(SOME SPOILERS FOLLOW)
Last night I watched an interesting indie horror movie called Lost After Dark. I picked it up because I grew up loving 80’s horror movies and this one promised to the “best 80’s horror movie not filmed in the 80’s.” Sounded good to me, even though I wasn’t expecting much. It’s a slasher film, set in the 80’s, so I was unsurprised to see the typical horror movie line up: the “slut”, the jocks, the nerd, the “good” girl, the black guy, etc. We all know how this goes, the characters that are morally “bad” or otherwise irrelevant die first, and almost every character will die. Again, it’s a slasher film, and that’s to be expected, but Lost After Dark attempted a twist, and I’m not sure it worked. Instead, it made me distinctly uncomfortable. Spoilers follow inasmuch as a 80’s style slasher film can be spoiled, but still if you plan to watch it, do that first before reading on.
Lost After Dark does some things well while struggling in several areas, but here I’m mostly concerned with the order in which the characters die. Sadly, when I first saw the character line up included a lone black guy, I thought he would be going petty quickly. That’s usually what happens, but I figured, it’s 2015, so who knows? As it turned out though, the characters didn’t die the order we have come to expect and the black guy stuck around for a while. In fact, I believe he was the second to last out of seven to die. But instead of feeling like we were finally making progress, it fell flat for me. When the first couple of characters died, I was surprised. These two were not the ones I imagined would go first or even die at all. So, I thought, “well this might be interesting. Early in the movie, some of the characters started to diverge a bit from their stereotypical roles, so I was hoping we would see more fully developed characters who acted outside of the typical constraints of a horror movie. That is, characters who developed unexpected relationships and perhaps a story line that didn’t make moral judgments on things like sexual activity, drug use, or even skin color.
But, the surprise deaths turned out to not be as interesting as I had hoped, or at least not interesting in the way I had hoped. Instead it seemed that the writers simply flipped the script without regard to character or plot development. So, rather than the morally corrupt or irrelevant characters dying first, they got to stay around. The order of deaths just flipped. The “good” characters died first and the “bad” characters died last. Mostly. One of the early characters was more complicated and neither stereotypically “good” or “bad.” But, mostly the characters died in the exact opposite order that they typically would in a movie like this.
But, simply reversing the order does nothing to combat or even engage with the typical problematic and stereotypical representations of characters in horror movies. In fact, for me the reversal made it worse because as the movie progressed, I started to see that the worse a character was depicted morally, the longer he or she would stay alive. And, yet, despite the length of time the lone black character stuck around, we didn’t get to learn much about his character. At one point, he was referred to as a “dog,” in relation to his player tendencies, I suppose. But, it was a passing reference, and he mostly just seemed like a regular kid. But, because the order of deaths seemed to have no purpose besides just reversing the usual order, of course, the black character would have to die last or second to last. And, for me that had the effect of making it worse. He wasn’t portrayed as morally “bad,” instead he was just portrayed as irrelevant. He stuck around, but we never learned about him, he was still never really part of the story. And, the morally “bad” kids are still portrayed as morally “bad.” Sexual activity and mild drug use and drinking are still portrayed as things used to judge a character’s, well, character.
Maybe the writers didn’t think beyond the clever “trick” of reversing the order. Maybe they only wanted that surprise factor. But, they started to give these characters interesting and different story lines. So much more could have been done in Lost After Dark.
