There are reasons why the 2009 Australian horror film The Beloved was a box office flop, only recouping $358,399 of its $4 million budget. It could be due to the dissonance between marketing and product. People may have gone into this film expecting a straightforward teen horror film à la Prom Given the young cast and the prom aesthetic, it is anything but that. Not to mention that Australian horror once again made its grand entrance with Wolf Creek In 2005, it didn’t really carry over into other movies. (Hopefully that will change with last year’s home run Talk to me.) That’s a pity, because The Beloved proves once again that the quality of a film does not depend on the box office results and that, contrary to popular belief, the 2000s were a great decade for horror movies if you know where to look.

The director’s film debut Sean Byrnethis film is viciously cruel, crazy and brilliant. A young man named Brent (Xavier Samuel), already struggling with a mixture of grief and guilt, is forced to fight for survival after being kidnapped by the even more problematic Lola (Robin McLeavy) and her father (John Brumpton) after he rejected her marriage proposal. It is undoubtedly a torture horror film that came out at the tail end of the trend when criticism of it was mounting. It is not a nice film; it is vicious and graphic, an unpleasant sight for those who have no experience of more intense horror films. This, as with Wolf Creek And Snow City, is something the Land Down Under really does – it makes the audience fidget in their seats.

The Beloved

Release date

4 November 2010

director

Sean Byrne

Duration

84 minutes

Main genre

crime

Authors

Sean Byrne

slogan

Prom can be torture.

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The Loved Ones is sadism with style

Like all the best splatter films,The Beloved is so much more than just seeing people suffer. In some ways, it has a lot in common with the films that have become legendary in the slaughterhouse genre. It has a solid sense of style and a sick sense of humor that fits it perfectly with Rob Zombie‘S The Devil’s Outcasts And House of 1000 Corpses from the same decade, or even the legends like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This is especially true because of the situation our protagonist is thrust into: she’s trapped in a house with a family of lunatics. Lola is an iconic horror villain, with her bright pink ball gown that keeps getting more and more blood-stained, a novelty paper crown on top, and that empty look in her eyes. She’s like Carrie, but with less sympathy and more madness, someone deeply emotionally stunted, lost in a fantasy of princes and castles that her father further turns into violence. This is also reflected in their form of torture, which involves glitter seeping into wounds, dancing with a boy nailed to the ground, and carving love hearts into their chests.

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Escalating violence everywhere The Beloved this is of utmost importance in the torture genre, as things start off badly and get worse as the film progresses. You see the extent of Lola and her father’s crimes; it’s clear that many have gone through the same torments in search of Lola’s “Prince Charming”. Although the prom is not a cultural landmark in Australia like it is in America, The Beloved is the best prom horror movie since Carrie. It serves as a fitting backdrop for the film – the ideas of love and its depravity – and the transformation of festivities into something terrifying. It is also quintessentially Australian, as much of the action takes place on these deserted back roads where no one is looking for you, and the soundtrack is full of Australian bands and artists such as Kasey Chambers And Little Red. The scene where Lola flips through her little girl’s scrapbook to Chambers’ “Not Pretty Enough” as the pages slowly dissolve to reveal scenes of depraved obsession is a solid short horror film in and of itself.

The Heart of Lovers is Brent’s journey

Another hallmark of a great splatter film is the beating heart in the middle, and this is a groundbreaking inversion of The Final Girl.It’s Brent’s journey of survival. We begin the film with Brent and his father being involved in a car accident, accidentally caused by Lola, which kills the latter. Brent blames himself for this, which plunges him into a dark phase of self-harm and suicidal thoughts, alienating him from his mother and girlfriend. The kidnapping itself occurs immediately after Brent attempts to take his own life, and as he finds himself in an even more serious life-or-death situation, he has to go to a deep, thoughtless place to survive.

There is something very The pit and the pendulum about Brent’s journey, where he relies entirely on himself to get out alive. The most important thing is that he is not just meat for the slaughterhouse, but a nice boy who has done nothing to deserve this. He rejects Lola because he already has a girlfriend, and he does so gently and without mockery. He has a mother who loves him and friends who wish him well. Byrne wants the audience to empathize with this character, and it works with a very convincing performance from Xavier Samuel. You want to see him look deep within himself and find the instinct to live that he lost through a very real and traumatizing tragedy.

There are many parts of The Beloved that separate it from what critics call “torture porn” and make it a true splatter classic that deserves a second look, but the most important one is this: you want to see Brent win, and he does. Despite the blood, the drills in the head, and the bleach on the neck, there’s still something so triumphant about watching someone struggle, fight, and then come home with the scars to prove it.

The Beloved can be rented from Amazon.

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