Wrong Turn (2021) isn’t misleading in its approach to genre filmmaking, to be certain. The brochure lets moviegoers know full well that they’ve traveled bloody byways like these before, that they’ve been terrorized by homicidal hillbillies like these before. But the destination of Wrong Turn (2021) is altogether unique in relation to what’s come before it, and it seems to suggest that the oft-reviled horror movie rehash may soon be replaced with slasher films audacious enough to have something more to say.
A ‘Wrong Turn’ remake? Wrong again!
In the film, six young adults venture into the Appalachian mountains for a weekend of hiking & adventure, only to find themselves the targets of an entire society of mountainside locals who have retreated into the wilderness where they’ve survived for over a century in an effort to divorce themselves from the cancerous history and bleak future of society.
In Wrong Turn, a group of young people are besieged by a small society of wilderness dwellers that has shunned the inevitable hardships of the modern world
The film’s action is led by a relatively unknown yet capable cast of 20-somethings, constructed by the filmmakers with a purposeful eye for inclusiveness and diversity. This cast of characters is unlike that of any of the original Wrong Turn films: it is not a cast of unlikable protagonists whom the audience will relish watching die horribly with gruesomely homemade, hick-influenced creativity as in the original franchise.
The film fleshes out its characters as none of the previous franchise entries tried to — and in defense of those films, the intent was not to inspire empathy from the audience but to dazzle and repulse through more and more over-the-top violence.
But with non-white and LGBTQ additions to the roster of would-be victims, a significant characteristic of this film is also its identifying a final girl early on in the film, when the franchise has by and large operated on a zero sum approach to the body count.
The film’s greatest effort in building a cast that will differentiate it from the original films — the oldest of which is almost 20 years old — is in the casting of Tim DeZarn as the grizzled townie who will also serve as the prophet of doom, warning worried father (played by Matthew Modine) that his daughter and her five friends may have ventured into those woods never to return. These two are the strongest attempts to ground the film in Hollywood viability, but the film otherwise belongs to the anonymous young people who will characteristically fight for their lives on a rugged mountainside.
What remains of the film, though, has been churned through a meat grinder so as to look quite a bit different from its predecessors.
The right heroes for the adventure
What ultimately separates this film’s victims from other cinematic mass murders is further established through the characters’ finer points.
As the group drinks at a local tavern, the conversation inevitably turns to the backwards nature of the townspeople, but their underestimation of these people is quickly revealed when Roades (DeZarn) criticizes the group for never having done a day’s work, never demonstrated a true usefulness in the world. But the group is not a collection of spring breakers with no future in sight — in their fold they have the owner of two bistros, an app developer, an oncologist, and more. The scene is a tense one, perhaps meant to cast these young people as superficial lambs being led to the slaughter, but when Jen (Charlotte Vega) admits that she is a barista with limited medical school experience, she also points out that Roades ought to be wary of his jaundiced eyes, which could be a sign of great medical misfortune if left unchecked. These are not, then, faceless bodies that will be gratuitously disrobed before they’re dispatched as in traditional slasher films. These are, in fact, human characters, a departure from the common fare. Even Darius (Adain Bradley) daydreams in the arms of his white girlfriend that he could one day live in a world where his worth is measured by what he can provide to the world, not by the color of his skin. The moment echoes the oration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Washington, but it serves a purpose in supporting the secondary motives that the film seems to have.
Is the unexamined life worth living?
Wrong Turn (2021) extends its runtime from the traditionally senseless slasher by an additional 20 minutes, and the purpose is to portray the fallout of many of the deaths within the small group. The majority of them are brought to so-called justice — killed brutally throughout — by the community of Backwoods butchers save for two: Jen and Darius.
Darius is spared because his work in sustainable energy benefits the decades-old mountainside community. Jen, meanwhile, has only her body to donate to the community. Darius, then, survives due to his tutelage — Jen survives due to her sexualized ingenuity. The film does not begin to qualify the methods by which one can survive peril, but the film also does not allow the viewer to oversimplify or underestimate these characters and their decisions. The college degrees of the remaining victims were not enough to spare them, but the film at least takes this opportunity to highlight that these were not simply meaningless lives lost, a significant contrast to the nihilistic violence of the franchise’s other films.
Despite the deaths of his friends, Darius appears to have discovered a society that sees him for his contributions and not for the color of his skin. This fact contributes to the complex reason that keeps Darius from fleeing the commune when he has the chance to escape. Jen, meanwhile, remains undervalued almost to the end. Hers is a rare portrayal of the final girl: objectified by the backwoods leader and kept alive as a concubine. In fact, Jen only escapes through the help of her dogged father and Roades (who owes his gratitude to her for warning him about his yellowing eyes). In this way, she appears to contradict everything for which the final girl is meant to stand in her apparent helplessness.
Returned to her home, it only stands to reason that Jen will be hunted there by the commune, only to be returned to the mountainside to give birth to a baby, an inanimate vessel in the service of others. But she is underestimated once more in her ability to survive when she thwarts the mountain people with lethal if offscreen skill and becomes a unique addition to the graduating class of final girls that have starred in slasher films of the past. Harkening back to Darius’ hope for his own place in the world, Wrong Turn suggests that everyone should be judged by what they can do in the world, not simply by how they appear on the surface.
Wrong Turn will not reinvent the horror genre or the backwoods killer subgenre simply by taking detours such as these over the course of what is a rather recognizable road in horror, but it demonstrates that one should not so quickly dismiss a horror film because it seems to travel some of the same, trusted road maps of the genre’s past.
You can rent Wrong Turn on Amazon (ad):
Justin Howard Query graduated from the University of Iowa with a Masters of Arts in Teaching Secondary Education and has taught English & journalism for the past 15 years in Oswego, IL, where he is also sponsor of the school’s student (oehowl.org) news magazine, the recipient of state & national awards for the past 10 years. He has previously written for Horror Homeroom on Image Comics’ Infidel and Image Comics’ Ice Cream Man. Personally, he has not won a single award for the content that he posts (@transl8edpoorly) on Twitter.
