That is the single most fucked-up idea for a movie I have ever heard about.

Joan

wow I didnt know that that was the ending. I had heard that it was actually a sort of zombie metaphor movie for "just because she can't say no, doesnt mean she's consenting" and I heard that the zombie girl escapes and kills her attackers.
Teeth was a funny movie but at some point i just wanted the poor girl to get a break! all the guys are so rape-y.
Really now that i think about it these movies make men look bad not women. Hahaha! that's pretty funny!!

Is this at least portrayed as HORROR, or are we supposed to see the rapists as "sympathetic" characters?

I remember reading about this movie on io9, and they were talking about how it's a classic example of "zombie feminism."

http://io9.com/5053881/zombie-feminism

I really feel that it's unproductive to go around labeling movies as horribly offensive because they deal with sensitive topics when you haven't actually seen the movie. (And also haven't done any research beyond discovering that ZOMG THIS MOVIE HAS RAPE.)

Judging from the resume of the writer/producer, it's just a grade-Z horror/exploitation film that has managed to latch on to a few festivals and generated enough buzz for some indie festivals and midnight showings. It doesn't even show up in the top 60 movies on the weekend box office chart.

However, marketing and youtubes and imdb summaries aside, I still maintain that you can't derive the tone and intent of a movie without seeing at least a large part of it. It's fine to say "the marketing sucks and I have no interest in seeing this tripe" (i.e. the promotional material is sexist and failure-bound), but I don't believe in shortcut condemnations.

After all, I could construct a similar disturbing precis for the movie River's Edge or the Twin Peaks franchise, but I'm pretty sure we wouldn't accuse either filmmaker of seeking to normalize rape or violence against women.

i'm going to bring this movie up next time someone is dumb enough to utter the words "but women and men are equal". just more fodder for my now practiced and authoritative "oh no you didn't" smack down.

what human beings are wasting their lives making and watching this kind of shit?

i'm going to bring this movie up next time someone is dumb enough to utter the words "but women and men are equal". just more fodder for my now practiced and authoritative "oh no you didn't" smack down.

what human beings are wasting their lives making and watching this kind of shit?

welllll... I saw the movie... it actually comes across more as feminist allegory. I mean, yes, it's very, VERY brutal, but having sex with the woman IS presented in a negative light, the zombie, when she gets free, does sort of make choices that suggest she has some agency in her life now that she's free and she recognizes who was complacent in her rape and who wasn't, and when the director did a Q&A afterwards, he said tha tthey made the movie with the idea in mind that the "hero" isn't even exactly heroic, that his decision at the end has a lot of moral ambiguity to it, and that's true, if you pay attention to the details.

SPOILER!

When the "hero"'s crush comes down, she ends up getting killed, and as she's dying they're faced with the idea that either they can jsut let her die, or they can let her become a zombiegirl. they actually never show her being raped or even having sex after she becomes a zombie; it's suggested, but the suggestion is ambiguous. all you know is that she's living on, tied up to a table, as a zombie. And while the "tied up to a table" part is a trigger for many, and certainly invokes bad imagery, the internal logic is consistent and not necessarily misogynistic.

Regardless of the movie's portrayal of the rape and the rapists, I'd say using sexualized imagery and taglines on the promotional materials makes it gross. Even if the movie is saying, "Look, let us deal with the nuances of disaffected youth raping zombie women," the posters are going, "SEXY!"

Er, I should add that it's feminist allegory in the Catherine Makinnon sense of "you grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs" sort of thing, but then at the end deadgirl, uh, you know, eats the bad guys. So, feminist allegory.

I think what really got me was the "Every generation has its story about the horror of growing up" line. Murder, rape, and necrophilia have nothing to do with "growing up", and it's ridiculous for anyone to try and paint it that way.

Since when did "controversial" mean "throw in as many violent and sick acts as possible"? You know what would be a REAL controversial film? A film where everything was reversed: minorities above whites, women above men, gays/bis/lesbians above straights, genderqueer above gender roles, etc. It'd be a real smack in the face to the people who have convinced themselves that everything is "equal now: nothing needs to change".

I really don't know if this can be called "feminist" just because the woman escapes and eats her rapists at the end. Even if it's not saying that rape is a good thing--and no filmmaker would ever, *ever* do that--it looks like the purpose is more to shock and cause "controversy" than actually make a point. It is quite possible to make a point of brutal reality without going to such fucked up extremes.

Well I DID see the movie at a friend's home who always downloads the newest horror flicks and I can attest to the fact that yes, it is disgusting and no, there are no underlying feminist messages unless you consider a dead woman escaping abuse and enacting immediate revenge as an inherently feminist act.
I guess the directors offered that line of bullshit to counteract any negative feedback that they were anticipating. It's basically 2 hours of raping an undead girl and talking about raping an undead girl without ever saying the words rape *once* in the whole movie. Seriously, I kept waiting for the "good" guy character to say, "Hey guys, this is rape. This is wrong." But he only kept vaguely saying stuff about how they would all go to jail and how he had a bad feeling about this. Plus they also try to make it seem as if the zombie girl "wants it" which is also problematic. Maybe if the newly kidnapped girl would have had a dramatic ass kicking scene where she freed both herself and the old dead girl and got the police involved, then I'd agree that this movie had slight feminist undertones at the most. It made me feel about as gross as Hostel 2 before I walked out of the theater. The only reason I stuck around watching this one is because I was curious to see how it ended.

Film is very important to me, including campy, bad, cheesy, etc, horror.

I can understand critiquing the marketing of this movie, commenting on reviews written by critics one agrees with, but I find the general judging of a movie before watching it to be kind of bothersome.

I think it's fine to say, whoa, definitely not seeing this movie, thanks. But to judge whether or not it's a "good" movie, whether it's feminist, whatever, without watching it just bothers me.

Sounds like yet another attempt to make a name for oneself in an already saturated zombie movie market using women's bodies in a one-upping shock-fest to make a buck. Is it ever considered feminist when a female movie character gets revenge on the sicko who killed her friends for the last hour and a half? Nope. It's just called THE END.

I saw this movie, and actually loved it. True, horror movies are my favorite anyways, but I really thought that the director used classic graphic and gory details that would draw horror fans in to illustrate the wrongness of what was going on, which is what happens in a LOT of horror. The best thing about horror is that it explores these social taboos. Just because it exists doesn't mean you sympathize with it. Or it gives a way of expressing "wrong" (quotation marks because the appeal of some of these aren't really for me to judge you about) and twisted desires and ideas in a medium that lets people understand that while these exist, they are not socially acceptable to act out in certain ways. The boys in the movie all reacted differently, in their actions and emotions, and it was interesting to see an interpretation of how people would react to the idea of such graphic rape. It also literally made rape disgusting... The girl was rotting, and every mark made on her stayed, which served as a reminder of every action that was taken towards her.

While the word rape isn't used throughout the entire movie, the word zombie isn't either. I think the director chose not to state the obvious overall, possibly to make it louder.

Just because something is graphic and offensive doesn't mean it's sending a terrible message about women out. That's a huge tradition in horror, and it's part of what makes it great to me. A lot of feminist art would seem to do that, at first glance.

I find it funny that 90% of this thread is people who haven't seen the film arguing talking about how this film sucks, yet of the 3 people who actually have seen it, 2 of them liked it.

Vagina mouth?!?! *insert expression of amused disgust and disbelief*

So I'm reading the synopsis, and it doesn't even make fucking sense. So there's this element of supernatural (the girl in the mental asylum "doesn't die" when they shoot her - OK), but then they just decide to go out and kill regular women and rape their corpses, and there's supposed to be something supernatural about it?

I, just, what?

This is why I couldn't stand _No Country For Old Men_: Male characters, no matter how stupidly stereotypical or what ancient patriarchal tropes they play into, are always lauded as so "complex" and "conflicted" and representing some deeply interesting problem for all of humanity. Women rarely, if ever, get cast in such parts ... they hardly even EXIST in film. You can go to a movie and it's like the goddamn world is populated by men, there's barely a female character in sight to say a lousy two words (_American Gangster_, off the top of my head). This is just the logical end point for an industry where women don't exist and might as well be dead.

What an idiotic post. You haven't even seen the movie.

I read the synopsis at IMDB and I'm really confused. Is she a normal woman or a zombie? Does the film include supernatural powers or not?

Ugh... Indie misogyny. Nothing new or original. By the way, I saw another film at a film festival last year that basically had this exact plot, and I was disgusted then, too. It was mostly graphic, overdone, unaware rape fetishism that was "made ok" by the final act of the zombie girl eating the rapist at the end. It won the audience choice award- I nearly cried. These filmmakers think they are creative, new, progressive and edgy but they aren't any of the above. Raping zombie girls is the new trend.

*spoilers*

I saw this movie and I considered it to be fairly misogynist.It was interesting when the movie just concerned the zombie girl, but I thought it got really bad when the boys began to look for a "suitable" (i.e. attractive) woman to kill and turn into the new dead girl without any regard for the
woman's thoughts or feelings. Although the movie does not portray what the boys are doing as ok or right, it was still pretty hard to watch. The characters in this movie forget that women are PEOPLE and people have the right to live their own lives the way they want regardless of what horny teenage boys wish they could be.

So wait, how many people here have actually seen the movie? Reading the synopsis of something is a terrible substitute for actually, you know, forming a real opinion on a work of art.

I saw it, and found it to be one of the single most feminist works of horror I've ever seen, in any medium, and I consume horror like few others.

This movie is horrifying. It's monstrous. And the monster is not the deadgirl. Once you wrap your head around that this film becomes a horrifying look at boys on the cusp of being men, and what their interpretation of manhood is in a society that commodifies women as bodies.

Deadgirl explores everything from the "male gaze" to a lack of adult role models to peer pressure. What's scary is the result.

I really think that this is far more feminist than your average horror film that uses sexualized violence to titillate. There's nothing titillating about this movie. It's horrific scenes spliced in with contemporary life, and it really shows how in a society where manhood is defined by some as conquest and control anyone can become a monster with the right impetus.

There's a whole community post in this, but suffice it to say that if you can stomach this movie (and I don't think most people can, as this thing is like the nuclear launch button of all triggers) Deadgirl says a lot of interesting things about contemporary manhood.

Thank you! You hit on what I was thinking but couldn't quite say very well.

So, of the 4 people on this thread who have watched the movie, 2 liked it and found it to be feminist, and 2 didn't and found it to be misogynistic-is it fair to say that interpretations can differ, here?

This thread is full of fail.

Let me spell out for everyone what's misogynistic about a movie like this. It's not the graphic portrayal of violence against women (although that argument could be made), it's using that graphic portrayal of violence against women to further the character development of the male protagonists.

What davenj said but entirely misinterpreted is true: the movie is about manhood. It's about men. It's about abusing a woman to explore what it means to be a man-- exactly what our grossly misogynistic society is all about. And, no, I don't have to see it to know that.

The very symbolism of a woman only having some semblance of power after she's dead/zombified (probably, i.e., can't feel anything) doesn't seem especially feminist to me. The woman as haunting witch/angel/other supernatural character is a centuries-old trope (so is the female martyr, the kind, pure woman who dies a premature tragic death); it's a lot more interesting and comfortable to cast the powerful woman as not even really human or existing. Though realist films about female rape survivors like _North Country_ and _The Accused_ sometimes get good reviews, the fact is, they make people really uncomfortable about the real world and real social problems around them, as realism tends to do. Zombie sci-fied women who eat human flesh, not so much. This type of woman is never going to show up at your door crying after being raped by her ex-boyfriend.

And it seems lost on many posters on this thread that people have many reasons for choosing not to consume various media, like movies, including to make a statement about social justice. Did we not just have a discussion about this regarding the rape scene in _Observe and Report_ some weeks ago? I have no idea how one is suddenly barred from discussing or having an informed opinion on a piece simply because s/he hasn't seen/read it in its entirety. Ridiculous. I'm not going to spend my limited free time reading everything I dislike and/or everything written by people I deem jerks just to make myself feel more "qualified" in determining that it's garbage and is a waste of my time. I'm not going to read George Bush's autobiography before I'm capable of making an informed judgment that the book is trite garbage mostly written by ghostwriters.

I saw it a few months back.

I think the movie is very well done.

The synoposis fails completely.

davenj, you are awesome. There is nothing titillating about this film. I think at one point one of them is eating rotting food just to stay down there to live with her.

There's something people should keep in mind, though I think many are aware.

While some posters are going off on tangents about what art is about, or this movie should be seen before they rush to judgment, this shit really happens. In "civilized" countries like the US, Japan and Germany. In recent years. Today.

Teenage boys really have kept live teen girls confined in their homes to use as sex slaves, for months at a time. Grown men really have kept live young girls and women confined for years and decades even, to use as sex slaves. Look it up yourself if you want to know.

Do we need "fiction" to examine how men are raised, or how society encourages and normalizes abuse of women? Do people need to see this movie, to judge it? No, they don't.

I'm watching it now, and will finish tomorrow after work. I have the privilege of it not being a trigger for me (though being alone in a room full of stereotypical men is), but it is like watching a train wreck. It is sad that many people had to make the effort to tell me something that CNN or Lisa Ling already can, for real.