Butcher Block is a weekly series celebrating horror’s most extreme films and the minds behind them. Dedicated to graphic gore and splatter, each week will explore the dark, the disturbed, and the depraved in horror, and the blood and guts involved. For the films that use special effects of gore as an art form, and the fans that revel in the carnage, this series is for you.
Hailing from Turkey, a country that doesn’t dabble in genre cinema too often, Baskin made an international tidal wave in 2016 with its arthouse meets Lucio Fulci and Hellraiser inspired descent into Hell. Based on Can Evrenol’s 2013 short film of the same name, Baskin follows a police squad contending with a night of pain, suffering, and the perverse horror of a depraved Black Mass from Hell when they enter an abandoned building. Turkish superstition, extreme imagery, and a deliberately paced journey for the unsuspecting antiheroes makes Baskin a unique entry in extreme horror.
At first glance the premise seems fairly basic; this is more of a sensory experience than narrative after all. But Evrenol layers in so much mythology, superstition, and meaning to parse out, if you can stomach multiple rewatches that is. After a nightmarish opening sequence set around a little boy and a nightmare come to life, Baskin introduces us to the five police officers oblivious to the hellscape they’ll enter later. It sets up their personalities, and how very flawed each of them are as they tell each other crass stories or pick fights with the workers from the restaurant in which they’re dining.
Of them all, Arda seems the most innocent as the newcomer, while the rest display varying degrees of cynicism and corruption. But this key scene serves as more than just an introduction to the characters- it reveals a key sin that they’ll atone for later on. Officer Yavuz proudly boasts of a sexual encounter with a prostitute, amusing the others with great detail. His sin, obviously, is lust. Once the officers find themselves deeply entrenched in the gruesome Black Mass, Yavuz’ lust is thrown back at him as he’s tortured, has his eye is gouged out, and forced to have sex with a chained woman sporting a goat skull mask. The rest suffer fates befitting of the sins they represent; rage, gluttony, and so on.
The presiding Father over the Black Mass, Baba (played memorably by Mehmet Cerrahoglu), oversees and leads the way in torture and mayhem. Intestines are pulled out of bellies, throats are slashed, eye trauma, writhing bodies eat gross things that don’t remotely look edible, and pain and suffering run rampant. The blood flows freely. That the Father is named Baba seems fitting, considering Taram Baba is a boogeyman figure in Turkish folklore. Arda proves to be the counterbalance to Baba’s darkness, the one destined to destroy Baba and free his fellow officers from their looping Hells. The underwater scenes representative of Arda’s cleansing journey. There’s a lot of minutiae Evrenol embeds in his surrealistic nightmare, saturated in a sort of Fulci inspired dream logic. It’s just wrapped up in one gnarly package of perversion and gore.
Between Derya Ergün’s makeup design, Alp Korfali’s cinematography, and of course Evrenol’s direction, Baskin is both stunning and repulsive- it’s arthouse infused with gore and grime. It’s brutal, but it’s a brutality that Evrenol eases into, not the rapid-fire onslaught of gory imagery the early trailers indicated. This means that the pacing might be off-putting for some. But for others, it’s a vicious descent into Hell that would make Clive Barker proud, and has a lot going on under the surface, too.
