(Canada, 83 min.)
Written and directed by Gavin Michael Booth
Starring: Sarah Booth, Kimberley-Sue Murray, Katherine
Barrell, Jennifer Miller, Teagan Vincze, Dani Barker, Brad Everett.
Girls go wild in The
Scarehouse! This horror-comedy from writer/director/editor gives torture
porn a good old catfight as jilted pledges Corey (Sarah Booth, who also gets a
story credit) and Elaina (Kimberley-Sue Murray) devise an elaborate scheme of
Jigsaw-justice in a Halloween spookhouse moonlighting as a party to get even
with their former sorority sisters. Don’t let the synopsis or opening number,
which sees some sexy co-eds throw pillows and bash each other with sex toys,
fool you: The Scarehouse is fully
aware of the gender politics at its core and it has lots of fun taking them to
the extreme. The Scarehouse is sadistic
satire and it’s a bloody hoot.
Two committed performances from Booth and Murray gives the
film a playfully creepy vibe as the two girls refuse to accept the consequences
of their actions and give twisted turns as the young women driven by revenge.
Both actresses channel cartoonish villainesses during several moments of the
film, but Murray adds an unexpected moral centre to Elaina, which contrasts
with Booth’s deadpan wickedness and gives The
Scarehouse an extra edge as the two killers consistently feel like their
own foils. They’re a regular freak show amidst the spectacular spookhouse—an impress
feat of production design for the film’s modest $200 000 budget—that makes for
some attractive visuals and a grand carnival setting for the dark humour of the
Looney Tunes violence.
The Scarehouse
seems like the film that Ottawa’s own Girlhouse struggled to be when it debuted last fall, but the coed bloodbath of Scarehouse doesn’t have the same
awkwardly sexist vibe that its counterpart has. It helps that the aggressors of
Scarehouse are both female—and Corey
and Elaina take the adage of “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” to the
extreme—and the film turns its disgusting girl-on-girl action as far as it can
reasonably go.
The difference between the two films might best be
exemplified in two telling deaths: in Girlhouse,
the male killer asphyxiates a female victim with a dildo (how psychoanalytic of
him), while the killers of Scarehouse
make a girl choke to death on her on breast implant. (Thankfully, for both the
poor girl and for the audience, the victim isn’t a double D.) If Girlhouse struggles, it’s because the
drama is framed from a male’s viewpoint (it’s about a web program in which
coeds broadcast their lives/sexual escapes 24/7) and it frequently uses
cringe-inducing sexual violence to tease and provoke the audience. Scarehouse, on the other hand, often has
the killers wield their weapons with a sexual charge, but Booth puts a
perceptible spin on rape culture as the morale behind the film, and the
ugliness of the girls’ revenge exposes itself in turn.
Scarehouse balance
the sinister and the silly with a double-edged narrative that crosscuts between
the torture porn of the present and the past transgressions for which the girls
are getting revenge. The flashback scenes of Scarehouse at first make the film seem like it’s going to be a
groaner, for the aforementioned pillow/vibrator fight plays out from the
viewfinder of a handheld camera. It’s a piece of found footage. Instead of
overwhelming the film with clichés, however, the found footage works as an
exhibit of evidence that slowly and teasingly reveals the reasons for which Corey
and Elaina are getting even. They more they use the past to justify their
actions in the present, the more the film reveals them far from blameless. They
did an awful thing then and they’re doing an awful thing now, and a gross
explosion of the blame game leads everyone to a gruesome fate. Elements of
bullying and slut-shaming sensationalize the deeds in both the scarehouse and the
sorority house, and The Scarehouse
builds a complicated web of characters in which everybody is complicit in a
culture that normalizes sexual violence and measures consequences only by the
number of “likes.”
It helps that nobody in The
Scarehouse feels particularly innocent, although the film frequently feels
as if it teeters on the edge of blame, but the fact that all of the characters
are pretty repugnant makes it easier to appreciate the edge to The Scarecrow’s satire. The film’s at
its funniest when the violence is at its most ludicrously stereotypical—like an
acid-drenched pillow fight or a case of strangulation by corset—that The Scarehouse humorously mocks the
extremism of things like Greek Life and selfie culture. The shallower the victim,
the more gruesome her death. Some of it’s downright nasty—both the violence and
the hazing. These girls are some twisted, twisted pranksters with or without
the knives, guns, and acid, and The Scarehouse is twisted, twisted fun.
Rating: ★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
The Scarehouse is now available on home video.
