Man, Bad Horror

"Holy shit that sucked!"

"If I saw one more cut to flowing water I was going to lose my fucking mind."

We all laugh as we gather our bags and make our way out into the Sunday afternoon sunshine; that very specific disorientation of leaving a theater midday hits and I put on my sunglasses. The gang had gone to see Keeper, Oz Perkins' new endeavor and all of us hated it. We marvel and mock as we meander to our separate cars.

"Let's see something better next time, ya?"

I clamber into my friend's car and we start to chat about the movie before moving on to other topics.

"I am genuinely already forgetting it," he says "I think I'm done with him as a director."

A witch, a druid, hunted and killed by violent boys, kept in a state of lesser life for hundreds of years as they feed her the lifeforce of the women they court and sacrifice to fuel the immortality she offers them. On its face, I don't actually think this is a bad plot for a supernatural horror. It is detached enough from real world violence to attract a more mainstream (at least for horror) audience while having the space to explore the things men will do to women be it for benefit or simple, vile, selfish want. I do not think Oz Perkins considered any of this. It feels like he took the critique that Longlegs lost the plot towards the end, and rather than taking that to heart, decided to have the incredibly boring villain deliver a toneless, unconvincing monologue summing up the plot for 5 minutes. This movie was bad in the way that I do not even think it's worth a hate watch, it is simply a boring, poorly acted waste of your time.
(Side bar: for a movie ostensibly about a couple madly in love, there was less than no chemistry between the two main characters. I truly believed they absolutely hated each other based on the performance.)

Initially, I genuinely thought this was just a vapid, lazy movie. Well, actually, I still think that, but what I haven't been able to stop thinking about is why on earth you would choose this particular plot if the dynamic of intimate partner violence is of seemingly no consequence or interest to you. It was written so poorly, so inattentively to its own themes that I cannot believe this was a choice but a conditioning. Men are monsters and women are victims, and they shall be portrayed as such with slight retirbution granted to the woman who only gets the upper hand through supernatural means. A lot of horror is "Man Bad Horror", it takes this presupposition of power and violence, pairs it with the fictional helplessness of women and takes some money home for its efforts. Other horror is good horror with bad men, but it is not lost on me how few people seem to be able to tell the difference.

2024-25 was a big year for Silent Hill lovers and by extension, horror lovers. In just under a year the Silent Hill 2 remake and Silent Hill f were both released. I feel comfortable saying Silent Hill 2 is the most beloved installment in the franchise, hence it getting the first faithful remake of the lot (we can argue in the comments about Shattered Memories but that's not what I'm talking about right now). Silent Hill f, the net new addition to the roster follows Shimizu Hinako, a teenager in 1960s rural Japan as she navigates the franchise requirements of fog, monsters and personal trauma. It was the fastest selling installment of Silent Hill, nominated for several awards and overall well received. I don't feel that I need to explain that I think it is good, actually, to criticize things even when you love them but it truly took no time at all for a certain subset of cretins to start loudly wondering on the internet when Silent Hill had gone so "woke" as to have a female protagonist, which is funny because Silent Hill 3 already did and idiotic because their so called "favourite" game, Silent Hill 2 is explicitly about the trauma and violence men inflict on others, particularly women. The protagonist James searches for his wife, whom he murdered, while the town torments him with monsters of mutilated, sexualized female bodies wandering the streets in high heels. Heather a young woman severely traumatized by years of abuse seeks her mother in the fog. Game modders make a game mod to make Heather, this young woman who suffered severe sexual abuse at the hands of her father and brother, "hotter", because that makes the game better, don't you know. Silent Hill is not Man Bad horror, but so fucking many of the men who consume it are Bad Men. They hate women so much that the extreme, violent themes of the game don't even occur to them as abnormal. As a matter of fact, the story of sexual violence would be better if they thought the victim was sexier. I am tired.

Not long ago I learned that the Swedish name for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is actually Men Who Hate Women or Män som hatar kvinnor after someone on my train home from Montreal made the very bold choice to watch it on their laptop in public and I did a little refresher for myself on Wikipedia. I read the books a long time ago and have seen the movie but had no idea that Stieg Larsson was an avowed an anti-fascist, a member of a worker's unions and exposed many neonazis in Sweden in his time as a journalist. I genuinely enjoyed the books and cannot help but wonder what I missed out on in the translation. English publishers pushed so hard to edit and "beautify" the books that English translator Steven T. Murray demanded his name be removed and replaced with a pseudonym so as not to be associated to such a faithless translation of the original work. "Eighteen percent of women in Sweden have at one time been threatened by a man." This opening line of the first book is surely jarring, but as with poetry titles can form part of the work itself and as such, it is dampened by the English translation. You start the book wondering if the titular girl is one of those 18%. Not if 18% is all that's been reported, not how many men speak vile things only to other men, not about if maybe you, sometimes, hate women. The violence is allowed to be entertainment, allowed to be sensational and gruesome but it cannot be real world fact. It cannot be a statistic, or god forbid a woman you know. Surely, she's overexaggerating. Your friends would never do something like that. It's her boss, he wouldn't risk his career like that. The guy at the bar was just trying to compliment her.

I am tired.

I watched the video. The picture of the glovebox filled with stuffed animals and covered in blood is going to stay with me for the rest of my life. The next day, the Administration and DHS released the ICE agent's own footage, somehow believing it exonerated him when the only detail it added was hearing him call Renee Good a "fucking bitch" after shooting her three times in the head. Watching the full weight of a fascist propaganda machine come down on a dead woman whose last words were "I'm not mad at you" found and broke a new piece of me. The American news cycle has done this to countless Black Americans, men, women and children for decades. It's not new. It's the cycle of fascism, imperialism and white supremacy that many on the left have been shouting about for years, but I can't stop thinking about Renee Good because in our fiction, we believe women. We make men monsters and women victims in our stories time and time again, but when a woman is shot in the face for daring to care about her community, an entire government will call her a terrorist, a bad person who deserved what she had coming. We write stories of how women deserve justice, vengeance and more, but will elect and celebrate a vile man covering up a human trafficking ring, a man who openly resents and objectifies women. I have so many men in my life that I love, that I truly cannot imagine my life without but I am tired. I am tired of the horror of men, of the world, the violence of it all. I am tired of men who know they make good monsters and hate the women who point it out. I am so, so tired.

Thank you for being here, friends. I started writing about Keeper the day I saw it and as annoyed as I was, realised the movie itself actually offered very little to talk about. My small rant was relegated to the draft pile and has been sitting there since November. It took a while for all my thoughts to come together, but here they are. It can never really just be about a movie with me. Funnily enough, I actually scrapped the entire first draft and wrote this in one sitting. I am trying to be better about writing more and it turns out if I sit down to write, I uhhhh.....write. If you are horrified by recent news out of Minneapolis, Chicago and dozens of other American cities, you can donate, share information and have frank conversations with those around you. Community and care first, every time. I love you all. Drop your good horror recs below, or really any other media you love.