Warning: This article contains discussions of murder, (internalized) homophobia, animal death, mental illness, images of blood/gore, and spoilers for High Tension.

This is (apparently) the second time in a row I’ve stumbled into a trifecta of thematically linked movies. Last time it was queer pregnancy or mommy horror; this time it’s queer ladies who kill. Go figure.

Now, the latter is a little unavoidable if you want to talk about queer ladies in horror, period. The lesbian killer (in all her many forms) has for better or worse — let’s be honest, it’s usually worse — become something of a staple of the genre. Instinct and Heavenly Creatures were, perhaps, surprisingly empathetic iterations of this trope.

This week brings us no such luck, with the heavily and understandably divisive 2003 New French Extremist film High Tension. I use the word “divisive” here for a reason: to date, you’ll find people who hate this movie, whether for its depiction of an unstable lesbian killer or simply for the infamous plot twist itself.

You’ll also find people who fully understand why it’s been such an upsetting piece for many viewers, and have still found value or significance in it on a personal level. I’ll tell you up front, i’m one of the people in the second camp.

Usually, at least from what I’ve been able to uncover, the latter comes about through the generous application of an interpretation that doesn’t at all seem to be the film’s original intent. It is looked at as an early 2000s entry from a straight white male writing and directing team. Additionally, it is in a horror subgenre whose overall aim has been to shock and unsettle, and there’s nothing kind or empathetic about it.

In that space, it’s a depiction of a young woman so “deranged” by her “obsession” with her straight best friend that she mows down said best friend’s entire family and gets tossed unceremoniously in an institution for her trouble.

To engage with media as a queer person is often to claim or reclaim things that don’t value or respect you, though. Curiously enough, my experience of High Tension lends itself to that kind of relationship.

Now, don’t get me wrong: any way you look at it, there’s a bleakness and cynicism, to High Tension that permeates the film. As Bloody Disgusting writer Wesley Lara puts it, it’s one of several horror movies that “explore the worst possible scenarios of bad situations and often have little-to-no hope whatsoever for the characters.” The more generously inclined queer reading of the text is, in its own way, heartbreaking; in a sense that nearly drowns out the viciousness of the violence.

Perhaps it’s even exacerbated by it. Unlike the wave of torture porn films that rippled out from New French Extremity in the States, High Tension’s kills walk a very particular, in some ways more painful tight rope. Instead of emphasizing the gore and cruelty for its own (arguably dehumanizing) sake, its violence offers something to gore hounds while putting the sympathetic cringe of human suffering front and center, unavoidably.

Forcing viewers to confront — and resonate with — the essential, fleshy humanity of Marie’s victims is only half of why High Tension almost plays as more of a tragedy than a straightforward horror film. Perhaps it might be more accurate to say that the “horror” in High Tension, for me, comes not from the perceived, projected threat of lesbian sexuality. Instead, it comes from Marie’s own fear, shame, and self-loathing, and the ways that she herself externalizes it.

Walking hand in hand with that is (of course) the awareness that when read “straight” so to speak, writer and director Alexandre Aja links the lesbian experience quite directly to repression and a destructive monstrosity. Any honest unpacking of this movie necessitates recognizing as much. Watching this in 2020, though — as an out, queer, nonbinary person, when I wasn’t out as any of those things the first time around — it resonates in ways it didn’t always.

More precisely, there’s been a noticeable — though far from complete — course correction in recent years when compared to older, more overtly “problematic” depictions of queerness. At first glance, that’s a good thing, and there certainly are movies and shows that manage to stick the landing on this change of direction.

Others however, almost seem to overcompensate. They leave us with only “good” and “saintly” gays who can do no wrong, who are endlessly tolerant and forgiving of their straight friends. They never get frustrated with their partners, and never express a desire for types of sex or love that isn’t safely palatable to a straight audience.

I do think it’s, usually, a well-intentioned overcompensation; but the outcome (intended or not) encourages viewers who only have time for us if we’re the “good ones.” Something reactionary in me ends up drawn to characters like Marie, who aren’t just flawed and believable humans, though I (of course) deeply love those too. Characters like Marie aren’t just flawed, they are directly unsettling to audiences that will only show up for us if we’re gender-conforming, “well-behaved,” safe and polite in our queerness.

Sometimes, as a queer horror fan, you just have to let yourself love a young lesbian whose imbalanced and unsatisfied experience of herself finds her murdering her way through a nuclear, heterosexual family to make up for it. High Tension’s Marie temporarily satisfies that liberation through the playing out of an ill-mannered, un-containable monstrousness, at least until she’s institutionalized at the end of the film. Yet there’s something fundamentally tragic at the heart of her character, too.

For those who aren’t familiar — or those who, like me, watched High Tension so long ago that they forgot half the plot points — the film follows Marie and Alex, two college students journeying to Alex’s family cottage to concentrate on their studying together. The film is quick to entrench the sense of isolation and disconnection the closer they get to the house. This easily and deliberately provides the set-up for the half-slasher half-home invasion movie High Tension seems to promise.

I say “seems,” because the grimy, violently intrusive masculine presence in the film is never physically there. Rather, he’s an externalization and a dissociation of Marie’s own violent impulses, leading her to, seemingly unknowingly, murder her way through the nuclear family she yearns to be part of but can’t figure out how to enter. The fairly direct connection Aja draws between this dissociation and Marie’s desire and love for Alex is unquestionably troubling, as I’ve said.

Still, there’s a reading that centers on Marie, and is painful in a different way. It echoes the experience of many young lesbians and queer women being intensely afraid that they’re “participating in the male gaze.” Looked at this way, Marie is more complex as a victim, herself, of an internalized homophobia and self-loathing, wrestling with the ill-conceived, painful notion that her desire makes her a predatory threat.

She creates, and subsequently projects this loathing onto a predatory, slimy, invasive masculine figure. He’s someone against whom she can be the hero; someone from whom she can save the girl she’s in love with.

I’ll be thinking about the heartbreaking, breath-snatching catharsis of her scream when the “killer” is dead for at least the rest of the month. It is at this point in this reading, essentially, when Marie is finally able to come out to and accept herself

Of course, it doesn’t last; she has killed four people and a dog, and nearly killed a fifth. Though Marie survives the film — a rarity for queer characters in horror as much as an unconventional ending for what is otherwise a roiling slasher film — her life is indelibly altered. She is shut away in an institution for the foreseeable future. Her un-closeting, such as it is, is so frightening to those around her that they have no solution but to try and push her back in.

High Tension isn’t an uplifting film; it’s not supposed to be. Even in its more queer-centric reading, its conclusion is painfully cynical. Still, as much as I can only speak for myself, I think there’s enough of (admittedly conflicting) value in the text that a queer person who wants it can and should feel able to claim it without feeling overly guilty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfkysYCxTdU

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