‘See No Evil’ at 20: In Defense of the Nasty Slasher Classic
When I started brainstorming my angle in honor of See No Evil’s 20th anniversary, my initial idea was to frame it as a bad relic of the past I can’t help but love. That backhanded impulse should be beyond me, though it’s often the first—and easiest—way back into something I’d loved as a kid that otherwise, on account of age, doesn’t hold up two decades later. Yet, when I revisited Gregory Dark’s grimy slasher, the debut from WWE Films, I regretted thinking See No Evil was even remotely conceptually bad. It’s not even a guilty pleasure, something so bad, it’s good. It’s simply good, a relic of the past, yes, but one with more style and grit to spare than most horror movies—especially slashers—released today.
WWE Films, as its name suggests, had a simple goal. Put their storied wrestlers in motion pictures. The studio, which boasts the likes of The Marine (John Cena), The Condemned (Steve Austin), and The Call (David Otunga), often traded in genre fare, the theatrics of which were a natural fit for wrestlers, who themselves are innately theatrical in their lore and performances. And See No Evil is certainly theatrical. It’s big, ugly, and biblical in scale and intention. Kane (Glenn Jacobs) plays Jacob Goodnight—though he’s unnamed in the first film– a hulking, deranged serial killer whose modus operandi is rooted in biblical abuse he suffered as a child.
Jacob Goodnight is presumably killed by Officer Frank Williams (Steven Vidler) in the cold open, but See No Evil is just getting started, so of course, the Michael Myers wannabe will be back for more slaughter to come. That slaughter comes in the form of a quasi-progressive anti-recidivism program tasking a group of low-level offenders with a weekend hotel cleaning. Successfully complete the program, and they can anticipate a month shaved from their sentence.
See No Evil is a product of its time, and I mean that in largely positive terms. Think of a slasher released today whose leads would be so messy, so down-and-dirty? You probably can’t. One of the survivors is a former pimp (Luke Pegler), first destined to be quick carnage, later a hero unwilling to abandon his fellow prisoners. They’re all conventionally attractive, yes, but there’s an edge to them that feels more earnest than most modern attempts at subversive, horror counterculture.
Of course, the big mark of 2006 is Jacob Goodnight (and Kane) himself. See No Evil was one of the first hulking slashers. Think Rob Zombie’s Halloween, Hatchet, Venom, later Texas Chainsaw entries, the Friday the 13th remake, and more. Big, six-foot-plus behemoths whose physique renders them not only imposing but unstoppable. The sheer scale of their size is terrifying enough, and that’s before they’ve been imbued with cinematic, supernatural immortality. Jacob Goodnight, for what it’s worth, is never deemed innately supernatural, but he endures more than most men could survive, and he does return for a sequel eight years later, so he’s Jason Voorhees-lite, at least.
And, yeah, it’s scary. Michael Myers has always been frightening, and while I’m partial to the more cryptic boogeyman, there’s something innately frightening about Tyler Mane’s size and staggering presence as the babysitter killer. Here, Kane doesn’t do much but grunt and run, but he’s clearly having the time of his life, and he does enough with the thin material to manifest as a genuinely frightening presence in the hotel’s decrepit hallways. I wouldn’t want to run into him, is what I’m saying.
Better still, it’s early aughts grindhouse. Grimy, brown, dirty, and most importantly? Wet. Not just in the gallons of blood spilled, whether that’s an arm chopped off or eyes plucked from their sockets. Wet otherwise. In the staging, the sheen over the sets, the sheer commitment to pantomiming filth, where most modern movies would recoil. The characters are rotten, as is the setting, and the violence is aggressively tactile. Jacob slams would-be victims around, tossing them like he’s back in the ring but with a hard-R edge.
The contemporaneous critical reception misunderstood the decay. They took it as a sign of the genre, as a death rattle for horror as a whole. Hey, look at this ugly, despicable movie! It’s emblematic of the genre itself. See No Evil was emblematic, but intentionally, and successfully so. It was released (wide, I might add) at a time when Saw and Hostel were leading the charge out of the Asian horror remake era, into the extreme (French or otherwise) horror of the latter half of the decade. Stylistically and thematically, would you believe me if I said See No Evil is no less evocative of a distinctly American rot than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? It is. A nasty, gnarly slasher whose rotten core propelled it into the seedy, storied underbelly of horror’s history.
Sure, See No Evil got a long-delayed sequel, and it’s not bad by any stretch, but the stylistic differential of the Soska Sisters illuminates just how special Dark’s original was. It’s got that piss-yellow filth (seriously, I can get enough of how tangibly dirty See No Evil feels) and shit-stain disregard for convention and taste. And it’s remarkable, and enduring, not in spite of that, but because of that. American culture was and remains a septic tank of noxious ideologies and persons, and sure enough, the prisoners here have more humanity and ethos than the biblically devout killers. Ha… haha. Wonder if we’ve ever seen that before.
See No Evil was a box office disaster, of course (the best horror always is, dammit), but it’s prime time to revisit it. Interestingly enough, on Prime Video, where (as of this writing) See No Evil is presently streaming. It’s a nasty hotel that is worth booking a stay in, and I’ll be waiting for American horror cinema to abandon the gloss and class and just get back to being as dirty, nasty, and confrontational as possible.
Categorized:Editorials