Comfort Viewings #4: On Knight Chills
The Final Girls was born to create a fun, safe space for all to enjoy horror. With our IRL plans put on indefinite hold, we've been thinking about how we can continue to continue to engage with the amazing horror crowd that we love, and that we love talking about movies with.
For now, we're excited to bring you a new series called Comfort Viewings, where we ask filmmakers, fans, and writers to talk about what they're finding comfort in right now, while we live through a real-life horror film.
The fourth one comes from critic, author, programmer and self-titled hand-washing enthusiast, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Confession: while seemingly everyone I know spent their 2020 pandemic lockdown veritably devouring screen media, I’ve been shocked at how hard I’ve found the act of simply watching movies. I no longer seemed to enjoy films in the same way I did in the Before Times. Almost everything felt suddenly and almost cruelly anachronistic; people are standing too close together! Wash your hands! My god, don’t touch her! What are you talking about - surely the person in the mask is a good guy! No, I don’t want to wax lyrical about the abstract poetics of death right now, thank you very much! Regardless of the elements that govern one’s personal experience of cinema viewing, it has felt for me that something has broken down in the ways that I used to find pleasure in cinema, leaving me at times, instead, with hazy feelings closer to loss or grief, or even an unexpected and unpleasant sense of mourning.
The films I have been able to connect with, both emotionally and intellectually, have therefore come as somewhat of a surprise, but there is retrospectively a logic to it. I’ve been watching a lot of movies that were very much on the outside to begin with; forgotten straight-to-video fare, the supposed pop cultural dreck relegated in the popular consciousness to what Ramon Lobato has evocatively described as the 'straight-to-video slaughterhouse', consisting of ‘obscure titles...not made to be remembered or cherished’ but ‘designed to deliver a modest amount of pleasure and then forgotten’. I’ve always had a soft spot for these kinds of movies precisely because they so fundamentally defy canonical (male-dominated) thinking and actively reject the fetishisation of assumed shared memories of film spectatorship.
Enter Katherine Hicks’s Knight Chills (2001). In 2018, I wrote a 200,000 word yet-to-be-published book on women and horror that includes an extensive filmography in the appendix of over 750 women-directed horror films, and for many years now, I’ve been trying to source and view as many of these as possible. I’m learning a lot, but most immediately this: never underestimate how many women-directed horror films have been condemned to the ‘straight-to-video slaughterhouse’. For every Babadook (2014) or Raw (2016) or A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), there’s twenty, thirty, forty other films you’ve never heard of, and are unlikely to.
This is how I discovered Knight Chills. I’d had a long, hard day - one of many - home-schooling my young neurodiverse child while juggling my own work commitments with omnipresent Covid-19-related anxiety, and I just needed to switch off. In any other context, Knight Chills might have left little impression, but in these particular circumstances it hit a sweet spot that I did not know I so desperately needed activated at this particular moment. Through the often-deceptive artifice of the teen horror film, Knight Chills reminded me just how malleable the relationship between the past, the present, and the future is, and how cinema can often accidentally reveal things about where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going, that we might not otherwise be able to articulate.
Knight Chills tells the story of cliched nerdlinger, Jack (Tim Jeffrey), who is so heavily into live action fantasy role playing that even the jocks and stoners he plays with give him endless shit about it. The bullied butt of every joke, Jack is also contending with an overprotective mother who believes role-playing games are the Devil’s Work, and he has an unrequited crush on one of the stoner guys’ girlfriends, Brook (Laura Tidwell). Humiliated once too often, and crushed by Brook’s rejection, Jack dies by suicide. He promptly returns from the dead as a powerful knight character inspired by the very game he played so frequently with his frenemies, enacting his revenge as he plows them down one by one.
Knight Chills gleefully mines highly publicised moral panics surrounding live action fantasy role-playing games, particularly Dungeons and Dragons. D&D copped a great deal of flack during the 1980s Satanic Panic era especially, linked to Satanic ritual abuse through its supposed status as cult-bait to lure unsuspecting young victims. Jack's mother was surely inspired by the real-life Patricia Pulling, founder of the one-woman activist group BADD (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons), which she formed after her D&D obsessed son died by suicide in 1982. Press coverage of the 1988 murder of Leith Von Stein by his stepson Chris Pritchard in North Carolina sensationalised Pritchard’s involvement in a D&D group, an aspect of the case that became central to the many true crime books, TV movies, and mini-series about the case.
Yet while Knight Chills recalls this now somewhat retro moral panic, watching the film in 2020, I was struck - dramatically so - by how inadvertently the film brought to life (literally and figuratively) another monster far more active in the contemporary world: the incel. On this front, Jack is a textbook case; the classic angry loser who takes it out on everyone else, with women always to blame. What is so intriguing about Knight Chills is that, in a critical sense, I cannot for the life of me figure out if he was intended to be a sympathetic figure who seeks justifiable revenge against those who wronged him, or if the film is more ambivalent about his moral status, making him an interesting example of the incel trope as we today understand it through the lens of violent misogyny.
This overwhelming experience of not quite being able to lock Knight Chills down hit me in an extraordinary and, at that point in time, very meaningful way, amplifying my awareness of the slippery and ephemeral nature not just of film criticism and interpretation, but the very experience of watching movies. Meanings change just as we do, and just as the world does, too. I was comforted by Knight Chills, a film that, on the surface, looks relatively straight forward, but to me watching it decades after its first release now feels anything but. Knight Chills reminded me that things change, and they’ll keep on changin; the nightmare of 2020 won’t last forever, and how we look back at this period in the future will itself evolve as we keep learning, re-learning, re-framing and re-thinking, the past and the place of this pandemic within it.
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