinarily perfectly fine with watching the wealthy get punished, but too often here we run straight back into horror's women problem. Because too often, in films like this, the too-powerful wealthy are given women's faces. Women are not people, but another hoarded resource; they are guilty of hoarding themselves and must be punished for it. Both of these films deal in this idea, of woman-as-resource rather than woman-as-human. Only one of them is interested interested in digging into what that means for the women involved.
Death Weekend opens on a couple in a shining Corvette, heading away for the weekend. We quickly gather they don't know each other well; former model Diane was under the impression that her new boyfriend Harry was a medical doctor, rather than the dentist he is. He is bringing Diane to his lakeside house for sex; she believes there will be other guests. They are menaced on the road by drunken locals in a much older car, and Harry is easily outmatched by them. Diane convinces Harry to let her take the wheel, and forces the locals off the road. They are humiliated, emasculated at being beaten by a pretty young woman, and vow revenge.
Harry too is embarrassed by the incident; he reasserts his dominance over Diane by vulgarly bragging to a few other locals at a gas station of his plans with her. The gang from the road tracks the couple down, and spends the weekend terrorizing and torturing them. Harry dies, but Diane finally defeats her attackers and escapes, traumatized but alive.
The Collector tells us a story of an ex-con turned handyman named Arkin, who plans to rob his employers, the Chases, to pay off a loan shark threatening his family. He has several heightened encounters with the women in the Chase family the day before the planned heist: he silently spies on Mrs Chase as she injects herself with botox; he indulges the youngest daughter in a tea party; he ogles and flirts with the teenage daughter. The women, all three of them, are of a piece with the beautiful house and the money and jewelry inside it: things Arkin wants and can't have.
When Arkin attempts to pull off his theft, he finds himself interrupted by the titular Collector, who is torturing and killing the Chase family for unexplained reasons. Arkin attempts to save them, but only succeeds with little Hannah, before being spirited away by the Collector himself.
Only one of these films has a rape scene in it; it has two, in fact. The film with the rape scene is also the one with only a single named female character. So why, if we can say that about Death Weekend but not The Collector, is Death Weekend indisputably the less misogynistic film?
Death Weekend is actually concerned with what being treated like a hoarded resource is like for a woman. Diane's boyfriend Harry, is as guilty of misogyny as his and Diane's attackers; he too sees her as a resource, and is angry at her skill and independence. The rape scenes are queasy and violent, but they are, crucially, filmed from Diane's perspective. We are with her throughout the film; she is the POV character, and she is the only character worth investing our emotions in. She, not Harry, saves herself. Her face, stricken and uncertain, is the image the film leaves us with. Her pain is the point, not the way a man feels about her pain.
Women and girls are tortured and terrorized in The Collector, but their pain is never the point. They are killed cavalierly to make us fear for Arkin. Nobody is raped, but every female body over the age of puberty is sexualized by both the camera and the hero. Hannah, the youngest Chase daughter and the only member of the family to survive, is the only one who escapes both the torture and the sexualizing male gaze of the camera. Don't mistake things, though: she is still objectified. She is less a character than a symbol of goodness and innocence. She is a way to demonstrate that Arkin is really a good guy, because of his concern for her.
The Collector is more slickly made; the performances are competent. "Slick" is the right word though; the film is pretty and shiny but shallow and cynical. Death Weekend is ugly in form and subject matter; it has never been remastered for DVD, and the only versions you can find look hilariously cheap. Death Weekend, though, has a beating heart - it has concern for its heroine and her struggles, however inexpertly it conveys them. The Collector is horror by numbers. There may not be much practical difference between a film about misogyny and a misogynistic film, but Death Weekend is at least trying to be the former. The Collector doesn't even realize it's the latter. The winner will have to be Death Weekend, as imperfect as it is.