Editorials
The Joy Paradox of ‘Martyrs’ (2008)
Martyrs (2008) is infamously known as one of the most disturbing films of the 21st century. It is often considered a standout of the New French Extremity wave, though writer-directed Pascal Laugier disavowed that label. And while Martyrs does use visceral gore and nihilistic themes (hallmarks of the genre) to make its point, it’s a mistake to label the film as gratuitous or exploitative. We’ll explain why there is more to ‘Martyrs’ and how it helps us experience joy.
Part I: The movie
Martyrs (2008) is infamously known as one of the most disturbing films of the 21st century. It is often considered a standout of the New French Extremity wave, though writer-directed Pascal Laugier disavowed that label. And while Martyrs does use visceral gore and nihilistic themes (hallmarks of the genre) to make its point, it’s a mistake to label the film as gratuitous or exploitative.
The story begins with Lucie as a young traumatized girl who escapes a rundown building. At an orphanage, Lucie refuses to tell the adults about her abuse, though her friend Anna tries to comfort her. Next, a 15 year time jump introduces us to a family having breakfast in their home. The mother has pulled a mouse out of the septic tank, restoring water pressure to the building. The parents praise their daughter’s athletic achievements while they mock their son for dropping out of school. “I want to study something I like,” he tries to explain, “law isn’t my thing.” Before we can learn anything more about these people, an adult Lucie interrupts their breakfast, and the violence continues. She is soon joined by Anna, who tries to protect Lucie while mitigating the situation. Over the next 85 minutes, the violence escalates with very few reprieves.
Everything about Martyrs is designed to be destabilizing. The point of view shifts every 20-ish minutes, at first focusing on Lucie, then switching to Anna, and then ultimately switching to their aggressors. The viewer is forced to cling to every line of dialogue, every glance, every movement. Watching Martyrs becomes an endurance test, especially when so much of the violence in the first half of the movie involves self-harm. “I really wanted all my [special] effects to be almost medical,” Laugier told WhatCulture back in 2009 while singing the praises of his late friend, VFX supervisor Benoît Lestang. “It’s supposed to be about the flesh, the real condition of the body when you hurt yourself.”
In a conversation with What’s Up Man after Martyrs screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, Laugier explained that “any time there is a direct act of violence, it turns the story into something else. There are consequences to what we do.” This is how Martyrs continues it’s dialogue with the viewers long after the film ends. Once you’ve seen the completed film, do you view Lucie’s actions differently? Do you feel guilt, as Anna does, for questioning Lucie’s sanity? Are you frustrated by Anna’s choices? When the aggressors explain their motivations, do you believe them? Martyrs will not answer any of these questions for you.
Though there are no religious symbols in this film, Laugier has said in several interviews that he drew on his Catholic background while writing this story. “The film is a personal reaction to the darkness of our world,” he told the online magazine Electric Sheep back in 2009. He describes the Western world as a place where “evil triumphed a long time ago, where consciences have died out under the reign of money and where people spend their time hurting one another.” He specifically uses the word “martyr” to mean someone who witnesses something to which only they can testify.
Here is Laugier explaining his movie in his own words:
“It’s a film about suffering. It’s a film about pain. It’s not a film about torture. … My film, for me, is very empathetic. You have to feel for them. I never make a laugh at my main characters. I love them and I want them to stop suffering. It’s a very sad movie. I would even say it could be a depressing film. It’s saying our time is over and evil has eaten everything.”
Part II: The viewer
I first watched Martyrs in the midst of a downward anxiety spiral – I was intentionally seeking out fucked up movies. Having grown up in a Catholic community, I immediately connected with how suffering is portrayed in this movie. The film left me nauseous and foggy, like my brain was being rewired. I also felt relieved. I had never before considered how institutions fetishize the suffering of others, and this new perspective soothed my anxiety.
The second time I watched Martyrs, now knowing the film’s arc, I could absorb more of the non-violent exposition details sprinkled throughout the story. For example, the few adults that we meet aside from the aggressors all behave callously. The way Anna’s mother speaks to her, the way the parents mock their son – these are ‘small’ acts of violence that are very common in our world. Laugier is pointing to the continuum of violence. Other quiet moments play with reality. If Lucie’s demons are manifestations of her guilt, how did those cuts get on her back? Why does the hammer fall in such a way that leads Anna to uncover the house’s secrets? Despite the film’s brutality, I relish these intricate details.
On my third viewing (spoilers from here onward), I understood Mademoiselle, and the acolytes that follow her. The way the parents praise their daughter’s athleticism is a nod to the fascist ideology that guides this cult. When Mademoiselle speaks, her words are gibberish, though she clearly believes in her cause. We, as the audience, never see what she sees in her photo album. She justifies her violence when she scoffs “people ignore the existence of suffering… yet everyone’s a victim”. According to her, the “true martyr” she so desperately seeks would be able to transcend the suffering she inflicts, though she is never the one to suffer. Her choices reveal the cowardice behind her philosophy.
Mademoiselle’s hypocrisy is so familiar to me, having grown up Catholic. I remember thinking as a child that I was a hypocrite because I did not believe in God. I attended mass most Sundays, and I always felt dishonest, like my heretical mind was an insult to the other attendees. I felt the need to hide parts of myself to fit in, but as I grew older, I witnessed several of the more pious attendees be violent, emotionally and physically, to their families and the community. I learned that my hidden self was not monstrous, like theirs, just different. My concept of hypocrisy changed; it’s not about dishonesty but a lack of identity. A hypocrite uses ideology to mask the missing identity within themselves.
Mademoiselle’s final act exposes the emptiness of her dogma. She achieves her ultimate goal when she gets a “crystal clear” answer from her martyr. This should be a celebration for her, she should be preaching, bragging even, to her followers. But she has tied her entire identity to this quest, and now that she has her answer, she is left with no purpose. Whether her martyr confirms or disproves her hypothesis doesn’t matter – her ideological quest has ended, and she has no identity left.
Part III: the violence
Though Mademoiselle and her followers are very organized and very powerful, their nonsensical ideology is not dissimilar to the contradictions in our real world. We treat retail theft as a newsworthy crime, even though corporations regularly steal billions in unpaid wages. Marijuana grown in a basement is an illegal narcotic, while oxycontin produced in a lab is sold as a wonder drug. When a person walks across a country’s border without the right paperwork, they’re branded as a dangerous criminal, and yet countries that drop millions of pounds of explosives on civilians are hailed as heroic. We have, without question, organized our society around a delusional ideology that allows powerful institutions, like Mademoiselle’s, to dole out violence as they see fit.
Every time I watch Martyrs, I feel validated. Simply following society’s rules will not protect me – what rules did Lucie break as a child for her to deserve such a fate? This is not a safe world for children, and institutions are not empathetic. Lucie and Anna may fight back, but doing so does not lead them to a happy conclusion. This is the nihilistic takeaway from Martyrs: institutional violence is both meaningless and inevitable.
But there is a paradox buried in the details of Martyrs. Anna and Lucie, like so many people, are both motivated by empathy. Lucie is trying to help the person she couldn’t save as a child – in many ways, she is the film’s hero. Anna is trying to protect the woman she loves, so she chooses to stay in the house. They both do the best they can, and with their very limited tools, they manage to bring an entire cult to its knees. They cause the death of its leader. It is their so-called ‘insignificance’ that gives them power; two small mice gumming up an entire system of pipes.
This world may be all violence, as Martyrs suggests, and delusional zealots may write the rules, but if you are reading this, then you have the capacity to feel joy and empathy. You are alive. It is radical to love someone, as Anna does, it is radical to atone for your faults, as Lucie tries to do. In a system that is so cruel, every second that I feel joy is precious and hard-earned. My greatest weapon is empathy, and it brings me joy to understand my power.
This is my paradoxical reading of Martyrs. The world is cruel and punishing. So try your best, be kind, and cause a ruckus when you can.
As a horror fan, I tend to think about remakes a lot. Not why they are made, necessarily. That answer is pretty clear: money. But something closer to “if they have to be made, how can they be made well?” It’s rare to find a remake that is generally considered to be better than the original. However, there are plenty that have been deemed to be valuable in a different way. You can find these in basically all subgenres. Sci-fi, for instance (The Thing, The Blob). Zombies (Dawn of the Dead, Evil Dead). Even slashers (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, My Bloody Valentine). However, when it comes to haunted house remakes, only The Woman in Black truly stands out, and it is shockingly underrated. Even more intriguingly, it is demonstrably better than the original movie.
The Original Haunted House Movie Is Almost Always Better
Now please note, I’m specifically talking about movies with haunted houses, rather than ghost movies in general. We wouldn’t want to be bringing The Ring into this conversation. That’s not fair to anyone.
Plenty of haunted house movies are minted classics, and as such, the subgenre has gotten its fair share of remakes. These are, almost unilaterally, some of the most-panned movies in a format that attracts bad reviews like honey attracts flies.
You’ve got 2005’s The Amityville Horror (a CGI-heavy slog briefly buoyed by a shirtless, possessed Ryan Reynolds). That same year’s Dark Water (one of many inert remakes of Asian horror films to come from that era). 1999’s The House on Haunted Hill (a manic, incoherent effort that millennial nostalgia has perhaps been too kind to). That same year there was The Haunting (a manic, incoherent effort that didn’t even earn nostalgia in the first place). And 2015’s Poltergeist (Remember this movie? Don’t you wish you didn’t?). And while I could accept arguments about 2001’s THIR13EN Ghosts, it’s hard to compete with a William Castle classic.
The Problem with Haunted House Remakes
Generally, I think haunted house remakes fail so often because of remakes’ compulsive obsession with updating the material. They throw in state-of-the-art special effects, the hottest stars of the era, and big set piece action sequences. Like, did House on Haunted Hill need to open with that weird roller coaster scene? Of course it didn’t.
However, when it comes to haunted house movies, bigger does not always mean better. They tend to be at their best when they are about ordinary people experiencing heightened versions of normal domestic fears. Bumps in the night, unexplained shadows, and the like. Maybe even some glowing eyes or a floating child. That’s all fine and dandy. But once you have a giant stone lion decapitating Owen Wilson, things have perhaps gone a bit off the rails.
The One Big Exception is The Woman in Black
The one undeniable exception to the haunted house remake rule is 2012’s The Woman in Black. If we want to split hairs, it’s technically the second adaptation of the Susan Hill novel of the same name. But The Haunting was technically a Shirley Jackson re-adaptation, and that still counts as a remake, so this does too.
The novel follows a young solicitor being haunted when handling a client’s estate at the secluded Eel Marsh House. The property was first adapted into a 1989 TV movie starring Adrian Rawlings, and it was ripe for a remake. In spite of having at least one majorly eerie scene, the 1989 movie is in fact too simple and small-scale. It is too invested in the humdrum realities of country life to have much time to be scary. Plus, it boasts a small screen budget and a distinctly “British television” sense of production design. Eel Marsh basically looks like any old English house, with whitewashed walls and a bland exterior.
Therefore, the “bigger is better” mentality of horror remakes took The Woman in Black to the exact level it needed.
The Woman in Black 2012 Makes Some Great Choices
2012’s The Woman in Black deserves an enormous amount of credit for carrying the remake mantle superbly well. By following a more sedate original, it reaches the exact pitch it needs in order to craft a perfect haunted house story. Most appropriately, the design of Eel Marsh House and its environs are gloriously excessive. While they don’t stretch the bounds of reality into sheer impossibility, they completely turn the original movie on its head.
Eel Marsh is now, as it should be, a decaying, rambling pile where every corner might hide deadly secrets. It’d be scary even if there wasn’t a ghost inside it, if only because it might contain copious black mold. Then you add the marshy grounds choked in horror movie fog. And then there’s the winding, muddy road that gets lost in the tide and feels downright purgatorial. Finally, you have a proper damn setting for a haunted house movie that plumbs the wicked secrets of the wealthy.
Why The Woman in Black Remake Is an Underrated Horror Gem
While 2012’s The Woman in Black is certainly underrated as a remake, I think it is even more underrated as a haunted house movie. For one thing, it is one of the best examples of the pre-Conjuring jump-scare horror movie done right. And if you’ve read my work for any amount of time, you know how positively I feel about jump scares. The Woman in Black offers a delectable combo platter of shocks designed to keep you on your toes. For example, there are plenty of patient shots that wait for you to notice the creepy thing in the background. But there are also a number of short sharp shocks that remain tremendously effective.
That is not to say that the movie is perfect. They did slightly overstep with their “bigger is better” move to cast Daniel Radcliffe in the lead role. It was a big swing making his first post-Potter role that of a single father with a four-year-old kid. It’s a bit much to have asked 2012 audiences to swallow, though it reads slightly better so many years later.
However, despite its flaws, The Woman in Black remake is demonstrably better than the original. In nearly every conceivable way. It’s pure Hammer Films confection, as opposed to a television drama without an ounce of oomph.
There are only so many times I can get away with burying the lede with an editorial headline before someone throws a rock at me. It may or may not be justified when they do. This article is not an attempt at ragebaiting Scream fans, I promise. Neither was my Scream 3 article, which I’m still completely right about.
I do firmly believe that Scream 2 is, at the very least, the last Scream film I’d want to watch. But what was initially just me complaining about a film that I disregard as the weakest entry in its series has since developed into trying to address what it does right. You’ve heard of the expression “jack of all trades, master of none”, and to me Scream 2 really was the jack of all trades of the franchise for the longest time.
It technically has everything a Scream movie needs. Its opening is great, but it’s not the best of them by a long shot. Its killers are unexpected, but not particularly interesting, feeling flat and one-dimensional compared to the others. It has kills, but only a few of them are particularly shocking or well executed. It pokes fun at the genre but doesn’t say anything particularly bold in terms of commentary. Having everything a Scream movie needs is the bare minimum to me.
But the question is, what does Scream 2 do best exactly? Finding that answer involves highlighting what each of the other sequels are great at, and trying to pick out what Scream 2 has that the others don’t.
Scream 3 Is the Big Finale That Utilizes Its Setting Perfectly
Scream as a series handily dodges the trap most horror franchises fall into: rehashing and retreading the same territory over and over. That’s because every one of its films are in essence trying to do something a little different and a little bolder.
Scream 3 is especially bold because it was conceived, written, and executed as the final installment in the Scream series. And it does that incredibly well. Taking the action away from a locale similar to Woodsboro, Scream 3 tosses our characters into the frying pan of a Hollywood film production. Despite its notorious number of rewrites and script changes (one of which resulted in our first solo Ghostface), it still manages to be a perfect culmination of Sidney Prescott’s story.
I won’t repeat myself too much (go read my previous article on the subject), but 3 is often maligned for as good a film as it turned out to be. And for all of its clunkier reveals, and its ghost mom antics, it understands how to utilize its setting and send its characters off into the sunset right.
Scream 4’s Meta Commentary Wakes Scream from a Deep Sleep
As Wes Craven’s final film, Scream 4 has a very special place in the franchise. It was and still is largely adored for bringing back the franchise from a deep 11-year sleep. With one of the craziest openings in any horror film, let alone a Scream film, it sets the tone for a bombastic return and pays off in spades with the journey it takes us on.
Its primary Ghostface Jill Roberts is a fan favorite, and for some people, she is the best to ever wear the mask. Its script is the source of many memorable moments, not the least of which is Kirby’s iconic rapid-fire response to the horror remakes question. And most importantly, it makes a bold and surprisingly effective return for our main trio of Sidney, Dewey, and Gale, whose return didn’t feel trite or hammy when they ended up coming back to Woodsboro for more.
Craven’s work on 4 truly understands the power its predecessors had exerted on the horror genre, both irreverent in its metacommentary and celebratory of the Scream series as a whole. The film is less of a love letter to the genre and more of a kicking down of the door to remind people what Scream is about. 4’s story re-established that Scream isn’t going away, no matter how long it takes for another film, and no matter how many franchises try to take its place.
Scream 5 & 6 Is Radio Silence’s Brutal and Bloody Attitude Era
Put simply, Scream 5 and 6’s strong suit was not its characters. It was not its clever writing. The Radio Silence duology in the Scream series excelled in one thing: beating the hell out of its characters.
Wrestling fans (of which there is an unsurprising amount of crossover with horror fans) will know why I call it the Attitude Era. Just like WWE’s most infamous stretch of history, Radio Silence brought something especially aggressive to their entries. And it’s because these films were just brutal. Handing the reins to the series, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillet gifted a special kineticism to the classic Scream chase sequences, insane finales, and especially its ruthless killers.
All five of the Ghostfaces present in 5 and 6 are the definition of nasty. They’re unrelenting, and in my humble opinion, the freakiest since the original duo of Stu Macher and Billy Loomis. Getting to hear all the air get sucked out of the room as Dewey is gutted like a fish in 5 was still an incredible moment to experience in theatres, and it’s something I don’t think would have happened if the films were any less mean and any less explosively violent.
So, What Does Scream 2 Do Best Exactly?
So now, after looking at all these entries and all of their greatest qualities, what does Scream 2 have that none of the others do? What must I concede to Scream 2?
Really great character development.
Film is a medium of spectacle most of the time, and this is reflected in how we critique and compliment them. It affects how we look back on them, sometimes treating them more harshly than they deserve because they don’t have that visual flash. But for every ounce of spectacle Scream 2 lacks, I have to admit, it does an incredible job of developing Sidney Prescott as a character.
On a rare rewatch, it’s clear Neve Campbell is carrying the entirety of Scream 2 on her back just because of how compelling she makes Sidney. Watching her slowly fight against a tide of paranoia, fear, and distrust of the people around her once more, watching her be plunged back into the nightmare, is undeniably effective.
It’s also where Dewey and Gale are really cemented as a couple, and where the seeds of them always returning to each other are planted. Going from a mutual simmering disrespect to an affectionate couple to inseparable but awkward and in love is just classic; two people who complete each other in how different they are, but are inevitably pulled back and forth by those differences, their bond is one of the major highlights throughout the series.
Maybe All the Scream Films Are Just Good?
These three characters are the heart of the series, long after they’ve been written out. I talk a big game about how Scream 3 is the perfect ending for the franchise, but I like to gloss over the fact that Scream 2 does a lot of the legwork when it comes to developing the characters of Dewey, Gale, and especially Sidney.
Without 2, 3 just isn’t that effective when it comes to giving Sidney her long deserved peace. Without 2, the way we see Sidney’s return in 4 & 5 doesn’t hit as hard. All of the Scream movies owe something to Scream 2 in the same way they owe something to the original Scream. I think I’ve come to a new point of view when it comes to the Scream franchise: maybe there is no bad entry. Maybe none of them have to be the worst. Each one interlinks with the others in their own unique way.
And even though I doubt I will ever really love Scream 2, it has an undeniable strength in its character writing that permeates throughout the whole franchise. And that at the very least keeps it from being the worst Scream film.
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