“What’s in the Basket?”: Sexualized and Sexualizing Violence in Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case

Abstract

Frank Henenlotter’s first feature-length film, Basket Case (1982), is a tonally somber example of the particular type of cult cinema that Henenlotter would continue to make for the entirety of his career; Basket Case is, by far, the most “classical” horror film in his directorial corpus. “Basket Case … took four years to complete because Henenlotter and Ievins kept running out of money, filming in 16 mm because they couldn’t afford to shoot in 35,” according to Alan Jones of Cinefantastique (37). The low budget restricted Henenlotter’s ability to independently create his visions, so he utilized the already-present aesthetic of cheap, grimy, downtown New York. He was nostalgically recreating the 42nd Street of his youth, the always-awake locus of grind house and exploitation fare that introduced him to the filmic aesthetic that he would fetishize through his productions. This chapter will discuss Henenlotter’s construction of gender performance in Basket Case by creating his main characters, Belial and Duane Bradley, as two very different halves of what was originally a single male body and by having them each, essentially, represent half of a single cohesive male-sexed psyche. The love between the brothers, and thus any love they attempt to share with others, as they cannot do so independently of each other, is the dark side of what would be considered a natural bond between twins. Because of their shared psychosis and desperate efforts to reconstruct themselves as normatively male, Duane and Belial expose the dark side of masculine performance, particularly that of sexual violence.

I knew, since the film was a revenge drama—or revenge melodrama—the doctors were so evil, were so wrong, that the audience would be cheering the killings, which they did. I wanted to remind them at the end that they shouldn’t be cheering death and killings and the monster. This guy is a monster; they’ve been murdering people! And here, they murdered a good person, and I thought that was worth remembering. When Duane and Belial died at the end, I wanted them to remember that they deserved that punishment.

—Frank Henenlotter, on the protagonists of Basket Case