Dirty Dancing: The Most Disturbing Horror Movie Ever Made

I haven’t slept in three nights on account of having just watched what I believe to be the Most Disturbing Horror Movie Ever Made. 

The movie begins with a family driving upstate to their annual summer vacation.  They’re a family of four: a successful professional father, housewife mother, and two daughters, the youngest having just graduated from high school.    

They arrive at a once-fancy but aging resort in the middle of the woods.  A few days into the vacation, the youngest daughter wanders off, watermelon in hand, and is soon seduced by a thirty-year-old seasonal employee of the hotel.  He’s a drifter and a grifter, a man who bounces from job to job and is essentially unemployed for ten months out of each calendar year.   

The movie is called Dirty Dancing.  And the man’s name is “Johnny Castle.” 

Johnny Castle initiates an ill-advised sexual dalliance with the youngest daughter. Sure enough, soon after this “relationship” gets off the ground, everyone finds out – the hotel staff, the other guests, the girl’s family, everyone.  The seasonal employee, this Johnny Castle, is summarily fired and sent packing.  Obviously.

Obviously. 

(Hey, here’s a thought, Johnny Castle: if everyone refers to the girl as “Baby,” don’t fuck her.) 

From the father’s perspective, this is clearly the worst vacation ever, and from the audience’s perspective, this is already a dark and unsettling movie. 

But believe me, it gets much, much worse.  So much worse that a botched back-woods abortion is the least disturbing part of the entire film.

Fast forward to the final scene. It’s the last night of the vacation, and this is when the hotel staff and select guests put on a musical performance for everyone to enjoy.  They do dances, like the Pachanga.  (Great idea, Neil.)   The father is just thinking about getting past this horrendous vacation and about how to start putting the pieces of his family life back together.  For some reason, everyone is mad at him.  He orders a scotch on the rocks and sits back to watch the show.

And guess who shows up.

The guy.  Johnny Castle.

He walks right up to the father and gets in his face.  He says, “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”

What did this guy just say? 

You heard what he said, man.

The father looks around the room, specifically towards the other fathers, and naturally expects all the adults to band together to beat this Johnny Castle to within an inch of his life — to string him up by his testicles and beat him like a piñata. To be clear, this would not have salvaged the movie, but at least it would have made sense.

But no.  In the Kafkaesque hellscape of this film, Johnny Castle tells off the father, takes the daughter’s hand, and guess what happens?

They start dancing!   

The girl’s family can’t believe it.

And what does everybody else do?  They love it.  They even dance along, ultimately building to a mocking choreographed spectacle designed for no other purpose than to humiliate and taunt the aggrieved father. 

The father stares completely dumbfounded, “What the fuck?”

And the credits roll. The End.

Dirty Dancing. What a complete, unmitigated, irredeemable, fucking nightmare.   

Yes, an earlier version of this post was first published here on January 21, 2023, I apologize to the dozen or so subscribers who had to read it twice. And, as always, to everyone else who had to read it once.