Blix is afraid

The little town of Valentine Bluffs is set to celebrate its first Valentines Day in twenty years. But when a miner with a pickaxe appears in the streets, and the bodies start piling up, it becomes clear that the past has come back to haunt them once more.

Once again, we’re heading into the weekend, and as everybody knows, that can only mean one thing: We are going to talk about a slasher film. And since we just celebrated International Workers’ Day a couple of days ago, I think it is only fitting to focus on a slasher film where the proletariat plays a prominent role. So, comrades, grab your helmets and pickaxes, and let us travel deep into the mines, where we will take a closer look at George Mihalka’s My Bloody Valentine (1981).

Twenty years before the narrative takes place, in the small Canadian mining town called Valentine Bluffs a great tragedy is suffered within the Hanniger Mine on Valentine’s Day, when a methane explosion occurred while five workers were still down in the mine. The two supervisors on the job left early in order to get to the Valentine’s Day dance at the Town Hall. Failing to check the methane levels in the mine, and leaving before the workers made their way out of the mine safely, they were ultimately to blame for the disaster. After searching through the rubble, only one of the miners is found alive: Harry Warden. He had to resort to cannibalism to survive, and suffered a mental breakdown due to the situation. After a year in the State Mental Hospital, he returns one year later to exact his revenge on the two supervisors, killing them and putting their hearts in heart-shaped boxes. The boxes are left in the Town Hall, along with a warning that the town is not to arrange another Valentines Day Dance, unless they want to experience the gruesome consequences. The town heeded that warning for 20 years, but when the town leaders believe it is safe to throw a Valentines Day Dance again, tragedy strikes once more.

So let’s get started with the obvious: the setting. As noted in last week’s discussion of Stage Fright (Michele Soavi, 1987), the typical settings for a slasher film in this era were places like college campuses, suburban neighborhoods, or summer camps. Although these settings are vastly different, they have one very important thing in common: They are all settings that were very linked to the middle class. My Bloody Valentine takes a sharp turn from this tradition, rather setting its narrative in a small mining town. These kinds of towns traditionally built solely for the purpose of extracting the natural resources of the area, with the mine as the citizens’ main employer. With this, there is automatically a larger working-class presence than what we find in films set in the suburbs or around college campuses.

Due to this location, it is obvious that the character gallery of this film will be distinctly different from most other films of the genre. Although most of the main characters are fairly young, they are not high schoolers or college students. They are rather working-class people, with all the young men working in the Hanniger Mine, the sole enterprise that the entire town revolves around. We do not get any insight into what the female residents of Valentine Bluffs do for a living, except for the “young barmaid named Harriet” (played by Terry Waterland), as she is referred to in a serenade by the towns’ young men, who serves drinks at a bar called The Cage, and Mabel Osbourne (played by Patricia Hamilton), who seemingly does some unspecified work within the local government.

What I find really interesting within the character gallery of this film is that we get an honest to God love triangle! T.J. Hanniger (played by Paul Kelman), son of the mine’s owner and town’s mayor, has returned to Valentine Bluffs after leaving everything behind and being gone for several years. He returns to the town and the mine to find that Sarah Mercer (played by Lori Hallier), his former girlfriend, is now dating Axel Palmer (played by Neill Affleck), an old friend and fellow miner. This kind of relationship dynamic is not common practice within the genre, and adds a totally different layer to the narrative. In My Bloody Valentine, you don’t only have to worry about the characters dying, but you also get to root for your favorite hunk to win the girl. It is also refreshing to see a love triangle in which the parties are able to set aside their differences and work together in a crisis situation, like, say, a pickaxe-wielding murderer has come to town.

Speaking of uncommon practice in slasher films: My Bloody Valentine does not have a final girl. At least not in the true sense of the word. When the characters actually realize that there is a killer on the loose, they stick together and act collectively, instead of running off in different directions. This is perhaps very natural, as they all live and work together in a small community and are used to everyone relying on each other to make their society work. I also think it is very natural considering their working-class backgrounds, where comradery and collective action is more common practice than in other socio-economic spheres.

As I alluded to in the opening paragraph, this review is published right after May 1^st, or International Workers’ Day. Therefore, I think it is only fitting that we also look at this film directly from a Marxist perspective. Don’t be scared. It’s just an academic exercise. For now.

One of the most important things to look at when viewing a film from a Marxist lens is the films portrayal of hierarchical power-structures. My Bloody Valentine has a very distinctive view of these structures. The methane explosion that set off the entire chain of events that lead to this film’s murder spree only happened because of the carelessness of two supervisors in relation to their subordinates. Four people died because the bosses would rather get drunk and party than making sure the miners were working under safe conditions. Their apathy towards the working class directly cost four lives, and indirectly many more. It is not necessarily a stretch to say that their deaths were justified, as they went wholly unpunished by the town’s legal system.

It is also impossible not to notice that Mr. Hanniger, the owner of the Hanniger Mine, which is the town’s main industry, is also the town’s mayor. Being the employer of a large percentage of the town’s population, this man already wields a whole lot of power. He was absolutely in a position to abuse that power to get elected, as he holds the townspeople’s livelihoods in his hand. Add to this that there is no mention throughout the film of the miners being unionized, it becomes very clear that they had very few opportunities not to follow his will if he was to nudge them in a certain direction during an election year.

Finally, and may I also add: HUGE spoiler warning for the following paragraph: Axel, who turns out to be the killer in this new spree, is the son of one of the supervisors that were killed by Harry Warden. It is suggested that witnessing the murder of his father as a child drove him crazy. However, I think there might be a more sinister explanation for his actions. There is a big difference between the two killing sprees: Harry Warden killed two supervisors that caused the lives of workers due to their lack of empathy for the working class. Axel exclusively kills working class people. One could argue that he makes this choice to punish the working class for what he perceives to be taking away his trajectory towards a higher socio-economic status when his father was killed. Far-fetched? Maybe. But one must never underestimate the potential for bloodlust from a social climber.

All in all, My Bloody Valentine is a fantastic early slasher film. The eerie setting of the tunnels deep within a mine adds a fantastic atmosphere for a slasher film. The stalking point-of-view shots are heightened by the killer’s heavy breathing from within the gas mask. We get some absolutely fantastic kills, with the pickaxe being an excellent weapon of choice for our killer. And finally, most of the characters are very likable people, who care about each other and work together. If you haven’t seen My Bloody Valentine already, I think you should give it a try. And also, join a union. Happy belated International Worker’s Day. I’ll try to cook up something more special for it next year.