Watching Fabrice-Ange Zaphiratos’ Blood Beat in 2025 is a wild sensory experience. It has the (ahem) beats of a slasher while boasting atmospheric sound design, expressionistic editing, and an all-around weird plotline. Ted, a college-aged man, and his girlfriend, Sarah, decide to spend Christmas with his family on their rural property in Wisconsin. His mother is an eccentric painter who wears Indigenous-coded clothing and seems to possess psychic abilities that sometimes control how and what she paints. His sister, future stepdad, and uncle are all just kind of there as well, and they go hunting on multiple occasions. Sarah is inexplicably unnerved by the mother’s quirks and more understandably by the family’s hunting escapades. The mother senses a telekinetic presence in Sarah. Ted is dumb; he treats his girlfriend like a child. The prospective stepdad is also dumb; he’s a simp who can’t quite get the hint that Ted’s mother doesn’t want to marry him. Oh, and a samurai spirit starts killing people every time Sarah orgasms, whether self-induced or from sex with Ted. By the end, we’re apparently supposed to glean that Sarah is a corporeal version of the samurai spirit, and when all is said and done, Ted and his sister are the only survivors, managing to defeat Sarah/Samurai/Ancient Force via combined sibling aura.
Large swaths of Blood Beat’s runtime are steeped in immersive sound — sometimes there’s just a droning thud and the samurai’s heavy breathing playing over the action. At other times it’s a minimalist synth riff. And occasionally, pure silence. These choices render eerie and propulsive what is otherwise a substantially silly and delusional film. It’s no surprise that most of its very existence stems from its European director being under the influence of drugs while traveling through the U.S., as everything onscreen appears DIY, stripped-drown, low-budget, psychedelic, unwieldy, and unprofessional. It’s the very essence of style over substance, of running on nothing but vibes.
Horror cinema has a longstanding “cultural reputation as a ‘low’ and/or populist form,” but in recent decades it’s increasingly been co-opted as a vehicle for artistic experimentation, polemical statement, and therapeutic battleground. In its now countless subgenres exist proportionately countless labels to differentiate the “lowbrow” from the “highbrow,” the “basic” from the “ambitious.” Scholars and critics tend to apply these labels rather liberally, from post-horror to slow horror to elevated horror to indie horror to prestige horror to arthouse horror. Zaphiratos’s samurai slasher would surely be granted one of these were it a new release and not a 1983 B-movie.
These classifications and sub-classifications and sub-sub-classifications have developed in part from a need to destigmatize the genre, but a larger issue has arisen in its wake; horror films are now fully nudged into binaries based on marketing and cultural capital. For example, Longlegs was branded prestigious because of the unnerving sound design and moody shot compositions present in its teasers and trailers. In actuality, it’s goofy as hell. And while this writer enjoyed In a Violent Nature, it’s not quite the “deconstruction of the slasher genre” that it was branded to be. Yes, it’s shot from the killer’s perspective in over-the-shoulder view, and it emphasizes slow plodding through the forest to excruciatingly build up each kill. But the kills themselves tend to be, in typical slasher fashion, showy and unseemly elaborate. Even the scarce bits of dialogue peppered throughout are campy, wooden, and ridiculously archetypal. The film is doing something fresh with the formula, but it’s certainly not transcending that formula altogether.
Longlegs and In a Violent Nature are just two very recent examples of films that have been bestowed with clout — the former often being deemed elevated horror and the latter experimental or slow horror. This has perhaps made them a lot more successful than they might have been were they framed in the cultural consciousness simply as straight-up horror films, or respectively as a serial killer film and a slasher film. Blood Beat happens to be the inverse of these; it was never branded as anything but a manic samurai slasher with minimal budget, and definitely is exactly that. Yet it also contains surprising bursts of artfulness that warrant revisit. Whereas newer slashers lean heavily on the post-horror trend previously outlined here, presumably to distance themselves from the “poor-taste” qualities often associated with the subgenre, Zaphiratos was fully in touch with this lowbrowness. So much, in fact, so that he doubled down on slashers’ tradition of unbridled style or spectacle (or both), with substance being sacrificed as easily as a character of color would be killed off in its narrative. Thankfully, for Zaphiratos’s sake, there are no characters of color to abuse within the mechanics of Blood Beat. Even the samurai is technically just a ghostly being, a suit of armor animated by psychic energy, and not necessarily tied to Asia ethnically, culturally, or otherwise. Most likely, the filmmakers thought a killer ghost samurai would be cool, with no further deliberation afforded.
This is all to say that Blood Beat, as unhinged and idiosyncratic as it is, was able to experiment within the parameters of the slasher in a blunter, more uncompromising, and thus messier way than its contemporary counterparts. It hit an artery right at the peak of this subgenre’s popularity, between the previous giallo tradition, with its decadent violence and madcap mysteries, and the future prestige culture that continues to blanket our slasher offerings with thematic resonance, meta-awareness, artistic muscularity, and “avant-garde” value. Zaphiratos’s film exists, even with growing cult status, as a true fringe artifact, an unkempt outlier in the annals of the slasher rubric. It achieved this because of its reverence for the formula — whether it was conscious of such reverence or not.
Indeed, the formula has always been the key, one that holds the potential to unlock progress and regress in equal measure. Carol Clover, in her seminal 1992 text, covered this facet of horror pretty cogently, observing:
“The fact is that horror movies look like nothing so much as folktales – a set of fixed tale types that generate an endless stream of what are in effect variants: sequels, remakes, and rip-offs… This is a field in which there is in some sense no original, no real or right text… A particular example may have original features, but its quality as a horror film lies in the way it delivers the cliché.”
The slasher, then, is perhaps the most skeletal of the genre — a distillation of its tropes. At its core: weapon-wielder picks off victims one by one. Victims are often characterized, and thus de-characterized, by archetypes, serving more as devices or signposts to propel us from one kill to the next, and to establish a clear moral compass for who is thrust onto the chopping block at which point in the narrative. The final girl — used here to refer generally to the last/main person who gets the opportunity to really face off against the slasher, and who may not always be a female character — is usually the only instance of depth or substance or growth within the ensemble, and even then, that depth is often one-dimensional and based on moral superiority. Along the way, these folks make us laugh or cringe or buckle in frustration, and never with them. Always at them.
All according to plan, after all, because if we truly wanted to relate to and empathize with most of these characters, we wouldn’t be watching a slasher. We want to see the ax grind, preferably into flesh. This is all to say that the slasher is perhaps the “purest,” most “mechanical” form of the classically un-prestigious horror film. If we use Clover’s pioneering scholarship as a grounding formula, the slasher fits the mold of that endlessly variable folktale: a moral yarn that, no matter the extent of the filmmakers’ aesthetic interference or infusion of political subtext, will always resist pretense. Whether it’s something as rudimentary as Friday the 13th or as experimental as In a Violent Nature, a slasher is always tied to these populist mechanics.
Maybe it’s no fault of its own, but films like In a Violent Nature are released in a present ecosystem of cultural capital that goes beyond the equation “entertainment = money.” It is now, also, “reputation = money” and “mainstream = renegade” and “high-resolution = prestige.” Hito Steyerl describes this visual economy as “the fetish value of high resolution,” its antithesis being:
“the poor image [which] embodies the afterlife of many former masterpieces of cinema and video art. It has been expelled from the sheltered paradise that cinema seems to have once been… After being kicked out of the protected and often protectionist arena of national culture, discarded from commercial circulation, these works have become travelers in a digital no-man’s land, constantly shifting their resolution and format, speed and media, sometimes even losing names and credits along the way.”
In a way, despite predating modern digital technology, Blood Beat fits some of this criteria of the “poor image.” It may have some artful camerawork, but its cinematography is far from high-res, anything but polished, its general filmmaking techniques not even trying to impress us other than to craft a strange, offbeat, atmospheric mood. Indeed, it never found a “national culture” to ascribe to since it’s about an unexplained samurai spirit killing people in rural Wisconsin, directed by a French man who essentially assembled the film start to finish on the fly, while road-tripping (interpret that as you will — travel or drugs or both) through the States. And it never, at least to this writer’s knowledge, was remotely close to achieving “commercial circulation.”
For these reasons and many more, in nobody’s right mind will Blood Beat ever be considered prestige horror, nor elevated or post- or high-concept or whatever label you care to use. But it is, to its very core, a horror film. Break it down further and it’s particularly a slasher, a lo-fi, guerilla-ish one that will always defy the labels that each generation attempts to brand its products with — as Clover would put it, it “delivers the cliché” with such oddball ferocity, and utter contempt for contextualization, that it becomes the cliché. It may have been overshadowed by the onslaught of popular slasher franchises in the ’80s, but it plays by and against the rulebook of that subgenre more boldly than most.
Admittedly, this accounting has gotten pretty heady and intricate for a film like Blood Beat. So, just to check in with the reader… does it make any sense? Well, neither does the samurai killing people outside my window whenever I orgasm.
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