Forest Film
Wrong Turn is an american horror movie (2003/Director: Rob Schmidt) I had the chance to see recently. It is the story of a few unlucky young folks whose road crosses a gang of degenerated red necks serial killers with elephant man faces. A bloody hunt with a terminal goal. The action takes place in the middle of a remote forest, somewhere in rural America. Of course a couple will manage to survive by taking out miraculously the assailants at the end of a terrifying suspense... This scenario recalls many others, as he functions according to the codes of American B movies. The likes of of the ones at the cross road of horror/genre movies: slasher meets survival. But mostly dependent on its geographical situation, classifying him in a type of cinema I would call "the forest film".Deliverance, directed by John Boorman in 1972 started the trend.Many of us still remember this group of friends on their way to pay a tribute to nature, canoeing their way down the river in a wild untamed area that is doomed to disappear. Followed by a bad encounter, with a few locals, that will eventually deteriorate beyond the point of no return. The approached themes (relation between man and nature and his own savagery) and the dramatic tension found in Deliverance makes it an incomparable movie. It installs and defines precisely the codes proper to the gender: a small group of individuals form an entity, superior and preexisting to the story.They often are city dwellers ( corporate workers,...students) who found themselves threatened by one or more creatures(human or not) in a natural environment, suddenly turned wild or even hostile and sleazy. The painful and terrifying ordeal the characters have to deal with, ends upstrengthening the friendship among survivors .Expression of values The singular interest in film de fôret, in spite of the gender limitations found in its narrative structure, holds the promise of a great expression diversity in its dialectic:-The artistic ambition: Filmaker like M. Night Shyamalan (The Village, 2004 Etats Unis) treat danger as an assumption thus fear as an irrational phenomenon. Or again, Terry Gilliam (The Brothers Grimm, 2005, Etats Unis ) mixing reality (the life of the Grimm brothers) and fiction (the story they tale) treating the subversive function of ferry tales and the role of terror as a tool of enslavement.-The political speech: Like Serge Leroy with La Traque (1975) who inaugurates the genre in France with a social satire in the form of a violent attack against the cowardliness of a group coming from small provincial bourgeoisie, to confront our own bestiality. -The diversity of the scenaristic approach: or how to articulate your story around a specific canvass. Dead End ( french-american film by Jean Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa 2007) comes to mind. There the story slowly sinks into the fantastique: the characters found themselves stuck on a road that ends up as a loop and are murdered by a quasi undetectable enemy. Same with Severance (English movie directed by Christopher Smith 2006) who intelligently mixes horror and humor.The diversity of treatment: such as the utilization of a subjective camera to lead the story in The Blair Witch Project ( American film- 1999-, Directed by Daniel Myric and Eduardo Sanchez) as well as the marketing techniques like an Internet buzz giving credibility to rumors generating a confusion between reality and fiction.A movie in particular strikes my attention, its Hansel & Gretel a Korean film directed by Pil-Sung Yim in 2007. First because it seems freely inspired from the kids tale, and because its screenplay puts it at extreme limits of the genre (forest film) . And also because it is symptomatic of the international/worldly/global dimension of this cinematographic niche. To the same extent: Manhunt a Norwegian film by Patrick Sysversen (2008) or El rey de la montana a spanish film (Les Proies in french) by Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego (2008). We see that the genre is very prolific in Great Britain (Eden Lake, Wilderness, Broken, Severance,Dogs Soldiers) and more surprisingly in France (Brocéliandre, Promenons-nous dans les bois, Cibles, Vertige...). Dog Soldiers (Directed by Neil Marshal in 2002) a pretty dull and boring movie by the way, is the kind of work, just like The Blair Witch Project and Dead End who slides towards the fantastique or like Predator towards science-fiction.-Reality vs fiction: When looking at all these movies, an obvious finding as of the very distinct nature of the assailants, you can see they don't exist as such. What comes out then, is the existence of an under-genre to the forest film which falls from what we call animal-survival: when the character are being attacked by an animal. Often of incredible size, just like in Anaconda (American film by Luis Llosa/1977) in which you can see Jennifer Lopez being pursued by a giant snake in the south-american jungle...hilarious. And more: Grizzly Park whose specificity resides in the presence of two distinct types of assailants, an extremely ferocious bear and a serial killer whose escape has lead him to the same place. Some of these movies are clearly inspired by the world of children tales. They remind us how much the mysterious nature of the forest as a basis to story telling, gives us numerous options to exploit. What I call the forest film is just one specific option whose immutable codes make it often very asphyxiating in terms of creativity in spite of its transgeneric dimension and the immemorial nature of its subject.
