Horror Week 2012: Roundup of Horror Week 2011

Here we are, at the end of Horror Week 2012!

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Hellraiser by Tatiana Christian

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

Drag Me To Hell by Stephanie Rogers

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

The Blair Witch Project by Alex DeBonis

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

The Descent by Robin Hitchcock

While a cave setting evokes female reproductive organs almost inherently, the set design here takes this metaphor to extremes. The women descend into the cave through a slit-shaped gash in the earth, and then must crawl head-first through a narrow passageway into the greater cave system, where the true danger of the monsters await.

The monsters, depicted as the products of evolution motivated only by a primal drive for survival, are the perfect elaboration of this cave-as-womb horror metaphor. And as a cherry on top, they rip the guts out of these women.

In their landmark study, “Madwoman in the Attic,” Gilbert and Gubar embraced the figure of Bertha Mason (the insane, ghostlike previous wife of Jane Eyre’s hero, Mr. Rochester, whom he has locked up inside the attic…apparently for her own good and out of the goodness of his heart!) as somewhat of an alternate literary heroine, and started to analyze exactly what was at work in the common themes found in the literature that women were writing during that time period. As women attempted to write themselves into the purely patriarchal forms of literature that they had grown up reading, they faced the limits of the representation of women in heroic roles. So the gothic heroine emerged as somewhat of a compromise: a heroine who is perpetually endangered and perpetually courageous in the face of that danger. This is the precursor of the modern horror movie heroine who, against all logic, insists on checking out that pesky sound in the middle of the night or following the creepy voices outside of her room.

Let This Feminist Vampire In by Natalie Wilson

While the original film was also excellent, it lacked some of the more overt gendered analysis of the U.S. version. Though this may be due to discrepancies in translation (I saw the film both in Swedish with English subtitles and dubbed in English), the bullying theme running throughout the narrative was framed very differently in the Swedish version. In it, the young male protagonist, Oskar, was repeatedly told to “squeal like a pig” by his tormentors. In contrast, the male protagonist in the U.S. version, now named Owen (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee), is attacked by bullies with taunts such as “Hey, little girl” and “Are you a little girl?”

House of 1000 Corpses by Dierdre Crimmins
Inevitably the college kids pick up a hitchhiker, which is where the plot starts to get interesting. This hitchhiker, Baby Firefly (played by Zombie’s wife Sheri Moon), seems odd and off in her own world. She messes with the radio and giggles at the college kids. Both Denise and Mary instantly despise her and are obviously threatened by her sexuality, and as expected both Bill and Jerry like her. While this little battle starts to play out, and Baby is loudly drumming on the car’s dashboard, the car gets a flat tire. Of course the sexy female hitchhiker is a local and her brother can help fix the car. It is when Baby insists that the whole gang come over to dinner that this story finally becomes interesting.

A Feminist Reading of The Ring by Sobia 

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

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

While both Alien and Aliens straddle the sci-fi/horror divide, one of the horror elements apparent in Alien is Carol Clover’s notion of the “final girl.” In numerous horror films (Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, The Descent), the resourceful 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 2011: The Roundup

Sleepaway Camp by Carrie Nelson

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

The Silence of the Lambs by Jeff Vorndam

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

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

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

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

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

Hellraiser by Tatiana Christian

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

Drag Me To Hell by Stephanie Rogers

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

The Blair Witch Project by Alex DeBonis

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

The Descent by Robin Hitchcock

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

Let This Feminist Vampire In by Natalie Wilson

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

A Feminist Reading of The Ring by Sobia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Horror Week 2011: Rosemary’s Baby: Marriage Can Be Terrifying

RosemarysBaby_quad_UK-1
This is a guest post 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.
The film, directed by Roman Polanski and released in 1968, has been written about at length, for its link to the era’s zeitgeist, its use of everyday people as agents of evil, even its shooting locations. Urban legends have been told about it; real-life events surrounding and following the film have been scrutinized. Rosemary’s Baby is essentially a fable about marriage and motherhood, and its magic is in the sleight of hand that all effective horror movies use: we focus on the scary yarn and are fascinated by it, so that the truth told (in this case, domestic unhappiness) goes down entertainingly. If it were told in a straight narrative arc, it would be kitchen-sink-drama depressing. Ira Levin, who wrote the novel the movie is based on, also wrote The Stepford Wives. How did we ever function without the phrase “Stepford Wife,” such a useful pejorative that has entered our lexicon? We all understand this shorthand phrase to describe a certain kind of too-perfect woman who seems to have lost the ability to articulate thoughts of her own. In Levin’s upper-middle class America of the 1960s, a male-controlled, male-centered marriage meant a slow death for a wife, as she loses control of her mind, her choices, and especially her body. In both novels, the husbands are able to transform the women’s bodies against their will—this is what marriage amounts to. Levin was acutely tuned-in to embarrassing truths about self-centeredness—the man who programs his robot wife to yell, “You’re the champ!” while having sex in the Stepford Wives; Guy Woodhouse, Rosemary’s husband in Rosemary’s Baby, eager to sacrifice his wife for his acting career. And while we all know a Stepford Wife, we probably have met these husbands as well. I find them recognizable. Levin’s characters found themselves in predicaments that were hard to imagine coming true—but the motivations for their behavior (wanting a pliant spouse, selfish ambition) were not hard to imagine at all. These human foibles are at the heart of the matter.
In the film, Mia Farrow is Rosemary Woodhouse, and John Cassavetes is her husband, Guy, an actor whose career is stalled and going nowhere. The two of them move into a spacious apartment in the Bramford building (shot on location at the Dakota building) in Manhattan. Rosemary meets a neighbor in the laundry room, a young woman who speaks highly of the people she lives with, Minnie and Roman Castavet whom, she says, took her in off the streets and saved her life. Just a few days later she is found dead on the sidewalk outside the building, a suicide. Rosemary and Guy meet Minnie and Roman that night; they are both strolling home to the building and arrive at the same time. Minnie and Roman are an older couple, in their late 60s or 70s, played by Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer. They soon insinuate themselves into the younger couple’s lives, forcing themselves onto the couple, who are too polite to reject them, but soon Guy is seduced by them. You don’t see it happen but later you come to understand that Roman has proposed a deal to Guy and Guy has accepted it. Guy has sold his soul to the devil so that he can have success in his career, and it works. The man playing the role he covets suddenly goes blind, and Guy gets the part.
The price for his success? His wife will be impregnated by the devil and bear his child. The young woman who has fallen to her death was supposed to bear the child, but maybe killed herself or was killed when she realized what she was involved in. In a terrifying scene, Rosemary, surrounded by the coven that includes Minnie and Roman, is held down and raped. She is hallucinating as this happens but some of the action she sees is taking place, and eventually she screams what has become a signature line from the film, “This is not a dream! This is really happening!” The next day, Rosemary discovers long claw marks on her back, and Guy tries to pretend that he made the marks during sex with her the night before. Rosemary looks at him differently than she has; she had seemed to adore him and now she looks at him with confusion and fear. If he scratched her like that, it’s very strange; if he is lying, it’s worse still. Much of the rest of the movie is about Rosemary trying to figure out what is happening to her, understanding what is happening, and trying to convince others that it is “really happening.” After she gives birth, the coven members tell her that her baby has died, and Guy expects her to move on and forget about it. The baby hasn’t really died, and the ambiguous ending makes it clear that the coven will use the baby to gain power and wreak havoc.
One of the reasons the film is so effective is because of the fine performances by all of the actors, even those in small roles such as Patsy Kelly as Minnie’s dim-witted friend, and Ralph Bellamy as a bellicose doctor. Ruth Gordon’s Academy Award winning performance, however, is a stand-out. She makes the conceit of devil-worshippers-who-look-like-your-grandma work, and it works beautifully. Her Minnie seems to be a batty old lady, kind of nosy but endearing and well-meaning, eccentric but not dangerous, and most importantly, harmless. It is hard to believe—nearly impossible to believe—that this old woman with her badly applied lipstick, gaping handbags and herbs from her herb garden, is sinister and evil. Gordon is entirely convincing as someone who is a skilled liar and con artist. She wiles her way into their lives because a person like Rosemary is too polite to refuse her. By the time she is sick of the Castavets and is ready to politely refuse them, Guy has been seduced and will not hear of her rejecting them.
If you take away the supernatural element, Guy could be any man who is seduced by his neighbors—wanting to keep up with the Joneses, wanting to get in on the deal, wanting to be famous, wanting to impress the others, whether it be in the building, on the job, or to the world. These people are a ticket to a bigger life and more success, money, and fame. He is willing to use his wife’s body to make it happen. Surely this is a metaphor for a person who sells his soul for success. The wife in this situation can be sacrificed in many ways to make it happen: to work hard while he pursues his dream, to be ignored or be ashamed of when he realizes he wants another kind of life than the one she can offer, to help him become a success until he is successful enough for a trophy wife. One of the tenets of a religious marriage vow is the promise to keep sexually faithful and even, in some vows, to “worship” each other’s bodies, perhaps in a holy sense of worship; what happens in the Woodhouse marriage is a complete blasphemy of this idea. A selfish person puts his or her own desires ahead of the other—with that person, there can really be no union. Stories of the “black mass” and Satanic stories may even reinforce the validity of the religious idea that they purport to trample, as may Satanic fables reinforce our most basic values: when you think about it, there could be nothing more appalling than betraying your spouse, and when it happens to you it feels horrific, like being fucked by the devil.
I’ve watched Rosemary’s Baby at different points in my life, and when I watched it after giving birth, it resonated with me about the experience of childbearing. Rosemary finds herself craving raw meat and having terrible pains—due to the fact that she is birthing a devil baby. However, cravings, pains, sickness—these are real and miserable parts of pregnancy. Having had my pregnancy nausea and sickness start around Valentine’s Day, I only have to think of Valentine’s Day to feel nauseous, and that happened to me nearly twenty years ago! I remember the fear and mixed feelings I had about having a baby, and I wanted to have a baby, and so did my husband. But I had sensitivity to smells, felt dizzy, threw up every day, and felt completely out of control of my body; I felt invaded as well as afraid, in the first part of my first pregnancy. That changed; I felt happy and calm as time progressed. But having a baby is a change that marks your life forever, and there is no turning back once it happens. It’s something that is seldom talked about or admitted to; we are annoyed or disgusted by women who feel that their pregnancy is less than ideal, or that their passage into motherhood was not easy. We do not talk about how we fear that we could be bearing a monster or a “bad seed,” how we may not know what to do, that we fear we may not have enough love or patience or mothering instinct. We do not want to hear about those fears, and we do not want to hear about how pregnancy changes a man and woman’s relationship, maybe for the worse. In Rosemary’s Baby, Guy is shown as not caring much about the baby; he knows that it will be taken away and given to the coven. How many women have found that their husband is not really interested in their pregnancy, or feels it interferes with the attention given to them, to their needs? Guy is really only interested in his burgeoning career. The knowledge that one has made a mistake, that the person one is tied now to is not the person you thought you married—Rosemary’s Baby reveals that bleak, depressing, and real-life scary story. Rosemary realizes it when she sees the scratches on her back, and she never feels the same way about him again. When Guy sees what is waiting for him in a glittering future, he realizes he’s set his sights too low in a life with Rosemary. He is no longer an understudy and is ready for more.
Horror stories like Rosemary’s Baby tell the truth about our darker natures. We can look at our bad feelings, hatreds, misgivings and betrayals without knowing too well what the story really reveals about our feelings—it’s displaced onto a monster, a Thing, a killer, a mist, a contagion. We can see the truth and the horror refracted, like looking at a Medusa head in reflection so that we do not turn to stone. We can look at our darker natures, and accept that they exist somewhere, displaced into a place we call the supernatural.

Stephanie Brown is the author of two collections of poetry, Domestic Interior and Allegory of the Supermarket. She’s published work in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares and The Best American Poetry series. She was awarded an NEA Fellowship in 2001 and a Breadloaf Fellowship in 2009. She has taught at UC Irvine and the University of Redlands and is a regional branch manager for OC Public Libraries in southern California.

Ellen Ripley, a Feminist Film Icon, Battles Horrifying Aliens … and Patriarchy

 

Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley

 

Written by Megan Kearns.

When I was 10 years old, the scariest movie I ever saw was Aliens. I remember the first time I saw it like it was yesterday. Late one night, plagued with insomnia (perhaps a product of my tumultuous childhood), I heard the TV on in my mother’s bedroom. Sitting down next to her, I began watching too. My mom was watching Aliens. It was the scene where Ellen Ripley goes down the elevator, guns strapped to her, to rescue Newt. Entranced, I watched as encased in a forklift, she clashed with the Alien Queen.

But it wasn’t the gore or even the alien that mesmerized me. It was Ripley. Seeing a strong badass woman on-screen left in an indelible impression on me.

With its tense, gritty, noir atmosphere, Alien broke ground spawning numerous imitations in the horror and sci-fi genres. Set in the year 2122, crew of the freighter spaceship Nostromo answer a beacon on the planet LV-426 and encounter a terrifying and insidious creature that attempts to wipe out the crew. Eschewing some of its horror roots in favor of an action-packed bonanza, the sequel Aliens features Lt. Ellen Ripley (the superb Sigourney Weaver), the Nostromo’s sole survivor (along with Jones the cat), warning and advising a group of Marines going to LV-426 to investigate after Earth lost contact with the planet’s colonists.

For me, I can’t separate Alien and Aliens (although I pretend the 3rd and 4th don’t exist…ugh). Both amazing films possess pulse-pounding intensity, a struggle for survival, and most importantly for me, a feminist protagonist. Radiating confidence and strength, Ripley remains my favorite female film character. A resourceful survivor wielding weapons and ingenuity, she embodies empowerment. Bearing no mystical superpowers, she’s a regular woman taking charge in a crisis. Weaver, who imbued her character with intelligence and a steely drive, was inspired to “play Ripley like Henry V and women warriors of classic Chinese literature.”

Sigourney Weaver’s role as Ripley catapulted her to stardom, making her one of the first female action heroes. Preceded by Pam Grier in Coffy and Dianna Rigg as Emma Peel in The Avengers, she helped pave the way for Linda Hamilton’s badassery in T2, Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, Carrie-Anne Moss in The Matrix, Lucy Lawless as Xena, Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy, and Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider and Salt. But Ripley, a female film icon, wasn’t even initially conceived as a woman.

Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, Alien’s screenwriters, wrote into the original script that all of the characters, while written as men (including “Ripley” who was originally written as “Roby”), were in fact unisex and could be cast as either women or men. While they never actually pictured Roby/Ripley as a woman, when producers Walter Hill and David Giler rewrote the final draft of the script, Ripley was indeed a woman…huzzah!

While the original and final scripts differ, particularly in that android Ash isn’t in the original, Roby and Ripley are surprisingly similar, sharing similar dialogue and eventually asserting their authority through decisive actions. Neither character wants to let the injured crewmember (Standard the Captain in the original script / Kane the Ex. O in the final draft) onto the ship as they might be infected. Although interestingly, Ripley stands her ground and doesn’t let him in while Roby caves. Also, both remain the sole survivors of the crew.

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

So remember those sexual themes I just mentioned…well just because Ripley isn’t sexualized, doesn’t mean sexuality doesn’t play a pivotal role in Alien. Swiss artist H.R. Giger designed the alien as well as some sets for the first film with pervasive phallic and vaginal imagery (don’t believe me…take a look; you won’t be able to not see it). Alien took the horror of rape comingled with the “male fear of female reproduction” and put it in space. Rather than maniacal villains attacking women and glorifying femicide, as many horror films do, Alien showed a creature attacking men (and eventually women too). While dangerous sexual elements abound, women weren’t punished for their sexuality.

Ripley never becomes an object merely for the male gaze. In Alien, she strips down to a tank top and underwear before she enters the cryogenic chamber. But rather than objectifying, to me it seemed to symbolize her vulnerability. The alien stows away in her escape pod yet she doesn’t hesitate, immediately slipping into a spacesuit to battle the alien. The script initially intended for Ripley to sleep with Dallas the Captain. Thank god that was never filmed! We need more movies where a woman is not reduced to a sex object. Ultimately, Ripley is not defined by her relationship with a man; she defines herself.

Films rarely feature multiple women; even rarer is it to see various depictions of women. In Alien, Ripley is juxtaposed with Lambert (Veronica Cartwright). While Ripley remains calm and collected, Lambert is an emotional hot mess, unhinged by fear. Time after time, the media pits women against one another. But after initial reluctance, Ripley and Lambert in Alien and Ripley and Vasquez (fiercely played by Jeanette Goldstein) in Aliens, work cooperatively together.

Motherhood exists as a reoccurring theme in Alien and Aliens. A pivotal scene cut from Aliens reveals that Ripley had a daughter. When she returns to Earth, after being stranded in space for 57 years on the Nostromo’s escape pod, Ripley discovers her daughter recently died at the age of 66. She survives to ultimately lose her daughter. Her grief catalyses her connection with the young girl Newt (Carrie Henn). Ripley risks her life to save and protect this little girl, perhaps in an attempt to reconcile her feelings of loss. At the end of the film, Newt hugs Ripley, calling her “Mommy;” she becomes a mother again. Even in Alien, Ripley smashes the computer called “Mother” onboard the Nostromo. Interestingly in Aliens, Ripley isn’t fighting a male villain; she combats a female: the Alien Queen. While the Alien Queen doesn’t equal a human woman, it’s hard to ignore that the film portrays one mother warring against another, both protecting their children.

Of the few truly empowered female film characters, most are lioness mothers: Ripley protecting Newt, Sarah Connor fiercely protecting her son and all of humanity in Terminator and T2, The Bride/Beatrix Kiddo a vengeful mother in Kill Bill. Despite the frequent comparisons made between the two badass women warriors, there’s a crucial difference between Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor. Connor exists solely to protect her male son from assassination or humanity will be wiped out; she possesses no other identity. While Ripley becomes a surrogate mother to Newt, her identity still remains her own, not solely contingent on another.

A feminist commentary regarding female voice confronted by sexism in society emerges in both Alien and Aliens. In Alien, Ash undermines Ripley’s authority as Warrant Officer as he lets Kane onboard, disobeying Ripley’s decision to follow protocol and quarantine him. Dallas the Captain disregards Ripley’s concerns about not trusting Ash. After Ripley uncovers Ash’s treacherous plot, he stuffs a porn magazine in her mouth, “the film’s most explicit equation of male violence with the desire to annihilate the female voice.”

In Aliens, Ripley tries to warn the Weyland-Yutani Corporation about the danger of the alien and the LV-426 colonists’ impending doom. When she travels with the Marines, they initially discount her testimony. Only when the shit seriously hits the fan do they listen, looking to her as a tactical leader to survive. A futuristic Cassandra, prophesying destruction yet no one heeds Ripley’s warning. Is it because she’s a woman? That seems to be the message. Society continually devalues women, silencing their voices.

The media inundates us with images of male protagonists so it’s refreshing to see women lead…and of course kicking ass! Living in a world dominated by patriarchy, women receive societal cues telling them explicitly and implicitly how to behave, look and speak. Social norms dictate that women should be gentle, nurturing, and caring. Subtly implied lies the assertion that women should support the men in their life, that they should not be too outspoken or too unruly.

In theory, women action heroes break that mold. But in reality, most female film characters don’t shatter gender stereotypes. They rarely lead as heroes, usually serving as props to the male protagonists, and serving as love interests. Rather than showcasing empowerment, researcher Katy Gilpatric found that women in action films ultimately succumb to stereotypical gender roles.

Under the guise of empowerment, most female film characters still play out gender norms where women serve men and stay out of the limelight. That’s what makes Ripley so unique. She subverts traditional gender roles while retaining her female identity.

In an interview in Time Magazine, Weaver talked about Ripley and film roles for women:

“Usually women in films have had to carry the burden of sympathy, only coming to life when a man enters. Doesn’t everyone know that women are incredibly strong?”

Growing up, Ellen Ripley was my role model, a fierce feminist. Alien and Aliens taught me an invaluable lesson. They showed me a woman doesn’t need a man to solve a problem or fight their battles. After recently watching the documentary Miss Representation, which exposes the ways the media objectifies and attempts to strip women and girls of their power, I realize the gravity of seeing strong, confident women on-screen who aren’t valued merely for their appearance. And therein lies the power of Ripley.

While sexist studio execs might not want a 60-year-old Sigourney Weaver to reprise her iconic role, we need more Ripleys on-screen. Weaver said that all women possess “a secret action heroine” inside them. Women don’t always know their own strength. We don’t need to be rescued or saved; we can do that on our own.

We may not live in a world with chest-bursting aliens bleeding acid for blood. But anyone can aspire to be Ellen Ripley.

Megan Kearns is a blogger, freelance writer and activist. She blogs at The Opinioness of the World, a feminist vegan site. Her work has also appeared at Arts & Opinion, Fem2pt0, Italianieuropei, Open Letters Monthly, and A Safe World for Women. She earned her B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy. Megan lives in Boston with more books than she will probably ever read in her lifetime.

Megan contributed reviews of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Something Borrowed, !Women Art Revolution, The Kids Are All Right (for 2011 Best Picture Nominee Review Series), The Reader (for 2009 Best Picture Nominee Review Series), Game of Thrones and The Killing (for Emmy Week 2011), and Women, War and Peace’s I Came to Testify. She was the first writer featured as a Monthly Guest Contributor. 

Horror Week 2011: A Feminist Reading of The Ring

“Before you die … “

 

Note: This article contains spoilers for the Japanese novel and movie Ringu that “The Ring” gets its story and concept from.

Infection in the sentence breeds
We may inhale Despair
At distances of Centuries

–Emily Dickinson

By some stroke of fate, right around the time I had gotten over my fear of Samara enough to want to rewatch “The Ring” multiple times in order to analyze it, I happened to be taking a feminist lit class whose major concern was how patriarchal narrative patterns and male-centered heroic stories where women are often silenced or marginalized influence women to reproduce those stories. The theories we studied were built around Gilbert and Gubar’s “Infection in the Sentence,” which explores how these harmful fictional patterns spread like a sickness and infect unsuspecting minds with their problematic views of women. This is a metaphor that has stayed with me, and it’s something “The Ring” seems to play into, so my reading of this movie may be more feminist than was the intention of the people involved. I won’t try to decipher what the writers/directors meant to do with this movie except to say that they are definitely interested in how stories spread, evolve, and infect people who consume them. I will primarily attempt to deconstruct the aspects of the movie that speak to the feminist themes touched upon by Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis of women’s literature.

“The Ring” opens with two young girls flipping through the channels as they discuss how the energy waves of the television influence people’s minds. As they do this, Becca tells Katie about the rumors she’s heard about a video tape that kills, elaborating on the elements of the tape. As we later find out, this story holds only bits of truth and seems to have gained some elements in its retelling. Already the movie is exploring evolution of stories through word of mouth. The end of the teaser sees the death of Katie, who has seen the tape, setting up the first mystery of the movie.

Rachel Keller, Katie’s aunt, happens to be an investigative reporter and, perhaps more importantly, a writer. She’s asked by her sister Ruth to look into the death of Katie, leading her to discover the stories about a tape that kills. She’s rightly skeptic until she herself watches the tape, which in Becca’s words is like watching “sombody’s nightmare.” Rachel sets out to deconstruct this nightmare and its originator, and the movie’s metaphors take a turn towards a feminist gothic discovery.

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. I believe that Samara retains the echoes of that positivity even in this version, particularly in the light of some of the gothic themes the movie is playing with.
“And it’s, like, somebody’s nightmare.”

“The things she’d show you,” exclaims Richard Morgan, Samara’s father right before committing suicide, and we’re told by Dr. Grasnik that Anna needed psychiatric help because of Samara. Given the gothic themes the movie seems to be playing with, I have to wonder about the exact nature of Anna’s sickness. Certainly, the movie implies that Samara was the root of the problem, but is the movie also implying that Anna is somehow responsible for Samara’s condition? The initial description of Anna’s visits seems to imply some sort of post-partum depression, but we’re also led to believe that there was something wrong with Samara. Particularly noteworthy is the scene where Rachel talks with Dr. Grasnik about the two women. Dr. Graskin says, “When Darby there was born, we knew something wasn’t right with him. But we loved him anyway. Takes work, you know. Some people have limits.” The last bit seems to imply that whatever was wrong with Samara tested the Morgans’ limits rather than implying that whatever was wrong with Samara would’ve gotten any parent to reject her.

At this point, Rachel beings to question the treatment of Samara as well, despite suspecting that something was wrong with her. As it happens, Rachel also has a child who could be called a little out of the ordinary, so it makes sense for Rachel to cast Samara in a more positive light than she’s been given reason to. These suspicions reach their peak when Rachel discovers the barn room where Samara was kept in isolation. While the movie’s treatment of Samara is ambivalent (possibly to add to the shocking ending), the use of yellow wallpaper inside Samara’s attic-like isolation room seems to be deliberate.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short feminist story by Charlotte Gilman that explores the narrator’s slow descent into madness brought on by the isolation imposed on her by her husband, who is also her doctor, in order to cure her of her post-partum depression. The woman, trapped in a room where the most stimulating thing is its strangely patterned yellow wallpaper, is forbidden from engaging in most socially and/or mentally engaging tasks. She becomes obsessed with discovering the secrets of the wallpaper and convinces herself that there’s a woman trapped inside the wallpaper who crawls inside the walls at night and creeps by the windows during daytime. The narrator, in time, becomes obsessed with the need to tear off the wallpaper and free this creeping, crawling woman from her prison.

It’s hard not to see Samara as the creeping, crawling woman trapped inside the wallpaper, while Rachel as the protagonist bent on freeing her. Given this, perhaps it’s no coincidence that Rachel’s final discovery of Samara’s resting place comes through her own tearing away of the yellow wallpaper. However, before she tears away the wallpaper, she expresses concern over the isolation of Samara, and Noah points out that Samara had the company of a television set.

The TV, and not the yellow wallpaper, then, is Samara’s lone stimulant in this confinement, so she uses that as her medium of communication with the outside world, just as the crawling woman uses the wallpaper as her way of letting people know that she’s trapped inside. Initially, the movie seems to warn against spreading people’s tragedies “like a sickness.” However, it should be noted that Richard Morgan is perhaps our most sinister character, given the control he exerted over Samara’s life and how he used it to isolate her and how our protagonist views him.

Gilbert and Gubar note that women’s fiction is filled with themes of weakness and silence, a reflection of how their stories have been repressed in the male-authored texts they see themselves reflected in. They suggest that the only way to overcome these themes would be to create a model of writing/story-telling that empowers, “To heal herself, the woman writer must exorcise the sentences which bred her infection in the first place; she must overtly or covertly free herself of the despair she inhaled.” As much as Rachel is a writer, Samara, too, can be read as a sort of artist.
“Anna and Samara.”

Given that the opening scene plays with the idea of evolution of stories, it’s useful to examine the evolution of “The Ring” story itself. While the American version de-ages Samara to a child and makes her more overtly sinister, her Japanese precursor, Sadako, is initially a much more sympathetic figure who is a victim of male perpetrated violence in both versions. In the “Ringu” novel, Sadako is a 19-year-old actress who has inherited her mother’s supernatural abilities. In the course of the story, she’s raped by a doctor who then murders her and throws her down the well. In the movie version, her father kills her after her powers begin to emerge. For the original Sadako, the creation of the tape is really the only way to get her story out and she views it as a form of revenge.

“She just wanted to be heard,” Rachel says about Samara, after discovering her fate. And Rachel inadvertently heals herself by giving Samara more power (something that unsettles both Richard Morgan and Aiden), ensuring that her story is heard. Taking into account the long literary and historical tradition of suppressing and erasing women’s histories, stories, and the violence perpetrated against them, “The Ring” really seems to be endorsing the passing on of Samara’s story. It helps that the narrative rewards the people who agree to pass the story on. Certainly, there are more sinister ways to read the ending. However, let’s see the two possible life trajectories of those who view the tape: Watching the movie and remaining silent about Samara’s story would lead to death. However, if the person agrees to make a copy and passes it on with the cure, what’s the worst that’ll come out of that cycle? Some creepy nightmares and a look inside Samara’s head that lasts for seven days. Really, given the usual fate of people in horror movies, Samara at least gives her victims a clear and relatively easy way out, but perhaps, it’s a cure that could only have been discovered by someone who cared to deconstruct Samara’s elusive nightmare.

Given all of these themes, the origins of Samara’s story, and the ominous use of the yellow wallpaper in Samara’s prison, I can’t help but read this movie as a warning against suppressing women’s stories and silencing women’s voices. It deals with the infection of ideas that comes from consuming media, and at its heart is a woman searching for and trying to free another woman who seems to have been abused. Now, it’s entirely possible to read Samara as a completely evil figure, and really, the movie is scarier that way. However, a lot of feminist and race-conscious readings of texts emphasize reading these narratives from the point of view of the Other because history is written by the winners and women, people of color, and other minorities are continually being silenced. So yeah, Samara’s story isn’t pretty, and it comes with its own dangers, but the consequences of suppressing that story and of remaining silent about what happened are much, much worse. 
Sobia spends her free time consuming media and thinking a lot. She uses her English lit degree for little else than critiquing media’s portrayal of gender and race, which is possibly just another excuse to consume more media with awesome women.

Horror Week 2011: House of 1000 Corpses

Too often horror is criticized for being antifeminist. Yes, most often men are the aggressors in these films, and women are shown as the helpless, one dimensional victims. Unfortunately the problem of flat female characters and dominant male leads is not isolated to just the horror genre. In fact, that is a major issue for all of Hollywood. Every day we are bombarded with images of spineless women who need their men to help them fix the car, or assemble furniture, and this might go unnoticed by people because we are so accustomed to these characters. The side effect of the brutality and raw emotion in horror makes it a much more obvious venue for showing our society’s overall angst when it comes to gender issues. Shouldn’t we be equally concerned about the portrayal of all one dimensional characters, regardless of their state of distress? Why is horror the problem here?
When discussing horror as a genre it is helpful to boil it down to basics. Watching horror is a sadistic act. People go to horror films to watch other people be tortured, killed, or humiliated. And we, the audience, get a thrill out of those acts. Whether is it because we like to see those who deserve it be punished, or we just like to feel fear, or we enjoy the thrill of watching pure emotion pour out of the screen, we like it and we want more of it. When it comes to horror films, I think the most feminist act of all is equal opportunity sadism. When the aggressor of this violence (mental or physical) is a woman acting of her own twisted free will, enjoying tormenting her victims, only then do I feel satisfied as a feminist viewer. The character of Baby is why Rob Zombie’s 2003 film House of 1000 Corpses a solidly feminist horror film. More on that later.

The film starts with a set of four college kids as they pull into a gas station and get more than they bargained for. Sounds horribly cliché, right? This is where the genius of Zombie’s film begins to shape up . You see, the film can essentially be broken in to two parts. The first half is essentially a love letter from Zombie to all of the great horror movies of the past. Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, and even The Munsters gets a reference or two. Zombie spends the first half of the film showing you that he has the knowledge of horror to be able to pull off the second half of the film. From there he takes us down the rabbit hole (literally) to a horrific, indulgent world of his own making.

The college kids’ predicament starts after a brief stop at a roadside attraction run by a local character Captain Spaulding (played by genre favorite Sid Haig). The good Captain has just killed two bumbling robbers, but the kids arrive just after that mess was cleaned up. While filling up on gas, kids tour the Captain’s haunted house that rehashes the local legend of a murderer and torturer, Dr Satan.

Stereotypically, the two college guys, Bill and Jerry (The Office’s Rainn Wilson and Chris Hardwick), love the haunted house and the two women, Denise and Mary (Erin Daniels and Jennifer Jostyn), are bored by it. While I do take fault with Zombie for following the general premise that women don’t like that sort of thing, it reads more like an homage to all of the uninterested and nagging girlfriends in past horror films. These four are mostly uninteresting and uncharismatic. But crucially they are equally so. Both the women and the men in this (let’s face it) doomed group are superficially and poorly developed characters. Even Denise’s call home to her ex-cop father doesn’t do much for her. Zombie is saving all of his interesting characterization for the sadistic Firefly family.

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.

Baby’s house, and presumably her brother’s tools, isn’t far, so the gang is whisked away to the house for shelter and a quick meal with the Firefly family. If the group of college students had any doubts about whether or not they were in a horror film, all of these doubts were erased at dinner. The whole family shows up to nosh and it reads like a casting call for characters out of horror film history. There is the terrifying and unhinged older brother Otis (Bill Mosley in a career rescuing role), the younger but gargantuan and deformed brother Tiny (Matthew McGrory), the elderly Eddie Munster looking Grandpa (Dennis Fimple’s penultimate role), and the aloof and spineless mother (played by Karen Black). Throw in the required Halloween masks to be worn at the table, and we have a truly motley dinner party.

After dinner the college kids are all but forced to attend the Firefly’s Halloween eve floor show in the barn next the house. The vaudevillian show starts with Grandpa yoking it up on stage. Grandpa’s jokes are sexual, astoundingly offensive, and old fashioned. Both Denise and Mary are obviously disgusted by the whole thing. Jerry loves it. He is eating the provided popcorn and having a great time while he is there. After Grandpa finishes his act Mary and Denise try to talk to Bill and Jerry about leaving. They want to head out on foot to find someone else who can help them. Bill and Jerry quickly dismiss their request because they are in the middle of nowhere and the odds of them getting somewhere safely are nil.

It is a good thing that they stayed. Good for us, the audience who is waiting for the torturing to begin, but not good for our sitting duck college kids.

The next, and final, act in the Firefly show belong to Baby. She starts of stage looking like the type of woman that is created specifically for the male gaze. Her hair is teased up to nearly an afro. She is wearing a skin tight, floor length beaded dress. Her makeup is so extreme it looks like an almost kabuki costume: drawn on lips, exaggerated eye lashes and rosy cheeks. Baby then proceeds to lip sync to “I Want To Be Loved By You” and flit with the male members of the audience.

While Baby does seem to be enjoying herself while performing, it seems more like she is putting on a show for the available young men there. Both Bill and Jerry are enjoying the show very much (to the annoyance for Mary and Denise) but they are not about to act of these impulses. They like to watch Baby dance, but only from as an object and have no real desire to interact with that object. Baby seems to be going through the motions of the show, but ultimately it is an awkward performance. We have seen the real Baby, and this is not her. The real Baby likes to listen to loud rock music and torture cheerleaders. Her empowered version of sexy is wearing ass-less pants and buying cases of alcohol. By performing just for the men, and playing up to the expected male gaze, Zombie is making a comment on the problematic representation of the feminine in film. Here Baby is doing everything right to act the part of a typical Hollywood woman, but it isn’t successful in wooing anyone, and is making more enemies than friends. This antiquated representation of the female is no longer attractive to an audience.

As the performance is going along, and Baby is approaching Bill to sit on his lap while lip syncing, Mary’s jealousy gets the better of her and she tosses Baby from Bill’s lap. Mary shouts at Baby, calling her a slut and a redneck whore. This is totally uncalled for. Yes, Baby was heavily flirting with Mary’s beau, but calling her those names was a bit harsh. Interestingly this is where the film goes rapidly downhill. Baby pulls a straight razor from out of her dress and threatens to cut off Mary’s tits. Here is where Baby really hits her stride and becomes the proactive, violence loving woman that she is meant to be. When Mary insults her misguided attempt at performing the assumed male concept of femininity Baby’s first reaction is to remove one of the most obvious objects of Mary’s femaleness. Insulting another woman with those sexualized names should then make the insulter less of a woman. And by bringing down another woman, she should be punished accordingly.
At this very second the mechanic brother Rufus shows up and declares that the car is fixed and they can leave. We all know that the group can’t leave and that they will be eradicated one by one in very interesting ways. At that moment, though, they all scurry off to the car in hopes of escape.

Throughout the rest of the film Baby and the Firefly bunch torture and terrify each of the college kids, and even Denise’s dad and a sheriff killed after a botched rescue attempt. Each kill is more interesting and inventively than the last, and Zombie has fun showing the audience how sick and creative he can make a modern horror film. Firmly throughout the film Zombie balances the female characters and the male characters equally. There are uninteresting flat college kids of both genders, and both men and women as tormentors. Baby seems to get just as much satisfaction in maiming Jerry as Otis gets in turning Bill into a taxidermy display. It is this even handed approach to the horror of the Fireflys that ultimately makes House of 1000 Corpses a feminist entry into this classic genre.


Deirdre Crimmins lives in Boston with her husband and two black cats. She wrote her Master’s thesis on George Romero and works too much.

Horror Week 2011: Let This Feminist Vampire In

This piece by Natalie Wilson previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on October 13, 2010.
 
Cross-posted at Ms. Magazine
Warning: spoilers
Vampires have become so common in contemporary texts that they have lost some of their bite. With most of them falling into the emo, brooding, love-struck and angst-ridden variety (Edward of Twilight, Damon of The Vampire Diaries and Bill of True Blood), the female vampire featured in Let Me In (the U.S. remake of the Swedish film Let the Right One In) presents a refreshing change. Abby (Chloe Moretz), the 12-year-old lonely-yet-resilient vampire in a world populated by male violence, is a feminist vampire worth rooting for.
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?”
Owen’s burgeoning friendship with the young vampire Abby (named Eli in the original) furthers this gendered meme when she advises him “You have to hit back … hit them back harder than you dare.” When she promises to help him, he says “But you’re a girl,” exhibiting the belief the bullies have instilled in him that girls are scared and weak. Even though an earlier scene showed Owen smiling as he views a girl punching the lead bully in the arm, this approval of female resistance has not erased the anti-girl taunts the bullies have polluted his brain with.
With an existence shrouded by his parents’ ugly divorce, the film suggests Owen has turned to voyeurism as an escape from his prison-like existence at both home and school. As Owen watches the world from his bedroom telescope and from behind his wide-eyed gaze, we see the daily injustices humans enact upon one another: bedroom fights, schoolyard torture, sibling abuse, interpersonal violence. Much of this violence is linked to codes of masculinity, including the muscling-up men do to create bodies capable of violence.
In comparison, vampire Abby’s thirst for blood becomes less violent and a lesser evil: Killing is something she resorts to in order to survive, in contrast to it being a sport (as with the bullies) or a means to secure and keep a mate (as with her “father” figure). The everyday violence in the film is more horrific and has more lasting effects than Abby’s monstrous thirst.
Unfortunately, the opportunity to further the suggestion that “average humans” are plenty monstrous is rendered less horrific in the American version by removing the references/suggestions of pedophilia in the original novel and film. Nevertheless, the remake provocatively suggests that our cultural proclivity to focus on exceptionally violent crimes of the “stranger danger” variety allows enduring, daily acts of violence to go comparatively unnoticed. Owen has adopted this view as well–he never mentions evil until he learns Abby is a vampire, failing to see that what the bullies do to him is actually more evil.
Though the film drips with gendered representations (although ones not as graphic, nor as queer as the original novel, as discussed here), reviews such as those in The New York Times and at MovieFone offer no gender analysis–an omission that seems particularly odd given the misogynistic bullying the film depicts as well as its focus on a girl vampire, a rarity in our male-dominated vampire tales of late.
To find such analysis, one most go back to reviews of the original film, including here at Feminist Review. Noting the tendency for a “queer sensibility about female vampires in film, whether explicit or subtextual,” Loren Krywanczyk argues the “gender non-normativity” of the two young protagonists presents us with a queering of gender as well as of childhood sexuality. Such queer readings are even more apt if Abby/Eli’s centuries-earlier castration (cut in the American film and only alluded to in the Swedish version) is taken into account.
While there has been much rallying against the necessity of remaking the film to appease Americans subtitle-avoidance (as here), I feel this new version offers yet another useful spin on a very complex tale–one a bit less queer but also one that  links the cultural disdain for femininity to the ubiquity of horrific daily acts of violence. If only our mainstream news media would similarly let that argument in.
Natalie Wilson, PhD is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in the areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of the blogs Professor, what if…? and Seduced by Twilight. She is a proud feminist mom of two feminist kids (one daughter, one son) and is an admitted pop-culture junkie. She previously contributed posts to Bitch Flicks about The United States of Tara, Nurse Jackie, and Lost.

The Madwoman’s Journey from the Attic into the Television – The Female Gothic Novel and its Influence on Modern Horror Films

The Mysteries of Udolpho, the first female gothic novel
This guest post is written by Sobia.

The very words “Gothic heroine” immediately conjure up a wealth of images for the modern reader: a young, attractive woman (virginity required) running in terror through an old, dark, crumbling mansion in the middle of nowhere, from either a psychotic man or a supernatural demon. She is always terminally helpless and more than a bit screechy, but is inevitably “saved” by the good guy/future husband in the nick of time.

– from “The Female Gothic: an introduction”

Described in such a way, it’s easy to see why scholars have speculated that the “female gothic” novel is what gave rise to both the modern horror film and the modern romance novel. While the gothic form itself is attributed to Walpole, who collected all the possible tropes of the narrative and populated his “Castle of Otranto” with them, Anne Radcliffe is credited with popularizing the form. At the end of the 18thcentury, Radcliffe employed a female heroine as the protagonist of her novel, giving birth to what Ellen Moers later described and defined as the “female gothic,” which is considered a subgenre of Gothic literature. Novels, and gothic novels in particular, were consumed and written primarily by women during this time period, which made them a reviled form of fiction, generally depicted as the source of problems such as women’s vapidness, hysteria, nervous disorders and such. Twentieth century, however, saw scholars like Gilber, Gubar, and Moers starting to deconstruct the gothic form, which emerged as a unique battleground for the metaphoric struggle between women and the patriarchal structures/institutions that confined and limited them.

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. In the female gothic, the haunted castle emerges as a prison that the woman cannot escape, where she’s often being held against her wishes. Given this subtext, it’s easy to see why the castle was commonly used as a metaphor for patriarchal institutions, where the domestic sphere to which women were socially confined became a stifling prison that drove them insane.

Bertha Mason, the original Madwoman in the Attic, from the 2006 “Jane Eyre.”

Ellen Moers further identified the two concerns of the gothic novel which deal with sexuality and child birth in the form of metaphors, where women are constantly confronted with the threats of living in a patriarchy disguised as the supernatural. It is noteworthy that while male writers of the time were tackling subjects like rape and sexual assault head on, the women were using complicated metaphors to confront these issues I would argue that for the male writer, given the distance they already have and maintain from these topics, it was easy to tell the story of the assault happening to an Other, where the assault is experienced by someone other than the male hero that the writer and the readers identified with. For women, however, there are different things at stake. Primarily, they were not allowed to write about sexuality in a straight-forward manner in a time when just the act of writing had male writers of the day calling these women tradeswoman, the implication being that they were not much better than prostitutes. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, women, for whom these things were a real concern (within and without marriage), needed to cultivate the distance that male writers already had from these subjects, and they did so by wrapping the horrors in layers of metaphor.

In order to understand exactly how the gothic formula works almost as feminist deconstruction, it’s important to understand the gothic heroine and her unique struggles. It’s been said that the act of creating a work with a female heroine alone is feminist because it recognizes that women can exist in important stories without needing to be part of a man’s. The female gothic, however, goes a step further in portraying the dangers of confining women to the domestic sphere, confining them to enforced social roles, and the dangers of the kind of insanity that emerges from the kind of isolation and limitations.

The gothic heroine is almost always isolated, and isolated from female companionship in particular. The usual formula (which Jane Austen later deconstructed/parodied in her “Northanger Abbey”) has the mother of the heroine die either giving birth to the heroine or shortly afterward, ensuring that the heroine is an only child. The heroine is brought up under her father’s care, who is a benevolent, loving male figure who dies promptly when the heroine reaches maturity. At this point, the heroine comes under the guardianship of a sinister male figure and is removed to his castle, to which she is confined. This is the pattern Radcliffe’s “Mysteries of Udolpho” follows, and it’s one that’s still common to see in gothic slanted horror movies like “Skeleton Key,” wherein the heroine’s mother left when she was young, she was close to her father, and the father’s death is what indirectly leads to her coming to live in her own gothic manor with its secrets. One of the things that Gilbert and Gubar address in their book is the woman author’s lack of connection to female writers because the literary canon is made up of male writers alone. So perhaps the birth of a heroine who knows she had a mother, but one that she’s unable to connect to is a reflection of the gothic writer’s lack of connection to her own literary foremothers.

Once locked inside this castle, by the men or circumstances, the heroine usually goes exploring, and often finds secrets having to do with the death/imprisonment/insanity of another woman. It is worth noting that her primary motivation often has to do with saving herself by trying to figure out what became of the woman who occupied this place before her. Essentially, this can be seen as her search for female companionship/connection. This is where the other big theme of the gothic emerges: the theme of insanity and fragmentation of self. The heroine, surrounded by men who wish to keep the fate of the women before her secret, comes to doubt her own sanity as everyone around her questions her. So the entire structure of the gothic became an elaborate metaphor for the perils of women living in confined spaces and being controlled by men. Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” which has famously been referred to as a love story, features a young woman marrying much above her social class and moving into another mansion with its own secrets. Du Maurier herself said that the book was about the imbalance of power within a marriage. Written to reexamine the figure of the insane wife locked away in the attic, “Rebecca” recreates this figure into an alluring, haunting portrait of a woman whose death and whose life echoes in every corner of the house. Unlike the Bertha Mason of “Jane Eyre,” who needs to be hidden and never talked about, Rebecca is all anyone in Manderley talks about, until the unnamed narrator finds herself falling under her spell, too. Even though Rebecca is a much more alluring take on the Madwoman concept, she has one thing in common with her precursor, which is that she, like Bertha Mason, challenges patriarchal notions of what a proper woman should be like.

The second Mrs. de Winter being forced to confront the ghost of Rebecca by Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock’s 1938 “Rebecca”

Gilbert and Gubar offer the following analysis of the Madwoman figure and her prominent appearances in 19th century women’s literature:

We will find that this madwoman emerges over and over again from the mirrors women writers hold up both to their own natures and to their own visions of nature. Even the most apparently conservative and decorous women writers obsessively create fiercely independent characters who seek to destroy all the patriarchal structures which both their authors and their authors’ heroines seem to accept as inevitable. Of course, by projecting their rebellious impulses not into their heroines but into mad or monstrous women (who are suitably punished in the course of the novel or poem), female authors dramatize their own self-division, their desire both to accept the structures of patriarchal society and to reject them. What this means, however, is that the madwoman in literature by women is not merely, as she might be in male literature, an antagonist or foil to the heroine. Rather, she is usually in some sense the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage.

The idea of doubles remains a major theme in gothic themed horror films of today. The heroine’s doppelganger is often the quest object of her journey, where salvation often comes by discovering the story of this woman who can be seen as a darker or more otherworldy version of the heroine. Gothic stories have, arguably, at their center the idea of women trying to form bonds with each other, while resisting the influence of the men around them. Horror remains, to this day, one of the very few genres where it’s more common to find a female heroine than a male protagonist, and it’s no wonder that it’s primarily consumed by women and considered to be the other major women’s genre, besides romance. It’s also a genre that often easily passes the Bechdel test because of the relationships it portrays between the women. Horror genre, however, seems to have split into two separate branches. There’s the gothic themed stories where women are at the center of them and the threat is supernatural/psychological, and there’s the torture/slasher horror where women mostly run for their lives. Admittedly, I am a lot more interested in the former kind, and will mostly be exploring how they’re the literary successors of the female gothic.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is a classic gothic tale where the young heroine coming under the domain of a powerful and sinister male figure forms bonds with another woman and finds salvation in her own discoveries and the story of an exiled princess, who serves as both a double and the supernatural presence on the other side of the mirror. The mother, while a significant part of the story, is in no position to protect Ofelia, who is left under the rule of her step-father, as she discovers hidden passages and lost worlds in order to save herself.

As I mentioned before, the female gothic split into the genres of modern horror narratives and modern romance novel. Divorcing the romance plot of the gothic novel from the rest of it has arguably left us with narratives where the heroines are left to save themselves, with no strong and benevolent male figure coming to help them. However, I should mention that the gothic romance wasn’t as clear cut as the above quote makes it out to be. In a gender-reversed reflection of the Dark Heroine/Light Heroine dichotomy that male-centered narratives seem to be obsessed with, the gothic romance is the one major genre where the male characters are split off into their own versions of Madonna/Whore. The Shadow Male figure is the sinister, powerful man who rules over the heroine’s life but with no benevolent intentions towards her. She’s sometimes sexually attracted to this figure, but also fearful of him. While the man that she’s actually in love with is often powerless to defend her despite his desire to protect her.

In taking out this benevolent male figure, the modern horror leaves the heroines to their own discoveries. “The Skeleton Key” is an especially subversive example of these tropes. The heroine, isolated from her native element, comes to live inside the old manor presided over by a powerful yet sinister seeming woman. As noted before, the heroine of the movie, Caroline, has a very gothic background, but in a gender reversal of the usual tropes, she forms a bond with the powerless male figure residing inside the house, while coming to suspect the powerful Violet as his abuser. In converting the Shadow Male figure to a woman, the movie lets the men become the Other presence in the attic, who are silenced, ghost-like, and pushed into the background as the women fight their battle of wills in the foreground of the movie. Violet can, however, also be read as a more corporeal version of the Madwoman, the doppelganger who perhaps embodies the character’s more rebellious urges, while existing outside of Caroline as a force to be struggled against. The ending is especially interesting if we choose to read Violet as a metaphorical version of Caroline’s fragmented self.

“Silent Hill” is another movie that seems to get rid of the sinister male figure, populating its world entirely with powerful women with agendas and various motivations. Rose, the heroine of the movie, travels to a ghost town in an attempt to discover the cure to her daughter’s nightmares. Once inside the town, Rose is trapped inside a haunting alternate verse that seems to have enveloped the entire town. In order to escape the tainted reality of Silent Hill, Rose must discover the origins of the taint, and that leads her to discover the stories of various women who were responsible for the genesis of the new reality. This act of discovering the stories and secrets of the lives of women in the past seems to run through most gothic horror movies, in an echo of the attempts of the gothic writers who searched the past to find literary foremothers and of their heroines who attempted to decipher their own future by discovering the pasts of other women. This movie is especially relevant to gothic themes because the idea of fragmentation of selves is the foundation of the premise and leads to the genesis of Silent Hill as it currently exists, with two sets of doppelgangers.

There’s also “Beneath,” perhaps the most underappreciated horror movie of all time, that brings back the themes of “Rebecca” and “Jane Eyre” wonderfully by dealing with the theme of menacing husbands and women who live on even after their deaths. Its heroine, who is the sister of the Madwoman in the Attic figure of the movie (again, the theme of a darker self/mirror), comes back to the town where her sister died and gets pulled into a web of secrets and deceptions that lead her to have visions. She becomes obsessed with discovering exactly how her sister died, while the men around her doubt her sanity. The theme of the heroine’s sanity being doubted is probably the biggest common denominator in these. serves further to isolate the heroine, to push her to do things on her own for the fear that she will be labeled as insane. Historically, the fear of being mislabeled as insane has had a unique significance for women, many of whom were driven to brinks of insanity by what was referred to as “the rest cure.”

Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a gothic themed look inside just such a madness, brought on by lack of mental stimulation. “The Ring,” while populated with more men than is common for these types of movies, still has at its center the idea of a woman deconstructing the story/life of another woman. Rachel’s search for answers is triggered by the death of a woman and it leads her to discover the lives of Anna and Samara, both of whom have elements of the Madwoman figure. Samara, in particular, is reminiscent of the “creeping, crawling” woman trapped behind the Yellow Wallpaper. Interestingly enough, Samara is kept isolated in a room with yellow wallpaper that Rachel is forced to tear off before she can uncover the truth behind Samara’s story.

The second aspect of the female gothic was identified by Ellen Moers as dealing with the fear of giving birth/creating life, and the modern birth horror genre definitely echoes the themes Moers identifies. My knowledge and viewing experience of this type of horror is not nearly as vast as my knowledge of the haunted house/insanity type of horror, but I will identify some movies that deal with this type of horror, in case someone else is interested in watching/analyzing some of these. According to Moers, Mary Shelley reinvented the female gothic with her “Frankenstein.” Shelley, unlike most women writing during that time period, who tended to be unmarried, had had experience with child birth. Moers’ essay here more fully explores how Shelley’s own experiences led to the creation of her monster, but it’s worth noting that Mary Shelley chose to make her protagonist and her monster both men in a step away from the female-centered gothic novels of years past. However, I am pleased that the modern birth horror tends to place women at its center, and perhaps, it’s more relevant to women’s reproductive rights issues today because a lot of it deals with women losing control of their bodies/identities/agency in the course of the pregnancy. “The Clinic” deals with several pregnant women trapped inside an unsanitary clinic, waking up to find that they’re no longer pregnant. The rest of the movie follows them as they attempt to find their babies and discover how they got there. One of the major themes, I would say, is the idea of women’s bodies and reproductive systems as commodities.

There’s the famous “Rosemary’s Baby” that perhaps better echoes Mary Shelley’s novel because the fear of the baby being a monster runs through the entire movie. Rosemary’s rising anxiety and fears for her baby as she discovers the existence of the cult and its plans are very in with keeping the Gothic heroine’s general mental state. “Blessed,” starring Heather Graham, is similar in its themes to “Rosemary’s Baby,” where the heroine is used as an incubator for a cult needing to bring about the birth of a demonic child. The 2009, “Grace,” deals with a mother who decides to carry her baby to term despite the heartbeat having stopped following a car crash, and when the time comes, the baby is miraculously born alive. As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that there’s something wrong with the baby, and our heroine has created a monster. The recent “Splice” deals with a female scientist who creates a new species by combining her own DNA with the DNA of various animals.

While the first subgenre of gothic horror deals with the metaphor of women being trapped inside patriarchal institutions and being forced by them to question their own sense of reality, the birth horror genre, arguably, deals with and plays into women’s fear of patriarchal control over their bodies and the lack of agency that comes with that control. The fate of the birth horror heroine, however, is often worse than the earlier gothic heroines, who, while often up against great odds, are fighting a monster/institution that exists outside of themselves. In the birth horror genre, the woman is fighting a more personal and internal battle. Women today still struggle to control the fate of their own bodies in a largely patriarchal world.

Gilbert and Gubar, too, identify a fear of creation in their study, specifically, the fear of creating a literary text in a canon that’s made up of patriarchal and male-centered texts. The female author learns to see the act of creation as a male one because she’s learned to see herself only in passive roles from the literature she’s consumed. Gilbert and Gubar refer to this as “anxiety of authorship,” and since the gothic heroine is often an artist of some kind (in fact, Jane Austen, in her parody of the form, goes out of her way to assure the readers that her heroine, Catherine Morland is not at all inclined to the arts and furthermore, is really bad at them) this anxiety of authorship can always be called an anxiety of creation. And the birth horror movies that do not fit under Moers’ definition of the birth horror story with the fear of creating a monster certainly deal with the anxiety of giving birth and creating life. Returning to the mental health side of it, since insanity and anxiety remain major themes of any sort of a gothic story, post-partum depression is another side effect of living in a patriarchal society that expects women to be mothers, and most women get conditioned into thinking that that is what they want for themselves. Given the cultural subtext, motherhood can become just another patriarchally enforced institution, one that patriarchy values over most other social obligations/interests of a woman. Birth horror genre is the perfect medium to deconstruct some of those expectations and institutions.

“To be trained in renunciation is almost necessarily to be trained to ill health, since the human animal’s first and strongest urge is to his/her own survival, pleasure, assertion,” write Gilbert and Gubar. Studies have linked mental illnesses commonly found in women such as agoraphobia, anxiety disorders, eating disorders to the effects of patriarchal conditioning and socialization. Girls get conditioned to be pleasing at the cost of disowning their own pleasures, they learn to place a high value on physical beauty, which is fleeting, and they learn to see themselves through the male gaze from early on, whether it’s through reading literature in the 19th century or through media and advertising portrayals of themselves in the current one. Women learn to see themselves as men see them while struggling with their own conflicting points of view of themselves and this fear of conflicting with the dominant paradigm enforces a culture of silence and repression that locks women into their own metaphorical castles of terror. This may be why horror films continue to resonate with modern women. Many horror films today take place in suburban homes, which can be just as stifling as the castles in the gothic novels. Films may no longer need dark and crumbling castles to be scary, but the ideas those castles represented are still alive in the horror genre. As long as women’s stories and voices are suppressed, the horror genre will continue to be the metaphorical battleground for women to fight against the patriarchal institutions that dominate their lives.

Note: While Gilbert and Gubar introduced ideas that have been used to analyze gothic fiction, they did not specifically deconstruct the genre itself. For further reading on that, I recommend “Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic after Thirty Years,” which explores the effects of their study on feminist lit critique. There’s an essay within that collection that specifically deals with the gothic form by Carol Margaret Davison entitled “Ghosts in the Attic.”


Sobia spends her free time consuming media and thinking a lot. She uses her English lit degree for little else than critiquing media’s portrayal of gender and race, which is possibly just another excuse to consume more media with awesome women.

Horror Week 2011: The Descent

When I first heard of The Descent, around the time of its 2006 theatrical release, it was described to me as “a movie about a bunch of lesbians who go into a cave and there are monsters.”

As it turns out, the entire six-woman cast of characters is ostensibly straight, if their boy talk in the early character-establishing scenes is anything to go by. I suspect my friend saw an all-female cast in a horror movie and assumed there MUST be lesbianism going on, because what’s a horror movie without sex? Or, for a more sexist explanation, chicks doing something interesting together without male supervision reads lesbian.
[Warning: If you are a group of friends in a movie, and you take a picture like this, at least half of you will be killed.]
Regardless, The Descent IS a movie about a bunch of women who go into a cave and there are monsters. What makes it such a brilliant movie is that you can chop the last three words off that plot description and you still have the makings of a terrific scary movie. It’s almost a full hour before the monsters appear, but that doesn’t mean the horror can’t start before the opening titles. After establishing a group of adventuresome female friends, we’re subject to witness the gruesome auto accident that kills main character Sarah’s husband and child. One year later, the friends have reconvened in the Appalachian mountains in the United States for a caving expedition to help a grief-wracked Sarah get her groove back. Only Juno, the alpha dog in the group (who just happened to have been schtupping Sarah’s husband before he was killed) knows that they are actually venturing into an unexplored cave system. In Juno’s mind, this surprise is an even greater gift to Sarah, who will get the honor of naming the cave system, perhaps after her dead daughter. But after a tunnel collapse blocks off their return path, Juno’s surprise means the group has no map and no one on the surface knows where they are.
Being trapped in an unknown cave with limited resources and no hope of outside rescue is in itself a terrifying situation, and The Descent plays it for all it is worth. A seemingly bottomless chasm must be crossed with only half the cams needed. One caver’s hand is sliced open by a ropeline when she saves her friend from plummeting to her death. Another caver follows the illusion of daylight, falls down a hole, and suffers a compound fracture in her leg. I’m already watching about half of the scenes through a finger screen and demanding that we turn the lights back on.
And then, the monsters come. Humanoid creatures with waxy pale skin, unseeing bleached-out eyes, and a tendency to rip people’s throats out and then chomp on their guts. Because the creature design is so simple, The Descent can afford to show them to us without your typical monster-movie restraint. And because the creatures are blind, we’re forced to endure several close-quarters silent standoffs recalling the T-Rex vs. Jeep scene in Jurassic Park. Only this is an R-rated horror movie, so some of those encounters end in stomach-turning gore.
All of this adds up to a horror movie so over-the-top terrifying I can’t believe I was willing to watch it again to write this review. But the gender implications of The Descent are too rich for me to deny, even though the film is sadly bereft of lesbians.
According to the iron-clad authority of Wikipedia, The Descent was originally conceived with a mixed-gender cast, until director Neil Marshall’s business partner “realized that horror films almost never have all-female casts.” But the female cast of The Descent brings more than novelty. I also don’t ascribe to Marshall’s suggestion that the chief advantage of the all-female cast is more naked emotion in a terrifying situation [“The women discuss how they feel about the situation, which the soldiers in Dog Soldiers [Marshall’s previous horror film] would never have done.”] The women of The Descent actually approach their situation with what is, at least to my American eyes, quite the stiff upper lip.
[Sidebar: Wikipedia also notes that Marshall gave the women different accents “to enable the audience to tell the difference between the women,” which is maybe the most depressing thing I’ve ever read. Who needs to bother with characterization when you have ACCENTS?]
I’m not buying the story that the all-female cast was to grab attention (if that were the case, maybe they would have been lesbians) or to allow for deeper exploration of feelings.  I think the all-female cast of The Descent is designed to clue the audience into a particular subtextual layer to this horror story. Because what’s more terrifying than being trapped in a cave with monsters? Women. Women’s bodies.
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.
Wait, the actual cherry on top is our heroine Sarah emerging Apocalypse Now-style from a pool of blood in the cave gallery that functions as the monsters’ killing fields, the signature image from the film.  And the cherry on top of that cherry is that Sarah fights the only female creature in the film while still wading in the pool of blood and kills her by stabbing her in the face with a phallic bone.
After this menstrual baptism, Sarah shifts from a wounded woman paralyzed by grief into terrifying killing machine, fighting off the creatures so gruesomely it seems almost dangerously inefficient (Eye gouging? Really? They can’t even see!) 
After all this, there’s still time for two more twists that rely on the gender of the cast for maximum effectiveness. [SPOILER ALERT, obviously.] First, we have Sarah in Creature Terminator Mode turn her rage against Juno, the only other human survivor, after discovering Juno’s affair with her late husband, by wounding her and leaving her to die at the hands of the creatures. It’s a moment that doesn’t sit quite right with me, in part because it is almost impossible to imagine a similar situation playing out between two male characters. 
Shortly after this betrayal, Sarah escapes from the caves and is able to return to their parked vehicle. As she takes a moment to collect herself, she sees a bloody Juno in the passenger’s seat. In the American theatrical release, the film ends here, but in the original edit and the DVD Director’s Cut there’s an additional minute of footage where we see that Sarah’s entire escape was a hallucination, and she is still in the cave, with no exit in sight. Sarah then hallucinates her daughter sitting with her in the cave with a lit birthday cake, and looks peaceful and accepting as the camera pulls out to reveal the enormity of the cave and the great number of creatures closing in. I prefer this ending, not only because I’m a sucker for bleak endings.  Throughout the film we’re given suggestions that Sarah’s grief is so great it has become a mental illness, including earlier depictions of hallucinations. And as much as I tire of cinema’s endless fascination with mentally ill women, in this case, it feels like a more honest character arc than the idea that fighting for survival and exacting cruel vengeance could snap her out of her grief haze. 
Whether it was done to cash in on these female tropes, to underscore the metaphors to the female anatomy, or just to grab our attention, the all-female cast undeniably serves in The Descent’s favor. And it sure is a nice treat for us horror-flick loving bitches.  
Robin Hitchcock previously reviewed Michael Clayton for Bitch Flicks. You can read more of her movie reviews at her blog HitchDied and plenty more feminist pop culture analysis at her other blog The Double R Diner.

Horror Week 2011: The Blair Witch Project

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Viewers might hope that with its unconventional approach, shoestring budget, and status as the first blockbuster powered by Internet buzz, The Blair Witch Project could offer horror fans something they haven’t seen before, specifically in terms of how women are represented. At first, the flick looks promising because it centers on a female lead in a position of authority. While it’s arguable whether The Blair Witch Project’s through-the-viewfinder conceit is actually innovative (cinephiles like to point to the correlations between Blair Witch and Man Bites Dog and Cannibal Holocaust), it’s safe to say that—in 1999, at least—no films with this particular conceit had enjoyed such widespread popularity. The presence of this conceit might account for the film’s success, coming as it did in the watershed era of reality television. Its lo-fi, DYI qualities lend the film a realism that at that time felt new and potentially persuasive. While the ensuing years have brought us further variations on the motif—Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity, and Super 8, among others—it’s also become much easier to see how The Blair Witch Project, for all its putative realism, renders unduly harsh judgments on its female lead.

In case you haven’t seen it, the film is supposedly “found” footage, recovered long after the three filmmakers depicted in the footage disappeared in the Maryland woods. There is little metaphorical space between the framing device (specifically, a shakey title card explaining when the footage was found) and the film-within-a-film. The film-within-the-film is the movie, it is the whole story. We are invited to view the footage as the unvarnished artifacts, the evidence of all that remains of Heather Donahue’s film project. Yet, the footage is edited for pace, laughs, and content with scenes that alternate from video to Hi 8 repeatedly. Directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez attempt to cover their editorial tracks by purposefully leaving in moments showing equipment checks and goofing around. Ideally, this approach would sustain the realism while allowing the filmmakers to craft a watchable film. Problem is, the edits also clearly posit Heather as the one responsible for what happens to herself and her crew. Heather is not blameless, yet for all her blunders, she is no more responsible for the bad turn of events than either of her male cohorts. But the film itself, and possibly its two male directors, want to lay the lion’s share of the blame at her booted feet. Her treatment both in the film and by the film belies a grave discomfort with a woman in charge. (This same discomfort might explain why Heather is pictured without a mouth on the DVD packaging, seen at the top of the post.)
Ostensibly, actress Heather Donahue’s portrayal of student filmmaker Heather Donahue seems positive. She’s no scream queen, scampering topless into the underbrush with breasts a-bob. This character is a product of her time: a self-possessed, driven, and adventurous young woman of the Lilith-Fair generation. The film opens on her, videotaping her preparations for what she knows will be a challenging shoot. Audiences see volumes on local history and wilderness survival among her possessions, and we see her forthrightness when it comes to dealing with the two male members of the crew. She drinks with the guys, and even chokes down some scotch. In the wilderness she casually dismisses both the risk of sexual violence and the appearance of impropriety by joking about her having two men in her tent. In directing Josh and Mike, she is self-assured. Her stern directive to them before they begin filming in earnest is that she “wants to avoid being cheesy” in the documentary. Similarly, in the early scenes, she comes off way more professional than the male crew members.

Her initiative stands in stark contrast with the lackadaisical insouciance of Josh and immature foolishness of Mike. When Josh arrives at her apartment, she dubs him “Mr. Punctuality.” After the three record an interview with a local eccentric, Josh complains (rightly) that the focus was off and blames it on the camera’s having only metric designations. When Heather observes that the lens also has U.S. measurements in brown letters, Josh only mumbles that the white numbers are more obvious. Then Heather states that she thought he used this camera before, and Josh is forced to acknowledge that he’s only used it once before. This moment may seem incidental, but it suggests that Josh may be out of his depth (or at least as out of his depth as Heather). Compared to Mike Williams, though, Josh is an old hand at the movie-making game. It’s made clear at several points that this is Mike’s first filmmaking experience. Mike is shown to be easily rattled and prone to angry confrontations. In particular, his rage over the first time the three become lost is especially irksome because, despite acknowledging that he has no ability to understand a map, he claims that he doesn’t “fully trust” Heather to get them out of the woods. The two males are quick to blame Heather for their situation because they are ultimately uncomfortable with her leadership.

Despite Heather’s capability, the film allows the two male characters to use the cameras to subtly undercut her authority. Josh directs the camera at a clearly agitated Heather as she struggles to find a hidden spot to urinate. He says, “What’s that? Is that the Blair Witch? No, it’s Heather, taking a piss.” When she expresses displeasure at being filmed, he shouts “Just go already!” While it may seem that Heather takes the same sort of liberties with the camera herself, particularly when she films Mike shirtless and makes fun of his “sporadic” chest hair, it’s worth noting that he fires back at the taunting with “You should see my ass.” Heather doesn’t take him up on the offer. Yet later, when Mike himself is holding the camera, he centers it on Heather’s muddy backside and cries, “I see a dirty behind!” Even in the woods it seems that men are still afforded a degree of privacy denied to the female character. While Heather is shown bursting into tears at three or four points in the film, Mike bars her from taping Josh as he sobs under a tree, keeping her at a distance.

It’s not just her cohorts that denigrate Heather; it’s the film itself. The directors include several confrontations that show Josh blaming Heather for their plight, criticizing her enthusiasm and drive. At these points, the film becomes self-conscious in a way that suggests the “hands of the directors” at work, rather than the loose improvisational feel of other scenes. The repeated taunting by Josh shows that he feels she is largely responsible for their situation. At one point, he asks, “You gonna write us a happy ending, Heather?” as if she has scripted all this out. Also, when he screams, “OK, here’s your motivation. You’re lost, you’re angry in the woods, and no one is here to help you. There’s a witch and she keeps leaving shit outside your door. There’s no one here to help you! She left little trinkets, you took one of them, she ran after us. There’s no one here to help you! We walked for 15 hours today, we ended up in the same place! There’s no one here to help you, THAT’S your motivation! THAT’S YOUR MOTIVATION!” like he’s in a method-acting exercise. He places the blame on her and, in response, she bursts into tears.
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.
First of all, unless Heather herself is also somehow the Blair Witch, she is not responsible for what’s happened to them. If the witch has caused disruptions in the compass, or somehow made the woods alter its appearance, or through black magic made the woods grow, then this could hardly be the fault of the student filmmaker who stumbled into this situation. What’s more, if we believe that the Blair Witch is responsible (rather than sadistic locals), then what motivation does the witch have for tormenting and disappearing three college students? It seems significant that the nocturnal sounds begin in the dead of night after Josh accidentaly disturbs one of the rock piles while filming in the cemetery. This gaffe horrifies Heather, who gently replaces the rock and plants a kiss on it, saying “You can’t be too careful.” Heather also didn’t kick the map (possibly their only salvation) into the river; Mike did that. Heather’s foibles are no more or less destructive than those of her peers. She’s inexperienced and becomes subject to the hunger and fatigue of the situation. So do her male counterparts. She exhibits poor decision making (not telling Mike about Josh’s severed finger), but it’s no worse than Mike’s decision to kick the map into the creek because he was angry. Yet her confession doesn’t have the feel of a woman taking responsibility for something she shouldn’t. Instead, the scene seems like the despairing of someone who has irrevocably screwed herself. The film wants us to agree that it’s her fault, hers alone.
Alex DeBonis has a PhD in fiction writing and literature from the University of Cincinnati. He currently teaches fiction writing, literature, and journalism in rural West Tennessee. His work has appeared in WordRiot, FictionDaily, eclectic flash, Storyglossia, no touching, and is in the current issue of kill author. He lives with his wife and son in Paris, TN.


Horror Week 2011: Drag Me to Hell

This review, written by Stephanie Rogers, was originally published in June 2009.

Drag Me To Hell. Starring Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Lorna Raver, Dileep Rao, David Paymer, and Adriana Barraza. Written by Sam Raimi and Ivan Raimi. Directed by Sam Raimi.

The honest truth: I loved Drag Me To Hell. Even though I’m not familiar with Sam Raimi’s other cult classic horror films (the Evil Dead saga, etc), I understood, finally, why so many horror fans obsess over him—he’s hilarious. Some reviewers of Drag Me To Hell have rightly questioned Raimi’s depiction of the stereotypes in the film, particularly the gypsy character, an old, unnecessarily disgusting, false teeth-removing, evil woman who curses another woman because, you know, what would a gypsy character be without the famous gypsy curse? (The Angry Black Woman posts an analysis of it here).

But, I ask you, can a film that sacrifices a goat and a kitten really be taking itself so seriously?

Everything that exists in this movie is a stereotype: the skinny blonde who used to be fat and now refuses to eat carbs, the skinny blonde’s self-hatred and rejection of her farm-girl roots, the rich boyfriend who will undoubtedly help her escape it all, his rich and consequently vapid, overbearing parents who want their son to marry a nice upper-class girl, the patriarchal workplace where the skinny blonde gets sent for sandwiches by her male coworkers, the jerk who sells out a coworker in order to get promoted, the brown-skinned psychics who hold hands around a table and chant in an attempt to invoke The Evil Spirit, the gypsy, obviously, and not least importantly, the fucking goat sacrifice.

The point is: it’s hard to play the I-hated-this-movie-because-of-the-blah-blah-“insert offensive stereotype”-game, when the film unapologetically turns everyone into a caricature.

Drag Me To Hell is about a young woman, Christine (played by Alison Lohman), who makes a questionable decision in an effort to get promoted at the bank where she works. She refuses to give a third extension on a woman’s mortgage loan, and in doing so, the woman, Mrs. Sylvia Ganush (played by Lorna Raver), could potentially lose her home. The twist? Christine could’ve given her the extension. But she chose not to. Instead, Christine wanted to prove to her boss that she’s a tough, hard-nosed, business savvy go-getter, and therefore certainly more qualified than her ass-kissing male coworker (who she’s in the process of, ahem, training) to take over the assistant manager position.

Then, as luck would have it, all hell breaks loose.

For the next hour and a half, these women go all testosterone and maniacally kick each other’s asses. This isn’t an Obsessed-type ass-kicking, where Beyonce Knowles beats the crap out of Ali Larter over, gasp, a man! and where all that girl-on-girl action plays like late-night Cinemax porn for all the men in the house. (Read Sady Doyle’s excellent review of it here). No, this is strictly about two women, one old, gross, and dead, the other young, gorgeous, and alive, trying to settle a score. Christine wants to live, dammit! And Mrs. Ganush wants to teach Christine a lesson for betraying her in favor of corporate success!

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. (Check out the review at Feministing for another take on this.)

Mrs. Ganush, though, isn’t your usual villain. She’s a poor grandmother, who fears losing her home. She literally gets down on her knees and begs Christine for the extension. Sure, she hacks snot into a hankie and gratuitously removes her teeth here and there, but hey, she’s a grandma, what’s not to love? Other than, you know, evil.

I love that this movie is about two women who are both arguably unlikeable to the point where you hope they either both win or both die. (The last time I remember feeling that way while watching a movie was probably during some male-driven cop/gangster drama. Donnie Brasco? American Gangster? Goodfellas? Do women even exist in those movies?) Everyone else is a sidekick, including the doe-eyed boyfriend (played by Justin Long), who basically plays the stand-by-your-(wo)man character usually reserved for women in every other movie ever made in the history of movies, give or take, like, three.

But at the same time, one could certainly argue that Christine’s unwillingness to help Mrs. Ganush, which results in Christine spending the next three days of her life desperately trying not to be dragged to hell, plays as a lesson to women: you can’t get ahead, regardless, so just stop trying. (Dana Stevens provides an analysis on Slate regarding this double-edged-sword dilemma that Christina finds herself in.)

Some have also argued that Drag Me To Hell exists in the same vein as the Saw films: it’s nothing but torture porn and obviously antifeminist. Yes, it’s gory, with lots of nasty stuff going in and out of mouths (Freud?), but the villain gets her share, and Christine hardly compares to the traditional heroine of lesser gore-fests: for one, she’s strong, much stronger than the horror-girls who can’t seem to walk without falling down in their miniskirts, and for the most part, she makes life-or-death decisions on her own, growing stronger and more adept as she faces the consequences of those decisions.

Perhaps most importantly, Christine isn’t captured by some sociopathic male serial killer and helplessly tortured in a middle-of-nowhere shed for five days. She trades blows with her attacker, and at one point, in pursuit of Mrs. Ganush, she even states that she’s about to go, “Get some.” (Ha.)

I personally read the film as an attempt to uphold the qualities our society traditionally categorizes as “feminine” characteristics: compassion, understanding, consideration, etc. I’m not suggesting that men don’t also exhibit these qualities, but when they do, they’re often considered weak and unmanly, especially when portrayed on-screen, which is demonstrated quite effectively when Christine confronts her male coworker about his attempts to sabotage her career; he bursts into tears in a deliberately pathetic played-for-laughs diner scene.

But it’s only when Christine rejects these qualities in herself (the sympathetic emotions she initially feels toward Mrs. Ganush), and consciously coaxes herself into adopting hard-nosed, traditionally “masculine” characteristics (which her male boss rewards her for), that she’s ultimately punished—and by another woman, no less. The question remains, though, is she punished for being a domineering corporate bitch, or is she punished for rejecting her initial response to help out? Regardless of the answer, the film makes a direct commentary on the can’t-win plight of women in the workplace, and, newsflash: it still ain’t pretty.

Watch the trailer here.

Horror Week 2011: Hellraiser

Hellraiser (1987)
(This review spoils the WHOLE movie!)

When people talk about classic horror movies, they’re almost always referring to the eighties which contained Nightmare on Elm Street, The Thing, and Child’s Play to name a few. Hellraiser, released in 1987, is no exception. While the movie lacks a lot of the high-tech special effects we’ve grown used to in contemporary cinema, the make-up in Hellraiser is impressively chilling. Although I’d seen the film several times prior (including all its sequels), I still found myself cringing and gagging as Frank emerged from the floorboards as little more than a slimy substance with bones.

As a horror film, Hellrasier is top-notch, as you find yourself wondering what’s going to happen next, worrying endlessly about the characters and freaking out all at once. So, it was definitely interesting to watch the film again but with a new perspective versus simply for pleasure.
When I first set out to write this review, I had been hoping to fixate mostly on Kirsty (played by Ashley Laurence) since she stuck out most in my mind. But having re-watched the film, I realized that Kirsty’s step-mother Julia (played by Clare Higgins) was actually more of a main character than Kirsty was.
Hellraiser introduces us to the Cotton family as Larry, the father, (played by Andrew Robinson) investigates the abandoned home of his brother Frank (played by Sean Chapman). We aren’t given much background information except that they’re probably in New York, since Brooklyn didn’t work out for various, unknown reasons.
As they’re wandering through the house, Julia finds herself in Frank’s old room which has little more than a mattress and some personal effects. She’s flipping through his pictures, which feature him with numerous (and faceless) women in various positions pertaining to S&M. When she eventually finds a clear photograph of him, she steals it. This is the first thing we see in regards to her obsession, and past affair, with Frank.
It seems that Julia prefers the days gone by, as we see in the next scene where she’s completely removed from those around her. There’s a dinner party featuring friends of the family and Kirsty, and Julia seems bored beyond belief. She excuses herself from the table, giving each person a kiss before she leaves except for her husband Larry.
Their lack of sexual chemistry in the film is blatant. They rarely touch each other, hug or kiss one another. There’s an aloofness to their marriage and it’s possible that it’s been years since the two have had sex. In a scene during a storm, Julia attempts to seduce Larry to keep him from investigating a noise from upstairs (Frank).
As they end to their bedroom, and Larry is kissing all over her, Frank emerges from closet with a knife, as if to kill his brother. As Julia is screaming, “No! I couldn’t bear it!” Larry is kissing away as Frank draws closer, who eventually leans over the railing to slice open a dead rat.
While Julia, distraught and frightened, is crying over this, Larry demands to know what her problem is, saying that he doesn’t understand her, before leaving the room.
But Julia’s troubled relationships with men don’t end there. Once Julia has agreed to help Frank (“Like love, only real.” – Frank) she has to pick men up so that Frank can eat them.
Her first victim is a balding, British man at the bar who is less than great. Her nervousness is palatable as they stand in the hall, and Guy A acts overly aggressive. When Julia seems hesitant to kiss him, he demands:

“What’s the matter? It’s what you brought me here for, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so, yes.”
“So what’s your problem? Let’s get on with it.”  And as Julia’s reluctance seems to grow, he growls, “You aren’t going to change your fucking mind, are ya?”  

Naturally, I wasn’t feeling a whole lot of sympathy for him when Frank ate him. And like most newbie serial killers, Julia simply becomes more confident over time. The next guy she brings is somewhat cocky, like the first one, and asks if they’re not going to be disturbed because “he likes to be careful”. This hints that he’s done this sort of thing before, but he doesn’t stand much chance.
This second murder is the most important because right after she kills him, she’s casually wiping the blood from her fingers, whereas before she nearly has a psychotic break. And in the very next scene we see Julia sitting with a glass of wine, in a white blouse, with an intense look on her face. As the camera slowly dollies in, a smirk creeps onto her face – she’s enjoying this.
In her final murder we have this nerdy guy with gigantic glasses. Julia has reached the height of confidence as she leads him upstairs casually. The soon to be victim tells her, “I get lonely sometimes.” Unlike the other two, he has almost no confidence and we all see watch as he pleads with his life, desperate not to die – whereas the other men died fairly quickly.
These interactions are insanely important because the confidence of the men is in contrast with Julia’s confidence. As Julia becomes more secure in herself, her victims became increasingly insecure, and fearful – almost mimicking her earlier state of mind.
The climax of the streak comes when she casually feeds Larry to Frank, doing little more than show him upstairs. I was curious as to know she attempted to use sex to lure him away, but not to bring him to Frank. I suppose one could argue that she has sex with people she doesn’t really know, or people who don’t care about her. This is equally interesting because Julia technically eventually has sex with Larry, but only once Frank has taken his skin for himself.
In the end, Frank accidentally stabs Julia in an attempt to kill Kirsty, but instead of mourning her death, he simply sucks the life out of her. Despite all his sweet nothings, promising her that he’ll always love her and that they’re meant to be together, in the end, he cared so little for her.
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). 

Tatiana Christian is a blogger at Parisian Feline, who writes about sexuality, gender and basically her thoughts on social justice and life. She previously contributed a review of Slumdog Millionaire to Bitch Flicks.