On Northern Exposure

This past Saturday, I took a canoe trip along Lake Upsilon in the wilds of northern North Dakota. The sun had just come up over the tiered peaks of the pine, and the greenish-black water glittered under a thinning mist. I had just come around the lake’s western fork, bringing into view some cabins lining the shore. That was when I saw the naked woman.

In truth, she wasn't completely naked. Not yet. She wore a scant bikini, and she was peeling it off in protracted fashion, as if for the benefit of a camera. She posed and pressed and canted against the railing of the cabin’s deck.

I pulled my oar out of the water, and as I drifted ahead, a man came into view in front of her. Perhaps he was a boyfriend or a husband. At the very least, he was an amateur photographer. He was snapping pictures briskly with a camera that looked elaborate. I didn't get the make; in an effort not to stare, I was allowing myself only repeated, rapid-fire glances at the model.

The woman took off the bikini bra, and then she took off the bikini panties. The woman moved through numerous postures, some demure and some vaguely decadent. I could tell she was somewhat comely even without my male gaze at full-bore. Her skin was honey-brown, like a full-bodied lager.

As I coasted past, casting my glances, my first reaction was aghast. I'm not a prude, nor am I offended by nudes, arty or otherwise. But my initial mental spasm to the (somewhat) public nudity was to be taken aback. The impudence! The profligacy! And to be taking photos of the whole affair—the narcissism! The sexism! Shame on him! Where was his feminism? And as for her feminism, what cognitive gymnastics had she done to rationalize this?

Perhaps these priggish knee-jerks occurred because nudity outside the house is such an unfamiliar thing, especially in North Dakota. But my righteousness had fast subsided once I'd glided a quarter-mile down the lake. By then I'd started interrogating my assumptions about these intimate nudes in a new light.

Perhaps this photo session represented new levels of intimacy for this couple. In whatever time they’d spent together, they had evoked a mutual liberation in one another. His photographing her wasn't necessarily exploitative. Rather, it could be an exploration in the expanding landscape of their love. And it didn't even have to be romantic. These nudes could be a new and exciting milestone in a budding artistic collaboration. Conceivably, these photos were the very zenith of a Platonic partnership that spanned creativity and companionship.

Who was I to declare this photo session tawdry? It wasn't necessarily smut they were fashioning. Perhaps it was all private and personal, for the satisfaction, aesthetic and/or sexual, of one or both parties. Perhaps it was even art. Together, photographer and nude were producing something beautiful—a portfolio, perhaps, or even a deliciously risqué installation for the Bismarck art district. Perhaps this photo session would go onto a DeviantArt account, to be seen by anyone anywhere in the world. Even if the partnership, Platonic or otherwise, didn't work out, model and photographer would at least be left with something lovely they'd collaborated to create, surrounded by the verdant forest and the dawn. Her nude body, elegantly posed, would coruscate in harmony with the water, thanks to his eye and her willingness. This photo set could capture the splendor of the lake scenery and the people of the region. It could travel all over the globe. This would champion artistic voices from exotic locales, as places like North Dakota are strange tropics from the perspective of the cosmopolitan world of art.

And even if it was porn, this didn't have to be a problem. It could be refreshing. As I floated down the lake, I reflected on all the years and all the nude photos I’d viewed, from artsy to outright tawdry. Whether art or porn, the scene was almost always situated in New York or LA (not necessarily respectively, and rarely respectfully). If not there, then it was set in Europe or somewhere tropical like Hawaii or Miami or Rio. It was always on a beach or in a fancy home—a mansion or at least an upper middle-class abode. Quality nude photos have always had one not-so-subtle subtext: you have to be upwardly mobile or outright elite to be involved in any worthwhile depiction of nakedness.

Then and there, on that deck behind me, a photographer and his subject were taking back the nude photo. Together, they were reclaiming the aesthetic dignity of points north. Together, they were creating nudes that were visual essays arguing a counterpoint to nude photos taken theretofore: that the untainted, natural beauty of a remote northern state could be a viable backdrop for a human beauty in the nude. The setting didn't have to be a palm-girded manse with a pool overlooking LA or an ocean. It could be a densely-forested lake with water the color of Jägermeister. The model could be a squat, thick-thighed girl.

We need more nudes at northern lakes. We need stripteases in foothills and in badlands. We need erotic thrillers on the pie-bald prairies. We need sex scenes, simulated and non-simulated, in snow. We need girl-on-girl action in unassuming log cabins. We need orgies on weather-beaten decks.

The list is endless. Every permutation and combination of the above should be made to happen if we want art—or at least arty porn—to thrive.

And so, in a matter of minutes, I had gone from abhorring these nude photos to adoring them. I had gone from crying foul to crying for more. I slid my paddle in the water and steered back around. The cabin and the deck approached anew. The photographer was still photographing, the clack of his shutter having worked up to a chittering paroxysm of artistry.

And the girl, she'd struck a pose on all fours and in full mammalian lordosis, prying apart her ass-halves for the camera's Cyclopean eye.

Delirium (1987)

As genres, the slasher and the erotic thriller share plenty in common, including a firm grounding in brutal realism. That is to say, the murders and the gore and the sex and the nudity are presented as-is with little ambiguity. Delirium, a 1987 giallo that incorporates elements of both the slasher and the erotic thriller in depicting a series of centrefold murders, breaks with this trend, presenting some crucial killings in surrealist fashion. In these scenes, Delirium follows the slasher trope of moving into the first-person perspective of the killer, but this point-of-view is, contra that of Halloween or Friday the 13th's antagonists, wracked with bizarre hallucinations. As the killer stalks after victims, the entire screen pulsates red and black; when the victims come into view, their faces are monstrous–by turns Cyclopean and theriomorphic. This imaginative depiction of the killer's psychotic, chimerical delusions marks Delirium as truly inventive across a pair of genres typically resistant to innovation. But this is not the only virtue of Delirium. The film is also a cinematographic marvel from start to finish, with intricate, luminous interiors and vast, palatial exteriors. The affluential aesthetic is realized entirely through visuals. Your reviewer supposes that he is expected to say something to the effect of "but no visual is more aesthetically pleasing than leading lady Serena Grandi," but he will not. Grandi's sex symbol status precedes her, at least in Italy, so it needn't be restated (see picture). Rather, it should be said that Grandi brings an unassuming warmth and earnestness to the protagonist's role, culminating in a human grace that transcends her statuesque physique and tameless, oft-exposed bust. You empathize with her character for the trauma she's experiencing due to the loss of her colleagues and family members, and not just for the backpain she's likely experiencing on account of her Brobdignagian bosom. Despite all it's merits, however, Delirium is not without its flaws: as is typical of an Italian film, it features some improbable plot developments and sketchy redubbing. Perhaps most disappointingly, the aforementioned surrealism is only overt in the first two kills, and tapers off as the film reaches its climax. Nonetheless, Delirium's replacement of realist brutality with vivid glimpses into the schizoid visual field of a psychopathic killer makes the film a refreshing take on the slasher/erotic thriller.

Black Christmas (1974)

This review of Black Christmas (1974) has two theses. The first thesis runs thus: despite the tendency among reviewers to classify Black Christmas as a "forerunner" of the slasher, I would argue that it is a slasher—and a good one at that. The second thesis of this review doubles as a spoiler alert: there are some slashers in which the killer is never revealed, and there are some in which the killer's motivation is never explained; Black Christmas succeeds because it combines both of these elements.

Black Christmas is about a killer-on-the-loose who has narrowed his focus to a sorority house, harassing its denizens via obscene phone calls. We meet among the sorority sisters a pre-Superman Margot Kidder and a pre-SCTV Andrea Martin. Playing the hardboiled detective is John Saxon, whose presence has never been a detriment to a horror movie. The film was made in Canada but is set in the United States, and the ubiquity of American flags among people pronouncing “about” like “a-boot” should annoy viewers on both sides of the border. Indeed, Black Christmas takes patience. The film is not fast-paced and streamlined like later slashers. Yet a body count gradually piles up, slowly but surely, with kills that would not look out of place in slashers of the late 70s and early 80s. Considering the fluidity (and ludicrousness) of genre criteria, it is difficult to speculate on the originary point of any given genre, but there’s a good case for Black Christmas being the singular ur-slasher. (Though Texas Chain Saw Massacre saw a limited release two months before Black Christmas, that film is less a pure slasher than it is a perfect celluloid distillation of America.) Preceding the slasher cycle that commenced in the late 70s, Black Christmas is a film years ahead of its time. That said, Black Christmas is in alignment with horrors present from time immemorial: the fear of a deranged man taking out aggressions on a plurality of people, especially women, with a bladed weapon might just be transhistorical.

The chief merit of Black Christmas is its ending. There are, of course, a number of sub-types of slasher films: In some, the killer is killed (his resurrection in sequels notwithstanding), while in others the killer escapes. In some, we find out why the killer did what he did, and it others, the killer's motivation is never explained. In some slashers, we know the killer from the outset, while in others, in the whodunit fashion, we learn who did it at the end, often via an unmasking. In some, however, the killer is never revealed. Such is the case in Black Christmas. Moreover, in Black Christmas, the killer escapes. We never find of who did it or why (though we suspect, in the late-Freudian mode of the early 70s, that it has something to do with a maternal and/or pubescent sexual trauma). In the end, Black Christmas offers us with nothing in the way of answers. We are left with pure speculation. Through some overdubbed laughter just before the credits, there is a strong suggestion that the killer is still in the attic, possibly metaphorically but more likely literally. This is underscored by the ringing phone to which the credits roll. Either way, the killer and the threat of sexualized violence he personifies will continue to haunt the survivor (played by Olivia Hussey). By not being killed, the killer takes on what novelist Nancy Wayson Dinan has called, in the context of missing persons, a “hyper-appearance.” It's a "conspicuous sort of absence"—the most conspicuous variety, I would suggest. Whether he is in the attic or not, the unrevealed, uncaptured killer in Black Christmas takes on an omnipresence, and so while the immediate terror of the predator has started to subside, a deeper horror has begun to set in, and it will never go away. That killer, and the gendered violence he embodies and iterates, will persist like that ringing phone; frustrated sexuality, as any incel will testify, cannot go unanswered. As Dinan explains, the conspicuous absence of hyper-appearance is “the kind a person can never ignore”—this is just the sort of timeless, violent, sexualized horror that Black Christmas realizes at its finish by not revealing the killer. This killer has disappeared, but he's not gone—in fact, he's now potentially everywhere. There is no closure, only an open wound, and this is the punctum of Black Christmas. The audience members have themselves been effectively slashed. The mysterious, deranged stranger will perpetually fill that gaping rent. Like the survivors in the sorority, he will continually be with us, too. On account of this repulsive timelessness, one of the first slashers ever made happens to be one of the best.

Perhaps this is why Black Christmas has earned not one but two remakes. These later Black Christmases stand as abject failures, though, as they are purely products of their times (2006 and 2019); as such, whatever limited frights they offer are historically bound. The horror of the 1974 original is timeless and expansive, ever-burgeoning, and it does not end at the conclusion of the movie. There is more horror in questions than in answers.

Lake Upsilon Legends

There was a story you used to hear in the Lake Upsilon area in northern North Dakota, right by the borderland with Canada. There was a family man named Crosley, very religious and very well-employed down in Minot. He owned a summer cottage along the shores of Lake Upsilon. His wife and three daughters would go there for the summer months, and he would come up to visit them on weekends. One night two boys snuck away from a camp that used to be in operation across the lake. Crosley's youngest daughter, Suzanne, was a bit of a tart, and she invited them into her room. You could hear the sexy ruckus across the lake. When Crosley got word that his daughter had been carrying on like a harlot, as he called it, he sent her into the woods. He said he wouldn’t take her back until she repented. She never did come home, but she wasn’t the only one. Two weeks later one of the two boys was found near the lake strangled to death. There was talk of closing up the camp early, but the owner wouldn't follow through. They were going to send the other boy back home, but they didn’t do that either. Sure enough, on the last day of camp, they found him dead in his room. Nobody else heard it happen, but he’d been strangled, and not by hands. There were big black bruises around his throat. The next year they opened the camp again like nothing happened. One night at about three in the morning, one of the counselors was awakened by gurgling sounds. He turned on his flashlight in the direction of the screams and saw his bunkmate being choked to death. There, with legs scissored over his throat, was a teenage girl who had once been very pretty but had since gone feral. Caught in the light, she ran from the bunkhouse and disappeared into the woods. The police were called, and they searched around in the woods. They called out for the girl to surrender, and eventually they got a response—crazed giggling. It bubbled up now and then until dawn broke. The police eventually gave up, but that giggling can still be heard in the woods around Lake Upsilon. And people have reported seeing a pretty girl, and later on a beautiful woman, around the shores of Lake Upsilon. She looks younger than her age. Every so often, someone goes missing around those parts. They have bruises on their necks like they’ve been strangled by a strong pair of thighs. Some say Suzy Scissors is still living in the woods, right at the fork in the Y for which Lake Upsilon is named. People liked to tell that one around the campfire at the lake. Who knows if it’s true? Around Lake Upsilon, you might wake up in the night. Maybe it’s the loons, but you could swear you heard a girlish giggle moving across that lake.