The Clovehitch Killer: Coming Of Age

Horror films do a better line than you might think in coming-of-age stories, considering that those are often the province of drama. But they tend not to be very subtle. They play to the cheap seats, recasting the physiological changes of adolescence as body horror, or, in the case of something like It, recasting childhood tragedy and abuse as supernatural ordeal. They deal in monsters.

The Clovehitch Killer is very much a coming-of-age story, in the sense that part of coming of age is finding out that your parents are as flawed as any other person. That they aren’t who you thought they were. It’s largely smart and restrained, told at a very human scale, and to its credit, it doesn’t deal in monsters.

The film takes place in Tyson County, Kentucky, in a small town filled with devout, hardworking folks. As an opening voiceover tells us, however, it’s a town with a shadow over it. For several years, the town was terrorized by the predations of the so-called Clovehitch Killer, named for the knot he left behind at every crime scene. He taunted the police, leaving behind a trail of bodies, elaborately bound, tortured, and suffocated to death. Every year, the town holds a memorial for the victims. They aren’t forgotten. Ten victims accounted for, and then ten years ago, the killings just…stopped.

The voiceover belongs to Tyler Burnside. He’s a young man like any other in this small town - a Boy Scout, a churchgoer, a high school student. And he has his eye on a young lady, as a number of teenage boys do, and one night he sneaks his father’s truck out to pick her up for whatever two teenagers do, parked in a car, away from adult supervision. And as things progress, this young lady reaches down and finds a folded-up picture under the seat. A picture taken from a pornographic bondage magazine.

Well, that kills the mood right quick, and soon enough, Tyler develops a reputation as a “pervert.” It’s a small town, so people talk, and it’s a churchgoing town, so people are self-righteous, as Tyler finds out the hard way. More worrisome, though, is what was that doing in his father’s truck?

Tyler’s father, Don Burnside, is every inch the affable family man. He’s married with two kids, he’s a Boy Scout troop leader, active in his church, he calls Tyler “bud” and has an arsenal bristling with dad jokes. He’s starting to feel the aches and pains of age - he’s been a handyman for years and his back acts up a lot. He’s taking care of his brother Rudy, left catatonic by a car accident, and that’s not getting any cheaper. The same problems we all have. And like all of us, he has his secrets - desires he doesn’t tell anyone about, things he doesn’t let anyone else see,

Things he keeps carefully locked away where nobody will look. Private things.

So, with a fair amount of narrative economy, this film sets up a situation where Tyler, bothered by his discovery (and with nobody to turn to), starts becoming more and more curious about what else his father might be hiding, gradually turning up more and more to suggest that maybe his father has much bigger, darker secrets than anyone would expect. The film, for most of its run time, generally does a good job of sustaining tension. The first act is mostly Tyler coming to realize what his father might be and having to go about day-to-day life with him as if everything is normal, and the performance sells it - an excellent example of showing, rather than telling that makes Tyler’s turmoil plain without histrionics. A lot of it also rests on a gradual process of discovery, as Tyler digs deeper and deeper and it gets harder to deny the truth. It’s to the film’s credit that the revelations carry some weight, even if you do have a sense of what they’re going to be. There aren’t a lot of twists and turns (some “oh god he knows/no wait it’s something innocuous” fake-outs, but not enough to become tiresome), more a steadily mounting dread. Anyone who’s spent any amount of time with true crime stories has an idea of what serial killers tend to keep, so it isn’t surprising in that sense, but you really get the feeling of what it’d be like for Tyler to find this stuff and know there’s no other way to explain it. You don’t want him to open that box, or look in the crawlspace, but you know he’s going to and it’s going to be bad.

So the better-than-average treatment of the family man-with-secrets is paired with a better-than-average treatment of the idea of a serial killer as well. As I’ve complained about in the past, serial killers are all too often made into monsters in film. They’re portrayed as criminal masterminds, evil geniuses with a flair for the theatrical, or as implacable, unkillable, masked hulks. And they aren’t monsters. Monsters aren’t real. Serial killers are very real - emotionally stunted narcissists whose lack of basic empathy and malformed desires cost innocent bystanders their lives, and cause uncountable anguish to the friends and families left behind. To turn them into another werewolf or vampire or zombie is massively disrespectful to the people who died at their hands. Real evil should be depicted realistically, and the filmmakers do a very good job here as well. Their fictional killer is based heavily on the case of Dennis Rader, a/k/a the BTK Killer, which keeps everything about as grounded as the world in which this story takes place. These things actually happened.

If anything, there’s a remarkable evenhandedness at work - what the Clovehitch Killer does is portrayed as plainly and matter-of-factly as trips to the grocery store or family dinners are. There are no theatrics, no musical stings or dramatic lighting, just something awful in its simultaneous cruelty and mundanity. And that’s the important point this film makes about serial killers: They aren’t monsters, they aren’t raving lunatics, and you don’t always (or usually) know one when you see one. Often they get away with it for years because they’re citizens, fathers, respectable members of the community, who have invested a great deal of energy into firewalling away the dark impulses they act on. Denial and compartmentalization are powerful coping mechanisms that we use for far less. The idea that the mask of sanity has to slip eventually (or that they’re even insane in the first place) is a fallacy.

Cinematically, one of this film’s strengths is that it isn’t shot like a horror movie. It’s shot like a drama. There’s very little music, and the film is shot in a spare, unadorned, almost utilitarian style. It depicts the events in the lives of these people in this small town, whether that’s going to church, going to school, eating breakfast together, having family game night, engaging in autoerotic asphyxiation, or tying someone else up and suffocating them to death. As I said above, there’s an evenhandedness to this that makes the awful parts somehow even more awful. It’s not an especially violent film, with the exception of the second act, and even that manages to dodge cliche - there’s nothing lurid or gratuitous, it’s just the spare, simple facts of what this killer does, presented unblinkingly. It’s very uncomfortable in its plain depiction, the way lives get snuffed out. Shots are well-composed and clearly lit - again, contrary to horror, a lot happens in the daylight in this film - and the performances are generally solid, the dialogue reasonably believable, though some of the stuff with Tyler and his peers skews into teen-drama territory, to its detriment. The outlines are familiar - Tyler is bothered by what he knows and none of his friends will listen (as much out of denial and fear borne of religious fundamentalism as anything else), so he turns to Kassi, the town misfit, the creepy girl who is obsessed with the Clovehitch murders and (gasp!) doesn’t go to church. It’s a little pro forma, some of the dialogue is pretty corny, and as the film moves on there’s more than a whiff of Encyclopedia Brown about Tyler and Kassi’s relationship.

This turn to the conventional (or maybe just cliched) about halfway through does rob the film of some of its power. The third act is a flashback that shows us events from the second act from a different point of view, and here it takes a turn for the formulaic, and improbable. It’s where the film feels most like a film, and not someone’s story, and characters behave in ways that you don’t in real life. But even then, what follows redeems it to a degree by grappling with something we don’t see in serial-killer films that often - the impact it has on the people who knew the killer all along, and it’s actually pretty touching. The end doesn’t have the impact it could - I think there’s some ambiguity there that distracts from the emotional power of it, but I I don’t know that it ruins it. There are some definite missteps, but there’s also a lot of good here.

The easy criticism for this film (one I’ve seen from professional critics) is that the evidence by a certain point is so overwhelming that there’s no way that someone wouldn’t go to the police, or there’s no way someone would make the decisions they do, but I think that’s the criticism of someone who hasn’t considered the frailty and fallibility of humanity all that closely. Denial is a powerful thing, the willingness to believe other than - anything other than - the obvious is a powerful thing if it means not having to reconsider everything you’d even held to be true. Everyone would rather just believe in the father, the husband, the churchgoer, the family man, especially in a small town. Learning otherwise is the kind of thing that makes you grow up in a hurry, and that’s not something most people want to face.

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