Virtual Fools

Dawn of the Dead (2004) writer and Troma vet Gunn’s major directorial debut is a welcoming diversion from the recent cycle of sadistic horror films flooding American screens. After graduating from a recent obsession with “postmodern”/reflexive work (the Scream trilogy, the I Know… series, etc), American horror has most recently been manifested in J-horror remakes and “pain” films like Saw, Hostel, and The Devil’s Rejects. These films appeal to the depoliticized impulses of the “savage cinema” of the 1970s, taking their then virginal willingness to show graphic content on the screen, amplifying it, and removing most of the social commentary/protest. What these films generally tell audiences is that our world is sick and populated by a kind of pure evil and pervasive cynicism.

Slither differs in many respects. A genre-literate spoof that is more of a cheeky-poke at monster films and the exploitation circuit than a testament to eternal suffering, it amplifies the “fun” of gore. A mysterious meteor lands in Wheelsy, a small, insular, and “stereotypical” South Carolina town. Local Grant Grant (Michael Rooker) has an unfortunate encounter with alien matter after a fight with trophy wire Starla Grant (Elizabeth Banks). Grant begins acting strangely - craving raw meat and murdering dogs, not this mention a rapidly metamorphosing body – to the point of attacking his wife, yet luckily the local police force intervenes in the nick of time and Grant escapes into the woods. Chief of police Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion) has a past with Starla, so the intersection of past love and current duty notch up the paternalistic concern, prompting a hunt for the monster. After an infected woman explodes into thousands of slug-like beasts, the danger becomes evidently clear – whatever came out of the meteor has found a king host in Grant, with the worker-slugs contaminating bodies and turning them into a kind of zombie-alien (and as if this were not ridiculous enough in itself, the zombie-alien-townsfolk later attempt to suture their bodies with Grant, in a nod to the climax of Brian Yuzna’s Society [1989]).

One of the greatest strengths of Slither is its narrative pacing. For a relatively fast movie with lots of comic asides, the story unfolds in a very manic way. As outlined above, the monster/alien presence has enough manifestations, mutations, special traits, and forms to fill up a novella, so it is delightfully humorous that the end of the movie shows one evolution of the monster after another with no time for digestion of ideas or issues of causality. In short, Gunn is pointing to the absurd way that many horror and sci-fi films explain away their supernatural element. Slither’s humor avoids being cheaply parodic (*cough* Scary Movie *cough*) and instead naturalistically jibes with the genre, justifiable either as criticism or homage.