Antichrist: Three Beggars Walk Into a Bar...

So Lars von Trier made a horror film. I like to imagine that he conceived this movie while thumbing through vintage Stephen King and watching three of the six Saw films on his buddy Soren’s sweet new plasma. Fed up with pointless, banal violence perpetrated by a clown puppet, Lars declared the world ready for a thinking man’s torture porn.

A conventional suspense narrative provides the framework for von Trier’s meditation on the horrors of human nature. Mourning the death of their young son, a couple (known only as She and He, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe) retreats to their cabin in the woods. Thanks to a steady diet of millennial horror films, we know that things ALWAYS go awry when you go to the cabin the woods. But this is von Trier’s vision, and his monsters aren’t serial killers or flesh eating viruses or creepy girls on haunted videotapes. His monsters are planted firmly in the psyche. He explores the destructive power of guilt, grief and self-loathing in incredibly visceral ways, culminating in a stomach-churning act of self-mutilation. Though far from a conventional horror movie, it still deserves a place in the canon. This film is terrifying.

It’s not easy to give the Cold Stone treatment to such a mind fuck, but I’m going to try my best. She is the vehicle for much of the chaos that defines the film, and so French Vanilla is the foundation of the creation. He attempts to comfort and cure She by embracing her physically, the way toffee syrup clings to the ice cream (also, Willem Dafoe screams toffee to me). Since one can’t put acorns on a Cold Stone, a healthy dose of mixed nuts represents nature of both kinds, transforming the creamy vanilla base into a rocky and unpredictable landscape. But this glorified ice cream sundae doesn’t even hint at the disturbing themes explored in the movie, so drastic additions must be made by the unstable female doctoral student mixing the creation (it should be noted that this will likely be the most misogynistic Cold Stone creation ever chronicled on this blog).

Verdict: If this movie were a Cold Stone, it would be French Vanilla with Toffee Syrup, Mixed Nuts and a severed digit.