I seek to answer a question that has plagued mankind ever since we first crawled from the primordial ooze and stood erect in the sun: is man really a walrus after all?
With lines like that, you know you’re watching a Kevin Smith film. His unique sense of humour made him famous in films like Dogma and Clerks, and that’s pretty much all he’s known for. Given his reputation, one could be forgiven for thinking that he was a writer/director of irreverent comedies - an exceptionally talented one, of course, but nothing more. Watch Tusk, though, and you’ll see that he can do horror as well as the best of them.
Tusk is a 2014 body horror/comedy starring Kevin Long, Haley Joel Osment, and the late great Michael Parks, inspired by an advert that Kevin Smith saw in a paper. The man who posted the ad wanted someone to live in his house for free - no rent, no bills, no nothing - so long as the person agreed to wear a walrus suit for a few hours each day. While wearing the suit, the person was to stay completely in character - acting like a walrus, making walrus noises instead of talking, and so on. Smith, being the twisted genius that he is, saw the potential for a body horror in what most people would see as wacky comedy material. What if, Smith thought, the person who posted the ad wanted more than a part-time walrus? What if he wanted to surgically transform the unfortunate person who responded to the ad into a walrus?
The film follows Justin Long as he travels to Canada to find a story for his podcast. The story he goes up there for falls through, but while he’s in a local pub he spots an advert placed by an old sailor, who’s looking for someone to listen to the stories he has from his time at sea. Thinking that this might make for a better podcast than what he originally came for, Long responds to the advert and drives out to see the old man at his remote house in the Canadian countryside. Then the guy drugs him and turns him into a walrus.
Body horror works on the same principle as haunted house horror. Your home is your castle - it’s a place that is yours and yours alone, where you are supposed to feel safe. Haunted house films and literature work by undermining that sense of security.
Your body is even more intimately yours than your house, and is much more closely tied to your sense of self, so the idea of your body being mutilated or changed in some horrible way is disturbing in a way that nothing else really can be. That’s the level on which the horror of Tusk works.
Tusk is one of the most affecting depictions of human misery that I’ve ever seen, and it’s genuinely hard to watch at times, which is what makes it all the more impressive that it’s fucking hilarious, too, and that neither element interferes with the other. You’ll cut from this brutal body horror, with a guy being mutilated and (literally) dehumanised in the most awful way possible, to a typical Kevin Smith scene with typical Kevin Smith characters, that will be so funny you’ll almost forget what you were just watching.
Not only does the comedy not interfere with the horror, I think that the reason Tusk is able to be so frightening is because it’s also funny. Let’s face it, a man getting turned into a walrus is a pretty ridiculous idea. But Tusk acknowledges that, and by acknowledging that its central premise is ridiculous, and incorporating that ridiculousness into the film, Smith was able to fully and unironically explore the horror of the concept, much like how an action-comedy like Hot Fuzz allows us to enjoy action cliches that we would otherwise deride by placing them in a parodic framework. We know it’s silly, and everyone else knows that we know it’s silly - so we can take it seriously. Irony as a Trojan horse for sincerity.
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