One topic that doesn’t come up often in discussions on writing horror is the importance of the victims themselves. There is plenty of writing on characters, but most of the victims in horror aren’t so much characters as they are additional bodies for the slaughter. This is especially true when it comes to the slasher subgenre.
We’re not going to be looking at slashers in this article, but we’re going to focus on victims nearly as much as Friday the 13th does. Our attention is going to be on why the choice of victim is important; specifically, we’re going to look at how victim selection impacts the audience’s emotional involvement with a film. To do so we’ll be contrasting The Last House on the Left (1972) with The House at the Edge of the Park (1980), as well as exploring Feast (2005), The Blob (1988), Rawhead Rex (1986), and Assault on Precinct 13 (1976).
The Last House on the Left VS The House on the Edge of the Park
The Last House on the Left is one of the most notorious of the rape-revenge films of the ‘70s. As well as being Wes Craven’s first film, this adaptation of Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960) features David Hess in the role of a psychopathic rape-murderer that leads a handful of degenerates on a spree of violence. Compare that to The House on the Edge of the Park which is an Italian rip-off of The Last House on the Left that stars David Hess as a psychopathic rape-murderer that leads his simple-minded friend on a spree of violence. While it happens at wildly different points in the narrative, each film ends up with Hess at the house of one of his victims where his violent spree comes to an end with his brutal death.
The similarities between these two films allow us a fascinating case study to see how the choice of victim influences our reactions. In both films, Hess is responsible for rape and violent assaults, and while you never necessarily root for him (his behavior is too barbaric to ever truly be on his side), each film leaves a distinctly different feeling in the viewer. It is my argument that this difference in feeling is down to the filmmaker’s choice of victim.
In The Last House on the Left, our victims are a pair of teenage girls. We are introduced to them at length: we learn about the relationship between the main girl and her parents, her desire to enjoy life and spend a day away from her parents with her friend; we see how her and her friend interact and throughout all this we’re left with a sense that we’re watching a normal girl, one with a rich life ahead of her. We have less time spent with her friend but enough to feel that she is similar enough to the main girl for us to classify them together. It is only through a poor decision to purchase pot, which is a far less transgressive choice these days than it was in 1972, that our two girls come into the clutches of Hess. Their rape and murder are given extra weight because of the time we’ve spent with them, similar to how I Spit on Your Grave (1978) makes its notorious rape scene so impactful.
The House on the Edge of the Park starts with Hess forcing a woman’s car to stop so he can rape and murder her. We don’t know who he is. We know nothing about her. It turns out, spoiler, that this scene is going to have a major part to play in the narrative but for 80 minutes of this 90-minute movie it seems as if it was just a pointless scene intended to inform us that Hess is up to no good, as well as to shock us. Right away, this scene leaves the audience feeling nothing towards the victim. Don’t get me wrong, we’re meant to be shocked and upset at the action that is occurring but these are rather simplistic emotions to provoke in an audience; they don’t offer any weight, especially not in the way that The Last House on the Left Does.
But this opening scene is just that: it’s something to open the movie. Many horror films open this way, like Friday the 13th (1980), The Faculty (1998), or any Scream (1996-) movie. Each of these films starts with a violent murder that works to establish the tone of the film. To put it bluntly, these scenes say “We’re not fucking around. Look, we know what you came here for.” None of the characters that are murdered in these scenes truly matter, except perhaps for Cotton’s death at the start of Scream 3 (2000) but that is only because his importance has been established throughout the prior two films. These moments don’t ask us to feel anything for the victim, rather they want to give us a quick scare. So we’re kept distant from the person who is being harmed and so there isn’t much of an emotional reaction beyond fear; if The Last House on the Left opened with our girls being murdered then we wouldn’t feel any of the pathos said murder leaves us with. So The House on the Edge of the Park’s opening scene is an example of this trope and we can’t hold our lack of emotion here against it.
However, there is no excuse for that lack from the rest of the movie. In the next scene, a young bourgeois couple stops at Hess’ auto-repair shop with car troubles. It’s easily fixed and Hess forces his way into joining them for their party. Upon arriving at the party, the rich attendees proceed to mock Hess’ mentally challenged friend, tease Hess sexually, and, supposedly, cheat at poker. From the very moment they enter the film, they act as if they are better than Hess and his friend. Later on, after the violence has begun, another character will stop by the party and a throwaway line implies that her boyfriend refused to come because of the rude behavior of the bourgeois characters.
Hess’ character is at no point a good individual. All of his actions are quite crass, if not straight-up psychopathic. Yet he hardly comes across as the bad guy. It is a very bizarre experience watching the film, because it is hard not to root for him despite his villainy. This is especially strange when you consider he is essentially playing the same character from The Last House on the Left and in that film he is sick and we can’t wait to see him punished. So where exactly is the disconnect?
One area is in the choice to make the victims members of the bourgeoisie. The victims in The Last House on the Left are average American girls in every sense of the word. The parents aren’t poor by any stretch, but they also aren’t upper class. They feel like the type of people that live next door to most viewers, the type that makes up the bulk of every small town across the country. Seeing them victimized, it is easy to imagine ourselves or our own daughters, sisters, or friends in their shoes. With the characters in The House on the Edge of the Park, we’re kept at arm’s length from them because they’re separated from the average viewer by class.
But the problems don’t stop there. The Last House on the Left gave us plenty of time to get to know the girls who would be our victims. In The Last House on the Edge of the Park, the would-be victims are never given more than the most passing of character traits. We know that the black woman is …well, black and silent. One of the white women is equally uncharacterized, while the other’s choices leave us with little idea as to her character. We know that one of the men is hot-headed and physically fit, that the other is indignant. But what the characters lack in personality, they make up for with cruelty. The majority of the movie may be spent tormenting these characters, but they spent the first part cruelly treating our mentally challenged character or sexually teasing Hess in a manner that seems over-the-top. Once the violence begins, we’ll learn nothing further from the characters until the end when it is revealed that they planned the night so that Hess’ assault would give them grounds to kill him in self-defense. Why? Because the girl murdered in the beginning was the sister of one of the characters. When they turn the tables and murder Hess, they do so with as much psychopathic glee as he had while committing his torments. This could make for a great twist, only it doesn’t. It leaves the characters feeling just as empty, but even crueler.
Where The Last House on the Left invites us to get to know the characters who are to be victims, The House on the Edge of the Park keeps them distant from us. Where Craven’s film offers compassion and understanding, The House on the Edge of the Park gives us cruelty. The end result leaves the emotional resonance of the film quite muddied. We’re never fully against Hess, even while we’re against his actions; and when he is murdered at the end, it doesn’t feel like the justice it should. If the characters were fleshed out before the violence started, made to be everyday people like you and me, and given other actions beyond just cruelty, then we would feel disgusted not just at the actions being taken but by the fact that they were being taken against these folks. But, ultimately, the film failed to provide victims who affect us.
Feast and The Blob
Both Feast and The Blob deploy a tactic that I’ve written about in Scream Writing: A Comprehensive Guide to Writing the Horror Film: The Decoy Protagonist. This is a fake-out technique that tricks the audience by convincing them that they’re watching the main character or the hero of the movie, before dispatching with that character. It’s most famously done in Psycho (1960) or, more recently, with Ned Stark at the end of the first season of Game of Thrones (2011).
In Feast, our “hero” bursts into the bar where our action is set. He’s carrying the head of a monster he killed, which convinces the patrons that his warning about the impending monster assault is real. More importantly, it informs the audience that this character knows what he’s doing. As mentioned previously, it’s a way of saying “We’re not fucking around,” or, more specifically, “He’s not fucking around.” At the end of his hero speech, the bartender asks just who in the hell this guy is anyway. He replies that he’s the guy that’s about to save their asses, seconds before two monster hands burst through the window behind him and yank his head off his shoulders.
This particular version of the decoy protagonist is short-lived to the point of comedy. The timing of his badass line and his immediate death generate laughter because of the way they play on filmic stereotypes, something that the film continues throughout the rest of the movie. We laugh, but we also get the distinct feeling that those in the bar are now fully and truly fucked; which the film bears out.
The remake of The Blob’s approach is more in keeping with the Psycho tradition. We establish our lead female character, though she feels like the sidekick to her boyfriend. That is until he is violently and gruesomely dissolved in one of the best scenes in all of 1980s horror. But where Feast makes us laugh, The Blob doesn’t. Why is this?
One of the reasons is that Feast is specifically using comedic timing with the disposal of their decoy. But even more important is the fact that their decoy has literally only just stepped onto the scene. We aren’t given a chance to get to know him. We assume that we’re going to spend the movie with him, but he dies immediately and so he ultimately comes across as a kind of aside the film is having. In The Blob, the film successfully convinces first-time viewers that we’re meeting our main character. We see him interact with friends, his girlfriend, his girlfriend’s father. We’re given a sense of the life that will be extinguished. It’s a shock when he dies, not just because his death is shocking in and of itself but because the movie has tricked us by playing on film tropes just as much as Feast did, only its tongue wasn’t in its cheek.
The use of a decoy protagonist is to shock an audience, to make them sit up and pay attention because you’ve subverted their expectations in an interesting manner. Both Feast and The Blob are shocking in their use of a decoy protagonist, but only The Blob manages the punch in the gut that the technique should have because it takes the time to introduce us to the victim and it ensures that we see them as a real person. Particularly, The Blob uses humor in setting up their decoy but humor that feels like it could belong to everyday life, not just the twisted reality that Feast’s humor exists within.
Killing Kids: The Blob, Rawhead Rex, and Assault on Precinct 13
Want to shock audiences?
Kill a kid.
Rawhead Rex might not be a very good movie, but boy howdy does it grab your attention when it murders the protagonist’s son.
Assault on Precinct 13’s child murder is even more effective and subversive feeling. It is purposeless, though not narratively as it is the spark that lights the explosion of action to come. Perhaps a better term would be to say that it is senseless. There is no real sense of loss, as the child isn’t much of a character, however.
This is where The Blob manages the best. We follow a child character for quite some time before they die. The unwritten rule of film is that you don’t kill kids, so we expect that they’ll be just fine. It’s a total shock when he is violently melted into a gory pulp. But it also carries a strong sense of loss… why?
Wrap Up
Is it just that we’ve spent more time with him? Is that the takeaway here? That in order to make a death impactful, we must spend time with the victim? Not necessarily, though it certainly helps. What is more important, rather, is that we get a sense of that character’s desires, goals, struggles, and personality; that we can relate to them on some level; and that we can root for them. We want the child in The Blob to live; we want the girls from The Last House on the Left to live, but Rawhead Rex? I don’t know anything about that kid. Assault on Precinct 13? I guess she wanted a vanilla twist.
It is also important that we align with a character’s actions. The choices of those victims in The House on the Edge of the Park are too cruel for the audience to support, so we allow ourselves to say “They had it coming,” when they are tormented. This is common in slasher movies; in Evilspeak, which shares slasher DNA in its epic final act, all of the characters throughout the film have been so insanely cruel to our lead that we take joy in his ruthless slaughter of them. Would we cheer these murders in real life? Doubtful. But we judge them not as people but as characters, our only frame of reference, therefore, is what we have seen them do and they have acted in a manner that lets us enjoy their deaths.
When you are writing victims for your horror stories, ask yourself what the audience should be feeling. Is this a slasher death scene meant as a quick jolt of horror goodness to sate the audience’s bloodlust? Then we don’t need to know anything about the character that is about to die. But do we want the audience to feel something more? If so, then you need to take a little extra time to flesh out the character and give them some depth. As an audience member, don’t you always recognize when a character enters a movie just to increase the body count? You prepare yourself for their death as soon as you meet them and so you don’t allow it to affect you on an emotional level beyond fear, shock, or disgust. These are perfectly fine emotions to elicit, but a discerning choice of victim can add some real pathos to your story.
