I recently saw Satan’s Rejects (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0395584/) on DVD. I’d already seen House of 1,000 Corpses (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0251736/) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (including the 1974 version – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072271/ – and the 2003 version – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0324216/). And Deliverance (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068473/). And Children of the Corn, all seven films (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Corn). I haven’t seen The Hills Have Eyes (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077681/), but I doubt it contains any surprises.
In all films of this well-established horror subgenre, the filthy inbred clan of insane serial-killer cannibals are rednecks – i.e., poor Southern whites; something out of a Jeff Foxworthy joke, with blood and madness added. This phenomenon is probably based on the strange and curious fear most suburban Americans seem to have of rural people and the hinterlands.
It works. Indeed it works. But it gets rather boring and repititious, like any cliche. And I think it’s unfair to rednecks. I mean, how much damage do they do, really?
Now, IRL, the real flesh-eating monsters (metaphorically speaking) in American society are the people running it. And they’re not rednecks. They’re WASPs. Which is not the same thing at all, at all. As Christopher Hitchens famously put it, “George Wallace might have been a white Protestant of Anglo-Saxon extraction, and rather vocal on all three points, but a WASP he was not.”
So.
I’d really, really like to see a movie about a clan of insane serial-killer cannibals who are not rednecks, but WASP preppies in the Lovecraftian-degenerate mold, like the Addams Family but worse – old money, armigerous lineage, DAR memberships, Andover, Yale, political connections, Bohemian Grove invitations, the whole business. They lure victims to their immaculately-kept ancestral estate somewhere in rural New England. They do the same kinds of things as the Leatherface family, but they supplement the torture with highfalutin power-philosophy quotations from Carlyle and Nietzsche and Fichte and Julius Evola. One of them, perhaps, is a fine young West Point man who finds creative uses for the interrogation techniques he learned as a Special Forces officer. Another, perhaps – call her “Muffy” – is a featherbrained debutante who’s always getting into hobbies (e.g., taxidermy). And then there’s the old patriarch of the clan, the man with highways and stock brokerages named after him, who rules from the head of the table . . . Heck, even the butler (one of the very few left in America) could get in on the action!
Whaddaya think? Sounds like a ton of fun! 