‘I’m not the monster you think I am…’
The mid-2000s were a strange time for horror movies. The teen slasher revival ushered in by Scream was dead and in its place was J-horror and torture porn. Hard Candy arrived in the same 18-month period as Saw and Hostel and while it isn’t as bloody and bombastic as those films, it certainly shares more than a strand of DNA with both of them…
When Jeff Kohlver (Patrick Wilson), a grown man, meets 14-year-old girl Hayley Stark (Elliot Page) for ‘coffee’, he doesn’t know that he is not the apex predator in this situation. Taking place mostly in one location and with Wilson and Page pretty much the only characters (aside from a late but welcome appearance from Sandra Oh), Hard Candy is an intense, nauseating and grim film that I can’t say I enjoyed sitting through again. It was only because The Evolution of Horror podcast covered it that I did so, and while it is no doubt a powerful work, it’s also pretty tough viewing. Partly because Wilson is so convincing as a disgusting sexual predator and partly because of the general darkness of the tone, Hard Candy is not for the fainthearted.
From director David Slade and writer Brian Nelson (both of whom would collaborate again on the underrated vampire romp 30 Days of Night), Hard Candy would probably be more successful now in this age of online discourse and heated debate. It’s a fantasy in the rape-revenge mould as popularised by The Last House on the Left, I Spit on Your Grave et al. As with those films, even the revenge part of the story isn’t triumphant. Indeed, during much of the third act here, I just wanted the film to finish to get it over with.
Hard Candy should be applauded for tackling a transgressive and taboo topic with maturity and tact but it’s also a film that I would happily never watch again.