Grant Wood’s painting, “American Gothic,” is undoubtedly his most famous work. The image is so evocative and suggestive that countless interpretations have been offered for it. The idea of debilitating isolation suggests itself. An unhappy self-reliance that has taken its toll on an aging couple (some say the woman is his daughter) often comes to mind. For some it suggests a movie. Normally I like horror films from the seventies and eighties. There’s almost an innocence to them that gets lost in the new millennium. On a rainy weekend afternoon when I couldn’t be mowing the lawn I found American Gothic on Amazon Prime and it had received four stars and even IMDb showed it as better than average. The longer I watched the more I was inching toward “bad movie” territory, but I had to see how it ended.
Six young people, four of whom are distinctly unlikeable, have plane trouble and get stranded on a lonely island in the Pacific northwest. They discover a house furnished from the twenties and it turns out there’s an older couple there who don’t really cotton onto strangers. As the plot unfolds it turns out they have three adult children who think they’re still adolescents. And—this is the good part—they are a very religious family (in part. Again, as often happens in such films, the writers really don’t understand religion). In any case, the predictable killing off of the kids starts to happen when they continue to be rude and insult the family. Since we’re in slasher territory here, there’s a final girl—one of the two sympathetic women—who ultimately takes over the house.
Part of the problem with the film is the utter paranoia with which it treats mental illness. The family clearly has problems and, in a way typical for the genre, they turn toward killing. Ironically, Pa, when he finds his family has been killed by the one mentally ill visitor (everyone with psychological problems in this movie turns to murder), renounces God and sells himself to Satan. Interestingly, he doesn’t survive long enough to do anything about it. Reading about this movie after watching it I came across a new word: hixploitation. Exploitation movies are familiar to anyone who watches much in this genre, but I’d never considered that Deliverance and company exploit “hicks.” It’s all about how others look at you. And, as a movie made in Canada and the UK, it shows us what others see when they look at us. There’s some ground to explore here in a sequel to Holy Horror.
