Inside Neil LaBute there are two Neil LaButes, fighting. One is the man who sent back controversial dispatches from the front lines of the battle of the sexes, films like In the Company of Men and The Shape of Things. The other was showrunner for three seasons of SyFy’s postapocalyptic vampire series, Van Helsing.
Those two LaButes quit fighting long enough to produce a curious-looking pup in House of Darkness, one brimming with a peculiar hybrid vigor. In Justin Long he has his archetypical doltish philanderer, the guy with the nice suit and the decent patter who picks up an attractive young woman at a bar and gives her a ride home. This should, of course, be the first red flag. How exactly did she get to the bar, considering her home (well, more of a castle, really) is in the middle of nowhere – remote enough that the nameless lothario can’t get a reliable cell signal.
There’s a certain shamelessness in LaBute’s script. A Gothic castle, a woman in a white dress that is equal parts nightgown and funeral shroud – and did she mention that her name is Mina? If that’s not obvious enough, her sister finally appears, and of course is called Lucy. The setup is a not-so-subtle reworking of the three sisters sequence from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. However, the book’s Victorian push-and-pull between seduction and disgust is replaced with LaBute’s distinctive and unflinchingly cerebral approach to dissecting the interactions of men and women. Subtext is everything: As Lucy and Mina both note, their guest has a flair for loading every word with a salacious undercurrent. Subtlety, however, is clearly not his strong point, as he pushes against the edges of conversational propriety. But the way they push back is scarcely innocent.
Long has a distinct flair for this kind of role, the conventional man stumbling into an unconventional universe with a hapless yelp – most famously as the doting boyfriend, Colt, in Drag Me to Hell, and more recently as salaryman Frank, plunging headfirst into the cosmic curiosity of The Wave. As the clear prey in the trap set by Mina (Bosworth, hiding a wicked blade under a knowingly innocent facade) and Lucy (a suitably acerbic Crovatin), he flounders between studied seduction techniques and furious backpedaling, always horny and drunk enough to be unsure whether the women are up to something or just playing with him.
LaBute pulls a similar parlor trick to the women. It’s not that he’s at any level hiding his Gothic influences. Instead, the game is in working out whether he’s using them metaphorically, or if the unnamed letch is in for a different kind of sucking than he expects. In the pen of a lesser writer, it might be a sleazy affectation; but LaBute is less interested in the specifics of the resolution than in the subtext, and how he can play with sexual dynamics in a new-old environment. Some of his insights into the world of white-collar misogyny may feel a little dated, but that’s less of an issue when his story is so clearly detached from time. And, after all, few can write this kind of acid-dripping parlor drama with as much bite as LaBute.
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This article appears in The Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival.