Editorials
‘The Adjuster’ Is a Psychosexual Baptism by Fire [Maple Syrup Massacre]
Maple Syrup Massacre is an editorial series where Joe Lipsett dissects the themes, conventions and contributions of new and classic Canadian horror films. Spoilers follow…
It would be disingenuous to suggest that Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster is a horror film.
Psychological thriller is more apt descriptor, though audiences seeking scary set pieces will walk away unsatisfied. Despite this, The Adjuster has a narrative of thriller tropes, including a large number of psychosexual relationships, characters adopting dual roles (or simply role playing) and an ending that encourages audiences to re-evaluate what they have seen.
Egoyan is one of Canada’s most significant contemporary directors, though internationally his work is known principally in art cinema and film festival circles. In the 90s, Egoyan was a symbol of national pride; he, along with David Cronenberg, was essentially the face of English-language Canadian film. His most famous film is the Sarah Polley-starring The Sweet Hereafter, which was nominated for two Oscars in 1998 (one for Best Director and one for Best Adapted Screenplay).
1991’s The Adjuster is his fourth film and the one that put him on the map as a significant talent to look out for.
Written and directed by Egoyan, the film stars Elias Koteas (Shutter Island) as Noah Render, an insurance adjuster who goes to great lengths for his job. He not only comforts the victims of house fires, he puts them all up in the same motel, and even sleeps with them (male and female).
Noah is married to Hera (Arsinée Khanjian, Egoyan’s real-life wife), an Armenian refugee who works as a film censor. Just as Noah has his own “private life,” so too does Hera: she covertly records the violent, sexual content of the films and screens them for her sister Seta (Rose Sarkisyan).
Then there’s rich married couple Bubba (Maury Chaykin, Of Unknown Origin) and Mimi (Gabrielle Rose, Grace), whose lives are seemingly dedicated to kinky role playing. They’re introduced on the subway, where Hera sees Mimi use Bubba, who is dressed as an unhoused, mentally-ill man, to finger herself in public. Later Mimi dresses as a cheerleader who is ravaged by football players while her cuck husband films the encounter.
Although the film has a unhurried, dream-like plot, the lives of these characters become intertwined when Bubba happens upon the Render house and asks to rent it for a week to film another salacious film with his wife. This displaces Noah, Hera, their young son and Seta, forcing them to move into the motel alongside all of his clients.
Written out in this form, The Adjuster reads like a cross between a porno and sex, lies and videotape, but like Egoyan’s other films, it is really about the secret lives of extremely damaged people. Tragedy looms large over nearly every character and while there is a certain amount of sex, the sexual interactions – much like the lies the characters tell – are a form of trauma-response. Characters struggle deeply to connect, often resorting to films or sex rather than words to negotiate their relationships with others.
These are common themes within Egoyan’s work: his films are filled with characters who adopt a false identity in order to seek out connections, all the while holding the truth (and therefore genuine relationships) at arm’s length. Canadian film scholar Tom McSorley even wrote an entire book on The Adjuster’s place within the history of Canadian film, as well as its use of “intimacy and detachment” to advance its thematic interests.
Tellingly, The Adjuster is set in an unnamed Canadian location. The world of the film is populated entirely by non-descript locations: the Render home is actually a model home in an empty tract of suburbia, abandoned when the developer went broke. The survivors of the fires that Noah works and sleeps with are all put up in a generic motel and Hera’s censor job takes place in an innocuous theater within a cavernous non-descript archive.
McSorley reads the lack of identifiers in the film as, in part, a reflection of the Canadian film funding model. At the time funding was available at both the provincial (Ontario Film Development Corporation) and federal (Canadian Film Development Corporation) level. Both agencies were incentivizing filmmakers to make work that was more commercial in order to sell films internationally, which was essentially code-speak for “remove the Canadian references” such as geographical and cultural specificity.
Situating the film in these liminal spaces reinforce its themes and character arcs, particularly the deconstruction of role-play and simulation. When The Adjuster ends with a startling reveal that recontextualizes who Noah is, it works because he and the other characters don’t seem to live in the real world. The result is a haunting meditation on the struggle to connect to others; characters are instead caught in a cyclical baptism of fire, role-play, mediated video, and shimmering memories of violence.
The Adjuster may not be a straightforward horror film, but it feels distinctly genre-adjacent in the way audiences describe A24 and NEON films. Fans who have exhausted the weird sex and chilly aesthetics of Cronenberg would do well to check out Egoyan for their next fix.
The problem with filming sequels back-to-back is that, unless you can afford expensive reshoots, there’s no easy way to adjust course in between movies if fans react badly to where the story is headed. That’s why it’s important to have a complete narrative thought out well in advance lest you accidentally kill a budding franchise.
However, this isn’t always the case. Every once in a while, it seems like the cinema gods smile upon certain chaotic productions and gift moviegoers with complete franchises that feel like more than the sum of their hastily produced parts. Ted Nicolaou’s Bloodlust: Subspecies III is precisely one of these miraculous pictures, with the raw talents of the artists involved (as well as the continued support from Romania) turning the feature into an effective conclusion for a series that kind of made things up as the filmmakers went along.
That’s why I’d like to invite my fellow readers to join me on this third part of our journey through the Subspecies franchise as we look into Bloodlust and talk about how it remains a surprisingly satisfying finale to the original trilogy.
A Trilogy Planned on the Fly
Released only a year after Bloodstone found plenty of success in rental stores and mail-in VHS catalogues worldwide, 1994’s Bloodlust was produced at the same time as its predecessor in (mostly) the same locations and with the same team. This means that the movie benefited from all the same upgrades as Bloodstone, with the crew now being more experienced with the ins and outs of surviving a low-budget Romanian production and the cast really settling into their characters.
At this point, everything from location scouting to the makeup process had been streamlined, with Wayne Toth and Norman Cabrera, the main duo behind special effects, even switching out time-consuming prosthetics for latex gloves in order to speed up Anders Hove’s monstrous transformation. The titular “subspecies” demons were also once again relegated to a mere cameo appearance due to the laborious puppetry required to bring them to life.
The only real hiccup came from the fact that actress Denice Duff had replaced the first film’s Michelle (Laura Mae Tate) and was immediately expected to portray the character as both an innocent victim in part II and as a secondary villain in part III. According to behind-the-scenes interviews, the hectic production schedule that blended two different movies meant that Duff would often find herself having to alternate between two incredibly different versions of Michelle during the same shooting day – though it’s obvious that she’s having more fun with Bloodlust’s more traditionally vampiric version of her character.
In the finished film, we pick things up immediately where the previous entry left off as Rebecca (Melanie Shatner) is forced to leave her vampire sister Michelle (Duff) behind in the dungeons of Castle Vladislav due to the rising sun. This allows Mummy (Pamela Gordon) to use Michelle’s blood to revive the vicious Radu (Hove) so that he may continue his quest for the coveted Bloodstone – a magical artifact that perpetually drips the Blood of Saints.
Meanwhile, the dreamy US embassy agent Mel (Kevin Blair) agrees to help Rebecca plan a rescue mission, though they’re unaware that Radu has become infatuated with Michelle during his attempts to guide her growing bloodlust. This all culminates in a climactic confrontation meant to tie up all of the series’ loose ends in one of Full Moon Pictures’ most ambitious productions.
The Evolution of Radu
Like its predecessor, Bloodlust: Subspecies III was also warmly received by fans who argued that the series was an even bigger success than Full Moon’s other major horror franchise, Puppet Master. This praise wasn’t unanimous, however, as 1994 had seen the rise of a more modern breed of sexy vampire popularized by Anne Rice, with old-school Nosferatu like Radu being viewed as obsolete when compared to the likes of Lestat and Gary Oldman’s take on Dracula.
In a way, one might argue that Nicolaou’s film is something of a swan song for the classic vampire story, as Bloodlust combines all of the traditional elements we tend to associate with these tales into a single tragic yarn that ties a neat little bow on Radu’s story as well as the old-fashioned monster movies that he represents. The finale remains shocking despite the fact that this is the third time we see Radu get brutally killed onscreen, with the brief tease that he may one day return feeling more like a nod towards the nature of evil rather than sequel bait.
The film dabbles a bit in gothic romance and even explores the inherent power fantasy behind transforming into an immortal creature of the night, but the filmmakers never lose sight of Radu as a demonic force even when he’s willing to betray his beloved Mummy for Michelle’s sake. In fact, his twisted “love” for his fledgling makes him even creepier as we get the feeling that his passion comes from a dark and disturbing place.
Anders Hove is at his absolute best in this film, with the effects department boosting his moments of what the younger generation would call “aura farming” whenever Radu emerges from shadows like a 90s version of Count Orlok. There are even a couple of surprisingly effective jump-scares here, which is why I’d argue that Bloodlust cements Radu as one of the most memorable cinematic vampires of all time despite his humble origins.
Subspecies Saves Its Best For Last
Nicolaou and Vlad Panescu also saved the best for “last” (more on that in a bit) regarding the film’s visuals, with the cinematography and overall atmosphere of Bloodlust absolutely surpassing what we saw in the previous films. Everything feels appropriately climactic this time around (including the wonderful soundtrack that was co-composed alongside an authentic Romanian orchestra), and I appreciate how this is the fastest-paced entry in the trilogy since the film doesn’t need to waste time setting anything up.
Bloodlust still suffers from some of the same low-budget blemishes as its predecessors, but there’s so much creative passion here that no amount of wonky effects work or stilted dialogue can get in the way of appreciating the flick’s gothic grandeur. That’s why it’s not surprising that the movie’s definitive(-ish) ending would later be retconned as fans begged for more Radu.
Of course, the next entry in this series would be a different kind of vampiric endeavor altogether, with the filmmakers attempting to engage with the same trends that ultimately killed Radu and his antiquated kin. That, however, is a story for another time. For now, I’ll merely insist that Bloodlust: Subspecies III remains a highlight of Full Moon’s expansive catalogue and is definitely worth seeking out today.
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