Neil LaBute

Cruelty staged like a plan, with steps and a target picked in advance. In the Company of Men has two executives choose the most trusting woman they can find and set out to break her, purely to see it done. The Shape of Things runs the same manipulation from the other direction, with an art student reshaping her quiet boyfriend and calling it love. Even LaBute's one studio horror, The Wicker Man, keeps his real subject: an outsider walking into a closed community that is using him for something he never sees coming.

Signature

• A manipulation planned out in steps and carried out by someone smarter than the target.
• Dialogue used as the entire weapon, with violence kept to the edges.
• A closed social system (an office, a couple, an island) that runs by its own rules.
• The audience seated uncomfortably on the manipulator's side of the plan.