Savageland (2015)

Someone – or is it somethings? – wipes out nearly the entire population of the small town of Sangre de Cristo, on the US-side of the Arizona-Mexico border area. The local police force arrests the only survivor when he is trying to cross the border towards Mexico, covered in blood, bites and barely able to speak coherently.

Because Francisco Salazar (Noe Montes) is Mexican, “illegal”, and in no mental or financial state to present any kind of defence against the racist good old boy Sheriff (George Lionel Savage) and the procedures of law that back him, he is declared a serial killer and rather quickly sentenced to be murdered by the state. Rather a lot of disturbing and curious facts about the case notwithstanding. There are questions like, how exactly could a single man have killed a whole small town of 57 people in only a few hours, only using some tools and his teeth apparently? Why do the teeth marks on the victims not fit his own? And why do the photographs Salazar himself took throughout the night tell a very different, much more disturbing tale about what happened?

Phil Guidry’s, Simon Herbert’s and David Whelan’s Savageland presents its case in the fake documentary sub-style of POV horror. Apart from being a highly effective horror film, this is obviously also a film that has quite a few angry things to say about the racist elements of Arizona border culture, grandstanding sheriffs, the inhuman way immigrants without papers are treated, and the injustices that result from all these things when they are combined with a system of justice that’s all about money and race, and very little about truth or justice. That the film can do this in a graceful manner that lets even the shitty people have some humanity without weakening its own argument is one of its major virtues; that it can be quite this angry and engaged and still be a fun and effective piece of horror filmmaking is another one.

I believe both of these virtues have a lot to do with the directors’ understanding of the importance of nuance and detail, as well as their ability to make a nuanced and detailed film on what can’t have been much of a budget. So there’s a feeling of weight and reality to the proceedings even though the core of what truly must have happened that night in this reality is the stuff of supernatural zombie/vampire horde nightmares about the repressed biting America in the throat.

The film is also highly effective in its fictional imitation of the forms of the better socially engaged true crime documentaries, again adding a feeling of reality and authenticity that makes the generic horror feel as plausible in context as the political one.

What’s particularly great about the more traditional horror movie elements of Savageland’s horror is with how little material it works: there are no film snippets from security cameras or anything of that matter (apart from one ambiguous phone call) portraying the night of horror, but only Salazar’s panicked still photos, a map of the town, and a border patrol officer (Carlos Olivares) walking us through the scenes of the crimes long after most of their traces have gone. So the viewers’ brains are doing most of the work here. We are filling in the spaces between these – very creepy – photos and the places they were supposedly shot in with our imaginations and our knowledge of genre tropes. For me, this approach worked incredibly well, particularly in dialogue with the real world horrors Savageland so clearly cares a lot about, producing the feeling of walking a battlefield with the film, not so much after the fact, but between one battle and the next.

If you’re a fan of American comics, you’ll also enjoy one of the handful of acting appearances by the late, great comics writer and editor Len Wein, which was as unexpected as it was awesome for me.