Perhaps the greatest “what if?” of my creative life thus far (and there have been a few), came back in 2007 when I was shortlisted for the Dramatic Writing MFA program at Carnegie Mellon. And just to be clear, when I say shortlisted, I mean that I was down to the final round – 1 of 8 being considered for a fellowship that takes 2 to 4 people a year. It was, in a word, unexpected. I had no live theatre experience (outside of playing in the orchestra for my high school’s production of Bye Bye Birdie), and had only taken a couple of dramatic writing classes as an undergrad. I knew that I wanted to be a writer, and that I had both a flair and a passion for writing dialogue in particular, but I was in no way an obvious choice. Having written just enough material on my own time – a full-length play and two one-acts – to meet most programs’ submission criteria, I literally put everything I had into those application packets, and save a first round chat with a rep from UCLA, heard nothing back until this call, inviting me to come for a weekend-long tour of the campus with the professor of dramatic writing and his current crop of grad students. It was, without question, the biggest validation of my fledgling talents to date. Proof positive that I just might have something. That I wasn’t kidding myself. That I was, by some formal metric, good.
With a little over a week between that call and my scheduled visit, and even the three professors who had written me glowing recommendations caught somewhat off guard by my success, to say that I packed up and headed to Pittsburgh unprepared to meet this moment would be a seismic understatement. But there I was, stepping out of my Toyota Yaris after 10 straight hours on the road, and immediately heading to dinner with Milan Stitt, playwright of the 1976 Broadway smash The Runner Stumbles, and arbiter of my dramaturgical fate.
Now, I’ve already made clear my numerous shortcomings as a candidate for this rarefied artistic air. Add on top of those that I was exhausted and rumpled, unwashed and underdressed, and probably, somehow, both overconfident and not nearly confident enough in my attempts to make a strong first impression – the kind of “fake it ‘til you make it” bravado that any seasoned theatre vet would see through in a nervous heartbeat – and what you’re left with is pretty much a script for disaster. The unusual nature of my application was brought up almost immediately. A joke about Oscar Wilde’s notoriously lengthy stage directions was willfully misunderstood. And then the kicker. When asked who my favorite working playwright was, I was thrilled to answer: Neil LaBute.
He had never heard of him.
(Sorry, Neil).
This was shocking to me. I’d been a borderline evangelical fan of LaBute’s acid-tongued antiromances (still my favorite descriptor I’ve ever heard for his genre-defying work) for years, introducing countless of my unsuspecting classmates to his scathing repartee and kidney punch reveals via the unholy triumvirate of YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS, IN THE COMPANY OF MEN, and THE SHAPE OF THINGS. If there’s any truth to the old chestnut that every writer starts out by imitating his heroes, then there was likely no one I unwittingly imitated more. It was then frankly unbelievable to me that I was now sitting across the table from a titan of stagecraft – a doyen in his field – and having to try and explain to his already skeptical mind, sight unseen, what exactly it was that I so adored about Neil LaBute. He should have already known! Where had he been!? Why was someone like me, with no practical theatre experience and the wrong answer to seemingly every question, even being considered by this man who had never so much as heard tell of my playwriting paragon?!? Our introductory meeting went downhill so fast it was enough to make me wonder if I was the butt of some LaButean joke myself – the naive dilettante, invited to his dream school by a malicious theatre cabal only to discover that his entire weekend was nothing more than a staged humiliation – some Artaud-worshiping grad student’s living thesis of cruelty. Just writing it all out here has me questioning again. What I could have done differently. If I ever had a chance. If any of it was even real.
Hap, the protagonist of LaBute’s latest film HOUSE OF DARKNESS (played – and here is a sentence I never expected to write – to nervy, discomforting perfection by an inspired Justin Long), is having a rocky time landing an unexpected opportunity too. Invited in for a nightcap by the mysteriously forthright Mina (Kate Bosworth, also excellent in a more interior role) after meeting her at a club and driving her home to her remote, castlelike estate, he can hardly believe his own good fortune; so much so that he at first seems all but determined to sabotage it. A wary jumble of performative niceness and chivalric chauvinism, Hap is the kind of deviously self-effacing beta male whose constant bemoaning of the state of modern sexual politics serves as his chief ploy in playing them; the kind who leans so hard into his good guy game that he can’t help but reveal his antiquated notions about sex, dating, and female autonomy. After insistently double- and triple-checking, however, that Mina does in fact mean everything she’s saying – “I always say what I mean. Don’t you?” she asks with a wicked smile – and does in fact want him to come inside, he allows himself to relax and surrender his guard. But as the alcohol continues to flow, LaBute slowly makes clear what we, and Mina, likely suspected about Hap all along: that any man who feels compelled to self-identify as “one of the good guys” is very likely not.
What follows will be familiar to LaBute stans for the most part, though no less enjoyable for it – the kind of talky, acerbic, chamber comedy of ill manners on which his early career was built. Hap and Mina talk in circles about the dubious compromises and moral pitfalls of 21st century courtship, he letting slip more and more of his barely repressed douchebag, she expertly teasing it out of him with the practiced reassurances and observant predations of a high class escort working a mark. In one of the film’s sharpest exchanges, Mina takes Hap’s paternalistic concerns about a woman like her living in such a big place, so far out in the country, all alone, and turns them into a kind of provocative greenlight for his baser intentions, cooing back at him “You could do anything you wanted, and I couldn’t stop you. You could do anything you wanted to me, and no one would ever know.” It’s a move, of course. All these two have is moves. But even in its disingenuousness, it still serves as a blunt, edgy reminder of the risk that every woman takes on, virtually every time she decides to bring a man home, as well as a tiny window into the erotic thrill potentiated by that inherent danger.
One of the things LaBute has always done remarkably well is write material with equally developed, nuanced, and most importantly, morally ambiguous male and female co-leads – from the aforementioned THE SHAPE OF THINGS to more recent fare like his caustic incest comedy Billy and Billie or the scorched-earth two-hander SOME VELVET MORNING – plays and movies which a man and woman might sit and watch together and yet still come away having seen completely different things. His work overtly endeavors to foster conversation between the sexes, and HOUSE OF DARKNESS only adds to that confrontational legacy (likewise, I showed my wife THE SHAPE OF THINGS while preparing to write this article, and rest assured, it’s power to incite spirited debate has not waned an iota in 20 years).
As HOUSE OF DARKNESS’ two protagonists carry on with their roundabout repartee – occasionally punctuated by an eerie creak or clatter from the other side of the manor – something begins to take shape that is not so much chemistry as the toxic fumes of a lab experiment gone awry; a corporeal foreshadowing; a cloud of menace. Hap (whose name is short for “Hapgood,” but who we are also clearly meant to think of as “hapless”), puts his foot in his mouth so many times it’s hard to imagine any woman falling for his C+ white knight shtick, and yet, there he is, slouched in a Victorian wingback before a roaring fire, about to get a blowjob from a rich, beautiful, ersatz princess – an eventuality that is only interrupted by the emergence of her even more sexually aggressive sister, Lucy (LaBute regular Gia Crovatin). By this point, anyone watching will understand that something is not quite right here, but poor, dumb, horny Hap is so drunk on his own good luck (and just plain drunk) that all he can see are the two leggy blondes right in front of his face (indeed, the way Mina keeps feeding Hap drinks makes for another trenchant running joke at the expense of yet another transparently sketchy “nice guy” dating tactic). For his part, somewhere between neat whiskeys two and four, Hap comes to the slow, subtle conclusion that he’s maybe not as good a guy as he thought – that the good guy he thought he was, is maybe even kind of a sucker – and after tidily encapsulating his true nature within the film’s single creepiest line reading (“Oh God. Sisters.”), he proceeds to double down on his newly emboldened bad boy success.
I will offer the lightest of spoiler alerts here, as I am about to give away quite a bit about the film’s third act, whereinHOUSE OF DARKNESSpulls back its heavy velvet drapes and lets all its excruciatingly accumulated sexual tension burst forth like a punctured artery (though anyone familiar with LaBute’s work will likely see much of this coming). The first twist – that Hap is decidedly not getting laid tonight – that he likely never was – and that the sisters are, for lack of a more sophisticated expression, fucking with him – is classic Neil. But the second twist is something of a departure, even as a writer well-known for his vicious rug pulls and beastly denouements. After Hap spends some extremely uninhibited time with Lucy, wherein she tells a harrowing ghost story about a child gang rape, and he makes increasingly untoward insinuations at the prospect of a sororal threeway (“I’m just putting it out there” he jokes, 100% not-jokingly), a third sister, Nora (Lucy Walters) appears at the witching hour, seeming far less amused by his now openly impatient, entitled, and lowkey misogynistic behavior, and kyboshing whatever porno fantasies he might have been entertaining about the rest of the evening. As Hap loses his temper (slipping at last into unfettered, highkey misogyny), the women artfully dismember every manipulation, half-truth, and out-and-out lie he’s employed toward the task of finagling Mina into bed from the moment he hit her with both finger guns at the bar however many hours ago – and then swiftly set upon and dismembering him physically as well, latching in troika to form a bloodsoaked ménage tableau of their very own (they’re vampires. The second twist is that they’re vampires).
Now, as a happily married man, watching this film and feeling more grateful by the second that I don’t personally have to navigate the treacherous singles landscape of 2023, there was no small part of me that strongly questioned whether or not Hap really deserved all this. He was a jerk, no question. He lied quite a bit. He was pretty pervy. He showed his hand with regards to a number of queasy, cringily-held principles. But overall, he was a much subtler dick than LaBute usually writes – a textbook example of the underhanded, faux allyship that has evolved in recent years into just another tool in many men’s seduction toolbox (or what a writer friend of mine has more directly called out as simply “feminist misogyny”), but hardly a monster on par with IN THE COMPANY OF MEN’s Chad or YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS’ Cary. On the flipside, however, as a feminist and erstwhile self-identifying “good guy” (not the proudest part of my life’s journey, but one I can absolutely cop to in hindsight), I could also see a degree of cosmic poetry to the idea of avenging, third wave nosferata tearing this bastard limb from limb. Men, after all, have been oppressing women in one way or another since the dawn of human history – somewhere in the ballpark of 200,000 years – and in the vast majority of the world are still doing so to this day (a world which, as we are reminded on an increasingly regular basis, likely doesn’t have anywhere near that many years left).
All of which is to say that, from this zoomed-out, macro perspective, justice can mathematically never be done. Women could be literally immortal, and still not have enough time to even the historical score before the Earth crashes into the sun and it’s all an existential wash. So maybe, just to play Dracula’s advocate, it doesn’t really matter that Hap was only a run-of-the-mill asshole, as opposed to the scumbags and molesters and rapists that populate so much of LaBute’s previous work. Maybe men just have to keep trying to be better, forever, and stop thinking about their behavior in terms of some bare minimum benchmark of acceptability; in terms of what’s simply “good enough.” It’s telling that, while the sisters imply they inherited their succubic powers from their father, anyone familiar with the Dracula legend will recognize Mina and Lucy as the names of his victims, rather than his daughters, suggesting that even if LaBute does see modern women as metaphorical vampires, it’s only because centuries of predatory men have made them that way.
There are surely even more ways of interpreting all the he-said/she-said narratives competing for your ear in HOUSE OF DARKNESS, but regardless of how you end up seeing them, they definitely are something to see. As I mentioned above, LaBute’s uncanny talent for coaxing career-best dramatic work out of traditionally comedic actors – helping them to weaponize their stockpiles of goodwill, and turn their million dollar smiles into mocking fool’s gold sneers – is on full display here with Long, just as it was with Paul Rudd back in 2003. And just as THE SHAPE OF THINGS landed its brutal, brass-knuckled, 12th-round knockout blow to the already punch-drunk puritanical sexual mores of the 20th century, LaBute here again shows off his unique, exacting capacity for ethical vivisection amid the shiftier, more shrilly pitched gender battles of the 21st, leaving you to ponder who’s side you’re really on (if anyone’s) long after the credits roll. Watching these two back-to-back would make for a fascinating thought experiment, explicating all the ways in which THE SHAPE OF THINGS’ possessive jealousy and old-fashioned romantic devastation directly begat HOUSE OF DARKNESS’ topsy-turvy, postfeminist hookup free-for-all – all the ways in which the latter film is grappling with its predecessor’s ongoing cultural fallout.
But more than any of that, even, HOUSE OF DARKNESS has something truly interesting to say about LaBute’s writing in and of itself – a now-massive body of work that includes 28 full-length plays, 11 films, 4 television series, a book of stories, and a staggering number of shorter works for both stage and screen – much of which has faced controversy for being either too libertine for conservative theatregoers (a BYU grad, the LDS Church actually disfellowshipped LaBute over his gutwrenching one-act Medea Redux), or too abrasively cynical (or in today’s terms, “unwoke”) for tenderhearted film critics (and very often both). But what all of that handwringing failed to recognize – indeed, the thing that elevates LaBute’s best work from timely to timeless – is his strict removal of himself from the equation; his willingness to tackle any subject, no matter how taboo, without moralizing or spoon-feeding his audience whatever his personal opinions might be. We talk constantly these days about separating the art from the artist – and we all make choices, from Norman Mailer to Roman Polanski to Michael Jackson, as regards how much real evil we’re willing to put up with when it’s attached to work we enjoy. But when it comes to artists who put that kind of evil into their art – whose art is, by their own admission, often about evil – we often have a harder time making the distinction. It feels suspect, all this fictional depravity; as though it must be confessional, or else hiding something even worse. But to comment is not to condone. To observe is not to endorse. And while I don’t know the man personally, it is my firm, critical contention that Neil LaBute actually is one of the good guys. And yet, for many, it seems his writing is so viscerally disturbing as to make them kneejerk right out of their seats yelling “misanthrope!” and “misogynist!” just as an excuse to leave the conversation; just as an excuse not to think about it anymore.
Obviously, that has not been the case for me. I have thought about Neil LaBute’s work a lot. Maybe more than is healthy. It’s hard to say. Time will tell, I guess. Just diving back into it this past week – not to mention mining my agonizing grad school visit for intro fodder – has brought up a lot of hard, vestigial feelings of paranoia, self-doubt, and regret. Needless to say, I did not get into Carnegie Mellon, and for better or worse, I’ve continued writing to this day. I’ve found some modest success outside the MFA system, and will see my debut novel, Troll, published later this year with Whiskey Tit Books. I like to think I’ve found my own voice in that time too, but I certainly still owe a lot to Neil LaBute. One of my female characters even calls him a “prick” during a lengthy section of acerbically flirtatious dialogue (no offense, Neil. I think you’d probably like her).
And so, with all of that said, I will close by expressing here on this horror website to which I so enjoy contributing, real excitement at my favorite working playwright’s latest foray into the genre proper, both because there is arguably no milieu more appropriate for the kind of envelope-pushing emotional violence in which he traffics, and inarguably no audience more hungry for it. The way in which LaBute, time and again, takes the worst things people wonder about themselves – our darkest, most base fears – the “What if everyone is lying to me?” “What if everyone is laughing at me?” “What if the person I love is using me?” “What if the world is not as it seems?” “What if it’s all a big joke and I’m the punchline?” of it all – the way he takes that sad, scared, self-loathing little voice in the back of all our heads, and it puts it directly into the mouths of the people we trust the most – that’s the only true throughline to Neil LaBute. Critics can call him every name in the book while erroneously conflating him with his characters, but his work isn’t really even about what the very worst people are capable of. It’s about what we’re all capable of at our very worst. It’s the outsized manifestation of the wounded, vengeful id. It’s the absolvent catharsis of empathy for thoughts unspeakable. It’s the darkest subtext of the human experience, rendered bold, illuminated text. Neil LaBute writes about the shit that changes us, permanently, and for the worse. His voice is the missing link between the gutting interpersonal dramas of Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and David Mamet, and the terroristic arthouse nightmares of Catherine Breillat, Michael Haneke, and Ulrich Seidl. When it comes to pinning him down – putting a name to that singular thing that he does so well – anti-romance is a nice turn of phrase, but oddly enough, Amazon Prime’s descriptors for HOUSE OF DARKNESS kind of nail it too. Whether it makes you gasp for breath, or laugh uncomfortably, or scream at the top of your lungs, vampires or no, LaBute’s work has always been “Suspense-Comedy-Horror.”
Tags: Adam Bosage, Amazon Prime, Bridget Durnford, comedy, Daniel Katz, Gia Crovatin, Horror, Justin Long, Kate Bosworth, Lucy Walters, Neil LaBute, Saban Films, Suspense, Theater
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