OUR SLASHERS, OURSELVES
Noah Berlatsky on 'Bodies Bodies Bodies' and the slasher fallacy of every man for himself
By Guest Writer NOAH BERLATSKY
Film: Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, 2022
Where to watch: In your girlfriend’s frenemies’ parents’ hurricane-ready mansion.
“Horrible in itself, disaster is sometimes a door back into paradise, the paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be, do the work we desire, and are each our sister's and brother's keeper.”
- Rebecca Solnit, 'A Paradise Built in Hell’
During the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, a soldier saw a man taking groceries from a store. On the rubble-strewn street, fires flaring around him, he bayoneted the looter.
Only it wasn’t a looter. The man had been invited by a grocer to take supplies from his store before it was consumed in the flames. A small businessman was trying to help his community, aware that the usual laws of commerce and self-interest had been suspended in the general conflagration. But the soldier, even with the city crumbling around him, knew his job was not altruism, but the protection of property, enforced on pain of execution.
Rebecca Solnit tells a number of these stories in her 2009 study of community response to disaster, 'A Paradise Built in Hell.’ I thought about the book repeatedly while watching director Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022).
Bodies Bodies Bodies is not exactly a slasher horror movie. Instead, it’s a social comedy about horror — more specifically about how horror and fear make social bonds fall apart. Reijin’s characters know how slashers are supposed to work, and because they know bodies are supposed to pile up, they start piling up the bodies.
Though the movie isn’t exactly meant as a genre commentary, it ends up suggesting that fantasizing about the monsters among us brings those monsters into being. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, not because fear makes us tremble in adversity, but because fear turns us into our own adversaries.
“Slashers depict disasters as individual trials.”
Early horror films generally focused on monsters: Godzilla, Frankenstein, the Fly, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Dracula. The threat to order and life came from magical or scientific freaks who were, whatever their other dangers, relatively easy to identify. When you looked up on that boat in Nosferatu (1922) and saw Count Orlok stalking toward you with his unnatural proportions, pointed ears, sharp teeth, and long tapering claws, you weren’t going to mistake him for some other innocuous traveler. The line between good and evil, or normal and monstrous, was easy to see.
This began to change in the horror movies of the 1960s. In films like Psycho (1960) and Peeping Tom (1962), there were no creatures and no prosthetics. Hitchcock’s Bates Motel is a looming gothic pile, but that just emphasizes that there aren’t any looming gothic monsters crawling out of it. Instead, the murderer is just some guy with psychological problems and a sharp implement. As film critic Owen Gilberman put it in his discussion of Psycho, “In truth, there was no monster at all… There was just Norman and his rage.”
This became the standard formula in the years and decades that followed. Monsters still popped up here and there for nostalgia’s sake, but the new, hot antagonists were (more or less) just people. In films like Deliverance (1972) or Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), rural residents were depicted as remorseless murderers bent on avenging themselves on urbanites. In Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th Part II (1981) singular serial killers wracked up horrific body counts.
These killers tended to be masked, not so much to conceal their identities (which weren’t mysteries) as to suggest that anyone could be behind that mask — me, you, lover, friend. In the slasher, death wears a familiar face, which means its mode is as much paranoia as fear. Universal townspeople might join together to torch the monster; in the slasher, those townspeople are more likely to come after each other. The owner of the hotel, the stranger you meet by the side of the river, a hitchhiker — they’re all potential threats.
It’s probably not an accident that the slasher subgenre coalesced and boomed during an unprecedented crime wave. Violent crime in the U.S. increased by 126% between 1960 and 1970, and then by another 64% between 1970 and 1980. Reactionary politicians used the resulting sense of pervasive fear to blame and demonize the Civil Rights Movement, and to fuel a massive racist system of mass incarceration which is still with us. Filmmakers used the same anxieties to build a new horror genre based on paranoid fear of… well, everyone.
Slashers (like mass incarceration) offer a particular kind of response to danger and crime. As Peter Hutchings writes in The Horror Film (2014), “the knowledge acquired through the cumulative viewing of horror films, and especially the slasher variant, encourages the horror audience to be constantly aware of off-screen space as a potential source of threat.” Slasher viewers are constantly surveilling for danger. The victors in a slasher prioritize vigilance (don’t go in that basement!) and self-reliance. The Final Girl who makes it through the slasher assault is able to outrun and outfight not just the antagonist, but the other characters; she’s the fittest who survives.
Slashers depict disasters as individual trials. Solnit’s 'A Paradise Built in Hell' is based on a study of numerous natural disasters, from the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake to Hurricane Katrina, and in it, Solnit argues disasters often pull people together rather than putting them at each other’s throats. When disaster strikes, Solnit says, people typically care for each other, rescue each other, and try to help each other. During Katrina, for example, many strangers set out in small boats to find survivors. Volunteers took strangers into their home.
Not everyone reacts so well, obviously. Many people are convinced by movies and the mass media that people are “hysterical or vicious in the face of calamity,” as Solnit puts it. When you think that others are going to horde food, or use disaster to rob you, you may become violent and selfish yourself.
Authorities like police are especially prone to assume the worst of others, Solnit suggests. After Katrina, in a notorious incident on the Danziger bridge, police opened fire, killing two and wounding four. The police claimed they were defending themselves from snipers. But there were no snipers.
Like those police, the characters in Bodies Bodies Bodies know the rules of slashers too well — everyone is after you, the world is a dangerous place, hypervigilance is safety.
The film starts with wealthy Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) bringing her new working-class girlfriend Bee (Maria Bakalova) to a party at the fabulously opulent home of Sophie’s best friend David (Pete Davidson). Shortly after they arrive, a hurricane hits, and everybody plays a murder party game which involves slapping each other in the face and then making a lot of accusations.
In a pause, David goes outside on the porch to play with his father’s sword; while no one is watching, he accidentally slices open his neck, killing himself. The other kids — irresponsible, on numerous drugs, and with phones and roads cut off by the storm — panic and turn on one another, certain that there’s a killer among them.
There isn’t. But soon there are a lot of dead bodies anyway.
The brilliance of the film is that it carefully builds on the viewer’s and the characters’ knowledge of the genre as the carnage escalates. Neither filmgoers nor characters sees David do himself in; they discover he’s hurt only when, drenched in rainwater, he lurches against the outside window in a scene that evokes (surely with intent) the Janet Leigh shower scene in Psycho.
The murder game and the Hitchcock reference tell you what kind of film you’re in. Now the question is just who is the murderer and who is going to survive? The script dumps a swimming-pool full of red herrings into the mansion, giving you a chance to exercise your slasher-honed instincts. Greg (Lee Pace) is a big white guy and a vet. Jordan (Myha-la Herrold) comes on to Bee; hypersexual women can be a bad sign in slashers (see X). Max (Conner O’Malley) left the party in a jealous rage after a fight with David. Maria and Sophie both seem to be keeping secrets from each other.
Slowly, though, it becomes clear that these aren’t motives or clues, but excuses. “It’s okay to be nervous. That’s part of the fun,” Sophie tells Bee as they prepare for the party. It’s the horror movie ethos — being scared is entertainment. We have an investment in our own paranoia, which drives the narrative, and becomes a kind of ethic in itself.
Much of the movie is the characters working themselves up to terror, and then violence, from a standing start. They head to the mansion to party during a hurricane, but inside their house, they’re safe. The storm is a fun pastime, like the murder party game itself. But that stimulation isn’t sufficient, so they stalk through the house to find something, or someone more insidious. Over and over, they plead with each other to de-escalate; Greg asks them all to put their knives down, Jordan begs Sophie to stop following her up the stairs, put down the gun, step away, let’s just talk about this. But they’ve all seen too many slashers, and they know that any one of them can be the killer. Love, sex, lifelong friendships — there is no relationship that can serve as the basis of safety or solidarity. Survival is kill or be killed. You can’t negotiate with a mask.
Bodies Bodies Bodies is, among other things, a satire. Its most direct targets are the young and the affluent clueless. The house party set sink into petulant ennui the way they dive to the bottom of their private pool. Their hate only shines with more malice because it’s focused on trivialities — who did or did not respond in the group chat, who is hate-listening to whose podcast. Their bickering is laced with social justice buzzwords — “gaslighting” and “I’m an ally” — deployed with so little sincerity it barely registers as hypocrisy. They are too shallow and self-loathing to form real friendships, which is why they fall apart immediately when faced with any threat, real or imagined.
It's certainly fun to despise a bunch of privileged jerks. But I don’t think the film is just about one generation (per The Last House on the Left) or one social stratum (per The Hills Have Eyes). After all, when you watch the film, you’re in the house with the kids, waiting for some murderer to show up when the only murderer is right in front of you.
The slasher is a parable, but it’s also a blueprint. Fear and mistrust are self-generating. When you’re convinced everyone is out to get you, you help ensure that you are part of the everybody out to grab that knife. “The best defense is a good offense,” Greg quips, but it isn’t. The best defense is trust and solidarity. With it, monsters hold no terror. Without it, you don’t even need a monster to pile up the bodies. 🪱
Noah Berlatsky is a freelance writer in Chicago. He's the author of ‘Fecund Horror: Slashers, Rape/Revenge, Women in Prison, Zombies and Other Exploitation Dreck.’ His Substack is Everything Is Horrible.
RELATED:
 | A guest post by
|