Most people watched Hostel (2005) when they were teenagers.
I can't actually verify this statement but there are definitely certain generations of people who came of age during the torture porn boom of the 2000s and tried to watch as many of them as possible to prove how much disturbing and offensive material they could put in their brains before they lost their stomachs. I grew up as a child too young to remember 9/11 and too immature to read the cultural criticism related to the sub-genre, to sit and think about what it was implying about American culture or masculinity or the human body. It was all about affect. And that worked perfectly fine for me at the time.
Eli Roth doesn't make movies for adults. You might think that the ratings and content of his films argue against this, but I've never been more convinced watching his 2015 paranoid home invasion gender crisis fable Knock Knock that this man has continually, but not consciously, cultivated an imagined teenage audience who is not positioned to think beyond the crassness of the premise and content.
Even before I'd watched this film, it haunted my mind, following me around door frames and standing at the end of my bed at night, begging me to engage. I became a little bit obsessed with watching it, for the simple reason that Roth seems to believe this is a feminist film. Once you discover something like that from the man who made a film about evil sexy foreign women luring Americans to their death with *gasp* sex, it's hard to not be curious.
Evan Webber is an all-American perfect family man with a beautiful blonde wife and beauitful blonde children. The events of this movie incite because Evan has to work and can't escort his beautiful blonde family to the beach for the weekend. He is left alone with his thoughts, his 3D printer and some weed, ready to enjoy some alone time when he hears a knock at the door. Stood in the rain, dressed in see-through tops and shorts, are two young women who have been dropped off at the wrong address by their taxi. Neither of their phones work. They are a long way from their homes and from their original destination, a house party. So they ask to come in, dry off and wait for a taxi to come and take them away.
These women, Genesis and Bel, are odd. They giggle and chatter, unthreatening (initially) though overly sexual, not so much characters but very specific enticing personified fears. We learn earlier in the film that Evan and his wife, Karen, haven't had sex in a while, so when two attractive and willing women emerge from the night, this unnerves him. He loves his wife and family. He yells this multiple times throughout the film. When Genesis and Bel assert that monogamy is a lie and that they have made a habit of having as many threesomes as they can to practice for their husbands, who will no doubt insist on them, a repression he has been holding back is released. As the evening progresses, it becomes more and more evident that these women are not going to leave when they said they would. But that doesn't matter because they want to have sex with him. Together. Right now.
Once he wakes up the next day, seemingly convinced that his flurry with danger is now over and he can rearrange the towels and clean his bedroom and go back to the image of himself plastered all over his house, he is met with a feeling of dread. These women are still here. They're in the kitchen and their behaviour is becoming increasingly volatile and erratic. This is ultimately garnished with the sudden and unbelievable fact that they aren't adult women at all; they're teenagers.
Evan find himself trapped in a 'nightmare' specific to a rich American male protagonist, where he must now reckon with the consequences of his infidelity and potential sexual assault. This manifiests in a Funny Games/Hard Candy setup, where he is tortured both physically and psychologically by entities (note I haven't used the word people) who threaten to splinter the image he has of himself as a 'good person', literalised in the defacing of his numerous gigantic family portratits.
When I stated above that this is a paranoid movie, I meant that the personal, alleged controversies of Roth have never felt more pertinent to the themes explored, which felt especially weird because he was the one bringing them up in the first place. His status as a horror film bro and troll, championing the 'tits and blood' model of filmmaking is well-known at this point and seemingly something he is very proud of. He has also cultivated a specifically chauvinistic work environment and a word-of-mouth reputation as a creep. He deliberately pokes the bear with this film, like many male directors before him, wanting the audience to become offended that he not only says and does misogynistic things but is willing to be referential about it, as if this provocation were some kind of easter egg. Once again, you are being encouraged to consume some fucked up things and then move on with your day.
But I will not.
The home invasion narrative is fundamentally about the perceived safety
of the inner sphere and how violence seeps in from the outside, forcing
you to question what these four walls have had you repressing the whole
time you believed you were safe. Knock Knock is a film about men who
don't believe they are a danger to women and that if they remain passive
and compliant with the demands of masculinity and fatherhood, they will
be able to retain the image of themselves as a 'good guy'.
I've noticed across Eli Roth's filmography that he finds the idea of 'the good guy' in a movie repulsive, maybe more so than the violent sadists and murderers he creates. He has a fundamental distrust of them. It clicked for me when rewatching Hostel II (2007) that I was meant to find Stuart, the reluctant businessman who feels sheepish about paying to torture and kill the main characters, reprehensible, and not his more brash and openly enthusiastic friend, Todd. Because there is nothing less impressive than a piece of shit who is convinced that he's actually doing the right thing. Roth goes out of his way to make this character impossible to identify with and makes the audience entirely culpable for his actions. The idea that you would even begin to align yourself with the sickly sweet family with no immediate discernible flaws at the centre of Knock Knock is presented as laughable.
Roth is a mean filmmaker, continuously positing that the good heterosexual man doesn't exist, that any other man in this situation would have had the threesome. In fact, Genesis and Bel state that this has been the case multiple times before, that no good upstanding husband and father has ever rejected them. Reckoning with the idea that you could be capable of causing harm is disruptive to the status quo of one's own life. As a result, like many of his other films, he believes that this truth has to be wrenched out of these characters. They must be broken down and brutalised and see the potentiality of their own deaths before they can come to accept that they're shitty and the world is shitty and that you will be punished for your actions eventually.
This is an extremely punitive film, taking the most histironic aspects of gendered perfomance and screeching them at full volume with a myriad of expletives and threats of castration. Women exist in this film to deceive you, to rip apart your selfhood and hand it back to you, for your sexual thrill and theirs. I've read many reviews that argue this is simply a heightened, horrific and prolonged sexual fantasy of Roth's, that this is an exorcism of the most scary thing he could think of: the complete destruction of his personal image at the hands of a vindictive woman.
Like many misogynistic films, the idea that
women could entrap you into this situation, blackmail and torture you,
threaten to destroy the image you have of yourself and expose this to
your wife and children, is a puerile fear. And I think Eli Roth agrees. A once loyal and mild-mannered Evan screams at the top of his lungs that exploiting the situation in front of him (that being sex with two women) was like trying to turn down 'free fucking pizza'. This is a not a man whose perspective is presented as reputable.
I can't ever argue that this film is a mature response to the criticisms Roth has received regarding misogyny both on-set and off, but it is an honest one, and truly the most complex he seems to be capable of. A haunted house filled with the horrifying shadows of male paranoia and guilt, misogyny bubbling behind the eyes, only screamed in anger when pushed to the limit. But isn't it always there? Weren't you always going to behave like this? What did everyone expect anyways? Isn't this what every man would do if the opportunity presented itself?
I think I feel somewhat envious of Eli Roth and those of his ilk for feeling so certain that they could make a movie this abrasive and inflammatory, and still continue to have a career. It actually hurts to think about the filmmakers who barely even got one film made before they were shut out of the industry because they weren't not cool enough or willing enough to compromise their comfort and safety to make them pliable for the moviemaking business. Roth is not someone who has ever had anything really to lose, so when he makes work with the air of a provocateur with none of the talent or any qualms about being perceived as a jackass, it makes me wonder why it takes me so long to create anything ever. What insecurity could possibly be holding me back when this man feels nothing of the sort?