Antonia Bird‘s film Ravenous is a number of things. It’s a horror, and a comedy, and an odd collision of vampire and cannibal tropes, and a frontier narrative. It’s also a vegan, feminist, and anti-colonial attack on mythologies of masculinist virility.
A recent episode of the excellent We Love To Watch podcast focused on Motel Hell, a quite poor film with fascinating subtexts. It got me thinking about the prevalence of animal rights themes in film, and in horror specifically. Horror’s fixation on the notion of the human and the nonhuman provides a kind of secret key to understanding an unease at the root of modern existence.