Can’t Wait for More ‘Terrifier’? Sean Byrne’s ‘The Loved Ones’ Belongs on Your Dance Card
On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.
This September, we’re celebrating Back to School Night with four midnight movies that aren’t just academically themed but also teach the lessons essential to understanding this school of cinema.
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First, read the spoiler-free bait — a weird and wonderful pick from any time in film and why we think it’s worth memorializing. After you’ve watched the movie, come back for the bite — a breakdown of all the spoiler-y moments you’d want to unpack when exiting a theater.
The Bait: You’re Invited to the Worst School Dance Since “Carrie”
“He looks dead,” panics the teenaged Lola (Robin McLeavy) while surveying the unconscious body of her prom date Brent (Xavier Samuel) in the trunk of her dad’s car. “You’ve ruined it!”
“I didn’t use that much!” retorts Eric (John Brumpton), glumly defending his drugging talents.
With that exchange, horror’s most phenomenally fucked-up daddy-daughter duo kicks off a cascading comedy of errors that — regardless of its villains’ ample dialogue and lack of literal clowning — belongs in a class with “Dead Alive” and “Terrifier.” That’s a reflection not only of the movie’s over-the-top gore, but also its appreciation for pitch-black comedy and herculean feats of survival.
It’s been a busy back-to-school season for IndieWire After Dark. Ant Timpson and Tim League’s “The ABCs of Death” taught us the importance of tight-knit creative communities within the counterculture — and New World Pictures’ “Saturday the 14th” explored how structure helps midnight movies get made as well as watched. Robert Rodriguez’s much maligned “The Faculty” offered us a masterclass in picking apart credits to find hidden gems worth reevaluating. And now, “The Loved Ones” is testing our limits as a dangerously extreme classic, bursting with lessons about ultraviolence, horror-fantasy, horror-comedy, and subversion.
Writer/director Sean Byrne made his feature directorial debut at TIFF with this nightmare from 2009, although the demented “Carrie” remix feels ripped straight from the annals of midnight movie Hell. When the grieving Brent, who lost his father in a car accident, is asked to the end-of-year dance by the weirdest girl at school, his (perfectly polite!) rejection gets him kidnapped and tortured. He’ll wake up in a suburban house of horrors set up for a private prom… but is it the living room’s disco ball or the chemical getting injected directly into his windpipe that has Brent seeing stars?
It’s hard to make lines like “I’m ready to draw on him now…” scary, especially when they’re coming from a short brunette dressed in a bubblegum pink cocktail dress. But with a gonzo cast and slippery script, “The Loved Ones” knows how to keep its viewers just tipsy enough to surprise and entertain.
By blending the experimental punk music of Ollie Olsen with the occasional campy needle-drop (shout out, Kasey Chambers’ “Not Pretty Enough”), this excruciating Australian horror movie offers a transporting soundtrack that can sometimes feel like awkwardly swaying on the dance floor. It also sees the filmmaker lavishly decorate an outrageous-yet-simple concept to overpowering effect. That’s a victory made all the more triumphant by the film’s moderately budget (it’s estimated around $3.5 million) and an ambitious commitment to pulling off some all-time theatrical sadism.
Class is just about dismissed on After Dark’s Back to School Night. If you can pass this test — a nauseating brain teaser in the literal sense — then that means you’re either rocking a god-given stomach of steel or you’ve learned to muscle past the macabre so you can appreciate even the most provocative artistry. Pin on your corsage, bolt the front door, and scream like no one’s watching: This song-and-dance goes out to all “The Loved Ones.”
“The Loved Ones” is streaming on Paramount+ and available to rent/buy on VOD.
The Bite: You’ve Never Met a Scream King Like Brent
In a horror year that’s overwrought with villainous women and antiheroic final girls, final guys are an under-appreciated breed. What Brent goes through in “The Loved Ones” should precede him more than it does — and not just because actor Xavier Samuel looks so determined it could give you the second-hand shakes. Excessive gore and violence are frequently criticized for glorifying evil antagonists, but rarely is that style praised for forging the kind of tough-as-nails heroes you can’t find anywhere else.
Between all the seductive milk sipping and unsteady cranium bleaching, Lola and Eric really take their time with Brent. (Imagine how the languishing mummy, must feel!) And still, he comes out on top. Sure, he’s on top of a lobotomy corpse pile… but credit where credit is due. Ripping knives from between the bones in your feet isn’t easy and the severity of Brent’s screwed-up situation is what makes this unforgettably disturbing movie worth an annual reunion.
All hail After Dark’s reigning Prom King — and some thoughts on “The Loved Ones”:
In an interview with Chase Whale from 2010, Byrne said that he modeled Brent’s peer group after the archetypes in John Hughes’ “The Breakfast Club”: “There’s the rebel, the stoner, the girl next door, the goth, the wallflower, etc. I wanted to make sure we covered a lot of personalities so there would be a good chance different personalities in the audience could see themselves on screen.”
Among his many other influences for “The Loved Ones,” Byrne cited “Footloose,” “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “Henry: Potrait of a Serial Killer,” and more. When cracking the concept, the filmmaker recalled asking himself, “What if I took the rituals of the prom – the dress up and the crowning of the King and Queen like in ‘Carrie’ – and moved the prom to a single location like in ‘Evil Dead,’ making the rituals of the prom the very instrument of torture?”
Speaking with HeyUGuys.com, also in 2010, Robin McLeavy described Lola as a combination of Annie Wilkes in “Misery” and Veruca Salt from “Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory.”
From “Bury Me an Angel” to “Bunny Lake Is Missing,” midnight movies routinely involve the taboo of incest. To elevate that concept, McLeavy described creating tension between Lola and Erica by touching her fellow actor as little as possible. Again to HeyUGuys.com, McLeavy said, “John Brumpton, who played my dad, and I talked about what their relationship was like and how we wanted there to be a real love between them but that teetered on something completely taboo and wrong and how we could communicate that. We talked about how little they would touch each other — so whenever we do touch it was this really powerful thing.”
Asked if she would ever play a horror victim, the actress said, “Never ever. I can’t do victim roles, it makes me sick.”
“The Loved Ones” wouldn’t debut in the United States until 2012. Speaking with Dread Central at the time, Samuel described the challenge of playing the mostly silent Brent, saying, “When I first read it, I wondered what kind of sicko would write this thing? [Laughs.] And then I thought, ‘Where’s all the dialogue?’ So I was thinking that maybe there was a reason Sean didn’t want me to talk much. [Laughs.]“
He continued, “No, but seriously — I read it and it was pretty intense but really clever, too. I had seen [Byrne’s 2007 short film ‘Advantage Satan’] before, and I found it absolutely exhilarating and unusual so I knew I wanted to work with Sean. I could see that he had a passion for terrifying people; his approach to both of those stories was kind of intoxicating.”
“The Loved Ones” inspired a copycat killer in a real case that happened a few years after the movie’s release. In his verdict, the Australian judge reportedly said, “Behaving in the way you did, you were apeing the conduct in a film of which you were obsessed, namely ‘The Loved Ones.'”
IndieWire After Dark publishes midnight movie recommendations every Friday night at 9:30 p.m. ET. Read more of our deranged suggestions…
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