FEATURE: The Orgasmic Theater - Stuart Gordon and Sex

A decapitated head lunges eagerly between the legs of a co-ed, and, for better or for worse, history is made.  This image, culled from the climax of the taboo-busting Re-Animator, may stand as the defining image of Stuart Gordon’s career.  Stuart Gordon brings a unique perspective on sex in horror films, one that tries to find organic ways of including it the genre.  Despite the insistence of Leslie Vernon, horror isn't terribly effective at wedding sex to scary stories - it's often used as a simple way to guarantee horny teenagers in the seats.  Not that this is awful...but sex can be more.  And in Gordon's films, it always is.

Take Re-Animator.  In Gordon's debut film, there are two key sex scenes.  The first one takes place between Dan (Bruce Abbott) and Megan (Barbara Crampton), boyfriend and girlfriend.  There is no coercion on the part of Dan, no unwillingness from Megan.  They love each other, and they want to make each other happy, and we only catch the end of the act, so the emphasis is on their mutual pleasure, and her screams of "Yes!"

At the same time, Megan catches the eye of the loathsome Dr. Hill (David Gale), and, later in the film's climax, his resurrected body (carrying his head around in a pan) attacks her, ties her up, and sexually assaults her.  Although there's certainly an exploitative element to the state of his body (unbodied as it is), the real horror of the situation comes from how Hill views Megan, versus how Dan views her.  Dan's love was shared, but Hill acts on his lust with greed.  He ties her down, which makes her not only helpless, but also inactive - she literally becomes an object to him.  After physically assaulting her, he tries to perform cunnilingus on her, a symbolic consumption of the woman he fetishizes, sex as a devouring mouth.

Gordon's subsequent film, From Beyond, goes one step further, tying the effects of the central "Resonator" machine to characters' sex drives.  As the Resonator stimulates the brain's dormant pineal gland, so the pineal gland stimulates sexual appetite.  Gordon bases this on medical apocrypha surrounding the organ (the pineal gland actually inhibits sexual development), but by establishing the link, Gordon writes himself a license to explore sexual sensation and pleasures continually throughout the film.  As an unexpected side-effect, he also portrays sex in a consistently negative light, since no sexual elements in this story exist free of the destructive Resonator's influence.

Only one brief scene suggests the sexual benefits of the Resonator, as main characters Crawford (Jeffrey Combs) and Katharine (again, Barbara Crampton) embrace in the machine's purple glow.  However, nobody in the film ever consummates their desires physically, and the film repeatedly treats sex as a destructive weapon.  Not only in how the villainous Doctor Pretorious (Ted Sorel) returns from beyond to assault Katharine, but in how Katharine, under the spell of the Resonator, climbs upon a sleeping Crawford and then tries to seduce Bubba (Ken Foree).  Pretorious and Katharine are both sexually attacking, and for specific reasons.  Pretorious's impotence (revealed late in the film) is the impetus for his sado-masochistic desires, violence supplanting what he cannot achieve otherwise.  Katharine's underlying motivation is never quite stated, but her development visually and behaviorally - from an inhibited bookworm into a lascivious, leather-clad bombshell - suggests an unleashing of pent-up sexual angst.  When Bubba brusquely turns her toward a mirror, she bursts into Puritan tears.

Sex in Gordon's later film Dagon returns to the bifurcated approach of Re-Animator, with hero Walter Gilman given two potential mates.  On the one hand, he can rescue his girlfriend Barbara (Raquel Merono) from the slimy clutches of the Imbocan villagers.  On the other hand, he can give in to the appeal of a village woman named Uxia (Macarena Gomez).  Barbara's sex appeal is simple and giving.  But Uxia's sex is surreal and exotic.  Walter's seen Uxia in his dreams, and when he pulls aside her bedsheets, he's shocked to find tentacles in place of legs.  In addition to their subtle labial connotation, the tentacles suggest a more obvious alien quality.  Certainly they're unsettling enough to make Walter race away from her bedside.

Uxia's mixture of sexual desire and deformity puts her in the same category as Pretorious and Gale, as a perverse, destructive force motivated by the most basic of urges.  Uxia demonstrates her destructive side when she stabs Barbara and sacrifices her to an octopus-god.  During the sacrifice, Uxia plunges a knife into the naked Barbara, whose once-attractive body has been destroyed by the mad harpy.  Only one attractive woman in Imboca is allowed, it seems.  Although the sexual politics get complicated on a few points (Walter and Uxia are siblings, and Ezra Godden is homosexual), the dominant image of sex in this movie is of a succubus, an image of beauty that hides frightening secrets and unknown depths.

Although the idea of marrying sexual desire and mortal danger has carried from film to film, Dagon pushes this idea in a more feminine direction, and Gordon's episode of the Masters of Horror series, "Dreams in the Witch-House" takes this to its only possible conclusion.  His idea of the fatal seductress ends here with a naked woman shrouded in a black hood that evokes images of the Grim Reaper.  The situation feels borrowed from Kubrick's The Shining, which also featured an old witch taking the form of an alluring young woman, but there's no cheating here.  Gordon gives the sex an important story function, as the witch lures the hero to bed so she can tear a pentagram into his back with her nails, which renders him a slave to her will.

While not all of his films present sexual situations, Stuart Gordon does carry the issue with him into his urban thriller films, which are really just horror films disguised by their real-world environment.  In King of the Ants, the slightly stupid hero (Chris McKenna) is hired to kill a man, and he becomes so enraptured with his target's wife that, after the murder, he seduces the wife in the very home he cased earlier in the film.  Their sex is treated as mutually pleasurable, but the undercurrents keep the viewer from engaging.  The circumstance is deeply wrong, and the underlying deceptions make the sex selfish, since an iota of honesty would tear their relationship apart, and, naturally, their relationship ends when the wife learns the truth, and the hero kills her.

Gordon's 2007 ripped-from-the-headlines shocker Stuck has a brief scene in which Brandi (Mena Suvari) tries to ignore the man stuck in her car windshield (!) long enough to have sex with her boyfriend Rashid (Russel Hornsby).  But she can't get the images of the car accident out of her head, and while she screams in fright during intercourse, Rashid idiotically interprets her screams as throes of pleasure.  Her expression of fear affects the act itself, which now feels invasive and assaultive, a source of pain.  While Rashid is oblivious, concentrating too much on himself to bother looking at her face, Brandi shrieks in terror.  This film features sex more as an aside than as a dominant part of any character's desire, but, all the same, here is again someone for whom sex has been perverted by its association with death.

That's the main thread.  In most of Gordon's films, sex isn't a placeholder situation, or a forbidden act that invariably results in death, as with slasher films.  Instead, sex ties into the dangerous indulgences of villains and anti-heroes, a passion twisted by the surrounding macabre situation into something that must stop if order can be restored.  However, Gordon does offer one twisted text that actively seeks a positive solution.  Edmond, based on the play by David Mamet, functions as a nightmare odyssey in which anti-hero Edmond (William H. Macy) bounces from woman to woman throughout a single night.  Each is a potential lover, each is just out of reach - sometimes literally, as is the case with the peep show vixen (Bai Ling).  Even when he successfully goes to bed with Glenna (Julia Stiles), their mutual attraction shifts abruptly into an eruption of misanthropy from Edmond, one that builds with him trying to diminish her ("You're a waitress, not an actress") and climaxes with him murdering her after she rebukes his vicious emotional outpouring.

Later convicted of Glenna's murder, Edmond goes to jail, where he's sized up and raped by his cellmate (Bokeem Woodbine).  After seventy-odd minutes of watching Edmond objectifying, demeaning, and assaulting women, the exact same thing happens to Edmond.  This plays out as a sick form of poetic justice, but, in what's the most perverse shift of the film, Edmond comes to accept the rape as routine, to the point that he and the other inmate treat each other as partners.  In the final scene of the film, they wax philosophical about God and death and life and the possibility of salvation, and when the lights go out, they climb into bed together and spoon.  They even kiss each other goodnight.

It's tragic and haunting and horrible, seeing two murderers clinging to each other when there's nothing else in life they can grasp.  Ironically, though, it's the only time in any of Stuart Gordon's films where a sexual relationship is fruitful and lasting.  I don't know if this is deeply cynical or ever-so-slightly optimistic, but it shows that Gordon's not beholden to just one perspective on sex.  However, he mostly remains focused on connecting the act to the sins and vices of his characters.  And because these are horror movies, this also ties sex irretrievably to death.  On a superficial level, sex in these films function as an exploitable element (one that can offer investors peace of mind), but, on another level, one that I believe is very intentional, Gordon presents sex as fundamentally destructive.  Which gives his films a newfound sense of melancholy.  There's almost no real pleasure in this universe from lovemaking.  There's only the little death and the big death, both of them dangerous, walking hand in hand between the bedroom and the grave.