Editorials
[Butcher Block] Hell Gets Perverse and Personal in ‘Baskin’
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.
Hailing from Turkey, a country that doesn’t dabble in genre cinema too often, Baskin made an international tidal wave in 2016 with its arthouse meets Lucio Fulci and Hellraiser inspired descent into Hell. Based on Can Evrenol’s 2013 short film of the same name, Baskin follows a police squad contending with a night of pain, suffering, and the perverse horror of a depraved Black Mass from Hell when they enter an abandoned building. Turkish superstition, extreme imagery, and a deliberately paced journey for the unsuspecting antiheroes makes Baskin a unique entry in extreme horror.
At first glance the premise seems fairly basic; this is more of a sensory experience than narrative after all. But Evrenol layers in so much mythology, superstition, and meaning to parse out, if you can stomach multiple rewatches that is. After a nightmarish opening sequence set around a little boy and a nightmare come to life, Baskin introduces us to the five police officers oblivious to the hellscape they’ll enter later. It sets up their personalities, and how very flawed each of them are as they tell each other crass stories or pick fights with the workers from the restaurant in which they’re dining.
Of them all, Arda seems the most innocent as the newcomer, while the rest display varying degrees of cynicism and corruption. But this key scene serves as more than just an introduction to the characters- it reveals a key sin that they’ll atone for later on. Officer Yavuz proudly boasts of a sexual encounter with a prostitute, amusing the others with great detail. His sin, obviously, is lust. Once the officers find themselves deeply entrenched in the gruesome Black Mass, Yavuz’ lust is thrown back at him as he’s tortured, has his eye is gouged out, and forced to have sex with a chained woman sporting a goat skull mask. The rest suffer fates befitting of the sins they represent; rage, gluttony, and so on.
The presiding Father over the Black Mass, Baba (played memorably by Mehmet Cerrahoglu), oversees and leads the way in torture and mayhem. Intestines are pulled out of bellies, throats are slashed, eye trauma, writhing bodies eat gross things that don’t remotely look edible, and pain and suffering run rampant. The blood flows freely. That the Father is named Baba seems fitting, considering Taram Baba is a boogeyman figure in Turkish folklore. Arda proves to be the counterbalance to Baba’s darkness, the one destined to destroy Baba and free his fellow officers from their looping Hells. The underwater scenes representative of Arda’s cleansing journey. There’s a lot of minutiae Evrenol embeds in his surrealistic nightmare, saturated in a sort of Fulci inspired dream logic. It’s just wrapped up in one gnarly package of perversion and gore.
Between Derya Ergün’s makeup design, Alp Korfali’s cinematography, and of course Evrenol’s direction, Baskin is both stunning and repulsive- it’s arthouse infused with gore and grime. It’s brutal, but it’s a brutality that Evrenol eases into, not the rapid-fire onslaught of gory imagery the early trailers indicated. This means that the pacing might be off-putting for some. But for others, it’s a vicious descent into Hell that would make Clive Barker proud, and has a lot going on under the surface, too.
Found footage movies rely on immersion and a particular kind of suspension of disbelief in order to scare viewers, so it stands to reason that playing along with the “kayfabe” of it all is necessary for these movies to be effective. However, despite being something of a purist when it comes to in-universe recordings, I’ve come to accept that traditional productions can benefit from the occasional injection of found footage thrills.
For instance, Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation makes genius use of the analog gimmick in order to trap us in the titular rooms alongside our main characters before effortlessly switching back to a more cinematic language. In honor of these dynamic films that manage to combine the best of both worlds, today I’d like to share six other hybrid horror movies that successfully incorporate found footage into their scares!
For the purposes of this list, “hybrid” horror movies are defined as any flick that shifts between diegetic recordings and traditional filming techniques for a significant amount of time (or at least for pivotal scenes).
As usual, don’t forget to comment below with your own hybrid favorites if you think a particularly freaky one was missed.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. The Last Broadcast (1998)
Internet critics may have overstated the influence that Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler’s The Last Broadcast had on The Blair Witch Project, but the found footage subgenre still owes a huge debt to this underrated piece of avant-garde filmmaking. However, while the movie sets itself up as a documentary about the disappearance of a group of cryptid-hunters attempting to track down the Jersey Devil, things take a darker and much more grounded turn towards the final act.
I won’t get into details in order to avoid spoilers, but suffice to say that the jarring shift in perspective actually helps to sell the idea that everything we’ve seen before the finale was an attempt at using filmmaking to manipulate the public perception of a “real” incident.
Not bad for a movie with a $900 budget!
4. Cam (2018)
When you consider just how much the internet affects our daily lives, it’s strange that we don’t see Screenlife elements pop up in more movies these days. For instance, Isa Mazzei & Daniel Goldhaber’s highly underrated Cam only works as a freaky parable about online sex-work because it masterfully balances Madeline Brewer’s intimate moments with highly immersive segments within cyberspace.
While one might argue that the entire film could have been produced as a Screenlife experience, the hybrid approach allows the filmmakers to explore our main character’s life beyond the screens – with the duality of modern human existence actually becoming a recurring theme in the story.
3. Banshee Chapter (2013)
Most of H.P. Lovecraft’s popular stories were told in the epistolary format (where the text is presented as an in-universe compilation of letters or personal notes), so it makes sense that a spiritually faithful adaptation of his work would incorporate elements from the modern-day equivalent to epistolary fiction – found footage!
That’s why Blair Erickson’s Banshee Chapter is such an effective scare-fest, as this hybrid adaptation of From Beyond -retold through a conspiratorial lens as it references MK-Ultra and even secretive numbers stations- immerses viewers in a mind-bending tapestry of Cosmic Horror that blurs the line between fiction and reality.
2. The Deep House (2019)
The underwater setting does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s The Deep House, with the film being especially uncomfortable if you’re already scared of tight spaces and being deprived of oxygen. However, even the universally unsettling elements of the flick only work because the POV often shifts into claustrophobic footage courtesy of our main characters’ GoPro cameras.
Telling the story of a couple of YouTubers who encounter a haunted house at the bottom of an artificial lake while vacationing in France, The Deep House’s first-person exploration sequences contain some of the film’s scariest moments. In fact, I’d argue that the movie didn’t even need ghosts, as becoming trapped in the titular House already sounds like a fate worse than death.
1. Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)
My personal favorite instance of filmmakers successfully managing to combine traditional cinematography with POV filmmaking, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, is proof that the two formats can co-exist if the right story comes along.
After all, what better way to conclude a mockumentary all about reality getting increasingly more cinematic than by ditching the found footage gimmick altogether during the finale? Not only does this shift in presentation work on a conceptual level, but it also elevates Behind The Mask into a proper Slasher, which is probably why we’re so excited for that long-overdue sequel!
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