Bitch Flicks – Page 87 – The radical notion that women like good movies

Satan in a Frilly Dress

However, this form of social shaming does not seem to prevent some of his young disciples from subverting their supposed childlike innocence: when the town is suddenly riddled by mysterious and violent crimes, it is suggested that the children have something to do with it, their leader being Klara, a 13-year-old angel-faced blonde and the pastor’s eldest daughter.

This guest post by Gloria Endres de Oliveira appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.

What are little boys made of? / What are little boys made of?

Snips and snails / And puppy-dogs’ tails / That’s what little boys are made of.

What are little girls made of? / What are little girls made of?

Sugar and spice / And everything nice / That’s what little girls are made of.

(nursery rhyme dating from the early 19th century)

Ana Patricia Rojo as Veronica in Poison for the Fairies — Ana Patricia Rojo as Veronica in *Poison for the Fairies*

Creepy little girls in cinema and television have always been important to me; growing up as the pale, black-haired daughter of Brazilian immigrants in the suburb of an ethnically very homogenous German town instantly made me fall in love with sullen, gothic heroines such as Wednesday Addams, Lydia Deetz, and Nancy Downs (thanks to my older sister, I first saw and enjoyed The Craft at the appropriate age of 7). They looked like me, dressed like me, relentlessly pursued their own peculiar interests, and remained strong in the face of societal opposition.

As I approached my late teens, I ditched my gothy black frocks and Doc Martens and started to indulge my love for all things pink, frilly, and girly. However, this led to me experiencing an all new form of social discomfort – while before I was just looked at as plainly weird, my new stereotypically female exterior made people underestimate me in a painful way, doubting my intellectual capabilities and often even being surprised upon noticing that I, a girly girl, possessed so much as a sense of humor. Furthermore, I have experienced first hand how so-called femme-phobia can even pervade queer spaces, where femme-identified persons are often faced with exclusion. This personal background led me to be fascinated with an all new set of creepy little girls.

As Leigh Kolb notes at Bitch Flicks, ”(l)ittle girls are supposed to be the epitome of all we hold dear – innocent, sweet, submissive and gentle. The Victorian Cult of Girlhood … bleeds into the twenty-first century anti-feminist movements, and these qualities are still revered.”

Lewis Carroll described little girls thusly:

“Their innocent unconsciousness is very beautiful, and gives one a feeling of reverence, as at the presence of something sacred.”

Furthermore:

“Artists like Charles West Cope and John Everett Millais produced dozens of domestic genre paintings with titles like The First Music Lesson (1863) and My First Sermon (1862-3), which portray the child as a bastion of simplicity, innocence, and playfulness. Women were also praised for embodying these qualities, and together with children they were urged to inhabit a separate sphere: to withdraw from the workforce, embrace their status as dependents, and provide the male breadwinner with a refuge from the dog-eat-dog capitalist world outside the family.”

These historic ideals are explored in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon; the director paints a haunting picture of the fictional rural German town Eichwald at the cusp of the outbreak of the First World War. The oppressive nature of this puritanical society is underscored by the local pastor, who, in his confirmation classes, instills a deep sense of fear in the children he teaches – and, if they sin in any way, makes them wear a white ribbon to remind them of the purity they should strive for.

At one point, Klara is even implied to have butchered her father’s beloved parakeet with a pair of scissors. Childhood animal cruelty is not only thought to be an early symptom of psychopathic tendencies, but also stands in direct opposition to 1914 (and modern!) society’s standards for young girls – a budding mothering nature, nurturing, empathic and caring, finding release in doll and homemaking play.

Could angelfaced Klara have done this? — Could angel-faced Klara have done this?

The notion of female children as the pinnacle of innocence is thus subverted – but what exactly lies behind the concept of the pure, the innocent little girl? Even today, a century after the fictional happenings in The White Ribbon, purity often seems to be a euphemism for virginity and sexual inexperience, celebrated with so-called purity balls and purity rings. Just as in Victorian times and in the rural, puritanical society depicted in Haneke’s film, nowadays, women who are sexually active (outside of marriage) are still considered impure and thus abject. This notion is so prevalent and ingrained, that even women who would deny being influenced by it often dream of a white wedding, with the father of the bride leading her to the altar to basically entrust her into the husband’s custody.

Jeanne Goupil & Catherine Wagener in Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal — Jeanne Goupil and Catherine Wagener in *Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal*

A similar church ceremony is, of course, first communion – where the traditional white wedding finds it ritualistic precursor, with pre-pubescent little girls decked out in white dresses, veils and wreaths. Anne and Lore, the two 14-year-old protagonists in Joël Séria’s Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal, who meet at a catholic boarding school set in stiflingly bourgeois 1970s France, act out by playfully, then violently processing and at the same time powerfully overthrowing what society has taught them; in a pivotal scene, the two girls stage an elaborate, candle-lit and organ-accompanied mash-up of a wedding and a communion, where they pledge everlasting allegiance to … Satan. Interestingly, the film features a screne where a pet bird belonging to an older man is killed by a one of the girls – reminiscent of Klara in The White Ribbon and her disregard for patriarchal authority.

Two little girls entangled in increasingly sinister play and satanism are also the protagonists in Carlos Taboada’s swan song Veneno para las hadas (Poison for the Fairies).

Veronica, the school’s outcast, traumatised by the death of her parents, her loneliness and the ”ridiculously inappropriate bedtime stories” her nanny tells her, befriends the new student Flavia – a wealthy, sweetly happy girl from a seemingly intact family. Veronica, a master manipulator at the ripe old age of 10, convinces Flavia that she, Veronica, is a powerful witch, enabling her to blackmail Flavia into sharing her privileges (her dolls, her happy family, her family’s summer house, even her beloved puppy) with her to an uncomfortable extent.

Elsa María Gutiérrez & Ana Patricia Rojo as Veronica in Poison for the Fairies — Elsa María Gutiérrez and Ana Patricia Rojo as Veronica in *Poison for the Fairies*

Scared and intimidated by Veronica’s increasingly violent displays of her supposed magical power, including the death of Flavia’s piano teacher (which was, in reality, due to a longstanding illness, not witchcraft), Flavia despairs and, at the culmination of the film, resorts to literally burning the witch: Veronica dies in a fire, the film ending with her haunting cry: “¡Flavia ayúdame!” (“Flavia, help me!”).

Behind the societal construct of the innocent little girl not only lies the imperative virginhood, but also the requirement of a certain passivity and submissiveness. Girls are taught from an early age not to be too rambunctious, not to get themselves dirty during play – femininity is thought and taught to be pristine, docile, meek and often inferior. The fact that Klara, Anne, Lore, and Veronica cannot be described as so-called tomboys is emblematic for their characters’ subversive power: They cause their violent mayhem in the frilliest, most femine dresses, decked out in candy colors, ragcurled pigtails bouncing. Perhaps this is one of the key factors that make famous cinematic creepy girls such as Wednesday Addams, Rhoda Penmark, and the Grady twins so powerful and memorable – by society’s standards, their characters’ darkness and defiance seems to exist in direct contrast to their girly exterior.

Jitka Cerhová & Ivana Karbanová in Sedmikrásky — Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová in Sedmikrásky

They have this in common with the Marie and Marie, the heroines in Věra Chytilová‘s Sedmikrasky (Daisies) and Alice, the protagonist in Catherine Breillat‘s directing debut Une vraie jeune fille. Those girls, wearing plenty of mascara and mini dresses, cause a range of disturbance, ranging from public masturbation to con games, theft and cake fights.

Both of these films not only pass the Bechdel Test with flying colours, but are also exclusively and intimately told from the girls’ perspectives, rendering them very modern and relevant still (which perhaps also explains Daisies‘ current popularity among girls, with stills and gifs from the film very present on all kinds of online platforms).

Charlotte Alexandra in Une Vraie Jeune Fille — Charlotte Alexandra in *Une Vraie Jeune Fille*

Another similarity between those two films (and Seria’s Mais Ne Nous Delivrez Pas du Mal) is that all three of them were immediately banned upon their release in their countries of origin. All three films depict young girls who defy any Victorian Etiquette School-style rules, who actively and independently take charge of their sexuality without any hint of submissiveness. None of these films explicitly depicts violence (no blood is ever seen on screen). The Godfather, on the other hand, a film released at a similar time, featuring a litany of violence, fist fights, gun shootings and blood baths (including a lengthy scene where a man brutally ”chastises” his wife with a belt), was not banned, neither in its country of origin, nor in France, or former Czechoslovakia. Rather, it was celebrated unanimously, winning three Oscars and is to this day held up as a cinematic masterpiece.

Creep girl du jour: Mia Wasikowska in Stoker — Creep girl du jour: Mia Wasikowska in *Stoker*

To me, the decade-long banning of films depicting rebellious young women demonstrates their subversive power that can be traced to the present day; as Elizabeth Kiy concludes, ”a culture’s horror stories have always reflected what they finds terrifying (…) from the fear of liberated women in Dracula to the virgin/whore dichotomy of the slasher film, and probably always will.”

Personally, I still cling to every well-written creepy heroine appearing on my screen, such as, most recently, India in Chan-wook Park’s Stoker – hopefully dismantling harmful gender stereotypes one lace-collared dress at a time, making it a little less difficult and less lonely to be a young woman.

Gloria Endres de Oliveira is a Berlin- and London-based actor, filmmaker, photographer, and writer. Updates on and samples of her work can be found on her tumblr and she twitters at @gloriayloslobos

Vampire Girls: Claudia and Eli

This guest post by Kathryn Diaz appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.

In the great monster mash team of terrifying children, the vampire girl is varsity captain. On the one hand, they are dolls forever: trapped in their prepubescent bodies for hundreds to thousands of years without a single curl losing its bounce. On the other hand, with hundreds of years of life come hundreds of years of experience, knowledge, even maturity. The great perverse contradiction of an innocent but worldly, pure but sexual girl beings that characterizes so many fantasies and paranoias about young girls comes to a larger than life reality with one part vampire bite added to sugar, spice, and everything nice. It’s a lot to take in. Especially since in practice, these horrific fantasies are much more complicated than they appear and often pack a harder punch than their makers bargained for. Because little girls aren’t dolls for men to play with. They have wills of their own, and one day they learn to use it with bite.

It’s worth mentioning that one of the most famous vampire girls in cinema is coveted by her makers for her girlishness. Claudia isn’t just raised in the vampire way by Louis and Lestat in Interview with the Vampire, she’s worshiped for it. From the moment she transforms from a dirty, malnourished urchin to a cherub-like creature that asks ever so sweetly for more blood, she is the apple of Lestat’s eye. He is charmed by her coquettish innocence and praises such traditionally feminine virtues as neatness. Even before this moment, Claudia represents hope for Lestat and Louis’ relationship and redemption for Louis’ conscience because of her apparent youth and innocence.

In the montage that depicts Claudia “growing up,” we see her surrounded by servants, dresses, and frills and privileges fit for a princess. One in particular has her standing on a pedestal in the center of a room–for trying on dresses, of course. But the imagery of her as a worshiped being, or perhaps a favorite doll upon a shelf is not to be dismissed. As Louis explains in his voice-over, “To me she was a child” and “to Lestat, a pupil.” Claudia is, in short, made into the desires of her makers.

This is not an uncommon motif in the vampire genre, or even in the broader spectrum of monster-making. Dracula makes his brides after his lusts, Frankenstein’s creature asks for a bride after his loneliness. Louis and Lestat are in good company, but Claudia manages to break away from the pack of female creations by sheer force of will and determined disobedience. She is more than discontent, she is proactive. And she isn’t alone.

Like all vampires, Eli was made by someone once upon a time. Both Let the Right One In and the American remake Let Me In are purposefully vague about the details of her origin story, but we can depend on the basic aspects of the common vampire myth to fill in some of the blanks. We don’t know what happened to her maker either, but their absence and Eli’s lack of preoccupation with them seems to support the idea that she doesn’t miss them. Instead, Eli roams the world as she chooses, finding human partners to help her survive along the way. She has broken away from the hold of whatever agenda she was created for and spends the film working her own. Like Claudia, Eli rebells against the routine of her lifestyle for her own desires. Her protector, Hakan, is comfortable in the way of their life and in their solitary household. He has a possessive devotion to Eli as evidenced by his behavior when the subject of Eli’s new friend, Oskar, comes up. Eli is quick to remind him that while he may play the role of her father to the outside world, he doesn’t have any authority authority over who she chooses to spend her time with.

Claudia’s rebellions are much less cooly carried out, perhaps in part because they are nearly always to some degree, unsuccessful. Like Eli, Claudia tries to gain some ownership of her identity through trying to control her appearance and how she is perceived by others. She tries to take her “perfect” doll-like appearance into her own hands by cutting her hair. She dresses older and when she is alone with Louis, she adopts the countenance of a woman as old as she feels rather than that of the child she looks like. These are different but comparable tactics to Eli insisting that she is twelve and maintaining an awareness and hold of childlike things such as puzzles and games. Both of these girls do not want to be overridden into someone else’s idea because of their circumstances. But Claudia cannot get what she wants out of her actions. Her hair grows back when she cuts it, strangers refuse to take her seriously when she dresses older, capturing and drawing grown women does not transform her by any manner of alchemy. But Claudia does accept her fate without a fight, perhaps lest Lestat mistake her for the dolls he buys her every year. So she breaks the rules, pushes her luck, and she tries her hand at a little bit of vampire-on-vampire murder. When Louis starts to show how uncomfortable he is about the deed, Claudia tells him “he deserved to die” and later, that she did it “so we could be free.” She knows, perhaps even better than Louis, that he is a created monster like her too.

Claudia and Eli are both determined, willful girls strong in their sense of self and what they want. It also feels fairly safe to say that the horror derived from them is from a fear of how much they can do and accomplish on their own terms and the consequences of getting on their bad side. I mean, these girls aren’t afraid of things getting a little bloody. At all. But it’s also worth noting that both of these films are invested in their perspectives. Interview with the Vampire is almost devoid of human characters and Let the Right One In is about Oskar and Eli’s growing relationship together. The loved ones in their lives adore them, seek comfort in them, and stand beside them. We read Eli’s notes and watch her quiet excitement as she gets back in touch with what she loves in the world. We see Claudia’s smile as she dances with Louis in France and her forlorn expressions as they share in their loneliness together. As frightful as the lengths these two girls will go to are, it’s hard not to want them to succeed. We are made to understand the frustration and anguish of their positions and the ache of hoping for something as universal and fundamental as control over one’s life and identity. Even though one of these girls succeeds in her story and the other does not, it says something that these films are able to clearly articulate that a little girl is not just pretty and cunning and mysterious. A girl is also every bit as complex and full of yearning as her older male counterparts. She can be as fierce as anything else that goes bump in the night. And sometimes? She’ll win. And you’ll be glad she did.

Kathryn Diaz is a writer living in Houston, Texas. She is currently pursuing a B.A in English at the University of Houston. You can follow her at The Telescope for more of her work.

Fucking with Fate: Sexuality, Loss, and Irreversibility in ‘The Returned’

This guest post by Tina Giannoulis appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.

The concept behind Les Revenants (or The Returned to its anglophone viewers) began in 2004, with the film of the same name. Its premise follows that of the less successful film; set in a small French village, a town reacts as its previously dead inhabitants begin to return, untouched by time or their own passing. If the show sounds familiar, you may be remembering the US series, Resurrection, based on Jason Mott’s 2013 novel, The Returned which, while sharing a title, seems to transpose the same premise to a small town in Missouri without being connected to the French works.

These permutations of the same, basic idea behind Les Revenants indicates something within it that filmmakers and writers are keen to explore. Traditional depictions of zombies are fairly straightforward affairs, using the brain-dead human to comment on all manner of social ills that spread like epidemic and manifest as thoughtless allegiance; from consumerism to organised religion, the politically unpopular to the socially demonised, zombies have acted as allegory for evils that are rendered inhuman. In recent years, the figure of the zombie has had an unmissable resurgence and has seen the figure reworked and appropriated into genres other than horror; Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland offer a comedic take on a zombie apocalypse while Warm Bodies and In The Flesh opt to re-humanise the inhuman.

Les Revenants sits somewhere between these traditional depictions and their rebirth. The series quickly shies away from the tropes of the undead but continues to play with the genres they feature in; horror and thriller elements are peppered through a thoroughly riveting drama, using the mystery and otherworldliness of the revenants to grip and frighten. With only one season aired and another in production, the easiest way to deal with unexplained facets of the story is to understand the world of Les Revenants through magical realism as, ultimately, the revenants’ origins are unnecessary when considering their roles in a series which explores so much more.

In her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin describes science fiction as a thought-experiment, arguing that thought-experiments are not meant to predict the future but rather describe reality. It’s with this in mind that I describe Les Revenants as being a thought-experiment on loss–loss of life, time, and innocence.

The first episode opens on a 15-year-old girl, the eponymous “Camille” (Yara Pilartz), as she finds herself alone at dusk in the mountains above her town. She starts her journey back home, disoriented and a little confused but otherwise intact, despite having died in a school bus trip four years prior. She does not remember her death, nor does she notice the years that she’s missed – but her family certainly has. From mother, Claire (Anne Cosigny), to father, Jerome (Frédéric Pierrot), and twin sister, Lena (Jenna Thiem), we see a spectrum of responses to the return of something lost: joy, suspicion, refusal. While it’s undeniable that Claire and Jerome have been hugely affected by Camille’s death and return, it is Lena who provides the most interesting relationship to Camille as they navigate their mutual loss of a sister–one through death, the other through life now lived and irreversible.

As identical twins, the two have a quality as otherworldly as the revenants and a cultural history as robust as the zombie. From their bountiful presence in mythology, twins have arisen in media time and time again as two sides of the same coin, playing on opposing binaries as well as the pair’s indivisibility. Perhaps the most famous mythological twins are Castor and Pollux, who make up the constellation Gemini, with whom Camille and Lena share a history; within both sets, one twin is immortal and the other not. In both cases, this leads to a struggle as each set refuses to be split by their mortal differences. What sets them apart is that Camille and Lena have been separated once before and this was not without consequence. The gap between Camille’s death and her return leaves the twins at 15 and 19 years old and while it serves as a point of difference between the twins, it also draws them closer as two halves of the same whole; Lena reflects what Camille could have been while Camille reflects what Lena once was.

It is in the space between these two images that Les Revenants questions matters of innocence and purity. Guilt, death and virginity are embedded in their tale as Lena escapes the bus crash by playing hooky in order to have sex with her boyfriend, Frédéric, who Camille also happens to be infatuated with. This sets up a dichotomy between the sacrificial virgin and the guilty survivor which, with the action of each event being intercut, seems to play on la petit morte. More significantly, it is the first signal of Lena’s unaccompanied move through adolescence. It is here that the twins begin to move from complimentary to opposing halves; Lena is sexualised, transitioning to woman and taking on all manner of wicked vices, leaving Camille frozen in time as the incorruptible, innocent child.

A significant part of Camille’s figurative defrosting comes as she sneaks into Lena’s room. In the time since her death, Lena seems to have taken on all manner of wicked vices; Camille surveys the array of rock records, magazine cut outs, and photographs. She lingers over pictures of Frédéric and Lena smoking and smiling in a life that could just as easily have been hers. It’s a stark contrast to Camille’s shrine of a room; a few nondescript posters and girlish colours cover the walls, not to mention the no-smoking sign on her door. Smoking also plays a brief, though telling part in Camille’s characterisation – both Lena and her father have taken it up and she asks her father for a cigarette while demanding the truth on the changes that have occurred since her death. Here, Camille’s otherworldliness does not symbolise her move to adulthood but rather permits that move (or at least permits her transgressions against what is acceptable for her age).

By combining the figures of twins and zombies, Les Revenants avoids positing Camille as a figurehead for all that is good or all that is evil. Instead, she occupies a middle ground and it is this middle ground which allows the thought-experiment to run on unabated. It does not ask what if she had not died, not even what if she came back, but by making Camille a not-quite-zombie and a not-quite-twin, she becomes not-quite-Camille. Not-quite-Camille instead opens up a space to consider what has happened since her death and, through her reappearance, what loss and time have done to Lena.

It should also be noted, however, that for all Les Revenants does for acting out against conventions of little girls in horror, there is a character which rearticulates them for boys. For the most part, Victor (Swann Nambotin) is silent and unassuming, not admitting where he came from or even his real name. He is reluctantly taken in by Julie (Céline Sallette), who was once attacked by cannibal-killer, revenant, Serge (Guillaume Gouix), and soon reveals himself to be perhaps the most horrific of the revenants. Bitch Flicks’ Max Thornton wrote about the nature of violence in Les Revenants, noting the significance of Victor’s appearance in relation to Julie’s attack, stating that the series has an undercurrent of commentary on sexualised, male violence against women.

However, he mentions Victor only as plaster to this violence, a form of healing for Julie, when Victor has shown himself to be something darker. While Camille’s supernatural abilities seem to affect only her sister, Victor has the ability to cause violent visions and actions in anyone. He apparently does so to his unknowing, new-found guardian, inducing a vision of her attacker ready to repeat his crimes before the boy pries the scissors from her hands, seemingly saving her. If Serge’s attacks represent male violence at large then one could argue that Victor’s attacks represent domestic violence. More easily, the link between Victor and Serge (for Victor summons Serge’s image once more, causing Serge’s brother to shoot himself in much the way Julie was poised to impale herself), parallels the convention of a little girl being controlled by an evil spirit to embody the dangerous sexuality and power of womanhood. In Les Revenants, Victor is the little girl, Serge the evil spirit and his powers the embodiment of dangerous sexuality and violence of manhood. This reconfiguration doesn’t just even the playing field for gendered representations of children, it sheds light on far more real and dangerous evils than vampires or puberty.

Tina Giannoulis is a current media student at UNSW in Sydney, Australia. She is the convenor of UNSW Feminist Free Talks and bakes a mean red velvet cupcake. You can keep up to date with her writing and reading by following her on Twitter.

Self-Made Orphan: Why We Cringe When Karen Cooper Snacks on Her Dad

This guest post by Julia Patt appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.

Kyra Schon had exactly one line—“I hurt”—and less than ten minutes of screen time in George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead. Much of her role consisted of lying supine on a table. Her big scene happened 84 minutes into a 95-minute film. Her character is not a perennial favorite on the creepiest kids in cinema lists. (Although when she does appear, she’s No. 1.) But before Regan MacNeil showed us her infamous head-spinning trick, before Damien took the world’s most sinister tricycle ride, and before Samara hauled herself out of the television and into our nightmares, there was little Karen Cooper, who ate her dad and stabbed her mom with a garden trowel.

It’s impossible to understand Karen without discussing her parents, Harry (Karl Hardman) and Helen (Marilyn Eastman); initially, her family is all that gives her context in Romero’s strange new world. But the Coopers always bothered me in Night of the Living Dead. They didn’t seem to belong. After all, almost half the film passes before they appear. Ben (Duane Jones), our protagonist, has spent a good chunk of screen time securing an abandoned farmhouse against the undead. All the stuff you want a good survivor to do, he does: barricade the doors and windows, look for supplies, and settle the nearly catatonic survivor-girl Barbra (Judith O’Dea) on the sofa. Forty minutes in and we’re all ready to weather the long night of Romero’s undead apocalypse.

And then the Coopers emerge from the cellar snarling with metaphorical significance—i.e., the nuclear family staggers out of the underworld to reassert its importance. We’re what you’re meant to defend, they seem to say. Of course, their presence also highlights the awful truth of any zombie apocalypse film: there are no safe places.

If the dead don’t overrun a stronghold, you will have to deal with the living eventually.

By the way, good luck if the living you have to deal with is Harry Cooper. He’s all the worst characteristics of the patriarchy packaged and amplified: aggressive, entitled, self-centered, oddly petulant, and arrogant. He won’t apologize for not coming up to help, despite hearing Barbra’s screams. Instead, he lashes out at Ben for criticizing him. When the others refuse to join him in the cellar, he throws a temper tantrum. He’ll board up that door and leave them to rot, understand? Moments later, he furiously demands they share the supplies Ben’s scavenged from the house. “We’ve got to have food down there,” Harry blusters. “We’ve got a right.” Helen, his wife, is not much more compelling. Bitter and cynical, she can’t resist poking at her husband’s neuroses:

“That’s important, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“To be right and for everyone else to be wrong.”

We know from just a few lines of dialogue that this is no close-knit couple or loving family, for all that its structure might evoke white picket fences and suburban houses. (Note: it’s unclear where the Coopers come from, but they seem neither rural nor urban.) And in case we miss the point, Helen sums up their situation this way: “We may not enjoy living together. But dying together isn’t going to solve anything.”

The crumbling cement in this relationship is the injured little girl lying on the table downstairs. Her parents are united only on the question of her safety. Unsurprisingly, Karen has no voice or agency of her own. The adults perceive her as entirely helpless— “Maybe it’s shock,” her mother says of her condition. “She can’t possibly take all the racket…” her father objects to bringing her upstairs. She is, they believe, the thing to be protected, shielded from the horror of the events outside. Like the house itself, if they can get her through the night, it will all be OK.

What no one understands in Romero’s first film is, of course, that the undead have already infected Karen. While audiences of Dawn of the Dead and every zombie movie after know that a bite is a death sentence, the characters in Night of the Living Dead haven’t fully realized what they will have to sacrifice. The news reports in the background that families “will have to forgo the dubious comfort of a funeral.” But the problem is much more insidious and frightening: families will have to forgo the comfort of family in order to survive.

It only takes a brief moment of contact for the Coopers to lose Karen. And no amount of hand-holding or parental influence will undo the contamination. While many debate the extent to which Night of the Living Dead is a political allegory, Romero has repeatedly stated he wanted the film to capture the social unrest of the 1960s. Once exposed to the chaos of the world outside, Karen is irrevocably changed. She is about to become part of the danger. Only Ben seems at all cognizant of the fact that she may pose a threat to them. “Who knows what kind of disease those things carry,” he points out when her parents acknowledge that she’s been bitten.

Until the end of the film, Karen remains what she seems: a sick little girl. She dies and rises amidst the chaos of the house being overrun by the undead. After a struggle, Ben shoots Harry, who went for his gun. Harry stumbles down to the cellar and staggers towards his little girl, hand outstretched in what should be a touching scene between parent and child. The next time we see the two of them, Karen crouches over her father—now dead or unconscious— a handful of meat in her hands and his blood on her lips. She does not need his affection, but she will take sustenance from him.

Undead Karen takes a bite out of dear old Dad

Helen finds them this way and, having drawn Karen’s attention, backs into a corner, horrified. Karen advances and then stabs her mother with a garden trowel in an almost surreal, Hitchcockian sequence. Helen is helpless against her undead daughter. All she can say is “baby,” which Karen does not acknowledge or recognize. Her murder of her mother is ultra-violent; she deals several blows to Helen’s abdomen, thus destroying the origin of her own life.

Romero’s living dead regularly use tools

The film and the scene disturbed audiences to no end, and Karen Cooper has become one of the iconic images of Romero’s films. As said, her moment is brief. Yet, it sticks with us. If we compare Karen to the other women in the film, she initially does not seem unlike Barbra, who is mostly helpless and overwhelmed. She must depend on the others for her survival; alone, she wouldn’t make it. Predictably, these young women are fragile, delicate, and need protection. They are not meant for the horrors outside the house.

This appears to be true up until Karen’s point of resurrection. Where Barbra is devoured, Karen is transformed. Unlike her parents, who are trying to hold onto the old social norms, or Ben, who will do anything to survive, Karen joins the restless mob of the undead. Not consciously or willfully, it’s true, but the end result is the same. Although briefly a victim, she becomes the monster and destroys the remains of her family. She cements her status as a member of the undead by consuming her father and increases their numbers by murdering her mother. These two acts definitively separate her from humanity. She neither wants nor needs the shelter of the family unit.

What’s subversive about Karen Cooper, then, is that she doesn’t just die. In the eyes of society, a good, innocent little girl would simply perish when she encounters something so monstrous. Instead, she joins it. Embodied in her, the new generation does not save us or give us hope. Rather, they become part of the chaos. And no amount of reasoning or pleading will sway them.

Julia Patt is a writer from Maryland. She also edits 7×20, a journal of twitter literature, and is a regular contributor to the Tate Street High Society literary blog. Follow her on twitter: https://twitter.com/chidorme

“The Demon” in ‘Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit’

‘Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit,’ a BBC production from 25 years ago, adapted by author Jeanette Winterson and based on her own autobiographical novel, is one of the few films in theaters or on TV which contains both a coming-out story and another parallel, equally compelling story. Seven-year-old, red-haired “Jess” (played as a young child by Emily Aston and as a teen by Charlotte Coleman) grows up in a small town in Lancashire, in the north of England, with her strict Pentecostal adoptive parents; her father, always in the background, is silent and her mother (Geraldine McEwan), front and center, quotes the Bible and denouncing the “heathens” all around her.

This post by Ren Jender appears as part of The Terror of Little Girls Theme Week.

I used to not understand why so many queer people disliked coming out stories in films, literature, and TV, but now I do. Because, as important as coming out stories are to the community, they are not the only stories–not even along with their flip-side: queer-bashing stories–the community has to tell, a fact casual observers wouldn’t realize watching most queer characters in movies and on television. The omission isn’t because real-life queer people haven’t led interesting lives, but because screenwriters, when adapting real-life queer people’s stories, have cut the queer right out of the script. This phenomenon is not a relic of the distant past: last year’s film about the author of Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers, had no mention of her long-term relationship with a woman. This year’s much anticipated bio-pic about WWII codebreaker Alan Turing who was arrested, tried and convicted for the crime of “homosexuality” and was then forced to undergo “chemical castration” as punishment–and went on to kill himself as a result–includes little enough of his identity as a gay man that even straight critics have noticed.

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, a BBC production from 25 years ago, adapted by author Jeanette Winterson and based on her own autobiographical novel, is one of the few films in theaters or on TV which contains both a coming-out story and another parallel, equally compelling story. Seven-year-old, red-haired “Jess” (played as a young child by Emily Aston and as a teen by Charlotte Coleman) grows up in a small town in Lancashire, in the north of England, with her strict Pentecostal adoptive parents; her father, always in the background, is silent and her mother (Geraldine McEwan), front and center, quotes the Bible and denouncing the “heathens” all around her.

The TV film, directed by Beeban Kidron (Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason), and scored by Rachel Portman (who has composed for many films, Belle is one of the most recent), captures a world of women. Jess’s mother is one of several middle-aged and older “ladies” in unfashionable 1950s-style suits and hats (the action starts around 1968) who are the backbone of the church. The pastor is the only man of note in nearly three hours of run-time: Jess’s father is present throughout her childhood, but he’s either sleeping (he works the night shift) or looking on with raised eyebrows but no other comment while Jess’s mother embarks on her latest project (equipping the house with an indoor toilet, painting all the house interiors, traveling to another town to minister to the sick or gathering Jess’s books to burn them). The father is so hesitant to speak that in a scene toward the end several of the characters are startled to hear him say a quiet “Amen.”

The terror in Oranges is the terror of the family. Children don’t have any choice in who raises them and until they leave home they are, to some degree, at the mercy of their parents. Fruit also exposes the terror of religious fanaticism. Jess’s mother sees sin and evil everywhere except in the church and with “the redeemed”–which is why she keeps her daughter out of school until she’s 7. The pastor takes the idea of hellfire so literally that he keeps a fire extinguisher in the van he uses to preach in other towns. They see The Devil in everything different from their own insular world, the church and their beliefs. Their perception of “a demon” in the teenaged Jess seems inevitable.

But Fruit frames fanaticism and not religious belief as the problem. Jess is close to an 80-something church lady, Elsie, (Margery Withers) who shows her many kindnesses. And the church and Jess’s sincere beliefs (which shine through Coleman’s radiant face when she talks about Jesus) gives her (and author Winterson, who published the book when she was 24) a confidence that is rare for women and girl characters in films and TV. When the pastor brings Jess and her girlfriend, Melanie (whom she converted!) in front of the congregation and tells them to repent for their “unnatural” passion, Melanie (Cathryn Bradshaw) bursts into tears and collapses on the floor but Jess, who is starting to preach herself, faces the pastor and quotes the Bible back to him, arguing that their love isn’t “unnatural” at all.

Her courage in standing up to the pastor would be rewarded in a lesser film (or one that was less autobiographical) but instead, as she struggles and shouts, she is tied up and gagged on the floor in a private parlor and “prayed over” for three days, without relent, until “the demon” is exorcised from her. Like most people who “confess” or “recant” during torture, Jess does so only to escape further harm. Right after she’s let go, she secretly meets up with the closeted queer member of the church-lady group, Miss Jewsbury (Celia Imrie) to give her a love letter to deliver to Melanie. Jess even continues to preach but eventually acquires another girlfriend (whom she also converts!) which permanently separates her from the church–and her home. She goes to live and work with her mother’s one acquaintance outside the church, the friendly, local undertaker, Cissy (Barbara Hicks), and at the end comes to a kind of peace with her past.

The pastor, Jess and her mother — The pastor, Jess, and her mother

Although the film doesn’t shy away from the damage the church and her mother’s fanaticism does (at one point Jess, as a child, is kept from medical treatment because the congregation believe she is experiencing a “miracle” instead of a raging infection) the audience comes to almost the point of admiration for Jess’s mother: as much as we can muster for someone who is wrong about everything. Her determination and exuberance (Winterson’s real adoptive mother wasn’t nearly as jaunty, which Winterson documents in the nonfiction Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?) is like the wind in the sails of a ship and propels the action forward. McEwan later played another religious fanatic who was cruel to young women in The Magdalene Sisters, but here she’s no cardboard villain. She’s sometimes very funny, though often unwittingly so, playing church hymns on an organ which has an added disco beat or melodramatically wondering what the neighbors will think if she’s dragged away to prison for keeping Jess out of school. Jess, who has already absorbed large chunks of The Bible, then mentions that one of the saints spent time in prison to which her mother replies, “I know that, but the neighbors don’t!”

Charlotte Coleman (a former child TV star in Britain–whom many might remember as Scarlett from Four Weddings and a Funeral–she died at age 33) is a more than worthy foil to McEwan, a persuasive and joyful preacher on and off the pulpit and also a girl giddy with love, especially when she’s with her first girlfriend, Melanie. The film doesn’t shy away from showing the two of them in a tender love scene together: their small, slender bodies signaling to us their youth and the wide eyes they make at each other showing the depth of their feelings. Without an explicit scene I don’t think we would have absorbed that Jess’s faith in love is as strong–and eventually stronger–than her faith in God. For so many of us who came out in the decades before homophobia became unfashionable, we followed love (and sexual desire) the same way the devout are supposed to follow God, without question and without fear–in spite of all the terrible things we were told about queer people and their lives. When Jess meets up with Miss Jewsbury she tells her that during the time she was prayed over she saw, or maybe hallucinated, the demon the group was trying to exorcise from her, “It was orange,” she says, the color of her hair. “It looked like me.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-D-CkBvSc0″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

The Beth Thomas Story: How a TV Film and Documentary Captured a Child Enraged

Tim and Julie didn’t know about the sexual abuse Beth had been subjected to as early as 19 months old by her father. They didn’t know she was suffering from Reactive Attachment Disorder, a condition that surfaces from past trauma and neglect into oceans of disturbing, detached, unresponsive, and apathetic behavior. They couldn’t possibly know that a young girl could be filled with so much—that much rage.

This guest post by Kim Hoffman appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.

CORRECTION UPDATED 2/10/16: An earlier version of this article incorrectly associated the Attachment Center with the Evergreen Psychotherapy Center. We have been informed that The Evergreen Psychotherapy Center has never been, is not currently and will never be associated with The Attachment Center of Evergreen.

When I was a kid, I was introduced to a movie called Child of Rage, a 1992 CBS TV movie that would be on Lifetime after school. It gave me equal parts dread and fascination—it was about a young girl who wanted to kill her adoptive family, severely traumatized by previous abuse as a baby. What I didn’t know at the time was that the film was based on the real life story of a little girl named Beth Thomas, and that two years earlier in 1990, HBO had released a documentary about the real-life Beth as part of their America Undercover series, called Child of Rage: A Story of Abuse. In the documentary, an oppressed Beth accounts for all the moments I’d seen repeatedly play out in the TV movie, including frank and expressionless accounts of her polluted understanding of right from wrong—like murdering the parents who adopted her and the only brother she’d ever known. I marveled, and still marvel, over the power of this six and a half-year-old child who was never shown displays of love and empathy, until she was prepared to take another person’s life.

Tim and Julie Tennant adopted little Beth and her younger brother Jonathan back in the ‘80s. The couple took the sibling pair into their home, not aware of their past abuse at the hands of their biological father. Her mother, who had abandoned her and Jonathan, died when Beth was one. When Child Services found the children, Beth was screaming in her own soil and Jonathan was found in his crib with a curdled bottle of milk, his head flattened from the way he’d been positioned. Tim and Julie didn’t know about the sexual abuse Beth had been subjected to as early as 19 months old by her father. They didn’t know she was suffering from Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), a condition that surfaces from past trauma and neglect into oceans of disturbing, detached, unresponsive, and apathetic behavior. They couldn’t possibly know that a young girl could be filled with so much—that much rage.

In the documentary, a psychiatrist interviews Beth, but he’s one out of a whole team of therapists who guided Beth in her recovery. In 1989, Beth and her adoptive parents went to live with a woman named Connell Watkins, a therapist who practiced a type of “holding” therapy for children who are severely affected by RAD. That same year, a girl by the name of Candace Newmaker was born—but no one would guess that a little over a decade later, the 10-year-old would die in an accidental killing at the hands of Connell and another therapist, Julie Ponder. In that incident, they were conducting a “rebirthing” session in which they wrapped Candace in sheets and pillows to simulate a “womb connection” between Candace and her adoptive mother. Candace had been previously diagnosed with RAD after almost setting her house on fire, and years spent on medicine to keep her rage at bay—often biting or spitting at her therapists. Regardless, this session went terribly wrong. After an hour and ten minutes, the girl’s mother asked if she wanted to be born, and Candace quietly murmured “no”—her last word before dying there in that session. But this event hadn’t taken place yet, not back in 1989 when Beth was dancing the dangerous edge of child murderer and child rehabilitated. Could it be possible?

In the CBS movie, Beth’s character is called “Cat.” The new mom begins to notice Cat’s strange behavior—controlling her brother’s every move, acting jealously about any attention he receives and finding ways to seduce or manipulate adults in order to have the spotlight on her—including a highly inappropriate fondling of her adoptive grandfather. Cat’s coping mechanism for when she’s caught doing something bad includes smashing things and screaming obscenities, eventually retreating into docile panic, holding out her stuffed teddy bear like a wall of armor between herself and the adult—becoming very small and childlike, after displaying such high-strung violence. The most shocking moment in the film is when her new parents catch her bashing her brother’s head into the cement floor in the basement. It’s an eerie scene that sticks with me still, the young boy clutching his dinosaur stuffed animal, and Cat in powder pink sweatpants and tiny little sneakers following him into a corner.

However dark and disturbing, Child of Rage depicts Beth Thomas as a manipulator and seducer to a tee—we begin to see more and more of Cat’s charms and her ability to influence anyone’s move, especially when she knows their move may squash her plan. When the parents find out the truth about Cat’s past abuse as an infant, their worries seem to magnify, especially after so many incidents: Cat kills a nest of baby birds, stabs the family dog with a pin, and slices a classmate across his face with a shard of glass. She lies about her involvement or reasoning and remains sweet—with a tinge of repulsion we can’t help but see slip out from her pursed lips when she draws out, “Yes—Mommy.”

Meanwhile in the Beth Thomas documentary, as she props her head up with her small hand, her eyes widen every once in a while as she explains in detail her desire to kill. Still, it’s obvious that by now in her real-life therapy, she has gone from deceptive to forthcoming, though her remorse is hard to locate from simply observing her. She only trips up once, about the baby birds she killed. The psychiatrist asks her if she thinks the birds could fly or run away from her—she seems confused and half states/half asks, “Yes?” He then asks if she remembers them dying, and she stumbles through an account of her mom telling her that one of them had died, yes. But the psychiatrist goes straight for it—telling Beth, “Your mom told me that you killed the baby birds, Beth.”

Suddenly Beth shows traces of sad emotion that the psychiatrist seems to draw out, coddling her: “That’s OK, that’s OK,” though I don’t know that this is a breakthrough, perhaps just a child whose red-handed admission is still proof she has a long road ahead. This single event was big for Beth; it was her one killing spree. She even admits to hocking a knife from the dishwasher and stashing it in her room. When asked what she wanted to do with the knife, she chirps back at the therapist, “Kill John. And Mommy and Daddy.” She then says, “They can’t see me, but they can feel me,” when she explains why she chooses to sneak about in the shadows while her parents sleep, unaware that their small child could be lurking their hallways yielding a knife.

It’s frightening to watch a child, a real life child, so small on the sofa that her legs barely skim over the side, speaking so candidly about life and death—not to mention her traumatic sexual abuse that no child (or adult, even) can make full sense of and process in a way that any of us should feel is simple. In the film, when the parents take Cat into intensive therapy, the therapist gives them a book called Kids Who Kill by Charles Patrick Ewing, written in 1992, the same year the TV movie aired. If you look up the book, you’ll find it’s connected back to Beth Thomas through the company it keeps in the category of “books on children who kill.”

There’s a lot of speculation over what happened to Beth Thomas after her intensive therapy with Connell Watkins. In the documentary, a woman in a bright track-suit with a cheery disposition talks with hope about Beth’s recovery, while we follow Beth on her chore run around the Attachment Center in Evergreen, Colorado, feeding goats and whatnot (no animals were harmed, seriously). Her name is Nancy Thomas, and she later adopted Beth. It’s rumored that the Tennants kept Jonathan. It’s a little disheartening to think that Beth has had not one, but three mothers. Nancy now owns and operates Families By Design, an organization that provides support for parents and children coping and suffering with RAD. Essentially, it’s become Nancy’s lifework.

Even Beth Thomas herself has participated in many of Nancy’s events, including writing a book that she and her mother wrote together, Dandelion on My Pillow, Butcher Knife Beneath. The book was released in 2010, following Nancy’s previous guide book five years earlier, When Love is Not Enough: A Guide to Parenting with RAD. What Cat displays in the film really illustrates best how easily young girls who are suffering with RAD can use their sexuality in ways that mirror what they’ve seen adults display, though the end result is obvious—that the behavior for how sexuality is displayed in adults is in sometimes lost in translation. How it’s modeled in children who are, as is, sexual beings, but confounded by past trauma in developmental years, can be disturbing and uninhibited. When Cat tells her grandpa that he can be her “sweet, sweet teddy bear,” we have to wonder if baby Cat was influenced by the language she heard from her biological father—the abused taking the abusive language and integrating that into their foundation for bonding, relating, receiving something she wants, gaining total affection and love.

Look anywhere: The reviews on Amazon, web forums, personal websites, reviewers—there is an obvious split among people in support of Nancy Thomas and the practice of Attachment Therapy, and people who, as a result of the Candace Newmark case, find AT and this version of therapy to be abusive and inconclusive—even some adults who underwent said therapy have stepped out over the years to express their concerns over the therapy they were subjected to as children, but, therein lies the toughness with accurately, tangibly calculating whether or not a type of therapy that is aimed at manipulative, violent, disturbed, abused children has: long-term positive effects, or deepens PTSD because of its method.

Something to keep in mind when you watch the film (and I recommend watching the Beth Thomas documentary first, and then delving into the CBS movie last)—the 1992 movie does not mention the word rape, or sex, or vagina, or anything else sex-specific, at all. They hint at the fact that Beth was raped by her biological father through grainy nightmarish flashbacks, and in one instance when Beth shows the sexual abuse through two teddy bears. In the Beth Thomas documentary, she admits to masturbating daily, even sometimes in public, to the point of infection and bleeding and having to be taken to the hospital as a result. She also expresses that she committed similar acts on her brother Jonathan, molesting him at any opportunity she got—which is why Tim and Julie Tennant eventually had to lock Beth in her bedroom for everyone’s safety. All of this, of course, lends itself to the reason why they sought outside help.

Today, Beth works as a nurse, and continues to support her mom Nancy’s organization in Colorado, speaking out about her recovery, and even coming to the defense of Connell Watkins on the witness stand back in 2000. (Watkins served seven years of her 16-year sentence.) Beth professed she wouldn’t be here without Connell. By all accounts, those closest to Beth will attest to her dramatic change and healing. But Attachment Therapy remains the seesaw on the playground when it comes to understanding how to properly heal traumatized children. The Beth Thomas story is a reality—it’s not an afterschool special. For all we know, Beth may very well still have issues—with men, with father figures, with forgiving herself for the acts she committed on her brother, and it may be confounded by the fact that she’s a woman who hadn’t yet grown up and very well had to all at the same time. There was adolescence, teen years, periods, relationships—all of which presents foreign emotion for any girl. Imagine being Beth Thomas, having her childhood, and then facing life head-on. I want to believe in Nancy Thomas, in AT, and in little girls like Beth who “beat the odds” and reclaim life. Again, I ask: Is it possible? Or will she always just be the little child of rage?

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2-Re_Fl_L4″]

Kim Hoffman is a writer for AfterEllen.com and Curve Magazine. She currently keeps things weird in Portland, Oregon. Follow her on Twitter: @the_hoff

Alarming Innocence: The Terror of Little Girls in ‘The Crucible’

Miller’s examination of the Salem Witch Trials, held in the Province of Massachusetts Bay from 1692-3, depicts the internal, secretive drive of a New England witch hunt, and how paranoia quickly escalates to devastate a marriage, a family, neighbors, and eventually, to cripple an entire community. The actions of little girls set it all in motion.

This guest post by Laura Shamas appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.

When I first saw Arthur Miller’s The Crucible as a child, I found it utterly terrifying; why could this crowd of girls see and feel things that no adult could? Later, studying it in school and learning about its allegorical references to McCarthyism in the 1950 s, I appreciated this American theatre classic at a deeper level. Miller’s examination of the Salem Witch Trials, held in the Province of Massachusetts Bay from 1692-3, depicts the internal, secretive drive of a New England witch hunt, and how paranoia quickly escalates to devastate a marriage, a family, neighbors, and eventually, to cripple an entire community. The actions of little girls set it all in motion.

The Crucible had its premiere on Broadway in January of 1953. In his 1987 memoir Time Bends: A Life, Miller describes a 1952 flash of understanding of “the Puritan cult” upon viewing etchings and woodcuts on the walls of the Historical Society Witch Museum: “Portrayed were the afflicted innocent girls pointing in terror at some farmer’s wife who was secretly persecuting them and yet stood in proud contempt of their Christian accusations” (p. 42).

Much as been written about Miller’s “fictionalization” of the Salem trial accounts, e.g., the conflation of characters, and the changing of characters’ ages. For example, accuser Abigail Williams was around 11 years old during the actual trials, not 17. John Proctor was about 60, not a youthful man. In 1996, Miller responded to some of this, as quoted in the New York Times: “My job as a dramatist is to create a drama, not documentary history—any more, if I may say, than Shakespeare had in mind when he created his kings and characters who had very little resemblance to the real people.”

When I saw the 1996 film of The Crucible, penned by Miller and directed by Nicholas Hytner, I was struck by its depiction of the condemnation of female sexuality in the Puritan world. The theme of “the witch as female scapegoat” is applicable to the film. Miller mentions female sexuality perceived as horror in a 1996 NY Times op-ed entitled “Salem Revisited”: “Witch hunts are always spooked by women’s horrifying sexuality awakened by the superstud Devil. In Europe, where tens of thousands perished in the hunts, broadsides showed the Devil with two phalluses, one above the other. And of course mankind’s original downfall came about when the Filthy One corrupted the mother of mankind.”

In “Salem Revisited,” Miller describes Puritanical views of race and sexuality related to Tituba from Barbados, who was enslaved to Reverend Samuel Parris at the time of the trials. As one of the few people of color in Salem Village, Tituba was abused and treated as Other. Miller notes: “Tituba was tortured into naming women she had seen with the Devil, thus starting the hunt on its way. The conflation of female sexuality and blackness in a white world is an old story, and here it had lethal result.”

Due to space limitations, I’ll narrow my analysis to three key scenes in the film: the opening dancing scene in the forest, the first accusation scene near Betty’s bed, and a courtroom “yellow bird” scene near the end, involving the condemnation of Mary Warren (Karron Graves), who works for John (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Elizabeth Proctor (Joan Allen).

In a marked difference from the play’s opening, the movie begins at night as teenaged Abigail Williams (played by Winona Ryder) awakens a young girl named Betty Parris (Rachael Bella). Together, they sneak out of the house, lit by a full moon, and head into the dark woods; other girls join them. The group of giggling Puritan girls, ranging in ages from about 6 to 17, tramp through the wild forest together until they reach a ceremonial campfire. When they’ve gathered in a circle, Tituba (Charlayne Woodard) asks: “What’d you bring me?” The girls each put something into a boiling cauldron at the fire’s center–an herb or toad, and a boy’s name is uttered as part of a spell. Young Betty, notably, says nothing but puts something into the pot. Abigail supplies a live black chicken for the brew. Tituba twirls the animal above her head as part of a ritual, and sings in another language. The girls dance and sway to Tituba’s music, and express their longings for certain young men or boys, by name. Although Abby says nothing, the other girls volunteer that Abby wants John Proctor for her love match. Then suddenly, Abby takes the chicken from Tituba, smashes its head, and is splattered with blood. She smears it onto her face. This inspires the other girls to scream, and a few of them disrobe, dancing in “hysteria.”

Suspicious Rev. Parris (Bruce Davison) comes upon their gathering. Someone yells, “It’s the minister!” The girls run. Parris’ daughter Betty, held by Abigail, shouts, “I can’t move, I can’t move.” Alone by the fire, Parris discovers a toad in the pot. The next morning, back at Parris’ home, where his niece Abigail resides, too, Betty can’t move or speak. Eventually, an exploration of Betty’s catatonic condition leads to conjuring charges against Abigail and Tituba. As Betty begins to “wake up,” she says she was trying to contact her dead mother in the ritual and wants “to fly” to her. “Keep still, you little devil,” someone replies, already setting the tone for the demonization of the girls. Alone with the girls later, Abigail cruelly threatens them to keep quiet about what really happened that night.

This opening ritual scene establishes the adolescent girls as a group, a collective, or as a female chorus found in ancient drama. Ringleader Abigail and servant Tituba stand out in the first scene, as well as young Betty and Mary Warren, but the other girls are part of a pack, expressing an ardent interest in magic to woo young men: they exhibit a supernatural interest in romance, an eagerness to “short-cut” courtship with a spell. The wild young girls in the woods, with exceptions noted above, are established as monolithic, secretive, lusty, rule-breaking, and unfazed by the use of spells–or in other words, in league with the Devil. Their charm contributions to the boiling cauldron, which could be seen as a fiery womb symbol, are indicative of their acceptance of the dark arts; their spontaneous wanton disrobing, seemingly for Satan, signifies the magnitude of their repressed lust. This moonlit spectacle depicts the “horror” of budding female sexual desire from a Puritan perspective.

Abigail, in an early scene with Proctor, forces a kiss on her former lover, even as he calls her “child” and says he’ll cut off his hand before he becomes involved with her again. This short exchange reinforces the concept of “female as sexual aggressor” in the film.

By night, the Salem girls are presented as believers in conjuring, but by day, we find them seated together in a church space for questioning by the newly arrived demonology expert Reverend Hale (Rob Campbell). The girls are costumed in a rainbow array of solid colors, each a different hue; the rainbow imagery visually associates them with “light” and iridescence. The shadow/light dichotomy of the girls is highlighted here, for, in daylight, the group reflects innocence and purity—and in this scene, even a love of Christianity.

Abigail, under questioning, accuses Tituba of magic. This leads to another sequence that presents the Salem girls as terrorizing: after tortured Tituba blesses the Lord, she begins to name Salem women as witches, to appease her brutal owner Parris. Abigail suddenly declares: “I want the light of God! I want the sweet love of Jesus! I did dance with the Devil. I saw him. I wrote in his book. I go back to Jesus. I kiss his hand.” And then she adds: “I saw Sarah Good with the Devil!” The other girls take up this refrain, supplying the names of myriad local women—and a man. They name Bridget Bishop, George Jacobs, Goody Howe, Goody Sibber, Goody Pike, and many more, as “with the Devil.”

Seeking revenge on Salem adults who’ve wronged them, the girls line up on a stairwell and function as a chorus of young female accusers. Reverend Hale yells: “Hallelujah! Glory Be to God! It is broken. They are free!” The adults who witness this scene believe the girls’ accusations, even though there’s no proof; a jailer is summoned to imprison the accused. Abigail’s reaffirmation of her love of Christ makes her “pure” again in the eyes of the adults. The fickle nature of the girls is established in this scene; opportunistically, they accuse innocent people in order to save themselves from the soul-damning charges of witchcraft. They have their scapegoats; they will not be blamed. Their volatile swing from “Satan to Jesus” helps to launch the witch trials that will claim 20 lives: 19 hangings, and one man pressed to death.

Their impenetrable solidarity is also what makes the girls so scary. Perhaps because they’ve been threatened by Abigail, or perhaps because they’re truly part of a groupthink mentality focused on self-preservation, the girls, except for Mary, follow Abigail’s lead through most of the film. They become alarming again in a courtroom scene in which Proctor accuses Abigail: “This is a whore’s vengeance now.” After Elizabeth is questioned about Abigail and Proctor’s affair, Hale pronounces Abigail “false.” But Abigail abruptly screams and points to the ceiling of the court: “Why do you come, yellow bird? You cannot want to tear my face.” The girls, huddling together, “see” the yellow bird, too. Abigail identifies it as Mary’s evil spirit; they begin to repeat everything Mary says. Judge Danforth (Paul Scofield) asks Mary why they parrot her. After more screaming, the girls run out of the courtroom, to escape the predatory “yellow bird”; they sob as they run into the sea, a baptismal visual reference. Eventually, in the water, Mary recants her support of the Proctors, calling John “the devil’s man.”

In this sequence, female sexuality and jealousy (“a whore’s vengeance”) are identified by Proctor as the key motives driving the witch hunt. The vindictive girls accuse one of their own as a conjuror to save Abigail, and thus, saving the group as a whole. Loyalty to community, family, and Christian morality are not girlish attributes in The Crucible. Instead, the girl accusers seek only their own safety as the film nears its climax; there’s no more talk of romance or lust. The terrorizing little girls who offer no real proof of their accusations in The Crucible watch the community hangings as a gleeful ensemble; we see their happy faces for the first few executions. Eventually, as time goes on, they become saddened. One wonders what might happen to them in the near future, as Abigail runs away from Salem for good.

The Puritan condemnation of budding female sexuality—a rejection of mysterious girls who long for love and lust—is mined by Miller and director Hytner for all dramatic effect in The Crucible. Females are both scapegoats and accusers in this world. In a final nod to a view of women as weak and sexually complex, Elizabeth accepts blame for Proctor’s adultery in the final moments, saying she “kept a cold house.”

In The Crucible, ruthless fickle girls propel paranoia; they are able to turn on a whim from the Devil to Jesus, and accuse their elders to save themselves. They are truly terrifying because they have no loyalty to conventional mores or religion, only to each other—a taboo sorority founded on nocturnal sexual secrecy, a presumed purity based on pretense. They are portrayed with a “pack” mentality, easily lead by a jilted teenager with a cruel streak. And the scariest aspect of all: they are so “innocent” that their accusations require no true evidence, thus upending an ideal of basic justice in the modern world. But they have an undeniable agency throughout most of the film; as a force, they are one. A communal suspicion of young girls proves fatal in The Crucible, as the last image in the film makes plain: a close-up of the hangman’s rope.

Laura Shamas is a writer, mythologist and film consultant. Her previous writing on witches is: ‘We Three’: The Mythology of Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters. Website: LauraShamas.com.

Little Girls in Horror Films: Setting the Stage for Female Double Standards

This guest post by BJ Colangelo appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.

Horror films frequently utilize little girls as a “go-to” scare tactic. As the sound disappears in a dark and spooky house covered in cobwebs and shadows, a little girl’s laugh or even a song will echo throughout the halls. The contrast of something so seemingly innocent found in a dark and uninviting environment has been used for decades. Whether it’s the iconic and eerie request of the Grady sisters asking Danny Torrance to play forever (and ever, and ever, and ever) in The Shining, or the innocent announcement of “They’re Heeeeere” from little Carol Anne Freeling in Poltergeist, little girls are as much of a scaring staple as a shrieking cat or a set of wailing violins. While there are the exceptions like Damien in The Omen or Barto in The Unborn, for the large part, little girls are used much more frequently in killer kid/child possession/child ghost films. In the same breath, the safety of little girls is valued far more than the safety of little boys. This double standard shown with little girls in horror films perpetuates the idea that women, regardless of age, are constantly in a state of conflict.

Little girls are often what we associate with innocence. Girls are said to be born out of “sugar, spice, and everything nice,” which attaches a stigma to women from birth that is unrealistic. Society is conditioned to believe this ridiculous myth, which changes the way we value little girls over little boys. When little girls in horror films aren’t used as demons/ghosts/killers/etc. and instead exist as just human, the importance of their survival is much greater than any other character. Referring back to Carol Anne Freeling in the Poltergeist franchise, the entire film is centered on protecting and saving her. Carol Anne’s brother, Robbie, arguably endures the more traumatic events in the film, but the focus still remains on Carol Anne. Yes, Robbie’s trees, gravity, his own toys, and his bedroom are torturing and “taken” by the spirits in the house, but the entire focus stays on protecting Carol Anne. Never mind the years of therapy Robbie may require to help him after the tree outside of his room tried to kill him, we still only care about Carol Anne simply because as a little girl, we feel that she constantly needs protecting.

Even when little girls are presented as the villains, we still care more about their survival than little boys. The Swedish vampire hit, Let The Right One In, shows Eli, a vampire girl around the same appearing age as her male counterpart, Oskar. Eli is capable of taking care of herself (and proves it throughout the course of the film) while Oskar is frequently bullied and shown as weak and in need of protection every step of the way. However, Eli’s survival is the one we focus on the most. Whether it’s aggravation towards her helper, Hakan, and his insolence that has now put her safety in jeopardy, or the fact an angry townsperson is hot on her trail to kill her, we sympathize with Oskar’s bullying, but we don’t invest in his safety quite like we do Eli’s. We expect Oskar to “deal” with his issues like he always had done before, but with Eli, we constantly want those around her to “save” her, even though she could do it on her own if she chose.

In Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs, we also witness intersectionality at play. Poindexter “Fool” Williams, is a young African-American boy trapped in a house of horrors. While he appears to be about the same age as the Caucasian girl, Alice Robeson, we value her safety far more than we do Fool’s. From the get-go, Fool is presented as almost deserving to be in trouble because he’s a poor Black child, and the angelically white Alice is stuck living in a home with abusive parents. The threat from “Mommy and Daddy” Robeson is much greater toward Fool, but we still shift our focus toward Alice and sense a greater sense of distress towards her survival. Fool is presented as not only a troublemaking youth, but also as the undisputed hero of the film. We believe that this poor Black child is capable enough of making it out alive because “he should be used to survival” while we see Alice as weak and with a lack of “street smarts.” It’s a tragic truth, but this sort of value on the young white female is something that is commonly reflected in the way the media portrays lost children (aka: missing white woman syndrome).

At the same time, despite our value of the lives of little girls over just about anyone else in a horror film, girls are used overwhelmingly more than boys as a source of “evil” in horror films. Cathy’s Curse, The Exorcist, Silent Hill, The Bad Seed, The Ring, The Shining, Orphan, Night of the Living Dead, Alice Sweet Alice, The Last Exorcism, The Amityville Horror, Case 39, and countless other films have all portrayed little girls as the perfect vessel for pure, unadulterated evil. We are terrified of these evil little girls, but at the same time, we feel like they need to be protected over anyone else. These conflicting ideals are the very start of the double standards that women endure over the course of their lives.

Compare this to a film like Insidious, where the focus is on little boys, we still don’t invest in their safety. The son, Dalton, is transported into an otherworldly land, but the greatest sense of conflict occurs when the father, an adult, goes in after him. It’s almost as if we don’t care about boys until they become men, but we only care about women when they’re little.

The film Orphan is particularly interesting in that it shows a little girl as evil–a little girl as the ultimate object needing protection–and a little boy as someone we completely ignore. Esther, a deranged child adopted by a loving family with two existing children, plays the villain in this film. The existing daughter, Max, is a deaf girl about the age of 4, and her brother Daniel is closer to Esther’s age at 10-12. While Daniel is immediately skeptical of Esther, he is written off as being a pain-in-the-ass prepubescent boy, while Max is shown as the perfect daughter, loving and trusting…the way little girls SHOULD be. However, when Esther is revealed to be the personification of evil that she is, our focus shifts to protecting Max. Esther literally tries to set Daniel on fire and burn him alive, but we still fear for Max’s safety on a much higher level when Esther turns her attention to Max. Why? Because she’s a little girl, and little girls need saving.

Once childhood is over, these little girls grow up into other tropes and female archetypes that continue the path of double standards: the mother or the killer, the slut or the prude, the dumb blonde, or the geeky brunette. Women in horror films aren’t allowed to simply “be,” but instead are constantly being pushed into eerily specific archetypal boxes. This practice starts in the young representation of children and follows us for the rest of our lives. Art really does imitate life, regardless of how depressing the outcomes may be.

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.

The Terror of Little Girls: Social Anxiety About Women in Horrifying Girlhood

Horror films hold a mirror up to these ideals, distorting the images and terrifying viewers in the process. The terror that society feels while looking at these little girls echoes the terror it feels when confronted with changing gender norms and female power.

This repost by Leigh Kolb appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.

Horror films have a long-standing tradition of commenting on the social fears and anxieties of their time.

Another universally recognized truth of horror is that scary children are terrifying–especially little girls.

While an analysis of “creepy children” in horror films usually proclaims that they are providing commentary on a loss of innocence, and it would make sense that a little girl is the “ultimate” in innocence, it can’t be that simple. We wouldn’t be so shaken to the core by possessed, haunted, violent little girls if we were simply supposed to be longing for innocent times of yesteryear.

Instead, these little girls embody society’s growing fears of female power and independence. Fearing a young girl is the antithesis of what we are taught–stories of missing, kidnapped or sexually abused girls (at least white girls) get far more news coverage and mass sympathy than stories of boy victims. Little girls are innocent victims and need protection.

In the Victorian era, the ideal female was supposed to be pale, fainting-prone and home-bound. Feminist literary icons Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar write about this nineteenth-century ideal in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women:

“At its most extreme, this nineteenth-century ideal of the frail, even sickly female ultimately led to the glorification of the dead or dying woman. The most fruitful subject for literature, announced the American romancer Edgar Allan Poe in 1846, is ‘the death… of a beautiful woman’… But while dead women were fascinating, dying girl-children were even more enthralling… These episodes seem to bring to the surface an extraordinary imperative that underlay much of the nineteenth-century ideology of femininity: in one way or another, woman must be ‘killed’ into passivity for her to acquiesce in what Rousseau and others considered her duty of self-abnegation ‘relative to men.'”

The feminine “ideal” (and its relation to literature) coincided with women beginning the long fight for suffrage and individual rights. It’s no surprise, then, that men wanted to symbolically kill off the woman so she could fulfill her ultimate passive role. There was something comforting about this to audiences.

Rhoda Penmark will not lose to a boy. Or anyone else.

Fast forward to the 1950s and 60s, and the modern horror genre as we know it emerged and began evolving into something that provided social commentary while playing on audiences’ deepest fears (the “other,” invasion, demonic possession, nuclear mutations and the end of the world).

We know that horror films have always been rife with puritanical punishment/reward for promiscuous women/virgins (the “Final Girl” trope), and violence toward women or women needing to be rescued are common themes. These themes comfort audiences, and confirm their need to keep women subjugated in their proper place. It’s no coincidence that the 50s and 60s were seeing sweeping social change in America (the Pill, changing divorce laws, resurgence of the ERA, a lead-up to Roe v. Wade).

Terrifying little girls also make their debut in this era. Their mere presence in these films spoke not only to audiences’ fears of children losing innocence, but also the intense fear that little girls–not yet even women–would have the power to overthrow men. These girl children of a generation of women beginning a new fight for rights were terrifying–these girls would grow up knowing they could have power.

The Bad Seed‘s Rhoda Penmark (played by Patty McCormack in the 1956 film), genetically predisposed to be a sociopath, murders a classmate and the janitor who suspects her. Her classmate–a boy–beats her in a penmanship contest, and she beats him to death with her tap shoes. A little girl, in competition with a boy, loses, and kills. While in the novel Rhoda gets away with her crimes, the Hays Code commanded that the film version “punished” her for her crimes and she’s struck by lightning. It’s revealed that Rhoda’s sociopathic tendencies come from her maternal grandmother, a serial killer. This notion of female murderous rage, passed down through generations and claiming boys/men as its victim, certainly reflects social fear at the time.

In 1968, Night of the Living Dead premiered on big screens and has been seen as commenting on racism/the Civil Rights movement, Cold War-era politics and critiquing America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. However, little Karen Cooper’s (Kyra Schon) iconic scene has long disturbed audiences the most. Infected by zombies, she eats her father and impales her mother with a trowel. A horror twist to an Oedipal tale, one could see Karen as living out the gravest fears of those against the women’s movement/second-wave feminism. Possessed by a demon, she eats her father (consumes the patriarchy) and kills her mother (overtaking her mother’s generation with masculine force).

Little Karen Cooper consumes patriarchy and overtakes her mother.

Five years later, Roe v. Wade had been decided (giving women the right to legal first-trimester abortions), the Pill was legal, no-fault divorce was more acceptable and women began flooding the workforce.

Meanwhile, on the big screen, sweet little Regan MacNeil–the daughter of an over-worked, atheist mother–becomes possessed by the devil.

The Exorcist was based on a novel, which itself was based on the exorcism case of a little boy. Of course, the novelist and filmmakers wanted audiences to be disturbed and terrified, so the sex of the possessed protagonist changed (would it be as unsettling if it was a little boy?).

Chris MacNeil, Regan’s mother, goes to great lengths to help her daughter, and resorts to Catholicism when all else has failed. Regan reacts violently to religious symbols, lashes out and kills priests, speaks in a masculine voice and masturbates with a crucifix. This certainly isn’t simply a “demonic possession” horror film, especially since it was written and made into a film at the height of the fight for women’s rights (the Catholic church being an adamant foe to reproductive rights). Only after Regan releases her demon, which possesses a priest (who flings himself out of a window to commit suicide), does she regain her innocence and girlhood.

Tied and bound, Regan haunts and kills men, and reacts violently to religious images.

What her mother and her culture are embracing–atheism, working women, reproductive rights, sexual aggressiveness–can be seen as the “demons” that overcome the innocent girl and kill men (and traditional religion).

These films are have terrified audiences for decades, and for good reason. The musical scores, the direction, the jarring and shocking images–however, they also play to society’s deepest fears about women and feminism. For little girls to be possessed is the ultimate fall.

In 1980, The Shining was released. Yet another film adaptation of a novel (Stanley Kubrick’s treatment of Stephen King’s novel), this film contains two of the creepiest little girls in film history–the Grady girls. The Shining shines a light on crises of masculinity. Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, is a recovering alcoholic who has hurt his son, Danny, in the past. When he takes his wife, Wendy, and son with him to be caretakers of a hotel over a winter, his descent into madness quickly begins. Danny has telepathic abilities, and sees and experiences the hotel’s violent past. As he rides his Big Wheel through the hotel, he stops when he sees two little girls begging him to “Come play with us Danny. Forever.” These girls–dead daughters of Grady, a previous caretaker who killed his family and himself–are trying to pull Danny into their world. Danny sees images of them murdered brutally, and flees in fear. Meanwhile, Jack is struggling with his alcoholism, violence and lack of control of himself and his sensitive wife and child. When he sees Grady, Grady advises him:

“My girls, sir, they didn’t care for the Overlook at first. One of them actually stole a pack of matches, and tried to burn it down. But I ‘corrected’ them sir. And when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, I ‘corrected’ her.”

Danny is confronted with the horror of what men are capable of.

In this aftermath of the women’s movement, Jack (a weak man, resistant to authority) is being haunted and guided by a forceful, dominating masculinity of the past. He’s stuck between the two worlds, and succumbs to violent, domineering alcoholism.

But he loses. Wendy and Danny win.

While his predecessor succeeded in “correcting” his wife and daughters, that time has past.

Here, the flashing memories of the ghosts of the past are terrifying. The Grady girls provide a look into what it is to be “corrected” and dominated.

“Come play with us Danny,” the girls beg, haunting him with the realities of masculine force and dominance.

Starting with the late-70s and 80s slasher films (and the growing Religious Right/Moral Majority in politics), the “Final Girl” reigned supreme, and the promiscuous young woman would perish first. Masculinity (characterized with “monstrous” violence and strength) and femininity became natural enemies. These fights on the big screen mirrored the fights in reality. The Equal Rights Amendment was pushed out of favor and was never ratified, and a growing surge of conservatism and family values began dominating American rhetoric.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, we see a resurgence of the terrifying little girl. This time, she is serving as a warning to single/working/independent/adoptive mothers.

In The Ring (the 2002 American adaptation of a 1998 Japanese film), Rachel Keller (played by Naomi Watts) is a journalist and a single mother. She unknowingly risks her son and his father’s lives by showing them a cursed videotape. A critic noted:

“If she had never entered the public sphere and viewed the cassette in the first place, she would not have inadvertently caused Noah’s death, nor would she have to potentially cause the death of another. Rachel would, perhaps, have been better off staying at home.”

Single motherhood has often been the driving force behind horror plots.

In her investigation into the video, she discovers the twisted, dark past of the video’s subject, Samara, a young girl who started life troubled (her birthmother tried to drown her). She was adopted by a couple, but her adoptive mother suffered from visions and haunting events due to Samara’s powers. They attempted to institutionalize Samara, but eventually the adoptive mother drowns her in a well after Samara cannot be cured of her psychosis. Her adoptive father, Rachel finds, locked Samara in an attic of their barn, and Samara left a clue of the well’s location behind wallpaper. (Bitch Flicks ran an excellent analysis of the yellow wallpaper and the themes of women’s stories in The Ring.)

Samara’s life was punctuated by drowning, which has throughout history been a way for women to commit suicide or be killed (symbolizing both the suffocation of women’s roles and the return to the life-giving waters that women are often associated with). While Rachel “saves” Samara’s corpse and gives her a proper burial, Samara didn’t want that. She rejected Rachel’s motherhood and infects Rachel’s son. Rachel–in her attempts to mother–cannot seem to win.

Rachel “saves” Samara from her watery grave, but she still cannot succeed.

The ambiguous ending suggests that Rachel may indeed save her son, but will have to harm another to do so. This idea of motherly self-sacrifice portrays the one way that Rachel–single, working mother Rachel–can redeem herself. However, the parallel narrative of the dangers of silencing and “locking up” women is loud and clear.

And in 2009’s Orphan, Esther is a violent, overtly sexual orphan from Russia who is adopted by an American family. Esther is “not nearly as innocent as she claims to be,” says the IMDb description. This story certainly plays on the fear of the “other” in adopted little girls (much like The Ring) and how that is realized in the mothers. In this film, Esther is actually an adult “trapped” in a child’s body. The clash of a childish yet adult female (as culturally, little girls are somehow expected to embody adult sexuality and yet be innocent and naïve) again reiterates this fear of little girls with unnatural and unnerving power. The drowning death of Esther, as her adoptive mother and sister flee, shows that Esther must be killed to be subdued. The power of mother is highlighted, yet the film still plays on cultural fears of mothering through international adoptions and the deep, disturbing duality of childhood and adulthood that girls are supposed to embody.

Like Samara, Esther is a deeply disturbed daughter, capable of demonic violence.

In the last 60 years, American culture has seen remarkable change and resistance to that change. Horror films–which portray the very core of society’s fears and anxieties–have reflected the fears of women’s social movements through the faces of terrifying little girls.

While nineteenth-century literature comforted audiences with the trope of a dead, beautiful woman, thus making her passive and frail (of course, we still do this), twentieth and twenty-first century horror films force audiences to come face to face with murderous, demonic, murdered and psychotic little girls to parallel fears of women having economic, reproductive, parenting and marital (or single) power.

Little girls are supposed to be the epitome of all we hold dear–innocent, sweet, submissive and gentle. The Victorian Cult of Girlhood and Womanhood bleeds into the twenty-first century anti-feminist movements, and these qualities are still revered.

_____________________________

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I’ and What Makes Katniss Everdeen a Compelling Heroine

While watching ‘Mockingjay Part I,’ I had an epiphany. I asked myself why Katniss Everdeen is such a compelling heroine to audiences and why other heroines modeled after her are popping up all over the place? There’s no denying that audiences (especially young women) are hungry for strong female representation on screen. We love to see Katniss use her wits and her bow to save the day, but in ‘Mockingjay Part I,’ there is very little action (Katniss uses her bow only once), and Jennifer Lawrence’s performance is still riveting. Why, do you think, that is?

Written by Amanda Rodriguez.

Mild Spoilers Ahead

First off, let’s get the unpleasant part out of the way. Serious fans of The Hunger Games series will likely hate me, but we’ve all got to face the truth. The third installment in the series, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I should not have been made. Splitting movies into two parts is an ever-growing trend in Hollywood’s never-ending quest for more money. Over the course of the two-hour film, not enough happens to warrant its existence. There is little moving the plot forward, and the ending itself is anticlimactic as our heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) isn’t even involved in the ultimately uneventful final showdown mission to rescue the captive tributes. The vital events that do happen in Part I could have easily been condensed into the first 20 minutes of the finale of a legitimate trilogy.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about what does work in Mockingjay Part I. There are a lot of women involved in the film itself, from the writer of the novels, Suzanne Collins, who adapted her books for the screen, to Nina Jacobson, the producer of the entire series, to our tenacious heroine Katniss, played by the increasingly popular, amazing performer and feminist Jennifer Lawrence.

I particularly liked that Mockingjay Part I also sets up the opposition between patriarchy and matriarchy with the introduction of Julianne Moore as President Coin of District 13. Under the patriarchal tyranny of President Snow (Donald Sutherland), the districts of Panem suffer as the people are used for their labor and their districts’ resources while fear and capital punishment are the norm. His Capitol, however, is rich, fashion-obsessed, and completely self-serving. The matriarchal President Coin, on the other hand, represents revolution with a strict focus on democracy and a socialist emphasis on the sharing of resources. District 13 is a militaristic, utilitarian underground compound that eschews fashion in favor of function (as evinced by the monotone uniforms all residents wear). Those of us who have read the books know that a lot will shift before the series concludes, but for now, this embodiment of a nontraditional representation of matriarchy in Coin is refreshing. She is decisive, smart, calm when under attack, and always thinking about the greater good of the people.

While watching Mockingjay Part I, I had an epiphany. I asked myself why Katniss Everdeen is such a compelling heroine to audiences and why other heroines modeled after her are popping up all over the place? There’s no denying that audiences (especially young women) are hungry for strong female representation on screen. We love to see Katniss use her wits and her bow to save the day, but in Mockingjay Part I, there is very little action (Katniss uses her bow only once), and Jennifer Lawrence’s performance is still riveting. Why, do you think, that is?

Two words for you: emotional range. While there are a plethora of limitations and stereotypes by which female characters are plagued, audiences are getting tired of the limited range of emotion that male heroes are allowed to exhibit due to the strictness of masculinity within our culture. Women are increasingly allowed to showcase a greater range of emotions without it damaging their perception as a strong, good leader.

In Mockingjay Part I, Katniss is suffering from intense PTSD. She has flashbacks, night terrors, uncontrollable bouts of crying, and dissociates from her surroundings. Throughout the film, she is an emotional wreck, as she should be after what she’s gone through, from being hunted and forced to kill for sport, to having her home of District 12 genocided as a result of her actions.

We watch Katniss go through an emotional roller coaster as she experiences shock, horror, terror, guilt, sadness, loss, anger, grief, and devastation. She is overcome with love for her family, Gale, and Peta, and, at her core, we are the most compelled by Katniss’ compassion and her instinctual drive to protect others. Katniss is sometimes wrong and often rash in her actions. In truth, it is her vulnerability displayed on screen like a raw wound from which we cannot look away.

This is the stuff of heroes. We see her experiences nearly break her time and time again, but she won’t give up. Carrying on is so hard that it nearly destroys her, but her sense of what is right is so strong that she cannot turn her back on her fellow oppressed district dwellers.

Like Katniss is the symbol of revolution as the mockingjay, she’s also the symbol of a movement that values women as nonsexualized leads with rich, complex characterization. We’re increasingly bored with the stoic male hero and instead crave the strength and vulnerability of the growing number of female sci-fi action heroines that are emerging thanks to the success of Katniss Everdeen and The Hunger Games.

Aside: The United States IS the Capitol. The storyline of The Hunger Games is so popular in the US, but we’re missing the point if we don’t confess that we are the oppressive world superpower that tyrannizes the rest of the word, exploiting the labor and resources of others so that most of us can live in relative wealth and comfort. End rant.

Bitch Flicks writer and editor Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. Her short story “The Woman Who Fell in Love with a Mermaid” was published in Germ Magazine. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.

‘Beyond the Lights’ Premiere: Interviews with Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Gina Prince-Bythewood

Gina Price-Bythewood: “It’s a love story first, but for me as a filmmaker, I never just want to make a movie that entertains. It should entertain first, but I think it should say something and this was an issue that was important to me, the way woman are objectified. The way that women don’t have a voice. As an artist I was able to put that into the film as well as someone who has something to say and sometimes it’s a struggle to get the chance, to just inspire women, also men, to have their own voice.”

New+York+Premiere+Relativity+Media+Beyond+JSRkDgZtCe6l — Gugu Mbatha-Raw, left, and Gina Prince-Bythewood

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

Read ahead for interviews with Beyond the Lights star, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and director, Gina Prince-Bythewood.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw, so good earlier this year in Amma Asante’s Belle as a biracial woman raised in aristocracy in slave-era England, is just as impressive in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Beyond the Lights as Noni, a pop singer who yearns for her identity and authenticity even as she’s pushed to perform sexy numbers in skimpy costumes. Mbatha-Raw’s fiery performance, which showcases her talent as a singer and dancer, just earned her a Gotham nomination for best actress to include her in the company of Julianne Moore and Scarlett Johansson.

As for the talented director, Prince-Bythewood, it’s been way too long between movies; her last feature film was The Secret Life of Bees in 2008, and before that, the critically acclaimed Love & Basketball, back in 2000.

I chatted with Mbatha-Raw and Prince-Bythewood on the red carpet at the New York premiere of Beyond the Lights last week.

Co-stars Nate Parker, who plays the security guard who becomes her love interest after he saves her from a suicide attempt, and rapper Colson “Machine Gun Kelly” Baker, who told me he writes lyrics that respect women, joined Mbatha-Raw on the red carpet, along with writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood and her producer husband, Reggie Rock Bythewood. (Minnie Driver, who gives a powerhouse performance as Noni’s manipulative “momager,” and in one of the best scenes in the movie has a blow-out argument with Noni over the direction of her career, was sadly not at the premiere.)

First I got to speak to Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who went from the film’s pop diva vixen in the film to an elegant 1940s-style Hollywood glamour queen on the red carpet.
Bitch Flicks: How did the musical scenes come together?

Mbatha-Raw: It’s been such a gift of a role. I grew up singing and dancing as a child, but more sort of musical theater style and classical dancing, so for me to be able to embrace this hip-hop style, you know I had a lot of help. Gina surrounded me with some wonderful people in the industry, not just herself, who’s had a background researching a lot of the hip-hop world, but also Laurieann Gibson, the choreographer (Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry), The Dream (Kanye West, Beyonce, Jay-Z), who wrote all the original music (Rihanna, Kanye West, Beyoncé) and also Machine Gun Kelly, who’s here, who really is a rapper in the industry and brings so much charisma and authenticity cause he really is from that world, so really I sort of had a lot of things to draw upon and felt very well-supported by the research cause we knew about the movie, or I knew about the movie, for almost two years before we got to shoot it.

BF: Were you uncomfortable performing the sexually suggestive numbers?

Mbatha-Raw: I felt very supported by the choreography. We rehearsed it; Laurieann Gibson as I mentioned, created that whole routine and that was something we rehearsed in the studio in front of a mirror for many hours, you know, and adding the elements of the hair, the makeup, the wigs, the amazing hair designs by Kim Kimble (Beyoncé), and the costumes of course, so we really were building this character on so many levels and then it was just really down to kind of doing it and singing the song and projecting that energy into the lens, which was a new experience for me, because usually as an actress you’re pretending the camera isn’t there but obviously for a music video in that style you have to look directly into the camera. And that was scary initially, but I had to get over it.

BF: Talk about your upcoming projects, including Jupiter Ascending, the Wachowski siblings sci-fi film. (It co-stars Eddie Redmayne, Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum.)

Mbatha-Raw: I just have a small role in that, but it’s a really exciting movie. I’m looking forward to seeing it because I haven’t seen it yet. It’s sort of an epic space adventure and I play a character’s who’s half human, half deer.

I also shot a movie in the summer called The Whole Truth with another female director called Courtney Hunt. I don’t know when that’s coming out yet (Renee Zellweger, Keanu Reeves), and I’ve just started work on another project that’s called Compassion with Will Smith about brain injuries in the NFL.
BF: (To director Gina Prince-Bythewood about her search for an actress to play Noni.)

Prince-Bythewood: I thought I wanted a real musical artist in the lead when I first wrote it (2007) and then realized for this character I needed an actor because this character goes into some pretty deep depths. And I found Gugu two years ago and it was an amazing thing to find a woman who had incredible chops, could sing, and was brave enough to go there. And she really is brave.

BF: How did Gugu prepare for the musical numbers?

Prince-Bythewood: She put in so much work. She has a background in musical theater, which I didn’t know originally. But she worked with Debra Byrd, a vocal coach, one of the most renowned, and then the Dream; he did all the original music, and for her it was hours in the studio singing to his demos the way that Noni would, where they tell you exactly how to sing a word, how to breathe, how to sing a note. There’s no control and that’s what I wanted for Gugu the actress to have to experience, because that’s what Noni would experience.

BF: Your movie besides being entertainment has a message. How important was that to you as a filmmaker?

Prince-Bythewood: It’s a love story first, but for me as a filmmaker, I never just want to make a movie that entertains. It should entertain first, but I think it should say something and this was an issue that was important to me, the way woman are objectified. The way that women don’t have a voice. As an artist I was able to put that into the film as well as someone who has something to say and sometimes it’s a struggle to get the chance, to just inspire women, also men, to have their own voice.

BF: You talk about how women are sexually objectified in pop culture, but how do you avoid that trap in your portrayal of Noni doing those sexy moves?

Prince-Bythewood: It starts with the message of the film and Gugu and I talked a lot about why we were doing this film and it was really to talk to young girls who are only emulating what they see right now. Can we give them something else to aspire to? So going in we knew for the character of Noni, the less she wears the less you see of her, that was the mantra, so we had to make a big jump from her as little girl and that sweetness and innocence about her, to the jump to what she is 15 years later. It has to be dramatic so that you wonder what damage happened in between. Trust me, I’m a female filmmaker, it’s a little tough sometimes to shoot things like that, but we had to compete with what the videos are out today and honestly, we could have gone further. If you see what’s out now, so we had to be authentic so that we could take the character on a journey and bring her back to an authentic place and the place that she wants to be.

BF: What’s your next movie?

Prince-Bythewood: It will take me about a year to write. It focuses more on female friendship and the way it changes through the years.

Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from The Artist. Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.