This Disturbing ’00s Horror Movie Was a Box-Office Flop — But It Shouldn’t Have Been

There are reasons why the 2009 Australian horror film The Loved Ones was a box office flop, only making back $358,399 of its $4 million budget. It might be the dissonance between the marketing and the product. People might’ve gone into this film expecting a straightforward teen horror film à la Prom Night given the young cast and prom night aesthetic, when it’s anything but. Not to mention, while Australian horror got its moment in the sun once again with Wolf Creek in 2005, it didn’t quite carry over into other movies. (Hopefully, that’ll change with last year’s homerun Talk to Me.) This is a shame because The Loved Ones once again proves that box-office performance doesn’t dictate a film’s quality and that, contrary to popular belief, the 2000s was a great decade for horror if you know where to look.

The feature debut of director Sean Byrne, this film is wickedly cruel, insane, and brilliant. A troubled young man named Brent (Xavier Samuel), who is already struggling with a blend of bereavement and guilt, is forced into a fight for survival after being kidnapped by the even more troubled Lola (Robin McLeavy) and her father (John Brumpton) after turning down her prom-posal. It’s a torture horror film, undoubtedly, which came out at the tail end of the trend as the criticism for it ramped up. It’s not a nice film; it’s mean-spirited and graphic, an uncomfortable watch for those uninitiated into more intense horror films. This, like with Wolf Creek and Snowtown, is something that the land down under truly mastered — making an audience squirm in their seats.

The Loved Ones Is Sadism With Style

Like all the best splatter movies,The Loved Ones is so much more than watching people suffer. In a way, it has a lot in common with the films that have become legendary in the slaughterhouse genre. It has a solid sense of style, and a sick sense of humor to boot, slotting it in perfectly with Rob Zombie‘s The Devil’s Rejects and House of 1000 Corpses from the same decade, or even the legends like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This is especially true because of the situation our protagonist is thrust into, trapped in a house with a family of maniacs. Lola cuts such an iconic figure as a horror villain, with her bright pink prom dress that becomes more and more bloodstained, topped with a novelty paper crown, and that empty look in her eyes. It’s like Carrie but with less sympathy and more insanity, someone who is deeply emotionally stunted, lost in a fantasy of princes and castles which her father further enables into violence. Her style of torture also contributes to this, with glitter seeping into wounds, dancing with a boy nailed to the floor, and love hearts carved into chests.

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There’s escalating violence throughout The Loved Ones that’s paramount to the torture genre, with things starting badly and getting worse as the film continues. You see the scope of Lola and her father’s crimes; it’s clear many have gone through the same anguish in this search for Lola’s “prince charming.” Despite the Prom not being a cultural landmark in Australia like it is in America, The Loved Ones is the best prom horror film since Carrie. It serves as a suitable backdrop for the film — the ideas of love and its corruption — and the twisting of festivities into something terrifying. It’s also characteristically Australian, with much of the action playing on those abandoned backroads where no one is looking for you, and the soundtrack being filled with Australian bands and artists like Kasey Chambers and Little Red. The scene of Lola flipping through her girly little scrapbook to Chambers’ “Not Pretty Enough” as the pages slowly unravel to reveal scenes of depraved obsession is a solid short horror film on its own.

The Heart Of The Loved Ones Is Brent’s Journey

Another marker of a great splatter film is that beating heart in the middle and here it’s an ahead-of-the-curve reversal of The Final Girl.It’s Brent’s journey of survival. We open the film with Brent and his father getting into a car accident, inadvertently caused by Lola, which takes the life of the latter. This is something Brent blames himself for, which puts him in a dark place of self-harm and suicidal ideation, growing distant from his mother and girlfriend in the process. The kidnapping itself happens straight after Brent attempts to take his own life, and when put into an even more severe life-or-death situation, he has to go to a deep, unthinking place to survive.

There’s something very The Pit and the Pendulum about Brent’s journey, where he’s wholly reliant on himself to make it out alive. The most important part is that he’s not just meat for the slaughter, he’s a nice kid who did nothing to deserve this. He turns down Lola because he already has a girlfriend, and he does so gently and without ridicule. He has a mother who loves him and friends who wish him well. Byrne wants the audience to strongly empathize with this character, and it works with a very convincing performance by Xavier Samuel. You want to see him reach deep inside himself and find that instinct to live that he’s lost through a very real and traumatizing tragedy.

There are many parts of The Loved Ones that separate it from what critics have taken to calling “torture porn”, making it a true splatter classic that deserves another look, but the main one is this: You want to see Brent win, and he does. Despite the blood, the drills to the head, and the bleach in the throat, there’s still something so triumphant about watching someone struggle, fight, and then make it back home with the scars to prove it.

The Loved Ones is available to rent on Amazon.

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