Crackpots #32: Red Rooms (Patreon)

Soraya Sebghati is a Los Angeles-based writer and the front woman of the band Night Talks. When she’s not eating an aggressive amount of popcorn at a rep screening or performing with her band, you can find her walking her greyhound and drinking one too many Vespers at the local bar.

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In the last month I’ve met multiple men who’ve been disturbed by my taste in movies. At a backyard birthday party for a friend of mine, I was introduced to a man named Todd because we were both “movie people.” We had a conversation that started with praise for Oliver Stone’s coked-out opus JFK, then for “idiot thrillers” (another favorite subgenre of mine), before inevitably turning to  our respective Mt. Rushmores of  movies and directors. Once I got to Michael Haneke’s oeuvre something happened: “Oh, of course you like that stuff.” Todd was much more into comedy, big romance, and maximalism. Stories of human kindness, friendship, love that moves us to take risks. When I feel kind of bad, I want to put on something like Cache, or The Piano Teacher, or Funny Games. I love The Straight Story, and Bridges Of Madison County, but I’m not champing at the bit to revisit them. Everyone tells me I “have to (!)” watch Love On The Spectrum, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Not because I don’t care, but because I hate being in that spot emotionally. I know I’ll cry, I’m sure it’s good for me, but that “tears of beauty” feeling is not something I enjoy subjecting myself to. 

I met a guy named Tim outside the El Rey in Los Angeles a few nights ago. He heard that I write about movies and I was explaining what my “concepts of a plan” were for this essay. I mentioned that I wanted to write on last year’s Quebecois cyber-thriller Red Rooms, and I loosely explained the movie to him. He grimaced a little, saying he doesn’t watch those kinds of things. “The news these days is hard enough to stomach, I don’t think I can handle that in my free time,” he explained. I hear that a lot. Neither Todd nor Tim mean their comments this way (nobody ever does), but these comments almost always feel like an insult. It’s like being accused of not being shocked or disgusted enough by the state of the world; how dare you derive fun and escapism from witnessing acts of brutality, you fucking sicko? I’ll admit it: I do get my rocks off watching movies where people get mutilated by chainsaws, or where sexual desire is inextricably linked with violence. It says it right there in my Letterboxd profile, “i Love that weird shit ok/ favorite genres are scary and horny (and both).” But sometimes it nags at me. Am I a bad person because I like that stuff? Why do I like it? What separates me from those weirdo true crime podcast fans?

Lots of movies are ahead of their time, or “eerily prescient,” but it’s much harder for a film to comment accurately on the exact moment of its release. Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms (streaming on Shudder) is that rare film. The film follows Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariepy), a working model who’s darkly obsessed with the murder trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos). Chevalier is on trial for the murder of three teenage girls, and for broadcasting these murders in what would be the first ever documented Red Room. For the uninitiated (and normal people): Red rooms are an urban legend, purported to be sites on the Dark Web where people can pay to watch murder and torture in real time. When I decided to write about the movie here, I saw this tweet from one of my favorite oomfs:

And after that, I kept seeing people using almost the same caption with screenshots of different female true crime Tik Tokers crossing so many ethical lines with different cases that it made my head spin. Exploitation doesn’t stop at gender boundaries, but it is weird to see how people treat men and women who participate in true crime media very differently. In the case of the aforementioned Diddy trial and the fictional one in Red Rooms, the victims are predominantly female. A few publications estimate that 80% of true crime fans are women, and it’s not really an accident. If you asked most women, they’d say it helps them to stay vigilant and not to let their guard down. Know thy enemy. It’s also a pretty convenient way to dodge the question — you can pretend that you’re not a pervert or a sicko while pretending to be honorable. The people who profit off of this will likely say they’re performing a public service: they’re telling women what to look out for, how not to get into this situation, and delivering news that other outlets might not. What they won’t admit is that it’s also incredibly profitable: for example, the podcast “My Favorite Murder” made an estimated $15 million in 2019. Maybe I’m being cynical here — the stories are genuinely compelling. It’s very validating to hear “fuck politeness” from female podcast hosts as a mantra to unlearn the societal conditioning that’s gotten a lot of women into these terrible situations (read about how Ted Bundy lured his victims if you still don’t get it). As much as Hilary Clinton, the DNC, and the Barbie movie ruined feminism for a lot of us (especially me, I’m the first to admit it), you can’t let it brainwash you into thinking we don’t need it. Women are still deeply vulnerable, and being one of Twitter’s most vocal Girl Sickos, I can admit that consuming a lot of macabre media makes me feel better sometimes. If I can learn enough about it, I might be able to attain a mastery over it, and remove myself from the possible victim pool. In a world (and country) that doesn’t seem to give a shit, I’ll take what I can get to feel strong. Plante’s film is both horrifying and vague enough that it perfectly lends itself to the moment. There’s a lot of space to read between the lines in its moral ambiguity.

In Red Rooms, Kelly-Anne sleeps outside the courthouse every night so she can guarantee her spot in the courtroom to see the trial up close and personal, and ostensibly to get a glimpse at the actual videos from the red rooms. The film begins with day one of the trial, where the opening statement from the prosecution promises us we’ll learn all about the “three counts of first-degree murder, abduction, confinement, sexual assault, causing bodily harm, committing indignity to a corpse, and production and distribution of obscene materials” that Chevalier is being tried for.  I first watched this movie at the London Film Festival in 2023 with my best friend Amorette. I was going to visit her in grad school and timed my trip perfectly with LFF. I got tickets to this film knowing almost nothing about it, except that it was about red rooms. We got our popcorn and went to the basement of Soho’s Prince Charles Cinema, and settled into our seats. The second we received the laundry list of heinous acts, I felt what I can only describe as a strange combination of apprehension and curiosity. I wondered if I dragged Amo to some level 5 gorefest, and then I wondered how much horrific abuse of teenage girls (from a filmmaker I knew nothing about) I could handle. Then I wondered where this would all lead, and how I’d emerge from the basement-level theater in two hours. 

It would be dishonest of me to separate myself from those true crime fans that I’m deriding here; I used to be one. From high school through my early 20s I listened to endless fucked up and disgusting podcasts, ranging from the ethical, well-researched journalism of the Canadian Broadcasting Company to the disrespectfully humorous My Favorite Murder. At a certain point an internal switch flipped, and I realized that I couldn’t keep consuming endless amounts of real-life trauma for entertainment. I was scared of being alone at night, and moreover, it just didn’t seem right. It’s hard to find the line between being informed and being entertained. It’s even harder to figure out why exactly I find it so, for lack of a better word, entertaining to watch movies about the depths of human depravity. Honestly, what’s wrong with me? 

The thing is, it’s not just me. Horror is a massive genre and a solid bet for profit — in 2024, four of the five most profitable movies were horror films. Sure, it’s in part because horror can often keep a lower budget, but the appetite is there. I’m not the only sicko who’s still drawn to seeing fucked up shit on screen despite all the horrible things happening right now, including genocide, school shootings, and war. It’s not like I don’t keep up with the news. I do my best to stay informed, but then I pile this insanity on top as a way of entertaining myself. I really think the main difference is that most of these movies are fabrications — the violence and trauma don’t have real-life stakes. 

For Kelly-Anne, however, the verisimilitude is the whole point. Like a gooner, she’s ramped up from regular consumption. The crime shows and podcasts aren’t working anymore; hell, neither is the body horror or giallo. Rotten.com and Live Leaks can only accomplish so much. She can only get off to the real mccoy. She begrudgingly makes friends with Clementine (Laurie Babin), a short, big-eyed, bob-haired superfan of Chevalier’s. They discuss the case, with Clementine fervently defending the killer every chance she gets, even telling a local news station that he’s the “real victim,” because she believes he’s a patsy. The courts eventually announce they are going to show two of Chevalier’s snuff films during the trial (the third recording is still unaccounted for), but Clem is disappointed to find that the courtroom will be cleared of everyone save for the jury and the family members of the victims. Kelly-Anne lets on to Clem that she’s seen them, and she eventually gives in to Clementine’s pleading desire to see them herself. Kelly-Anne knows her way around the internet; earlier in the film we see her opening her Duck Duck Go browser to play Bitcoin poker on a Tor browser, under the clever username “LadyofShallott.” (For the uninitiated, the Lady of Shallott is a figure from Arthurian myth who lives atop a high tower in isolation. Kelly-Anne is the modern version of her; living a life in near isolation in a cool, grey skyscraper. Also a funny pun, being that a Tor browser is often likened to an onion, due to its many layers of encryption.) She also has a custom-programmed AI assistant named Guinevre. Her access to the tapes feels characteristically earned, and it’s clear that Plante and the team behind the representation of tech on this film did their research. She and Clem sit there, red light from the screen washing over them, as they watch the brutal killings, each video about a half hour long. Kelly-Anne’s face never wavers from her steely stare, meanwhile Clementine completely unravels. She dissolves into tears, in disbelief that Ludovic Chevalier is definitely the killer, and in shock that her new friend can watch these videos, especially disturbed that she can watch them more than once. Clementine catches a bus home, abandoning the trial early. 

In spite of knowing that Chevalier is guilty, Kelly-Anne seemingly can’t help but feel some sort of attraction to Ludovic.  Her fascination with him transcends sexuality; it’s almost as if she feels that they’re two magnets, drawn to each other by magic. She’s the next evolution of the Manson-girl, feeling a strange kinship with this absolutely vile human being. This certainly has something to do with why the vast majority of true crime fans are women. There’s a disconcerting portion of the fanbase who idolize these killers, treating them like heartthrobs on the cover of Tiger Beat. Then there are the other women, those who claim that they’re interested in this stuff because men are the number one threat to women’s safety. They claim it’s educational, or a form of self-defense. They never cite the constant statistic that year to year, men make up a much bigger portion of victims of murder than women. So I’m going to go ahead and say it, I really do not think that’s a big part of it at all. People are so afraid to admit that they’re titillated by this stuff, especially women. It feels wrong to derive entertainment from the very real suffering of other people. I think that women have a harder time admitting to this especially because of our socialization to be more polite, and to be supportive to people who are hurt and oppressed. To be drawn to stories of suffering is to violate the social contract to mother the world. When Red Rooms came out, my entire Twitter feed was dudes posting stills of Kelly-Anne with the caption “I could fix her.” And you know what, I don’t blame them at all! She’s textbook gorgeous, and they rightfully wanted to “fuck on [her] freaky hacker chick bodyy” [sic].  

But in all seriousness, what guy on twitter doesn’t want to fix a gorgeous girl who has a penchant for Arthurian Legend, poker, and the dark web? Red Rooms only works because she’s our anti-hero, she’s a tall drink of water and a seemingly anchored presence, depicted in stark contrast to Clem, who’s tiny, wild-eyed, and cannot help but be expressive. Kelly-Anne is our cipher. But even so, Red Rooms wouldn’t work at all if Kelly-Anne and Clementine were male characters. They’d be too dangerous, too easy to write off. People don’t want to talk about the “male loneliness crisis,” probably rightfully so, but we can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. Plante is very smart to transpose these predominantly male issues to a female protagonist. By giving us lady sickos, the movie allows us the curiosity, empathy, and safety to follow these threads. A man obsessed with someone torturing and murdering teenagers? Jail, exploitative, disgusting. A woman who does the same? She’s so dark, mysterious, and probably broken. Incels are scary, femcels are sexy. Why did all of us sickos watch a movie we mostly knew was going to be about snuff films of teenage girls? What’s wrong with us? In the spirit of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, Pascal Plante uses this movie against us, to get us to ask ourselves what draws us to this shit. Perhaps his greatest trick is never showing us any of the violence that we keep hearing about. It constantly nags at our attention, and we’re expecting to be rewarded for our sickly patience. The reward never comes; instead, a slap on the wrist. He wisely uses our own gender biases to get us to take a better look at ourselves. Why do we want to watch a girl on the internet do her makeup while merrily describing a brutal murder? 

Somehow, Plante’s film has captured some societal ill that’s always been present, but growing more and more malignant with the advent of social media and podcasting. Everyone has a platform now; perhaps that was a big mistake. I was under the impression that there was a large-scale reckoning with our cultural true crime obsession. It took me a while to realize that  because I left the party doesn’t mean it stopped. It’s only metastasized. At least Kelly-Anne goes out in a blaze of glory in her story (this is where I tell you to watch the movie, for real). What are we going to do? How are we going to get ourselves out of this mass-desensitization? We can’t exactly pull the plug. I certainly don’t want to get rid of fucked up movies. There’s been a strange uptick in the desire to censor art. Sex should only be in movies to move the plot forward, telling the story of a problematic protagonist is a glorification of their behavior, the list goes on, the tweets are never ending. It’s a real chicken-and-egg situation here; are we being dumbed down by our media, or do we desire explanations for everything because we’re dumber? Are Marvel and Netflix to blame, or is it cell phones, social media, and the school system?

Art is supposed to be a safe way to plumb the depths of the human condition without causing material harm. Art is supposed to use these examples to teach us what not to do. The younger generations are so interested in total moral purity that they’re going to reinvent the Hays Code, but woke. I think without these complexities to tease out, we lose the ability to work through all the complications life throws at us. The delineation between right and wrong and good and evil should be clear, and nobody should have to suffer unjustly. Would that it were so simple! Everyone is so given to black-and-white thinking that they forget every horrible shade that exists in between. There is a lot of unethical true crime media out there (looking at you, Ryan Murphy), but who are we to decide what should and shouldn’t exist? I’m not about to suggest that we need to personal responsibility ourselves out of this disgusting place we’re in, but I don’t think there’s another option at the moment. There’s something to be said about the importance of checking in with yourself, to make sure you’re not too far gone. De-sensitization is an important tool to survive in a world where every day you see videos of kids being blown up by bombs on your phone, but it can’t be the only mode. You have to turn it off. You can shift into psycho mode when you watch The House That Jack Built because it’s a work of fiction. You also don’t have to do that. I don’t think that you should be able to watch actual torture videos and feel absolutely nothing, though growing up with ISIS and Cartel videos on 4Chan doesn’t help. It’s perfectly normal to be curious about fucked up shit; that stuff actually, unfortunately exists in our world. People do experience it, though I wish so badly that they didn’t. But to compartmentalize and deny that curiosity is to do a disservice to yourself and to the broad spectrum of human experience. To be a voyeur or spectator is not an inherently innocent act, but it’s probably the closest you can get.