how to scare yourself

While I know I will never go watch this movie, I have to recommend the trailer, basically because of the song.

The Last House on the Left, 2009 release and remake of earlier 1972 release. Just get to the cover of Sweet Child o' Mine and you'll know why I went and downloaded that song as fast as humanly possible (Artist: Taken by Trees). That is freaking terrifying. I mean, the movie would scare me into peeing myself and I hate graphic visual violence and that trailer basically tells me I will never see that movie, but this is the reminder that before I am anything I am a fangirl and have been conditioned by vidders to respond to pictures set to music by hyperexamining the scene choice and trying to see what the vidder wants me to know. I will say this, the trailer succeeded in that. It tells me this is going to be gross and it will be revenge-oriented, and I don't want to know what the fuck was up with that microwave because oh my God, please.

Okay, what I found was neat as well is that the first time I saw the trailer on TV, I recognized before I saw the title what it was about, because I read about it in Wikipedia under revenge themed horror or something (wikipedia surfing: totally a drug. I know the plots to like, so many horror movies you have no idea) and it was odd, but that's why I occasionally kick ass at Jeopardy and Trivial Pursuit; I store shit like this for no particular reason. Yes, I forget my cell phone constantly and three credit cards I hid from myself very successfully so I have no clue where they are, but I can recognize in the first fourteen seconds of a trailer a movie I read a summary of. There's no way to explain that.

I also find it neat on a different level that the revenge concept of horror is brought up.



Granted, people are much hotter for the other way around (aka Hostel et al, with the helpless victims and one's eventual escape and a short pause to kill the bad guy, sometimes), but one of the things that horror movies really don't do very often is justified righteous indignation rage revenge, because there's a very real part of us that get mighty uncomfy with that sort of thing. Upsets us in our moral parts or something, as it is a-okay for the slut to get it for being a slut and then the more innocent potential victims run, run, run and maybe get rid of the bad quickly, but we're not so sure the slut should rise up with a knife and cut, cut, cut her way to revenge. That's not on.

(Exception: Kill Bill, but I don't count Tarantino in the horror genre. I think he is a genre, to be honest.)

The plot summary is that girl and friend are raped and murdered (OR ARE THEY?) and the murderers cleverly get out of the rain by going to the house of the murdered (OR IS SHE?) girl's family who they do not know is the murdered girl's family (AT FIRST?) and then the girl is alive (PRETTY SURE?) and somehow stumbles home to her father and mother, who enact a really horrific revenge against the three men and one woman who are staying in their guesthouse.

And I do mean horrific. The 1972 summary twitched me very hard with the entire grand entrance of blow jobs being less blow and more teeth oriented, but the trailer (again, vidders have trained me; I can't watch and not analyze and set the plot together, so trust me when I say, holy fuck) twitched me off the scale. Which is why I downloaded a song I can't listen to when it's dark because I keep flashing back and freaking myself out. Yes, welcome to my life.

So I am not sure this is Hostel or Saw level icky, but it's up there, but in its defense, it's a husband and wife being the fist of God in a very creatively horrifying way.

(Also, one of the bad guys I could have sworn was Justin Timberlake. IMDB says this is not so. Dammit.)



The song really creeps me out now, kthx. I keep trying to move it so I can't see it in my playlist. My sanity is not what one calls stable.

Comments

[norabombay.livejournal.com]

Psst: We just took slashdragonsays live.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I'll post first thing in the morning. Mind if I use the text from your entry?

[norabombay.livejournal.com]

I stole half of it from the description, which domtheknight wrote. Use all that you want :)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_medley_/]

Holy fuck, I should not have watched that. I knew better, I knew better. *hides* (Word about the freaky terrifying vid-quality of the thing, though.)

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Yes, I was already interpreting words to actions before I realized what the hell I was doing and freaked myself out. Just. Gah.

[tricksterquinn.livejournal.com]

I will be SKIPPING that, although my vid-sense is now VERREH VERREH CURIOUS. *shakes fist*

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Mine won't stop for that damn song.

[fan-eunice.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, that trailer is creepy. I saw it when Zen and I went to see My Bloody Valentine, and it gave me more shivers than the movie we went to see, in part because of the use of that song. It most definitely activated my vid brain right away. Well done trailer makers!

I am sad I did not get to see you this last weekend on account of being such a mess :(

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I really want to use that song to vid in Merlin. So. Freaking. Much. You know, when i can listen to it during daylight and all.

And np honey! *hugs* I will see you hopefully in August!

[likethemodel.livejournal.com]

I was very "Fuck yeah! The victim fights back" about the trailer until I read the wiki entry for the original. Wes Craven is sickety-sick.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes he is. But it's nice to see parents become the wrath of God, you know?

[lurkerlynne.livejournal.com]

But also a genius at the whole horror thing. ::nods:: I know when I'm watching one of his movies I'll be O_O and probably sleeping with the lights on.

[gehirnstuerm.livejournal.com]

Grah, my cursor keep hovering over the link because I'm curious, but I guess I shouldn't watch it. Or should I?

... okay, I watched the trailer. Dammit, you're right. It's pretty awesome. I don't think I can watch that movie, I would think about this way too much and freak myself out. I mean, it took me a while to learn not to think too much about slasher movies. Now I can usually watch them, even though I don't really care for graphic violence. But the "How far would you go?" thing is just too thought inducing.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

The trailer is not explicit, but it doesn't need to be. And that song is pure genius.

[unamaga.livejournal.com]

I don't think anything will ever, EVER top Audition for me in the category of OH HOLY SHIT JESUS CRAP I WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN. God, that movie.

I AM NEARLY CRYING JUST MENTIONING IT. D:

[seperis.livejournal.com]

OMG I READ THE WIKI ON THAT DURING MY REVENGE-MOVIE SURFING. I just went to look to make sure. DO NOT TELL ME MORE. That was enough. I was freaked out for days.

[elizaria.livejournal.com]

Umm.. yeah, the original is ... unwatchable? Me and yuonger brother last year decided that for Halloween we were gonna watch some classic horrormovies. Like "Flesh for Frankenstein" which is a gore classic and funny as hell, Zombie Holocaust (1980) which is like cannibal and zombie gore and Italian-made which sums it up nicely. Etcetera.

But when we started this movie we couldn't finish it, we hardly managed to watch much out of it - it's one thing if you can sit through the beginning to see that it's an old movie and rather badly done. We couldn't get past the rape to even watch the revenge, we tried to skip forward and see if it felt better but ... ummm.. no. For all of us those scenes were way too "real" to even bother watching more. So we shut that movie off and watched Dead Meat (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0369359/) instead and got a good laugh as an end to the evening.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Really? *twitch* I kind of freaked out just reading the summary.

[lazar-grrl.livejournal.com]

Upsets us in our moral parts or something, as it is a-okay for the slut to get it for being a slut and then the more innocent potential victims run, run, run and maybe get rid of the bad quickly, but we're not so sure the slut should rise up with a knife and cut, cut, cut her way to revenge. That's not on.

This is actually more of the former, if it follows the old movie. Lake-girl is the nice one, while her slutty friend is the one who gets them in trouble and (highlight for spoilers) . So no major trope subversion there.

The original wasn't anywhere near Saw or Hostel levels of ick. I actually thought it was fairly tame, violence-wise. Psychologically, yeah, it was damned scary.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I figured the dead girl would be the slutty figure, but I did like the parents doing the epic revenge angle.

[lazar-grrl.livejournal.com]

$5 says that after a teary "They killed so-and-so," when mom and dad first find her (if that), the friend is never mentioned again.

[suaine.livejournal.com]

Huh. This is a horror/slasher movie I might actually like. I'm very fond of the righteous rage/revenge. Much much more interesting than the innocent helpless victim type horror.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Yes, this.

[rurounihime.livejournal.com]

Just as a warning, in case the remake actually adheres to the themes of the original... The "righteous revenge" might not feel so sweet. I've commented more extensively about this below, if you are curious.

[snarkist.livejournal.com]

Oh man. I am a huge fan of horror. Like, have gone to the conventions and everything, but there is one kind of horror that I've never liked, and that is rape-revenge. Most of these are cult classics now, like Last House on the Left or I Spit on Your Grave, so when I saw they were remaking Last House, I was like, HELL NO. I saw the original when I was 18, and it scarred me for life. The problem is that while getting revenge is awesome, you ALWAYS have to sit through the rape scene(s). And they are usually quite extensive, and really freakin' vicious. Never really worth getting to see the revenge, IMO.

Which is really my way of saying, OMG NEVER SEE THIS MOVIE. But yes, in regards to your actual post, the trailer was actually quite good. When I saw it with my sister, she leaned over and said, "I must have that cover song." So yes, that part was awesome.

[hradzka.livejournal.com]

The seventies and early eighties were really big on revenge flicks. Lots of them involved rape, followed by either the woman or men who loved the woman getting revenge on the perpetrators. I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE was mentioned above -- a particularly horrifying example -- but you could also cite more mainstream movies such as DEATH WISH. (In that one, interestingly, Charles Bronson shoots his way through every mugger in New York, but never actually encounters the ones who destroyed his family. This showed that Bronson's struggle was against the world, rather than individuals; later movies failed to understand this, and sucked accordingly.) Revenge has been a huge staple in B-movies; Linda Blair avenging the rape of her sister Linnea Quigley in SAVAGE STREETS, f'r instance, or the B-movie SUDDEN DEATH, basically a female DEATH WISH, and Pam Grier did revenge stuff a couple of times. And there was one seventies flick I can't remember right now in which convicts take over a black minister's house, abuse his family, rape his daughter, and keep up a truly staggering display of racial abuse -- they make the family dance and sing spirituals at gunpoint, really grotesque stuff like that. I am blanking like hell on the title, but in the end the minister blows them away, killing the rapist in particularly gruesome gunshot-to-the-throat fashion. Apparently audiences really liked that part.

(The revenge thing also reared its head in a horrifyingly unexpected way in the T&A comedy THE SWINGING CHEERLEADERS, which really sent that movie on a 180-degree turn.)

...um, I may have watched too much late-night HBO as a teenager.

(And I'm sure everybody knows, but THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT was itself a remake/ripoff of Ingmar Bergman's THE VIRGIN SPRING.)

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I am really curious about The Swinging Cheerleaders now. I wiki'ed and couldn't find a description. yes, I find it funny too that I can't actually watch them but I read summaries and descriptions like voraciously.

And for the last--I did not know this! Thank you! *happy*

[fyrdrakken]

Otis has a plot kind of like that only the kidnapped girl isn't really badly hurt before she makes her escape. Also, her family winds up attacking the killer's brother instead, who had nothing to do with it. IIRC it's streamable on Netflix.

I didn't watch the trailer because I'm at work, but now I want to hear that cover...

[rurounihime.livejournal.com]

I can't speak for the remake... I have only seen the original, as part of a Horror Film Theory course in college. And I have no idea if this remake will be faithful to the focus and themes of the original. So many remakes these days sacrifice theme and message for blood-and-guts-scare-factor. But I can say that what made that original VERY hard to watch (not counting the physical violence done to the victims and their murderers) is that Craven portrays the killers as a family. And it's such an icky crossover, very confusing to the mind that wants to righteously hate people who would do such things to these two girls... But the fact that the four victimizers really do care for each other and look out for each other is very difficult to reconcile. I think that's part of why the original is so hard to sit through; we are not usually meant to side with the villain, but this film goes for that angle and is successful, to a certain extent. You feel for the girls, and then you feel for their killers. I'm not saying you hate the parents for taking their revenge. But you do feel sympathy where you are (or were) sure you shouldn't, and it's more like watching speechlessly as something extremely horrific goes down, and not being able to do a thing about it. Like watching a rock roll unstoppably down a cliff and not quite believing that you are really seeing it.

I will not be seeing the remake, and I do not feel the need to ever see the original again. It is very disturbing. Very graphic, and possibly a very unnecessary movie. I go back and forth about my opinion of it. I will say this, though: it stays with you. Its ugliness stays with you.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Ooh, thanks for that. I didn't know that about the original.

[rurounihime.livejournal.com]

Definitely a bizarre movie. *shudders* I'd never even heard of it until my class.