Editorials
[Butcher Block] The Slaughterhouse Nihilism of ‘Frontier(s)’
Butcher Block is a weekly series celebrating horror’s most extreme films and the minds behind them. Dedicated to graphic gore and splatter, each week will explore the dark, the disturbed, and the depraved in horror, and the blood and guts involved. For the films that use special effects of gore as an art form, and the fans that revel in the carnage, this series is for you.
The world of French Extremity horror is filled with bold debuts by filmmakers staking a claim on horror with torrential blood flow and visceral brutality. Like Alexandre Aja’s explosive entrance in horror with High Tension, Xavier Gens brought Frontier(s), a film originally meant to be a part of the lineup for the independent horror movie festival, After Dark Horrorfest, in 2007 but was released separately once the MPAA gave the film an NC-17 rating. Drawing from the intense riots in France after a far-right candidate circled closer to election, Gens penned a brutal script that featured a gang of thieves fleeing to Amsterdam amidst politically charged rioting only to find themselves prey to a family of neo-Nazis on the border. Angry, violent, and unrelenting, Frontier(s) brings the familiarity of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and dials it up to extreme levels.
Final girl Yasmine, played with admirable ferocity by Karina Testa, begins the film in an emotional place. Her brother is shot during their robbery stunt, using the riots as cover, and mourns his passing as the police are closing in. She’s also three months into an unwanted pregnancy, her brother’s dying breath begs her to keep the baby. It gives Yasmine moral ambiguity that most final girls lack, but more importantly it gives her the mental fortitude to survive the neo-Nazi family picking off her friends one by one. And of course, this family happens to be cannibals.
Between the cannibalism, the pig pen, and meat processing facilities, this means a ton of gruesome slaughterhouse style deaths. Meat hooks through flesh, table saws through skulls, cringeworthy severing of Achilles tendons, exploding heads, and even one character whose burned alive in a boiler, it’s easy to see why the film earned its NC-17 badge of honor. Even still, Gens held back on the gore; his original script featured two scenes not included in the final film, one of which was considered too grotesque. The scene was to delve into the family preparing a human body for the big family dinner scene, and would have included a shot of the body being skewered from anus to mouth. The other was a scene featuring one of the robbers fighting off the underground children with an axe, ultimately cut to keep the mystery around them.
Gens had a difficult time getting the film made initially, thanks to the extreme violence. It wasn’t until Luc Besson (The Fifth Element, La Femme Nikita) signed on as producer that gave Gens the freedom to go wild, sans human dinner preparation scene. Between Gens and cinematographer Laurent Barès, Frontier(s) is visually arresting horror movie. But of course, the makeup team deserves a ton of credit for the visceral trauma the characters endure (or don’t endure). Sabine Fevre, Nicolas Herlin, and Laetitia Hillion were all nabbed at the early stages of their makeup effects careers and fresh off beloved French horror film Inside before bringing their talents to Frontier(s).
Frontier(s) is the first in French horror to really draw comparisons to the wave of horror branded “torture porn,” with its level of violence and gore resembling films closer to Hostel and Saw. The very core premise also leans heavily into The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as well, though way more bleak and nihilistic than its counterpart. Even still, Frontier(s) is an unrelenting bleak ride that never lets up. It’s an onslaught of visceral violence enhanced by very talented people both on screen and behind it.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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