Horror Reviews, Part III

I don't ordinarily like apocalypse scenarios: seven years of a parochial education will take all the fun out of the end of the world.

I do, however, based on the couple of short stories I've read, have a weakness for the late Alice Sheldon, aka James Tiptree, Jr., aka Raccoona Sheldon. "Beyond the Dead Reef," my first encounter with her work, was a classic story of the planet getting revenge on polluters; "The Screwfly Solution" explores some of the same themes, but less as cause-and-effect and more as a matter of karma; this is the story that the Masters of Horror series chose to adapt.

The basic plot outline of story and film are much the same: a plague of misogyny is spreading across the world, with men killing women in droves and forming a new religion around their homicidal urge. Scientist Alan, his wife Anne and their daughter Amy are all affected by the epidemic, but only Anne will eventually discover its source.

"The Screwfly Solution" is horror at is most basic, I think, less about the cliches of fright than about the real, aweing possibility that a small change could wipe out everything we know. The film suffers, not from having Jason Priestley as Alan (I definitely had my doubts), but from the problems of adapting a chiefly epistolary story into an active linear screenplay: one must of necessity add new characters and scenes, or tweak perfectly fine existing characters and scenes, to make a movie that, well, moves.

I was most impressed by the film's attention to the ways everyday sexism seems to lead to misogyny, considering that this was really subtext in the story: though the rash of femicide is definitely driven by an outside force which I won't spoil for once, the MoH adaptation is careful to show that the difference between this and the catcalls and strip clubs of the "normal" world might be one of degree. Certainly more substance than I expected to see from this, and it really builds nicely, but I still like the short story better.