No Greenwashing for this Bloodbath
A review of Slaxx, Elza Kepahrt’s horror comedy about the bloody truths of fast fashion
By Bethany May
Instagram
Editor: Karrie Witkin | Designer: Haley Burson | Illustrator: Rabbit Person Illustration | Copyeditor: Katie Frankowicz | Communication/Support: Meg Chellew
If you are reading this then your high-waisted jeans, belted a few notches too tight, haven’t severed your torso in half. Your strappiest cami hasn’t strangled you in the night and your stilettos haven’t yet punctured some major artery. So happy to hear it. But since I’ve already put those gruesome images in your head, you should go ahead and watch Slaxx, a 2020 Canadian horror comedy directed by Elza Kephart and co-written by Patricia Gomez, before you get too comfortable adding any more fast fashion to your closet.
There’s that moment in a good horror plot when the viewer and the final girl (the last one alive in the film) discover together that we trusted the wrong person. In Get Out (spoiler alert), we should have known that Daniel Kaluuya’s character needed to be suspicious of his white girlfriend and her “voted for Obama” family, who fetishize and exploit her Black friends even while appearing to be good progressives (shocker). Misplaced trust is a part of the horror in Slaxx. The TLDW: A pair of jeans is literally possessed to kill retail workers, but this sinister sisterhood of the slaughtering pants is not the only villain in this story.
I’m scared of horror movies; just tell me what happens.
It’s the night before a new collection is released at Canadian Cotton Clothiers. It’s also the first shift for Libby, played by Romane Denis, a superfan of the environmentally and socially conscious brand. She’s always wanted to work for the company and its charismatic leader Harold Landsgrove. CCC is a hip store with a mission it shares with its customers: Make a better tomorrow today. A sales clerk repeatedly sings the motto to customers as he rings up their purchases and smiles on beat.
Libby’s coworkers approach their jobs with varying degrees of seriousness. Store manager Craig is determined to make a good impression on Landsgrove and get a promotion to regional manager, and one of the employees, Jemma, has no problem stealing product for her personal closet. Most of the staff seems bored to be there. They exclaim to customers with faux enthusiasm, “It’s Aqua-65 Day! Every aqua item is 65% off!” But to eachother, they argue via headset. Anyone who’s ever experienced a toxic work environment will be triggered when the manager assures Libby that they are all part of one big CCC family.
Landsgrove arrives to give a pep talk to the team; they will be merchandising a new product, Super Shapers, which is a gender-inclusive style of jeans that adapt to body size. He plays a sunny promotional video to remind the staff that CCC garments are ethically-sourced, fair trade, organic, and made with economically-sanctioned partners. The jeans are marketed as “one shape for all,” which in CCC sizing translates to “made to fit whether you are 5 lbs underweight or 5 lbs overweight.” Read that again. Whether you are 5 lbs underweight or 5 lbs overweight. So many things to say.
Do we need to explicitly say that jeans are gender inclusive, as if that’s revolutionary?
“One shape for all” only includes a 5 lbs under- or overweight situation?
What is an economically-sanctioned partner?
Wait, where’s Jemma?
While Landsgrove continues to hype up the staff for a long night of merchandising denim, the camera is in a bathroom stall where one of the employees, Jemma, is struggling to unbutton the Super Shapers she swiped earlier so she could try them before anyone else. Now, as the waistband tightens around her, it is obvious that the jeans are sentient. Horror is often moral theater. The victims who go first seem to have it coming; they might be too promiscuous, drink too much, have fun at someone else’s expense, or maybe steal from their employer.
Our protagonist Libby is sent to find Jemma. And she does. In pieces. Shoved underneath the sink. Libby’s manager insists that no one can call the police until the morning because the store is on lockdown with no cell service while the new product is shelved. They are trapped with the killer. A long night of mysterious deaths ensues.
If you can only watch a scary movie through your fingers with every light in your apartment on, give this a try anyway. There are a lot of predictable beats. Most of the characters are too something — too naive, too vain, too try-hard, too greedy — to be believable. Slaxx isn’t a jump-scare sequence with a creature who’ll stalk your nightmares. It’s a gory fable about greenwashing, retail work, internet haul culture, and who we think makes our clothing (if we think about it at all).
Clothing NOT to die for . . .
There are some horror movies that, regardless of the terror occurring on screen, make you want to enter a scene and be in that world. I want to join the coven in The Craft and rock black lipstick. I would pay to comb the closet of Love Witch, where the aesthetic is as memorable as the plot. You couldn’t stop me from flying to Sweden during Midsommar, finding the Hårga, and becoming the May Queen before burning a toxic ex alive in a bear suit. But, but, but while Slaxx is a fashion movie; it’s not a fashionable movie. Slaxx is a commentary on fast fashion and the companies who attempt to convince us through greenwashing that we can consume cheap clothing without consequences to us or someone else in the supply chain. What it has to say about fast fashion is as ugly as the costumes in the film itself.
Save for the two sharp Ss embroidered in citrine thread on the butt of the Super-shapers, every piece of clothing in this story is basic and boring. There are characters that are supposed to be more fashionable than others, but aside from a high heel and a faux fur coat, it’s kind of hard to tell. A shopping haul vlogger holds up a few forgettable items at one point, but I came away remembering the way she died, not what she wore on the way out. The clothing is unspecial, but that’s kind of the point. When we look back at fast fashion a few seasons later, it’s nothing to die for. It’s nothing anyone should die for.
Who makes our clothes?
The question of who suffers and possibly dies to support our shopping habits is central in this film. Citizens of developed countries expect to work under labor laws that define overtime, ban child labor, set a minimum wage, and provide workplace safety standards. There is inherent hypocrisy in turning around and buying cheap items from countries that don’t have those laws. If Slaxx has a moral, it’s that we are all too willing to support companies that appear to mirror our values. We fail to question the companies that exploit our values to make a sale.
This kind of cultural ignorance runs through the movie. Libby seems scandalized when she learns that CCC doesn’t know who actually makes its clothes. The company can trace the origin of the cotton seeds used to make the cloth, but there is no information about the humans who harvest and process it. CCC can’t verify that child labor isn’t being used because the company relies on subcontractors.
The most likable character is Shruti, one of Libby’s new coworkers, portrayed by Sehar Bhojani. She’s the first character who is able to communicate with the jeans, first through Bollywood music (please watch the film just to see bodiless jeans perform choreography) and then through Hindi. The jeans animate a mannequin body and write in blood the story of Keerat, the girl who died while working in CCC’s experimental cotton field. Shruti, who can read Hindi, translates the message and discovers the motive of the murderous jeans.
The characters are all a little flat and the film wades into shallow cultural stereotypes, but there’s still something that resonates in a revenge plot where the clothes consume the consumers. One of the workers is more or less eaten, chewed up and spit out. The film closes with a shot of shoppers at the front door when the store opens the next morning. These shoppers represent the demand for Super Shapers (a symbol for any fast fashion item of the moment) that is driving the whole ugly enterprise. The shoppers are us. We are complicit.
Slaxx is the fast fashion of film. It isn’t a couture gown or a thoughtfully preserved vintage coat that will be passed down for generations. The audience can slip into this campy slasher, which plays out in ways as familiar as a well-worn pair of denim. However, it is an effective parable for our current moment; there are real off-screen lives at stake when we blindly trust clothing companies that claim to provide ethical and sustainable fast fashion. Spoiler alert: That naivete must die.
Want to contribute to the blog?
Keep Reading
