The family is a bizarre institution. Families are where we receive our cultural education, learn to walk, and internalize the rules of the world. At the same time, families are where we receive trauma that leaves us with dysfunctional personalities traits and maladaptive behaviors. The family at its core is where we are initiated into the best and the most brutal of what humanity has to offer. The Eastwood family in the film Crucible of Horror is a prime example of the nihilistic potentiality of the family institution.
The film centers around a mother and daughter who kill the oppressive father and are haunted by his corpse until the father rematerializes at the end of the film as if nothing happen. Crucible of Horror highlights the difficulty
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A heavy fist can cripple the will of a wife or inspire her revolt. But all too often the scales are tipped in favor of powerlessness. A learned helplessness. A body with a shattered spirit.
But what inspires such submission to control? The mother and Daughter’s characters are more action that voice. Their only lines of dialog are responses to the father’s dinnertime badgering. The mother appears broken down, a shell of a person struggling to speak. The daughter spite and fire lashing out at the father's insults. Neither character is fleshed out enough in the film to be more two impulsive reactions to violence. The broken spirit and the spirit on fire.
The turning point in the film takes place when the daughter is caught stealing. The father charges to her room and beats her with a switch. The cries ring out in the house and the camera cuts between three scenes; the beating, the mother overhearing the beating, and the son who mockingly waves a stick playing orchestra conductor.
This last frame has a unique violence. The beating itself is straight forward. A father whipping his daughter. A direct physical violence. The conductor son, on the other hand, is the horror of a fascist in training. It’s as if to guarantee that the fathers violence will continue in a subsequent