Sean Parker
DON’T Go in the Church
As far as I can tell, the diegetic Frederick North film Don’t Go in the Church is a bit of a spoof on the horror titles of the ’70s and ’80s era. Movies with jarring titles used to scare typical moviegoers and rental store patrons before getting to the theater or bringing the film home. Many video nasties had titles beginning with the word “Don’t,” some later losing the title for better posturing towards film censors who grouped the similar titles into the extreme horror genre. If this sounds vaguely familiar, the 2007 Grindhouse double feature of Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof also spoofed these titles by releasing a faux trailer directed by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg while momentarily featuring Nick Frost in a non-existent film called DON’T.
I have become a little obsessed with Censor, having viewed it multiple times since its release. As a result, I’ve also sought out some of the video nasty era “Don’t” films as well. I’ve noticed a couple of small connections in the movies I’ve seen so far. At the end of Don’t Go in the Woods, a baby is seen covered in blood playing with an axe, similar to how Enid ends up. Mentally speaking, she was a child with her innocence taken away and doomed to become a monster because of it. In Don’t Go in the House, Donny is traumatized by the death of his mother after returning home one night and decides to continue treating her as if she were still alive. His psychological issues don’t resolve themselves, however, as he brings home and tortures women with impure intentions.
In some ways, Donny is like Enid. After brutally murdering the women based on his mother’s cruel disciplinary tactics, he dresses them up in very reserved clothing and pretends they’re alive again and that he’s reformed them. Enid, as a censor, does this by cutting portions of films and allowing them a new life free from indecorous scenes.
Don’t Go in the Church muses on the nasties as well by amalgamating genre themes and tropes from these features, asking us not to venture into houses, the woods, or the basement. The warning proposes a triggering response to the allusion of something we’re unlikely to comprehend. We begin to understand Enid’s struggle to maintain her sanity through viewing the film. Her entire life, she’s coped by leaving the less reserved portions of her consciousness from her continuing narrative. However, one view of Frederick North’s Don’t Go in the Church blends the film with what little she does remember about the sealed-off event. Maybe her memory is flooding back to her, or perhaps the movie is filling in the blanks with the most extreme possibilities. Enid never actually remembers the day she lost Nina, Don’t Go in the Church only activates an emotional response to the suppressed event in Enid’s memory. Her rabbit hole pursuit of Frederick North turns Enid’s life into the horror movie it always has been.
Censor’s ending is a brilliant display of twisted vision by director Prano Bailey-Bond. Though it’s relatively straightforward narratively speaking, showing an excited Enid rush home to her parents after saving her sister over cheerfully upbeat music, little flashes indicate the blood-soaked scene Enid is fleeing was anything but fiction. What did it mean? I saw the ironic twist of someone whose job is to protect a standard of decency for a public scrutinized as unable to distinguish reality from fantasy, becoming the cautionary tale the tabloids and politicians warned against—a sort of satire on the idea that these people are elevated above the madness. Bailey-Bond suggested much of the same when she developed the film’s premise:
I had been reading an article about the Hammer Horror era and it was talking about the fact that they didn’t have many guidelines or rules during this period, but one of their rules was that the sight of blood on the breast of a woman would be cut from films because they believed it would make men likely to commit rape. And I thought, ‘Well, surely there were a number of male film censors working during this period so if these images are supposed to have this effect on us, what protects the censor from losing control? And what if they believed so much in censorship they started to have a strange relationship with the material onscreen and have a kind of darker conversation with their moral compass. Start to doubt themselves, maybe wonder deep down if they’re not a good person.’ That was kind of the beginning of the idea.
Bailey-Bond evolves the broad idea to make Enid a three-dimensional character in the best possible way, using Enid’s repression of childhood events against her.
The Beastman
When Enid confronts Frederick in that infamous scene, the frame shrinks to a 4:3. We see Enid’s actions play out as if she, along with the audience, is watching a VHS presentation of one of the banned films she’s accustomed to watching at work. Throughout the film, the Beastman (Guillaume Delaunay) embodies the violence in the memory Enid cannot retain and has attempted to cut from her personality. It makes the actor portraying Beastman her first target when she reaches the staging area for the film’s sequel. Walking through the door to the cabin, she’s greeted by the burly figure. The representation of the metaphor for the evil inside her that she’s fought to suppress for years is now standing in front of her as if this were a homecoming, begging her to unleash her wrath.
Enid’s worlds collide. Seeing the man responsible for the bloody on-screen carnage in her screening of Don’t Go in the Church builds the Beastman into the heartless monster responsible for Nina’s disappearance. This time she’ll save her sister and leave him on the cutting room floor, and that’s precisely what she does. The film morphs back to standard widescreen resolution after Enid murders the actor, and it becomes clear that Enid can no longer separate reality from a horror movie. Through her pursuit of saving Alice Lee, she effectively becomes the thing she fears most. However, he is not her first victim in the film.
Enid kills Doug Smart after she visits him in his home. Being a producer, he steals his seduction methods from the school of Harvey Weinstein, and through self-defense, Enid’s able to protect herself from Smart’s slimy advances in his living room. But despite his monstrous sexual advances, Smart’s fate is sealed when Enid arrives. The first thing we see as Smart opens the door is the foreboding face of the monstrous Beastman on the Don’t Go in the Church poster. That image alone imposes violence on Enid but combined with the setting of the diegetic horror movie Extreme Coda’s rape scene and Smart’s behavior, the result on her psyche is claustrophobic.
What impresses me more about the scene is that Smart doesn’t become threatening towards Enid until he mentions the Beastman’s revival in the Don’t Go in the Church sequel. Yes, he tries to talk himself up, saying he’s been to LA and goes to the States often, and he pours her a drink with obvious intent. But upon her initial arrival, he seems scared and alone. Once she’s inside, he sits on the other side of the room. It’s relaxed and predatory at the same time. Enid went to his house looking for information about Alice Lee, and directly after getting it, Smart makes his move. Smart’s resulting death scene poses the idea that Censor may be showing us Enid’s deteriorating perspective. Doug Smart isn’t any less of an opportunistic creep, but with the repeated Beastman references, the stress of the scene would have likely ended in violence regardless. That stress is what changes the aspect ratio at the end of the film. Further foreshadowing is found in Smart’s death with the axe-wielding trophy top figurine sticking out of his mouth, marking it as Enid’s weapon of choice and possibly alluding to how Nina died.
Schizophrenia and Trauma
In a scene directly following Enid’s viewing of Don’t Go in the Church, Enid asks fellow censor Perkins (Danny Lee Wynter) about the film’s amnesiac killer, looking for answers that would stop him from remembering. He replies,
It makes me think of my psychotherapy days. We’d talk about how people construct stories to cope. You’d be surprised what the human brain can edit out when it can’t handle the truth.
The parallels are understated in the scene, suggesting that the Beastman is missing memories. Still, it sparks some of the best psychological musings in the film, with Perkins being the only one who ever asks Enid to consider talking to someone and inferring Enid to be Nina’s killer.
Given what we know about Enid’s fear of the Beastman, I believe that Enid may be an undiagnosed schizophrenic. Censor never clinically presents Enid in this light, but clues surrounding this theory present themself in nuanced ways. Schizophrenia affects less than one percent of people and, given the era, could go undiagnosed given the adverse reaction people have historically had toward mental health and illness. What’s more, schizophrenia was often a plot point in many early psychological thrillers and B-grade horror as the genre’s scapegoat. Films would easily lump together various medical diagnoses, most often multiple personality disorders, into the singular diagnosis. With Censor, this evaluation follows the progression of Enid’s symptoms into full-on psychosis.
Schizophrenia can lie dormant, but symptoms begin to present themselves when the affected person goes through what is known as a prodromal stage. According to WebMD, prodromal schizophrenia is usually brought on by stress and can include a wide range of symptoms. When Enid leaves work at the start of the film, she mistakes a woman on the street for her sister; memory issues and hallucinations are basic symptoms. Enid’s lack of focus at work, another symptom, causes her to make the judgment call on a film that ultimately gets blamed for inspiring a murder. And in a more subtle clue, Enid tells her parents that her job is to “protect people,” suggesting early delusions of grandeur that are further presented in her efforts to “protect” Alice Lee from Fredrick North’s Beastman at the conclusion of the film.
Her prodromal stage progresses into full schizophrenia. During the hallucination sequence, you note the presence of the Beastman lurking around the forest, similar to the out-of-focus photographs of Bigfoot. Enid begins the sequence inside the film as a child, standing outside the Don’t Go in the Church cabin. Once the Beastman is revealed to Enid’s mind, an idea of transference is realized, with Enid clenching a clump of Nina’s hair. As she opens her hand, a crumpled-up piece of paper in the tangled mess reveals her handwritten screening notes taken during Don’t Go in the Church. The hair again suggests Enid’s violence toward her sister, but the paper serves a dual purpose asking her not to remember and a warning for her future if she continues on this path.
The sequence ends with Enid’s mother screaming, “It’s all your fault!” offering the viewer both the guilt and resentment Enid feels billowing from her parents. Of course, Enid feels guilt in being unable to remember what happened to Nina, but her grieving mother has created an insurmountable opposition for Enid to overcome. It’s enough anxiety for anyone to require therapy. Specifically, in Enid’s journey, it could serve as her schizophrenic transition from dormant to active while also suggesting a hereditary link. We hear this line again at the end of the film, as Enid pushes blame onto Frederick North and his video nasties—a metaphor for the scapegoating in the UK government.
While the ending of Censor plays out like its own video nasty, the audience has to assume history is repeating itself on Frederick North’s set. Whether Enid did kill her sister or not is alluded to but never made clear, but it isn’t necessary either. Enid becomes the Beastman. That could mean she killed Nina, but it could also mean she’s taken the place of Nina’s killer in a cycle of violence that could have been avoided if her psychiatric issues had been addressed.
Showtime recently released a docuseries called Buried. A true story concerning Eileen Franklin, who in 1989 suddenly recalled a repressed memory from her youth: the rape and murder of her childhood best friend by her father. This story garnered international attention when Eileen was called to testify against her father and the blurry line between the twenty-year-old evidence already made public and the gaps Eileen could not fill in.
Buried’s second episode, “Voodoo Psychology,” considers the defense’s argument. They argue that Eileen may have undergone hypnotherapy, making her testimony inadmissible, further stating that therapeutic suggestion may have imposed the memory onto Eileen’s consciousness, similar to Michelle Smith’s story. All of the events Eileen described surrounding Susan Nason’s murder could be linked to the various newspaper clippings her husband was saving in a scrapbook. Unlike Michelle Smith’s story, Franklin’s father was convicted because of her testimony. Still, memory scientist Elizabeth Loftus argues that Franklin was likely suffering from the misinformation effect and that post-event information is likely to blame for the false memory. In Buried, Loftus says that this idea of reconstructing a memory feels very real and even recounts a traumatizing memory of her own that she later proved never occurred. Loftus says, “I even like to think about memory as more akin to a Wikipedia page. You can go in there and edit it, but so can other people.”
Loftus’ quote resonates given the comparable Perkins quote from earlier, proving that many doctors and neuroscientists know that memory isn’t perfect. I mentioned earlier that Enid never officially recalls her memory of the event after screening Don’t Go in the Church, but instead, she’s just filling in the blanks. Studies are finding a link between traumatic childhood experiences, repression, and schizophrenia, and Censor encompasses those findings into its plot with ardent ease. The stress Enid endures through her parents’ decision to declare Nina dead, the guilt she feels over not remembering Nina’s disappearance, and the timing of her viewing of Don’t Go in the Church are all part of her inevitable mental collapse.
A study published in 2019, Childhood Trauma in Schizophrenia: Current Findings and Research Perspectives, had this to say:
Childhood trauma can be assumed to be a severe form of stress that renders individuals more vulnerable to developing schizophrenia. In a meta-analysis of 18 case-control studies (including 2048 patients with psychosis and 1856 non-psychiatric controls), 10 prospective studies (including 41,803 participants), and 8 population-based cross-sectional studies (35,546 participants), found that adverse experiences in childhood significantly increased the risk to develop psychosis and schizophrenia.
If nothing else, writers Prano Bailey-Bond and Anthony Fletcher do their due diligence in crafting this psychological web of horror and creating a character positioned in a career that’s above the madness, succumbing to the social atmosphere that scapegoated films, and never acknowledging her own mental distress stemming from grief and guilt. It’s an intelligent, multi-layered film that needs to be seen and praised as a vitally important film for the hypocritical era of the video nasties and the dismissal of mental health problems that continue today. The extreme nature of these mental health themes may shock you, but as is the nature of horror films, they will warrant discussions for social change. If we’re not careful, like Enid, we may end up doomed to repeat what’s been forgotten.
