Killer Inside Me
The Killer Inside Me (2010) is an independent American film directed by the ironically named Michael Winterbottom. It stars Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba, Kate Hudson, and Bill Pullman.
The movie is based on the 1952 hardboiled crime novel of the same name by Jim Thompson (1906-1977). Casey Affleck portrays a small town deputy sheriff who is also a clever psychopath who conceals his true self from everyone around him. Kate Hudson plays his submissiive girlfriend and Jessica Alba plays a prostitute.
The spanking scenes
After slapping the sheriff during an argument, Alba's character gets a furious belt spanking of around a dozen strokes from Affleck while she lays face down in bed. A closeup shows red marks on her bare ass-cheek. He stops and apologizes, but she suddenly shows a masochistic side to her personality and embraces him.
This tightly edited sequence suggests that a body double was used for the glimpses of nudity in this scene. Alba's face is only seen in close ups. (She has publicly stated that she won't do nude scenes on film.) Video clips and still photos of this scene have been posted on a number of internet websites.
Later on in a montage of brief clips, Kate Hudson - or more likely her body double - is seen getting a few quick hand smacks from Affleck.
The novel
The story is a first-person narrative told by Lou Ford, a deputy sheriff in a small Texas town. Lou maintains the facade of an affable and somewhat slow-witted hick sheriff. Beneath the surface he struggles with a sickness, a desire to kill that he can barely control. This is outwardly expressed in his sadomasochistic relationships with women. One belt-whipping incident is briefly described (and portrayed in the film) and there are several subtle references to the beating of his girlfriend.
Early in the story, he meets a prostitute, Joyce Lakeland. After she insults him and slaps his face, he throws her down on the bed, ties her hands, and flails away with his belt: "I don't know how long it was before I stopped, before I came to my senses. All I know is that my arm ached like hell and her rear end was one big bruise...."
Additional notes
Jessica Alba also suffered a sadistic back whipping in another neo-noir film, Sin City (2005).
The Killer Inside Me was filmed before, minus the spanking scene, in 1976. Some of Thompson's other novels adapted for film treatments include The Kill-Off, The Grifters, and After Dark, My Sweet (all from 1990), and two versions of The Getaway produced in 1972 and 1994.
See also
External links
Review Review Killer Inside Me on Internet Movie Database
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