Emma Gilbert
Random Acts of Violence is a 2019 horror film directed and co-written by popular dragon-trainer Jay Baruchel. It follows a comic book writer named Todd who, accompanied by his girlfriend and business partners, embarks on a press tour for the final issue of his series Slasherman. It is vibrant, confrontational, brutal, and in my eyes, truly something special.
Its themes are nebulous and uncomfortable, regarding the ethics of fictitious horror based on true events, the concept of creators’ responsibility, and morality when it comes to depictions of extreme violence (especially against women). Where is the line when we’re creating stories with such grotesque imagery and ideas? When does fascination turn to fetishization? The movie ends up depicting these questions as rather open-ended, offering a handful of perspectives but no real conclusions. I can tell you right now, we’re not going to find any universal answers.
As someone who was assigned female at birth and identifies mostly as a woman, when should I start finding depictions of brutalized women created by men alarming? Titles like Terrifier and Ichi the Killer come to mind, both of which I adore—in fact, their brutality is part of what I like so much about them. Is it questionable, or is it just a bunch of effects? What do I see, or not see, in these depictions that results in me being so generally indifferent? I’m not sure I’ll find a definitive answer to these questions, either.
These are rough conversations that we seem to keep having in little blips here and there throughout history, what is and isn’t okay in fiction. Despite my admittance of there being no proper verdict, I hope you’ll humor me anyway by accompanying me on this exploration of the themes in this particular film.
“There can be no accidents without there first being a design.”
Slasherman is explained to have been inspired by a “real” serial killer (credited as “The Man”) who was best known for arranging his victims’ battered bodies into his version of art (think The House That Jack Built). Todd’s illustrations and ideas drawn from The Man’s crimes are graphic, cruel, and harbor what he and his adoring fans view as a grotesque beauty.
He addresses the character of Slasherman as his protagonist; a “special character,” one to be handled with care and grace. It’s easy to tell when watching that this is framed as peculiar, what with this character being based on a real murderer, but it becomes apparent (at least to me) that Todd thinks of Slasherman as being an entity all his own. Slasherman wouldn’t exist without The Man, but perhaps it can exist outside of him, a separate exploration of depravity that simply uses a real event as its basis. Even so, the use of a real person as a building block in the creation of an evil character remains a delicate job no matter how you go about it. It’s hard—impossible even—to say what the most appropriate way to make a villain based on an actual human being is. Perhaps the best way is to simply not make such things at all—but we all know that’s never going to happen.
Aside from the real-life inspiration aspect of the story, Todd’s illustrations are, as I stated, graphic, and women frequently appear on the receiving end. Tied up, sewn together, torn apart, brutalized in peculiar fashions, imagined based around the acts of a deranged stranger. What does this say about Todd, as a creator and a person? I think, not necessarily anything. We as horror fans can easily say, without hesitation, that none of us condone murder, torture, or anything of the like. Enjoyment of horror imagery doesn’t equate to justification (the same can be said about any form of media). Horror creators and consumers do not have anything inherently wrong with them for enjoying what they do, no matter how nasty. Yet sometimes we still wonder, especially when faced with horror like Random Acts presents: what kind of brain is comfortable with this?
“The closer you look at anything, the less you will see.”
At the beginning of the team’s road trip, Todd drops in for a guest appearance on a radio show. The host eases the interview into putting him on the spot by revealing they knew one of The Man’s victims when they were a child. They criticize him openly, and Todd stumbles over himself, unsure of how to regain some control over the situation. How are you supposed to respond when someone tells you you’re profiting off of their childhood friend’s murderer, while you’re referring to that character as a “protagonist”? You’re rendered powerless and silent, even if you’re used to such questioning of your morality, which Todd certainly is.
Back at the team’s chosen motel, an argument brews between him and his girlfriend. While she’s telling him about a good development in the creation of her own story (based on the same murders), he gets defensive, the scathing interview still fresh in his mind. She isn’t attacking him, but by talking about her project, one of sympathetic nature toward his muse’s victims, he can’t help but consider his own story and what it means. This kind of thinking is obviously uncomfortable for him as a successful creator, so naturally, he’s averse to taking a step back. Todd may not condone the murders of The Man or even his character (he doesn’t), but that doesn’t stop him, or any of us, from wondering what effects such work may have on those around us; those involved in the real story, strangers who happen to become fans, and even ourselves. We don’t want to open ourselves up to these concepts, so we run away, reject them.
At Todd’s first comic shop signing, one fan approaches him with a small model based around his story—what appears to be a trailer, inside of which are various figurines of women being tortured. They tell him something along the lines of, “Slasherman is my life, like my religion.” This comes not only after the interrogative interview, but after the team came across a horrific display on the drive to the signing.
There had been a small cluster of murders the previous night, along the same highway The Man committed his killings, the victims tied into a pose mimicking a panel from Slasherman. Todd’s response to seeing the fan-made model is therefore through raw eyes. While he praises the artist for their creation, we can tell it’s through stricken nerves. Whoever enacted those vile murders, do they feel the same way about his comic as this fan?
A bit further down the storyline, the main crew is in a police station being questioned about the grisly death of their fourth member. The woman questioning Todd is blatantly critical of his work and considers it obscene. She shows him images from the comic, which again mirrors the actual murder of his friend. He is shaken, grappling with what his role might be in all of this, his defensive nature finally beginning to crumble. His girlfriend points the finger at him as well, stating that he “fetishizes” the violence he depicts, and this time, he doesn’t have a comeback. Maybe it’s not his fetish, only his art, but it’s somebody’s twisted fantasy, and clearly someone has found it to be quite inspirational.
The implied question here is: is it his fault? If you’re asking me (which I assume you are because I’m sitting alone in a draft document and I can’t hear you), no, it’s not. To be quite frank I don’t see how it can be. It was obviously not his intent to inspire copycat murders; the wide-eyed look of terror he displays throughout the movie says it all. When is it ever a creator’s intent to inspire murder? But, still; just how responsible is he for how others perceive his story’s message if there even is one?
He created that art—that art that can be viewed as fetishistic and wrong, despite his simple intent to explore depravity through a figure in his world’s history. Should such art even exist under any circumstance, if it provides a haven to disturbed individuals who feel the content enables their vile innermost thoughts? When tragedies do happen as a result, where do we direct the blame? Do we point to the inspiration, or to the killers who make the decision to act?
And the questions don’t stop there. Regardless of whether there are copycat murders or not, there are still the victims and their families to consider when questioning the ethics of Slasherman and similar works. I’m not in their shoes, don’t know, and will probably never know what it’s like to see the killer of your loved one used as inspiration for a depraved comic series.
But someone does.
“Real art is born of truth.”
As we make our way toward the end of the film, we’re made to know something that gives the story a completely new angle. Todd has been keeping a secret from everyone, the audience included, and it’s that he is one of The Man’s victims—the only surviving one, never physically hurt, but forced to watch the murder of his mother one winter’s night at the hands of our titular killer.
This turns the story into one of coping with tragedy. As we can now see, Todd has taken his memories of The Man, alongside his knowledge of his other killings, and turned them into art. Now we understand that all those grisly depictions, the way he talks about Slasherman as a character, and the beauty he sees in the bloodshed, it was all to cope with unimaginable trauma.
But now the question becomes: is that healthy? Is it good to indulge in work relating so closely to the cruel loss of your mother? Is it safe to take inspiration from her killer, to make art so similar to that of The Man? I have one answer to this—I don’t know. I can’t. Who am I to judge how one copes with such a heartbreaking event, whether the “one” in question is fictional or real? I have no reference points in my own life, nothing even remotely close to Todd’s past, and I’m no mental health professional. I have no real right to criticize.
At first, I felt this new angle derailed the original commentary, but after thinking on it, I feel both perspectives work. Not only does Todd grapple with his horrific childhood trauma, but by keeping it secret he presents himself and his work as something ulterior to what he’s actually about. He opens himself up to criticism that forces him to reexamine himself and his intentions in ways he might not have if he’d been honest. If he’d told the truth, his critics might be more understanding.
But even if he had been upfront, would that have stopped all the backlash? Again, he isn’t the only person involved in The Man’s crimes. He might find Slasherman to be a healing creative process, but what about the families of the other victims? Have they any right to judge how he copes with the same tragedy they face, or is he wrong for turning his mother’s murderer into the main character in a fictional tale?
When Todd finds himself at the end of his story, all of his loved ones dead and gone, he is at last faced with the killer; The Man himself. He explains to Todd that his comic granted him peace of mind, because his “work” was being immortalized and celebrated, “kept alive.” Because of this, he felt no need to kill—until, of course, the comic began its closing chapters. So, if only to provide poor writers-blocked Todd with inspiration, he embarked on another spree.
The Man then asks for a favor, one final request before allowing himself to be killed; that Todd makes these final brutal killings the basis for the end of Slasherman’s story, what he views as his story. But it’s not his—it’s Todd’s, and in a final act of vengeance, he vocally rejects the request, leaving the body of his lifelong tormentor to burn alongside his childhood home.
That’s where the film leaves us, never to know what ultimately becomes of our leading man, and never giving us any answers to its many questions of morality and ethics in fiction. It only visualizes these concerns surrounding brutal horror media, leaving people like me no choice but to create messy analyses such as this.
“There can be no beginning without an end.”
This brings us to the part where I give a summary of my personal conclusions or lack thereof. I’ve already stated that I think the murders are in no way Todd’s fault and that I can’t judge him for how he chooses to cope with his trauma. I also don’t believe he can truly be blamed for anyone’s perception of his work, because no matter what, people will see what they see. He is not to blame for The Man viewing his story as a love letter—that drive to find an excuse to kill was all in the grisly killer’s brain, and it was going to be there with or without Slasherman. I believe blame can only truly be directed toward the one who makes the choice to act.
However, if you take a look at this piece I wrote on mental illness in horror films, you’ll notice I comment on a specific responsibility that I believe should be embraced by creators when it comes to the terminology they use in and when speaking about their work. For example, using the name of a real mental condition to describe your movie killer is arguably a bad idea. By that logic, I can call into question Todd’s use of the word “protagonist” to describe Slasherman. While he states that he doesn’t mean it in the “traditional” sense, the term still brings a certain archetype to mind; one that certainly doesn’t describe Slasherman. When you are talking about your characters who are inherently evil and want to ensure your audience perceives them as such (and not, let’s say, a dark messiah, cough Joker cough), it might do you well to use more condemning terminology.
On the other hand, I also believe we should all be more responsible for ourselves and how we intake information presented to us. As we’ve observed over time, there is an extreme lack of critical thinking in the general population. So, creators should take caution in the terminology they used, but we should also take into account that not everything we see or hear should be taken seriously. I think these two things can and should coexist because while many of us are capable of consciously making ourselves take a step back to reflect, I know some people just aren’t going to get there, and need a little shove. But even then, some viewers will always be out of our control, an unfortunate fact I’ll expand on in a few paragraphs.
Now, what of the fans? Well, as I’ve made clear, I’m aware that horror lovers aren’t inherently dangerous, and shouldn’t be viewed as such. That being said, I do sometimes wonder what it means that I, a female-presenting person, don’t mind excessive depictions of violence against women. I also wonder what it could say about the creators of such depictions, especially if they are men. But I still love Terrifier, and if Slasherman were real, I’d probably love that, too. Maybe I’m just numb, maybe it’s internalized misogyny, or maybe there’s truly nothing wrong with it because it’s all fake. I have no doubt I’ll still be asking myself these questions later in life.
One last examination: Because Todd is basing his comic off of someone who hurt him directly, someone he met, I’m reminded of works like My Friend Dahmer. When it comes to things like that, reflections from people in the pasts of real killers, there still stands the question if it’s right to make films and novels about them. Should we keep the memories alive for the sake of art and knowledge, or is it best to let these people vanish into the crevices of history? This is another one of those questions that leaves me nothing short of stumped, but it remains interesting nonetheless.
So, where does this all leave us? I said the questions would yield no definitive answers, and I was right, but above all else, they were hard. It’s hard to have these conversations that question the very existence of things I, and I’m sure many of you, love. We don’t want to believe treasuring these bloody stories makes us questionable human beings, nor do we want to believe it’s wrong to create them in the first place. It’s hard to think about, and it’s hard when something doesn’t have a perfect answer; how many things do have perfect answers, anyway?
I don’t have the end-all-be-all conclusion I’d like to, but here’s this: a lot of the time, movies are very much misunderstood by a large chunk of their fanbases. But regardless, they connect to it, even if it’s not at all in relation to what the creators had in mind (think Fight Club). They see things the way they do because of who they are, their individual paths in life, and in their worlds, they’re not wrong—in fact, they’re right. They’re right because they’re using their eyes and intaking a piece of art in a way entirely special to them. They’re right because they are seeing artful depictions of life through the lens of their own experience. Even if these perceptions lead someone down a dark path, it cannot be the fault of the media they consumed. The responsibility for human actions lays entirely within the human, not some story. They unlocked something within themselves that was already there.
Fiction is eternal, boundless, everything, and nothing at the same time. How anyone should interpret it is, at the end of the day, completely and utterly out of our control. You cannot intake it wrong, but you can do something wrong because of how you read it. Perhaps that is the real horror of Random Acts of Violence.
