![]() It correctly implies that Teeth is a comedy as much as a horror. Lichtenstein and Pierpoline's poster features a tousled-looking, relatable heroine. It's a radically different poster from the one the distribution company eventually settled on. The alternative poster for "Teeth." Image courtesy of Mitchell Lichtenstein "Lionsgate…did so many films like Saw and everything, and we're not like that." At the time Teeth came out, studios were trying to replicate the success of torture-porn slasher franchises like Saw Saw 3 came out a year before Teeth's Sundance premiere. "If Lionsgate had done a different marketing campaign and spent more money and gone wider, that would really have helped the film," she says. A decade on, she's still pissed off about how its release was handled. Pierpoline pulls even fewer punches when it comes to naming names. It's a word of mouth thing, and that's a more genuine way of people discovering it." "But the good news is that people feel that they discover it themselves, it's not pushed down their throats from advertising hype. "The distribution company wanted to sell it as a pure horror, against my objections, and I think it was marketed to the wrong audience. I lean towards it being misogyny," Lichenstein says. "Either the studio didn't get it, or it was misogyny. Like Emerson, movie executives didn't understand, or want to understand, Teeth. Stop! Dammit Tobey! NO!") As we watch Dawn struggle against her attacker, we're clearly watching a violent sexual assault-but Emerson minimizes Tobey's rape as "young-romantic" ardor, and reimagines him, not Dawn, as the "victim." (Dawn: "Get off." Tobey: "You don't have to do anything." Dawn: "No! No! Dammit. The scene Emerson describes takes place at a waterfall, where a consensual kiss between Dawn and her classmate Tobey turns into attempted rape. In a bloody, nightmarish, young-romantic way, it's kind of touching. Still, when Dawn's first full-frontal victim looks down to find he's not even half the man he used to be, he seems genuinely hurt-by the rejection as much as the castration. Not only was he not going to help us, but he was calling all the places we'd been, saying it was a pornographic shoot and not to let us shoot there." Undeterred, the close-knit crew (they wore matching promise rings throughout the shoot-Pierpoline still has hers) pushed on and found alternative locations in the city.īecause they're such unprincipled horndogs who won't take "no" for an answer, the movie suggests they deserve what they get. "In between showing us that morning and coming to collect us that evening, he'd read the script. That is, until he got wind of Teeth's plot. A local film commissioner happily took them to a number of potential locations. Pre-shoot, him and Pierpoline went down to Austin to scout locations. ![]() "We needed a hospital set, a school and a house," Lichenstein remembers. (Incidentally, no dogs were harmed during the filming of Teeth, and the frenum piercing was a custom-made sugar confection from a local bakery.)Įven when funding was secured, shooting Teeth was a grindingly arduous process. If the overt message of Teeth is that jerks get their dicks-genital piercings and all-eaten by dogs, the secondary message is that men will try and obstruct your vagina dentata film at every turn, from the pitching stage to production and post-production. "I was at a friend's house in New Jersey," says Pierpoline, "and her 16-year-old daughter shrieked, 'You made Teeth? My friends and I love that film!" She practically glows as she tells me about distributing Teeth posters at a screening to an adoring audience of young girls: "It was a really nice feeling." Nonetheless, in the decade since its release, Teeth has won new fans-especially as online streaming opens it up to a younger audience. (It's a mistake that Mitchell Lichtenstein openly acknowledges during our conversation.) ![]() " Teeth is a great concept for a film, but the final product feels less concerned about women and their bodies than it does about what women's bodies can do to men." Parts of the film have aged terribly with as our understanding of consent grows-specifically a scene where Dawn's classmate Ryan gives her a sedative before masturbating her with a vibrator. "Just because you're making a movie about the monstrous feminine, doesn't give you a free pass into the feminist horror film canon," she writes in an email to Broadly. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, who devoted a chapter to Teeth in her 2010 book Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study, feels similarly. One prominent feminist critic I emailed for comment declined to speak about Teeth, on account of it being a male-written, male-directed film. Which isn't to say that everyone loves the film.
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