Toxic masculinity and the college scene: John Berardo on Initiation and the anti-establishment thriller

ABSTRACT

In this interview, I discuss with John Berardo his attempt, through his feature length debut Initiation (2020), to respond to cases of sexual abuse, how he calls his viewer to action, how Initiation developed, and its larger commentary. Through the film’s central mystery, Berardo weds together multiple cases of sexual assault and cyberbullying, a fraternity wherein the president wishes to have a member expelled, a university that takes little interest in its students, and a community the eyes of which seem forever locked in their phones. Berardo gained his MFA in Cinema Production at the University of Southern California (USC) and his BA from the University of California, Los Angeles. His short film ‘Dembanger’ (2013) is about the dangers of social media and it directly inspired Initiation. This interview contributes to scholarship by revealing ways in which the horror genre can be used to examine pressing social issues and by showing how Berardo capitalizes on the unknown to challenge larger establishments, such as university fraternity cultures and toxic masculinity.

KEYWORDS:

• Genre
• fraternity
• sorority
• campus
• horror
• sexual assault
• toxic masculinity

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for supporting my scholarship through an Insight Development Grant.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tom Ue

Tom Ue researches and teaches courses on nineteenth-century British literature, intellectual history, and cultural studies at Dalhousie University. He is the author of Gissing, Shakespeare, and the Life of Writing (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming) and George Gissing (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming), and the editor of George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming). Ue has held the prestigious Frederick Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship and he is an Honorary Research Associate at University College London.