Cassandra A. Clarke – Bitch Flicks

‘Hush’: A Resourceful Heroine with Disabilities for the Horror Genre

In addition to featuring a female protagonist with disabilities, ‘Hush’ crafts a home-invasion story that isn’t about her “problems” or obstacles or the attacker at all, but rather it focuses on the tactful solutions she chooses along the way. …Its depiction of Maddie as a full, engaging character who fends for herself and thrives alone is an asset to adding more characters with disabilities in films, especially horror, as not victims but stars.

This guest post written by Cassandra A. Clarke appears as part of our theme week on Women in Horror. | Spoilers ahead (in the last paragraph).

Horror films thrive on powerlessness, on weaving tales that create vicarious feelings of hope and dread. Many horror movies follow a type of formula: restrict a character’s capability over time as external risks and dangers increase. Films that stick too closely to this pattern become formulaic. Audiences know what to expect, which is usually counterintuitive to manifesting fear, as the very idea that we do not know what is coming or why or how to stop it typically provokes fear. Insert obstacle here: friends travel to rural area and nearby families are out of town sounds like The Strangers or the home invasion sub-genre. Insert physical limitation: protagonist broke their collar-bone and can’t protect themselves which is a common mid-way tactic of horror to increase the plot’s driving sense of inescapability, like in Halloween or the teen slasher sub-genre.

What’s interesting about this formula, however, is its side effect when the same film stars a woman protagonist. Introducing insurmountable obstacles comes at the cost of disempowering its woman lead literally. While horror films in the past five years have started to come to terms with this consequence and spin survivor tales with resourceful, complex female protagonists (The Babadook, It Follows, Raw) it still begs the question: Why are women always the ones having to fight for their safety? Is a survivor’s tale that different than a chase story?

What’s brilliant about Hush, written by Mike Flanagan and Kate Siegel (who stars as the lead), is it pushes the envelope of the survivor’s tale further through its main character, Madison “Maddie” Young: a woman who is deaf, mute, and lives alone in a rural area. In addition to featuring a female protagonist with disabilities, Hush crafts a home-invasion story that isn’t about her “problems” or obstacles or the attacker at all, but rather it focuses on the tactful solutions she chooses along the way. The film challenges the horror genre to be more inventive with escape. Flanagan initially wanted to make a film with the challenge of no dialogue. He and Siegel thought having a deaf and mute protagonist would be “a real benefit to character development.” If this trend of female characters leading their way out of danger is growing, why not see these women as fuller characters who are masters of their own experiences and use their brains as much as brawn to escape?

Flanagan and Siegel use Hush’s opening moments and other scenes of heightened tension to play with sound by turning off the score and diegetic sound and using sound design, such as “audio from ultrasounds,” at certain points for extended time periods in order to acclimate the hearing viewer into Maddie’s world. The film also shows how she adapted to becoming deaf and mute as a child and how she shaped her life as a successful mystery writer. We see a burned dinner that culminates in her strobe-flashing smoke detector going off, Maddie text on her synced Apple devices with her sister who playfully rebukes her for being single, and a conversation with her neighbor Sarah who is learning to sign; we see enough of Maddie’s life to know that she is content and a master of her surroundings. Of course this peaceful life is challenged as Sarah is stabbed violently outside of Maddie’s house while Maddie unknowingly paces around her kitchen, trying to finish a new story she’s writing.

The film cleverly depicts the killer as a faceless man, an interchangeable slasher. He has no name nor back-story. Through this approach, we care less about him as the film cares less about him, opening up room instead to focus on Maddie and her choices. After not seeing Maddie turn around from Sarah’s screams, the man realizes she is deaf and appears aroused by the idea of killing her. Flanagan and Siegel approach his stalking of Maddie in a way that is new and also true to her experiences. Since Maddie cannot hear him, the killer has to find new ways to be known, so he steals Sarah’s phone and sends photos of Maddie to her. As soon as she realizes she’s being watched, Maddie attempts to bargain with the stalker-killer by writing a message backwards in lipstick on the locked glass door that he’s standing in front of, saying that she would never tell anyone that he was here. Her delivery is tongue in cheek. There’s even a flash of what could be called a smirk on Maddie’s lips. The man finds no humor in this; however, the audience can appreciate this moment as this odd display further develops Maddie as a character who even in grim circumstances finds a way to be resilient and playful.

After Sarah’s death, the plot quickly revs up to focus on Maddie’s escape. Hush does not hold back on the gore to accomplish this cat-and-mouse reversal. A crossbow, knives, shattered glass, and a cork-screw are some of the tools used to torture the man and Maddie. Both are injured and both attack, causing the film to feel less like cat and mouse and more like cat and cat, which helps to counteract the fact that it is still, at its core, a film about a woman being hunted. Setting the film in Maddie’s house creates a sense of claustrophobia that mimics not only Maddie’s initial fear but also the growing frustration and rage of her failing assailant.

To its credit, Hush brings Maddie’s career into the story, which she utilizes as a unique resource to help her survive. As a writer, she can look ahead of the story, see the possible outcomes of actions, and weigh the consequences. This decision to make her writing a part of her method to save herself does wonders for the film as it prevents it from relying too heavily on Maddie’s disabilities as a plot device and gives her more things to do, besides run or fight. In between moments of chase and bloody fighting, viewers follow along as Maddie (and the film) literally retreats into her head in imagined scenes, watching her play out possible choices of escape: Should she climb out the window? Does she hide in the bathtub? We see the failures of these fictional choices that lead Maddie to move in another direction. Horror fans can delight in these scenes as the writing becomes a meta-commentary on the formula of home invasion stories — we know this situation well and we know how we would act, and so, Hush invites us to play with choice, and to watch Maddie do the same. She is like us; she knows this story well and so she is desperate to find a better way out, a smarter way out. We’re engaged because we too want Maddie’s story to be different.

While I won’t say Hush soars in its depiction of Maddie as a deaf and mute woman, I think it’s a worthwhile progression to have a disabled character as a fully developed protagonist. Actress-co-writer Siegel is hearing and speaking in real life and I can see some viewers being disheartened that they didn’t cast someone who is deaf or mute. Maddie’s signing doesn’t appear natural or nuanced (using slang gestures, for instance). She might have been more sensitive to seeing motion if this was really happening to her. That being said, I think its depiction of Maddie as a full, engaging character who fends for herself and thrives alone is an asset to adding more characters with disabilities in films, especially horror, as not victims but stars.

I would even go as far to say that the ending suggests this even more. Much like Maddie does in previous scenes, after the final fight, she sits on her porch, closes her eyes, and smiles. Her demeanor is shockingly similar to how she was in imagined moments earlier, not necessarily indicative of someone who just survived a harrowing ordeal. What this suggests to me is that there is a possibility that the ending didn’t happen, that actually, the plot we watched was a story but it wasn’t true in the film’s narrative. Earlier in the film, before Sarah is killed, we see Maddie struggling to write the end to a new thriller. She rewrites the ending multiple times and visualizes how it could go, and is dissatisfied. Sarah’s death ultimately interrupts her and one can imagine that her death, and everything that follows, is of Maddie’s creation. What’s wonderful about this interpretation of the film is that it doesn’t just become a survivor’s tale, it becomes Maddie’s tale and invention and she exists as both the killer and the chased. She is given a duality that has yet to grace horror films that seem to position women as either the kill-or-be-killed model. Hush thrives in knowing what it is and what it is not; it is a tale of the formulas we play with, and it is asking us to play more, to think more.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

How Home Invasion Films Reinforce Gender Stereotypes and Portray Domestic Violence

The Strangers: The Horror of Home Invasion and the Power of the Final Girl

Cassandra A. Clarke is a writer, martial artist, and non-profit professional lady. Her work’s been previously published in Electric Literature, Word Riot, Entropy, other places that love a taste of the weird. In her spare time, she runs the literary magazine Spectator & Spooks. Follow her misadventures @cass__clarke and @spec_ta_tor_mag.

‘Penny Dreadful’: Departure from Heroine

We do not see the warrior that we have come to know and love, for her ability to not just fight battles, but to align others to fight against their darkest selves and moments for a better world. … Her death becomes a part of their story and creates an allegory of her character; she is not a woman anymore, but a figure to them, something they now own.

This guest post is written by Cassandra A. Clarke. | Spoilers ahead.

In battles, there’s an importance not just on the victor but on the amount of effort given by both sides. Perhaps this is why it’s the longest boxing matches that we remember, not for the score, but for the sake of the perseverance in those who step into the ring; that’s what we remember. It is no wonder that Penny Dreadful’s season three finale (and unexpected series finale) left viewers with a bitter aftertaste in their mouth.

“The Blessed Dark” episode was framed as the show’s last battle (including an epic slow motion shot of the team assembling on their way to face Dracula in his Gothic hideout in the dregs of the city), one that viewers had been waiting for since the series’ introduction of Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), as the doomed to be cleverest person in the room, facing an eternal battle against the Devil and Dracula, both vying for her soul and flesh. Yet, we received a forfeit: a bequest to finish with all of the battle, with all of the effort, in exchange for calm; or, in more literal terms, she asks Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett) to kill her in order for her to find redemption in heaven and leave this earth. Vanessa, the same woman who punched the Devil in the face, who fought for her soul back, relinquishes her life.

In an interview with Variety, Penny Dreadful creator/showrunner John Logan and Showtime president David Nevins, claimed that this ending for Vanessa was actually a message of empowerment for the audience. In Logan’s words, he said Vanessa Ives “owns her death.” While it’s true that Vanessa did ask for her death, the two are missing a bigger point about the show’s view of agency. The series does a marvelous job at toying with the idea of possession to make us question the view of agency for the characters: Are they acting like themselves or another? Are we imagining them to be better than they are? In Vanessa’s last moment, it’s unclear whether or not her agency is fully there or not as moments before she is shot, she tells Ethan, “Vanessa is long gone.” This begs the audience to wonder whether or not her death was something she truly wanted or the desire of her darker parts inside herself and we received no answer. The moment is too brief to provide more clues to her state of mind and wishes; it ends with someone taking her life in their hands and ending it in order to prevent her from having to be hurt (or have others hurt) to survive.

Even if Penny Dreadful is saying that this death, this kind of redemption from her life, is what she sought after, there is still another question that goes unanswered: Why did Vanessa’s death come so easily? In the finale, we see no battle with Vanessa, no decision to harm the creatures that have harmed her. Although she has leveled up to be the Queen of Darkness, we do not see her actually wield her power nor use it to take advantage of Dracula. We are led to believe that she is seduced by him and not of herself, and yet, we see her escape the clutches of this darkness to ask Ethan for help? All of her battle happens under the surface and off-screen, so that we as a audience cannot actually see any of Vanessa’s planning or will or desire, and that is where her death failed us. We do not see the warrior that we have come to know and love, for her ability to not just fight battles, but to align others to fight against their darkest selves and moments for a better world. She has no team to lead, no mission to complete.

The team exists, but we do not see Vanessa lead them like she has in the past to help defeat witches, demons, and toxic people. Her team is almost completely destroyed by the hands of the creatures of the night and they have no real power in which to defeat Dracula without her assistance. Instead of her power, we see a docile, white-dressed maiden, asking to be sent back to her creator. This feels so wrong because the series tended to show us how sometimes the darkest parts of ourselves can be aligned with good intentions and used for something more. We see that motif exercised plentifully through Ethan, who is able to kill an entire bar of people and yet is still shown to struggle emotionally, returning to London for the good fight. Yet, we do not get a chance to really see Vanessa struggle in and through her darkness. And this also begs another uncomfortable question to ask that the show avoids of her darkness: Did she do enough to win back her God’s faith? Because we don’t see her fight and do see Dracula flee back into the night, we’re left wondering if she earned her redemption. Did she do enough good?

The series carefully avoids answering that question by putting us into a hazy London where we can only imagine the thousands of deaths that Vanessa caused. We do not see her confront that. We see her choose to join Dracula and then hear of her casualties but we do not see Vanessa reconcile these consequences. We do not see her team assemble to do everything they can for her. Instead, we are left with an ending of her friends gathering at her grave, talking about what they learned from her. They are all given a second life to live, post-Vanessa, and she has taught them how to be more wicked than good. Her death becomes a part of their story and creates an allegory of her character; she is not a woman anymore, but a figure to them, something they now own.

Although Logan says this is a “shocking” ending for a show in 2016, as it shows a woman dying for what she believes in, it is not at all shocking to me. Plenty of women characters have been used as a prop to tell other men’s stories, to be their emblem of hope and fear. Penny Dreadful perpetuates the idea that in order to be strong and overcome the life that you were born into, even if it’s unfair, even if it’s theoretically doomed to cause you pain over and over again, it’s more worthy and noble to sacrifice yourself for others as opposed to learning how to channel your efforts into creating a stronger world. Each of the male characters who create monsters literally and kill innocents (including their children and siblings) are able to gain a chance at a new life, but Vanessa was never granted this option.

Logan argues that the only two choices that Vanessa had were eternal Hell on earth or Heaven. I think that is where the show ultimately failed Vanessa and us, because there was no thought to a third alternative for her, to a last battle, or, dare I say, the vanquishing of both evil male-oriented forces in her life. Could we imagine in 2016 a woman who was able to defeat the evils and traumas that plagued her and while changed, becomes stronger? Could we even further imagine a world in which she is not quite all innocent and certainly not eternally good, but a force to be reckoned with and one that could be called upon for future battles of good and evil, thereby earning redemption?

I imagine the Penny Dreadful showrunners heckling, “But you can’t defeat evil!” Yes, Vanessa living through her darkness would be hard. And the forces that seek to control her will always be there, but that’s where her will gets to come in and thrive. Vanessa is the kind of woman who believes that while fighting is harder than succumbing to temptation, it is the more interesting choice to court the impossible for the sake of friendship. If Penny Dreadful aims to thematically tackle oppressive forces, why use her freedom of choice to leave the story? If the show is willing to reanimate a corpse to fight the patriarchy, it could have let Vanessa live to rebuild herself. Yes, oppression will always persist, but that is why her life’s work as an ally to and against evil would offer more power for her and others.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Sex and the Penny Dreadful

A Feminist Guide to Horror: Torture Porn TV

Cassandra A. Clarke’s work’s been previously published in Electric Literature, Word Riot, Entropy, and other speculative places. She has an MFA in Fiction from Emerson College and is the Editor in Chief of the new-weird literary magazine, Spectator & Spooks.