Lars von Tier and Horror

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Rotten rails. Pre sakes, drag your f to the screen. Welcome to the graveyard where the film screams back your name every cut. [00:00:28] Speaker B: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the final girl on 6th Avenue podcast. My name is Carolyn Smith hillmer and I'm 6th Avenue's very own Final Girl. And today I want to talk to you about one of the most divisive, disturbing corners of modern cinema. We're going to be talking about the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, a director hailed as a visionary, but also dismissed as a sadistic and sometimes in the same review. So if that's any indication for you of what we're about to get into, I do apologize in advance, as I usually do, but I also just want to say that Lars von Trier is a very. There's a lot of drama surrounding him as an individual, but I think in the context of this medium, right, and of this podcast, we can talk about his film and a little bit of his personal life and able to be able to separate them just for the sake of study of film. Okay? Also, it's been brought to my attention that there are many film lovers that exist in the world today that have no knowledge of any of Lars von Truer's films and have never seen them. And so my hope is that through this episode, I'll be able to show and demonstrate why his films are worth watching, particularly if you are a cinephile or someone who is deeply ingrained in film and film study. So if you've seen films like Antichrist or the House that Jack Built, you already know that Lars is not popcorn horror. This is his films are horror as psychological collapse and largely philosophical provocation. And they're a bit of an endurance test. So over the course of this episode, I'm going to dig into three big things. Who is Lars von Trier? We're going to talk about his life, his Persona, and how his own anxiety and depression seep into his films. We're going to talk about how his movies intersect with horror, especially Antichrist, Melancholia and the House that Jack Built. And finally, we're going to talk about the ethical minefield around his work, the accusations of misogyny, the Cannes controversies, and the question of how horror fans should approach an artist like this. This is going to be a relatively heavily research based episode. I'm going to be drawing on biographies, interviews, academic essays, critical pieces from places like the Danish Film Institute, the New Yorker, npr, horror scholarship. All of those sources will be linked in the show notes, if you want to dig deeper. So if you've Ever watched Antichrist and thought, did I just see a horror masterpiece, a misogynistic nightmare, or both? Stick around, because that's the kind of question we're looking to unpack here. So who is Lars von Trier? Let's start with the basics. Before we get to the foxes that whisper chaos reigns, we need to know who's actually conjuring them. Lars von Trier was born lars Trier on April 30, 1956, in Copenhagen, Denmark. No van yet. That gets added later. He grew up in what you could politely call an unconventional home. His parents were atheist, left wing and proudly anti authoritarian. Accounts from biographical work in the Danish Film Institute describe a kind of free thinking, nudist, culturally radical environment. So from the very beginning, he's raised in a household that's skeptical of authority and of religion and comfortable breaking taboos. And those are traits that are going to echo throughout his films. The Vaughan in Lars von Trier, that's not a noble title. It's actually a film school joke. In the late 1970s and early 80s, in film school, he actually adds Vaughn as a kind of tongue in cheek homage to old European auteurs like von Straheim. And it's self mythologizing, but it's also a signal that he's already thinking about himself as part of this, like, grand tradition, even though he simultaneously wants to tear that tradition down. And from early on, von Trier stug. He struggles like he struggles with anxiety and phobias and later in life, serious depression. And this is something that has. He's been very open about throughout his life. But it does also shape the way that he views cinema and film and very much shapes the way in which his films are, you know, shown to the public. One detail that comes up again and again is his fear of flying. Even though his films are premiering at Cannes and winning major prizes, he's often literally staying put in Denmark. He's absolutely terrified of planes. So think about that. He's never left the continent of Europe. So if he needed to get somewhere to film for one of his films, right, one of his movies, he has to do it all in Europe because he won't get on a plane. So he needs to find somewhere that he can get via train or by car. These experiences with anxiety and depression are not just background trivia. They're central to how he talks about his work and especially to the films that horror fans tend to latch onto. And he later refers to Antichrist, melancholia and nymphomaniac parts one and two as his depression trilogy. And he's very explicit that these films come out of his own periods of mental illness. And that's important context when we get to Antichrist, because it isn't just a film about grief in the abstract. It's actually born out of a director who says he felt unable to function, unable to plan, and completely overwhelmed by despair. Before he was a lightning rod, he was simply an amazing European auteur. He breaks out internationally in the 1990s with some of my favorite films. Breaking the Waves, the Idiots, Dancer in the Dark. And these are sometimes grouped as the Golden Heart trilogy. So stories of like naive and self sacrificing women in a brutal world. And already you can see patterns that will haunt this horror adjacent work. There's suffering women, moral extremity, and an almost religious fascination with. With sacrifice. Particularly with the golden heart Trilogy. In 1995, along with the fellow Danish director Thomas Vinterberg, Von Trier and you know Thomas Vinterberg because of the celebration, right. Don't forget that was a Dogma 95 movie. Together they launched the Dogma 95 movement, which, you know, we talked about before, but it's kind of a punk manifesto for, quote, unquote, pure filmmaking. So handheld cameras, natural light, location shooting, no music added. And it's a bit of a vow of chastity against big budget artifice. And in classic Von Trier fashion, after making a couple films that flirt with those rules, he kind of proceeds to break most of them in his later work. So he creates a set of commandments and then treats them as something that are intended to be violated. Yeah, he's a strange guy. But then there's the public Persona, right? The provocateur. In 2011, during the press conference for Melancholia at Cannes, he makes a series of. I guess he. They were intended to be a joke. So he makes a series of like joking and rambling comments about quote, unquote, understanding Hitler. And the jokes fall very flat. And the festival literally responded by declaring him Persona non grata. So he basically is banned. He can't go back to Cannes. It's one of the most notorious PR disasters in recent film and festival history. It cements this image of Von Trier as someone who really just like can't resist crossing a line, even when he doesn't seem fully in control of what he's saying. But later he leaned into the scandal. He showed up with a T shirt that says Persona non grata and tattooed the phrase on his knuckles. And he turned a public shaming into part of his brand. So that combination of deep insecurity and mental illness and the compulsive need to provoke is exactly what makes his relationship to horror so fascinating and so fraught. So that's the person, right? Is it? Radical? Radical parents raised this child who is an anxious and depressive adult, a self stylized European auteur and a public figure who keeps setting off cultural landmines. So with all of that in mind, let's talk about how all of that shows up when he wanders into his horror film territory. Lars von Trier is not, on paper a horror director. You're not going to find him on the same shelf as, say, Wes Craven or John Carpenter. But if you map out his career, there are clear fault lines where his obsessions line up almost perfectly with horror's core concerns. One of them is a, you know, one recurring theme critics often point out is extremity. And so scholars who write about Lars von Trier talk about his obsession with pushing things as far as they can go. We're talking extreme emotion, extreme suffering and very extreme imagery. Horror, especially modern extreme and art horror is one of those genres that sort of welcomes that kind of push. It's built to handle images and experiences that feel like too much. The Danish Film Institute notes that Lars has long been fascinated by, you know, the sort of decadent and pessimistic portions of European culture. You know, writers and thinkers like Schoenberg and Nietzsche, and the turn of the century fascination with death and decay and the darker side of human nature sort of seeps into and shapes his worldview. So in other words, his horror streak isn't an accident. It's baked into the philosophical DNA that he's actually drawing from. But then there's the question of misogyny. Misogyny is not a new concept here. We've talked about women in horror before. We've talked about how film and horror film in particular, was typically meant to be viewed from the male lens. And that's why we have the concept of the final girl. Although I like to assign a different meaning to the final girl. The final girl was intended to be sort of a female character that men could identify with. She was intended to be someone that is rational and critical and, you know, tactful in what they're executing on the screen and what they're doing within their personal lives. They're usually like the smartest person. And so it's supposed to be a character that men could identify with. That sort of holds true in the Golden Heart trilogy. I mean, this is starting in the 90s, right. So his major films in the 90s centered on female characters who undergo this sort of ritualized suffering. Right. So Breaking the Waves. Breaking the Waves is about a woman who is recently married, and her husband goes to work in oil and in drilling, and he suffers an accident. He becomes paralyzed from the neck down, and he asks his wife to go find men to have sex with and then come back to to him at the hospital and explain to him in great detail the sexual acts that she is taking part in. Dancer in the Dark. Dancer in the Dark is famously starring Bjork. Great film. Cried my eyes out. Never watched it and not cried. Same with Breaking the Waves, actually. But Dancer in the Dark is about a woman who comes from Czechoslovakia to America, and she lives in a rented, you know, house on the same property as her landlord's. And she is saving up money in secret so that she can get her son, who's about to turn 13, an eye surgery that will prevent him from losing his vision. She is also losing her vision during this, and she knew she was going to. And she knows that her son has this same fate, and so she saves up money so that he can get the surgery. Her neighbor ends up stealing the money from her. He's a police officer. So he ends up uncovering that her vision is going, sneaks in to her home, steals the extra cash, and in a struggle to get it back, she murders him. She is later awarded the death penalty in a trial and hanged at the end of the film Dogville, famously starring Nicole Kidman and takes place entirely on a stage. Fascinating, fascinating film. Very good. Roger Ebert would disagree with me, but I think it's really good. It's definitely an experimental film nonetheless, but it's about a woman, Nicole Kidman. She's on the run from the mob, and she sort of gets accepted with some convincing into a small town. And in this town, they allow her to stay in exchange for labor. Obviously, she's exploited. You can imagine the rest. So Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark and Dogville are different stories, but they have the same basic patterns. There's a woman, and that woman is put through a moral and physical and emotional ringer. And critics and scholars have repeatedly accused him of misogyny, of turning women into sacrificial lambs or fetishizing their pain. So film scholar Caroline Bainbridge and others have noted that Von Trier responds in ways that are not exactly reassuring. He often says that these women are not real women or that they're symbols or that he, like, identifies with them so strongly that he in some sense is them. And that doesn't really make the debate go away because if anything, it actually raises new questions, like, is he critiquing misogynistic structures by showing them so starkly, or is he like, repeating them but just with an art house flair? And when he finally leans into horror, these issues don't really disappear. They actually, like, intensify to an extent. And so in Antichrist, you have explicit sexual violence and a woman who is coded as potentially evil or witch. Like in the House at Jack Belt, you have a serial killer whose victims are mostly women and children. So the specter of misogyny is always hanging in the frame. And as horror as a genre has its own history of exploiting female suffering, so that overlap sort of makes Lars both a natural fit for horror and a deeply uncomfortable one. Another like recurring thread in his aesthetic of suffering and punishment. You know, NPR once described how actresses have nicknamed him the Punisher because of the intensity of their roles. So particularly Bjork's experience on Dancer in the Dark and that punishing sensibility, the idea that, like, characters have to be broken and humiliated and destroyed to make a point also shapes his horror material. And so an Antichrist, like grief is punished. And in the House at Jack Built violence is put pushed to the absolute brink of what an audience would tolerate. So I just want to say that while I understand the argument that people are making when they say that his films are misogynistic, I don't know that I actually see them that way. I actually sort of appreciate that there is a woman playing the lead role and that I'm really like, witnessing this story through her eyes and through her way of telling the story to me. To say that women do not suffer in the world today, I think is an egregious. It's an egregious lie. It's not true, but I sort of appreciate that. It doesn't feel exploitive to me. It feels like I'm watching a film with a woman in the lead and that women sacrifice daily lives all the time, right? They quit their jobs to, you know, work as a stay at home mother or to work inside the home to be there for their children. They give up jobs that they love to move across the country or across the world to be with their spouse. They sacrifice every day. And so for me to hear that people believe that were exploiting the sacrifice of women, I don't know that I agree with, like, I think in a way he's simply showing that Women make sacrifices every day. And why would we think any different when we know that to be true? So that was just something I wanted to say. I don't know. I don't. When I watch his films, I don't [00:20:42] Speaker C: often feel like women are being exploited. [00:20:44] Speaker B: The one, the two exceptions I would say to that rule are Nymphomaniac Part two for I don't want to spoil the ending of that story. But if you know, you know, and in the house that Jack built, because a lot of his victims are women and the women that are his victims are not portrayed as like what I would consider like your normal everyday woman. Like they're not. Well, actually that's not true. Some of them are and some of them are not. And I'll get to what I think about the house that Jack built later in terms of the study of women. But just finishing up, you know this, we, we also have depression, right? And so Von Triers so called depression trilogy of Antichrist, Melancholia and Nymphomaniac is explicitly shaped by his own mental health struggles. And critics point out that these films treat depression not as a subplot, but as the universe that the film is taking place in. And so it sort of controls the time and the color, gravity and even the end of the world. Right in the case of Melancholia. And that's where horror really enters the picture here. Because it's uniquely suited to represent internal states as external forces. Like the haunted house, that's really a traumatized mind, the monster that's really in addiction, the apocalypse, that's really clinical despair. And so as we go into talking about Antichrist, keep that in mind. Like Venture isn't simply using horror to shock us, even though it does, he's using it as a language to talk about grief, misogyny, depression and punishment. And whether or not you think he succeeds and whether or not you think he crosses lines ethically while doing it is where the debate really lies. Okay, so let's go into the woods. Antichrist was released in 2009. Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg starring as a married couple who lose their toddler in a completely tragic accident. So this kid climbs out of an open window while mom and dad are having sex in another room and ultimately falls to his death. And that's the opening. Like that all happens within the first five minutes. So Von Trier is starting by tying sex, guilt and death together in one slow motion black and white prologue. After the funeral, the husband, who happens to be a therapist, decides that he's gonna treat his wife's grief himself. That you can't do that, but that's fine. And so he wants to do this instead of just letting her continue traditional therapy. So he takes her to a remote cabin in the woods called Eden, where he believes that he can guide her through exposure based treatment. The choice to name this cabin Eden is literally not subtle at all. And we're immediately in the territory of original sin and knowledge and gendered blame. You know, Eve. Shout out formally. The film is divided into a prologue, four chapters and an epilogue. And it feels like a nightmare sermon or a dark fairy tale. It's structured, almost literary, but filled with imagery that's closer to a surrealist painting. And this is a deeply controversial film, even within horror circles. So I want to break it down into a few layers before everybody freaks the fuck out. There's the imagery, there's the reading of grief and depression. There's the misogyny debate, of course, and its place in folk and occult horror. So let's talk first about the imagery. If you've ever seen stills or heard stories about Antichrist, they probably Involve 1 of 3 A deer, a fox, or genital mutilation. And in one scene, Willem Dafoe's character encounters a deer in the woods. Only the deer has a dead fawn hanging partially outside of its body. And so it's sort of forever in this moment, a of a birth gone wrong. And later he sees a fox disemboweling itself by pulling out its own organs and then looking straight at him. And growling. Chaos reigns. There's also a scene with a crow that refuses to die despite repeated blows, turning even the act of killing into something grotesquely prolonged. And I get all of this. This is very valid criticism. Very. Some of the imagery is really just like, why. Then there's the violence between the actual couple. There's acts of brutality, self harm, sexual mutilation. And these are still shocking in an era that's used to, you know, quote unquote, elevated horror and extreme cinema. So think about that. You have cannibal holocaust and snuff films, and then people are upset about the imagery in Antichrist. I don't know. You tell me. Lars von Trier shoots some of this film in slow motion with operatic music. Other scenes are raw and handheld and they kind of feel like a documentary. And the effect of the differing cameras alone is very disorienting. So you kind of feel like you're flipping between an art museum and a snuff film. So as someone watching it it's incredibly. It has an effect on you that you're not even consciously aware of. There's a piece from Bloody Disgusting that describes Antichrist as a immersive examination of depression and grief. That's a useful lens, I think. The film isn't actually just about grief. It actually tries to make grief feel like a place. And the sound design, there's the way that the forest feels alive and hostile, and the cyclical structure, you know, all of it is designed to make you feel trapped in a space where time doesn't behave normally and pain is endless. And I really appreciate this because it. You know how sometimes when people are grieving, they also just don't act like they would normally. Like that also is shown to us. So it's like he built this universe or this atmosphere surrounding this grief and let us all in on it to witness it. After his comments about writing the film during a severely depressed, impressive episode, critics have actually pointed out how the structure of the film sort of reflects mental collapse. He said he couldn't storyboard in his usual meticulous like way because he was so unwell. So the film leans more heavily on intuition and chaos. And you can see how tightly controlled the opening is compared to how unmoored the last act and the epilogue is. And again, if you're dealing with grief, if you're dealing with depression, you can sort of understand the structure of the film itself. Feeling like being trapped. And you're in this space where you don't behave normally and the people around you don't maybe behave the way that you know them to normally. And you have to rely on your intuition. You're living in chaos. And I, again, I really appreciate the way that this film depicts this. This grief. And then we hit the hardest part of the discussion. We're back at misogyny on paper. The setup of this film is. It's an archetype, right? Man of reason, woman of nature, man believes in therapy. She's spiraling grief, guilt, mystical connection with the woods. Even as the film progresses, she becomes more violent and is increasingly linked to witchcraft, which is sometimes and often associated to a sort of evil type of femininity. And there's this sequence involving notes that she wrote about historical witch hunts and suggesting that women may indeed, in her own words, be inherently evil. And many critics and many viewers see this and conclude that Antichrist is just misogynistic based on that. And that this, you know, female character has a sort of internalized misogyny within herself. And it shows a grieving woman, right? She's becoming monstrous, she's torturing her husband. She's being coded as part of a lineage of evil women who are persecuted as witches. And on that reading, the film isn't a critique of those ideas, it's a repetition of them, with extra blood, operatic music and art house lighting. And some scholars, who I tend to side with, argue that the film is actually exposing misogyny rather than endorsing it or co signing it. Because they point to the way that the film references real histories of actual witch hunts, the medical pathologizing of women, and the violence performed against female bodies in the name of a cure. Read up on the history of obstetrics and call me back. If you want to get mad, do that. And from that angle, her rage and violence become like a distorted response to centuries of repression and blame. Especially when you think about this stemming from the original sin of Eve. It's not an essential truth about womanhood. And to complicate things further, the Danish Film Institute has of course discussed Lars von Trier's long standing fascination with misogynistic texts and traditions, from early literature to early 20th century psychoanalysis. And he's someone who reads and absorbs misogynistic material. Whether he's critiquing it or reproducing it, or both at once is obviously an open question. And I think that Antichrist sits firmly in the center of that argument. From a genre perspective, Antichrist very much taps into folk horror and occult horror. You have the isolated cabin in the woods, you have the sense that nature is not benign, it's actively hostile. The suggestion of a dark pre Christian force in the forest. And at the same time there's talking animals and hyper stylized imagery that push it into a more surreal art horror space. So it's less like the Witch and more like if a painting by Goya or Francis Bacon came to life and actually dragged you into it. And personally, when I watch Antichrist, I feel like I'm sitting at the intersection of grief, horror, art, cinema, and something genuinely dangerous. Like there are stretches of the film that feel like a profound depiction of depression, other stretches that feel like an elaborate excuse to torture the female character. And whether the film works for you may depend on how you weigh those two impulses. So I definitely see both sides to this argument. And if you're listening to this and you've seen Antichrist, I'm genuinely curious if you also experienced it as primarily about grief and depression or as pure provocation. I just, I can't help but feel Like, I'm not the only person who has my. My read on the film. I don't find it to be a purely misogynistic film. So let's look outward a little bit. We're gonna look at two films that are not technically horror, but are essential to understanding Lars von Trier's relationship to it. So first, let's talk about Melancholia, because Melancholia is like a cosmic depression film. It came out in 2011, the same year as the infamous Cannes press conference. Persona Non Grata certification. The film is divided into two parts, each named after one of two sisters. So we have Justine and we have Claire, and we start with an almost impossible wedding reception. There's Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst, who is deeply depressed, and she's trying to go through the motions of a perfect celebration as everything inside of her is falling apart. Her sister Claire is played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, of course. Would it be a Lars film without her? I don't know. She's iconic. And hovering over all of this is this, like, rogue planet, also called Melancholia, that may or may not collide with Earth. So the film opens with, like, this slow motion overture that effectively gives away the ending. Like there's images of horses collapsing and people sinking into the ground, and then finally the planet smashes into Earth. So we know from the first few minutes that there's no last second rescue. Like the world is going to end. Like, we know that. And critics often read Melancholia as a metaphor for depression. Right? There's Justine. She's the character who's clinically depressed. Like, that woman is depressed. She sees the world as meaningless. And as this apocalypse approaches, she becomes the calmest and most composed. Versus Claire, who's a more normal and neurotypical person in the film who's more anxious to preserve life. And she's falling apart. And her coping mechanisms completely fail as the reality of the extinction event presses in. And from a horror perspective, this is a cosmic horror without a monster, right? There's no tentacled creature. There's no demon, there's no slasher. There's just this inescapable astronomical event that treats humanity as totally irrelevant. The dread lies in the certainty, right? Typically, it lies in the uncertainty, but here it lies in the certainty. We're not watching two people fight to survive. We're watching them adjust or fail to adjust to the knowledge that they're not going to survive. And the way that Lars von Trier stages the final collision, there's these characters and they're holding each other in a fragile, like, magic cave that they made from sticks as the planet fills the sky. It's terrifying in a quiet, sublime way. So if Antichrist is a horror movie about the collapse of a mind, Melancholia is a horror movie about the collapse of the world that mirrors the collapse of a mind. Then we should talk about Nymphomaniac, right? Nymphomaniac is more of the body as a sort of battleground. Nymphomaniac was released in two volumes in 2013. Yes, it is so long it needed to be released in two volumes. I understand that that's pretentious. I also can't say that I sit here and recommend anybody watch it because it's one of the only films that I have almost ever passed out while watching. Nymphomaniac begins with a man. His name is Seligman. And he is finding a woman, Joe. Her name is Jo, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, of course, beaten in an alley. So he takes her in, and she begins to narrate the story of her life as a nymphomaniac to him, her sexual life. And the film unfolds as a series of chapters, and each of them are an episode in Joe's escalating, forever escalating pursuit of sexual experience and gratification. And so, on the surface, it's not horror. It's explicit and it's sexual, and it's often bleakly funny. But it's not marketed as genre cinema, and many viewers experience it as disturbing in a way that overlaps with horror. You know, Jo's body becomes a site of punishment and addiction and self destruction, and her relationships in her life are full of cruelty and pain and games of power. There's an essay titled Lars von the Sex Pression Ideology. And this essay argues that in works like Nymphomaniac, Von Trier uses sex not as pornography, but as a vehicle for exploring nihilism, power, and the limits of what can actually be shown. And in that sense, sex becomes to Nymphomaniac what murder is to the house that Jack built. It's a repeated act used to probe what's left of meaning when you strip away morality. Placed alongside Antichrist and melancholia, Nymphomaniac sort of completes this picture of depression that's not just emotional, it's physical and existential. And these three films sort of show minds and bodies that can't quite bear the world that they're living in. And so if you are a horror fan used to Films where the body is mutilated by an external force. Nymphomaniac might feel to you like a more grounded, but I would argue equally brutal cousin. It's the horror of a body used and misused from the inside. And from a genre theory standpoint, Nymphomaniac belongs to a lineage of extreme cinema, right, where the lines between art, sexual explicitness and horror blur. Think of, like, New French Extremity or some rape revenge narratives or even. Even certain Cronenberg films, actually. But Lars Venture sort of complicates who's the victim and who's the perpetrator, which, again, makes the ethical reading of the film very messy, very contested. So together, these two films, along with antichrist form like this constellation, where horror is sometimes explicit and sometimes it's just below the surface, but it's always present in the way that they treat depression, apocalypse and embodiment. So let's move on to what I would consider the most approachable of Lars filmography, the House that Jack Built. It's a film about serial killers and self portraiture. This is his most overtly horror film. So it was released in 2018 starring Matt Dillon, who's playing a character named Jack. He is a highly intelligent, deeply narcissistic serial killer. And the film is structured as a series of incidents which are like, essentially chapters, but they're built around these particular murders that Jack has actually committed. So these are recounted in a voiceover spoken to an unseen interlocutor. So from the start, we're in confession mode. There's a killer, and he's talking about his work. Not as a crime, he's talking about them as if they are works of art. And the film premiered at Cannes because. Just because you kicked the man out does not mean that his films are not going to come back. So when it. When it premiered at Cannes, there were reports of people walking out everywhere. People left during scenes of. There's some pretty graphic violence, especially scenes involving women and children, of which there are more than one. And even by Von Trier's standards, this one tested the limits of what an audience would sit through. Horror writers quickly tagged this as one of his most disturbing works, even as they praised his dark humor and absurdity. I would consider this an absurdist film. It's so over the top that it's almost unrecognizable in the horror genre. It's so like, when you're watching it, your jaw will just be on the floor. There's no everything in this film that is shown and all of the audio that you hear from the narrator is just. It's the most insane thing you've ever heard or you've ever seen. And what makes the film especially interesting for our purposes is how it openly folds Lars von Trier himself into the narrative. Right. So throughout the film, Jack is talking about this house that he's building out of his murders. He sees them as works of art that they're misunderstood in their time, they're misread by critics and authorities. And at various points the film cuts to images from Lars von Trur's own movies. It's as if Jack's murders and Lars filmography are part of the same grand project. Several critics have read Jack's character as a stand in for Lars. Like this artist who's obsessed with pushing boundaries, loathed by some, defended by others, always wondering whether he's making art or committing acts of cruelty. And this house, right, that he's building is. It's literally a house that he makes of the corpses of the people that he's murdered. So like instead of wood or brick or like cement, he's using corpses to build this house. And throughout the film he's like talking about building this house, but he's like, oh, but it wasn't working and like, I had to start over because he's a, he's an architect, so he's like trying to build his own house. And he's always talking about how the materials are not what he needs, like something is always wrong. He's constantly starting over, but the corpses are the perfect material for him. And so this house that Jack stacks together at the end, at the climax, sort of, sort of mirrors this metaphorical house of films that Lars has has stacked over his career. You know, like, constructed from images of suffering and transgression, the film also grapples directly with the representation of evil. Jack and his listener debate what art is actually allowed to show. And is it the artist's job to display evil in all its ugliness? And, and does depicting it, you know, depicting violence, does it risk glamorizing it? Is there a moral line where art should simply not cross? These are questions horror has been wrestling with forever, from the video nasties of the 80s to torture porn of the 2000s, right? So Jack's America is just another layer. The film is set in the United States. Of course, Lars has never been to North America, famously because of that fear of flying. So what we get is a sort of imagined America. It's a cold, rural, blood and gun soaked space built for media and movie images and critics have described it as unreal, but also familiar. It's like a surrealist depiction. It's like the dream of America seen entirely through crime films and news footage. Imagine if that was all you had ever consumed of America and American culture and North American. You know, history is just like crime film news footage. That would also sort of shape the, the way that you view it. And like something similar can be said for Dancer in the Dark because she's, it takes place in America as well. She's, she's granted the death penalty at the end of the film and she receives it in like under two weeks. Americans like, please, you know that it, it's way longer than two weeks. Like, don't even, don't even try to fuck with me. Like, it's way longer than two weeks. So within horror history, the House that Jack Built sort of belongs next to films like Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer or Maniac. You have this intense character study of a killer and they try to show us not, not just what they do, but how they actually think. And the difference is that Lars von Trier layers a thick coat of self reflexivity and philosophy over it. It's not just this is a killer, it's this is a killer as a metaphor for the artist and maybe even for me. Once again, we're back at punishment and endurance. How much of Jack's depravity are we willing to watch? If you were at Cannes, apparently not everyone was willing to watch very much of it. How many times can von Trier dare us to walk out before we start to question why we're staying? To begin with, if Antichrist forces us to endure grief and bodily trauma and obviously the loss of a child, Jack [00:51:47] Speaker C: forces us to endure like being complicit and moral disgust. [00:51:55] Speaker B: If you've ever seen the House that Jack Built, I don't know if I wholly and completely consider it a horror film. I feel like it's more a satire, particularly about art and one's ego. [00:52:11] Speaker C: It's a very self reflective film and at times self indulgent. And above all, I think it's a very self aware film. And so I don't know that I consider it wholly and completely horror other than the things that we are shown. That Jack does is horrific. But I don't, I don't know if I agree that I, I was maybe complicit or that I felt like I crossed a line just because I stayed to watch the film. [00:52:48] Speaker B: That's me. [00:52:51] Speaker C: So let's move on to Controversy and ethics as it relates to the horror fandom. Because we can't talk about Lars von Trier in horror without talking about the sort of ethical cloud that hangs over his work and his Persona. Let's start with can and the public image, right? As I mentioned earlier, 2011 press conference for Melancholia was a turning point. He joked about understanding Hitler and made remarks that were widely interpreted as deeply insensitive at best and outright anti Semitic at worst. And can responded by basically labeling him Persona non grata. And this is the first time that they had used that phrase for a director in modern history. A profile that was completed in the New Yorker describes that basically how Lars von Trier often embraces political incorrectness. And he does it in an almost compulsive way. And he says that he says the thing that you're not supposed to say and tries to turn, like, shame into a joke and then seems amused and mortified by the fallout and the repercussions of that. So when he later, like, wears the Persona non grata T shirt and tattoos the phrase on his hands, he's mocking the situation, but he's also turning it into part of his mythology, into his sort of identity. So that's one thing, but the other thing is that there are allegations about his working methods. Dancer in the Dark. [00:54:39] Speaker B: Right. [00:54:41] Speaker C: During and after the making of Dancer in the Dark, Bjork accused Lars von Trier of sexual harassment and emotional mistreatment on the set. And she described that there was basically a hostile work environment at play and power dynamics had been abused. And producers and collaborators have disputed parts of her account. But the accusations fed into a broader picture of Lars von Trier as someone who exerts intense psychological pressure on his actors in. In Women in particular. For horror fans, these off screen issues do matter because they intersect with what we're seeing on the screen. And so when you watch a Lars von Trier film in which women are being sort of humiliated or tortured or broken down, it's harder to compartmentalize that as just fiction if you know that there are real allegations of harm in the background, as there are with Dancer in the Dark. So some critics argue that the production context of it all, like, who has power, who's vulnerable, that should shape how we interpret the ethics of film itself. Within the horror community in particular, Lars von Trier sort of occupies a strange position. He's not a genre workhorse, right, making sequels and franchises like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm street that go on for fucking forever. But his films have become a key reference point when we talk about art, horror and extreme cinema. And so, you know, there's an article called maniacally macabre. Lars von Trier as a horror icon. And this article explicitly argues that even his non horror films deploy horror devices like destruction and frenzy, chaos, inevitability. And in ways this marks him as important to the genre, even though his films may not sit, you know, in a nice pretty box with a bow on it in that genre. So where does that leave us as an audience? For me personally, I find that Lars Von True's films are more exhausting than exhilarating. For me, they're not movies that I like, they're movies that I feel are important. When we talk about the edges of horror and extreme cinema, when we talk about things like what horror can do, what it maybe shouldn't do, how it handles mental illness, how it portrays suffering. Right. At the same time, I think that horror fans are absolutely within their rights to say, this is too much. I don't want to support this filmmaker. I think this filmmaker does nothing but show misogyny on the screen. And it feels too close to misogyny that I experience off screen. And to that I say, I understand, I really do. I don't, like I said, I don't feel like all of his films are deeply misogynistic. But I understand where that there's a very fine line where that comes from, right. Or where that toes with his, with his films. Like he, he does show women suffering. He does often show women in a very hard place, either in their life or within a story or within a universe he's devised. It sort of shows suffering, that women actually suffer. And so I, I, I can understand the ethics behind it absolutely with Bjork in particular. And I understand that he would be, I can just see outwardly that he would be a difficult person to work with, especially emotionally as a person who like feels emotions and feels things very deeply. So there, that's not always my interpretation of it. I do find that there are misogynistic pieces of his stories absolutely as there are with any film made by a male for a predominantly male audience. [00:59:16] Speaker B: Right. [00:59:16] Speaker C: Can is just think about can in a, in a, in a vacuum. [00:59:20] Speaker B: Right. [00:59:20] Speaker C: Can is a festival that is invite only and it's essentially reserved solely for those that work within the industry. The majority of the industry is male and that's who these films are being shown to. So I can understand why when you're making, when you're a male making a film for a predominantly male audience, yes, there is Inherently misogynistic, Misogynistic things shown on the screen, misogynistic character tropes. It's not something that you can ignore. And we navigate questions like this all the time in the genre. Like, can we separate art from the artist? Should we separate art from the artist? Do we even know what happened on set? And does knowing what happened on set change the way that we see what's happening on the screen? And with Lars von Trier, those questions get dialed up to 11 because his work is already about extremity and ethical limits. So let's say you've listened to all this and you're. [01:00:32] Speaker B: You're curious, right? [01:00:34] Speaker C: Where do you begin with Lars von Trier? As a horror listener, if you're primarily a horror fan, I'd recommend this path. I would start personally with Antichrist. That is his clearest dive into horror. There is folk horror trappings, you know, very explicit body horror. There's a supernatural adjacent element with talking animals, and there's this completely overwhelming atmosphere of grief. So I would say that that would be my starting point. I would maybe use Melancholia as my second recommendation, although I do think that Dogville would fit nicely into this as well. But with Melancholia, it's not horror in the traditional sense, but it is a more accessible film for most people. I don't think that most people will see Dogville and be like, oh my God, that's the greatest thing ever. I think it's an acquired taste. Melancholia is more easily digestible. And it's not horror in the traditional sense, but it does give you this, like, apocalyptic dread and cosmic terror, all while it's being filtered through depression. So I think of it sort of as like an existential horror with a shell of sci fi. And third, I would recommend the House that Jack Built, but I would only recommend that if you're prepared for a very long, very confrontational film about a serial killer that makes you want to question why you're still watching it across all of these. Just know what you're getting into. [01:02:35] Speaker B: Okay? [01:02:36] Speaker C: I just. I just want to make you aware because, like, it really and truly is extreme cinema. And I just don't want anybody to feel like they didn't have all the information they needed. If you're taking a recommendation from me, these films contain explicit sexual content. There is graphic violence, abundant self harm and mutilation. There are scenes of violence against women and violence against children. In the House that Jack Built in particular. And in Antichrist, there is really disturbing imagery involving animals that many viewers find unbearable. I can understand that. There's also the imagery of the literal. The literal opening of the film where this kid just falls out of a window. So if that's something that you don't want to see, don't watch those. [01:03:30] Speaker B: Okay? [01:03:31] Speaker C: If any of that's a no go for you, no shame in skipping. The horror genre is huge. You don't need to go through this man's films to be a serious fan or a scholar. But if you do want to dig deeper on the scholarly side, I recommend Caroline Bainbridge's work on the cinema of Lars von Trier. I happen to own a copy of, in particular the essay Lars von the Sexpression Ideology. And that sort of gives a dense. It's pretty dense but rewarding take on how sex and violence and ideology sort of play out in his work. For more general overviews, the Mubi Notebook primer on Lars von Trier and the Danish Film Institute's article on his relationship to cultural liberalism offer good context for understanding where he sits in Danish and European cinema in particular. So where does this leave us? Lars von Trier is one of those filmmakers who splits audiences right down the middle. And for some, he's a necessary artist of extremity. He's someone who's willing to stare into the eyes of grief and depression and cruelty without flinching. And for others, he's a bully with a camera and a director who turns suffering into spectacle and calls it art. But whether you consider Antichrist, Melancholia, the House that Jack Built, Nymphomania, part one and two, even the Idiots, which is an early film of his, and Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark. Whether you consider those masterpieces or moral disasters or something in between, they've undeniably shaped how we talk about horror and censorship and the ethics of representing suffering on a screen. And if you've watched any of the films we talk about today, maybe none of this is anything new to you. Maybe Antichrist hit you differently than it hit me. Maybe Melancholia felt more like horror to you than it did to me. And did watching the house that Jack built make you feel complicit in his actions? I mean, these are all things that I think we've all thought about. So I don't know that it's all too different than watching a Michael Henneke film. I mean, a lot of these, a lot of the time, right? Because of how complicit you become and watching what's playing out on the screen. And it does always confuse me that Michael Henneke is not talked about in the same sort of sort of like sphere, right? For better or for worse like than as Lars von Trier like. To me their films feel pretty similar and if you want to hear more about that, I could probably do a whole episode about that too. So anyways, thanks for staying with me through this sort of dark forest of cinema and art cinema. [01:06:47] Speaker B: Until next time, [01:06:50] Speaker C: keep the lights low, [01:06:51] Speaker B: keep the volume up, [01:06:54] Speaker C: and remember that sometimes the scariest people are the ones that are holding the camera for the film that you are watching. Before we go, quick reminder that the final girl on 6 Ave is part of the incredible Morbidly Beautiful Network. Morbidly Beautiful is your home for horror. So if you love horror in any way, shape or form, you are welcome with us at Morbidly Beautiful. So go on over to morbidly beautiful.com to check it out. Show us some love. You can find this podcast on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. If you enjoyed the show, it would mean the world to me if you left me a five star review. Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcast. For any questions, comments, concerns, suggestions or requests, you can email me at finalgirlon6mail.com or send me a message on Instagram. Final Girl on six thank you so much for listening. Never Forget that I'm 6th Avenue's very own final Girl. [01:08:08] Speaker A: Where the film screams back your name every cut, every shadow you dissect the dark exclaim.