The Power & The Glory – In Blood Red Films

Photo by Ariel B

The Power & The Glory – In Blood Red Films

Note: This art film is Not Showing at or in anyway connected with The English Mansion
As an artist a few year ago, I made a number of short art films. I wanted to elaborate here on one in particular – Old Enough to Bleed, which I think expressed some of my darker leanings. This was not one film but four shorts exploring aspects of womanhood and the female rites of passage – Virgin, Whore, Wife/Mother and Goddess. The section I want to draw attention to is that of Wife.

This film was based on a story/monologue that I had written entitled ‘The Power & the Glory’. It’s about a female serial-killer who drugs, rapes and murders her male victims, always in hotels, the bastion of men’s secret love-affairs. She toys with the police who at first cannot believe a woman could kill like this and think it is a homosexual killer.

In the film we witness her picking up a man in a hotel bar taking him back to her room for sex where she drugs and uses him before raping him with a bottle and castrating him. During the assault and murder it becomes apparent she is getting a sexual kick from the murder. The film ends with her smiling and enjoying a post-coital cigarette while touching up her lipstick as her victim bleeds to death. She is empowered and sexually excited, not just by the murders per-se but by the fact that men everywhere who secretly meet women for sex will be afraid. That is her power and that is the glory she basks in.

Still from OETB: Wife

The subject matter may seem horrific but as a woman I felt these are the kind of images we constantly see on television. Except the victims are always women – naked, raped murdered. This is in some way a reflection of women’s position in society, with the innate lack of physical strength and with less power we make better victims. I wanted to reverse this to create a character that would make men afraid, make men the victims.

Note: As a woman I enjoyed exploring the powerful fantasy of castrating a man, to completely emasculate and de-sexualize him. However, these fantasies are just sex games with no place in reality. I abhor all violence. Art here is being used to explore repressed female  anger and comment on the ubiquitous nature of violence against women in our society.