Blood Diner (1987) and Exploitation

In Blood Diner, Michael (Rick Burks) and George (Carl Crew) follow their Uncle Anwar’s (Drew Godderis) direction and construct what they call a perfect female body out of women’s body parts to host the spirit of a decadent ancient Egyptian goddess, Shitar. Their murdered victims become fodder for customers in their so-called vegetarian restaurant, providing humorous scenes of vegetarians inadvertently ingesting human flesh. 

Eventually, two inept but persistent detectives Sheba Jackson (LaNette La France) and Mark Shepherd (Roger Dauer), discover the boys’ plan to resurrect Shitar. They learn more about Shitar’s Lumerian Cult from an archeologist who explains how the gruesome goddess entices followers to participate in a literal blood feast. Michael and George plan to recreate this feast.

Although Michael and George successfully construct their goddess and bring her back to life with a ritual Uncle Anwar provides, their plan fails when a newly arisen Shitar feeds on George instead of the female virgin Connie (Lisa Elaina) they have provided her. Detective Shepherd shoots Michael, freeing Connie and angering George, who yells, “You killed my brother!” But Detective Jackson kicks George into a hungry Shitar’s fanged stomach, and she eats his head. With shots of electric low-budget effects, Shitar seems to explode in a blast, seemingly destroying her and the brothers who created her. The remains of the drugged revelers line the floor and stage in the club. When one wakes up, a police officer shoots her. 

But in a final scene, a woman in red walks away. It is Shitar transformed. A young man picks her up in his convertible and tells her, “You look hot, bothered, and horny.” Shitar smiles, revealing her fanged teeth. In this campy B cannibal horror film, Shitar may be the product of male exploitation. But she also destroys the colonizers who create her.

Blood Diner (1987) and Jennifer’s Body (2009): When Women’s Bodies Fight Back

Although director Jackie Kong’s Blood Diner and director Karyn Kusama and writer Diablo Cody’s Jennifer’s Body differ in their approaches to the horror genre, they both integrate the supernatural into at least partial eco-feminist approaches to cannibalism. Blood Diner plays homage to Herschell Gordon Lewis’s B-horror Blood Feast (1963), transferring its tale of an Egyptian caterer combining body parts to resurrect a dormant Egyptian goddess to a late 1980s vegetarian restaurant. As an exploitation movie, Caryn James of The New York Times calls it “celluloid swill.” Blood Diner at its best is “bloody good fun,” according to Clint Morris of Film Threat, but at its worst, as Ken Hanke of the newspaper Mountain Xpress, suggests, the film is an “intentionally funny thriller [that] isn't as funny as the straight films it mocks.”

More satiric teen thriller than horror, Jennifer’s Body may be lampooned as “a premeditated cult classic” by Nick Pinkerton of The Village Voice, but it also received high marks from The New York Time’s A.O. Scott, Roger Ebert, and Dana Stevens of Slate.com. Scott declares, for example, “Ms. Cody and Ms. Kusama take up a theme shared by slasher films and teenage comedies—that queasy, panicky fascination with female sexuality that we all know and sublimate—and turn it inside out.” According to Scott, Jennifer’s Body “tak[es] the complication and confusion of being a young woman as its central problem and operating principle.” Dana Stevens asserts, “Jennifer’s body is luscious and powerful, sexy and scary, maddening at times, but impossible to stop watching. So is Jennifer’s Body.” And Roger Ebert declares, “This isn’t your assembly-line teen horror thriller. The portraits of Jennifer and Needy are a little too knowing, the dialogue is a little too off-center, the developments are a little too quirky …. I’d rather see Jennifer’s Body again than Twilight.”

Despite their glaring genre differences, however, Blood Diner and Jennifer’s Body both reverse representations of Wendigo/wetiko, exploring female bodies and the landscapes they are said to represent from an ecofeminist perspective. In Blood Diner and Jennifer’s Body, women successfully defeat their oppressors, at least in the context of their respective films.

An Elephant Sitting Still and Ecology

A three hour and fifty minute film set in a gray industrial mining city somewhere in Northeast China, Bo Hu’s first film (he died before the final cut of the film was released) focuses on the lives of four characters who ultimately share the same horrific space and ecology, similar to what Krzystof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue did in 2000. To highlight both characters and their connection to this eco-disaster, Hu throws in the dynamic use of the long take via Steadicam that PT Anderson displayed in Boogie Nights and deep focus exploitation of space that is clearly influenced by Citizen Kane, sometimes showing us four or five planes of action at the same time. The film’s plot lines ultimately converge, and we and the characters are left in a limbo of a very long take late at night. The possible influence of Robert Altman’s vision jumps out at this end point.

The clearest and most depressing aspect of this film is not the characters’ dilemmas, nor the potential solutions that may unfold (well after the story is completed), but their situation and environment. Each character is having a horrible day. A grandfather is being told by his son and daughter-in-law that they want him to leave his own apartment for a nursing home, so they can have more space, and his beloved dog dies in a very distasteful way. Two high school students find themselves on the run (right out of Rebel Without a Cause). One because he has violently defended a friend who lied to him about stealing a phone, and the other because she was outed on social media for her affair with the high school Vice Dean. All three have miserable home lives.

Added to the mix is a local gangster whose affair with his best friend’s wife leads to her husband’s suicide, right out the bedroom window they just occupied. One could walk away trying to keep this hyper melodramatic set of storylines in some kind of logical order and actually succeeding in doing just that. Bo Hu weaves these lives together in spaces that are more depressing than their personal problems.

From an eco-perspective, this city is also a nightmare: Gray streets, blue gray barely illuminated interiors, endless mining trains pulling across a flat landscape that has been sucked dry by industrialization. The need to run away is dramatically structured by the plot of the film, but escaping this grim landscape would be reason enough. The air is clearly thick with pollution, and living conditions are cramped and soulless. The grandfather’s (a pensioner) trip to the nursing home his family want to stow him is a descent into purgatory. Every time a character turns, their stories get worse—but not as bad as the physical world they inhabit. An Elephant Sitting Still offers only a dark promise of change in a night-time shot outside a bus, and we’re left wondering whether or not the elephant’s cries accompanying our characters’ dimly lit soccer game mean this dire eco-disaster will end. 

Thank you, Joe!

Denis's Trouble Every Day and the Wendigo Cycle, continued

In the second brutal cannibal scene in the film, Shane confronts hotel maid Christelle in the hotel employee locker room to (the film suggests) avoid having sex with his wife and devouring her. After the multiple images of Christelle as both maid and human, however, the camera pulls away instead of veering in on her body as landscape. 

What begins as a stolen sexual moment shown in medium long shot, however, becomes a violent rape scene amplified by Christelle’s unanswered screams. Unlike the vivid cannibal sequence with Coré, however, the horror is revealed visually primarily after the attack, with shots of Christelle’s now-motionless body and Shane’s bloodied face. Tears run through his blood, as well, matching the lines of blood on the curtain during his post-murder shower.

He and June are reunited with a puppy to provide the warmth he cannot. But the suggestion that Shane’s one attack might have satiated him becomes less reliable when juxtaposed with June’s frightened and distrustful eyes when he hugs her and asks her to take him home. 

Although Trouble Every Day complicates a frontier myth that constructs a land as female to justify the exploitation of its resources, its conclusion offers no solution to the destructive results of the metaphor. Instead, Shane’s seeming ability to contain his desires by satisfying them through the literal cannibalizing of the native “other” continues the wetiko/Wendigo cycle Forbes describes.

Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, continued

In Denis’s Trouble Every Day, the metaphor of the land as woman is complicated in two ways: Coré becomes both cannibal and cannibalized because her Wendigo disease was forced upon her by Leo and Shane’s experiments with exploited South American resources. And even though he leaves Paris unscathed, Shane too contracts the infection from their post-colonial research. 

Defying the frontier myth, both male and female bodies become landscapes in Trouble Every Day, especially in the film’s two key horrific cannibal scenes. In the first, Coré seduces a neighbor, who breaks into her house and pulls down the boards Leo has hammered across her bedroom door. She teases him first, climbing on top and kissing him. But then her kisses turn into bites, continuing even when he yelps for her to stop. 

The extreme close-ups suggest the intruder’s body is a landscape, with a camera hovering over body parts while she bites and pulls off his flesh. She kisses him as he struggles to breath but pokes his wounds with her fingers and laughs. The approach, as Ian Murphy states, is “anthropological,” with “copulating human bodies registered in an unusual manner: not as clear figurations or distinct forms, but as dislocated swatches that took several moments for a viewer to recognize and identify as muscle, hair, or skin.” The result is a transformation of body into a landscape on which, as Laura U. Marks puts it, Coré, “grazes” (162).

Trouble Every Day (2001), Continued

In Trouble Every Day, the connection between Western intruders and post-colonial indigenous populations is complicated only by June’s interaction with a French-African porter (Bakary Sangare) outside her Paris hotel where she desperately looks for Shane in the pouring rain. In a more positive connection between colonized and colonizer, he offers her an umbrella while she stands drenched and frozen in doubt in the darkness asking her, “Wouldn’t you prefer to wait inside? It is warm.” According to Andrew Asibong, “these moments constitute a radically post-colonial break from the status quo” (158-9). Shane’s interaction with Christelle, however, perpetuates this status quo, reaffirming the exploitation of natives and their resources he and Leo began in Guyana. He seems to render Christelle invisible when she and June make their hotel bed, literally stepping out of the frame. But he gazes at her neck as she walks down a hall, metaphorically colonizing her by fragmenting her body into parts.

The most exploitative consumption in Trouble Every Day, however, is the literal ingestion of human flesh that results from Shane and Leo’s misuse of Guyana’s resources. In visual compositions, the film “gender[s] the land as feminine” (Kolodny, Lay of the Land 8), a gendering that reveals the two sides to a mythology that constructs women and the nature with which they are compared as both nurturing mothers and whores. Both cases, however, suggest women and nature are meant to be exploited, with or without their consent. An opening close-up of a heterosexual couple kissing reinforces the latter construct, for example, especially when it cuts to a setting sun over water and an extreme close-up of Coré’s face that reveals fecund lips and piercing eyes. She retains her role as sexual temptress even after devouring a truck driver. When her husband Leo finds her, he merely hugs her, kisses her forehead, and buries the driver.        

Trouble Every Day (2001)

Claire Denis’s Paris-centered anti-colonial horror film Trouble Every Day even more explicitly transforms bodies into landscapes. The Wendigo disease has been imported from post-colonial South America after a research expedition led by Dr. Leo Seneneau (Alex Descas). And the disease infects both Leo’s wife Coré (Béatrice Dalle) and an American male colleague, Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo). But the responses to cannibalism are even more gendered in Trouble Every Day than in American Psycho. Whereas Coré must be sacrificed after preying on and devouring several men, Shane remains unpunished, even though he too cannibalizes at least one victim, Christelle (Florence Loiret Caille), a hotel maid. Her interactions with both Shane and his wife June (Tricia Vessey) humanize Christelle, heightening the horror when Shane tortures, murders, and feeds on her flesh; yet because Shane is a respected male doctor, he is free to return home washed clean of guilt. As both victim and perpetrator, Coré must die, perhaps reifying her pleas to Leo: “I can’t wait any longer …. I want to die.”

Although scholarship exploring Trouble Every Day primarily highlights how the film plays with genre^[i] and/or style^[ii], we see the film as a comment on intruders violating interconnected frontiers. As in American Psycho, the literal cannibalism both Coré and Shane perform in Paris parallels the consumption of resources. This time the exploitation is in Guyana and also serves as the source of their disease. According to a website explanation of Dr. Leo’s bioprospection mission in Guyana, “These samples and analyses should in the near future help us to focus our pharmacological research into nervous diseases, pain, mental diseases, and problems of libido.” The following year, a bulletin article published in Revue of the Association of Neuroscientists explains, “Leo Seneneau has released several studies about botany applied to neuroscience.” And in flashback, we see Leo working in the jungle with a variety of plants. Other flashbacks show Coré and Shane with Leo in his rainforest camp.

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[i] See also Met, Phillippe. “Looking for Trouble: The Dialectics of Lack and Excess, Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001). Kinoeye: New Perspectives on European Film. 3.7 (9 Jun 2003). Web. 3 Jul 2013.

[ii] See also Morrey, Douglas. “Textures of Terror: Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day.” Belphegor: Littérature populaire et culture médiatique. 3.2 (Apr 2004). Web. 1 Jul 2013 and Murphy, Ian. “Feeling and Form in the Films of Claire Denis.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. 54 (Fall 2012). Web. 30 Jun 2013.