Blood, sweat and fears

>> Local filmmakers Karim Hussain and Mitch Davis unleash their twisted Subconscious Cruelty

by MATTHEW HAYS

Who would have thought that our nation's capital could be responsible for this?

Ottawa gets blamed for many things, but a low-budget horror movie filled with genital mutilation, bloody infanticide and people having sex with the earth must be a first. And here it is: Subconscious Cruelty, brought to you by local film freaks Karim Hussain (who wrote and directed) and Mitch Davis (who produced), is an all-out, epic assault on the senses, a bizarre anthology of three tales that are only very loosely connected. And indeed, Hussain attributes a good chunk of the spirit of his film to an upbringing in "that evil and repressed" city of Ottawa.

Though the film is opening Easter weekend, no one is going to mistake this for a traditional family movie. Full of frantic, chaotic and horrific images, Subconscious Cruelty is certainly a film that defies easy description. In their own press material, the filmmakers have called it "a surrealistic, experimental anthology film structured like a fever dream... broken up into fragmented episodes that deal with common themes: religion, creativity, familial politics, perversion and the raw, horrific honesty of the human being."

And that's a niced-down version of the events that unfold. For starters, the film introduces us to a young man who's sexually obsessed with his sister, who's pregnant. He envisions sexually violating her and ultimately murders her baby directly after she gives birth (he holds the baby corpse up so that blood spatters all over her face). Then, in the next segment, there are a bunch of hippies who lie naked in the countryside, humping the earth. Finally, a businessman confronts questions of his existence while masturbating in front of porn videos. Interspersed along the way are images of a penis being ripped apart, a guy going down on a woman who has a knife for a penis and a woman urinating on Christ. Quick! Call grandma! It's movie time!

Infamous freakery

Those in tune with local film gossip have been waiting for Hussain's vision to hit the big screen for a long time. Even before its release, the stories surrounding the making of Subconscious Cruelty have already elevated it to a virtual legendary status, right up there with Marlon Brando refusing to wear pants on the set of The Score to the neverending heroin-induced tribulations of Shirley Pimple.

The film arrives some six years after it began, and though both Hussain and Davis maintain they're proud of the feature, they acknowledge that it does now seem somewhat dated and naive. Equal parts exploitation movie and art film, the filmmakers have drawn heavily on Alejandro Jodorowsky, the cult director behind such bizarre midnight movies as El Topo and Dusan Makavejev, the man behind the unforgettable W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism. Also cited high on their list of influences are Ken Russell, early David Lynch and Mario Bava. The film gets a wee bit too pretentious at times--the opening line of voiceover is "Reality... it traps us in a monotonous, deadening cycle"--but Subconscious Cruelty does boast some outrageous imagery, much of which will leave an indelible impression upon audiences. (My personal fave: three women ripping apart a guy playing Christ and then gobbling up the pieces of him.)

Pubic dreams

"When I wrote the film in the early '90s, it was quite an intense time," explains Hussain. "Bush, the original, was President and the Christian Right was really in control. It was a time of antagonism and nihilism for youth, and I was a part of that at 19. It's a mirror reflection of the time we were in. Heroin was back and there was a renewed interest in underground art. The film is a transcription of my dreams and marks the end of my puberty."

What with so much exploding genitalia and an intensely uneasy depiction of the gender divide, much of the film's imagery begs the question: does Hussain have some mommy issues? "Actually, I love my mother very dearly. It's quite an anti-misogynist movie. Femininity is one of the leading aspects of the movie. The men don't understand the women--that's one of the horrific aspects. The film looks at humanity like maggots from a distance. Part of that is a byproduct of growing up in Ottawa, which was a very conservative environment."

What Hussain and Davis have been intent on doing is eliciting a response--any response. "The movie camera is a lovely little weapon," says Hussain. "With this movie I thought of it as a dream machine gun." And Hussain and Davis confirm what low-budget filmmakers have reported about the no-budget experience. (They estimate that Cruelty cost approximately $100,000.) "In a sense, that made us lucky," says Hussain. "We were able to put anything in the film without fear of bankruptcy."

Hussain does say the experience of "capturing my dreams in chemicals" turned out to be very, very cathartic. "It was amazing therapy and hopefully it will be for the audience as well. Go to it with an open mind and expect to release some liquids while doing it."

The act of creating Subconscious Cruelty may not have proven quite so therapeutic for the actors. These troopers, paid nothing or next to nothing, were made to feign all sorts of bizarre sex and violence for the cameras. Hussain recalls enticing a few of them to do the nude scene in which the hippies do the nasty with the earth. "Just to show them how, and that I was willing too, I took off all my clothes and ran around and rubbed my balls into the grass. It was cold and the grass was frosty--there was a bit of a panic later as we couldn't find our clothes."

Davis recounts that some pulled out of the project and that their timing wasn't always so considerate. "We were on our soundstage, ready to do the scene where the women devour Christ," he says. "An actress was very cool with it, but then her boyfriend read the shot list and said if she did the scene, he'd break up with her. We found a replacement, which was lucky, because she was the one who disembowels Christ and then masturbates him with his entrails."

Davis says many of the actors have probably developed cold feet since shooting various sequences years ago. "Thank god we have signed release forms!" (The entire story of assembling Cruelty is told in a feature-length documentary, A Subconscious Cruelty Christmas, to be included on the DVD version of the film.)

Subconscious demographic

Certainly, who or what will constitute an audience for Subconscious Cruelty remains a good question. Hussain and Davis acknowledge the dilemma: when they made the film, there was a midnight movie circuit, something which has since--for the most part--dried up. And though Cruelty has many undeniably impressive special effects which are bound to please horror buffs, many of those same genre fans may be put off by the film's obtuse narrative. Still, getting audiences together to appreciate the off-kilter is a specialty of these two. Since the second year of Montreal's Fantasia Film Festival in '97, both have served as key programmers in that wildly successful film event. Davis, too, has been a late-night cult programmer at the city's anglo rep house, Cinéma du Parc, for the past two years, drawing crowds with his perverse view of cinema. (Thanks to Davis, I was able to see The Poseidon Adventure on the big screen for the first time since I was nine.)

"I think people will appreciate this, at least people who recall when horror movies were brave," says Davis. "We've thought of this as a brand of cultural terrorism, of a way to terrify and alienate audiences. Film has become such a passive experience. Too many movies out there are neither good nor bad. They're just there. Even if you fucking hate Subconscious Cruelty, you won't forget it." And Davis has considered the tricky demographic situation he and the project face. "Remember, our budget is at around $100,000. Even if we alienate 50 per cent of the horror crowd and 90 per cent of the mainstream crowd, we'll still be ahead of the game."

Davis also says that some midnight movies have maintained their allure to filmgoers largely due to their unavailability. "El Topo still draws crowds at repertory cinemas across North America. That's because the film is very rare and not available on video. We're not going to release the Subconscious Cruelty video and DVD in North America for at least two years."

And Davis and Hussain understand the history of Canadian cinema--especially horror cinema--throughout which our nation's film critics have tended to eat their own (that is, until the films get positive response from foreign critics). They know full well they will probably get "savaged" by some local types, so they've intentionally launched the film at festivals in Europe, where it's elicited very strong responses (from standing ovations to one person who fainted) everywhere from Brussels to Stockholm--thereby establishing that all-important buzz.

Yep, that wacky, crazy continent that has elevated everything from Jerry Lewis to dwarf porn to the level of high art is also lapping up Subconscious Cruelty. Davis has already secured DVD and video sales of the film in several regions, including Spain and Portugal.

"Wherever people are crying, sobbing, nauseous or fainting, we're happy," says Davis, whose own short, Divided Into Zero, has been screening with Cruelty at fests worldwide. "We made this to challenge the world," adds Hussain. "Sometimes when you tell the world to fuck off, the world tells you, 'Fuck you' back. So far crowds have responded as a collective masochist. Subconsious Cruelty may be something you hate--but you'll hate it with passion."

Subconscious Cruelty opens Friday, April 13