HORROR BUSINESS Episode 168: LADY STAY DEAD & DON’T GO IN THE WOODS

Greetings, and welcome back to Horror Business. We’ve got one heck of an episode in store for you guys as we’re talking about Lady Stay Dead and Don’t Go In The Woods, both from 1981.

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We briefly talk what we’ve doing involving horror recently. Liam discusses the film Infinity Buffet, and Justin talks about the films This Is Not A Test, Hokum, Disclosure Day, and some of the films he watched for the Chattanooga Film Festival.

Up first is Lady Stay Dead. We talk largely about how unpleasant we found the film to be, mostly since it felt interested mostly in being cruel and shocking and not so much in telling some kind of story. We compare the sexual assault scenes to other famous horror films that use such a tactic, and how the film has the unsettling tendency to sexualize such things instead of portraying them as acts of violence. Liam points out the film somehow is the worst at this amongst ‘80s horror films, and not only is it edgy for the sake of edgy it’s also not particularly good at it.

We talk about how the film seems unable to make the antagonist a real believable threat, and how the film lacks the sense of catharsis most rape revenge films have so the violence comes off as completely pointless.

Liam talks about how the film can’t decide if the antagonist is developmentally challenged or just an asshole, as well as the idea that this film isn’t really “the nastiest of the nasty” because it’s just a weak example of that phenomenon.

Up next is Don’t Go In The Woods. We talk about how the poster might be familiar to horror fans even if they haven’t seen the movie. Justin talks about how the film might the archetypical slasher film and unlike the previous film in the episode is compelling and interesting.

Liam talks about how it’s interesting that the film takes its time in revealing the killer, and possibly uses Bigfoot as a red herring