May 2013's Footstones

Being a List of the Assorted Horrors I've Consumed During the Month of May, 2013.

Black Rock (2013) dir. Katie Aselton

Director Katie Aselton's new women-in-peril survival horror film, Black Rock, has received some derisive twittering ever since it played the Sundance and BFI film festivals early last year. Alongside more positive (and dare I say more perceptive) reviews, it has been called "a terrible, generic stalk and kill thriller," "rushed and sloppy," and "a so-so action movie." But among genre fans the brunt of the ire that's being thrown at the film seems to have been stirred by Aselton's public comments about her disdain for contemporary horror films, with their stock situations and, more importantly, their shift away from emotional conflict. Because those allegations about the bulk of contemporary horror are largely true, it seems bizarre to take issue with her statements. In that linked interview, Aselton discusses her film as a sort of response to Neil Marshall's widely loved women-in-peril survival film The Descent (2005), noting that Black Rock is what she wanted The Descent to be. Attacking that recently forged Golden Calf may have been her biggest mistake in winning the allegiance of genre fans: though an often shocking and engaging monster thriller, The Descent has also tricked some folks into believing it's a sophisticated, emotionally complex feminist horror film with strong female leads. But it's not. The Descent is a film with superficially strong female characters who, when not murdering or plotting to murder each other over extramarital affairs, wind up as monster chew toys. Its "strong female protagonists" are thrust into a harrowing situation and aren't allowed to see past their own destructive, petty cattiness. 

If Black Rock is a reaction to The Descent, it is so in its refusal to cast its women as male fantasy props: strong babes literally willing to kill each other over a man's affection. Two of Black Rock's trio of women (Aselton herself and co-star Lake Bell) have a similar touchy past relationship beef (Bell's character once slept with Aselton's character's ex-fiancee), but the film dramatizes the rekindling of their friendship through adversity rather than exploiting its deterioration for snappy thrills. The women, stranded on a chilly island and preyed upon by a duo of emotionally damaged and deranged veterans, learn to forgive past transgressions, accept their own flaws (and those of each other), and embrace their bond of friendship in order to persevere through their terrifying predicament. The film acknowledges (in many agonizing, suspenseful scenes) that its women are not superheroes able to individually defeat their stalkers. The final conflict between the women and the lone surviving villain, a 2-on-1 brawl that it is horrific in its slow, labored violence, aptly demonstrates the need for their unity in order to pull through this ordeal. It's not a perfect film (it makes overtures at political and gender critiques that it never follows up on) but it is a great one, and while its basic structure and situation is well-trod-upon ground in thriller cinema, its emotional thrust is unique: many other modern horror films would have had the mutually triumphant women slitting each other's throats by the end. The horror that Black Rock presents is the horror of healing, of forcing you to realize that your emotionally dramatic conflicts with others, those conflicts that take on such tremendous, insurmountable gravity in your own mind, mean nothing when juxtaposed-- violently-- against true fear, pain, and suffering.

Jennifer's Body (2009) dir. Karyn Kusama

Though I hadn't exactly been avoiding it because I share the fiery Diablo Cody hatred that so many souls seem to harbor post-Juno (2007), Jennifer's Body (like a majority of mainstream horror films from the past decade) was still pretty far down my list of urgent things to devour. I decided to give it a chance after listening to a thorough and intelligent discussion concerning it from the ever-thorough-and-intelligent ladies of The Faculty of Horror podcast. My reading of the film's very definite (and, to some, surprising) feminist leanings falls almost entirely in line with theirs, so you might as well listen to them rather than watch this paragraph grow ever larger as my fingers blather on. However, I will make clear a couple issues I had with Karyn Kusama and Cody's film, both in its themes and in its position as a horror film. Firstly, while very much a feminist narrative about the dangers of some women's self-propagation of the male exploitation of female bodies (e.g. the case of Jennifer (Megan Fox)) and the appeal of a sexually free but self-assured and independent alternative female identity (e.g. Needy (Amanda Seyfried)), the film falls back on a-- by this point-- cliched rape-revenge resolution by having that ideal alternative female personage exact revenge for violence committed against women by committing violence against men. Aren't we past this, culturally, as the ideal  cathartic release for this sort of tale? Sure, the murderous Satanic indie rock scumbags of the band Low Shoulder deserve some sort of cosmic comeuppance, but must it be accomplished through a reaffirmation of the cycle of violence between men and women? Jennifer's Body is a clever film, so it's a shame it wasn't as clever when dishing out this justice. (I'm now imagining some alternate scenario in which Needy helps ensure the band's Sophomore Album Slump, sending them spiraling into depression and substance abuse.) Secondly, Kusama and Cody have crafted a pretty lousy horror film. It's a decent comedy with thoughtful satire, but there's not a frightening or uneasy moment in here. Much of this is due to the Heathers-lite comedy undermining any tension, but it's also because those bits of horror that the filmmakers have decided to employ are as stock and generic as one can find in modern horror and are filmed with no visual panache (prepare for lots of silhouetted murders and Jennifer popping out from around corners). The best horror films are those that put the actual depiction of horror as a priority while still embedding ripe themes and subtext. By abandoning the subtlety of its narrative and thematic intentions, a horror film loses its ability to frighten: the horror elements become a mere vehicle for the greater message. Jennifer's Body is tattooed with its own noble but blatant intentions; its horror is a flimsy sheer garment providing it some narrative cover.

Dead Silence (2007) dir. James Wan

James Wan and Leigh Whannell have hit my horror sweet spot. Insidious (2010) provided the duo with a commercial success to distance them creatively from their earlier creation of the often maligned Saw franchise, but they'd developed an even bolder departure a few years earlier with their immediate follow-up to Saw (2004), Dead Silence. This film taps into a vein of retro horror that most modern filmmakers leave untouched: the extravagant, potentially corny, earnest shriek shows of the 1950s and earlier. Though updated for contemporary sensibilities in terms of its violence, editing, and cinematography, Dead Silence is virtually a hyperactive episode of The Twilight Zone mashed up against an EC horror comic. Its locations are moody and sound-stagy, giving the viewer the impression that the long abandoned sets of classic Hollywood horror were resurrected, having been twisted by time into even more expressionistic structures than they were before. The nursery rhyme mythology that the film creates for its villain, coupled with the story's frequent violations of mimetic narrative logic, hint that this is a film best suited for the fertile and accepting minds of a younger audience, eager to squeegee away such perceived flaws in favor of soaking up its excess of imaginative qualities. The film's R-rating implies either a miscalculation on Wan and Whannell's part or the inability of the MPAA to understand how desperately the thirteen-year-old crowd needs exposure to this sort of nightmare. They are, after all, our horrifying future.

The Watcher in the Woods (1980) dir. John Hough

A film I wish I'd peeped as a child, John Hough's Disney-produced The Watcher in the Woods was filmed shortly before he made The Incubus (1982) with John Cassavettes, a film about a demonic entity raping women to death. Though Hough had already made the fairly strange Witch Mountain films for Disney, the director of suggestive, sexually-charged films like Twins of Evil (1971), The Legend of Hell House (1973), and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974) is still a peculiar but welcome choice as a director of children's cinema. Appropriately, The Watcher in the Woods, adapted from a pretty odd-sounding 1976 young adult novel written by Florence Engel Randall, is more bizarre and frightening than anything I've yet seen from the house that Mickey built. One part Nancy Drew mystery and two parts alien-encounter-masquerading-as-a-haunted-forest trans-dimensional mini-epic, the film is-- even in its toned down theatrical version-- pretty wild. The studio's post-production tinkering with the film's ending has been well documented, but both of the alternate versions of the ending must be seen for the viewer to achieve a full understanding of the trippy, horrifying, head-scratching cosmic insanity the filmmakers were intending. Besides these joys, the film also presents young viewers with the positive role model of a brave, inquisitive, and independently-minded female protagonist in the character of amateur sleuth Jan Curtis (Lynn-Holly Johnson, in a performance that loosens Carroll Baker's usual stranglehold on the award for most wide-eyed overacting in whatever film she's starring in). If Disney had refrained from meddling with it in post, The Watcher in the Woods could have become a minor classic, terrifying and transporting the minds of its child audience to new planes of cinematic existence and possibility. As it exists, it's that sort of weird and confusing Disney movie half-remembered from many childhood VHS rentals.

House of the Long Shadows (1983) dir. Pete Walker

Logline: Kenneth Magee (Desi Arnaz, Jr.), a successful but creatively stagnant writer with a monstrous ego, makes a brash $20,000 bet with his publisher that he can dash off a novel of the same literary significance as Wuthering Heights over the course of only twenty-four hours. Taking up his publisher's offer of an abandoned Welsh manor for an appropriately melodramatic setting in which to write, Kenneth settles into this opulent yet menacing abode and soon finds himself assailed by a parade of uninvited guests, each of whom provides Kenneth with a piece of the estate's lurid, bloody history. And that's when folks start being murdered. 

By re-opening the same vein of metafictionality that was slashed in The Flesh and Blood Show (1972) and then allowing it to bleed out all over the place, The House of the Long Shadows finds Pete Walker splattering the walls with nine pints of meta-fun that soon dries, leaving behind the stain of a meta-headache, a dash of meta-confusion, and eventually a meta-shrug. The screenplay by Michael Armstrong (director of Mark of the Devil (1970) and Screamtime (1986)) is adapted from Earl "Charlie Chan" Derr Biggers' 1913 novel Seven Keys to Baldpate, which was itself adapted into a farcical play by George M. Cohan soon after its release and from there into well above a dozen different film, television, and radio pieces over the ensuing decades. House of the Long Shadows looks to be the latest and possibly last adaptation of the material, and that's not a particular surprise: the basic story has a pulpy, melodramatic, turn-of-the-century levity that must have felt as out of place in '80s genre cinema as it would in today's. Granted, this version of the tale is based more closely on Cohan's play, which-- through a metafictional frame narrative concerning an author's bet with his publisher and certain revelations concerning the play's triple artificiality-- sought to undermine the conventions and stock characters of pulp mystery and crime writing. House of the Long Shadows attempts to do the same, but with Old Dark House murder mysteries and more contemporary horror cinema as the targets of its lighthearted ribbing. 

It's hardly the only film of the '70s/'80s to resurrect the Old Dark House subgenre, but it's telling that the most creatively successful entries were the out-and-out comedies that never really played for gasps (Clue (1985), Murder by Death (1976), Haunted Honeymoon (1986)). Walker's film sort of does attempt to be frightening (by late in the film employing the same sort of gory murder set pieces we could find in any of his more earnest efforts) but this secondary goal is continually undercut by the film's insistence upon being that unfunny-but-pleasant-enough type of comedy that we damn with the label of "amusing." Walker and Armstrong appear confused about what they want their film to be, and this confusion has seeped so deeply into the film's foundations that it comes of not only confused about its tone but also about its intended parody. One might think that the film, with its horror movie updating of Derr Biggers and Cohan's original mystery plot and almost direct references to classic films like, oh, The Old Dark House (1932), is hoping to elicit from the viewer the same wry, knowing response that it does from Arnaz, Jr.'s character when he's introduced to the titular house and its spooky irregularities: "I've seen the movie." Simply placing all of these weathered horror icons on screen together (Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, John Carradine) clues one into the fact that the film is attempting to say something about the horror films of a bygone era.

And, yet, it's not as clear cut as that: after all, Arnaz Jr.'s character is an author of mystery novels, and the novel he takes the bet to write (which in a meta twist becomes the story of the action of him actually trying to write the novel) is intended to ape the Victorian Gothic melodrama tradition of writers like the Brontë sisters. Placed alongside its movie genre mockery, this deliberate narrative association with classic literature (carried over from the play) results in unclear intertextual references: Christopher Lee's character resembles Heathcliff as much as he does his earlier character Kurt Manliff from The Whip and the Body (1963) and we can read as much Jane Eyre as The Old Dark House in the old "madperson locked up in the attic" trope that the film includes. Is this a film about literature or cinema? Is it just about genre itself, as if genre doesn't become complicated when switching between media? You would think the filmmakers-- who were making a movie ostensibly about movies based on other movies that were adapted from a play which was derived from a novel-- would ponder these questions. You'd think.

House of the Long Shadows was Walker's first major-minor-studio effort (a Cannon film, no less!), his last horror film, and his last film to date. It features a hugely impressive cast (minus the dreadful, black hole of charisma known as Desi Arnaz, Jr.), but this same cast is given little to chew on. They seem tired, and the film does no more than fall back on their previously established celluloid gravitas. This is the last time Cushing and Lee would collaborate before Cushing's death, and the film hardly has the two interact while otherwise requiring Cushing to put on an embarrassing elderly Porky Pig voice for the majority. Walker's signature excessive gore is a lot of fun during the murder scenes, but these scenes feel frightfully out of place in this otherwise bland and stagy film, one content to throw down buckets of exposition in place of meaningful action or story. It's a frightfully low note for Walker to go out on: as if the spirit rattling the chains in the spooky mansion attic tried to keep the guests up for awhile before losing interest, allowing his chains to slacken, and nodding off to sleep.

Schizo (1976) dir. Pete Walker

Logline: Newlywed ice skater Samantha (Lynne Frederick) believes she's being maliciously terrorized by a man from her past, the lumbering William Haskin (Jack Watson), who was convicted of the murder of her mother decades before and has recently had his sentence pardoned. The trouble is no one believes Samantha: not her new husband, not her best friends, not her psychiatrist. They all think Samantha is losing it. But when the horribly mutilated bodies of Samantha's acquaintances begin cropping up, it becomes clear that someone lurking out on London's streets has snapped for good.

In addition to roughly conforming to the patented Pete Walker Sado-Thriller Formula (as described in an earlier post of mine concerning The Confessional (1976)), Schizo also splashes around in the conventions of the just-past-its-peak giallo subgenre, resulting in the film's easy classification as a post-Psycho, post-Italian, pre-teenage mayhem prim and proper English proto-slasher. The film is a mutt composed of the the Italian giallo's greatest hits, with a gloved killer, potential gaslighting, gory murder set pieces, past traumas, bizarre love triangles, upper-class victims, and surprise revelations all hard-wired into its cinematic DNA. This is all to say that Schizo-- while unquestionably creative in its implementation of its many common horror-thriller elements-- is far from groundbreaking in the larger context of European genre cinema, despite what Pete Walker might have you believe. In a video interview included on Redemption's blu-ray boxset of his films, Walker himself takes a lot of undue credit when he makes bold claims about Schizo's startling originality, which is a laugh for anyone familiar with even a cursory knowledge of continental horror cinema: the closing twist (given away, Walker aptly notes, in the film's title) dates back to at least 1926 and would go on to become a common occurrence in the gialli of the early '70s (see, most notably, Lucio Fulci's A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971; coincidentally re-titled Schizoid for its American release)). But a film that cherry-picks from a subgenre and winds up with a rather exemplary product is hardly something to frown at. Schizo is calculated for maximum enjoyment. In a delicious bit of thievery, the film blatantly pilfers from Argento's Deep Red (1975) when lead heroine/budding schizoid Samantha is invited to a spooky seance held by a group calling themselves the Psychic Brotherhood, which results in some bulged eyeballs and a few ecstatic chills. From its first reel to its last, Schizo skates by on the conscious implementation of successful ideas from the genre's past. In that way, it feels like Walker's most commercial film, one aimed (whether cynically or not) squarely at the checkbooks of 1976's theater-going audience.

But for all its stylistic charms, Schizo is abnormally weak on a thematic level. Walker forgoes the transgressive, making his murderess's motivation no more complicated than an unfortunate youthful association of sex (kinky or otherwise) with punishment and violence. This is, rather unfortunately, a standard slasher-killer motivation, and though the film may be prescient on this account of a future decade of body count films to come, it's not in a way that lends the film any thematic oomph. Luckily, Schizo is Walker at his visual prime. The film is beautiful and unsettling in equal measure, rife as it is with clever editing, exquisite murder set pieces, and a photographic menace that's difficult to describe. Allow me to try: mundane shots of the home occupied by Samantha and her new husband are converted into scenes of the utmost suspense by a camera that roves, almost lasciviously, around the hallways and rooms. Is this camera, prying and sneaking as it is, intended to alert us to the presence of an unseen intruder? Are we occupying the killer's point-of-view in these moments, or merely that of an errant prankster? (We're informed that one of their pals has been installing goofy rubber varmint pranks around their home as a honeymoon gift, so we can't be immediately certain). The film refuses to provide us a definitive answer, but a later offhand comment from Samantha about the home's contents' appearance of having moved by themselves out of order is enough to confirm our worst fears. While neither contemplative nor daring, Schizo is-- at the minimum-- enormously effective as the giallo-bellied thriller it makes no bones about being.

The Confessional (1976) dir. Pete Walker

a.k.a House of Mortal Sin

Logline: One day, Jenny (Susan Penhaligon), a young English girl with errant boyfriend issues, wanders into a church and ends up confessing her troubles to the resident priest, Father Meldrum (Anthony Sharp), who-- unfortunately for Jenny-- turns out to be a murderous crusader against sins both great and small and whose dangerous, fast-growing obsession with her will put the lives of all of her loved ones in peril.

Viewing a slew of Pete Walker's horror films over a short period of time reveals to the viewer that the director and his handful of regular screenwriters are working from a pretty well-defined formula. Here are the ingredients: a) an inciting crime that occurred at some point in the diegetic past and has been long-since buried, only to be uncovered near the film's conclusion, b) human, non-supernatural villains brought to madness and murder by psychological repression (generally either sexual in nature or created in conjunction with the trauma of that inciting past crime. Sometimes both), c) conservative morality clashing with contemporary liberalism, manifesting in violence perpetrated by the older generations against the younger, and d) grim, cynical resolutions that either end in the outright victory of the villains or, if the villains fall, partial villainous victories due to the total destruction of some aspect of the protagonists' lives. But breaking Walker's horror output down to these essential shared components might lead one to believe that his films are needlessly similar rehashes of a successful plot. While there may be a shred of truth to that notion (after all, Walker financed and produced most of these films himself and so had to guarantee he'd make his money back. What better way to do that than by remaking a film he knows will sell until it stops selling?), it might be more just to label them variations on a theme. The fact that Walker never strayed from his particular approach to horror filmmaking (even as the genre itself evolved into a diverse, multi-headed beast over the decade of the 1970s) demonstrates the same sort of obsessive circling of theme and situation as present in the filmography of a director like Jess Franco, who has suffered similar erroneous accusations of storytelling laziness in the pursuit of salable product. With each of his films, Walker returns to his themes and situations in order to play them in a different key, adding notes across the bars where it suits him, and each time he finishes he's produced a recognizable tune, certainly, but one that places unique and fascinating emphasis on nuances that may have been mixed far into the background on previous recordings.

Take The Confessional as your example. At a basic level it's a repetition of the same bloody clash between the young and the elderly over issues of morality that we've seen in The Flesh and Blood Show (1972) and House of Whipcord (1974), but a deeper inspection of its story reveals a new complexity added to the old formula. In this particular instance we have a murderous priest, Father Meldrum, who believes he was "put on this earth to combat sin" and obstinately refuses to adapt the church or himself to the times. (His position is contrasted against that of a progressive younger priest, Father Cutler (Norman Eshley), who is working towards the abolition of the vow of celibacy for Catholic priests: an act that would, ironically, help to solve Meldrum's deep-seated psychological issues. When Cutler informs Meldrum that "The times change, and we must change with them," Meldrum shoots back, childishly, "By whose orders?!") Meldrum abuses his position of moral and religious authority in the aide of sadistically blackmailing and psychologically torturing young girls who have detailed their sins to him in confession. The lecherous holy man records their private conversations about intimate details and then threatens to reveal these secrets to the girls' friends and family if they do not follow his twisted commands for contrition, which drives at least one of his victims to suicide. Meldrum's blackmail takes on an even creepier air (as if such a thing were possible) when he grows enamored with one of his victims, Jenny, who reminds him of an unrequited love from his youth.

And this is where The Confessional gets interesting and diverges significantly from its predecessors: Father Meldrum is himself a victim of the older generation's sexual repression of the younger. Meldrum is a momma's boy, hopelessly devoted to his ancient, physically addled mother (Hilda Barry), with whom he has shared a home for his entire life. When he was a young man decades before the film's events, Meldrum had fallen in love with a girl (portrayed by Sheila Keith as an older woman) but instead of consummating that love he had been pushed by his jealous and moral mother into service with the church, preventing him from ever marrying or leading a life not dictated by religious restrictions. His attempts to repress his own desires (complicated by the fact that his would-have-been lover dedicated her life to serving him and his mother as a sort of maid) drove him into becoming the monster that he is. This late revelation opens up an unexpected wound in our villain that we're urged to sympathize with, while simultaneously complicating and expanding the regular theme of Walker's horrors: society's elders have always sought to suppress the perceived liberty of  the youth, making Walker's critique timeless rather than particular to the expanding sexual freedoms of 1970s England. This taut, pacey, bleak-as-all-heck thriller possesses the added benefit-- beyond all of its delectable, slasher-rific gore-- of showing us what sad monsters we'll become if we let our elders keep us home.

House of Whipcord (1974) dir. Pete Walker

Logline: A young French nudie model working in England (Penny Irving) is tricked by a mysterious and dour man (Robert Tayman) through the front doors of a secret correctional institute for morally corrupt girls. Run by a ruthless trio of matronly wardens (Barbara Markham, Sheila Keith, and Dorothy Gordon) and presided over by a decripit former judge (Patrick Barr), this illegal prison turns into a house of casual sadism, in which its nubile prisoners learn that the second infraction against good behavior earns one a whipping and the third earns one a hanging.

I think Pete Walker is a fibber. In a recent video interview included on Redemption Films' snazzy blu-ray boxset of four of his films (House of Whipcord included), Walker claims that he stands by the old adage that a filmmaker "must never let [his] audience know which side [he's] on," lest he become too preachy or inadvertently simplify the ambiguity of his characters. And yet, the allegiance of the minds behind House of Whipcord is apparent from the film's opening frames. Boisterously, with a touch of irony as tender as the crack of a whip, the film opens with a dedication of itself "to those who are disturbed by today's lax moral codes and who eagerly await the return of corporal and capital punishment." In no conceivable way do the film's unending scenes of horrific torture and murder in the name of moral decency support this dedication as an earnest one. Rather, the film is-- much like Walker's previous effort, The Flesh and Blood Show (1972)-- an exaggerated, hysterical dramatization of what would happen if the looser, sexier England of the 1970s were to all of a sudden revert (at least in the eyes of the law) to a rigidly conservative moral code. Under such an archaic code, flagrant offenses like modeling for nude photographs in a public park (an action unthinkable and unconscionable in the truly conservative society of England's jolly old days) would need to be met with punishment pious in its intent and extreme in its severity-- bordering on the barbarous-- in order to attempt to cleanse the sin from the hopelessly corrupt criminal.

Once again, Walker is pitting the older and younger generations against one another in mutual misunderstanding and intolerance, breeding violence. Neither generation can comprehend the actions of the other: the older sees the younger as reckless heathens decaying the fabric of society, while the younger sees the older as a group of ruthless, stuffy sadists upholding a fruitless and unjust system of yore. In that same video interview, Walker claims that in contrast to what most of his critics read, he has put no conscious themes of the "suppression of the young by the old" into his films, and in fact identifies himself as a conservative (though in what sense a conservative he fails to elaborate). Either Old Pete is being disingenuous with these statements (not terribly unlike House of Whipcord's opening dedication) or he fails to realize the power with which he condemns the conservative moral authority. House of Whipcord's younger generation may be vapid and slightly debauched, but such attributes come nowhere near to approaching the deplorable lows of the older generation's hypocrisy, repression, and sadism.

And what is at the root of hypocrisy, repression, and sadism, you ask? The patriarchy, of course! House of Whipcord equates ultra conservatism and patriarchal authority (an apt maneuver), and then demonstrates how they are used to suppress female identity, sexuality, and independence. In line with Walker's belief that sides shouldn't be too clearly drawn or freely sympathized with, the film's attack of patriarchal authority stems from its trio of female villains rather than its male villains. The off-the-grid prison institution is run by three elderly matrons-- Mrs. Wakehurst, Walker, and Bates-- who don themselves in grey, put up their hair, refer to themselves by their masculine last names, and whip poor young liberated women half to death. They do this with the hope of curing "depraved females of every category," though their "cures" and "categories" are awfully loose. In a moment of angry passion, Walker (Sheila Keith) spills the beans to the imprisoned French model concerning their true motives when she snarls, "I'm going to make you ashamed of your body." The three matron wardens, made to be ashamed of their own bodies, seek to violate and harm the bodies of those women who aren't, those who are free (relatively speaking) from the old patriarchy's sway. 

Because Wakehurst, Walker, and Bates all very much subscribe to the notion of a controlling patriarchy, they are restricted (at least formally) from enacting this violence independently. They require male consent before taking action against their prisoners, not because it's lawfully required (their institute is basically structured vigilantism) but because they have been culturally indoctrinated to believe that they require it*. Consequently, the three women require the constant presence and notarization of a resident senile judge, Justice Bailey, before they commit any of their evil deeds. In a curious twist, Justice Bailey (while still complicit in the forced imprisonment of innocent women) is oblivious to the violence and murder, believing as he does that their prisoners are being rehabilitated and released. The point being: even "benevolent" patriarchal authority causes damage and violence to women, if by no other way than altering the way women see and treat themselves and each other. 

To conclude, it's worth noting that House of Whipcord is essentially a Women in Prison film (all the rage in 1970s exploitation cinema) that becomes a horror film merely by twisting a few knobs and turning the Gothic sadism and blood up a tad. There's no need for monsters or the supernatural with a situation as horrific as the one presented here. And despite very definitely being concerned with staging a social critique, it's not all dour and self-important-- for giggles, there's an amusing instance of ice cube sadism and the mindbogglingly stupid "Mark E. Desade" false identity employed by one character-- but any moments of levity are countered by the bleak, nihilistic streak that runs underneath it all. As long as the patriarchy continues to hold court, society's escape from the House of Whipcord seems unlikely.

*The most illustrative moment of the matrons' bowing to male authority occurs during the film's resolution: Walker and Bates are attempting to flee the prison in a car after everything has gone awry but are thwarted, rather easily, by a police officer who merely raises his hand and commands them to stop. From their patriarchy-infected viewpoints, the notion of disregarding a symbol of male authority and, say, running the defenseless police officer down with their running automobile isn't even an option.