Lace Crater (2015)
Directed by Harrison Atkins
Viewed on Shudder
Valentine’s Day has come and gone, so now it’s time to sweep up the candy wrappers, take down the heart decorations, and talk about Lace Crater! Going into Lace Crater I only knew two facts about the movie, the first being that it is a strange movie and the second being that the plot is about a woman who has sex with a ghost. Thinking about it now, I probably could have just said the second thing and you would have assumed the first. So, if you want to read about a movie where a woman has sex with a ghost, well, here’s your chance!
Our Story!
Lace Crater is the story of a woman, Ruth, who, while on a drug and alcohol fueled trip with her friends, comes across a ghost in her friend’s pool house. This ghost is more attractive than you would think and Ruth, in a questionably sober state, decides that it would be a good idea to have sex with her ghastly suitor. Ruth awakens the next day not entirely sure if what happened was real or not but soon finds her body changing in strange ways. Ways that frighten her and threaten her connection to reality.
A Mildly Odd Film
How many times can I say this is a weird movie? A few more before the end of this review, I bet. This weirdness isn’t just from the plot though, it comes from many aspects of the film, like the shaky cam cinematography, the interesting visual choices (which I will expand on later), and the odd subject matter. It would be easy to say that the ghost sexing is the weirdest the movie ever got, but that isn’t really the case. We can talk about the weirdness all day, but the point of this review is to determine if Lace Crater is good, so, is it?
I Think So?
This is a bit of a tough call, but my immediate reaction was to say yes. That isn’t an instant, unequivocal yes, but a yes that I arrived at after some discussion and contemplation. There’s a lot I enjoyed in Lace Crater, and most of that was related to how unafraid of the odd subject matter that the filmmakers were. There isn’t much going on here that is subtle, for better and for worse, and this starts with how the ghost appears and the weird sex scene that happens. There isn’t a ton of fanfare, the ghost just shows up and talks to her and that leads to some ethereal intercourse.
The Sex Is Where It Got Good!
This intercourse, of course, leads to the odd body changes that Ruth begins to go through and from here I started to get much more into Lace Crater. I’ve always been a big fan of the body horror subgenre and Lace Crater handles this aspect expertly, slowly building up what is going on without revealing anything too quickly. And while much of Lace Crater is plagued with clear budget limitations, which I will get into later, they clearly spent a lot of time and effort figuring out low budget options for how these symptoms could manifest and still have them be shocking. They succeeded. I don’t want to give any of them away, but things get more and more disturbing as the film goes on.
The Horrors of Social Life
What took me by surprise though, was that the horror here isn’t from just the physical aspects of the disease, but from the social toll that it takes on Ruth. I won’t get into spoilers here, but Ruth’s friend group doesn’t exactly take the news of what happened to Ruth well. It goes into a really interesting direction while also trying to maybe preempt audience members who could feel similarly that Ruth did something morally incorrect and perhaps deserved what happened to her, which I appreciated. Often, when making a narrative about how illnesses affect you, the story can be overshadowed by whether or not the illness was a “proper” one and showing the ghost sex in a normal light while highlighting the incorrectness of these views is an admirable juxtaposition.
Sometimes Things Get Stretched A Bit Thin
While I’ve been focusing on the positive aspects I do have to comment on some of the less enjoyable bits. As much as I enjoy seeing lower budgeted filmmakers stretching what they can do effects-wise, it is still sometimes very obvious that this movie had not a lot to work with. The shooting style itself is kind of a giveaway, the whole ‘shaky cam on close-ups of people’s faces’ that happens in most scenes kind of betrays that they didn’t have a lot of locations to work with and it makes some of the sequences look rather bland. One scene, in particular, looks a bit silly and took me out of the film, which is a scene where Ruth goes to a “club”. They try with all their might to make this scene look real by having a few extras and strobe lights in the corner of a room, but it never connected and I laughed a bit because I never bought that this scene was actually happening. Of course, they don’t actually need to shoot in a club or with dozens of people, but the illusion of reality is kind of important.
The Best Movie About Ghost STDs That I’ve Ever See
There are a lot of other little moments where reality begins to creep into Lace Crater, but they didn’t detract too much when I took the film as a whole. Whether or not you’ll get much from the movie though, depends on what your tolerance for weird indie horror films are. If your first thought after learning of the ghost sex in this movie was, ‘this sounds so weird, I have to watch it!’ please be warned that there’s a little more going on than just raunchy ghost sex. Lace Crater has something important to say, and I enjoyed it, even if there were some missteps along the way.
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