Corpse Party: Tortured Souls and Slender Man (TVT #1)

It’s often said that April showers bring May flowers, but in this week’s Marvelous Mystery Stream, April showers bring… um, May BLOOD showers. Yeah, dude. Fuckin’... rad.

     Halloween may very well be my favorite holiday of all time. I don’t need to explain myself, as this is a universal opinion that everyone obviously agrees on. As with all seasonal holidays, one of the primary ways our culture signifies the start of the Halloween season is through media—specifically, horror media. Even if I’ve never been particularly scared by horror media (which, I suppose, would then categorically classify most of it as a complete failure), there’s a unique atmosphere inexplicably grafted onto even the worst of it that I just can’t help but enjoy. To me, horror is incredibly interesting conceptually, and you can spend a lot of time analyzing every work that calls the genre home from a lot of varied political and/or philosophical viewpoints. I don’t want to do any of that though—I want the trashy shit. To quote the great Ljot Swanhild, "I like garbage. It's where I DWELL!" Here's what we watched on last night's broadcast.

1. Ghost Stories (2000, episode #7, directed by Shigeki Hatakeyama and written by Ryōta Yamaguchi, ADV dub. Note that I'm not writing anything on this one. Not a lot to talk about, sorry! By the way, I picked this episode specifically to make a Kamen Rider Ryuki joke. Laughs: 0.)
2. Corpse Party: Tortured Souls (2013, episode #2, directed by Akira Iwanaga and written by     Shōichi Satō)
3. Slender Man (2018, directed by Sylvain White and written by David Birke)

    All in all, the broadcast was fun! We've definitely had better (oh, how I miss you, Kaiju board...), but that's on me, and, in any case, it was nice to return to the stream after our small impromptu hiatus. Let's get into my thoughts, because, boy, do I have some. Spoilers for the first two episodes of Corpse Party: Tortured Souls and all of Slender Man.

 This has got to be one of the worst images on the internet. Wholly incomprehensible.

All in attendance of last night's broadcast: AZ, K (that's me!), SP.

 

Corpse Party: Tortured Souls (#2)

"The Kisaragi students learn that Heavenly Host is the site of a murder incident where school teacher Yoshikazu Yanagihori allegedly severed the tongues of four children. Ayumi Shinozaki and Yoshiki Kishinuma are attacked by one of the victims' ghosts, but are rescued by the ghost of Naho Saenoki, a famed blogger who posted the Sachiko Ever After ritual online. Following her advice, they look for the murdered children's tongues to return them and lay their spirits to rest." -Wikipedia

    Honestly, I didn't have nearly as much to say about this one as I thought I would. I'd scoped out the first episode prior to screening this one, and, though useful for setting my expectations, I ended up deeming it non-conducive to a fun viewing with friends (y'know, with the hanging at the end, and all). I chose to screen the second episode, which was generally better about that, even if not by a lot; laughs were had, and even if they were nearly entirely at the expense of what we were watching, that's still a win in my book. Across the board, it was decent—it was well-animated, well-directed, and the atmosphere was great (probably better if viewing in ideal circumstances, which basically means "without the security your friends")—but there's a couple of things that caught my eye. Actually, (one) more than a couple.

 

1. The Gore

    Listen, I'm not about to fault a horror anime for having gore in it. It wasn't particularly disturbing, even if it was graphic, and that's coming from someone who's pretty squeamish—if you've seen, like, the first episode of Elfen Lied, you'll be fine. As for a lot of horror media, the gore is just an inexorable part of the appeal, and it's often something of a shorthand for "good" horror; like, sure, it's probably better if you're not solely relying on it for making the audience uncomfortable, but no one's fault you for it, at least not without being seen as something of a pearl-clutching buzzkill—in fact, a lot of people would gleefully accept it as a full-on substitute for genuinely well-crafted scares, and I find myself unable to really fault that. Part of horror's appeal is the gore, and that's all there is to it. However, I'd argue that, in the case of Tortured Souls, it's actually disproportionately integral to the experience—for example, within seconds of starting the second episode, we see a close-up of an eyeball being stabbed as blood and tears simultaneously gush and leak out of it, all while hearing the victim's screams—and it gets to the point, particularly with how cartoonishly graphic it all is, of near desensitization. The show seems acutely aware of this, as we can see one character, Sakutaro Morishige, occasionally stopping his journey through Heavenly Host to photograph the various rotting corpses and piles of organs (which are so gruesome that he remarks with amazement that "this was once a human being"), regarding them with a sort of quietly perverse amusement and using the images of their mangled bodies as reassurance that he's "still good." 

 

    This is a fairly cut-and-dry case of desensitization. He's in a high-stress situation, and to cope, he chooses to "revel in their misfortune." This spell is broken, however, when he views the pile of organs that was once his beloved Mayu, learning (via ghostly shenanigans) exactly who they used to be. The information drives him mad(der?), leading him to go on a rampage throughout the school. Mayu's death leads us nicely into our next problem...

2. The Fan-service

 

    Please keep the theme of desensitization in the back of your mind as you watch this clip. The only way to convey this scene to you is by witnessing it with your own eyes and ears. If you've seen Tortured Souls, you likely know exactly what I'm about to talk about.

 

    I don't need to explain to you the ties between the sexual (or, at least, the sexually suggestive) and the horrifying in media. They have the same aims (the arousal of specific bodily mechanisms—sexual arousal or fear, respectively)—and that's why they mix so freely. Desensitization often drives one end of the spectrum towards the other; desensitization to horror (specifically, violence) drives a piece of horror media towards sexuality (pointless fan-service, nudity, sex scenes, etc.) and, similarly, desensitization to sexuality drives a piece of sexual media (i.e., pornography) to violence ("rough" porn, choking, beating, etc.*). I hope you've noticed that women are the primary victims of this phenomenon. I feel that, in a way, the clip you just watched is the symbolic culmination of this effect; we get a prolonged, detailed panty shot of an underage girl mere seconds before she is violently dragged across the ground, half-face-down, with her own blood skidding behind her, before she is, in one fell swoop, lifted up and lunged into a wall with such force that her body immediately combusts, leaving her as nothing but a black mark, survived by nothing but some intestines that slowly slide to the ground. There's absolutely nothing funny about this scene on a conceptual level, and yet, all I could find myself doing was laughing. I'll leave you with that, I suppose; I've nothing more to say than that image. Wait, what's that below me? A clarification? You mean I have more to say?! NOOOOOOOOOoooooooo....

 

    *(Let me be clear, here, since, upon rereading, this comes off the wrong way a little in a way I can't easily fix—this is not to say that engaging in these kinks personally is inherently a bad thing, nor is it to say that you'd be a bad person for doing so; between consenting adults, in my opinion, go nuts. It's not at all my intention to imply or suggest that these kinks are the problem here—they aren't. However, you must recognize that women are commonly victimized within these settings—both in mainstream horror films and random porn—and that victimization perpetuates a lot of what women go through. It's less to do with kinks and more to do with how we engage with them in media, if that makes sense. Thanks.)

 

Slender Man (2018) 

"In a small town in Massachusetts, a group of friends, fascinated by the internet lore of the Slender Man, attempt to prove that he doesn't actually exist - until one of them mysteriously goes missing." -IMDB

    This movie was nearly unwatchable, and that's no secret—in fact, I'd offer a cash prize for anyone who could show me someone who genuinely and uncompromisingly enjoyed the film (if I had any cash, anyway). Still, allow me to summarize my general thoughts undeterred. Let me have this.

 

    I was thoroughly impressed by the film's uncanny ability to get unfathomably worse as it went on—which I now know was likely due to a lot of scenes being cut late into production, for reasons we'll get to shortly—but, overall, it was a fun time, if only because I was watching with friends. Removed from that context, I would probably have fallen asleep before the end. There was one moment that I could feasibly see scaring someone—Wren's little body horror episode in the library—but, apart from that, the thing failed to even hold the potential of scaring anybody, and, without having any fun ideas, good acting (I thought Joey King's portrayal of Wren was great. I mean, she's, like, sobbing on the floor and shit, she's really selling Wren's remorse, and... *scary noise* Wuh-oh. I wonder how King will convey Wren's reaction to the abrupt... Oh, oh. She's done crying, now. Okay.), compelling writing or evocative cinematography, the film generally fails spectacularly by practically ever measure by which we typically measure a film's quality. It's so bad that it's impressive, and, in a way, genuinely sort of beautiful. A team of people got together, worked tirelessly to make this product, and it sucked ass. That's great, seriously. Still, I left the film feeling nothing.

 

    In fact, the film was such a nothing-burger that, after the immediate departure of AZ upon the film's closing (me too, dude), me and SP had a lengthy dialogue (over my sick Emily Wants to Play gameplay, of course) that held the express purpose of coming to even the most mundane of conclusions about the movie's thematic aims. A particularly notable point of discussion started early on in the film, when SP, with consideration of the film revolving around a group of teenage girls who are all "messed-up" in some way, wondered aloud if the film had something to do with 2014's infamous Slender-Man stabbing. Not having seen the rest of the film yet (I believe they had just summoned Slender-Man), I, politely as I could, waved the idea off—it was an interesting idea, but there's no way they'd do that, right?

 

    Only later, upon finishing the film and beginning to talk it over with one another, did the idea float up again. I initially held the same reservations as I did an hour prior, but his insistence—paired with my independent realization that the stabbing and the ensuing moral panic surrounding creepypasta were valuable cultural context, given the time of release—made me finally consider his perspective without reservation or skepticism. The results of that consideration bring me to what I believe to be the most cohesive explanation of the film (which, honestly, isn't saying much). First, please read the film's closing monologue, narrated by, Lizzie, little sister of Hallie—one of the film's dual protagonists. 

  "Hallie, Katie, Chloe, Wren. There's almost always a pattern. He only shows himself just enough to infect us. The more fear he creates, the more fascinated we get. We talk and write about him—share pictures, click on links, Photoshop images—that's how a virus works. That's how it spreads. And some people cross the line and actually seek him out, like my sister and her friends did... and those messed-up people go out and do messed-up things that become more stories for people to tell. It's all spreading his word, y'know?"

    It's pretty hard to read Lizzie's monologue as being about anything but the stabbing, isn't it?

     Herein lies an explanation for the film's strange pregnancy (repeated instances of Slender-Man tendrils shooting violently out of wombs) / Christian (the blink-and-you'll-miss-it church cameo, the crosses adorning Chloe's house, the weird pilgrims/demons talk at the start, etc.) imagery, as well. If the film were to, even if loosely, center around the Slender-Man stabbing, it'd likely be in participation or response to the subsequent moral panic. The film expresses a clear culturally Christian / culturally conservative stance on youth, particularly teenagers (Wren shouts "troll!" to indicate she's messing with her friends; the film introduces Hallie and Katie by showing them watching cat videos together; Wren's first words are "Twitter poll," which she (and all teenagers, probably?) apparently says whenever she's about to ask for an opinion;), who are at risk of corruption and/or pose a significant risk of corrupting younger children by way of the horrors of the internet (Slender-Man is summoned on a sketchy, "Russian malware-y"(???) website; Katie jokingly states that she doesn't sneeze because she wants to keep demons in her soul, "if [she] had one"; Wren expresses pride and glee upon finding out that Lizzie got into trouble at school for wearing one of her implicitly obscene shirts; Wren's room has a large OBEY poster; Hallie and Lizzie's family judgmentally discuss one of Hallie's friends, Delores, and her teen pregnancy, which recently caused her to drop out of school; Wren takes Lizzie into the woods, probably (see two paragraphs from now) as a sort of sacrifice to Slender-Man (ring any bells?), leaving her hospitalized and delusional). The numerous instances of the Slender-Man-tendril-wombs are evocative of a desecration of youth, viewed from a mother's perspective, by the lurking threat of Slender-Man, here symbolic of creepypasta, or, more broadly, general moral depravity children are frequently exposed to online (or, at least, what these types think that is), and the Christianity is just the icing on the cake.

    I think, with all of that in consideration, that this reading is somewhat feasible. I'm grasping at straws, here, and that's frustrating; when I watched Slender Man, I wasn't exactly expecting metatextual analysis. Still, when I went to bed last night, that was what I had reached. When I woke up this morning, my suspicions were largely confirmed.

    Upon some further (though, still cursory) research, it seemed that a large amount of content had been cut from the film, likely in response to backlash surrounding similarities to the stabbing (a particularly notable portion of which coming from Bill Weier, father of one of the stabbing's perpetrators, Anissa Weier). Thankfully, this isn't purely the work of whistle-blowers—we have some concrete proof that multiple scenes were cut, and, reasoning with each scene's contents in mind, it's fairly obvious why they never saw theaters. In the film's first trailer, we can see a scene involving Hallie's approximation of a boyfriend, Tom, committing suicide by jumping off of the roof of the school. In the film, he asks Hallie out on a date, does a scary, is seemingly disinterested in Hallie following the scary, and disappears forever. In another scene, one of the film's four main characters, Chloe, stabs her own eyes with a dissection scalpel in front of an entire biology class. In the film, she has two notable encounters with Slender-Man before disappearing from the plot forever, sans a brief shot where she stares blankly at Wren and Hallie (y'know, to show how crazy she is). Using context provided by the film, both acts of self-harm were presumably committed because of Slender-Man's influence. Finally, another scene, featured at the end of the trailer, shows a character and scenario involving police surrounding a dishevelled girl emerging from a forest, which is entirely absent from the film. "Who the fuck is THAT," I shouted while watching the trailer this morning, much to the confusion of the guy walking his dog outside of my open window. These anomalies within the trailer align with numerous online rumors that suggest entire integral characters and plotlines—not just a few scenes and deaths—were hastily removed from the film at some point after shooting. Due to NDAs, not a lot more could be revealed—whether or not you think that's true, or just some liar's easy excuse, is up to you.

    All in all, I think that's a pretty compelling argument as to what Slender Man was really about, as well as why it doesn't necessarily feel like it. They tried to hide it, but basing your film upon such a well-remembered incident leaves you with a scent you can't really scrub off. Still, I find myself wishing that they had kept all of these scenes in—if I could tell that the film was loosely responding to the moral panic caused by the stabbing, they did such a bad job of hiding it that they might as well not have tried—because, even if its message would have been polarizing, and even if I would have vehemently disagreed with it and its goals, that doesn't mean it shouldn't have the right to exist. What we're left with is a horrible, incomplete mess of a film—where police have custody of a laptop, then Wren inexplicably has it in her possession not two minutes later; where Katie goes missing, and we care about Katie, then Chloe goes missing, and we care about Chloe instead of Katie, then Lizzie goes missing, and we care about Lizzie instead of Chloe or Katie; etc., etc.—that I refuse to believe a single person was happy with upon release. Honestly, I'm in agreement with Bill Weier; the film, under the pretense of it being based upon the stabbing, is incredibly distasteful, and if the world was mine, I wouldn't want it made, but that doesn't suddenly mean that the creative vision the film had should have been compromised in such a way. Art is allowed to talk about uncomfortable things; art is allowed to question our morals; art is allowed to disagree with you; and it's a tragedy that, in light of what could have been an incredibly interesting reflection upon the stabbing, internet culture and how we, as a society, treat our youth—even if that film would've been bad, too—we've been left with a nothing but a $10,000,000 hole in the ground.

    See you next week.

-Kim  

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