The Daily Stream: A Wounded Fawn Delivers A Fugue State In 16mm

(Welcome to The Daily Stream, an ongoing series in which the /Film team shares what they've been watching, why it's worth checking out, and where you can stream it.)

The Movie: "A Wounded Fawn"

Where You Can Stream It: Shudder

The Pitch: Rod Serling's opening narration for "The Twilight Zone" teased "a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind." It's in this realm that filmmaker Travis Stevens is most comfortable, and the one he presents in "A Wounded Fawn." Stevens' third directed feature is his gnarliest thus far, and bodes well for the kind of original horror movie that fans have clamored for since the first jump scare.

The whole bloody affair of "A Wounded Fawn" concerns jaded museum curator Meredith Tanning (Sarah Lind) who lives out this writer's personal nightmare of jumping back into the dating pool only to find herself in a serial killer's living room (said killer here is Josh Ruben, director of 2020 horror-comedy, "Scare Me"). What follows is a series of escalations that function as a cat-and-mouse game infused with surrealist imagery, classic Greek deities, and good old 16mm film grain. The end product is the final panel of Stevens' unofficial triptych of movies featuring men learning lessons the hard way.

One of the most common complaints from horror fans is, "Where are the original horror movies?" So much of the genre practices IP necromancy, and it's been a breath of fresh air to hit up the local movie theater in 2022 and see sold-out screenings of how-did-this-get-greenlit works like "Barbarian" and "Smile." Stevens' film has recently made itself home at horror streaming service Shudder, so those who seek out the spooky stuff won't have to trek to a film festival to see something wild and new.

Stevens' producing credits from indie horror gems like the sexy anthology, "Little Deaths," and the Tinseltown cautionary tale, "Starry Eyes," fuels his assuredness in the director's chair. Far from the type of filmmaker to shy away from the "horror" label, Stevens wields his movie influences as judiciously but firmly as a surgeon wields their scalpel — the Overlook Hotel carpet pattern from "The Shining" isn't present, for example (thankfully; it's overdone), but several shots see Josh Ruben's psychopathic Bruce share a common madness with Jack Nicholson's Jack Torrance.

The movie is something of a two-hander — first sadistically and then cathartically, Nathan Faudree's screenplay insists that the audience experiences Meredith's fears and Bruce's phantasmic delusions and starts with Bruce murdering a woman for a statue representing vengeful feminine fury. Later on, actual Furies make their way into the freaky festivities and, true to their description in "The Illiad", enact vengeance upon men. The sleight-of-hand "A Wounded Fawn" pulls off is in the blurred line of demarcation between goddess-induced madness and Bruce's own mental decline. 

Big birds, two-toned Mario Bava lighting, and buckets of bright red blood work in tandem to give the film's second half — Bruce's half — the feel of watching a visionary stage production in an opium den. Are the masked femme avengers symbolized by the statue real? How much of his madness is self-inflicted? One answer comes in the end credits sequence, an 11-minute reel that recalls an infamous scene from the "Hellraiser" movies, and is every bit as uncomfortable and strange as that extended smile capping Ti West's "Pearl." Through it all, Sarah Lind remains steely-eyed and assured, re-evaluating the situation and pivoting accordingly even through shuddered breaths; as a counterweight, there's little more terrifying than watching Ruben's eyes go blank.

13 Finger FX has been making a real bloody mess lately. The makeup effects unit has orchestrated, among other befouled things, the devastating fusion of human bodies in Richard Stanley's "Color Out of Space," the spindly parasite creature in the found footage movie, "Dashcam," and the violent death of a Sean Bean stand-in puppet for Brandon Cronenberg's fugue-state thriller, "Possessor." Those interested can scroll through SFX maestro Dan Martin's informative step-by-step Twitter thread on the gory process. If special effects are a mode of magic, then Martin is a modern-day Houdini.

"A Wounded Fawn" contains some of the wry humor of Stevens' femme-based vampire comedy, "Jakob's Wife," and the masterful 13 Finger FX-engineered practical effects of his 2019 film, "Girl on the Third Floor." Here, however, there be mystic monsters such as the kind found in Alejandro Jodorowsky's "Holy Mountain" and the like (funnily enough, one of Stevens' producing credits is for the documentary chronicling Jodorowsky's doomed "Dune" adaptation). Among the bizarre imagery 13 Finger FX summons in "A Wounded Fawn": A towering bloodthirsty owl (and an incredible unmasking), a small head wound birthing a huge metaphor, a rogue pipe that could easily be one of Freddy Krueger's nightmares on Elm Street, and throat gashes galore. 

When the budget's modest, it can be tempting to CG the blood spatter and pipes that take on reptilian tendencies. But there's something inherently "movie magical" that occurs when storytellers work the problem and conjure monsters well before entering the VFX phase of production. Such is the alchemy that gives "A Wounded Fawn" its midnight movie feel — and based on the bonkers-in-Yonkers horror movies that studios have cozied up to lately, we'll hopefully see more like it at the local cineplex. Until then, retribution awaits on Shudder.