Little Deaths is a 2011 British anthology horror film written and directed by Sean Hogan, Andrew Parkinson, and Simon Rumley. The film has three segments: House & Home, Mutant Tool, and Bitch. Each segment is directed by a different author and are unrelated to one another in any way other than sharing a theme of sex and death. Critical reviews for Little Deaths were polarized and the United Kingdom DVD release had to have some portions removed due to their sexually violent content.
Synopsis
House and Home
In Sean Hogan's segment, Richard and Victoria are a married couple that tries to solve their boredom by picking up homeless women under the guise of a Christian charity, with the intent to abuse them sexually. When they pick up Sorrow, they soon discover that they have taken on more than they can handle and that Sorrow is not exactly the homeless woman that she seems to be.
Mutant Tool
The second segment was directed by Andrew Parkinson and follows Jen, a prostitute that gains the ability to see frightening visions whenever she touches someone. She is also addicted to the emissions of the captive Mutant. His captor, Dr. Reese, has been feeding him human kidneys as part of a twisted Nazi experiment.
Bitch
short focuses on the dysfunctional relationship between Pete and Claire. Claire routinely subjects Pete to emotional and physical abuse and, in the bedroom, makes him participate in various BDSM activities such as forcing him to live and behave as a dog while he gets pegged. Pete longs for his relationship with Claire to get better and for her to give him more respect and acceptance, but is pushed to his limit when Claire decides to sleep with his best friend Al. The reason behind Claire's abusive behavior towards Pete seems to be that she is extremely Cynophobic and takes her anger out on dogs by treating him like a dog. Pete then exacts his revenge on her. He first destroys all dog like artifacts in the house and then purchases a whole kennel of ferocious dogs, prepares dog food for them, pours out the whole concoction on her buttocks while she is handcuffed on the bed posts completely naked on the pretext that he would have anal sex with her. Pete then releases the entire pack of the starving dogs on her who bite off of her buttocks and horribly maul her to an extremely gruesome death.
Development
Hogan began planning the film anthology after a prior film project did not come to fruition. He approached Parkinson and Rumley with the idea, as Hogan believed that the differences in their filmmaking styles would work well in an anthology setting. The three collaborated on the film as a whole in the pre-production stages, but "kind of went separate ways" after production began. Hogan has stated that he and Rumley initially had difficulty casting the roles for their segments House & Home and Bitch, as many actors declined to participate after reading the scripts.
Critical reception has been mixed to positive. Shock Till You Drop and FEARnet both gave predominantly positive reviews, with Shock Till You Drop commenting that "as a whole, Little Deaths is ultimately one of the best horror anthologies I've ever seen, not the least of which because it ignores the pretense of a framing device in favor of ideas that bind its segments more tightly together than a wraparound story ever could".
