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High Tension (also known as Switchblade Romance) is Alexandre Aja’s 2nd directorial feature.

Released in 2003, the French film follows a repressed lesbian staying at the family home of her best friend. As her psyche comes unwound from repressed desire, an unseen killer stalks the remote manor and begins to kill the family in horrific ways. But at the film’s climax, the audience discovers they’ve been misled — the actual killer is Marie, the repressed woman who Aja has spent most of the picture endearing us to.

This is a jarring, but effective decision. It fits square in the New French Extreme category, in that it frames socially prescient anxieties of the time with a hyper-violent and psycho-sexual light. At film’s end, Marie is alive and under psychiatric care. Her friend and object of affection, Alex, stares at her from the other side of a one-way mirror. But through it, Marie’s eye catches her, and the woman stares her victim down. Reaches for her. Aware that she is just on the other side of the wall.

The conclusion to High Tension is one of my favorites. It’s upsetting, in that it leaves the plot in flux, refuses to explain itself, and doesn’t give the audience any clear character to feel good about. Is the film blaming sapphism for driving women to insanity? Or is it blaming straight women for refusing to see the obvious? The truth is, it isn’t doing either of those things. Aja is simply creating characters, smashing them into one another, then chronicling their gristly remnants. They are ideas and concepts being driven against one another, pummelled until only two are left standing.

Actor and director Scott Chambers (star of Winnie The Pooh: Blood & Honey 2) has cited High Tension as a major influence on his latest film.

“I am taking inspiration from French cinema while in prep for this movie,” Chambers told Bloody Disgusting. “The film will be incredibly tense following Wendy as she tries to track down her brother, Michael, who has been abducted by Peter Pan. I would say it’s a mesh between Switchblade Romance and The Black Phone with our own spin on it. It is a nasty, violent and incredibly dark movie.”

The title, presentation, and elevator pitch of Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, then, almost feel like an ironic joke. For two films, Blood & Honey prepared us for fun splatter and elevated carnage. It did not, however, prepare us for the all-out emotional attack that is Nightmare — an ugly, whacked-out reflection of current social mores. I love it.

But like High Tension, Chambers doesn’t shy away from subject matter that will stick like a shard of glass in the soles of some viewers.

The basic narrative is as Chambers says — Wendy (Megan Placito) is distracted by her absentee boyfriend outside while picking up Michael (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) outside of school. Her younger brother takes off on his bike, only to be tripped and trapped by Peter Pan himself (Martin Portlock). In this continuity, Pan is neither a sprightly young boy nor Michael Jackson in a Spirit Halloween costume.

He is instead a third, significantly more disturbed thing. Chambers and Portlock’s take on Pan is downright chilling. He is a serial child killer who kidnaps some victims, then forces them into rooms with footage of fighting animals on loop.

His Tinker Bell (Kit Green) is a dysphoric child abducted from their drive way and forced into a heroin addiction at prepubescent age. Now in her 40s, she’s convinced she’s a literal fairy who injects “pixie dust.” Denied a normal transition, she has instead been groomed into a stunted but well-meaning accomplice.

Throughout the film, however, she begins to question just what happens to the boys Peter drags into the basement and takes to “Neverland.”

But not before the eternal boy’s killing spree racks up an impressive body count. Neverland Nightmare is a heinous picture, going pound for pound with its inspiration for intensity. The opener is among the most upsetting things in recent film history, with a mother’s head ripped open in front of her own child. She gurgles her last breaths as Peter advances on the boy, and his shadow overcomes until it’s too late. This scene — cast in deep purple — sets a mood.

You will not leave this film unscathed. You are going to be upset.

This is only the beginning. As the picture descends, so too does the violence to deeper levels of depravity. Perhaps most upsetting is the last kill of picture, in which Peter turns on Tink and brutalizes her in front of a hiding Michael and Wendy. Silent, they watch as she’s hacked to pieces and her limbs are bent out of place. She makes eye contact with the hiding sister and pleads, ‘don’t give up,’ before Peter steps on her skull and caves it in. It’s a saddening, sickening sequence that makes a tragic spectacle of queer death instead of relegating it to polite sadness via prestige drama.

Chambers reincorporates points of recent horror influence so skillfully that it only ever feels like elevated homage — not regurgitation. Moments from Halloween Ends, It, Jeepers Creepers 3, and fucking Joker wind up here, yet no one thing ever feels too derivative. This is, after all, a creator that came up in the mockbuster space, and cut his teeth on learning how to twist extant elements on the fly. That’s a skill in and of itself; in Neverland Nightmare, it feels like less like the director’s Letterboxd watch list, more like an exercise in competition and showmanship. Those are hallmarks of great directing, and they’re on full display here.

On display, too, is an artful eye for mise en scene. Minimalist sets are framed within blurred boundaries. Characters are shot at unlikely, sometimes Hitchcockian angles during conversation. High contrast between shadow and light — punctuated by dust and grime — turns Peter’s own Neverland Ranch into a derelict nightmare defined by desecation and decay. It is the dark and warped id to the perpetual innocence of misunderstood Henry Darger, a perverse fascimile of childhood built by a decayed mind.

At the film’s mid-point, Wendy tracks down Tink’s father in hopes of finding clues to her brother. He tells the teen, “[Timmy] said he felt like a little girl inside — his mother did, too."

We see the consequences of what has been sold to Tinker Bell here, but we also see consequences in the father’s phrasing. The film shows complicated sympathy here. Tink’s father clearly misses his child, but his rejection of the idea that a ‘girl was inside’ his child has left him alone with a room of dresses and plush fairies. Effigies to a childhood that was stolen, denied, but preserved in pink amber. Unlived.

This is one of the most effective depictions of losing a queer child I’ve seen put to film, in how it’s critical of everything and not moralizing in its tragedy. While some may take the phrasing as ‘problematic,’ this is the point of the scene. To show the way Tinker Bell was remembered, how she died, and how a chance to ever be anything other than ‘Timmy’ to her dad was robbed from her by coerced substance abuse.

This is honesty. Transness is not magic, despite what the memes will tell you. It is not something you can just run away, reset your life, and come out the other side of with no scars to speak of. Transition will make you finally feel at home in your own body, and as if you can live out your life without being in waking misery. It is also a slow, arduous process with occasional doubt and second-guessing that most of us don’t feel safe enough to express.

In a time when we are under unilateral attack in many social strata, this narrative is an important one. These are narratives that need to exist, because rainbow-washed acceptance parables can only go so far. We need to reach into the ugly guts of our global conscience and wrestle with the innards to understand the fears, misconceptions, and stigmas that haunt our existence.

Hormone therapy and acceptance as your decided self is paramount to healthy life for transgender people. However, those things alone are not sufficient. Actualization and happiness starts at a very base level — those around them accepting what they are, and meeting them on their terms. This is not the responsibility of trans people. It is work and understanding that must be done by those closest to the person. Before somebody weaponizes their identity — turns it into something to control them with, before that mechanism becomes drugs, alcohol, sex, money, or all of the above.

This revelation in Neverland Nightmare pairs queasy with the late-film reveal that Peter’s mother disfigured his genitals as a young boy. But this queasiness is being handled by openly gay creatives, in a country that has grown outwardly hostile towards the queer community. Chambers re-appropriates queer panic elements from It and The Black Phone with reverence to say something quiet and effective about the roots of queer panic directed at children. Mothers who essentialize their children as they molest them. That are so afraid of anatomy that they’d rather maim their own child than accept them as what they are. It is pointed and political — not partisan.

Contemporary audiences tend to shun pictures that trade in this sort of causality. I’d argue Last Night In Soho and Saint Maud were misunderstood by American audiences due, in part, to their suggestion that doing bad things to people might make them (gasp!) do bad things. On the one hand, moralizing causation narratives lie at the root of British culture, which itself is a punitive and self-righteous one.

But on the other, there’s a truth to some of these narratives. In Soho, a woman’s repeated sexual abuse drives her into butchering dozens of Johns and lining her walls with their corpses. In Maud, a repressed lesbian is raped and radicalized into murder-suicide by her vague conception of Christianity. This sort of narrative shows the breakage that occurs under repeated abuse, and I’d argue doesn’t demonize the victims like some have argued.

Causality in Peter Pan is veiled, but very pointed when talked out. It is an inconvienient and horrific parable centered on the current surge of queer panic, and one that will likely hold a significant historical weight in the coming years. Like Maud and Soho, I don’t think Chambers is heaping a blanket blame on any one community or idea. Instead, his picture places blame on actions — personal choices that isolate, deprive, and abuse children. This, and the dark places it can lead, is the true evil force at play here.

In interviews about the film, Chambers et al are extremely respectful of Green — even as media writers at large continue to be clueless and regressive in their framing of the film. (The term, “biologically male” has been used a lot.) The importance of Tinkerbell is have a grace and mercy that Peter lacks towards children.

“I really wanted to keep this sort of lightness and this sort of magicalness, if you know what I mean, that she could dream and she could believe things and she wasn't just a victim,” Green said in an interview. “She had all these things happening in her and she was a little bit sparky and still had a little touch of that sort of naughtiness, the naughty fairy thing despite everything she'd been through. Yes, a lightness I suppose, which is saying a lot given everything that was happening.”

Chambers echoed that sentiment in another interview.

“This is not a villain at all,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “This is an extremely layered character. This is someone that's really troubled. They're brainwashed. It's Stockholm Syndrome. They've been in this situation for years and years and years. They don't know any other way.”

Chambers also singled out Green’s human read on the character as selling point.

“She just really tapped into it where no one else was. As soon as I saw the audition, I was like, ‘Yes!’”

Green, too, seems excited to continue with the character.

“I love his world-building,” she told interviewer Liam Crowley. “It's very seductive. He really draws you into it, and it makes you go, 'Oh yeah, okay, I can see that. All right then. Let's do that.' So yeah, it's exciting.”

Green is already signed on for not only Poohniverse Assemble (I love saying that out loud), but a solo Tink film as well. I hope for not only further brutal lows from the character, but a continued teasing out of her pathos and mercy.

This willingness to let a trans performer go to an ugly, dark place — and to facilitate that in your own writing, to boot — belies an empathy that means much more to me than ballyhooed inclusion efforts or post-op supporting roles. As a writer and director, Chambers doesn’t insist on gendered perfection in presentation, which gives his trans character more freedom to breathe under less scrutiny. And at the same time, Green doesn’t shy away from extreme range that only a performer comfortable in multiple modes of presentation could have. Both are clear revelations amidst mass confusion.

While it is tempting to sell the Twisted Childhood Universe as ‘queer horror,’ it’s more aligned with the likes of Child’s Play and Hellraiser. Those are two franchises created by gay men that tackle the masculine id, yet at large, they are not pigeonholed as ‘queer horror.’ This is a contemporary one, and a nebulous one at that — one that I feel too many modern queer creatives are easy to slot themselves into.

Horror doesn’t have to be ‘queer horror’ to be queer. It does not need to have a tidy and kind message about our lives (or deaths), especially if it is in the hands of a visibly queer creator like Mancini, Barker, or Chambers. In a time where our visibility is being fought for, tooth and claw, it’s important to know how to get away with what you want to say without making it the focal point.

(Just ask Dalton Trumbo. He did it in Spartacus and Tender Comrade. History does not remember these as queer film, and yet — they are queer film.)

Explaining our existence isn’t working. So we must become formless before we rematerialize in a safer place or time. Lest we become broken disassembled things on the kitchen floor. Trampled for trying to protect a future for children that was stolen from us.

Promised Neverland, then forced to the plank. Locked behind glass, reaching out to what we can never have.