Famke Janssen in 100 Feet

Eric Red’s new movie has found a novel answer to the old trick question, “When did you stop beating your wife?” 100 Feet’s villain, an abusive New York City cop played by Michael Pare, will never stop, even though he’s dead. The battered spouse, Marnie (Famke Janssen), can’t exactly get away—having shot the bastard, she’s confined to her brownstone by a court-ordered electronic ankle monitor, and is stuck in close quarters with a begrudging spirit. From this dubious premise emerges an enjoyably chilling B picture, showing the night before Halloween at the Bagdad Theater. What’s most startling about it, however, is that Red—whose notoriously perverse history includes writing The Hitcher, a 1986 slasher flick in which Jennifer Jason Leigh was drawn and quartered by a tractor-trailer—has made something dangerously close to a women’s retribution picture, albeit with more ghostly bone-crunching. Before arriving in Portland to haunt a screening, Red talked to WW about his new direction.

WW: I was pretty delighted by the basic premise of the movie: A wife-beater keeps wife-beating from beyond the grave. How’d you think that up?

Eric Red: The story came out of the desire to do a ghost story. A few years ago Martha Stewart was in the news, when she was under house arrest and she had the ankle bracelet and she could only go 100 feet. The two kind of came together. I thought that was a great situation, where you’d be haunted by a ghost under house arrest, where you can’t leave. That had all kinds of opportunities for claustrophobic horror. The trick was to create a female character who was kind of flawed and yet compelling—and it sort of had to be that she’d killed her husband, and that her husband was the ghost. In order for her to be sympathetic, it was important that he was highly abusive and very violent, and certainly when the ghost comes back, he’s going to do the same to her and worse. In some ways, though, it’s not entirely one-sided, because she could have done other things than kill her husband. The ghost has a legitimate beef, as crazy as he is.

That brings me to the theme I think is most interesting in the movie: a sense of voluntary victimhood, or survivor’s guilt. Do you think a sense of complicity is at the root of a good horror movie?

A sense of complicity between the audience and filmmaker is definitely at the heart of it. I think the most compelling characters in movies are flawed characters—rather than black-and-white good guys and bad guys—because all of us in the audience are flawed in some way or another.

Is 100 Feet not so secretly a women’s empowerment picture?

Yeah, my first chick flick, huh? Women like it very much. I kind of knew that going in. Because I think a lot of women relate to the abused character Famke plays—her strength, and her sensitivity in the situation.

And what’s next for you?

One of a couple things. There’s a vampire picture called Nightlife. It’s a contemporary vampire story that’s set in San Francisco and is very erotic and violent—it revolves around a love triangle. And there’s a cannibal film, based on a novel by Jack Ketchum that I’ve wanted to film for about 30 years. It’s about a group of people who are trapped in the Maine woods, facing off against a clan of cannibals. It’s very convincing and horrific.