[Film Review] Black Swan (2010)
Rivalries among female performers have always been a fruitful source of inspiration for filmmakers, from the scheming ingénue of All About Eve (1950) to the bitter child star of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Darren Aronofsky’s psychological horror film Black Swan (2010) deals with the familiar trope of the devious understudy but brings into focus the pressures faced by women in the ballet world, with the horror of institutional abuse emerging as the real threat to a dancer’s career.
Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is a rising star in the New York City Ballet Company. She is cast in the career-defining lead role of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, but the role requires her to play both the innocent White Swan and the seductive Black Swan. For the White Swan, Nina is the perfect choice. Timid and childlike, she lives a sheltered life in a small apartment with her mother – a resentful and controlling former dancer who gave up her career when she fell pregnant. Nina is her mother’s ‘sweet girl’, and her bedroom is an infantilised explosion of baby pink, cuddly toys and ballerina music boxes.
For the Black Swan, her understudy Lily (Mila Kunis) is a more suitable choice. A spontaneous party girl with a carefree attitude, Lily indulges in junk food, takes recreational drugs, flirts with guys and lives dangerously. The immense pressure of the role sends Nina into a tailspin of extreme paranoia and terrifying visions as she becomes convinced that Lily is plotting to steal the spotlight.
In recent years, discussions around the treatment of women in performance industries have been more open than ever before, from the #MeToo movement to Samantha Stark’s documentary Framing Britney Spears (2021). Whether you are watching Black Swan for the first time or revisiting it after its initial release in 2010, the film really brings to light this insidious abuse of power.
The director of Swan Lake, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), embodies the toxic boy’s club attitude at the heart of the New York ballet scene. Cassel expertly brings an element of Hitchcockian sadism to the character, who torments his leading ladies with gruelling repeated performances. When he’s not bullying, shaming or objectifying Nina during rehearsals, he’s forcing himself on her behind a locked office door. In a particularly uncomfortable scene that conveys the strained politeness and escalating fear that is so familiar to women in these situations, Thomas invites Nina to his apartment for drinks and asks a series of impertinent questions: if she has a boyfriend, if she’s a virgin. He even tells her to masturbate as ‘homework’. Thomas is not just a nightmare boss, he’s an abuser and his behaviour is an open secret in the ballet company – an all too frequent occurrence that rings true for so many performance industries, from Hollywood film to pop music.
Thomas controls women’s careers by exploiting their fears of being replaced, which Winona Ryder brilliantly articulates in her underrated performance as the retired prima ballerina Beth MacIntyre. Excessive competition is so ingrained in the dancers that any sense of sisterhood has been eroded by an overwhelming suspicion of scheming rivals. Through Beth’s mental deterioration, we see the extent of Thomas’ abuse of power from the beginning to the end of a dancer’s career, foreshadowing Nina’s inevitable downfall. At the beginning of the film, the ripple effect of institutional ageism and misogyny is clear when Beth is referred to as ‘approaching menopause’ and compared to a ‘grandmother’ by younger dancers. From Nina’s perspective, Beth is a troubled star on a self-destructive downward spiral. We see glimpses of her stumbling around drunk at a party or trashing her dressing room, but we never hear her side of the story. In many ways, Beth is silenced. This narrative framing reflects her position as an invisible ageing woman who is discarded because she is no longer considered desirable enough to play the Black Swan. The cycle of fear and replacement that plays out between Beth, Nina and Lily reveals much about the dynamics of performance industries, with male authority figures pulling the strings and women merely responding.
Black Swan’s psychological horror is so effective because it toys with universal fears that are ingrained in the human psyche, from uncanny visions of doppelgängers to mirror images coming alive and moving independently. Despite this, the film’s subtle moments of body horror have the most lasting impact. Whether real or imagined, the close-up shots of Nina’s broken nails and bleeding skin are excruciating. These shots by no means match the extremity of chainsaws ripping through limbs, but they certainly make you want to look away. The ordinariness of trimming a fingernail becomes so anxiety-inducing to watch because we anticipate something going wrong. In these scenes, Aronofsky captures the power of pain on a small scale, like a papercut between your fingers. The horror of these imperfections especially resonates with a ballet industry that obsesses over women’s bodies and pushes them beyond their limits, where beauty and perfection cannot be achieved without some degree of mental and physical suffering.
When Nina dances the Black Swan routine in the film’s final act, Portman’s performance is at its most breath-taking. A tracking shot follows her as she owns the stage. As if possessed by the Black Swan, she stares back at the camera with demonic red eyes. This scene is so complex and emotionally charged. You find yourself rooting for Nina because she has endured so much torment and deserves her moment in the spotlight. At the same time, it is tinged with sadness because the role has completely consumed her. In this short but captivating scene, time stands still, nothing else matters. The old Nina is gone, but the audience is totally seduced.
When people think of horror films, slashers are often the first thing that comes to mind. The sub-genres also spawned a wealth of horror icons: Freddy, Jason, Michael, Chucky - characters so recognisable we’re on first name terms with them. In many ways the slasher distills the genre down to some of its fundamental parts - fear, violence and murder.
Throughout September we were looking at slasher films, and therefore we decided to cover a slasher film that could be considered as an underrated gem in the horror genre. And the perfect film for this was Franck Khalfoun’s 2012 remake of MANIAC.
In the late seventies and early eighties, one man was considered the curator of all things gore in America. During the lovingly named splatter decade, Tom Savini worked on masterpieces of blood and viscera like Dawn of the Dead (1978), a film which gained the attention of hopeful director William Lustig, a man only known for making pornography before his step into horror.
Looking for some different slasher film recommendations? Then look no fruther as Ariel Powers-Schaub has 13 non-typical slasher horror films for you to watch.
Even though they are not to my personal liking, there is no denying that slasher films have been an important basis for the horror genre, and helped to build the foundations for other sub-genres throughout the years.
But some of the most terrifying horrors are those that take place entirely under the skin, where the mind is the location of the fear. Psychological horror has the power to unsettle by calling into question the basis of the self - one's own brain.
On Saturday, 17th June 2023, I sat down with two friends to watch The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009) and The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) (2012). I was nervous to be grossed out (I can’t really handle the idea of eating shit) but excited to cross these two films off my list.
Many of the most effective horror films involve blurring the lines between waking life and a nightmare. When women in horror are emotionally and psychologically manipulated – whether by other people or more malicious supernatural forces – viewers are pulled into their inner worlds, often left with a chilling unease and the question of where reality ends and the horror begins.
Body horror is one of the fundamental pillars of the horror genre and crops up in some form or another in a huge variety of works. There's straightforward gore - the inherent horror of seeing the body mutilated, and also more nuanced fears.
In the sweaty summer of 1989, emerging like a monochrome migraine from the encroaching shadow of Japan’s economic crash, Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man shocked and disgusted the (very few) audiences originally in attendance.
Whether it's the havoc wreaked on the human body during pregnancy, emotional turmoil producing tiny murderous humans or simply a body turning on its owner, body horror films tend to be shocking. But while they're full of grotesque imagery, they're also full of thoughtful premises and commentary, especially when it comes to women, trauma, and power.
RELATED ARTICLES
If you know me at all, you know that I love, as many people do, the work of Nic Cage. Live by the Cage, die by the Cage. So, when the opportunity to review this came up, I jumped at it.
When V/H/S first hit our screens in 2012, nobody could have foreseen that 11 years later we’d be on our sixth instalment (excluding the two spinoffs) of the series.
When someone is in a toxic relationship, it can affect more than just their heart and mind. Their bodies can weaken or change due to the continued stress and unhappiness that comes from the toxicity.
If you can’t count on your best friend to check your teeth and hands and stand vigil with you all night to make sure you don’t wolf out, who can you count on? And so begins our story on anything but an ordinary night in 1993…
The best thing about urban legends is the delicious thrill of the forbidden. Don’t say “Bloody Mary” in the mirror three times in a dark room unless you’re brave enough to summon her. Don’t flash your headlights at a car unless you want to have them drive you to your death.
A Wounded Fawn (Travis Stevens, 2022) celebrates both art history and female rage in this surreal take on the slasher genre.
Perpetrator opens with a girl walking alone in the dark. Her hair is long and loose just begging to be yanked back and her bright clothes—a blood red coat, in fact—is a literal matador’s cape for anything that lies beyond the beam of her phone screen.
Filmed on location in Scotland, Ryan Hendrick's new thriller Mercy Falls (2023) uses soaring views of the Scottish Highlands to show that the natural world can either provide shelter or be used as a demented playground for people to hurt each other.
EXPLORE
Now it’s time for Soho’s main 2023 event, which is presented over two weekends: a live film festival at the Whirled Cinema in Brixton, London, and an online festival a week later. Both have very rich and varied programmes (with no overlap this year), with something for every horror fan.
In the six years since its release the Nintendo Switch has amassed an extensive catalogue of games, with everything from puzzle platformer games to cute farming sims to, uh, whatever Waifu Uncovered is.
A Quiet Place (2018) opens 89 days after a race of extremely sound-sensitive creatures show up on Earth, perhaps from an exterritorial source. If you make any noise, even the slightest sound, you’re likely to be pounced upon by these extremely strong and staggeringly fast creatures and suffer a brutal death.
If you like cults, sacrificial parties, and lesbian undertones then Mona Awad’s Bunny is the book for you. Samantha, a student at a prestigious art university, feels isolated from her cliquey classmates, ‘the bunnies’.
The slasher sub genre has always been huge in the world of horror, but after the ‘70s and ‘80s introduced classic characters like Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, Leatherface, and Jason, it’s not harsh to say that the ‘90s was slightly lacking in the icon department.
Mother is God in the eyes of a child, and it seems God has abandoned the town of Silent Hill. Silent Hill is not a place you want to visit.
Being able to see into the future or back into the past is a superpower that a lot of us would like to have. And while it may seem cool, in horror movies it usually involves characters being sucked into terrifying situations as they try to save themselves or other people with the information they’ve gleaned in their visions.
Both the original Pet Sematary (1989) and its 2019 remake are stories about the way death and grief can affect people in different ways. And while the films centre on Louis Creed and his increasingly terrible decision-making process, there’s no doubt that the story wouldn’t pack the same punch or make the same sense without his wife, Rachel.
I can sometimes go months without having a panic attack. Unfortunately, this means that when they do happen, they often feel like they come out of nowhere. They can come on so fast and hard it’s like being hit by a bus, my breath escapes my body, and I can’t get it back.