Don't Nap or You'll Miss This Sleeper Horror Flick

Don’t Nap or You’ll Miss This Sleeper Horror Flick: A Review of High Tension

06/26/2005

High Tension (Haute Tension). Alexandre Aja, director, 2003. [Released in the United States in 2005]

The slasher film is a uniquely American genre with its own oft parodied rules: sexually active girls die as punishment for their carnality while the virgin lives; the slasher has no entirely logical reason for meting out his punishment with some sort of knife or saw; bad things happen in rural areas, particularly the American south, where hoards of inbred unreconstructed Southerners lurk in the trees. Etc. Etc.

High Tension (originally released in France as Haute tension and in England as Switchblade Romance) plays with all of these rules. A slasher film set in rural France is already consciously manipulating these rules, at least for American viewers who see Europe in general as the antithesis of the United States—clean, civilized, non-violent. In short, the opening shots don’t inspire dread they way they might if set in the United States.

Other introductory elements that initially put American viewers off their guard are the main characters: two female best friends, Marie and Alex, one a feminine American ex-patriot and the other an androgynous French woman—with nary a man in sight to get anyone in trouble by insisting the group do something stupid and dangerous. In addition, the girls are traveling to the safety of Marie’s family farm house rather than away from home where danger usually lurks.

The girls have just returned from a holiday in Spain, and during the car ride home, Alex playfully chides Marie for ditching her the night before to be with a strange man, while Marie teases her friend for not having found the right man, or a man at all for that matter. The first hint we have that something is wrong is when the camera leaves the two girls for a moment and we see a rickety van driving through the corn field, too close to the farm house for comfort. Inside the van is a Gallic version of Leatherface, a portly, weathered man in a gimmie-cap who appears to be receiving fellatio from a dark haired woman. The awful truth of what’s really happening is made clear when the mysterious man lifts the woman’s head from between his legs and tosses it out the van window.

Night comes to the farm house, and Marie and Alex arrive late, going to bed after greeting Marie’s father. After the obligatory exposure of breasts and a masturbation scene, the killer invades the home and begins murdering much of the family in a way much more realistic and gruesome than anything represented in an American big budget film. Alex, in the top room of the house, hears the killer and hides, doing what she can to attempt to summon the police or somehow sabotage his plans without getting herself killed first. As the killer momentarily leaves the house, Alex sneaks downstairs and finds Marie bound, gagged, and already raped by the killer once. Before the killer returns to take Marie away, Alex promises to save her. The killer tosses a screaming, crying Marie into the back of his van, and Alex sneaks inside, looking for an opportunity to save her friend.

Okay, I know I’ve told you a lot, but I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the story, so don’t think I’ve ruined the film for you. Suffice it for me to tell you that nothing is going where you think it is headed, and you will not see the ending coming. I will, however, tell you that the ending pays homage to the conclusion of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Also, High Tension is a fine example of the giallo, an Italian term describing thrillers, which itself is taken from a series of pulp paperbacks bound in yellow. According to Tommy Olsson’s excellent website Profondo Giallo: Italian Exploitation Film on Video, the giallo is defined by ten rules:

· Rule #1 Several persons must be murdered.

· Rule #2: The killings should be shown in graphic detail.

· Rule #3: The identity of the killer must not be given away during these killings.

· Rule #4: The killer must use various methods of killing. Innovations are welcome, but so are the traditional black gloves, the razor knife and the bathtub. Firearms [don’t] count!

· Rule #5: There may be several different killers, and, if so, one of them may use a firearm.

· Rule #6: It is preferable that the killer be unmasked by an amateur detective, who may be an intended victim, and not the police.

· Rule #7: The killer may cross dress, but only when killing.

· Rule #8: The killer may die as the victim of an accident when about to be caught.

· Rule #9: The killings should be triggered by a traumatic experience the killer has had in the past. Economical motives are disappointing! It doesn't matter if the explanation is far-fetched.

· Rule #10: The film, or at least its director, must be Italian.

High Tension meets five of these criteria—I won’t tell you which five though.

Other things that High Tension has going for it is the capable direction of Alexandre Aja, who co-wrote the script with Grégory Levasseur, and the excellent acting of Cécile De France as Marie and Maïween Le Besco as Alex, along with original music by François Eudes. De France and Le Besco gave masterful performances in roles, that in films made in the United States would have gone to the actresses with the most jiggly chests, certainly not performers with the previous experience De France and Le Besco brought to their respective parts. And I was truly floored to see, in the closing credits, that one person alone was credited with the music, since songs were quite different, ranging from Europop to something that sounded a bit like Radiohead.

The director and writer, Aja and Levasseur, are both clearly familiar with not only the conventions of the giallo, but also with those of the American horror film.¹ This familiarity is demonstrated not so much through their following the rules as reinterpreting them. For example, we weren’t treated to a lot of false scares, where the villain is allegedly lurking just beyond the screen, right behind the oblivious victim the way we might be drawn in by something like John Carpenter’s Halloween, only to have that “presence” revealed as that of a friend rather than a foe (Carpenter uses this particular ploy about three times before Michael Myers actually is lurking is this space off camera, waiting to pounce). Only one such scene comes to mind in High Tension, occurring early on in a corn field, itself reminiscent of Children of the Corn. When victims die, they don’t expire in a shade of red that is larger than life, blood spurting in gravity defying arcs, and nerves quivering in a CGI crafted frenzy. Instead, the gore is all too realistic: the blood is the correct color, spatter occurs only where it would anyway, and death and suffering aren’t enhanced through the use of sound effects such as the crunching of bone against a baseball bat or the sickening sucking sound that a knife usually makes in films when it enters a bodily cavity.

Okay, now for the things that annoyed me about this film, and there were a few. First, the movie was both dubbed into English and had English subtitles! The dubbing itself was acceptable, though at times it had that Godzilla-dubbed-into-English quality, but I guess that can’t be helped when you are attempting to get actors speaking one language to appear to be moving their lips in another tongue. Anyway, the dubbing itself was not noticeable after about 30 seconds. However, I was reminded about the dubbing anew when the actors, without warning, reverted to French, which was translated in English subtitles. This inconsistency occurred several times in the film, and I don’t understand why. When the film was being prepared for release in the U. K. and the United States, did someone suddenly notice that a few snatches of French remained undubbed and thus, the only economical way to correct this oversight was to quickly slip in some subtitles?

Finally, without giving away too much, let me just say that one Internet Movie Database reviewer is right on the money in observing that this film is not politically correct, and I’m not talking about all of the cigarette smoking. I’ll say no more, or I really will ruin your enjoyment if you see the film. Suffice it to say that I don’t know how I feel about this particular facet of the plot that will be clear to you once you view the film. Still, High Tension is one of the better horror films made this year.

¹The Internet Movie Database mentions that Aja is directing a remake of the classic The Hills Have Eyes, due out in 2006. He has co-written the screenplay with Wes Craven and Levasseur. I am anxious to see how his particular vision will interpret characters that are fairly hollow stereotypes.