In a woodland location crepuscular and foreign, “The Girl” and her three friends stand stranded in a habitat not too dissimilar to that found in many a nursery rhyme. Like the content of such morality poems, this prelapsarian area has its own monster, the same beast that forced their car off-road. Yet far from being a monster from the Id, “Spike” originates from a more corporeal realm: The Girl’s suburban childhood.

Just as the gothic etymology of Spike’s script is simply luscious, Robert Beaucage’s mise-en-scène concomitantly reveals him to be enamoured with the visual language of horror. Like one of M R James’ low-bound heathen monsters, Spike prowls the dark lands that separates Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber from Charles Vess and Elaine Lee’s astonishing graphic work Morrigan Tales. Yet rather than resulting in a series of ill-assimilated post-modern touchstones, its earthy cultivation of a monster’s obsession with love’s dead bloom is a talon-sharp original: a work in harmony with Vladimir Propp, Val Lewton, Clive Barker, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s sublime Jack London-riffing Beauty and the Beasts episode.

As a torture porn-era Hollywood continues to smother post-feminist emancipation in make-safe captivity scenarios, Spike chooses to usher in a new era for the Final Girl: showing her true nemesis existing not as a violent masculinity, but a normative heterosexual love fostered in youth. Subversive through to its sublime, moving dénouement, Spike’s horror transubstantiates into Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s ruminations of abuse being intrinsic aspect of affection. As Eros becomes Thanatos, Spike’s gothic amour fou becomes enfolded within a primordial denial of emotional emancipation, with the act of penetration becoming a literal embrace of death. Or, as surrealist poet Robert Desnos wrote in Death: The Oaken Rampart, “I do not imagine love without the taste of death ... the fugitive character of Love is also that of Death.”