The countdown to Christmas is on, and Hard Ticket is hard at work with their Hard Ticket to Halloween series. It’s definitely their fault that the holidays are so out of synch and not because I’m late. This week’s timely episode features a subterranean skirmish between The Descent and Barbarian. Get ready to be drilled deep!
Our friends and my only readers over at the Hard Ticket podcast have a long history of covering movies set in Appalachia and The Descent is one of the best. After losing her daughter and husband in a car crash, our hero Sarah opts to take a thrilling spelunk into an uncharted cave. Through this venture, we see a grieving mother, violently separated from the fruit of her loins, journey through the gaping crevasse and into the womb of Mother Earth itself, sort of like a vagina dentata. The term is usually reserved for aquatic life like sharks, but this is a rare terrestrial example. As Sarah and her group of friends traverse the tunnels, there is a minor cave-in, blocking their original path. In searching for an exit, the group finds themselves hunted by inhuman figures in the dark. Ambushed by so-called “crawlers”, a bloodbath ensues and Sarah’s friends are picked off one by one until only she and Juno remain. Sarah sees this as her chance to confront Juno about the affair she had with Sarah’s late husband. Luckily, that’s a capital offense in North Carolina so there are zero issues with Sarah standing her ground and putting a climbing axe through her knee. With Juno occupying the crawlers, Sarah is able to climb back up into the world of light, reborn in the light of Christ.
Barbarian is a 2022 Bill Skarsgård delivery mechanism about the dark side of an Airbnb—and I don’t just mean the company’s contribution to the rise of homelessness. Our protagonist, Tess, is staying in what could be a unit of affordable family housing in an effort to land a new job in Detroit. Unfortunately, the land leech double-booked her with Keith, an attractive man with no sense of danger. Tess and Keith find that the basement of this house is home to a deformed woman, more monster than person, shortly before Keith finds the inside of his head has miraculously become the outside via blunt force osmosis. We come to learn that the original owner abducted, raped, and imprisoned various women over the years—IDF style. Tess is eventually able to escape the house with AJ, the current owner of the house and soon-to-be-outed sexpest. The pair climb a nearby water tower, but AJ decides to push Tess from the top as a means of self-preservation. The woman shields Tess from the fall, before killing AJ and being killed by Tess. The UN has yet to sanction any of the individuals involved.
This episode is a truly great matchup, with both movies exploring the nature of feminism and misogyny through the metaphor of scary holes. The Descent can be looked at as a rebuke of classic horror tropes and their reduction of female agency. There isn’t a clear whore, jock, nerd, virgin, stoner etc. framework at play in this movie. All of the women are experienced thrill-seekers—they’re all the jock, except for Juno, who is also a cheating whore that needs to keep her grubby little hands off Sarah’s dead man. Also, there’s a vagina dentata that goes all dentata all over everybody. Conversely, male sexuality is framed as the threat in Barbarian. Frank’s abuse serves as the impetus for this domino run of misery, but AJ and Keith serve as examples in their own right. AJ is a man who has clearly used the power prescribed him by a system of patriarchy to take advantage of the women around him. Even Keith, who does seem to be a decent person, is viewed warily by the audience because of the implicit threat he could pose if he so chose, and the way that so many men do so choose. It’s a sort of toothed penis to serve as a foil to the vagina dentata of The Descent. Maybe that’s what Lauren means when she talks about “tasteful teeth”.
Hard Flickit 