At first glance, A Wounded Fawn seems like it fits straight into the tradition of films about women being pursued by deranged psychosexual killers. But if you’re expecting I Spit on Your Grave X, filmmaker Travis Stevens said, think again.
In A Wounded Fawn, the writer/director shows Meredith (Sarah Lind) is being chased around a remote house by psychotic art collector and serial killer Bruce (Josh Ruben). But she has her own defenses, other than whatever weaponry she can muster from the kitchen: the Erinyes, the Furies of Greek legend. They’re represented in a statue that Bruce has purloined, but they very soon make their presence known …
With his gooey dismantling of masculinity The Girl On the Second Floor and vampiric folie à deux Jakob’s Wife, Stevens is no stranger to unusual narratives, but A Wounded Fawn is his strangest film yet. He said, “I made some weird friends, and we just started jamming.”
Austin Chronicle: So who’s to blame for Travis getting even weirder?
Sarah Lind: Travis.
Travis Stevens: Hah! Listen, you pay attention to how your work is received, and you pay attention to what people respond to, and what critics say, and you learn from looking back at the work, and hopefully you expand and improve what you do. I think that, because this film has similarities in theme to the other movies I did, I thought, “well, what can I do that’s different?” and leaning into the exaggerated imagery was the path through this story.
“The most terrifying thing to an egotistical man would be that admission of guilt.” – Josh Ruben
TS: I discovered the limits of the Toronto public education system when I started making this project. I didn’t know the Furies, but when I started to read about them and watch the material about them that had been produced, what I was drawn to about them was that their version of justice seems really, really relevant to 2022. It was about atonement as opposed to retribution. So even though, yes, they are, “Call ’em out, sic ’em on to the person who wronged you,” I liked that idea of chasing after the wrongdoer going, “Admit you fucked up! Admit you fucked up!” That felt strangely relevant to how we are talking about justice today.
SL: One of the things I read by this brilliant woman, Mariame Kaba, is that our justice system – that is to say, our legal system – de-incentivizes people from every saying “Yes, I did this, and that caused harm.” And that’s one of the key things to making it better. So even if someone is found guilty and punished, you don’t necessarily get justice on that.
Josh Ruben: There’s so much that’s original about this movie, but the most terrifying thing to an egotistical man would be that admission of guilt. You can imagine that our last president, he’d probably have nightmares about it. Those kinds of sociopaths would likely rather flay themselves than to get as vulnerable as to admit that they were wrong.
It’s also an allegory for men’s resistance, historically, to getting help, to getting mental help, to self-help. … There’s so much that’s original about this movie, but to express that is so exciting because it’s too real and extremely relevant.
AC: It’s reminiscent of [French philosopher Michel Foucault’s book] Discipline and Punish, and his idea that society’s need for punishment, and punishment being seen to be done, create injustice if they’re done without rehabilitation. And a lot of American horror reflects that: “OK, the final girl kills the slasher.”
SL: It happened first at Tribeca, and at other times on the festival circuit when we saw it with an audience, it was so exciting [to] sit with the audience long enough to hear them go through so many feelings. It’s funny, and there’s a bit of a gasp, and then there’s confusion, and nervous laughter, and then dead silence.
AC: There is this thick element of black comedy and slapstick.
TS: I always say, the band members are going to create with other people, created that fun aspect of it. Because Bruce is an absurd character, and like Sarah often says, the movie is about popping his sense of self.
JR: The great thing that [Stevens] did was that he didn’t overclog my upstate New York school system brain with the historical of it all, and the allegory of it all, but just said, “Take some swings.”
SL: Rightly or wrongly, I didn’t see what a tightrope act it was, or I just saw a clear way through it. The objective of Meredith’s and then [the Erinyes] is to get him to admit he did something wrong. So it didn’t feel too complicated, and in some ways I felt she’s the eye of the storm.
So it didn’t feel complicated for me, but when I saw a cut for the first time I was quite surprised at the humor in it. I didn’t expect that, and it enriched the absurdity. But that’s mostly Josh. I was the juggernaut, plodding forward.
AC: You’re also dragging in surrealist art.
TS: I don’t know but with this one – and it sounds really hippyish – for whatever reason the universe threw the right kind of ingredients and they stuck. All this stuff, it wasn’t intellectually mapped out. It was very intuitive. I happened to be reading about surrealist art, and was like, “Is that a possible way into this story? Can I set this in the art world? OK, if we do, here’s how we can utilize the Greek myths in the statue,” and all that stuff started lining up.
It felt pretty effortless, and that was what I was taking from the Surrealist art world to begin with: a different approach to creating a work. Let’s just see how this turns out if I turn off these parts of my brain, and turn on these other parts, and just looking at symbolism and seeing what comes up.
A Wounded Fawn is available to stream on Shudder now.
This article appears in December 9 • 2022.
