Cindy Sherman’s Horror Movie Flop Is Back. Is the World Ready?
Photographer Cindy Sherman has made just one feature film to date—Office Killer, a 1997 box-office flop that was unloved by critics, such as the New York Times’s Stephen Holden, who called the movie “sadly inept” and “crude.” I agree, at least, on the “crude” part: in one scene, the film’s star Carol Kane plays with a violated corpse’s guts. Once she’s smeared them around the corpse’s opened chest cavity for long enough, she then tries to stick them back into place using Scotch Tape. It’s gross, but that’s the point. Before Office Killer, Sherman was better-known for her “Untitled Film Stills,” a series of photographs from ’70s in which the artist poses in settings that appear to be excerpted from B-movies and pulp fiction. The year before the film was released, MoMA paid $1 million for a full set of the black-and-white pictures, which remain her most famous pieces. But during the ’80s and ’90s, Sherman spent much of her time making pictures that looked quite unlike her iconic work: they were filled with vomit, mold, and dismembered limbs (belonging to anatomical dolls, not …
