Blood and High Heels: about The Town That Boars Me

I have explored the connection between fashion and horror films in a previous post, but I still haven’t explored it in shortcuts that blend musicals, horror films and fashion. That’s probably because there aren’t too many shortcuts with such themes. In fact the first of this genre is The Town That Boars Me, a short independent musical film written and directed by London-based fashion and nightlife photographer Ben Charles Edwards and produced by Glass Loves and Shoot to Kill. The short film was premiered on Thursday night during the Portobello Film Festival and it’s now available on its MySpace site.

Some of you might already be familiar with Edwards’ imaginary and visionary photographic work. He was also behind the “Chapter 7: Eat Your Chiffon” video, that recorded a surrealist dinner at Zandra Rhodes’ house - featuring among the others Marios Schwab, Bishi, Andrew Logan, Fred Butler and Natt Weller - inspired by John Waters’ “Eat Your Make-Up” and by the seventh chapter of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Adventures in Wonderland (about the mad tea party).

The 15-minute long The Town That Boars Me is rather different from Edwards’ previous work. The shortcut tells the story of a pig boy with a shoe fetish who goes out at night killing local women and stealing high heel shoes.
The film cast features Kelly Osbourne, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, drag queen extraordinaire Jodie Harsh, Zandra Rhodes, Sadie Frost and Andrew Logan (as the town butcher and creator of pig boy), while the songs are co-written by Steve Cradock and film music composer Angus Havers.

The plot is rather bizarre and inspired by Edwards’ obsessions with George Orwell’s Animal Farm, his love of musicals and exploitation films and the rather unstylish girls he saw one day walking around his hometown of Woking, none of them wearing high heels. The film features elements a la Rocky Horror Show, such as grotesque characters and bizarre costumes, but there are bits that remind me of Italian horror and exploitation films. There are sequences that for example evoke in my mind Mario Bava’s works and in particular Blood and Black Lace (Sei donne per l'assassino).

Bava’s film was the first to launch the perfect killer look: its murderer wears a scarf on his face that deforms his features, erasing them and turning him into an anonymous being. Edwards’ pig boy is half anonymous assassin, half rag and bone man with his mask and clothes in tatters. Blood and Black Lace was characterised by the use of surreal and garishly sensationalised colours – among them reds, violets, magentas and greens - that contributed to give a kitsch and mysterious atmosphere to the whole film. Edwards uses the same colours as Bava, in particular in the scenes when Kelly Osbourne and Natt Weller are inside the “Model Citizen Training”. But while in Bava the colours turned the glamorous world of fashion into a nightmarish universe, in Edwards' short film, they contribute to create his fantastically surreal world. Besides, in Mario Bava's film the different models were almost an excuse to show different types of death, while in The Town That Boars Me death and violence are excuses to show a few pairs of glamorous shoes and to listen to some catchy songs. Like Bava, Edwards seems to have created with his polychromous short film a new aesthetics of fashion, violence and murder.

If the shortcut is successful, Edwards will develop it into a feature or a musical. I hope this short film will somehow be turned into a longer feature, first as I'd like to see a proper feature film by Ben Charles Edwards, second because this would be a great opportunity for a director to collaborate with a shoe designer who might produce for the occasion some exclusive high-heeled shoes.   

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