[Pride 2022] Out of Body Decay in High Tension

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The cinematic refuge Alexandre Aja has built over two decades is laden with carnage. In it, he houses characters who have been failed by their immediate social realities and even their own bodies. There is not a singular moral framework to affirm the actions of individuals plunged into survival. Blood tends to flow in whatever shape his stories take. Aja, if anything, is a master at exposing the underlying damage in a single person or unit. Watching characters in his films undergo physical and psychological decay carries with it a morbid fascination. Central to the pessimistic nature of his best work is the act of treating a self-inflicted wound when bravado cannot function as a suture. But what does one do when the body rejects treatment? No other film in the director’s canon articulates this betrayal more effectively than High Tension.

When we meet our protagonist Marie (Cécile de France), it is through a series of bruises and cuts. The camera levitates over her running through a forest in a surreal visualization of the future. Following this dream, Marie wakes up in a car next to her friend Alex (Maïwenn) and retells exactly what we’ve just seen. “It was me running after me,” she says. From here, a viewer can expect that everything unfolding from Marie’s perspective is unreliable at best. As the film settles into its rural environment its sound design and score create a dread-inducing atmosphere, setting the stage for the infamous home invasion sequence. An ogreish trucker (seen earlier using a decapitated head for felatio) brutalizes everyone in Alex’s family home. The murders are unflinchingly gruesome and the film spares no soul, young or old.

Marie witnesses all of this in a somnambulist state as equally somber and detached music trails her. When Alex is kidnapped, Marie takes matters into her own hands and chases after the killer. It is a harrowing journey that bypasses assistance from police in order to deliver a proper beatdown. Then, Aja executes one of the most polarizing sleight of hand tricks in modern horror revealing that Marie has been the killer all along.

The chaos of High Tension grips its viewer and throttles them. Its harshness is made all the more disquieting by the aftermath of Marie’s killings. While the heroics of Marie’s chase and final confrontation are immediately nullified by the twist, Aja’s commitment to the character remains. The harm Marie has caused is irreversible, but the director gives her space to address her torments head-on. As Marie watches herself deteriorate, acts of self-preservation nonetheless persevere through moments of self-harm.

The film is clever in how it reverse-engineers the process of psychological fragmentation. It is an oppressive film because it is being told through her perspective. And whatever nameless thing is holding Marie hostage binds the viewer all the same. Contrary to how the ending was received at the time, kicking the chair from beneath its audience is a major coup that also thrusts the film into different sub-genre classifications. Specifically, by fusing Marie’s psychosis with elements of body horror. 

One of the primary concerns of body horror is a continuous struggle to put oneself back together in spite of decomposition. In High Tension, scenes are vignettes strung from a broken mind in an attempt to piece together Marie after a highly traumatic event. Per Aja himself, Marie is recalling a “fantasy of the end.” She is consumed from within, rather than in the flesh, and in more ways than one. Prior to unleashing hell, we know from several longing gazes that Marie is smitten by Alex.

Even as the two coldly discuss men and how to appeal to them, Marie is clearly only focused on her. The ideal of Alex is what drives Marie to break out of the timid demeanor and make every possible move to be the hero of the story. Queerness burns through the celluloid where its images reside. However, Marie’s interior also reveals a deep self-loathing and the need to expel it violently. Through the manifestation of a double, a narrative unfolds that is equal parts unhinged, savage, and nasty. Loaded as it is, the model of a tortured host and their murderous counterpart nonetheless has cultural precedent.

In her essay “Dr. Jekyll’s Closet,” Dr. Elaine Showalter explores the vehemently homophobic milieu in which Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel was released. In the late 1890s the UK passed the Labouchere Amendment, effectively written to prosecute gay men. Published concurrently, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde centers on an anguished man who drinks a potion to repress the impulses of an irreverent persona. He becomes consumed by it in the end. The novel has been canonized as a seminal text in “fin de siècle” queer literature, and Stevenson’s own contemporaries immediately caught onto the sublimated anxieties of a closeted gay man. The subtext of the work also fed into the current and dubious psychoanalytic tenets of a condition known as “hysteria”, characterized by stress and triggered by repressed traumas and (typically same-sex) erotic desire. 

Persons suffering from hysteria were said to exhibit signs of dissociation, often manifesting in multiple personalities. Having primarily been examined through the experience of cisgender women, the condition was considered as a possible diagnosis for cis men who were percieved to harbor feminine traits. The latter was controversial at the time but the division along gendered lines wasn’t just regressive. This diagnosis actively erased lesbian identities and was used to forcibly out gay men whom people were already suspicious of. A novel like Stevenson’s was groundbreaking in how it put a spotlight, however tacit, on the issue of sexuality and leading a double life. Subsequent film adaptations in the early-to-mid 20th century solidified this trope but would bury a crucial queer reading of the text. Where more delicate productions failed, however, exploitation cinema picked up the slack.

The Hammer production of Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde puts a wild spin on Stevenson’s novel by taking the age-old tale of a scientist seeking immortality and answering his hubris with “female hormones.” The persona of Sister Hyde quickly takes over the good doctor’s body, using sex to her advantage and extending her influence by murdering women and stealing their hormones. Sister Hyde is a progenitor of what Dr. Joelle Ruby Ryan calls the “she-male psycho”, as her monstrosity certainly falls in line with the anxieties cis males harbor about trans women.

On the one hand, the nature of an exploitation film is exactly as advertised. Sister Hyde is quite campy and leans hard on bio-essentialist characterization. But the impact of the character is so undeniable that Dr. Showalter herself argues that she is as close to Stevenson’s vision for the novel as has ever been achieved in cinema. And monstrous characters often afford viewers a more layered reading of queerness than are given credit for.

With all of this in mind, Marie’s angst falls in line with the cinematic tradition of transgressive queer monstrosity, which genre films are singularly well-suited to accommodate. It doesn’t require a lifetime of self-hatred to know what to look out for in a film like High Tension. But that feeling of discomfort, disillusionment, and most importantly, rage, is there regardless of how much was done on purpose. The rot inside of Marie is complex and her reverse-fragmentation is a bold move that allows for intimacy before Aja shocks the viewer with the twist.

Marie’s attraction to Alex is unrequited. In piecing together an idealized version of the events that transpired between them, there is a melancholic acceptance of the truth. She never adjusts the distance between her and Alex even in this fantasy. Yet she prolongs her yearning to an uncomfortable degree by visualizing herself peeking at Alex and repeating the phrase: “I won’t let anyone come between us anymore.”

The relationship Marie has with her split persona comes from a volatile disconnect from her own body. While it is clear that the film is entirely a projection, one scene that stands out as a trigger for the violence is the masturbation scene. Not only does it echo the wretched “headless head” moment from the beginning of the film, it marks the start of Marie’s dissociation. According to the director: “[Marie] is calling the killer…there is an underlying link between both events.” There’s no potion that Marie uses to conjure up her dark half. His presence is purely destructive and involuntary. And in some ways, his rampage is reminiscent of an intensely physical manifestation of dysphoria. Coming to this conclusion as a trans person was difficult. But the more I began to acknowledge my feelings on the film in place of a a straight dismissal, the deeper it burrowed into my psyche. 

At a certain point while I buckled down to watch this film again, I considered how my love for High Tension has evolved through the years. It was my entry point into extreme cinema as a younger horror fan and I have felt connected to Marie even before taking ownership of my identity. This is not a confession of a latent desire to go on a murder spree. I could have found a far less messy example to fit the roomy mold of body horror and decomposition for this essay. But as with Stevenson’s original novel and Sister Hyde, the specificity of Marie’s pain and how she navigates it gave me a visual language for my own baggage. One I had not seen portrayed so viscerally before. As a Jekyll/Hyde narrative told out of body and pieced together retroactively, the film operates on dream logic and threatens to fall apart completely. But it manages to hold on the strength of Marie’s character alone.

The film’s ending is a stinger that doesn’t provide any closure. Wrapping around to the present, things haven’t improved for anyone in the film. It closes on a reliably pessimistic note that characterizes many horror films about broken minds. Like the protagonist of Stevenson’s novel, and by extension Sister Hyde, the final image of Marie is pitiful. Her condition will likely not be taken as empowering, but one final theme seeded throughout the film that remains downplayed is the protagonist’s metamorphosis.

In the set-design, we see framed butterflies in the room where Marie sleeps. Reflections factor heavily as visual motifs, whether in mirrors or quietly in a closet (by now a heavy-handed metaphor). But metamorphosis is nothing without the painful molting process. Muse’s “New Born,” a song detailing the horrifying specifics of change under duress, plays right before the climax. There’s a distinct high Aja strives for as Marie nearly grinds the wheels off a 1972 Ford Gran Coupe that becomes a second-hand intoxication. Demoralizing and undignified as Marie’s fate may be, it’s a rare film that sticks it to an unsuspecting audience while conveying inner turmoil and catharsis in such a vivid fashion. 

High Tension isn’t a catch-all queer experience. It can be a down-right gross watch that catches you off-guard with its ugliness. For me, it fills the cinematic void for all the unwanted and intrusive thoughts I’ve ever had about my body and don’t yet have the means to rectify. And when decay happens out-of-body without any real “evidence” it can be a bitch to deal with. Sometimes you find a way to stay on top of the deadly trucker in your head. Sometimes he finds a way to sneak up behind you.

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