Freeway

The film we look at this week, Matthew Bright's Freeway, is a film which like Cat People both plays with and against multiple genre conventions. Like Cat People, Freeway is part horror film (it could even be said to essentially share the same monster---the werewolf). It also has, as several critics have pointed out, "one foot in the grind house and one in the art house." Director Bright himself labeled the film an "artsploitation" movie: marrying the over-the-top action, sex and violence of exploitation films with an astutely feminist re-telling of the fairy tale "Little Red Riding Hood."

For our purposes, we should look for the ways the film uses/subverts genre convention. Some things to think about while watching are the conventional relationship between the horror film monster and "his" victim, the usual "'punishment" of sexuality in horror/slasher films, the violence for violence's sake code of exploitation films, the handling of female characters in exploitation/splatter films, realistic vs. cartoon violence, and the many ways this film changes and even defies these "rules."

As even this cursory list implies, horror and exploitation films have a specific way of treating gender and sexuality---maybe one could go so far as to say that's what they're always really about at their red, bloody core. And more than just the iconic use of the colour red links these genres to the venerable fairytale/children's story, "Little Red Riding Hood." To examine Freeway's rewriting of that narrative, we first need to review the story as it develops from folk tale to children's story.