The disembodied hand isn’t exactly new territory for horror films, but Bloody Knuckles might be the first to make it a crusader in the war against censorship.
The feature-length debut from Vancouver filmmaker Matt O’Mahoney – award-winning director of numerous horror shorts, including 2008’s Electric Fence – centers on Travis (Adam Boys), an illustrator of underground comic books who loses his drawing hand after his satirical work pisses off a gang kingpin (gleefully portrayed by Kasey Ryne Mazak).
The hand comes back to life in order to avenge Travis’ loss and, in so doing, becomes an intrepid anti-censorship avenger.
It’s a story that sits pretty close to O’Mahoney’s bones.
“I’ve always been a staunch opponent of censorship, mainly because I grew up watching movies like this,” says O’Mahoney. “They were always the movies that were targeted by censors, and that really irritated me.”
O’Mahoney was inspired in large part by the Danish comics controversy of 2005. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets around the world after a Danish newspaper published 12 cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad. Some of the protests turned violent; more than 200 people lost their lives. The outcry included calls for self-censorship.
“There were a lot of people saying, ‘maybe we shouldn’t be saying things like this, maybe there’s a limit to our speech,’ and it was totally contrary to everything I believed in,” says O’Mahoney. “I wanted to make a movie that was a reminder of why we need to protect the most offensive speech, and I wanted to show how destructive stripping people of that ability to express themselves freely really is.”
This week, Bloody Knuckles – which had its world premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival in July – screens to the hometown crowd at the Vancouver International Film Festival.
Though it’s horror with a message, Bloody Knuckles isn’t (pun alert!) heavy handed. It’s got all of the staples of splatter-horror film fare: gruesome deaths, NSFW scenarios, and gallons of spilled blood.
O’Mahoney used visual effects, a hand actor (Krista Magnusson), and old-fashioned camera tricks to bring the feisty disembodied limb to cinematic life.
“We would try to do everything as practically as possible, because we were so low budget,” says O’Mahoney. “A lot of it was old make-up effects trickery: cutting a hole in the couch and putting a hand through the hole, or building one glove that had just a stump coming out of the wrist.”
Bloody Knuckles is screening at VIFF as part of the prestigious BC Spotlight, alongside dramas, comedies, thrillers and documentaries. O’Mahoney hopes that festival-goers who don’t normally watch splatter-horror flicks will experience a cinematic awakening, and also swell with pride that films like Bloody Knuckles are being created right under their noses.
“There are a lot of really good genre pictures that shouldn’t be written off just because they’re genre or because they’re low-brow,” says O’Mahoney, who is currently working on a script about a gang of killer hobos. “I hope VIFF audiences get a kick out of [Bloody Knuckles] and say, ‘I knew the people that made that because they’re all around me, and they’re good.’”
Bloody Knuckles screens Oct. 3 at the Rio Theatre and Oct. 4 at Cineplex Odeon International Village Cinemas.
