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Horror Week 2012: The Roundup
The Final Girl Gone Wild: Post-Feminist Whiteness in ‘Scream 4’ by Jeremy Cornelius
Wes Craven’s 1990s Scream trilogy completely rewrote the slasher genre in a postmodern meta-film. In March 2011, Scream 4 was released, ten years after Scream 3 was originally released, starring the original trio: Neve Campbell, David Arquette, and Courtney Cox-Arquette along with some new teen stars to apparently spur a new trilogy. Yet again, this film rewrites the genre, only this time the film plays with concepts of post-racial, post-feminist girl power by making Ghost Face [SPOILER ALERT!!!] a white sixteen-year-old girl, Sidney Prescott’s cousin Jill (played by Emma Roberts). Craven portrays Jill as the most violent and aggressive killer of any of the other serial killers in the Scream films. Jill kills mostly other white teenage girls (her best friends), a black police officer who is depicted in a racist fashion, and her own mother. Jill’s vitriolic aggression is fueled by her neoliberal pursuit of media fame and self-consciously performing the role of victim while veiling herself as the white-faced killer draped in a black shroud.
As well as being a zombie aficionado, I spent my teen years deep in confusion and denial about sexuality and gender – and these two things are perhaps not unrelated. Vampires and werewolves are explicitly sexual and very gendered, but my movie monster of choice erases sex and gender entirely by its very nature. There are no alluring seductions, no monthly cycles, no explosions of pent-up masculine rage in the zombie: only a creeping sameness and inevitability, all social categories dissolved into nothingness, all physical difference literally consumed in the nightmarish Eucharist of undead cannibalism. Of course, this erasure of sex and gender does not mean that sex and gender are not explored in zombie films. On the contrary, there are some very interesting things going on, as we shall see in our whirlwind tour of the Three Eras of Zombie Cinema.
Not only is Kristen (Liv Tyler) the film’s protagonist, she’s a woman who is not presented as a helpless idiot…It is Kristin who loads the shotgun after James confesses he’d lied about going hunting with his father and doesn’t know how to work it. Ultimately, James fires the gun, but by loading it Kristin proves she isn’t an incompetent damsel-in-distress. Throughout the film she strives to fight back…The Final Girl phenomenon is problematic because it is predicated on society’s sexist notion that women are the weaker sex. But scream time results in screen time, and while watching a movie like ‘The Strangers,’ with whom is the viewer being asked to identify? The masked maniac? Or the woman frantic to survive? (Hint: it’s not the maniac.)
In both the novella and The Vampire Lovers, Carmilla (Ingrid Pitt) exclusively stalks female victims, showing little interest in the male characters as anything other than fodder or a means to an end; Ingrid Pitt’s Carmilla never looks quite as comfortable with the lone male in the film she interacts with in a sexual manner as she does with the various women she seduces and bites…indeed the appreciation of Carmilla is seen in the faces of the female characters and it is with tentative exploration that they approach the mysterious woman.
‘Absentia’ Showcases Terror, Strong Female Characters and Sisterhood by Deirdre Crimmins
While I could continue on about the remarkable characterization of Callie and Tricia, it saddens me a little bit that strong non-sexualized female characters in horror films are such a unique phenomenon. While there are plenty of ass-kicking final women in slasher films, and many smart lady doctors who help stop the spread of a zombie outbreak, it is rare to feature a realistic female friendship, or a complicated sibling rivalry, in a horror film. Both Callie and Tricia are attractive, but that is not why they are there. The purpose that they are serving goes so far beyond their gender and their bodies that the contrast to other horror vixens seems like night and day. And neither of them plays the victim, or the unnaturally stoic heroine. They are both complex, and with long histories that they carry with themselves, and impact their judgments.
ELLEN RIPLEY (Aliens): This is perhaps the only scary movie where the villain (a 7-foot alien) was actually slightly intimidated by the intended victim, in this case a female lieutenant trapped on board an alien-infested ship. If she was ever frightened by the aliens, Ripley rarely showed it. As one of the only women on the ship, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) often swooped down to save her fellow male shipmates from becoming dinner for the aliens without hardly breaking a sweat. This is why we love her.
The central pleasure of Jennifer’s Body — the confusing love Needy feels for Jennifer, and the trouble she takes to clarify that feeling, and act on it (revenging Chip), then act on it again (revenging pre-demon Jennifer) — might be precisely what turned off male reviewers. For all the promise of eye candy going in, this is a story about young women negotiating the horrors of the adolescent-to-adult obstacle course with some dignity, loyalty, and social conscience intact. The infamous male gaze has to work harder to appropriate a film told from the p.o.v. of cute but bookish, shy but self-respecting Needy, whose closest bond is, and might ever be, her friend Jennifer.
When Moira is not around a living straight man, a target for that sexuality, she is an old woman displaying a damaged eye where she was shot. She is presented as completely lacking in sexual attractiveness — not only in appearance but in demeanour as well. Her sexual nature is reserved for straight men…Moira does get to be seen as a tragic figure for this. We see her pain and her loss when her mother dies in a nursing home. We get to see her fear and frustration over trying to be free from the house and having her plans thwarted. We get to see her pain and anger in the face of Constance’s constant taunting and needling of her, still holding a grudge for her husband’s infidelity. But in all these instances we’re expected to sympathise with the older Moira — the good Moira, the non-threatening Moira and, tellingly, the non-sexual Moira. Sexual Moira is not a person to be pitied or a person due sympathy or who feels pain.
For those who haven’t read the comics (like me), Michonne…seems to be a strong, powerful, complex character. She’s clever since she uses two incapacitated walkers to hide from other zombies. She appears to be a fierce and fearless survivor. But what’s even more exciting is that she’s a woman of color. Yet I’m skeptical as the show hasn’t done a great job portraying gender so far…I’m sorry, did the zombiepocalypse also signal a rip in the fabric of time where The Walking Dead characters now live in fucking 1955?! So Lori, women shouldn’t be “playing” with guns or hunting for food or protecting the camp. Nope. Women are only good for domestic duties like cooking, cleaning and child-rearing. Leave the tough stuff to the men. Silly me for forgetting. Thank god Andrea told Lori and her bullshit off…While blaming it on Lori’s “irrational behavior” due to her pregnancy and “going through a lot of stuff” (um, aren’t they all?), writer/creator Robert Kirkman ultimately defends this exchange and the show’s depiction of traditional gender roles…Why must we constantly see a rearticulation of sexist gender stereotypes?…Why is everyone on the show struggling to maintain white male patriarchy??
The Stepfather (the 1987 version) is not like most slasher films; it is a uniquely feminist horror film. Carol J. Clover’s theory of the “final girl,” the trope in horror cinema that leaves one unique girl as the sole survivor, is brilliant and generally accurate. But our heroine, Stephanie, is not like other final girls. For one, she is one of the ONLY girls in the film. The film is full of empty, impotent signifiers of male power: the male lieutenant, the male therapist, the male high school teacher, the male hero/amateur detective, the male reporter and, of course, Stephanie’s dead father. More importantly, throughout the duration of this film no women are killed. Let me repeat that: NO women are killed. It may not be obvious to some viewers, but it is strikingly obvious to me, a feminist who loves horror films. When the film opens, Jerry (or Henry Morrison, his identity before Jerry) has already killed his previous family, which we know contained a wife and at least one daughter, but during the film only men are slaughtered. They are men who attempt to rescue Stephanie and her mother Susan, but the only person who actually rescues Stephanie is Stephanie.
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…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.
Call it The Nervous Wife, which is more concise than “women are super emotional, illogical and fearful and cannot be trusted.” The Nervous Wife is a staple of the haunted house film genre, and now that paranormal shows are slowly taking over the small screen, it can be found there, too. In the first season of the FX channel’s American Horror Story, the character Vivien Harmon had to be committed and impregnated with a devil baby, and her teenage daughter dead and haunting the family abode, before her husband would believe that something spooky was going down. Yes. Yes. I know. Science says ghosts and goblins and such don’t exist. True enough. It is natural for a body to be skeptical of supernatural claims. Would you believe it if you were told the portal to hell was in your laundry room? Likely not. The problem is that women in horror films are rarely, if ever, the skeptical ones. Logic is portrayed as a man thing. Little ladies are quick to believe the unbelievable. And to be frightened by it.
But really, I think that the guys who made this film have no idea what kind of culture they are feeding into. I think that V/H/S is a horror film, not because it is well-made, or clever, or scary, but because these are the stories we expect to hear. Girls are murderous. Girls are sluts. Girls won’t give it up. Girls can’t be trusted. Girls are victims. Girls. Are. The. Worst. Those girls? They’re even worse than those guys. But you know what, guys who made this film? When you feed into this culture, when you populate your brains and ours with these images, with these narratives, you make it more and more likely that the only option girls have when date raped, when stuck in a loveless marriage, when victimized, when traumatized is to strike out. To strike back.
I started thinking about the five college students in The Cabin in the Woods and how their roles ar e defined by gender. The two women, Jules and Dana, are defined as The Whore and The Virgin – two opposite ends of the spectrum whose deaths are meant to serve as bookends for the others. The order of deaths is irrelevant except in the case of the women. Jules, as the corrupted Whore, has to die first, and Dana, the Virgin, has to die last, if she dies at all. As Hadley (Bradley Whitford) says, “The virgin death is optional as long as it’s last.” The female characters are defined only by their sexuality – nothing else about them really matters. Still, the men don’t fare much better…What I find particularly interesting, though, is how the “puppeteers” (as Marty calls them) recognize that the five people they’ve selected for the sacrificed don’t easily fit into the prescribed archetypes.
[Bexy Bennett]: Strong women don’t necessarily need to be role models, though. I certainly wouldn’t want my children to raise the headless horseman from the dead to exact revenge for previous injustices, but I can admire Lady Van Tassel’s forbearance – she and her sister are left alone, as children, in the Western Woods, yet she ensures their survival and raises herself to a position of some importance in the village. Of course her motives are questionable but does that diminish her strength?[Amanda Civitello]: Given the way that the other lead female character is portrayed, I have the impression that it’s a deliberate editorial decision to make the one strong female character into the antithesis of a role model. The audience is meant to identify – or if not identify, at least feel for – sweet Katrina Van Tassel, who does all she can to save the man she loves. But Katrina isn’t nearly as well-rounded a character as Lady Van Tassel. She’s more of a generic type of filler than anything else; to compensate for the lack of development of Katrina’s character, it’s as if they wanted to ensure that Lady Van Tassel would be so offensive and so off-putting that they made her into something bordering on a monstrous caricature.
The horror genre has a tradition of terrorizing women, of chasing them through the woods and attackingthem in houses. It also has a tradition of The Final Girl, a trope that is simultaneously empowering and reductive: the only survivor is a virginal woman who wields a phallic weapon and destroys the monster. The ‘Paranormal Activity’ trilogy features a different kind of Final Girl: she doesn’t kill the monster — she becomes it.
Ableist and sexist stereotypes of women and mental illness abound in horror movies and TV (American Horror Story, Orphan, Gothika, Nightmare on Elm Street 3, The Ring and Misery)…Society polices women’s appearances, language and behavior. We can’t let the ladies get out of control. Who knows what could happen??? Calling a woman “crazy,” doubting not only her veracity but her very sanity, is offensive. It’s also an attempt to control women, demean them and strip them of their power. Women with mental illness are often silenced, invisible from the media aside from victims or villains in horror. When we do see them on-screen, they instill fear as they are depicted as violent, volatile and uncontrollable…The “crazy bitch” trope and label — in both pop culture and reality — silences and dismisses women while simultaneously shaming and stigmatizing women living with mental illness.
Without a doubt, the movie is doing many exciting, transgressive things. I find particularly important the way the audience is analogous with “the gods” because we are the ones demanding these elaborate, repetitive sacrifices that push people into these stereotypical roles. It’s not only an indictment of the horror genre but of the voyeuristic spectatorship that perpetuates these horror tropes. However, I expected more from the feminist powerhouse team that created Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I find myself wishing Marty had been cast as a woman, and the two women, the fool and the non-virgin virgin, would be the pair of survivors who finally say “no more” to a horror genre that dismembers, kills, and punishes them for being women.
The woman’s scream has been an essential part of horror. Women play a fundamental role in horror films – possibly more than other genres. Women function as a foil. They are wrought by terror. They scream the way we, in the theater, want to…The problem is that we are still dealing with an either-or sort of situation. Women can be preternaturally courageous and stoic. Or, they can be spastic screeching machines that fall to pieces.
And while my confession at the start of this remains the same, upon closer inspection, I realized that Leslie Vernon’s treatment of women is left to be desired. While there is a lot of discussion about empowering the survivor girl to become a strong woman, it is described from a mocking male’s perspective. One scene in particular especially rubbing me the wrong way, in which Leslie discusses with Taylor how the faux survivor girl, Kelly, will imminently end up at an old shed to find a weapon. He describes her choice of weapon as “empowering herself with cock.” The axes, sledgehammers, and other long handled devices purposely phallic.
Horror films are commonly seen as one of the most sexist film genres; utilizing the voyeuristic male gaze, objectifying the female body, and reveling in helpless women being victimized. I am not discounting these claims, but horror has the potential to be more than that: films which subvert the genre’s sexism and incorporate strong, distinct female characters do exist.
The Neeson Identity: What the Release of ‘The Grey’ Got Wrong About Men
Liam Neeson in The Grey (2012). Beard. Check. Snow. Check. Y Chromosome. Check. |
Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins in The Edge. Beards. Snow. Wilderness. Etc. |
“So you say this movie has some throwback qualities, or some old school manly-man qualities; that’s intentional… So, guilty as charged on that; if that’s something that needs to be brought back, then let’s bring it back. It seems like people are responding to that about this movie and to my mind there haven’t been enough of them. The pendulum swung the other way since I started in this business and there were men’s movies like whatever those Tom Cruise movies [were]”
He continues “…then all of a sudden Sigourney Weaver comes in the Alien and we have strong women, we have Working Girl, we have all this, we have Best Friend’s Wedding, and before you know it, all the f–king movies are about the girls!”
Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity. Non-existent leading man. |
Willem Defoe in The Hunter. Beard. Snow. Raw masculinity. Rinse and repeat. |
Horror Week 2012: Roundup of Horror Week 2011
If you missed last year’s Horror Week and want to keep reading feminist analysis of the genre, check out these great articles.
Sleepaway Camp by Carrie Nelson
The shock of Sleepaway Camp’s ending relies on the cissexist assumption that one’s biological sex and gender presentation must always match. A person with a mismatched sex and gender presentation is someone to be distrusted and feared. Though the audience has identified with Peter throughout the movie, we are meant to turn on him and fear him at the end, as he’s not only a murderer – he’s a deceiver as well. But, as Tera points out, the only deception is the one in the minds of cisgender viewers who assume that Peter’s sex and gender must align in a specific, proper way. Were this not the point that the filmmakers wanted to make, they would have revealed the twist slightly earlier in the film, allowing time for the viewer to digest the information and realize that Peter is still a human being.
Starling must unfortunately endure many such difficulties because she works in the male-dominated institution of the FBI. As an attractive woman, Starling receives lascivious looks from nearly every male in the movie. When she and her roommate go jogging in one scene, a group of men jogging the other way turn around to ogle the women’s behinds. Earlier, when Starling is looking for Agent Crawford’s (her boss) office, the men gaze at her as if she were an exotic delicacy. Hannibal Lecter’s psychiatrist Dr. Chilton tries to pick her up initially, “Are you familiar with the Baltimore area? I could show you around.” When she explains she has a job to do, Chilton becomes angry, “Crawford sent you here for your looks–as bait.” Lecter surmises that Crawford fantasizes about Starling and that is why she was selected for the assignment. Even the bespectacled etymologist asks her out. In fact, it is only Lecter who is more interested in getting in her head than her pants.
The Sexiness of Slaughter: The Sexualization of Women in Slasher Films by Cali Loria
The whores in horror are the signature flesh of the slasher flick. Women in this genre have long been given the cold shoulder: cold in as much as they are often lacking for clothing. Often a female character’s dearth of apparel becomes prominent at the pivotal point of slaughter: in cinema, women dress down to be killed. Filmmakers pair scopophilia with the gratuitous gore of killing–leaving viewers to male gaze their way into a media conundrum: When did sexual arousal and brutality towards women pair to become the penultimate money shot?
Amanda Young, Gender Erasure, and Saw‘s Unexpected Pro-Woman Attitude by Elizabeth Ray
There are many things that set Amanda apart from most villains in horror movies, the most notable one being that she’s a woman. But more than that, she’s a woman who is not driven by: jealousy, vanity, or obsession over a man. She doesn’t indulge in vampiric, Sapphic tendencies meant to titillate male viewers. And she isn’t sexualized: while reasonably attractive, she isn’t a young, nubile twentysomething, and she dresses in plain, normal clothes, which neither accentuate nor hide her feminine features. And she isn’t demonized either: she’s a not a “bitch” or “whore” who deserves what’s coming to her. Her mundanity is what makes her so appealing: she’s not just an “everygirl,” she’s an everyperson, who, like Jigsaw, is a character that all genders can identify with and sympathize — but her femininity isn’t taken away from her in order to make her stronger or more appealing (she is not given a boyish nickname like “Chris” or “Billy” and doesn’t adopt masculine traits like Ripley did in Alien), which is the most important thing.
Hellraiser by Tatiana Christian
Julia is an interesting character because unlike Kirsty – who experienced a mutual loving relationship between both her father and Steven (her love interest) – Julia had no such thing. Instead, Julia experienced rejection from Frank, her main obsession/love interest and killed off all the men who showed any interest in her (Larry and her victims).
Drag Me To Hell by Stephanie Rogers
I vacillated between these two women throughout the movie, hating one and loving the other. After all, Christine merely made a decision to advance her career, a decision that a man in her position wouldn’t have had to face (because he wouldn’t have been expected to prove his lack of “weakness”). If her male coworker had given the mortgage extension, I doubt it would’ve necessarily been seen as a weak move. And even though Christine made a convincing argument to her boss for why the bank could help the woman (demonstrating her business awareness in the process), her boss still desired to see Christine lay the smack-down on Grandma Ganush. I sympathized with her predicament on one hand, and on the other, I found her extremely unlikable and ultimately “weak” for denying the loan.
The Blair Witch Project by Alex DeBonis
But the film itself denigrates Heather because she accepts responsibility, almost agreeing with the taunts. The most famous scene in The Blair Witch Project is Heather’s tearful confession into the lens. The substance of this confession is that she is responsible for what’s happening to them, but it’s infuriating that Heather takes responsibility and does so at this point. The confession scene tries to make Heather an Ahab-like figure. On the one hand, her tendency to tape allows the narrative conceit of the film to operate. When events take a turn for the eerie and tense, Heather’s obsession with documenting the experience keeps the cameras rolling and allows us to see the ensuing tumult. On the other hand, it puts her energetic striving for a quality film on trial and coaxes from her a confession for a crime she doesn’t actually commit.
The Descent by Robin Hitchcock
While a cave setting evokes female reproductive organs almost inherently, the set design here takes this metaphor to extremes. The women descend into the cave through a slit-shaped gash in the earth, and then must crawl head-first through a narrow passageway into the greater cave system, where the true danger of the monsters await.
The monsters, depicted as the products of evolution motivated only by a primal drive for survival, are the perfect elaboration of this cave-as-womb horror metaphor. And as a cherry on top, they rip the guts out of these women.
In their landmark study, “Madwoman in the Attic,” Gilbert and Gubar embraced the figure of Bertha Mason (the insane, ghostlike previous wife of Jane Eyre’s hero, Mr. Rochester, whom he has locked up inside the attic…apparently for her own good and out of the goodness of his heart!) as somewhat of an alternate literary heroine, and started to analyze exactly what was at work in the common themes found in the literature that women were writing during that time period. As women attempted to write themselves into the purely patriarchal forms of literature that they had grown up reading, they faced the limits of the representation of women in heroic roles. So the gothic heroine emerged as somewhat of a compromise: a heroine who is perpetually endangered and perpetually courageous in the face of that danger. This is the precursor of the modern horror movie heroine who, against all logic, insists on checking out that pesky sound in the middle of the night or following the creepy voices outside of her room.
Let This Feminist Vampire In by Natalie Wilson
While the original film was also excellent, it lacked some of the more overt gendered analysis of the U.S. version. Though this may be due to discrepancies in translation (I saw the film both in Swedish with English subtitles and dubbed in English), the bullying theme running throughout the narrative was framed very differently in the Swedish version. In it, the young male protagonist, Oskar, was repeatedly told to “squeal like a pig” by his tormentors. In contrast, the male protagonist in the U.S. version, now named Owen (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee), is attacked by bullies with taunts such as “Hey, little girl” and “Are you a little girl?”
Inevitably the college kids pick up a hitchhiker, which is where the plot starts to get interesting. This hitchhiker, Baby Firefly (played by Zombie’s wife Sheri Moon), seems odd and off in her own world. She messes with the radio and giggles at the college kids. Both Denise and Mary instantly despise her and are obviously threatened by her sexuality, and as expected both Bill and Jerry like her. While this little battle starts to play out, and Baby is loudly drumming on the car’s dashboard, the car gets a flat tire. Of course the sexy female hitchhiker is a local and her brother can help fix the car. It is when Baby insists that the whole gang come over to dinner that this story finally becomes interesting.
A Feminist Reading of The Ring by Sobia
At the center of the mystery are Samara and her mother, Anna, both women whose sanity is questioned by the narrative. At first glance, the movie seems to be Anna’s creation, and it’s her face that we see in the images on the tape. Anna is implied to have been driven to the brink of insanity and eventually to suicide by Samara, who somehow creates images that burn themselves into the minds of those around her. Samara herself is an ambivalent figure that the movie does not seem to be sure about, which leaves her open to interpretation. While I was convinced of her pure evilness initially, subsequent viewings have made her emerge as a less sinister figure, especially given her portrayal in the Japanese version of the story.
Ellen Ripley, A Feminist Film Icon, Battles Horrifying Aliens…And Patriarchy by Megan Kearns
While both Alien and Aliens straddle the sci-fi/horror divide, one of the horror elements apparent in Alien is Carol Clover’s notion of the “final girl.” In numerous horror films (Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, The Descent), the resourceful female remains the sole survivor, the audience intended to identify and sympathize with her. Oftentimes sexual overtones exist with the promiscuous victims and the virginal survivor. While Alien and Aliens display sexual themes (we’ll get to those in a moment), Ripley isn’t sexualized but remains the sole survivor in the first film. She’s also never masculinized as Clover suggests happens to final girls in order to survive.
Rosemary’s Baby: Marriage Can Be Terrifying by Stephanie Brown
Rosemary’s Baby is one scary movie. It’s about a woman’s lot in a hostile world. It is about a terrible marriage to a narcissistic and selfish person. It is about the fear of motherhood and giving birth. It is convincing as a terrifying movie about the supernatural, and as a life lesson about selling your soul to a metaphorical devil. I like horror to convince me that I have learned something about the dark side of human nature…not just play with gore, or supernatural themes, or catastrophic nightmares. It has to name a fear that we really have, or a truth we find hard to believe, and the best horror enlightens us by showing us the darkness that haunts our lives.
Thanks to all our Horror Week 2011 and Horror Week 2012 writers!
Horror Week 2012: Top 10: Best Female-Centered Horror Films
Halloween |
Ginger Snaps |
Horror Week 2012: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon |
Horror Week 2012: “We work with what we have," The Subversion of Gender Roles in ‘The Cabin in the Woods’
Apparently, sexy fireplace dancing and making out with a taxidermied wolf aren’t part of Jules’ normal partying repertoire. |
The non-virgin virgin. Talk about not really fitting into a gender stereotype. |
Bong Boy to the rescue! |
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Horror Week 2012: ‘V/H/S’: The New Face of Horror
The new face of horror …
I just watched and reviewed the found-footage horror genre film V/H/S after reading some promising reviews. Despite the early read in the opposite direction, V/H/S is not anything close to good — and that’s just the writing, editing, filming, and acting.
My brother’s mainstream movie review site didn’t seem like the right place to do it, but I want to talk about the women of V/H/S and why this film should, in fact, scare you.
The rest of this post will contain spoilers for each of the short films, and discussions necessitating a trigger warning. Warnings include but are not limited to: blood, non-con, murder, sexual violence, religious violence, self-harm, medical violence.
The film opens with “Tape 51″ (which we cut back to each time a ‘tape’ ends) — or rather, opens with the first-person hand cam assault of a woman. The group of guys drive past her in a parking lot. They circle back. They swoop in. One takes down her male friend, two others grab the girl, expose her breasts, and whoop and holler for the camera. The next scene reveals that the guys work for a porn site that specializes in these kind of attacks, and that the guys get paid to take these shots. They speculate about expanding to up-skirt shots.
These are, for the intents of assigning this film a plot, our protagonists. A new character enters and offers these guys a job that will pay a lot more than their current gig. All they have to do is break into a house and steal a particular VHS. No big deal.
The short films included in V/H/S are tapes that the guys check out, trying to find the one they are looking for, before meeting their own ends and rendering the entire film completely pointless.
Image provided by V/H/S press kit. |
First up: “Amateur Night.” We continue with the theme of filming girls without their consent. Group of white guys armed with a hidden glasses cam hits the bars with the intent of getting some hot chicks liquored up and willing to have sex in a room with several people watching. In addition to one girl who, as we meet her, is already intoxicated but seems game, the guys attract the attention of “Lily” (named on the film’s IMDb page, not in the film), a wide-eyed girl who appears to be, at best, on an array of drugs. The guys get the girls into a cab where they encourage both girls to take drugs. Fast forward (hah) to the motel room. Girl 1 is wasted, and making out with Dude 1. Dude 2 watches and laughs because he is stoned or something. Dude 3 (hidden glasses cam dude) has several moments of… contemplation in front of the mirror before re-entering the situation. Yes, he seems to decide, he’s in this, and he’s going to film some girls getting fucked without consent. But there’s a hitch in his plan! Girl 1 has passed out, and — holy shit, give the guy a cookie — Dude 1 calls it off. Course, he really wants to get some drunk pussy! “Lily” is weird, but she’ll do. Dude 1 goes at it, and Dude 2 wants to get in on that action. “Lily” doesn’t fight back, but upon what we can assume is penetration, growls and hunches over before digging into Dude 1 with her teeth and claws. Dude 2 and Dude 3 are officially freaking out, man. Dude 1 is totally dead! That’s uncalled for! Dude 2 gets it too. Dude 3 narrowly escapes a few times before “Lily” completes her transformation into a vampire/succubus/bat creature and flies off. Jeez. That bitch really had an attitude problem.
“Second Honeymoon.” Everything is really boring and a lovely normal heterosexual white couple is sight-seeing for their second honeymoon! Girl is grossed out by the shitty hotel, and grossed out by Dude’s attempts at filming her naked. God, what is her problem what an uptight bitch. Dude and Girl sleep in separate beds because of reasons. Dude sees a girl in the parking lot and is Really Exaggeratedly Freaked Out By Her Because She Means Something To This Story. Mysterious person breaks into their hotel room and runs a knife along Girl’s back, steals $100 and dips Dude’s toothbrush in the toilet bowl… also because of reasons. More boring sight-seeing and dialogue that probably Means Something to the dudebros who put this shit together. Dude blames Girl for his missing money because that is definitely something you should do to your uptight bitchy wife. Mysterious person — a girl, is it the girl from the parking lot? it is probably the girl from the parking lot! — kills Dude while he is sleeping. Kills him to blubbery death. Girl and Mysterious Girl make out and hit the road… because of reasons that are probably that lesbians are BITCHESSSSSSSS.
“Tuesday the 17th.” Girl takes her friends and significant other out to the woods, uses lies and misdirection to get them there because girls are just like that yanno. After not reaching the promised party cabin, friends start to get suspicious. Girl tells her friends they’re gonna die, but they don’t believe her. The camera (???) has weird flashes of dead people and Girl is starting to act pretty creepy so friends insist on more information. Turns out, a while ago Girl came here and this creature killed off all of her friends. (The creature is actually kinda scary, but the hand-cam, while integral in showing us the creature eventually undermines the scares.) She’s using these friends as bait, because she’s going to kill the creature/capture him on film (she says both at different times, because they’re totes the same thing). Everybody dies.
“The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger.” Girl talks to her boyfriend on Skype, shows her tits without him asking for it cause girls are sluts. Girl thinks her house is haunted. Girl hears noises and boyfriend sees green ghost creatures on screen but whoops isn’t recording so cannot play back the footage. Girl also has a weird lump on her arm. Girl decides to cut weird lump out of her arm, digs around with a stick. Boyfriend, oh thank goodness, is a doctor and he’s pretty sure she shouldn’t be doing that. He’ll be home soon and he’ll take care of her then. Girl decides to try and communicate with ghosts, but looking at them scares her so she does the obvious and closes her eyes and asks boyfriend to tell her where the ghosts are so she can talk to them. Girl gets knocked unconscious. Enter boyfriend who isn’t as out of town as he said! Boyfriend cuts Girl open, removes something, and whines to alien/ghost/people about having to do this. Girl gets doctored up, slapped with a diagnosis of schizophrenia because only that would explain all the weird stuff. Boyfriend chats with another girl… more tits… and more lump in her arm. THIS GUY IS A DOCTOR YOU GUYS YOU ARE LUCKY TO BE DATING SUCH A WINNER.
“10/31/98.” Drunk dudebros head to a Halloween party. One is dressed as a nanny cam with camera and all. Dudebros cannot find the party or even the street it’s on. They see a house and it must be the party but no one is there but they’re pretty sure it is a haunted house haha great party man. WATTA JOKE IT REALLY IS A HAUNTED HOUSE AND THE ONLY ONE PARTYING IS SATAN JUST KIDDING. Dudebros make their way upstairs, noticing strange things. At the attic they hear chanting and see a group of men performing what looks like an exorcism on a girl dressed in white. She’s crying a lot and they are hurting her and what might just be part of a really elaborate haunted house party is probably not cause some guy just got snatched out of the air and killed? Dudebros freak out! But Dudebros have a savior complex and gotta rescue that girl. They escape a horrible series of CGI horrors and make the escape. Dudebros can’t read a map but where is the hospital dudes! OMG. The girl isn’t in the car any more! She’s being creepy in the road! And the guys get hit by a train.
And now that I have this all written out, I think maybe V/H/S is a secret feminist masterpiece because all the guys are the worst and with the exception of “Emily” all the girls GET REVENGE AND MURDER and everyone who dies is an asshole.
(But really, I think that the guys who made this film have no idea what kind of culture they are feeding into. I think that V/H/S is a horror film, not because it is well-made, or clever, or scary, but because these are the stories we expect to hear. Girls are murderous. Girls are sluts. Girls won’t give it up. Girls can’t be trusted. Girls are victims. Girls. Are. The. Worst. Those girls? They’re even worse than those guys. But you know what, guys who made this film? When you feed into this culture, when you populate your brains and ours with these images, with these narratives, you make it more and more likely that the only option girls have when date raped, when stuck in a loveless marriage, when victimized, when traumatized is to strike out. To strike back.)
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Marcia Herring is a recently relocated writer from Missouri. She is still working on her graduate degree, working in retail, and writing freelance for ThoseTwoGuysOnline.com (one of the guys is her brother) and Lesbrary. She spends most of her free time watching television and movies. She wrote an analysis of Degrassi, Teens and Rape Apologism, contributed a review of X-Men First Class, and reviewed Atonement and Imagine Me & You for Bitch Flicks.
Horror Week 2012: Patriarchy in Crisis: Power and Gender in ‘The Stepfather’
“Wait a minute . . . who am I here?” is the central question posed by Jerry Blake in the 1987 slasher film, The Stepfather. It is a story of patriarchy in crisis. In a world in which “traditional” and “old fashioned” (both characteristics attributed to Jerry) notions of male dominance and the nuclear family are thoroughly challenged, the patriarchal order is undergoing a desperate identity crisis. The film is about a man who marries into a family that eventually disappoints him by not living up to his expectations of the perfect family, so he kills them and moves on to another town and another family. In The Stepfather, it is patriarchy that is broken and unable to find a reality in which its conceptualization of self exists. Without the structural order “the father” is accustomed to, he simply does not know who he is, and rather than deal with this and evolve, he chooses to deny reality, destroy it, and recreate it in his own image, which, ultimately, always fails.
“Am I Jerry, or Henry, or Bill?” — patriarchal schizophrenia in The Stepfather |
Stephanie’s character is portrayed as a strikingly healthy, good-natured, 16-year-old girl. The first time we see Stephanie, she is riding her bicycle toward the camera, over hills, the wind in her hair; she is strong and independent. She arrives home to have a playful autumn leaf battle with her mother in the backyard. Both are vibrant and laughing, and the bond they share is evident: these women genuinely like one another and enjoy each other’s company. When Jerry arrives home and Stephanie’s mother, Susan, runs off to greet him, Stephanie is blatantly disappointed. She tells her (male) therapist, “If he wasn’t there, Mom and I’d be alright.” It is important to note that Stephanie is not portrayed as a damaged child who will not permit anyone to replace the unmarred memory of her dead father. Though she misses her father, she knows there is something fundamentally wrong with Jerry, and every time he refers to the three of them as a family or himself as her father, it feels intensely creepy and inappropriate.
The American family, weird and creepy |
In Clover’s “final girl” theory, she states that the final girl is identified early on in the film as different from her peers: she is more intelligent and perceptive than her friends, and, among other attributes, she has sexual hang-ups. In fact, these sexual hang-ups are the key to the final girl’s power in that they allow her to identify enough with the killer to overpower him. There are many examples of this in the slasher genre (Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Scream, etc.), but Stephanie isn’t one of them. Stephanie’s awakening sexuality is portrayed as natural, romantic and exciting. Stephanie knows she likes boys and she knows that is perfectly normal, a fact her mother reinforces on the porch after Jerry accuses Paul, Stephanie’s new boyfriend, of attempted rape. “He just kissed me goodnight Mom, and I wanted him to,” Stephanie says. “Of course you did,” her mother responds reassuringly, confirming that, despite what Jerry thinks, female sexuality is completely normal. Though Susan later slaps Stephanie when Stephanie says of Jerry “He’s a creep, how can you let him touch you,” it is also the first time Susan reprimands Jerry, and it is the beginning of the end. She slaps Stephanie out of defensiveness of her own sexual desire for Jerry. The only sex scene in The Stepfather is instigated by Susan and focuses on her pleasure, emphasizing her moaning and showing her face in close-up. In fact, when the camera cuts to Jerry’s face, we can see he is not really enjoying himself at all. He is doing what a man is supposed to do, and obviously has severe issues with sex that the women in the film do not have. In fact, other than Stephanie’s lackluster friend Karen, the only other woman we really engage with is Annie, the records desk clerk who assists our pseudo-hero Jim because she doesn’t like her male boss (patriarchal figure), and she is somewhat attracted to Jim. Though we only see her for less than a minute, it is significant that within 60 seconds her sexuality and rebelliousness are highlighted.
Jerry starts looking for a new family after the confrontation over Stephanie’s sexuality |
In his current identity in the film, Jerry Blake is a real estate agent – he sells houses. The audience is given no opportunity to miss this metaphor when, at a family barbeque comprised of the first five families Jerry sold houses to in the neighborhood, Jerry declares “I don’t just sell houses. I sell the American Dream.” The film is basically about the nuclear family, the American Dream, and a dying patriarch trying to force everyone to “play house” with him. The actual physical structure of the house functions visually in the film to illustrate the psychological space of the characters’ power struggles. The basement is relegated as Jerry’s safe space; Freud would call it his unconscious, where he blows off steam by throwing on a flannel shirt and playing with his gender appropriate toys – construction tools, hammer, saws, etc., – implements used to build and create structures, to create order, to fix things. Oh, and he also periodically yells at himself, violently. Stephanie enters this space during the barbeque and witnesses one of Jerry’s rants. Symbolically it demonstrates Stephanie’s ability to see through Jerry’s facade and his promise of familial love and security. The staircase is rendered as an iconic image utilized over and over in the film, usually featuring Jerry at the top via a low camera angle looking up. There are multiple staircases in the film, but they all function the same way, to demonstrate Jerry’s positioning of himself in dominion over the domestic space. The climax of the film is on the staircase, with Jerry trying desperately to climb to the top to reach and kill Stephanie.
Jerry finds Stephanie in the basement witnessing his freak-out session |
Both of the murders in the film also feature a house structure. The first is when Jerry kills Stephanie’s therapist who, posing as a potential client, is beaten to death with a wooden beam from the construction of the house Jerry is showing him. The second is Jim, poor Jim, the stereotypical ruggedly good-looking pseudo-hero. Jim’s sister was Jerry’s last victim (when Jerry was Henry), and throughout the film we watch Jim playing amateur detective, hot on Jerry’s trail. He finally figures out where Jerry is right at the end of the film and rushes over to save Susan and Stephanie. He walks in after Susan has been pushed down the basement stairs, right when Jerry is climbing the main staircase to kill Stephanie. Though Jim has been preparing for this moment with firearms training, he is ridiculously ineffective when he cannot even get the gun out of his jacket pocket before Jerry stabs him to death at the bottom of the staircase.
Though Stephanie has not been training for several months to kill Jerry, and does not have a gun, she is quick and resourceful. She picks up a piece of glass with a towel and stabs Jerry in the arm. She then leads him into the attic where, while pursuing her, he falls through the ceiling. This is significant because it is the actual structure of the house that protects Stephanie. During the climax on the staircase, Susan has survived her fall. She retrieves Jim’s gun, crawls to the bottom of the staircase and shoots Jerry twice (misses once) before the bullets in the gun run out (why Jim goes to kill Jerry without a fully loaded gun nobody knows; he doesn’t seem like the over-confident type). Jerry continues to climb the stairs. In the final moment, Jerry’s hand and Stephanie’s hand are both on the knife, the symbol of phallic power. Stephanie stabs Jerry and he falls down the staircase. The last shot of the scene is Stephanie standing at the top of the staircase, a low camera angle looking up. But rather than looking down triumphantly, she calmly sits down on the top step. She seems to be analyzing the scene, and we look at her looking and feel the power of her gaze.
Stephanie is her own hero |
Throughout the film, Jerry has been making a birdhouse – a miniature version of his idea of the perfect home. Susan and Stephanie help Jerry erect it mid-way through the film, and we are given a distorted shot from the top of the birdhouse, looking down, emphasizing how high and unreachable Jerry’s idea of family really is. In the closing scene of the film, Stephanie cuts the birdhouse down. We see it lying in the foreground while Stephanie and her mother walk arm-in-arm, happy and complete, back into their home. They do not relocate as many families in horror films do after tragedy because of the symbolic significance of reclaiming their house, their structure. The film shows us that these two women are a complete family. They do not need a patriarch, and they do not need the conventional notion of the nuclear family to be happy – in fact, they are better off without it.
Stephanie and Susan, happy without the “American Dream” |
The Stepfather is not only about the collapse of the traditional patriarchal social order, but it is also about the strength of alternative notions of family. You do not only see “evil” destroyed, but you see something positive replace it. I really like Stephanie as our heroine, not only because she is strong and smart and resourceful, but also because she is not represented as an anomaly, as most final girls are. She is a normal, likable, regular teenage girl that takes down the patriarchy. A strong message like this cannot help but be subversive.
*For more on the final girl theory, see Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film by Carol J. Clover. It rocks.
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Horror Week 2012: American Horror and the Evils of the Sexual Woman
Alexandra Breckinridge (l) and Frances Conroy (r) as American Horror Story‘s Moira |
“Be it Lilith or Eve, is seen as the enemy of harmony, well ordered life and peace. She is the source of all evils, the originator of sin in the world. This negative understanding of the woman, particularly Eve, is presented in the words of some prominent male scholars. The Jewish commentator, Cassuto, maintains that the serpent too is female and the cunning of the serpent is in reality the cunning of the woman. The German Old Testament scholar, claims that women confront the allurements and mysteries that beset our limited life more directly than men do, and therefore, woman is a temptress. Mckenzie connects woman’s moral weakness with her sexual attraction and holds that the latter ruined both the woman and the man. Thus, male interpreters understand woman as responsible not only for the origin of evil in the world, but makes female “to represent the qualities of materiality, irrationality, carnality and finitude, which debase the manly spirit and drag it down into sin and death.”
Horror Week 2012: Portrait of the Artist as the Demon’s Best Friend Forever
Jennifer’s Body (2009) |
Megan Fox as Jennifer |
Needy (Amanda Seyfried) and Jennifer (Megan Fox) |
Amanda Seyfried as Needy |
Demon Jennifer |
Vampire trope |
Jennifer and Needy’s much-hyped lesbian moment |
Erin Blackwell is a practicing astrologer who blogs at venus11house and pinkrush. Congratulations to Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green on their new baby boy.