Abstract
Whether in terms of on-screen representation or the identity of the director behind the camera, the gendered body lies at the heart of discourse surrounding rape-revenge films. For the second edition of Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (McFarland, 2021), the author emailed three very different filmmakers about three very different films, but all linked through the range of ways they engage with the rape-revenge trope. Featured here are interviews with Peter Strickland about his 2009 film Katalin Varga, Karen Lam about Evangeline (2013), and Sam Ashurst about A Little More Flesh (2020). The interviewees reflect on a range of subjects, including production histories, their own relationship to the trope, and broader social and cultural attitudes to sexual violence.
Introduction
It’s hard to think of any cinematic trope other than rape-revenge that demonstrates the idea that bodies can be battlegrounds. And while predominantly those bodies are those of women, it is not always the case. What remains true, however, is that those bodies in this context are always emphatically gendered. But the body-battleground of rape-revenge transcends mere plot mechanics, and in recent years in particular questions surrounding the gendered body of the director behind the camera has become a subject of almost equal critical investigation. What does it mean when a man makes a rape-revenge film? What does it mean when a woman makes a rape-revenge film?
These questions have dominated my recent engagement with rape-revenge. In 2011, I published my first book with US publisher McFarland, Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study. In the decade that followed, to say that the conversation around this controversial category went through dramatic shifts feels like an understatement; particularly in light of the discourse spawned from the #MeToo movement that in the mainstream media focused on the film industry due to the centrality of once-revered Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, rape-revenge felt almost perfectly suited as a forum upon which broader anxieties surrounding gendered violence and screen culture could be explored. Releasing a heavily updated second edition of my book in 2021, then, it was important for me to turn to filmmakers themselves and explore their own personal and professional relationships with rape-revenge. While I quoted from these email interviews in the book, until now they have not been published as a whole, and with the permission and co-operation of these filmmakers I am therefore delighted that Cine-Excess have found a home for the full text. Representing a range of tonal engagements with rape-revenge, generic frameworks, budgets and national contexts, the three interviews that follow primarily concern Peter Strickland’s Katalin Varga (2009), Karen Lam’s Evangeline (2013), and Sam Ashurst’s A Little More Flesh (2020). We would like to express our gratitude to Peter, Karen and Sam for allowing us to reproduce these interviews.
Whether in terms of on-screen representation or the identity of the director behind the camera, the gendered body lies at the heart of discourse surrounding rape-revenge films. For the second edition of Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (McFarland, 2021), the author emailed three very different filmmakers about three very different films, but all linked through the range of ways they engage with the rape-revenge trope. Featured here are interviews with Peter Strickland about his 2009 film Katalin Varga, Karen Lam about Evangeline (2013), and Sam Ashurst about A Little More Flesh (2020). The interviewees reflect on a range of subjects, including production histories, their own relationship to the trope, and broader social and cultural attitudes to sexual violence.
Introduction
It’s hard to think of any cinematic trope other than rape-revenge that demonstrates the idea that bodies can be battlegrounds. And while predominantly those bodies are those of women, it is not always the case. What remains true, however, is that those bodies in this context are always emphatically gendered. But the body-battleground of rape-revenge transcends mere plot mechanics, and in recent years in particular questions surrounding the gendered body of the director behind the camera has become a subject of almost equal critical investigation. What does it mean when a man makes a rape-revenge film? What does it mean when a woman makes a rape-revenge film?
These questions have dominated my recent engagement with rape-revenge. In 2011, I published my first book with US publisher McFarland, Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study. In the decade that followed, to say that the conversation around this controversial category went through dramatic shifts feels like an understatement; particularly in light of the discourse spawned from the #MeToo movement that in the mainstream media focused on the film industry due to the centrality of once-revered Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, rape-revenge felt almost perfectly suited as a forum upon which broader anxieties surrounding gendered violence and screen culture could be explored. Releasing a heavily updated second edition of my book in 2021, then, it was important for me to turn to filmmakers themselves and explore their own personal and professional relationships with rape-revenge. While I quoted from these email interviews in the book, until now they have not been published as a whole, and with the permission and co-operation of these filmmakers I am therefore delighted that Cine-Excess have found a home for the full text. Representing a range of tonal engagements with rape-revenge, generic frameworks, budgets and national contexts, the three interviews that follow primarily concern Peter Strickland’s Katalin Varga (2009), Karen Lam’s Evangeline (2013), and Sam Ashurst’s A Little More Flesh (2020). We would like to express our gratitude to Peter, Karen and Sam for allowing us to reproduce these interviews.
Rape-Revenge Film 1: An Interview With Karen Lam On Evangeline (2013)
Director Karen Lam
Canadian filmmaker Karen Lam’s Evangeline (2013) – and the short film that predates it, Doll Parts (2011) – give a supernatural twist to the usual rape-revenge formula, turning it into something uniquely effective and thoroughly unforgettable. Evangeline follows the young woman of the film’s title (played by Kat de Lieva) who had a tragic home life that she hopes to turn around once beginning university. With a great roommate, the future looks bright until the awkward Eva goes to her first campus party. She dresses up – cute as a button – and catches the eye of the handsome rich guys, with sparks seeming to fly. She hooks up with the handsomest of the group, who invites her to an isolated family cabin where she discovers that this exciting new romance is in fact a plan hatched by violent sadists; this guy and his friends genuinely hate women, and it is revealed that they lured Eva there to prove how gullible and stupid women are. They beat her to a pulp, leaving her for dead, and what follows from there is an unravelling list of gendered harassment and violence that culminates in her death at the hands of a serial killer based on the still-unidentified, real-life murderer responsible for Canada’s notorious ‘Highway of Tears’ killings. It’s only when Kat comes back as an avenging spirit – focused not just on avenging what happened to her, but protecting and seeking vengeance for all women – that Evangeline flourishes as a powerful rape-revenge film, using and reimagining the key ingredients to speak to real-life horrors.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas: Evangeline is such an intriguing film in terms of how strategically you map rape as part of a broader ecosystem (for want of a better term) of gendered violence. I revisited the film again recently and I had it in my head that she was raped much earlier in the film than I remember, and I was so impressed by how much nuance you have in there regarding the different ‘shapes’ gendered violence and abuse can take. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!
Karen Lam: In so many rape-revenge films, the rape seems to be the film’s centrepiece – as if it is the most enticing thing about the film, and I actively chose to make the rape scene a catalyst for her transformation. To me, it was about revenge more than the rape, which is an act of violence and domination for me. The challenge was always about de-sexualizing the act and make it much more about attempted dominance. Where I put the camera, what images I showed, her reactions versus his, were vital to my process. I wouldn’t film a rape scene for the sake of it, unless I felt like I had something to bring to the discussion.
There’s obviously a strong relationship between Doll Parts and what you do in Evangeline, but it is expanded and goes in a really interesting new direction. Leaping off from this point, can you tell me about the real-life horror story that inspired the earlier short and how you creatively ‘processed’ that into the context of a supernatural horror film? How would you describe the relationship between Doll Parts and Evangeline?
Doll Parts was a pivotal film for me: I had just finished my first feature film, Stained (2010), and after a rather brutal reception, I needed to find out if I even wanted to continue on as a filmmaker. A distributor told me that I was incapable of filming sexual violence, based on what he saw in my feature, and if I couldn’t ‘go there’ then I had no business being in the industry. I remember that meeting and feeling like I had been kicked in the stomach.
The genesis of the short film came when I was in Hong Kong, visiting my grandmother for the last time before she passed. She didn’t recognise me at that point in her illness, but spent every night arguing with the demons in her head. I think I felt the veil between our worlds lift at that time, although I don’t know if I knew it at the time. I came up with the broken doll image in Hong Kong and the storyline fell into place.
When it came to adapting Doll Parts into the feature film, Evangeline, I did a lot more research. The Highway of Tears is a northern highway in my province of British Columbia where many young women have gone missing from hitchhiking over decades. And there was the serial killer Robert Pickton, who was also preying on young female sex workers in Vancouver, and it affected our Aboriginal community extensively. The idea of their ghosts and spirits haunting our forests where I assume their bodies have been left, and building up a mythology of these restless spirits is an amalgam of First Nations and Japanese mythology. Our northern communities also housed Japanese families during the internment of World War II, so it seemed to be a natural and organic fit between the two.
Some of the most striking images in Evangeline are of the abstracted, internal ‘prison’ (I am not sure I am describing that properly, so feel free to clarify my words here!). How important was it to make tangible her inner life in terms of the film’s broader themes?
The internal prison is an idea I took from Asian mythology. I have no idea where I read it now, maybe it was an issue of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, but that purgatory would take place in a windowless, doorless cell. In my mind, I had pictured a mansion where rooms and rooms of these restless spirits would wait for their penance, hearing only the sounds of their own heartbeats and haunted by their own inner demons.
The room sometimes looked like the cabins that I read about internment camps, but eventually, we settled on a kind of cell block with a single chair. It was the perfect place to deal with the rape scene, where I wanted to symbolically show how we detach from the reality of our life, from violence and can go ‘inside’. The key was always that I wanted to be with our heroine, with Evangeline, wherever her mind went, regardless of what was happening in her so-called real world.
Evangeline is a film that definitely holds rape/gendered violence and revenge at its core, but it’s not what people might usually think of when they hear the often-disparaged term “rape-revenge film.” How do you see the film in relation to that (very explosive) label?
I did choose to do a rape-revenge film, and wanted to make sure that there was more to the genre than the conventional. To me, being a feminist horror filmmaker at my core, it’s using the conventional as a springboard. I wanted the film to be a reaction to the genre, to add another voice and perspective to a well-trodden trope.
I love how the film has a very strong horror core; what is it about the intersection of horror, gendered violence (not just rape, but all the horrors Evangeline endures) and revenge that gels so much for you as both a filmmaker and as a viewer?
Horror has such a narrow definition in cinematic terms, but in literature, genre fiction can take so many other forms. My favourite kind of film is one that doesn’t fit neatly into any box but one that transforms in the storytelling. I love the images and themes in horror filmmaking, I love how experimental I can be within the genre, but I also love when you can add elements that aren’t strictly horror. We can discuss big social ideas, world religion, history, and psychology and make everything fit, and hopefully, we can entice viewers to watch without dreading the message. Also, it’s the only genre where I can leave on an unhappy ending and it’s expected.
How much is too much? Is there any film in this category that you’ve seen and just thought ‘NO, this has gone too far’? Have you seen anything that would fall under a rape-revenge banner – even if to deconstruct the formula – since you made Evangeline that’s got under your skin, for better and/or for worse?
In researching Evangeline, I watched two films called (The) Dead Girl: [The Dead Girl, 2006] was made by a female filmmaker [Karen Moncrieff] and was about a murdered young woman who was caught hitchhiking by a serial killer and told in a series of short stories from different perspectives. It was deeply humanistic and challenging. The other [Deadgirl, 2008] was made by two male filmmakers [Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel], about some young men who find a beautiful corpse in an abandoned hospital and proceed to rape the dead body. It had the opposite effect on me. These two films bookended my own version and I was inspired by one, and revolted by the other. I think I owe a debt to both.
Out of curiosity, have you had much reaction to the film from rape survivors? This is something I find personally fascinating because so many survivors have spoken to me about my book [Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study, 2nd edition 2021] since I first published it. I often wonder if filmmakers have the same experience.
I have actually had incredible feedback from women’s shelters and rape centres who showed Doll Parts and Evangeline to some of their members. I think it’s clear to those women that my intent was not about exploitation but about exploration, and taking on the story from the perspective of the victim. She isn’t the catalyst by which the male hero sets about on his journey, but it’s about surviving and fighting for herself. To me, there’s nothing more powerful than a story about a woman who is fighting for her own salvation, not just her family or loved ones. It’s important to show that women need to fight – not just to save the people they love – but for themselves.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas: Evangeline is such an intriguing film in terms of how strategically you map rape as part of a broader ecosystem (for want of a better term) of gendered violence. I revisited the film again recently and I had it in my head that she was raped much earlier in the film than I remember, and I was so impressed by how much nuance you have in there regarding the different ‘shapes’ gendered violence and abuse can take. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!
Karen Lam: In so many rape-revenge films, the rape seems to be the film’s centrepiece – as if it is the most enticing thing about the film, and I actively chose to make the rape scene a catalyst for her transformation. To me, it was about revenge more than the rape, which is an act of violence and domination for me. The challenge was always about de-sexualizing the act and make it much more about attempted dominance. Where I put the camera, what images I showed, her reactions versus his, were vital to my process. I wouldn’t film a rape scene for the sake of it, unless I felt like I had something to bring to the discussion.
There’s obviously a strong relationship between Doll Parts and what you do in Evangeline, but it is expanded and goes in a really interesting new direction. Leaping off from this point, can you tell me about the real-life horror story that inspired the earlier short and how you creatively ‘processed’ that into the context of a supernatural horror film? How would you describe the relationship between Doll Parts and Evangeline?
Doll Parts was a pivotal film for me: I had just finished my first feature film, Stained (2010), and after a rather brutal reception, I needed to find out if I even wanted to continue on as a filmmaker. A distributor told me that I was incapable of filming sexual violence, based on what he saw in my feature, and if I couldn’t ‘go there’ then I had no business being in the industry. I remember that meeting and feeling like I had been kicked in the stomach.
The genesis of the short film came when I was in Hong Kong, visiting my grandmother for the last time before she passed. She didn’t recognise me at that point in her illness, but spent every night arguing with the demons in her head. I think I felt the veil between our worlds lift at that time, although I don’t know if I knew it at the time. I came up with the broken doll image in Hong Kong and the storyline fell into place.
When it came to adapting Doll Parts into the feature film, Evangeline, I did a lot more research. The Highway of Tears is a northern highway in my province of British Columbia where many young women have gone missing from hitchhiking over decades. And there was the serial killer Robert Pickton, who was also preying on young female sex workers in Vancouver, and it affected our Aboriginal community extensively. The idea of their ghosts and spirits haunting our forests where I assume their bodies have been left, and building up a mythology of these restless spirits is an amalgam of First Nations and Japanese mythology. Our northern communities also housed Japanese families during the internment of World War II, so it seemed to be a natural and organic fit between the two.
Some of the most striking images in Evangeline are of the abstracted, internal ‘prison’ (I am not sure I am describing that properly, so feel free to clarify my words here!). How important was it to make tangible her inner life in terms of the film’s broader themes?
The internal prison is an idea I took from Asian mythology. I have no idea where I read it now, maybe it was an issue of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, but that purgatory would take place in a windowless, doorless cell. In my mind, I had pictured a mansion where rooms and rooms of these restless spirits would wait for their penance, hearing only the sounds of their own heartbeats and haunted by their own inner demons.
The room sometimes looked like the cabins that I read about internment camps, but eventually, we settled on a kind of cell block with a single chair. It was the perfect place to deal with the rape scene, where I wanted to symbolically show how we detach from the reality of our life, from violence and can go ‘inside’. The key was always that I wanted to be with our heroine, with Evangeline, wherever her mind went, regardless of what was happening in her so-called real world.
Evangeline is a film that definitely holds rape/gendered violence and revenge at its core, but it’s not what people might usually think of when they hear the often-disparaged term “rape-revenge film.” How do you see the film in relation to that (very explosive) label?
I did choose to do a rape-revenge film, and wanted to make sure that there was more to the genre than the conventional. To me, being a feminist horror filmmaker at my core, it’s using the conventional as a springboard. I wanted the film to be a reaction to the genre, to add another voice and perspective to a well-trodden trope.
I love how the film has a very strong horror core; what is it about the intersection of horror, gendered violence (not just rape, but all the horrors Evangeline endures) and revenge that gels so much for you as both a filmmaker and as a viewer?
Horror has such a narrow definition in cinematic terms, but in literature, genre fiction can take so many other forms. My favourite kind of film is one that doesn’t fit neatly into any box but one that transforms in the storytelling. I love the images and themes in horror filmmaking, I love how experimental I can be within the genre, but I also love when you can add elements that aren’t strictly horror. We can discuss big social ideas, world religion, history, and psychology and make everything fit, and hopefully, we can entice viewers to watch without dreading the message. Also, it’s the only genre where I can leave on an unhappy ending and it’s expected.
How much is too much? Is there any film in this category that you’ve seen and just thought ‘NO, this has gone too far’? Have you seen anything that would fall under a rape-revenge banner – even if to deconstruct the formula – since you made Evangeline that’s got under your skin, for better and/or for worse?
In researching Evangeline, I watched two films called (The) Dead Girl: [The Dead Girl, 2006] was made by a female filmmaker [Karen Moncrieff] and was about a murdered young woman who was caught hitchhiking by a serial killer and told in a series of short stories from different perspectives. It was deeply humanistic and challenging. The other [Deadgirl, 2008] was made by two male filmmakers [Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel], about some young men who find a beautiful corpse in an abandoned hospital and proceed to rape the dead body. It had the opposite effect on me. These two films bookended my own version and I was inspired by one, and revolted by the other. I think I owe a debt to both.
Out of curiosity, have you had much reaction to the film from rape survivors? This is something I find personally fascinating because so many survivors have spoken to me about my book [Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study, 2nd edition 2021] since I first published it. I often wonder if filmmakers have the same experience.
I have actually had incredible feedback from women’s shelters and rape centres who showed Doll Parts and Evangeline to some of their members. I think it’s clear to those women that my intent was not about exploitation but about exploration, and taking on the story from the perspective of the victim. She isn’t the catalyst by which the male hero sets about on his journey, but it’s about surviving and fighting for herself. To me, there’s nothing more powerful than a story about a woman who is fighting for her own salvation, not just her family or loved ones. It’s important to show that women need to fight – not just to save the people they love – but for themselves.
Rape-Revenge Film 2: An Interview With Peter Strickland On Katalin Varga (2009)
Director Peter Strickland
While Katalin Varga (2009) is not commonly discussed in terms of the rape-revenge film category, this approach sheds fascinating light on the debut feature film by internationally acclaimed auteur Peter Strickland (whose subsequent credits include 2012’s Berberian Sound Studio, 2014’s The Duke of Burgundy, 2018’s In Fabric and 2021’s Flux Gourmet). The film follows its eponymous protagonist (Hilda Péter) after she is thrown out of her home by Zsigmond (László Mátray) when he learns he is not the biological father of their child, Orbán (Norbert Tankó). As the film unfolds, it is revealed that Orbán was conceived as the result of a rape at the hands of Antal (Tibor Pálffy). The film follows Katalin as she travels towards Antal to confront him, with tragic consequences. Aside from its exquisite pastoral landscapes and low-key, even slow tone, Katalin Varga is marked by the absence of a rape scene; rather, the film’s climactic revelation takes place on a relatively quiet boat trip where Katalin verbally accounts the assault to Antal and his wife. Strickland’s thoughts on this approach to the material – and his reflections on rape-revenge more broadly – were discussed when I spoke to him while revising my 2011 book Rape-revenge Films: A Critical Study and included in the 2021 publication of the updated version. This is the first time the interview has been published in full.
Alexandra Heller–Nicholas: Considering the low-brow reputation of rape-revenge film, what made you decide to pursue a film that hinges on these two elements in a way so outside the usual cliches of the trope in Katalin Varga? I, of course, wouldn’t be the first to describe the film as a post rape-revenge film (or even an anti-rape-revenge film); I know you are enormously film literate in terms of both art and trash cinema – how did you creatively process the presence of rape-revenge (or even the spectre of rape-revenge is a better way to phrase it) from development through to the final product?
Peter Strickland: I was always attracted to the idea of taking genres regardless of their merit in the critical canon and seeing if it’s possible to go somewhere different with it. With Katalin Varga and rape-revenge, it’s more a case of changing the balance of emphasis, so we are focusing less on the rape and revenge and more on other things that are not so foregrounded in some of those films. In a way, Katalin Varga mostly exists between the ‘rape’ and ‘revenge’, but it’s still very much a rape-revenge film. I was much more interested in the revenge side of things, specifically the lead-up to the act when you’re dealing with that impotent rage. For me, what really defines the atmosphere of the film is impotent rage and that feeling of knowing you’re on your own when it comes to dealing with trauma and pursuing justice. The music by Steven Stapleton and Geoff Cox (who co-wrote Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Earwig (2021)) was also a big part of the sense of foreboding and the overall cloud that hangs over the film. I got permission to use it very early on, so I could write the script to it.
The scene on the boat is really such a powerful scene not only on its own merits (it’s beautifully shot), but in terms of it being so thoroughly unique in how this sort of revelation is usually delivered in the more orthodox terrain of quote-unquote ‘rape-revenge’ film, I am fascinated in hearing your thoughts on why precisely that information was delivered in that way?
I was trying to see if by withholding visual information, the audience might compensate more in their heads. Paradoxically, we all know that words can sometimes have more impact than images. I remember a woman I was staying with in Sarajevo unexpectedly telling me about the siege back in 2003. I wanted to record her talking about local recipes and we misunderstood each other. It would’ve felt insensitive to ask about the siege, but maybe she assumed that was what most Western tourists wanted to know. Initially, I didn’t understand why she was getting so distressed over a recipe, but then it dawned on me that she was recounting her experiences over those horrors. I didn’t understand anything, but hearing the cracks in her voice and seeing her face affected me far more than the images of brutality on the news back in the 90s.
When we shot the film in 2006, to feature a talking head was one of the most passé crimes against cinema, which made me want to be confrontational with it. To trap the audience with that kind of eye contact and not let them go. The crew could be quite rebellious due to their low fees and had no hesitation in telling me if something was rubbish. I remember some of the crew on the neighbouring boat complaining how boring the scene was, which put Hilda off. She was very sensitive to that kind of criticism and believed that what she was doing was boring. I had to really coax her into doing it and she managed to go into herself and ignore everyone and everything around her. We spent so long arguing that by the time we got around to filming, it started to rain midway through the take, which looked ridiculous (in a bad way) and unrealistic. I was about to call ‘cut’, especially as we were running low on film rolls, only I could see Hilda was going even further into this reverie of hers. It almost looked as if she was in a trance and the best thing I could do was to stay out of her way. Not calling ‘cut’ was the best decision I made on that film and the scene felt very powerful even though we had to dub it a year later after we lost the sound. When I wrote it, someone suggested I use flashbacks to the attack within that lake scene, but that would’ve undermined everything I wanted to convey.
How important was it that Katalin’s journey ended the way it did?
The injustice was vital to the story, as that is a reality all too often. Maybe it’s cathartic for some people to see a film that recognises injustice and the randomness of death. There was never any doubt that Katalin had to die and I was very much thinking along the lines of ballads and tragedies that employed that kind of inevitable trajectory. What’s strange for me is the power of it, as we were so desensitised to that scene given how exhausted we were by the end of the shoot, which is when we shot it and also that Hilda and Sebastian (who played the assailant) were friends, which somehow shielded me from its brutality.
Male violence and abuse (particularly paternal violence) really seems to bookend the film, starting with Katalin’s husband rejecting her and Orban and triggering her journey, and then the revelation about Antal and Orban’s paternity. Because Katalin is such a strong and central character (obviously – the film is named after her!), I’m fascinated to hear your thoughts about how so much of her life is dominated by men – not just her husband and Antal, but even Orban himself.
Sadly, it’s a universal truth that the vast majority of violence in the world comes from men. I don’t want to come across as a man-basher and I know that fact shouldn’t diminish the impact of female violence even if it’s much less common. The script was always set in a patriarchal culture even before I decided which country to shoot in. It should be emphasised that I wrote the script in English in some mythical, ‘nowhere’ land and once I found actors and locations, I tailored the writing to that place. I wasn’t making any comment on Romania specifically even though the film is set there. That kind of patriarchal community can be found everywhere. Even though I tend to write female protagonists, I’m very interested in masculine power and how that manifests itself in different types of behaviour. Women who grow up in those environments can also sometimes adopt those patterns of behaviour even without realising it and Katalin is probably an example of that even if it’s as a means of survival.
The seduction and murder of Gergely is such an interesting moment, and feels like both a recognition but also a subversion of the ‘woman rape avenger as seductress’ motif that is so typical of more orthodox grindhouse/horror/exploitation examples of the trope. Am I overthinking this?
You’re not overthinking it at all, as we’re almost giving the audience what they expect up until Gergely’s death. That is the classical narrative, where the victim picks her assailants off one by one. The counter-revenge that follows, however, is what was more interesting for me and is where the film takes the wrong turning. I was interested in the consequences of vigilante justice, as no matter how repellent Gergely is, the contagion of suffering will be transferred to his kids when they’ll be told that their father isn’t ever coming home again. I was interested in that link from ‘evil’ to innocence and that an assailant is probably someone’s son, sibling or father. It’s not my job to decide on what kind of justice Gergely or any other character in the film should face. All I can do is show the audience what is at stake for everyone and look beyond the acts of brutality.
We tend to discuss cinema still very much in terms of national cinemas, but the production history of Katalin Varga really challenges such easy discursive frameworks. How do you conceive these frameworks functioning – or perhaps not functioning – in terms of this movie? Is it a Romanian film? A British film? A European film? A transnational film? Or something that transcends all of this?
There was confusion as to the film’s nationality upon release. It could be British because of its writer/director and financing, Romanian because of its location (and co–financing) or Hungarian since it mostly stars ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania and is in the Hungarian language apart from three small scenes where Romanians speak in Romanian or when a Hungarian speaks Romanian to a Romanian. I’ve never really been that bothered about these things and always saw European culture as something much more all-embracing, especially now, in the face of Brexit. There are countless trans-national films if one thinks of Luis Buñuel or Jess Franco as just two examples. I haven’t given it a great deal of thought since the film came out. I’m half-British and half-Greek and never really agonised over my identity even though there are huge differences between those two cultures.
How much is too much? Is there any film in this category that you’ve seen and just thought NO, this has gone too far? Have you seen anything that would fall under a rape-revenge banner – even if to deconstruct the formula – since you made Katalin Varga that’s got under your skin, for better and/or for worse?
My limits differ in terms of what I can and can’t tolerate watching and can and can’t tolerate making. I actually haven’t seen that much in the genre, but rightly or wrongly, I’m a great admirer of films such as Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 (1980) or Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (2000). There is this very intense, caustic energy in those films that is very unique. Limits are very difficult to quantify, as a lot depends on the intentions of filmmakers, which vary widely. I do have a problem with filmmakers that want to titillate an audience with a rape scene, but even with that in mind, films such as Shaun Costello’s Waterpower (1976) are so deranged that you somehow get dragged into its nightmare logic even though you know it was probably made to get people off, which actually makes it even more nightmarish. There is always that very grey area between any given film placing the audience in a nightmare or fantasy and that line is impossible to delineate given that it’s different with each viewer. I personally have no interest in titillating an audience with sexual violence. Titillation in film is fine, but only within the boundaries of consenting adults. The problem is that we as filmmakers don’t get to control how audiences process and use our images or words or sounds even if we’re trying to be honourable and show sexual violence in a responsible manner.
Alexandra Heller–Nicholas: Considering the low-brow reputation of rape-revenge film, what made you decide to pursue a film that hinges on these two elements in a way so outside the usual cliches of the trope in Katalin Varga? I, of course, wouldn’t be the first to describe the film as a post rape-revenge film (or even an anti-rape-revenge film); I know you are enormously film literate in terms of both art and trash cinema – how did you creatively process the presence of rape-revenge (or even the spectre of rape-revenge is a better way to phrase it) from development through to the final product?
Peter Strickland: I was always attracted to the idea of taking genres regardless of their merit in the critical canon and seeing if it’s possible to go somewhere different with it. With Katalin Varga and rape-revenge, it’s more a case of changing the balance of emphasis, so we are focusing less on the rape and revenge and more on other things that are not so foregrounded in some of those films. In a way, Katalin Varga mostly exists between the ‘rape’ and ‘revenge’, but it’s still very much a rape-revenge film. I was much more interested in the revenge side of things, specifically the lead-up to the act when you’re dealing with that impotent rage. For me, what really defines the atmosphere of the film is impotent rage and that feeling of knowing you’re on your own when it comes to dealing with trauma and pursuing justice. The music by Steven Stapleton and Geoff Cox (who co-wrote Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Earwig (2021)) was also a big part of the sense of foreboding and the overall cloud that hangs over the film. I got permission to use it very early on, so I could write the script to it.
The scene on the boat is really such a powerful scene not only on its own merits (it’s beautifully shot), but in terms of it being so thoroughly unique in how this sort of revelation is usually delivered in the more orthodox terrain of quote-unquote ‘rape-revenge’ film, I am fascinated in hearing your thoughts on why precisely that information was delivered in that way?
I was trying to see if by withholding visual information, the audience might compensate more in their heads. Paradoxically, we all know that words can sometimes have more impact than images. I remember a woman I was staying with in Sarajevo unexpectedly telling me about the siege back in 2003. I wanted to record her talking about local recipes and we misunderstood each other. It would’ve felt insensitive to ask about the siege, but maybe she assumed that was what most Western tourists wanted to know. Initially, I didn’t understand why she was getting so distressed over a recipe, but then it dawned on me that she was recounting her experiences over those horrors. I didn’t understand anything, but hearing the cracks in her voice and seeing her face affected me far more than the images of brutality on the news back in the 90s.
When we shot the film in 2006, to feature a talking head was one of the most passé crimes against cinema, which made me want to be confrontational with it. To trap the audience with that kind of eye contact and not let them go. The crew could be quite rebellious due to their low fees and had no hesitation in telling me if something was rubbish. I remember some of the crew on the neighbouring boat complaining how boring the scene was, which put Hilda off. She was very sensitive to that kind of criticism and believed that what she was doing was boring. I had to really coax her into doing it and she managed to go into herself and ignore everyone and everything around her. We spent so long arguing that by the time we got around to filming, it started to rain midway through the take, which looked ridiculous (in a bad way) and unrealistic. I was about to call ‘cut’, especially as we were running low on film rolls, only I could see Hilda was going even further into this reverie of hers. It almost looked as if she was in a trance and the best thing I could do was to stay out of her way. Not calling ‘cut’ was the best decision I made on that film and the scene felt very powerful even though we had to dub it a year later after we lost the sound. When I wrote it, someone suggested I use flashbacks to the attack within that lake scene, but that would’ve undermined everything I wanted to convey.
How important was it that Katalin’s journey ended the way it did?
The injustice was vital to the story, as that is a reality all too often. Maybe it’s cathartic for some people to see a film that recognises injustice and the randomness of death. There was never any doubt that Katalin had to die and I was very much thinking along the lines of ballads and tragedies that employed that kind of inevitable trajectory. What’s strange for me is the power of it, as we were so desensitised to that scene given how exhausted we were by the end of the shoot, which is when we shot it and also that Hilda and Sebastian (who played the assailant) were friends, which somehow shielded me from its brutality.
Male violence and abuse (particularly paternal violence) really seems to bookend the film, starting with Katalin’s husband rejecting her and Orban and triggering her journey, and then the revelation about Antal and Orban’s paternity. Because Katalin is such a strong and central character (obviously – the film is named after her!), I’m fascinated to hear your thoughts about how so much of her life is dominated by men – not just her husband and Antal, but even Orban himself.
Sadly, it’s a universal truth that the vast majority of violence in the world comes from men. I don’t want to come across as a man-basher and I know that fact shouldn’t diminish the impact of female violence even if it’s much less common. The script was always set in a patriarchal culture even before I decided which country to shoot in. It should be emphasised that I wrote the script in English in some mythical, ‘nowhere’ land and once I found actors and locations, I tailored the writing to that place. I wasn’t making any comment on Romania specifically even though the film is set there. That kind of patriarchal community can be found everywhere. Even though I tend to write female protagonists, I’m very interested in masculine power and how that manifests itself in different types of behaviour. Women who grow up in those environments can also sometimes adopt those patterns of behaviour even without realising it and Katalin is probably an example of that even if it’s as a means of survival.
The seduction and murder of Gergely is such an interesting moment, and feels like both a recognition but also a subversion of the ‘woman rape avenger as seductress’ motif that is so typical of more orthodox grindhouse/horror/exploitation examples of the trope. Am I overthinking this?
You’re not overthinking it at all, as we’re almost giving the audience what they expect up until Gergely’s death. That is the classical narrative, where the victim picks her assailants off one by one. The counter-revenge that follows, however, is what was more interesting for me and is where the film takes the wrong turning. I was interested in the consequences of vigilante justice, as no matter how repellent Gergely is, the contagion of suffering will be transferred to his kids when they’ll be told that their father isn’t ever coming home again. I was interested in that link from ‘evil’ to innocence and that an assailant is probably someone’s son, sibling or father. It’s not my job to decide on what kind of justice Gergely or any other character in the film should face. All I can do is show the audience what is at stake for everyone and look beyond the acts of brutality.
We tend to discuss cinema still very much in terms of national cinemas, but the production history of Katalin Varga really challenges such easy discursive frameworks. How do you conceive these frameworks functioning – or perhaps not functioning – in terms of this movie? Is it a Romanian film? A British film? A European film? A transnational film? Or something that transcends all of this?
There was confusion as to the film’s nationality upon release. It could be British because of its writer/director and financing, Romanian because of its location (and co–financing) or Hungarian since it mostly stars ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania and is in the Hungarian language apart from three small scenes where Romanians speak in Romanian or when a Hungarian speaks Romanian to a Romanian. I’ve never really been that bothered about these things and always saw European culture as something much more all-embracing, especially now, in the face of Brexit. There are countless trans-national films if one thinks of Luis Buñuel or Jess Franco as just two examples. I haven’t given it a great deal of thought since the film came out. I’m half-British and half-Greek and never really agonised over my identity even though there are huge differences between those two cultures.
How much is too much? Is there any film in this category that you’ve seen and just thought NO, this has gone too far? Have you seen anything that would fall under a rape-revenge banner – even if to deconstruct the formula – since you made Katalin Varga that’s got under your skin, for better and/or for worse?
My limits differ in terms of what I can and can’t tolerate watching and can and can’t tolerate making. I actually haven’t seen that much in the genre, but rightly or wrongly, I’m a great admirer of films such as Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 (1980) or Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (2000). There is this very intense, caustic energy in those films that is very unique. Limits are very difficult to quantify, as a lot depends on the intentions of filmmakers, which vary widely. I do have a problem with filmmakers that want to titillate an audience with a rape scene, but even with that in mind, films such as Shaun Costello’s Waterpower (1976) are so deranged that you somehow get dragged into its nightmare logic even though you know it was probably made to get people off, which actually makes it even more nightmarish. There is always that very grey area between any given film placing the audience in a nightmare or fantasy and that line is impossible to delineate given that it’s different with each viewer. I personally have no interest in titillating an audience with sexual violence. Titillation in film is fine, but only within the boundaries of consenting adults. The problem is that we as filmmakers don’t get to control how audiences process and use our images or words or sounds even if we’re trying to be honourable and show sexual violence in a responsible manner.
Rape-Revenge Film 3: An Interview With Sam Ashurst On A Little More Flesh (2020)
Director Sam Ashurst
The very fact of including Sam Ashurst’s outrageous A Little More Flesh (2020) in an article about rape-revenge films contains a spoiler of sorts; in large part, the vengeance in question provides the deeply satisfying yet unequivocally perverse twist in the tail of this very dark horror comedy. Assuming the reader has seen it, then (it is streaming on TromaNow for those unfortunate enough to have missed it), what follows is a deep dive into the film with Ashurst who helps unpack its very funny, deeply metatextual and ideologically not–shy–at–all examination of sexual violence, harassment and discrimination.
The setup is as simple as it is effective; the film’s main character is a filmmaker called Stanley Durall (James Swanton on camera, with Ashurst providing Stanley’s voice uncredited) who we almost solely hear off-camera as he records an audio commentary to accompany a home entertainment release of his controversial first film, God’s Lonely Woman. We learn early on the reason for this controversy; the two women who appeared in the film – Candice Embers (Hazel Townsend) and the star of God’s Lonely Woman, Isabella Dotterson (Elf Lyons, who co-produced the film with Ashurst) – would die by suicide, clearly as a result of horrendous sexual harassment and abuse. In both Candice and Isabella’s case, this culminates in rape; statutory rape in the case of 14-year-old Candice who Stanley seems to disgracefully interpret with shocking casualness as being in a consensual sexual relationship with the film’s adult cinematographer, and in the case of Isabella, a gang–rape at the hands of two dangerous non-professional actors Stanley hired for the film and explicitly instructed to assault Isabella for the film’s climactic scene.
As a character study, Stanley is a masterful demonstration of someone being given enough rope to hang themselves. As a horror-comedy, A Little More Flesh has the far-too-rare ability to be both horrific and very, very funny, albeit in a deeply twisted sense that contains perhaps surprising ideological potency. I spoke to Sam about the film when I was updating my 2011 book Rape-revenge Films: A Critical Study (McFarland), which was published in 2021 – below is my interview with Sam, reproduced in full for the first time.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas:#MeToo and the ‘Weinstein climate’ feel like they play a significant role here in the topicality of the film, without ever becoming preachy or didactic. Was this a conscious thing to tap into, or was it really more of a ‘soaking up the zeitgeist’ vibe?
Sam Ashurst: The original idea came from working around technical limitations. The film was going to be self–funded, on a very tiny budget, so the plan was to shoot it and edit myself, so I could pay the actors and feed them. But I knew I couldn’t do the sound. If I was going to make a film with just me as the crew, I couldn’t hold a camera and a boom microphone at the same time.
That’s where the concept of delivering a narrative through an audio commentary came from, something I could do in a booth later on. Once I had that idea, the thought of using the driving force of a commentary – to analyse past choices and behaviours – as a weapon against the person delivering the commentary felt like a strong starting point. My character would revisit an old film, and reveal something about himself.
I also wanted the film to have a The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) feel, believe it or not, and I’ve always loved the way Tobe Hooper used real news stories to inspire the feel of that film. So, it was very much a conscious decision, I was looking to the news for inspiration in the same way he did.
Weinstein was in the news, and my mum – who was an actress and model in the 60s and 70s – had told me about similar experiences she’d had with agents. So there was a personal connection there. She’d also been spiked with LSD in the 60s, so that was a direct inspiration.
The 70s are seen as a different time, and they were – a lot of this kind of stuff was a lot more open, you had Jodorowsky talking about raping his actress for real in El Topo. Whether he did or not is disputed – he’s said he made the comments to shock the interviewer, but the point is, women were so objectified he felt safe to say that.
All of this was swirling in my mind when I decided to create the most monstrous director of all time – I’ve described him as the ultimate movie monster – who would revisit a 70s film, reveal his dark side with no remorse, and get punished, like the people who are still being exposed today.
That’s when Japanese horror influences started creeping in – this idea that people get punished for past transgressions – and I arrived at the decision to have the film haunted by the people he’d hurt. He wouldn’t see them, but the audience would (or would they? There are hidden ghosts no-one’s spotted yet). So, films like Ringu / Ring (1998) and Kairo / Pulse (2001) are really obvious influences.
Ghosts haunting the film would allow me to have really unique jump scares. Usually, with a jump scare, the music and framing let you know one’s coming. I wanted my audience to feel tension throughout the film – like a jump could come at any time. It’s part of the aim of the experience of A Little More Flesh, to make the audience feel as tense as if they were in the actual presence of this malignant man. If you were in a room with him, you wouldn’t be able to relax, I wanted the audience to feel that.
The setup is as simple as it is effective; the film’s main character is a filmmaker called Stanley Durall (James Swanton on camera, with Ashurst providing Stanley’s voice uncredited) who we almost solely hear off-camera as he records an audio commentary to accompany a home entertainment release of his controversial first film, God’s Lonely Woman. We learn early on the reason for this controversy; the two women who appeared in the film – Candice Embers (Hazel Townsend) and the star of God’s Lonely Woman, Isabella Dotterson (Elf Lyons, who co-produced the film with Ashurst) – would die by suicide, clearly as a result of horrendous sexual harassment and abuse. In both Candice and Isabella’s case, this culminates in rape; statutory rape in the case of 14-year-old Candice who Stanley seems to disgracefully interpret with shocking casualness as being in a consensual sexual relationship with the film’s adult cinematographer, and in the case of Isabella, a gang–rape at the hands of two dangerous non-professional actors Stanley hired for the film and explicitly instructed to assault Isabella for the film’s climactic scene.
As a character study, Stanley is a masterful demonstration of someone being given enough rope to hang themselves. As a horror-comedy, A Little More Flesh has the far-too-rare ability to be both horrific and very, very funny, albeit in a deeply twisted sense that contains perhaps surprising ideological potency. I spoke to Sam about the film when I was updating my 2011 book Rape-revenge Films: A Critical Study (McFarland), which was published in 2021 – below is my interview with Sam, reproduced in full for the first time.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas:#MeToo and the ‘Weinstein climate’ feel like they play a significant role here in the topicality of the film, without ever becoming preachy or didactic. Was this a conscious thing to tap into, or was it really more of a ‘soaking up the zeitgeist’ vibe?
Sam Ashurst: The original idea came from working around technical limitations. The film was going to be self–funded, on a very tiny budget, so the plan was to shoot it and edit myself, so I could pay the actors and feed them. But I knew I couldn’t do the sound. If I was going to make a film with just me as the crew, I couldn’t hold a camera and a boom microphone at the same time.
That’s where the concept of delivering a narrative through an audio commentary came from, something I could do in a booth later on. Once I had that idea, the thought of using the driving force of a commentary – to analyse past choices and behaviours – as a weapon against the person delivering the commentary felt like a strong starting point. My character would revisit an old film, and reveal something about himself.
I also wanted the film to have a The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) feel, believe it or not, and I’ve always loved the way Tobe Hooper used real news stories to inspire the feel of that film. So, it was very much a conscious decision, I was looking to the news for inspiration in the same way he did.
Weinstein was in the news, and my mum – who was an actress and model in the 60s and 70s – had told me about similar experiences she’d had with agents. So there was a personal connection there. She’d also been spiked with LSD in the 60s, so that was a direct inspiration.
The 70s are seen as a different time, and they were – a lot of this kind of stuff was a lot more open, you had Jodorowsky talking about raping his actress for real in El Topo. Whether he did or not is disputed – he’s said he made the comments to shock the interviewer, but the point is, women were so objectified he felt safe to say that.
All of this was swirling in my mind when I decided to create the most monstrous director of all time – I’ve described him as the ultimate movie monster – who would revisit a 70s film, reveal his dark side with no remorse, and get punished, like the people who are still being exposed today.
That’s when Japanese horror influences started creeping in – this idea that people get punished for past transgressions – and I arrived at the decision to have the film haunted by the people he’d hurt. He wouldn’t see them, but the audience would (or would they? There are hidden ghosts no-one’s spotted yet). So, films like Ringu / Ring (1998) and Kairo / Pulse (2001) are really obvious influences.
Ghosts haunting the film would allow me to have really unique jump scares. Usually, with a jump scare, the music and framing let you know one’s coming. I wanted my audience to feel tension throughout the film – like a jump could come at any time. It’s part of the aim of the experience of A Little More Flesh, to make the audience feel as tense as if they were in the actual presence of this malignant man. If you were in a room with him, you wouldn’t be able to relax, I wanted the audience to feel that.
Figuring the female voice: A Little More Flesh (2020)
The flip side to this is the question of female agency and voice, of which in literal terms there is at first seemingly very little in the film, but the supernatural premise allows enormous creative freedom with which to turn that on its head. When I first saw it I was reminded of the mute rape ‘avengestress’ figure that permeates rape-revenge history – from Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973) to Ms. 45 (1981) and beyond – and in a way it felt to me that you were really pushing this ideas to the limit by having her voice effectively drowned out by an extremely over-chatty man (he's so perfectly unbearable; again, well done!). So there’s a few things here I guess – agency and gender, the supernatural framework, and voice, and how all of these relate to the genuinely quite tragic and shocking story we hear through the voice of the villain himself.
So, there were two versions of this script. The first version was way too dark, Stanley Durall was just so horrendous from the start, there was no real journey – it was too much. And these people start out charming, before revealing their depravity, the first version really missed that key truth.
But, that draft did have a detail that stayed with me when I created Isabella’s backstory – her grandmother was a silent film actress and Isabella’s mum was conceived at a ‘legendary fuck-party’ and her dad could have been anyone from Howard Hughes to ‘Fatty Arbuckle's favourite Coke bottle’. The point was to underline that this stuff has always been a part of Hollywood, it’s embedded. The lines got cut, but I think both Elf and I saw Isabella as having that silent star energy, if that makes sense.
And there’s a deeper level to her silence. Obviously, practically, we weren’t going to hear her speak, but in the fake film itself, there are moments when she refuses to say her lines – she uses silence as a weapon, but it doesn’t go well for her, it’s not a useful tool. Only when she speaks, and takes over the narrative (literally, by supernaturally forcing Stanley out of the commentary booth, and into the silence of the film) can she use her power against this overbearing bully. Her power is in her voice, not in her silence.
That was one of the first ideas I had, actually – that the director would get pushed into the film and she would take over the commentary, to tell her own story – as so many people are doing now. It was in my original pitch to Elf, and in that pitch I talked about going into a lengthy torture sequence, with her doing the commentary over it, and she said ‘Nah, I just want to cut his cock off’. And I said: ‘Yes! Perfect!’ So one of the greatest – some might say the greatest – ideas in A Little More Flesh came from Elf.
You have in my mind created the perfect #MeToo villain here; something about the structure of the film where he is literally the dominant voice seems to aggressively step beyond ‘softer’ ways men have dominated filmmaking (‘the male gaze’, etc.) that works so well in that he is the one who lets his own words bury him. Can you tell me a little about the novel commentary structure, what inspired you, and also about the character himself?
To create Stanley Durall, I was inspired by a lot of different things. His name is a play on a combination of Stanley Kubrick and Shelley Duvall. Not that I’m saying Kubrick was as bad as my character, I love Kubrick, but that legendarily difficult dynamic between Kubrick and Duvall when they made The Shining (1980) was essential for A Little More Flesh. I was pushing that to its furthest extreme, which is why there’s the joke in there about Durall influencing Kubrick, and there’s a specific shot that I lifted from The Shining that Kubrick technically could have lifted from God’s Lonely Woman, which premiered before The Shining in the universe of the film. One of the fake producers is called ‘Torrance Towns’, there’s a couple of references to The Shining.
Bizarrely (and I had no idea about this) the first time I met Elf’s mum during the pre–production phase of the film, I was a bit nervous, because I’m from a working-class background, and Elf’s family live in a very fancy house, but then she told me that she was at the premiere of The Shining, because her best friend had created the photo at the end of the film, and she’d also seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at the cinema, and we connected on that level…
But, anyway, after the character had a name, I started doing research into these types of people. For a while, my YouTube recommendations were an absolute cess-pit. I was watching all of these red pill movement videos, manosphere stuff, and stuff about how to pick up women, reading books by these kinds of people, all to try to get into the head of someone who absolutely dehumanises women, hates them, and objectifies them. I also watched some interviews with directors of the period, to get some of the turns of phrase you hear in the film.
In terms of the actual construction of the commentary, we filmed the fake movie first, God’s Lonely Woman. We had an outline, detailing the men Isabella would encounter on her journey after she rejects Temptation, and what they’d put her through, but we improvised fake dialogue on the day (which we knew would never be heard). Then I edited as we went along, and I wrote the commentary script based on what we had.
Maybe the most difficult element of constructing Stanley – aside from recording the commentary itself, that was very, very hard, memorizing the script, getting exact timings right and still making it feel like it was being made–up as he went along, was very tough – but more difficult than that was making him feel relatively likeable at the start, or at least compelling – someone you could almost feel sorry for in those early stages, because he’s so pathetic, before he fully reveals himself – to give him something resembling an arc, so the audience would go on the journey.
Getting that balance right was such a challenge, keeping his monstrous character consistent. He was based on people with narcissistic personality disorder, who can be charming to begin with, but they cannot accept that they are / were wrong, they have no empathy, and get off on cruelty: and these things can be their ultimate undoing, especially in the current climate of consequences.
So, there were two versions of this script. The first version was way too dark, Stanley Durall was just so horrendous from the start, there was no real journey – it was too much. And these people start out charming, before revealing their depravity, the first version really missed that key truth.
But, that draft did have a detail that stayed with me when I created Isabella’s backstory – her grandmother was a silent film actress and Isabella’s mum was conceived at a ‘legendary fuck-party’ and her dad could have been anyone from Howard Hughes to ‘Fatty Arbuckle's favourite Coke bottle’. The point was to underline that this stuff has always been a part of Hollywood, it’s embedded. The lines got cut, but I think both Elf and I saw Isabella as having that silent star energy, if that makes sense.
And there’s a deeper level to her silence. Obviously, practically, we weren’t going to hear her speak, but in the fake film itself, there are moments when she refuses to say her lines – she uses silence as a weapon, but it doesn’t go well for her, it’s not a useful tool. Only when she speaks, and takes over the narrative (literally, by supernaturally forcing Stanley out of the commentary booth, and into the silence of the film) can she use her power against this overbearing bully. Her power is in her voice, not in her silence.
That was one of the first ideas I had, actually – that the director would get pushed into the film and she would take over the commentary, to tell her own story – as so many people are doing now. It was in my original pitch to Elf, and in that pitch I talked about going into a lengthy torture sequence, with her doing the commentary over it, and she said ‘Nah, I just want to cut his cock off’. And I said: ‘Yes! Perfect!’ So one of the greatest – some might say the greatest – ideas in A Little More Flesh came from Elf.
You have in my mind created the perfect #MeToo villain here; something about the structure of the film where he is literally the dominant voice seems to aggressively step beyond ‘softer’ ways men have dominated filmmaking (‘the male gaze’, etc.) that works so well in that he is the one who lets his own words bury him. Can you tell me a little about the novel commentary structure, what inspired you, and also about the character himself?
To create Stanley Durall, I was inspired by a lot of different things. His name is a play on a combination of Stanley Kubrick and Shelley Duvall. Not that I’m saying Kubrick was as bad as my character, I love Kubrick, but that legendarily difficult dynamic between Kubrick and Duvall when they made The Shining (1980) was essential for A Little More Flesh. I was pushing that to its furthest extreme, which is why there’s the joke in there about Durall influencing Kubrick, and there’s a specific shot that I lifted from The Shining that Kubrick technically could have lifted from God’s Lonely Woman, which premiered before The Shining in the universe of the film. One of the fake producers is called ‘Torrance Towns’, there’s a couple of references to The Shining.
Bizarrely (and I had no idea about this) the first time I met Elf’s mum during the pre–production phase of the film, I was a bit nervous, because I’m from a working-class background, and Elf’s family live in a very fancy house, but then she told me that she was at the premiere of The Shining, because her best friend had created the photo at the end of the film, and she’d also seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at the cinema, and we connected on that level…
But, anyway, after the character had a name, I started doing research into these types of people. For a while, my YouTube recommendations were an absolute cess-pit. I was watching all of these red pill movement videos, manosphere stuff, and stuff about how to pick up women, reading books by these kinds of people, all to try to get into the head of someone who absolutely dehumanises women, hates them, and objectifies them. I also watched some interviews with directors of the period, to get some of the turns of phrase you hear in the film.
In terms of the actual construction of the commentary, we filmed the fake movie first, God’s Lonely Woman. We had an outline, detailing the men Isabella would encounter on her journey after she rejects Temptation, and what they’d put her through, but we improvised fake dialogue on the day (which we knew would never be heard). Then I edited as we went along, and I wrote the commentary script based on what we had.
Maybe the most difficult element of constructing Stanley – aside from recording the commentary itself, that was very, very hard, memorizing the script, getting exact timings right and still making it feel like it was being made–up as he went along, was very tough – but more difficult than that was making him feel relatively likeable at the start, or at least compelling – someone you could almost feel sorry for in those early stages, because he’s so pathetic, before he fully reveals himself – to give him something resembling an arc, so the audience would go on the journey.
Getting that balance right was such a challenge, keeping his monstrous character consistent. He was based on people with narcissistic personality disorder, who can be charming to begin with, but they cannot accept that they are / were wrong, they have no empathy, and get off on cruelty: and these things can be their ultimate undoing, especially in the current climate of consequences.
Reconfiguring the vendetta format: A Little More Flesh (2020)
A Little More Flesh clearly hinges on key acts of rape and revenge, but it is by no means a typical ‘rape-revenge’ film in how it is most broadly conceived. What are your thoughts on how the film relates to that broader category?
It’s not a typical rape-revenge film, but I do feel like it relates on a broader level. I really do believe that rape-revenge films can be a positive force for good. No right-minded person is pro-rape, obviously, but some people don’t think about it as much as they should. I wanted this film to be a weapon against some of my audience, and catharsis for the rest (I’m not gendering that split, by the way). For me, the most powerful rape-revenge films deliver extreme discomfort, to represent trauma.
Sometimes that’s through the rape scene itself; a contrast between cruel pleasure and extreme pain. But I wanted to do things a little differently. The only rape scene we show, neither person is getting pleasure, they’re both marginalised people who are upset during, and afterwards. Then, at the end, we cut before we really get into the much–hyped ‘final sequence’.
A Little More Flesh’s discomfort comes through the intended omnipresent jump-scare tension, like someone walking home alone at night, who feels that constant terror until they arrive at their front door – our movie’s ending is the metaphorical front door. Or the discomfort comes through a seemingly never-ending dance sequence, or a force-feeding scene that feels so real, or the constant stream of consciousness from Stanley, that you literally can’t escape.
And then the frequent mentions of ‘the final sequence’ that got God’s Lonely Woman banned – I wanted the audience to think ‘what could that possibly be? What are we going to see here?’ (and we’re told it’s half an hour long!). Then I wanted them to feel relief when it cuts, and we don’t see the actual rape. But then we do see something extreme, with the tables turned.
I wanted to build and build to a moment that would make most people experience extreme catharsis, and make some people groan in discomfort. It was so satisfying to sit in the audience at the world premiere and hear both of those reactions. It worked! I’m glad it worked when you watched it too.
I believe the two most important emotions in rape-revenge films are discomfort and catharsis. The more extreme one is, the more powerful the other can be. I wanted to play with that balance, through the filmmaking itself.
I find it really interesting that rape-revenge is considered a low genre, because I think it’s a feminist genre, one that can provide a voice for victims. It can also be a safe environment to process trauma. Yes, it’s depicting a harrowing crime for ‘entertainment’, but so much of cinema does the same.
The hope is that the vast majority of people watching the film feel the catharsis of seeing a brutal monster dispatched brutally. But those who don’t... well, they’ve had an experience too!
I don’t expect you to be my therapist here, but any ideas why I delighted so much in this ending? Is this something you’ve seen in screenings of the film – like, I was literally screaming with laughter. I don’t think I have ever enjoyed an act of vengeance so much.
Because of all the above, your personal reaction absolutely delights me. You don’t know what it means to read that you enjoyed the act of vengeance that much.
My theory on why you reacted that way: you’re an expert in the genre, and this film was made with those genre tropes in mind, embedded into every decision along the way – to subvert, but still deliver, under the surface. Both this and my first film are aimed at the conscious and subconscious minds of my audience, and some brains are more responsive than others!
Also, let’s face it, Elf’s idea that the target of the vengeance should be so symbolic of the crime is a significant part of the joyful reaction people have had. And Dan Martin’s unbelievably realistic special effects, Elf’s brilliant giddiness in the sequence, James Swanton’s agonised reactions... it all combined perfectly, I couldn’t be happier with it.
Tell me about the castration – was this always something that was going to be included?
I’ve talked a bit about this already, but some other facts (maybe not useful for the book, but may be of interest!): It took a long time to find the scissor prop, as I was determined we wouldn’t cut across the penis, but up it (for maximum audience discomfort / catharsis), and you’d be surprised by how difficult it is to find scissors long enough for the task!
We filmed the effect on the very last day of production, and it was in the back of my mind the whole shoot – if it went wrong, or if I didn’t capture it correctly, the whole film wouldn’t work. Luckily, it all came together. But it was my most intense day during filming, by far.
The big thing I guess I’ve averted thus far is really core to what I think makes the film work so well: comedy. It’s not a common approach to stories that incorporate rape and revenge to frame them in the context of a horror-comedy, but that is precisely what you do here, and very well indeed. This feels like quite a radical approach; how did this take shape in your mind from fruition to the end product? Were there other comedies or comic-toned films that either consciously or subconsciously inspired you to take this tonal approach to the subject matter, do you think?
My comedy past isn’t something I talk about loads, but I actually met Elf doing stand-up comedy, and Dane. We were all part of the same scene. Going into stand-up, I’d researched the laughter impulse, and discovered some people believe laughter originated as a fear response, as a noise that acted as a warning when confronted with shock or surprise. So I used to do a character who was a psychedelic serial killer, who did deadpan observational comedy based on his very specific, very violent experiences. The logic was, if I scared people in comedy clubs, they’d laugh – and it worked. I made it to the final of the Leicester Square Theatre New Comedian of the Year Awards with that character.
So that mixture of fear and comedy has always been there for me, and I also thought this project could use a bit of cognitive dissonance – people are laughing, but what are they laughing at?
It’s a spoonful of sugar – people are laughing, they’re having a good time, then the film gets darker and darker, and more and more extreme, but the jokes still come... how does that affect the audience psychologically? How complicit are they? Some people laugh at Stanley, some people laugh with him – which side will that land them on the discomfort / catharsis scale?
So the film was cast with comedy in mind, everyone in the film is a comedian – except for James, who plays Stanley in the fake film, and David Houston, who does experimental theatre and was Elf’s partner at the time. I approached Elf first, and asked her to star and produce, putting her in charge of casting, so she’d be as comfortable and in control as possible. I didn’t want her to feel peer pressure in this film at any point. I ultimately signed off on everyone, but I had no reason not to go with her first choices.
Elf and Hazel had met at the Philippe Gaulier Clown Workshop, so both of their physicalities were amazing. Dane had his own BBC3 series, and had been on Live at the Apollo, Rob tours an ‘Evil Dead meets Elvis Presley’ one–man musical, and Gabriel Thomson was a child star in the BBC sitcom My Family.
I always warn people that it isn’t a traditional horror-comedy, it’s more in-line with Chris Morris’ work, who is a huge inspiration for me. His Channel 4 series Jam is an incredible, incredible creation. I didn't want people walking into this thinking they were getting a typical British horror-comedy!
It’s not a typical rape-revenge film, but I do feel like it relates on a broader level. I really do believe that rape-revenge films can be a positive force for good. No right-minded person is pro-rape, obviously, but some people don’t think about it as much as they should. I wanted this film to be a weapon against some of my audience, and catharsis for the rest (I’m not gendering that split, by the way). For me, the most powerful rape-revenge films deliver extreme discomfort, to represent trauma.
Sometimes that’s through the rape scene itself; a contrast between cruel pleasure and extreme pain. But I wanted to do things a little differently. The only rape scene we show, neither person is getting pleasure, they’re both marginalised people who are upset during, and afterwards. Then, at the end, we cut before we really get into the much–hyped ‘final sequence’.
A Little More Flesh’s discomfort comes through the intended omnipresent jump-scare tension, like someone walking home alone at night, who feels that constant terror until they arrive at their front door – our movie’s ending is the metaphorical front door. Or the discomfort comes through a seemingly never-ending dance sequence, or a force-feeding scene that feels so real, or the constant stream of consciousness from Stanley, that you literally can’t escape.
And then the frequent mentions of ‘the final sequence’ that got God’s Lonely Woman banned – I wanted the audience to think ‘what could that possibly be? What are we going to see here?’ (and we’re told it’s half an hour long!). Then I wanted them to feel relief when it cuts, and we don’t see the actual rape. But then we do see something extreme, with the tables turned.
I wanted to build and build to a moment that would make most people experience extreme catharsis, and make some people groan in discomfort. It was so satisfying to sit in the audience at the world premiere and hear both of those reactions. It worked! I’m glad it worked when you watched it too.
I believe the two most important emotions in rape-revenge films are discomfort and catharsis. The more extreme one is, the more powerful the other can be. I wanted to play with that balance, through the filmmaking itself.
I find it really interesting that rape-revenge is considered a low genre, because I think it’s a feminist genre, one that can provide a voice for victims. It can also be a safe environment to process trauma. Yes, it’s depicting a harrowing crime for ‘entertainment’, but so much of cinema does the same.
The hope is that the vast majority of people watching the film feel the catharsis of seeing a brutal monster dispatched brutally. But those who don’t... well, they’ve had an experience too!
I don’t expect you to be my therapist here, but any ideas why I delighted so much in this ending? Is this something you’ve seen in screenings of the film – like, I was literally screaming with laughter. I don’t think I have ever enjoyed an act of vengeance so much.
Because of all the above, your personal reaction absolutely delights me. You don’t know what it means to read that you enjoyed the act of vengeance that much.
My theory on why you reacted that way: you’re an expert in the genre, and this film was made with those genre tropes in mind, embedded into every decision along the way – to subvert, but still deliver, under the surface. Both this and my first film are aimed at the conscious and subconscious minds of my audience, and some brains are more responsive than others!
Also, let’s face it, Elf’s idea that the target of the vengeance should be so symbolic of the crime is a significant part of the joyful reaction people have had. And Dan Martin’s unbelievably realistic special effects, Elf’s brilliant giddiness in the sequence, James Swanton’s agonised reactions... it all combined perfectly, I couldn’t be happier with it.
Tell me about the castration – was this always something that was going to be included?
I’ve talked a bit about this already, but some other facts (maybe not useful for the book, but may be of interest!): It took a long time to find the scissor prop, as I was determined we wouldn’t cut across the penis, but up it (for maximum audience discomfort / catharsis), and you’d be surprised by how difficult it is to find scissors long enough for the task!
We filmed the effect on the very last day of production, and it was in the back of my mind the whole shoot – if it went wrong, or if I didn’t capture it correctly, the whole film wouldn’t work. Luckily, it all came together. But it was my most intense day during filming, by far.
The big thing I guess I’ve averted thus far is really core to what I think makes the film work so well: comedy. It’s not a common approach to stories that incorporate rape and revenge to frame them in the context of a horror-comedy, but that is precisely what you do here, and very well indeed. This feels like quite a radical approach; how did this take shape in your mind from fruition to the end product? Were there other comedies or comic-toned films that either consciously or subconsciously inspired you to take this tonal approach to the subject matter, do you think?
My comedy past isn’t something I talk about loads, but I actually met Elf doing stand-up comedy, and Dane. We were all part of the same scene. Going into stand-up, I’d researched the laughter impulse, and discovered some people believe laughter originated as a fear response, as a noise that acted as a warning when confronted with shock or surprise. So I used to do a character who was a psychedelic serial killer, who did deadpan observational comedy based on his very specific, very violent experiences. The logic was, if I scared people in comedy clubs, they’d laugh – and it worked. I made it to the final of the Leicester Square Theatre New Comedian of the Year Awards with that character.
So that mixture of fear and comedy has always been there for me, and I also thought this project could use a bit of cognitive dissonance – people are laughing, but what are they laughing at?
It’s a spoonful of sugar – people are laughing, they’re having a good time, then the film gets darker and darker, and more and more extreme, but the jokes still come... how does that affect the audience psychologically? How complicit are they? Some people laugh at Stanley, some people laugh with him – which side will that land them on the discomfort / catharsis scale?
So the film was cast with comedy in mind, everyone in the film is a comedian – except for James, who plays Stanley in the fake film, and David Houston, who does experimental theatre and was Elf’s partner at the time. I approached Elf first, and asked her to star and produce, putting her in charge of casting, so she’d be as comfortable and in control as possible. I didn’t want her to feel peer pressure in this film at any point. I ultimately signed off on everyone, but I had no reason not to go with her first choices.
Elf and Hazel had met at the Philippe Gaulier Clown Workshop, so both of their physicalities were amazing. Dane had his own BBC3 series, and had been on Live at the Apollo, Rob tours an ‘Evil Dead meets Elvis Presley’ one–man musical, and Gabriel Thomson was a child star in the BBC sitcom My Family.
I always warn people that it isn’t a traditional horror-comedy, it’s more in-line with Chris Morris’ work, who is a huge inspiration for me. His Channel 4 series Jam is an incredible, incredible creation. I didn't want people walking into this thinking they were getting a typical British horror-comedy!