Tucker and Dale vs Evil is a perfect summer horror film. Horror movies set during summertime immerse audiences in physical activities—swimming, hiking, vacationing, camping—ideal plot devices for dropping heroes in the fight of their lives. Which is perhaps why, for many of us at least, Jaws (1975) keeps us out of the water, and Friday the Thirteenth (1980) compels many camp counselors to rethink their summer vacations.
But maybe more terrifying, though, are the types of rustic antagonists that audiences encounter in scary movies about rural America. Their summer getaways, although beautiful, offer up some nasty locals. Think Leatherface swinging his chainsaw, the banjo-playing rapists of Deliverance (1972), or the motel owners in Motel Hell (1980) who turn their guests into world-famous sausages, and we can begin to understand why city slickers prefer sweltering urban summers to provincial dangers.
But what if the monsters are really the city-dwellers themselves? Eli Craig’s Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010) takes an old trope, deranged country yokels, and turns it on its head. Our protagonists in the film are actually the hunting, fishing, pickled egg-eating bumpkins, who, despite appearances, just bought their first vacation home. They might not be the most educated; Dale barely made it past the third grade, but Dale and Tucker vs Evil proves that appearances can be deceptive.
Here’s the trailer:
Early in the film, Tucker (Alan Tudyk) encourages Dale (Tyler Labine) to approach pretty college girl, Allison (Katrina Bowden). “She’s just human. Why don’t you go over and talk to her?” Tucker assures him. But Dale applies his friend’s advice in the worst way, laughing and mumbling awkwardly, and Allison and her friends leap to the conclusion that Dale is a crazed redneck. Only later, when Tucker and Dale save Allison from drowning does she realize her blunder.
That evening while fishing, the pair watches Allison hit her heard and fall into the lake. They save her, but when alerting her friends with cries of “we’ve got your friend,” the men are again mistaken for dangerous rednecks. One of the boys even suggests that Dale tried “eating her face off” as the pair pulled her from the water—as crazy hillbillies are wont to do, of course.
Katrina Bowden as Allison: beautiful woman imperiled by “crazy rednecks”
Dark slapstick humor ensues as the kids attempt to rescue Allison for the rest of the film. And due to a series of misunderstandings and equipment laid around haphazardly, the kids are killed off—not because Dale and Tucker meant for these things to happen. The students’ deaths are mostly accidental or just bad luck. But who will believe that?
In a way, Tucker and Dale vs Evil might seem self-referential in the same way Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) is about itself. Scream’s self-awareness, frequent allusions, and humor reinvigorated the slasher genre, but it also seems to have initiated the first of many recent “smart horror” films. However, Tucker and Dale vs Evil is more gore meets cartoonish absurdity meant to inspire tolerance of the rural other.
Dale and Allison discuss the time they first met each other. “You thought I looked like some kind of freak?” he asks. “We misjudged you Dale. I’m…I’m really sorry,” she responds. “Don’t be sorry, it’s my fault. I should have known if a guy like me talked to a girl like you, somebody would end up dead.”
Dale (Tyler Labine) and Allison (Katrina Bowden)
And were this the typical hillbilly horror Hollywood has generated for ages that could certainly be the case. Comparing Tucker and Dale vs Evil to Scream is useful here. Both fall on various sides of the smart horror spectrum, but more importantly, hillbilly horror and slashers behave like distant cousins. In her book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws, author Carol Clover discusses not only the Final Girl of slasher films but in a later chapter, “Getting Even,” points out that redneck horror often features a heroine in peril.
That danger, however, becomes literal rape. Clover contends one of the fears presented in the movies revolve around “patriarchy run amok.” Without the socializing influence of women in the rural communities depicted in classic hillbilly horror, the men seek to outdo the others, and raping becomes a type of sport to reaffirm each other’s maleness. When Tucker says he is taking Dale up to the cabin because “He’s been strikin’ out with the ladies. I figure a little man time might do him some good,” audiences might recall similar stances in I Spit on Your Grave (1978) or Deliverance. In fact, one of the first lines spoken in Tucker and Dale vs Evil involves allusion to the latter’s graphic rape scene.
Dale (Tyler Labine) and Tucker (Alan Tudyk)
But Tucker and Dale vs Evil fails where Scream triumphs in recapitulating the premise of antecedents. Allison is not raped by Tucker or Dale because neither is a rapist. Nor are the men killers. Allison’s college beau offers more threats in those arenas; Dale eventually saves her from the boy. Viewers do not see the film from Allison’s prospective. They do not need to: she is not the victim/hero, as Clover describes the Final Girl. The victim turned hero is actually Dale or maybe Tucker; the true “evil” (hinted in the film’s title), the bigotry of the college kids.
Michelle Mastro is a third year PhD student at Indiana University, Bloomington’s English department. There, she studies the development of the novel with an emphasis on the Victorian Gothic. She recently taught a course of her own design: The Final Girl: Cultural Analysis and Representations of Gender in the Slasher Film. Michelle Mastro has written previously for Horror Homeroom on Stranger Things, the 90s horror film, Fear, the phenomenon of the creepy clown, It Follows and the new Final Girl, and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
Tucker and Dale vs Evil is available on Blu-ray, DVD, and streaming:
