Yay! It’s four films to drive white straight male wingnuts even crazier—explorations of women’s issues, women’s feelings, and the way women are treated in a patriarchal society.
SOUND OF VIOLENCE (2021)
This is a trippy, almost psychedelic and artsy horror flick that delves into how a young woman’s past with violence as a child shapes her present…and her homicidal tendencies. Don’t expect a simple slasher flick. There are plenty of brutal kills along the way, but the focus is on this young woman awakening to the realization that the sound of pain brings her pleasure.
A young deaf girl witnessed her family being brutally murdered, and the incident somehow triggered her to regain her hearing.
As an adult, she now teaches music and explores the psychological effects sounds have on moving her mind and soul. She begins sampling sounds to create her own experimental music. It begins as recording sessions of people participating in S&M, but escalates from there.
Soon, the main girl is recording the agonizing screams of people as she kills them and turning those sounds into music in scenes that are presented like a DJ experiencing a good drug high at a club.
It’s weird and somewhat vicious, and the final act is quite tragic as her female roommate, who is actually in love with her, is drawn into her “music”.
The funny thing is that as with every film featuring people of color and/or queer characters these days, the white supremacists are all butt sore and can say nothing online about Sound of Violence beyond it being “woke”. I even saw it bashed for being a whole movie about a Black girl getting sexually aroused by killing white men. Hm. I lived through the eighties and never heard any white guys complaining that every slasher was about a white guy in a mask getting sexually aroused by killing half naked women. Not to mention that if white supremacists want to see a bright side to this “woke” movie, it’s actually the people they hate who should be complaining about it considering it depicts a Black gay female as a psycho killer. They’re so damn hateful they would prefer that people just like them are the psychos killing people just like them.
THE STYLIST (2020)
This is a brooding and depressing film that follows the life of a lonely, sociopathic hair stylist who lives her life vicariously through the stories she’s told by her clients.
Oh…she also imagines what it’s like to be them by killing them, scalping them, and wearing their hair as wigs.
While it’s a tragic character study, it’s also a major commentary on the pressures put on women—to get married, to look beautiful, to compete with other women, to support one another, to cope with being torn down by other women instead of lifted up by them.
It’s good to see horror exploring these issues, but for me the movie was too low energy and too long at 105 minutes, although that did manage to make me as a viewer feel as dragged down by life as the main girl.
The other problem was that this is as predictable a film as you can get when it comes to these “portrait of a serial killer” movies. Naturally she has a female friend who is open to embracing her, yet the friend also tends to be self-centered and uses her at times. She of course becomes drawn to the girl and increasingly psycho stalkerish. If you’ve seen these types of films before, you know exactly how it’s going to end. If you haven’t, then the finale might leave an impression.
What had me most intrigued was that she keeps killing these women to take their scalps, yet we never learn what becomes of the hairless bodies.
THE COLUMNIST (2019)
This is such a cathartic film for those of us who have just wanted to reach our hands through social media and choke all the anonymous fuckers that say awful, nasty things to hurt people.
Through a psycho killer lens, it explores online anonymity, how those anonymous people are or aren’t different when you actually meet them offline, why they bully online, and how online bullying deeply affects individuals, consuming their emotions and pushing them to take extreme actions.
A writer with an opinion column becomes obsessed with the negative attacks she receives in comments online. She starts spending every waking hour doom scrolling to see what new, awful things are being said about her to destroy her reputation.
And then she begins fighting back, tracking down those who attack her most, killing them, and keeping one of their fingers as a souvenir. These aren’t the most original kill scenes, but they are so damn satisfying. You really feel this woman’s emotional instability as her confidence and self-worth are eroded, and she becomes a weird kind of hero as she turns into a literal social justice warrior.
In an ironic contrast, her daughter, who is becoming controversial as a writer at school, is on a crusade defending free speech, so this isn’t totally a one-sided look at the problem of social media. And the final act is most definitely a reminder of how fucking tragic this whole phenomenon has become and the damage it has done to everyone entangled in it.
WITCH HUNT (2021)
This wingnut head-exploder makes you think about social issues plaguing the U.S., like suppression of women, government control, immigration, authoritarianism, and racism.
In current day U.S., witchcraft is illegal, and women are being burned at the stake for practicing it.
Conveniently, one of the stars of The Craft: Legacy plays a girl whose mother is keeping the daughters of a burned witch hidden in her home, echoing the realities of Anne Frank while establishing a concept of women taking their lives into their own hands and protecting each other.
The main girl begins to have frightening experiences in her house due to the practices of the two young witch refugees. She also befriends one of them and starts getting sucked into witchcraft herself. In terms of horror, Witch Hunt relies heavily on annoying orchestral stinger scares even when nothing scary is actually happening.
Think of this more as a frightening take on the horrors of The Crucible if played out in modern society. It explores illegally transporting witches across the border to Mexico to help them escape the tyrannical U.S. government. It incorporates elements of racial profiling and the terror Black men experience when pulled over by cops. And most importantly, it highlights the push to make women second class citizens and to portray them as the root of all evil.
