One thing I don’t want this blog to become is a moan-fest. However dire the current state of horror fiction, both written and filmed, there’s still some great stuff out there. However (and there really had to be a ‘but’ there, didn’t there?), every now and then something comes along masquerading as horror fiction that aggravates me so much I tend to have to vent. Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs, which I saw at a small showing as part of the Brighton Shocks festival, is just the latest piece of work to trigger that old annoyance in me.
It was being shown as part of a French double-bill with Alexandre Aja’s Haute Tension (or Switchblade Romance, as it was called on its original UK release). I’d seen Haute Tension before, and didn’t get on with it all that well, mainly due to the ridiculous twist at the end of the last act which rendered the whole first hour of the film utterly nonsensical, but it has its fans – a lot of whom drawn by the splattery gore effects by Giannetto De Rossi, favoured FX man of Lucio Fulci (Zombie Flesh Eaters, The Beyond etc).
Martyrs came on the back of some good buzz, considering it the latest in a wave of exciting new horror films coming from France. And, indeed, it started well enough with an atmospheric and intriguing opening sequence showing the two main girls meeting in an orphanage, where one of them is terrorised by what seems to be some kind of night-gaunt. We’re then introduced to a family, and follow them through to a particularly bloody and extreme massacre at the hands of what is revealed to be one of the girls from the opening sequence (now grown). Tough and gritty, it’s a brave opening for the movie, and the continued presence of the shadowy figure from the girls’ past raises the interest. I was engaged, and curious to see where the film went next.
Where the film went next was down torture porn alley.
I’m no great fan of yer Hostel’s, yer Saw’s and yer Captivity’s. They feel like rites of passage movies for 13 year old Americans, but lack the wit and social awareness of their 70s predecessors. Eli Roth is particularly embarrassing, a cut-rate horror Quentin Tarantino, with possibly even fewer original ideas (trust me, that’s saying something). Martyrs, after an interesting first act, becomes the French equivalent of these films – but with added pretension! Long, dull scenes of extended torture – usually consisting of little more than a girl being punched in the face – drag the rest of the film out tediously. There’s no fear, no tension, just dullness upon dullness. The audience around me were either audibly wishing it were over, or laughing at the idiocy of it all. This isn’t horror.
When the full extent of the protagonists plot comes into clarity, the pretension levels shoot through the roof. The gore is upped towards the end in a scene that makes you realise why the director was initially chosen to direct the remake of Hellraiser (a deal which, I think, has fallen through now), but by the good work of the opening 20 minutes was long lost. Martyrs is one of those films that thinks it’s deep, but lacks any and all profundity. It thinks it’s tough and brutal, but it’s just boring. The painful thing about it is that people will consider it a horror film, and it’s not. Maybe that sounds snobbish, and who am I to say what should be classed as horror and what shouldn’t, but when something like this comes along which is made with no awareness or intelligence, it’s tough to do anything with it other than exclude it and hope that it doesn’t start to contaminate anything else around it.
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