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.
Lars von Trier films tend to be polarizing. They’re confrontational, controversial, and challenging on an emotional and psychological level, topped off with von Trier’s artful and languid pace. They also tend to be von Trier working through his feelings, either with humor or chaos, or both. Such is the case with Antichrist, a film that kicks off what’s been dubbed the Depression Trilogy (followed by Melancholia and Nymphomaniac). Written while hospitalized for a depressive episode, Antichrist was influenced by von Trier’s anxieties and despair. It shows. An unrelenting nightmare of grief and mourning, this film is an uncomfortable watch that crescendos in shocking violence.
The film opens with a monochrome prologue that sees She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and He (Willem Dafoe) deep in the throes of passion, so much so that they’re completely oblivious that their young son has freed himself from his crib and toddled his way over and out the window to his death. The grief consumes She to the point of hospitalization and a slew of prescription drugs. He happens to be a psychotherapist and decides to take his wife’s care on himself. He convinces her to flush her prescriptions down the toilet and come away with him to an isolated cabin in the woods to confront her fears. What could go wrong? His ego proves damning as her fears seem to be interwoven with the eternal struggle between man and woman.
Throughout the film, He learns more and more about She’s previous thesis studies in Eden; specifically, historical violence against women throughout the centuries, including witch hunts. But her interpretation of the research leads her to believe that woman is evil. He may have intended for the excursion to heal her, but instead, it lets loose her psychosis and anxieties. It culminates in her finally snapping, accusing him of wanting to leave her. Spoilers for those who haven’t yet seen the movie: She attacks, smashing his groin with a large grindstone and then sexually assaulting him while he’s unconscious from the pain. She then drills a hole in his leg to bind a grinding wheel to it. Because she perceives herself as evil, she takes a pair of scissors to her genitals in an unflinching act of self-mutilation.
For these key moments of violence, enter special makeup effects artists Morten Jacobsen (The House That Jack Built, The Square) and Thomas Foldberg (When Animals Dream), both regular collaborators of von Trier’s. They cast a silicone leg for Dafoe, soft and squishy like flesh with a bone through it. It’s effectively hyper-realistic, and it had to be- remember the part about von Trier’s film being confrontational? He zooms in on the acts of violence and uses long-takes. Meaning that he gets up close and personal with the gore. That also means that von Trier doesn’t shy away from showing She’s self-mutilation in intimate detail.
When Jacobsen and Foldberg read the script, they thought this moment would be a cutaway or quick shot and were surprised to learn von Trier wanted to show it in implicit detail. They crafted a silicone cast of Gainsbourg’s body double, from navel to mid-thigh. Multiple interchangeable vagina parts were created, and the silicone cast had a hollow tube through the core so they could pump blood through it during that crucial scissor snip.
Antichrist is a grueling experience. It has developed a reputation for its confrontational depiction of mutilation and sexual violence, but it’s done with purpose. Not that it makes the film any less of a bleak journey. There are a lot of layers to dissect, themes of nature and religion, and a depiction of mourning and depression that can feel oppressive. That it was conceived as a horror film pushes it even further into divisive territory. All of which to say, Antichrist is designed to be an uncomfortable watch and succeeds in that goal on every level.
Chaos reigns.
