Horror – Page 3 – Bitch Flicks

‘Imprint’: Examining the Presence of Indigenous Representation in the Horror Genre

In the endless web of conundrums that Native peoples face, marginalization is a result of societal erasure, whether that be through stereotypes or the lack of representations all together. … With that in consideration, I seek to influence popular consciousness by analysis of horror through a Native woman’s lens. One endeavor of asserting Native presence is through my analysis of the Native thriller film, ‘Imprint.’

This guest post written by Danielle Miller appears as part of our theme week on Indigenous Women.

The horror genre has always been a realm that I naturally gravitated towards, simply because of the ways it embraces imagination, eccentricity, and feeds my curiosity for the unknown. The more involved I have become in social justice discourse and analysis, I have become cognizant of the lack of representations for Native people, and even more so when narrowed down to specific genres like horror. In the endless web of conundrums that Native peoples face, marginalization is a result of societal erasure, whether that be through stereotypes or the lack of representations all together.

Many times, I have been angered by the films that whitewash and stereotype, and they drove me to educate myself to dismantle those depictions in hopes of also addressing the further links to oppression. With so many resources available and outlets within social media to discuss my grievances, I have very much reached the saturation point of feeling the need to prove that Native oppression is real. Yes, I recognize the need for those conversations, but no longer do I question the validity in my analysis of linking the existence of power structures and settler colonialism to the struggles Indigenous peoples face.

Increasingly, I have begun to expand beyond basic concepts and feel more free in applying these ideals to everyday interest to assert that Natives are multidimensional in every aspect of our identities, personhood, and modern existence. Being burdened by the need to constantly educate, means exclusion from participating in the upper echelons of art forms such as film. That is not to say there haven’t been artists and creators asserting their vision, but as I see it, if we are denied basic understandings of personhood, then we are also being pushed out from artistic options as creators and from participating as an acknowledged and respected audience. Without being creators or consumers, Native people will also be denied opportunities for creating and overseeing accurate and positive representations.

With that in consideration, I seek to influence popular consciousness by analysis of horror through a Native woman’s lens. One endeavor of asserting Native presence is through my analysis of the Native thriller film, Imprint (2007).

The story was written by Michael Linn and produced by prominent director of the “Ndn famous” film Smoke Signals (1998), Chris Eyre. With Smoke Signals being “the first wide-release feature film written, directed, co-produced, and acted by Native Americans” and popularly known as a positive representation of Native peoples, that gave me an optimistic feeling about Imprint. I had every intent to view this film in hopes that it wouldn’t just be a good watch, but also offer analysis of Native identity in proximity to broader themes of the horror genre.

One of the most important aspects of horror I seek to critique as a Native person, are the various tropes that so frequently repeat in film. One of the most pervasive tropes is “Indian mysticism.” Initially, I watched this film with hopes to see that trope turned on its head because the protagonist Shayla Stonefeather (Tonantzin Carmelo) worked as a lawyer. While it was successful in showing an authentic contemporary narrative, there were some moments that may still pander to that stereotype. During multiple scenes Shayla sees a wolf, (Hello “spirit animal” trope!) eventually this leads her to follow the wolf, where she meets a spiritual leader from her community. There weren’t terms used like “spirit animal” or “shaman” IN the film, but it was clear he had done spiritual work as he cleansed her house previously and gave her advice: “What you see might frighten you until you learn to listen.”

Where filmmakers were successful in not replicating the Noble Savage trope, was in the content of the Elder’s advice to Shayla. Rather than ending the conversation on a note of vague wisdom, the elder takes the conversation a step further in bringing up real issues:

“…I was here, these people were slaughtered, we forget, but it’s the trees, rocks that remind us. It is imprinted on this land. The past, present and future together, time doesn’t exist. Can you hear them? Can you hear their cries?”

The cries that he is referring to are an implied allusion to the genocide of Wounded Knee massacre. It is in this conversation that one realizes where the title is mentioned in the film, which then leads to further speculation on its meaning. In alluding to connection with the land, collective memory, and the concept of time, it ultimately sets the stage of paradigms as they relate to Indigenous survivance. I immediately saw a juxtaposition which challenges colonial perceptions of time and reiterates collective memory as a shared value of Native peoples. One can also assume this correlates to the identity conflicts Shayla faces, inner turmoil in questioning which paradigms are more valid: the cultural views she grew up with or the new views she internalized through her occupation as a lawyer? The supernatural element of that conversation, as well as the general idea of the film, is emblematic of a larger statement; one that diverts from the societal conception that Natives are ghosts of the past. In centering Shayla as the lead character experiencing supernatural phenomena and asserting her agency in confronting her many struggles, her character renders that popular misconception of the Native ghost, as paradoxical.

A significant aspect of this film was the fact it brought up real-life issues. In the special features of the DVD, an excerpt explains more about the making of the film. Initially, Imprint was supposed to be a story about a white family, which was decidedly changed after actor Misty Upham posed the question, “Why aren’t there more Indigenous representations in film?” This question is put into a deeper perspective with the knowledge of the suspicious and tragic details of her passing on October 4, 2014 — a tragedy emblematic of the issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous women worldwide, that is so reoccurring but goes unsolved. It’s interesting that the film started with her brother Nathaniel (Tokola Clifford)’s disappearance, as there is also little discourse on the disappearance of Indigenous men. In a way, this shifted things away from this turning into an expected story centered purely on the trope of a broken and battered woman. In mentioning the inspiration of Misty Upham, one can see the ways in which that influenced the dynamics of the story.

One barrier to the discussion of issues like Missing and Murdered Indigenous women, is white fragility. This film doesn’t shy away from displaying a white man as the cause for injustice. Shayla’s romantic relationship with a white man (Cory Brusseau) exacerbates her conflicts with culture clash and eventually endangers her life. But the way this played out was not over the top; a nice outcome in comparison to films that mention violence against Indigenous women, but end up reinforcing ideals by displaying scenes of gratuitous and triggering violence (such as rape scenes like in The Revenant). Although there were moments which underlined dynamics of whiteness and paternalism, there wasn’t fear to ultimately subvert that. The main character’s internalization of colonial systems as well as the paternalism of her white boyfriend running for office were a bit touchy in concern of identity (maybe too often simplified as universal Indigenous identity conflict) but they ultimately remained relevant to the outcome of the story.

Other references to larger issues of oppression, such as state sanctioned violence and the protest of the court decision, mirror the ongoing movements of resistance that Indigenous peoples have lived for centuries against the myriad faces of settler colonialism. It was unexpected to see a reference to Native protest in a horror film.

Other scenes challenged popular misconceptions of Native culture as stagnant, by showing cultural rituals and customs actively taking place. In one scene, Shayla smudges with her parents, in another they huddle together around a drum group. There was nothing performative in the manner of which either takes place, but is simply representative of Natives as contemporary peoples.

One symbol I do wish to address that plays into the trope of mysticism is the dream catcher, pervasive throughout the film. Numerous dream catchers inhabit Shayla’s brother’s room, to the point that it’s almost overkill. On the film’s poster and DVD cover, a dream catcher is placed next to wolf, which could admittedly be perceived as a bit stereotypical.

The dream catcher has been commodified to a point that it has the potential of pushing Pan Indianism. However, this brings up the question, would I remove them from the film? There are Native tribes all over that embrace the dream catcher symbol. While not always in the appropriate way of using them, there is an intercommunity connection in recognizing the dream catcher origin that is Ojibwe. It led me to think this is also representative of the complexities of Native cultural identity as an example of the intercommunity customs that organically take place, such as the process of cultural exchange. Recognizing those dynamics is what sets the distinction between when a symbol like the dream catcher is a cultural identifier or blatant cultural appropriation. While I wouldn’t conclude it must go, I am critical enough to recognize the need to make those distinctions and recognize the ways symbols are being represented in films. There could have been a better inclusion of the dream catcher that respects its purpose, but I also recognize that its relationship to Native people is different than with non-Natives.

After introducing the dynamic of the way Native symbols and identity are consumed, that leads me to the topic of intercommunity conversation and conflict. In one scene, the word “Apple” was spray painted across Shayla’s car as backlash to her complicity in a guilty verdict which ends up leading to a Native young man’s death. In another scene, Shayla argues with her mother (Carla-Rae Holland) about alleged mismanaging of funds from Tribal members and her mother points out how much she changed; Shayla retorts with the remark, “Our problems are self-inflicted.” On the surface, these are all complex issues that definitely should not be for the judgment of non-Natives, or even Natives outside of those communities. So I’ll admit, they made me feel a bit uncomfortable. While it is frustrating to know that non-Natives might watch this and feel affirmed in their presuppositions, it does give credence to the idea that Natives can be complex, flawed human beings and reclaim those struggles.

In summation, Imprint is a film that I enjoyed. There were emotional moments, a solid plot, a unique take on visuals of the spirits Shayla encountered (suspense with minimal effects), and a twist ending. I would recommend it just on the basis that the film cast so many Native actors. It was nice to watch something where I felt represented rather than alienated or excluded. It was refreshing to see new faces, rather than the standardized casting that caters to colonial/white supremacist beauty standards. Another huge positive for me was the use of Lakota language throughout the film, which further contributed to the idea of Native culture as thriving and contemporary. It also showed a sense of ethical dedication because of the process of cultural coaching and consultation that should be heeded when incorporating a cultural story in a film. There are aspects of the film that could have been fine-tuned and I’m sure the film would be even more engaging had the script been an Indigenous story from the beginning and Indigenous representation was a priority. Ultimately, films like this will be an example to open doors, and inspire more Indigenous filmmakers to pursue their talents and tell their own stories, regardless of societal perceptions and expectations.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Complicating Indigenous Feminism: Shayla’s Story in Imprint

Danielle Miller is a Native American (Dakota/Lakota) with a Tribal Affiliation to Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, that grew up and currently lives in Southern Maryland. Danielle is an alumni of the University of North Dakota, a writer and co-founder of the horror platform called Never Dead Native. You can follow Dani on Twitter @xodanix3 and @NeverDeadNative.

A Feminist Guide to Horror: Torture Porn TV

Small screen torture porn, at least in the cases of ‘American Horror Story’ and ‘Penny Dreadful,’ seems to be serving rather to take our fear of sex and women out of the dark and into the light, giving us an opportunity to vicariously take women apart and show them as disgusting as a substantial portion of our society fears we might be.

This guest post written by Holly Derr is an edited version that originally appeared at her site. It is cross-posted with permission. | Spoilers ahead for Penny Dreadful.

When what film critic David Edelstein called “torture porn” became a trend in 2004 and 2005, its relationship to the growing awareness that the U.S. had become a country that tortures was clear. On-screen representations of people being tortured by evil but human monsters served as a means of taking what had been kept secret about Abu Ghraib and putting it in full view in all its gore. Even films like Hostel and Turistas, that deliberately built their stories around Americans in foreign locations, served as a kind of collective catharsis upon accepting that our country also engaged in such horrific practices.

Twelve years later, with the Saw franchise eight movies in, torture porn has made its way into television. Between American Horror Story and The Walking Dead still going and Penny Dreadful having recently ended, it occupies a fairly important space in the supernatural television landscape.

For this year’s Feminist Guide to Horror Movies, I had the ridiculous idea that I would watch all three of these television series from beginning to end, determining, if not which show is most feminist, at least which is least sexist. I couldn’t do it. I made it through only one show all the way – Penny Dreadful – and in the course of just three seasons I watched women tortured by demons from the inside out, tarred and burned alive, branded, poisoned, smothered and brought back to life, a woman was driven to cut her own throat, and multiple women were shot by their father, creator, and closest friend.

Bringing together characters from Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, with a werewolf thrown in for good measure, Penny Dreadful’s main theme is that we are all possessed by demons; we all have a monster lurking inside. Creator, writer, and showrunner John Logan uses the Victorian backdrop to great effect. In season one, the Grand Guignol delights audiences with its onstage violence and spurts of blood. Season two features a subplot about a wax museum of gory crime scenes with ambitions of becoming a full-on freak show. Season three features the trusty horror trope of the mental institution in which people are experimented upon. All three elements anchor the show firmly in its gaslight era and constantly remind us that, despite a lot of talk about faith and sin, Victorians were really obsessed with bodies and their physical limits.

The potential for feminism is high. The focus of the show on a woman, Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), as its protagonist gives the audience a chance to identify with and follow the story through a woman’s perspective. Patti LuPone’s second-season cut-wife character Joan Clayton – unnecessarily violent depiction of abortion aside – is a strong, single mentor and good witch/doctor. Her third-season psychiatrist, a gender-flipped Dr. Seward from Dracula, is a smart woman succeeding in a man’s world who can handle herself in a fight to boot.

But the show’s feminism falters by treating the female characters differently from the male ones. Though minor male characters in Penny Dreadful are the victims of some pretty horrifying violence, too, the women really get the worst of it, and there are fewer of them to start with. Furthermore, for the male characters, the connection between what haunts them and their sexuality remains the subverted metaphor that it is in the Gothic horror novels in which they were created, with greed, ambition, and failure to be a good father/son mixed into an all-encompassing idea of their sins/demons.

For Vanessa Ives, however, acting upon her sexual feelings literally brings out the demon in her, creating a one-to-one relationship between her sexuality and her dark side. Though her suffering is centered, her character is actually less complex and therefore less fully human than the male ones. Other than one early sexual misstep, she has no flaws at all. To make matters worse, the female character who fully owns her sexuality, Brona/Lily (Billie Piper), one of Dr. Frankenstein’s creatures, is also a fully evil murderer, even when she connects to the early feminist movement and becomes a leader of disenfranchised women.

Finally, the presence of the same female body (Patty LuPone’s) in two different characters (something that is not a recurring aspect of the show, as it is with American Horror Story, but rather only happens with this one actor) keeps female heroism in the realm of archetype. In fact, the most interesting character in the series is not Vanessa Ives but the werewolf, Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett), whose relationships with three different father figures and his past as a soldier and an adopted Apache give him far more to grapple with than his sexuality (which is interesting as he is a queer character), which, despite the Victorian setting, doesn’t seem to be a problem for him at all.

No possible alternative to her fate is ever implied for Vanessa Ives, for whom acting on her sexual desires is to bring about the end of the world, and the audience is given little opportunity for hope. Accordingly, Penny Dreadful lacks a key component of horror: the moments of relief, whether in the form of humor or love, that are essential to keeping audiences vulnerable to the coming terrors – nothing is so rewarding when watching horror as a laugh that turns into a scream. Torture porn as a genre has very few of those moments, creating a rhythm that is not about suspense and jump-scares but merely about the ongoing horror of watching, head on, what terrible things people will do to people.

Penny Dreadful comes close to performing feminist work by showing how hard it is for women to live in a society that thinks of their sexuality as dangerous and their bodies as “nasty” and “disgusting,” with blood coming out of their wherevers. In the end, however, it doesn’t just depict the oppression of women, it reifies it, concretizing the idea in audience’s minds by making the women’s suffering disgusting.

I couldn’t get further than one and a half seasons into American Horror Story, which puts even more torture on screen than Penny Dreadful. Though some bad things happen to the men in that show too, the rape, mutilation, deliberate transmission of the bubonic plague, and unnecessary amputations in the episodes I’ve seen are reserved for female bodies. The buzz around this year’s season premiere of The Walking Dead indicates that it has gone from being a means of examining the variety of ways that people form societies and families to a means of examining the variety of ways people kill one another. Some scenes in the premiere were too graphic to be shown during prime time in the U.K.

At this point, our culture is no longer using torture porn to work out our guilt about our conduct abroad. Small screen torture porn, at least in the cases of American Horror Story and Penny Dreadful, seems to be serving rather to take our fear of sex and women out of the dark and into the light, giving us an opportunity to vicariously take women apart and show them as disgusting as a substantial portion of our society fears we might be.

Perhaps these depictions of torture are a necessary step to take before we finally accept that sexual women are not demonic, the women’s movement is not led by a superhuman killer with a vagenda of manocide, and our bodies don’t need to be tortured to be made pure. If anything good can be said about recent public discussions of sexual harassment, abuse, and oppression, it’s that they are public. Women all over the country are sharing their stories of being grabbed in the pussy and kissed against their will, women are owning the descriptor of “nasty” as a badge of pride, and women are refusing to be seen as anything less than fully human, inside and out.

Unfortunately, Penny Dreadful doesn’t ultimately reject the notion that women need to be tortured to be sure that they’re not evil. I can’t tell you where American Horror Story and The Walking Dead are going because, even though I am a hardened, life-long horror fan, I can’t take any more torture, and I don’t want to keep seeing bodies, and women’s bodies in particular, used to create disgust.

I watch horror because identifying what we are afraid of tells us a lot about ourselves, but also because it’s fun to be scared. As my Halloween binge-watching experiment draws to a close, I’m a lot more scared by what it means that torture porn TV is so popular than I am by torture porn itself.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Sex and the Penny Dreadful

Holly L. Derr is a feminist media critic who writes about theater, film, television, video games and comics. Follow her @hld6oddblend and on her Tumblr, Feminist Fandom.

The Threat of Feminine Power in ‘The Witch’

Recognizing the witch hunts dotted throughout the U.S.’s early history as a feminist issue, Robert Eggers smartly constructs his film to be a power struggle between the two main female characters, each representing a different conception of femininity. … By rejecting motherhood, the witches reject their feminine role in the patriarchal Puritan society.

This guest post is written by Josh Bradley. | Spoilers ahead.

Judging it against other modern horror films, a lot is surprising about Robert Eggers’ outstanding debut, The Witch. It’s not a slow build like so many others in the genre, as one of the very first scenes shows us a witch and is as horrifying as anything I’ve ever seen in the first 10 minutes of a movie. It manages to be deeply unsettling and creepy without resorting to jump scares, a staple in the genre sometimes leaned too heavily upon. And it fully commits to its ending without going the ambiguous route that many have come to expect from this type of story.

The ending that the film ultimately commits to also illuminates another surprise: the eponymous witch alluded by the title may not be the hooded figure from the first 10 minutes or the bewitching woman in the woods who curses Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) in the second act. It could just as easily refer to the protagonist, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy).

Sure, Thomasin’s climactic decision indicates this may be the case, but so does Katherine’s suspicion and treatment of her daughter. And that’s the biggest surprise: the film presents a family-vs-witch situation as the main dramatic conflict, but the fates of the characters show that – from a narrative standpoint – Thomasin is the definitive protagonist, and the antagonist is actually her mother, Katherine (Kate Dickie). Considering some of the heinous things done by the witches in the movie – and the fact that Satan himself is a literal character – revealing Katherine to be the ultimate antagonist is quite the statement.

Recognizing the witch hunts dotted throughout the U.S.’s early history as a feminist issue, Eggers smartly constructs his film to be a power struggle between the two main female characters, each representing a different conception of femininity. Katherine, a middle-aged woman and mother, believes her power comes from her ability to give life, from her ability to have children. This fits nicely into the patriarchal Puritan society of the time, as women were relegated to be mothers and caregivers. The disappearance of her infant and the untimely death of her son compromise her caregiving abilities, leaving her powerless without her children (visualized by the nightmare image of her breastfeeding a crow, laughing maniacally as it gores her breast).

Unlike Katherine, the witches – who live outside the patriarchal Puritan society – at least partially draw their power from their sexuality, giving them (potentially) even more power than men. It’s no accident that Caleb’s demise stems from his male (hetero)sexual curiosity, as a witch takes the form of a young, attractive woman to lure him in and curse him. It’s also no accident that Caleb takes particular note of Thomasin’s developing chest (unbeknownst to her), around the same time Katherine announces to her husband, William (Ralph Ineson), that Thomasin needs to be sent away to work for another family now that she “begot the sign of her womanhood.” Now that Thomasin is a woman – with youth, beauty, vitality, sexuality, and fertility – she’s a threat to Katherine’s power.

In her final scene, Katherine, who is quick to blame all of the family’s hardships on Thomasin and her blossoming womanhood, attempts to strangle her scared and crying daughter to death. After Thomasin cuts her, Katherine bleeds all over Thomasin’s face, as if trying to insist that she (Katherine) still has the womanly power too (blood being “the sign of her womanhood”). But she doesn’t.

Directly contrasting Katherine, the witches in this world reject motherhood in the most drastic way imaginable, as evidenced by young Samuel’s fate. Eggers has mentioned in interviews that the macabre scene involving the infant was inspired by legends of witches using the entrails of an unbaptized babe as a “flying ointment,” hinted at by a blurry image of the witch floating in front of the moon directly after rubbing the… “ointment”… all over herself. Following the above metaphor, the witches are literally stealing Katherine’s source of power (her children) to further their own.

By rejecting motherhood, the witches reject their feminine role in the patriarchal Puritan society (although they still seem to follow a male leader). And that is what makes the witches so scary to the family in the film (and to the Puritans in general); they refuse to use their feminine power in the service of the patriarchal family, which threatens the patriarchal family. Add this to William’s inability to either protect or provide for his family – i.e., the man’s traditional source of power – and Thomasin’s feminine power becomes even scarier to them.

In a symbolic final act of desperation, William locks Thomasin away with her young siblings, as if attempting to force her to be with children (perhaps as indirect punishment for her failed moment of motherhood, where her infant brother was stolen from under her nose). Instead, the witches – and Satan – rescue her from this prison of mandated maternity. Ultimately, Thomasin decides that she has no use for the societal structure (or pious religion) that her family tried to confine her in, and she leaves it behind in order to embrace – and fully realize – her feminine power. As a witch.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

‘The Witch’ and Legitimizing Feminine Fear
‘The Witch’ and Female Adolescence in Film

Josh Bradley is a literal rocket scientist who spends most of his free time with his YouTube channel, watching the Criterion Collection, or staring at a blank Final Draft document. You can follow him on Twitter @callme_Yosh.

10 Women-Directed Films for Halloween

Are spine-chilling films always in demand because they help us dialogue with and about death? … In the past year, I’ve been focused on seeing films directed by women because I participated in the “52 Films by Women” initiative.

This guest post written by Laura Shamas originally appeared at Venus in Orange. It is cross-posted with permission.

I’m not a horror film fan per se, but I’ve seen some scary, eerie stuff through the years, and Halloween is always a good time to view them. Are spine-chilling films always in demand because they help us dialogue with and about death? C.G. Jung once wrote: “Death is the hardest thing from the outside and as long as we are outside of it. But once inside you taste of such a completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don’t want to return.”

In the past year, I’ve been focused on seeing films directed by women because I participated in the “52 Films by Women” initiative. The 10 films detailed below (for adults, not kids!) have strong psychological components, too. I’ve divided them into well-known Halloween-ish folklore categories: monsters, strange illness, haunted house (ghosts), killer, losing one’s head (lost), witches, and vampires.

MONSTER

1. The Babadook (2014)
Written and directed by Jennifer Kent

This film is about a lonely widow, her young son, and their journey through grief. A mysterious book suddenly appears in their home, and launches a trajectory of events related to a home-invading monster. What a fascinating portrayal of aspects of motherhood in this film. The tone and cinematography are original; the key performances are strong. The conclusion is truly inventive, and, for me, unexpected. I can’t wait to see Kent’s next film. (Note: female protagonist. Available through streaming services, like Amazon and Netflix).

STRANGE ILLNESS

2. The Fits (2015)
Written and directed by Anna Rose Holmer

This film took my breath away. It centers on the extraordinary performance of Royalty Hightower as Toni, an eleven-year-old tomboy who hangs out with her older brother in the gym. When an all-girl dance troupe rehearses in the same community center, Toni becomes fascinated by the aspiring performers, and joins them. Then a strange sort of “illness” descends on the girls. As I watched the film, Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible came to mind; I’ve examined the film version of it before. I don’t want to give anything away, but the ending of The Fits was revelatory and mesmerizing. It involves a different sort of fear of the unknown and a transformation, but with tremendous female resonance. I eagerly await more of Holmer’s work as well. (Female protagonist, available on streaming platforms.)

HAUNTED HOUSE (GHOSTS)

3. A Cry from Within (2014)
Written by Deborah Twiss, co-directed by Twiss and Zach Miller

This is a ghost story with a particular feminine twist. Twiss stars as a married mother with two young kids. The film examines what happens when a city family moves into a drafty old mansion in a small town. This is a familiar set-up, and some tropes from the “haunted house” genre are used here predictably. Yet, as the film gradually turns towards its true theme, it held my interest: a spirited quest to heal a gruesome family history. Perhaps some of it is melodramatic, but I appreciated the different sort of twist in the third act; it concludes with a strong depiction of the “shadow” side of motherhood and ensuing generational repercussions. (Female protagonist, available on streaming platforms.)

4. The Invitation (2015)
Directed by Karyn Kusama

The film is about Will (Logan Marshall-Green), a grief-stricken man haunted by a past tragedy that occurred in his former house in the Hollywood Hills. As it begins, Will and his girlfriend hit a coyote in the rain on the way to a dinner party, hosted by his ex-wife and her new husband — a foreshadowing of what’s to come. At first it seems as if it’s going to be like The Big Chill: a gathering of old friends reminiscing, catching up, talking about what’s new. But then Will’s ex-wife and her new husband show a movie clip before dinner that sets the eerie tone of what’s to come. Let’s just say that if you’re invited to a dinner party in the Hills, this film will make you reconsider showing up. The house becomes a character of sorts, and old memories emerge like ghosts in flashbacks as terror reigns. (Male protagonist, available on streaming platforms.)

5. The Silent House (2011)
Co-directed by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, written by Lau

This 2011 film, an American version of a 2010 Uruguayan film titled La Casa Muda, is another “Haunted House” type of film with a twist at the end. Based on a “true story” from its Uruguayan origins, the movie is seemingly filmed in a single continuous shot, which gives it a lot of tension. The Silent House follows Elizabeth Olson as Sarah, a young woman who, along with her father and uncle, are moving out of a dark old family home near a shore, and encounter strange noises, specters, old photos that no one should see, and more. Of course, the power is not on. When Sarah’s father is knocked out on a staircase, Sarah knows there’s someone else in the house. The revenge component in the film’s conclusion will resonate with many. (Female protagonist, available to stream on Amazon.)

KILLER

6. The Hitch-Hiker (1953)
Directed by Ida Lupino, written by Lupino, Robert L. Joseph, and Collier Young

As part of this initiative, I’ve tried to catch up on many of Lupino’s films. The Hitch-Hiker is considered the first mainstream film noir feature to be directed by a woman. It varies from standard film noir fare because of its desert locales (as opposed to urban settings). A tale of two American men who are ambushed by a terrifying killer in Mexico, and their attempts to escape danger, the film’s original tagline was: “When was the last time you invited death into your car?” (Male protagonists. You can watch it for free on YouTube here. A version with higher resolution also streams on Amazon.)

LOSING ONE’S HEAD (or LOST)

7. The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza) (2008)
Written and directed by Lucrecia Martel

Made in Argentina, it’s perfectly titled. The film’s ominous psychological atmosphere produces a slow burn sort of scare and a dawning realization as you watch it; it’s not a conventional horror “scream” viewing experience. A strange auto accident on a deserted country road is at the center of a mystery; the protagonist is the driver Veronica or “Vero” to her friends (Maria Onetto), a middle-aged married dentist. We wonder: who or what has been hit? Is the victim okay? As the movie continues, we come to understand the true identity of the Headless Woman. (Female protagonist, available on streaming platforms, including Hulu.)

WITCHES

8. The Countess (2009)
Written and directed by Julie Delpy

Starring Julie Delpy, the film is a bloody biographical account of Hungarian Countess Erzsébet Báthory, who lived from 1560 to 1614. The film depicts the Countess’ fascination with death; even as a young girl, Báthory declared: “…I would have to raise an army to conquer death.” Thematically, this period piece examines the possibility that unrequited love could lead to madness, and that an obsession with youthful appearance could launch serial killings, as the Countess searches for virginal blood as a magical skin elixir. Because of the focus on bloodletting and torture in her story, Báthory became connected to vampirism through legend. But witches figure prominently in the film in several ways: Erzsébet’s estate is successfully run by a witch named Anna Darvulia (played by Anamaria Marinca), who’s also one of the Countess’ lovers; the Countess is cursed by a witch in a key roadside scene that changes her life: “Soon you will look like me”; and later, when she is on trial, Báthory is notably not tried for witchcraft, although she might have been. The ending brings information that forces a reconsideration of all we’ve just seen. (Female protagonist, available to stream on Amazon).

VAMPIRES

9. Near Dark (1987)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, co-written by Bigelow and Eric Red

I’ve long wanted to catch up on Bigelow’s earlier films, and have watched two so far as part of this initiative. But no Halloween film list is complete without a vampire movie, let alone a vampire Western like this one.

A lesson you learn quickly in Near Dark: never pick up hitchhikers at night in Kansas, Oklahoma or Texas. The movie is campy, bloody and violent; it debuted in October 1987, a part of the 1980’s vampire movie trend. The story revolves around Caleb (Adrian Pasdar), a young cowboy in a small mid-western town who inadvertently becomes part of a car-stealing gang of southern vampires. The frequent tasting of death in the film, and its repeated reverence for nighttime, reminded me again of Jung’s quote about death: “But once inside you taste of such a completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don’t want to return.” The ending of this one also pleasantly surprised me. (Male protagonist, available on DVD.)

10. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014)
Written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour

This is a highly stylized, fascinating film. It’s a unique Persian-language film that follows a mysterious vampire figure named The Girl (Sheila Vand) who haunts the rough streets of “Bad City” at night in a chador, and encounters a young gardener named Arash (Arash Mirandi). Arash’s father is a heroin addict and his mother is dead; Arash is under threat from a tough character who keys his car as the film starts, and after that initial sequence, Arash befriends a beautiful stray cat who becomes part of the action. Amirpour’s film is so atmospheric, beautifully shot in black and white. The plot is untraditional; the ending was also unexpected. Some of the images are unforgettable, and the acting is strong. (Male and female lead characters, available via streaming.)

These ten “scary” films richly explore a range of psychological and social issues: grief; the arrival of puberty; abuse and repressed memories; the aging brain; unrequited love and growing old; justice; and becoming an adult. Most have plot surprises at the end, which makes the viewing all the more worthwhile.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Why The Babadook Is the Feminist Horror Film of the Year
The Babadook: Jennifer Kent on Her Savage Domestic Fairy Tale
Patterns in Poor Parenting: The Babadook and Mommy
“The More You Deny Me, the Stronger I’ll Get”: The Babadook, Mothers, and Mental Illness
The Babadook and the Horrors of Motherhood
The Fits: A Coming-of-Age Story about Belonging and Identity
Male Mask, Female Voice: The Noir of Ida Lupino
9 Pretty Great Lesbian Vampire Movies
Kathyrn Bigelow’s Near Dark: Busting Stereotypes and Drawing Blood
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Scares Us
Feminist Fangs: The Activist Symbolism of Violent Vampire Women

Laura Shamas is a writer, myth lover, and a film consultant. For more of her writing on the topic of female trios: We Three: The Mythology of Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters. Her website is LauraShamas.com.

‘Supernatural’s Scariest Monster: Bisexual Erasure

I won’t spend too much time trying to convince you that one of the main characters, Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles), is bisexual — or would be, if the writers and producers would allow him to be — and that the show is queerbaiting. … What I am arguing is that queer people do not need a character’s sexuality to be canonized in order to identify with that character and recognize literary tropes that are generally used to align characters with queerness.

This guest post written by Hannah Johnson appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation.

Discussions around queerbaiting on the TV series Supernatural have brought up some interesting, often controversial questions. Many of them have been asked before, and will be asked again. At what point does canonical evidence for a character’s queerness outweigh the writers’ and creators’ denial? Does subtext count as canonical evidence? Is subtextual queerness better than no queerness at all? Do the writers’ intentions matter, and if so, to what extent?

I won’t spend too much time trying to convince you that one of the main characters, Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles), is bisexual — or would be, if the writers and producers would allow him to be — and that the show is queerbaiting. I’m not arguing that Dean Winchester counts as representation at this point. Queerbaiting absolutely does not count as representation for marginalized sexual orientations. What I am arguing is that queer people do not need a character’s sexuality to be canonized in order to identify with that character and recognize literary tropes that are generally used to align characters with queerness. In other words, just because other people – writers, producers, network executives, and other fans – aren’t acknowledging it, doesn’t mean we don’t know it’s there.

There have already been several articles written about the show’s queerbaiting tendencies, including from TV Guide and The Advocate. There is also a blog dedicated to dismantling faulty arguments against Bi Dean, entitled Arguments Against Bi Dean Are Bad, complete with sections on the most common fallacies. Every time a new episode of Supernatural airs, Tumblr is flooded with blog posts detailing the new evidence for Dean’s queerness, as well as replies arguing that said evidence is just a misinterpretation. It’s an ongoing battle, one that often causes a wide rift in the Supernatural fandom.

Emerging from this discourse are lists of events, interactions, facial expressions, wardrobe details, and other parts of canon that are compiled in order to prove or disprove Dean’s heterosexuality. But what’s fascinating – and infuriating – is watching again and again as the “straight” evidence list fills up with Dean’s interactions with women. “How can you deny how much Dean loves chicks?” people demand to know. This kind of thinking is based on the false assumptions that a man who “loves chicks” is inherently unqueer, that in order to be a queer man, one must prefer other men, and not show attraction to women, or else demonstrate a “50/50” attraction to men and women. The whole premise of Dean being bi is most often rejected based on a misunderstanding and/or ignorance about what it means to be bisexual.

The kind of queerbaiting that happens on Supernatural would not be so effective if it weren’t for the invisibility of bisexuality. In a way, the show takes advantage of bisexual erasure and uses it as fuel for the queerbaiting fire. Dean can throw out an endless barrage of queer signals, but as long as he also makes a comment about a woman being attractive, a large portion of the show’s audience can hold onto the illusion of his straightness, largely due to their lack of understanding about how bisexuality works. This creates an environment in which queerbaiting thrives.

There is also the common assumption that if Dean were to be bisexual in canon, and were to have a relationship with another male character, it would somehow make the show fundamentally different. Some fans seem to think that male bisexuality – or male queerness in general – is aligned with femininity, and that if Supernatural had a bi main character, it would have to ditch its gore, muscle cars, and classic rock in exchange for sappy, romantic, soap opera drama. That’s just not true. And it reveals a lot about the misogynistic, homophobic, and biphobic beliefs of many of the fans.

Some fans claim that people who support the canonization of Bi Dean are only in it for the sake of shipping – the desire for characters to be in a relationship. Sometimes there is even the accusation that they are all a bunch of lonely, horny women who fetishize queer men and just want to see two attractive men kiss on television. While there is certainly a valuable discussion to be had about the fetishization of queer men in fandom, this particular accusation against people who think Dean Winchester is bi surfaces again and again, even when the people in question are bisexual themselves. Many Bi Dean advocates – perhaps even a majority – identify as queer, and want Dean’s queer sexuality to be confirmed in canon because they see something of themselves in his character. It becomes a sort of bisexual erasure to silence that, or to assume that proponents of Bi Dean are always straight women.

As many Bi Dean advocates will tell you, at times watching Supernatural feels like being in a dysfunctional relationship. And that’s the nature of queerbaiting. They reel you in, tease you, drop hints, and convince you that it’s finally going to happen. Then they put an obnoxious one-liner in the script that reaffirms the character’s heterosexuality, or one of the writers sends out a tweet saying that the fans are misinterpreting things. Essentially, they gaslight you. They make you question whether or not your identification with this character and your reading of their sexuality – based on actual, textual evidence – is valid.

Dean Winchester is one of the heroes of Supernatural. He is a deeply complex, flawed, multidimensional character who rescues people from monsters and saves the world on a regular basis. It would be incredibly meaningful for bisexual people to see that kind of representation. After all, there are relatively few representations of bisexuality on television, particularly of bisexual men. But with season 12 of the series premiering next month, many fans are asking, “Is Dean ever going to come out of the closet?”

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Not Exactly the New Buffy: The Many Failings of Supernatural

Hannah Johnson is a bisexual activist currently pursuing her MFA in Poetry at Mills College. Her writing has been featured in Bi Women Quarterly, Selfish Magazine, The Journal of Bisexuality, and The Minetta Review. She is the co-moderator for the Non-Mono Perspective, a blog for people with non-monosexual identities.

‘Jennifer’s Body’ and Bisexuality

We don’t have direct evidence of how Jennifer or Needy would describe their sexual orientations, but ‘Jennifer’s Body’ works as a depiction of the relationship between two young bisexual women. If nothing else, it subverts expectations around gender and sexuality in horror films. … Even when Jennifer and Needy resort to physical violence with each other, their conflict has an erotic, and even romantic, subtext.

This guest post written by Tessa Racked appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation. | Spoilers ahead.

While the feminist merits of the 2009 horror film Jennifer’s Body remain up for debate, there is no denying that it is a standout in its genre for being female-centric. Directed by Karyn Kusama and written by Diablo Cody, Jennifer’s Body follows the story of Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) and Anita “Needy” Lesnicky (Amanda Seyfried), two teenage girls from a small town whose troubled friendship is shaken up when Jennifer is turned into a demon who must feed on human flesh. The film revels in Jennifer’s seduction and consumption of boys, but it simultaneously gives importance to the conflict between her and Needy. The film throws many heteronormative assumptions made by the audience into doubt. Jennifer isn’t afraid to talk about or act on her desire to have sex with men, but the most important relationship in her life is with Needy, and that relationship is eroticized at some key moments, including Jennifer referencing how they used to “play boyfriend-girlfriend.”

In a 2009 interview with The New York Times, Megan Fox describes Jennifer as a “cannibalistic lesbian cheerleader.” We don’t have direct evidence of how Jennifer or Needy would describe their sexual orientations, but Jennifer’s Body works as a depiction of the relationship between two young bisexual women.

If nothing else, Jennifer’s Body subverts expectations around gender and sexuality in horror films. Sexually active young women commonly meet their fates early on at the hands of the antagonist while their innocent/virginal counterparts survive. But as Gaayathri Nair observes in her article “Does Jennifer’s Body Turn the Possession Genre on Its Head?,” “Jennifer’s lack of purity saves her. The fact that she is not actually a virgin means that she gets a second shot at life.” Not only is she more than fodder for the sake of building tension, Jennifer becomes the most powerful character in the film, as Needy goes from her sidekick to her nemesis. Instead of being fueled by revenge or menace, Jennifer’s love/hate relationship with Needy is the driving force behind Jennifer’s Body. A competitive tension exists between their relationship and how they relate to the male characters that suggests an equal emotional, and even erotic, importance to their connection to each other.

When Needy introduces us to the setting of Devil’s Kettle High School, we see a scene of her watching Jennifer performing with the flag team from the bleachers. The setting and camera work — alternating between and slowly pushing in on Jennifer and Needy — acts as a visual homage to the cheerleader routine sequence from American Beauty. However, instead of emphasizing voyeurism and fantasy, as in the American Beauty scene, we see Jennifer and Needy smiling and waving, connected and mutually happy to see each other. Any potential voyeurism is also undermined by a classmate sitting behind Needy, who describes her relationship with Jennifer as “totally lesbi-gay.” The depth of the two girls’ connection reveals itself to be borderline supernatural even before the occult aspects of the film are introduced, when Needy senses Jennifer’s arrival to her house before we hear her at the door. “That’s fucking weird,” Needy’s boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons) comments.

When Jennifer becomes a demon, her bizarre behavior (including the murders) strains Needy’s love for her, but also intensifies their connection. The one actual sex scene in the film, between Needy and Chip, is cross-cut with Jennifer killing and eating Colin (Kyle Gallner). Not only does this equate Jennifer’s consumption of a male body with the more conventional eroticism of Needy and Chip having sex because they love each other, but the two scenes blend together as Needy has visions of blood seeping through her ceiling, and a demonic Jennifer standing over a previous victim. “I need you hopeless,” Jennifer growls at her prey, as Needy begins to whisper “hopeless” over and over, without seeming to know why. Even when trying to satisfy their hunger or connect with someone else, they can’t separate from each other.

Jennifer poses a threat to the young men of Devil’s Kettle, but Jennifer’s Body pushes male characters to the side, relegating them to tropes often embodied by women or other historically marginalized groups. In the beginning of the film, Jennifer refers to men as “morsels;” even before she literally eats them, she views men who she wants to sleep with as disposable objects for her consumption. Roman (Chris Pratt), Jonas (Josh Emerson), Ahmet (Aman Johal), and Colin are Jennifer’s prey, brought into her story so that she can exercise power and prestige both before she becomes a demon (Roman is a police academy cadet, which Jennifer claims gives her legal immunity) and after (she feeds on classmates Ahmet, Jonas, and Colin to replenish her powers). In the extended cut, Needy tries to reason with Jennifer, stating that they need to look for a cure so she can stop “killing people.” “No, I’m killing boys,” Jennifer responds, “Boys are placeholders. They come and they go.” Where characters who wield threatening magic in horror films are usually from marginalized groups — for example, the stereotype of a Romani woman cursing someone — Jennifer’s Body has Low Shoulder, the good-looking, white, male indie rock band who turn Jennifer into a demon as a side-effect of their quest to be “rich and awesome like that guy from Maroon 5.” And then there’s Chip, who takes on the role of the dutiful if clueless partner who needs saving from the supernatural threat in the third act.

If Jennifer were purely a stereotypical bisexual seductress sprung from a heteropatriarchal imagination, she would use erotic interaction between herself and Needy as an accessory to appear more attractive to the male gaze. Instead, Jennifer performs heterosexuality to get a response from Needy. Jennifer agrees to go on a date with Colin after Needy says that she thinks he’s cool, and threatens Needy by stating that she finds Chip attractive, intimating that she is going to fuck, kill, and eat him. In a role that is often filled by an attractive female character, Chip becomes a battleground between Jennifer and Needy.

Jennifer, Needy, and Chip’s dynamic allows space in the film for sexual attraction between characters of both same and other genders. If the film were to go with heteronormative expectations, Jennifer and Needy would be vying with each other for Chip’s affections. Rather, Jennifer and Chip are vying with each other for Needy’s time and attention.

Jennifer and Needy have been best friends since early childhood (“sandbox love,” as Needy calls it), and Jennifer doesn’t have much of an interest in supporting her friend’s romantic relationship. In the first conversation we see between them, Jennifer convinces Needy to ditch Chip and go to Low Shoulder’s show with her. In the next scene, Needy gets dressed to meet Jennifer’s specifications (“I could show my stomach but never my cleavage. Tits were her trademark.”), while Chip sullenly criticizes the low cut of her jeans from the background. Jennifer asks if they’ve been “fucking,” to which Needy giggles and calls her “gross.” Jennifer then indulges in some gloating as the two girls leave together. “You’re just jello because you’re not invited…” she tells Chip, “You’re lime green jello and you can’t even admit it to yourself.” “Stop kidnapping my girlfriend,” Chip responds helplessly. Chip’s insecurity about his standing with Needy is his Achilles heel. Jennifer isn’t able to seduce him as easily as Jonas or Colin, but she is able to lower his defenses by telling him that Needy cheated on him.

Jennifer sees the female body as a weapon. She tells Needy that her breasts are “like smart bombs: point them in the right direction and shit gets real.” Jennifer receives an array of powers when she comes back as a succubus, but also becomes more aggressive, both sexually and overall. She makes rude, callous comments about the Melody Lane Fire and its victims; she uses her beauty and sexuality to lure her victims into secluded areas where she can kill and eat them. It would only make sense that she would use her body as a weapon against Needy once the conflict between them surfaces. And the conflict between them is definitely eroticized, but their preexisting close relationship adds a layer of depth to the violence that is not present when Jennifer hunts her prey.

After resurrecting as a succubus, Jennifer shows up at Needy’s house, covered in blood but smiling at her friend (albeit creepily). I imagine that being sacrificed to the devil and coming back to earth as a demon would leave one a little punch-drunk, but considering that Jennifer recounts later that “[she] woke up and [she] found her way back to [Needy],” it could be a smile of relief to see her friend. She pushes Needy against a wall and nips at her neck, both alluring and terrifying. After she eats Colin, Jennifer turns up in Needy’s bed (literally) and tries to seduce her. Although Needy stops her, the scene is shot quite differently from Jennifer’s seduction of Jonas or Colin, or Needy and Chip’s sex scene. There’s no distracting humor, such as Chip’s inexperience in putting on a condom, or the wild animals that flock to Jennifer’s presence when she’s in seduction mode. Instead of dialogue or soundtrack, the sound cuts out completely. The sequence also includes extreme close-ups of their lips and backs. These factors all give their make out scene a more intimate, sensual tone than their sexual encounters with boys.

Jennifer’s reasons for trying to seduce Needy are never clearly outlined, but given that she had just fed on Colin and is at the height of her powers and confidence, it’s likely that she is reveling in her abilities by exerting control over Needy, or using their interaction as a celebratory indulgence. However, considering that this scene also includes her mentioning that they used to “play boyfriend-girlfriend,” and that Needy is active in their kissing before pushing Jennifer away, we are led to believe that there is some precedent in the two having sexual feelings for each other.

Even when Jennifer and Needy resort to physical violence with each other, their conflict has an erotic, and even romantic, subtext. When Needy tries to save Chip from being eaten, we get an exchange that is the closest the film comes to explicitly identifying either of them as bisexual. When Jennifer threatens to “eat [her] soul and shit it out,” Needy tells her, “I thought you only murdered boys.” “I go both ways,” Jennifer responds. This is a Diablo Cody script, smothered in sarcasm and quips, but given the prevalence of bisexual erasure, at least we have a little text to accompany the subtext.

Their final fight begins with Needy gazing through a bedroom window at Jennifer, reminiscent of a typically masculine fetishistic role of voyeur (and Jennifer’s role of hunter). They grapple with each other in bed: Needy straddles Jennifer, who calls her “butch” for using a box cutter as her weapon. Jennifer begins to use her powers to levitate, but when Needy sees the matching BFF necklace from Jennifer’s neck, she becomes vulnerable for a moment and they fall back to the mattress in an oddly sensual slow-motion shot. It’s only when Needy metaphorically stabs Jennifer through the heart that she gets the opportunity to literally do so as well. But even death can’t separate Jennifer and Needy from each other: Needy’s narration informs us during the denouement that some of Jennifer’s demon powers transferred to her when she was bitten during their final showdown. The end credits document a more powerful, vengeful Needy unleashing a satisfyingly bloody revenge on Low Shoulder.

Jennifer and Needy’s relationship is not a very healthy one, characterized by a power imbalance even before Jennifer gains her demonic abilities. The supernatural forces at play in Jennifer’s Body serve as a metaphor for Jennifer’s narcissism, as well as forcing the tension in their relationship to the surface. But even if their friendship isn’t allowing them to be their best selves, their love for each other proves to be the driving force in the film, giving the audience a level of emotional engagement deeper than a conflict for survival between a human and a force of evil. By giving attention both to what Needy and Jennifer want and pursue out of sexual relationships with boys and delving into the romantic and sexual component of their relationship with each other, the film gives enough space to their emotional lives to depict desire for characters of both same and other genders.

Films are imbued with amazing powers when they delve into female characters beyond the depictions of prey and love interests. In the case of Jennifer’s Body, LGBTQ audience members can see an aspect of themselves reflected on the screen.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Does Jennifer’s Body Turn the Possession Genre on Its Head?
Jennifer’s Body: The Sexuality of Female Possession and How the Devil Didn’t Need to Make Her Do It
From Ginger Snaps to Jennifer’s Body: The Contamination of Violent Women

Tessa Racked writes about depictions of fat people in cinema at Consistent Panda Bear Shape and displays Diablo Cody-level feats of wit on Twitter @tessa_racked.

The Sister as Revenant in Brian De Palma’s ‘Sisters’

‘Sisters’ displays an early concern with women’s liberation in mainstream American film (De Palma’s collaborator on the screenplay was Louisa Rose). Many of the film’s social complaints remain liberal talking points today: that police can be motivated by racism, that the legal institution can subject women to excessive scrutiny, and that the medical-psychiatric institution remains patriarchal and sexist in its diagnosing and treatment of women. Yet the film’s intersections with disability are more complicated.

This guest post written by Stefan Sereda appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood. | Spoilers ahead.

Classical Hollywood horror cinema often positioned its monsters as threats to a conservative social order represented on film through family and the home. King Kong snatches Ann Darrow away from Jack Driscoll’s apartment and Dracula lures women from their intended husbands. In Cat People (directed by Jacques Tourner, 1942), a woman fails to consummate her marriage because sexual arousal turns her into a ferocious feline, and an adopted child brings a killer’s instincts to roost in The Bad Seed (directed by Mervyn LeRoy, 1956).

In the 1960s and 1970s, Women’s Liberation and the Sexual Revolution provoked a swell of reactionary horror films that reframe domestication as a potential trap that can destroy women and cause social fragmentation. Nightmarish expressions of Second Wave feminist sentiments abound. In Rosemary’s Baby (directed by Roman Polanski, 1968), a newlywed (Mia Farrow) suffers spousal rape in a plot to breed the Antichrist. The Stepford Wives (directed by Bryan Forbes, 1975) depicts husbands replacing their wives with obedient fembots. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (directed by Tobe Hooper, 1974) locates its horror in a disturbing symbolic inversion of the American family homestead.

Brian De Palma’s 1973 film Sisters is a post-Psycho (directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), pre-Halloween (directed by John Carpenter, 1978) proto-slasher that belongs to this loose cycle of liberationist horror cinema. For an early-1970s film directed and co-written by a man, according to journalist and film critic Julie Salamon some critics deemed a “perverse misogynist,” Sisters displays an early concern with women’s liberation in mainstream American film (De Palma’s collaborator on the screenplay was Louisa Rose). Many of the film’s social complaints remain liberal talking points today: that police can be motivated by racism, that the legal institution can subject women to excessive scrutiny, and that the medical-psychiatric institution remains patriarchal and sexist in its diagnosing and treatment of women. Yet the film’s intersections with disability are more complicated.

De Palma’s films have inspired protests from anti-porn feminists, but critics also champion his depictions of women and illustrate that his films are “about misogyny.” For example, Carrie (1976), a film feminist scholars both attack and defend, is a film about women’s internalized misogyny from its opening scene onward: it nonetheless passes the Bechdel Test, privileges a woman’s perspective in almost every scene, and represents a broad range of women characters, including career women.

A rote observation about De Palma is that he takes up the mantle of Hitchcockian themes and motifs: guilt, suspicion, repression, voyeurism, psychoanalytic critique, and sexualized violence. Sisters maintains this trend in De Palma’s Hitchcockian oeuvre. De Palma hired Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann to compose the nerve-wracking score. Moreover, Sisters rewrites Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and the pseudo-gothic thriller, Psycho, from a post-counterculture historical context.

Sisters grounds its thematic appraisal of domesticity within literal and metaphorical depictions of sisterhood, wherein the sisters are foils for one another. Margot Kidder plays twin Quebecois sisters Danielle and Dominique. As the plot unravels, Danielle and Dominique are conceived as Canada’s first conjoined twins, who are now separated. The film introduces the viewer to Danielle, the seemingly “sweet” sister with whom De Palma aligns our sympathies: Danielle is pleasant, flirtatious, and cast as the survivor of past trauma and an aggressive ex-husband. As an immigrant from French Canada, she is also positioned as an ambiguous “other” in a narrative that film critic and producer Steven Jay Schneider describes in The Horror Film as a “powerful depiction of monstrous female sexuality.” In this respect, the film is a sister-narrative to Psycho. The only way to conduct a proper post-mortem on Sisters — a deliberately nonsensical film — is to spoil its plot twists, so this would be a good time to pause and watch the film online.

The film frames women’s expected domestication, reified through decades of Hollywood cinema, as a concern from the opening sequence onward. Model/actress Danielle meets Phillip (Lisle Wilson), an African-American man, on the set of an exploitative Candid Camera-style television game show, Peeping Toms. The exploitative show’s stereotyping attitudes are cemented when the host gives Danielle a set of cutlery for her participation, and Phillip, dinner for two at New York’s African Room. Phillip grimaces, but agrees to bring Danielle along at her behest.

Over dinner, Danielle insists she is not a Women’s Liberationist. Soon after, her stalker ex-husband, Emil (William Finley), pleads with her to leave with him. Emil is dragged away, and Danielle, now inebriated, convinces Phillip to escort her to her Staten Island apartment, where she seduces him (it is worth noting here that interracial sexual relationships, though becoming more frequent in independent films such as Sisters, were still seldom depicted in Hollywood films in 1973). As Phillip caresses his way up Danielle’s leg, Herrmann’s soundtrack escalates to a grating cacophony and the camera zooms in to reveal a large scar on Danielle’s hip. The soundtrack suggests this scar is a source of anxiety and monstrosity. What follows is a narrative about trauma and ability, or disability, both physical and psychological. At its root is Danielle’s desire for normalcy, which she interprets as heteronormativity and motherhood.

After Danielle and Phillip sleep together, she awakens from a dream that produces moans both tormented and orgasmic. She proceeds to the bathroom, where she grips her womb in pain and places two red tablets on the sink’s basin. The pills provide a stark contrast to the apartment’s virginal, all-white color scheme (Danielle typically wears white, as well). Since these pills keep Danielle functioning and therefore —as it is later revealed — liberated, they are somewhat analogous to the contemporaneous emergence of birth control technology and its role in the Sexual Revolution. Before Danielle can take the pills, she hears a woman’s voice calling her name and enters the corridor, where she argues with her sister, Dominique, off-screen. The argument, wherein Dominique labels Danielle “disgusting” for bringing a man home, wakes up Phillip, who proceeds to the bathroom and inadvertently knocks Danielle’s pills down the sink without realizing this blunder. Danielle assures Phillip her sister only stopped by because it is their birthday, and sends him out to renew her prescription. While Phillip stops to buy Dominique and Danielle a birthday cake, Danielle realizes she is out of medication, and, panicking, calls Emil for help.

When Phillip returns, he grabs a knife from Danielle’s new cutlery set and brings her the cake while she is asleep under some blankets. Phillip’s last words are benevolently patronizing, uttered after Danielle grasps the knife: “Now you know you’re not supposed to cut the cake until you blow out the candles.” Danielle, in a moment of rage, pounces on Phillip and stabs him to death.

In this first split screen sequence, Danielle’s neighbor, Grace (Jennifer Salt), a liberal investigative journalist, witnesses the murder through her window and phones the police. The detectives predictably bungle the investigation, preferring to waste critical time railing against Grace for writing an op-ed where she called police racist “pigs.” The senior detective immediately assumes Grace is imagining things, while his partner reveals his racism when he tells her, “Take it easy, lady, these people are always stabbing each other.” The police are only motivated to investigate because they fear Grace will give them more bad press. Meanwhile, the viewer watches in split screen as Danielle wakes up and Emil arrives. Emil promptly discovers the murder, but Danielle has no memory of the event. Instead, she whispers, “Dominique, what have you done?” Emil appears shocked by Dominique’s presence, but he exerts a patriarchal control over the situation, shaking Danielle out of her catatonia and telling her, significantly, “Put on some makeup. It must look as though nothing has happened.” In a scene reminiscent of Norman cleaning up after “Mother” commits murder in Psycho, Emil helps Danielle clean the apartment and stash the corpse in a fold-out sofa (if that sounds implausible, De Palma films this action in one shot to demonstrate it is possible to hide a body this way). He avoids running into the police with a garbage bag full of blood-soaked rags by seconds.

Casual and institutional sexism repeatedly thwart Grace’s attempts at investigation. When Grace and the detectives confront Danielle, the police sympathize with Danielle, and the viewer can appreciate why they would: Danielle is charming, demure, beautiful but modest — a traditionally feminine woman who represents herself as a victim, the lonely divorcee. Grace, on the other hand, is anything but her namesake: shrill-voiced, abrasive, accusatory, and clumsy enough to drop the cake she discovers, destroying a key piece of evidence. The police threaten to charge Grace unless she drops the matter.

Grace stubbornly refuses to abandon the investigation, and viewers can assume this is partly an act of rebellion against her mother, who belittles her journalism career and berates her about finding a husband. Eventually, Grace confirms her suspicion that Danielle had a sister, about whom she is lying. While watching a documentary, Grace hears a psychiatrist in patriarchal clergy robes describe Dominique as “disturbed” and Danielle “sweet” and “so responsive,” but says the latter can only be that way because of her sister. After, Dominique is said to have died during an emergency surgery that separated the conjoined twins.

De Palma once responded to accusations of misogyny with a quip: “I’m always attacked for having an erotic, sexist approach — chopping up women, putting them in peril. I’m making suspense movies! What else is going to happen to them?” (Caputi 92). While this blasé attitude might not have won him more feminist fans, Sisters’ tragic denouement has a Brechtian pedagogy meant to gall and galvanize liberal viewers.

When Grace raids the psychiatric hospital where Emil conceals Danielle, the investigation falls apart. After an encounter with a patient who shrieks because Grace asks to use the telephone (the incident presents another metaphor for women obsessively seeking false security in a domestic space), Emil easily convinces his staff that Grace is another deluded patient who needs sedating. Grace is dosed (as in Rosemary’s Baby, wherein Rosemary is restrained on a bed before being penetrated and drugged with a needle, the incident plays out like rape), and Emil begins to use hypnosis to convince her there was no murder.

The sequence that follows is metacinematic, unreliably narrated, and only logical in a surrealist sense: Grace imagines herself as Dominique, attached to Danielle, in the documentary she had viewed on the sisters. Therein, it is revealed that Danielle was traumatized as a child when others called her “freak.” Later, in the context of an inappropriate relationship with her doctor, Emil, she developed a strong desire to have a baby. Unfortunately, Dominique was always there to observe Danielle’s sexual relationship with Emil. In a surgery scene that plays out like a black mass attended by a host of spectators, Emil separates the sisters using a cleaver from the cutlery set Danielle was given at the beginning of the film. The film’s metaphor imagines Danielle and Grace as sisters, with women’s domestication and innate urges for procreation being to blame for career women’s suffering. For Danielle to have the “normal” life she desires, it is necessary to excise less “feminine” qualities and pursuits, as represented through Grace and Dominique.

After this sequence, Danielle is provoked by traumatic memories. Emil assures her he loves her and kisses her, which of course triggers her to murder him. Since the police now know Danielle is a murderess, they are ready to believe Grace. Unfortunately, Grace has been brainwashed by a patriarchal representative of the psychiatric establishment and she refuses to cooperate. She tells the police “there was no murder” from what looks like a teenager’s bedroom at her mother’s house, having regressed to a childish state where she now depends on domestication.

As with Rosemary’s Baby, Danielle’s desire for motherhood becomes a site of horror. Similar to Irena (Simone Simon) in Cat People and Carol (Catherine Deneuve) in Repulsion (directed by Roman Polanski, 1965), Danielle’s murderous tendencies erupt when she is sexually aroused or confronted. And like Norman Bates, she dissociates herself from the act of murder by adopting the persona of a dead female family member that once kept her bound in place. Sisters is, perhaps, ableist in how it associates congenital disability with horror. Yet Danielle’s monstrosity is located more in the discrepancy between her desire to fulfill a “normal” feminine role by denying her disability and the mental illness this provokes after her sister’s death. In De Palma’s film, the sister is the revenant reminding Danielle of the expense paid for her traditionally feminine identity, her liberated actions, and her domestic desires. Since Danielle’s desire for a child preempts Dominique’s accidental death (or murder), the opening credit sequence is more harrowing in retrospect: twin sisters, developing in utero.

References: Caputi, Jane (June 15, 1987). The Age of Sex Crime. Popular Press. p. 92.

Dr. Stefan Sereda is a writer/researcher with a PhD in English and Film Studies and an MA in Literature with a focus on gender and genre. His publications on American cinema and global media have appeared in A Companion to Martin Scorsese, The Memory Effect, Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, the Directory of World Cinema: Africa, and ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature.

My Sister’s Keeper: When Sisterhood Sours in Horror Films

But there’s also a darker side to sisterhood, where rivalries take violent turns and where bonds are almost too strong, superseding everything else including reality. When sisters are pushed to the extremes, when women don’t meet society’s expectations, what does this tell us about the constraints on women to conform to idealized versions of femininity and sisterhood? Are bad sisters just failures or are they simply women with complicated narratives that a patriarchal society doesn’t allow room for?

This guest post written by Jamie Righetti appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood. | Spoilers ahead.

[Trigger warning: discussion of suicide and abuse]

The beauty of sisterhood has been extolled in cinema for generations, where undeniable bonds and deep love carry women through a multitude of obstacles and life-altering events. In A League of Their Own (1992), the rivalry between Dottie (Geena Davis) and Kit (Lori Petty) drives them to achieve greatness when the country needed it most and their undeniable love for one another helps them mend their relationship in the long run. In Eve’s Bayou (1997), two sisters, Eve (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) and Cisely (Meagan Good), take turns sheltering each other from the truth behind a dark childhood trauma and help each other heal after death of their father. Despite the variety of stories, the message is clear: the love between sisters can overcome anything. It is a powerful, transcendent bond that can even be inexplicitly supernatural at times.

There’s possibly no greater example of female sibling rivalry gone wrong than Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), a Robert Aldrich film about two feuding sisters living in a crumbling mansion, which was fueled in part by the notorious rivalry between stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. In the film’s opening sequence, the stage is set for conflict. Baby Jane (Davis) is a child star and adored by the girls’ father, but later in life, it is Blanche (Crawford) who finds success in Hollywood as Jane’s star wanes. One evening, the Hudson sisters return to their mansion and when one sister gets out to open the gate, the other tries to run her over. Although we cannot see who is behind the wheel, the accident leaves Blanche permanently paralyzed.

Blanche now uses a wheelchair and Jane’s mental health declines, her behavior having grown more erratic over the years. Jane’s desperate attempts to regain her childhood stardom are in many ways directly tied to the death of her father, but her adoration (which isn’t matched by Blanche) also hints at sexual abuse. It is this correlation between success and warped love that causes her to lash out at her sister, whose success she sees as the reason her own stardom ended, which in turn brought an end to the abuse that she had categorized as love. The seeds of bitterness and dysfunction run deep for both sisters.

In the end, we discover that Blanche endures Jane’s senselessly cruel behavior because she was the one driving the car that fateful evening and it was Jane, not Blanche, who was pinned against the gate and nearly killed. Blanche has endured decades of abuse as penance for her anger, choosing to keep the truth of the accident a secret not just to punish herself but to punish her sister as well by never revealing the truth behind the story and allowing Jane to believe she was capable of such a heinous act against her own sister. As a result, Jane unleashed a torrent of abuse on to Blanche. The downfall of the Hudson sisters did not come from faded stardom but from a sibling rivalry that warped itself into a vicious cycle of abuse in place of affection.

But just as bitterness can tear two sisters apart, love can also distort into an obsession so strong that it clouds reality and puts everyone else at risk. In Sisters (1973), director Brian De Palma continues his early career homage to Hitchcock with a twist on Rear Window (1954), as well as a small nod to Vertigo (1958), with the story of Danielle (Margot Kidder), a beautiful model sheltering her dangerous sister, Dominique (also played by Kidder). The film opens with a hidden camera game show, where an unwitting salesman, Phillip (Lisle Wilson), is pranked by Danielle. He wins dinner for two and decides to take her out that evening. The two make it back to Danielle’s Staten Island apartment. Although they are menaced by Danielle’s ex-husband, Emil (William Finley), they spend the night together. In the morning, Phillip overhears Danielle arguing with her sister, Dominique, in the bedroom. Danielle is unwell and asks Phillip to pick up a prescription for her as well as a birthday cake, so she can celebrate her sister’s birthday. Upon his return, Phillip is attacked by a frenzied Dominique, who stabs him to death in the living room while Danielle is sick in the bathroom.

The murder is witnessed by one of Danielle’s neighbors, Grace (Jennifer Salt), a journalist known (and disliked) for exposing police corruption. In the film’s more overt Hitchcock homage, Grace struggles to get the police to take her claims seriously, and when they finally do search Danielle’s apartment – which Emil hastily cleaned up – they find no trace of Phillip’s body or Dominique. Although the audience knows the truth, Grace’s sanity is continuously called into question as she tries to uncover the truth about what happened. Finally, Grace discovers the truth about Danielle and Dominique: the two were Canada’s first conjoined twins, however Dominique died shortly after an operation to separate the two women. Armed with this revelation, Grace tracks down Danielle, who is once again under the control of her ex-husband, and realizes that Danielle has split her own personality, assuming the identity of her long-dead twin as a means of keeping her memory alive.

Although Sisters subtly highlights Danielle’s condition, by showing her reliance on pills and her violent withdrawal shortly before Phillip’s death, in many ways, the film is less about a diagnosed mental illness and more about Danielle’s inability to cope after the loss of her twin. For Danielle, and in turn “Dominique,” there is no greater intimacy than the one shared between twin sisters. Although a part of Danielle yearns to break free and live her life as she wishes, as evidenced by her date with Phillip, ultimately she is powerless to the bond she shares with her twin, which will take over to eradicate any threat. By quantifying Danielle and Dominique as conjoined twins, there’s an added sense of symbolism – the two are quite literally part of each other; even after the death of Dominique, part of her would inevitably live on in Danielle.

The powerful, protective bond between sisters is a theme that is also explored in A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), a South Korean horror film written and directed by Jee-woon Kim. Based on a Korean folk tale, the film introduces Soo-mi (Su-jeong Lim), a young girl questioned by doctors about an unnamed event which caused her significant trauma. Although she refuses to answer any of their questions, she is allowed to return home to her family’s large estate where she lives with her father (Kap-su Kim), her younger sister Soo-yeon (Geun-young Moon) and her stepmother (Jung-ah Yum). Although the film initially brings in a supernatural element — bloody ghosts and strange noises set us up for a ghost story — there is also a very real conflict between the sisters and their stepmother. Family photos reveal that the girls’ hatred of their stepmother is rooted in the death of their own mother. Their stepmother was a nurse who worked with their father and worked as an in-home nurse while their mother was sick. In turn, Soo-mi finds vicious bruises on her sister’s arms, indicating that the hatred is quite mutual.

Soo-mi becomes increasingly protective of her younger sister, who seems to be the target of their stepmother’s aggression. When Soo-yeon finds their pet bird has been killed, she goes into her stepmother’s room where she finds photos of herself that have been defaced. Her stepmother then grabs her and locks her in a giant armoire, ignoring the girl’s terrified pleas to be released. Finally, Soo-mi releases her sister, begging her forgiveness for not hearing her cries for help. When Soo-mi confronts her father about Soo-yeon’s ordeal, he blames her for the problems and drops a bombshell: Soo-yeon is dead. Soo-mi refuses to accept this and her father decides to send her back to the institution which she was released from earlier in the film.

But instead of just mirroring one sister’s inability to process her grief, which is at the center of Sisters, A Tale of Two Sisters offers us one more twist. It is also revealed that Soo-mi is not only seeing her dead sister, but she has split her personality and is also acting as her abusive stepmother. The film’s final sequence offers insight into Soo-mi’s fractured psyche. After the abrupt marriage between her father and stepmother, Soo-yeon discovers the body of her biological mother, who was terminally ill, hanging in the armoire. While attempting to save her mother, the armoire collapses onto Soo-yeon, who is slowly suffocating and being crushed to death. Her stepmother comes to investigate the source of the crash and notices Soo-yeon’s hand reaching out of the tipped armoire but before she can intervene, she is dragged into an argument with Soo-mi, who inadvertently facilitates her sister’s death by arguing with her stepmother. Soo-mi’s grief makes it impossible to accept her sister’s death, because by doing so she must accept her own role in it. To avert this and to demonstrate her love for Soo-yeon, she not only mentally resurrects her sister but she also assumes the identity of her stepmother, acting as both savior and torturer. Soo-mi’s ritual is almost akin to self-flagellation, where she instigates a cycle of imagined abuse and rescue to try and blur a reality in which she was too late.

While the inability to process the death of a loved one is very real, distorting both love and grief allow horror films to explore and subvert traditional gender roles, particularly where women are concerned. Both Danielle and Soo-mi could be considered good sisters because they are devoted to the memory of their dead sisters. They demonstrate the unbreakable bond that sisters can have, but in doing so, they destroy their own view of reality, unleashing violence on both themselves and those around them. Furthermore, by role-playing her dead sister’s savior, Soo-mi is adopting the maternal, nurturing instincts expected of her as a woman, but in the context of A Tale of Two Sisters, this becomes a symptom of her mental illness and eventually leads to her institutionalization. Likewise, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? not only warps sibling rivalry into something unhealthy, but it also allows the Hudson sisters to break free of the stereotypical constraints of both sisterhood and womanhood by allowing them to be abusive and even murderous towards one another. In doing so, the women are able to step away from acceptable gender roles (particularly for the film’s time period), which is something normally confined to masculine depictions of a Cain and Abel-esque brotherhood.

While sisterhood is something to be celebrated and has given us memorable depictions of love and life-long devotions, we can still glean important lessons and commentary from its darker side about our own limits as women who must juggle and adapt to multiple roles within an ever-changing society.

Jamie Righetti is an author and freelance film critic from New York City. Her work has been featured on Film School Rejects and Daily Grindhouse, as well as in Belladonna magazine. Jamie is the host of the horror podcast, ScreamBros, and she has just released her debut novel, Beechwood Park, which is currently available on Amazon. You can follow her on Twitter @JamieRighetti.

The Scary Truth About Sisters in Horror Films

So what makes sisters such fascinating subject matter for horror films? What makes them both scary and powerful, yet the most vulnerable, both to outside forces as well as to each other when they are threatened? … Sisters can behave as a single entity and fight for the same things, but there are two bodies — two physical forces — to reckon with.

This guest post written by Laura Power appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood.

Female siblings have been a go-to in horror films since horror films themselves. Sisters have been used as minor characters to fill in a cast: Daisy and Violet, the conjoined twins, and Elvira and Jenny Lee, the “Pinhead” twins, in 1932’s Freaks; the Soska sisters playing twin body-modification gurus in their own film American Mary; as specters that haunt a protagonist (the murdered twins in The Shining); as a smaller pair within a larger community of women (Danielle and Laurie in Trick ‘r Treat); and as protagonists (the Crane sisters in Psycho, Su-mi and Su-yeon in A Tale of Two Sisters, Jay and Kelly Height in It Follows).

Sisters are bound by unconditional forces: love, blood, family. Yet unlike the mother-child story in horror movies (Carrie, The Exorcist, The Babadook), the story of sisters in horror has the potential to be more forceful, more frightening. Sisters can behave as a single entity and fight for the same things, but there are two bodies — two physical forces — to reckon with. Sisters share secrets that no one else is privy to, and those secrets bind them together and make them mysterious and sometimes deadly. And turning on your sister is the ultimate betrayal, scarier and more unexpected than an attack from an outsider, which is why it makes for such effective conflict in film, especially in horror.

Sisters represent a single strong force that is duplicated in another person. Sisters work together, act together, and yet even when forces are driving them apart, they are powerful. In fact, sisters frequently become even more powerful when they are reacting to those forces that are driving them apart: they become more cunning, braver, smarter, stronger, and usually more violent and dangerous. They become even more of the “other” than they are already, and this force can be either terrifying or heroic — and sometimes both.

This power dynamic is exhibited beautifully and thoroughly in the Canadian horror film Ginger Snaps, written by Karen Walton and directed by John Fawcett. The film’s sisters, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) begin the story as a powerful duo. As children, they made a blood oath because just being sisters wasn’t enough. In school as teenagers, they stick together, even as outcasts, collaborating on a morbid “Life in Bailey Downs” photo project, standing together as though they are a single brooding unit, protecting each other on the field hockey pitch, and wearing a similar uniform of thick, dark, oversized clothing. But when the girls are driven apart — by their biological differences, both natural (Ginger starts menstruating) and unnatural (Ginger becomes a werewolf) — the changes between them that follow only seem to increase each girl’s power.

While Ginger becomes increasingly powerful physically and sexually, taking on the role of male aggressor with Jason, and tackling and beating Trina when she attacks Brigitte in a game of field hockey, Brigitte becomes increasingly powerful physically and emotionally. She is required to problem solve time and time again, and the stakes get higher and higher. Brigitte pierces her sister’s belly button with a silver ring hoping it will curb Ginger’s werewolf traits; Brigitte reacts quickly to Trina’s accidental death in their household kitchen to make sure their parents don’t suspect what has happened (and then she chips away at Trina with a screwdriver, dislodging the girl’s stiff, dead fingers from her hand). And Brigitte problem solves, delegates, and acts with maturity to the ever-increasing drama and violence around her. When the sisters have to dig a grave to bury Trina, Brigitte makes Ginger do the physical labor while she watches. She takes charge to figure out a way to help Ginger by hiding it from their parents, locking her sister in the basement bathroom, and enlisting drug-dealer Sam’s help to cook up a cure. But Brigitte must also decide if trying the cure on Ginger is worth the possibility of killing her, of losing her sister for good. And then, ultimately, Brigitte must make the decision to live and to fight — to the death — the werewolf her sister has become.

And perhaps another relative would have taken this same trajectory to help a family member or loved one. But would they have gone far enough? We see that the girls’ mother, Pamela Fitzgerald (Mimi Rogers), is willing to make major sacrifices to protect her daughters: when she finds out the girls are responsible for Trina’s death, she plans to burn the house down and take them away to “start fresh.” She is protective and proactive rather than scared or angry; but is this mother-daughter relationship stronger than the sisters’ bond? No. It is Brigitte who soothes her mother and then gives her instructions (which Pamela doesn’t follow). It is Brigitte who reenacts the sisters’ blood oath by slicing her palm and pressing it against Ginger’s, knowing that this action likely infects her with the same virus her sister suffers from. It is Brigitte who is willing to try to become a part of Ginger’s “pack” and drinks Sam’s blood. Even though Brigitte ultimately can’t follow that through, she is willing to try, and this bond — this willingness to stand together — is what makes these sisters such a powerful force.

But what happens when one sister is not willing to sacrifice for another? As Brian De Palma shows us with his 1973 film Sisters, the results can be just as powerful and just as deadly.

In Sisters, Margot Kidder plays Danielle, a French-Canadian actress and model living on Staten Island. But Danielle has a sister — a twin sister, Dominique — who we believe is disturbed and violent, and responsible for the death of Danielle’s love interest, Phillip, at the start of the film. But as the story develops we learn that Dominique, who was not just Danielle’s twin sister, but her conjoined twin sister, died a year earlier during an operation to separate them. It is, in fact, Danielle who is the murderer; it is she who has been having violent episodes and “becoming” her dead sister to assuage the guilt at having been indirectly responsible for Dominique’s death. Danielle wasn’t willing to sacrifice her romantic relationship for her conjoined twin, and she asked Emile (her doctor and lover) to “make [Dominique] go away” so that she and Emile could make love. This desire started a deadly chain-reaction, resulting in Danielle getting pregnant, Dominique reacting violently, and stabbing her sister in the stomach to end the pregnancy, and the doctors needing to separate the twins in order to save Danielle’s life, knowing that the surgery would kill Dominique.

The removal of Dominique from Danielle — removing her from Danielle’s physical body, and removing her from Danielle’s life — had such a powerful impact on Danielle that it split her mind in two. The Dominique side of her lashes out at anyone trying to love Danielle; the Danielle side regrets what she has done and calls out for her sister to “come back,” yet cannot admit that she has hurt anyone (as she stands calmly over the body of the man she has just murdered). Danielle is the villain, the monster of the film, but she has become so because her sister was taken from her.

The sacrifice of a sister is approached differently in the 2013 Andrés Muschietti film Mama. Here the sisters are Victoria and Lilly Desange, who are orphaned as very small children after their father murders their mother and then is killed himself by a mysterious creature that the girls come to call “Mama.”

The creature Mama has been living with the sisters — raising them in a way that ensures their survival but turns them near-feral — in a cabin in the woods until they are found and sent to stay with their uncle Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). Mama follows the girls and continues to play with them and protect them while getting more and more jealous of their uncle’s girlfriend Annabel (Jessica Chastain). The older sister, Victoria (Megan Charpentier), recognizes Mama’s jealousy and knows just how volatile she is; so she tries to protect Annabel whenever she can, warning her to stay away from the places Mama is likely to be.

As Victoria and Annabel’s relationship strengthens, Victoria and Lilly (Isabelle Nélisse) drift apart. Victoria’s brow is constantly furrowed when she sees her sister acting contrary to their surroundings or continuing to cling to Mama. And Victoria literally turns her back on her sister when Lilly tries to get Victoria to leave their bedroom in the middle of the night to play with Mama: Lilly shakes her head in a warning when Victoria will not go, but Victoria, after telling her sister that she loves her, is steadfast in her refusal, and Lilly goes alone.

Ultimately, Mama steals the girls away to the cliff where she died decades before, and Annabel and Lucas must try to save them. Mama tries to take both sisters off the cliff with her, and Lilly goes willingly, feeling that her place is with Mama, the mother and playmate she has known all her life, rather than with the new guardians Annabel and Lucas. At first Victoria is willing to go, to sacrifice what she can see as a happy family life with Annabel and Lucas for her only sister. Victoria is older and wants to protect Lilly, and she feels that this is how she must do that.

But when Annabel grabs onto Victoria’s robe and doesn’t let go, Victoria reconsiders and decides to let Mama and Lilly go without her: “Goodbye, Mama,” she says. “I love you.” Lilly and Victoria, separated by air as Mama and Lilly hover over the cliff, make a mirror-image as they stretch their hands out towards each other. But Lilly accepts that Victoria is staying, clasps her hands over Mama’s, and the two go over the cliff.

Victoria’s action may seen antithetical to the sister relationship, but it is not. Victoria has seen how Lilly has acted with Annabel — closed off, angry, and unhappy — and this is the opposite of how Lilly behaves with Mama. Victoria can see the unhappiness in her sister’s future if she stays, while she knows that Lilly will be happy if she goes with Mama. Victoria’s sacrifice sits in the fact that she is willing to lose her sister and live without her, so that they may both be happy.

It is in these sacrifices where we can find the true power of sisters in horror films. These sacrifices may drive the sisters apart or pull them together; but whichever way sisters in horror are drawn, the fallout is so intense and potentially destructive that it is a natural pairing with the genre — a pairing that will hopefully continue on both sides of the camera.

See also at Bitch Flicks: Puberty and the Creation of a Monster: ‘Ginger Snaps’

Laura Power teaches English composition and creative writing at a two-year college in Illinois. You can read more of her work at Cinefilles and Lake Projects and follow her on Twitter @chicagocommuter.

“A Truth Universally Acknowledged”: The Importance of the Bennet Sisters Now

But more and more it seems you can judge the quality of modern adaptations on how the filmmakers view Lizzie in relation to her sisters. Even though the representation of women has greatly expanded since Austen’s time, a story that revolves mostly around sisterly relationships remains rare, which makes it even more vital. And while it is true that Austen’s romance has a timeless quality that makes it popular, the narrative of sisterly love remains transcendent.

This guest post written by Maddie Webb appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood.

The Bennet sisters are some of the most enduring characters in fiction and Pride and Prejudice remains a beloved story. Can the modern incarnations of Lizzie, Jane, Lydia, Kitty, and Mary explain why people keep falling in love with their story?

Pride and Prejudice, for most people in popular culture, is seen as an early example of the “rom-com” genre. Boy meets girl, boy and girl hate each other, but despite their clashing personalities, they grow, develop and eventually, inevitably, fall in love. But Pride and Prejudice is more than just a first in its genre; it’s also one of the most adapted, readapted, spun off, and reworked pieces of fiction. I think the reason for that isn’t about how hunky Darcy and Wickham are or even the comic stylings of Mrs Bennet; I think it’s because of the Bennet sisters.

Like most of Jane Austen’s work, there is so much more going on under the surface and it’s easy to miss how her plots or characters often subvert societal norms, which is part of the reason her stories endure. In the case of Pride and Prejudice, this subversion comes in the form of the Bennet sisters, who are at once relatable and thoroughly atypical female characters in Regency fiction. Even within the confines of the 19th century, the Bennet sisters, for better and worse, have agency and personality coming out their ears. Though I didn’t watch every single adaptation of Austen’s classic (you’ll have to forgive me but my spare time is not that abundant), the most successful ones choose to make Lizzie’s happiness as dependent on her relationship with her sisters as her relationship with Darcy.

Three modern versions of Pride and Prejudice I did watch recently are Bride and Prejudice, the web series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — all of which I can recommend for different reasons, but all ground the heart of the narrative in the Bennet sisters’ bond. My personal favorite retelling of the Elizabeth Bennet story is The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, an Emmy-winning web series that reimagines Lizzie as a grad student who starts a video series while studying mass communication. Although only two of the sisters, Jane and Lydia, make the cut for this adaptation (there is a cousin Mary and a cat replaces Kitty), they are unquestionably more important to Lizzie than her love life, a good thing considering Darcy doesn’t even appear in person until episode 50. The vlogging format of the show gives the story enough room to fully flesh out both Jane and Lydia and shifts large amounts of Lizzie’s character development onto her relationships with her sisters. Lydia even gets her own spin-off series, which in her own words is “totes adorbs.”

I also enjoy Bride and Prejudice, the 2004 Bollywood film, mostly because of some killer musical numbers, but also because of the Bakshi sisters’ camaraderie. Our Elizabeth character, here called Lalita Bakshi, has three sisters, only losing Kitty in the translation (poor Kitty). Having the concept of arranged marriages still in place within the culture makes it a modernization that maintains more of the plot than The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. But again the alterations made to the story are largely to do with the sisters. The frame of the plot is largely the same, but the chemistry, affection, and bickering between the women feels honest and refreshing; it’s given more screen-time than the period adaptations. Bollywood and Regency fiction may not seem like a natural pairing, but keeping the family dynamic central is key to why this version is so charming.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies may be ridiculous but it’s both a period film and an action movie, making it my kind of ridiculous. Even though this is still technically a period piece it has much in common with the other modern spins on the story. The action in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is focused on the power of the sisters as a team and helps develop their characters. The opening fight scene — when the girls slaughter the zombie hoards — is a moment where an otherwise muddled film comes alive, while the training scenes are used to smuggle in some sister bonding time, over their love lives. Considering how easily this could have ended up as the period version of Sucker Punch, the Bennet sisters ensure that the film, while occasionally brainless, is never heartless.

Another key point of change in these versions is how the Wickham/Lydia plot is handled. I can only speak for myself, but in the book, Lydia’s behavior for me is just another annoying inconvenience in the path of Lizzie and Darcy’s happiness. In the original, the issue of Lydia running off isn’t about what will happen when Wickham abandons her, but more that it’ll ruin the family’s standing in society (read: Lizzie and Jane, the characters we actually care about). However, placed in a modern context, the Wickham/Lydia plot reads more like an abuse story. She is still young, naïve, and silly but crucially, not vilified because of it. As a result of this subtle but important distinction, Wickham is elevated from cad to full on monster. Hell, in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, he literally locks Lydia up and is unmasked as the cause of the zombie apocalypse. It’s another element of this version that is a bit ridiculous, but again, no one can accuse Pride and Prejudice and Zombies of being subtle.

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries variation on Wickham, while more restrained, is equally as menacing and monstrous. Over the course of the series, a subplot of party girl Lydia becoming isolated from her family slowly unravels. Now career women, Jane and Lizzie are too busy for their little sister, with the latter dismissing her as a “stupid whorey slut” in the second episode. This leads her to be emotionally manipulated by Wickham, which we get to see painfully play out in her own spin-off series. The episode in which Lizzie confronts her and Lydia realizes Wickham’s true nature, is devastating. Not because it messes with Lizzie’s happiness, but because we truly care about Lydia. Creators Hank Green and Bernie Su have spoken at length about the importance of their alterations to Lydia’s story, resulting in a heartbreaking and insightful portrayal of abuse, within a light comedy series.

A similar situation unfolds in Bride and Prejudice, perhaps to a more satisfying conclusion since we get to see both Bakshi girls slap Wickham before walking out hand in hand. It’s only fitting that, in each of these adaptations Lydia is (sometimes literally) saved from Wickham and her crime of being an impressionable and impulsive teenage girl is no longer worth a life sentence. This area of the story has always left a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to the otherwise completely serviceable 2005 Joe Wright film adaptation. Despite bringing a modern filmmaking sensibility to the rest of the narrative, Lydia is still just another silly, inconvenient hurdle on Lizzie’s path to happiness, a real wasted opportunity to show how crap it was being a woman in Regency England.

People love Pride and Prejudice for all sorts of reasons: for example, my mother is rather attached to Colin Firth’s Darcy. But more and more it seems you can judge the quality of modern adaptations on how the filmmakers view Lizzie in relation to her sisters. Even though the representation of women has greatly expanded since Austen’s time, a story that revolves mostly around sisterly relationships remains rare, which makes it even more vital. And while it is true that Austen’s romance has a timeless quality that makes it popular, the narrative of sisterly love remains transcendent.

Recommended Reading: Lizzie Bennett Diaries #2 by Hank Green (on the Lydia Bennet story)

Maddie Webb is a student currently studying Biology in London. If she doesn’t end up becoming a mad scientist, her goal is to write about science and the ladies kicking ass in STEM fields. In the meantime, you can find her on Twitter at @maddiefallsover.

‘The Neon Demon’: Objectification and Rape Culture

‘The Neon Demon’ brings to light the dual narcissism of our culture: the simultaneous, reciprocal reality created when consumers come into contact with images. The images exist so long as we look at them, and all Refn has done is reify our culture’s unhealthy obsession… I’m glad for ‘The Neon Demon,’ because it solidifies something that was already there: a hundred ornate mirrors reflecting back a society complicit in rape culture.

This guest post is written by Holly Thicknes.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and rape culture]

The Neon Demon threw up a lot of questions when it regurgitated Elle Fanning’s eyeball.

Yes, Nicolas Winding Refn made a surrealistic film about a 16 year old It-Girl model who gets slowly engulfed by the horrific monster that is the fashion industry via a bunch of envious flesh-eating model competitors. It’s the Donald Trump card of controversy at cinemas right now. But it also – pretty neatly, despite its gory appearance – epitomizes a society that is at once compelled and revolted by its need to consume.

Refn is obviously obsessed with women. He’s in awe of them. He thinks they’re intangibly beautiful. His entire filmic career can be seen as an expression of his distraction with how the female body differs from the male, and how that inspires violence. Jealousy, protectiveness, impotency: it’s all there in the scopophilic text of his films, skirting around the ankles of his uber-masculine figurines that dance perfect executions of violent, sexual acts.

It’s no wonder his latest film, a departure from the likes of Drive and Only God Forgives in that its central character is a woman, but in which his obsession shines through stronger than ever, has been deemed by many a gross, misogynistic ululation, or else pure unashamed spectacle. I can’t help but wonder if, had a heterosexual woman made a neo-porn movie detailing all of her perverse, beautiful desires, anyone would be eager to finance it. But I don’t begrudge Refn for making it, just as I don’t begrudge Hitchcock’s unapologetic spunking of his inner most fantasies on cinema’s walls. It’s not about limiting human creativity, censoring what could be deemed a negative influence or pointing the finger at what someone truly feels.

The Neon Demon brings to light the dual narcissism of our culture: the simultaneous, reciprocal reality created when consumers come into contact with images. The images exist so long as we look at them, and all Refn has done is reify our culture’s unhealthy obsession – what he himself is unhealthily obsessed with.

I’m glad for The Neon Demon, because it solidifies something that was already there: a hundred ornate mirrors reflecting back a society complicit in rape culture.

Reducing someone to an object makes it easier to harm them. More than this — it incites violence. Rape culture is a culture that dehumanizes. It normalizes rape and abuse while simultaneously blaming rape and sexual assault victims/survivors for their actions and behaviors.

This is embedded in the fabric of The Neon Demon. It sets up a gorgeously glowing, electronically scored, Americana world in which beauty “isn’t everything – it’s the only thing,” and women strive to mold themselves into non-human visions. The predatory danger of this nightmarish place, which young Jesse (Elle Fanning) is so keen to be part of, is crucial to the first part of the film, in which Keanu Reeves plays a rapist motel owner by the name of Hank, preying on young disenfranchised girls who are forced to live there. As Jesse presses her ear to the wall of her room and listens to the 13-year-old girls being raped next door with tears streaming down her face, the margins of her power close tightly around her. She is reduced to nothing but a porcelain doll – her beauty and youth her only bargaining tools of worth.

But, alas, every effort the first half of the film makes to incredulously depict moments of degradation and objectification – so promisingly linked directly to rape in the above scene — melts into nothing. It is disappointingly superseded by what it sees, like a magpie destined to be drawn from one shiny artifact to the next. Refn gets entirely distracted by the surface of the movie, pushing the mesmerizing spectacle to its all-consuming limit and in doing so, dissolving all of its efforts towards saying something interesting, memorable and, crucially, progressive.

Perhaps it is enough to address the link between objectification and rape at all, and Refn’s second-act descent into style obsession — there are some painfully drawn-out shots of pure fantasy indulgence — only reiterates his pointing out how far our image illness has gone. But somehow, I don’t think so. I feel it has the effect of switching off swaths of audiences who find themselves in the middle of one of Refn’s wet dreams. The film negates its previous commentary by becoming hypnotized by its own evil.

We cannot blame Refn for articulating an ugly truth. We are all complicit in our culture. If the eyeball-eating scene is the only one that survives The Neon Demon, let it be not for its shock factor, but because it fills us with as much disgust as do rape culture and our own mass consumption of women’s bodies.

Holly Thicknes is a freelance film critic and editor of female-focused film blog Girls On Film. She lives and works in London, studies printmaking, and helps organize themed short film events for Shorts On Tap. She is particularly interested in the ways in which films help people carve out spaces for themselves in an increasingly lonely society. You can follow Girls On Film on Twitter @girlsonfilmLDN.

1950s B-Movie Women Scientists: Smart, Strong, but Still Marriageable

While the happily ever after scenario in these 1950s B-movies comes with an expectation that women give up their careers in science to become wives and mothers once the appropriate suitor is identified, it seems there are women in B-movies who do have it all — they maintain the respect afforded to them as scientists and also win romantic partners, without having to sacrifice their professional interests to assume domestic roles instead.

This guest post written by Linda Levitt appears as part of our theme week on Women Scientists.

A study published by the University of Denver in 2012 shows that less than one third of women completing degrees in STEM fields end up pursuing careers in the disciplines they studied. In fact, one in three women leaves the technology workforce within the first two years. Since the number of women pursuing and succeeding in careers as scientists remains quite small, it is surprising to find a particular characterization of women as scientists in 1950s science fiction B-movies. The abundance of female scientists in these films does not reflect the reality of women in the sciences at the time. We could argue that including female scientists enhances the moviegoing experience by creating “eye candy” for male audience members. If the moviegoer identifies with the heroic male lead, as film theorist Laura Mulvey and others would assume, then the film’s satisfying conclusion includes winning the heart of the “leading lady” and enabling the “happily ever after” for the heroic male scientist who saves civilization from deadly creatures, nuclear meltdown, or another apocalyptic scenario.

Science fiction routinely offers an alternative present or a possible future: some of these realities are promising, and some are apocalyptic. The possibility of gender equality in the workplace is not far-fetched for an alternative reality, especially in light of a long history of women working quietly in the background in the sciences. Thus another perspective would be to argue that the inclusion of female scientists in B-movies allowed young women in the audience to see the possibility for an intellectual career for themselves.

In the decades since these films first played in theaters and drive-ins, it has become relatively commonplace for women to have fulfilling careers, although gender equality remains a daunting challenge across all professions. The recent proliferation of discussions about “work-life balance” indicates this inequality: the need to find a balance between professional and personal lives is addressed almost exclusively to women. While the happily ever after scenario in these 1950s B-movies comes with an expectation that women give up their careers in science to become wives and mothers once the appropriate suitor is identified, it seems there are women in B-movies who do have it all — they maintain the respect afforded to them as scientists and also win romantic partners, without having to sacrifice their professional interests to assume domestic roles instead.

Women scientists featured in 1950s B-movies span a broad variety of expertise: paleontologist Lee Hunter in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), Dr. Patricia Medford, an etymologist in Them! (1954), biologist Stephanie Clayton in Tarantula (1955), and three scientists — Joanna Merritt, Marna Roberts, and Madame Elzevir (truly, she was not afforded a first name), wife of the esteemed Dr. Pierre Elzevir — in Gog (1954). These women often have the answers to save civilization, or willingly brave deadly encounters with the unknown, but many of the depictions of female scientists also reify gender stereotypes about women, regardless of their intellectual prowess and independence.

The 1954 Cold War sci-fi thriller Gog offers several good examples. A feminist critique would address some of the blatantly sexist events, such as the research assistant who weeps hysterically when the scientist she works with dies suddenly, only to be slapped across the face by another male scientist who implores her to “get some men up here and restore order.” Just the same, three women scientists are at work in this underground laboratory where a space station is being built. One of the scientists, Joanna Merritt (Constance Dowling), is portrayed as serious, intellectual, and devoid of much emotion. She does, however, have a quick wit.

Merritt and Dr. Van Ness (Herbert Marshall), the lab supervisor, take security agent David Sheppard (Richard Egan) on a tour of the facility. They observe an experiment in weightlessness, where a man and woman are training for a zero-gravity environment in space. After watching them for awhile, Sheppard asks: “Why the girl?” Merritt replies: “We think women are better suited for space travel than men.” Lest she have the opportunity to make an argument favoring women over men, Van Ness quickly adds, “For one thing, they take up less space in a rocket.”

Sheppard objectifies the female astronaut in training, referring to her as “the girl” and questioning the appropriateness of her place in the space program. Then Van Ness adds that women are better because they are smaller, providing an idealized stereotype of the petite, fit woman. Nonetheless, there is still an opportunity for Merritt to offer what rhetorically sounds like a scientific truth: “We think women are better suited for space travel than men.” She has a strong and present personality, and the perspective she voices is not easily dismissed. Spoiler alert: There have already been hints that David Sheppard and Joanna Merritt are… well… romantically acquainted, and by film’s end, they appear destined for the happily ever after. Still, her position as a scientist of regard does not seem diminished. The presence of women in positions of intellectual power seems tacitly accepted here, in a filmic world where imagination is boundless.

Merritt has no internal conflict — she is not concerned about making choices about her life. Yet the taken-for-granted nature of female scientists in these films differs markedly from recent films: for characters like Dr. Ellie Sattler in Jurassic Park (1993) or Dr. Eleanor Alloway in Contact (1997), their choice of careers leads others to question their scientific authority and personal motivation.

Women’s studies scholar J. Kasi Jackson points out that “in addition to negotiating between detachment and empathy, the female scientist must balance professionalism with femininity.” The woman scientist is an outsider both in science, where her “feminine” empathy is not objective, and in society, where scientific rationality conflicts with assumed “feminine” traits. Jackson’s observations relate well to Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond), a paleontologist in the 1953 giant creature movie The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Hunter is a social outcast: as a woman, she doesn’t comfortably fit in with her male colleagues, nor does she seem to connect with any other women. She is, in fact the only woman with any substance in the film, and no one doubts her place on the scene or the veracity of her research and observations. The other female characters are empty stereotypes: a nurse, a nun, a telephone operator, a screaming mother, and a bank of phone operators handling calls in the monster-created emergency. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms fails the Bechdel Test, since it does not have: (1) at least two women in it, who (2) talk to each other, about (3) something other than a man.

Although it is unlikely that a 1950s science fiction B-movie would pass the Bechdel Test, it is employed here to draw attention to the strength of the female scientist in this film. Like Joanna Merritt, Lee Hunter is poised, confident, and smart. She is the assistant to Dr. Thurgood Elson (Cecil Kellaway), who is visited by a physicist named Thomas Nesbitt (Paul Hubschmid), who believes he has seen a dinosaur. No one takes Nesbitt very seriously, but Hunter does. She establishes both her scientific prowess and her compassion after Nesbitt leaves Elson’s laboratory. Of Nesbitt, she tells Elson, “When he first came to this country, I attended his lectures on the curative properties of radioactive isotopes. He’s a brilliant man. Isn’t his story in any way feasible?” Despite Elson’s refusal, Hunter decided to visit Nesbitt’s office to offer her support.

Nesbitt’s secretary informs him of Lee’s arrival: “There’s a Lee Hunter waiting for you. She’s very pretty.” In this moment, the narrative privileges Lee’s femininity and sexuality over her intellect. Yet when Nesbitt later asks why she would believe his claims, she says, “I have a deep abiding faith in the work of scientists. Otherwise I wouldn’t be one myself.” Hunter ties her identity to science, a theme which is repeated throughout the film.

Science fiction B-movies from the 1950s are rife with female characters who do not have the independence or determination of Joanna Merritt and Lee Hunter. Some female characters are primarily sexualized and seductive, where others are hyper-emotional and present themselves as weak and needy. Despite the depiction of some women scientists, these films still reflect the gendered reality of their time: the cultural framework in which these films are set is undeniably sexist. Teresa De Lauretis argued that female characters are made to conform to the ideal image that the male protagonist has for them. Regardless of their intellect or achievements, these characters are the object of the male gaze.

Writing in 1971, political scientist Jo Freeman argued that one of the core concepts of sexism is that “women are here for the pleasure and assistance of men.” Freeman goes on to say that:

“It is this attitude which stigmatizes those women who do not marry or who do not devote their primary energies to the care of men and their children. Association with a man is the basic criterion for participation by women in this society and one who does not seek her identity through a man is a threat to the social values.”

Identity formation is a complex process, and every person forms and performs their identity in the context of their interpersonal relationships. In other words, self-identity reflects, but is not dependent upon, the presence of others. Freeman’s claim, then, has validity, especially when viewed with contingency. For women scientists in the 1950s, “association with a man” was “the basic criterion for participation by women” in society: science has been and remains patriarchal. As previously noted, women tend to abandon or simply not pursue professional life in the sciences; the lack of a welcoming, balanced space for women is one reason. With this in mind, it is noteworthy that B-movie women scientists seem undaunted by the patriarchal cultures in which they choose to work.

Although men significantly outnumber women in the B-movies discussed here, women were frequently featured in significant scientific roles, battling aliens, mutant forces, or giant bugs. A survey of these films indicates a spectrum of reception in which female scientists may be welcome or othered, depending on their circumstances and relationships to men within the patriarchal culture of a scientific organization.

Linda Levitt’s research focuses on gender studies, media, and cultural memory. Her work is often situated at the intersection of these ideas.