As part of my ongoing horror binge, I've been forced to develop my Pretentious Arthouse Bullshit Horror Radar as a self-preservation instinct, though I didn't have a name for it until after I wasted an evening watching We Are What We Are, aka A Pastoral Ode To Sad Cannibal Girls.
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But it's only now, reflecting on Blackcoat's Daughter in light of We Are What We Are and various other films, that I've been able to put my finger on exactly what characterises Arthouse Bullshit Horror for me, and why it's so immediately recognisable as a filmtype to avoid:
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Arthouse Bullshit Horror (ABH) is, to put it bluntly, obsessed with the scenic silence of teenage girls and young women in a way that you really only find in narratives constructed by men who have zero understanding of teenage girls and young women beyond wank-pedestal fodder.
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ABH girls are quiet and yearning and troubled. If they interact with girls in a group (rare), it's to show us that girl-groups are Bitchy and Cruel and Loud; more often, they interact primarily with one other girl (sister and/or rival) while having weird chats with adult men.
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This is why I stopped watching the 2018 Suspiria: it starts with this weird, long, awkward-quiet exchange between a young girl and a grown man, in which the girl behaves less like a real human person than something the camera is there to accentuate while the man says Deep Things.
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This same dynamic was replicated perfectly at the start of Blackcoat's Daughter, this strange-strained-quiet exchange between a schoolgirl and her headmaster that I suspect was meant to be Tense and Meaningful, but which is actually just pointless unbanter.
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I've observed before that western film and TV generally has a problem with making all the female characters perfectly coiffed and conventionally beautiful to such an extend that it erases their visual individuality to such an extent that it can contradict their characterisation.
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If you make your actresses all have salon-perfect hair, designer clothes, high heels and glam makeup onscreen, you're showing me that the *character* makes time for this stuff, too - even if you're also trying to sell her as a hardbitten tomboy detective with bad fashion sense.
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So ABH films aren't unique in perpetuating this problem; I just find it particularly maddening when they do it to teenage girls in a way which, when paired with their equally staged silent-but-troubled-but-will-tensely-banter-with-men personalities, serves to make them soul-mute.
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Here is a snapshot of Teenage!Foz: a gawky girl growing out a pixie cut into a mullet, still wearing the oversized tie-dye shirts and hippy pants she bought at thirteen, bony shoulders curled to hide self-consciousness about her height and (wrongly perceived) weight.
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Teenage!Foz laced her school shoes in permanent loose knots so that she could literally step out of them, a quiet protest at having to wear them at all, even though they often flew off if she tried to run. She drew on her arms and hands in class and wrote notes on her palms.
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Then as now, she wore no makeup. Her school tie (it was a private school) was always a bit loose, because she hated the choked feeling of it being done up all the way. She undid her top button to breathe better and hugged her stomach when she laughed.
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I was a geek then and am a geek now, but even if I was to describe the type-A, queen bee popular girls I went to school with, the type of girls I suspect ABH films and Hollywood types would claim to be describing, they all still had the kind of individuality these films deny.
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The point being, I don't know when the pseudo-intellectual manbun fedoratypes of the film world decided to make the jump from drama to horror so that their nubile mannequin women could murder each other instead of pining after their English professors, but I wish they'd Stop.
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All of which is a way of saying: if a horror film that's meant to focus on women starts with a haunted, skinny white girl posing listlessly in a setting that tells you nothing about her character, exchanging nothing dialogue with an older dude, with lots of Slow Quiet Shots? RUN.
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