TIFF Report: S&Man Review

To give you a synopsis, as at least as we're told by his voiceover, JT Petty was initially interested in making a documentary concentrating on a story from his youth. In his neighbourhood a voyeur was discovered to have filmed the lives of everyone on his street over a period of years, but was never prosecuted, as his "subjects" didn't want the footage to have to be examined in court. After several months of pleading and preliminary shooting, the voyeur refused to take part in the documentary, and so, Petty, finding himself without a core to the film, floundered, eventually finding his central subject in the form of Eric Rost, the creator of the disturbing underground stalker horror series, S&Man.

It's hard to approach this subject delicately, but the issue debated over S&Man is simply "Is Eric real? And if not, does this invalidate the film?" I'm not going to reveal whether Eric is or isn't. This isn't a documentary about Eric; it is a documentary about horror cinema and our reaction to it as viewers; as such he and his work are critical.

With the help of Carol Glover Phd., author of Men, Women, and Chainsaws: A Look at Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Petty explores the different aspects of horror cinema, in particular the use of particular "gazes", from the most well known concept, the male gaze, to gazes more specific to the horror genre; the killing gaze, the gaze of a victim, though it is near impossible (with the way horror films tend use women as victims) for these gazes to not be genderized.

The film poses the questions: where do you ( the viewer) draw the line? From which gaze do you gain the most enjoyment? And finally, how are you implicated by this? With comments from underground film makers such as Bill Zebub and August Underground’s Fred Vogel, this is explored with uncompromised honesty. But the film is most illustrative when it is unavoidably posing those questions to the viewer by allowing them to observe Eric Rost and footage of the S&Man series.

This is a film that almost works too well; perhaps discovering the ultimate in horror to make its point. It is, intellectually, one of the most honest documentaries I’ve ever seen; the cinematic manipulations it uses only emphasize its points. A documentary of an astounding and surprising power, This is almost required viewing for anyone who considers themselves to have a particular interest in cinematic form. Don’t let me lie to you; it’s possible to simply not "understand" the film and have a knee-jerk reaction of revulsion. Ironically, this is as valid a reaction as any other.