Butcher Block is a weekly series celebrating horror’s most extreme films and the minds behind them. Dedicated to graphic gore and splatter, each week will explore the dark, the disturbed, and the depraved in horror, and the blood and guts involved. For the films that use special effects of gore as an art form, and the fans that revel in the carnage, this series is for you.
“My brother keeps a human head in his closet. Every few days it’s a new head.”
That’s how 12-year-old Marty (Gavin Brown), through voiceover, opens 2012’s Found. It’s the precise type of opening hook that announces straightaway that this coming-of-age horror tale won’t be like anything you’ve seen before. Based on a novel of the same name by Todd Rigney, which he adapted for screen with director Scott Schirmer, Found is an indie effort with serious ambition. One that goes to some dark, depraved places and isn’t for the faint-hearted.
As Marty announces in the opening, his older brother Steve (Ethan Philbeck) is a serial killer. Steve keeps the severed head of his latest victim in a bowling bag stashed away in his closet. Save for his penchant for killing people, Steve seems like most teen boys. He’s away from home most of the time and has a contentious at best relationship with his parents. He loves his younger brother, bonded particularly over their love of horror, but treats him much the same way any older teen would an annoying younger sibling.
Because Marty knows about his brother’s nasty little hobby straightaway, the narrative digs into how Marty copes with that knowledge and presents an overview of his family’s life. Meaning that while it’d be easy to blame Steve’s psychotic nature on the horror movies he adores, especially the grisly nature of his VHS copy of Headless, the narrative slowly unfurls a more disturbing family portrait. Steve’s favored victim of choice is black women, the racist implication clear. Only the more we get to know Steve and Marty’s parents, the more we realize Steve learned racism through his father.
The further the story progresses, the more problematic those family dynamics become. It explains why Marty might choose to harbor Steve’s secret. He’s a loner at school and a frequent target to bullying; his only friend is growing more distant as a means of lessening the mark on his own back by association. Adults fail Marty at just about every turn. There’s no excuse for Steve’s psychotic nature, but Schirmer does an excellent job eliciting sympathy in a psychologically distressing scenario. These brothers may be hardcore horror aficionados, but it’s not the movies that made them who they are.
Headless did, however, inspire an outlet for Steve’s rage. The film within a film offers up the goriest moments of the movie, as much of Steve’s murderous ways are offscreen. That is, until the grand finale; an ending so suitably bleak, violent, and blood-drenched that it’s bound to alienate viewers. It’s the finale that likely caused two significant roles to be recast before production; parents of the initial actors cast in the parts weren’t so comfortable with the subject matter after all, and they pulled out of the production.
Though the extreme shoestring budget sometimes shows, it’s clear that Schirmer treated the story with care and respect. He didn’t shy away from the touchier elements, either, and surely not the gore. What initially seems to be a love letter to horror of the VHS era quickly detours into something far more savage and visceral. The violence of Headless can’t compare to the uncomfortable violence in Marty’s family, both sexual and physical. It’s the type of film that leaves you with a lot to chew on, full of depraved imagery that lingers long after the credits roll.