| Trying to calm Lucie, Anna kisses her, but Lucie pulls away. Trying to calm Lucie, Anna kisses her, but Lucie pulls away. Nearly fifteen years later, convinced that she has finally found her fiendish tormentors, Lucie decimates an entire family, as horrible visions of an emaciated and deformed creature haunt her. Such women all too often become unspeakable, invisible - even in the queer community. While there’s a rich history of queer men, many records of queer women that should be there simply aren’t. For the cult’s other victims (explicitly chosen because they are women), the horror of simply being women. Barbara Creed mentioned in Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection that horror stories can be related to religious experiences, because both rely on some sort of ritualistic practice that leads to a transformation or a change in state. The one kiss between the two main characters, Anna and Lucie, occurs after Lucie has murdered an entire family she believes to be involved with torture she suffered as a child. The house holds a great secret the Belfonds can never let be known, and Anna is abducted into that secret space.
She leads police to the derelict slaughterhouse where evidence suggests she was held captive. Whatever she sees as she looks into the beyond, even if it’s actually nothing, she goes into it as a queer and queered being - to use the film’s own label in translation, “an exceptional being.”. Plot Keywords I think that of all the torture scenes, the most terrifying and brutal one is when Anna gets flayed alive. Tosha Rach is a writer, academic, and occasional performance artist currently living in New York. The final stage of Anna’s martyrdom, although being unfathomably inhumane, hits us with a unique insight about the horror film process and of transcendence as well. I developed an interest in horror at a very young age (in retrospect, I realize it may have partly been a way to cope with an early trauma). But to queer women, it’s painfully recognizable. What the cult wants from their captive is for her to speak - to torture her so extremely that she sees the secret that waits after death and can relate it to the cult. Martyrs features some truly sickening gory scenes and inhumane torture sequences, yet managing to same something quite beautiful about the strength of the human spirit and the afterlife.
Under those circumstances, what is the dead family's secret? Martyrs was always going to draw me in. But when Lucie and Anna investigate further, they discover that they've only scratched the surface of an unspeakably vile secret organization. The film begins with a young girl, Lucie, as she escapes from a disused abattoir where she has been imprisoned and physically abused for a lengthy period of time. Martyrs is a masterfully executed artistic expression with an ending that leaves us wondering, “What happens next?” The answer, I believe, is a mystery that we can only find out once we get there. At this point, the brutality and physicality of the film became the main focus of the plot. As Anna becomes a martyr, a “witness” to the truth that lies beyond life on earth, it appears as though something so profoundly beautiful can still emerge out of something tragic. What do we call ourselves? Is Anna destined to be a glorious martyr?
And whether or not the viewer believes she does see something on the other side of the death, the film makes it clear that she has transcended the limitations of the human body. As part of her torture, her captors depersonalize her, remaining silent and seeing her only when feeding and beating her.