The Perpetrators is a ghost story. This is likely obvious to anybody familiar with the film’s concept, with its lead character being a pre-pubescent phantom, but beyond that, this 14-minute short is a tale of the collective ghosts of a queer past, ones which still continue to haunt the LGBTQ+ community to this day. Partially animated, part live-action, part documentary, and part collective nightmare, The Perpetrators is a bite-sized cinematic rumination on depictions of queerness and villainy via the medium of cartoons – something which director Richard Squires is no stranger to, having previously helmed the documentary feature Doozy (2018), which told the story of Paul Lynde, the performer who provided the voices for many of Hanna-Barbera’s most iconic evildoers. Here, Squires takes yet another leaf out of H-B’s book, with the visual style of The Perpetrators taking clear influence from the original classic Scooby-Doo, Where are You! (1969-70) series – and its aesthetic homages to those meddling kids are far from merely skin-deep.
Currently (at the time of writing) playing at the 2023 edition of the BFI Flare queer film festival in London, following its premiere at Portugal’s Queer Lisboa Festival, The Perpetrators follows the ghost of a young boy (voiced by Art Erikson, and very likely an on-screen avatar of director Squires) as he is pursued by a veritable rogues’ gallery of grotesques, each one representative of a different homosexual bogeyman figure that has been created at some point in history to demonise the LGBT+ community. Filmed during the 2020 lockdown in the London neighborhoods where Squires grew up, the movie seems to take place in some kind of uneasy liminal dream state, a shadowy world of monsters and maniacs that is separate from our own; and yet, somehow, it’s undeniable that this fearful dimension is one that we live in.
At its core, The Perpetrators is an experimental memoir of a full queer childhood’s worth of homophobic media caricatures and conservative scaremongering, of being taught by the world around you that the very thing you are is a predator waiting to snatch you off the street. Interestingly, there are obvious parallels between many of the cruel gay stereotypes from yesteryear that this film exorcises and the “reasonable concerns” of anti-transgender campaigners in our mainstream media today – hell, some of the hypothetical ghouls conjured into animated being here are described word-for-word in the manner that gay and trans people are referred to by right-wing pundits in our present day.
I’m not going to pretend that I was fully able to follow the narrative of The Perpetrators, in spite of being a member of the LGBTQ+ community myself, and I’ll have to admit that I found myself more mildly intrigued by the film than being overtly gripped by it – but I’d be lying if I said that this film didn’t have a compelling vibe. Its grainy night-time visuals are both warmly nostalgic and chillingly eerie, and Elroy Simmons’s animation work on the film is uncannily faithful to the art style of those classic Hanna-Barbera Scooby-Doo cartoons. Fittingly enough for said source of inspiration, the ghouls, ghosts, and zombies of The Perpetrators are merely human beings – except this time, when the masks are removed, the true villains still remain unseen.
LMFYFF Productions presented The Perpetrators at BFI Flare on 19 & 25 March 2023
Robyn’s Archive: The Perpetrators (2022)
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