Tag: Horror Week 2012

Horror Week 2012: The Roundup

The Final Girl Gone Wild: Post-Feminist Whiteness in ‘Scream 4’ by Jeremy Cornelius

Wes Craven’s 1990s Scream trilogy completely rewrote the slasher genre in a postmodern meta-film. In March 2011, Scream 4 was released, ten years after Scream 3 was originally released, starring the original trio: Neve Campbell, David Arquette, and Courtney Cox-Arquette along with some new teen stars to apparently spur a new trilogy. Yet again, this film rewrites the genre, only this time the film plays with concepts of post-racial, post-feminist girl power by making Ghost Face [SPOILER ALERT!!!] a white sixteen-year-old girl, Sidney Prescott’s cousin Jill (played by Emma Roberts). Craven portrays Jill as the most violent and aggressive killer of any of the other serial killers in the Scream films. Jill kills mostly other white teenage girls (her best friends), a black police officer who is depicted in a racist fashion, and her own mother. Jill’s vitriolic aggression is fueled by her neoliberal pursuit of media fame and self-consciously performing the role of victim while veiling herself as the white-faced killer draped in a black shroud.

As well as being a zombie aficionado, I spent my teen years deep in confusion and denial about sexuality and gender – and these two things are perhaps not unrelated. Vampires and werewolves are explicitly sexual and very gendered, but my movie monster of choice erases sex and gender entirely by its very nature. There are no alluring seductions, no monthly cycles, no explosions of pent-up masculine rage in the zombie: only a creeping sameness and inevitability, all social categories dissolved into nothingness, all physical difference literally consumed in the nightmarish Eucharist of undead cannibalism. Of course, this erasure of sex and gender does not mean that sex and gender are not explored in zombie films. On the contrary, there are some very interesting things going on, as we shall see in our whirlwind tour of the Three Eras of Zombie Cinema.

Not only is Kristen (Liv Tyler) the film’s protagonist, she’s a woman who is not presented as a helpless idiot…It is Kristin who loads the shotgun after James confesses he’d lied about going hunting with his father and doesn’t know how to work it. Ultimately, James fires the gun, but by loading it Kristin proves she isn’t an incompetent damsel-in-distress. Throughout the film she strives to fight back…The Final Girl phenomenon is problematic because it is predicated on society’s sexist notion that women are the weaker sex. But scream time results in screen time, and while watching a movie like ‘The Strangers,’ with whom is the viewer being asked to identify? The masked maniac? Or the woman frantic to survive? (Hint: it’s not the maniac.)

The Failure of the Male Gaze in ‘The Vampire Lovers’ by Lauren Chance

In both the novella and The Vampire Lovers, Carmilla (Ingrid Pitt) exclusively stalks female victims, showing little interest in the male characters as anything other than fodder or a means to an end; Ingrid Pitt’s Carmilla never looks quite as comfortable with the lone male in the film she interacts with in a sexual manner as she does with the various women she seduces and bites…indeed the appreciation of Carmilla is seen in the faces of the female characters and it is with tentative exploration that they approach the mysterious woman.

‘Absentia’ Showcases Terror, Strong Female Characters and Sisterhood by Deirdre Crimmins

While I could continue on about the remarkable characterization of Callie and Tricia, it saddens me a little bit that strong non-sexualized female characters in horror films are such a unique phenomenon. While there are plenty of ass-kicking final women in slasher films, and many smart lady doctors who help stop the spread of a zombie outbreak, it is rare to feature a realistic female friendship, or a complicated sibling rivalry, in a horror film. Both Callie and Tricia are attractive, but that is not why they are there. The purpose that they are serving goes so far beyond their gender and their bodies that the contrast to other horror vixens seems like night and day. And neither of them plays the victim, or the unnaturally stoic heroine. They are both complex, and with long histories that they carry with themselves, and impact their judgments.
ELLEN RIPLEY (Aliens): This is perhaps the only scary movie where the villain (a 7-foot alien) was actually slightly intimidated by the intended victim, in this case a female lieutenant trapped on board an alien-infested ship. If she was ever frightened by the aliens, Ripley rarely showed it. As one of the only women on the ship, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) often swooped down to save her fellow male shipmates from becoming dinner for the aliens without hardly breaking a sweat. This is why we love her.
The central pleasure of Jennifer’s Body — the confusing love Needy feels for Jennifer, and the trouble she takes to clarify that feeling, and act on it (revenging Chip), then act on it again (revenging pre-demon Jennifer) — might be precisely what turned off male reviewers. For all the promise of eye candy going in, this is a story about young women negotiating the horrors of the adolescent-to-adult obstacle course with some dignity, loyalty, and social conscience intact. The infamous male gaze has to work harder to appropriate a film told from the p.o.v. of cute but bookish, shy but self-respecting Needy, whose closest bond is, and might ever be, her friend Jennifer.
When Moira is not around a living straight man, a target for that sexuality, she is an old woman displaying a damaged eye where she was shot. She is presented as completely lacking in sexual attractiveness — not only in appearance but in demeanour as well. Her sexual nature is reserved for straight men…Moira does get to be seen as a tragic figure for this. We see her pain and her loss when her mother dies in a nursing home. We get to see her fear and frustration over trying to be free from the house and having her plans thwarted. We get to see her pain and anger in the face of Constance’s constant taunting and needling of her, still holding a grudge for her husband’s infidelity. But in all these instances we’re expected to sympathise with the older Moira — the good Moira, the non-threatening Moira and, tellingly, the non-sexual Moira. Sexual Moira is not a person to be pitied or a person due sympathy or who feels pain.

For those who haven’t read the comics (like me), Michonne…seems to be a strong, powerful, complex character. She’s clever since she uses two incapacitated walkers to hide from other zombies. She appears to be a fierce and fearless survivor. But what’s even more exciting is that she’s a woman of color. Yet I’m skeptical as the show hasn’t done a great job portraying gender so far…I’m sorry, did the zombiepocalypse also signal a rip in the fabric of time where The Walking Dead characters now live in fucking 1955?! So Lori, women shouldn’t be “playing” with guns or hunting for food or protecting the camp. Nope. Women are only good for domestic duties like cooking, cleaning and child-rearing. Leave the tough stuff to the men. Silly me for forgetting. Thank god Andrea told Lori and her bullshit off…While blaming it on Lori’s “irrational behavior” due to her pregnancy and “going through a lot of stuff” (um, aren’t they all?), writer/creator Robert Kirkman ultimately defends this exchange and the show’s depiction of traditional gender roles…Why must we constantly see a rearticulation of sexist gender stereotypes?…Why is everyone on the show struggling to maintain white male patriarchy??

The Stepfather (the 1987 version) is not like most slasher films; it is a uniquely feminist horror film. Carol J. Clover’s theory of the “final girl,” the trope in horror cinema that leaves one unique girl as the sole survivor, is brilliant and generally accurate. But our heroine, Stephanie, is not like other final girls. For one, she is one of the ONLY girls in the film. The film is full of empty, impotent signifiers of male power: the male lieutenant, the male therapist, the male high school teacher, the male hero/amateur detective, the male reporter and, of course, Stephanie’s dead father. More importantly, throughout the duration of this film no women are killed. Let me repeat that: NO women are killed. It may not be obvious to some viewers, but it is strikingly obvious to me, a feminist who loves horror films. When the film opens, Jerry (or Henry Morrison, his identity before Jerry) has already killed his previous family, which we know contained a wife and at least one daughter, but during the film only men are slaughtered. They are men who attempt to rescue Stephanie and her mother Susan, but the only person who actually rescues Stephanie is Stephanie.
Instead, these little girls embody society’s growing fears of female power and independence. Fearing a young girl is the antithesis of what we are taught — stories of missing, kidnapped or sexually abused girls (at least white girls) get far more news coverage and mass sympathy than stories of boy victims. Little girls are innocent victims and need protection…Their mere presence in these films spoke not only to audiences’ fears of children losing innocence, but also the intense fear that little girls — not yet even women–would have the power to overthrow men. These girl children of a generation of women beginning a new fight for rights were terrifying — these girls would grow up knowing they could have power.
Call it The Nervous Wife, which is more concise than “women are super emotional, illogical and fearful and cannot be trusted.” The Nervous Wife is a staple of the haunted house film genre, and now that paranormal shows are slowly taking over the small screen, it can be found there, too. In the first season of the FX channel’s American Horror Story, the character Vivien Harmon had to be committed and impregnated with a devil baby, and her teenage daughter dead and haunting the family abode, before her husband would believe that something spooky was going down. Yes. Yes. I know. Science says ghosts and goblins and such don’t exist. True enough. It is natural for a body to be skeptical of supernatural claims. Would you believe it if you were told the portal to hell was in your laundry room? Likely not. The problem is that women in horror films are rarely, if ever, the skeptical ones. Logic is portrayed as a man thing. Little ladies are quick to believe the unbelievable. And to be frightened by it.
But really, I think that the guys who made this film have no idea what kind of culture they are feeding into. I think that V/H/S is a horror film, not because it is well-made, or clever, or scary, but because these are the stories we expect to hear. Girls are murderous. Girls are sluts. Girls won’t give it up. Girls can’t be trusted. Girls are victims. Girls. Are. The. Worst. Those girls? They’re even worse than those guys. But you know what, guys who made this film? When you feed into this culture, when you populate your brains and ours with these images, with these narratives, you make it more and more likely that the only option girls have when date raped, when stuck in a loveless marriage, when victimized, when traumatized is to strike out. To strike back.
I started thinking about the five college students in The Cabin in the Woods and how their roles ar e defined by gender. The two women, Jules and Dana, are defined as The Whore and The Virgin – two opposite ends of the spectrum whose deaths are meant to serve as bookends for the others. The order of deaths is irrelevant except in the case of the women. Jules, as the corrupted Whore, has to die first, and Dana, the Virgin, has to die last, if she dies at all. As Hadley (Bradley Whitford) says, “The virgin death is optional as long as it’s last.” The female characters are defined only by their sexuality – nothing else about them really matters. Still, the men don’t fare much better…What I find particularly interesting, though, is how the “puppeteers” (as Marty calls them) recognize that the five people they’ve selected for the sacrificed don’t easily fit into the prescribed archetypes.
[Bexy Bennett]: Strong women don’t necessarily need to be role models, though. I certainly wouldn’t want my children to raise the headless horseman from the dead to exact revenge for previous injustices, but I can admire Lady Van Tassel’s forbearance – she and her sister are left alone, as children, in the Western Woods, yet she ensures their survival and raises herself to a position of some importance in the village. Of course her motives are questionable but does that diminish her strength?
[Amanda Civitello]: Given the way that the other lead female character is portrayed, I have the impression that it’s a deliberate editorial decision to make the one strong female character into the antithesis of a role model. The audience is meant to identify – or if not identify, at least feel for – sweet Katrina Van Tassel, who does all she can to save the man she loves. But Katrina isn’t nearly as well-rounded a character as Lady Van Tassel. She’s more of a generic type of filler than anything else; to compensate for the lack of development of Katrina’s character, it’s as if they wanted to ensure that Lady Van Tassel would be so offensive and so off-putting that they made her into something bordering on a monstrous caricature.
The horror genre has a tradition of terrorizing women, of chasing them through the woods and attackingthem in houses. It also has a tradition of The Final Girl, a trope that is simultaneously empowering and reductive: the only survivor is a virginal woman who wields a phallic weapon and destroys the monster. The ‘Paranormal Activity’ trilogy features a different kind of Final Girl: she doesn’t kill the monster — she becomes it.
Ableist and sexist stereotypes of women and mental illness abound in horror movies and TV (American Horror Story, Orphan, Gothika, Nightmare on Elm Street 3, The Ring and Misery)…Society polices women’s appearances, language and behavior. We can’t let the ladies get out of control. Who knows what could happen??? Calling a woman “crazy,” doubting not only her veracity but her very sanity, is offensive. It’s also an attempt to control women, demean them and strip them of their power. Women with mental illness are often silenced, invisible from the media aside from victims or villains in horror. When we do see them on-screen, they instill fear as they are depicted as violent, volatile and uncontrollable…The “crazy bitch” trope and label — in both pop culture and reality — silences and dismisses women while simultaneously shaming and stigmatizing women living with mental illness.
Without a doubt, the movie is doing many exciting, transgressive things. I find particularly important the way the audience is analogous with “the gods” because we are the ones demanding these elaborate, repetitive sacrifices that push people into these stereotypical roles. It’s not only an indictment of the horror genre but of the voyeuristic spectatorship that perpetuates these horror tropes. However, I expected more from the feminist powerhouse team that created Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I find myself wishing Marty had been cast as a woman, and the two women, the fool and the non-virgin virgin, would be the pair of survivors who finally say “no more” to a horror genre that dismembers, kills, and punishes them for being women.
The woman’s scream has been an essential part of horror. Women play a fundamental role in horror films – possibly more than other genres. Women function as a foil. They are wrought by terror. They scream the way we, in the theater, want to…The problem is that we are still dealing with an either-or sort of situation. Women can be preternaturally courageous and stoic. Or, they can be spastic screeching machines that fall to pieces.
And while my confession at the start of this remains the same, upon closer inspection, I realized that Leslie Vernon’s treatment of women is left to be desired. While there is a lot of discussion about empowering the survivor girl to become a strong woman, it is described from a mocking male’s perspective. One scene in particular especially rubbing me the wrong way, in which Leslie discusses with Taylor how the faux survivor girl, Kelly, will imminently end up at an old shed to find a weapon. He describes her choice of weapon as “empowering herself with cock.” The axes, sledgehammers, and other long handled devices purposely phallic.
Horror films are commonly seen as one of the most sexist film genres; utilizing the voyeuristic male gaze, objectifying the female body, and reveling in helpless women being victimized. I am not discounting these claims, but horror has the potential to be more than that: films which subvert the genre’s sexism and incorporate strong, distinct female characters do exist.

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 2012: Top 10: Best Female-Centered Horror Films

This is a guest post from Eli Lewy.
Horror films are commonly seen as one of the most sexist film genres; utilizing the voyeuristic male gaze, objectifying the female body, and reveling in helpless women being victimized. I am not discounting these claims, but horror has the potential to be more than that: films which subvert the genre’s sexism and incorporate strong, distinct female characters do exist. Some of the films on this list are reductive and infuriating at times but they attempt to show a different side of horror and affirm that the female perspective has a place in the horror landscape. 
Ryo (Shigeharu Aoyama) is a middle-aged widower looking for a new partner. His friend convinces him that he should audition potential mates and choose who he wants. Ryo claims he is searching for someone confident, yet chooses the seemingly obedient and passive Asami (Eihi Shiina). Appearances may be deceiving. Though the film is more focused on Ryo, it is his degrading treatment of women in general that is the most important aspect of the film.

Halloween
The slasher subgenre’s first film, Halloween’s menace takes the form of Michael Myers. However, Halloween is Laurie Strode’s (Jamie Lee Curtis) story. A shy wallflower surrounded by nubile airheads, she comes into her own in the the film. While fighting for her life she realizes the strength and resourcefulness she possesses, making her horror cinema’s archetypical final girl; the girl smart enough to survive till the end of the film.

Rosemary’s Baby
Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy (John Cassavetes) are a young couple who just moved into a new apartment. The neighbors are awfully nosy and Rosemary’s husband becomes more distant and patronizing. Rosemary gets pregnant under dubious circumstances and senses that something is wrong with the baby but no one will listen to her. Everyone around her believes her to be an over-sensitive and paranoid woman while she fights for autonomy over her own body.
7. Inside (aka A l’interieur)
The pregnant Sarah (Alysson Paradis) recently lost her husband in a car accident. Alone at home on one fateful night, she gets the wrong kind of visitor in the form of a homicidal woman (Beatrice Dalle). Inside is perhaps not the most empowering or progressive of films, but it is one of the most taught, suspenseful 82 minutes ever caught on celluloid.
The Craft
Nancy (Robin Tunney) moves to a new town after her mother’s death and struggles to fit in. She falls in line with a group of young women who are rumored to be witches. Nancy is, in fact, a born witch. The freaky foursome test their prowess in matters of the occult which brings them closer together. They grow stronger by the day, and negative emotions get magnified. The Craft sheds a positive light on female sisterhood and tackles female teen issues in a frank manner (an over-the-top climax notwithstanding).
Teeth
Chaste Dawn (Jess Weixler) has an inkling that she is not like most girls. Faced with violent and despicable men all around her, she may begin to use that to her advantage. Though the dangerous, castrating woman is a sexist trope, the fact that we witness Dawn’s transformation from her perspective marks a certain twist on the age-old tale.
Family man and lawyer Chris Cleek (Sean Bridges) eyes a “wild” woman (Pollyanna McIntosh) while hunting. He proceeds to confine her to his shed where he wants to “civilize” her for reasons that remain unknown. He introduces the woman to his family and Chris’s behavior becomes more bizarre and off-putting from that point onwards. The two main male characters, the father and son, are the real uninhibited beasts.
The Descent
A group of old friends go on a cave expedition; marking a new beginning after a tough year. They are all competent explorers, but are all of them good people? The cave transpires to be nothing short of a death trap, which is when loyalties, betrayals, and their true nature come to the fore.
2. Bedevilled (aka Kim Bok-nam salinsageonui jeonmal)
A young banker (Seong-won Ji) takes a (forced) vacation on the tiny, isolated island she spent some of her childhood in. Her childhood friend, Kim Bok-nam (Yeong-hie Seo) remembers her fondly and has tried to contact her through the years, to no avail. The back-breaking hard labor and the community’s overt sexism and mistreatment of Bok-nam gradually sends her over the edge. The oppressive social setting is set up so believably that it is incredibly gratifying, if distasteful, to watch its destruction.

Ginger Snaps
Brigit (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katherine Isabelle) are two sisters who take morbid photographs and enjoy the darker things in life. One day, their life takes a drastic turn for the worse. Ginger gets her first period, and as if dealing with her looming womanhood was not confusing enough, she gets bitten by a werewolf. It is up to Brigit to try and save her before it is too late. The obvious parallels between the respective lunar cycles and bodily transformations are effective as well as the characterization of multidimensional, troubled young women.
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Eli Lewy is a third culture kid and Masters student studying US Studies. She currently resides in Berlin. She is a movie addict and has a film blog which you can find under www.film-nut.tumblr.com

Horror Week 2012: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

This is a guest post from Libby White
I’m going to be honest, I chose Behind the Mask because of an instant love that came from my first viewing of it two years ago. As an admitted horror movie junkie, I mourned the end of the reigns of Michael and Jason, Chucky and Pinhead. The old days of seemingly immortal killers with a penchant for hacking up horny teens were long gone, and in their place, we had “torture porn” like Saw, Hostel, and The Devil’s Rejects. But then came Leslie Vernon into my life. 
Warning: This review contains spoilers. If you have not seen the film, I suggest watching it before I ruin the plot for you. It’s so much better when experienced firsthand. 
The plot of Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon takes place over two very distinct parts. For the first half of the film, we have a comedic documentary which gives tribute the infamous killers we love and know, revealing their “secrets” and all the work it takes behind the scenes to be an apt killer. Led by a naïve young intern, a local TV news crew is sent to document the activities of a budding serial killer, Leslie Vernon. In a world where Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger are living legends; serial killing has become a well honed art form. And under the guidance of Eugene, a former serial killer himself, Leslie adopts a macabre back-story for himself, and begins to meticulously arrange every little detail of his future killing spree. From picking the perfect location for a massacre, to his final “survivor girl,” we are able to get a sense of how difficult it is to do a serial killer’s work. 
During the second part of the film, we get our real horror film. 
In a somewhat surprising twist, it is revealed that Leslie’s real target was Taylor, the intern, and her crew all along. Knowing that she would not be able to stand by and watch as a group of teens was cut down, Leslie counted on her interference with the original plan to set in motion his real motive. Sweet and virginal, Taylor is the epitome of the horror movie heroine. And when it comes time to fight for her life, she doesn’t disappoint. One by one the characters are hacked off, leaving Taylor to battle it out with the gone psychotic Leslie Vernon. 
And while my confession at the start of this remains the same, upon closer inspection, I realized that Leslie Vernon’s treatment of women is left to be desired. While there is a lot of discussion about empowering the survivor girl to become a strong woman, it is described from a mocking male’s perspective. One scene in particular especially rubbing me the wrong way, in which Leslie discusses with Taylor how the faux survivor girl, Kelly, will imminently end up at an old shed to find a weapon. He describes her choice of weapon as “empowering herself with cock.” The axes, sledgehammers, and other long handled devices purposely phallic. 
Leslie: “She’ll be taking my manhood, and empowering herself with it.” 
Taylor is visibly uncomfortable with the conversation, but Leslie persists, going full out monologue on the relation of women to horror. 
While a lot of this ongoing discussion provides interesting insight into the symbolism in horror films, Leslie’s narrative can’t help but seem like total BS. And that’s the point. The first 2/3 of the film is treated as a joke by the interviewers, (minus one or two emotionally intense moments), until the cold reality of what they are participating in hits them. While Taylor, Todd, and Doug are somewhat uncomfortable by all this talk of murder, they are obviously detached from the real truth of the matter. Only when they realize that they have been the targets all along do the crew truly become invested in the outcome of Leslie Vernon’s plan for infamy. But Leslie’s wording doesn’t help either. 
Leslie: “Yonic imagery is extremely important in our work.” 
Taylor: “Yonic?” 
Leslie: “The opposite of phallic. Bit girl parts.” 
There is also a lot of mention of virginity, and why it is all final horror movie girls are “obviously” virgins. The word “pure,” and “good” thrown around quite a bit. Leslie justifies what he is doing as a way of balancing out the good and evil in the world; that he, Eugene, and the other serial killers have chosen to fulfill a role that society doesn’t like to acknowledge needs filling. The need for a virgin for the incident to revolve around is supposedly their way of pitting good against evil. And believe it or not, the serial killers are rooting for this girl. Leslie repeatedly states throughout the movie that he has high hopes for “Kelly,” and feels he is watching a glorious thing as she makes her transition from frightened girl to “empowered woman.” But in other scenes, virginity is treated as a joke, the wife of Eugene telling the crew to “get someone in her pants,” or “get the hell away from her,” if they ever want to survive a massacre. 
This perpetuation of the idea that women are only “pure”, or good, when they are virgins is incredibly harmful. But even more so given the context of the film. After all, it is only virgins who get to live. So now a woman’s sex life is determining whether or not she is worthy to live? And pity the male characters, who are doomed to die no matter what. 
And while I know that the film is merely mocking its famous predecessors, it felt as if the writers of Leslie Vernon wanted to have an honest discussion on the matter, but got scared away, and decided to fill in the blanks with a less-serious male narrated version. 
Still, I do give the film some props for trying. In their attempts to explore the female focus of horror movies, they unintentionally misstep. With a background character that constantly cracks smart-ass remarks at Taylor, and a gratuitous close up of breasts being fondled; Leslie Vernon’s feminism isn’t all it appears to be. 
Taylor, the film’s heroine, and true “survivor girl,” is an excellent female character, however. She is neither purely innocent, nor totally timid. She is given more than one chance to wash her hands of the matter or turn Leslie in, but doesn’t. But as per Leslie’s expectations, she continuously grows throughout the film, eventually fulfilling the destiny of “empowered woman.” 
From the very start of the film, you can feel her discomfort with the plan and her own inner insecurity. She constantly questions Leslie’s justification for murder, eventually working up the courage to get into a full blown battle with him about it. On the night of the planned killings, you can see that Taylor has just about had enough. By the time she interferes, and later battles for her life, she hardly resembles the girl we started with. 
Pushed to the edge, Taylor fearlessly takes on Leslie alone, and (seemingly) wins. 
Outside of Taylor, there are very few other female characters. We have the wife of Leslie’s mentor, a murdered librarian, (played by the lovely Zelda Rubinstein), and Kelly. Unfortunately, none of these women qualify as more than background characters; Kelly, the supposed lead, killed off mid-coatis at the start of the slaughter. 
In the end, I still like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. While it will never be a great feminist work, the plot, characters, and twists make it a fun watch. Anyone who grew up on the classic 70’s and 80’s slashers will be able to watch the cameos and obscure references with glee, and imagine a world in which the most well-known movie serial killers of all time actually make a living off their killings. 
Happy Halloween!
Libby White is a senior at the University of Tennessee, studying Marketing and Spanish full-time. Her parents were in the Navy for most of her life, so she got to see the world at a young age, and learn about cultures outside her own. Her mother in particular has had a huge influence on her, as she was a woman in the military at a time when men dominated the field. Her determination and hard-work to survive in an environment where she was not welcomed has made Libby respect the constant struggle of women today.

Horror Week 2012: Women’s Terror Vocalized in Horror Films

If only she could scream louder! It might defeat Ro-Man

In the 1953 B-movie, Robot Monster, protagonists Alice (Claudia Barret) and Roy (George Nader) attempt to engage in post-apocalyptic frolicking and fornicating. This is all while being pursued by a gorilla-suited socialism-spewing space man (John Brown). This space man, or as he calls himself, Ro-Man, falls in love with Alice. How could a communist alien from the stars resist a red-blooded American woman? Exactly. Impossible.

Unfortunately for Ro-Man, his love is unrequited. So, he does what any oversized hairy simian does. He launches an impromptu kidnapping. While Alice kicks and screams in his arms, he awkwardly saunters across the desert countryside. But, it is Alice’s screams that are of particular interest. While fighting Ro-Man, Roy grunts and groans but he doesn’t issue the same prolonged tone of terror that Alice does. Alice’s only “action” is to indicate her utter passiveness via screaming. Roy gets to act and rescue.

The woman’s scream has been an essential part of horror. Women play a fundamental role in horror films – possibly more than other genres. Women function as a foil. They are wrought by terror. They scream the way we, in the theater, want to.

The archetypes we see presented in B-movies extend into the classic horror canon. Some of the great horror movies wouldn’t be the same without the woman’s scream.

Psycho featured one of the more famous screaming scenes on the silver screen. What is brutal about this Alfred Hitchcock film is that we follow a faux-protagonist for a long time, Marion (Janet Leigh), only to see her abruptly and brutally murdered. Her role is to be lost to terror and die shrieking.

The thing about Psychoand Robot Monster is that they position their female characters in both terrifying and erotic situations. Alice is swept away by Ro-Man from her dalliances with Roy. Marion is murdered while in the shower. Their screams can be reminiscent of orgasm.

This is pretty typical in any horror movie – especially the ones featuring young people getting indirectly punished for sexual activity (as in: any horror movie since the ‘80s.)

There’s got to be a better place for women in horror films.

And there is. But, it’s complicated.

There are strong women characters in horror movies – ones that rarely scream, and if they do it is with purpose. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) from the Alien films has got to be one of the bad-assest of horror heroes out there. She’s calm, steely and a survivor. Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) from Buffy the Vampire Slayeris also an admirable kicker of supernatural asses. Women can be tough in horrific situations.

It’s not the norm, though. 
I mean, in all likelihood, you would scream in her situation. 
In Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), the chirpy wife to the murderously insane Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), spends the last half of the movie in hysterics. It seems like a pretty appropriate reaction to your husband losing his mind and trying to kill you. She does ultimately save herself and her son, but it’s in a human and clumsy sort of way.

This should be ok – but against a backdrop of hysterical women, Wendy becomes a part of the passive amalgam.

The problem is that we are still dealing with an either-or sort of situation. Women can be preternaturally courageous and stoic. Or, they can be spastic screeching machines that fall to pieces.

We need more nuance. While horror is not the first place you look for complex characters, we can do better than fitful women standing in for the audience’s own desire to scream.   

Horror Week 2012: “We work with what we have," The Subversion of Gender Roles in ‘The Cabin in the Woods’

This is a guest post from Amanda Rodriguez
Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s Cabin in the Woods is a fantastic movie, laying the horror genre bare, critiquing its conventions, and creating a space for a larger cultural conversation. Gender roles (both in and out of horror movies) are a major component of this conversation in which the filmmakers encourage us to engage. Most importantly, the film critiques the virgin/whore dichotomy that cinema and society seem to insist is the only way we can view most women.
A little background info: The scenario in Cabin in the Woods is pretty typical of the horror genre: five college-aged teens spending a weekend at a remote cabin are brutally attacked by a “zombie redneck torture family.” What isn’t typical is that a powerful, secret agency using advanced technology is manipulating the situation in order to complete a sacrificial ritual to ensure the continued slumber of fierce, ancient gods. Yeah, a bit off the beaten path, no?
The sacrifice requires a “transgression” and the resulting deaths of the athlete/jock (Curt), the scholar (Holden), the fool (Marty), and the whore (Jules). The death of the “final girl” aka the virgin (Dana) is optional. Each character is a stand-in for a horror movie archetype. When we examine the two female characters fighting for their lives, we find that they are neither virgin nor whore.
The so-called “whore” is Jules, our heroine’s bubbly best friend and roommate. She is sharp-witted and good-natured, a loyal friend. The agency manipulating the kids is decreasing Jules’ cognitive abilities through a slow-acting chemical compound in her blonde hair dye (she decided to dye her hair on a whim…sounds suspicious to me), and they’ve upped her libido via drugs. As the night progresses, Jules’ behavior becomes more and more out of character.
Apparently, sexy fireplace dancing and making out with a taxidermied wolf aren’t part of Jules’ normal partying repertoire.
Jules is the one who must “transgress” by showing her breasts and her willingness to engage in sexual activity, setting off the release of the Buckners (zombie rednecks) to begin the blood sacrifice. When it comes time, though, Jules doesn’t really want to have sex. She and her boyfriend, Curt, are outside, and she wants to go back inside. She’s cold, and it’s too dark. In order to combat Jules’ reservations about having sex, the agency raises the temperature into the 80’s, shines light into a clearing to simulate moonbeams, and floods the area with a pheromone mist.
Though it can’t be said that Jules is forced to transgress, her free will is certainly called into question. Outside forces are influencing her brain, her hormones, and her physical surroundings in such a way that her downfall becomes inevitable. Taken in a larger cultural context, this calls into question the notion that women who like sex or who own their sexuality are whores. It is as if all the women who are judged for some perceived promiscuity are miscast, just like Jules is miscast. Much like the agency, cultural circumstances manipulate women into these roles. A key example of this is how media representations of women replete with their over-sexualization and overt body focus set women up to take the fall in order to fulfill some arcane cultural need. This need seems to go back to (if not predate) the biblical “Fall of Man” where Eve is the transgressor who is blamed for the birth of sin and then punished. Like the horror movie genre, we repeat this same formula over and over again, craving the same result: the transgression and punishment of a woman for her sexuality. Why do we do this? Because it’s a man’s world? Because men are threatened by the power and autonomy of female sexuality? I’m sure all that and more is true, but it’s safe to say it’s definitely a dude thing. 
On the other side of the dichotomy coin, we have Dana, the archetypical virgin, who is not actually a virgin.
The non-virgin virgin. Talk about not really fitting into a gender stereotype.
Unlike Jules, though, Dana naturally exhibits many of the traits that have cast her in the role of the virgin. She is shy, sexually uncomfortable, brainy, artistic, and somewhat socially awkward. However, as the terrors she must face intensify, Dana has a reserve of strength that aligns her with Carol Clover’s final girl feminist trope. She repeatedly stabs her bear-trap-wielding zombie attacker, Matthew Buckner, with a crowbar and then a knife. She wrestles her way out of the depths of a lake after being attacked by Father Buckner and then withstands an almost inhuman amount of abuse on the dock at the hands of Matthew Buckner. Not only that, but Dana identifies with the killer when she sympathetically reads from the diary of Patience Buckner, thus setting the stage for the ritual by choosing the method of the five friends’ deaths. Also, at the end of the film, in an act that borders on complicity, Patience Buckner stabs The Director (of the agency), and when she does this, Dana sees Patience as her salvation. 
In the end, though, Dana doesn’t fit the horror genre virgin role or Clover’s mold because she isn’t the final girl. Marty manages to survive, thus subverting the entire horror genre and the final girl trope in the process. Marty uses his bong invention to rescue Dana from Matthew Buckner before spiriting her away to show her that he’s discovered a subterranean maintenance override panel that he’s hotwired to take them out of their contained, controlled area down into the agency’s headquarters to confront their true tormentors.
Bong Boy to the rescue!
Marty is our unlikely hero, which I appreciate, on the one hand, because he is smart, inventive, funny, insightful, and not attractive in the typical Hollywood sense of the word. Even as far as characterization goes, Marty is a far more interesting and engaging protagonist than Dana, who is, frankly, about as fascinating and individualized as linoleum. On the other hand, Marty as the hero making the final decision about whether or not to save our corrupt world subverts the possibility of a feminist reading of the ending. Marty decides that we’re not a species worth saving, and after attempting to shoot him and being bitten by a werewolf, Dana goes along with his choice. Ultimately, Cabin in the Woods is a male fantasy in which the nerd becomes the hero, saving the woman for whom he clearly cares while holding in his hands the power to determine the fate of the world.
It’s dubious whether or not Cabin in the Woods passes the Bechdel Test, as even the final conversation Dana has with The Director is centered around the importance Marty plays in maintaining world order. Without a doubt, the movie is doing many exciting, transgressive things. I find particularly important the way the audience is analogous with “the gods” because we are the ones demanding these elaborate, repetitive sacrifices that push people into these stereotypical roles. It’s not only an indictment of the horror genre but of the voyeuristic spectatorship that perpetuates these horror tropes. However, I expected more from the feminist powerhouse team that created Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I find myself wishing Marty had been cast as a woman, and the two women, the fool and the non-virgin virgin, would be the pair of survivors who finally say “no more” to a horror genre that dismembers, kills, and punishes them for being women. Maybe the world isn’t ready for that, but I’d hoped Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard would be ready to tell us that story anyway.

———-

Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.

Horror Week 2012: That "Crazy Bitch": Women and Mental Illness Tropes in Horror

Vivien (Connie Britton) in American Horror Story

Ladies, how many times have you been called a “crazy bitch?” Once? Twice? 5 thousand times?? Or is that just me? This oh-so-not-lovely term of endearment gets tossed around waaaaayy too often. It’s bad enough when we get labeled the sexist term “bitch” — and it’s very different for us women to reclaim the word and its power, calling ourselves “bitch,” as we do here at Bitch Flicks. But it’s typically coupled with “crazy,” a problematic and offensive ableist term. Put them together and you have the Crazy Bitch, an all-too common trope in the media, appearing as victims and villains in horror.

Horror movies have undoubtedly been influenced by feminism.  Some argue a “stealth empowerment message” exists in horror films for women with lots of ass-kicking female survivors and the rise of the Final Girl. Sadly, not all tropes have fallen by the wayside, including the Crazy Bitch. Ableist and sexist stereotypes of women and mental illness abound in horror movies and TV (American Horror Story, Orphan, Gothika,Nightmare on Elm Street 3, The Ring, Misery, etc.).
Now, my mother and some of my friends live with mental illness. For each of them, it’s a part of their lives but it doesn’t define them. So I’m acutely aware of the stigmas, misconceptions and prejudices surrounding mental illness. Mental illness — from bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and depression to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), schizophrenia and anorexia — is a legitimate medical condition requiring medication and/or therapy.
But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say mental illness isn’t “real” or they question why people with mental illness can’t get their shit together. Really, asshole? You wouldn’t dare say that to someone with diabetes or heart disease or cancer. So don’t say that ignorant shit. Ever.
Rather than dispelling myths, pop culture often reinforces mental illness stereotypes. As Bitch Magazine’s s.e. smith asserts: 

“For those of us with mental illness(es), pop culture can be a constant reminder of the fact that we are considered both scary and public property, objects of curiosity, fascination, and revulsion.”

Samara (Daveigh Chase) in The Ring

And the Crazy Bitch trope helps perpetuate mental illness stereotypes. It has many sister tropes infesting horror too. Like the Hysterical Woman, where female characters are depicted as overly emotional and irrational, The Madwoman in the Attic, a trope where a character with mental illness is locked away, isolated from society, and the Nervous Housewife, where men doubt women’s paranormal experiences and patronize them. Jen Doll at The Atlantic Wire gives us “10 tropes about women that women should stop laughing about,” including “the crazy.” As Doll astutely observes, calling someone “crazy” is a way to put people (often women) down and for the accuser to feel better about themselves, all while being insulting to those who who struggle with mental illness.

The second season of the hit show American Horror Story is titled Asylum and set in a psychiatric institution. And of course the usual tropes emerge, like over-the-top shocking caricatures and the crazy nympho sexpots. But one of the most disturbing elements, besides the rampant gore, is when Sister Jude (Jessica Lange) utters, “mental illness is the fashionable word for sin,” reinforcing the pervasive stereotype that mental illness isn’t actually real.

Cait at Feminist Film analyzes the mental illness tropes in American Horror Story: Asylum: 

“To appropriate this traumatic history and use it as a measure of “freakiness”, to scare and shock viewers, as it explores this strange asylum with a serial killer who skins women, a doctor who performs Mengele-like experiments on patients who have no family or friends, nuns who dream about doing the deed and take their sexual frustration out in a weird form of repressed anger, and apparently, aliens, is exploitative and negates much of the positive aspects that the psychological field has accomplished…

“Horror does not equal shock value, and that is precisely what American Horror Story: Asylum is attempting to do. Where the first season left off on misogynistic representations of women and glorifying bad boy murderers, the second season picks up on the exploitation and stereotyping of mental illness. In a world where mental illness is already still heavily stigmatized, this is an ignorant and unnecessary bastardization of mental health practices.”

Lana (Sarah Paulson) in American Horror Story: Asylum

But it’s not just the second season suffering from problematic depictions of mental illness. In season 1, Constance (Jessica Lange) calls her daughter Addie who has Down’s Syndrome a “mongoloid” and a “monster.” When Vivien (Connie Britton) says she was raped and she saw a ghost, her husband Ben (Dylan McDermott) doesn’t believe her and has her committed to a psychiatric ward. You know, because women can’t be believed or trusted. Because bitches be CRAZY!!

Creator and showrunner Ryan Murphy calls his TV series “feminist horror.” And some even claim Sister Jude is a secret feminist. Sure, there are plenty of interesting female characters. But that doesn’t automatically make it feminist.
Now, I don’t expect American Horror Storyto be sensitive or politically correct. Especially as gender and race problems clog up Murphy and Falchuk’s show Glee with its incessant problematic depictions of body image, race, gender and erasure of bisexuality. And the hospital staff in AHS: Asylum seems far more evil and sadistic than any of the patients. But considering the enormity of the stigma surrounding mental illness, the last thing we need is yet another movie or TV show perpetuating harmful stereotypes.
Many killers in horror films are unhinged or unstable, with many explicitly suffering from mental illness. In Orphan, Kate and John adopt Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) after a devastating miscarriage. Turns out, Ester is really a murderous 33-year-old woman with hypopituitarism, posing as a 9-year-old girl, who had been institutionalized in a mental hospital. In Carrie, Carrie’s mother Margaret White (Piper Laurie) has a mental illness and repeatedly abuses and eventually attempts to kill her telekinetic daughter. While never explicitly stated, Misery implies that torturous nurse Annie Wilkes suffers from bipolar disorder, as well as being a “virtual catalog of mental illness.”

Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) in Orphan
Ashley Smith asserts too many horror movies — like Orphan — “send a false message of mental illness.” They correlate mental illness and extreme violence, an offensive and dangerous stereotype. We shouldn’t fear mental illness or people who live with it. Yet that’s the message continually reinforced.
But apparently it’s not just the living we must fear. In Hollywood, ghosts suffer from mental illness too. House on Haunted Hill (1999), Session 9, and Asylum all transpire in haunted psychiatric hospitals or asylums where the former living who struggled with mental illness become terrifying ghosts haunting the living. In The Ring, Samara is the girl responsible for the video tape that kills people. She tormented her adoptive mother as well as driving horses to commit suicide. Before she died, she was institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital. Then she becomes a murderous ghost. Naturally.

“Why would a mental illness like schizophrenia still plague someone after death?  Would we expect a diabetic ghost to require insulin? A paraplegic ghost to require a wheelchair? Somehow, we’ve decided, the mentally ill are terrifying and threatening even when they’re dead. That seems unfair, given the stigma that they have to endure in life as well.” 

Many horror films take place in psychiatric hospitals with women being committed because of their actions or recounting paranormal events. After protagonist Kristen battles Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, her mother erroneously thinks she was attempting suicide and hospitalizes her. Similar circumstances cause Kirsty in Hellbound: Hellraiser II to be hospitalized. In Gothika, Miranda (Halle Berry) is a psychiatrist who becomes institutionalized after she’s accused of murdering her husband. Her former colleagues think she’s delusional and suicidal after she tells them she sees ghosts. Miranda’s former patient Chloe (Penelope Cruz) — who Miranda didn’t believe was being raped, thinking she was fabricating the trauma — tells her, “You are not a doctor in here. And even if you tell the truth … no one will listen. You know why? Because you’re crazy.”

L-R: Chloe (Penelope Cruz) and Miranda (Halle Berry) in Gothika
In American Horror Story and many of these films, the women aren’t believed. As a result, they’re deemed dangerous and erroneously labeled mentally ill. Removed from society, they are punished for their actions.
Yes, we do see men struggling with mental illness in horror films. Halloween, Shutter Island, In the Mouth of Madness, and The Shining are all examples of men struggling with mental illness or in psychiatric hospitals. But despite the Final Girl in many horror films, we still see a wider variety of men represented. And men don’t have to worry about being labeled “crazy” the way women do.
Jezebel’s Jenna Sauers discusses the impact of calling women “crazy”:

“Reflexively calling women “crazy” is a habit young men need to learn to break. As a term, “crazy” is entirely of a piece with the long and nasty tradition of pathologizing female emotion (and particularly sexuality). Hysteria comes from hystera, the Greek word for uterus, after all: “crazy” has been a gendered trait in Western culture for thousands of years. The male gaze was for virtually all of human history synonymous with the medical gaze, and men assigned themselves the authority to determine which bodies are sick and which are hale.”

In his popular post, “A Message to Women From a Man: You Are Not ‘Crazy,’” Yashar Ali argues that men often call women crazy to emotionally manipulate them. He discusses “gaslighting” (taken from the classic film Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman), in which men diminish women’s concerns by dismissing them, making them neurotically question their perception and themselves. I’ve accused many men in my life of doing this — trying to mansplain to me and make me doubt myself. Ali explains why gaslighting affects so many women, regardless of their self-confidence:
“Because women bare the brunt of our neurosis. It is much easier for us to place our emotional burdens on the shoulders of our wives, our female friends, our girlfriends, our female employees, our female colleagues, than for us to impose them on the shoulders of men. It’s a whole lot easier to emotionally manipulate someone who has been conditioned by our society to accept it. We continue to burden women because they don’t refuse our burdens as easily. It’s the ultimate cowardice. 

“Whether gaslighting is conscious or not, it produces the same result: It renders some women emotionally mute.” 

Society polices women’s appearances, language and behavior. We can’t let the ladies get out of control. Who knows what could happen??? Calling a woman “crazy,” doubting not only her veracity but her very sanity, is offensive. It’s also an attempt to control women, demean them and strip them of their power. Women with mental illness are often silenced, invisible from the media aside from victims or villains in horror. When we do see them on-screen, they instill fear as they are depicted as violent, volatile and uncontrollable.

Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) in Misery
Gender Focus’ Jarrah Hodge writes about mental illness tropes in all films: 

“Because women have been historically branded as “hysterics,” and women are oppressed in the media in general, women with disabilities report feeling particularly harmed by media misrepresentations of their realities…From the Joker in The Dark Knight to Angelina Jolie’s character in Girl, Interrupted, people with invisible disabilities (disabilities that aren’t physically apparent, including mental illness), are often portrayed as dangers to society who need to be contained and/or ‘fixed’.”

Horror movies aren’t necessarily about portraying mental illness (or anything for that matter) accurately. They strive to push boundaries, spurring us out of our comfort zone. They strip everything away to its visceral core. But it’s highly problematic the Crazy Bitch trope keeps appearing on-screen.
It might not be such a big deal if the media showcased positive representations of mental illness to counter or balance those we see in horror movies and TV series. But we rarely do. Women in general are continually portrayed as illogical, overly emotional, unreliable and unbalanced. The media often dehumanizes women with mental illness, depicting them as dangerous, brutal and sadistic. The perpetual message is that we need to be rescued from women with mental illness as they are a threat to not only themselves but to society.
The “crazy bitch” label — in both pop culture and reality — silences and dismisses women while simultaneously shaming and stigmatizing women living with mental illness. So Hollywood, let’s stop with all the prejudicial bullshit and just show us what we all really want to watch…a zombie apocalypse.

 

Horror Week 2012: ‘Paranormal Activity’: The Horror of Waiting, of Watching, of Things Unseen

This guest review by Mychael Blinde previously appeared at Vagina Dentwata and is cross-posted with permission.
Please don’t film the demons!
I’m partial to the Paranormal Activity trilogy for three reasons: the clever camera work, the pitch perfect execution of tension building and release, and the films’ focus on women’s stories and histories. (The first half of this essay features only minor spoilers. You will be warned when the spoiler shit gets real.)
The first Paranormal Activity came out in 2007 during the outset of a scary thing called a subprime mortgage crisis. All three films tap into our anxiety about the bargains we make to ensure wealth and prosperity. Coincidence? Maybe.

But probably not.

Katie, Kristi, and Julie
Katie (in the first film), Kristi (in the second), and their mother ­Julie (in the third) all have ginormous houses because their mother/grandmother made a deal with the devil.
Grandma
Each film opens with a display of the sizable house and the occupants’ expensive accoutrements: PA 1 opens with Katie pulling up to the house in a fancy car on a beautiful suburban street, where her boyfriend Micah is filming his big screen TV. In the opening of PA 2, viewers take a tour with newborn baby Hunter and are introduced to multiple living rooms and “man caves,” flat screen TVs, a fireplace in the bedroom, a pool and a hot tub. PA 3 conveys the family’s wealth with both the size of the house and the expensiveness of the multiple cameras (it is 1988, after all).

Each film uses the hugeness of the house to create anxiety about the myriad dark corners and empty rooms. All three films exploit doorways; thresholds are the locus of fucked up shit:

These movies may be about the anxiety of wealth, but they were each made with a small budget relative to their box office intake. They do a lot with very little.

For example, the first film’s stroke of genius: the timestamp. Fucking brilliant. Here’s how it goes: The camera is on a tripod in the bedroom.

Katie and Micah are sleeping and time is fastforwarding and nothing’s happening, and time is fastforwarding and nothing’s happening, nothing’s happening, nothing’s happening. And then suddenly, the clock switches to REALTIME.
And you think, The clock must have stopped for a reason. Something’s going to happen. And they’re sleeping. And nothing’s happening. Nothing’s happening. Nothing’s happening. Fuck, what’s going to happen? Something’s going to happen! Let it fucking happen already! And then it happens and you’re startled – but the tension is released.
I call that a horrorgasm: tension builds and builds and builds and then finally the horrible thing happens, and it scares you but it feels good. The Paranormal Activity trilogy elicits multiples.

The timestamp from the first film still haunts me. Whenever I wake up in the middle of the night, my mind thinks OH FUCK I’M IN REALTIME WAS THAT A SOUND IN THE KITCHEN?

In the first film, the kitchen isn’t really a locus of horror. It’s featured in the requisite horror fake out: What’s that weird sound? Is it a demon? Nope, it’s the ice maker. Hahaha!

In the second and third film, horrible things happen to women in kitchens. Scary fucking things.

The second film’s genius is the multiplicity of cameras, capturing footage of the front stoop, backyard, the kitchen, the living room, the front door, and the nursery.
Add to that a handheld camera…
I told you, these people have money.

Here’s how it goes: Shot from the front door: nothing’s happening. Shot from the backyard: nothing’s happening. Shot from the kitchen: nothing’s happening. Shot from the living room: nothing’s happening. Shot from the foyer: nothing’s happening. Shot from the nursery: nothing’s happening. Shot from the backyard: nothing’s happening. Oh shit, did that pool cleaner thing move?

It’s tedious and somewhat irritating, but if the goal is to build tension before the real shit goes down, it works. Because boy does the shit go down…eventually.

In my estimation, the third film does an excellent job of utilizing both the timestamp and the multiple cameras – it was smart to use more than one camera like the first film, but also smart not to incorporate as many as the second film. To the cinematic mix, the third film adds an astoundingly effective method of capturing horrifying footage: strapping a camera to a fan. GENIUS.

If horror films have taught me one thing, it is that scary shit awaits behind corners. Liminal spaces are frightening places. The camera on the fan, constantly in motion, is constantly turning corners, showing you awful things, and terrifying you with the horror of the thing you cannot see. This is particularly well executed in a sequence involving the babysitter.
Speaking of the babysitter…let’s talk about the representation of female characters:

[WARNING: HEAVY DUTY SPOILERS AND CRITICAL ANALYSES AHEAD. ALSO NOT AS MANY PICTURES]

The horror genre has a tradition of terrorizing women, of chasing them through the woods and attacking them in houses. It also has a tradition of The Final Girl, a trope that is simultaneously empowering and reductive: the only survivor is a virginal woman who wields a phallic weapon and destroys the monster.

The PA trilogy features a different kind of Final Girl: she doesn’t kill the monster – she becomes it.

Here is the plot of each of the three films: a woman/women/girls are terrorized by a demon. A man puts cameras and captures scary-as-fuck footage until he is killed in a horrible way by a woman’s body powered by demonic forces.

“I’m a man and this is my house and I can protect it if I gain enough knowledge about my demonic adversary. Oh wait, no I can’t.”

Who is responsible for the demon’s success? Well, the demon itself, obvs, and the coven of women who made a bargain with it. But what about the three men who insist on filming the paranormal activity? Their actions certainly don’t seem to help the situation in any of the three films.

Micah (first film) is the cameraman most explicitly responsible for the escalation of the demonic presence. He insists on bringing a camera into their home, and he asks Katie “Do you know of any tricks to uh…make stuff happen?” and asks the psychic “Is there something we can do to like make stuff happen, you know, to like get it on tape?” Katie objects to Micah bringing home a Ouija board, but he does it anyway. He argues against bringing in an exorcist. He tells her, “This is my house, you’re my girlfriend, I’m going to fucking solve the problem.”

Micah’s actions and attempts to chronicle the demonic disturbances only seem to exacerbate those disturbances. James MacDowell at The Lesser Feat argues that Katie is subject to “a persecuted wife melodrama.” Jenn at XXBlaze claims that Micah is “a big stupid douche.” I agree with both of them.

I spent the entire movie thinking, “This asshole’s going to get his girlfriend killed.” But PA 1 flips it around, and it is demonically-possessed Katie who winds up killing Micah.

In the second film, Katie’s sister Kristi, Kristi’s husband Daniel, their toddler son, and his teenage daughter all live in the house afflicted by the paranormal activity. It is Daniel who decides to install cameras all over. He’s not a shithead like Micah; in fact, he isn’t even really excited by the activity. He’s the only one of the three cameramen who is a skeptic about its status as paranormal. He does fuck up by firing the nanny – the only person in the entire movie who actually understands how to engage with the demonic entity – because he doesn’t believe in “that stuff.”

Unfortunately, in Paranormal Activity 2, “that stuff” is real, and it really kills him.

The third film features footage of Katie and Kristi as children living with their mother (Julie) and stepfather (Dennis).

It is Dennis and his friend/employee Randy who take to setting up cameras all over the house. Dennis seems to have the least culpability – he neither desires the paranormal activity like Micah, nor does he deny that anything supernatural is going on like Daniel. Nevertheless, he winds up killed.

I don’t think the PA films suggest that the filmmaking is the catalyst for the paranormal activity, but I do believe they imply that the filmmaking exacerbates the demon’s antics.

In the first film, when Katie is frightened by the increase in the intensity of the activity, she tells Micah “Maybe we shouldn’t have the camera.” (Micah’s response is, “Uh, hello, this is some really golden shit.”)

In the second film, Katie tells Kristi: “It thrived on fear. The more we paid attention to it, the worse it got…You need to ignore it.”

In the third film, when a particularly fucking horrible thing is happening to Katie, Kristie shouts, “Just ignore it! Just ignore it!”

Focusing on the demon in one’s mind goads the demon; focusing on the demon with one’s camera seems to do the same. To varying degrees, each of these films implicates the man who set up the camera(s) – and by extension, the viewer.

See, Micah is an asshole, but we’re just like him: we want to see it, we want to see evidence of an entity. We strain to see it, to see any indication of it. We don’t sit down to see these films hoping to watch a bunch of people sleeping peacefully through the night. It’s called Paranormal Activity, not Paranormal Nothing’s Happening.

Micah winds up dead, and we wind up afraid of our ice makers.

Ironically, it is the physical manifestation of evil – when we see the demon possess a human body – that makes the endings of each of the three films so anticlimactic. The chief horror of these films lies in the visible invisibility of the entity.

Don’t get me wrong: a possessed person can be absolutely horrifying. But in a film so focused on the scariness of not being able to see the adversary, this sudden transition feels…weak.

My co-thinker on the matter pointed out to me that even though the lady becoming the demon (or the demon becoming the lady) kind of demystifies the evil, any visible adversary would have been anticlimactic. She points out that the filmmakers could have really fucked up by trying to show the audience a demon in demon form. I agree with her.

And despite the meh resolutions, the overall message of the trilogy is chilling: the compromises we make to ensure our wealth and prosperity may very well come back to bite us in the ass (or lower back). There Is No Such Thing As A Free Ginormous House.

The vast majority of these films are so cinematically strong (the horror of waiting, the horror of watching, the horror of things unseen) and so committed to the stories of their female characters (whose history is the catalyst for the events that unfold) that I’ll forgive them for their crappy endings.

I’m not sure I’ll be able to forgive Paranormal Activity 4.

I don’t have a problem with the fourth film departing from the first three by jumping forward in time. I think that featuring a woman filming herself via her laptop is a clever next-step in the PA tradition of innovative found-footage cinematography. I’m also glad that they’ve decided to continue keeping the focus on a female character.

So what’s the problem?

Look at the conventionally attractive young woman sleeping in her bed! It’s SEXY scary!

Yes, there are moments in the first three movies when the women are sexualized — but a sexualized woman’s body was never used to sell them.

I’m afraid to watch Paranormal Activity 4, but for the wrong reasons.

———-

Mychael Blinde is interested in representations of gender and popular culture and blogs at Vagina Dentwata. 

Horror Week 2012: ‘Sleepy Hollow’: Deeply Shallow

This is a guest review in conversation by Bexy Bennett and Amanda Civitello.
Lady Van Tassel (Miranda Richardson)
As a director, Tim Burton specializes in eerie, off-kilter films that frequently skirt the edge of light horror with a distinctive aesthetic; 1999’s Sleepy Hollow is one of his earliest forays into the genre. Starring Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, and Miranda Richardson, the lavishly-produced film is an adaptation of the short story by Washington Irving, and tells the re-imagined tale of Ichabod Crane and his efforts to solve a series of murders in the small New York town of Sleepy Hollow. While Sleepy Hollow effectively creates the kind of visually rich, engrossing film viewers expect from Burton, it is also full of curious decisions that cast its female characters in frequently (unflattering) lights. This review, a (transatlantic) dialogue between friends, aims to track the ways in which these narrative and directorial decisions affect the portrayal of Sleepy Hollow’s women, making problematic characters of Lady Van Tassel (Miranda Richardson) and her step-daughter, Katrina Van Tassel (Christina Ricci).
[BB]: I think the first angle we should consider is the woeful lack of strong women who aren’t insane, though Lady Van Tassel is likely better described as angry. She’s probably insane with the need for revenge, but everything she does is very cool, calculated, and intelligent. But first of all, what do we define as a ‘strong woman’? I suppose for me it’s a woman capable of acting in her own interests and making choices for herself. And, in the words of a friend, “she does what she needs to do.”
[AC]: I think that’s a good place to start. And a strong character doesn’t have to be a nice one, but I think that he or she does have to be more than a narrative device. And in this film, I think there’s only one female character who really fits that bill.
[BB]: It’s interesting that Lady Van Tassel – the wicked stepmother – is actually new to the Burton film, whose script rewrites the story.
[AC]: Lady Van Tassel is probably the first casualty of the new script. She’s not the character who’s mentioned only obliquely in the story, Van Tassel’s ‘noble wife’ who’s happily occupied with keeping her home; this character exists in the film, but she’s already dead. Lady Van Tassel is the second wife, stepmother to the sweetly angelic Katrina, Ichabod’s love interest. Obviously Sleepy Hollow is significantly different from Irving’s short story, but I can’t help but wonder at the decision to write the script they way they did. Increasing Katrina’s role is understandable – and problematic, as I’m sure we’ll discuss – but the reinterpretation of Lady Van Tassel is troubling, too. Rewriting her as the stepmotherly villain certainly emphasizes the fairy-tale aspect of the story, and that’s something that frequently fascinates Tim Burton, but Irving’s story works well as a fairy-tale, too, with the Brom-Katrina-Ichabod love triangle. I wonder why they chose to rewrite Lady Van Tassel as they did, particularly given that there’s a ready-made villain in Brom. Why make that decision, and further, why send Lady Van Tassel so far over the cusp of madness?
[BB]: This is interesting actually. It’s been so long since I read the short story I forgot all about Brom’s role as the ‘villain,’ but in Burton’s adaptation Brom, though he begins initially as something of an antagonist, actually redeems himself when he fights off the Hessian and is, sadly, killed. In contrast, Lady Van Tassel reveals her backstory, reveals how she has suffered at the hands of the Van Garretts and the Van Tassels – suffering which perhaps explains her need for vengeance, yet she remains utterly unsympathetic and is portrayed in an increasingly unflattering light. Her strength is negated by her evilness, and she becomes increasingly unhinged.
[AC]: I think you’re right in that her evilness seems to counteract her strength. She might be the only female character working with a degree of individual agency, but because she’s working toward nefarious ends, she’s not someone to be emulated. And then by pairing her opposite Katrina, we’re left with the idea that women must either be power-hungry and crazed or meek and lovesick.
[BB]: Although does the intended genre of Burton’s adaptation effect the characterisation of his female characters?
[AC]: Irving’s short story is an effective fairy tale – it’s written in fairytale language (Katrina’s described in idealized terms, her father is noble and good, etc.) and follows the basic structure of a fairytale (there’s a hardscrabble hero fighting against the establishment man for the hand of the pretty daughter of the town’s leading citizen; some past event has created the conditions for the present trouble to occur, etc.). Unfortunately, in Irving’s story, the hero doesn’t actually succeed – but endings are easy enough to alter. Burton made more far-reaching changes than that with his characterization of a new Lady Van Tassel.
[BB]: But why change the villain if Burton already had the bones of a fairytale? If he wanted it to fit into the horror genre, sure, throw in a real undead horseman, but keep the villain. Although is romance a good enough motive? I suppose we can’t ignore the plot either – for a movie requires more action than does a short story, particularly one nuanced like Irving’s – but even that explanation falls short.
[AC]: It’s actually as if Burton took the situation and the concept of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and went from there. It’s really not much of an adaptation at all; it just borrows the characters and places and reimagines them in a completely different context; there’s so very much that’s different about it that I don’t know whether we ought to be comparing the two. At the very least, Burton’s Lady Van Tassel has some agency; she has her moments of clarity and moments of madness, and ultimately, the former are most certainly at the service of the latter. When she’s not raging, she’s certainly the strongest female character of the film. But she’s beset by violent tendencies, however much a product of childhood traumas; she’ll never be a role model for the children.
[BB]: Strong women don’t necessarily need to be role models, though. I certainly wouldn’t want my children to raise the headless horseman from the dead to exact revenge for previous injustices, but I can admire Lady Van Tassel’s forbearance – she and her sister are left alone, as children, in the Western Woods, yet she ensures their survival and raises herself to a position of some importance in the village. Of course her motives are questionable but does that diminish her strength? 
Katrina Van Tassel (Christina Ricci)
[AC]: Given the way that the other lead female character is portrayed, I have the impression that it’s a deliberate editorial decision to make the one strong female character into the antithesis of a role model. The audience is meant to identify – or if not identify, at least feel for – sweet Katrina Van Tassel, who does all she can to save the man she loves. But Katrina isn’t nearly as well-rounded a character as Lady Van Tassel. She’s more of a generic type of filler than anything else; to compensate for the lack of development of Katrina’s character, it’s as if they wanted to ensure that Lady Van Tassel would be so offensive and so off-putting that they made her into something bordering on a monstrous caricature. Even the costuming is meant to emphasize this: Katrina is almost always dressed in pale colors, frequently in white, whereas Lady Van Tassel is dressed in darker colors.
[BB]: Let’s talk about Katrina. I just don’t think there’s much substance to her. She’s very needy. She goes from the protection of one man (her father) straight to another (Ichabod). On the other hand, I suppose she does go into the Western Woods when most of the men won’t.
[AC]: But that might just make her reckless, not strong.
[BB]: I’m not sure she’s being reckless, but she’s not doing it wholly out of bravery, but out of love. But does that lessen her courage?
[AC]: Well, you’re right: she still does it, after all, but I’m ambivalent about Katrina in the same way that I am about Bess in The Highwayman. I don’t think doing something out of love lessens the courage or the bravery of the act, but I also don’t think that an instance of bravery is necessarily synonymous with “strong female character.”
[BB]: No, I agree: one foray into the Western Woods isn’t enough to change my opinion of Katrina’s character. Instead, I would have preferred to see Katrina volunteering her services as a “sidekick” for lack of a better word – though that term is problematic in itself – much earlier in the film, before she has a chance to fall for Ichabod.
[AC]: I agree: but there isn’t a moment where Katrina doesn’t fall for Ichabod, until Ichabod suspects her father of controlling the Horseman. Their romance is established in the first few minutes of the film, when Katrina kisses Ichabod in a game of blind man’s bluff. Katrina does assist Ichabod, but she’s acting for him, not herself, though that isn’t to say that she’s ego-centric. It’s simply that she enters the Woods to support him when no one else will go; she doesn’t go because she wants to solve the mystery. I suppose my opinion of Katrina plays into my problem with making the girl sacrifice everything for love. Consider Bess, after all: she kills herself to warn the highwayman that the soldiers are lying in wait at her father’s inn. She’s willing to sacrifice herself to save him – that’s love, perhaps, but that’s not self-worth. I wonder if we’d be having this discussion if things ended differently for Katrina: would we raise the issue of her courage at all if she died? I think if we said we wouldn’t consider her running into the Western Woods to be brave had she died (rather that it would have been the natural consequence of a foolish, lovesick, reckless action), it would be because there hadn’t been that foundation to her character. That’s a legitimate issue with the way the character is written. So my question, perhaps better phrased, would be: does the film give us enough in the way of backstory, of character development, to perceive Katrina’s running into the Western Woods as an example of strong, individual agency?
[BB]: Oh, not at all. We learn precious little about her. The only characters we actually get real backstory for are Lady Van Tassel and Ichabod Crane. Katrina isn’t considered important enough for a backstory.
[AC]: What’s interesting is that her role was greatly expanded for the film; Katrina is much more of a bit player in the short story. In this case, she really is a kind of light-horror manic pixie dream girl. She’s a young female character whose part in the story has been greatly expanded in the film adaptation solely to facilitate Ichabod’s success. She’s important only relative to Ichabod: as his love interest, as his assistant. The writing deliberately excludes the potential for a strong female character (who isn’t of questionable sanity) in favor of pumping up its male lead.
[BB]: To be fair, she’s certainly not a strong character in the short story. The screenwriter and director have a choice when adapting something: they don’t necessarily need to stick to the source material when it comes to characterisation.
[AC]: That’s what makes Katrina’s expanded role so disappointing to me: they could have done more with her, as you say, and instead, they took a minor character, turned her into a lead, but didn’t give her additional substance.
[BB]: To be honest, that seems to be the case in many Burton films: it’s supposed to be about the male lead.
[AC]: Now that you say that, I’m reminded of Dark Shadows, which has lots of female characters but basically two leads: Elizabeth and Angelique.
[BB]: Yes, I think Elizabeth could have been stronger. We had snippets of strength, but she falls flat next to the characterization of Barnabas Collins.
[AC]: Elizabeth plays second fiddle to Barnabas, ceding control of the estate and the business. She’s basically waiting in Collinswood to be rescued, and we’re meant to be grateful that her rescuer is as dashing and mysterious as Barnabas. The question becomes, how will he save the family business and not why didn’t she do so? After all, that’s what Angelique does: she builds Angel Bay; it’s not her fault that her success comes at the expense of the Collins family business. If she could do it, why can’t Elizabeth?
[BB]: Now that you mention Angelique, I find her character rather problematic also. Angelique could have been quite a strong character, but she falls short. Everything she does, we come to find out, was done out of love for Barnabas, and in the end, she ‘died’ of love for him. Never mind that she’s built up this modern empire and has a powerful position in the community. None of that matters next to Barnabas.
[AC]: We’re actually meant to despise her character for those reasons, because it’s her business that’s ruined the Collins family business, and her high profile in the town that’s limiting their own.
[BB]: She’s villainized for her strength, and I think the same can be said for Lady Van Tassel. You see it as her character descends further into madness: we understand her childhood trauma and follow her evil plotting until she’s been reduced to a caricature of a villain, shouting increasingly ridiculous lines like “Watch your head!” and “Still alive?”
[AC]: I wonder if that’s the natural consequence of making Lady Van Tassel into a strong character? Does the fact that they’ve rewritten her into a larger role – and accordingly given her power – necessitate turning her into a typical fairy-tale villain, so that she must she become the Evil Queen/Evil Stepmother/etc.? That’s how fairy tales conceive of their villainous ladies, after all, and the female characters who don’t fit that stereotype usually aren’t what we would call “strong.” In this sense, is Burton actually emphasizing this aspect of the fairy-tale genre?
[BB]: I suppose so, though fairytales do not necessarily need a female villain. As you said before, the short story itself could be described as a fairytale and did not have a female villain. Rather than creating an entirely original role (even if I think the character of Lady Van Tassel only adds to my personal enjoyment of the film) why not utilise the ready made villain the short story offers? I wonder if it’s not because the choice of a female villain gives Burton and his artistic staff more flexibility in terms of the visuals: let’s talk about costuming. What does that add to our understanding of Burton’s motivations?
[AC]: If you look at Angelique’s costuming, she’s objectified like Lady Van Tassel. As Lady Van Tassel descends further and further into madness her costumes become more ridiculous; her cleavage is more and more on display; she takes down her own hair. These are clearly purposeful choices, and they’re effective ones, too. Most strikingly, her costumes, with few exceptions, put her breasts prominently on display.
[BB]: That’s an understatement. I don’t think there’s a moment Lady Van Tassel’s breasts aren’t on display and that’s quite interesting in itself. Katrina is billed as the female lead, and as she’s the object of affection for the romantic lead I would have expected to see more of her than the middle-aged Lady of the Manor. I can’t bring myself to believe that this isn’t deliberate, so that the costuming deliberately emphasises Katrina’s purity and goodness in comparison with Lady Van Tassel’s already irredeemably corrupted soul. On that note, as well as rather prominently displaying her body, Lady Van Tassel also uses sex to get what she wants – she keeps Magistrate Phillips in line with midnight trysts in the Western Woods – and is villainized for that too. 
Lady Van Tassel’s descent into madness, emphasized by her hairstyling and dress
[AC]: As I said before, the color of Katrina’s clothes emphasize her status as the good witch of the family. Yes, she is – and incidentally, so is Angelique. Would you say that this is emblematic of a larger pattern in Burton’s films?
[BB]: Perhaps. But is he really going for a strong narrative? Or just a pretty film?
[AC]: Fair point. I think in many cases, the aesthetic is of incredible importance to him. His films have a definable look; he deals in the visual, first and foremost. But on the other hand, he can’t expect us to wave away criticism of the narrative – or not look into it too deeply – when, as in the costuming, say, the aesthetics actually echo the problems of the scripts.
[BB]: Of course; you can’t sacrifice substance just because it looks very pretty.
[AC]: I think Burton would probably say that the aesthetic of the film is of equal importance, because he’s as much of a visual storyteller as a verbal one.
[BB]: I do think that Burton is motivated by his desire for an attractive, genre appropriate film, rather than challenging female stereotypes and promoting female strength within his films. And that’s fine by me: I don’t think Burton is pretending Sleepy Hollow is anything but an incredibly pretty film.
———-
Bexy Bennett is a history student at King’s College London. Her (research) interests include transatlantic marriages between 1870 and 1914 and the relationship between servant/employer in Victorian and Edwardian England. She also has a keen interest in Australian history, and when she’s not studying she’s fangirling Mrs Danvers and drinking copious amounts of tea. You can find her on twitter @madamdictator.

Amanda Civitello is a Chicago-based freelance writer and Northwestern grad with an interest in arts and literary criticism. She has most recently written on Jacques Derrida and feminist philosopher Sarah Kofman for The Ellipses Project and has contributed reviews of Downton Abbey and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to Bitch Flicks. You can find her online at amandacivitello.com.


Horror Week 2012: Gender Roles in ‘The Cabin in the Woods’

The Cabin in the Woods
A few months ago, the Joss Whedon-directed The Avengers was released, and there was much rejoicing. Fans seemed pleased. I saw it and enjoyed it, but I’m more obsessed with the OTHER Joss Whedon-directed film that came out this year. I loved The Cabin in the Woods and there are so many things I want to say about this movie, but for now I’m going to write about the interesting commentary on gender roles that was in the story.
WARNING: Spoilers ahead. Lots of them.
The Cabin in the Woods is more of commentary on horror films than a horror film in of itself, and the commentary comes to a head with the final scene, as the two survivors of the zombie attack confront the Director (played by Sigourney Weaver). She reveals that the five college students were selected to be killed as part of a ritual sacrifice to a group of ancient gods. Each student was meant to represent a different archetype: the Whore (Jules, played by Anna Hutchison), the Fool (Marty, played by Fran Kranz), the Athlete (Curt, played by Chris Hemsworth), the Scholar (Holden, played by Jesse Williams), and the Virgin (Dana, played by Kristen Connolly).
The five friends hear something in the basement.
Fans and critics have argued over the significance of the ancient gods and what they’re supposed to represent. I think the ancient gods are a metaphor for humanity’s deepest, darkest desires – the ugly side of human beings. This is why the final two survivors sit back and let the world end, instead of Dana killing Marty or Marty killing himself. As they say, if sacrificing people is the key to humanity’s survival, then maybe humanity doesn’t deserve to be saved. (I also think Joss really, really wanted to write at least one story where the world actually ends – there are only so many times that Buffy, Angel, Mal, or Echo can prevent the apocalypse before the writer gets bored.)
With that interpretation in mind, I started thinking about the five college students in The Cabin in the Woods and how their roles are defined by gender. The two women, Jules and Dana, are defined as The Whore and The Virgin – two opposite ends of the spectrum whose deaths are meant to serve as bookends for the others. The order of deaths is irrelevant except in the case of the women. Jules, as the corrupted Whore, has to die first, and Dana, the Virgin, has to die last, if she dies at all. As Hadley (Bradley Whitford) says, “The virgin death is optional as long as it’s last.” The female characters are defined only by their sexuality – nothing else about them really matters.
Dana (Kristen Connolly) will be very surprised to learn that she’s a virgin.
Still, the men don’t fare much better. Their prescribed roles are not based on how much sex they have and don’t have, but shoving them into the roles of The Athlete, The Scholar, and The Fool doesn’t give them much room to breathe, either. If you’re a woman, you can be the virgin or the whore. If you’re a man, you can be athletic or smart or funny. Complexity is not allowed.
What I find particularly interesting, though, is how the “puppeteers” (as Marty calls them) recognize that the five people they’ve selected for the sacrificed don’t easily fit into the prescribed archetypes.
Of the five, Holden is the closest to resembling his actual archetype. He’s able to calculate the distance in the gorge that Curt tries to jump on the motorcycle, and, well, he’s fairly quiet and wears glasses. He’s also ridiculously good-looking, which isn’t typical for the Scholar archetype, but other than that, he fits the role pretty well.
The athletic scholar (Jesse L. Williams) and the smart fool (Fran Kranz)
The same cannot be said for Curt and Jules. As Marty points out, “He’s a sociology major! When did he start pulling this alpha male bullshit?” The little we saw of Curt before the puppeteers started altering his personality was of a pretty intelligent young man who was nice to his friends. Similarly, Jules, a pre-med student, is a seemingly good friend who makes jokes with her boyfriend about anti-drug PSAs. But that won’t do – the puppeteers have to inject drugs into the air to make Curt more aggressive and alpha male, and they put cognition-lowering drugs in Jules’ hair dye to turn her into a dumb, overtly sexual blonde.
(On a side note, one of my favorite things about this movie is the moment where Jules comes onto Marty, calling him her old sweetheart, where he clarifies that they only made out one time. I completely expected a scene where Marty revealed his resentment towards the dumb whore who broke his heart and left him for the hot jock. Instead, Marty worried that this behavior was out of character for his good friends and seemed concerned for them. I really appreciated that Marty primarily saw Jules and Curt as his friends, and that once kissing Jules was such a non-issue for him.)
Curt (Chris Hemsworth) and Jules (Anna Hutchison) in happier times
Then there’s Dana, the so-called virgin – even though she slept with one of her professors, a fact that is mentioned in her first scene of the film. Dana’s behavior would probably be considered more “whorish” than Jules’s, as Dana is sleeping with a teacher and Jules is having sex within a monogamous relationship. But that doesn’t matter. Dana is still the virgin and Jules still the whore, because Dana is more quiet and subdued than Jules is, and American society thinks of virgins as quiet and subdued and sweet, and whores as brash and loud and more outgoing.
Finally, we have Marty, the Fool who is the first to understand that he and his friends are the victims of a conspiracy. In addition to being the most entertaining character of the five college students – because Fran Kranz is fantastic, even if he is playing a less creepy, more stoned version of Topher Brink in Dollhouse – he’s also the least subversive. Anyone exposed to a small amount of classical literature won’t be surprised to see the Fool as the smartest character of the group, which makes me feel like the puppeteers in The Cabin in the Woods all failed their English classes in high school. Still, he’s the one who throws the wrench in the plans to save the world by sacrificing a group of humans.
None of this analysis is new, but I brought it up because I want to return to my original point of the ancient gods representing our deepest, darkest desires. The ancient gods represent the ugliest traits of humanity – not only the lust for blood, but the need to categorize people into certain roles and to keep them there. We need to see men defined by one character trait and women defined by their sexual choices, and if these particular men and women don’t fit into the roles as we’ve prescribed them, we’ll make them fit. We’ll alter their personalities so they can easily fit into the Whore, the Scholar, the Athlete, the Fool, and the Virgin. And as we can see from the other countries’ failed attempt to appease the gods – including the Japanese tradition of unleashing one monster on a group of elementary school girls – this need to categorize into the Whore/Scholar/Athlete/Fool/Virgin is a uniquely American desire. The desires created by nature and nurture clash together in an ugly mix where we want to see these people killed one by one in a prescribed order.
Yeah, I really loved this movie.
The white board of monsters behind Richard Jenkins distinguishes between “witches” and “sexy witches.”
 
Lady T is a writer with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at www.theresabasile.com.

Horror Week 2012: Gender Roles in ‘The Cabin in the Woods’

The Cabin in the Woods
[This article was originally posted at The Funny Feminist.]
A few months ago, the Joss Whedon-directed The Avengers was released, and there was much rejoicing. Fans seemed pleased. I saw it and enjoyed it, but I’m more obsessed with the OTHER Joss Whedon-directed film that came out this year. I loved The Cabin in the Woods and there are so many things I want to say about this movie, but for now I’m going to write about the interesting commentary on gender roles that was in the story.
WARNING: Spoilers ahead. Lots of them.
The Cabin in the Woods is more of commentary on horror films than a horror film in of itself, and the commentary comes to a head with the final scene, as the two survivors of the zombie attack confront the Director (played by Sigourney Weaver). She reveals that the five college students were selected to be killed as part of a ritual sacrifice to a group of ancient gods. Each student was meant to represent a different archetype: the Whore (Jules, played by Anna Hutchison), the Fool (Marty, played by Fran Kranz), the Athlete (Curt, played by Chris Hemsworth), the Scholar (Holden, played by Jesse Williams), and the Virgin (Dana, played by Kristen Connolly).
The five friends hear something in the basement.
Fans and critics have argued over the significance of the ancient gods and what they’re supposed to represent. I think the ancient gods are a metaphor for humanity’s deepest, darkest desires – the ugly side of human beings. This is why the final two survivors sit back and let the world end, instead of Dana killing Marty or Marty killing himself. As they say, if sacrificing people is the key to humanity’s survival, then maybe humanity doesn’t deserve to be saved. (I also think Joss really, really wanted to write at least one story where the world actually ends – there are only so many times that Buffy, Angel, Mal, or Echo can prevent the apocalypse before the writer gets bored.)
With that interpretation in mind, I started thinking about the five college students in The Cabin in the Woods and how their roles are defined by gender. The two women, Jules and Dana, are defined as The Whore and The Virgin – two opposite ends of the spectrum whose deaths are meant to serve as bookends for the others. The order of deaths is irrelevant except in the case of the women. Jules, as the corrupted Whore, has to die first, and Dana, the Virgin, has to die last, if she dies at all. As Hadley (Bradley Whitford) says, “The virgin death is optional as long as it’s last.” The female characters are defined only by their sexuality – nothing else about them really matters.
Dana (Kristen Connolly) will be very surprised to learn that she’s a virgin.
Still, the men don’t fare much better. Their prescribed roles are not based on how much sex they have and don’t have, but shoving them into the roles of The Athlete, The Scholar, and The Fool doesn’t give them much room to breathe, either. If you’re a woman, you can be the virgin or the whore. If you’re a man, you can be athletic or smart or funny. Complexity is not allowed.
What I find particularly interesting, though, is how the “puppeteers” (as Marty calls them) recognize that the five people they’ve selected for the sacrificed don’t easily fit into the prescribed archetypes.
Of the five, Holden is the closest to resembling his actual archetype. He’s able to calculate the distance in the gorge that Curt tries to jump on the motorcycle, and, well, he’s fairly quiet and wears glasses. He’s also ridiculously good-looking, which isn’t typical for the Scholar archetype, but other than that, he fits the role pretty well.
The athletic scholar (Jesse L. Williams) and the smart fool (Fran Kranz)
The same cannot be said for Curt and Jules. As Marty points out, “He’s a sociology major! When did he start pulling this alpha male bullshit?” The little we saw of Curt before the puppeteers started altering his personality was of a pretty intelligent young man who was nice to his friends. Similarly, Jules, a pre-med student, is a seemingly good friend who makes jokes with her boyfriend about anti-drug PSAs. But that won’t do – the puppeteers have to inject drugs into the air to make Curt more aggressive and alpha male, and they put cognition-lowering drugs in Jules’ hair dye to turn her into a dumb, overtly sexual blonde.
(On a side note, one of my favorite things about this movie is the moment where Jules comes onto Marty, calling him her old sweetheart, where he clarifies that they only made out one time. I completely expected a scene where Marty revealed his resentment towards the dumb whore who broke his heart and left him for the hot jock. Instead, Marty worried that this behavior was out of character for his good friends and seemed concerned for them. I really appreciated that Marty primarily saw Jules and Curt as his friends, and that once kissing Jules was such a non-issue for him.)
Curt (Chris Hemsworth) and Jules (Anna Hutchison) in happier times
Then there’s Dana, the so-called virgin – even though she slept with one of her professors, a fact that is mentioned in her first scene of the film. Dana’s behavior would probably be considered more “whorish” than Jules’s, as Dana is sleeping with a teacher and Jules is having sex within a monogamous relationship. But that doesn’t matter. Dana is still the virgin and Jules still the whore, because Dana is more quiet and subdued than Jules is, and American society thinks of virgins as quiet and subdued and sweet, and whores as brash and loud and more outgoing.
Finally, we have Marty, the Fool who is the first to understand that he and his friends are the victims of a conspiracy. In addition to being the most entertaining character of the five college students – because Fran Kranz is fantastic, even if he is playing a less creepy, more stoned version of Topher Brink in Dollhouse – he’s also the least subversive. Anyone exposed to a small amount of classical literature won’t be surprised to see the Fool as the smartest character of the group, which makes me feel like the puppeteers in The Cabin in the Woods all failed their English classes in high school. Still, he’s the one who throws the wrench in the plans to save the world by sacrificing a group of humans.
None of this analysis is new, but I brought it up because I want to return to my original point of the ancient gods representing our deepest, darkest desires. The ancient gods represent the ugliest traits of humanity – not only the lust for blood, but the need to categorize people into certain roles and to keep them there. We need to see men defined by one character trait and women defined by their sexual choices, and if these particular men and women don’t fit into the roles as we’ve prescribed them, we’ll make them fit. We’ll alter their personalities so they can easily fit into the Whore, the Scholar, the Athlete, the Fool, and the Virgin. And as we can see from the other countries’ failed attempt to appease the gods – including the Japanese tradition of unleashing one monster on a group of elementary school girls – this need to categorize into the Whore/Scholar/Athlete/Fool/Virgin is a uniquely American desire. The desires created by nature and nurture clash together in an ugly mix where we want to see these people killed one by one in a prescribed order.
Yeah, I really loved this movie.
The white board of monsters behind Richard Jenkins distinguishes between “witches” and “sexy witches.”
 
Lady T is an aspiring writer and comedian with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at The Funny Feminist, where she picks apart entertainment and reviews movies she hasn’t seen.

Horror Week 2012: ‘V/H/S’: The New Face of Horror

This review by Marcia Herring previously appeared at Another Coast and is cross-posted with permission.

The new face of horror … 

 
is privileged white dudebros.

I just watched and reviewed the found-footage horror genre film V/H/S after reading some promising reviews. Despite the early read in the opposite direction, V/H/S is not anything close to good — and that’s just the writing, editing, filming, and acting.

My brother’s mainstream movie review site didn’t seem like the right place to do it, but I want to talk about the women of V/H/S and why this film should, in fact, scare you.

The rest of this post will contain spoilers for each of the short films, and discussions necessitating a trigger warning. Warnings include but are not limited to: blood, non-con, murder, sexual violence, religious violence, self-harm, medical violence.

The film opens with “Tape 51″ (which we cut back to each time a ‘tape’ ends) — or rather, opens with the first-person hand cam assault of a woman. The group of guys drive past her in a parking lot. They circle back. They swoop in. One takes down her male friend, two others grab the girl, expose her breasts, and whoop and holler for the camera. The next scene reveals that the guys work for a porn site that specializes in these kind of attacks, and that the guys get paid to take these shots. They speculate about expanding to up-skirt shots.

These are, for the intents of assigning this film a plot, our protagonists. A new character enters and offers these guys a job that will pay a lot more than their current gig. All they have to do is break into a house and steal a particular VHS. No big deal.

The short films included in V/H/S are tapes that the guys check out, trying to find the one they are looking for, before meeting their own ends and rendering the entire film completely pointless.

Image provided by V/H/S press kit.

First up: “Amateur Night.” We continue with the theme of filming girls without their consent. Group of white guys armed with a hidden glasses cam hits the bars with the intent of getting some hot chicks liquored up and willing to have sex in a room with several people watching. In addition to one girl who, as we meet her, is already intoxicated but seems game, the guys attract the attention of “Lily” (named on the film’s IMDb page, not in the film), a wide-eyed girl who appears to be, at best, on an array of drugs. The guys get the girls into a cab where they encourage both girls to take drugs. Fast forward (hah) to the motel room. Girl 1 is wasted, and making out with Dude 1. Dude 2 watches and laughs because he is stoned or something. Dude 3 (hidden glasses cam dude) has several moments of… contemplation in front of the mirror before re-entering the situation. Yes, he seems to decide, he’s in this, and he’s going to film some girls getting fucked without consent. But there’s a hitch in his plan! Girl 1 has passed out, and — holy shit, give the guy a cookie — Dude 1 calls it off. Course, he really wants to get some drunk pussy! “Lily” is weird, but she’ll do. Dude 1 goes at it, and Dude 2 wants to get in on that action. “Lily” doesn’t fight back, but upon what we can assume is penetration, growls and hunches over before digging into Dude 1 with her teeth and claws. Dude 2 and Dude 3 are officially freaking out, man. Dude 1 is totally dead! That’s uncalled for! Dude 2 gets it too. Dude 3 narrowly escapes a few times before “Lily” completes her transformation into a vampire/succubus/bat creature and flies off. Jeez. That bitch really had an attitude problem.

“Second Honeymoon.” Everything is really boring and a lovely normal heterosexual white couple is sight-seeing for their second honeymoon! Girl is grossed out by the shitty hotel, and grossed out by Dude’s attempts at filming her naked. God, what is her problem what an uptight bitch. Dude and Girl sleep in separate beds because of reasons. Dude sees a girl in the parking lot and is Really Exaggeratedly Freaked Out By Her Because She Means Something To This Story. Mysterious person breaks into their hotel room and runs a knife along Girl’s back, steals $100 and dips Dude’s toothbrush in the toilet bowl… also because of reasons. More boring sight-seeing and dialogue that probably Means Something to the dudebros who put this shit together. Dude blames Girl for his missing money because that is definitely something you should do to your uptight bitchy wife. Mysterious person — a girl, is it the girl from the parking lot? it is probably the girl from the parking lot! — kills Dude while he is sleeping. Kills him to blubbery death. Girl and Mysterious Girl make out and hit the road… because of reasons that are probably that lesbians are BITCHESSSSSSSS.

“Tuesday the 17th.” Girl takes her friends and significant other out to the woods, uses lies and misdirection to get them there because girls are just like that yanno. After not reaching the promised party cabin, friends start to get suspicious. Girl tells her friends they’re gonna die, but they don’t believe her. The camera (???) has weird flashes of dead people and Girl is starting to act pretty creepy so friends insist on more information. Turns out, a while ago Girl came here and this creature killed off all of her friends. (The creature is actually kinda scary, but the hand-cam, while integral in showing us the creature eventually undermines the scares.) She’s using these friends as bait, because she’s going to kill the creature/capture him on film (she says both at different times, because they’re totes the same thing). Everybody dies.

“The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger.” Girl talks to her boyfriend on Skype, shows her tits without him asking for it cause girls are sluts. Girl thinks her house is haunted. Girl hears noises and boyfriend sees green ghost creatures on screen but whoops isn’t recording so cannot play back the footage. Girl also has a weird lump on her arm. Girl decides to cut weird lump out of her arm, digs around with a stick. Boyfriend, oh thank goodness, is a doctor and he’s pretty sure she shouldn’t be doing that. He’ll be home soon and he’ll take care of her then. Girl decides to try and communicate with ghosts, but looking at them scares her so she does the obvious and closes her eyes and asks boyfriend to tell her where the ghosts are so she can talk to them. Girl gets knocked unconscious. Enter boyfriend who isn’t as out of town as he said! Boyfriend cuts Girl open, removes something, and whines to alien/ghost/people about having to do this. Girl gets doctored up, slapped with a diagnosis of schizophrenia because only that would explain all the weird stuff. Boyfriend chats with another girl… more tits… and more lump in her arm. THIS GUY IS A DOCTOR YOU GUYS YOU ARE LUCKY TO BE DATING SUCH A WINNER.

“10/31/98.” Drunk dudebros head to a Halloween party. One is dressed as a nanny cam with camera and all. Dudebros cannot find the party or even the street it’s on. They see a house and it must be the party but no one is there but they’re pretty sure it is a haunted house haha great party man. WATTA JOKE IT REALLY IS A HAUNTED HOUSE AND THE ONLY ONE PARTYING IS SATAN JUST KIDDING. Dudebros make their way upstairs, noticing strange things. At the attic they hear chanting and see a group of men performing what looks like an exorcism on a girl dressed in white. She’s crying a lot and they are hurting her and what might just be part of a really elaborate haunted house party is probably not cause some guy just got snatched out of the air and killed? Dudebros freak out! But Dudebros have a savior complex and gotta rescue that girl. They escape a horrible series of CGI horrors and make the escape. Dudebros can’t read a map but where is the hospital dudes! OMG. The girl isn’t in the car any more! She’s being creepy in the road! And the guys get hit by a train.

And now that I have this all written out, I think maybe V/H/S is a secret feminist masterpiece because all the guys are the worst and with the exception of “Emily” all the girls GET REVENGE AND MURDER and everyone who dies is an asshole.

(But really, I think that the guys who made this film have no idea what kind of culture they are feeding into. I think that V/H/S is a horror film, not because it is well-made, or clever, or scary, but because these are the stories we expect to hear. Girls are murderous. Girls are sluts. Girls won’t give it up. Girls can’t be trusted. Girls are victims. Girls. Are. The. Worst. Those girls? They’re even worse than those guys. But you know what, guys who made this film? When you feed into this culture, when you populate your brains and ours with these images, with these narratives, you make it more and more likely that the only option girls have when date raped, when stuck in a loveless marriage, when victimized, when traumatized is to strike out. To strike back.)

———-

Marcia Herring is a recently relocated writer from Missouri. She is still working on her graduate degree, working in retail, and writing freelance for ThoseTwoGuysOnline.com (one of the guys is her brother) and Lesbrary. She spends most of her free time watching television and movies. She wrote an analysis of Degrassi, Teens and Rape Apologism, contributed a review of X-Men First Class, and reviewed Atonement and Imagine Me & You for Bitch Flicks.