Butcher Boys

For an example of gothic in contemporary culture, I chose the film Butcher Boys. The movie is mysterious, gruesome, dark and just all around creepy. It leaves you never wanting to be alone in a quiet city at nighttime. The entire film has a dark setting based in a deserted ghetto type area. The inside walls of the buildings look as if they are rotten and abandoned. The lighting in the scenes, the buildings, the overall setting was just uncomfortable. 

A group of dark haired, husky men dressed in all black hunt down four teenagers through the small deserted city area. What’s unsettling is watching them run through the area not knowing if the next corner they take could be one of these crazy guys ready to kill them. What’s gothic about this part of the movie is the mysteriousness of the men and why they are chasing four teenagers through the darkness of the night. As the movie goes on there is only one teenager left and we find out that the men are cannibals. The weird thing is though, they don’t want to harm the last remaining girl and wind up impregnating her through surgery. This movie is so subtle with the horror that I would categorize it as gothic. Horror to me is more blood and guts being thrown everywhere and monsters scattering from the depths of hell, where this movie is more realistically scary. In another scene of the movie, they are all trying to sit around a table but they are all arguing and fighting. Meanwhile there is a girl set up with only her head on the table with her head half grated with a metal utensil separating pieces of her brain like chunks of sushi and she’s still alive as each one of the guys keeps snacking her.This part is grotesque and disturbing yet well thought out. While watching the movie it was like I was feeling her pain.

This movie to me is definitely gothic in contemporary culture because it’s like Frankenstein, lurking in the darkness and attacking when least expected on the innocent, killing them. Frankenstein is grotesque because the monster is made from dead human parts and Butcher Boys is grotesque because they are cannibals eating humans alive. Both movies have something to do with deranging the human body.