[7]

Two high school buddies discover a girl chained to a table in an abandoned mental hospital. At first she appears dead, but she’s actually one of the “living” dead. And she’s all theirs… Yes, just when you thought zombies had been completely used up as cinematic metaphors, along comes Deadgirl, a provocative and deeply disturbing exploration of the slippery slope between male sexual impulse and violence. After finding the girl, the boys (played well by Shiloh Fernandez and Noah Segan) come to represent the ego and the id of the archetypal adolescent male. By the end of the movie, one of them will succomb to horrifying urges and the other will struggle to do the right thing.

It’s easy to market Deadgirl as an exploitation horror movie, but if you can stomach the concept, it’s much more than that. And even more disturbing. By incorporating a zombie into the scenario, Deadgirl muddies the necrophilic aspect of the boys’ moral trespass. It also bypasses the issue of female consent, as zombies can neither agree nor disagree. This allows Deadgirl to explore further, revealing a glimpse of something even more disturbing than rape or sex with corpses — the human animal.