“Heidi Van’s journey into the murky soul of the American West doesn’t quite raise the pulse.“
In the township of Osage, Kansas in 1873 – beneath the shadow of the Civil War and amidst the acceleration of the US’s Westward expansion – the Bender Family are getting down to their bloody business. Based on the notorious real-life family of serial killers dubbed the ‘Bloody Benders’ – who enticed numerous westward-bound travellers into their inn before murdering and robbing them – Heidi Van’s Bloody, Bloody Kansas follows Mary York (also played by Van) on her search for her missing husband William, who’s fallen into the family’s clutches. The real Mary York did in fact write a memoir about the Benders, and here she is our narrator, detailing the Benders’ gruesome rituals and recounting her desperate hunt for answers – which inevitably leads her directly into the path of that same murderous brood.
Bloody, Bloody Kansas joins a lengthy tradition of deep-fried gothic Americana, and the show appears to be positioning the Benders as inspirations for or antecedents to a subsequent cultural fixation on the murder and mayhem of the midwest and south. But BBK doesn’t approach the delirious, ecstatic strangeness of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for instance, nor the psychedelic shlock of Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses – both of which are borrowing from this same tradition. Instead, writer-director Heidi Van seems to be locating her story more in the dark-western vein of Sam Peckinpah or Cormac McCarthy – particularly the latter’s own treatise on the senseless violence of the Westward expansion, Blood Meridian. In setting the scene for us, Mary describes in sweeping detail the postbellum flood of Americans seeking land and livelihood further west – in which “some hunt and some are hunted”. The spectre of genocidal violence wrought upon Native Americans creeps around the peripheries: “Kansas,” Mary tells us, “was already bleeding.” But if the Bloody Benders are metonymic of the lawless, profane and omnipresent bloodlust of the colonial project, BBK doesn’t exactly mount a compelling case for it, either discursively or in its mood-stylings.
The plot itself is fairly thin and meandering in its structure, with a victim or two materialising to meet their ghastly fate. Mary’s flights of narration ram their way into the piece with a jagged repetitiousness; they’re lithely and solidly written, but are staged and delivered with scant variation, with a tendency to coax the piece into a stylised languor of expository material that doesn’t all the way support the development of any budding suspense. Micro-vignettes of the Bender family at dinner or about their ghoulish work pepper the show, but don’t often do a lot to cultivate an air of dread, nor to tighten the screws on us.
The simple and fatal reality is that the Benders here just aren’t all that chilling. As the charlatan spiritualist Kate Bender, Katie Gilchrist brings a crisp and grounded presence to her devilish occultism, engendering an imperious sangfroid that’s watchable if not particularly intimidating. Vanessa A. Davis does a nice turn with the bloodthirsty murderer-in-chief John Jr.’s skittish eccentrics – but in practice he mostly reads as a gormless hyucking hillbilly: not exactly Hills-Have-Eyes levels of deranged evil. Bob Paisley doesn’t get a lot to work with as Pa Bender; he’s better as the ill-fated victim George Langcor, in which brief appearance he achieves a stolid gentility that paints shades of tragedy around the violence – it’s the most emotionally potent moment in the piece.
Van keeps the set wisely uncomplicated: weather-worn table in the centre, white sheet of fabric hoisted with hessian ropes through the middle of the space (which also serves as a screen for sporadically successful shadow work). It gives a productive sense of grimy sparsity that supports the action well. Costumes mostly do the same – Kate Bender’s darkly austere dress is eye-catching and articulate – though they’re occasionally baffling in the role-switching, with items thrown on top of others in an awkward mosaic. Hats well and truly off to John Story for some richly-produced music; it’s beautifully scored. It also veers off into some weird stylistic territory though, with detours through Morricone’s warbling harmonica or Elmer Bernstein’s sweeping rural idyllicism. These too have the unfortunate effect of rupturing the suspense somewhat. The lighting is a truly odd element in the piece: some scenes are so dimly or inconsistently lit that the already messy staging becomes nigh-on indecipherable.
Without any real tension or compelling narrative engine driving it forward, BBK’s attempts at horror are just a bit half-baked: like a friend telling you a ghost story with a torch under their face, saying “Ooooooooooo” every now and again. It’s not quite a glimpse into the abyss of the West’s dark soul; more a fleeting, creepy anecdote relayed in passing. The creative team have a core competency that holds the thing together, but it never catches alight.