Minor Horror #6: Long Pigs

This is the sixth in a series of fifteen pieces on “minor” horror films that I’m going to be publishing here throughout October. For more information, please see this post.

Long Pigs (Chris Power / Nathan Hynes, 2007)

“Just let me get the drip pan under her.”

The killer is repulsive, but not in the way you really expect. He’s repulsive in his slovenly ordinariness, in the way he is leading a drab life in an empty way. His hairline is receding, he’s overweight, he works a shitty job for low pay. He doesn’t seem to have much insight into why he started killing and eating people. The way he describes it, it just kind of happened, the way everything happens to people who take no interest in themselves. We’re repelled not because he’s a killer, but because he’s a loser – because (imagine now I’ve lowered my voice, I’m speaking to you in confidence), I mean, there must be something wrong with him if he’s okay with living like this, you know, wasting his life away. It’s not that you’re scared of him, it’s that his life depresses you. If anything, the cannibalism is his saving grace; it’s the only thing he talks about with anything like passion – and passion, at least, explains why one might keep waking up each day.

Long Pigs was released in 2007, the waning days of the Bush administration, and a few years out, at most, from the point at which the first wave of internet-driven shock culture would enter terminal decline. The first thing we hear in the movie is the radio voice of an obnoxious talk personality, the kind that always sounds a little pissed off at nothing in particular, at the fact that he’s not in charge of things – it’s unclear what his political affiliation is, if any, but it doesn’t really matter; his purpose is to oscillate wildly between callous indifference and raw indignation depending on the value he, personally, places on the life of a given victim (whores are disposable, nice little schoolgirls are not), and in so doing fill us in on what the killer (whose name is Anthony, by the way) won’t. The presence goatee-and-sunglasses blowhard is the first of many things which mark the film as unmistakably a product of the Bush years (I know the film is Canadian; it does not matter), a whole parade of archetypes which either went underground in the late 00s, only to emerge changed, mutated, and worse in every way in 2016, or simply disappeared entirely, never to be seen from again. The way these archetypes are skewered, or not, is equally inseparable from its moment. This is one of the great pleasures of the “found footage” slush pile – with a decade or two of distance, a film on a threadbare budget, leveraging the easy verisimilitude of its everyday surroundings, becomes an inherently revealing historical document, not just of places and things but of dominant and suppressed discourses, forms of living, ways of seeing the world.

I enjoy how little effort this film puts into selling you on its situation. There’s no real explanation for how its “desperate” filmmakers found Anthony, why he agreed to this, how these guys could possibly expect to screen this film for anyone without getting immediately arrested. Obviously, the film puts so little effort in because it understands it doesn’t matter. Here’s Anthony cruising for a streetwalker, judging them by their flesh – not in the way a john does, or perhaps exactly like that. Here he is picking one up, leading her into the basement, sneaking up behind her and smashing in her skull. Here’s the guy with the camera vomiting. The found footage horror is the horror of the eternal present. This is what matters, because this is what’s happening. You are stuck here, listening to this man explain the importance of tying off the anus, showing you how to do it, telling you it’s not sexual, looking a little bemused that you would ask such a thing, don’t you get it? Don’t you get what this is about? He would almost be likable, he sort of is likable, you can imagine you might not mind making conversation with him at work – but he’s just so pathetic. No wonder his only friend is so angry, so stupid, such a creep. It would break the spell if he killed the little girl on screen, but he doesn’t. That’s in the past, and we’re in the present, and when he talks about it, you can tell the memory genuinely upsets him, but that if it didn’t bring so much heat down whenever a kid disappears, he probably have done it again. Anthony is the product of a dead monoculture; he couldn’t exist today, not in this form. But if he did, he would probably love those videos where dead-eyed Kick streamers bait out “pedophiles” and shave their heads on stream.