Rotten to the Core
FRANÇOIS SAGAT GOT out of the car covered in blue-green rotting flesh, wearing sharp fangs dripping blood. He followed the film crew as they lugged equipment to set up near a freshly dug gravesite. It seemed like the perfect spot to shoot the scene in arthouse director Bruce LaBruces LA Zombie. Until the grieving family caught site of the hulking French porn star who resembled the walking dead.
The people who run the cemetery started freaking out and saying, Get him out of here! Get him out of here! LaBruce says. It isnt something you want to see at a funeral.
After recent films like Jennifers Body and Zombieland and HBOs True Blood series, sexy supernatural horror has certainly gone mainstream. But LaBruces latest is set to be released in June and is intended as an unabashedly hardcore pornographic film, not cutesy or kitsch. While films that deal with sexual acts with the undead might not exactly be the type of movie that audiences buy tickets for on opening night, LaBruce and other directors are finding that their films are being increasingly accepted as they ride the coattails of the horror trend.
According to Peter Dendle, associate professor of English at Penn State Mont Alto, who specializes in zombie movies and literature, the idea of using zombies to represent sexually explicit themes has been documented widely in the past. Especially in early movies, where as Hollywood was incapable of dealing with race and gender issues, these horror movies were capable of expressing them, Dendle explains. They were reducing her to material physicality even as she goes through the motions of wife, girlfriend, trophy wives.
Dendle argues that having sex with zombies taps into an unapologetic revealing of humanity in which peoples guts and inner feelings are explored for the entire world to see. He stated that while most people disgustedly brush off zombie pornor even the suggestion of itas necrophilia, sexualized zombie activity is often used to represent what people consider contagions to society, from biblical leprosy to AIDS.
Instead of finding only these sexually charged horror films in remote arthouses, mainstream movie rental chains such as Netflix are now distributing risqué titles to a potentially much larger niche audience.
LaBruce is already known for his films that feature provocative content, such as skinheads and amputees. In 2008s Otto, or Up With Dead People, he focused on a lesbian pornographic filmmaker and her relationship with a homeless zombie boy. It was added on Netflix because it had some appeal to folks who like certain types of horror movies, according to Steve Swasey, Netflixs vice president of corporate communications. The company has a policy of not disclosing the specific numbers of rentals, but Swasey said the film had received close to 15,000 reviews from viewers since it was added to the Netflix film library in 2008.
In a similar vein, Gadi Harel and Marcel Sarmiento, both 38, have seen success with their film Deadgirl, which was added in 2008 as well and has received 50,786 reviews to date.
The movie is really finding a massive audience already, far larger and faster than we had expected, Harel said. Its still divisive as hell, but theres clearly a tremendous interest in it, and people are really passionate one way or the other, love it or hate it. We couldnt have asked for more.
Deadgirl revolves around two teenage boys who find a woman who cannot die chained in an abandoned mental asylum. Being young and, umm, curious, they decide to take advantage of the zombie in her situation. While Harel and Sarimiento first tried to avoid characterizing their dead girl with the z-word, they admit that theyve found it hard to avoid the label and have come to accept it, although they still strictly insist this is not a traditional zombie film.
She is real, and we dont want to let them off the hook, said Sarmiento. We didnt want it to be about zombies or sex. We wanted it to be about their actions.
Because the film is more verbally suggestive than visually explicit about the boys sexual escapades, the film received a hard R rating. In spite of this, some film critics still believed that the material was too taboo and did not successfully show what the filmmakers intended.
Joanna Angel runs the hardcore pornographic site Burning Angel, and the 28-year-old agrees that, in some cases, there are no greater sociological aspects behind the work. Her film Re-Penentrator won the 2006 AVN Award for Most Outrageous Scene. Admitting the genre is definitely not profitable, she said that the one good thing that came out of the film was the publicity, and cites it as the one big event that put her company on the radar.
Directed by horror director Doug Sakmann, the 20-minute, $5,000 porno features Angel, made up as a zombie, comically spewing blood and ripping out guts as she has sex with the doctor who brought her back to life.
Its definitely not a jerk-off porno, Angel says. You dont feel like youre watching porn; its just kind of outrageous. She knew the idea would be controversial, but she never realized the impact on her company until her father emailed her saying that he read on Google Trends that his daughter had made a zombie movie that was sparking debate. The biggest problem arose when Angel discovered that Visa, which is accepted on the Burning Angel site, had a policy of not allowing its company to be used in accordance with films that include blood and sexual acts. Angel thought she got around it because she was using fake blood, but Visa didnt buy her explanation. (Visa denied comment on the issue.) She was forced to take Re-Penetrator off Burning Angel and host it on its own website.
Most adult bookstores refused to carry the film on shelves because they said it didnt appeal to their clientele, and regular stores that carried horror films couldnt hold the title because of the sexual nature of the film. She tried re-editing the film and released The Sick and Twisted Horror of Joanna Angel, which made it on Netflix, but too many complaints from viewers forced the company to pull the edited version of the film.
Most people going to an 18-plus kind of place are looking for a quick fix, and that quick fix is usually not a zombie, Angel said laughing. Re-Penetrator is something you want to see with a group of friends, and porn isnt marked as a group activity.
LaBruces Otto also garnered controversy, but he was able to gain public support and funding because of the underlying themes of alienation. Initially he pitched it to investors as a gay zombie movie, playing down the sexual elements of the film. He received funding from private investors, art galleries and the Ontario Arts Council and Canadian Arts Councileven though it contained two explicit scenes of sexual acts with guts and a zombie orgy.
If youve ever cruised a public toilet or gay bathhouse, it really is pretty much like night of the living dead, LaBruce says. People are in a kind of somnambulist, zombie-like state; people are in a sexual trance almost. Its not really about the individual.
With LA Zombie, he didnt hide any of the sexual elements and made it very clear to distributors and independent financiers that this was to be a hardcore pornographic companion piece to Otto. While he feels that this will be his last zombie porn, LaBruce says hes open to making a trilogy sometime in the future. In the meantime, he seems ready to make the leap to non-pornographic films and has a crime thriller in the works.