Ever since reading Joshua Gibson’s essay “Monsters in the Closet:  Killer Kids and Queer Identity,” I have a much more acute awareness of the ways in which gays and lesbians get configured as the monster objects in horror films.  One of the interesting aspects of Gibson’s essay comes from the way he shows that even characters not overly coded as gay can act as stand-ins for fears about homosexuality endangering the beloved and always besieged family.  

High Tension is a film that feels like it was made by a panting serial killer with one hand down his pants.  It’s the first horror film I’ve ever seen that made me feel guilty for watching it.  The camera puts you in the position of a sociopath, erotically lingering over images of women gored and distressed, eschewing plot for stark visual caresses of slit throats, gushing wounds, and sadism so prolonged and unrelenting that the movie becomes a marathon for your capacity to tamp your gag reflex.  I guess I should note that the next paragraph might spoil the one-trick,  wholly implausible plot twist in this rancid piece of trash.

The big shock in High Tension comes at the end when you discover that you’re simply watching a hyper-violent exploration of lesbian desire.  The character being chased and tortured throughout the movie is really the killer, who envisions herself as a fat, middle-aged, white man so that she can express her desire to have sex with her friend and attempt to kill her when her advances get rebuffed.  Of course, she can’t just get drunk and make out with her during spring break for the Girls Gone Wild crew; she has to gruesomely murder the family of the one she loves.  In this way, High Tension traffics in any number of right-wing slurs about the birth of homosexual desire necessitating the death of the traditional family.  

If it were just homophobic, it would be simply typical, but the retrograde notions of queer identity abound.   In one scene, the killer uses a decapitated head to simulate a blowjob in her fucked up terror-truck (every good serial killer needs one) before discarding the head out the window.  Not only does the movie equate homosexual desire with the extinction of the family, but it theorizes lesbianism as simple penis envy.  Thus, all the big rifles, buzz saws, and barbed wire sticks seem like frustrated dildos, the rage that apparently comes from being cursed with a vagina.  After all, what are two women-identified women going to do with two vaginas?  In this sense, homosexuality itself becomes inconceivable except as a stunted desire to reproduce the heterosexual model atop mutilated bodies.  

The tradition in horror films of packing conservative messages into surfaces that would appear antithetical to the family values crowd has been around as long as teenagers have needed to be impaled on film for having pre-marital sex.  But High Tension offers a new bottom in hidden messages.  It’s painstaking to dig through the depravity to find the secondary message of degradation.  

Terry Sawyer