13 Nights of Shocktober: The Loved Ones

by A. J.

This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month-long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. There are a lot of horror movies out there, but as a genre, horror is still looked down upon by some mainstream critics and moviegoers. It doesn’t help that, admittedly, there are so few quality horror movies made but, like comedy, it’s a very difficult and subjective genre. So, in the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some recommendations for scary movies to help you celebrate Shocktober.

Night 8: "Will you go to the dance with me?" The Loved Ones

Released in 2009 from Australia, The Loved Ones is the best horror films I’ve seen in recent years. The story is simple: a psychotic teenage girl kidnaps the boy that turned down her invitation to the school dance. The execution by first time director Sean Byrne is excellent. It would be easy to describe The Loved Ones as a torture porn movie, but it would also be wrong. In the deplorable torture porn genre the sadistic acts of torture and the gruesome, gory effects are the main event, and everything else (characters, plot, and motivation) is superfluous. Spectacle becomes the focus instead of adding to the impact of the narrative. Torture happens just to show you gore and the result is not a movie, but a geek show, one with a hopeless feeling of dread. The Loved Ones has a sense of dread, but it never feels hopeless. It is a tense, disquieting horror film that is also brutally violent. 

This movie shows us two bad dates, one far more nightmarish than the other. Brent is a quiet, brooding teenager in a rural Australian town. He’s trying to come to terms with the death of his father who died in a car accident while Brent was driving. His mother is hesitant to let him go to the school dance because his girlfriend, Holly, will be driving. A shy looking girl named Lola asks Brent to the dance. He says no, politely, he’s already going with Holly. Brent’s extroverted friend Jamie, asks the pretty but intimidating Goth girl Mia to the dance; she says yes. Before Brent can even go the dance, however, he is abducted. He wakes up bound to a chair and what follows is the date from hell. He is tortured by Lola, now referred to only as Princess, and her Daddy. Yes, Princess Lola uses that power drill.

Robin McLeavy is superb and memorable as the cute, but psychotic and sadistic, Lola/Princess. She listens to the angst filled ballad Not Pretty Enough by Kasey Chambers like it is her anthem. That pop song juxtaposed with scenes of psychotic violence brings to mind Patrick Bateman butchering a victim to the Huey Lewis and the News song Hip to be a Square in American Psycho. John Brumpton as Lola’s subservient father, referred to only as Daddy, is at once equally meek and sadistic. The dinner scene with all of them around the table, including Bright Eyes (presumably Lola’s lobotomized mother), is heavily influenced by Texas Chainsaw Massacre in that the horror comes from the bizarre nature of this family.

Princess and Daddy are without a doubt the stars of this movie, but they are not the protagonists. We’re never rooting for them or for the next round of bizarre torture Brent must endure. We’re always with Brent looking for a method of escape, anxious about how and when Holly will figure out where he is being held, but The Loved Ones is not all torture and psychotic family members. It also has a sense of humor. We get unnerving humor in the scenes with Princess. We get awkward humor in scenes of Jaime on his much more traditional bad date with Mia. Jaime stumbles as he tries to be suave and doesn’t know how to handle his disinterested date, who gets so stoned she is staggering by the end of the night. Those scenes break up the tension of Brent’s storyline and give us a break from the violence and torture Princess is inflicting on him. Those scenes also expand the world of this film from a house of horrors to a real place populated by normal people.

The Loved Ones does take one very dark turn when Brent is thrown into the cellar which has a pile of bones amid other horrors. Even with the cellar scene and all of the blood and torture this movie is nowhere close to the gruesome gore of movies like Saw and Hostel. The Loved Ones transcends the trappings of psycho killer movies and gory spectacle to become a true horror film; one that unsettles, scares, and satisfies.