‘August Underground’: The screwed up film that inspired Ethel Cain
On Preacher’s Daughter, Hayden Silas Anhedönia tells the story of Ethel Cain from heartbreaking start to horrific end. The lyrics are a whole narrative, but in the final, most gruesome moments, words fail. However, even in a piece like ‘August Underground’, a fully instrumental track, Anhedönia’s references do the talking.
The world of Ethel Cain is vast and deep. There is a cast of characters to know, a storyline to follow, and details to remember. But even beyond the narrative, the world also involves a vast array of references from Anhedönia’s own life and library. In particular, her callback to August Underground, a deeply controversial horror movie, is not only clearly inspired but also a crucial part of the storytelling.
Released in 2001, August Underground was a movie directed by, written by and starring Fred Vogel, who cast himself as a serial killer and violent rapist, terrorising and murdering several victims throughout the flick in increasingly horrific ways. Shot in a found-footage style, it’s a brutal watch and pretty quickly became controversial as Vogel’s obsession with on-screen violence raised eyebrows.
The whole spark of the film came from Vogel’s frustration with other serial killer movies, specifically being annoyed by the fact that they “didn’t show you what was really going on”. He wanted real gore, true realistic gore and intense violence. He wanted to show the violence outright and his desire for that immediately feels questionable.
It got even more questionable later on when, in 2005, Vogel was stopped at the airport on the way to the Rue Morgue Festival of Fear. The border control in Canada deemed the merchandise, promotional materials, and even simply the DVDs of August Underground so obscene and violent that they were seized and investigated.
But how does that connect to Ethel Cain? Coming right after the screaming finale of ‘Ptolemaea’, ‘August Underground’ is deeply ominous and unsettling. It’s dark and creepily quiet. There are no words but murmurs and harmonies, but even without any lyrics, the title alone with its reference to Vogel’s film tells the story.
After the character of Cain screams “Stop” before a barrage of heavy guitars come in on the previous track, representing her spiral into dark mania before her boyfriend violently attacks her, the next track’s connection to the film, and the knowledge that the movie is about a violent assault that leads to an even more violent murder, tells us Cain’s fate. Merely by titling the instrumental after the controversial flick, Anhedönia wordlessly tells the listeners just how brutal her character’s death is.
In the movie, Vogel’s character and his accomplice film themselves attacking sex workers before beating them to death with a hammer. As Cain’s character previously fell into work as a sex worker during the track ‘Gibson Girl’, it seems that her ending was inspired by the victims in this violent flick. However, as she chooses to never really vocalise in words exactly what happens to her character, she takes the exact opposite approach to Vogel, who was fascinated, or sinisterly obsessed, with an unfaltering view on the most heinous deeds.
