In cinema, “exploitation” is loosely defined as a subcategory of lo-fi B-movies exploring lurid subject matter in a hard genre context. Exploitation had its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s with groundbreaking yet extremely controversial hits like Cannibal Holocaust, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and I Spit on Your Grave.

There are plenty of subgenres within the realm of exploitation: slashers, women-in-prison, spaghetti westerns. Blaxploitation movies like Coffy and Shaft empowered Black audiences with badass vigilantes played by Pam Grier and Richard Roundtree. Carsploitation movies like Vanishing Point and Death Race 2000 generated thrills by crashing muscle cars into each other.

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In today’s franchise-focused industry, exploitation has all but faded from the cinematic landscape. Directors occasionally come along with a tribute to a long-forgotten exploitation genre. Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 double feature Grindhouse is a throwback to exploitation. 2013’s Sonno Profondo is an affectionate homage to Italian giallo movies. But, as a prominent underground cult phenomenon, exploitation is pretty much dead.

S. Craig Zahler’s Movies Hark Back To Exploitation Classics

A cowboy shoots a cannibal in Bone Tomahawk

But as long as S. Craig Zahler keeps making movies, it’s not gone completely. With hard-hitting, ultraviolent gems like Bone Tomahawk, Brawl in Cell Block 99, and Dragged Across Concrete, Zahler has been bringing the gritty, violent, boundary-pushing sensibility of exploitation into the modern age.

After spending years working as a novelist and musician, Zahler moved into filmmaking and made his directorial debut with 2015’s Bone Tomahawk. Kurt Russell and Patrick Wilson lead a band of cowboys out into the wilderness, where they’re kidnapped, tortured, and eaten by cannibals. Zahler followed that up with 2017’s Brawl in Cell Block 99, in which Vince Vaughn’s ex-con reluctantly returns to crime when his girlfriend becomes pregnant. He’s caught and sent to prison, and as if missing the birth and early years of his child isn’t bad enough, his girlfriend is held hostage and he’s forced to get himself transferred to a filthy underground prison block so he can murder a protected crime lord to earn her freedom. He followed that up with 2018’s Dragged Across Concrete, in which Vaughn co-stars with Mel Gibson as a pair of cops who are suspended without pay for police brutality and plan to rip off the perpetrators of a bank heist to make end’s meet.

In all three of these movies, Zahler has defined his directorial style as a fresh take on exploitation. He uses modern filmmaking techniques and special effects capabilities to make the violence even gnarlier and more hauntingly realistic than it was in exploitation classics like Mandingo and Lady Snowblood. Much like the exploitation directors of yesteryear, Zahler has used blunt, uncompromising action filmmaking to tackle contemporary issues like police brutality and the effectiveness of rehabilitation. Zahler’s idiosyncratic voice has brought out previously unseen talents in well-established stars like Vince Vaughn and Don Johnson.

Zahler’s Greatest Asset Is Inventive Storytelling

Vince Vaughn in prison in Brawl in Cell Block 99

The greatest asset of Zahler’s movies – and, indeed, any exploitation movies – is his use of inventive storytelling techniques to bring out to best in hard-edged genre material. Bone Tomahawk starts off as a standard western about a sheriff and his posse going out onto the lawless frontier to rescue the town doctor. But it quickly becomes an all-out gore-fest when they’re abducted and dragged back to a cave by a tribe of bloodthirsty cannibals. To audiences going in without watching a trailer or reading a plot summary, this is a wildly unexpected left turn.

The fiercely effective plotting of Brawl in Cell Block 99 is driven by brutal hand-to-hand combat. The messy fight scenes are visceral and uniquely choreographed and Zahler captures them mostly through unflinching long takes. But they’re not just there to look cool; Zahler came up with a plot that has clearly established stakes and a compelling protagonist with a universally relatable goal (to save his girlfriend from an experimental abortion procedure) and it relies entirely on that protagonist beating and gouging his way to the darkest, deadliest corners of the prison system.

With its tale of gunslinging antiheroes fighting over a bag of gold, Dragged Across Concrete is a classic western in the mold of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It’s a straightforward heist story told from multiple perspectives. There’s a long sequence involving a new mother struggling to return to work and leave her baby with her husband at home after delaying it for weeks. At her husband’s insistence, she goes back to work at a bank and it turns out to be the day of the heist. The scenes establishing her family life initially seem like an extended non-sequitur, but they end up making her death extra heartbreaking.

The Beauty Of Zahler’s Movies Is Their Simplicity

Mel Gibson with a handgun in Dragged Across Concrete

The beauty of the storytelling across Zahler’s filmography is in its simplicity. His scripts have concise, clear-cut conflicts, allowing him to focus squarely on his characters and their dynamics. His premises and situations are pure pulp. His style feels like Elmore Leonard meets Stephen King. Even the action sequences in his non-horror films are so gruesome and intense that they border on horror.

Zahler keeps pushing the envelope with his graphic depictions of violence. In Bone Tomahawk, a guy is ripped in half down the middle. In Brawl in Cell Block 99, a guy’s skull is scraped across the ground. In Dragged Across Concrete, a guy retrieves a key that another guy swallowed by cutting open his torso, following his intestines to his stomach, and carefully opening up his stomach in an excruciatingly dragged-out sequence.

Zahler Has Three New Movies In The Pipeline

A prison yard fight scene in Brawl in Cell Block 99

In a recent interview with Word Balloon, Zahler announced three new movies he’s working on. The first is Hug Chickenpenny: The Panegyric of an Anomalous Child, based on his own novel, about a deformed orphan who’s adopted by some sadistic scientists as a pet. The movie will reportedly be shot in black-and-white, run at three hours long, and the Jim Henson Company is involved because the lead character will be an elaborate animatronic puppet.

The second is Fury of the Strongman, a script he’s been shopping around. A gritty, ultraviolent neo-noir in the vein of Brawl in Cell Block 99 and Dragged Across Concrete, Fury of the Strongman revolves around a traveling circus in the 1970s that runs afoul of nefarious locals in Louisiana.

The third is a mystery project, with Zahler revealing no details except that it’s a horror movie. It would be great to see a nod to the giallo subgenre mixing the pulpy crime stories of Brawl and Dragged with the blood-drenched terror of Bone Tomahawk.

Based on these upcoming projects, Zahler isn’t done with his ongoing modernization of exploitation. In a cinematic climate that increasingly plays it safe, Zahler is making movies with violence that makes Tarantino look tame and antiheroes that make Travis Bickle look like a saint.

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