PopHorror Let's Get Scared
When Chad Crawford Kinkle’s sleeper hit, Jug Face, was released in 2013, it was met by the indie horror community with quiet appreciation. The tale of a pregnant teen, her pagan village, and the entity that keeps them all alive is full of rage, desperation, and mud. And it’s 10 years old this year.
Synopsis:
When she learns the supernatural pit worshipped by her remote community in the woods has demanded her as a blood sacrifice, Ada struggles to find a way to survive, while the pit lashes out in anger.
Written and directed by Chad Crawford Kinkle (our interview), Jug Face stars some familiar faces: The Woman’s Lauren Ashley Carter (our interview) and Sean Bridgers, Larry Fessenden (our interview), Sean Young (Blade Runner 1982), and Kaitlin Cullum (Grace Under Fire TV series), as well as Daniel Manche (The Girl Next Door 2007, Jennifer Spriggs (Nashville TV series), Marvin Starkman (The American Way 1962), and Katie Groshong (Dementer 2019 – our review).
I love folk horror. There’s something about the idea that if enough people believe in something, it will come true that is so fascinating to me. Or maybe they’d even discovered something years ago, something powerful and thirsty, and are keeping it hidden from outsiders to keep them from harm… or to lure them into its trap. In Jug Face, the unknown entity keeps a small, reclusive Appalachian community safe and healthy in exchange for a sacrifice of one of its members. It’s a bit like Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery or even The Cabin in the Woods, but with incest and and a lot more mud.
I’m from the south from a small town in Tennessee, so I’ve grown up with backwoods elements that I almost take for granted to a degree. Things like smaller churches or strange, kind of Christian offsets that do snake handling or they have their hair really long. They do these really weird things. So it came from my experiences growing up in this small town and this element, this face jug, and what I could do with that storywise. — Chad Crawford Kinkle
If you’re like me and you’re a big fan of Lucky McKee’s The Woman (the sequel to 2009’s Offspring), then you’ll have noticed some cast similarities between that film and Jug Face. Both Lauren Ashley Carter and Sean Bridgers star in The Woman, the former as a moneyed, misogynistic authoritarian who runs his home like a boot camp, demanding respect and giving none, and the latter plays his meek, ashamed daughter. The two switch roles in Jug Face. Bridgers takes on the role of Dawai, the simple-minded potter who makes the face jugs while in a blind trance. Carter leaves behind teenager Peggy Cleek for the strong-willed, defiant, backwoods villager, Ada, the only one willing to stand up to the entity.
Andrew van den Houten, who directed Offspring, produced both The Woman and Jug Face. The Woman director Lucky McKee also stepped in as producer on this film. Last but certainly not least, Composer Sean Spillane wrote and performed the songs on the soundtrack to both The Woman and Jug Face.
Speaking of Sean Spillane, his soundtrack for Jug Face is one of my favorites. He combines raw, grating energy with a bluesy, country twang that works so well for this film. My favorites are “Baby, Sweet Baby,” “Big Brass,” and “Whip Wildcats,” which you can listen to below.
His score is amazing as well. Can’t you feel the heavy evening breeze blowing the mosquitos off the back of your neck… as something creeps towards you from the trees?
I also think it’s genius that Kinkle created a terrifying monster out of a muddy hole in the ground and pretty much nothing else. The entity that lives in the sludge is never shown, yet you can’t help but feel like it’s hiding around every tree branch or river rock. You don’t know what it looks like, so you could be staring right at it and not even know it. And this thing is angry. It kills in the bloodiest ways, right out in the open. And it always gets what it wants.
I’ll wrap up this retro review with a bit on Appalachian face jugs. I personally had no idea that these were a thing until I saw this movie. Potter and sculptor Jason Mahlke designed and created the face jugs for this film.
Face jugs have a long history, going back to generations of enslaved people who created pottery with a spiritual purpose. Ceramicist Jim McDowell continues this tradition with his own work. He tells me his ancestors “amalgamated three religions: ancestor worship in Africa, voodoo in the islands, and Christianity,” and face jugs were a part of that. Because enslaved people were not permitted to have headstones, ceramics were often used to mark their graves; placing a face jug there served double duty. “They were so ugly they would scare the devil away from your grave so your soul could go to heaven,” McDowell says. — Curbed.com
Would you sacrifice yourself to save others? Not in the heat of the moment, but slowly. You have plenty of time to think about it. And you’re the only one who knows what you can do. Something wants you dead, and when you refuse to give yourself up, your friends and family get ripped apart one by one. How long would you keep running?
