I’ve always been one to devise little projects for myself. When I was 16, I embarked on a quest to find the movie that was too disturbing to finish. It was an interesting way to map the boundaries of my tastes, classic teenage edgelord shit. I don’t fully remember where my quest took me (though vaguely I remember watching Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)) but I know definitively where it ended: Fred Vogel’s 2001 film August Underground. I was doubly fixated on it. First for its high standing on many of the “Top Most Fucked Up Disturbing Movies of All Time” lists I found online, and second for its being a film made in Western Pennsylvania near my hometown of Pittsburgh. I barely made it 15 minutes into the movie when I was 16. It was a little too close to home in the most literal, geographic sense not to affect me. Sitting alone in my dark bedroom after I had ostensibly gone to bed for the night, I was horrified. I had to watch cartoons before I could fall asleep.
Now, I’m older, for sure. Wiser, maybe, but not altogether more mature. I’m still drawn to a certain type of movie, that being: trash, horror, extremity. In the last year, I’ve watched a number of other movies often topping the fucked up movie lists (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Cannibal Holocaust, etc.). And I’m still devising little movie-watching projects for myself. Earlier this summer I started building a list of all the movies filmed in and around Pittsburgh, and my “spooky szn” watchlist draws primarily from that Pittsburgh movies list. At first, I was thinking it would be a good way to watch through more of George Romero’s filmography. However, in compiling that list I was confronted by my old friend August Underground, which has become something of a white whale over the years: I have, a number of times, unsuccessfully attempted to watch. I am nothing if not persistent, and finally, after something like 8 years, I watched August Underground start to finish.
I understand why I turned the movie off so quickly back in high school — the film is jarring and it wastes no time bringing you right into it. An early entrant to the found footage genre, August Underground opens with a cameraman standing outside, the camera fixed on the front lawn while the man behind the camera pours beer out from a beer bottle and giggles. Offscreen, a voice calls out to him “that’s a waste of a fuckin’ beer, dude.” The camera pans up to show a Peter, played by Fred Vogel, standing in the distance. He approaches carrying a bucket and tells the cameraman he has something to show him. From there the pair enter the house and descend into the basement. “You are going to love this,” the man says over his shoulder as he leads the cameraman downstairs.
Shiny pages ripped from porno magazines cover large patches of the cinder block walls of the unfinished basement like the most uneven plaster job. They litter the floor, too. A long string descends from the single lightbulb that lights the room. A naked woman is tied with her arms behind a chair against the wall, her mouth gagged and duct-taped over. Her hair is greasy and matted. A trail of dried blood runs down her face, with more down her torso. One nipple removed. Beside her sits a small bin filled with something dark. In front of her, a small box TV sits on a cinder block. The man introduces the woman as Laura, his “friend.” Both he and the cameraman gleefully poke and prod and jeer while Laura cries and tries futilely to move away from their touch. Checking in on the runtime, not two full minutes have elapsed. The violence is brutal and appalling, there’s no two ways about it.
Excerpts from select letterboxd reviews:
There are others who get it though. George Krakow writes “Going to sound like a sick fuck but this is one of the funniest movies ever made. It’s like this perfect fuck you to the whole subculture built around serial killers while also reveling in it. While your average “respectable” film about this topic would go into the “mysterious psyche” of the killer imbued with pop-Freudianism, you instead just watch these absolutely infantile losers gallivanting about and making fools of themselves. They’ll torture a lady while making the kind of noises one makes singing in the shower, or stalk someone while making Looney Tunes jokes. It’s absolutely ridiculous, but presents a picture of sadistic serial killers completely stripped of romance. They’re so cold and callous it becomes uproarious, to the point that the verisimilitude of the film is rendered completely irrelevant. The mystique of true crime is melted away, and all that’s left is comedy.”
Phil A. Mignon writes “besides a reluctance to conflate a character’s attitudes and actions with the filmmaker’s, Vogel’s command of the SOV format is seriously unmatched, and this forces one to consider August Underground from a different perspective…the interactions with the video format provide the space from which August Underground can be viewed from a distance. It is impossible to ignore Vogel’s artistic prowess when it comes to these kinds of films, a fact that becomes increasingly obvious when one considers the lazy or unsuccessful found-footage torture films that have littered the horror underground since AU’s release…For all its intents and purposes, August Underground is perfect: disgusting, reaction-inducing, condemnable. It is for these reasons that I refuse to dismiss it as exploitative trash, but rather accept Vogel’s work for what it is: a fully successful experiment in repulsion and alternative videography.”
I don’t want to say that many of the letterboxd reviews I read approached the film in bad faith or didn’t give it a fair shake. I do, however, think approaching August Underground as an experimental film is kind of necessary. Or at least, it was for me.
Something that people talk about a lot when it comes to the found footage aesthetic is the importance of consumer-grade equipment in adding to the realism. With August Underground, however, I would not say that the quote-unquote realism comes from the found footage format and miniDV quality — we’re getting realism through the makeup and effects, which are as impressive as they are gruesome and disgusting. I don’t have a good handle on the degree of difference between what is challenging for me to parse visually and what is challenging for others. In August Underground, this is definitely compounded by the cinematography. However, it is the struggle to parse the images (as a result of consumer-grade cameras and the cinematography) that compounds the horror: if I want my slow brain to be able to make sense of what is happening on screen, I can’t look away.
I’m absolutely overthinking things here, but given the way that I have engaged with August Underground over the years, that is, the handful of false starts I had with it, that first attempt might have been the only time I turned it off because it was too much to handle. Otherwise, I think it was a matter of patience. In the first film class I took in college, during the week on experimental films, my professor began his lecture saying that films (experimental films, in particular) teach you how to watch them. You have to work with the film, let it show you how to watch it or something like that. After that first attempt, I was not altogether interested in letting the film reveal itself to me, but once I allowed myself to simply take in film (and accepted the visual quality as intentional, instead of seeing it as a flaw) was I able to get through it. I even enjoyed it.
The juxtaposition of the brutality and violence with the pure, aimless mundanity of Peter and cameraman’s existences is striking. The more mundane scenes are comedic and call to mind Wes Craven’s The Last House On the Left (another movie I had to turn off in high school but found a great deal of humor in when I eventually made my way back to it) in the stark contrast they draw. After the first scene in the basement, it cuts to the car. “So, what do you want to do tonight?” Peter asks the cameraman, before pulling over to pick up a woman walking along a rural road in the dark.
“I gotta get a fucking day job, I can’t keep doing this shit,” Peter laments between trips to the toilet to vomit as he dismembers the body that has been sitting in the bathtub of the basement since the beginning of the film.
Letterboxd user Marcel may have said “fuck pennsylvania,” but maybe that’s the key here. There is an illuminating discussion of the Amish and Pennsylvania Dutch and a road trip across the state to New Jersey complete with a stop at a roadside miniature village. Plans are made for a ski trip to the Poconos. There’s predictable New Jersey slander, and surprisingly, New Jersey defense.
[“New Jersey smells like shit,” says the cameraman.
“That’s just a rumor, man,” Says Peter “My mom lives in a nice part of New Jersey.”
“What, New York?”]
Generally speaking, there are two things that make trash [neutral] compelling for me: joy and excess. The joy that permeates the film is sadistic and perverse, to say the least. It goes well beyond the carnivalesque, but I don’t know that it enters into an altogether different territory either. Rather, just like the carnivalesque, the joy comes from the turning inside out of the way of polite society and reveling in filth and violence. Fred Vogel successfully pulled off what he set out to do with August Underground — showcase his gore effects skills — and in doing so, made a disgusting (I really cannot emphasize this enough) film that is as shocking for the comedy it contains as it is the violence.