Poetry is Not the Final Girl: Michael Thomas Vassallo

I've known Michael Thomas Vassallo now for almost a decade. Which also means that in the first horror film he ever made, someone pretended to break my neck while I was tied to a dentist's chair with a bunch of RCA cables; that I've made the fake blood for almost every cinematic endeavor he's ever been involved in (he sucks at it), and that we've seen countless horror and/or YA supernatural teen movies together—last Valentine's we even went on a friend date and subjected ourselves to Vampire Academy.

Basically, Michael Tom makes movies that are supposed to be about how it’s important to be yourself in a world where being yourself is, like, so passé. So instead, what he gives us is an intensified cinematic version of every kind of ‘being yourself’—an excessive virtual partitioning of every counterculture and subfield and subgenre and countersubcounterculture until what you’re looking at turns out to actually be some kind of vimeo documentary by an asexual Finnish woman focusing mostly on US e-mail ponyplay porn spam and hetero gonzo websites. But that’s the point exactly—Michael Tom/s work mobilizes an excess of subcultural markers to create a specifically teenage nostalgia for an era one couldn’t have known. A cinematic apocalypse without climax. Welcome to carnoburger #bless.

Michael Thomas Vassallo (mtvassallo.tumblr.com) is a filmmaker and writer working between narrative and experimental forms. His film and video works have shown at numerous film festivals, including BFI Flare: the London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Philadelphia Qfest, and the Milwaukee LGBT Film/Video Festival, and at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. He is the programmer of MY TEENAGE DREAM ENDED (myteenagedreamended.tumblr.com), a series for poetry, video, performance, and other time-based work. Originally from Philadelphia, he currently lives in Brooklyn.

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TL: Let’s start with the most obvious, but also most telling question in honor of my favorite horror franchise, SCREAM: What’s your favorite scary movie? But also, why? Do you think this has any bearing on your aesthetic practice?  I understand that as my No. 1 lifelong horror companion this will be extremely hard for you but you do have to pick at the very least a sub-genre.

MTV: Should’ve known you’d go straight to the most difficult question! I get this one a lot, and my usual answer is Tobe Hooper’s original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I think it’s one of purest horror films, which is to say that it doesn’t really rely on plot (I’d also say it’s one of the purest “American” films). A bunch of young people are driving in a van; they go swimming; they fight with each other; they get tortured and die. There’s this great moment early in the film, where one of the characters talks about “Saturn in retrograde,” and bad astrological omens. There’s an element of predestination; it’s not really because they’re good or bad, because their choices were right or wrong—they’re going to get punished anyway. The editing really builds on this, too —continuity gets thrown out entirely.

I think that space—that moment where narrative collapses—is what I’m most interested in, in respect to horror, and where horror has a big impact on my work. I make narrative films, but I’m interested in these gestures that step outside the narrative—something you also get from melodrama. I’m also interested in abjection, which is obviously a big part of horror in general, and also has this start/stop effect on cinematic narrative.

I think the idea that’s sort of implicit here—the differences between the horror film and the horror franchise—is really interesting. If I had to pick a favorite horror franchise, mine would definitely be Friday the 13th, for similar reasons to what I’ve just been discussing. The Friday the 13th films are clearly not the best slashers—no single one of them even comes close to the original Halloween, or Black Christmas, another personal favorite—but taken collectively, they’re this sequence that just repeats endlessly, death after death. It’s not about the story, which stops making sense in Friday the 13th: Part 2 - it becomes about ritual.

Obviously, I think I have a preference for slasher and splatter-type movies, in terms of sub-genre.

TL: There’s always going to be something really terrifying about the idea of just a dude. With a knife. Amirite?  I feel as though you and I are particularly interested in these like teen franchises because they seem to be literal materializations of the intensity you suffer during adolescence. Materializations that then get carried out to their logical conclusion—the slut dies first etc. So for me, the moments of narrative collapse actually happen because some form of societal convention is carried out too perfectly, leading to carnage, whereas for you it’s more like narrative discontinuity is an inherent feature of the genre—it’s about total control over filmic content. Playing god, so to speak. 

Can you tell me a little more about the relationship between abjection and discontinuity though? Because I feel like as time passes, certain discontinuities have become what we might consider horror convention, which is what makes a genre. Ultimately what horror is for me is a script of the script of the script. The infinite displacement. The spaces for play between each displacement. Like, do you even get scared by any horror movies any more?

MTV: The abject is the ultimate displacement—I think of it as that space for play. The French have this great term, film maudit—riffing on that concept a bit, I think horror films attempt to depict the abject, but also the film can also be abject in-and-of-itself, with respect to the viewer. Like, there are these moments of narrative rupture within the film, and then there’s the gross moments where the viewer’s own ability to process what’s going on on-screen is overwhelmed, when your psychic censor gets maxed out. That’s the moment when you have to look away—or maybe more accurately, when you need to cover up your eyes and watch what’s going just enough, through the cracks in your fingers. Personally, I remember watching Hitchcock’s The Birds while hiding behind a big, puffy chair in my parent’s living room, as a child. That movie scared me so much, maybe mostly because it has no real plot. Punishment for punishment’s sake.

Speaking of punishment: I don’t scare easily, I don’t reach that point of being overwhelmed much anymore, but one film that did sufficiently get me there recently was Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs. Have you seen it yet? I know I’ve been telling you to watch it. I feel like everyone who was raised a Catholic should probably watch it.

TL:  I did see Martyrs and yeah, it’s definitely the squeamish-est thing I’ve seen in a while.  I feel like horror movies that are really needlessly violent resist interpretation in a certain way because it starts to feel so senseless. You can’t ever really make an argument, they aren’t psychologically compelling or politically efficacious, their internal logic is totally skewed. But if this is the case, why do you think we like them? Like what are horror movies for, or what do they do for us?

MTV: I think the standard answer here is a sort of classical one, about catharsis and processing our fears in a way that’s “safe.” The same principle at work behind haunted houses, or rollercoasters, or, to a certain degree, BDSM. It’s a way to process the abject without looking at it too hard—the way that makes it hurt just enough that it’s meaningful. Hurt me just enough, so I know it’s real.

I’m excited to see It Follows, for instance, because it deals with a relevant fear that was instilled in me—in this case, there’s an HIV/AIDS metaphor at work. As someone born in the mid-1980s, and growing up in the 90s, I was cognizant of the AIDS epidemic—it was this thing that defined my (very nascent) view of what “gay” or “queer” could mean. HIV/AIDS was presented to me this sort of infinite, cold, inescapable horror—very different from how it is experienced today, to a younger generation. It Follows might be the first horror movie to represent HIV as a manageable condition. I’ve been reading “Fire in the Belly,” Cynthia Carr’s biography of David Wojnarowicz, so it will be interesting to see that particular horror dealt with in a different way.

If that’s like, politically efficacious, which is to say morally “correct”—I find it hard to say. Narratives fix meaning, but horror is slippery. I think that the narrative rupture I’ve been talking about, is itself a radical gesture. We all know that no one can ever really “kill” the killer in the end. There’s always room for a sequel, even if it doesn’t actually make sense. It’s a rule of the genre.

TL: Right, paradoxically, the lack of continuity in genre is precisely what makes it so viral, so obstinately continual. I saw It Follows last night and I have to say, it kind of totally reformulates the idea of how dread and suspense typically operates in a genre movie—fuck the jump scares, it's all low level anxiety. More like The Virgin Suicides, it depicts this suburban wasteland where the "something you can't escape" is what you know you can't resist, that is already ominously coming, rather than something unexpected or aberrantly scary. Watching it feels like you’re constantly always dying a little, like the life force is literally being sapped out of you. Arabelle says it's the best metaphor for what life after assault is like that she has ever seen. I can't disagree. Surburbian matrimony, date rape, it could be either. Horror for me is particularly efficacious when its illustrating not what is happening but how things actually feel. Which is terrifying. It Follows lost a lot of enjoyable melodrama though, so it would be an interesting direction for horror to go in, rather than these increasingly formulaic versions of the same meta-commentary. What do you hope for for horror in the future? Is there hope for horror in the future?

MTV: Horror is cyclical, so I think there’s always hope for the future. It responds to the zeitgeist—a particular sub-genre or cycle of films is usually read to correspond to a particular prevailing cultural anxiety. Personally, I was very interested in the wave of “home invasion” films that came in the wake of Haneke’s Funny Games, like The Others or Them (Ils). Those films all day with upper-middle-class people in large, expensive houses, who are beset by a mass of faceless attackers in dirty clothes. Those films very literally dramatize the fear of losing one’s class privileges—it really says something that they became popular enough to be a noticeable trend in the horror market, right at the time that the housing market collapsed. I don’t think class issues are often dealt with realistically in cinema, and definitely not in American cinema; those that try to usually collapse into “poverty porn.” Given our discussion of narrative rupture, slippage, and radical potential, I’d love to see horror take the lead on addressing class in cinema. There’s a lot to be unpacked in the genre conventions around class (e.g. “redneck horror” like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Deliverance). That’s the direction I’m trying to take my upcoming horror film.

In terms of the technical or aesthetic future—I just put on the Oculus Rift for the first time, and I could foresee a big future for horror in VR. This past Halloween, I went to BLACKOUT NYC, New York’s infamous “extreme theater” haunted house. It’s basically a horror-themed dungeon that you go to with strangers—it’s like being the star of your very own torture movie. You mentioned “how things actually feel,” and this is it, a total immersive experience. Maybe the future of horror isn’t theatrical, communal—it’s personal. It is what it’s always been. You, all alone, in the dark.

TL: Speaking of being all alone. In the dark. What are your personal intentions for integrating horror into your work in 2015? Because let's face it, it’ll always be there.

MTV: Probably the best critique I’ve ever gotten for my work was one I got in film school. A professor saw a performative, horror-influenced video I made—one where I rubbed my gums until they bled. He handed me a piece of paper with some notes on it, but one of the only things I could make out, because of his handwriting—the only thing I remember—was one line, in big letters: “TORTURE YOURSELF.” I’ve been feeling really emotionally raw these last few months, so I’m hoping to torture myself more in 2015.