Horror – Page 12 – Bitch Flicks

Becky, Adelaide, and Nan: Women with Down Syndrome on ‘Glee’ and ‘American Horror Story’

Characters with physical or developmental disabilities are rarely given prominent roles on television ensembles, much less well-developed characters. ‘Glee’ and ‘American Horror Story,’ TV shows created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, both feature important characters with Down Syndrome and have received much praise for it. However, the mere existence of these characters is not enough to suggest they are well portrayed and in each character there are several questionable areas that warrant discussion.

Characters with physical or developmental disabilities are rarely given prominent roles on television ensembles, much less well-developed characters. Glee and American Horror Story, TV shows created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, both feature important characters with Down Syndrome and have received much praise for it. Glee’s Becky Jackson and AHS’s Adelaide Langdon and Nan are all portrayed as flawed women and are allowed their own inner lives, desires, and triumphs.

However, the mere existence of these characters is not enough to suggest they are well portrayed and in each character there are several questionable areas that warrant discussion. Though one must take this criticism with a grain of salt, as Glee is a surreal over-the-top comedy where everyone is made fun of to a degree (though has been consistently problematic in its portrayal of women, the disabled, bisexuality and transwomen, among others) while American Horror Story is literally a horror show, where nearly everyone suffers and dies and indulges in many horror movie cliches–among them the child-like prophet and the martyr.

Becky

Becky Jackson (Lauren Potter) was introduced in Glee’s first season to as a means to character development for the show’s previously one-dimensional villain, Sue Sylvester. She was a shy, young girl with Down Syndrome, a social outcast who just wanted to be a cheerleader.

When Sue put her through a rigorous audition process, viewers and Glee Club leader Will Schuester assumed this was yet another of Sue’s cruelties. Obviously Sue was just torturing this girl for her own amusement with no hope of her actually making the squad, but this assumption was proved wrong when the show revealed that she reminds Sue of her sister Jean, who also has Downs.

Sue tells Will she is treating Becky just like everyone else because that’s what she wants and from then on Becky is a Cheerio, Sue’s constant sidekick and assistant and frequently recurring character.

Becky also continues to aid in the development of Sue’s character, as she becomes her voice of reason, being the the only one who can criticize Sue’ behaviour and talk to her on her level without fear of retaliation. For example, when Becky learns that Sue’s baby will likely have Downs, she is able to tell Sue that she needs to work on her patience to be a good parent. Becky functions as Sue’s heart and when Sue is shattered by her sister’s death, she expresses her grief by casting aside the only other thing that made her human, and kicks Becky off the Cheerios. Their bond is restored when Sue welcomes Becky back to the squad and promotes her to captain, after realizing how much it helps her to have Becky in her life.

Becky and Sue have a strong relationship that gives Sue humanity and Becky, a role model

However, for Becky, her relationship with Sue results in the loss of her own personhood. In a relatively short length of time, Becky gives up any other interests or ambitions she had and becomes a miniature version of her hero, Sue (even dressing her for Halloween). For most of the show, Becky is Sue’s mouthpiece, echoing her criticisms and opinions and making snarky and frequently offensive comments in the same manner that Sue is known for. She even shares Sue’s grossly inflated sense of self worth and importance (Helen Mirren is her inner voice) and heckles and sabotages other students when given the opportunity.

For brief period, it was fun that Becky could be as mean and snarky as almost all the other characters, but as the show dragged this on to become Becky’s defining characteristic, it become patronizing and unfunny. Becky is not portrayed as an otherwise ordinary teenage girl with interests in sex and blue humour but as low comedy, like a child swearing. The joke wasn’t what she was saying but that she was saying these kind of things at all.

Becky is disturbingly infantilized as Baby Jesus in the school’s nativity scene

In addition, Becky is constantly prepositioning other characters and making crude sexual comments about them. She lusts over the Glee Club’s Men of McKinley calendar and claims ownership of one-time date, Artie Abrams when she sees him kissing his girlfriend, calling him her future husband. However, none of her attractions are treated as valid. When she pays for a kiss at a kissing booth run by quarterback Finn Hudson, he kisses her on the cheek; when she and Artie bond over their disabilities on their date, he breaks up with her after she asks him to “do it” with her (in an alternate reality where Artie never went out with her, Becky became “the school slut”); and when she seems to find happiness with Jason, who also has Down Syndrome, she claims the relationship couldn’t work because he liked hot dogs and she liked pizza. By hypersexualizing a character who is treated as humourous for having a sexual desire and never considered as a viable romantic option, she is also desexualized and infantilized, treated like a child who doesn’t understand that (from the narrative’s perspective) the conventionally attractive characters aren’t interested in sleeping with her and she’ll never be prom queen.

There have been two particularly problematic plot lines featuring Becky in Glee’s recent seasons, both which could be essays in their own right. In season four’s much-maligned Shooting Star , Becky brings a gun to school because she fears the world outside the safe bubble of McKinley High, suggesting individuals with Down Syndrome are unstable and dangerous. In season five episode, Movin’ Out, frequent misogynist Artie decides to “save” Becky and helps her find a college with programs for people with developmental disabilities, something she hadn’t considered previously. While this recent story has a positive message about Becky’s future and her abilities, the fact that another character, one who she stalked after he rejected her, imbues it with the same patronizing dynamic found in much of the plot lines featuring Becky.

Adelaide

The first episode of American Horror Story: Murder House opens in 1978 with Adelaide Langdon, a young girl with Downs ominously warning two boys they will die if they go into the titular house. In the next scene, her warning comes true.
As an adult over 30 years later, Adelaide (Jamie Brewer) continues to given warnings, frightening the Harmon family who have just moved into the house, next door to where she lives with her mother Constance (Jessica Lange). Though she is well meaning and friendly, her warnings are constantly misconstrued as threats due to her creepy habit of starring unblinking and appearing out of nowhere in the Harmon house.

Addy’s mother Constance is relentlessly cruel to her

Being a character on a horror television show, Addy’s Down Syndrome is used to frame her as an uncanny figure, an other in the style of Tod Browning’s Freaks. In horror or gothic media, the uncanny is something that is familiar, yet strange at the same time, producing an unsettling and comfortable feeling, such as identical twins, mutes or people with developmental disabilities. Seemingly, Addy is able to enter the house whenever she desires, no matter what barriers are in her way, suggesting a magical, otherworldly aspect of her character. Her Down Syndrome alone is meant to produce discomfort in the viewer, manipulating them into wondering if she is evil or will, even unthinkingly, harm the family, for no other reason than that she is so othered.

Raised to believe she is an ugly monster who should keep out of sight, Addy wants nothing more than to be “a pretty girl” and mourns that she doesn’t look like the women in her fashion magazines. Her mother frequently insults her, calling her a burden and a ‘mongoloid’ and reinforcing over and over that Addy’s dream will never happen. Cruelly, Constance punishes her by locking her in the “Bad Girl Room,” a closet full of mirrors, further reinforcing Addy’s monstrous self-image.

As punishment, Addy is terrorized in a closet full of mirrors, where she is forced to see her face

Addy’s story ends sadly on Halloween when she is hit by a car and killed. Here, the show’s treatment of Addy continues to be problematic as it tries to have it both ways, portraying her as both something to fear and as an object of pity, a tragedy for viewers to mourn. When Addy dies she is wearing “a pretty girl” Halloween mask and just minutes before, she was ecstatically happy to finally be the person she’d always wanted, even if it was only in a small, temporary way. Like Sue, Addy is also used to humanize a bigoted character, as Constance, who caused most of the problems in Addy’s life puts makeup on Addy’s corpse and cries while telling her she’s “beautiful.” This suggests that Addy’s purpose in the narrative was chiefly to facilitate Constance’s character development, rather than a storyline or a life of her own.

Dressed as a “pretty girl” Addy is hit by a car and killed on Halloween

Nan

Unlike Adelaide, whose story is presented as a tragedy centered around her Down Syndrome, Nan’s condition is never mentioned but subtly informs how she is treated by the narrative and the other characters. A young clairvoyant on American Horror Story: Coven, Nan (Jamie Brewer) is in most ways, portrayed as a normal girl. She admires the hot neighbor with her classmates, joins in on their catty comments and using her powers for cruel, teenage girl teasing (trying to make Madison put her cigarette in her vagina) in a way that doesn’t seem like the joke is that she is saying these things at all.

Nan is however, constantly dismissed even within the group that tacitly includes her (problematically, Queenie who is Black is treated as the real outsider). She is never considered a serious contender in the season long competition to see who is the most powerful witch of her generation, the Supreme, called ugly by Queen Bee Madison and the discovery that the neighbor, Luke is interested in her is treated as unbelievable by other characters.

Nan and Madison (Emma Roberts) compete for the affections of their neighbor Luke

However, sad as it may be, this is probably be an honest portrayal of how such a character would be treated in such an environment full of bitchery and backstabbing over any character flaw or deficit in appearance. Unlike Queenie, whose difference and feelings about her exclusion from the coven’s majority of white witches are explored in detail, Nan’s feelings are glossed over. She is different, but her difference is never examined, so it becomes an elephant in the room.

Like Adelaide, Nan insists she is not a virgin when it is assumed by other characters. She says she has sex all the time and men find her hot, however because the show never gives any background on who Nan was before she came to the school (as is given for all other characters), it is not clear whether this is true. The storyline of her romance with Luke is never able to progress to a romantic or sexual relationship as he is quickly murdered by his mother so he will not reveal her secrets.

Nan is portrayed as the moral center of the school/coven as her power, allows her to see into the hearts of the people around her. She mediates in fights and threatens to tell the police about the baby Marie Laveau had kidnapped earlier. However, Nan has a dark side which is briefly explored when she uses her powers to kill Luke’s mother, by compelling her to drink bleach, as revenge for her murder of Luke.

After her murder, Nan’s spirit looks down at her body and decides to leave the coven

She is ultimately murdered by matriarchs Marie and Fiona Goode, functioning bringing them closer together. Her death is used as the sacrifice of an innocent soul, but it is suggested that Nan had some choice in the matter and decides to leave the coven to destroy each other so she can be at peace. The one bad thing she does, the neighbor’s murder is excused because it was deserved and as she is accepted as an innocent, a soul too pure for this world. In this manner, Nan comes close to the stereotype of the saintly disabled person, and is portrayed as a martyr, the lone character over the season who is never resurrected.

Ultimately, though are three characters discussed here have problematic and debatable qualities, both in their personalities and in the way they are framed by their respective narratives, they offer unique portrayals of women with Down Syndrome. If nothing else, they are all prominent characters who are treated as people rather than public service announcements in major television shows. Hopefully they are seen as steps in the right direction.

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.

The Horror of Female Sexual Awakening: ‘Black Swan’

What disappointed me most, I think, was that Black Swan could easily have been a progressive film with a positive, young woman-centered journey out of repression at its center. It could have recouped that gender-centric childhood ballerina dream of so many little girls into a message about determination, hard work, personal strength, and emotional growth. Instead, Darren Aronofsy has produced an Oscar-winning horror film. That’s right: I said HORROR. While that might seem like a stretch, it seems clear to me that the horror I refer to is the possibility of changing an age-old story. The horror of Black Swan is the absolutely terrifying idea that a young woman might make it through the difficult process of maturation, develop a healthy, multi-faceted sexuality, and be successful at her chosen career at the same time.

Natalie Portman in Black Swan — Natalie Portman in *Black Swan*

This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.

I don’t know what I was expecting when I settled in to watch Black Swan, long after its theatrical release and subsequent meteoric rise to Oscar stardom. I knew there would be ballet (that quintessential representation of femininity and near-unattainable physical characteristics), and there had been much talk about a lesbian scene. Plus, it wasn’t as if I didn’t know that Swan Lake ends in a suicide; there’s quite a lot of that in ballet, opera, or virtually any other artistic, dramatic work produced over a wide range of historical periods. In the words of Tomas, the pretentious (male) genius ballet company director in the film (Vincent Cassel): “in death she finds freedom.” Yep, I can see where this is going.

So I saw the tragic ending of Swan Lake coming, but the tragic ending of the film was kind of a surprise. Or, maybe not so much a surprise as a disappointment. What disappointed me most, I think, was that Black Swan could easily have been a progressive film with a positive, young woman-centered journey out of repression at its center. It could have recouped that gender-centric childhood ballerina dream of so many little girls into a message about determination, hard work, personal strength, and emotional growth. Instead, Darren Aronofsky has produced an Oscar-winning horror film. That’s right: I said HORROR. While that might seem like a stretch, it seems clear to me that the horror I refer to is the possibility of changing an age-old story. The horror of Black Swan is the absolutely terrifying idea that a young woman might make it through the difficult process of maturation, develop a healthy, multi-faceted sexuality, and be successful at her chosen career at the same time.

Natalie Portman is no stranger to this maturation process, and she’s done most of it in the spotlight. She has been acting since age 13, and in her first starring role she portrayed an orphan captured by a hit man in Leon: The Professional (1994). It might also be worth noting that this first role, even, was a strange one in terms of sexuality: Mathilda is quite a precocious young girl, and in a fit of Stockholm syndrome does, weirdly, “fall in love” with her much older (though admittedly endearing) kidnapper, played by French actor Jean Reno. Older man, French accent, I can understand. We might say that she “rocketed” to stardom, however, due to her casting in the Star Wars prequels as Queen Amidala, a role encompassing conventions of action, romance, and motherhood. While those films were slowly driving sci-fi fans mad, Portman was working on a Bachelor’s degree in psychology at Harvard, and it’s impossible to ignore the historic links between psychology, madness, and horror when watching Black Swan. We also need to remember, however, that Portman’s character Nina’s journey is viewed through the cinematic lens of a male director, and that seems to only lead… well, nowhere new.

Portman does not portray a young girl in this film, as much as she portrays a woman who has left her sexuality at the door in pursuit of being “perfect” at ballet. When the film opens, she is “getting older,” which, in the world of ballet, means you’re about 25 with no body fat, which makes you look like a young girl. But you certainly don’t feel like a young girl: you are a woman. Nina seems to have missed that memo. She is arguably already imbalanced when the film begins (not to mention frighteningly infantilized by her mother), but when she is cast as the Swan Queen in her company’s production of Swan Lake–a role that must embody both the “beautiful, fearful, and fragile” nature of the White Swan alongside the “dark impulse” of the Black Swan–her delicately constructed vision of herself begins to disintegrate. She sees herself—clad in a pink coat and white scarf— stroll past herself—wearing a black coat and heels— in an alley. Her reflection in the dance studio mirror stops mirroring and takes on a life of its own. These are just some of many moments throughout the film where Nina is faced with her shadowy double. Sometimes that double takes on horror-film qualities, as when she imagines herself as Beth, the ballerina whose place she has taken in the company, stabbing herself in the face with a nail file while screaming, “I’m nothing!” At these moments, things get a little harried in the genre department.

Even given Nina’s sometimes horrifying hallucinations, it might be a hard sell to classify Black Swan as a horror film. When we discuss films as horror, we’re usually talking about narratives chock-full of gore, jump-scares, suspenseful music, shadows, violence, and “stupid girls running up the stairs when they should be running out the front door.”* We get some of those conventions in Black Swan, but only because, in her stressed mental state, Nina imagines them. Horror films also typically give us a heaping helping of misogynistic, male-gaze visuals, though that might be changing, albeit slowly. I suppose we could say that there are a lot of female bodies to be looked at in a variety of ranges of sexual objectification in this film. Dancers are, after all, performing. The intent is that someone watches.

But these aren’t the real reasons I think it’s a horror film. It’s a horror film not because Nina slowly descends into madness from the pressure of portraying the starring role in Swan Lake. It’s not even because Aronofsy makes use of this madness in amazing visuals that leap over the bounds of realism into the realm of the surreal with scenes where Nina appears to literally be transforming into a swan. It’s because at the very moment when it seems that Nina might recover from this nightmare and become a whole, happy person, the film kills her off in a twist of tragedy that is narratively as old as the hills. Isn’t there any other female story to be told?

All the cracks in Nina’s psyche, which are brought to visual life by the film’s surreal images as well as real-world physical disintegrations—she constantly scratches at herself, picks at hang-nails, bandages her abused feet— viewers can see sympathetically as Nina struggles to find balance between the two sides of her leading role. Some of these struggles manifest themselves in her relationship with fellow dancer Lily, with whom she forms a tenuous bond. When she leaves her house to go “out” with Lily (Mila Kunis), her foray into social nightlife is encouraging— yes, I know she does drugs in this scene, and that we generally want to frown on potentially destructive behavior. But I was happy that in this scene Nina is, in some small way, controlling her own destiny for once, even if it means recognizing that she can use a bit of chemical assistance to escape the many forms of repression and oppression of which she finds herself a victim. Though the drugs could be said to promote a few more slips between Nina’s reality and her fantasy world—where she has a satisfying sexual encounter with Lily, but where she also begins to sprout black swan feathers from her back—I would argue that those fantasies allow Nina to explore her budding sexuality.

It doesn’t help that Nina’s mother (Barbara Hershey) is the ultimate helicopter parent and, it seems, Nina’s only friend until she begins her relationship with Lily. I cheered Nina as she literally bars her mother from her life (read: bedroom) so she can have enough privacy to even fantasize effectively. The mother/daughter relationship in this film reminded me of Brian DePalma’s Carrie (1976)—another horror film about a young girl becoming a woman. Nina’s mother not only lives vicariously through her daughter’s success in the ballet, but also tries to control her and prevent her from being a success, a competition stemming from the fact that Nina’s mother was never cast in a starring role. These realities, as well as the creepy portraits her mom paints of her, and that bedroom decorated for a ten-year-old show that the maternal relationship does nothing but stifle Nina, and compound her problem with coming to terms with any type of sexual desire.

For Portman, this role is a mix of childlike body type and pubescent girl growing pains. The casting choice brings to mind the warped sense of ageism experienced by dancers, as well as the stunted emotional development often suffered by young performers transitioning into adulthood. Portman would ostensibly know the latter well. It’s a character that is both stuck in girlhood and desperately coveting the transformation that signifies becoming a woman. That transformation is made flesh in the visual shifts that equate Nina with the swans she tries to portray through dance.

On the opening night of the ballet, Nina apparently kills Lily, her understudy, in a jealous rage after almost being replaced. As Nina chokes Lily (and then stabs her with a bit of shattered mirror), she exclaims, “It’s MY turn!” and partially transforms into a swan. Surreal and horrifying: check. A few moments later, she thrillingly dances the Black Swan, and comes completely out of the repressive shell she’s been trapped in for the whole movie. As she moves, she “loses herself” in the dance, her arms transforming into wings, freed from her oppressive prison. These scenes are the climax of the film, employing dizzying 360 shots, dazzling lighting effects, close-ups on Nina’s face, and stunning CG. When she leaves the stage exhilarated, a good few moments are devoted to Nina’s ecstatic face and heavy breathing—it is an emotional orgasm. So imagine my horror when she realizes that rather than stabbing Lily in the dressing room before the performance, she has actually stabbed herself, significantly with that piece of mirror. She becomes not a whole, realized being, but her own fragmented, shattered worst enemy. When she returns to the stage to dance the finale of Swan Lake, she is dancing to her own death. While Swan Lake’s narrative is already known to include a suicide, slowly we learn that Black Swan also requires one. For each to be “perfect,” Nina can live just long enough to complete one perfect performance.

Just for the record, there is a part of me that digs the catharsis and frustration in this ending. I get it. Really. But I am classifying this film as horror for a few reasons: the disturbing imagery, the dark implications of Nina’s downward spiral, her obsession, her crazy mom, and the fact that the poor girl isn’t allowed to have a sexual awakening without dying. Or, more accurately, it’s because she actually HAS that moment of fulfillment and is able to embrace her sexual nature for even an instant, the film punishes her. Aronofsky’s narrative seems, therefore, to argue that women—especially those temperamental dancer-types—are perennially unbalanced, unable to maintain a healthy equilibrium between the Black and White Swans; the virgin and the whore. Once Nina has felt the power of the Black Swan, her signifier for sexual assurance and agency, she can’t escape it; can’t return to the innocence and fragility that society prefers, so she has to be eliminated. She is too dangerous, because she wants to tell another story: the story of a whole woman. You could argue that it’s the classical tragic form I’m railing against, and you’d be right. But this form has repressed and oppressed female characters for hundreds of years. The very use of Swan Lake (circa 1875, people!) as a narrative to tell the story of a contemporary woman points to the fact that we’re revisiting a problem we can’t escape, rehashing the same gendered issues. I hoped maybe this film could move beyond that. Or, we could give it an Academy Award.

*A phenomenon pointed out by another female horror heroine, Sidney Prescott of Wes Craven’s Scream (1996).

Rebecca Willoughby holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University. She writes most frequently on horror films and melodrama, and is currently a lecturer in Film/Media Studies at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

A Personal Reminder that Women Have What it Takes to Make Film. by Nihla Mu’min at Bitch Media

Race + Comics: On Ms. Marvel And Protecting Young Superheroes by Arturo R. García at Racialicious

The Top 25 Lesbian/Bi Characters on TV (Right Now) by Heather Hogan at AfterEllen

AFM: Jennifer Lynch, Mary Harron, Karyn Kusama Join All-Female Horror Anthology ‘XX’ by Borys Kit at The Hollywood Reporter

NBC Bites, Gives Maya Rudolph a Variety Show by Susana Polo at The Mary Sue

“BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez” Is Bound to Be Good by Tara Murtha at Ms. blog

What Really Makes a Film Feminist? by Holly L. Derr at The Atlantic

Oscar and the Bechdel Test by Sasha Stone at Awards Daily

Powerful, Fabulous Women Over 55 on TV by Deb Rox at BlogHer

Study: PG-13 Movies Have More Gun Violence than R-Rated Ones; Sex Still Taboo by Inkoo Kang at Women and Hollywood

‘After Tiller’ Director Martha Shane and Dr. Susan Robinson Interviewed on GRITtv at RH Reality Check

These Five Oscar-Qualifying Films Were Directed by Black Women by Jamilah King at Colorlines

It’s Hard Out Here for a Feminist by Camille Hayes at Bitch Media

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

Zombies and Revolution: An Interview with Esther Cassidy, Producer of ‘Birth of the Living Dead’

Zombie fans among our readers will have read my conversation with Amanda last week about Birth of the Living Dead, the new documentary about game-changing horror classic Night of the Living Dead. On Halloween, I got a chance to sit down with producer Esther Cassidy and learn more about the film, the gender politics of George Romero’s work, and the broader symbolism of zombies.

Zombie fans among our readers will have read my conversation with Amanda last week about Birth of the Living Dead, the new documentary about game-changing horror classic Night of the Living Dead. On Halloween, I got a chance to sit down with producer Esther Cassidy and learn more about the film, the gender politics of George Romero’s work, and the broader symbolism of zombies.

Birth of the Living Dead, a passion project for zombie-loving director Rob Kuhns and his (life and work) partner Cassidy, was initially intended to be a “making of” documentary featuring interviews with the cast and crew of Night, but 2008’s One for the Fire stole that thunder. So Cassidy and Kuhns changed tack. They already had experience with socially conscious journalism from their 2001 PBS documentary Enemies of War, about the El Salvadoran civil war, and Kuhns’ work for Bill Moyers got him access to archival footage from Moyers’ tenure as Lyndon B. Johnson’s Press Secretary, from 1965-67 – a.k.a. the years immediately preceding the release of Night of the Living Dead. The upshot is a documentary that superbly locates Night in the context of the US in the late sixties and skilfully analyzes the relationship between horror and sociopolitical climate, both then and now.

“A lot of people don’t realize that horror can make a political statement,” Cassidy observed. She’s a horror fan, powerfully affected by a viewing of Night in college, but, unlike Kuhns, she says she didn’t realize how much she appreciated the film until she came to make this documentary about it. This is a transferable result: Birth is likely to give viewers a renewed appreciation for Night and a deepened understanding of the social forces that influenced the making of modern zombies.

The two major cultural events to which Birth returns again and again are the Vietnam War and the race riots. In a late-sixties milieu, their specific impact lay in their relation to two major factors: the failure of sixties counterculture and the rise of mass media. Cassidy was quick to name the latter as an important component of today’s zombie obsession. Citing the devastation wrought on New York by Hurricane Sandy last year, she proposed that the renewed cultural interest in zombies this century can be linked to an awareness of both how connected we are and how fragile those connections are. “Everyone born since 1945 wakes up every day surprised we haven’t blown ourselves up yet,” she said of our generations’ apocalyptic mentality. Zombie films are a space where we can ask what resources we can muster to survive in a world where everything can change in a heartbeat, where the only certainty is death, and now even this is undone.

Gary Pullin's gorgeous graphics. — Gary Pullin’s gorgeous graphics.

The failure of institutions is a major theme of Night, and no commentator fails to note the “suspicion of authority and unmitigated bleakness” (to quote the narration of Birth). There’s a revolutionary impulse here, a desire to overthrow the forces of war and racism and capitalism and consumerism through a dramatic world-altering event, but there’s also a hopelessness, a fear that perhaps we can never really change anything. The two warring impulses are surely familiar to everyone who has ever felt dissatisfaction with the status quo. I see the current popularity of zombies as reflecting a powerful sense of collective guilt and frustration. Zombies are the systemic forces to which we are subject and which we cannot control, but these same systemic forces are us – they are the result of human actions and human institutions.

Without the rule of law, mass media, and other social and cultural institutions to perpetuate them, racism and other systemic oppressions need no longer be cynically viewed as inevitable aspects of human existence. (The fact that they are still uncritically included in most of the popular zombie stories today bespeaks both a cynicism so deep it borders on nihilism and a profound artistic laziness.) What’s so brilliant about Night is that the conflicts within the farmhouse are to do with survival, not tribalism, and that the racially-coded violence is perpetrated by the forces of social institutions. Neither war nor racism is over, despite decades of activism and protest, so it’s no wonder Night‘s dark ending still speaks so powerfully to audiences. The fact that mainstream zombie fare today does not engage with critical social theory the way Night does instantiates this collective disillusionment on a metatextual level too. What comfort is there? Romero offers, “There’s always the refreshment stand.”

Night of the Living Dead is far from an actively misogynistic movie, but it does fail to address the vector of gender oppression, which makes its social engagement, otherwise so sophisticated, seem thoroughly incomplete. Cassidy can provide a feminist counterreading for most of the female characters in the movie, from the teenage girl whose desire to help her boyfriend leads to the downfall of the escape plan, to the strong mother whose love for her daughter is her weakness, but she’s under no illusion that Night is an explicitly feminist text. As she points out, you have to look to Romero’s series of sequels – Dawn, Day, Land, Diary, and Survival of the Dead – for some genuinely well-rounded and interesting female characters. The man has learned, and his work has developed accordingly.

Perhaps, then, there is ultimately a message of hope for redemption, for a new radically reconstructed world, but it requires a lot of work and self-critique and undeniable pain and horror and times of bleakness and despair. And that seems to be missing from a lot of present zombie stuff, wherever engagement with social issues is missing. Without that engagement, zombie stories are cynical voids of human feeling, all style and no substance, pure money-grabbing consumerist culture. They are zombies, in the most Baudrillardian way, and our only comfort is the refreshment stand.

Hope rests in the people who don’t succumb to nihilism. One of the most interesting strands in Birth is the portrayal of an after-school program to promote literacy through film, where Night is a teaching tool for Brooklyn kids – mostly kids of color whose families aren’t exactly high on the socioeconomic ladder – and it’s fascinating to see how much the film engages them. Cassidy herself works with Downtown Community Television Center to “provide outstanding media arts education to underserved populations.” There are ways in which people are attempting to engage horror with a social conscience. And hopefully Esther Cassidy and Rob Kuhns are going to do more of it with their proposed forthcoming work, on the influence of the Holocaust and the atom bomb on horror, SF, and monster movies from 1945 to the present. I eagerly await it.

Birth of the Living Dead opens at New York’s IFC Center on Wednesday.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. He thinks way too much about zombies.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

The Seven Stages of Important Black Film Fatigue by Stacia Brown at American Prospect

Why ’12 Years A Slave’ Is Different From ‘The Help’ And ‘Django Unchained’–And Why It Matters by Alyssa Rosenberg at ThinkProgress

It’s Time To Say Good-Bye To TV’s Strong Black Woman by Nichole Perkins at BuzzFeed

13 Myths Hollywood Uses to Hide Discrimination Against Women Directors by Maria Giese at Women Directors in Hollywood

Voices: Halloween–A White Privilege Christmas by Arturo R. García at Racialicious

The Big O: Oscar Could be Swayed by Leto’s Feminine Mystique by Susan Wloszczyna at Women and Hollywood

15 Fantastic Horror Films Directed by Women by Alison Nastasi at Flavorwire

Creator/Producer Lorne Michaels Responds To Lack Of Black Women On ‘SNL’ Criticism by Tambay A. Obenson at Shadow and Act

Queen Latifah, Patti Labelle, Venus Williams to Be Honored at Black Girls Rock! by Evelyn Diaz at BET

Why White People Can’t Quit Blackface by Camille Hayes at Bitch Media

‘Homeland’ And The Delicate Art Of Withholding by Linda Holmes at NPR

Heroines of Cinema: 10 Great Films About Female Sexuality by Female Filmmakers by Emily Craig, Matthew Hammett Knott and Sophie Smith at Indiewire

Season of the Witch: Conjuring Strength Through Power by Alyssa Rosenberg at Women and Hollywood

Tina Fey’s New Show Picked Up By NBC #Blessed by Eloise Giegerich at Bust

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

The Shock of ‘Sleepaway Camp’

On the surface, Sleepaway Camp isn’t much different than your average 1980s slasher movie. The comparisons to Friday the 13th can’t be ignored – Sleepaway’s Camp Arawak, much like Friday’s Camp Crystal Lake, is populated by horny teens looking for some summer lovin’, and is the site of a series of gruesome and mysterious murders that threaten to shut down the camp for the whole summer. But unlike Friday the 13th and other slasher films, the twist in Sleepaway Camp isn’t the identity of the murderer, and the final girl isn’t exactly who you’d expect.

This piece by Carrie Nelson previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on October 24, 2011 and is republished as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

On the surface, Sleepaway Camp isn’t much different than your average 1980s slasher movie. The comparisons to Friday the 13th can’t be ignored – Sleepaway’s Camp Arawak, much like Friday’s Camp Crystal Lake, is populated by horny teens looking for some summer lovin’, and is the site of a series of gruesome and mysterious murders that threaten to shut down the camp for the whole summer. But unlike Friday the 13th and other slasher films, the twist in Sleepaway Camp isn’t the identity of the murderer, and the final girl isn’t exactly who you’d expect.

(Everything that follows contains significant spoilers. Read at your discretion.)

The protagonist of Sleepaway Camp is Angela, the lone survivor of a boating accident that killed her father and her brother, Peter. Years after the accident, her aunt Martha, with whom she now lives, sends her to Camp Arawak with her cousin Ricky. Angela is painfully shy and refuses to go near the water, which leads to the other campers tormenting her incessantly. Ricky’s quick to defend her, but the bullying is relentless. One by one, Angela’s tormenters are murdered in increasingly grotesque ways (the most disturbing involves a curling iron brutally entering a woman’s vagina).

So come the end of the film, when it’s revealed that Angela is the murderer, there’s no particular shock – after all, why wouldn’t she want to seek revenge on her tormentors? But the fact that Angela is the murderer isn’t the point, because when we find out she’s the murderer we see her naked, and it is revealed that she has a penis. We quickly learn through flashbacks that it was, in fact, Peter who survived the boat accident, and Aunt Martha decided to raise him as a girl. The ending is profoundly disturbing, not because Peter is a murderer or because he is a cross-dresser (because his female presentation is against his will, it isn’t accurate to call him transgender), but because he has been abused so deeply by his aunt and his peers that he can’t find a way to cope.

Unlike most slasher movies I’ve seen, I wasn’t horrified by Sleepaway Camp’s body count. Rather, I was horrified by the abuses that catalyze the murders. Peter survived the trauma of watching his father and sister die, only to be emotionally and physically abused by his aunt and forced to live as a woman. At camp, he’s terrified of the water, as it reminds him of the tragic loss of his family, and he’s unable to shower or change his clothes around his female bunkmates, as they might learn his secret. But rather than being understanding and supportive, the other campers harass Peter by forcibly throwing him into the water, verbally taunting him and ruining his chance to be romantically involved with someone who might truly care for him. Not to mention, at the start of camp, he is nearly molested by the lecherous head cook. Peter may be a murderer, but he is hardly villainous – the rest of the characters are the real villains, for allowing the bullying to transpire.

The problem, of course, is that the abuse of Peter isn’t the part that’s supposed to horrify us. The twist ending is set up to shock and disgust the audience, which is deeply transphobic. Tera at Sweet Perdition describes the problem with ending as follows:

But Angela’s not deceiving everybody because she’s a trans* person. She’s deceiving everybody because she’s a (fictional) trans* person created by cissexual filmmakers. As Drakyn points out, the trans* person who’s “fooling” us on purpose is a myth we cissexuals invented. Why? Because we are so focused on our own narrow experience of gender that we can’t imagine anything outside it. We take it for granted that everyone’s gender matches the sex they were born with. With this assumption in place, the only logical reason to change one’s gender is to lie to somebody.

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. (This kind of twist is done effectively in The Crying Game, specifically because the twist is revealed midway through the film, and the audience watches characters cope and come to terms with the reveal in an honest, sensitive way. Such sensitivity is not displayed in Sleepaway Camp.)

And yet, despite its cissexism, Sleepaway Camp has some progressive moments. Most notably, the depiction of Angela and Peter’s parents, a gay male couple, is positive. In the opening scene, the parents appear loving and committed, and there’s even a flashback scene depicting the men engaging in romantic sexual relations. Considering how divisive gay parenting is in the 21st century, the fact that a mainstream film made nearly thirty years ago portrays gay parenting positively (if briefly) is certainly worthy of praise.

Sleepaway Camp is incredibly problematic, but beyond the surface-layer clichés and the shock value of the ending, it’s a fascinating and truly horrifying film. Particularly watching the film today, in an era where bullying is forcing young people to make terrifyingly destructive decisions, the abuses against Peter ring uncomfortably true. Peter encounters cruelty at every turn, emotionally scarring him until he can think of no other way to cope besides murder. Unlike horror movies in which teenagers are murdered as punishment for sexual activity, Sleepaway Camp murders teenagers for the torment they inflict on others. There’s a certain sweet justice in that sort of conclusion, but at the same time, it makes you wish the situations that bring on the murders hadn’t needed to happen at all.

Carrie Nelson was a Staff Writer for Gender Across Borders, an international feminist community and blog that she co-founded in 2009. She works as a grant writer for an LGBT nonprofit, and she is currently pursuing an MA in Media Studies at The New School.

Red, Blue, and Giallo: Dario Argento’s ‘Suspiria’

I was neither a discerning nor an educated viewer, but even so I quickly cottoned on to the fact that certain Italian directors had produced some above-average horror flicks in the 1970s, characterized by a cavalier attitude toward nudity, pervasive Catholic imagery, and lashings of gore. Ignorant of the term giallo, I proceeded to dub this subgenre “spag-horror,” which isn’t actually an awful name for it.

As my initiation into the worlds of sex and violence, many European horror films of the 1970s no doubt occupy a Freudian subspace of my psyche. Probably the Ur-example of this genre and its strange, ambivalent attitude toward women and sexuality is Dario Argento’s 1977 meisterwerk, Suspiria.

This post by Staff Writer Max Thornton appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies. It was previously published as part of our theme week on Women and Gender in Foreign Films.

I started getting into film when I was a teenager. Growing up with daily power cuts, both scheduled and unscheduled, is not conducive to childhood as a cinephile, and anyway my parents did not consider film a “real” art like literature or music – I can vividly remember being forced, at age seven, to quit Video Club and join Chess Club instead, because my mother did not think that sitting around watching videos constituted a worthwhile extracurricular.

(I am still breathtakingly terrible at chess.)

So, partly as the cultivation of an indoor hobby in response to the unpleasant British climate, and partly as the world’s meagerest teenage rebellion, I started watching films. In particular, I sought out horror films, thanks to the friendly proprietor of our local video rental store (now sadly gone the way of all such places in the Netflix age), who would happily rent the bloodiest, goriest, most revolting 18-ratedmovies to an obviously-14-year-old me, always with a cheery, “Enjoy!”

Most of these.

I was neither a discerning nor an educated viewer, but even so I quickly cottoned on to the fact that certain Italian directors had produced some above-average horror flicks in the 1970s, characterized by a cavalier attitude toward nudity, pervasive Catholic imagery, and lashings of gore. Ignorant of the term giallo, I proceeded to dub this subgenre “spag-horror,” which isn’t actually an awful name for it.

From its kickass score by prog-rockers Goblin to its borderline incomprehensible plot, I love damn near everything about Suspiria. For starters, it’s set in a ballet school, which is a direct line to my heart; and it features Udo Kier (UDO! KIER!); plus, it’s a strikingly female-dominated story. Argento says of the film: “there are only three men in it: one is blind, one can’t speak and the other is gay. It’s the women who have the power.” Which is such a problematic statement on so many levels, but let’s just focus on the undeniable fact that the film is mostly about women.

The film opens with American dancer Suzy Banyon (played by a young Jessica Harper – did you know she writes children’s books and has a cookery blog now??) arriving at a German airport on a rainy night. Pretty much the first thing we see is her repeated attempts to hail a taxi; her young face, rain- and wind-swept above the virginal whites of her clothes, expresses a vulnerability that will recur throughout the movie. Her big, frightened eyes peer out of the taxi at the gushing storm-drains, the phallic tree-trunks in the spooky woods, the bright red facade of the ballet school (on the subtly named Escher Strasse). Untoward goings-on, shockingly enough, are underfoot at the school, and Suzy soon finds herself completely out of her depth as things get steadily creepier.

Suzy and Sara, swimming.

What’s particularly interesting about Suspiria, especially in relation to the giallo genre as a whole, is its lack of nudity or overt sexuality. There’s a pretty good reason for this, as Argento explains:

To begin with, I imagined the story set in a children’s school, not of teens. I thought that it could be interesting that the school was for very young girls, eight, ten years old. This was the first version. The distributor strongly opposed this choice, and the film was made also with American money, from Fox, and they were against that too. So I changed the script and raised the girl’s age, but I kept a sort of childish attitude, so the characters behaved like children. The decor too… I used little tricks, for example the doors have the handles not at a normal height, but at face level, the height at which a child of 8 years old would find the handle. It gives the impression of dealing with children, even though they have adult bodies.

I don’t think it’s reading too much into the film to find some Freudian undertones in the whites and reds, in the repeated motif of water, in the pivotal role of irises. There is a strong fairy-tale quality to the film’s artifices, its primary colors, scenes awash in blue or red; the story of the young girl entering a world of danger and threat carries echoes of Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White – Bruno Bettelheim would surely have something to say about that.

Make no mistake, this is a pretty violent movie. There are some quite fantastically grotesque murders. Within the first fifteen minutes, we see a still-beating heart stabbed and a woman’s face split in two by plate glass. Throughout, the lily-white garments of the murdered women are streaked and splattered with bright red blood. We also get a revolting maggot infestation, some magnificently scary chase scenes, and a truly bonkers climactic sequence.

Red, the color of a very murdered woman.

And yet Suzy retains a sense of childlike innocence and vulnerability throughout, relating to her friends and teachers like the little girl she was originally written to be. It’s a very weird juxtaposition, and I think it crystallizes the strange combination of female empowerment and ingrained misogyny that characterizes classic European horror. What, in the end, are we to make of stories where women are both the brutally murdered corpses and the proactive investigators of the mystery; both the pure childlike heroine and the monstrous villain; both desexed and penetrated by sharp objects; both agents and victims?

It speaks volumes to the general lack of such female-dominated stories in our broader culture that I even find myself asking this question.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

‘Freaks’: Sing the Body Eclectic

Freaks (1932) is a true cult movie, one that’s ridden a rollercoaster of opprobrium and acclaim since its initial release. Tod Browning’s sideshow-set horror-romance destroyed his career (and several others), caused such disgust in early audiences that one woman (allegedly) miscarried, outraged critics and moral guardians, traumatized some of the performers who appeared in it, languished in obscurity after being banned for three decades, resurfaced on the exploitation circuit in the 1960s, and earned a spot in the National Film Registry archives in 1994 before enjoying its current status as a one-of-a-kind classic. It’s been repeated to the point of cliché, but Freaks, once seen, is never forgotten. Love it or hate it, it will stay with you for the rest of your life.

This guest post by Karina Wilson appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.

Cult movies are lightning in a bottle, a one-time only circumstance of story, director, cast, crew, location and budget that defies original intentions and transmutes into something unforgettable, unrepeatable, unsurpassable. Cult movies are accidental, born of a mismatch between the scenes filmmakers thought they were shooting, and what ended up in the can. Cult movies are magic, of a puckish sort, and we shouldn’t probe their mysteries too closely. They’re best regarded from a distance, after a significant amount of time has passed.

Freaks (1932) is a true cult movie, one that’s ridden a rollercoaster of opprobrium and acclaim since its initial release. Tod Browning’s sideshow-set horror-romance destroyed his career (and several others), caused such disgust in early audiences that one woman (allegedly) miscarried, outraged critics and moral guardians, traumatized some of the performers who appeared in it, languished in obscurity after being banned for three decades, resurfaced on the exploitation circuit in the 1960s, and earned a spot in the National Film Registry archives in 1994 before enjoying its current status as a one-of-a-kind classic. It’s been repeated to the point of cliché, but Freaks, once seen, is never forgotten. Love it or hate it, it will stay with you for the rest of your life.

Originally, Freaks wasn’t intended to achieve any of these feats. All MGM head honcho Irving Thalberg wanted was a box office hit, along the lines of Universal’s Dracula (1931), a movie that exploited the audience’s new-found appetite for the talking horror genre. So he called Tod Browning, Dracula‘s director, who’d had a run of success during the silent era working with Lon Chaney Sr., and asked the million-dollar question “What else have you got?”

Although “horror” wasn’t a label applied to film in the 1920s, Browning and Chaney’s collaborations dealt with mutilation, disfigurement, and the resulting heartbreak (see: The Phantom of the Opera and The Unknown), subjects dear to the hearts of those whose loved ones had returned home, scarred, from the war in France. Browning and Chaney had also worked together on box office sensation The Unholy Three, a macabre crime caper featuring the 3’ 3” tall circus performer, Harry Earles.

Earles enjoyed working in the movies but knew there weren’t many roles out there for actors his size. So he brought Browning’s attention to another short story by Unholy Three writer, Tod Robbins, Spurs, a mean little melodrama about a love triangle between a circus midget, a bareback rider, and her normal-sized lover. Browning had a carnival background (he ran away to join the circus when he was 16), loved the milieu, and, when MGM gave him carte blanche to direct a movie more horrifying than Dracula, he picked Freaks.

In those pre-television days, the circus sideshow ruled supreme as entertainment for the curious masses. Trumpeted as part edification, part education, the ‘Ten-In-One” tent showcased human oddities and provided a rare opportunity for those born with a difference to earn a living. People with all manner of abnormalities found a profitable home in the sideshow – armless, legless, eyeless, giant, dwarf, bearded, scaled, obese, skeletal. Some simply exhibited their unique bodies, others performed an act, introducing music, dance, stage magic or comedy into their routine; many earned good money and toured the globe. After auditioning the crème-de-la-crème of this international talent pool, Browning assembled his cast, the likes of which has never been seen on a movie screen before or since.

The cast of Freaks includes some bona fide female sideshow stars, women who projected glamorous images of considerable wattage despite being born different. They worked their way up through circuses and on the vaudeville circuit, often from a very early age. They viewed their divergence from the accepted norm as an opportunity to build a show business career, rather than as a debilitation. Self-sufficient, often with strings of admirers, they didn’t lead easy lives, but charted their own paths and lived to a respectable age. It’s difficult to imagine any of these performers working in the perfect-image-obsessed entertainment industry today.

Conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton had been working professionally in vaudeville since the age of three. Renowned for their beauty, fashion sense and musicianship as well as their dancing skills (they performed onstage with Bob Hope and Charlie Chaplin), they had recently received $100,000 damages and emancipation from their predatory managers (they later said they were “paupers living in practical slavery”) and their appearance in Freaks marked the beginning of their independent career.

The “midget Mae West,” Daisy Earles (Frieda), along with her brother Harry and two equally short-statured sisters Tiny and Gracie, was part of the Doll Family, a popular act who toured with both the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circuses, and appeared in Laurel and Hardy films.

Martha Morris billed herself as “Martha The Armless Wonder” and was a featured attraction at Coney Island and in the traveling Freak City Show in the 1920s. She entertained rubes by writing and typing with her toes as dexterously as if they were fingers. Frances O’Connor’s stage name was “the Living Venus De Milo,” and she loved to pose in specially designed costumes that showed her entirely smooth and armless (there were not even stumps) torso, whilst impressing admirers with her coffee-drinking, cigarette-smoking and sharp-shooting skills.

By contrast, the non-“freak” women (Cleopatra, the Peacock Of The Air” trapeze artist, and Venus, the animal trainer) are low profile. Myrna Loy supposedly begged not to play Venus, and, although mentioned in press releases, Jean Harlow failed to materialize as Cleopatra. Instead, Russian defector Olga Baclanova (a gifted physical actor who was struggling with the shift to talkies) got the villainess role, while hard-working contract player Leila Hyams was cast as Venus. Both women were regular Hollywood blondes, used to commanding the silent screen with the arch of an eyebrow or the flare of a nostril, but, at 36 and 27 respectively, they were aging out of leading roles and Freaks marked the last major stop on the Hollywood Express for both of them.

Given the luminaries in the cast, it’s not surprising that Freaks is a female-driven narrative, a deft illustration of Madame de Merteuil’s assertion in Dangerous Liaisons, that “When one woman strikes at the heart of another, she seldom misses, and the wound is invariably fatal.” The plot is simple and universal: unrequited love, greed, jealousy, revenge.

The beautiful Cleopatra knows her co-worker, Hans, is in love with her, although she does not reciprocate the feeling. She enjoys making fun of him, much to the chagrin of his fiancée, Frieda. When Frieda lets slip that Hans has inherited a fortune, Cleopatra (egged on by her boyfriend, Hercules) persuades Hans to ditch Frieda and marry her. The other co-workers are suspicious of Cleopatra’s gold-digging motives but, if Hans is happy, they’re happy, and they all attend a celebratory wedding feast to welcome Cleopatra to the family. Unfortunately, Cleopatra sneers at their attempts to be friendly, and humiliates Hans, who collapses thanks to the alcohol she’s been forcing down him all evening – along with a dubious substance from a tiny black bottle. Frieda is furious. From that point on, Cleopatra is doomed. Frieda and the other co-workers close ranks around Hans to protect him from Cleopatra’s nefarious schemes and will do whatever it takes to keep him safe.

This is the type of run-of-the-mill romantic retribution played out every night of the week on today’s Lifetime network. We enjoy seeing the man-stealing hussy get her just desserts, while the wronged party is reunited with her one true love. In terms of pure plot, Freaks presents nothing we haven’t seen before. It creaks. It’s clumsy. It’s barely even a horror story. That’s the point. That’s why, 81 years later, Freaks still resonates as a progressive text. By rejecting fantasy, by refusing to use freaks to populate a fairy tale (as The Wizard of Oz would do seven years later), instead slotting them into a bog standard kitchen sink melodrama (albeit with a circus setting) Browning succeeds in making us see his characters as people first.

Much of Freaks’ power comes from the humdrum nature of the narrative, coupled with the easy familiarity of the early scenes. The first half of the screenplay deals with housekeeping, where the circus performers sleep (and who they sleep with), how they peg laundry out to dry, roll a cigarette, sip coffee, present a new baby to their friends. Dialogue takes the form of petty squabbles, between husband-to-be and conjoined fiancée, and performers discussing the mechanics of their acts. We’re forced to vacate our circus spectator headspace; there are no sequins or spotlights to direct our gaze. We quit gawking and embrace domesticity. It’s O.K. to be “one of us.”

This makes the second half all the more disturbing. After breaking down their Otherness, establishing the freaks as friendly, ordinary beings, not at all threatening, pussycats in fact, Browning lets rip. These freaks – even infantilized pinheads like Zip and Pip – have teeth. Masterminded (we assume, although we never see her giving the orders) by the cherubic Frieda, the freaks enact justice. We’ve been encouraged to recognize their inner contentment and beauty. In the spirit of reciprocity, the freaks pull Cleopatra’s inner hideousness to the surface. Sideshow justice is done, and, within the movie’s running time of little over an hour, it’s all the more terrifying for its swiftness.

Freaks still makes for startling viewing, and, even in these enlightened, CGI-weary times, challenges our expectations of the human form. We’re so used to seeing physical perfection as the standard, so conditioned to accept the narrowest definition of beauty, so ignorant of the spectrum of human shapes, that many frames of the movie seem like a slap in the face. Freaks stands as a reminder that, for all our talk about diversity and inclusiveness, we sideline performers with difference. Unless they are playing “grateful recipient of charity” or “pathetic victim” or “awkward dependent,” we’ve largely wiped them from our screens.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about Freaks is that the diverse human beings in this pre-Production Code picture take it for granted that they can go about their business, flirt, have relationships, express sexual desire and procreate without any hand-wringing, or guilt, or “professional intervention” (a la The Sessions) from the normals. They invite us to gaze upon them, not with pity, but as players with agency in a story as old as time. Although it’s often criticized for being exploitative (and the critics have a point), Freaks is still the only movie in over a century of cinema history to celebrate these characters so boldly on the big screen. Until someone steps up to the plate, Freaks remains a unique experience, my cult classic, lightning in a fascinatingly misshapen bottle.

For more about the making of Freaks go to http://horrorfilmhistory.com/index.php?pageID=freaks.

Karina Wilson is a British writer and story consultant based in Los Angeles. She writes a regular column on horror fiction at Litreactor and can also be found at Horror Film History.

We’re the Weirdos: Female Power for Good and Evil in ‘The Craft’

The Craft presents a lesson that coming-of-age films don’t typically make a point to show. A ballot is cast for prom queen or SAT prep sits on the horizon with college days looming, a girl must get a boy to like her, losing her virginity in the process. But this film is about serving the self—the craft of empowering oneself to surmount the archaic persecutions against women—taking back the threat of female power. But like a genie in a bottle that allows three wishes, this craft must be practiced and understood, respected completely before it can be outwardly used, or else it will perpetuate transgression.

This guest post by Kim Hoffman appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.

There are countless teen films with themes that focus on the ways young females work with, and then eventually against each other, for the sake of a number of factors: their place in a social hierarchy, a jealous feeling, or in summation, an overall insecurity they are plagued with because they’re sixteen and they haven’t yet developed a sense of self-awareness outside of their high school cafeteria.

What I’ve always welcomed in The Craft was the idea that a group of girls could be simultaneously contributing to the ongoing high school drama they’re faced with each day, while nurturing their powers on a higher plane that none of their peers could possibly grasp. Earth, air, fire and water—the four corners of the world, but incomplete without a fourth girl until character Sarah (Robin Tunney) begins attending her new Catholic high school and develops a friendship with the school witches.

The group needs a fourth to be complete.

In elementary school, slumber parties with girlfriends typically involved the game “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board.” It was a bonding experience between us girls that didn’t quite mean we believed we could actually make one another float, or invoke a spirit to talk to us through a candle or the Ouija board, but perhaps that very hyper-adolescent female clout was a presence in itself, an ember growing hotter within us, if we dared pay attention. Boys in class picked me on—one called me “Casper” because I was so pale. I was living in Florida at the time and all of the other girls were tan and flirted with boys by dumbing themselves down. I didn’t subscribe to that diluted mindset. I was determined, even as a confused pre-pubescent girl with a deep shyness in me, to move to the beat of my own drums, however weird others thought I was.

The understood leader of this teenage coven in The Craft is Nancy (Fairuza Balk), a girl who stands up to the likes of other mean girls in teen drama history like the most cruel of Heathers or Rose McGowen’s unapologetic lipstick machine Courtney Shane in Jawbreaker. Next to Nancy are Bonnie (Neve Campbell) and Rochelle (Rachel True). Bonnie is scarred with terrible marks on her back, causing her to be shelled and quiet, uncomfortably covered up so no one can see her, fraught to feel beautiful. Rochelle, an African American athlete with a sweet and open disposition, puts up with torment from a girl named Laura Lizzie (Christine Taylor), a popular blonde who makes terrible racial slurs at her. Nancy and her mother live in a dilapidated trailer with her sickening and habitually abusive stepfather. There’s a feeling hanging in the air when Sarah begins to show signs of telekinetic power; the girls know their coven could be complete and that their powers joined could change everything they can’t currently control.

After popular boy Chris (Skeet Ulrich) asks Sarah out on a date and she agrees, she’s angry to find out that the following Monday at school, a terrible rumor has been spread about her and Chris having sex on that date—despite the fact that they absolutely didn’t. As a result, the three other girls approach her with an idea, a spell. They cast a spell to make Chris do whatever Sarah says. And it works. He’s now following her around like a lost puppy, and Sarah’s slut-shaming rumors are put to rest. It’s a moment of reckoning, wherein a bad school rumor at the hands of a guy is twisted to his disadvantage, causing him to be the weak, demure one that he attributed to Sarah, banishing his ego and putting Sarah in power. But is it power for women, or is it power modeled after male dominance?

Now fueled with delight, greed and confidence, the coven is a complete dynamic troop, marching through the hallways in their Catholic school-girl uniforms, evoking a new brand of strength that makes their school mates fear them even more, which they love and welcome. Nancy’s face says, “Look at me, I dare you.” It’s the high point in the film for these girls, as they’ve joined their powers to reclaim their place, to restore their souls—but as quickly as that power is recognized, they begin to misuse it for revenge—a yin yang of dark and light that must bring chaos if used too recklessly.

The girls perform a healing spell on Bonnie, who only wishes for her scars to be gone. At her next doctor’s appointment, Bonnie, her mother and the doctors are stunned to find out that when they peel back her bandages, her back is completely healed. The next day at school, Bonnie walks in with a new outfit, a new attitude, and an outward vivaciousness that all can see. Of course, the boys take notice—but this is about Bonnie, for Bonnie, and no one else. Simultaneously, Rochelle is handling Laura Lizzie, who is still taunting her in the locker room. Over the course of a few days, Laura finds her hair is beginning to fall out in her hairbrush and in the shower—and it’s only becoming more and more atrocious. Finally, Nancy causes her stepfather to have a heart attack and die. She and her mother are left with a booming inheritance and can move out of the trailer into a swanky new high-rise condo.

The Smiths’ iconic “How Soon Is Now?” echoes in the background, and the girls, who call upon a deity named Manon, host a ritual in attempt to invoke the spirit within them. What they don’t realize is that Nancy has a plan to take Manon into herself completely, a dark power that the woman at the magick shop they frequently steal from knows is not the kind of magick that amateur witches should mess with without proper practice. The crone shop owner however recognizes Sarah is different from Nancy and the others, a consciousness that rises above the girls who have impulsive, quick-tempered intentions.

Inside the traditional current of teen film subtext in which we root for the new girl/the odd girl out/the girl with the chance to teach something/the girl who has been influenced by the luster of a life she is told will make her more popular, Sarah must defeat the soul-sucking people who seek to make her an object. We root for her because we see what she can’t see yet, and we know that something terrible might have to take place in order for her to come to fully developed realizations that push her into making important choices. This isn’t about making an A; it’s about making sure you aren’t burned at the stake for your high school to witness.

The Craft presents a lesson that coming-of-age films don’t typically make a point to show. A ballot is cast for prom queen or SAT prep sits on the horizon with college days looming, a girl must get a boy to like her, losing her virginity in the process. But this film is about serving the self—the craft of empowering oneself to surmount the archaic persecutions against women—taking back the threat of female power. But like a genie in a bottle that allows three wishes, this craft must be practiced and understood, respected completely before it can be outwardly used, or else it will perpetuate transgression.

The mystery of women, our cyclic connection to the moon, to medicine, math, written words—it has all been condemned and misappropriated as voodoo, black magick, devil worshipping, witch work. To many, witch means bitch. Bitch means witch. What is unconventional is evil. But ego is genderless, and it feeds a darker realm. The people who attack and target Sarah, Nancy, Bonnie and Rochelle represent that gender-neutral aspect that aims to banish female power. The age that is dawning doesn’t require school texts and chalk boards. The real war taking place requires ritual books and goblets filled with blood and wine, you know—typical high school material.

However, Sarah’s spell eventually backfires when Chris tries raping her at a party because he will stop at nothing to be near her and can’t wrap his head around these feelings he can’t part with. Nancy saves Sarah by throwing Chris out of the window with her powers, and he is killed. Despite the harm he has caused, Sarah is mostly just scared of Nancy now. It’s a turning point in the film when the roles shift and the people against them are not the ones to be feared—it’s the girls themselves that have to come face to face with their own shadows.

After Sarah tries casting a binding spell against Nancy to prevent her from causing harm against herself and others, the girls turn on Sarah. As a real life outcast who was banned from my own in-crowd group of girl friends in middle school, I see this as a blessing in disguise for girls who are meant for bigger things. It’s a calling of sorts—a low hanging cloud that beckons you away from cliques, from being another follower, from believing in something just because someone tells you its real. What about believing in you? Sarah has had the power all along—Nancy knew it. So she muddled Sarah down in the hopes she could overcome her and maintain what would only ever be a false sense of supremacy. All Queen Bees are only as strong as their weakest link; they can’t survive alone.

In the final act, Sarah and Nancy come head to head, Nancy filling up Sarah’s house with snakes and creepy crawlers, attempting to influence Sarah to commit suicide—the ultimate female betrayal in which Sarah’s death is the only means for Nancy to move forward. Motivated by life and a true sense of power that musters itself back to the surface, Sarah defeats Nancy and thereafter Nancy is sent to a mental hospital. We’re left with a few lingering feelings and questions. Most prominent is the feeling that good can defeat evil and that female power is strongest when the belief is in oneself, not what they’re told to follow. But what does this say about a coven of women? Can women work together without turning on each other? What factors would dispel women from competing over control and success? Is The Craft a lesson in the art of witchcraft, or is it a deeper lesson in the very real and everyday transformation we make from girls to women?

Kim Hoffman is a writer for AfterEllen.com and Curve Magazine. She currently keeps things weird in Portland, Oregon. Follow her on Twitter: @the_hoff.

‘Friday the 13th’: In Defense of Pamela Voorhees

So I asked Twitter the following question: “Who’s scarier: Jason or Jason’s mom?” Surprisingly, despite all the movies (12 in total) in which Jason is seen slashing throats and hanging victims, his mom (who’s only alive and running amok in the first film in 1980) is apparently considered the more horrifying killer. But I’ve always had a soft spot for Pamela. Not that I condone the gruesome murders of innocent people (of course not). But, unlike Jason, Pamela committed crimes of passion. Her crazy antics were actually revenge for her young son’s fatal drowning, which she felt was caused by the unjustifiable neglect of the camp counselors who failed to watch him (a longtime rumor has faulted the counselors for being too busy fornicating and not paying attention to Jason’s cries for help).

Friday the 13th

This guest post by Candice Frederick appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.

Raise your hand if you remember the chilling first Friday the 13th movie in which–spoiler alert–Jason Voorhees’ mom, Pamela, is the wild-eyed killer. Those final few moments when she, hobbling and bloody, is chasing down one of the Camp Crystal Lake camp counselors all over the grounds (to her impending death) are forever etched in my mind.

I'm Mrs. Voorhees — “I’m Mrs. Voorhees.”

Meanwhile, Jason, who is supposed to be dead, has been on an aimless bloody mission. He is maniacal in the true sense of the word–no trigger, no reasoning, just brutal killing sprees that seem to result only to keep his mother’s legacy alive. I always thought there was nothing scarier than a villain with no real motive. Because he can be coming for you, too. Why? Just because. You’d think his mother took care of all the culprits in the first movie. What’s left for Jason to do? He’s a terrifying, malicious machete-slinging corpse running around with mommy issues and no motive (cue disturbing Psycho score). This is who you should be most frightened of.

"Kill her, mommy." — “Kill her, mommy. Kill her.”

Upon further research, I’ve learned a very interesting back story for Pamela. She got pregnant at 16, and was married to a reckless abuser who she ended up chopping into pieces while he slept. Carrying her unborn son, she burned down the house with her husband’s body still in it. Guys, this is what happened in The Burning Bed (which was released in 1984), and remember, you rooted for Farrah Fawcett’s character in that.

But back to Pamela. Jason was apparently born in June 1946. Pamela and her son moved into a house that was said to be haunted, but of course Pamela, being the boss she is, braved the rumor (and probably got an excellent deal on the mortgage). In the summer of 1957, she later got a job as a cook at the now notorious Camp Crystal Lake. Things were going fairly well for the mother-son pair until Jason drowned. No body was recovered, which means Pamela never got the closure she so needed. And no one was held accountable for Jason’s death. You can only imagine how that could affect someone. This is about the time that I think she started to lose her grip on reality, and began poisoning the water at the then shut-down camp to further delay its reopening. (Her son was killed there and no one seems to care. I mean, I get it.) She did, however, spend six months in a mental institution before she was rehired at the camp in 1958. But she still had that vendetta and understandably couldn’t get her son’s mysterious death out of her mind. Hence, she resorted to her bloodbath, for which she is most famous. This is about where I depart her pity train. I empathize with her because she truly became a broken woman with years of traumatic memories. But she really could have taken permanent residence at that mental institution; it might have saved many lives (and possibly prevented the Jason outbreak).

"My only son, Jason." — “My only son, Jason.”

Now that the antiheroes are having their moment in the spotlight, I have really been thinking about how some of our most dishonorable villains came to be. Pamela’s origin story is particularly intriguing as it inspired one of the most unnerving serial killers in cinematic history. So the next time someone asks you, “Who’s scarier: Jason or his mom?” how will you respond?

This is cross-posted with permission from Reel Talk.

Candice Frederick is an NABJ award-winning print journalist, film critic, and blogger for Reel Talk.

‘Birth of the Living Dead’: Women and Gender in Cult Films and B-Movies

Birth of the Living Dead is Rob Kuhns’ documentary of the making of George Romero’s 1968 cult horror genre game-changer Night of the Living Dead. Bitch Flicks writers Max Thornton and Amanda Rodriguez discuss both the documentary (BOTLD) and the original film itself (NOTLD).

A Conversation Between Max Thornton & Amanda Rodriguez

Birth of the Living Dead is Rob Kuhns’ documentary of the making of George Romero’s 1968 cult horror genre game-changer Night of the Living Dead.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TowiviD3xgE”]

Bitch Flicks writers Max Thornton and Amanda Rodriguez discuss both the documentary (BOTLD) and the original film itself (NOTLD):

MT: I spent my teens as an ardent fan of all things zombie (and I have a lot of theories about what this says about my relationship to embodiment as a trans person, but that’s another discussion). I went on a zombie walk in London for the 40th anniversary of NOTLD in 2008. I skipped a college class to go meet George Romero when he was doing a signing for the Creepshow re-release. My first academic publication is a chapter on zombies (and queerness, and Jesus, because those are my other favorite things). My cred as a Romero fan is well established, and I’m guessing yours is, too. Do you think someone who’s less of a zombie nut — or perhaps even someone who hasn’t seen NOTLD — could enjoy Birth of the Living Dead?

AR: I am a huge horror and zombie fan, but I didn’t start out life that way. I saw NOTLD when I was 4. I can empathize with Ebert’s observations of the younger children who didn’t have the resources to protect themselves from the fear and dread engendered by the film. I refused to watch NOTLD again until I’d graduated college because it was so formative and so terrifying. Perhaps in large part because of NOTLD, I have always been fascinated with what frightens us and why. The deep psychology of fear and what that fear represents within a larger cultural context have been the subjects of much of my critical analysis and fiction writing. I love the idea that horror, in particular the zombie, is a physical manifestation of our societal fears.

Karen cannibalizes her father, illustrating society's fear of the brutality of youth. — Karen cannibalizes her father, illustrating society’s fear of the brutality of youth.

That said, I’ve only properly seen NOTLD once, so I think the documentary can be interesting to people who aren’t as entrenched in zombie culture; although who isn’t these days, considering they’re such a popular horror subgenre? I found Romero’s continued enthusiasm for the film all these years later to be quite endearing. Film nerds and aspiring indie filmmakers could find value in this documentary. People interested in history, particularly the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war could benefit from seeing this documentary, as it and NOTLD deal with those huge cultural landmarks from a different angle than we’re used to seeing. I also really appreciated the way the documentary casts NOTLD as a meta-narrative of the actual making of the film: the DIY approach and guerrilla tactics the crew used despite the huge filmmaking machine that is Hollywood. The process of making the film becomes its own protest against the Hollywood status quo, the insistence on professional actors, the elitism of art and entertainment. In a way, this is exactly the function of zombies; to disrupt the normalcy and complacency of institutions.

MT: Is this documentary perhaps a little too much of a hagiography? Does it give Romero too much credit for inventing the zombie as we know it, provide too little contextualization of the Haitian origins of the zombi, and thus perhaps whitewash the racism, colonialism, and cultural appropriation inherent in our cultural enthusiasm for the zombie?

Haitian Zombi in 'I Walked with the Dead' — Haitian Zombi in ‘I Walked with the Dead’

AR: Though I thought Romero was a sweet man, and as a fan, I couldn’t help but gobble up his nostalgic reminiscences, the documentary underscored for me the importance of the concept of the death of the author and the fallacy of the notion of authorial intent. It is clear that Romero had no idea what he was making. This film is considered a cult classic and of cinematic significance in spite of him. He makes it clear that he didn’t intend to comment on race by casting a black protagonist, and I doubt he had any idea he was critiquing the Vietnam war or truly upsetting the horror genre in a profound way. I think the film does all those things in a compelling way, which is why it withstands the test of time and is infinitely imitable. Without divesting him of his agency completely, the documentary shows that film experts and filmmakers today understand the important work he created more than Romero himself does.

You’re right that the documentary seems to gloss over the true origins of the zombi, which does divorce it from its racially-charged roots. However, I always thought the movies that predate NOTLD featuring Haitian zombis were painfully racist. Romero zombies are different from the Haitian zombi and speak to our culture in a different way…probably because the Romero zombie is versatile and can morph into any of our greatest fears. It would have made sense, though, to have the documentary further explore the origins of the zombi. Since BOTLD is so racially aware, I would have enjoyed seeing it tackle the implications of colonialism and appropriation. Do you think Romero’s so-called reinvention of the zombi is ultimately racist? Does his malleable notion of zombies only address first-world fears and insecurities?

MT: I think this is something that deserves more interrogation than it tends to receive — consider the fact that he always cites I Am Legend as a huge influence, and not the Haitian voodoo roots or even the massively racist earlier zombie films like White Zombie — but then NOTLD doesn’t actually use the term “zombie.” As well as getting more credit than he deserves, perhaps Romero gets more flak than he deserves when we criticize his appropriation of the zombi, because, as you point out, he doesn’t necessarily know quite what he was doing. (I would note that some people are attempting to balance out the deification of Romero as inventor of the modern zombie: the editors of my zombie chapter, for example, were very insistent on giving Romero’s co-writer Russo equal credit.)

I really enjoyed the film’s emphasis on the social context of the late sixties and how that shaped much of the imagery and message of NOTLD: race riots, Nam, anger, disillusionment with the hippie movement’s failure to elicit major structural change. Are we currently in a comparable period of crisis and distrust in institutions, reflected in the renewed zombie boom of the past decade? And yet is the profound social consciousness of NOTLD largely missing from zombie stories today? For example, I rage-quit The Walking Dead at the end of Season One because it seemed to me so profoundly the white men’s story, with the female characters and characters of color remaining firmly secondary to the almighty White Man. I think maybe I find this particularly disappointing in zombie stories because I want more out of a genre rooted in a movie that was so far ahead of its time in its attitude toward race.

'Night of the Living Dead' hero Ben played by Duane Jones — ‘Night of the Living Dead’ hero Ben played by Duane Jones

AR: I think zombies will always appeal to us because our society is a house of cards. Zombies remind us of a life without the comforts of technology, safety, and structure. The more complicated and reliant we become on institutions and corporations, the more relevant dystopian fantasies like zombies become because we are one global crisis away from that house of cards collapsing on us, leaving us weak, reeling, and unable to fend for ourselves.

I think zombie movies are being made left and right because they’re a hot item, but a zombie movie isn’t truly great unless the zombies are a compelling metaphor. The last zombie movie I remember adoring was 28 Days Later because it explored the terrifying fear of pandemics, the brutality of the military, and the rage that exists inside us, constantly questioning whether or not human nature is really as pure and good as we’re led to believe. Though Naomie Harris’ Selena was its secondary protagonist and her characterization falters at the end, she is a majorly badass, smart Black woman who kicks some serious keister with a machete. (However, I didn’t love the sequel 28 Weeks Later because I thought that was some misogynistic bullshit.)

Selena Machete — Selena slays first and asks questions…not at all.

I, too, have been struggling with the TV show version of The Walking Dead. I even wrote a Bitch Flicks article comparing the superior graphic novel series to the show. You’re totally right; the show is reactionary, racist, and sexist. It’s not doing much new or interesting with its post-apocalyptic material, which has vast potential to make meaningful commentary about what day-to-day life looks like when you’ve stripped our society away. There are questions ripe for the asking, such as: What do morals look like? How do you raise children? Can we work together against a common enemy (as touched on in the BOTLD), or are we inherently self-motivated?

What do you think the zombie trope “means”? Why do you think it’s still got such a stranglehold on us after over four decades?

Are zombies then not really a horror subgenre but a dystopian subgenre? Maybe the words “zombie” and “apocalypse” always go together. Can you think of any zombie film examples where the threat of utter human and societal annihilation were not issues?

MT: I wonder — and this is highly speculative, and clearly born out of my perspective as a theologian with seminarian friends who worry a lot about the decline of mainline Christianity in the US — if the zombie’s place as a monster of the 20th and 21st century is intertwined with secularism. Is it a manifestation of a certain cultural anxiety related to the “rise of the nones” — that is, a cathartic expression of a fear of being swallowed up by materialism (in both the philosophical and the economic senses of the term)? As mindless masses of rotting flesh whose only drives are the basest physical urges, zombies represent the logical extreme of pure materialism, and I suspect it’s not a coincidence that our cultural psyche is obsessed with them in a time when global capitalism is engulfing everything while traditional channels for religious/spiritual sensibilities are on the decline — among the young westerners who are the primary audience for zombie culture, at least.

Zombies gravitate to the mall in 'Dawn of the Dead', consumers even in death. — Zombies gravitate to the mall in ‘Dawn of the Dead’, capitalist consumers even in death.

It’s an odd and frustrating paradox that zombie stories are always these grand-scale, global apocalypses, and yet they always focus on your straight-white-male protagonists. This piece does a grand job of addressing this issue. I’d take World War Z as an example of the paradox: the book actually does take on the geopolitics of the zombie apocalypse on a truly global scale, whereas the film is a by-the-numbers Hollywood disaster flick where the global disaster is mere backdrop to the story of whiterocis dude hero and his perfect(ly passive) white family. I think that’s perhaps symptomatic of the increasing polarization of mainstream and independent content in our age of digital distribution, and I suspect that mainstream pop culture zombie tales are only going to get more anodyne and more unthinkingly supportive of the heteropatriarchal status quo, while we’ll have to look to non-traditional channels of production and distribution for interesting stories. I haven’t yet watched Ze, Zombie, a queer zombie film, but I’m deeply intrigued — not least, I admit, because the top update on the website is currently an apology for the film’s excessive whiteness…we’ve a long way still to go, it seems.

For all its social consciousness, though, does NOTLD (and BOTLD – only one of the talking heads is a woman; African-American men are interviewed, but African-American women are not) fall into the trap of so many progressive social movements, both in the sixties (e.g. black power) and still today (e.g. movement atheism): failure to properly include, address, and account for women? Do you know of any actually feminist zombie films (I can’t think of any)? Why is this such a cultural lacuna? Other movie monsters have been reinterpreted in explicitly feminist ways: vampires (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), werewolves (Ginger Snaps) — doesn’t the zombie have feminist potential as a movie monster?

In 'Ginger Snaps', werewolf Ginger revels in her new power. — In ‘Ginger Snaps’, werewolf Ginger revels in her new power.

AR: I’m totally with you on your critique of World War Z the film vs. the book. We’re like E.T. and Elliott here because I wrote a Bitch Flicks review critiquing the film: its narrative choices that narrowed the scope of the book until it was unrecognizable, the way it cast Gerry as a messianic figure, and its under-development of its potentially fierce female characters, rendering them as nothing more than symbols to reflect back upon Gerry’s manly manliness.

I’ve always thought that NOTLD wasn’t feminist when I consider all the female characters in the movie. I wish someone would have commented on the flat female NOTLD depictions in the documentary, but I guess the movie wouldn’t come out looking so well…the documentary does kind of lionize NOTLD.

They were coming to get you, and they got you, Barbara.

I think Jennifer’s Body could maybe be categorized as a female zombie flick, but it’s debatable whether or not its feminist. Return of the Living Dead 3 was kind of a big deal because the protagonist was a woman and a zombie, and she became a sexual icon for teenage boys everywhere. I think part of the problem with associating zombies and women is that zombies aren’t usually sexy, and it seems like a requirement that women and sexuality are linked in cinema whether it’s in a feminist or a non-feminist way. So, I’d say that the lack of feminist zombie films speaks to a larger issue, in which our culture insists on associating women and sexuality.

Mindy Clarke stars as a sexay zombie in 'Return of the Living Dead 3' — Sexay zombie in ‘Return of the Living Dead 3’

There’s no real reason, however, why a woman can’t be the zombie killing heroine, though it happens so infrequently. We’ve got shitty examples like the Resident Evil series, but I think there’s a lot of potential to critique the patriarchy in a film that sets up a lone woman (or a small group of women) working against the never-ending onslaught, the plague of patriarchy. Wow, now I’m stoked to see that movie! Think it’ll ever get made?

Romero identifies as “Spanish” as per his Sharks vs. Jets anecdote in BOTLD, but he’s of Cuban & Lithuanian descent. He’s never represented as a director of color (I bet his last name, as he mentions, is often mistaken for Italian), and I wonder if that has an effect on the distribution and reception of his films? Would horror films directed by a POC known to have an underlying social and political commentary be shunned by the mainstream or turned into an even more exclusive niche (i.e. something like “politically-charged cult horror films by people of color”…ugh)? I also wonder if that’s why he’s well-known for casting characters of color in his films without sort of thinking about it: because he views race differently than, say, his white director counterparts?

Romero contextualizes his sense of race using 'West Side Story' — Romero contextualizes his sense of his race using ‘West Side Story’

MT: Your point about Romero and race is really interesting, and I hadn’t considered that before. The idea that he’s a POC who’s never read that way does go a long way to explain the use of race in his films. The history and theory of the “passing” POC is too often elided or overlooked in a lot of critical race discussions, and perhaps this element nuances the question of misappropriation of zombi above? It definitely merits more analysis!

And I think Romero’s engagement with both race and gender does get more explicit in his later films, notably Day of the Dead (clearly a heavy influence on 28 Days Later) and the very underrated Land of the Dead. It’s not an accident that Land‘s Big Daddy, the first zombie to develop a sense of consciousness, is African-American, and Land‘s whole narrative of class warfare is extremely relevant. (Now I kind of want to have future discussions about each of Dawn, Day, and Land of the Dead, looking at the evolution of Romero’s social consciousness over the years and films!)

AR: I’m in complete agreement about Romero’s evolution as a socially and politically conscious director in his later films. Dawn of the Dead‘s critique of consumerism is probably the reason that I insist upon socially relevant zombie interpretations. I also find it fascinating and a bit depressing that the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake was lazy in that it eschewed the critical commentary inherent in a mall-based zombie flick, proving once again that we’re not necessarily getting better or more self-aware as a people. Romero’s Diary of the Dead I also thought was an interesting engagement on the notions of the viral connection of online media and the viral nature of information, despite its ultimate disappointment as a film. Although Land of the Dead wasn’t as commercially successful nor as engaging as some of Romero’s other films, I, too, was impressed by its class critique and some of its underlying racial commentary. However, I think the Black man emerging from the water with his new sense of self-awareness is a problematic depiction, putting Africans and African Americans on a slower time line for evolution than white people, claiming (perhaps unintentionally) that their consciousness is nascent, which is a disturbing paternalistic attitude.

Zombie leader, Big Daddy, emerging from the water.

This is one of my long-held issues with the horror, sci-fi, and fantasy genres. In order to tell these socially and politically charged stories, they embody the Other in monster flesh: think the apartheid conversation in District 9 with the grotesque alien bug people or Oz, the werewolf, along with Angel, the vampire, in Buffy and even more so in the Angel series or the way all the Star Trek series are rife with the creation of Othered alien species to elucidate the plight of an oppressed people (not to mention the racism inherent in the vicious warrior Klingons as stand-ins for Black people or the antisemitism of the greedy, urbane Ferengi as stand-ins for Jewish people). While the metaphor comes across, it often dehumanizes and further Others those it is attempting to bolster.

I could talk about this stuff for days and days! Count me in for future convos on the rest of the Romero zombie films! I’m planning to watch his Survival of the Dead, the last of Romero’s zombie series, for a Halloween-y treat since I’ve shockingly never seen it before.

—-

Thanks for joining us for this conversation between Max Thornton and Amanda Rodriguez on ‘Birth of the Living Dead’ and ‘Night of the Living Dead’. Keep an eye out for Max’s upcoming interview with Esther Cassidy, producer of ‘Birth of the Living Dead’.

The Blood of ‘Carrie’

Most feminist criticism of Stephen King’s Carrie has focused on the male fear of powerful women that the author said inspired the film, with the anti-Carrie camp finding her death at the end to signify the defeat of the “monstrous feminine” and therefore a triumph of sexism. But Stephen King’s honesty about what inspired his 1973 book notwithstanding, Carrie is as much an articulation of a feminist nightmare as it is of a patriarchal one, with neither party coming out on top.

This guest post by Holly Derr previously appeared at Ms. Magazine and is cross-posted with permission as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.

Carrie is largely about how women find their own channels of power, but also what men fear about women and women’s sexuality. Writing the book in 1973 and only three years out of college, I was fully aware of what Women’s Liberation implied for me and others of my sex. Carrie is woman feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight at the end of the book. —Stephen King, Danse Macabre

Most feminist criticism of Stephen King’s Carrie has focused on the male fear of powerful women that the author said inspired the film, with the anti-Carrie camp finding her death at the end to signify the defeat of the “monstrous feminine” and therefore a triumph of sexism. But Stephen King’s honesty about what inspired his 1973 book notwithstanding, Carrie is as much an articulation of a feminist nightmare as it is of a patriarchal one, with neither party coming out on top.

The rise of Second Wave feminism in the ’70s posed serious threats to the patriarchal order–as well it should have. But even for those who think change is not only necessary but good, change can be pretty scary. This, with a hat tip to the universality of being bullied, is one of the reasons Carrie scares everyone.

Carrie (Chloe Grace Moretz) and Margaret White (Julianne Moore)

While men in the ’70s felt threatened by the unprecedented numbers of women standing up for themselves and attempting such radical social changes as being recognized as equal under the law, women themselves must have felt some anxiety that the obstacles to fully realizing themselves might be too big to conquer. The story therefore resonates with men in terms of the fear of (metaphorical) castration prompted by changing gender roles, and with women in terms of the fear that no matter how powerful we become, social forces are still so aligned against us that fighting back might destroy not just the patriarchy but ourselves.

Feminism was not the only thing on the rise in the ’70s: so was Christian fundamentalism. In 1976, the year that the original movie debuted, 34 percent of Protestant Americans told the Gallup Poll that they had had born-again experiences, leading George Gallup himself to declare 1976 the Year of the Evangelical. In fact evangelism, then as now–when 41 percent of Americans report being born again–was one of feminism’s more formidable foes, one of those very social forces that would rather destroy women than see them powerful.

The triggering event of Carrie–the infamous shower scene–is a product of the meeting of these two forces. Because of a fundamentalist Christian worldview in which menstruation is not simply a biological process but rather evidence of Eve’s original sin being visited upon her daughters, Carrie‘s mother does nothing to prepare her for getting her period. When she starts bleeding at school, Carrie naturally panics, and as a result faces the scorn of her peers–who laugh at her for not knowing what’s happening–and the scorn of her mother, who believes that “After the blood the boys come. Like sniffing dogs, grinning and slobbering, trying to find out where that smell is.”

I can’t believe I’m about to go all Freudian here, but for the male viewer the shock of seeing unexpected blood between one’s legs clearly represents a fear of castration–a literal embodiment of King’s anxieties about feminism. From the woman’s perspective, the menstrual blood obviously signifies Carrie’s maturation–coming into her power–which has been marred by fundamentalism.

The new Carrie and the old Carrie (Sissy Spacek)

Without making the new remake of the movie any more violent, director Kimberly Peirce emphasizes the imagery of this inciting event by adding waaaaay more blood to her Carrie. When Carrie gets her period in the shower, there’s more blood than in Brian De Palma’s film. When Carrie gets some of that blood on her gym teacher, which happens in both films, Peirce adds more of it, and the camera lingers on it longer and returns to it more often.

When Carrie’s mother locks her in the closet, Peirce has the crucifix bleed–something that doesn’t happen in the first movie. The blood of the crucifix connects Carrie’s first period to the suffering of Christ, deepening the relationship between debased femininity and religion.

Then, when Carrie gets pig blood dumped on her head at the prom, there’s not just more of it in the second film: Pierce shows the blood landing on her in slow motion three times. This final deluge of blood echoes a scene that Pierce added to the beginning of the movie, in which Carrie’s mother endures the bloody birth of her daughter. Carrie, then, is essentially born again at the prom, and the devastation she wreaks can be read as a result not of her feminine power but of the corruption of it by religion.

Peirce told Women and Hollywood that her goal was to make Carrie as sympathetic as possible. She removes the male gaze aspect of the original shower scene, in which many of the girls are naked and the long, slow shots of Carrie’s body are rather pornified. She makes sympathy for Carrie’s primary nemesis at school pretty much impossible by changing her from an angry girl in an abusive relationship to a sociopath without a conscience. In the new film, Carrie even has the strength to challenge her mother’s theology. Her prom date is more likeable and Peirce uses his death–something De Palma doesn’t reveal until the end–as further motivation for Carrie’s rampage.

None of this changes the fact that Carrie dies at the end, but it does foreground the idea that the message doesn’t have to be that powerful women are indeed dangerous. It can be that fundamentalism is dangerous to women.

If you’re a feminist, I say go see Carrie. Watching her be destroyed–but not without taking out a lot of the patriarchy with her–and then, as a viewer, emerging again into the sunlight unscathed, allows feminists to process some of our deepest fears about what we’re up against. Then we can get on with making the world a place where religious beliefs don’t corrupt our sexuality, where women don’t have to destroy themselves to be powerful and where women’s equality doesn’t trigger men’s fear of their own doom.

Holly L. Derr is a feminist media critic who writes about theater, film, television, video games and comics. Follow her @hld6oddblend and on her tumblr, Feminist Fandom. For more of the Feminist Guide to Horror Movies, check out Parts One, Two, Three, and Four.