Girls in Horror – Bitch Flicks

‘It Follows’: More Dread Than Bloody Red

It’s not the best horror movie I’ve seen, but it’s a decent flick that can be added to the pantheon of solid fares to check out this year. Many of my horror comrades hated it or were disappointed, but I encourage everyone to see it just for the masterful use of dread instead of the usual one-note slasher or gore-riddled bloodfests that are passed off as great horror cinema. The genre I love is more concerned with spectacle rather than genuine fear.

Written by Lisa Bolekaja.

It Follows answered the question I was curious to know in the first seven minutes.

“What happens to you after it follows and catches you?” Short answer: you get jacked up. I’ve said this on Twitter and I will say it again here. I sincerely apologize to my fellow viewing audience for laughing with great joy after the first victim is killed. I do have home training. But I was giddy.

We are introduced to an unknown young woman, visibly anxious as she runs out of her family home wearing flimsy underwear and heels in the middle of the night. It’s like we caught her in a state of undress after a long day at work, or maybe after a date, but we never know because there is a great 360-degree camera pan that sets the tone for the rest of the film. The writer/director David Robert Mitchell is forcing the audience to not trust anything or anyone that moves within eyesight. The 360 camera turns are used to great effect numerous times in this film which creates a relentless creeping dread. We never see what kills our first victim, but we do view the aftermath, and it ain’t pretty. While the audience I was with had a collective “Oh shit” moment after gazing upon the unnaturally twisted remains, I laughed with giddiness because I was now fully engaged. The discordant sound design and music score added to the atmosphere of this slow deliberate terror. Imagine if Portishead had made a horror soundtrack without any singing. It caught my attention, and held it for the first half of the film.

Disclosure: I am a horror connoisseur.

This is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because I’ve enjoyed horror from across the globe and from every era. (I even enjoy bad horror. Stinkers can be a lot of fun to hate watch. I relish it.) It’s also a terrible curse because as hardcore as I am, it’s hard to impress me. I radiate so much joy whenever a new horror film comes out, but then I am quickly disappointed when it doesn’t live up to the hype. Granted, It Follows has a lot of hype surrounding it (“The scariest movie to come out in 10 years!” is a recent example), but most of the overblown hyperbole is because horror, in particular American Horror, is in a sad state of affairs. Overused tropes, clichéd jump-scares, little to no character development, plus sequel after goddamned sequel has stifled the genre. (Don’t get me started on re-makes.) So anything that looks a wee bit fresh and tries to be serious is pounced on as the next great thing. And alas, many filmmakers don’t respect horror. There, I said it. A lack of respect has given rise to a collection of recent horror films that are mediocre at best and straight trash at its worst.

It Follows in those first seven minutes made me believe there is some hope for us jaded Horror Hounds. It’s not the best horror movie I’ve seen, but it’s a decent flick that can be added to the pantheon of solid fares to check out this year. Many of my horror comrades hated it or were disappointed, but I encourage everyone to see it just for the masterful use of dread instead of the usual one-note slasher or gore-riddled bloodfests that are passed off as great horror cinema. The genre I love is more concerned with spectacle rather than genuine fear. (Remember all the Saw sequels that just gave us diminishing returns each time out? Yawn.)

What makes It Follows click on all cylinders in the first half is the empathy we have for our protagonist Jay (Maika Monroe). She reminded me of the classic old school white female heroines in the mold of Sissy Spacek or Jamie Lee Curtis. The set designs, the cars, and even the hairstyles have a retro 70s feel. The color scheme looked slightly muted, a little drab, and this added a dark texture to the film that takes place in Detroit. The mentions of 8 Mile and the demarcation line separating white Detroit and Black Detroit are quite evident. One of the characters talked of her parents warning her about crossing over that implicit physical/racial line due to safety concerns. Just as there is a transgression of the division between the supernatural seeping into the natural world, there is a definite class transgression between rich and poor (and the inferred racial one between Black and white).

What draws us to Jay is her longing to be loved and to have a boyfriend. She’s pretty much a dreamy-eyed plain Jane, but she spruces up quite nicely when she goes on a date with Hugh who uses the alias Jeff (Jake Weary), and this is where her troubles begin. What Jay doesn’t know is that Hugh is slumming with her. Pretending to be interested in Jay for companionship, Hugh has transgressed class lines. He uses the lower class Jay to save himself from the unknown entity that stalks his upper class suburban landscape.

After some hot sweaty sex in the backseat of Hugh/Jeff’s car (which she initiated), Jay eventually finds herself tied to a wheelchair still in her underwear from the afterglow of lovemaking. Hugh/Jeff quickly runs down what her fate will now be. Apparently fucking the wrong person in this world will give you something worse than an STD or AIDS. You now get the unwanted attentions of an “It” that will literally follow you around. And this It can be anyone you know or don’t know. It takes on the embodiment of anyone in order to get close to its intended next victim. Hugh/Jeff tells Jay that the only way to get rid of It is to have sex with someone else, passing on the creeping dread to them. This all smells of the influence of The Ringu Virus films and all the superior J-Horror/K-Horror that the U.S. has ripped off and repackaged. However, I respect David Robert Mitchell’s attempt to spin an oldie but a goodie into something new. The catch is, if you pass It onto someone else, and they get killed before they have sex with a new partner–Surprise!—It will come back after you. Ain’t that a bitch? This menace is truly relentless and inescapable.

Our emotionally bamboozled protagonist enlists the help of her younger sister and a rag tag bunch of friends to survive. This is what made the film work for me overall. Her friends are just regular teens, no snarky, overly beautiful, or unrealistic characterizations. Just awkward young people yearning to help her. They know something has gone horribly wrong in Jay’s life. They presumed a date rape, but when Jay tells them her new reality, they don’t shine her on or call her crazy, they support her even when they don’t fully believe in the supernatural weirdness. All of this works well, especially when Jay is the only one who can see It –random strangers of all ages, with pale flaccid faces (sometimes naked) , making slow and eerie movements towards her no matter where she goes. Much like many Asian horror flicks, the beauty of It Follows is that nothing is explained and we don’t waste time trying to figure out the mystery of how it all started. Jay either has to have sex knowing she’s dooming another life or forever be haunted until her own death. She eventually gives in to a form of protective weaponized sex that isn’t degrading. The teens-having- sex-and-then-dying trope (Ahem, Halloween and Friday the 13^th) is subverted into something new and dilemma-inducing.

Unfortunately, all promising starts often fizzle out, and halfway through the film the plot lost steam for me. There is some elaborate scheme to try and stop It, but the execution of said scheme doesn’t quite make sense. I also felt that some of the rules of the world got jettisoned, which led to a lackluster ending. There’s nothing wrong with open-ended finales, but I was bored the last 20 minutes, mainly due to the loss of character/plot momentum.

Love it or hate it, It Follows is a thoughtful addition to the horror genre. Hopefully David Robert Mitchell has more dread-inducing gems up his sleeve. But please, no sequels.

See also at Bitch Flicks: An interview with David Robert Mitchell and Maika Monroe

Staff Writer Lisa Bolekaja enoys watching classic Horror Films when they play at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in the summer. Co-Host of Hilliard’s Guess’ Screenwriting Rant Room Podcast, and a story editor for Apex Magazine, Lisa’s newest short story “Three Voices” comes out next month in Uncanny Magazine.

“But I Do!”: Releasing Repressed Rage in ‘The Ring’

These abstract symbols not only frighten, but link events in the real world to Samara’s cursed tape: this particular creature recalls the “spiders, snails, and puppy-dog tails” that little girls are decidedly not supposed to be made of. When Rachel engages this videotape, notably created by the patriarchal forces that might be seen to repress Samara, she sees Samara in a sparse hospital room in fast motion, staring at the clock as its hands whirl around and around.

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

If horror films with little girls at their centers express anxieties about puberty, female potential, or the morphing of charming young women into screeching harpies, then The Ring is probably one of the best examples. Its little girl, Samara Morgan, seems to be just plain inexplicably evil.

If recounted chronologically, her “real world” back story goes something like this: Samara was adopted by Richard and Anna Morgan when Anna failed (repeatedly) to conceive. I should note that I’m not talking about the sequels, which to me are clearly made not because we necessarily want to know more about the story and the characters, but because the first film enjoyed some financial success. Anyway, after the adoption, strange things begin to happen at the Morgan’s horse ranch, including the animals going crazy and drowning themselves. Anna begins seeing things, and believes the terrifying images are generated by Samara. The Morgans decide to seek psychiatric treatment for Anna and for Samara; at some point both are released, but Anna is still disturbed. Believing Samara to be the source of her visions, Anna suffocates her daughter and throws her into a well, then leaps off a cliff near their home.

But Samara isn’t dead, and spends seven days expiring at the bottom of said well. Afterward, well, even if she wasn’t evil before, she certainly has an axe to grind. Samara’s supernatural obsession becomes “showing” people terrible “things,” through her strange psychic ability, which gives her the power to create media—this special talent eventually takes the form of a cursed videotape that kills the viewer seven days after watching. Usually this process involves a very waterlogged and very scary-looking Samara crawling out of a leaky television set and looking at the victim with her very angry eye, whereupon that victim also suddenly becomes very scary-looking and waterlogged, but also totally dead.

When I saw the film on its release, I slept with the lights on for seven days. Yes, me: horror film aficionista, one who has seen some pretty intense stuff in the service of her dissertation research. Right. While at the time I was kind of obsessed with figuring out just why the film scared me so much, now I am kind of obsessed with one scene—hell, just a few shots—and one line of dialogue from the movie.

It’s probably not the scene that immediately springs to the mind of most folks who have seen the film. It’s not the last terrifying moments in Noah’s (Martin Henderson) life where a slimy Samara (Daveigh Chase) slithers out of a television screen and stalks him across his studio apartment to fulfill her awful curse. It’s not even the first of many interruptions of the linear narrative with shocking or weird images: where in the midst of Rachel’s (Naomi Watts) conversation with her bereaved sister Ruth (Lindsay Frost), we’re treated to a brief shot of poor Katie (Amber Tamlyn), the film’s first victim, crouched in a closet with a horrifying look on her dead face. It’s the scene when Rachel, previously rebuffed by Mr. Morgan in her search to discover who Anna Morgan and her daughter were, returns to his farm at night (brilliant move in a horror film) and stumbles upon a videotape of Samara Morgan’s psychotherapy.

We know that something significant is about to happen because—aside from the usual horror film suspense buildup—Rachel is surprised by a centipede as she rifles through a box of the Morgan’s belongings. She’s seen this centipede before in the fabled videotape that kills you, and throughout the film images from the tape seem to intrude little by little onto the real world. These abstract symbols not only frighten, but link events in the real world to Samara’s cursed tape: this particular creature recalls the “spiders, snails, and puppy-dog tails” that little girls are decidedly not supposed to be made of. When Rachel engages this videotape, notably created by the patriarchal forces that might be seen to repress Samara, she sees Samara in a sparse hospital room in fast motion, staring at the clock as its hands whirl around and around. An off-camera doctor indicates that they are in hour 14 of therapy–a therapy where Samara is wired with electrodes, plugged into a wall, and asked a variety of questions. The doctor makes several inquiries before she responds. But the most disturbing and important moment occurs when, just after Samara asserts that she loves her mommy, the Doc indicates that Samara is hurting her. When he says, “You don’t want to hurt anyone,” Samara responds: “But I do, and I’m sorry. It won’t stop.”

A revelation! A young girl supposedly given up by her family, subsequently adopted, and then poked and prodded by medical science and creepy male psychologists admits to having feelings other than love, maternity, and joy? Amazing! So although as a society we might locate a lot of anxiety in the maturation of young girls, this film—at least for a moment—doesn’t repress the idea that young girls might have feelings other than the ones society tells them to have. What’s problematic, of course, is that the film sees this admission as evidence of Samara’s evil. While the film overall may not be very progressive in terms of its depiction of women, and young girls in particular, it does have this ONE MOMENT of openness, like a valve releasing some of the pressure of repression.

In addition to admitting that she wants to hurt people, Samara is plagued by the idea that her adopted father is going to leave her in the institution, that he doesn’t love her. Eventually, her mother kills her, ostensibly because her idealization of what it means to be a mother didn’t come true exactly as she envisioned it. Because her adopted daughter isn’t “sugar and spice and everything nice” all the time. The expectations that society doles out for young girls and for mothers is far from realistic. Is this disconnect the real horror?

I’d like to take a moment to point out that Aiden (David Dorfman), Rachel’s young son, is far from a normal kid. He’s able to channel that creepy-but-probably-our-hero vibe that was perhaps first perfected by Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense just a few years before The Ring. Rachel is also probably not up for a Mom-of-the-Year Award; like Anna and Richard Morgan, she and Noah haven’t been the best parents in the world. Ruth Goldberg has written insightfully about the mirroring present in The Ring between Anna and Richard Morgan and Rachel and Noah with Aiden in Barry Keith Grant’s book on horror film, The Planks of Reason. It’s very clear that while Aiden is a model kid—picking out not only his clothes for Katie’s funeral, but Rachel’s as well, and being extraordinarily self-sufficient because Rachel is working all the time—Rachel and Noah are far from model parents. While she certainly doesn’t seem to share Anna Morgan’s homicidal ideas, Rachel’s life is not exactly constructed to be conducive to having a young child; she relies on Aiden’s capable nature to take up the slack. So really, part of the “terror” of little girls has to do with their mothers—the expectations that society heaps upon them for a “perfect” child, and that they must always, under all circumstances (including unrelenting evil) love their offspring. Certainly reality is far more complicated, and motherhood and childhood much more complex. If The Ring is expressing THAT anxiety, then the film’s success should be evidence that this is a conversation society needs to have.

On that note, one final word on sequels. I might have tipped my hand in the paragraphs above about my general feelings for them, but I do at the end of the day have a hard time believing that any film project is mounted for purely financial or business-oriented reasons. I have to think that there’s just too much work involved in an endeavor like filmmaking to justify it with solely materialistic motives. Therefore, if there are sequels to The Ring (which there are, but which I judge to be inferior in many ways to the style of the original—which was not even an “original,” but that’s another essay), then it’s because there’s some deeper driving force behind the need to express the anxieties at their center. So, I’ll tentatively say: onward to The Ring 3! Perhaps the most frightening things about this film in the end are its telling links to some of the more frightening aspects of our own society. If it takes sequels to work those issues out, bring them on.

Rebecca Willoughby holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University. She writes most frequently on horror films and melodrama, and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

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.

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