American Mary (2012) deserves credit for being one of the few films where I really had no idea what was going to happen next. It's a unique, stylish, and surprising chronicle of the title character's descent into slasher movie madness—but it's also a bit of a mess, both literally and figuratively. Where the unpredictably of a film like Kill List only adds to the mounting tension, Mary's lack of direction sometimes just makes it feel unfinished.
Mary (Katharine Isabelle) is a medical student struggling to cover her expenses, resorting to increasingly desperate options to pay the bills. At first, she thinks stripping is the worst thing she'll have to do, but as you might imagine, things quickly take a turn. And then another. Before you know it, she's wearing a rubber apron and...well, you'll see.
In the first twenty minutes or so, I thought I knew where the movie was headed, expecting a familiar "boiling frog" scenario where tension and weirdness would gradually ramp up until Mary found herself in previously unimaginable territory. That's not really what happens, though. The film's arc doesn't look like a steady climb, but a jerky polygraph—although Mary still winds up in a very different place from the character we first encounter.
The recurring theme of the movie is perception: the plot turns on the way people respond to images, both of themselves and of others. Mary never seems quite sure about herself or her rapidly changing niche in the world, and her frank assertiveness reminds me of that one Jawbreaker song where during the bridge Blake just keeps muttering "I know...who I am", as if trying to convince himself as much as the listener. In this sense, it's actually a pretty effective coming-of-age movie (although it's the kind of coming-of-age I wouldn't wish on anyone).
The setup of American Mary (which really seems like it should've been titled Bloody Mary but wasn't for fear of getting lost in a sea of IMDB entries) made me think of the gleefully nasty Pathology, but as it moved along I was also reminded of Girls Against Boys. Both comparisons are a bit too pat though: this is no medical horror, nor simply a battle-of-the-sexes vengeance flick. (There are distinct shades of Audition at times though, as you can see in the cap at the top of the page). Mary is a strange and stylized affair, and it sometimes feels like directors Jen and Sylvia Soska had more ideas than they really knew what to do with; Mary can feel like it's made up of material from three or four different movies.
Perhaps unfortunately, American Mary also reminded me of the phenomenal Excision, which similarly chronicles the psychic dissolution of a young, would-be surgeon. I say unfortunately because Excision is stiff competition for any film, and it's tough for Mary to measure up to Pauline, Excision's oddly endearing anti-heroine, who for my money is one of the most memorable horror characters of the last 20 years. But Mary is still interesting in her own right, and worth spending 100 minutes with.
While Mary left me with mixed (although ultimately positive) feelings, S&man (2006) is a film I genuinely loved. Where Mary spotlights the subculture of extreme body modification, S&man director JT Petty points his camera at horror filmmakers themselves. What makes S&man great is the same thing that opens it up for criticism: it honestly can't decide if it's a documentary or a scripted horror story.
While it ends on a distinctly scripted note, the bulk of the film is an honest documentary, and a good one. That really is the great Carol J. Clover, who coined the term "final girl", intelligently discussing the through-lines between films like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and the Abu Ghraib photographs. And those really are underground filmmakers Fred Vogel and Bill Zebub, discussing their own subterranean, DIY works (Vogel is behind the infamously depraved August Underground trilogy, while one of Zebub's movies is titled Jesus Christ, Serial Rapist).
But there's a fictional element too, in the form of the unassuming director Eric (Eric Marcisak, pictured above), the auteur behind the S&man series, which features the director stalking, tormenting, and strangling a series of young women. Initially framed as an extremely verite form of artificial snuff, director Petty begins to wonder how much of what he's seeing is "only a movie". (Marcisak's unnervingly normal performance is outstanding.)
I can see the argument that the scripted bits bring down the documentary sections, which feature some incisive and thoughtful interviews with Petty's principal subjects and really are surprisingly excellent. (Even as a diehard horror fan the idea of a documentary about horror filmmakers seems a little boring, but these folks have some fascinating things to say, and Petty draws them out expertly.) However, the sequences with Eric bring a crackling, nervous tension to the film, and some smart editing allows them to enliven and illuminate the talking heads' commentary—at some points, S&man is actually a better documentary for having scripted content.
One of the central ideas in S&man and in a lot of horror is the porousness of the border between illusion and reality, and more than one of the subjects of the film make the point that watching people die on camera for real can actually be surprisingly boring. In one of the film's best moments, when Petty asks Vogel if he's seen the decapitation videos made famous by terrorists and drug cartels, he notes that his first response was that Toetag (his production company) can do it better.
It gets at the idea that horror isn't really about watching real-life violence, which tends to be messy, awkward, and without dramatic punctuation. If you want snuff, Youtube is full of videos from Syria showing real-life deaths that make A Serbian Film look like an episode of Family Guy. Horror isn't just about watching people die: it's about exploring the sense of dread that suffuses human existence, thanks to the curse of reason and the knowledge that death is inevitable.
It's Romanticism with a capital R, where the subject is swallowed up in something vast, impossible, and terrifying. An innocent young girl falls prey to an unholy malady that distorts her very being; beautiful people in the prime of life are butchered by a stalker without a face; alien forces invade our bodies and rip their way out. At its best, horror is a stark encounter with what Damien Hirst called the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living—the title, fittingly, to a piece starring one of horror's primal figures: a big, dead-eyed shark.
Bon appetit.
