Fortress and Classroom Horror

When people ask me what’s the scariest film I remember from my misspent youth, they’re always surprised when I reference Fortress (1985), a little seen Australian thriller that inexplicably became an HBO mainstay in the late 1980s. Based on a novel of the same name by Gabrielle Lord, the movie centers on a classroom of children and their young teacher, Sally Jones (Rachel Ward), who are taken hostage by a band of homicidal, mask wearing men. With moments of pronounced violence, the film is worth another look by horror fans for the way it leverages its classroom setting to instill fear.

Because horror grapples with the collective anxieties of the time, how a space is viewed by an audience is contingent largely upon the events of the day. For instance, to an audience in the 1930s watching The Lady Vanishes (1938) for the first time, the claustrophobic setting of a train car reads very differently than it does to a millennial audience who may lack a real world understanding for how it feels to travel by train. As a space, the classroom historically represents not only a place of learning, but also a place of security. While this perception has altered radically in the wake of Columbine and Sandy Hook, in the 1980s the classroom did not instantly connote a sense of fear.

Fortress is interesting because it is one of the first times that a classroom in a horror film becomes the site of violence. Certainly, a school setting is not all that unique to the genre. Massacre at Central High (1976), Prom Night (1980), and Hell Night (1981) all feature a school setting prominently. But the events of those films take place outside of the classroom and, by default, outside of the influence of an adult authority figure. The setting becomes insignificant and could easily be replaced by any other young adult meeting place. Even Carrie (1976), arguably the most well-known tale of horror in a school setting, situates the violence in a gymnasium after school hours. But in Fortress, the violence finds the children in their classroom during a normal school day and despite the presence of an adult. And it’s this underlining suggestion that our institutional safeguards and protections are an illusion that is terrifying to an audience.

Another point of distinction in Fortress is the age of the children being hunted. Horror films are virtually synonymous with teenagers and the classroom can be a useful tool to convey a sense of everydayness that makes the impending carnage feel less removed for an audience. Consider how films such as Slaughter High (1986), Scream (1996) and The Faculty (1998)- all films post Fortress– use the classroom as a means of establishing a sense of normalcy before the violence begins. The suggestion is that these teenagers are typical in every sense of the word and if this threat can find them, it can find you, the audience, as well. Less typical is the depiction of elementary school age children in horror which makes sense if you agree with Stephen King’s argument that horror movies are largely conservative because they reinforce societal norms.

Unlike their older counterparts, elementary school children are still seen culturally as more pure. While deaths of children under 12 in horror films are relatively infrequent, when they do occur the implication is that they are more tragic because they have not participated in any of the actions (premarital sex, drug use, unruliness) that older teenagers traditionally do. And so the decision to have the children being hunted in Fortress-ranging in ages 6 to 16 as befitting an isolated, small community classroom- is an interesting one. It’s one thing to see someone on the cusp of adulthood fight for their lives, but it’s quite another to see a small child do so. That the film gives equal agency to fight back to all the children, regardless of age, is a unique positioning of adolescence in relation to savagery.

If adolescence is going to be depicted as running amuck, it is usually within the context of a loss of institutionalized safeguards created by polite society. Consider William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies in which a band of children must survive alone in the wilderness or Thomas Tryon’s The Other in which two children must tend to their own needs in the face of two absentee parents. Even Children of the Corn (1984), arguably the bloodiest tale of homicidal children without adult supervision, situate the children in a space specifically independent of adult supervision. The underlying suggestion of these texts is that if only the children were guided properly, the ensuing moral breakdowns would never have occurred. Fortress upends that assumption by keeping its adult heroine squarely at the center of the film. While the children offer input into how to deal with their predicament, the final decision maker is always Sally.

It’s an important distinction because, unlike films such as Battle Royale (2000), which offers up a similar ‘kill or be killed’ scenario featuring children, the presence of an adult who initially eschews violence complicates how the audience perceives the violence. In Battle Royale, the children turned murderers are at the mercy of adult machinations and have no choice but to respond with violence if they want to survive. But in Fortress, it is ultimately Sally’s authority that gives the children the agency they need to fight back. As a teacher, Sally represents one of the oldest institutional safeguards against chaos and so her using that authority to fuel the bloodlust of her students is a marked departure from previous horror films.

Sally’s metamorphosis in the film underscores the role her position plays in how events unfold. Throughout the film, the children offer suggestions on how to escape and offer up increasingly violent scenarios by which to make that happen. But Sally, as the adult authority figure, rejects those notions in favor of less confrontational ones. She is still subscribing to cultural notions of safety and appropriateness. As the film progresses and the group is chased from a cave to farmhouse, Sally’s law and order approach is proven repeatedly to be ineffectual. Sally’s mental state continues to breakdown to the point where she recognizes that the things she has been taught about how to care for the children in her charge may no longer be effective. The group devises a plan that is violent but appropriate given the situation, as they are fighting back against a direct threat.

But as their plan unfurls, the group grows distinctly more bloodthirsty. The film culminates in a violent sequence in which Sally and the children decimate the body of one of their assailants long after the man has died. The montage, shot in close-up and focused on the rocks and spears being used by the group to ravage the body beyond the point of recognition, is explicitly violent, especially for the time it was released.

The final moments of the film show what looks to be a return to normalcy. The children have gathered back in the classroom and Sally is again occupying the position of teacher. But when a police officer enters and inquires about the state of the bodies and even points out that the heart was missing from one, it’s clear that all involved have taken a vow of silence regarding the murders. Suddenly, the two authority figures of the film are in opposition to one another with Sally now occupying the role of an agent operating outside the boundaries of polite society, thereby showing the fluidity of what constitutes indecency. The final image of the film is a jar nestled among a variety of science experiments filled with, you guessed it, a heart floating in formaldehyde.

Fortress is a movie that holds up remarkably well and deserves far more praise than it receives. You can get it on DVD from Amazon here: