Tag: Sleepaway Camp

Trans* Women and the Horror of Misrepresentation

While women (especially women of color) are constantly misrepresented, the trans* woman is without a doubt the most misrepresented minority group in existence. The horror genre frequently comes under fire for its formulaic uses of tropes and characters, and the “mentally ill trans* woman/psycho killer” is one we should really stop using.

Felissa Rose as Angela Baker in Sleepaway Camp
Felissa Rose as Angela Baker in Sleepaway Camp

 

This guest post by BJ Colangelo previously appeared at her blog Day of the Woman and is cross-posted with permission.

While women (especially women of color) are constantly misrepresented, the trans* woman is without a doubt the most misrepresented minority group in existence.  The horror genre frequently comes under fire for its formulaic uses of tropes and characters, and the “mentally ill trans* woman/psycho killer” is one we should really stop using. (NOTE: The asterisk at the end of “trans” is an umbrella term to encompass all non-cisgender gender identities including: transgender, transsexual, transvestite, genderqueer, genderfluid, non-binary, genderfuck, genderless, agender, non-gendered, third gender, two-spirit, bigender, and trans man and trans woman.)

The first thing that needs to be addressed is the depressing use of trans* women or cross dressers in horror and the fact filmmakers are treating the two like they’re interchangeable.  For example: Norman Bates in Psycho may lose his cool and dress like his mother when he kills someone, but that doesn’t make him a trans* woman. However, Angela Baker in Sleepaway Camp is revealed as having male anatomy but then returns years later in the sequels happily living and identifying as a woman. I’d make the argument that Angela Baker is a trans* woman. Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs wanted to be a woman, I’d consider him a trans* woman, while The Bride in Black from Insidious and Insidious 2 may have been struggling from an identity crisis caused by the years of abuse inflicted on him by his mother.  It’s difficult to tell whether The Bride in Black wanted to castrate himself because he truly wanted to be a woman, or if it meant his mother would finally love him.  That’s a complex issue and one that could easily constitute its own article.

Origin of The Black Bride in Insidious 2 (see: boy in a dress)
Origin of The Black Bride in Insidious 2 (see: boy in a dress)

 

Mey Valdivia Rude is a trans* woman and contributing editor/author to Autostraddle who recently covered this very topic with an incredible article titled “Who’s Afraid Of The Big, Bad Trans* Woman? On Horror and Transfemininity.”  Her article is highly informative, but it is her experiences as a trans* person and a horror fan that are truly telling of the impact film has on its audiences.  In describing her theatrical experience watching Insidious 2 she states:

As the movie was ending, I sank down into my seat, hoping that no one would notice that I was trans*. I was afraid that if someone realized I was trans*, they might make the connection between me and the serial-killer-turned-ghost in the movie. After all, if you don’t know me, you might see me and (incorrectly) think that I’m just some man who is dressed up like a woman. According to the filmmakers behind Insidious Chapter 2, that makes me creepy, insane and dangerous.

When I think of women in horror films that I can identify with, I can respond with characters like the bodacious and brash Elvira, Mary from Hocus Pocus, and a handful of other sassy, independent women.  For trans* women, they have motel owning serial killers, kidnapping lepidopterists, malicious ghosts, and slashers. Considering horror films are predominately made by men and the fact Western society heavily values men over women, it’s somewhat predictable that we’d have all of these “mentally ill” male characters dressing like women. Why would a man want to live as a woman? That’s just insane! Henry Lee Lucas was forced to dress like a girl when he was a kid, and look how he turned out! Mey Rude goes on in her article to say, “The same insanity that causes them to be transgender is the thing that causes them to become serial killers, and causes them to be seen as frightening.” It’s very difficult for the average cis-gendered male to understand what it feels like to misidentify with the gender their anatomy and society tells them they’re “supposed” to be. Film representation is very, very important. Think of it this way–if Jaws made people scared of the ocean and IT made people afraid of clowns, what sort of idea are we perpetuating about trans* women if they’re frequently shown as psychotic, violent, or perverted?

Buffalo Bill putting on lip makeup in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
Buffalo Bill putting on lip makeup in The Silence of the Lambs

 

A recent study showcased that trans* people across the U.S. experience three times as much police violence as non-transgender individuals. Even more terrifying, when trans* gender people were the victims of hate crimes, 48 percent reported receiving mistreatment from the police when they went for help. These statistics are the true horrors. Mey Rude sums it up perfectly:

When people look to pop culture and see trans* women portrayed as dangerous impostors that they should be afraid of, they cease to see trans* women as people and start seeing them as monsters. In the fictional world of movies it may be the trans* women who are frightening and menacing killers, but in real life, those trans* women are far, far more likely to be the victims of horrific and violent murders.

To my knowledge, there is really only one horror movie that showcases trans* women in a positive light, and even then the film showcases drag queens…not trans* women. (Pro-tip, not all drag queens are trans* women and not all trans* women are drag queens.) Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives is a tongue-in-cheek rape revenge film meant to be an entertaining film of empowerment a la I Spit on Your Grave.  GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) protested the film at its original Tribeca screening, but opinions on the film are extremely polarized.  Considering the somewhat cartoonish film is the only real positive representation trans* women have in horror, I can sympathize with the anger from the trans* community. At the end of the day, I can’t hate the player but I will hate the game. Hollywood (horror in particular) needs a makeover on its portrayal of trans* women, and fast.

Just picture Jamie Clayton as a Final Girl real quick. THAT is a film I want to see.
Just picture Jamie Clayton as a Final Girl real quick. THAT is a film I want to see.

 

If horror were to take a page from the books of dramatic films like Dog Day Afternoon, Dallas Buyers Club, or even the smash hit TV series Orange Is the New Black, we can start showcasing trans* women as actual people with feelings and complex thoughts and not just an easy way to tell an audience “this guy is supposed to be a weirdo, so we put him in a dress.”  There are amazing trans* women actresses, and they would be amazing additions to the female horror cannon as much more than a punch line or a quick villain. Laverne Cox, Harmony Santana, Jamie Clayton, and Candis Cayne are just a few working actresses that would completely dominate in the horror world. Trans* women deserve proper representation in horror, and it’s about time someone does something about it.

 

BJ Colangelo is the woman behind the keyboard for “Day of the Woman: A blog for the feminine side of fear” and a contributing writer for Icons of Fright. She’s been published in books, magazines, numerous online publications, all while frantically applying for day jobs. She’s a recovering former child beauty queen and a die-hard horror fanatic. You can follow her on Twitter at @BJColangelo.

 

Women and Gender in Cult Films and B-Movies: The Roundup

Check out all of the Women & Gender in Cult Films & B-Movies Theme Week posts here!

Slumber Party Massacre came up while I was searching for female directors in the exploitation genre. Although it came off as yet another sensationalistic and gory 80s slasher, it stuck out, mainly due to its ridiculous title or the fact that most of the characters were female. Upon viewing it, what shocked me was not so much the gore and violence, but I was surprised by the clever humor, the funny characters, and most of all the incredibly veiled feminist satire.

Fairytale Prostitution in Angel by Elizabeth Kiy

Angel, a 1984 cult film, attempts to be both a melodrama about a teen hooker forced to face her life choices (as the trailer proclaims it “A Very Special Motion Picture”) and a very 80s crime thriller where a tough-talking street kid teams up with a cop to catch a killer, but the resulting film is a mess of clashing tones that seems more campy than hard-hitting.

Luc Besson: Hero of the Feminist Antihero? by Shay Revolver

For the uninitiated, Nikita was the often too realistic story of a drug-addicted young woman who finds herself in jail after a robbery gone horribly wrong. Most filmmakers would have ended there, a cautionary tale of the woman led down the wrong path who ends up punished for her sins. But Besson took the story further; this broken young woman gets turned into an assassin that is used by her government to kill. The killing takes its toll on her, but she values her life and freedom over the other option provided her: death. She meets a guy, falls in love, and at the end of the day Nikita turned out to not be the same story I was used to.
In terms of gender representations, both men and women are shown as the worst possible version of themselves. Barbra swings back and forth from being near catatonic and unable to communicate, to wild and hysterical. Ben even slaps her at one point to get her to snap out of her state. She is weak and unable to deal with the emotions of seeing her brother attacked. Barbra would have already been killed and reanimated were it not for the über masculine Ben to save her from the perils that lie outside.
A Study in Contrasts: The Hunger by Amanda Civitello and Rebecca Bennett

Perhaps for the movie’s purposes, that doesn’t matter: the story seems to be far more driven by the desire to create an artistic film, rather than an intellectually/ethically/scientifically engaging narrative. The scientific aspect for example—the part of the film I found personally most engaging, that it is possible to tamper with the natural life-cycle, halting the aging process in its tracks—is touched upon but it seems, at least to me, to be more of a plot device for bringing Sarah into Miriam’s life than an attempt to explore an ethically challenging issue. The biology behind Miriam’s present state and the fate of her lovers is similarly irrelevant.

When the movie begins we’re introduced to Brad, a hero (Barry Bostiwck) and Janet, a heroine (Susan Sarandon), two straight-laced representations of the all-American, white middle class Christian boy and girl who are suddenly thrown into a den of loose morals and provocative dancing. At all turns, we’re blatantly reminded of their status as a proxy for a nice boy and a good girl, and it’s reinforced with every cliché possible.
Being set in the Valley in the 80s, the film portrays much of the vapidness and consumerism popular at the time, with two of the film’s songs, “Brand New Girl,” and “’Cause I’m a Blonde,” focusing on changing or criticizing women’s appearances. “’Cause I’m a Blonde” is purposely satirical, however, and really serves more to make fun of the blonde “Valley Girl” stereotype than to support it.

Maude and The Dude: Feminism and Masculinity in The Big Lebowski by Rachael Johnson

Populated by mostly male characters, The Big Lebowski is, to some extent, a tale of male friendship. Nevertheless, the cult comedy should never be interpreted and celebrated as exclusively a guy’s film. The Big Lebowski offers an amusing, subversive portrait of masculinity and features an excellent comic performance by one of the most gifted actresses working today. What’s more, it suggests that the future is matriarchal.
Consistently, then, femininity in men is dangerous. It may be actively dangerous, as in Uncle Monty, who assaults Marwood whilst in near-drag, or passively dangerous, in that it makes the feminine man a target for harassment, as in the lout at the pub who calls Marwood a perfumed ponce. Ultimately, it is dangerous because it marks the other, and to be other is to be in danger.
The Blood of Carrie by Holly Derr

Most feminist criticism of Stephen King’s Carrie has focused on the male fear of powerful women that the author said inspired the film, with the anti-Carrie camp finding her death at the end to signify the defeat of the “monstrous feminine” and therefore a triumph of sexism. But Stephen King’s honesty about what inspired his 1973 book notwithstanding, Carrie is as much an articulation of a feminist nightmare as it is of a patriarchal one, with neither party coming out on top.

Birth of the Living Dead: Women & Gender in Cult Films & B-Movies by Amanda Rodriguez and Max Thornton

Birth of the Living Dead is Rob Kuhns’ documentary of the making of George Romero’s 1968 cult horror genre game-changer Night of the Living Dead. Bitch Flicks writers Max Thornton and Amanda Rodriguez discuss both the documentary (BOTLD) and the original film itself (NOTLD).

The ethics of the film are one thing, but it says a lot about the world of the movie that it’s able to go nearly two hours without a single important female character showing up on screen. There are no women cops, there are no women in the mob, there are only a couple of wives or passers-by or maybe a drug-addled girlfriend or two. But no one who matters. The acting characters in the film are all overwhelmingly and vocally male.

Even the ethos of the characters, that they will destroy that which is evil, but leave alone the pure and blameless, is inherently sexist. Because when they say pure and blameless, what they mean is the women and children. In this universe, women are not even people enough to do things wrong. We do not have enough agency even to commit evil.

On any dark and stormy night in the fall, it is a wonderful thing to curl up with a mug of mulled cider and watch Clue. The murder mystery based on the eponymous board game may have been a huge flop when it was released in 1985, but it has gained a passionate cult following in the last 28 years, probably due to its infinitely quotable dialogue and gleeful disregard for the pile of bodies amassed as the movie progresses – as well as being shown on cable about once every two hours.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve watched Fight Club. Every time I view it, I end up noticing something new. How did I miss that before? This time, Marla Singer (played by Helena Bonham Carter) captured my attention. What would the situations in the movie look like from her viewpoint?
The midwestern, puritanical values that American Gothic seems to represent so well win at the end of the film, and quite literally kill difference and sexual and gender subversion. While Riff Raff and Magenta go back to their home planet Transsexual, in the galaxy of Transylvania, Brad, Janet and Dr. Scott are left on the cold ground, crawling and writhing in their fishnets.
Here are some game-changing cult classics, divided into handy genre sections. And while we’re looking at the influence of these cult films, why not check out how they portray and treat women? Almost entirely coincidentally, they’re all from the ‘80s. What can I say? It was a culturally rich period.
So I asked Twitter the following question: “Who’s scarier: Jason or Jason’s mom?” Surprisingly, despite all the movies (12 in total) in which Jason is seen slashing throats and hanging victims, his mom (who’s only alive and running amok in the first film in 1980) is apparently considered the more horrifying killer. But I’ve always had a soft spot for Pamela. Not that I condone the gruesome murders of innocent people (of course not). But, unlike Jason, Pamela committed crimes of passion. Her crazy antics were actually revenge for her young son’s fatal drowning, which she felt was caused by the unjustifiable neglect of the camp counselors who failed to watch him (a longtime rumor has faulted the counselors for being too busy fornicating and not paying attention to Jason’s cries for help).
The Craft presents a lesson that coming-of-age films don’t typically make a point to show. A ballot is cast for prom queen or SAT prep sits on the horizon with college days looming, a girl must get a boy to like her, losing her virginity in the process. But this film is about serving the self—the craft of empowering oneself to surmount the archaic persecutions against women—taking back the threat of female power. But like a genie in a bottle that allows three wishes, this craft must be practiced and understood, respected completely before it can be outwardly used, or else it will perpetuate transgression.
Freaks (1932) is a true cult movie, one that’s ridden a rollercoaster of opprobrium and acclaim since its initial release. Tod Browning’s sideshow-set horror-romance destroyed his career (and several others), caused such disgust in early audiences that one woman (allegedly) miscarried, outraged critics and moral guardians, traumatized some of the performers who appeared in it, languished in obscurity after being banned for three decades, resurfaced on the exploitation circuit in the 1960s, and earned a spot in the National Film Registry archives in 1994 before enjoying its current status as a one-of-a-kind classic. It’s been repeated to the point of cliché, but Freaks, once seen, is never forgotten. Love it or hate it, it will stay with you for the rest of your life.

I was neither a discerning nor an educated viewer, but even so I quickly cottoned on to the fact that certain Italian directors had produced some above-average horror flicks in the 1970s, characterized by a cavalier attitude toward nudity, pervasive Catholic imagery, and lashings of gore. Ignorant of the term giallo, I proceeded to dub this subgenre “spag-horror,” which isn’t actually an awful name for it.

As my initiation into the worlds of sex and violence, many European horror films of the 1970s no doubt occupy a Freudian subspace of my psyche. Probably the Ur-example of this genre and its strange, ambivalent attitude toward women and sexuality is Dario Argento’s 1977 meisterwerk, Suspiria.

Before There Was Orange is the New Black, There Was Roger Corman’s Women in Cages by Leigh Kolb

I found myself wondering about the designation of sexploitation. Female nudity in itself isn’t exploitative. Women fighting and women being abused are things that happen in prison. Are representations of women in these situations inherently exploitative, or are we conditioned to see women’s bodies and women’s actions and think: object? Certainly frame after frame of powerful, complex, awful and good, sympathetic and loathsome women has some kind of effect on the viewer. Since we are conditioned to only really consider the straight white male gaze as the norm, we see these movies as highly sexualized and exploitative.

The Shock of Sleepaway Camp by Carrie Nelson

On the surface, Sleepaway Camp isn’t much different than your average 1980s slasher movie. The comparisons to Friday the 13th can’t be ignored – Sleepaway’s Camp Arawak, much like Friday’s Camp Crystal Lake, is populated by horny teens looking for some summer lovin’, and is the site of a series of gruesome and mysterious murders that threaten to shut down the camp for the whole summer. But unlike Friday the 13th and other slasher films, the twist in Sleepaway Camp isn’t the identity of the murderer, and the final girl isn’t exactly who you’d expect.

Veronica Decides Not To Die–Heathers: The Proto-Mean Girls by Artemis Linhart

Indeed, the social structure of Westerburg High School is unsettling to say the least. Teens there would rather commit actual suicide than “social suicide.” Their alienation from both reality and ethical values is mirrored not only in J.D., Veronica and the Heathers, but also in the rest of the students. Peer pressure and the dream of popularity result in the “Westerburg suicides,” causing a downright suicide craze. Their supposed actions gave the popular kids depth and humanity and made them more popular than ever. When an unpopular girl attempts to kill herself, the new Heather in charge asserts, “Just another case of a geek trying to imitate the popular people of the school and failing miserably.”

 

Horror Week 2011: The Roundup

Sleepaway Camp by Carrie Nelson

The shock of Sleepaway Camp’s ending relies on the cissexist assumption that one’s biological sex and gender presentation must always match. A person with a mismatched sex and gender presentation is someone to be distrusted and feared. Though the audience has identified with Peter throughout the movie, we are meant to turn on him and fear him at the end, as he’s not only a murderer – he’s a deceiver as well. But, as Tera points out, the only deception is the one in the minds of cisgender viewers who assume that Peter’s sex and gender must align in a specific, proper way. Were this not the point that the filmmakers wanted to make, they would have revealed the twist slightly earlier in the film, allowing time for the viewer to digest the information and realize that Peter is still a human being.

The Silence of the Lambs by Jeff Vorndam

Starling must unfortunately endure many such difficulties because she works in the male-dominated institution of the FBI. As an attractive woman, Starling receives lascivious looks from nearly every male in the movie. When she and her roommate go jogging in one scene, a group of men jogging the other way turn around to ogle the women’s behinds. Earlier, when Starling is looking for Agent Crawford’s (her boss) office, the men gaze at her as if she were an exotic delicacy. Hannibal Lecter’s psychiatrist Dr. Chilton tries to pick her up initially, “Are you familiar with the Baltimore area? I could show you around.” When she explains she has a job to do, Chilton becomes angry, “Crawford sent you here for your looks–as bait.” Lecter surmises that Crawford fantasizes about Starling and that is why she was selected for the assignment. Even the bespectacled etymologist asks her out. In fact, it is only Lecter who is more interested in getting in her head than her pants.

The Sexiness of Slaughter: The Sexualization of Women in Slasher Films by Cali Loria

The whores in horror are the signature flesh of the slasher flick.  Women in this genre have long been given the cold shoulder: cold in as much as they are often lacking for clothing.  Often a female character’s dearth of apparel becomes prominent at the pivotal point of slaughter: in cinema, women dress down to be killed. Filmmakers pair scopophilia with the gratuitous gore of killing–leaving viewers to male gaze their way into a media conundrum: When did sexual arousal and brutality towards women pair to become the penultimate money shot?

Amanda Young, Gender Erasure, and Saw’s Unexpected Pro-Woman Attitude by Elizabeth Ray

There are many things that set Amanda apart from most villains in horror movies, the most notable one being that she’s a woman. But more than that, she’s a woman who is not driven by: jealousy, vanity, or obsession over a man. She doesn’t indulge in vampiric, Sapphic tendencies meant to titillate male viewers. And she isn’t sexualized: while reasonably attractive, she isn’t a young, nubile twentysomething, and she dresses in plain, normal clothes, which neither accentuate nor hide her feminine features. And she isn’t demonized either: she’s a not a “bitch” or “whore” who deserves what’s coming to her. Her mundanity is what makes her so appealing: she’s not just an “everygirl,” she’s an everyperson, who, like Jigsaw, is a character that all genders can identify with and sympathize — but her femininity isn’t taken away from her in order to make her stronger or more appealing (she is not given a boyish nickname like “Chris” or “Billy” and doesn’t adopt masculine traits like Ripley did in Alien), which is the most important thing.

Hellraiser by Tatiana Christian

Julia is an interesting character because unlike Kirsty – who experienced a mutual loving relationship between both her father and Steven (her love interest) – Julia had no such thing. Instead, Julia experienced rejection from Frank, her main obsession/love interest and killed off all the men who showed any interest in her (Larry and her victims).

Drag Me To Hell by Stephanie Rogers

I vacillated between these two women throughout the movie, hating one and loving the other. After all, Christine merely made a decision to advance her career, a decision that a man in her position wouldn’t have had to face (because he wouldn’t have been expected to prove his lack of “weakness”). If her male coworker had given the mortgage extension, I doubt it would’ve necessarily been seen as a weak move. And even though Christine made a convincing argument to her boss for why the bank could help the woman (demonstrating her business awareness in the process), her boss still desired to see Christine lay the smack-down on Grandma Ganush. I sympathized with her predicament on one hand, and on the other, I found her extremely unlikable and ultimately “weak” for denying the loan.

The Blair Witch Project by Alex DeBonis

But the film itself denigrates Heather because she accepts responsibility, almost agreeing with the taunts. The most famous scene in The Blair Witch Project is Heather’s tearful confession into the lens. The substance of this confession is that she is responsible for what’s happening to them, but it’s infuriating that Heather takes responsibility and does so at this point. The confession scene tries to make Heather an Ahab-like figure. On the one hand, her tendency to tape allows the narrative conceit of the film to operate. When events take a turn for the eerie and tense, Heather’s obsession with documenting the experience keeps the cameras rolling and allows us to see the ensuing tumult. On the other hand, it puts her energetic striving for a quality film on trial and coaxes from her a confession for a crime she doesn’t actually commit.

The Descent by Robin Hitchcock

While a cave setting evokes female reproductive organs almost inherently, the set design here takes this metaphor to extremes. The women descend into the cave through a slit-shaped gash in the earth, and then must crawl head-first through a narrow passageway into the greater cave system, where the true danger of the monsters await.
The monsters, depicted as the products of evolution motivated only by a primal drive for survival, are the perfect elaboration of this cave-as-womb horror metaphor. And as a cherry on top, they rip the guts out of these women.
In their landmark study, “Madwoman in the Attic,” Gilbert and Gubar embraced the figure of Bertha Mason (the insane, ghostlike previous wife of Jane Eyre’s hero, Mr. Rochester, whom he has locked up inside the attic…apparently for her own good and out of the goodness of his heart!) as somewhat of an alternate literary heroine, and started to analyze exactly what was at work in the common themes found in the literature that women were writing during that time period. As women attempted to write themselves into the purely patriarchal forms of literature that they had grown up reading, they faced the limits of the representation of women in heroic roles. So the gothic heroine emerged as somewhat of a compromise: a heroine who is perpetually endangered and perpetually courageous in the face of that danger. This is the precursor of the modern horror movie heroine who, against all logic, insists on checking out that pesky sound in the middle of the night or following the creepy voices outside of her room.

Let This Feminist Vampire In by Natalie Wilson

While the original film was also excellent, it lacked some of the more overt gendered analysis of the U.S. version. Though this may be due to discrepancies in translation (I saw the film both in Swedish with English subtitles and dubbed in English), the bullying theme running throughout the narrative was framed very differently in the Swedish version. In it, the young male protagonist, Oskar, was repeatedly told to “squeal like a pig” by his tormentors. In contrast, the male protagonist in the U.S. version, now named Owen (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee), is attacked by bullies with taunts such as  “Hey, little girl” and “Are you a little girl?”
House of 1000 Corpses by Dierdre Crimmins
Inevitably the college kids pick up a hitchhiker, which is where the plot starts to get interesting. This hitchhiker, Baby Firefly (played by Zombie’s wife Sheri Moon), seems odd and off in her own world. She messes with the radio and giggles at the college kids. Both Denise and Mary instantly despise her and are obviously threatened by her sexuality, and as expected both Bill and Jerry like her. While this little battle starts to play out, and Baby is loudly drumming on the car’s dashboard, the car gets a flat tire. Of course the sexy female hitchhiker is a local and her brother can help fix the car. It is when Baby insists that the whole gang come over to dinner that this story finally becomes interesting.

A Feminist Reading of The Ring by Sobia

At the center of the mystery are Samara and her mother, Anna, both women whose sanity is questioned by the narrative. At first glance, the movie seems to be Anna’s creation, and it’s her face that we see in the images on the tape. Anna is implied to have been driven to the brink of insanity and eventually to suicide by Samara, who somehow creates images that burn themselves into the minds of those around her. Samara herself is an ambivalent figure that the movie does not seem to be sure about, which leaves her open to interpretation. While I was convinced of her pure evilness initially, subsequent viewings have made her emerge as a less sinister figure, especially given her portrayal in the Japanese version of the story.

Ellen Ripley, A Feminist Film Icon, Battles Horrifying Aliens…And Patriarchy by Megan Kearns

While both Alien and Aliens straddle the sci-fi/horror divide, one of the horror elements apparent in Alien is Carol Clover’s notion of the “final girl.” In numerous horror films (Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, The Descent), the resourceful woman remains the sole survivor, the audience intended to identify and sympathize with her. Oftentimes sexual overtones exist with the promiscuous victims and the virginal survivor. While Alien and Aliens display sexual themes (we’ll get to those in a moment), Ripley isn’t sexualized but remains the sole survivor in the first film. She’s also never masculinized as Clover suggests happens to final girls in order to survive.

Rosemary’s Baby: Marriage Can Be Terrifying by Stephanie Brown

Rosemary’s Baby is one scary movie. It’s about a woman’s lot in a hostile world. It is about a terrible marriage to a narcissistic and selfish person. It is about the fear of motherhood and giving birth. It is convincing as a terrifying movie about the supernatural, and as a life lesson about selling your soul to a metaphorical devil. I like horror to convince me that I have learned something about the dark side of human nature…not just play with gore, or supernatural themes, or catastrophic nightmares. It has to name a fear that we really have, or a truth we find hard to believe, and the best horror enlightens us by showing us the darkness that haunts our lives.

Thanks to all our Horror Week 2011 writers! (Previous Theme Weeks include Mad Men Week and Emmy Week 2011.)