I was part of an exchange recently where someone dismissed a particular film as not being “real” horror, because in their estimation it “wasn’t scary” and was “too political.” Now, there are a couple of things wrong with this line of argument. First, it presumes that something can be objectively scary, when any response a viewer has to a creative work is to one degree or another subjective. We have the reactions we do to art based on our own memories, experiences, feelings, and values. Those are unique to us, and so what one person dismisses as silly might frighten another. We can talk about the degree to which a film succeeds at conveying what it’s trying to convey or make arguments for different interpretations based on the text (else what have I been doing for the last several years), but the idea that a creative work can be objectively anything is sort of a non-starter.
And for that matter, the idea that horror film isn’t or can’t be political is risible. Some of our biggest fears are political or have political expression. And horror films are a produce of a given time, place, and culture, and all of those carry with them their own politics, their own values. But that said, it’s certainly possible for a film to try and be topical and fumble the ball. There’s always the danger of being too didactic or using an issue as trivial window dressing for otherwise conventional horror clichés. But people watch horror movie and people have their own politics, so treating horror film as some objective artifact that is pure of either of these things is just ridiculous to me.
Oh, right, the movie. I bring this all up because Savageland is very much a topical horror film. It’s a somewhat uneven, but generally effective story about the banality of evil - evil is usually not the product of capital-E Evil, but rather it is what happens when people fail to do the right thing, fail to have courage or compassion or integrity. Evil comes from weakness and frailty and ignorance.
It’s the story of the small town of Sangre de Cristo, Arizona. It’s a very small town - fewer than 100 inhabitants - and its population is mostly if not entirely Mexican immigrants. Most of the folks who live in Sangre de Cristo work as farm laborers or domestic help for white families in nearby Hinzman. The white population of Hinzman doesn’t give Sangre de Cristo much thought - it’s referred to as “SDC” by folks who couldn’t be bothered to learn enough Spanish to pronounce it correctly, and “Savageland” by others. All those folks know is that’s where their gardeners and maids come from, and past that they don’t care.
Until one horrible night where, starting at sundown, everyone in town was massacred. Out of 57 people, only a few bodies were even identifiable as bodies. Smears of blood trailed out into the desert and just stopped. Scraps of bloodstained clothes, mangled body parts, what few bodies remained were badly mutilated and covered with bite marks. Well, almost everyone was massacred. A lone survivor, Francisco Salazar, stumbles out onto the road, covered in blood, and is picked up by a passing truck driver. He’s taken to the hospital in Hinzman, raving and babbling.
Naturally, Salazar - a soft-spoken, reclusive Mexican immigrant - is immediately arrested and charged with singlehandedly murdering an entire town. Case closed, a terrible tragedy but justice will be served, what else do you expect from those people, you know the story.
But Salazar’s a photographer. And he took pictures of everything he saw.
The film is structured like a crime documentary, cutting between archival footage and talking-head interviews and infographics, somewhat similarly to Lake Mungo (which I’ve just realized I’ve never written up and holy shit that is an oversight) but instead of being about the way grief and loss affects us and how secrets complicate all of that, it’s about the ways that bigotry, ignorance, and the complacency of privilege cost far too many lives. So it’s not a found-footage film, but as something being presented as documentary, it’s subject to some of the same concerns with verisimilitude. And it largely handles those well, apart from insisting on using a distressed-typewriter typeface for all of its captions and intertitles, which makes the whole thing feel a little cheesy. Likewise, the narrative starts off a little shaky, essentially re-telling us the same information two or three times in about the first fifteen minutes. That said, once it gets past the redundant table-setting, it settles into a stronger groove as it recounts the events of that night, using Salazar’s photographs and the locations they were taken as a map, represented by an actual infographic map of the town, which gives the story a strong sense of place and movement as well as feeling like something you’d see in an actual documentary.
The acting, like the pacing, is a little erratic as well. The performances are mostly solid but sometimes veer toward the wooden or the histrionic (a sequence about a family of missionaries feels especially artificial), and it’s a little distracting at times, but not a deal-breaker. What helps make up for some of the weaknesses in the acting is the art direction and the editing. It’s largely shot in what I take to be an actual ghost town, and as is often the case, it helps tell the story well. You just can’t fake that kind of decay, it never looks right. The photographs that Salazar took are impressionistic, black and white, just blurry and distorted enough that what you can see is especially effective - feral, blood-smeared faces emerging from shadows, slouched, misshapen forms backlit by the setting sun or by firelight. Something really bad happened here, something hard to imagine in its scope and impossible to explain (and to its credit, the film makes absolutely no effort to explain or mythologize or backstory what happened). Live footage of locations in town are intercut with crime scene photos from the same places that are largely riots of blood and hard-to-identify body parts. The photos don’t linger, which again helps, so we’re left with an impression of terrible violence committed by something (or things rather) monstrous, before we can notice the artificiality of the effects. There’s a good sense of restraint at work here, and though it’s probably a function of the budget, it never comes across that way.
The narrative is a clear one - maybe a little too clear, to the point of being on the nose at times. Sangre de Cristo was a very small town full of Mexican immigrants -some documented, some not. Hinzman is full of the kind of white folks who are possessed of the confidence and self-assurance that only proceeds from unearned privilege, from never having to really fight for something and assuming everything is there for their benefit. With only a couple of exceptions, neither of them local, all of the white people in this film are sure that Salazar was solely responsible, and everyone else - Mexican locals and a Black reporter - are sure that he wasn’t. The idea that this isn’t about culpability as much as it is prejudice and complacency isn’t even subtext, it’s just text. It gets a little ham-handed in places, but only a little, and is largely articulated with restraint through narrative, rather than having someone just straight-up tell us it’s happening.
And it’s woven tightly into the story, unlike a film like Undocumented, which takes the plight of Mexican immigrants and the kind of “patriot” yahoos who “patrol” the border unsolicited hoping for a chance to kill someone and uses it as a flimsy pretext for your basic torture-porn setup. The story here is about those sentiments and attitudes and all of the different ways, small and large, that they cause harm and cost lives. And also to its credit, the people who don’t believe Salazar did it don’t necessarily make the right call either - both sides are faced with the incomprehensible, but that doesn’t mean that the folks who are on the right side of history are somehow automatically granted clear and perfect understanding. All humanity is subject to frailty, not just the folks who believe things we disagree with.
The ending falls a little flat, pulling back from the full consequences of what’s happened, but only a little. It looks like this is the first feature-length effort from the filmmakers, and though I do see room for improvement, they aren’t off to a bad start. The terrible things have already happened here, what we’re watching is the aftermath, and the way that the people with all of the social capital, all of the power to avoid something worse happening, are content to blame it all on one poor man and call it a day. Their lack of compassion and desire to be inconvenienced as little as possible, the ending seems to say, is going to cost a lot more lives before this is all over.
Fuck, if that’s not topical, I don’t know what is.
No comments:
Post a Comment