Horror is for Grrrls

An ongoing series on movies that, though I hate to admit it, fucked me up. Discussion of the Sawyer family and capitalism in part 3 inspired by this  episode of Faculty of Horror   1.      This movie is here to fuck you up (but not in the way you think). There was a time when no movie could send a certain kind of critic, scholar, or film classification board member clutching for their pearls quite like this one. It was banned in Britain until 1999, and in at least eight other countries at one point or another. The deliberately provocative title promises dismemberments, carnage, and gristle, and its high profitability sparked plenty of imitators who took a similar tact, such that even the word “chainsaw” was banned from titles in the UK during the video nasty scare of the’80s. As a kid flipping through my beloved monster movie book, I was careful to skip past the picture of Leatherface. Though by then thirty years old, and inexplicably di...

                         There’s a phenomenon amongst film enthusiasts that may surprise you. A whole lot of people, otherwise sane and of good taste, willingly seek out and choose to watch bad movies, the worse the better. I am one of those people, and, what’s more, I regularly coax my friends into subjecting themselves to bad movies alongside me. If you’re not one of my fellow cultists, this may seem like the height of poor entertainment choices. I disagree.             In this essay, I want to argue that bad movies do the same thing that experimental films do, only by accident. They challenge the aesthetic and formal standards that we normally apply to film and in that way challenge our ideas of what makes movies ‘good’ or ‘watchable,’ entertain us with the unexpected, and challenge our aesthetic categories. I also want to argue that not all bad movies are e...