A Walkthrough of the New ‘Evil Dead’ Trailer

The Evil Dead movies are some of my all-time favorites. I love them the way you can only really love something you first saw in your teens: with nostalgia, delight, and fierce ardor.
Just looking at this makes me incoherent with happiness. ;aksdjf.
So I have a lot of complicated feelings about the forthcoming remake. On the one hand, precedent suggests that any remake of a classic horror film has a high likelihood of being terrible (see: Psycho, The Wicker Man, The Omen, etc.), and what’s an Evil Dead movie without Bruce Campbell anyway? On the other hand, The Bruce is onboard as a producer, as is original director Sam Raimi; and, now that the new red band trailer is out, I am starting to get excited.
00:09 –Look at the cabin! It’s so perfectly Evil Dead, just looking at it makes me happy.
00:18 –Aah! Creepy basement of taxidermy.
00:24 –DON’T SAY IT DON’T WRITE IT DON’T HEAR IT! Oh you dumb kids. You never do what you’re told.
(Actually I’m pretty interested to see how the movie will deal with the problem of self-awareness. Will they just be dumb horror-movie kids who ignore all warnings, or will there be some nice meta Cabin in the Woods-style explanations for their behavior? Is it going to pretend the last 30 years of film never happened, or is it going to acknowledge them?)
00:27– Shakycam through the woods. Nostalgia is threatening to overwhelm me. Maybe I should just go marathon the originals.
00:31– Well that’s new! A creepy girl rising from a lake. I can get behind that.
00:39– “We’re all going to die tonight.”
00:41 –FROM THE CREATORS OF THE HORROR CLASSIC. Comforting words.
00:50– I’m not quite sure what’s happening here. A red-clad figure appears to be catching a red ball. Somehow this is the creepiest image in the trailer to me.
00:51– Although the long-haired girl crawling along the ground, The Ring-style, comes close.
00:54– Lightbulb! Nostalgia again. The bloody lightbulb is one of my favorite little moments from the first Evil Dead.
Somehow simultaneously silly and creepy, which is the Evil Dead franchise in a nutshell.
00:57– Another creepy girl standing there. There are an awful lot of creepy girls in this trailer, which seems to be the biggest influence of the past few years of horror. Someone really needs to write a Men, Women, and Chain Saws-type analysis of all these J-horror silent creepy girls in contemporary horror.
1:05 –Chainsaw! This can only end well.
1:06– Possessed arm! This is definitely going to end well.
1:07– Chainsaw, meet possessed arm.
1:08– A girl in KISS makeup appears to be getting stabby on another girl.
1:10– Lamp getting spattered with blood. An even better lightbulb moment.
1:12– Explosion!
1:14– Oh no. The tree-rape. Um. Of all the scenes in the original, is that one we really need to see again?
This sad puppy has just seen moment 1:14 in the new Evil Dead trailer, and now is very very sad.
1:20 –She just sliced her own tongue in two with a box cutter! Okay, the gorehound in me must admit that’s kind of awesome.
Honestly, overall I have mixed feelings about this trailer. It looks like a mash-up of some great horror tropes of the past few years all in a classic Evil Dead setting, and there look to be at least a couple quite inventive horror set-pieces. As a straight horror film, there’s plenty to like here.
However, I’m both intrigued and concerned as to the new film’s approach to gender. One of the most striking points about the remake is the fact that the Bruce Campbell character has been gender-flipped. Of course, as Bruce himself observes in this video, it was already a gender-flip in the original. Ash was the Final Girl, and I’m awfully worried that, in making the Ash character female this time, the film-makers are going to wind up watering down everything that made Ash a memorable character and falling back on traditional Final Girl tropes.
The trailer does little to allay my fears on this front. The female protagonist gets to do a lot of standard Final Girl screaming and hiding, and most of the talking and action is done by the nerdy guy in flannel. (When my brother watched the trailer, not knowing in advance about the gender-flipped Ash, he assumed this guy was the new Ash.)
I want to see a female Ash. I want to see a woman in a movie who is as goofy and prone to slapstick as Bruce Campbell in the original Evil Dead films. I want to see a woman in a movie who follows Ash’s character arc, from cowardly dweeb to loudmouthed braggart with a chainsaw for an arm.
I want to see this, and I am not sure that the Evil Dead remake will give it to me. But I’ll certainly be there in 2013 to find out.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Horror Week 2012: The Nervous Wife: Horror Stereotype or Statement on American Masculinity?

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This is a guest review by Tamara Winfrey Harris. Includes spoilers for Paranormal Activity (2007) and Orphan (2009).

There, outside the window, in the dark, are those eyes again. Yellow. Animal, but at the wrong height to be a coyote or fox–human height. And those amber, animal eyes are locked on hers. She slams shut the kitchen curtains and races to the living room window. The eyes are there, too, peering from the family’s wooded lot outside of town. Family. She thinks of her sleeping child down the hall and her heart beats faster. She shuts off the lights, hiding herself and her little girl from the gaze of whoever, whatever, is outside, and she dials the police. They arrive, lights flashing, just as her husband’s truck pulls into the driveway. They find nothing. The head cop chuckles, patting her on the shoulder, while looking at her husband, “Don’t worry. I think we just have a case of nervous wife here.”

Thank you, Paranormal Witness (Syfy, Wednesdays, 10 p.m. ET), for giving me a name for a ubiquitous horror trope. It goes like this: Woman begins to experience disturbing things. She shares this with her male partner (or other man), who responds by patronizing her, saying she is tired, silly, imagining things, nervous. It is only when the occurrences escalate and the male protagonist himself experiences something otherworldly that he will believe.

Call it The Nervous Wife, which is more concise than “women are super emotional, illogical and fearful and cannot be trusted.”

The Nervous Wife is a staple of the haunted house film genre, and now that paranormal shows are slowly taking over the small screen, it can be found there, too. In the first season of the FX channel’s American Horror Story, the character Vivien Harmon had to be committed and impregnated with a devil baby, and her teenage daughter dead and haunting the family abode, before her husband would believe that something spooky was going down.

Yes. Yes. I know. Science says ghosts and goblins and such don’t exist. True enough. It is natural for a body to be skeptical of supernatural claims. Would you believe it if you were told the portal to hell was in your laundry room? Likely not. The problem is that women in horror films are rarely, if ever, the skeptical ones. Logic is portrayed as a man thing. Little ladies are quick to believe the unbelievable. And to be frightened by it.

An example of this can be found in the horror juggernaut Paranormal Activity. In it, a young couple, Katie and Micah, live in a subdivision tract house that is plagued by threatening phenomena. Katie, who endured a brush with the supernatural as a child, is fearful and seeks relief from a psychic, who counsels that the best thing to do, until the home can be cleansed, is not to engage the spirit. In this instance, the male protagonist believes in the haunting; he does not, however, believe anyone’s advice on handling the problem. In a perfect illustration of male privilege and bullying in action, Micah dismisses the expert advice and laughs off Katie’s fear of an increasingly-menacing spirit. As his girlfriend becomes more frightened, Micah becomes more oblivious to her and her concerns. By the end of the film, their relationship feels uncomfortably emotionally abusive, with Katie withdrawing and Micah seemingly doing everything possible to provoke the thing that is terrorizing his mate.

There is often another feature of The Nervous Wife trope. Once the male protagonist (partner of The Nervous Wife) realizes a place is infested with spectres, he will not be cowed. Like a drunken dude bro outside the bar at 2 a.m., a dog protecting his territory, or Tom Petty–he won’t back down. He will rage. He will threaten to beat a demon’s ass. (The manly crew on The Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures is all about this method of posturing ghost busting, which makes them ripe for parody.) He will refuse to relocate. He will reject fear in favor of wrong-headed investigation. All this, even if it causes an escalation in dangerous activity or discomfort for his loved ones.
At first glance, the message is clear: Men are logical and brave protectors who do what needs to be done–even over the objections of lesser beings. Women, on the other hand, are emotional and fearful and need to be protected. But there is a twist. In most cases the female protagonist is proven right. And, as a result of his hubris and general assholery, the male protagonist sometimes meets a bad end, as in Paranormal Activity or Orphan, a horror/thriller where a doomed husband refuses to believe that his adopted child is really a murderous woman with hypopituitarism until he’s stuck on the end of her knife.

On Facebook, my buddy Barry pegged The Nervous Wife trope as “a statement against the traditional macho sexism of the American male.” Bravado, aggression and ignoring the needs of others is a losing approach–at least against the supernatural. I think he may be right, but The Nervous Wife trope is still troubling, even if it is a deserved jab at patriarchy.

The problem is that the trope, while weirdly subversive, is ultimately regressive. The aforementioned narratives all embrace rigid, traditional gender lines for male and female protagonists. They then reject masculinity as ultimately useless and harmful. But why are they so invested in base, simplistic and incomplete illustrations of masculinity and femininity in the first place? The women I know are far braver and more logical than their horror flick counterparts; the men more caring and thoughtful. And while I know Hollywood is not real life, I also know that it is possible to draw complex fictional characters that are not caricatures of their respective genders.

For once, I’d like to hear a horror husband respond to his wife’s concerns with “Let’s call the cops and check that out!” (because you are normally a really smart and level-headed woman and I trust your judgment), or a solicitous miss calm her demon-plagued boyfriend with a “Darling, you’ve been working too hard. Perhaps you’re just nervous.”

 


Tamara Winfrey Harris is a freelance writer living in the Indianapolis area. Her work focuses on race and gender, and their intersection with pop culture and politics. She is currently senior editor at Racialicious and a contributor to Clutch and Frugivore magazines. Tamara is working on her first book–a feminist exploration of black women and marriage, and the sexist and racist underpinnings of the “black marriage crisis” narrative.

Learn more about Tamara and her work at her website.

The Terror of Little Girls: Social Anxiety About Women in Horrifying Girlhood

Horror films have a long-standing tradition of commenting on the social fears and anxieties of their time.
Another universally recognized truth of horror is that scary children are terrifying–especially little girls.
While an analysis of “creepy children” in horror films usually proclaims that they are providing commentary on a loss of innocence, and it would make sense that a little girl is the “ultimate” in innocence, it can’t be that simple. We wouldn’t be so shaken to the core by possessed, haunted, violent little girls if we were simply supposed to be longing for innocent times of yesteryear.
Instead, these little girls embody society’s growing fears of female power and independence. Fearing a young girl is the antithesis of what we are taught–stories of missing, kidnapped or sexually abused girls (at least white girls) get far more news coverage and mass sympathy than stories of boy victims. Little girls are innocent victims and need protection.
In the Victorian era, the ideal female was supposed to be pale, fainting-prone and home-bound. Feminist literary icons Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar write about this nineteenth-century ideal in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women:

“At its most extreme, this nineteenth-century ideal of the frail, even sickly female ultimately led to the glorification of the dead or dying woman. The most fruitful subject for literature, announced the American romancer Edgar Allan Poe in 1846, is ‘the death… of a beautiful woman’… But while dead women were fascinating, dying girl-children were even more enthralling… These episodes seem to bring to the surface an extraordinary imperative that underlay much of the nineteenth-century ideology of femininity: in one way or another, woman must be ‘killed’ into passivity for her to acquiesce in what Rousseau and others considered her duty of self-abnegation ‘relative to men.'”

The feminine “ideal” (and its relation to literature) coincided with women beginning the long fight for suffrage and individual rights. It’s no surprise, then, that men wanted to symbolically kill off the woman so she could fulfill her ultimate passive role. There was something comforting about this to audiences.
Rhoda Penmark will not lose to a boy. Or anyone else.
Fast forward to the 1950s and 60s, and the modern horror genre as we know it emerged and began evolving into something that provided social commentary while playing on audiences’ deepest fears (the “other,” invasion, demonic possession, nuclear mutations and the end of the world).
We know that horror films have always been rife with puritanical punishment/reward for promiscuous women/virgins (the “Final Girl” trope), and violence toward women or women needing to be rescued are common themes. These themes comfort audiences, and confirm their need to keep women subjugated in their proper place. It’s no coincidence that the 50s and 60s were seeing sweeping social change in America (the Pill, changing divorce laws, resurgence of the ERA, a lead-up to Roe v. Wade).
Terrifying little girls also make their debut in this era. Their mere presence in these films spoke not only to audiences’ fears of children losing innocence, but also the intense fear that little girls–not yet even women–would have the power to overthrow men. These girl children of a generation of women beginning a new fight for rights were terrifying–these girls would grow up knowing they could have power.
The Bad Seed‘s Rhoda Penmark (played by Patty McCormack in the 1956 film), genetically predisposed to be a sociopath, murders a classmate and the janitor who suspects her. Her classmate–a boy–beats her in a penmanship contest, and she beats him to death with her tap shoes. A little girl, in competition with a boy, loses, and kills. While in the novel Rhoda gets away with her crimes, the Hays Code commanded that the film version “punished” her for her crimes and she’s struck by lightning. It’s revealed that Rhoda’s sociopathic tendencies come from her maternal grandmother, a serial killer. This notion of female murderous rage, passed down through generations and claiming boys/men as its victim, certainly reflects social fear at the time.
In 1968, Night of the Living Dead premiered on big screens and has been seen as commenting on racism/the Civil Rights movement, Cold War-era politics and critiquing America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. However, little Karen Cooper’s (Kyra Schon) iconic scene has long disturbed audiences the most. Infected by zombies, she eats her father and impales her mother with a trowel. A horror twist to an Oedipal tale, one could see Karen as living out the gravest fears of those against the women’s movement/second-wave feminism. Possessed by a demon, she eats her father (consumes the patriarchy) and kills her mother (overtaking her mother’s generation with masculine force).
Little Karen Cooper consumes patriarchy and overtakes her mother.
Five years later, Roe v. Wade had been decided (giving women the right to legal first-trimester abortions), the Pill was legal, no-fault divorce was more acceptable and women began flooding the workforce.
Meanwhile, on the big screen, sweet little Regan MacNeil–the daughter of an over-worked, atheist mother–becomes possessed by the devil.
The Exorcist was based on a novel, which itself was based on the exorcism case of a little boy. Of course, the novelist and filmmakers wanted audiences to be disturbed and terrified, so the sex of the possessed protagonist changed (would it be as unsettling if it was a little boy?).
Chris MacNeil, Regan’s mother, goes to great lengths to help her daughter, and resorts to Catholicism when all else has failed. Regan reacts violently to religious symbols, lashes out and kills priests, speaks in a masculine voice and masturbates with a crucifix. This certainly isn’t simply a “demonic possession” horror film, especially since it was written and made into a film at the height of the fight for women’s rights (the Catholic church being an adamant foe to reproductive rights). Only after Regan releases her demon, which possesses a priest (who flings himself out of a window to commit suicide), does she regain her innocence and girlhood.
Tied and bound, Regan haunts and kills men, and reacts violently to religious images.
What her mother and her culture are embracing–atheism, working women, reproductive rights, sexual aggressiveness–can be seen as the “demons” that overcome the innocent girl and kill men (and traditional religion).
These films are have terrified audiences for decades, and for good reason. The musical scores, the direction, the jarring and shocking images–however, they also play to society’s deepest fears about women and feminism. For little girls to be possessed is the ultimate fall.
In 1980, The Shining was released. Yet another film adaptation of a novel (Stanley Kubrick’s treatment of Stephen King’s novel), this film contains two of the creepiest little girls in film history–the Grady girls. The Shining shines a light on crises of masculinity. Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, is a recovering alcoholic who has hurt his son, Danny, in the past. When he takes his wife, Wendy, and son with him to be caretakers of a hotel over a winter, his descent into madness quickly begins. Danny has telepathic abilities, and sees and experiences the hotel’s violent past. As he rides his Big Wheel through the hotel, he stops when he sees two little girls begging him to “Come play with us Danny. Forever.” These girls–dead daughters of Grady, a previous caretaker who killed his family and himself–are trying to pull Danny into their world. Danny sees images of them murdered brutally, and flees in fear. Meanwhile, Jack is struggling with his alcoholism, violence and lack of control of himself and his sensitive wife and child. When he sees Grady, Grady advises him:

“My girls, sir, they didn’t care for the Overlook at first. One of them actually stole a pack of matches, and tried to burn it down. But I ‘corrected’ them sir. And when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, I ‘corrected’ her.”

Danny is confronted with the horror of what men are capable of.
In this aftermath of the women’s movement, Jack (a weak man, resistant to authority) is being haunted and guided by a forceful, dominating masculinity of the past. He’s stuck between the two worlds, and succumbs to violent, domineering alcoholism.
But he loses. Wendy and Danny win.
While his predecessor succeeded in “correcting” his wife and daughters, that time has past.
Here, the flashing memories of the ghosts of the past are terrifying. The Grady girls provide a look into what it is to be “corrected” and dominated.
“Come play with us Danny,” the girls beg, haunting him with the realities of masculine force and dominance.
Starting with the late-70s and 80s slasher films (and the growing Religious Right/Moral Majority in politics), the “Final Girl” reigned supreme, and the promiscuous young woman would perish first. Masculinity (characterized with “monstrous” violence and strength) and femininity became natural enemies. These fights on the big screen mirrored the fights in reality. The Equal Rights Amendment was pushed out of favor and was never ratified, and a growing surge of conservatism and family values began dominating American rhetoric.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, we see a resurgence of the terrifying little girl. This time, she is serving as a warning to single/working/independent/adoptive mothers.
In The Ring (the 2002 American adaptation of a 1998 Japanese film), Rachel Keller (played by Naomi Watts) is a  journalist and a single mother. She unknowingly risks her son and his father’s lives by showing them a cursed videotape. A critic noted:

“If she had never entered the public sphere and viewed the cassette in the first place, she would not have inadvertently caused Noah’s death, nor would she have to potentially cause the death of another. Rachel would, perhaps, have been better off staying at home.”

Single motherhood has often been the driving force behind horror plots.
In her investigation into the video, she discovers the twisted, dark past of the video’s subject, Samara, a young girl who started life troubled (her birthmother tried to drown her). She was adopted by a couple, but her adoptive mother suffered from visions and haunting events due to Samara’s powers. They attempted to institutionalize Samara, but eventually the adoptive mother drowns her in a well after Samara cannot be cured of her psychosis. Her adoptive father, Rachel finds, locked Samara in an attic of their barn, and Samara left a clue of the well’s location behind wallpaper. (Bitch Flicks ran an excellent analysis of the yellow wallpaper and the themes of women’s stories in The Ring.)
Samara’s life was punctuated by drowning, which has throughout history been a way for women to commit suicide or be killed (symbolizing both the suffocation of women’s roles and the return to the life-giving waters that women are often associated with). While Rachel “saves” Samara’s corpse and gives her a proper burial, Samara didn’t want that. She rejected Rachel’s motherhood and infects Rachel’s son. Rachel–in her attempts to mother–cannot seem to win.
Rachel “saves” Samara from her watery grave, but she still cannot succeed.
The ambiguous ending suggests that Rachel may indeed save her son, but will have to harm another to do so. This idea of motherly self-sacrifice portrays the one way that Rachel–single, working mother Rachel–can redeem herself. However, the parallel narrative of the dangers of silencing and “locking up” women is loud and clear.
And in 2009’s Orphan, Esther is a violent, overtly sexual orphan from Russia who is adopted by an American family. Esther is “not nearly as innocent as she claims to be,” says the IMDB description. This story certainly plays on the fear of the “other” in adopted little girls (much like The Ring) and how that is realized in the mothers. In this film, Esther is actually an adult “trapped” in a child’s body. The clash of a childish yet adult female (as culturally, little girls are somehow expected to embody adult sexuality and yet be innocent and naïve) again reiterates this fear of little girls with unnatural and unnerving power. The drowning death of Esther, as her adoptive mother and sister flee, shows that Esther must be killed to be subdued. The power of mother is highlighted, yet the film still plays on cultural fears of mothering through international adoptions and the deep, disturbing duality of childhood and adulthood that girls are supposed to embody.
Like Samara, Esther is a deeply disturbed daughter, capable of  demonic violence.
In the last 60 years, American culture has seen remarkable change and resistance to that change. Horror films–which portray the very core of society’s fears and anxieties–have reflected the fears of women’s social movements through the faces of terrifying little girls.
While nineteenth-century literature comforted audiences with the trope of a dead, beautiful woman, thus making her passive and frail (of course, we still do this), twentieth and twenty-first century horror films force audiences to come face to face with murderous, demonic, murdered and psychotic little girls to parallel fears of women having economic, reproductive, parenting and marital (or single) power.
Little girls are supposed to be the epitome of all we hold dear–innocent, sweet, submissive and gentle. The Victorian Cult of Girlhood and Womanhood bleeds into the twenty-first century anti-feminist movements, and these qualities are still revered.
Horror films hold a mirror up to these ideals, distorting the images and terrifying viewers in the process. The terror that society feels while looking at these little girls echoes the terror it feels when confronted with changing gender norms and female power.



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

Horror Week 2012: Patriarchy in Crisis: Power and Gender in ‘The Stepfather’

This is a guest review by Allison Maria Rodriguez.

“Wait a minute . . . who am I here?” is the central question posed by Jerry Blake in the 1987 slasher film, The Stepfather. It is a story of patriarchy in crisis. In a world in which “traditional” and “old fashioned” (both characteristics attributed to Jerry) notions of male dominance and the nuclear family are thoroughly challenged, the patriarchal order is undergoing a desperate identity crisis. The film is about a man who marries into a family that eventually disappoints him by not living up to his expectations of the perfect family, so he kills them and moves on to another town and another family. In The Stepfather, it is patriarchy that is broken and unable to find a reality in which its conceptualization of self exists. Without the structural order “the father” is accustomed to, he simply does not know who he is, and rather than deal with this and evolve, he chooses to deny reality, destroy it, and recreate it in his own image, which, ultimately, always fails.

“Am I Jerry, or Henry, or Bill?” — patriarchal schizophrenia in The Stepfather
The Stepfather (the 1987 version) is not like most slasher films; it is a uniquely feminist horror film. Carol J. Clover’s theory of the “final girl”*, the trope in horror cinema that leaves one unique girl as the sole survivor, is brilliant and generally accurate. But our heroine, Stephanie, is not like other final girls. For one, she is one of the ONLY girls in the film. The film is full of empty, impotent signifiers of male power: the male lieutenant, the male therapist, the male high school teacher, the male hero/amateur detective, the male reporter and, of course, Stephanie’s dead father. More importantly, throughout the duration of this film no women are killed. Let me repeat that: NO women are killed. It may not be obvious to some viewers, but it is strikingly obvious to me, a feminist who loves horror films. When the film opens, Jerry (or Henry Morrison, his identity before Jerry) has already killed his previous family, which we know contained a wife and at least one daughter, but during the film only men are slaughtered. They are men who attempt to rescue Stephanie and her mother Susan, but the only person who actually rescues Stephanie is Stephanie.

Stephanie’s character is portrayed as a strikingly healthy, good-natured, 16-year-old girl. The first time we see Stephanie, she is riding her bicycle toward the camera, over hills, the wind in her hair; she is strong and independent. She arrives home to have a playful autumn leaf battle with her mother in the backyard. Both are vibrant and laughing, and the bond they share is evident: these women genuinely like one another and enjoy each other’s company. When Jerry arrives home and Stephanie’s mother, Susan, runs off to greet him, Stephanie is blatantly disappointed. She tells her (male) therapist, “If he wasn’t there, Mom and I’d be alright.” It is important to note that Stephanie is not portrayed as a damaged child who will not permit anyone to replace the unmarred memory of her dead father. Though she misses her father, she knows there is something fundamentally wrong with Jerry, and every time he refers to the three of them as a family or himself as her father, it feels intensely creepy and inappropriate.

The American family, weird and creepy

In Clover’s “final girl” theory, she states that the final girl is identified early on in the film as different from her peers: she is more intelligent and perceptive than her friends, and, among other attributes, she has sexual hang-ups. In fact, these sexual hang-ups are the key to the final girl’s power in that they allow her to identify enough with the killer to overpower him. There are many examples of this in the slasher genre (Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Scream, etc.), but Stephanie isn’t one of them. Stephanie’s awakening sexuality is portrayed as natural, romantic and exciting. Stephanie knows she likes boys and she knows that is perfectly normal, a fact her mother reinforces on the porch after Jerry accuses Paul, Stephanie’s new boyfriend, of attempted rape. “He just kissed me goodnight Mom, and I wanted him to,” Stephanie says. “Of course you did,” her mother responds reassuringly, confirming that, despite what Jerry thinks, female sexuality is completely normal. Though Susan later slaps Stephanie when Stephanie says of Jerry “He’s a creep, how can you let him touch you,” it is also the first time Susan reprimands Jerry, and it is the beginning of the end. She slaps Stephanie out of defensiveness of her own sexual desire for Jerry. The only sex scene in The Stepfather is instigated by Susan and focuses on her pleasure, emphasizing her moaning and showing her face in close-up. In fact, when the camera cuts to Jerry’s face, we can see he is not really enjoying himself at all. He is doing what a man is supposed to do, and obviously has severe issues with sex that the women in the film do not have. In fact, other than Stephanie’s lackluster friend Karen, the only other woman we really engage with is Annie, the records desk clerk who assists our pseudo-hero Jim because she doesn’t like her male boss (patriarchal figure), and she is somewhat attracted to Jim. Though we only see her for less than a minute, it is significant that within 60 seconds her sexuality and rebelliousness are highlighted.

Jerry starts looking for a new family after the confrontation over Stephanie’s sexuality

In his current identity in the film, Jerry Blake is a real estate agent – he sells houses. The audience is given no opportunity to miss this metaphor when, at a family barbeque comprised of the first five families Jerry sold houses to in the neighborhood, Jerry declares “I don’t just sell houses. I sell the American Dream.” The film is basically about the nuclear family, the American Dream, and a dying patriarch trying to force everyone to “play house” with him. The actual physical structure of the house functions visually in the film to illustrate the psychological space of the characters’ power struggles. The basement is relegated as Jerry’s safe space; Freud would call it his unconscious, where he blows off steam by throwing on a flannel shirt and playing with his gender appropriate toys – construction tools, hammer, saws, etc., – implements used to build and create structures, to create order, to fix things. Oh, and he also periodically yells at himself, violently. Stephanie enters this space during the barbeque and witnesses one of Jerry’s rants. Symbolically it demonstrates Stephanie’s ability to see through Jerry’s facade and his promise of familial love and security. The staircase is rendered as an iconic image utilized over and over in the film, usually featuring Jerry at the top via a low camera angle looking up. There are multiple staircases in the film, but they all function the same way, to demonstrate Jerry’s positioning of himself in dominion over the domestic space. The climax of the film is on the staircase, with Jerry trying desperately to climb to the top to reach and kill Stephanie.

Jerry finds Stephanie in the basement witnessing his freak-out session

Both of the murders in the film also feature a house structure. The first is when Jerry kills Stephanie’s therapist who, posing as a potential client, is beaten to death with a wooden beam from the construction of the house Jerry is showing him. The second is Jim, poor Jim, the stereotypical ruggedly good-looking pseudo-hero. Jim’s sister was Jerry’s last victim (when Jerry was Henry), and throughout the film we watch Jim playing amateur detective, hot on Jerry’s trail. He finally figures out where Jerry is right at the end of the film and rushes over to save Susan and Stephanie. He walks in after Susan has been pushed down the basement stairs, right when Jerry is climbing the main staircase to kill Stephanie. Though Jim has been preparing for this moment with firearms training, he is ridiculously ineffective when he cannot even get the gun out of his jacket pocket before Jerry stabs him to death at the bottom of the staircase.

Though Stephanie has not been training for several months to kill Jerry, and does not have a gun, she is quick and resourceful. She picks up a piece of glass with a towel and stabs Jerry in the arm. She then leads him into the attic where, while pursuing her, he falls through the ceiling. This is significant because it is the actual structure of the house that protects Stephanie. During the climax on the staircase, Susan has survived her fall. She retrieves Jim’s gun, crawls to the bottom of the staircase and shoots Jerry twice (misses once) before the bullets in the gun run out (why Jim goes to kill Jerry without a fully loaded gun nobody knows; he doesn’t seem like the over-confident type). Jerry continues to climb the stairs. In the final moment, Jerry’s hand and Stephanie’s hand are both on the knife, the symbol of phallic power. Stephanie stabs Jerry and he falls down the staircase. The last shot of the scene is Stephanie standing at the top of the staircase, a low camera angle looking up. But rather than looking down triumphantly, she calmly sits down on the top step. She seems to be analyzing the scene, and we look at her looking and feel the power of her gaze.

Stephanie is her own hero

Throughout the film, Jerry has been making a birdhouse – a miniature version of his idea of the perfect home. Susan and Stephanie help Jerry erect it mid-way through the film, and we are given a distorted shot from the top of the birdhouse, looking down, emphasizing how high and unreachable Jerry’s idea of family really is. In the closing scene of the film, Stephanie cuts the birdhouse down. We see it lying in the foreground while Stephanie and her mother walk arm-in-arm, happy and complete, back into their home. They do not relocate as many families in horror films do after tragedy because of the symbolic significance of reclaiming their house, their structure. The film shows us that these two women are a complete family. They do not need a patriarch, and they do not need the conventional notion of the nuclear family to be happy – in fact, they are better off without it.

Stephanie and Susan, happy without the “American Dream”

The Stepfather is not only about the collapse of the traditional patriarchal social order, but it is also about the strength of alternative notions of family. You do not only see “evil” destroyed, but you see something positive replace it. I really like Stephanie as our heroine, not only because she is strong and smart and resourceful, but also because she is not represented as an anomaly, as most final girls are. She is a normal, likable, regular teenage girl that takes down the patriarchy. A strong message like this cannot help but be subversive.

*For more on the final girl theory, see Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film by Carol J. Clover. It rocks.

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Allison Maria Rodriguez is a visual artist and a writer. She received her BA from Antioch College and her MFA is studio art from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Some of her art work, and her contact information, can be found on her website: http://allisonmariarodriguez.com/

Weekly Feminist Film Question: Who Is Your Favorite Female Horror Movie Hero?

Women in horror movies comprise a range of roles from homicidal villain and gory murder victim to the badass, resourceful Final Girl survivor. Since next week is Women in Horror Film Week, we thought we would kick things off a little early. (Are you all as excited as we are??) So we asked you to tell us: Who is your favorite female horror movie hero?
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Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien
Jess Bradford (Olivia Hussey) in Black Christmas
Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) in Carrie 

Sarah (Shauna MacDonald) The Descent

Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) in Drag Me to Hell
Ginger Fitzgerald (Katharine Isabelle) and Brigitte Fitzgerald (Emily Perkins) in Ginger Snaps 

Laurie Strode (Jaime Lee Curtis) in Halloween 

Sally (Catherine O’Hara) in Nightmare Before Christmas

Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) in Nightmare on Elm Street

Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter) in Quarantine
Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) in Scream
Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster)  in Silence of the Lambs 

Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper) in Suspiria 

Selena (Naomie Harris) in 28 Days Later

The Woman (Pollyanna McIntosh) in The Woman
Did your favorite women in horror make the list? Tell us in the comments!
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Each week we tweet a new question and then post your answers on our site each Friday! To participate, just follow us on Twitter at @BitchFlicks and use the Twitter hashtag #feministfilm.

LGBTQI Week: Sleepaway Camp

This piece by Monthly Guest Contributor Carrie Nelson previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on October 24, 2011.

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.
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Carrie Nelson is a Bitch Flicks monthly contributor. She 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.

LGBTQI Week: The Problem with GLBT Representation in True Blood and Lost Girl

This is a guest post by Paul and Renee.

When it comes to GLBT representation in the media, unless a television show is targeted specifically at the community, erasure continues to be the norm. Urban fantasy has moved from a small die hard audience to the mainstream and though we can regularly see shows about vampires, werewolves, fae, and ghosts, there are few GLBT characters and a dearth of decent representation.

HBO’s True Blood and Showcase’s Lost Girl have the most visible GLBT characters on television in North America, in terms of the urban fantasy genre. Though both shows have GLBT characters who have extremely high profiles and a reputation of being extremely GLBT friendly, there are certainly many problematic elements.

True Blood is based on The Southern Vampire Series written by Charlaine Harris. In the novels, Lafayette is killed off quite early and is shamed for participating in a sex party. Thankfully, the character of Lafayette in True Blood has become a staple of the show. Despite being a fan favourite, Lafayette is a character that inarguably fulfills a lot of stereotypes that are aimed at same gender loving men of colour. Lafayette is a cook but he moonlights as a sex worker and a drug dealer. Though he is routinely given some of the best lines to say, he too often falls into the sassy best friend role.

Nelsan Ellis as Lafayette and Kevin Alejandro as Jesus in True Blood

In season three, we learned that Lafayette only started dealing V and doing sex work to pay for the hospitalisation of his mentally ill mother and though the reason is understandable, no other character on True Blood has been forced into this position though they are all working class.

If Lafayette is dogged by several stereotypes, Talbot revels in them. The lover of Russell Edgington (who is an awesome villain but also personifies the depraved, psychopathic homosexual trope), Talbot is a 700-year-old vampire who squeals at the sight of violence. He throws epic temper tantrums over the interior decorating. Someone stamp a rainbow on him and call his unicorn, he’s done. But to quickly fill his shoes we have Steve Newlin – get yourself another trope bingo card because he’s a) a gay man trying to force his attentions on a straight man b) a closeted homophobe, c) a closeted, bigoted preacher and d) getting campier by the episode – have you hit bingo yet? Bet you will by the end of the season, this was just 2 episodes!

The women aren’t free from stereotyping either; Tara finds her love for women and with it an interest in kick boxing – did she get some free dungerees and power tools with that?

I do have to say that not all the portrayals are stereotyped – Eddie subverts many (albeit he exists to serve and help Jason grow) and Jesus more – we don’t see enough about Pam and Nan to see what they fit. But except for Pam, they all fit one trope – GAY DEATH. Yes, there’s a drastic amount of “gay death” on this show. It’s a sad trope that GBLT people rarely live long on the television screen and their sexualty is often the cause of their deaths – and with Talbot (who actually died during gay sex! And to hurt his gay lover), Jesus (at the hands of his gay lover!), Eddie (found by his killers because he hired a gay prostitute), Sophie Ann and Nan were racking up the body count.

But, perhaps the most glaring flaw in True Blood is how the GBLT romances compare with the straight counterparts. True Blood is not a show that is shy about nudity or sex scenes – it is pretty unusual for episodes to go by without at least someone humping someone wearing very little. Eric, Sookie, Jason, Bill, Sam – we have seen them naked and going at it hammer and tongs. But Lafayette and Jesus? The contrast is blatant – even most of their kisses are in low light conditions. They go to bed wearing multiple layers of clothing (in Louisiana, no less) and their scenes together commonly have them sitting pretty far apart and lacking any real physical (or even emotional) intimacy. The emotional distance is very telling in what should be some of the most poignant scenes between them – when Jesus is grieving over his dead friend, when he is risking his life going into Marne’s shop, when Jesus emerges from that shop injured (Lafayette actually ran to hug Tara while Jesus bleeds); you’d expect some emotional angst here. But throughout season 4, you could have mistaken them for roommates, not lovers. This sanitisation is sadly prevalent with gay and bi male couples in television in general – their sex lives are considered more obscene than their straight counterparts, in need of censorship and “toning down.” True Blood’s straight explicitness makes this extremely blatant – with Lafayette and Jesus and even with Sam and Bill’s “Water in Arkansas” dream sequence (that cuts out just before a kiss). The closest we get to any explicit scenes is with Eric and Talbot – again with low light kissing, no nudity and, of course, saved for straight audiences by including the dreaded gay death.

We contrast that with the lesbian relationships and, if anything, we see a different story. But is this putting them on the same explicit level as the straight relationships or is it an attempt to pander to the straight male gaze? If anything, the scenes between women are more sexualised than between straight couples – not because they’re more explicit, but because they are less personal. Nan Flannigan and Pam both have sex (oral sex that doesn’t smudge their perfect make up, no less) with nameless, characterless women. The only actual relationship we have seen between two women is Tara and Naomi – and again, we saw them make out and have sex almost before we knew Naomi’s name. She appeared in exactly five episodes – and not for much of them at that – and in that time they were either having sex or fighting over Tara’s deception. She has now disappeared. Tara and Naomi’s relationship seemed to exist more to show sex and provide Tara with conflict than to be an actual relationship. All of these sex scenes feel even more gratuitous than the majority of the straight sex scenes because they add precious little to plot, story, development or any relationship – they’re there for the sake of the sex.

Rutina Wesley as Tara Thornton in True Blood

I love that True Blood goes out of its way to include so many GBLT characters – yet at the same time they make me cringe. Inclusion of many characters is great – but we shouldn’t be able to go through TV Tropes, ticking off the stereotypes, the tropes and the unfortunate prejudiced portrayals.

In Lost Girl, we move from having a GLBT character as a sidekick to the protagonist. Bo is a succubus – a being which takes life force from others through sexual contact. At first she is only interested in taking energy from evil doers because she has absolutely no control over her abilities. When she discovers that she is actually a member of the fae, and not some sinful freak, Bo begins a relationship with Dyson – a male werewolf. Vying for her attention is also the beautiful human doctor Lauren.

Essentially what develops is a love triangle and, as to be expected, it is far from simple. Bo has good chemistry with both Dyson and Lauren and in the end engages in sex with them separately. The problem then becomes a question of who does Bo really belong with. It is clear from the outset that though she cares very deeply for Lauren, her real love is Dyson. Dyson even goes as far as sacrificing the most important thing in his life – his love for her at the end of season one, in order to save Bo’s life. When they do have a break in their relationship, it is because he is temporarily unable to feel passion for her. It is during this period that Bo explores further possibilities with Lauren, which rather makes Lauren look like second choice.

Lauren is heavily attracted to Bo, but she is searching for a cure for her comatose girlfriend Nadia, who has been in stasis for five years. The first time that Lauren and Bo have sex, it is because Lauren has been ordered to do so by The Ash – the leader of the light fae. This amounts to sex through deception. Unfortunately, this isn’t the last time that sex between women happens at the behest of a man, which reads like cheap titillation. In a break from both Lauren and Dyson, Bo briefly dates the dark fae Ryan and he initiates a threesome, but what the camera focuses on is Bo’s interaction with the woman he procured. Clearly this was a sexual performance meant to please the straight male gaze.

The cast of Lost Girl

One of the most frustrating aspects of same sex love on Lost Girl is its treatment of the relationship between Nadia and Bo. After spending five years looking for cure for Nadia, Lauren is finally successful. However, after Nadia is infected by The Garuda, a few short episodes later, Lauren quickly assents to her desire to die. How are we to believe that Lauren held this faithful love for all of these years and then so quickly agreed that her partner should die? Nadia and Lauren’s feelings for her were determined disposable for the sake of furthering a love story which has clearly already been decided.

Even when Bo learns to control her desire to drain life energy during sex, there are still only two instances of sex between her and Lauren, which pales to the numerous times that Bo engaged in sex with Dyson. Lauren is the fragile human that Bo can potentially hurt, whereas Dyson literally represents everything that is good in terms of protection, strength and healing.
 

This of course places a premium on the heterosexual relationship over and above the gay one.

And this is perhaps the cornerstone of GBLT depictions in media in general – and certainly in these shows specifically – GBLT relationships are nearly always depicted as secondary to relationships of straight people. They can be there, but they have to take a back seat to the “real” relationships and depictions. Too often this backseat results in characters that are fraught with tropes and are frequently laden with stereotype after stereotype.

We’re happy, after so much erasure, that we’re actually seeing GBLT inclusion – and these programmes certainly do a lot right – but there’s still a lot dogging these characters.

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Paul and Renee blog and review at Fangs for the Fantasy. We’re great lovers of the genre and consume it in all its forms – but as marginalised people we also analyse critically through a social justice lens.

 
 
 

Motherhood in Film & Television: The Evolution of Margaret White

Piper Laurie and Sissy Spacek (1976 film)

This piece is from Monthly Contributor Carrie Nelson.

(Warning: Contains spoilers about Stephen King’s Carrie and its film and stage adaptations.) 
I love Stephen King’s Carrie, and not just because we share the same name. More than anything, I love the way that Carrie honestly explores the tensions and horrors of being a teenage girl. The details of the story aren’t terribly realistic – not many teenage outcasts have telekinetic powers, and few high school send-offs involve murdering everyone at the prom. But the anxiety around getting your first period, the fear that the boy asking you on a date is only doing it as a prank, the compulsion to make fun of others even though you know it’s wrong – these are normal parts of being a teenager. King’s book taps into those experiences incredibly well, which is why the story has resulted in numerous artistic adaptations. 
Carrie was first made into a film in 1976. Since then, it has become a stage musical, a made-for-TV movie, and it will soon be made into a new film, directed by Kimberly Peirce and starring Chloë Moretz in the title role. Every adaptation of Carrie contains similar elements (notably the torturous shower scene in the beginning and the fatal prom toward the end), but other aspects of the story change slightly in each incarnation. What I want to talk about today are the ways in which the character of Margaret White, Carrie’s religious fundamentalist mother, has evolved over the years. Margaret is arguably the most frightening character in Carrie, and I believe that she has only become more disturbing in each new incarnation, but for a different reason than one might suspect. 
In the 1976 Brian De Palma adaptation, Piper Laurie plays Margaret. Laurie’s interpretation of the role is iconic, but something about the performance has always rung false to me. Laurie’s Margaret is loud and bombastic and evil, to a degree that’s almost campy. In particular, the scene in which Margaret dies is significantly different from King’s novel. In the book, Carrie uses her telekinetic powers to stop Margaret’s heart, but in the De Palma film, Carrie uses her powers to send knives flying at Margaret, crucifying her and mimicking the imagery of Saint Sebastian that torments Carrie throughout the film. It’s an unforgettable image, and given the visual nature of cinema, it makes sense that this particular detail would be modified from the book. (It’s important to note, however, that the De Palma adaptation is the only version with this ending – all others I’ve seen remain true to King’s original ending.) However, the excessive spectacle of the scene (and the film as a whole) lessens the emotional impact. Laurie’s Margaret is shocking and disturbing, but there’s an emotional element missing from the performance, which has always bothered me. 
Marin Mazzie and Molly Ranson (2012 musical revival)
I saw the 1976 version of Carrie for the first time nearly five years ago, and it wasn’t until recently that I realized what doesn’t work for me about Laurie’s performance – it’s entirely one-dimensional. It’s cartoonish, even. It’s hard to be frightened by Laurie’s Margaret when she seems so unlike any mother who could realistically exist. But that isn’t how the character has to be. I thought about this in March, when I saw the MCC Theater’s Off-Broadway revival of the Carrie musical. Now, I did not see the original version of the musical, which opened on Broadway in 1988 and closed after only five performances, making it one of the biggest Broadway flops of all time. I cannot speak to that version, but I can speak to the heavily revised revival, in which Marin Mazzie played an unnervingly sympathetic version of Margaret. Though the story is the same, and Margaret is still deeply disturbed and abusive, there is a greater emphasis on Margaret’s inner struggle and the reality that she truly wants to help her daughter. In the second act, Margaret sings, “When There’s No One,” a moving ballad that reveals her intention to murder her daughter and the despair she feels about that decision. Rather than solely seeing Margaret’s evil and rage, in this version we see her rationalization. We see a fully developed character, a person who truly believes she is making the right decision, which makes the decision even more horrifying. There is nothing cartoonish about Mazzie’s Margaret, which made her far more terrifying than Laurie’s Margaret ever could be. 
Patricia Clarkson (2002 made-for-TV movie)
I feel similarly about Patricia Clarkson’s interpretation of Margaret in the 2002 made-for-TV movie version. In a dramatic shift from Laurie’s excitable reading, Clarkson nearly whispers all of her dialogue. Clarkson’s Margaret is completely understated, so much so that you almost believe she might come around and change her mind about her daughter. Of course, she doesn’t, and the scene in which Margaret tries to kill Carrie is shocking not because of the spectacle but because it catches you off-guard. This isn’t to say that the 2002 Carrie isn’t filled with spectacle – it is, sometimes to a distracting degree. But Clarkson’s performance as Margaret remains the calm, quiet element of the film, making her ultimate act of violence against her daughter all the more frightening. 
Kimberly Peirce’s highly anticipated remake of Carrie will be released in 2013. Little has been revealed about Peirce’s plans and vision, but Chloë Moretz promises the film “really looks into the relationship of Margaret and Carrie.” Julianne Moore recently signed on to play Margaret, a decision that makes me incredibly excited and anxious to see the film. I believe Moore will be able to add subtlety and nuance to the role, adding layers to Margaret’s character that have never been present before. I look forward to reading more about the film and Moore’s work on it as it enters production. 
I recently spoke with a friend who said that she didn’t think Carrie should be remade. She said the original is good enough as it is, so why change it? While I agree that the 1976 version is a classic, and nothing will ever replace it in cinematic history, I do think that much more can be done with the story. Particularly, I believe Margaret has much more room to grow as a character, and if the 2002 television film and the 2012 stage adaptation tell us anything, it’s that Margaret’s horror doesn’t come from her anger and violence – it comes from the completely calm way in which she rationalizes her beliefs and her actions. I hope to see Peirce’s version take Margaret even further as a character. I don’t know what that will look like, but I am anxious to find out.
Fan-designed poster for upcoming remake


Carrie Nelson is a Bitch Flicks monthly contributor. She 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.


Motherhood in Film & Television: ‘Rosemary’s Baby’

This is a guest post from Erin Fenner.
Rosemary’s Baby, the Roman Polanski 1968 adaptation of the novel with the same name, uses minimal effects. While it is a horror story about the mother of Satan’s child, we only briefly glimpse the arm and eyes of the feature’s supposed monster. And, while the plot against Rosemary is conceived by a coven of witches, we don’t see bubbling potions. That is because Rosemary’s Baby is not a horror story about Satan or witchcraft.
Rosemary’s Baby is a horror story about being a woman.
Watch the trailer:
Rosemary, played by the waifish Mia Farrow, is a young woman excited for her role as wife and soon-to-be mother. But, even in her acceptance and celebration of traditional gender roles she is exploited, robbed of autonomy, discounted as hysterical and ultimately must give up all control of herself and her body.
Sound familiar? That’s because her terrors are real ones with just a dash of supernatural motivations.
We meet Rosemary when she and her husband, Guy, played by John Cassavetes, decide to move into a new apartment house. She is the picture of a cheerful stay-at-home wife – taking pleasure in decorating the house, filled with bubbling optimism and one who enjoys pleasing her husband. All she wants beyond her currently cozy situation is to become a mother.
She gets her wish when Guy, an ambitious actor, declares he’s ready to be a dad. The audience learns quickly that his motivations aren’t rooted in a comparable desire for fatherhood, but because he’s made a pact with peculiar neighbors we later discover are witches. He gets a shot at success if he delivers them a baby.
While the viewer can deduce this easily, we never see the world from anyone’s perspective but Rosemary’s. We spend most of the film cooped up with her, claustrophobic and powerless, in the apartment house.
The conception of Rosemary’s baby happens in a particularly brutal way – through rape. Guy drugs his wife and takes her to a ritual to be impregnated by Satan. Rosemary is semi-conscious and cries out, “This is no dream – this is really happening!” And, when she wakes up the next morning, Guy casually mentions that he had sex with her while she was sleeping. So, even though upon waking she concludes the rape was a dream, she still considers the conception of her baby as one derived through non-consensual sex. Her first step toward motherhood is one where she is deprived the right to control her own body.
Her journey into motherhood is further hijacked by Guy and her witch-neighbors who insist on her going to a different doctor – one we learn is part of the Satanist coven. Her new doctor, Dr. Sapirstein, played by Ralph Bellamy, demands she ignores the advice of her friends and books, and only listen to his instructions. Whenever she expresses concern about her pregnancy, he shoots her perspective down and shames her for self-education.
Rosemary (Mia Farrow)
We see the already thin Rosemary develop pronounced dark shadows under her eyes and become emaciated. She says she’s in a constant state of pain. It’s only when, during a party with her peers, that she is validated by other women. One of her friends even pushes Guy out of the room so that they can express their support and concern. It’s from this very brief exchange with her friends, where they insist her pain is abnormal, that Rosemary is empowered and encouraged to change doctors and take charge of her own health.
This empowerment is short-lived, because she gives up after a fight with Guy and her pain eases up. She relinquishes to her husband and her body.
Her small rebellions against others’ attempts to control her body – like not drinking the drink her witch-neighbors prepare for her – cease. She falls easily into passivity until she reads a book left to her by an old friend who we can presume was murdered by the coven next door.
The book details the history of the coven that had lived in her apartment house generations before, and helps her conclude that her pregnancy is central to a plot devised by her neighbors, husband and doctor.
With this new realization Rosemary rushes to her old obstetrician, Dr. Hill, played by Charles Grodin, to seek help. After pleading with him for assistance, Dr. Hill brings her into a room for rest, but then returns with Guy and Dr. Sapirstein to sedate her and take her away. She is dismissed as being a hysterical woman: pre-partum.
The next scenes are delirious. Rosemary is sedated, and when awake she attempts to make demands, but is denied. And, when she gives birth, she is not allowed to see her baby and is deceived about its condition.
Rosemary’s only motivation now is centered on her motherhood. It’s the only power she can claim. So, after recovering from giving birth, she sneaks around her apartment house, and finds a hidden passage to the witch-neighbors. There she finds the coven surrounding a satanic crib.
The scene is almost anti-climactic. There is no struggle and no high drama speeches. Rosemary discovers her baby is a monster – the son of Satan. She learns the truth – her husband and neighbors were plotting against her. And then, she resigns herself. She has already lost control of her body long ago and has nothing left but her role as a mother.
Rosemary lives up perfectly to the norm of womanhood. Unlike the women who we begrudgingly expect to be punished in films because they are promiscuous, independent, “bitchy” or uninterested in family life – we would expect Rosemary’s story to pan out positively because she adheres to gendered expectations.
But, Rosemary’s Baby is not a film meant to encourage a fearful narrative about the value of following prescribed roles – instead it is about a woman who is victimized by the very gender roles she had enthusiastically accepted. Rosemary accepts her societal role as a woman. Still, she is punished and suffers. And, because it is so close to reality, it is horrifying. 


Erin Fenner is a legislative intern and blogger for Trust Women: advocating for the reproductive rights of women in conservative Midwestern states. She also writes for the Trust Women blog and manages their social media networks. She graduated from the University of Idaho with a B.S. in Journalism.

Motherhood in Film & Television: ‘Carrie’

Jamie Lynne Grumet on Time
Recently there’s been major hullabaloo about Jamie Lynne Grumet, the 26-year-old California mom who proudly posed on the cover of Time magazine breastfeeding her 3-year-old son. Ridiculed, condemned and completely unorthodox, this shocking image continues to reverberate across the globe.
A similar effigy from the 1976 film Carrie has lingered in our minds for more than three decades. It’s near the end of the movie, when religious momster Margaret White (Piper Laurie) is at the end of her rope trying to jam some fundamentalist sense in her terribly feeble-minded teenage daughter, Carrie (Sissy Spacek).
For several minutes she’s imploring one strict value after the next on Carrie, desperately teaching her to repent for the sin she has committed. But when her daughter needs her the most, she is knee-deep in a sermon trying to shelter her from all the evil in the world. In a fit of rage, her telekinetic daughter mind-hurls several knives at her, stapling her to the wall in a perfect crucifixion. Her head tilted to her right in blissful silence.

“I should’ve killed myself when he put it in me…. I should’ve given you to God when you were born, but I was weak and backsliding, and now the devil has come home.”

A crucified Mrs. White
One could discern that Mrs. White was taken out of her misery, which enveloped her throughout her adult life and suffocated her maternal instincts. Or did it?
Often times we are quick to judge parents—especially mothers—whose values and beliefs differ from our own. We deify figures like Angelina Jolie as Mother Theresa or sacrifice them as we do both Jamie and Margaret. But both sides have their own story, and they both think they’re right.
On the surface, it’s so easy to criticize Margaret. But there is something so inherently evil yet desperately loving about Laurie’s pitch-perfect performance of the religion-stricken single mother. You know she wants what she thinks is best for her child, like all great mothers do. But she’s too terrified—or terrifying?—to really consider what she’s saying. She wanted Carrie to be God-fearing, like herself. She wanted her to not suffer the tainted feeling of self-disgust with which she was burdened every day. In essence, she wanted her daughter’s life to be better than her own, by not making the same mistakes she did.
But when Mrs. White saw her daughter developing breasts and getting her period, and even receiving interest to attend the prom, her maternal preference overwhelmed her. She had to intervene before her Carrie ended up shameful, deflowered and ungodly like she had become. It was imperative.
Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie in Carrie
However, she could never really convey her true intentions to Carrie. It was always about what Carrie shouldn’t be doing, even when Carrie herself couldn’t fully comprehend the course her life was taking. It was always about repenting, while never examining what the repenting was for.
Meanwhile, Carrie is relentlessly teased in her school for her extraordinary innocence, and became the object of a vicious stunt that escalated beyond both her and the perpetrators’ most barbaric imaginations. Her fate at school is exacerbated when news gets around about what her mother is like. While her mother’s behavior minimally explains the way Carrie is, it doesn’t end antagonistic remarks of her peers. They don’t understand why neither Carrie nor her mother are the way they are, but they do know that they must be against it.
It’s not until Carrie realizes that there’s something gravely askew about her mother’s parental guidance—really on account of her peers’ reaction to her mien—when the position of her mother’s stance becomes horribly acute. Margaret’s unusual parenting style made sense for a long while, before it was held under the light and scrutinized by those on the outside, and before Carrie knew well enough to attempt to break away from it. That was the precise time when Margaret discovered that her daughter had become the person she tried to prevent all these years, and that her long-time fear had finally come to fruition.

“All the kids think I’m funny, and I don’t wanna be. I wanna be normal…. a whole person, before it’s too late for me to –“ [Margaret throws tea on her face, Carrie wipes it off].

Piper Laurie as Margaret White
Laurie’s perfect portrayal of a mother obsessed with her own ideals is mesmerizing to watch unfold. She’s like a pressure-cooker that slowly percolates until she eventually boils over and quietly explodes by the end of the movie. But she never loses her cool; she barely offers any inflection in her voice. She’s calm but deliberate. It’s the very thing which unsettles you when you watch her onscreen. You know her heart is in the right place, and that she—like most good mothers—just want her daughter to grow up better than how she saw the rest of the world.
But once her fear overpowered her rationale, once her masked hysteria was put on full blast through the halls of her daughter’s high school, she became victimized by her own steeple of values. She became the monster that you delighted in only when she was sacrificed for the greater good.
Clearly Margaret is not without her faults. As stated before, she wouldn’t impose these atypical morals on her daughter if she didn’t truly believe them to be right. That’s why we see her preaching the message around the neighborhood, to even parents of Carrie’s peers—she sees nothing wrong in what she does, but everything amoral about what everyone else does, which ultimately makes her out to be a frightening proselytizer when all she wants to do is protect them. When she can’t convince others to see her view, she is comfortable knowing that her daughter will at least be saved from the fires of hell. 
But by then it’s too late. Her daughter had been influenced by the kids at school, who nominated themselves as judge and jury in the case of Margaret White versus everyone else.
Whatever you think about the way in which other mothers choose to parent their children—and Lord knows some of them are real head-scratchers—is it ever okay for us to impart our notion of right and wrong on them? I wonder how Margaret would have fared if she was on the cover of Time with the cover line, Pimples are the Lord’s way of chastising you. 
Candice Frederick is an NABJ award-winning journalist and film blogger for Reel Talk. She’s also written for Essence Magazine and The Urban Daily. Follow her on twitter.

Movie Review: How ‘Vamps’ Showcases the Importance of Women Friendships

Movie poster for Vamps
Vamps, the new indie film directed by Amy Heckerling and starring Alicia Silverstone and Krysten Ritter (the upcoming star of the TV show Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23) takes the vampire genre and turns it into a fun, feminist celebration of youth culture and female friendship. The film is part spoof of the recent onslaught of vampire fare, part romantic comedy, part buddy movie—with women!—part history documentary, with some astute political commentary thrown in, and, ultimately, a film about aging, which pays particular attention to the struggles women face within a culture that values youth and beauty above all else.

Jason Buchanan on Rotten Tomatoes effectively captures the plot as follows: “Radiant New York City vampires Goody (Alicia Silverstone) and Stacy (Krysten Ritter) find their immortality in question after learning that love can still smolder in the realm of the undead. Meanwhile, Russian bloodsucker Vadim (Justin Kirk) prowls the streets in search of the next big thrill, and Dr. Van Helsing (Wallace Shawn) seeks to exterminate the creatures of the night as young Joey Van Helsing develops an unusual fixation on Stacy. As ravenous ‘stem’ vampire Ciccerus (Sigourney Weaver) presides over her dark dynasty with the help of her loyal assistant Ivan (Todd Barry), oddball Renfield (Zak Orth) strives to impress Stacy and Goody by any means necessary. Amidst all of the bloodshed and intrigue, nefarious vampire Vlad (Malcolm McDowell) works to perfect his knitting skills.” 


Alicia Silverstone as Goody and Krysten Ritter as Stacy in Vamps
It’s a fun cast of characters for sure, but Silverstone and Ritter shine as the main (women) characters. And for once there’s almost no reason to discuss The Bechdel Test; these two ladies barely talk about men for the first half of the film. Instead, we get to see them playing practical jokes on each other, hanging out in their shared apartment (often texting back and forth while inside their two side-by-side coffins), discussing their fashion choices—which is hilarious, as they struggle to make sure they’re fitting in with the latest 2012 trends (Stacy was first turned into a vampire in the 80s, and Goody lived all the way through the 1800s)—and generally looking out for each other and even (gasp) looking out for other women.

[SPOILER] Case in point: one of my absolute favorite scenes in the film happens early on, when Goody and Stacy head out for their nighttime ritual of club-hopping and imitating the new dance moves of the local youth “Day Walkers” (the term they use to refer to The Living among them). A couple of particularly horrible dude vampires approaches a woman after she bends over, ass in the air, with the word “Juicy” written on her tight pants. The dude vamps merely introduce themselves to her, to which she responds, “I’ll get my coat.” Goody chastises the horrible dude vampires—Goody and Stacy drink only the blood of rodents, not humans—and the dudes respond with, “She’s asking for it,” referring to her “Juicy” attire. It’s a pretty fucking great commentary on the victim-blaming that always accompanies any instance of the rape or sexual assault of women


Stacy and Goody on the computer
Goody walks over to the woman with the goal of getting her to stay away from the vampires, but she ultimately ends up hypnotizing her; in this film, vampires have the power to erase the memories of Day Walkers. At first Goody says something to the woman (paraphrasing), “Listen, you don’t want to leave with them. They’re really bad guys.” The woman says, “I like bad guys.” Goody begins hypnotizing her, repeating, “No, I like nice guys.” The woman walks away, passing the horrible dude vampires, while saying, “I like nice guys. I like guys who listen to me when I say things.” (I laughed out loud at that.)

This scene makes me so happy for a couple of reasons. First, a woman intervening to help another woman avoid getting killed by two horrible dude vampires—an obvious metaphor for rape in this scene, rarely happens in movies. How lovely to see that! Because women looking out for their friends certainly happens in real life—first-hand experience! Second, while I don’t necessarily like the implication that women always go for Bad Boys, I appreciate the acknowledgment that bros like this, who want to harm, abuse, and assault women, definitely exist. 


Stacy, Goody, and Sigourney Weaver as Cisserus in Vamps
Also, get this: I turned 33 six months ago. I still have my crappy 35-dollar Blackberry that my sister’s dog spent an hour chewing on. (There are bite marks on the fucking battery.) Let me just say, I could relate to the commentary about youth culture in this film. Heckerling makes wonderful observations about technology, with constant mentions of Twitter, Facebook, texting (there’s a funny reference to someone being in a “textual relationship” due to lack of real-life communication), and other technological stuff I’m probably forgetting because I don’t know what it is. While the film definitely celebrates youth culture, especially in its appreciation of women’s fashion (which reminded me so much of Heckerling’s famous film Clueless), it also juxtaposes that celebration with a critique of the value our society places on youth. That theme comes into play throughout the film, but the focus on women and aging sharpens with the introduction of the head vampire in charge.

Two words: Sigourney Weaver. Do we not adore her? The Alien films, mainly due to Weaver’s badass role as Ellen Ripley, remain one of the quintessential go-to franchises for getting that much-needed feminist fix that Hollywood movies today seem less willing to provide. (Quick shout out to Hunger Games, though!) And Weaver’s role in Vamps as Cisserus, the head vampire, or “Stem,” as they refer to the few vampires who possess the power to turn people into vampires, displays some feminist qualities—strength, leadership, and ambition, to name a few—but her character isn’t without flaws.

While the other vamps fear Weaver’s character—because she’s In Charge—they mainly fear her because she’s the evil, murderous villain. She obsesses over acquiring the love of young men, and when she doesn’t get it, well, you know, she eats them. In many ways, she reminds me of a vampiric version of Miranda Priestly, Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada. She often summons Goody and Stacy (by psychically speaking to them), and it’s almost always to make them model clothing. (Ha!) See, vampires can’t see themselves in mirrors (invisible!), so Weaver wants to look at these women wearing her very youthful, fashionable clothing so that she can visualize what it possibly looks like on her. Eventually though, Cisserus’ power goes so far to her head that she begins putting the other vampires in danger, and the tagline for the last act of the film basically becomes “This Bitch Needs to Die.” 


Vampires hanging out at the club
A woman-in-charge who becomes an evil, power-hungry bitch who ruins lives? Where have I seen that before? (Clue: EVERYWHERE.) I did get the sense from Vamps, though, that it’s making light of that trope rather than relishing in it, and casting feminist film icon Weaver in that role further pushes it toward satire. An interview with Weaver in Collider sheds a bit more light on that:
Collider: What made you decide to jump into the vampire genre with Vamps?

Weaver: Well, I’m a big Amy Heckerling fan, and I also loved the character. She was so unrepentant … I love playing delicious, evil parts like that.

Collider: How does your character fit into the story?

Weaver: She is the person who turned the girls into vampires. So, they have to do her bidding, and she’s very unreasonable and demanding. I would have to say that the one change I made was that I thought she was not really enjoying herself very much, in the original script. I thought, “What’s not to enjoy?” She’s 2,000 years old, she can have anything, she can have anyone, she can do what she wants, so I wanted her to be totally in-the-moment. So, I talked to Amy about it and she just evolved that way. She’s a really happy vampire. She digs it.

(I have to admit, I can kind of get behind a woman—vampire or not—saying, “Fuck it; I own this town.”)
Most of the descriptions and plot summaries I’ve read of Vamps say things like: “Two female vampires in modern-day New York City are faced with daunting romantic possibilities” … (from imdb). True, but not quite. It’s ridiculous to reduce the film to the status of cheesy rom-com because, while both Stacy and Goody somewhat struggle with their hetero-romantic relationships, Vamps ultimately celebrates the friendship and love between the two lead women. (I will say that I have a feminist critique of the ending, but I can’t give it away YET; the movie only recently got picked up by Anchor Bay Films and will be released in theaters around Halloween.)

Stacy and Goody at the club
Overall, it’s pretty significant that I left the theater feeling that this movie—a vampire movie that follows most of the same vampire tropes as all vampire movies—explores something new. It’s also disappointing that I left with that feeling. Because when I thought about it later, I realized what felt so new to me was the depiction of a female friendship that seemed wonderfully authentic. Their dude problems were fairly secondary; their loyalty to each other trumped all other obstacles. Their friendship, in fact, resembled my real-life friendships with women: we don’t fight over men; we don’t sit around endlessly talking about men; we don’t get together and stuff our faces with entire cakes if a man doesn’t call.

That’s why this close relationship between Goody and Stacy is so important to see on The Big Screen in 2012.

In an interview conducted with the director Amy Heckerling by Women and Hollywood, Melissa Silverstein asks the question, “Do you have any comment on the fact that only 5% of movies are directed by women?” Heckerling’s response? “It’s a disgusting industry. I don’t know what else to say. Especially now. I can’t stomach most of the movies about women. I just saw a movie last night—I don’t want to say the name—but again with the fucking wedding, and the only time women say anything is about men.”

Word.

Reproduction & Abortion Week: ‘American Horror Story’ Demonizes Abortion and Suffers from the Mystical Pregnancy Trope

Warning: if you have not watched all of American Horror Story Season 1, there are massive spoilers ahead!

American Horror Story co-creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk wanted to create a TV series that truly scared people. And they’ve definitely succeeded in their goal. But why the hell are they so afraid of abortion and women’s reproduction?

Inspired by The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby and The Shining, the creepy, eerie and phenomenally acted and well-written show follows the Harmons — cellist Vivien (Connie Britton), psychiatrist Ben (Dylan McDermott) and their daughter Violet (Taissa Farmiga) — as they move from Boston to Los Angeles to heal over past traumas of a stillbirth and infidelity. They move into an old haunted mansion in this “violent, erotically charged horror story about a troubled family.”
American Horror Storysucked me in immediately. Besides passing the Bechdel Test many times, strong, clever, interesting women abound. The performances by Connie Britton, Jessica Lange, Dylan McDermott, Frances Conroy and Taissa Farmiga are outstanding. 
Britton, who co-headlines the first season, wanted Vivien “to be somebody that was accessible, somebody who was strong and not victim-y. Which is something that’s always really important to me, no matter what I’m playing.” Britton almost didn’t play Tami Taylor in the TV show of Friday Night Lights didn’t want to merely play a coach’s wife on a show “dominated by men” and have her character “fall into the background.” Murphy has called the bravura Constance (Jessica Lange) a “survivor” and according to Britton, he called Vivien “‘a heroic character’ and describes American Horror Story as a horror for women.”
A horror for women? Sounds promising. Ahhhh but not so fast! If the show is for women, why do we see women objectified, conflating sexualized images with rape, assault and violence. And why the hell is it obsessed with demonizing abortion and pregnancy?? 
In the series premiere, we first encounter Vivien in a gynecological exam (after a brutal stillbirth) and her doctor prescribes her hormones. Eco-friendly Vivien, who uses organic products and doesn’t like using anything synthetic, responds:
“I’m just trying to get control of my body again, especially after what happened.”
That line might just be the most prophetic in the series. The female characters’ bodies are continuously invaded, brutalized and dominated. 
In the series premiere, Vivien is raped by the Rubber Man, thinking she’s having sex with Ben but who’s really ghost Tate. At the end of the episode, we learn Vivien’s pregnant…with twins…by two different fathers. It’s crystal clear that as soon as Vivien gets pregnant, she’s having a “mystical pregnancy” and will give birth to a demon baby. Vivien has a nightmare that she can see a hand (paw or claw??) moving underneath her swollen pregnant stomach. In “Open House,” the obstetrician tells Vivien and Ben that “every woman worries she’s got a little devil inside her.” We’re also told several times that one of Vivien’s twins is growing at an alarmingly rapid rate. Vivien eats cooked offal and later ravenously devours raw, bloody brains, paralleling the liver-eating scene in Rosemary’s Baby. Murphy attributes this to the baby having “demonic cravings.”Angie, the ultrasound technician, faints when conducting Vivien’s ultrasound. When she meets with Vivien later in a church, Angie tells her that she saw the devil on the sonogram, “the unclean thing, the plague of nations, the beast.” 
As the fabulous Anita Sarkeesian at Feminist Frequency, in her outstanding “Tropes vs. Women” video series, writes:
“It’s common practice for Hollywood writers to have their female characters become pregnant at some point in their TV series. These story lines are almost always built around women who have their ovaries harvested by aliens or serve as human incubators for demon spawn – basically the characters are reduced to their biological functions.”
Sarkeesian goes on to quote Laura Shapiro who called the Mystical Pregnancy “a type of reproductive terrorism:” 
“…It makes becoming pregnant seem disgusting, frightening and nightmarish…The problem from my point of view is that pregnancy and birth are natural processes that are being distorted into torture porn, ways of punishing women and exploiting their terror to up the dramatic stakes.”
After she learns of Vivien’s pregnancy, Hayden (Kate Mara), Ben’s student who he had an affair with (and who’s killed after she tells Ben she’s keeping their baby), becomes obsessed with stealing Vivien’s baby. And if one babystealer wasn’t enough, Constance and former house dwellers Nora (Lily Rabe) and Chad (Zachary Quinto) conspire to steal Vivien’s unborn baby too. Babysnatching! Cause that’s what all women and gay men do. Oh wait, that’s what all “crazy” women do…Wait, aren’t all women “crazy???” (The show’s treatment of mental illness is a topic for a WHOLE other post). 
As each of these characters can’t procreate (Constance due to her age, Hayden and Nora as they’re dead, Chad a man…who’s now dead), they covet Vivien’s capacity for reproduction. They objectify Vivien, reducing her to a vessel, an incubator for the baby these characters so desperately yearn to possess.
Vivien’s pregnancy is in many ways the crux of the show. Even on the poster, a pregnant Vivien arches her back seductively as the Rubber Man hovers above with outstretched hands, as if waiting to pluck the baby from her womb. 
In “Piggy Piggy,” Leah, Violet’s former bully, tells Violet the devil is real. She discloses information in the Book of Revelations from the Bible:
“In heaven, there’s this woman in labor, howling in pain. There’s a red dragon with 7 heads, waiting so he can eat her baby. But the archangel Michael, he hurls the dragon down to earth. From that moment on, the red dragon hates the woman and declares war on her and all her children. That’s us.”
In “Spooky Little Girl,” medium Billie Dean tells Constance that a child conceived by a human and a ghost (Vivien and rapist Tate) would result in the antichrist and would bring about the apocalypse. In the penultimate episode, when Vivien gives birth, scenes flash between the horrific current situation of Vivien dying — a scene inspired by the film Demon Seed — and Vivien and Ben’s joyous delivery of Violet 16 years earlier. But Vivien dies in childbirth, giving birth to one baby who lives (and who’s a murderous sociopath) and one who dies. 
In fact the entire season, from the first episode to the last, revolves around Vivien and her pregnancy who inevitably becomes the allegorical “Woman of the Apocalypse.” Hmmm, so we should all fear women because they could at any moment incite the end of the world. 
According to American Horror Story, we shouldn’t just be terrorized by pregnancy. All aspects of reproduction should scare the shit out of us, including abortion.
In the title sequence for each episode, we see jars of aborted fetuses on the shelves in the basement –again fueling the fire of fear and disgust surrounding abortion. It feels like the messages implied here are “good” women don’t get abortions and abortions are gross and scary. Don’t believe me? Trust me, it gets reinforced over and over again. In fact, because of the macabre show’s obsession with abortion, Feminist Film renames it “American Abortion Story.”
Abortion is discussed throughout the series. Vivien and Constance (who says her “womb is cursed”) talk about abortion after Vivien worries something’s wrong with her baby. After the Harmons move to LA, Ben returns to Boston to accompany Hayden to get an abortion. We witness her emotional instability after Ben checks his phone (because you know, no one in their right mind would choose to get an abortion…eyeroll!). Then Hayden changes her mind and decides to keep the baby…which she never has since she’s murdered.
In the 3rd episode, when Vivien takes the “Eternal Darkness” house tour,” she discovers the history of the Montgomerys and Charles’ “Frankenstein complex.” In 1922, surgeon Charles Montgomery and his socialite wife Nora lived in the house. When they need more money to pay their bills, Nora arranges for Charles to perform illegal abortions on young women. 
The “Eternally Damned” tour guide also condemns the Montgomerys’ performing abortions: “But the souls of the little ones must have weighed heavy upon them as their reign of terror climaxed in the shocking finale in 1926.” Reign of terror? Is that what you call abortions?? At first I thought I must have missed something…perhaps the girls were being murdered. But nope. The abortions are the “reign of terror.” Lovely. 
As Tami at What Tami Said astutely points out, the inception of the house’s evil, its pull in harboring pain, despair and tortured souls, all stems from one person: an abortionist. Oh and to hammer home the point that abortion equates to evil, the episode is entitled “Murder House.”
In another episode, we learn in a flashback that one of the women’s boyfriends, angered by her abortion, kidnaps Nora and Charles’ baby Thaddeus and murders him. Charles “reconstructs” Thaddeus (aka the “infantata”) with the baby’s body parts, animal parts and the heart of one of the aborted fetuses. Nora tells Charles she tried to breastfeed him but it wasn’t milk the baby was craving. We witness bloody claw marks above her breasts. Nora goes on to say:
“We’re damned Charles because of what we did to those girls, those poor innocent girls and their babies.”
So basically Murphy and Falchuk are saying, “Fuck you, reproductive justice!”
Think Progress’ Alyssa Rosenbergfinds American Horror Story “seems to suggest that the end of a pregnancy before term, whether by miscarriage, abortion, or murder, is the ultimate expression of evil. Abortion Gang’s Sophia rightfully condemns the series as an “abortion horror story” and “anti-choice propaganda at its worst.” Tami at What Tami Said criticizes the series for its “conservative and anti-choice messages” including “doctors who perform abortions are bad;” “women who receive abortions are promiscuous and selfish, therefore bad;” “abortion = murdering babies.” 
By portraying Charles and Nora as greedy, preying on young girls reinforces the notion that all abortion providers are greedy, evil predators. And American Horror Storyisn’t telling us that illegal, back-alley abortions are bad. No, it’s telling us ALL abortions are bad. 
The most terrifying aspect of American Horror Story isn’t the shocking gore or gasping plot twists. When our reproductive rights face a daily barrage of attacks, it’s frightening that the series so blatantly perpetuates myths surrounding the fear, stigma and shame of abortion and pregnancy. Reducing women to their reproductive organs, we’re told women’s sexuality and reproduction should scare us and as a result, women’s bodies should be punished and controlled. I’m getting so fucking sick and tired of ignoring sexism, misogyny and anti-choice bullshit just to watch TV.