Harmony Korine has written and directed several extremely disturbing and weird films. Korine wrote the controversial script for director Larry Clarke’s KIDS when he was still a teenager. He followed this up by directing such films as Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy, and Trash Humpers, all extreme films with little appeal to mainstream film audiences. This changed when he directed his first ‘mainstream’ film, Spring Breakers. His films are subversive and involve the breaking of taboos, controversial projects which are deliberately designed to provoke the audience.
One of the best and most obscure examples of this is Korine’s 2009 movie Trash Humpers. What at first glance appears to be a joke, is in fact one of the most unnerving and unpleasant films ever made.
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What Is Trash Humpers About?
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Trash Humpers was filmed in VHS and has the look of a found footage film, complete with glitches and errors to give the film a realistic look. In fact, Korine has stated that he wanted this to be a found footage film. He considered releasing the film without any credits to make it more realistic. He also considered distributing the film by just leaving copies out on the sidewalk, which would also enhance the film experience by making viewers feel like they have found someone’s dark home video.
Korine has a unique style that makes his films look more like documentaries than real movies, and none more so than Trash Humpers. The story does not have a logical or conventional plot. Instead, it is a series of scenes about a small group of people engaging in subversive and destructive activities. There is no logic, no reason for the order of the scenes, and there is nothing even closely resembling a plot. It is a radical film that pushes all boundaries and makes us question what is a film, and more generally, what is art?
The film follows a small gang of seemingly elderly perverts who film their activities. In a kind of ‘Jackass from hell’ variation, these include such deviant behaviors such as vandalism and property destruction, inappropriate behavior with a young kid, murder, engaging in nefarious sexual practices with prostitutes, and most of all, dry-humping trash cans, trees, telephone polls, and other inanimate objects.
Harmony Korine’s Disturbing Elderly Delinquents
There are four of them, three men and one woman. Because one of the men is holding the camera and filming the chaos, we see a gang of three elderly people behaving in odd and antisocial ways. They are peeping toms, looking in people’s windows as they dry hump trash cans. These scenes are as transgressive as anything you might see in recent cinema, and the fact that the film looks like a homemade videotape with a random collection of scenes rather than a conventional linear narrative makes the film incredibly disturbing to watch.
The elderly people are not actually elderly. In fact, Korine himself plays one of the characters. They are covered in makeup that is designed to make them look old, but also makes them look intellectually challenged, and they resemble mutant burn victims. They are very unpleasant to look at. In many ways, they don’t even look human, adding to the unsettling disturbances of Trash Humpers.
The disturbance is audiovisual. One of the members of the elderly gang is a woman who sings a lot. She has an unsettling voice that really can get under your skin, and is haunting enough to stay in your head long after the film is over. Their laughter and vocal noises have a great deal of unease, but it’s probably the visual elements of Trash Humpers which will linger in your memory long after the movie is over.
Harmony Korine has created something actually scary that may exist outside the horror genre, but is nonetheless horrifying, and he did it with almost no budget. He has created his own unique world, and at times it doesn’t look like you are watching actors at work. It looks more like a home video that you stumbled upon. It may sound like a joke, but this is a brilliantly made film from the found footage genre, with many artistic touches to make it seem more authentic and closer to a documentary than a work of fiction. In Gummo, it was hard to tell at certain times if the people we watch are acting or if Korine has captured something real. Trash Humpers takes the similar faux reality feeling to the next level.
What Is the Point of These Terrifying Trash Humpers?
Perhaps the film’s most disturbing scene is the murder. We don’t see the murder, we just see someone lying on the floor in a giant pool of blood, their throat slit. The trash-humping gang act like nothing serious has happened, and they act as if there isn’t a dead body in a pool of blood lying at their feet. It is clear from this scene that they have no values and no respect for human life, and that they are legitimately psychopathic.
In one of the film’s creepiest scenes, the elderly gang spends some time with a young kid, whom they encourage to engage in deviant activity. First they mock him and make jokes at his expense because he is trying to get a basket on a basketball court, and his shots don’t go near the basket. Then they cheer as he beats up a doll that looks like a small child, encouraging him to act aggressively and destructively. The kid seems seriously disturbed and at no point do you feel that he is “acting.” This fits in with the film’s homemade, documentary feel.
The elderly gang also bullies and tortures two people. In one of the most unpleasant scenes in the film, two bizarrely dressed men are forced to consume dish soap-soaked pancakes by the gang of elderly delinquents. But what is the point of all this lunacy, cringe, and destruction? Perhaps, in Harmony Korine’s mind, these are the heroes of our post-modern world, or maybe they’re just a grim reflection of the real trash people regularly watch.
Korine Mocks More Famous Trash
However, despite all this, it is possible that Korine is glorifying the trio of destructive lunatics. After all, they pretty much do whatever they want whenever they want. This includes not just disturbing behavior, but also behavior that is outright weird, like jumping on a trampoline that is in the middle of the street, or spanking twerking strippers, who are mostly nude. The point is that they have a freedom which most of us do not. A lack of fear of getting into trouble enables them to live free lives where there are no rules (or no consequences for breaking the rules). Perhaps the trio are outlaw rebels in Korine’s mind.
Or perhaps Trash Humpers is a morbid commentary on the comedy world’s embrace of pranks, stunts, and cruelty. Consider the painful, violent, and sometimes sexual pranks in Jackass; the hidden camera escapades of Impractical Jokers; Punk’d and all the other MTV prank shows; the disguised, real-world comedy of Borat; the endless YouTube channels devoted to nefarious, destructive stunts. Maybe Trash Humpers is a thought experiment that takes all this to its darkest extreme, asking us – why are we even watching?
From Dumb Joke to Disturbing Watch
Interestingly, although Trash Humpers is fairly nihilistic and grim (though sometimes uncomfortably funny) in its minimalist deconstruction of those prank-filled titles, it has what some people might consider to be an optimistic ending. We see the woman holding a doll as if it were a little baby, as she sings to it. Everything before this seems cruel and ironic, but this seems like a genuine moment of emotion, made all the sadder by the fact that the character can only share it with an inanimate object. Despite the fact that we see her acting humanely, the whole scene is still incredibly disturbing, an assault on the viewer’s senses, a perversion of the way life is supposed to be.
The entire film is an incredibly subversive tale of sexually depraved criminal delinquents who are thrill-seeking destroyers that are upsetting the status quo. If Alex and his gang of droogs from A Clockwork Orange were senior citizens on acid and Viagra, creating a homemade VHS tape chronicling their deviant behavior, it might look something like Trash Humpers.
Although the premise of Trash Humpers is immature and seems like an adolescent joke, it is in fact another incredibly disturbing film from Harmony Korine, one of the most independent and iconoclastic filmmakers in the world. He is someone capable of creating images that are so creepy or unsettling, that they’re nearly unforgettable, and Korine makes his usual low budget work in his favor here, making Trash Humpers both realistic and disturbing. This film will never get mainstream acceptance because it is so radically different from what we consider to be a conventional movie, but maybe that’s why it’s important.
