Wrong Turn (2003)

Rob Schmidt's Wrong Turn arrives from 2003, a year when the slasher film had settled into a comfortable middle age. A medical student takes a detour off a West Virginia highway, collides with a stranded carload of campers, and the assembled young people are hunted through the woods by three inbred cannibals with a fondness for barbed wire. The premise is borrowed wholesale from the backwoods horror tradition, and the film knows it. There is no pretense here beyond the delivery of gore, and the gore is delivered with workmanlike enthusiasm.

What the film does not deliver is any discernible social program. Eliza Dushku's Jessie is a competent survivor, resourceful and clear-eyed, and she helps destroy the cabin by the final reel. This is the standard architecture of the final girl, inherited from decades of genre convention, and the film makes no argument about gender beyond that inheritance. The cast is largely white, with Emmanuelle Chriqui offering the lone variation, and the screenplay treats every character as interchangeable meat. The Appalachian antagonists are a regional caricature of poverty and isolation, a classist shorthand rather than any commentary on race. Nobody in the picture has a thesis to advance.

There is no environmental sermon, no economic critique, no historical revision, and no lesson of any kind. The cannibals are monsters because the script requires monsters. The grotesque disfigurement of the villains operates as pure spectacle, the exact inverse of any sensibility that would celebrate the body. When the credits roll, we are left with a burning cabin and a survivor driving away, which is all the film ever promised. A picture of this vintage, stripped of messaging and content to be a machine for suspense, scores very low on the contemporary index. It is not a failure of ambition. It is an absence of it, and the absence is total.