“If word gets back to these kids that someone’s murdering virgins, we’re going to have a goddamn… fuckfest on our hands,” the school principal barely whispers in disgust. “It’s better than a pile of dead teenagers,” responds the cop. Say what you will about Cherry Falls, a semi-provocative and definitely strange slasher movie that snuck into release 25 years ago, but it certainly has a handle on the ways that its horror subgenre blurs the line between two different types of body counts. (It even brings out the “dead teenager” terminology that Roger Ebert used to deride slasher pictures of the 1980s and beyond.)
Cherry Falls exploits that sex/death dichotomy via a brilliant gimmick straight out of the bygone decade of Jason Voorhees knockoffs. A serial killer is skulking around the town of Cherry Falls, Virginia, exclusively targeting virgins as his prey. That’s the working theory, anyway; the killer carves “virgin” on the bodies, and autopsies do suggest that these designations are correct for the young women (Ken Selden’s script downplays the degree to which this would actually be unknowable for any of the teenagers in question, regardless of gender). Brent (Michael Biehn), the town sheriff, wants to inform local parents. He also feels obligated to have an awkward talk with his daughter Jody (Brittany Murphy) to see how far she’s gone with Kenny (Gabriel Mann), the long-term boyfriend who recently dumped her.
It’s a discomfiting scene, and not just because Brent doesn’t know whether to feel relieved that his daughter hasn’t yet had sex or nervous that this supposedly makes her a target. (How the killer would know who to target in the first place, beyond gossip or guesswork, is never really addressed.) He’s hesitant, even bashful, in asking his daughter such a personal question, but their interactions have unnerving undertones, a tenderness that doesn’t feel especially wholesome. The same goes for Jody’s friendship with her teacher (Jay Mohr).
The reasons for the slightly creepy relationship between Jody and her dad are never directly addressed, but general unease about Brent eventually is. (He’s not the killer, but the killer does connect to an incident in his past.) The movie, largely but not exclusively told from Jody’s point of view, is about parents not living up to the trust placed in them, concealing ugly secrets to uphold the status quo. In that sense, Cherry Falls is reminiscent of A Nightmare on Elm Street, where the sins of the past are revisited upon a seemingly idyllic community.
The ostensible villain here is, admittedly, no Freddy Krueger: a long-haired figure of initially indeterminate gender. As a scary movie, Cherry Falls doesn’t really have the juice, possibly by design of director Geoffrey Wright. The killer’s work is blunt and largely suspense-free. They approach the first set of victims, a teenage couple making out in a car, by pulling another car up behind them, lights on, and wastes little time before slashing them both. The second kill kicks off when the killer… rings the victim’s doorbell. No ruses, not even much stalking; this is fish-in-a-barrel stuff. The eventual reveal owes a little bit to De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, and manages to be similarly problematic to audiences watching 25 years later, without nearly as much of De Palma’s stylistic kick.
Maybe there would have been more genuine perversity in the original cut of the film, which remains unreleased. According to the booklet from the Scream Factory Blu-ray, Cherry Falls went back to the MPAA multiple times to avoid the NC-17 rating it received from, among other elements, its climactic party, where the town’s teenagers take their lives into their own hands and arrange for a giant virginity-annihilating orgy. Eventually, distributor USA Films gave up on the movie and premiered it on cable in October 2000 (it played theaters in Europe, but not the United States). The broadcast version is apparently the same movie available now; Scream Factory wasn’t able to get an earlier, unrated cut. So Cherry Falls as it currently exists has some R-rated language, but not much action. An actor can say “fuckfest,” but the fest itself is heavy on the underwear.
Yet the movie’s attention to sexuality still sets it apart from its fellow turn-of-the-millennium slashers. Scream, ground zero for the subgenre, discussed the explicit sex-and-death link so often pointed out by fans and scholars of the genre, with its young horror experts holding forth on the apparent “rule” that virgins live and the sexually active perish. This is an arguable point, and one that Scream itself intentionally subverts by having Sidney (Neve Campbell) lose her virginity to her boyfriend — who, of course, turns out to be one of the masked killers. She survives, he dies. With him goes any real addressing of sex in subsequent slashers of the series or its era; there’s plenty of cleavage and talk, definitely, but sex and nudity is less prevalent. A quarter-century later, when sexually explicit material is more available than ever (and a part of plenty of respectable cable dramas), mainstream horror still tends to shy away. A self-advertised boundary-pusher specifically addressing sexuality like Bone Lake will actually stay mostly within the realm of marriage proposals and bra-on sex.
Even in its cut-down, cable-ready form, Cherry Falls goes further than plenty of contemporary horror. Screenwriter Ken Selden reverses the Scream-stated dynamic by having the killer target virgins, while maintaining its apocryphal nature because, well, who really knows anyone’s virginity status? The point is clearly more social panic — here a form of revenge — rather than an actual reward for the deflowered. Then, whether the killer intends it or not, the gimmicky spree turns the town’s teenagers both pragmatic and debauched. As the teenagers plan their mass virginity loss, a group of girls convenes for a quick-and-dirty sex talk. “What about clitoral or vaginal orgasm?” raises a voice from the crowd, hilariously clinical for a teenager. The ringleader levels with her: “Unless you’re talking about masturbation, forget it.” This is not a service the town’s boys will be able to provide under the circumstances. Everyone is just looking to get it done.
Wright’s blunting of traditional slasher suspense, then, feels of a piece with the movie’s rawness, especially in Brittany Murphy’s performance. At one point, cornered by the killer in a classroom, she goes absolutely feral, screaming and throwing things until the shrouded figure has no choice but to relent. She brings similarly despondent energy to her initial reaction at her father’s youthful indiscretions. This in turn makes the movie’s final pivot to complicity, where the characters agree to sweep the film’s events under the rug, all the more chilling. As with sex, a subject of taboo or uncertainty suddenly becomes acceptable when everybody agrees to do it — or to ignore it. Maybe it’s appropriate that the unrated cut of Cherry Falls isn’t actually available. The movie’s story ultimately concludes that neither sexual freedom nor sexual violence are any match for good old-fashioned repression.
