Excision (RIchard Bates Jr, 2012)

It's no surprise that so many horror films feature adolescents and that they are the audience the films are meant for. Unless you're the most fortunate of individuals, the kind who won all of the lotteries of fate, granted the genetic ticket to have grown into someone that matches societies description of physical beauty, a materially comfortable and secure home, a relatively well adjusted family, and the confidence that comes with all of that, chances are adolescence is not going to be an easy, simple time in your life that doesn't involve stress and confusion that you're barely capable of handling.

Horror films are a great outlet for that stress and tension, and many of them are created by people who understand that experience from a very personal standpoint. The best of these kinds of films distill that combination of sheer terror, youthful energy, and the hope that somewhere, somehow the confidence and capability the world seems to value are going to available. In the case of horror films, they usually aren't available to the characters until after some horrible, terrifying experience has threatened their physical safety, their immortal souls or something else your average teenager finds of great value. It's not a mistake that for decades, horror films were based on a lone survivor having watched their entire circle of friends unceremoniously massacred by a maniac wielding a variety of different weapons. It represented both the connection to community that many teenagers experience and fear losing and the degree of competition in that community. As budding adults, teenagers and adolescents are basically new converts to the adult experience. They haven't quite gotten there and don't have the acceptance that an adult does though. As with any other new convert in any other subset or society, they're also the one's who are going to most forcefully enforce group norms as part of the insecure need to feel they belong and deserve their place, and in doing so, they end up creating a hyper competitiveness, which comes out in horror films as the inevitable whittling down of the community or competitors to one lone survivor, who has survived because of some combination of traits they've drawn on either purposely or by chance, that the others lacked.

Excision explores many of those same ideas from a perspective that couldn't be more different from your standard horror film. After seeing it to the end, few people would argue that this isn't a horror film, but it doesn't deal with it's characters or it's content in the way audiences generally expect a horror film with an adolescent as the central character to deal with them. It's instead presenting a view of that experience and the kind of hyper competitiveness that comes with it from the perspective of someone who is more or less experiencing it from the outside and not as a member of a small community of friends.