Bitch is Hardcore

Slither (2006): written and directed by James Gunn

WARNING: THIS A SPOILER-ATHON. If you really can’t guess what happens in alien zombie movies, don’t read this before seeing the film. Also, familiarise yourself with the rules of genre and narrative structure. The world will seem a less frightening and unpredictable place.

I’m no aficionado of B movie horror but, as you can imagine, Carl’s quite up for it and especially if the horrific is introduced by anything extra terrestrial (ersatz Catholic hokum, on the other hand, makes him really quite irritable. There was no talking to him after that thing with Tilda Swinton as an angel). So he was well up for Slither and I’m glad I let him talk me into it – and not just because of Nathan Fillion. But significantly because of Nathan Fillion, to be fair.

The central horror motif of the movie is a kind of alien rape, in which two tubes are inserted into the abdomen of the writhing victim so that something unspeakable can be pumped in and s/he is transformed into a vast, swollen womb. This subsequently explodes in a shower of squeaking and speedy slugs that crawl into people’s mouths and become parasites, killing their victims and turning them into the usual (conveniently slow-footed) zombies. Already this is ticking a lot of the required boxes of the genre, and we haven’t got to the teenage girl in the bath or the suburban family zombie sequences yet.

This is already likeable enough, but what interested me is the particular complexion of the conventional relationship with the feminine at the centre of the film. There is always a sexy blonde in a horror movie, and post-Buffy she’s allowed to fire guns, stab zombies in the throat and then give them a good kicking. She also always the vehicle for the anima relationship dynamic, and so it is here. Starla Grant, a Hitchcock-ish classy blonde in pencil skirts and tight cardies, teaches biology at the high school in the run down backwoods town of Wheelsy. The product of a poor and broken home, she has married a rich but fairly repulsive older man, Grant Grant (yes really – scriptwriters clearly ran out of coffee at a critical moment) to escape her lot, but hunky local sheriff Bill (Fillion) still holds a torch for his high school sweetheart. Both men love her and neither feels worthy of her; one of the engaging elements of the film is the genuine pain of the increasingly monstrous Grant as he wrestles with his love for his wife, his knowledge that she doesn’t truly love him but only feels pity, gratitude and loyalty, and his certain knowledge that, if allowed expression, his true nature would only horrify and corrupt her.

So, plot. Driven out of the house after yet another sexual rejection from Starla, Grant goes a local bar and picks up Starla’s alter ego, the dirty blonde Brenda who has, unlike Starla, always fancied him. They go into the woods but when Brenda jumps his bones the sexually frustrated Grant nonetheless rejects her out of love for and loyalty to his beautful young wife. In order to avoid further social embarrassment he goes poking about with a strange object that opens like a vulva (seriously, it’s a vulva) and ejaculates something spiky into his chest. Alien inserted, let mayhem commence.

For a while Grant struggles with the literal as well as a figural monster inside, trying with increasing desperation to protect his wife from the truth and from his violent desire (to shove to tubes into her abdomen and fill her with his little space slugs). Eventually he seeks out the grubbier Brenda, who is poor and a bad (single) mother and therefore presumably up for it with whichever million year old space parasite that happens to be passing. Who says they don’t have class war in the USA? They initiate what poor Brenda thinks is going to be regular old nice sex but it turns out Grant’s needs are far darker than that; he overcomes and penetrates her, watching her twitching body and she is pumped full of his space juice. The problem here is not that the psyche fears sexuality; it is that its own sexuality is so much, darker, more destructive and more violent than it should be.

Brenda and Grant disappear, their presence betrayed only by a trail of savaged animals. After a hunt by the local menfolk, led by hunky Bill, they are discovered deep in the woods (see previous posts and misty woods and the unconscious). Poor Brenda has turned into the parody of an American white trash woman, a vast, distended ball being fed piles of rotting food by her de-evolving lover preparatory to giving birth to her thousands and thousand of revolting offspring. Class war again. Anyway, the usual kinds of high jinks ensue and there are plenty of variations on the theme of women being attacked by disgusting penis-slugs that want to live inside them and destroy them, which is all as it should be. The particular thing it might be worth noting is that Grant has been, in a sense, right; if he had been able to enact his desire on his wife, he would have turned her into a monstrous, animal-like vessel and she in turn would give birth to his disgusting, bestial offspring. His is so horrifying a person that he could destroy his own anima if he allowed himself free rein.

This is, in other words, an animus position in which true relationship with the anima cannot be achieved because of an over-acute awareness of the darkness and deformity of the deepest self. True relationship, the fear is, would mean the loss even of the fragile, distant relationship that does exist, would mean seeing the horror you know in yourself reflected in the eyes of the one you love, and result in total rejection. This is a male psyche permanently divided from itself by a terror of its own darkness, a psyche that cannot create in love because knowledge of its own violence and ugliness seems insurmountable. All it could create is monstrous offspring that perpetuate the original furious destruction. A male psyche that cannot permit itself to love.

Starla would, it's apparent, be far better off with clear-skinned, clear-eyed sheriff Bill, who probably doesn’t nurse fantasies of two-tube rape and alien babies. Nonetheless, he is only another face of Grant; Bill too does not initiate a relationship with Starla because he doesn’t feel he can offer her what she deserves (wealth and security and all the uptight cardies she can buy). These are not alternatives for Anima to choose from; they are two aspects of the same psyche in which the dark has overcome the ego and rendered it powerless. It is only when Anima has confronted the darkness in the form of Jabba-like Grant (touchingly, surrounded by photos of his Earth-wife that he’s presumably spent ages trying to pin up with his great slimy tentacles), wounds him and, with Bill’s help, destroys him that she and Bill can set off into the sunset (dawn, in this case, as it happens). In other words, it’s only when the fullness of the darkness is expose to anima that the full relationship of animus and anima can be achieved and that darkness put in its right place. And anima herself in the process also develops, or at least is seen more fully; Starla is allowed finally to leave the ironed knitwear bheind and put on a leather jacket, stab things in the throat and generally prove the point that Bill makes to her earlier in the film: that she doesn’t need his protection because she’s entirely able to take care of herself. No pedestal needed.

Anyway, what can I say; I liked it and I suggest you watch it if you get the chance. And, because I’m nice, here’s a picture of Nathan Fillion.

Carl says: it costs [men] enormous difficulties to understand what the anima is. They accept her easily enough when she appears in novels or as a film star, but she is not understood at all when it comes to seeing the role she plays in their own lives, because she sums up everything that a man can never get the better of and never finishes coping with.

Thom says: When you were here before, Couldn't look you in the eye,You're just like an angel, Your skin makes me cry;You float like a feather,In a beautiful world,I wish I was special,You're so fuckin' special;But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo,What the hell am I doin' here?I don't belong here.
Creep (Radiohead: Pablo Honey (2003))