Slumber Party Massacre came up while I was searching for female directors in the exploitation genre. Although it came off as yet another sensationalistic and gory 80s slasher, it stuck out, mainly due to its ridiculous title or the fact that most of the characters were female. Upon viewing it, what shocked me was not so much the gore and violence, but I was surprised by the clever humor, the funny characters, and most of all the incredibly veiled feminist satire.
Angel, a 1984 cult film, attempts to be both a melodrama about a teen hooker forced to face her life choices (as the trailer proclaims it “A Very Special Motion Picture”) and a very 80s crime thriller where a tough-talking street kid teams up with a cop to catch a killer, but the resulting film is a mess of clashing tones that seems more campy than hard-hitting.
For the uninitiated, Nikita was the often too realistic story of a drug-addicted young woman who finds herself in jail after a robbery gone horribly wrong. Most filmmakers would have ended there, a cautionary tale of the woman led down the wrong path who ends up punished for her sins. But Besson took the story further; this broken young woman gets turned into an assassin that is used by her government to kill. The killing takes its toll on her, but she values her life and freedom over the other option provided her: death. She meets a guy, falls in love, and at the end of the day Nikita turned out to not be the same story I was used to.
In terms of gender representations, both men and women are shown as the worst possible version of themselves. Barbra swings back and forth from being near catatonic and unable to communicate, to wild and hysterical. Ben even slaps her at one point to get her to snap out of her state. She is weak and unable to deal with the emotions of seeing her brother attacked. Barbra would have already been killed and reanimated were it not for the über masculine Ben to save her from the perils that lie outside.
Perhaps for the movie’s purposes, that doesn’t matter: the story seems to be far more driven by the desire to create an artistic film, rather than an intellectually/ethically/scientifically engaging narrative. The scientific aspect for example—the part of the film I found personally most engaging, that it is possible to tamper with the natural life-cycle, halting the aging process in its tracks—is touched upon but it seems, at least to me, to be more of a plot device for bringing Sarah into Miriam’s life than an attempt to explore an ethically challenging issue. The biology behind Miriam’s present state and the fate of her lovers is similarly irrelevant.
When the movie begins we’re introduced to Brad, a hero (Barry Bostiwck) and Janet, a heroine (Susan Sarandon), two straight-laced representations of the all-American, white middle class Christian boy and girl who are suddenly thrown into a den of loose morals and provocative dancing. At all turns, we’re blatantly reminded of their status as a proxy for a nice boy and a good girl, and it’s reinforced with every cliché possible.
Being set in the Valley in the 80s, the film portrays much of the vapidness and consumerism popular at the time, with two of the film’s songs, “Brand New Girl,” and “’Cause I’m a Blonde,” focusing on changing or criticizing women’s appearances. “’Cause I’m a Blonde” is purposely satirical, however, and really serves more to make fun of the blonde “Valley Girl” stereotype than to support it.
Populated by mostly male characters, The Big Lebowski is, to some extent, a tale of male friendship. Nevertheless, the cult comedy should never be interpreted and celebrated as exclusively a guy’s film. The Big Lebowski offers an amusing, subversive portrait of masculinity and features an excellent comic performance by one of the most gifted actresses working today. What’s more, it suggests that the future is matriarchal.
Consistently, then, femininity in men is dangerous. It may be actively dangerous, as in Uncle Monty, who assaults Marwood whilst in near-drag, or passively dangerous, in that it makes the feminine man a target for harassment, as in the lout at the pub who calls Marwood a perfumed ponce. Ultimately, it is dangerous because it marks the other, and to be other is to be in danger.
Most feminist criticism of Stephen King’s Carrie has focused on the male fear of powerful women that the author said inspired the film, with the anti-Carrie camp finding her death at the end to signify the defeat of the “monstrous feminine” and therefore a triumph of sexism. But Stephen King’s honesty about what inspired his 1973 book notwithstanding, Carrie is as much an articulation of a feminist nightmare as it is of a patriarchal one, with neither party coming out on top.
Birth of the Living Dead is Rob Kuhns’ documentary of the making of George Romero’s 1968 cult horror genre game-changer Night of the Living Dead. Bitch Flicks writers Max Thornton and Amanda Rodriguez discuss both the documentary (BOTLD) and the original film itself (NOTLD).
The ethics of the film are one thing, but it says a lot about the world of the movie that it’s able to go nearly two hours without a single important female character showing up on screen. There are no women cops, there are no women in the mob, there are only a couple of wives or passers-by or maybe a drug-addled girlfriend or two. But no one who matters. The acting characters in the film are all overwhelmingly and vocally male.
Even the ethos of the characters, that they will destroy that which is evil, but leave alone the pure and blameless, is inherently sexist. Because when they say pure and blameless, what they mean is the women and children. In this universe, women are not even people enough to do things wrong. We do not have enough agency even to commit evil.
On any dark and stormy night in the fall, it is a wonderful thing to curl up with a mug of mulled cider and watch Clue. The murder mystery based on the eponymous board game may have been a huge flop when it was released in 1985, but it has gained a passionate cult following in the last 28 years, probably due to its infinitely quotable dialogue and gleeful disregard for the pile of bodies amassed as the movie progresses – as well as being shown on cable about once every two hours.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve watched Fight Club. Every time I view it, I end up noticing something new. How did I miss that before? This time, Marla Singer (played by Helena Bonham Carter) captured my attention. What would the situations in the movie look like from her viewpoint?
The midwestern, puritanical values that American Gothic seems to represent so well win at the end of the film, and quite literally kill difference and sexual and gender subversion. While Riff Raff and Magenta go back to their home planet Transsexual, in the galaxy of Transylvania, Brad, Janet and Dr. Scott are left on the cold ground, crawling and writhing in their fishnets.
Here are some game-changing cult classics, divided into handy genre sections. And while we’re looking at the influence of these cult films, why not check out how they portray and treat women? Almost entirely coincidentally, they’re all from the ‘80s. What can I say? It was a culturally rich period.
So I asked Twitter the following question: “Who’s scarier: Jason or Jason’s mom?” Surprisingly, despite all the movies (12 in total) in which Jason is seen slashing throats and hanging victims, his mom (who’s only alive and running amok in the first film in 1980) is apparently considered the more horrifying killer. But I’ve always had a soft spot for Pamela. Not that I condone the gruesome murders of innocent people (of course not). But, unlike Jason, Pamela committed crimes of passion. Her crazy antics were actually revenge for her young son’s fatal drowning, which she felt was caused by the unjustifiable neglect of the camp counselors who failed to watch him (a longtime rumor has faulted the counselors for being too busy fornicating and not paying attention to Jason’s cries for help).
The Craft presents a lesson that coming-of-age films don’t typically make a point to show. A ballot is cast for prom queen or SAT prep sits on the horizon with college days looming, a girl must get a boy to like her, losing her virginity in the process. But this film is about serving the self—the craft of empowering oneself to surmount the archaic persecutions against women—taking back the threat of female power. But like a genie in a bottle that allows three wishes, this craft must be practiced and understood, respected completely before it can be outwardly used, or else it will perpetuate transgression.
Freaks (1932) is a true cult movie, one that’s ridden a rollercoaster of opprobrium and acclaim since its initial release. Tod Browning’s sideshow-set horror-romance destroyed his career (and several others), caused such disgust in early audiences that one woman (allegedly) miscarried, outraged critics and moral guardians, traumatized some of the performers who appeared in it, languished in obscurity after being banned for three decades, resurfaced on the exploitation circuit in the 1960s, and earned a spot in the National Film Registry archives in 1994 before enjoying its current status as a one-of-a-kind classic. It’s been repeated to the point of cliché, but Freaks, once seen, is never forgotten. Love it or hate it, it will stay with you for the rest of your life.
I was neither a discerning nor an educated viewer, but even so I quickly cottoned on to the fact that certain Italian directors had produced some above-average horror flicks in the 1970s, characterized by a cavalier attitude toward nudity, pervasive Catholic imagery, and lashings of gore. Ignorant of the term giallo, I proceeded to dub this subgenre “spag-horror,” which isn’t actually an awful name for it.
As my initiation into the worlds of sex and violence, many European horror films of the 1970s no doubt occupy a Freudian subspace of my psyche. Probably the Ur-example of this genre and its strange, ambivalent attitude toward women and sexuality is Dario Argento’s 1977 meisterwerk, Suspiria.
I found myself wondering about the designation of sexploitation. Female nudity in itself isn’t exploitative. Women fighting and women being abused are things that happen in prison. Are representations of women in these situations inherently exploitative, or are we conditioned to see women’s bodies and women’s actions and think: object? Certainly frame after frame of powerful, complex, awful and good, sympathetic and loathsome women has some kind of effect on the viewer. Since we are conditioned to only really consider the straight white male gaze as the norm, we see these movies as highly sexualized and exploitative.
On the surface, Sleepaway Camp isn’t much different than your average 1980s slasher movie. The comparisons to Friday the 13th can’t be ignored – Sleepaway’s Camp Arawak, much like Friday’s Camp Crystal Lake, is populated by horny teens looking for some summer lovin’, and is the site of a series of gruesome and mysterious murders that threaten to shut down the camp for the whole summer. But unlike Friday the 13th and other slasher films, the twist in Sleepaway Camp isn’t the identity of the murderer, and the final girl isn’t exactly who you’d expect.
Indeed, the social structure of Westerburg High School is unsettling to say the least. Teens there would rather commit actual suicide than “social suicide.” Their alienation from both reality and ethical values is mirrored not only in J.D., Veronica and the Heathers, but also in the rest of the students. Peer pressure and the dream of popularity result in the “Westerburg suicides,” causing a downright suicide craze. Their supposed actions gave the popular kids depth and humanity and made them more popular than ever. When an unpopular girl attempts to kill herself, the new Heather in charge asserts, “Just another case of a geek trying to imitate the popular people of the school and failing miserably.”
Freaks (1932) is a true cult movie, one that’s ridden a rollercoaster of opprobrium and acclaim since its initial release. Tod Browning’s sideshow-set horror-romance destroyed his career (and several others), caused such disgust in early audiences that one woman (allegedly) miscarried, outraged critics and moral guardians, traumatized some of the performers who appeared in it, languished in obscurity after being banned for three decades, resurfaced on the exploitation circuit in the 1960s, and earned a spot in the National Film Registry archives in 1994 before enjoying its current status as a one-of-a-kind classic. It’s been repeated to the point of cliché, but Freaks, once seen, is never forgotten. Love it or hate it, it will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Freaks poster
This guest post by Karina Wilson appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.
Cult movies are lightning in a bottle, a one-time only circumstance of story, director, cast, crew, location and budget that defies original intentions and transmutes into something unforgettable, unrepeatable, unsurpassable. Cult movies are accidental, born of a mismatch between the scenes filmmakers thought they were shooting, and what ended up in the can. Cult movies are magic, of a puckish sort, and we shouldn’t probe their mysteries too closely. They’re best regarded from a distance, after a significant amount of time has passed.
Freaks (1932) is a true cult movie, one that’s ridden a rollercoaster of opprobrium and acclaim since its initial release. Tod Browning’s sideshow-set horror-romance destroyed his career (and several others), caused such disgust in early audiences that one woman (allegedly) miscarried, outraged critics and moral guardians, traumatized some of the performers who appeared in it, languished in obscurity after being banned for three decades, resurfaced on the exploitation circuit in the 1960s, and earned a spot in the National Film Registry archives in 1994 before enjoying its current status as a one-of-a-kind classic. It’s been repeated to the point of cliché, but Freaks, once seen, is never forgotten. Love it or hate it, it will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Originally, Freaks wasn’t intended to achieve any of these feats. All MGM head honcho Irving Thalberg wanted was a box office hit, along the lines of Universal’s Dracula (1931), a movie that exploited the audience’s new-found appetite for the talking horror genre. So he called Tod Browning, Dracula‘s director, who’d had a run of success during the silent era working with Lon Chaney Sr., and asked the million-dollar question “What else have you got?”
Although “horror” wasn’t a label applied to film in the 1920s, Browning and Chaney’s collaborations dealt with mutilation, disfigurement, and the resulting heartbreak (see: The Phantom of the Opera and The Unknown), subjects dear to the hearts of those whose loved ones had returned home, scarred, from the war in France. Browning and Chaney had also worked together on box office sensation The Unholy Three, a macabre crime caper featuring the 3’ 3” tall circus performer, Harry Earles.
Earles enjoyed working in the movies but knew there weren’t many roles out there for actors his size. So he brought Browning’s attention to another short story by Unholy Three writer, Tod Robbins, Spurs, a mean little melodrama about a love triangle between a circus midget, a bareback rider, and her normal-sized lover. Browning had a carnival background (he ran away to join the circus when he was 16), loved the milieu, and, when MGM gave him carte blanche to direct a movie more horrifying than Dracula, he picked Freaks.
In those pre-television days, the circus sideshow ruled supreme as entertainment for the curious masses. Trumpeted as part edification, part education, the ‘Ten-In-One” tent showcased human oddities and provided a rare opportunity for those born with a difference to earn a living. People with all manner of abnormalities found a profitable home in the sideshow – armless, legless, eyeless, giant, dwarf, bearded, scaled, obese, skeletal. Some simply exhibited their unique bodies, others performed an act, introducing music, dance, stage magic or comedy into their routine; many earned good money and toured the globe. After auditioning the crème-de-la-crème of this international talent pool, Browning assembled his cast, the likes of which has never been seen on a movie screen before or since.
The cast of Freaks includes some bona fide female sideshow stars, women who projected glamorous images of considerable wattage despite being born different. They worked their way up through circuses and on the vaudeville circuit, often from a very early age. They viewed their divergence from the accepted norm as an opportunity to build a show business career, rather than as a debilitation. Self-sufficient, often with strings of admirers, they didn’t lead easy lives, but charted their own paths and lived to a respectable age. It’s difficult to imagine any of these performers working in the perfect-image-obsessed entertainment industry today.
Conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton had been working professionally in vaudeville since the age of three. Renowned for their beauty, fashion sense and musicianship as well as their dancing skills (they performed onstage with Bob Hope and Charlie Chaplin), they had recently received $100,000 damages and emancipation from their predatory managers (they later said they were “paupers living in practical slavery”) and their appearance in Freaks marked the beginning of their independent career.
Daisy and Violet Hilton
The “midget Mae West,” Daisy Earles (Frieda), along with her brother Harry and two equally short-statured sisters Tiny and Gracie, was part of the Doll Family, a popular act who toured with both the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circuses, and appeared in Laurel and Hardy films.
Martha Morris billed herself as “Martha The Armless Wonder” and was a featured attraction at Coney Island and in the traveling Freak City Show in the 1920s. She entertained rubes by writing and typing with her toes as dexterously as if they were fingers. Frances O’Connor’s stage name was “the Living Venus De Milo,” and she loved to pose in specially designed costumes that showed her entirely smooth and armless (there were not even stumps) torso, whilst impressing admirers with her coffee-drinking, cigarette-smoking and sharp-shooting skills.
By contrast, the non-“freak” women (Cleopatra, the Peacock Of The Air” trapeze artist, and Venus, the animal trainer) are low profile. Myrna Loy supposedly begged not to play Venus, and, although mentioned in press releases, Jean Harlow failed to materialize as Cleopatra. Instead, Russian defector Olga Baclanova (a gifted physical actor who was struggling with the shift to talkies) got the villainess role, while hard-working contract player Leila Hyams was cast as Venus. Both women were regular Hollywood blondes, used to commanding the silent screen with the arch of an eyebrow or the flare of a nostril, but, at 36 and 27 respectively, they were aging out of leading roles and Freaks marked the last major stop on the Hollywood Express for both of them.
Given the luminaries in the cast, it’s not surprising that Freaks is a female-driven narrative, a deft illustration of Madame de Merteuil’s assertion in Dangerous Liaisons, that “When one woman strikes at the heart of another, she seldom misses, and the wound is invariably fatal.” The plot is simple and universal: unrequited love, greed, jealousy, revenge.
The beautiful Cleopatra knows her co-worker, Hans, is in love with her, although she does not reciprocate the feeling. She enjoys making fun of him, much to the chagrin of his fiancée, Frieda. When Frieda lets slip that Hans has inherited a fortune, Cleopatra (egged on by her boyfriend, Hercules) persuades Hans to ditch Frieda and marry her. The other co-workers are suspicious of Cleopatra’s gold-digging motives but, if Hans is happy, they’re happy, and they all attend a celebratory wedding feast to welcome Cleopatra to the family. Unfortunately, Cleopatra sneers at their attempts to be friendly, and humiliates Hans, who collapses thanks to the alcohol she’s been forcing down him all evening – along with a dubious substance from a tiny black bottle. Frieda is furious. From that point on, Cleopatra is doomed. Frieda and the other co-workers close ranks around Hans to protect him from Cleopatra’s nefarious schemes and will do whatever it takes to keep him safe.
This is the type of run-of-the-mill romantic retribution played out every night of the week on today’s Lifetime network. We enjoy seeing the man-stealing hussy get her just desserts, while the wronged party is reunited with her one true love. In terms of pure plot, Freaks presents nothing we haven’t seen before. It creaks. It’s clumsy. It’s barely even a horror story. That’s the point. That’s why, 81 years later, Freaks still resonates as a progressive text. By rejecting fantasy, by refusing to use freaks to populate a fairy tale (as The Wizard of Oz would do seven years later), instead slotting them into a bog standard kitchen sink melodrama (albeit with a circus setting) Browning succeeds in making us see his characters as people first.
Much of Freaks’ power comes from the humdrum nature of the narrative, coupled with the easy familiarity of the early scenes. The first half of the screenplay deals with housekeeping, where the circus performers sleep (and who they sleep with), how they peg laundry out to dry, roll a cigarette, sip coffee, present a new baby to their friends. Dialogue takes the form of petty squabbles, between husband-to-be and conjoined fiancée, and performers discussing the mechanics of their acts. We’re forced to vacate our circus spectator headspace; there are no sequins or spotlights to direct our gaze. We quit gawking and embrace domesticity. It’s O.K. to be “one of us.”
One of us. One of us.
This makes the second half all the more disturbing. After breaking down their Otherness, establishing the freaks as friendly, ordinary beings, not at all threatening, pussycats in fact, Browning lets rip. These freaks – even infantilized pinheads like Zip and Pip – have teeth. Masterminded (we assume, although we never see her giving the orders) by the cherubic Frieda, the freaks enact justice. We’ve been encouraged to recognize their inner contentment and beauty. In the spirit of reciprocity, the freaks pull Cleopatra’s inner hideousness to the surface. Sideshow justice is done, and, within the movie’s running time of little over an hour, it’s all the more terrifying for its swiftness.
Freaks still makes for startling viewing, and, even in these enlightened, CGI-weary times, challenges our expectations of the human form. We’re so used to seeing physical perfection as the standard, so conditioned to accept the narrowest definition of beauty, so ignorant of the spectrum of human shapes, that many frames of the movie seem like a slap in the face. Freaks stands as a reminder that, for all our talk about diversity and inclusiveness, we sideline performers with difference. Unless they are playing “grateful recipient of charity” or “pathetic victim” or “awkward dependent,” we’ve largely wiped them from our screens.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about Freaks is that the diverse human beings in this pre-Production Code picture take it for granted that they can go about their business, flirt, have relationships, express sexual desire and procreate without any hand-wringing, or guilt, or “professional intervention” (a la The Sessions) from the normals. They invite us to gaze upon them, not with pity, but as players with agency in a story as old as time. Although it’s often criticized for being exploitative (and the critics have a point), Freaks is still the only movie in over a century of cinema history to celebrate these characters so boldly on the big screen. Until someone steps up to the plate, Freaks remains a unique experience, my cult classic, lightning in a fascinatingly misshapen bottle.
Karina Wilson is a British writer and story consultant based in Los Angeles. She writes a regular column on horror fiction at Litreactor and can also be found at Horror Film History.
