Cabin in the Woods – Bitch Flicks

Life, Death, and Cinema in ‘Benny Loves Killing’

There are plenty of movies about making a movie, to the point where it’s arguably a little passé, and ‘Benny Loves Killing’ is careful not to ever be heavy-handed or obnoxious in its extra layer, addressing it obliquely – by which I absolutely don’t mean obscure or pretentious, but subtle and thought-provoking. This is one of those films where the more you think about it the better it gets.

Written by Max Thornton.

“Why horror?”

“Because I think it’s the most flexible genre…the most malleable genre. You are able to experiment and discuss the text without interfering with the object itself.”

So say Benny and her professor in the first set of dialogue in Ben Woodiwiss’s quietly excellent indie feature Benny Loves Killing, setting the scene for the experimentation and discussion to come. Although it has won at least one award for “Best Horror Film,” Benny Loves Killing isn’t really a horror film as such. Or rather it is, to use Benny’s own words, “a meta-horror film. A horror film about horror film. More importantly, a horror film about cinema.” I think one could argue that, whether or not it’s explicitly meta (and there’s plenty of superb horror that is, from Peeping Tom to Cabin in the Woods), horror is always, to some extent, about cinema. As far back as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, horror films have been self-consciously Jungian, awash with dreamscapes and archetypes, exploiting the visual and sonic immediacy of the medium to inhabit and unsettle the viewer’s psyche.

Notice how her eyes are obscured. — Notice how, in this most visual of media, her eyes are obscured.

But Benny Loves Killing is a meta-meta-horror film, a film about somebody making a film about film. Benny is a French film student in the UK making a horror film for a class, but we don’t actually see very much of her film. There are plenty of movies about making a movie, to the point where it’s arguably a little passé, and Benny Loves Killing is careful not to ever be heavy-handed or obnoxious in its extra layer, addressing it obliquely.

“Oblique” is a good word for most of this film’s approach – by which I absolutely don’t mean obscure or pretentious, but subtle and thought-provoking. This is one of those films where the more you think about it the better it gets. It’s not quite psychological horror, but the narrative does largely follow Benny’s tenuous state: bumming from one friend to another, refusing to take a shower, stealing from those around her, doing way too many drugs, arguing with her mother, having some fantastically creepy nightmares. The direction of the film is gorgeously stylish and evocative, with uses of chiaroscuro and splashes of red that probably deserve scene-by-scene analysis.

There are a few conversations where the characters discuss the film they are making, but the meta-commentary never gets inelegant. In one scene, Benny and her colleague Alex argue about the workings of point-of-view shots: “You sympathize with who you’re looking at, not with the eyes you’re looking through,” Benny insists, invoking the classic killer’s-viewpoint horror shot. If up to this point in the film you had overlooked the subtleties of how point of view is used, from here on you would surely notice how often the camera stays on Benny, with her interlocutor barely in frame – especially when these are men, especially men with power (the professor, the board that controls Benny’s funding, a creeper at a party). The effect is a claustrophobically intense focus on Benny, emphasizing her overwhelming and precarious mental state, but there’s also a complex and nuanced commentary here about gender in cinema.

"You sympathize with who you're looking at" — “You sympathize with who you’re looking at”

The most explicit discussion of gender and cinema occurs in the scene where Benny and Alex are screen-testing an actress who admits that their names had led her to expect two men, and then expresses her wariness of the widespread misogyny in the horror genre. Like any filmmaker who cannot step into the text of the film without thereby becoming a part of it, Benny allows the actress to speak without defending herself. There is no great rush to defend the feminist credentials of horror in general or of Benny’s film in particular, simply the opening of a conversation: is the camera necessarily a male gaze, even when wielded by a woman? Is a camera-on-camera the male gaze doubled or reversed or negated? How do the layers of agency and power operate in a male filmmaker’s film about a female filmmaker’s film?

Benny is surely to some degree an avatar for writer/director Ben Woodiwiss, and the different wigs she dons can be seen as a literalization of the different “hats” an independent filmmaker perhaps inevitable wears, as well as the multiplicity of her relationship to the camera eye. While Benny is not unsympathetic, she is certainly no wish-fulfillment self-insert, either in her personal or her professional life. Her cinematic ambitions are grandiose, but perhaps all talk: she constantly says she’s trying to do something innovative, to make a different kind of film, but nothing we see about the film-within-the-film suggests that it’s anything other than a conventional horror film, with its buckets of fake blood and negotiations with actresses about topless scenes. To what extent, the film seems to be asking, can the filmmaker have mastery over her film and its tropes? Or do film and tropes have mastery over the filmmaker?

The film couldn't work without Pauline Cousty's excellent performance as Benny. — The film couldn’t work without Pauline Cousty’s excellent performance as Benny.

The question is deepened by the mother/child imagery throughout the film. Benny’s fraught relationship with her mother doesn’t precisely parallel her relationship with her film, but it echoes it: despite, or perhaps at the root of, their conflicts, Benny comes from her mother, is shaped by her, inherits her flaws and characteristics. A creative work is its maker’s baby, and the mother gives the baby life but also, in the very life itself, life’s horizon of death, natality and mortality intertwined. The unleashing of the creative work into the world marks the author’s death, but for the auteur, it is also the death of her baby through her loss of control over it, birthed and killed at once in the cutting of the umbilical cord.

If Ben(ny) indeed loves killing, (s)he invites us, with a small smile and a gaze directly into the camera, to confront the lens and its powers of life and death: who, exactly, is being killed? And who, exactly, is doing the killing?

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax.

Is Marvel’s ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D’ Promising?

Two out of the three female characters are women of color: Melinda May played by Ming-Na Wen and Skye played by Chloe Bennet. They’re both of Asian descent, which leaves me wishing there were also prominent Black and Latino characters, but maybe more will be introduced over time. I’ve got to say that the Asian hacker and the Asian martial arts expert are pretty stereotyped roles, but I’m living on faith in Joss that he’ll flesh those characters out in a way that takes them beyond their trite origins into fully rounded characters to whom we’re heartbreakingly attached.

Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D Poster

Written by Amanda Rodriguez

Wow, the title of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D is a mouthful. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. That said, I’m a huge fan of Joss Whedon. I should clarify, though. I loved Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Serenity, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Cabin in the Woods. I did not love Dollhouse OR The Avengers. My critique of Dollhouse was that it really underplayed the slavery and prostitution implications of the “dolls” who must do whatever they are commanded to do, never truly acknowledging that the Dollhouse was, in reality, a very high-priced brothel of sorts. As far as The Avengers go, frankly, I was just disappointed. It was better than, say, Thor, but that’s setting the bar a whole lot lower than I tend to expect from the smart, feminist, socially conscious Whedon. However, I’m always game and will always watch with an open mind a TV show with Whedon at the helm.

We’ve now got two episodes of the new Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D under our belts, so we have a bit of a base to gauge whether or not this show will be everything old-school Joss Whedon fans are looking for or if it’ll be superhero comic book fans’ hearts’ desires, or both (as the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive). As far as gender and diversity go, we’ve got three women and three men on the team (that’s right, Coulson is back), so there’s more of a balance than Whedon struck on his first go around in The Avengers with its lone female superhero, Black Widow.

His resurrection bears untold secrets that will doubtless unfold over time.

Melinda May is a veteran operative with a past to be reckoned with. Her asskickery is fluid and natural.

Melinda May getting it done.

Skye is a brilliant and gifted hacker who values information, truth, and humanity above all else. She’s also quick-witted and sharp-tongued.


Coulson and Agent Ward discover Skye broadcasting from her seemingly secret mobile base…the van out of which she lives.

Episode one was a little lackluster. With too much going on, too many characters being introduced, too many techno gadgets, too much CGI, and too many awkwardly placed Joss Whedon signature jokes, I was left feeling the show was trying too hard, and I was longing for the character depth and subject matter substance that Joss tends towards. The episode’s final speech is delivered by Gunn, I mean J. August Richards playing, Mike, the artificially enhanced unemployed ex-factory worker, and it refocused the show into what is important:

“You said if we worked hard, if we did right, we’d have a place. You said it was enough to be a man, but there’s better than man—there’s gods. And the rest of us? What are we? They’re giants. We’re what they step on.”


Mike performing a rescue using superpowers borrowed from alien technology that will most likely kill him.

This isn’t just a speech about superpowers. This is a speech about our society, about the lie of the American dream. It’s saying that it’s no longer enough to work hard and be a good person. It’s a critique of the disparity of wealth and power, of our healthcare system, and our employment system (as Mike was fired for a workman’s comp back injury, which led him to undergo such drastic experimentation). This is a speech about the 99%. Having a Black man deliver it makes it all the more potent, referencing the deeply embedded racism in our country that insists upon assimilation but offers little reward or acceptance. Bravo, Joss.

Pilot episodes are notorious for trying to cram too much into an hour, and the trajectory of shows often change after that pilot, once they get their bearings. So how did Episode two, “0-8-4”, fare? It’s still a bit too flashy and gimmicky with too many explosions and frenetic fight sequences, but I enjoyed the use of the fancy-pants, newly commissioned S.H.I.E.L.D plane that seems as if it may serve as home base for the group…not unlike a certain ship helmed by the indomitable Malcolm Reynolds.

S.H.I.E.L.D’s apolitical mission with its interest in artifacts amongst a guerrilla war-torn Peru create a nice tension between its objectives and Skye’s very political, underdog/rebel sympathizing tendencies. I hope she will continue to put these missions in perspective, not allowing the group to forget the geopolitical ramifications of their actions as well as the history and context of the places in which they practice resource extraction.


Coulson and his former colleague/lover Camilla Reyes make a deadly team fighting off rebels in Peru.

Episode “0-8-4” is really about one thing, though: teamwork, a specialty of Joss Whedon’s. Kelly West of Television Blend even dubbed the episode “Smells Like Team Spirit”. Right you are, Ms. West. I easily grow bored of overwrought gun fights with CGI that just won’t quit. Don’t get me wrong, I love the action genre with kickass fight choreography and heart-pounding do-or-die situations where characters must make impossible choices, but it’s got to have a soul. The team-building aspect of this episode, while a bit cheesy, gave the characters time to bond and to reveal snip-its about themselves, which had a generally humanizing effect and gave the audience an opportunity to warm to them.

Am I sold on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D? Not yet. Do I think it has promise? Quite possibly. Will I keep watching? You bet your keister.

Bitch Flicks writer and editor Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.

Horror Week 2012: “We work with what we have," The Subversion of Gender Roles in ‘The Cabin in the Woods’

This is a guest post from Amanda Rodriguez

Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s Cabin in the Woods is a fantastic movie, laying the horror genre bare, critiquing its conventions, and creating a space for a larger cultural conversation. Gender roles (both in and out of horror movies) are a major component of this conversation in which the filmmakers encourage us to engage. Most importantly, the film critiques the virgin/whore dichotomy that cinema and society seem to insist is the only way we can view most women.

A little background info: The scenario in Cabin in the Woods is pretty typical of the horror genre: five college-aged teens spending a weekend at a remote cabin are brutally attacked by a “zombie redneck torture family.” What isn’t typical is that a powerful, secret agency using advanced technology is manipulating the situation in order to complete a sacrificial ritual to ensure the continued slumber of fierce, ancient gods. Yeah, a bit off the beaten path, no?

The sacrifice requires a “transgression” and the resulting deaths of the athlete/jock (Curt), the scholar (Holden), the fool (Marty), and the whore (Jules). The death of the “final girl” aka the virgin (Dana) is optional. Each character is a stand-in for a horror movie archetype. When we examine the two female characters fighting for their lives, we find that they are neither virgin nor whore.

The so-called “whore” is Jules, our heroine’s bubbly best friend and roommate. She is sharp-witted and good-natured, a loyal friend. The agency manipulating the kids is decreasing Jules’ cognitive abilities through a slow-acting chemical compound in her blonde hair dye (she decided to dye her hair on a whim…sounds suspicious to me), and they’ve upped her libido via drugs. As the night progresses, Jules’ behavior becomes more and more out of character.

Apparently, sexy fireplace dancing and making out with a taxidermied wolf aren’t part of Jules’ normal partying repertoire.

Jules is the one who must “transgress” by showing her breasts and her willingness to engage in sexual activity, setting off the release of the Buckners (zombie rednecks) to begin the blood sacrifice. When it comes time, though, Jules doesn’t really want to have sex. She and her boyfriend, Curt, are outside, and she wants to go back inside. She’s cold, and it’s too dark. In order to combat Jules’ reservations about having sex, the agency raises the temperature into the 80’s, shines light into a clearing to simulate moonbeams, and floods the area with a pheromone mist.

Though it can’t be said that Jules is forced to transgress, her free will is certainly called into question. Outside forces are influencing her brain, her hormones, and her physical surroundings in such a way that her downfall becomes inevitable. Taken in a larger cultural context, this calls into question the notion that women who like sex or who own their sexuality are whores. It is as if all the women who are judged for some perceived promiscuity are miscast, just like Jules is miscast. Much like the agency, cultural circumstances manipulate women into these roles. A key example of this is how media representations of women replete with their over-sexualization and overt body focus set women up to take the fall in order to fulfill some arcane cultural need. This need seems to go back to (if not predate) the biblical “Fall of Man” where Eve is the transgressor who is blamed for the birth of sin and then punished. Like the horror movie genre, we repeat this same formula over and over again, craving the same result: the transgression and punishment of a woman for her sexuality. Why do we do this? Because it’s a man’s world? Because men are threatened by the power and autonomy of female sexuality? I’m sure all that and more is true, but it’s safe to say it’s definitely a dude thing.

On the other side of the dichotomy coin, we have Dana, the archetypical virgin, who is not actually a virgin.

The non-virgin virgin. Talk about not really fitting into a gender stereotype.

Unlike Jules, though, Dana naturally exhibits many of the traits that have cast her in the role of the virgin. She is shy, sexually uncomfortable, brainy, artistic, and somewhat socially awkward. However, as the terrors she must face intensify, Dana has a reserve of strength that aligns her with Carol Clover’s final girl feminist trope. She repeatedly stabs her bear-trap-wielding zombie attacker, Matthew Buckner, with a crowbar and then a knife. She wrestles her way out of the depths of a lake after being attacked by Father Buckner and then withstands an almost inhuman amount of abuse on the dock at the hands of Matthew Buckner. Not only that, but Dana identifies with the killer when she sympathetically reads from the diary of Patience Buckner, thus setting the stage for the ritual by choosing the method of the five friends’ deaths. Also, at the end of the film, in an act that borders on complicity, Patience Buckner stabs The Director (of the agency), and when she does this, Dana sees Patience as her salvation.

In the end, though, Dana doesn’t fit the horror genre virgin role or Clover’s mold because she isn’t the final girl. Marty manages to survive, thus subverting the entire horror genre and the final girl trope in the process. Marty uses his bong invention to rescue Dana from Matthew Buckner before spiriting her away to show her that he’s discovered a subterranean maintenance override panel that he’s hotwired to take them out of their contained, controlled area down into the agency’s headquarters to confront their true tormentors.

Bong Boy to the rescue!

Marty is our unlikely hero, which I appreciate, on the one hand, because he is smart, inventive, funny, insightful, and not attractive in the typical Hollywood sense of the word. Even as far as characterization goes, Marty is a far more interesting and engaging protagonist than Dana, who is, frankly, about as fascinating and individualized as linoleum. On the other hand, Marty as the hero making the final decision about whether or not to save our corrupt world subverts the possibility of a feminist reading of the ending. Marty decides that we’re not a species worth saving, and after attempting to shoot him and being bitten by a werewolf, Dana goes along with his choice. Ultimately, Cabin in the Woods is a male fantasy in which the nerd becomes the hero, saving the woman for whom he clearly cares while holding in his hands the power to determine the fate of the world.

It’s dubious whether or not Cabin in the Woods passes the Bechdel Test, as even the final conversation Dana has with The Director is centered around the importance Marty plays in maintaining world order. Without a doubt, the movie is doing many exciting, transgressive things. I find particularly important the way the audience is analogous with “the gods” because we are the ones demanding these elaborate, repetitive sacrifices that push people into these stereotypical roles. It’s not only an indictment of the horror genre but of the voyeuristic spectatorship that perpetuates these horror tropes. However, I expected more from the feminist powerhouse team that created Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I find myself wishing Marty had been cast as a woman, and the two women, the fool and the non-virgin virgin, would be the pair of survivors who finally say “no more” to a horror genre that dismembers, kills, and punishes them for being women. Maybe the world isn’t ready for that, but I’d hoped Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard would be ready to tell us that story anyway.

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Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.