Introduction
The Bunny Game, an independent horror film released in the US in early 2011, is presently at the centre of a new research project commissioned by the British Board of Film Classification [1]. The goal is to gauge the current attitudes of the British public to representations of sexual violence in a range of recent releases, many of which have earned the generic label of ‘torture porn.’ In October 2011 the film was denied a certificate for British video release by the BBFC, another sign that this film is raising concerns about the effects of sexualised violence on-screen [2]. Director Adam Rehmeier and actress Rodleen Getsic have asserted that the film, about the torture of a female prostitute by a male truck driver, contains scenes of ‘real torture,’[3] based on Getsic’s own experiences of abduction. An audience member at the Heavy Metal Film Festival, April 2011, confronted Getsic by challenging her claim that she did not want the torture to happen, attempting to draw from her the admission that the acts were consensual, but she refused to concur. This claim seems to be the foremost concern of reviewers to date. The recent New York Times’ response to the film records Rehmeier’s reasoning behind the production, saying that it was ‘intended less as entertainment than as a feminist take on “a cautionary tale about drug abuse and taking rides with strangers.”’[4] Similarly, at the film’s first screening, actor Jeff Renfro claimed that the film has an intended function as a warning to women.[5]
This article will tackle Rehmeier’s claim for The Bunny Game, asking if the explicit, objectification of a woman on-screen in scenes of sexual violence can operate as a feminist text or, indeed, if a feminist reading can be possible. The film’s relationship with the ‘real’ will be discussed by highlighting cinema as a discourse, what Colin MacCabe describes as a ‘metalanguage.’ This discourse is designed to remain unnoticed, to encourage the viewer to accept the film’s content as an objective reality.[6] A dialectic will be exposed in the film between two self-conscious ‘looks’ or stylistic paradigms; documentary and expressionist. I am suggesting that both styles are designed to be noticed, unlike MacCabe’s concept of cinematic discourse. Both draw attention to the presence of the male director, and both encourage an exploitative gaze at the objectified female. Certain pornographic elements in the film will be discussed, and it will be proposed that in the torture scenes there are similarities to Antonin Artaud’s ‘theatre of cruelty.’[7] In so doing, it will be argued that the film is largely characterised by sensation in its presentation of violence, attracting the torture porn enthusiast and the sadomasochistic porn user, and disputing Rehmeier’s assertion that the film was intended as a feminist text. Significant moments in the film will, however, be reviewed for a potential political message by recalling Stuart Hall’s thesis of oppositional textual readings.[8] I propose that certain aspects of the film make a bold statement about the American ‘underbelly,’ and for this reason I believe that it deserves a second look.
The Bunny Game, an independent horror film released in the US in early 2011, is presently at the centre of a new research project commissioned by the British Board of Film Classification [1]. The goal is to gauge the current attitudes of the British public to representations of sexual violence in a range of recent releases, many of which have earned the generic label of ‘torture porn.’ In October 2011 the film was denied a certificate for British video release by the BBFC, another sign that this film is raising concerns about the effects of sexualised violence on-screen [2]. Director Adam Rehmeier and actress Rodleen Getsic have asserted that the film, about the torture of a female prostitute by a male truck driver, contains scenes of ‘real torture,’[3] based on Getsic’s own experiences of abduction. An audience member at the Heavy Metal Film Festival, April 2011, confronted Getsic by challenging her claim that she did not want the torture to happen, attempting to draw from her the admission that the acts were consensual, but she refused to concur. This claim seems to be the foremost concern of reviewers to date. The recent New York Times’ response to the film records Rehmeier’s reasoning behind the production, saying that it was ‘intended less as entertainment than as a feminist take on “a cautionary tale about drug abuse and taking rides with strangers.”’[4] Similarly, at the film’s first screening, actor Jeff Renfro claimed that the film has an intended function as a warning to women.[5]
This article will tackle Rehmeier’s claim for The Bunny Game, asking if the explicit, objectification of a woman on-screen in scenes of sexual violence can operate as a feminist text or, indeed, if a feminist reading can be possible. The film’s relationship with the ‘real’ will be discussed by highlighting cinema as a discourse, what Colin MacCabe describes as a ‘metalanguage.’ This discourse is designed to remain unnoticed, to encourage the viewer to accept the film’s content as an objective reality.[6] A dialectic will be exposed in the film between two self-conscious ‘looks’ or stylistic paradigms; documentary and expressionist. I am suggesting that both styles are designed to be noticed, unlike MacCabe’s concept of cinematic discourse. Both draw attention to the presence of the male director, and both encourage an exploitative gaze at the objectified female. Certain pornographic elements in the film will be discussed, and it will be proposed that in the torture scenes there are similarities to Antonin Artaud’s ‘theatre of cruelty.’[7] In so doing, it will be argued that the film is largely characterised by sensation in its presentation of violence, attracting the torture porn enthusiast and the sadomasochistic porn user, and disputing Rehmeier’s assertion that the film was intended as a feminist text. Significant moments in the film will, however, be reviewed for a potential political message by recalling Stuart Hall’s thesis of oppositional textual readings.[8] I propose that certain aspects of the film make a bold statement about the American ‘underbelly,’ and for this reason I believe that it deserves a second look.
Debasement, desire and the dark American underbelly of The Bunny Game
The Bunny Game is a pared down narrative of a nameless prostitute, who staggers from one abusive client to the next, trading sexual favours for the drugs that eventually cause her to be robbed of her money and possessions. After a truck driver invites her into his vehicle to take drugs, she is rendered unconscious, driven to isolated wasteland and subjected to five days of degrading violence and sexual assault. During this time she is chloroformed, chained to the inside of the truck, stripped, beaten, dressed in sadomasochistic costume, dragged on a lead, forced to drink alcohol with her mouth wired open, branded and has her head shaved. Many of these acts are videoed by the truck driver and played back to her, along with recordings of one or more previous female victims. On the fifth day, the truck driver gives her the opportunity to ‘win’ by choosing the shorter of two sticks, and although it is impossible to ascertain the comparative length of the stick she chooses, she is carried off, laughing hysterically. Later, the driver carries her unconscious or dead body to another man in an unmarked white van. The final credits reveal the woman’s name to be Bunny, and the truck-driver to be called Hog.
It is not surprising that this film is raising some alarm. The director and cast meticulously explore the minutiae of the physical and psychological abuse of a helpless woman. The length of the torture sections, filling two-thirds of the film’s running time, is comparable to some of the most intense of European SM pornographic video material, but in this essay I am suggesting that the film is a very particular hybrid of drama and documentary. It is a carefully constructed clash of expressionist and documentary conventions, making it transgressive in more than its depicted acts of sadism. Because of the claims from Getsic and Rehmeier that, apart from the alcohol and drug use, the torture scenes were non-simulated,[9] the film can be regarded as part-documentary. But, as the director and cast state, it is a recording of acts that were improvised, not scripted, and as such it belongs to a theatrical tradition. These claims from the filmmakers and performers, that the acts were both non-simulated and improvised, encourage an examination of the film’s relationship with the ‘real.’
Real-Not-Real
Colin MacCabe’s work on mainstream cinema helps to remind us of the constructed nature of ‘reality’ or ‘the real,’ something that exists only in its articulation through language. The story-telling conventions of cinema, he argues, are designed to be self-effacing, invisible, to encourage the forgetting of cinema as a discourse and aligning film’s narrative content with a perceived ‘truth.’ As he puts it, ‘the narrative discourse simply allows reality to appear and denies its own status as articulation,’ calling it a ‘metalanguage’ that is not noticed.[10] He urges us to resist the association of the camera with the recording of an objective point of view, since the camera functions to create the metalanguage itself. To MacCabe it is less the subject matter than the language of cinema that typifies a text as ‘realist.’[11] Despite the conspicuousness of the stylistic conventions of documentary, such as the use of a hand-held camera, direct address to the camera and responsiveness to spontaneous action, the same effect in The Bunny Game is sought: the viewer’s acceptance of the film as a record of the ‘real.’ Although an additional consequence of these conventions is the tangible presence of the filmmaker or documentarist, the intention is for the film’s content to be regarded as ‘true.’
A dialectic, or clash, is apparent in The Bunny Game which is the result of the employment of the documentary metalanguage and expressionist techniques, both of which operate to draw attention to the presence of the filmmaker. Black and white cinematography and a hand-held camera seem to collide with increasingly frenetic montage as the film progresses. The director’s own composed soundtrack, a blend of guttural noises with electronic feedback and wailing sounds, expresses Bunny’s psychological and physical ordeal in abstract, sonic terms. One stylistic choice is realist, the other denies any close relation to the ‘real’ by adopting montage that is overly evident and which often disobeys the rules of temporal continuity. The film is constantly announcing itself as real-not-real, encouraging both the viewer’s absorption into an on-screen drama and a concomitant distancing from that drama. It is because of the stylistic choices in the music, cinematography and editing that the film is so obviously crafted, making it more apparently representation than presentation. But both Getsic’s testimony and the convincing evidence on-screen, that the scenes of torture are authentic, specific sequences of the film as presentation instead of representation. The distinction is a false one if MacCabe’s identification of the camera as the means of constructing ‘reality’ is taken into account, but nevertheless the impression of recording ‘reality’ is what responses to this film are reacting to, including that of the BBFC.
The Bunny Game‘s status as fiction then is indelibly disrupted by its association with Getsic’s personal experiences, the collapsing of the boundary between actor and character and the apparent documenting of actual violence and cruelty taking place in front of Rehmeier’s and Renfro’s cameras. One might be tempted to identify it as drama-documentary which, as Paul Ward puts it, mediates ‘actual events and people via dramatic conventions and performances.’[12] But The Bunny Game is not a literal mediation of actual events, it is merely based upon Getsic’s experiences, although the acts in and around the truck seem literal. Instead, then, it is drama and documentary in an unconventional hybrid. It bears a resemblance to what Ward describes as ‘irreal,’ a plausible hypothesis depicted through a collection of credible events.[13] Ward sees this ‘recognizable reality’ in the 2006 drama-documentary Death of a President, a fictional account of the assassination of US President George W. Bush.[14] In fact, The Bunny Game could be regarded as part of an established tradition in what might be described as ‘hypothetical documentary’.
The clash of styles replicates the origins of the film’s narrative: part-fiction and part-reenactment of Getsic’s own experiences of abuse and abduction. Getsic’s and Rehmeier’s interviews have them describing the film in various ways including horror, art and improvisation, but they frequently stress that it evolved from Getsic’s experience. They had planned it as ‘bullet points’ over a number of years before its production, and then recorded it as a series of improvisations. The development of the idea made it, according to Rehmeier, ‘part therapy, part character development,’[15] endorsing the production as both drama and biography. Referring to the acts performed in front of the camera, Getsic claims, ‘It was not planned. We [Getsic and Renfro] just lived it.’[16] Again, the filmmakers’ account of the pre-production and production of The Bunny Game is contradictory, claiming that it was both planned and not planned. It is these claims, as well as the unusual stylistic choices, that encourage me to respond to the film as a collision of drama and documentary.
Rehmeier states that there were no repeated takes throughout this time in order to capture the psychological and physical immersion of the actors in their actions. He claims:
It is not surprising that this film is raising some alarm. The director and cast meticulously explore the minutiae of the physical and psychological abuse of a helpless woman. The length of the torture sections, filling two-thirds of the film’s running time, is comparable to some of the most intense of European SM pornographic video material, but in this essay I am suggesting that the film is a very particular hybrid of drama and documentary. It is a carefully constructed clash of expressionist and documentary conventions, making it transgressive in more than its depicted acts of sadism. Because of the claims from Getsic and Rehmeier that, apart from the alcohol and drug use, the torture scenes were non-simulated,[9] the film can be regarded as part-documentary. But, as the director and cast state, it is a recording of acts that were improvised, not scripted, and as such it belongs to a theatrical tradition. These claims from the filmmakers and performers, that the acts were both non-simulated and improvised, encourage an examination of the film’s relationship with the ‘real.’
Real-Not-Real
Colin MacCabe’s work on mainstream cinema helps to remind us of the constructed nature of ‘reality’ or ‘the real,’ something that exists only in its articulation through language. The story-telling conventions of cinema, he argues, are designed to be self-effacing, invisible, to encourage the forgetting of cinema as a discourse and aligning film’s narrative content with a perceived ‘truth.’ As he puts it, ‘the narrative discourse simply allows reality to appear and denies its own status as articulation,’ calling it a ‘metalanguage’ that is not noticed.[10] He urges us to resist the association of the camera with the recording of an objective point of view, since the camera functions to create the metalanguage itself. To MacCabe it is less the subject matter than the language of cinema that typifies a text as ‘realist.’[11] Despite the conspicuousness of the stylistic conventions of documentary, such as the use of a hand-held camera, direct address to the camera and responsiveness to spontaneous action, the same effect in The Bunny Game is sought: the viewer’s acceptance of the film as a record of the ‘real.’ Although an additional consequence of these conventions is the tangible presence of the filmmaker or documentarist, the intention is for the film’s content to be regarded as ‘true.’
A dialectic, or clash, is apparent in The Bunny Game which is the result of the employment of the documentary metalanguage and expressionist techniques, both of which operate to draw attention to the presence of the filmmaker. Black and white cinematography and a hand-held camera seem to collide with increasingly frenetic montage as the film progresses. The director’s own composed soundtrack, a blend of guttural noises with electronic feedback and wailing sounds, expresses Bunny’s psychological and physical ordeal in abstract, sonic terms. One stylistic choice is realist, the other denies any close relation to the ‘real’ by adopting montage that is overly evident and which often disobeys the rules of temporal continuity. The film is constantly announcing itself as real-not-real, encouraging both the viewer’s absorption into an on-screen drama and a concomitant distancing from that drama. It is because of the stylistic choices in the music, cinematography and editing that the film is so obviously crafted, making it more apparently representation than presentation. But both Getsic’s testimony and the convincing evidence on-screen, that the scenes of torture are authentic, specific sequences of the film as presentation instead of representation. The distinction is a false one if MacCabe’s identification of the camera as the means of constructing ‘reality’ is taken into account, but nevertheless the impression of recording ‘reality’ is what responses to this film are reacting to, including that of the BBFC.
The Bunny Game‘s status as fiction then is indelibly disrupted by its association with Getsic’s personal experiences, the collapsing of the boundary between actor and character and the apparent documenting of actual violence and cruelty taking place in front of Rehmeier’s and Renfro’s cameras. One might be tempted to identify it as drama-documentary which, as Paul Ward puts it, mediates ‘actual events and people via dramatic conventions and performances.’[12] But The Bunny Game is not a literal mediation of actual events, it is merely based upon Getsic’s experiences, although the acts in and around the truck seem literal. Instead, then, it is drama and documentary in an unconventional hybrid. It bears a resemblance to what Ward describes as ‘irreal,’ a plausible hypothesis depicted through a collection of credible events.[13] Ward sees this ‘recognizable reality’ in the 2006 drama-documentary Death of a President, a fictional account of the assassination of US President George W. Bush.[14] In fact, The Bunny Game could be regarded as part of an established tradition in what might be described as ‘hypothetical documentary’.
The clash of styles replicates the origins of the film’s narrative: part-fiction and part-reenactment of Getsic’s own experiences of abuse and abduction. Getsic’s and Rehmeier’s interviews have them describing the film in various ways including horror, art and improvisation, but they frequently stress that it evolved from Getsic’s experience. They had planned it as ‘bullet points’ over a number of years before its production, and then recorded it as a series of improvisations. The development of the idea made it, according to Rehmeier, ‘part therapy, part character development,’[15] endorsing the production as both drama and biography. Referring to the acts performed in front of the camera, Getsic claims, ‘It was not planned. We [Getsic and Renfro] just lived it.’[16] Again, the filmmakers’ account of the pre-production and production of The Bunny Game is contradictory, claiming that it was both planned and not planned. It is these claims, as well as the unusual stylistic choices, that encourage me to respond to the film as a collision of drama and documentary.
Rehmeier states that there were no repeated takes throughout this time in order to capture the psychological and physical immersion of the actors in their actions. He claims:
I wanted to keep Jeff and Rodleen raw and in the moment. Traditional blocking was out of the question. I have an extensive background in documentary work, so I was able to be in the right place at the right time and get the shots I needed in real time during the shot. […] Parameters were mapped out, to an extent, but the actors were allowed to play. [17]
This statement reveals much about the tension that the film exhibits between ‘real’ and ‘not real,’ referring to Renfro and Getsic as actors whilst acknowledging the freedom they (or perhaps just Renfro) had to choose what actions would be performed and how. The use of the word ‘play’ is a nod towards the vocabulary of the SM scene which describes consensual activities in this manner. For sadomasochists, ‘play’ signifies the acts as distinct from genuine, vindictive torture and emphasises them as ‘fun.’ Rehmeier’s use of the word in the film’s title is, then, intended as irony. The ‘game’ of the title has Bunny placed in a ‘bunny’ gimp-mask and chased outside the truck by Hog in a pig-mask. The game and play metaphors are disrupted, however, by the question over the alleged authentic torture that takes place, particularly the branding of Getsic’s body.
Punitive 'play'; punishment and performance in the film’s notorious sequences
Given the filmmakers’ assertions about the source of the narrative, it seems likely that The Bunny Game adopts documentary conventions to endorse the impression that there is an objective reality being recorded by its cameras. The performances might then be regarded less as acting and more as ‘doing.’ Here, a similarity to Antonin Artaud’s ‘theatre of cruelty’ can be found, despite the filmmakers’ adoption of a realist aesthetic for much of the film. Artaud’s concept of ‘cruelty’ was first conceptualised in the 1930s and called for a theatre that refused to censor the struggles, or cruelty, of lived experience and rejected the kind of theatre and cinema that kept people in ‘an intellectual stupor.’[18] Artaud’s insistence on his cast as living instruments, rather than actors who mimicked the real, had them ‘doing’ rather than ‘performing,’ which appears to be the objective in the making of The Bunny Game. Rehmeier then films these ‘acts’ taking place, effectively a documentarist, videoing individual, non-simulated torture acts without interruption (except between acts) and the result is a filmed document of incidents that occurred in front of the camera. This is the nature of documentary as theorised by Dai Vaughan, who argues: ‘To see a film as documentary is to see its meaning as pertinent to the events and objects which passed before the camera; to see it, in a word, as signifying what it appears to record.’[19] To see The Bunny Game, or any film for that matter, as recording some documentary ‘truth’ requires the viewer to accept this premise. This may tell us why the filmmakers and cast have gone to such lengths to highlight the genuine nature of the acts seen on-screen, despite the likelihood of this being a marketing strategy to generate interest in the film.
However, a fiction is certainly established from the film’s opening. Getsic plays a prostitute, Renfro plays a truck driver. They enact a narrative that leads to an enigmatic open ending. Both are in their first film roles; they are not the people they become on-screen. But this distinction is weakened by a number of choices that muddy the identities of the performers and their characters. It is only on reading the credits that the viewer discovers the characters’ names as Bunny and Hog. Throughout a first viewing of the film the viewer can only identify them as the prostitute and the truck driver or, as I found myself doing, Getsic and Renfro. Getsic has her surname tattooed down her right arm and, this being the only indication of any formal identification, seemed to be the best name for her. Similarly, Renfro’s name is painted on the outside of what was in fact the actor’s own truck. Although Rehmeier explains in the HorrorNews.net interview that both characters were given names in the plot outline (Sylvia Gray and J.R.), these are never used in the film. Consequently, Getsic and Renfro play characters that may be identified by the viewer as Getsic and Renfro. The borderline between actor and character is essentially made indistinct and the boundary between the perceived real and not real is further blurred.
However, a fiction is certainly established from the film’s opening. Getsic plays a prostitute, Renfro plays a truck driver. They enact a narrative that leads to an enigmatic open ending. Both are in their first film roles; they are not the people they become on-screen. But this distinction is weakened by a number of choices that muddy the identities of the performers and their characters. It is only on reading the credits that the viewer discovers the characters’ names as Bunny and Hog. Throughout a first viewing of the film the viewer can only identify them as the prostitute and the truck driver or, as I found myself doing, Getsic and Renfro. Getsic has her surname tattooed down her right arm and, this being the only indication of any formal identification, seemed to be the best name for her. Similarly, Renfro’s name is painted on the outside of what was in fact the actor’s own truck. Although Rehmeier explains in the HorrorNews.net interview that both characters were given names in the plot outline (Sylvia Gray and J.R.), these are never used in the film. Consequently, Getsic and Renfro play characters that may be identified by the viewer as Getsic and Renfro. The borderline between actor and character is essentially made indistinct and the boundary between the perceived real and not real is further blurred.
Digital technology helps diffuse the distinction between performer and role in The Bunny Game
As well as the actor/character breach, authorial presence is similarly unstable throughout the film. As soon as Renfro begins to video the activities within the truck it has a self-reflexive effect, manifesting the process of videoing on-screen. Simultaneously, the captured footage from Renfro’s camera that at times fills the entire screen, identifies him as author and authority, by which Rehmeier seems to eschew his own authorial presence. Although this authority is returned to the editor, Rehmeier, during post-production, Renfro can be understood as a documentarist as well as a performer.
The violence inflicted in The Bunny Game, having such an evident effect on the actress Getsic, can be compared to Linda Williams’ conceptualisation of pornography as the ‘frenzy of the visible,’[20] the display of a woman’s apparent sexual pleasure through stylistic elements such as performance and cinematography. The visibility of this pleasure is made possible by the camera, the recorder of the perceived objective reality discussed by MacCabe, made even more significant in hard-core pornography where the sex act is seen to be non-simulated. Getsic’s reactions to Renfro’s violence cannot at any point be described as pleasure, but they are nevertheless a visual manifestation of states of body and mind such as terror, pain and despair. Rehmeier’s stylistic approach and Getsic’s performance reproduce the same frenzy that Williams finds in pornography, even to the point of Getsic’s back being branded twice and her body becoming visibly emaciated over the course of the film. In her discussion of sadomasochistic pornography Williams writes, ‘a flinch, a convulsion, a welt, even the flow of blood itself, would seem to offer incontrovertible proof that a woman’s body, so resistant to the involuntary show of pleasure, has been touched, “moved” by some force.’[21] In Rehmeier’s film, Getsic’s body and emotions suffer from the attacks of a violent, sexualised force. It appears to demonstrate something of the mythical snuff movie, described by Williams as the ‘worst-case scenario’ amongst violent pornographic films, in which hard-core violence leads to murder.[22]
Perhaps more evidently it belongs to Artaud’s dramatic tradition of the ‘theatre of cruelty’ raised earlier. In his ‘Second Manifesto’ Artaud writes, ‘[t]his cruelty will be bloody if need be, but not systematically so, and will therefore merge with the idea of a kind of severe mental purity, not afraid to pay the cost one must pay in life.’[23] In this theatre, the actors would face the risks that could be a consequence of rejecting the limits of traditional realist theatre. It is this apparent fidelity to lived experience (both Getsic’s past experiences and the acts performed in front of the camera) that makes The Bunny Game seem reminiscent of the theatre of cruelty and this makes it sensational. It appeals to a sense of disgust, perhaps shock, by its unremitting gaze at violent acts. Getsic, Renfro and Rehmeier all participate in a theatre of cruelty which has obvious immediate effects on the actress as well as potential ongoing emotional effects for all involved, not least for the viewer.
Part of the sensationalism of the film is down to Rehmeier’s filming of the female body under duress. Using varying shot sizes, but principally closer shots, he constructs a gaze that complements Bunny’s objectification by Hog. Laura Mulvey’s concept of the ‘male gaze’ would see here a repeated fragmentation of Bunny’s body, and a fetishisation which is typical of mainstream narrative cinema.[24] The film’s male subject, Hog, shares this gaze with the viewer who becomes complicit in the objectification of the female on-screen. It is difficult to substantiate The Bunny Game as a feminist text given this patriarchal treatment of the woman’s body. Perhaps, then, the evidence within the film of the male gaze, the theatre of cruelty and the frenzy of the visible suggest that it is more akin to torture porn.
Expectations of the torture porn sub-genre, however, are not fulfilled in The Bunny Game. Beth A. Kattelman summarises the expectations of this new ‘wave’ of horror films, also labelled as ‘carnography’ and ‘gorenography,’ as ‘featuring extremely graphic gore, complete with close-ups of bodies being eviscerated, [...]. [They] seem to revel in scenes of protracted pain and mental anguish that is doled out in particularly diabolical ways.’[25] Kattelman argues that the appeal for certain viewers is both the ‘pleasurable tension-release sensation’ and ‘that nobody is really getting hurt in the scenes that we are witnessing.’[26] Despite a film like Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005) using the same cinematic metalanguage as all mainstream cinema, viewers know that the violence is simulated and so it is ‘only a movie,’ to adapt Wes Craven’s renowned warning about The Last House on the Left (1972). The Bunny Game, however, shows Getsic ‘really getting hurt,’ to use Kattelman’s terminology. Its manifestations of cruelty, sexual spectacle and pornography suggest that its appeal may be that it is not ‘only a movie’ because it exceeds torture porn.
The Gutter and the Wilderness
Controversial films about sex trafficking have had a sporadic history in the United States. A small number were produced in America in the early years of the twentieth century, causing negative reactions amongst state censors and civic leaders. Historian Kevin Brownlow outlines a number of instances when films, despite enthusiasm from audiences, went on to be cut for their use of violence or banned outright by certain states, such as Traffic in Souls and The Inside of the White Slave Traffic (both 1913).[27] These examples contained scenes of abduction, the drugging of women, beatings and forced marriage. The films then, as with The Bunny Game, were regarded by some as dangerous material for the public to see, particularly young males. Major Metellus Funkhouser, leading a committee of censors in Chicago in 1914, claimed that ‘the effect on boys might be injurious’ of seeing The Inside of the White Slave Traffic.[28] Such a comment, most likely, refers to the expectation that certain ‘vulnerable’ viewers may be excited by the action on-screen and attempt to replicate it. Sex trafficking was also one of many socially unacceptable topics banned with the introduction of the Production Code in the 1930s. Along with miscegenation and ‘sex perversion’ it disappeared entirely or was encoded obliquely in mainstream American cinema, to be noticed by those who recognised the signs.[29]
Most cinemagoers today will be far more familiar with Pierre Morel’s Taken (2010) starring Liam Neeson as an ex-CIA agent who saves his daughter from Albanian sex traffickers in Paris. It is an action film above all else and the abuse of the abducted women in the film is implied rather than seen. If one assumes that Bunny ends the film unconscious rather than dead, The Bunny Game is about the use and enjoyment of violence to prepare someone for trafficking, and as such it is far more concerned with the means of destroying a person’s hope and subjective control than it is about the people involved in it as a business. A parallel can be drawn with Pasolini’s Salò in which a group of teenagers are abducted by a ring of depraved aristocrats and subjected to increasingly horrific acts of cruelty and violence, ending in their deaths. The Bunny Game has been unfavourably compared to Salò[30] given Pasolini’s film’s artistic quality and challenge to political complacency and taste. I would, however, contend that an alternative reading of The Bunny Game could present it as a meditation upon sexual violence that comments upon the United States’ socio-political condition. My challenge is that we look beyond the violence to the parts of the film that the reviews are ignoring, to the locations and what they may signify, to more fully test Rehmeier’s claim for it as a feminist text.
There are four main locations in the film, two interiors and two exteriors. The first twenty minutes of the film take place in an urban environment and scenes are principally set in Bunny’s sparse one room apartment and the empty streets and alleys of downtown Los Angeles. The remainder of the film is set in the specially adapted cargo area of Renfro’s truck and the desert-like wild spaces of Agua Dulce, just north of Los Angeles – a Hollywood favourite.[31] It is the exteriors that I am most concerned with here because of their potential for meaning as real spaces in a contemporary America. As identifiable as these locations may be to a cinephile or LA citizen, the exteriors of The Bunny Game speak of desolation, emptiness and neglect. When Bunny pays for her drugs with oral sex near the beginning of the film, the transaction takes place on a deserted street, effectively in the marginal spaces of the city.
The violence inflicted in The Bunny Game, having such an evident effect on the actress Getsic, can be compared to Linda Williams’ conceptualisation of pornography as the ‘frenzy of the visible,’[20] the display of a woman’s apparent sexual pleasure through stylistic elements such as performance and cinematography. The visibility of this pleasure is made possible by the camera, the recorder of the perceived objective reality discussed by MacCabe, made even more significant in hard-core pornography where the sex act is seen to be non-simulated. Getsic’s reactions to Renfro’s violence cannot at any point be described as pleasure, but they are nevertheless a visual manifestation of states of body and mind such as terror, pain and despair. Rehmeier’s stylistic approach and Getsic’s performance reproduce the same frenzy that Williams finds in pornography, even to the point of Getsic’s back being branded twice and her body becoming visibly emaciated over the course of the film. In her discussion of sadomasochistic pornography Williams writes, ‘a flinch, a convulsion, a welt, even the flow of blood itself, would seem to offer incontrovertible proof that a woman’s body, so resistant to the involuntary show of pleasure, has been touched, “moved” by some force.’[21] In Rehmeier’s film, Getsic’s body and emotions suffer from the attacks of a violent, sexualised force. It appears to demonstrate something of the mythical snuff movie, described by Williams as the ‘worst-case scenario’ amongst violent pornographic films, in which hard-core violence leads to murder.[22]
Perhaps more evidently it belongs to Artaud’s dramatic tradition of the ‘theatre of cruelty’ raised earlier. In his ‘Second Manifesto’ Artaud writes, ‘[t]his cruelty will be bloody if need be, but not systematically so, and will therefore merge with the idea of a kind of severe mental purity, not afraid to pay the cost one must pay in life.’[23] In this theatre, the actors would face the risks that could be a consequence of rejecting the limits of traditional realist theatre. It is this apparent fidelity to lived experience (both Getsic’s past experiences and the acts performed in front of the camera) that makes The Bunny Game seem reminiscent of the theatre of cruelty and this makes it sensational. It appeals to a sense of disgust, perhaps shock, by its unremitting gaze at violent acts. Getsic, Renfro and Rehmeier all participate in a theatre of cruelty which has obvious immediate effects on the actress as well as potential ongoing emotional effects for all involved, not least for the viewer.
Part of the sensationalism of the film is down to Rehmeier’s filming of the female body under duress. Using varying shot sizes, but principally closer shots, he constructs a gaze that complements Bunny’s objectification by Hog. Laura Mulvey’s concept of the ‘male gaze’ would see here a repeated fragmentation of Bunny’s body, and a fetishisation which is typical of mainstream narrative cinema.[24] The film’s male subject, Hog, shares this gaze with the viewer who becomes complicit in the objectification of the female on-screen. It is difficult to substantiate The Bunny Game as a feminist text given this patriarchal treatment of the woman’s body. Perhaps, then, the evidence within the film of the male gaze, the theatre of cruelty and the frenzy of the visible suggest that it is more akin to torture porn.
Expectations of the torture porn sub-genre, however, are not fulfilled in The Bunny Game. Beth A. Kattelman summarises the expectations of this new ‘wave’ of horror films, also labelled as ‘carnography’ and ‘gorenography,’ as ‘featuring extremely graphic gore, complete with close-ups of bodies being eviscerated, [...]. [They] seem to revel in scenes of protracted pain and mental anguish that is doled out in particularly diabolical ways.’[25] Kattelman argues that the appeal for certain viewers is both the ‘pleasurable tension-release sensation’ and ‘that nobody is really getting hurt in the scenes that we are witnessing.’[26] Despite a film like Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005) using the same cinematic metalanguage as all mainstream cinema, viewers know that the violence is simulated and so it is ‘only a movie,’ to adapt Wes Craven’s renowned warning about The Last House on the Left (1972). The Bunny Game, however, shows Getsic ‘really getting hurt,’ to use Kattelman’s terminology. Its manifestations of cruelty, sexual spectacle and pornography suggest that its appeal may be that it is not ‘only a movie’ because it exceeds torture porn.
The Gutter and the Wilderness
Controversial films about sex trafficking have had a sporadic history in the United States. A small number were produced in America in the early years of the twentieth century, causing negative reactions amongst state censors and civic leaders. Historian Kevin Brownlow outlines a number of instances when films, despite enthusiasm from audiences, went on to be cut for their use of violence or banned outright by certain states, such as Traffic in Souls and The Inside of the White Slave Traffic (both 1913).[27] These examples contained scenes of abduction, the drugging of women, beatings and forced marriage. The films then, as with The Bunny Game, were regarded by some as dangerous material for the public to see, particularly young males. Major Metellus Funkhouser, leading a committee of censors in Chicago in 1914, claimed that ‘the effect on boys might be injurious’ of seeing The Inside of the White Slave Traffic.[28] Such a comment, most likely, refers to the expectation that certain ‘vulnerable’ viewers may be excited by the action on-screen and attempt to replicate it. Sex trafficking was also one of many socially unacceptable topics banned with the introduction of the Production Code in the 1930s. Along with miscegenation and ‘sex perversion’ it disappeared entirely or was encoded obliquely in mainstream American cinema, to be noticed by those who recognised the signs.[29]
Most cinemagoers today will be far more familiar with Pierre Morel’s Taken (2010) starring Liam Neeson as an ex-CIA agent who saves his daughter from Albanian sex traffickers in Paris. It is an action film above all else and the abuse of the abducted women in the film is implied rather than seen. If one assumes that Bunny ends the film unconscious rather than dead, The Bunny Game is about the use and enjoyment of violence to prepare someone for trafficking, and as such it is far more concerned with the means of destroying a person’s hope and subjective control than it is about the people involved in it as a business. A parallel can be drawn with Pasolini’s Salò in which a group of teenagers are abducted by a ring of depraved aristocrats and subjected to increasingly horrific acts of cruelty and violence, ending in their deaths. The Bunny Game has been unfavourably compared to Salò[30] given Pasolini’s film’s artistic quality and challenge to political complacency and taste. I would, however, contend that an alternative reading of The Bunny Game could present it as a meditation upon sexual violence that comments upon the United States’ socio-political condition. My challenge is that we look beyond the violence to the parts of the film that the reviews are ignoring, to the locations and what they may signify, to more fully test Rehmeier’s claim for it as a feminist text.
There are four main locations in the film, two interiors and two exteriors. The first twenty minutes of the film take place in an urban environment and scenes are principally set in Bunny’s sparse one room apartment and the empty streets and alleys of downtown Los Angeles. The remainder of the film is set in the specially adapted cargo area of Renfro’s truck and the desert-like wild spaces of Agua Dulce, just north of Los Angeles – a Hollywood favourite.[31] It is the exteriors that I am most concerned with here because of their potential for meaning as real spaces in a contemporary America. As identifiable as these locations may be to a cinephile or LA citizen, the exteriors of The Bunny Game speak of desolation, emptiness and neglect. When Bunny pays for her drugs with oral sex near the beginning of the film, the transaction takes place on a deserted street, effectively in the marginal spaces of the city.
Desolate sex, deserted spaces: marginal spaces of body and place in The Bunny Game
The screen is filled with pale, featureless concrete with the two figures offset from centre in a doorway. Their existence as those who live in the margins is thus magnified. Kerbs, buildings and backstreets are all indistinct, bland and devoid of any signs of community except in populated areas where Bunny is gazed at by passersby without compassion, underlined by the black and white cinematography which literally eschews colour in these parts of the city. An old VW Beetle, parked at the side of an empty road, is a Disney icon that is incompatible with this picture of America. Bunny is seen walking, smoking, squatting and even urinating in or by the gutter – no clearer metaphor is necessary to stress the status of America’s street-walking underclass.
Shots of the wilderness location include views of a wind farm, mountains in the distance and inhospitable wasteland. The truck is parked close to a junkyard full of abandoned cars and trucks, predicting Bunny’s doom. A single road curves around the nearby hill, perhaps a quarter of a mile away with occasional cars driving by. It is the perfect person-less environment for a sadist to practise and keep a sordid video diary. Intermittent short scenes have the camera placed inside the truck, looking out at Bunny and Hog framed by the backend of the cargo area. Both actors are exposed to the wilderness, open to the view of anyone driving by who happens to look in the right direction. But of course, no-one does. Hog, a middle-aged man with a thick set physique and an enthusiasm for hunting knives, starts to bring Hollywood’s frontiersman to mind, encouraged by the words ‘High Noon’ emblazoned along the side of his truck. These short scenes are different in tone to the chaotically edited and noisy torture scenes. In one example, Bunny cries helplessly and Hog gazes at her face. In the near distance is the single road where cars pass by. A doorway composition like this, with the wilderness beyond, the frontiersman tenderly holding the young woman, casts Hog as the ghastly antithesis of John Wayne in The Searchers. Instead of ending the nightmare with ‘Let’s go home,’ Hog reminds Bunny that ‘Nobody cares. Nobody hears you.’ It is these moments at the back of the truck, as well as the film’s opening scenes of Bunny as an abused and neglected figure in the urban environment, that add a socio-political context to the rest of the film. Rehmeier and Getsic’s story seems to be set in an America that is absent of philanthropy, in which Bunny represents the women who are as valued in American society as the abandoned trucks in the junkyard. This assessment of the film takes account of both class status and gender; Bunny is a commodity by virtue of her prostitution, her victimhood and her sexualisation. The film indicates that her social status and physical condition, as a drug-dependent sex-worker, mean that she is subject to exploitative forces even before the abduction takes place. It signifies more than it appears to record, to adapt Dai Vaughan’s summary of documentary. It is more than just a torture film.
A ‘Lack of Explanation’
At this point it might be productive to turn to Stuart Hall’s work on meaning production which suggest that the readers of a text are able to reject the most likely ‘preferred’ meaning and reach an alternative ‘oppositional’ reading.[32] He writes, ‘it is possible for a viewer perfectly to understand both the literal and the connotative inflection given in a discourse but to decode the message in a globally contrary way.’[33] It is feasible, based on the sexual objectification of its female actress, to consider The Bunny Game as encoded with a message about the enjoyment of sadistic abuse both for the male filmmakers and the viewer, as one may find in sadomasochistic pornography. This reading takes into account an apparent and likely reading of the film’s content and its style of recording Bunny’s torture and Getsic’s suffering. In other words, this reading seems to be the preferred one, which means that the film is produced as a form of entertainment.
However, Rehmeier’s statement to the New York Times about the film’s motivation as a feminist warning for women to avoid ‘drug abuse and taking rides with strangers’ is the director’s preferred reading. It opposes what the text itself suggests is the preferred interpretation, so the director and the text could be seen to be at odds with one another. The conflict over the film’s meaning has extended to the BBFC’s decision to deny The Bunny Game a video release in the UK. The official news release makes the BBFC’s preferred reading position clear:
Shots of the wilderness location include views of a wind farm, mountains in the distance and inhospitable wasteland. The truck is parked close to a junkyard full of abandoned cars and trucks, predicting Bunny’s doom. A single road curves around the nearby hill, perhaps a quarter of a mile away with occasional cars driving by. It is the perfect person-less environment for a sadist to practise and keep a sordid video diary. Intermittent short scenes have the camera placed inside the truck, looking out at Bunny and Hog framed by the backend of the cargo area. Both actors are exposed to the wilderness, open to the view of anyone driving by who happens to look in the right direction. But of course, no-one does. Hog, a middle-aged man with a thick set physique and an enthusiasm for hunting knives, starts to bring Hollywood’s frontiersman to mind, encouraged by the words ‘High Noon’ emblazoned along the side of his truck. These short scenes are different in tone to the chaotically edited and noisy torture scenes. In one example, Bunny cries helplessly and Hog gazes at her face. In the near distance is the single road where cars pass by. A doorway composition like this, with the wilderness beyond, the frontiersman tenderly holding the young woman, casts Hog as the ghastly antithesis of John Wayne in The Searchers. Instead of ending the nightmare with ‘Let’s go home,’ Hog reminds Bunny that ‘Nobody cares. Nobody hears you.’ It is these moments at the back of the truck, as well as the film’s opening scenes of Bunny as an abused and neglected figure in the urban environment, that add a socio-political context to the rest of the film. Rehmeier and Getsic’s story seems to be set in an America that is absent of philanthropy, in which Bunny represents the women who are as valued in American society as the abandoned trucks in the junkyard. This assessment of the film takes account of both class status and gender; Bunny is a commodity by virtue of her prostitution, her victimhood and her sexualisation. The film indicates that her social status and physical condition, as a drug-dependent sex-worker, mean that she is subject to exploitative forces even before the abduction takes place. It signifies more than it appears to record, to adapt Dai Vaughan’s summary of documentary. It is more than just a torture film.
A ‘Lack of Explanation’
At this point it might be productive to turn to Stuart Hall’s work on meaning production which suggest that the readers of a text are able to reject the most likely ‘preferred’ meaning and reach an alternative ‘oppositional’ reading.[32] He writes, ‘it is possible for a viewer perfectly to understand both the literal and the connotative inflection given in a discourse but to decode the message in a globally contrary way.’[33] It is feasible, based on the sexual objectification of its female actress, to consider The Bunny Game as encoded with a message about the enjoyment of sadistic abuse both for the male filmmakers and the viewer, as one may find in sadomasochistic pornography. This reading takes into account an apparent and likely reading of the film’s content and its style of recording Bunny’s torture and Getsic’s suffering. In other words, this reading seems to be the preferred one, which means that the film is produced as a form of entertainment.
However, Rehmeier’s statement to the New York Times about the film’s motivation as a feminist warning for women to avoid ‘drug abuse and taking rides with strangers’ is the director’s preferred reading. It opposes what the text itself suggests is the preferred interpretation, so the director and the text could be seen to be at odds with one another. The conflict over the film’s meaning has extended to the BBFC’s decision to deny The Bunny Game a video release in the UK. The official news release makes the BBFC’s preferred reading position clear:
The principal focus of The Bunny Game is the unremitting sexual and physical abuse of a helpless woman, as well as the sadistic and sexual pleasure the man derives from this. The emphasis on the woman’s nudity tends to eroticise what is shown, while aspects of the work such as the lack of explanation of the events depicted, and the stylistic treatment, may encourage some viewers to enjoy and share in the man’s callousness and the pleasure he takes in the woman’s pain and humiliation. [34]
The BBFC’s statement succinctly lists the reasons for its rejection and hones in on a point that I raised earlier. The filmmakers do not go out of their way to contextualise Bunny’s story, to explain Hog’s purposes beyond his own pleasure and to identify the driver of the white van at the film’s conclusion. This ‘lack of explanation’ is one factor that puts the film beyond the acceptable limits of today’s classification guidelines.
The BBFC follows a principal that states: ‘Any association of sex with non-consensual restraint, pain or humiliation may be cut.’[35] In addition, the guidelines state that ‘graphic images of real injury, violence or death presented in a salacious or sensationalist manner which risks harm by encouraging callous or sadistic attitudes’ may be cut.[36] Whether or not one can reasonably argue that the film encourages any specific kind of attitude, there is no doubt that both Getsic and fellow victim / actress Drettie Page are both injured when Renfro brands them, and the violent actions throughout the film ranging from asphyxiation to physical blows, are nothing if not graphic. How a ‘salacious or sensationalist manner’ is measured is difficult to ascertain from the BBFC guidelines, but, as I have argued, the film’s enactment of cruelty and Rehmeier’s techniques of editing and close-up filming might be understood this way.
The BBFC also take into account the level of ‘realism’ in any film submitted for classification, based on the assumption that the more realist the depiction the more intense the effect. The visual signs of apparent authenticity in The Bunny Game make it both remarkable and unacceptable to the video regulatory body in Britain. The concern that the BBFC have for a film’s ‘realism’ reveals that they see their responsibility extending to the regulation of professional filmmakers’ stylistic decisions. The question for us to consider is whether The Bunny Game might potentially glamorise sexualised violence and abduction. Are these activities presented uncritically by the filmmakers? If one accepts a reading of certain scenes as I have presented above, as a condemnation of present-day America, then no. If one accepts Rehmeier’s reading, then it is a cautionary text. In fact, if one entertains this possibility, its denial of a video release in Britain closes the door on the exposure of its serious message. But to validate the film in this way means to regard its motivation very differently than its lengthy torture scenes would suggest. Based on the text itself, The Bunny Game appears to be a film produced by men which exploits women, and the scenes that introduce a socio-political context to this exploitation do little to justify Rehmeier’s alleged message.
The BBFC follows a principal that states: ‘Any association of sex with non-consensual restraint, pain or humiliation may be cut.’[35] In addition, the guidelines state that ‘graphic images of real injury, violence or death presented in a salacious or sensationalist manner which risks harm by encouraging callous or sadistic attitudes’ may be cut.[36] Whether or not one can reasonably argue that the film encourages any specific kind of attitude, there is no doubt that both Getsic and fellow victim / actress Drettie Page are both injured when Renfro brands them, and the violent actions throughout the film ranging from asphyxiation to physical blows, are nothing if not graphic. How a ‘salacious or sensationalist manner’ is measured is difficult to ascertain from the BBFC guidelines, but, as I have argued, the film’s enactment of cruelty and Rehmeier’s techniques of editing and close-up filming might be understood this way.
The BBFC also take into account the level of ‘realism’ in any film submitted for classification, based on the assumption that the more realist the depiction the more intense the effect. The visual signs of apparent authenticity in The Bunny Game make it both remarkable and unacceptable to the video regulatory body in Britain. The concern that the BBFC have for a film’s ‘realism’ reveals that they see their responsibility extending to the regulation of professional filmmakers’ stylistic decisions. The question for us to consider is whether The Bunny Game might potentially glamorise sexualised violence and abduction. Are these activities presented uncritically by the filmmakers? If one accepts a reading of certain scenes as I have presented above, as a condemnation of present-day America, then no. If one accepts Rehmeier’s reading, then it is a cautionary text. In fact, if one entertains this possibility, its denial of a video release in Britain closes the door on the exposure of its serious message. But to validate the film in this way means to regard its motivation very differently than its lengthy torture scenes would suggest. Based on the text itself, The Bunny Game appears to be a film produced by men which exploits women, and the scenes that introduce a socio-political context to this exploitation do little to justify Rehmeier’s alleged message.
Footnotes
[1] Brown, M. (2012) ‘UK censors ask focus groups to watch sexually violent films,’ 11th July, https://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jul/11/censors-focus-sexually-violent-films [accessed 07/08/12].
[2] BBFC News Release, ‘The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has rejected the DVD THE BUNNY GAME,’ 12th October 2011, https://www.bbfc.co.uk/newsreleases/2011/10/the-british-board-of-film-classification-bbfc-has-rejected-the-dvd-the-bunny-game/ [accessed 07/08/12].
[3] The Bunny Game Movie Q&A II, YouTube.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC48HhpC5Y4 [accessed 10/08/12].
[4] Piepenburg, E. (2012) ‘Testing Horror’s Threshold for Pain’, New York Times, September 16th, AR12.
[5] The Bunny Game Movie Q&A II.
[6] MacCabe, C. (1974) ‘Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses,’ Screen, 15/2, Summer 1974, 7-27.
[7] Artaud, A. (2010) The Theatre and Its Double. Richmond, Surrey: Oneworld Classics.
[8] Hall, S. (1980) 'Encoding/decoding,' in S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis (eds) Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson, 128-38.
[9] See also ‘The Bunny Game Featurette,’ Adam Rehmeier, 2009, https://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1522846/.
[10] MacCabe, 9.
[11] MacCabe, 20.
[12] Ward, P. (2008) ‘Drama-documentary, ethics and notions of performance: The ‘Flight 93’ films,’ in Austin, T. and de Jong, W. (eds), Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices. Maidenhead and New York: Open University Press / McGraw-Hill, 191-203, 195.
[13] Ward, 192.
[14] Ward,191.
[15] Interview with Adam Rehmeier, Director The Bunny Game, 2nd August 2012, https://horrornews.net/54809/interview-adam-rehmeier-director-the-bunny-game/ [accessed 21/08/12].
[16] Interview with Rodleen Getsic, 3rd August 2012, https://horrornews.net/54871/interview-rodleen-getsic-the-bunny-game/ [accessed 21/08/12].
[17] Interview with Adam Rehmeier, horrornews.net.
[18] Artaud, 2010, .60.
[19] Vaughan, D. (1999) For Documentary: Twelve Essays. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp.84-5.
[20] Williams, 1999.
[21] Williams, 1999, p.194.
[22] Williams, 1999, p.189.
[23] Artaud, 2010, p.88.
[24] Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen, 16/3, 6-18.
[25] Kattelman, B.A. (2010) ‘Carnographic Culture: America and the Rise of the Torture Porn Film,’ At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries, vol. 70, 3-15, p.6.
[26] Kattelman, 2010, 10,11.
[27] Brownlow, K. (1990) Behind the Mask of Innocence: Sex, Violence, Prejudice, Crime: Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era. London: Jonathan Cape, 70-85.
[28] Brownlow, .82.
[29] For a contemporary summary and discussion of the Production Code, see Inglis, R.A. (1947 [1985]) ‘Self-Regulation in Operation,’ in Balio, T. The American Film Industry. London and Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 377-400.
[30] See, for example, Pacheco, G. (2012) ‘The Bunny Game stares torture in the face and doesn’t flinch,’ Examiner.com, 24th July, www.examiner.com/review/the-bunny-game-stares-torture-the-face-and-doesn-t-flinch?cid=rss [accessed 21/08/12].
[31] Agua Dulce was the location of choice for, amongst others, Duel, 1971, Blazing Saddles, 1974, and the Star Trek episode ‘Arena’ from 1967.
[32] Hall, 1980.
[33] Hall, 1980, 137.
[34] BBFC News Release.
[35] BBFC: The Guidelines, 15.
[36] BBFC: The Guidelines, 33.
[1] Brown, M. (2012) ‘UK censors ask focus groups to watch sexually violent films,’ 11th July, https://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jul/11/censors-focus-sexually-violent-films [accessed 07/08/12].
[2] BBFC News Release, ‘The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has rejected the DVD THE BUNNY GAME,’ 12th October 2011, https://www.bbfc.co.uk/newsreleases/2011/10/the-british-board-of-film-classification-bbfc-has-rejected-the-dvd-the-bunny-game/ [accessed 07/08/12].
[3] The Bunny Game Movie Q&A II, YouTube.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC48HhpC5Y4 [accessed 10/08/12].
[4] Piepenburg, E. (2012) ‘Testing Horror’s Threshold for Pain’, New York Times, September 16th, AR12.
[5] The Bunny Game Movie Q&A II.
[6] MacCabe, C. (1974) ‘Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses,’ Screen, 15/2, Summer 1974, 7-27.
[7] Artaud, A. (2010) The Theatre and Its Double. Richmond, Surrey: Oneworld Classics.
[8] Hall, S. (1980) 'Encoding/decoding,' in S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis (eds) Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson, 128-38.
[9] See also ‘The Bunny Game Featurette,’ Adam Rehmeier, 2009, https://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1522846/.
[10] MacCabe, 9.
[11] MacCabe, 20.
[12] Ward, P. (2008) ‘Drama-documentary, ethics and notions of performance: The ‘Flight 93’ films,’ in Austin, T. and de Jong, W. (eds), Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices. Maidenhead and New York: Open University Press / McGraw-Hill, 191-203, 195.
[13] Ward, 192.
[14] Ward,191.
[15] Interview with Adam Rehmeier, Director The Bunny Game, 2nd August 2012, https://horrornews.net/54809/interview-adam-rehmeier-director-the-bunny-game/ [accessed 21/08/12].
[16] Interview with Rodleen Getsic, 3rd August 2012, https://horrornews.net/54871/interview-rodleen-getsic-the-bunny-game/ [accessed 21/08/12].
[17] Interview with Adam Rehmeier, horrornews.net.
[18] Artaud, 2010, .60.
[19] Vaughan, D. (1999) For Documentary: Twelve Essays. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp.84-5.
[20] Williams, 1999.
[21] Williams, 1999, p.194.
[22] Williams, 1999, p.189.
[23] Artaud, 2010, p.88.
[24] Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen, 16/3, 6-18.
[25] Kattelman, B.A. (2010) ‘Carnographic Culture: America and the Rise of the Torture Porn Film,’ At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries, vol. 70, 3-15, p.6.
[26] Kattelman, 2010, 10,11.
[27] Brownlow, K. (1990) Behind the Mask of Innocence: Sex, Violence, Prejudice, Crime: Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era. London: Jonathan Cape, 70-85.
[28] Brownlow, .82.
[29] For a contemporary summary and discussion of the Production Code, see Inglis, R.A. (1947 [1985]) ‘Self-Regulation in Operation,’ in Balio, T. The American Film Industry. London and Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 377-400.
[30] See, for example, Pacheco, G. (2012) ‘The Bunny Game stares torture in the face and doesn’t flinch,’ Examiner.com, 24th July, www.examiner.com/review/the-bunny-game-stares-torture-the-face-and-doesn-t-flinch?cid=rss [accessed 21/08/12].
[31] Agua Dulce was the location of choice for, amongst others, Duel, 1971, Blazing Saddles, 1974, and the Star Trek episode ‘Arena’ from 1967.
[32] Hall, 1980.
[33] Hall, 1980, 137.
[34] BBFC News Release.
[35] BBFC: The Guidelines, 15.
[36] BBFC: The Guidelines, 33.