The horror genre is a declining state—throughout the years we’ve been constantly exposed to the bloodiest, goriest, most fucked up kinds of movies and as wrong as it is, we eventually become numb to it. Someone gets their head chopped off? No big deal. Guts ripped out? Pffft. And don’t even get me started on atrocity and useless horror subgenre that is torture porn—it’s overdone, inherently sexist and needs to stop.
So when I read that a recent horror film caused both audience vomiting and anxiety, I’m slightly surprised. How could this happen in this day and age where we’ve seen the worst of the worst? The movie that’s causing all of this commotion is Bite, a 2015 body horror film that premiered at Fantasia Film Festival. Directed by Chad Archibald and starring newcomer Elma Begovic, the movie tells the classic story of what happens when you get infected with something unknown and the horrific transformation that follows.
This movie starts off very badly—which, honestly, was only foreshadowing for the rest of the film—Casey (Begovic) is engaged and she’s spending her last few days of freedom vacationing with her friends Kirsten and Jill. Towards the end of the vacation, she ends up getting bit by an unknown insect but it doesn’t begin to affect her until she returns home. At first you think the movie is found footage because it’s being filmed by Jill but as someone who loves found footage films, I was instantly dreading this stylistic choice because none of the lead characters can act and I never felt an emotional attachment to any of them because they’re all poorly written and one-dimensional.
From the video footage, we’re able to come to the conclusion that Casey ended up getting trashed, she flirted with and possibly cheated on her fiancé and we’re supposed to feel bad for her because five minutes before she drunkenly explained that she wasn’t ready for marriage. If we had gotten a better build up to this moment, I would’ve felt something but the movie wants to get straight to the gore and because of that, the character development suffers.
The movie drops hints that the entire story from the vacation hasn’t been told but it’s pushed to the sideline to focus on Casey’s transformation into a bug. Unless you have a crippling paranoia of insects, I don’t understand how any of this could cause vomiting. Anxiety, maybe, but vomiting? You may find yourself unnerved in the beginning but as with most modern gore films, it gets repetitive. That, on top of the fact that the film relies on cheap manipulation in order to make us feel bad for Casey only made me roll my eyes.
The most offensive part of this movie is the casual mention of sexual assault as a—spoiler—plot device to humanize Casey after her transformation is complete. Sexual assault is fucked up as it is, it doesn’t need to be a humanizing trait and if anything, it feels like the movie is punishing women for being raped. This is something that I’m so sick of seeing in horror films—Contracted, I’m looking at you—if you wanted to make Casey a sympathetic character, you should’ve actually developed her instead of grossly underwriting her.
Everyone is just an asshole to Casey so it’ll be even more satisfying when she eventually kills them but there was nothing satisfying about this film. And the one thing I cannot get out of my head is the GLARING plot hole involving the video camera. I would say come back and read this following section after you watch the movie but I don’t want anyone to suffer through this so I’m just going to say it:
Jill turns out to be a complete villain when she shows the footage of Casey drunkenly making out with a guy to her fiancé because for some reason, Jill is in love with him (and no, this is something that’s NEVER expanded upon) and thinks that he’ll get with her. But the entire unedited footage really showed how Casey was rejecting the man and he ended up forcing her into sleeping with him when she wasn’t sober. The thing is, both Casey and Jill had this footage. Throughout the film, Casey was so worried about the possibility that she cheated but at the climax she conveniently finds the part in the video where the guy was pulling her into a hotel room? What?
Let’s take out the horror part of this and just look at the drama—she could’ve proved her innocence the entire time. This movie has you stressing over a conflict that was fixable from the minute Casey returned from vacation because she always had the evidence. This is one of the worst movies that I’ve ever seen in my life. Badly acted, ineffective horror and the film uses the same audio dialogue twice within one minute. Please save yourself the trouble and do not watch this movie.
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