High School Horror

Cherry Falls

Suicide Club

Salutations my fellow sinners and Samhain celebrators. It’s the last week of October, my first full week of being 29, and the night before Halloween, so let’s close the circle on scary movie season with another redundantly-titled double feature: high school horror movies. Even though I personally found middle school to be far more sinister, high school as a concept and as a reality has been the site of more horror stories I can count. Carrie, Halloween, Scream, Prom Night, Jennifer’s Body, The Craft, When A Stranger Calls, Battle Royale, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Covenant, Teen Wolf, Thanksgiving, Lisa Frankenstein, Final Destination, Teeth, Veronica, Ma, Ginger Snaps, The Faculty, Urban Legend, Swim Fan, Stoker, Night of the Comet, Idle Hands, Sleepaway Camp, and Slumber Party Massacre—just to name a few. And it does make sense, to set scary stories at the epicenter of hormones, standardized tests, social and academic anxiety, peer pressure, overcompensating teachers, dress codes, blaring alarms, impending adulthood, all manner of bizarre hazing humiliation rituals, and perhaps the most dreaded high school happening of all: P.E. And this is to say nothing of the horrific, near-immeasurable amount of mass shootings and acts of domestic terrorism that high school campuses have become a hub for. It can be easy to make light of the trivial problems of teenhood, but I appreciate when a film can both lovingly poke fun at and validate youthful tribulations—and horror is often the only genre with the guts to really cover it all. Though most of my trauma within academia occurred in middle school and college, high school was not without its disturbances and disappointments, and I’ve always loved how high school horror movies explore these normalized and mundane disappointments to their fullest extent(s). Social inadequacy, insecurities about identity, and the general desire to be accepted and well-liked are universally-felt, at any age, but high school is often the birthplace of these uneasy feelings. To quote Bowling for Soup, high school never ends, and many of the toxic tendencies we adopt to survive school—sorting into cliques, gossiping, and performing different versions of ourselves—unfortunately are carried into adulthood. I’d like to think I’ve evolved past the person I was in high school, but one thing that was true of me then and is true to me now, is my love of teen slashers and high school horror movies. There have been an immense amount of high school horror movies featured on this blog, even a few high school thrillers, but I felt it was time to do a dedicated night of hormonal horror stories—and these two happen to be semi-deep cuts.

Up first is a film that really takes advantage of the burgeoning and unfettered lust among pubescent co-eds, this is Geoffrey Wright’s underseen schoolyard slasher from the year 2000: Cherry Falls. Director Geoffrey Wright, not to be confused with Oscar-nominated actor Jeffrey Wright, always envisioned a script that was equal parts intelligent and ironic, perhaps to follow in the footsteps of the tense-yet-tongue-and-cheek and wildly successful Scream movies. But as I learned in my research of Idle Hands a few weeks ago, the turn of the recent century was an extremely disjointed and confused era of teen-movie-making. Filmmakers were clearly picking up on the cynicism and self awareness of the youth at the time, and wanted to reflect their sensibilities with darkly funny stories, but media conglomerates and government busyworkers sought to censor and snuff out all of the freaky fun that these creators had to offer. Because of this, almost all of the fun-youthful-horror-comedies of the early 2000s—good and bad—became underground, underseen films that garnered cult followings over time. This delay in appreciation often added a level of mystique to films like Cherry Falls, which was fully intended to have a theatrical release, but instead became (and remains) the most expensive TV movie of all time. Cherry Falls opens on a young and horny Jesse Bradford, as he makes out with his girlfriend at a classic make-out-point location in the woods. He tries to make a move on his girlfriend but she denies him, and before he can get too pissy, another car begins to approach theirs. He’s certain that it’s one of his friends playing a prank on him, until a feminine figure emerges from the car and begins to attack them both. Neither of these teens survive the night, and the girl is killed in a particularly brutal fashion: her corpse is nailed to a tree and put on symbolic display. This would be horrifying enough, but we then cut to another make out sesh in a different car, where it is now our protagonist Jody (Brittany Murphy) who is being pressured to sleep with her boyfriend, Kenny (Gabriel Mann.) Kenny is even more obnoxious than the previous pair of blue balls, because Kenny is so annoyed that Jody will not go all the way with him, that he breaks up with her on the spot. Seconds later, Jody’s mom randomly appears by the car, and requests a sneaky cigarette from Kenny, since her husband aka Jody’s dad aka the town sheriff Brent (Michael Biehn) doesn’t like her to smoke. And when Jody sneaks back into her bedroom, past her curfew, her creepy cop dad is already hiding in her room, as any overprotective, overbearing parent would. After the bodies of these two young people are discovered, Sheriff Brent gives a cautionary speech to Jody’s school (actually just her English class, for some reason) and her hot and smart but still way-too-young-looking English teacher Mr. Marliston (Jay Mohr) finds a way to quote Plato amid the grief and paranoia. Later that day, a fight breaks out in the cafeteria after a boy is caught lying about sleeping with a female student, and as soon as we know nothing actually happened between them, we cut to this female student at home, alone, where the same feminine killer gets her too. The disturbing connection between these shocking murders finally reveals itself: all of the victims were virgins, and left with the word “VIRGIN” carved into each of their thighs. We are hardly given any time to process this information before the fuck frenzy begins, and every student in the town of Cherry Falls makes plans to lose their virginities at a giant “Pop Your Cherry” party. But as the youth makes light of the situation, Sheriff Brent and several other adults in town seem increasingly uneasy—not just because of the killings, but because of who seems to be carrying them out. Jody is trying to dodge the killer like everyone else, but with her douchey ex-boyfriend immediately pursuing other women in front of her and her parents seeming increasingly suspicious, she isn’t exactly reveling in the romantic excitement. Brittany Murphy was such a talented, instantly-lovable actress, whose bright-eyed charisma lent itself incredibly well to every role, and it was so cool to finally watch her in a horror movie. Her innocent but shrewd interpretation of a scream queen is the foundation of this flawed movie, because while the film as a whole struggled to strike the right balance between sincerity and irony, Brittany saves the day with her effortless ability to embody vulnerability and mystery. Cherry Falls is pretty all over the place, even for this era, as it constantly vacillates between a confidently bizarre sense of humor, and a somewhat undercooked sense of darkness. The editing was extremely frenetic and of-its-time, which is usually somewhat to blame for disconnected storytelling, but that wasn’t the case here. You can see the gears turning in this movie—its desire to create its own slasher villain with its own uniquely fucked up lore, all propped up by a sexy and fun cast—but I’m not sure how successful it was in its shocks or scares or symbolism. I am almost certain that the twists in this film were more surprising back then, but in the grand pantheon of iconic teen slashers (which is an impossibly competitive space to be in), Cherry Falls falls a bit short. It’s messy, it’s cliched, it is at times so oddly written that I inadvertently laughed, and yet I had an absolute blast watching it. I loved that every teen in the town of Cherry Falls is goth—or at least dresses alternatively—I loved the weird, specific teen slang that was implemented, and I even loved how melodramatic it was at times when the film certainly didn’t need the ante upped any more. And while I wish the writing was as clever as a film like Scream, Cherry Falls still had some lines that will remain in my memory such as, “She thinks fellatio is a character in Shakespeare” and “You lose your spiritual virginity when you realize your parents are even bigger hypocrites than you are.” I loved that most of the sex jokes were made at the boys’ expense(s), and I love that Brittany Murphy played a teenager for nearly ten years, much like DJ Qualls, who is in this and has only one line. To quote Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club, “Cherry Falls is just good enough to make you wish it were far, far better.” It could’ve been funnier, it definitely could’ve been scarier, but I still have a lot of appreciation for a film like Cherry Falls, one that feels a bit like it was dreamed up and filmed inside of a Hot Topic. It’s wild that this film never got a theatrical release in the U.S., it’s wild that its German title translates to “Sex or Die!”, and it’s especially wild that David Lynch almost directed it—but given how oddly-toned and morally-confused this film is, I actually think that could’ve worked.

Similarly strange, oddly-toned, and morally all over the place was tonight’s next film, another cult-classic with polarizing reviews but a ton of gusto, this is Sion Sono’s 2001 film Suicide Club. The horror genre has a strange and at times problematic relationship with mental health, as mental disorders and depression are not always depicted in the most thoughtful ways (recently, the movie Smile comes to mind), but ironically enough, many people who suffer from anxiety (myself included) are drawn to the horror genre. To quote Chris Fleming, “it’s like taking my anxiety to the dog park.” Some topics are more delicate than others, and a lot of times, horror films do not explicitly diagnose their protagonists or antagonists. But since death is such a staple and guarantee of horror, suicide is never out of the realm of possibility. It is a tricky, triggering topic to cover, but I find that dark comedies and horror films handle it with more courage and explicit concern than other genres. My favorite movie of all time, a high school horror called Heathers, is a deliciously macabre satire surrounding suicide and disturbing teenage social trends—and it was once considered to be one of the most controversial and risky films (to the point that Winona Ryder’s agent tried to talk her out of doing it.) But as needless death and tragedy become unsettlingly more common on school campuses and beyond, I’m glad some movies are willing to actually speak on these sensitive subjects—even if it’s not always in the most coherent ways. Teenagers, after all, are not always the most articulate when it comes to expressing how they really feel, so why would a movie surrounding teenage suicide be any more cogent? Sion Sono’s 2001 film Suicide Club gets into this unfortunately common phenomenon in Japan—something that has been reported on by smarter writers than I—but it does so with a pitch black, totally twisted sense of humor. We open on Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, on May 26th, as a large gaggle of school girls descend the subway stairs. They’re all smiles and giggles and chit chat, until an automated voice directs passengers to “stand behind the yellow line”, and together, as if in a choreographed dance, they all stand in a line, join hands, and jump off the platform as soon as the train appears. What follows is a flurry of blood and guts and human body parts and backpacks, and an immediate rush of chaos both outside and inside the train as people come to grips what what just happened. 50 high school girls willingly threw themselves in front of a train together, and the police are understandably befuddled as to why. And to make matters worse, this continues to happen elsewhere. We’re shown a couple of nurses in a mostly empty hospital, who seem to, out of nowhere, gleefully decide to jump out the same window. But it’s mostly spreading to schools, where kids are one moment taking ghoulish delight in making fun of the suicidal sheep, but then decide to jump from the roof themselves. Dozens and dozens of teenagers are inexplicably killing themselves, and as the death toll rises, a mysterious website appears that seems to reflect each suicide with a blinking dot. Even more disturbing is the fact that at each of these crime scenes—if you can even use the word “crime”—there is a bag left behind that is holding a disgusting collection of patches of human flesh, all sewn together into a spiral. The police are scrambling to find answers, and Detective Kuroda (Ryo Ishibashi) is concerned about his own teenage kids. The police attempt to work with a mysterious female hacker who only goes by the name “The Bat”, but soon she is kidnapped by a wannabe boy band who claims to be responsible for influencing these killings. Whenever the cops question any students, they claim to have no knowledge of a “suicide club” and yet the deaths continue to rise, the public continues to panic, and all the while a popular new J-Pop group wholesomely called “Dessert” takes the country by storm. Suicide Club really nails the bored, cold, sometimes unnerving indifference of teenagers, even when dealing with matters of life and death. It is both funny and freaky and at times, and builds really excellent, unpredictable tension. What it doesn’t nail, is its tone, and its conclusion. I was all for the cartoonish amounts of blood, and was pretty decently disgusted by its gore, but I couldn’t help feeling like these deaths could’ve been more impactful. We don’t get to know any of these students particularly well, we don’t get a check-in with their families or friends, and each death—no matter how brutal or gory—becomes less meaningful as they increase in random absurdity. There were details I absolutely loved, and details that I really didn’t understand the purpose of, and I don’t think they were all due to my own Japanese cultural ignorance. I was ultimately pretty frustrated by the resolution—or lack thereof—of this movie, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t absolutely gripped by its mystery the entire time. Life and its many mysteries are ambiguous enough for my liking, so forgive me for wanting a more concrete answer to this fictional one. I don’t always feel that explicit answers are necessary, but it would’ve been so awesome if Suicide Club afforded us one. And apparently, many people share my sentiments, because a sequel (Noriko’s Dinner Table) and a manga were released shortly after to solidify this story a bit more. It’s still compelling as hell, with a thoroughly scary premise, though, so I have to give it some kudos. Well that’s all the time I have, dear readers, and I suppose my favorite season of movie-watching has come to a technical end. Thank you for reading along, and for always enabling my obsession with horror movies. Tune in next week for something less scary, but still hellish and haunting. Ta ta for now 😈