Horror – Page 4 – Bitch Flicks

‘Splice’: The Horror of Having It All

…’Splice’ could very well be a cautionary tale for the career woman considering motherhood. From the outset, the film shows Elsa as an ambitious scientist who loves her job – and who loves her life exactly the way it is. … This presents the central conflict of Elsa’s character: her repressed desire to be a mother, and her larger desire to remain in control of her own life, body, and career.

This guest post written by Claire Holland appears as part of our theme week on Women Scientists. | Spoilers ahead.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape]

“What’s the worst that could happen?”

That’s the question Clive (Adrien Brody), a genetic engineer, poses to his partner in both work and life, Elsa (Sarah Polley), regarding the possibility of having a child together. The rest of Splice goes on to answer that question, and the perspective is not an optimistic one.

While sporadically debating the pros and cons of making a baby the old-fashioned way, the two scientists create a creature, eventually named “Dren,” by splicing genetic material from different animals – including human genes from Elsa, who becomes a de facto mother. Splice explores a number of fraught topics, including the politics of male-female relationships, the nature of motherhood, and the ethics of genetic engineering and abortion. One of the less explored topics, however, is what the film says about the working mother, specifically. While the waters are a bit murky on the subject, look at it in the right light and Splice could very well be a cautionary tale for the career woman considering motherhood.

From the outset, the film shows Elsa as an ambitious scientist who loves her job – and who loves her life exactly the way it is. Her boyfriend Clive is the one who wants to change things, gently but insistently prodding Elsa about altering their lives to make room for a baby. Elsa makes it clear that she’s not interested in doing so, stating, “I don’t want to bend my life to suit some third party that doesn’t even exist yet.” She also suggests they wait until they “crack male pregnancy,” suggesting that she may never be interested, for a variety of reasons. However, Clive continues to pester Elsa to change her mind. It’s apparent that Clive represents the good, “normal” man who wants expected things like a nuclear family, blissfully unaware of the lasting effects a child would have on his female partner’s body and career. Elsa represents the abnormal, and implicitly wrong, approach to living as a woman: putting herself before her womb.

Elsa takes the ultimate gamble when she inserts her own genetic material into the amalgam that is Dren. This presents the central conflict of Elsa’s character: her repressed desire to be a mother, and her larger desire to remain in control of her own life, body, and career. Splice goes on to suggest that these two desires are inherently incompatible, and further, that attempting to “have it all” is a punishable offense.

When it comes to pseudo-motherhood, Elsa can’t do anything right, at least in Clive’s opinion. At the beginning, he reprimands her for treating Dren “like a pet” rather than a specimen. Clive’s fear illustrates how stereotypically female attributes, such as the ability to nurture, are considered weaknesses in a male-dominated profession like science, and the working world in general. Elsa sees potential in Dren that reaches far beyond the original goals of the experiment, but the film only presents this new facet of her character as a negative. It makes Elsa emotional, and therefore a danger to the sterile work world she inhabits.

As Dren (Delphine Chanéac) matures and becomes more volatile, she grows closer to Clive, who she begins to see as a potential mate (and, disturbingly, vice versa), and becomes resentful of Elsa’s restrictive presence. Clive remains critical of Elsa’s reactions to parenthood as she begins to shift from doting mother to controlling mother, suddenly finding her not maternal enough for his liking. Although we discover that Elsa has deep-seated issues with her own mother that hinder her ability to parent effectively, we also see that as the only parental figure left in the equation, she is obliged to become more and more domineering in order to keep their unauthorized experiment under wraps.

It’s at this point that Elsa becomes fundamentally unable to reconcile her roles as mother and scientist. Faced with a wild, fully grown Dren who doesn’t want to be told what to do, Elsa reestablishes control the only way she knows how: by force. She knocks Dren unconscious, ties her down, and surgically removes the stinger she has on her tail. Elsa then uses the stinger to synthesize the protein her team has been attempting to make all along. It is her greatest accomplishment, and also her coldest, most calculating moment, divorcing her entirely from the mother figure she once represented to Dren. It seems that in order to find success in her job, Elsa has to renounce her maternal side completely.

In the final act of Splice, Dren transitions from female to male (the final part of her life cycle, foreshadowed earlier in the film). Dren then rapes Elsa, for reasons left unexplained. Perhaps it’s simply Dren’s animal instinct, but it comes across as punishment; punishment for being too ambitious in realms not traditionally female (Elsa’s career, science), or punishment for not finding fulfillment in the roles women are “supposed” to find fulfillment (motherhood and wifedom). No matter how you splice it, the film does not treat Elsa’s non-conformance with much kindness or sympathy, and for better or worse it reads as a blaring warning sign to women like her: attempting to “have it all” can be deadly.

See also at Bitch Flicks: ‘Splice’: Womb Horror and the Mother Scientist

Claire Holland is a freelance writer and author of Razor Apple, a blog devoted to horror movies and horror culture with a feminist bent. Claire has a BA in English and creative writing, but she insists on writing about “trashy” genre movies nonetheless. You can follow her on Twitter @ClaireCWrites.

When Will Black Women Play Leading Scientists More Often?

In movies and on television, the absence of Black women as scientists is glaringly obvious. …The response on social media to the vocation of Leslie Jones’ character in ‘Ghostbusters’ offers an opportunity to ponder: When have Black women been cast as scientists in laboratories, creating and inventing significant and outlandish developments, and leading investigations? …Where are the Black women playing scientists in films in the 21st century?

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

In movies and on television, the absence of Black women as scientists is glaringly obvious. This became more obvious when the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot caused an outcry around Leslie Jones — the only Black Ghostbuster — being cast as a municipal worker, rather than a scientist like her white women costars. Even though Jones’ occupation is identical to Ernie Hudson’s role as Winston in the 1984 original, the response on social media to the vocation of Jones’ character offers an opportunity to ponder: When have Black women been cast as scientists in laboratories, creating and inventing significant and outlandish developments, and leading investigations? Black women have been stereotypically cast as servants and sex workers in too many films to name here, but we should be asking: Where are the Black women playing scientists in films in the 21^st century?

Some of the smaller, less central scientist roles played by Black actresses include Kerry Washington as Medical Officer Marissa Brau in 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea (2007), Alfre Woodard as Lily Sloane as Zefram Cochrane’s (played by James Cromwell) assistant in Star Trek: First Contact (1996), N’Bushe Wright as hematologist Dr. Karen Jenson in Blade (1998), and Dr. Billie Worth (Rosalind Cash) seeking the cure to cirrhosis with Dr. Henry Pride (Bernie Casey) in Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde, the 1976 blaxploitation version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Most recently, Viola Davis seems to have cornered the most roles as a Black female scientist. Davis played Dr. Helen Gordon in Solaris (2002) and as Major Gwen Anderson, a psychologist in Enders Game (2013). Davis also plays Amanda Waller in the recently completed Suicide Squad movie. Angela Bassett portrayed the same role in Green Lantern (2011) but this version of the character was a scientist, rather than a government official.

The upcoming 2017 Hidden Figures (starring Taraji P. Henson, Janelle Monáe, Octavia Spencer), Sanaa Lathan in the 2004 film AVP: Alien vs. Predator, and Janet Jackson in the 2000 comedy The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps approach representations of Black women as scientists in ways that have yet to be replicated more often. But there is also room for more believable portrayals across STEM-related disciplines. These roles are some of the only leading roles where Black women scientists received top billing, rather than as supporting characters who assist other scientists.

In AVP: Alien vs. Predator, Lathan portrays Alexa Woods, an environmental technician and expedition leader for a group of archaeologists, which makes her more than a scientist. She leads her fellow scientists and eventually prevails against two nearly unstoppable adversaries. Throughout this film, Alexa is a quick-thinking, resourceful heroine in escalating crises. Her final challenge lies in preventing any aliens from rising to Earth’s surface. Otherwise, the Predators and humans know that life on the planet will be completely destroyed.

Alexa’s first scene displays her endurance as she climbs the Lho La icefall in Nepal. In the middle of ascent, her ringing cell phone startles her, but she calmly and quickly secures herself in order to answer the call via the ear piece tucked beneath her cap. She, along with a team of experts, is flown in directly from the mountaintop via helicopter to meet with Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen) to hear a description of the mission. Weyland’s satellites have discovered an unusual heat signature in Antarctica, and thermal imaging reveals a massive structure with hundreds of rooms built around a central core beneath the edifice. The pyramid itself displays characteristics from structures from Aztec, Cambodian, and Egyptian structures. Woods’ doubt about the safety of the mission leads her to turn it down. But Sebastian de Rosa (Raoul Bova) and Graeme Miller (Ewen Bremner) convince her to take the mission by asking if they have a better chance of surviving with her. The lack of experience of other scientists in her hazardous field and de Rosa’s gentle request convinces Alexa that she can work toward keeping the crew safe. Inevitably, Alexa is the only expert who can take on the mission with Weyland Industries to find what may be the earliest pyramid, 2,000 feet below Bogataya Island.

The team arrives at the abandoned whaling station on the Antarctic island. They discover that some sort of advanced thermal equipment has cut a perfectly angled tunnel straight toward the pyramid just before their arrival. As they begin to descend into the tunnel, Weyland loses his grip and starts plummeting toward a possible collision with the rocks and pyramid below. Alexa clearly notes his sliding body and lowers an ice hatchet onto the loose, unused hood of Weyland’s parka. In doing so, she saves the wealthy initiator of the project who, at times, sounds like a fatherly/great white benefactor standing in for Alexa’s late father, who died from complications related to a mountain climbing injury.

After losing Sebastian, the last member of her team who helped her figure out some of the written hieroglyphs, Alexa undergoes a significant hunting ritual of the Predators. She surrenders one of the artifacts, approaches a surviving Predator peacefully, and kills one of the aliens. This unlikely alliance places a Black woman in a role that is nearly nonexistent in U.S. cinema: a leader who survives an animal-like alien onslaught and a technologically-advanced hunter who could easily eliminate human life. Lathan could have reprised her role as Alexa Woods in the 2007 sequel Alien vs. Predator: Requiem or in other films, much like Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in the Alien franchise. But that opportunity never arose.

Before the release of the suspense-filled sci-fi action film AVP: Alien Versus Predator, Eddie Murphy starred as the lead in the 1996 remake of The Nutty Professor, which was originally a Jerry Lewis film made in 1963. Unlike the chemistry student Carla Purty (Jada Pinkett Smith) in Murphy’s first Nutty Professor, Denise Gaines (Janet Jackson) is Sherman Klump’s colleague in the sequel The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps. In her opening scene, Jackson dons wire-framed glasses and a blazer. Throughout the entire film, Jackson is covered in long sleeves and long skirts, like a modest academic who would rather downplay her physical attributes and draw attention to her intellect. Sherman wedges his way into a crowded lecture to listen to Denise explain her research as she points to an overhead projection featuring illustrations of DNA chains. Her research is related to a potential process for genomic extraction. An extraction such as this would remove risk factors from an individual’s DNA in order to prevent genetic health problems in the future.

In the next scene, Denise enters Sherman’s lab to pull him aside and talk to him one on one. As they walk under wide collegiate arches together, Denise tells him that she’s been invited to take a position at University of Maine, but she’s not sure if she wants to take it since she wants to stay because of her feelings for Sherman. In some ways, this reflects the difficulty that women faculty, including women of color STEM faculty often face, the challenge of finding a spouse. “Sherman, I’m not talking about research. Sherman, you’re very special to me. You are kind and decent. You are the most brilliant man I’ve ever known.” When Gaines says this and disregards Sherman’s size, the implication is that she loves him, not some conventionally attractive appearance he could have. Gaines’ perception of Sherman is reinforced after an outburst from Buddy Love, his bullying, overtly macho Jekyll-like, alter-ego. When Sherman proposes to Denise, he impresses her by writing/spraying “Marry Me” in the sky with a simulated hormone. It is his decency and intellectual prowess that leads to Denise accepting his proposal. They celebrate this happy moment after class in a lecture hall while they sip champagne out of beakers, and Chaka Khan’s “Tell Me Something Good” plays in the background. Their giggles and sips are followed by a major professional success when the boss of both Sherman and Denise, Dean Richmond (Larry Miller), notifies them that their research led to receiving a multi-million-dollar research grant from a fictional pharmaceutical company.

Although Denise is Sherman’s peer, not just his fiancée, her role is downplayed to emphasize the scenes where she participates in wedding festivities for her plans, including dinner with both sets of parents, trying on Sherman’s mother’s wedding dress, picking up an altered dress, and attending a bachelorette party complete with a fireman stripper dancing to Sisqo’s “Thong Song.”

Although there are some thoughtful moments that portray masculinity as a scholarly, sensitive man like Sherman Klump or his loving father Cletus, who can be tender with the wife he desperately wants to please, they are caricatures of Black people that stereotype plus-size people and older Black women by Murphy dressing in drag. When he plays Mama Klump and the hyper-sexual Granny Klump, the humor resides in creating a plus-size, undersexed mother and a representation of an older, lascivious Black woman with oversized, flapping breasts and bad dental health. This reliance on Granny Klump’s appetites as an ageist source of humor makes the sexuality of older women look absurd and completely undesirable. The women in the film (who aren’t Murphy in drag) are Denise, a couple of women that Sherman briefly greets on campus, and a few women of various ages in a club where Cletus tests out Sherman’s youth formula during a night out. In fact, Sherman’s nephew Ernie Klump, Jr. (played by Jamal Mixon) is the only person in the Klump family who is actually plus-size, and he has the least to say in the film. When he does speak, it is often to punctuate a moment of comic relief.

Aside from these shallow sizeist and stereotypical portrayals of Black people (especially Black women and Black families), one of the underlying messages is that a good woman can help save you. After convincing Dean Richmond that he can fix his declining intelligence and secure the pharmaceutical contract, Sherman takes a small amount of the youth formula and checks his computer to check the details of his rapidly progressing brain damage, which will only be reversed by ingesting some of the genetic material of Buddy Love. This isn’t necessarily consistent with science, but it offers a simple plot point.

After Dean Richmond and Sherman hurriedly leave to capture Buddy Love, Denise enters the laboratory to leave a note for Sherman. She understands the life-altering results of the file that Sherman carelessly left open. The details of the file reveal the genetic extraction that Sherman performed on himself without telling her, and she follows them to save Sherman. When she finds Sherman, he is barely able to speak, and they discover that some of Buddy Love’s genetic material has been absorbed into a water fountain. Denise forces Sherman to drink from it to restore his deteriorating intelligence. Even though she has access to the laboratory and she understands the file, Denise’s intellectual and scientific talents are primarily showcased in that first classroom scene where she is teaching, not necessarily in applied sciences, like Sherman.

Lastly, in Margot Lee Shetterly’s upcoming book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (William Morrow, 2016), she focuses on the “women computers” of the Langley Research Center, of what would become NASA, who performed calculations that led to John Glenn’s walk on the moon. These women included Katherine G. Johnson, Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan, Kathryn Peddrew, Sue Wilder, Eunice Smith, and Barbara Holley. In 2014, two years before the book’s publication, the book rights were sold and plans to launch the new film Hidden Figures began.

As more Black women assume the roles of scientists in major motion pictures, a better job can be done to make them instrumental, rather than ancillary, to the plots of such films.

See also at Bitch Flicks: 5 Women Scientists Who Need Their Own Movie ASAP

Tara Betts is the author of two full-length poetry collections Break the Habit and Arc & Hue. She is also the author of the chapbooks 7 x 7: kwansabas (Backbone Press, 2015), the upcoming Never Been Lois Lane (dancing girl press, 2016), and the libretto THE GREATEST!: An Homage to Muhammad Ali (Argus House/Winged City Press, 2013). Tara’s writing has appeared in The Source, XXL, Black Radio Exclusive, Essence, NYLON, and the blog for Ploughshares.

Black Women in 1980’s Horror Films: Tokenism and Regression

However, I do thoroughly enjoy and sometimes defend 80s horror and the Black (female) characters I can find, but it’s crucial to examine the narrow confines of their characterization. …The 80s opened up a dialogue about where Black women’s place was not only in society, but in horror.

This guest post written by Ashlee Blackwell originally appeared at Graveyard Shift Sisters and appears here as part of our theme week on Ladies of the 1980s. It is cross-posted with permission.

Horror in the 1980s saw its most economically prosperous boom ever with droves of young audiences flocking to the theaters each weekend to catch the latest mainstream fare and the independent distribution circuit got a taste for massive dollar returns thanks to VHS technology, video rental stores, and small film companies not yet chewed and swallowed by the landmark Telecommunications Act in 1996. The abundance of films were endless. So much so, myself and other horror aficionados are still combing purposely through the virtual racks to find untapped treasures, and others we loved but don’t remember by name. Unsurprising, diverse character representations weren’t necessarily a part of this equation.

The best description of Black characters in horror films in the 1980s is “fairly fleeting or nonexistent.” With major horror films in settings that reflected the “white flight” from “urban” (read: poor/working class, people of color) spaces, the reality of camps, suburbs, and modern, renewal terrains is where supernatural forces found a home away from the reality-based, city horrors. Of course, you had both non-White interlopers as insignificant, stand-in characters (actor Richard Lawson as Ryan in Poltergeist comes to mind) and the fly in the buttermilk characters I often mirror with the trend of the Black middle class during this time.

With sparse African American presence on this foundation, “Black characters’ value was confined to their ability to affect an assimilable air in cross-racial, interpersonal encounters,” often reduced to tokenized roles that saw them “blend” in with the group with no discernible interest in fleshing their characters out, making them just as multi-faceted, whole individuals as their white counterparts. However, I do thoroughly enjoy and sometimes defend 80s horror and the Black (female) characters I can find, but it’s crucial to examine the narrow confines of their characterization. While it was important for them to be “seen,” it’s disheartening that they were left to our imaginations to assess their merit.

Below are three of note, as they are as diverse in characterization as they are in setting. Within the realm of Black women in 1980’s horror films, they are standouts and widely recognized; funny enough because they are amongst the few.

Grace Jones as Katrina in Vamp (1986)

There’s one self-indulgent wish I have: to go back a few years to the pop culture conference I attended and to not have another meeting conflict with one graduate student’s presentation on Grace Jones’ vampiric performance in this film. I’m still wildly interested in the author’s thoughts on the dynamics of this character. There’s a lot to say about a significant character who does not speak. Your understanding comes from Katrina’s movements and reactions to those with whom she interacts. Katrina is feared, respected, and desired as any head vampress of a seedy strip club should be. Regardless of the film’s camp, it’s sort of an original step with Jones’ personae bringing to life such art and terror to a memorable character.

Toy Newkirk as Sheila Kopecky in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

It’s not without surprise to those in-the-know that this character is a personal favorite. Sheila is the first casualty of the barrier broken between the “Elm Street children” and the “fresh meat.” She is the Black friend who her white high school co-horts depend on for math tutoring and bug zappers. She is a part of the white female protagonist’s (Alice) arc in avenging her fallen friends and defeating Freddy. And in step with this particular Elm Street franchise installment and the famed sentiment, she proves the rule loosely solidified in this decade that the Black person does die first.

We don’t learn much about Sheila: we don’t see her at home, with family, taking interest in anyone romantically, or alone with her thoughts. To be fair, that’s not the tone of this film with a clear focus on Alice vs. Freddy. A small grace that Sheila offers is the fact that she strays heavily from caricature often associated with Black women in mainstream films. She wasn’t a “sassy, eccentric, magical servant,” a trope long associated with Black women in horror films long before the blaxploitation period in the 1970s. In fact, she was an extroverted nerd. Because this is a character so rare, if arguably non-existent for Black women on screen, it makes A Nightmare On Elm Street 4 revolutionary.

Lisa Bonet as Epiphany Proudfoot in Angel Heart (1987)

An ethereal presence in a surreal mystery, Epiphany provided both distraction and information to Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke), a private investigator who travels down to the American south to find the whereabouts of a musician named Johnny Favorite. The story was Angel’s; Epiphany’s presence had its share of significance considering the structure of the story. Bonet’s role was of a mystical practitioner of voodoo, more inclined to offer Angel rather cryptic facts about her mother, Evangeline who was the deceased lover of Favorite’s. Angel Heart‘s place in genre as a period mystery has me refraining from revealing too much of the story, but the beats that addressed matters of race are much better for analysis than the prior two films mentioned.

It is difficult to separate artist from the art here. Bonet was on a highway to super stardom during the film’s release, and her explicit love scene with Rourke’s character, considering their age difference and grisly imagery accompanying, sent a tizzy of rumors spiraling, citing this role as possibly being one of the reasons she and Bill Cosby were infamously at odds which Bonet has disputed.

In what may be considered more cult than mainstream, Angel Heart has earned its stripes as being one of the more bold and richly dark thrillers of the decade.

With a significant absence of Black filmmakers creating work in horror during the 1980s, representation was scant. Black characters were villains, supportives, and ultimately, victims just like other disposable characters. The problem lies in a lack of consideration for non-White actors to receive fulfilling, leading roles, not matter how slashery a horror film in the 80s was. It took the renaissances of Black cinematic genre storytelling of the 1970s and 1990s to bring more compelling roles back to these characters, Black women in particular. They have set the tone for what mainstream and independent horror filmmakers of any background are slowly but steadily doing today.

However, the 80s opened up a dialogue about where Black women’s place was not only in society, but in horror. Katrina demonstrates a stark fear of “the Other” who dwells beyond the parameters of the safe, White institutions, Sheila is a marker of assimilation and the rise of the Black middle class with a Huxtable like allure, while also being a Black girl nerd we like, and Epiphany is rooted in a past that Reagan’s message to America desired; a return to the good ‘ole days when miscegenation was taboo if not illegal. This may not have been a time to necessarily celebrate representation and diversity in the genre. But there’s enough open for much discourse that, whether intended or not, these films have left for its consumers to chew on for years to come.

References:

*Additional information and references not linked are from Dr. Robin Means Coleman’s book, Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present. New York: Routledge, 2011.

Ashlee Blackwell is the founder and managing editor of Graveyard Shift Sisters, a website dedicated to highlighting the work of women of color in the horror and science fiction genres. She holds a MA in Liberal Arts from Temple University and aspires to bring intersectional horror into the college classroom.

‘The Fog’: 5 Women, an Environmental Crisis, and No Forecast of Friendship

Before watching the movie with a more critical lens, I reminisced that these strong female characters drove the community response to crisis as they began to interact and even came to depend on each other. … It seems like ‘The Fog’ exposes the idea that strong women can’t have any meaningful relationships that might endure and even help them survive and understand themselves better through tough times.

This guest post by ThoughtPusher appears as part of our theme week on Ladies of the 1980s. | Spoilers ahead.

When I saw the theme for this month, I assumed John Hughes and cult-favorites with coming-of-age individuality would be well-covered territory; so as I considered topics that might extend beyond teen angst and stellar soundtracks, I started thinking about friendship. Honing in on my beloved 80s-era references, I would like to say that I immediately jumped into an ocean of examples of empowering female friendships such as the spot-on interpretation of The Golden Girls that Megan Kearns published awhile ago. But instead, I thought of a horror movie that stood out to me as presenting more women than men — and three really different kinds of women — who come together to survive an onslaught of vengeful ghosts.

Before watching the movie with a more critical lens, I reminisced that these strong female characters drove the community response to crisis as they began to interact and even came to depend on each other. But now in retrospect, I see that they remain isolated from each other and do not develop any mutually fulfilling relationships like the sense of family in my nostalgic memory of The Golden Girls household. I originally thought this month’s theme would provide an opportunity to examine the genesis of female friendships through crisis. But upon further examination, these characters only come together in a geographic sense rather than develop significant strength through the social bonds of supporting each other. And with that, I welcome you back to the early scream-queen transition into the 80s in the John Carpenter classic The Fog (1980).

The film opens with John Houseman telling a campfire story about the intentional shipwreck of colony settlers with leprosy and their vengeful ghosts who return with the fog to search for the six people who conspired to destroy them and steal their gold. With the ghost story told, Carpenter progressively introduces three kinds of women — literally progressing from the first to the second to the third, cut back to one, to two, to three — for the first half of the movie until their storylines start to converge.

Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau) speaks from her lighthouse radio booth “on top of the world,” wishing the town of Antonio Bay a happy 100th anniversary, and questioning the foreboding weather forecast since she sees a great view of clear skies. It’s significant that this introduction to her character indicates her presence at all of the town locations in establishing shots during her broadcast, rather than any camera shots of her talking into the mic. A few fishermen drinking on a ship in the bay also question the reported fog bank as they discuss the voice on the radio, and one is surprised to find out that another once met her at a little league game. From the outset, one star of the film is more a presence in voice than body.

Stevie is the most basic female archetype: a Mother to young son Andy (Ty Mitchell) and later to the community. As a local radio broadcaster who at one point identifies herself as Antonio Bay’s “nightlight,” she is the steady voice that informs the town of what is happening and what they should do — quite like many of us hear that inherited parental voice in the back of our heads providing a stream of thoughts, advice, and occasional criticism. There are almost as many shots in the movie of different radios while Stevie’s broadcasting as there are of her embodied agency in the booth. There’s no father in the picture (well, not in the story, although we see a few pictures of a happy family presumably with a young Andy); so Andy’s babysitter, Mrs. Kobritz (Regina Waldon), fills in at home when Stevie is at work. As the Surrogate-Mother, she’s the physically present caretaker for Andy in the absence of his professional mom. In fact, both women ask Andy at different times about the other, so it doesn’t seem like the maternal mind and body interact except through the son.

Further, in an amazingly strange representation of motherhood, Stevie and Andy share one scene together that is not mediated by either the radio or phone when Andy wakes up his mom after finding a gold coin that turned into a plank of wood from the crashed ghost ship on the beach. They are in the same bedroom set, but the entire conversation is edited shot-reverse-shot conversational style so that they don’t share any eye lines. Even in the one clear two-shot, Stevie has yet to open her eyes as she rises from bed with Andy talking excitedly in the background. In this entire scene, they don’t even touch! Not a hug, not a pulling up of the jacket zipper, not even a tussle of Andy’s hair as the kid goes about his day searching the shoreline for washed-up treasure. In The Fog, Stevie becomes a completely isolated and disembodied Mother, especially since all of the other characters look at radios to an objectified Voice rather than an embodied woman.

During the night of glowing ghost-fueled fog, and after she learns it’s homicidal, Stevie watches it approach her house in the distance. On the air, she announces: “My son is trapped by the fog. Andy, get out of the house! Run!” She begs for someone to help as she watches the fog bank invade her dockside home. Shortly thereafter, the fog moves away and, without knowing if anyone heard her call, Stevie apologizes to her son in a disturbingly unmotherly way: “Andy, I don’t even know if you can hear me. I’m sorry that I didn’t come for you… that I wasn’t there.” She can’t leave her post since she has responsibilities to her job and the listening audience in town? I mean, what the fuck?! She’s standing in her booth asking her kid to understand because, stifling of tears (and sounding more like she’s either a ghost to him or standing on his grave), “I have to stay here.” Then Stevie swallows her fear or pain or what should be an emotional transition from a son’s Mother to a community’s Voice and she begins objectively reporting the movement of the fog through town. Street by street, she describes locations in a distanced public-broadcasting tone. She alerts her listeners to seek shelter and “stay away from the fog.” For those who can get out of town, she announces the changing clear path to get to the old church. Amazingly(ish), the surviving primary characters all gather there for a showdown with the fog-ghosts.

When Stevie apologizes to Andy, she says goodbye and sheds her working mother identity for a civic-minded character, where the good of the community takes precedence over familial obligations. This is certainly character development, but I can’t shake the abruptness of this sudden shift from family to community protection — it’s not like she’s a cop or other public official. Yet her transmission becomes the stationary lighthouse perspective as it blares through the fog and alerts the community about the dangerous environmental threat and how to reach safety. Strangely, according to the setting of the lighthouse, Stevie does not have a superior perspective of the town, but much more a lateral cliff-side view; so there is no implied omniscience but only relational distance from the danger observed through the night with limited ability to know if her message is being heard by anyone, including the son who may or may not have been slaughtered. By the end of the film, Stevie transitions from Mother to a fully disembodied Voice. But more to come on that shipwreck of character…

Elsewhere in the universe of strong women illuminated by the supernatural fog, Elizabeth Solley (Jamie Lee Curtis) hitches a ride with Nick Castle (Tom Atkins) even though he says he’s on his way to “the other side of town.” Sure she probably could have walked that distance in an hour, but why not jump into his truck, directly ask if he’s weird, and then roll to his house after sharing a scare when the truck windows mysteriously smash in. Elizabeth and Nick have sex, so she is neither the archetypal Whore required by The Cabin in the Woods standards nor hindered by the “sex equals death” rule of Scream. Elizabeth enters the film as a drifter, hitchhiking her way to Vancouver when Nick drives by in his pick-up. She then stays attached to Nick (quite literally for much of their screen time outside of the truck) during the ensuing events — so I’m going with the double-meaning characterization of Hitcher for her.

In the scenes leading up to the nighttime crisis, Carpenter posits a physical relation between the Hitcher and Andy which appeals to an initial shared innocence. As Nick tells Elizabeth the scary story of his father’s supernatural encounter at sea, she pulls her legs in to hold them in a self-comforting embrace. Andy maintains a similar posture as he fearfully sits on his bed while the invading ghosts start to break into his room.

At a point of character development beyond an innocent drifter, Elizabeth is in the truck with Nick when Stevie yells out commands to her son to leave and run away from the fog. As Stevie pleads for help from listeners, Elizabeth and Nick heed the panicked Mother-Voice and rescue Andy. Where Stevie drops out of the Mother role (and the Surrogate has already been murdered in ghostly revenge), the Hitcher picks up the maternal responsibility. In various scary moments after the rescue, Elizabeth breaks away from her distressed damsel reactions of screaming and reaching for Nick. Instead, she holds Andy to her body in a protective frontal embrace to shield him physically in a way that the Mother and the grandmotherly Surrogate did not — they both told him to run for cover and the Hitcher actually provides him cover.

Elizabeth ventures into the uncharted waters of Motherhood by grasping a child; she’s now Hitched to a son rather than a lover. And for all we know, she might even become Andy’s Mother; because by the end of the movie, Stevie broadcasts a “keep watching the skies” kind of warning to all those in town and at sea, before she does any damn thing to try to find out if her own son lived through the night! There’s no mention of “I hope to see you again” or “meet me at the dock,” much less giving the impression that her recently ghost-hook-stabbed shoulder might hurt. This is the shipwreck of the Mother: Stevie moves on from the (possible) loss of her son and becomes the fully disembodied Mother-Voice for the community.

Thus Carpenter distinguishes different kinds of Mother characters that remain severed, even if their narratives overlap: a Mother loses touch with her son and his Surrogate as she becomes the town’s Mother-Voice who tries to explain the best route to survival to listeners, including a drifter who falls into bed with a man and stays attached to him through danger until she becomes a Mother/Surrogate to an abandoned child. Sure, the Hitcher becomes the savior of the Mother-Voice’s son; but she answers the on-air pleas unbeknownst to the Mother herself. There is no interaction between them. The woman who begins in the maternal role acts for the community so she is unable to save her own child from danger while a stranger passing through town can. The woman who fills the carefree Hitcher role is embroiled in the strange happenings of the cursed town and answers the call to save a child in need. However, Elizabeth takes on that burden without any mutual involvement with Stevie, and both women extend their characters beyond their initial tropes without even a chance meeting or conversation.

Finally, the last of The Fog‘s three lead women characters, the ever-talented Janet Leigh portrays civic leader Kathy Williams. She’s in the stressful waning hours of planning the town’s centennial celebration and statue dedication. She has an aide, Sandy (Nancy Loomis), whom she depends on, talks to, and thus provides Bechdel checkmarks next to all three boxes. But with that criteria fulfilled, Sandy plays the role of Assistant to Mrs. Williams, so even the personal discussions between them seem like the kinds of conversations that are the norm between close coworkers rather than friends. Yet Mrs. Williams consistently maintains a community-focus. Before leaving a meeting with the Priest (Hal Holbrook) who is troubled by the recent revelation of the town’s foundation on the demise of the ghastly (and now ghostly) lepers, Mrs. Williams wants to ensure he’s okay and offers to send for the doctor. Sandy indicates the time and implies their need to get on with their agenda, but Mrs. Williams is the epitome of the Civic Leader: she really cares about others, despite Sandy pointing at her watch to stress the importance of wasting time during a busy day.

Further establishing herself as Civic Leader, the power goes out and the crowd’s candles are already lit for the dedication ceremony, so Mrs. Williams calmly announces over the now-dead microphone: “We should all proceed over to the statue.” The patrons move through in a calm and orderly fashion, and Mrs. Williams wants everyone to be able to participate and then leave the ceremony safely. Unlike Stevie’s panicked-Mother freak-out session directing Andy to get out of the house, Mrs. Williams focuses on civic responsibilities distinct from her personal upheaval. Carpenter makes use of a really effective long take to focus on Mrs. Williams’ emotional processing of a personal crisis in the midst of her civic responsibilities, but she lives this moment isolated in a crowded frame. After the Sheriff leaves the shot, Sandy tries to comfort her; but Mrs. Williams only brings her eyes to Sandy’s hand on her arm. When she finally meets Sandy’s eye line, she has shifted the topic from personal loss to an obligation to keep it together for the ceremony. She dabs her eyes and reestablishes her firm, professional tone: “We can’t have the chairlady of the birthday celebration in tears, can we?”

As the two community-centric women leave the shot, the camera backtracks through the narrow bar with Nick to reveal that Elizabeth has been there the entire time. Sure, she’s not a member of this community and may not know Mrs. Williams’ role or identity beyond this emotional outburst, but she doesn’t say or do anything? Really?? Granted, Jamie Lee Curtis is in character at the time, and demonstrates her chops alongside the set watching her mom (Janet Leigh) cry — take after take for the dozen or so attempts to get this long tracking shot right — and not reacting like a daughter in the vicinity of her own mom’s gut-wrenching performance. But wouldn’t someone who eventually heeds a distress call to rescue a child in danger also be someone who would find a way to try to comfort someone going through a personal crisis?

This one long tracking shot seems to finally rest on a two-shot of Nick sidling up to the bar next to Elizabeth, but then there’s a broadcasting radio on the back shelf of the bar. Stevie’s updates grab Nick’s attention, and he goes to the payphone to make contact with the Voice. This is the first scene where we get a sense that the three primary women in the movie are actually in the same movie, and it is when none of them share a shot or directly speak to either of the others.

Stevie’s awareness is established as one of independent authority, and her relationship to the other female characters are sequentially constructed in the editing room. Once the stage is set, Carpenter cuts through the gradually overlapping events of these women in an orderly fashion. Eventually, we reach the climactic crisis: Surrogate murdered, the Hitcher and Civic Leader along with the Assistant come together in obedience to the supreme Voice of the Mother (along with a motherless son wandering around with a local guy who happens to be able to engage directly with all the women) in the church to hold off the invading ghosts while the local Priest tries to break the curse his grandfather helped catalyze. But come on, what the fuck is going on here? Even in the barricaded confines of the church with leper-ghost arms swiping into the windows, Elizabeth and Mrs. Williams do not speak to each other or even seem to acknowledge the other’s existence. They are in survival mode against invading ghosts of a cursed past! By no means do I need (or frankly even want) a gushy-emotional “wind beneath my wings” kind of friendship to be imposed on these strangers who met about an hour ago in narrative time, but not even a damn glance of mutual recognition? And when they leave the church as a successful kick-ass team of survivors, all the embodied primaries stand gazing at the dissipating fog as if they’ve become distinct statues memorializing fierce independence.

Would it end the whole narrative world if we got to see these women battle vengeful ghosts in close quarters and leave the arena with a celebratory fist-bump, or a relieved hug, or even a little wink or smirk in a shared eye line?! Much less if they could walk away from the destruction as they catch up on what’s been going on aside from the apocalypse. (So, yeah, maybe the Buffy-Willow friendship is more to my taste; but seriously…) These are all strong women; all survivors of a shared catastrophe, all indirectly related protectors, yet all isolated identities who remain without equal, friendless.

It seems like The Fog exposes the idea that strong women can’t have any meaningful relationships that might endure and even help them survive and understand themselves better through tough times. The whole foundation for mutual recognition in friendship (at least in a classic Aristotelian sense) would be to have a reflection in peers to better understand themselves as individuals. Instead, we’re presented with dynamic women cut off from those who should have the most impact on their lives, and they apparently know it. For instance, Stevie talks to the weatherman who calls to report movement of the fog bank rolling against the wind, and they seem to have a cordial professional relationship until we see how easily she deflects his advances. He asks her to dinner, but with a humorous revelation she lets him down: “My idea of perfection is a voice on the phone.” Maybe this only expresses Stevie’s independence from a conventional relationship, but her movement toward disembodied-Voice isolation is already established in her sole on-screen encounter with her son. When he wakes her the morning of the ghost ship plank washing ashore, she says to him in a rather put-off tired voice: “I love you… but sometimes you’re a real pain.” This attitude (along with not sharing an eye line with her son in that whole mess) distances Stevie from the physical relational expectations of a Mother.

A similar kind of distance is established by Mrs. Williams with her Assistant. Sandy supports Mrs. Williams throughout the hectic day and into the crisis, but even this relationship stays fairly hierarchical as a professional arrangement. We can assume that a Civic Leader would have an Assistant in planning and executing community activities, but Mrs. Williams expresses a playful exasperation with Sandy, calling her “a little annoying” but right about leaving the public ceremony to deal with personal loss — as if those two ways of existing must remain distinct. As the supernatural events unfold, even though Elizabeth stays attached to Nick, she keeps reiterating her intention of leaving town to get to Vancouver. Each of these women thus have relational attachments in their lives, but no sign of friendship that matters beyond practical concerns. What the fuck does that tell us about ladies of the 80s? Women can be strong as individual types and even experience dynamic growth, but they don’t interact as equals.

Nerd Alert: In a social satire published in the previous century’s 80s, fog was referenced as something that could illuminate identity and dictate proper social relations. In Edwin A. Abbott’s classic novella, Flatland, the upper-class Art of Sight Recognition is enhanced by Fog, an environmental condition which augments a finer quality of depth perception in two-dimensional reality. Fog becomes a superior blessing in the landscape of Flatland because it entails the possibility of seeing acceptable interpretations of social status that remain hidden from clear perception. Just as visual perception in Flatland is enhanced by Fog, Carpenter distinguishes these female identities in their encounters with the glowing fog and its ghostly apparitions. But the undeveloped idea latent in Abbott’s world — whether or not the inferences based on Fog-enhanced perception are appropriate to determine the value of an encountered subject within the preconceived social hierarchy — becomes an issue of social interpretation of ladies of the 1980s.

Even if we get a sense of strong women capable of being independent, protecting children, or maintaining civic-mindedness; these are distinct personal identities which each impose their own proper social relations (or absence thereof). We do not witness any overlap within individuals or immediacy of female friendship. This is even more surprising considering the screenplay was co-written by Debra Hill. Each female trope becomes a species in itself, incomparable to other kinds of women and apparently cut off from previous character identities, such as Stevie shedding the Mother role for community-Voice role and not forging a more complex union of the two. The Fog illuminates the boundaries of different types of women. To strong women out there on an individual level: Sure you can be a good mother, a free spirit, or a community leader; but those things don’t really all go together. And to strong women out there on a social level: Sure you can be individuals and even wear different hats when it comes to character development, but you and other kinds of women are just ships blindly passing through a foggy bay with access only to indirect communication — mediated by technology, hierarchical relations, or some local guy like Nick.

Through The Fog, we see the emergence of these starring women — town-defending, child-protecting, ghost-fighting women — who all develop beyond their initial molds. Yet they don’t seem to have any potential to build relationships or mutual respect for each other across those boundaries. Carpenter edits a vision of three distinct kinds of women of the early 80s — roles which can be broadened for potential character development, but remain distinct enough to offer only indirect support from other women. I can only imagine how much these different women would benefit from meaningful interactions with each other through this crisis. But I’m left merely to speculate on the respect and support that friendship could provide to each of these completely different personalities… like imagining a sudden onslaught of vengeful ghosts invading The Golden Girls’ household. Oooh, I think I just got a totally wicked crossover sequel idea!

In retrospect, what The Fog reveals is a glimpse of some really strong ladies of the 80s; but it falls short of giving us any clear view of what strong women can be, do, and become together.

ThoughtPusher might live somewhere near you (especially if you have a neighbor who blasts New Order or Tears for Fears records most nights), but certainly is a cinephile who has no interest in being followed or asking to be liked, unless it’s for access to an embarrassingly extensive VHS collection.

‘The Stepfather,’ Toppling Patriarchy, and Love of 80s Horror Ladies

Stephanie emerges as a poised, perspicacious, and resilient female lead. She is a wonderfully surprising alternative from most of the panoply of horror heroines who are tortured, fight, and scream their way through the terrifying films of the 80s. … Stephanie embodies what each of the archetypally male characters in the film fails to, and in doing so transcends the clutches of gender expectations in the film…

This guest post written by Eva Phillips appears as part of our theme week on Ladies of the 1980s. | Spoilers ahead.

Following the banal images of a brutal murder scene in a quaint, thoroughly 80s suburban living room that kick off the wildly underrated 1987 Josef Ruben film The Stepfather, there is a fantastic tracking shot that careens through a blissfully undisturbed, quintessential American upper-middle class neighborhood: we see the blooming, verdant trees, pristine yards, immaculately manicured homes — the whole shebang. The shot, which as a narration tool serves to show the titular stepfather Henry Morrison/Jerry Blake (unnerving and under-used Terry O’Quinn) exodus from one domicile — or, as the film later shows, one arena for him to futilely commandeer another single mother and her children — and move onto another, as he progresses from home-to-home, insidiously usurping them as he sees fit. But on a more subversive level, this opening tracking shot, which unintentionally parodies idyllic tracking or panoramic shots of 80s and 90s films that featured goofy but affable dad protagonists (think Uncle Buck or Father of the Bride or any film in which kids are shrunk) speaks to the film’s more profound subversive qualities. The shot indicates a sort of potential for undisturbed perfection, but it is a perfection that is violated and infested by the nefarious threat the stepfather symbolizes.

While many of the memorable and crucial aspects of The Stepfather are the flailing, if not furious, impotent attempts at O’Quinn’s menacing nomad in securing some draconian ideal family life, the true power of Stepfather lies with the groundbreaking dynamic between the two women who are preyed upon — Stephanie and Susan Maine (Jill Schoelen and Shelley Hack, respectively) — and the intuitive resilience of the daughter Stephanie in prevailing against her “new dad.” The introduction to Stephanie and Susan, mere moments after the grisly scene by Henry Morrison (who changes his name to Jerry Blake, real estate wizard, like any good homicidal villain would) is one of such unadulterated, unsullied bliss, that in my years of film watching it has yet to be rivaled by any moment of mother-daughter conviviality on screen. The two very jovially, un-eroticized and un-infantilized, play in a leaf pile, genuinely enjoying the frivolousness and love between them. What intrudes upon this mother-daughter euphoria, of course, is Susan’s mention of her new husband — aforementioned, newly reminted killer Jerry — who greets the glowing Susan and the less-than-enthused Stephanie with a puppy (which, mercifully defying the awful tropes 80s horror, LIVES TO THE END) and the hope that he’ll finally make a good impression on his surly stepdaughter.

What is most sensational about this cult classic (which, if it hasn’t officially been elevated to this status, I’m empowering myself to do so) is how, in the wake of the disquietingly erratic invasion of Jerry and his hauntingly traditional family values — the family must get along, the family must eat together, the family must not mind if the new stepfather has a completely savage break in the basement during a cookout — Stephanie emerges as a poised, perspicacious, and resilient female lead. She is a wonderfully surprising alternative from most of the panoply of horror heroines who are tortured, fight, and scream their way through the terrifying films of the 80s. Stephanie’s sexuality originates and exists organically (except when the rapidly unhinging Jerry accuses her crush of “raping” her when they kiss on the front step) and the film never once fetishizes her sexual development, or lack thereof, in the tradition of much of 80s horror cinema — built on a preexisting set of standards for horror women.

More importantly and gratifyingly, Stephanie’s fortitude and cleverness, and her determination to restore the blissful perfection between mother and daughter displayed at the beginning of the film, is in the face of the absolutely bumbling antics or brutal tendencies of the men around her. The men completely fail or are violently disconnected from reality: whether it is the well-intentioned but mainly hapless chisel-faced brother of Jerry’s slain first wife, always 10 minutes too late in trying to sniff Jerry out; the perpetually denying, stagnating police officers; or the earnest therapist who is brutally murdered by Jerry in his foolish attempt to confirm Stephanie’s feelings of unease about Jerry. Stephanie embodies what each of the archetypally male characters in the film fails to, and in doing so transcends the clutches of gender expectations in the film and in a genre that is so often besotted by explicit or implicit gendered presumptions.

Stephanie’s formidability and indefatigable stamina, despite being thwarted by Jerry at many turns throughout the film, is also a sub-textual nod to a profound reversion of a patriarchal predominance, one which looms over the film and certainly taints many films in the 80s horror tradition. The brand of paternal instincts and familial preservation that Jerry is so ruthlessly fixated on is a hollow, ghastly farce. He is joltingly compulsive, and when the family unit does not function as he wants it to (which is to say, in defiance of picturesque happiness and groveling at the shrine of Jerry-Or-Whoever-He-Is), he must resort to abhorrent violence to embody the dismay over the shambolic domestic unit “failing.” Selling real estate and life insurance in his various assumed identities, every orchestrated move Jerry makes is a testament to the meretriciousness of the type of “home” for which Jerry strives. And so, in tandem with this vicious, empty patriarchal presence, is the true domestic perfection that Stephanie stands for — one established and centering around matriarchal and even Edenic love; one based on respect and value and ass-kicking bulwarks of women. Restoring this order is not only the be-all-end-all for Stephanie, it symbolizes the natural order of things and the film, critically, supports this perspective. The culminating, relentless fight scene is cleverly staged like so many chaotic 80s horror slaying scenes: Susan is abruptly and unflinchingly assaulted by Jerry upon realizing his farce and unearthing his true identity. As she stumbles helplessly into the basement, the chiseled brother of Jerry’s former victim swoops in, only to be maniacally stabbed by Jerry. It is only Stephanie who can effectively enter the domestic sphere and overcome her despotic stepfather, ending not only his reign of terror but reclaiming the domestic sphere for herself and her mother.

For a film that gets too frequently billed as a B-Movie, or disregarded or lost in the canon of slasher-centric 80s horror, The Stepfather is outstanding for the distinct feminine strength and unity it lionizes. Moreover, the film is a brilliant experiment in subverting expectations. Despite the title’s implications, the film is not some nauseatingly machismo feature of masculine power and reconstruction in which a destabilized family unit (weakened, of course, by the lack of a “father”) is consumed by the diabolical machinations of a traditionalist murderer. Rather, the film is one of the feminine-centric family unit prevailing, and the love between a mother and daughter being the prized, organic form of love that champions the aberration of the male intrusion and the male buffoonery that ensconces it. The haunting poster for the film shows Jerry pensively staring at a fogged over mirror, the words “Who Am I Here” traced on the glass. It is not so much indicative of Jerry’s delusional mania, but indicates the emptiness and futility of the forced patriarchal order on a domestic sphere. Importantly, too, Stephanie does not function as some Carol Clover-esque horror heroine — her body and her actions exist outside of an eroticized or fetishized realm, and she is not operating within some sort of phallic terror-dome, but, rather, transcends it. And, sure, the movie has some wonky moments: laughably oblivious characters, awkwardly 80s-tastic quips, and perhaps one of the most heinous scores of any 80s horror film (think a synth-focused Def Leppard instrumental cover band with no sense of dramatic irony). But it should be valorized for its uniquely feminist message that is never pandering, unequivocally unique, and woefully difficult to replicate (case in point: the miserably dude-centric 2009 remake). The Stepfather’s sly championing of female strength and domestic reclamation is no more evident than the masterful final scene: Susan and Stephanie, shaken but stalwart, reassess their home in the backyard, as Stephanie takes an ax the birdhouse Jerry erected in the backyard, therein violently and resolutely toppling the specious emblem of his false domesticity, his pseudo-colonization, and literally dismantling the patriarchal presence. Get it, girl.

See also at Bitch Flicks: Patriarchy in Crisis: Power and Gender in ‘The Stepfather’

Eva Phillips is constantly surprised at how remarkably Southern she in fact is as she adjusts to social and climate life in The Steel City. Additionally, Eva thoroughly enjoys completing her Master’s Degree in English, though really wishes that more of her grades could be based on how well she researches Making a Murderer conspiracy theories whilst pile-driving salt-and-vinegar chips. You can follow her on Instagram at @menzingers2.

Did Gender Alter the Tone of the ‘Alien’ Series? Narrative Implications of Femininity

It is science fiction fact however, that Ellen Ripley should not have been “Ellen Ripley” at all. Dan O’Bannon’s original script for ‘Alien’ stated: “The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men and women.” … In ‘Aliens,’ both Ripley and the alien are further solidified as female. …We come to an implied understanding that is wholly complicit in their both being mothers, adding a subliminal layer that would not have been present had either Ripley or the alien been male.

This guest post written by Kayleigh Watson appears as part of our theme week on Ladies of the 1980s. | Spoilers ahead.

When Ridley Scott cast Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien, he created The First: The First Action Heroine; The First Female in a Science Fiction Film That Did Not Have To Be Rescued or Was Not Brunch for a Swamp Monster. Such titles may as well be monikers attached to her name. Ripley was important, and still is, her legacy living on in many an action heroine that followed: Buffy (the Vampire Slayer), The Bride (Kill Bill), G.I Jane, Trinity (The Matrix), Furiosa (Mad Max: Fury Road) and Sarah Connor’s transformation in Terminator 2.

It is science fiction fact however, that Ellen Ripley should not have been “Ellen Ripley” at all. Dan O’Bannon’s original script for Alien stated: “T he crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men and women.” In the climate of the time, it is wholly plausible that Ripley was intended to be a male, as despite the script’s stated gender ambiguity, the original name for the character was still “Martin Roby.” So far so standard for horror and sci-fi, for the genres had always been male-dominated whether it be characters on-screen or in literature or those who create them. After all, it was not until the New Wave of sci-fi that women began to truly stake their claim on the genre, birthing feminist science fiction and writers such as Margaret Atwood, Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, Ursula K. LeGuin and the singular entity that is Octavia Butler — C.L. Moore and Leigh Brackett being exceptions in the “Golden Age,” and Brackett went on to contribute to the screenplay of The Empire Strikes Back.

O’Bannon once stated that:

“I don’t see it as that revolutionary to cast a female as the lead in an action picture,” said O’Bannon. “It didn’t boggle me then, and it doesn’t boggle me now. My conception from scratch was that this would be a co-ed crew. I thought there was no reason you had to adhere to the convention of the all-male crew anymore.

After all, Star Trek had already had a mixed gender crew for years, and Ridley Scott had a similar reaction when the prospect of making the character female was pitched to him (“I just said, ‘That’s a good idea.”’). Scott later said in an interview:

“My film has strong women simply because I like strong women… It’s a personal choice. I’m no male chauvinist, nor do I understand female chauvinism – I just believe in the equality of men and women. It’s as simple as that.”

In Alien itself, Ripley – portrayed by the then largely unknown actress Sigourney Weaver – blended into the background of the team of the Nostromo crew; she was straightforward in conduct, voicing her opinion, making decisions, contributing to physical work and not waiting for someone else to save her. It can be intrinsically interpreted that these factors are entwined with the fact that Ripley’s character was intended to be male and, should “Martin Roby” have existed in her place he would have led the way as a main protagonist, one that is ultimately smarter than crewmembers with more authority.

Except nobody expected that of Ripley, solely because she was female. She was the ultimate unexpected protagonist, with the audience wholly expecting her to be snuffed out somewhere between the second and third act – because they had been conditioned their entire lives to do so. Her gender made her disposable – one only has to recall the aforementioned damsel vs. swamp monster scenario to consider how this should have played out. Yes, Ripley was female, but she was not feminine. That is the distinctive line here; she was not overtly sexualized (until she strips to her underwear near the culmination of the film: you can’t have it all, it seems), she fought back, she did not need to be rescued by a male, she wielded weapons: she defeated the “bad guy.” Due to the duality of the writing, Ripley became an androgynous entity in a fictional universe so symbolically enveloped in gender.

The Alien universe is primarily constructed around the perception of the “monstrous feminine” and plays into a lot of male-centric fears to do with gender alienation, with an aesthetic to follow suit. Renowned artist H.R Giger was in charge of designing the alien and set, and his explicit and sexually symbolic imagery can be viewed throughout, with phallic monsters hiding in a womb-shaped interior ready to pounce on unsuspecting victims. The Nostromo is the monstrous womb that births death, the gestation of that alien creature involving male rape – orally, impregnation and birth via the destruction of the male body; who can forget that iconic scene mid-film where the baby alien bursts through John Hurt’s chest, takes a look around at the crew’s horrified faces, before scurrying off into the unknown?

This narrative decision turns gender roles on its head and plays into male fears of human reproduction and that which they will never experience. It also draws from 1970s fears of “no longer being in control of our bodies,” as film studies professor Mark Jancovich asserted, thanks to “pollution, pesticides, food additives, man-made cancers” causing mutation. Extrapolating and combining the two sure makes for one horrific film. This monstrous amalgamation is culminated in a predatory creature that was designed by Giger to be both vaginal and phallic with a mysterious omnipresence onscreen. No character is sure what it is that they are facing.

Yet gender implications are reinforced in the making of the antagonist – the alien itself – female. Had Ripley’s character been “Roby” and the alien been male, the conflict would have been conventional. Had there been a binary gender-based conflict, e.g. Roby fought a female alien or had Ripley been a woman and the alien been male, it would have played into the perception of the “monstrous feminine” on alternate sides; the alien being primarily grotesque and man eating, with Ripley being similarly so for possessing male attributes of character. However, both Ripley and the alien are female, which makes for an interesting dilemma: both are considered to be “monstrous” and “feminine” despite neither possessing attributes of human femininity. Both are also capable of deploying death, to which men are either a spectator or a victim, which sparks Freudian psychology, simultaneously castration anxiety in males and possession of the phallus in females. So even though Ripley is female, are viewers actually still watching a protagonist that is essentially male?

This crisis of gender is complicated further as the Alien series progresses, as in Aliens – the 1986 sequel directed by James Cameron – both Ripley and the alien are further solidified as female. Cameron pushed the series into being specifically feminist, having Weaver reprise the role in more extreme circumstances. She gained a surrogate daughter – Newt – to protect, more men to fight and an Alien Queen – one who breeds – to defeat. Both the protagonist and antagonist (not the same alien) have graduated from being maidens to mothers. Both have dependents to protect. We first saw this side of Ripley when she went to find Jones – the Nostromo’s cat – in Alien, however it is important to point out aspect was part of the original script and not dependent on Ripley being female. Through the course of the film, we come to an implied understanding that is wholly complicit in their both being mothers, adding a subliminal layer that would not have been present had either Ripley or the alien been male.

By the time Alien 3 rolls around, it is quite clear where we stand, for whilst Alien subverted the genre and Aliens showed itself to be intrinsically feminist, Alien 3 fulfills the cycle of female purpose by casting Ripley as the “crone” of the “maiden-mother-crone” of the Triple Goddess interpretation of the female life cycle. She chooses to perish after discovering she is hosting an alien queen inside of her body, and as such, despite the franchise being perceived as a feminist one, the female protagonist has still been dragged back into a trope. It is an end that feels almost inevitable for the character – one that could have still been plausible had Ripley been “Roby” instead – yet is far more telling: the genre has to regain control of this strong female protagonist. Perhaps, in that manner, the real winner in this is the alien itself, for despite its specified gender, both it and its children continue to persist as a threat to humankind. Perhaps, the alien queen is the true exemption of this 1980s franchise.

See also at Bitch Flicks: Ellen Ripley, a Feminist Film Icon, Battles Horrifying Aliens… and Patriarchy

Kayleigh Watson is a writer and occasional illustrator from the UK. After realizing that her childhood ambition of being a vet would mean she would actually have to cut up pets (ew), she decided life would be better spent absorbing art and telling others about it. Her years spent studying for her BA (Hons) English and Creative Writing also involved music blogging, reading SF, and watching lots of Buffy. She currently writes about music for female-centric site The Girls Are as well as talking film and TV (or trying to) at her new blog Post-Modern Sleaze. A collection of her work can be found at what kayleigh said, and she tweets about all of the above under @kaylwattson. Her GIF game is strong.

‘Videodrome’ and the Pornographic Femme Fatale

David Cronenberg’s sci-fi-horror-noir ‘Videodrome’ updated the femme fatale as a response to media-saturated late twentieth-century culture. …The femme fatale is reborn and unleashed to warn of contemporary dangers, including how women’s media representation as sex objects is connected to capitalist propaganda, often with the intent of making a violent agenda seem pleasurable.

This guest post written by Stefan Sereda appears as part of our theme week on Ladies of the 1980s.

“The beams become my dream
My dream is on the screen.”
— Blondie, “Fade Away and Radiate”

In Paul Schrader’s 1972 article, “Notes on Film Noir,” the soon-to-be screenwriter-director predicted with accuracy that the noir style would experience a revival in the decade ahead. While the list of New Hollywood noir films is too extensive to list here, encompassing everything from Point Blank (1967) to Blade Runner (1982) and several of Schrader’s own efforts, the Hollywood Renaissance is also known for genre revisionism, and one film noir convention that all but disappeared in the 1970s was the femme fatale.

Critics and audiences argue about whether classical femme fatales were “progressive” representations of American womanhood. From one perspective, fatales such as Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner) in The Killers (1946) and Kathie (Jane Greer) in Out of the Past (1947) embodied paranoia about crime, urban decay, family collapse, capitalist competition, and the sexual promiscuity associated with mid-century American womanhood. Of course, the villainous femme fatale archetype gained popularity in a decade wherein men found themselves competing with women in the workplace. On the other hand, femme fatales exercised agency and autonomy, unlike women found in most classical genres and especially in contrast to their domesticated “good girl” foils in noir. Although femme fatales were always destructive manipulators punished for their transgressions, these bad girls were resourceful and ambitious drivers of their own agenda who weaponized their sexuality.*

In the 1970s, film noir’s women were recast as social victims. The most glaring example of the femme fatale’s reformation takes place in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), where Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) is a false suspect who only lies to protect her daughter, the offspring of an abusive, incestuous relationship with her father. Deadly women lurked off to horror films such as Brian De Palma’s Sisters (1973) and Carrie (1976). By 1981, the femme fatale came sauntering back wearing ironic virgin white when Kathleen Turner appeared as Matty Walker in Body Heat (1981). Blade Runner (1982) featured two fembots-turned-fatale (and another faux–fatale) whereas David Cronenberg’s sci-fi-horror-noir Videodrome (1983) updated the femme fatale as a response to media-saturated late twentieth-century culture.

A Postmodern Fatale

Andy Warhol hailed Videodrome as “A Clockwork Orange of the 80s.” The Canadian film stars James Wood as Max Wren, a television producer-turned-amateur detective looking for “something that will break through,” until he finds “Videodrome,” a pirate broadcast showing only detached scenes of torture and murder. Max is captivated, but “who would want to watch a scum show like Videodrome?” Max’s casual girlfriend, Nicki Brand, played by Deborah “Debbie” Harry of Blondie fame, is certainly an enthusiast.

Max first meets Nicki on a talk show, where they debate mediated sex and violence. Nicki bemoans contemporary Western existence as “overstimulating times,” but Max challenges her for wearing red (it’s worth noting the famous blonde appears with red hair in Cronenberg’s film), suggesting, “You know what Freud would say about that dress?” Nicki confesses Max is right about her — she also hosts the “Emotional Rescue” show, a talk radio advice program where she blithely addresses her callers as “lover,” signaling her detached post-sexual revolution approach to intercourse and personal attachment, if not her listeners’ attitudes as well. Nicki is a forward first date: the scene cuts to Max’s apartment, where she flippantly inquires, “Got any porno?” Nicki finds a copy of “Videodrome,” which she admits is a turn-on, despite it having no ostensibly sexual content. Max quips, it’s “torture, murder… not exactly sex,” but Nicki answers, “Says who?” She also reveals a history of S&M with “a friend” who she let cut her, and encourages Max to pierce her ear as foreplay while “Videodrome” plays in the background.

It soon becomes apparent Nicki is more sexually versed than Max and beyond his containment, as she progressively seems less naïve than she first appeared in each of her scenes. When Nicki announces she’s going to audition for “Videodrome,” Max warns her “these mondo weirdo video guys… they play rough… rougher than even Nicki Brand wants to play.” Nicki responds with a fatale’s obstinacy, extinguishing a cigarette on her breast. The next time Max sees Nicki, she’s performing on “Videodrome.”

Besides what Freud might call the subconscious “death drive” apparent in her masochism, Nicki shares superficial characteristics with the archetypal fatale. Her makeup and dresses recall the 1940s. As with many fatales, and Harry in real life, Nicki is self-aware of her status as a sex object, to the point where she craves objectification. In a screenplay loaded with double entendres, the name “Nicki” sounds sharp, but also resounding with the false innocence of fatale names like Kathie, Kitty, and Matty. “Brand,” on the other hand, connotes medieval torture and image commodities. Eventually, Max learns a corporate brand, Spectacular Optical, developed “Videodrome” as a mass brainwashing device in preparation for global warfare. Through “Videodrome,” Nicki — or, at the very least, the fatale’s simulacrum — ensnares, tortures, and directs Max.

Moreover, Cronenberg casts Harry to perfection. Before appearing in Videodrome, Harry was already a postmodern shapeshifter, the only woman to be a Playboy Playmate, a punk rock phenom, a pop star, and a household name big enough for The Muppet Show. A New Yorker up on the trends, she was even rapping as early as 1980. Blondie sprinted along a razor line between punk and pop, attracting Andy Warhol’s attention: his likeness of Harry graces the cover of Phaidon’s Andry Warhol Portraits.

Several Blondie songs, some with Harry-penned lyrics, demonstrate what made Harry an ideal choice for the role of a thrill-seeking sex obsessed woman adrift in a consumer-capitalist landscape. On the BDSM-themed debut album opener, “X-Offender,” she plays a sex worker who threatens to “perpetrate love” with her cop crush after he slaps the cuffs on her. “One Way or Another” relates post-sexual revolution mores to consumer excess, with Harry in stalker-mode, ready to pounce on a love-object in the supermarket and discard him thereafter like any other replaceable commodity. Of course, the song title, “Die Young, Stay Pretty,” offers a paradox that parallels Nicki’s early demise and uncanny life thereafter as a televisual seductress. “Fade Away and Radiate” is more specifically about screen performers surviving death as image commodities, with bandmate Chris Stein’s lyrics beating both David Cronenberg and Jean Baudrillard to the punch with regard to commenting on the hyperreal. Despite their sneering punk credentials, several Blondie songs are about gleeful abandonment to the consumer culture landscape of postmodernity — “Platinum Blonde,” “I’m on E,” “Rapture,” and the American Gigolo theme, “Call Me.” “Roll me in designer sheets,” Harry purrs, “I’ll never get enough.”

Pornography and Propaganda

Cronenberg’s techno-horror film is partially a response to porno chic, released a little more than a decade after Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat (1972) broke through to mainstream audiences. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, Toronto television station Citytv — the basis for Videodrome’s CIVIC TV — broadcast softcore adult films. Nicki becomes the film’s personification of pornography’s seductive and desensitizing potential.

Unlike the majority of horror films, Cronenberg’s ouevre torments male protagonists (by contrast, horror auteur Dario Argento made the sexist, objectifying remark, “I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man.”). In Videodrome, much of the terror results from Max discovering his capacity for sadism. Yet the narrative and its iconography also interpret the media as a penetrative force. Max eventually learns “Videodrome” is not fiction but snuff, and that the violent imagery is meant to lubricate the brain to be more receptive to a signal that causes hallucinations. The film refuses to distinguish between these hallucinations and the narrative proper. Soon Max hallucinates/grows “new flesh”: a vaginal wound in his stomach that conspirators use as a tape player to remold him as an assassin. In other words, Videodrome also locates its horror in a man discovering in himself “feminine” traits such as openness and vulnerability for mass media to exploit. Cronenberg, the so-called “Baron of Blood,” likens violent media’s propagandist assault on the senses to rape when various parties forcibly penetrate Max with videotapes.

Nikki’s first appearance on Videodrome marks what Federico Fellini would call the film’s volta: its pivot-point between a narrative “reality” and the surrealist (or hyperreal) events that follow where “reality” becomes an outmoded concept. Soon after McLuhan-esque figure Dr. Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley) finishes telling Max via video, “Television is reality, and reality is less than television,” Nicki is strangling him, and then seducing Max to consummate with his writhing tv set. Later, she appears to him via a VR headpiece, handing him a whip to encourage his penchant for violence in a dreamlike S&M scenario.

Similar to many fatales, Nicki has a “good girl” foil in Brian O’Blivion’s daughter, Bianca O’Blivion (Somja Smits), who runs a “Cathode Ray Mission” to give derelicts their fix of time in front of a television screen. Yet Bianca is as ruthless as Videodrome’s creators when it comes to brainwashing Max, and she turns him against the conspirators who sent him to kill her. Before Bianca sends Max off to kill while reciting the dictum, “Long live the new flesh,” she shows him an image of Nicki being strangled, insisting the “Videodrome” people killed her and used her image to seduce him, not unlike what she herself is doing to Max. It would seem Videodrome’s femme fatale is indeed punished for her transgressions.

Yet after Max believes he has put an end to “Videodrome,” he wanders to an “abandoned vessel.” There, he finds a television showing Nicki’s image. Nicki tells Max that to become “the new flesh” he must leave “the old flesh” and displays a scene of him shooting himself in the head. The film ends with Max saying, “Long live the new flesh,” and a cut to black synced with the sound of a gunshot.

The finale is ambiguous: is Bianca behind Max’s suicide or is “Videodrome,” and how much of what transpired was “real” or hallucinatory? Will Max have a second life preserved as a simulacral image? Regardless, in Cronenberg’s prophetic film, the femme fatale is reborn and unleashed to warn of contemporary dangers, including how women’s media representation as sex objects is connected to capitalist propaganda, often with the intent of making a violent agenda seem pleasurable.

References:

*For a more thorough academic reading of the classical femme fatale and “nurturing woman,” see: Janey Place, “Women in Film Noir,” in Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: BFI, 2001.

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.

‘Carnival of Souls’ and the Mysteries of the Insubordinate Woman

What is so terribly “weird and unnatural” … about Mary? While writer/director Herk Harvey and writer John Clifford may not have intended to make Mary a subversive woman, she certainly was in a few ways. … Keep in mind, her actions and her situation are supposed to be terrifying. Only because she was presumed to be dead could she act in ways “unfit” for a woman. Uncoupled, hardhearted, curt, and curious.

This guest post written by Marlana Eck originally appeared at Awaiting Moderation. It is cross-posted with permission. | Spoilers ahead.

I’ve been watching 1962’s Carnival of Souls recurrently with rapt attention since I was a teen. My stepdad had a DVD box set which included Carnival along with The Last Man on Earth and House on Haunted Hill.

Notice the representative art work for both The Last Man on Earth and House on Haunted Hill. The Last Man on Earth, for instance, shows Vincent Price in the background with a decidedly active and intelligent glare. In the fore, we see the negative space of a woman’s spirit with her fully illustrated, sexualized body helplessly laid out on the margin credits.

In the art work for House on Haunted Hill, we see a woman in a yellow dress hanging in a noose situated in the middle of the film advertisement, and in the bottom left corner we see the severed head of a woman held by Vincent Price.

In both posters, Price is the master of his universe.

Now I love me some Vincent Price. However, looking critically, I see the limited agency of the female figures in the representative art work as a snippet of larger culture. Horror calls to mind the repressed, the subconscious. It is fascinating that the art of both of these film posters show sacrificial women. As Pierre Bourdieu sums up in “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction”: structures reproduce themselves, and these posters show us how female bodies are treated within the context of our culture.

There were several promotional film posters used for Carnival of Souls, but the one on the boxed set was the commissioned illustration which showed a woman (Mary Henry as we learn, played by Candace Hilligoss) with the straps of her white top falling off (pretty sure half nipple hanging out) and leg out almost up to her hip, centered. On the left-hand bottom corner there is the “floating head” of “The Man” (as he is billed in the credits) styled after the main terrorizing apparition in Carnival, played by the film’s director, Herk Harvey.

As I go on in my interpretation, I hear a 1989 interview with the film’s writer, John Clifford, echoing in my mind. In an endearing Midwestern twang he said, “We just wanted to make a horror movie with some pizzazz.” Herk Harvey implied people have granted the film more meaning than they originally intended. I am aware, then, that perhaps the subversive tenants of the film were not intentionally engineered and may have been subliminal on the part of the creators.

The film begins with a cryptic portrayal of misogyny: a car full of men challenge a car full of women to a drag race, which was quite popular in our nation’s history post WWII as it emphasized a leisurely freedom loving and equally destructive America.

The men run the women off the road as we fear most of them have plunged to their death.

After the crash, the police question one of the men who challenged the car of women to the drag race. He lies and says “It wasn’t our fault. We were the first ones on the bridge, coming along, following the track, and they wanted to get around us I guess and they lost control and they dropped off…”

A crowd of select townspeople watch as the police fish for the missing car. This scene is riveting, if only for the audience of onlookers being 100% men, young and old.

Yet, hours later as the women’s car is exhumed, there is one woman who just won’t die: Candace Hilligoss’s character, Mary Henry. She famously trudges up from the mud, seemingly unharmed. We are unclear how long she was underwater, how she survived, or if she is even really alive (this is a horror flick, after all). It is this iconic picture that starts us off.

Mary could easily represent a critique of wartime post-traumatic stress disorder; Herk Harvey was a veteran himself opting out of the Navy and going into theater after his service in WWII.

Mary tries to resume her life, but irritates others with her insouciance.

Hilligoss trained with Lee Strasberg (in New York City where her cohort included Marilyn Monroe). Carnival of Souls was one of her only forays into film, she was mainly a stage actress. Hilligoss has a keen sense for the macabre, an edginess that I find so badass. This is part of her supposed supernaturalness.

In one of the first scenes where we learn more about Mary’s life, we observe she is a talented organist who has decided to take a job out in Utah. The priest says goodbye to her and tells her the ole, “If you’re ever in town again, stop by.” Not one for niceties, Mary says, “I don’t know if I’m ever coming back.” After she walks out the priest confides in one of his bros, “I don’t know about that girl [sic]…a few days ago she survived an accident. You’d think she’d feel a little something like humbleness or gratitude.”

A looming thought is: so, Mary is walking about “dead.” What does it mean to be a “living” woman?

What is so terribly “weird and unnatural” (to use the verbiage from one of Carnival of Soul’s promotional taglines) about Mary? The film investigates metaphysical uncertainties in the mind of this young church organist. Does she have a soul? Why doesn’t she connect with others the way she is supposed to?

Partly, I think Mary is simply a byproduct of all that was negative about the boom of consumer culture in the 1950s and 60s. The dissonance Mary displays can be attributed to the confusion of women not being as liberated as they thought they’d be by “going to work.” She is continually haunted by “The Man,” a ghoul who represents all she will become (dead, laborer).

When she spurns the advances of her voyeur housemate, John, (a classic “I’M JUST A NICE GUY!”) who frequently watches her bathing and dressing, she then deals with being “the bitch.” Interestingly, she doesn’t reject John on the basis of religious protestation (as maybe you’d think was her orientation as a church organist). She says, “The church is just a place of business.” This is quintessential Mary Henry. She tells John (essentially), “K, you have to leave now, I want to go shopping.” It is only during this time in the film do we see her look as if she is in love as she swoons. But it’s love for shopping, not John.

There are several scenes in the film where she is in public places and people don’t see her at all. She feels invisible, alienated. The ghouls, her subconscious fears, always see her though, especially “The Man.”

One of these scenes is in a department store. She goes in to try on a dress in a chipper mood. All of a sudden there are dreamy glitch squiggles on the screen and Mary snaps back into her post-accident self. She panics and runs out of the dressing room screaming that no one sees her. No one really sees her. I feel you, Mary.

Mary talks to a male analyst who tells her everything she’s been experiencing has been her imagination. Yes, she may have PTSD, but we know there is something else going on with Mary, and so does she.

The amount of mansplaining Mary has to face in this film is incredible. Candace Hilligoss’s exquisite portrayal of resistance and apathy inspires me to do Mystery Science Theater style voiceovers of key scenes. For instance her supervisor, the priest, says, “But, my dear, you cannot live in isolation from the human race,” to which Mary, in my head, responds, “WATCH ME, G.”

It’s also fun to caption her with postmodern endearments, like “Dafuq?” in the photo below.

While Harvey and Clifford may not have intended to make Mary a subversive woman, she certainly was in a few ways. Much like Jill Lepore does in The Secret History of Wonder Woman, I look at Harvey and Clifford’s work of male gaze through my female gaze. Unlike William Marston’s Wonder Woman, Mary Henry was never meant to be a hero of this story. Keep in mind, her actions and her situation are supposed to be terrifying. Only because she was presumed to be dead could she act in ways “unfit” for a woman.

Uncoupled, hardhearted, curt, and curious. Many have compared the story of Carnival of Souls to Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” where the protagonist, Confederate soldier Farquhar, imagines the noose around his neck at his execution does not kill him and he instead escapes by swimming upstream to find his wife and children. This fantasy of being able to escape pending actions of justice is similar to Mary’s conundrum.

Mary is not able to live out her fantasy of embodying the detachment she feels as a “real life” experience. What traumas may she have faced while alive? We are introduced to a variety of scenarios, all of which many woman deal with regularly: leering, mansplaining, male-based research and psychoanalysis, accusations of “hysteria,” spiritual guilt. In the final shot of the film, we notice the car is exhumed once more, and Mary is still inside of it, dead, unable to work through her traumas as a living, insubordinate woman.

Marlana Eck is a scholar, writer, and educator from Easton, Pennsylvania. Her writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Raging Chicken Press,Hybrid Pedagogy, San Diego Free Press, Cultured Vultures, Lehigh Valley Vanguard, and Rag Queen Periodical. At the latter two publications she serves as director. In her free time she enjoys horticulture and overestimating the efficacy of her dance moves in the living room mirror. Follow her on Twitter at @marlanaesquire.

Feminist Survivorship in ’10 Cloverfield Lane’

The protagonist Michelle immediately establishes herself as a survivor of domestic abuse as well as an impressive quick-thinker; she embraces her womanhood both as an essential act of character development and as a means to survive. … Tasha Robinson at ‘The Verge’ posits that the entire film is a metaphor for domestic abuse, as Michelle strategizes, endures, and eventually decides to keep on fighting.

This is a guest post written by Bill Ollayos. | Spoilers ahead.

[Trigger warning: discussion of domestic abuse and violence]

Dan Trachtenberg’s 2016 directorial debut 10 Cloverfield Lane builds a claustrophobic, apocalyptic narrative from the survival tactics of its three main actors. Tense silences, enclosed spaces, and slow-building suspense artfully construct the piece produced by J. J. Abrams and Lindsey Weber. As the trio works to outlast a mysterious threat that has supposedly overtaken Earth, issues of power and gender simmer throughout the performances of this narrow cast. While I appreciate the overall compactness of the premise, I wonder what footholds exist for feminism in such an intentionally economic work. Can a film of majority male leads and an ensemble of white actors truly receive the “feminist” stamp of approval?

The recent deluge of superhero movies has furthered the critical discourse around sexist tropes in film, a discussion tied closely to the #OscarsSoWhite movement during the 2016 Academy Awards. While Hollywood’s handling of Black Widow throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe continues to fuel and frustrate feminist scholars, 10 Cloverfield Lane strikes me as more akin to the feminism of Buffy Summers: authentic, gritty and unabashedly feminine. The protagonist Michelle immediately establishes herself as a survivor of domestic abuse as well as an impressive quick-thinker; she embraces her womanhood both as an essential act of character development and as a means to survive.

In 10 Cloverfield Lane, Mary Elizabeth Winstead stars as Michelle, a young woman fleeing from her fiancé, Ben. While distractedly driving away from their home, Michelle crashes her car and falls unconscious, awakening to find herself imprisoned in the underground bunker by Howard (played by John Goodman). Howard describes a global attack that overwhelmed their planet and how he brought Michelle to the bunker to keep her safe. The audience also meets Emmett (John Gallagher, Jr.), a simple yet endearing man who claims to have witnessed the attack before seeking shelter in Howard’s bunker. Michelle does not buy their tales of an alien invasion, instead believing that Howard ran her off the road and then kidnapped her. The audience watches as Michelle wrestles with her distrust of Howard, her uncertainty about the supposed annihilation of humankind, and her residual trauma from the relationship with her fiancé. Tasha Robinson at The Verge posits that the entire film is a metaphor for domestic abuse, as Michelle strategizes, endures, and eventually decides to keep on fighting.

And so enters the essential question – can we consider Michelle a feminist hero? Her feature film barely passes the Bechdel Test, stars only white actors, and was predominately written, directed, and produced by men. If we do accept Michelle’s portrayal of gender as feminist, then does 10 Cloverfield Lane land more solidly in the realm of “white feminism,” or should the narrowness of its premise exempt it from any broader expectations around diversity?

The first ten minutes of the film simultaneously establish Michelle’s victimhood and survivorship, a multifaceted identity that she builds over the next hour and a half. After Michelle tearfully packs her belongings into her car, we see her abandoned engagement ring and overhear a phone call from Ben. “Michelle, please don’t hang up,” he says, “Look, we had an argument, couples fight, that is no reason to just leave everything behind!” When Michelle awakens in Howard’s bunker with her broken leg chained to the wall, only moments pass before she starts using the metal rod holding her IV to reach for her cell phone. When Howard arrives to give her food and crutches, Michelle sharpens the tip of one crutch to a nasty point, starts a fire in the vent to draw Howard’s attention, and attacks him as soon as he enters the room. When Michelle is cornered, she thinks quickly and acts with the self-reliance of one accustomed to overcoming.

The audience is allowed to understand Michelle’s tenacity before the full breadth of her trauma is clear. After another of her escape attempts, she confides in Emmett about the cycle of abuse that permeates her life. “When my dad got that way,” she recalls in reference to a memory from her childhood, “my brother Collin was always there to take the worst of it for me.” In keeping with the tidy nature of the narrative, Michelle’s experiences with domestic abuse are only alluded to, as the script rarely strays from the apocalyptic circumstances of the film. Indeed, the word abuse is never even used throughout the entire movie, with focus instead staunchly placed on the question of an alien invasion and Howard’s possibly murderous tendencies. However, Ben’s references to a “fight” combined with Michelle’s traumatic memories indicate a history to her character beyond what is featured in this plot.

The tightness of the film prevents an in-depth exploration of Michelle’s past. However, her identity as a survivor of abuse still appears through more subtle methods. Howard himself serves to further the abuse metaphor, as his domineering behavior, sensitivity to perceived slights, and commitment to traditional gender roles all match with documented techniques of an abuser. He states that Michelle will “learn to like cooking” and cries, “No touching!” when Emmett grazes her elbow. Additionally, a series of dark clues planted around the bunker indicate that he may have murdered a young girl from Emmett’s class. Howard’s lumbering stance and propensity for aggressive outbursts exude chauvinistic masculinity. Drawing from her resourcefulness and familiarity with such abusive men, Michelle utilizes aspects of her femininity to ensure her own survival.

Michelle’s gender becomes an essential part of her attempts to survive both literally from the apocalyptic context of the film, as well as metaphorically from partner abuse. At her first meal in the bunker, wherein Howard sternly reminds them to “watch [their] language at table,” she hatches a plan to steal the master keys from his belt. She plays off her experiences with similarly abusive men and, anticipating Howard’s jealousy, begins flirting with Emmett during their meal. She giggles, her demeanor suddenly flirtatious, and caresses Emmett’s hand, triggering an immediate explosion from Howard. As he throws himself into her face, asserting his dominance over Michelle, she covertly pilfers his keys. In demonstrating her most salient identity factor, Michelle’s commitment to survival, she tactically uses gender to manipulate her environment and pursue her freedom.

Michelle’s performance of her femininity actually yields the ultimate escape plan. Howard’s regime of traditional gender roles included badgering Michelle to give him stitches, exemplifying the “angel in the house” stereotype of women who sew, heal, and enact other domestic duties. Michelle embraces certain aspects of this socialized regard for womanhood, proudly admitting to her interest in fashion design and spending much of her time in the bunker drawing sketches of apocalyptically chic attire. Once again merging her gender identity with her commitment to survival, she masterminds a plan to sew a biohazard suit that would allow her to enter the supposedly toxic atmosphere beyond the bunker.

The cinematography of the entire film is arguably bent on giving tools to Michelle. The camera rests on a shot of the shower curtain that she will weave into her biohazard suit. Within the first few frames of the film, we see the bottle of alcohol that she will eventually detonate within the belly of an alien beast during the final battle. 10 Cloverfield Lane builds Michelle into a survivor across several planes: as a woman, a victim of abuse, and an Earthling. In the very last scene of the film, Michelle overhears a radio broadcast asking anyone with combat experience to join the remaining human forces in Houston. The audience watches as she turns her now stolen car around and drives toward the meeting point. Her decision allows the many poles of her identity to intersect. By heading to Houston, she is keeping herself engaged with the alien invasion (a symbol for the daily struggle faced by women survivors of domestic violence even after they escape their houses) and bringing her proven survival skills to the aid of the less powerful.

I find Michelle’s cunning nature and decided embrace of femininity as markers of feminism within 10 Cloverfield Lane. Although she only speaks to another woman for several seconds (when neighbor Leslie appears at the door of the bunker and dies after Michelle does not let her in), I believe that the economy of the narrative, which is so critical to the artistry of the film, excuses the underrepresentation of women. I also argue that Michelle’s repeated performances of her gender endorse an overall positive regard for womanhood and, thus, allow me to consider her a feminist hero.

However, I cannot express the same level of comfort when faced with the hegemonic Whiteness of the film. If we speak in terms of cinematic quizzes, though 10 Cloverfield Lane passes the Bechdel Test, it would certainly fail the DuVernay Test for its complete disregard for characters of color. 10 Cloverfield Lane is the second film in this franchise, and its predecessor Cloverfield undoubtedly features more actors of color. Cloverfield also takes place on a much larger scale (the streets of New York instead of an underground bunker), which allowed for the inclusion of more characters and the increase of racial diversity. While the premise of 10 Cloverfield Lane demanded fewer characters, I am not content with overlooking an all white cast. I also do not want to disparage the film with a label of “white feminism” – I wonder how a piece that so creatively handles gender in an intentionally tight script could have engaged race without losing the wonderful compactness. Besides casting people of color in the roles, of course.

I believe the character of Michelle to be a feminist hero. She renders a positive, complex portrayal of womanhood and survivorship. Roxanne Gay states in her 2014 book Bad Feminist that she “would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.” Although the overall workings of 10 Cloverfield Lane deny intersectionality in feminism, I still want to appreciate the film for what it is: clever, suspenseful, and a smart testament to the trials of domestic abuse.

Bill Ollayos is a current Master’s student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the Translation Studies program. His research focuses on cultural power, gender studies, and critical race theory. Email him at william.ollayos@gmail.com for more information.

The Manipulative Woman in Sci-Fi: Bending Time and People to Her Will

Individually, each film presents interesting, tough, somewhat complex female characters – which could be considered feminist in its own right. Taken together, however, I can’t help but see a pervasive trend that doesn’t reflect well on women. Why do filmmakers see women as master manipulators so readily? Is it simply because they believe women to be cold and calculating? Or, conversely, are they relying on audiences not seeing how tricky these women are, banking on their innocent façades to make the ending a real surprise (i.e. the ‘Basic Instinct’ effect)?

This guest post written by Claire Holland originally appeared at Razor Apple. It is cross-posted with permission. | Major spoilers ahead for the films Blood Punch, Coherence, Time Lapse, and Triangle.

I’m a huge fan of time travel thrillers, and some excellent ones have come out in the past several years. In fact, the four films I’ll be talking about today – Triangle, Time Lapse, Blood Punch, and Coherence – are four of my all-time favorites within the genre. As a disclaimer, I have to say that I deeply enjoyed all of these films, and wholeheartedly recommend them to anyone. But we’re allowed to think critically even about the things we enjoy, right? Despite loving these films, I couldn’t help but notice while watching these films that there was a conspicuous trend uniting them all – manipulative female characters. In every one of these films, a deceitful woman acts as a catalyst for the (generally unfortunate) events of the film. To be fair, some other event out of the anyone’s control causes the rift or bend in time, but it’s always a female character that underhandedly uses that time loop/lapse/rift to her advantage.

Before we get into it, though, a quick primer on the four films (although, seeing as these are time travel movies, and therefore complicated and confusing by nature, I recommend actually watching them). Time Lapse involves three friends – Callie and Finn, who are dating, and their roommate Jasper – who find a camera in their missing neighbor’s apartment that faces the window of their apartment. They soon discover that the camera’s photos show events 24 hours into the future, and try to use this to their advantage. Triangle is about Jess, a single mother who goes on a boating trip with her friends. They hit some bad weather and are forced to board what appears to be an abandoned ship, where a masked figure begins stalking and killing them. It turns out the masked figure is another version of Jess herself, trying to put an end to a time loop they’ve all been stuck in for quite some time. Coherence is the story of Em who, while at a dinner party with friends, experiences a rift in time that opens up parallel universes – some of which seem better than the one in which Em currently lives. Finally, Blood Punch revolves around Skyler, Milton, and Russell, who are stuck repeating the same day over and over again due to a Native American curse, until blood is spilled and only one person is left alive.

First of all, don’t misunderstand me – I’m not positing that any of these films set out to make an anti-feminist statement, or any statement at all, necessarily. Individually, each film presents interesting, tough, somewhat complex female characters – which could be considered feminist in its own right. Taken together, however, I can’t help but see a pervasive trend that doesn’t reflect well on women. Why do filmmakers see women as master manipulators so readily? Is it simply because they believe women to be cold and calculating? Or, conversely, are they relying on audiences not seeing how tricky these women are, banking on their innocent façades to make the ending a real surprise (i.e. the Basic Instinct effect)?

I think it’s a combination of both. The stereotype of women as emotional manipulators goes back all the way to Shakespeare (can I get a Lady Macbeth monologue?) and further. Google “women are manipulative” and you’ll find all kinds of research claiming it’s part of female biological makeup – being the “weaker” sex, women supposedly had to find other ways to survive, chief among those tactics being the manipulation of men. And society has reinforced this for, well, forever, by disempowering women and shackling their choices to the whims of men. Before 1974, a woman would have had trouble getting a credit card without her husband’s approval, so it’s no wonder if women employed a little manipulation to get what they needed. In short, the stereotype certainly still exists, even if only subconsciously, making it an easy archetype to draw on while writing a character.

Then there’s the surprise factor. Even though Basic Instinct pretty well shattered the notion that women can’t be cutthroat decades ago, these films employ the reveal of a shrewd, often merciless woman quite well. So much of each film’s runtime is spent watching men bloodily, showily batter one another in the most basic grapples for power; we’re distracted from figuring out that a woman is the one pulling all the strings, engineering the situation to her advantage, until much later. Of course, after four movies, I’d think the jig is up by now, but who knows.

While I would guess that pragmatism is most often at the root of the manipulative female character, I still find this trend troubling for one glaring reason: there is always an aspect of punishment to the character’s treatment. More often than not, the word “bitch” follows the word “manipulative,” and these stories reinforce that by indicating that the female character is bad and she deserves her situation – more so than the male characters. It’s as if attempting to shape the outcome of the situation in a way that’s favorable to her is a mortal sin, and being left to deal with the worst consequences is her penance.

Take Callie in Time Lapse, for example. Even though every character uses the photos of the future to their advantage in selfish ways that cause harm – Finn uses them to overcome his artistic block, neglecting his girlfriend in the process; Jasper uses them to gamble, putting everyone in the crosshairs of a dangerous bookie – Callie is the one who is most punished for it, when her goal is perhaps the least selfish, or at least the most sympathetic: she uses the photos to try to reignite the passion in her relationship with Finn by making him jealous. A photo shows Callie and Jasper kissing, and because the trio believes the events shown in the photos have to occur in order to avoid a paradox and keep time going along as normal, Callie and Jasper are “forced” to kiss in front of Finn. As it turns out, Callie has been secretly changing the order of the photos she shows to Finn and Jasper, presenting old photos of past transgressions (we discover she cheated on Finn with Jasper weeks ago, and the camera caught those moments) as new.

The most superficial way of looking at the situation is that Callie is a cheater who deserves everything she gets, but it is just that – superficial. The fact that Callie cheated on Finn once or twice, months ago, also points to the fact that Finn has been neglecting Callie for quite some time before the discovery of the photo machine. When Callie first finds the photo machine, she is so frantic to hide the evidence of her indiscretions and win back Finn’s love that she immediately forms a plan to do so. It’s not a malicious plan, but a desperate one, for which she is harshly punished.

Callie ends up killing Jasper in order to save Finn’s life, but when the entire scope of her manipulation is revealed, Finn rejects Callie and she kills him as well. Callie plans to warn herself of this course of events by using the photo machine so that she can change things and Finn won’t be dead or know about her manipulation, but she is interrupted by a police officer and unable to carry out the warning. Thus, Callie is doomed to her current timeline, where the love of her life is dead by her own hand, and where she will certainly be found guilty of murdering at least two (and as many as four) people. The manipulative woman is always the final witness, forced to live out the consequences of her actions – and the actions of all those around her. It is the most serious punishment, worse than death, doled out in this case for the grave sin of wanting to be loved.

The most complicated character of these three movies may be Jess in Triangle, but her motivations are only explored briefly, making the handling of her arc difficult to parse. As the single mother of an autistic child, it is revealed at the end of the film that Jess has become abusive towards her son. Jess is forced to watch herself – or rather, another version of herself in a separate time loop – abuse her son again and again. Horrified at seeing herself this way, she murders the other version of herself and takes off with her son in the car, where her frenzied driving results in his death. This sequence ends with her restarting the loop by going on the boating trip (yet again) in an effort to get to another time where her son is still alive – which spurs on the events in which she’s forced to kill her friends, and alternate versions of herself, ad nauseam.

On the one hand, Jess abuses her child – is there any adequate punishment for that? However, the Jess we see throughout most of the film seems entirely divorced from the Jess we see abusing her son at the end of the movie, and for that reason, I have a problem buying into her character as a whole. She appears to be a kind person throughout the film, and when she sees herself yelling at her son, she looks deeply dismayed and repentant. She kills the other version of herself without hesitation in an effort to protect him. For the majority of the film, she shows herself to be a loving mother who has simply been stretched too thin (it’s also hinted at that she may have been abused by her late husband), who spends every ounce of energy she has attempting to save her child’s life. There’s a disconnect between the character we get to know for 90 minutes and the one we see hitting her child for two minutes that seems mainly in place to make the viewer believe that Jess deserves to relive this agonizing loop forever.

Then there’s Em, whose fate is foreshadowed early in on Coherence. During dinner at the beginning of the film, Em explains that she lost out on an opportunity to dance the lead in a big show because she turned down the understudy part. The dancer who was supposed to do the part got sick, and the understudy who did take the job became famous. Another female guest at the dinner remarks, “So basically she stole your entire life.” Immediately, the female characters, both onscreen and off, are depicted as jealous and conniving. That depiction is reinforced when, during a comet passing that opens up alternate realities, Em finds a better reality in which she did take the understudy part, and proceeds to murder the version of herself living in that reality so she can take over. As it turns out, there are two other versions of Em wandering that reality at the same time, and though she attempts to murder them both, she only succeeds once. At the end of the film, her boyfriend receives a phone call from the other version of her that she failed to kill, and it is implied that she is about to be outed as an imposter in her own life – a feeling she already knows too well.

Once again, the punishment seems overly moralistic and self-flagellating. While other characters reveal unflattering secrets and pummel one another out in the open to little consequence, Em is, both literally and figuratively, only hurting herself throughout the film – and yet she is penalized most harshly for it. Em has obviously spent a lot of time berating herself for losing out on big opportunities. It’s unclear whether she really feels like the life she was meant to have was taken from her by someone else, or if she faults herself alone for letting it slip through her fingers, but either way, she’s not going to let opportunity pass her by yet again. She kills the alternate version of herself in an ambitious, albeit ruthless move, and she is punished dearly for that ambitiousness.

Finally – and I’ll try to keep this one short, because boy is this post getting out of hand – we have Skyler in Blood Punch, whose biggest fault appears to be that she’s smarter than the two male characters, Russell and Milton. Stuck in a time loop where the same day is played over and over again, Skyler is the first to realize that the only way out is by killing everyone else – the last person left standing will then be freed. Since she’s not strong enough to physically overcome either of her male counterparts, she uses her wits to manipulate the two men into fighting to the death. Unfortunately, her plan doesn’t go as smoothly as it could, and even after Russell and Milton are dead, she ends up trapped in the time loop again with two new people. Skyler, like Jess, is condemned to her terrible situation, possibly forever, and the audience is left feeling like she deserves it. But does she really? Because she wanted to survive – the most basic, relatable human instinct there is – and she was smart enough to figure out how to do that?

Muddying the waters further is Milton, who is a supremely likeable character, making Skyler seem all the worse. Milton thinks he loves Skyler, and is content with the idea of existing together in the time loop forever, even if it means killing Russell himself every day for eternity. Skyler recognizes what a bad idea that is – even the best couple would likely go insane being trapped in that situation forever, and Milton and Skyler barely know each other – but Milton comes off as a sweet, selfless romantic nonetheless. He serves as a foil to Skyler, highlighting her narcissism and disingenuousness, even though his motivations only take his own feelings into account and are therefore selfish as well.

Perhaps all of these films are simply metaphors for Hell, where the characters’ worst fears and traits spur on the cycle they’re doomed to live out over and over again. It’s an effective illustration, to be sure, but why is it always the women who are seen getting the worst of it? Why are they so often blamed for the very existence of Hell? In essence, the female characters are viciously punished for not being selfless every minute of every day – for sometimes being desperate, or ambitious, or for breaking down – despite the fact that the other characters surrounding them are overwhelmingly selfish as well. Even if the case can be made that these women do deserve what they get, why is it always the women who are written as the most self-centered and conniving of all characters? It’s not flattering to men, either, who populate these films as oafish idiots, lovesick dopes, and pawns.

As I’ve said, taken individually, the depictions of women in these films don’t seem nearly as damaging. Viewed together, however, I think they represent a concerning tendency to stereotype women as deceitful and untrustworthy, while men are regarded as too decent or too dumb to defend themselves. In these films’ defense, it’s the way the world has been depicted for a long, long time. In defense of women, however, I don’t think it’s all so cut-and-dried.

See also at Bitch Flicks: ‘Coherence’ Is the Best Movie You Didn’t See Last Year

‘The Witch’ and Legitimizing Feminine Fear

Instead it mashes these together to legitimize the misogyny of historical witch trials. … Those hoping for a nuanced 1630s witch tale, beware: ‘The Witch’ legitimizes fear of feminine sensuality while simplifying powerful female denizens to devil-worshiping pleasure-seekers.

This is a guest post written by Josephine Maria Yanasak-Leszczynski. | Spoilers ahead.

Witches are one of those archetypes common enough that it is easy to say they exist in every culture. Yet through foreign interpretation, mythological evolution, and even simple mistranslations, witches vary enough to call into question their omnipresence. This archetype differs from actual witches, followers of Wicca and other pagan religions.

Witches depicted in tales are often women, but not always. As healers they practice medicine, but sometimes in the form of potion making, as they are in possession of forgotten medicinal and herbological knowledge, sometimes spiritual, with plenty of amalgamations in between. As curse makers they are in possession of dark magics, using common implements or rare ingredients, or sometimes only words. They can be ritualistic, fickle, or wise entities of more or less human composition depending on their lineage. Their power can derive from lineage, chance, interactions with powerful beings and on and on.

In the United States, witch stories and lore are flavored by witch trials in New England. In extreme cases here, women and men perceived as living outside the pious norm were forced to admit to committing atrocious acts, jailed, tortured and murdered. Inspired also by a period of witch trials in Europe lasting hundreds of years where accusations of witchcraft were used to bring down politically powerful women, or the invisible threat of feminine power over men, there is a rich history of witches in film and television touching on this morbid piece of shared American and European history. Many of these depictions in media support or reject the criminalizing of perceived feminine power.

The Witch explores very few of these things, except to depict the scariest versions of American witches in stark color and with exacting matter-of-factness. There is no room to misinterpret the witches in this movie. It is also a film about desires so secret, the audience does not even know they exist within our poorly fleshed out protagonists.

This is especially frustrating in a film so visually complete, because the desire for more on the part of women is often demonized in film, and The Witch plays into that while using its powers of cinematography to the greatest degree. Here is a beautiful, sometimes terrifying film, chilling in its failure to flesh out characters and give them understood motives.

However, one thing this film does well is presenting its trumped up, cliché version of witches.

Witches, after all, are feminine inspired fear incarnate. They are reflections of sin, and in The Witch we see three mirrors. The first mirror is mother Kate, her baby murdered in a scene so grotesquely the opposite of motherly care, it reads like the Hostel of American Witch film. The second mirror is a seductress for the oldest boy Caleb, aided in ogling his older sister by the camera repeatedly and obviously, because hey, he likes breasts. Finally, the patriarch William is murdered not by a witch, but by a new masculine power, Black Billy, who we can read as the Devil. There was something satisfying in his murder: he was the reason they were all out in the wilderness alone in the first place. Yet it is unconvincing that he was the root of all their sufferings given his ineffectiveness as a leader and general weakness beside the focal point of his wife. Also, the replacement of patriarchy with patriarchy reads like so many witch trial accusations of Puritan fathers versus Satan.

It would be easy to view these scenes as each protagonist individually snapping if it weren’t for so many witnesses in some central scenes. The Witch reads like two movies: One of visual horror, depicting in full grandeur the literary and oral traditions of decrepit European minds in religious frenzy, then one of psychological horror on the tolls of extreme piety and isolation. Instead, it mashes these together to legitimize the misogyny of historical witch trials.

The film can be described as The Crucible style witch trial pretending on the part of the young twins Mercy and Jonas confused by the Black Narcissus seduction by erotic wilderness. It would be a 1600s familial AntiChrist, flavored by Lovecraftian fear of the American backwoods if it weren’t for the sheer number of things we fear. The film reels too quickly from paranoia to solid evidence of evil to be effective; stabbing “show don’t tell” into bite-sized chunks for an audience not sure they’re really hungry.

The Kubrick-esque score does play beautifully when contrasted with the great stillness of the stunning forested vistas. But this is interrupted by every scene with human life where, boxed in and poorly protected by their wood constructions, they talk far too quietly and often incoherently.

The ending would be satisfying if any of it tied together, or any of the offerings made by our witch’s seducer had been touched on earlier in the story. Those hoping for a nuanced 1630s witch tale, beware: The Witch legitimizes fear of feminine sensuality while simplifying powerful female denizens to devil-worshiping pleasure-seekers.

This is a truly forgettable and not-good horror film that is frustrating in its potential. In case there was any hope the film is symbolic and not representative, writer/director Robert Eggers comes out with a clear message in the end, citing “historical witch trials” as a source.

See also at Bitch Flicks: ‘The Witch’ and Female Adolescence in Film

Josephine Maria Yanasak-Leszczynski is a museum educator by day (and often night), and a freelance writer every other time she manages to make a deadline. She can be found on Twitter at @JMYaLes.

Leigh Janiak’s ‘Honeymoon’ as Feminist Horror

The film thus brilliantly puts the everyday (marriage) on a continuum with the horrifying (possession?), connecting the problem of Bea’s troubled self-expression and containment, now that she’s married, to the later seemingly supernatural plot. … Are the seemingly supernatural elements of the plot symbolic of Bea’s struggles with intimacy and the weighty expectations of married domestic life (sex, cooking, and reproduction)? Janiak’s expert writing and directing definitely leaves open this possible subtext of the film…

This guest post written by Dawn Keetley appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

Although their numbers appear to be on the rise, women directors of horror are still relatively scarce. I’m always excited, then, when I can add another film to the growing list of exceptional horror films directed by a woman, a list that includes Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987), Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary (1989), Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000), Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), Jen and Sylvia Soska’s American Mary (2012), Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014), and Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body (2009) along with her even better The Invitation (2015).

Leigh Janiak’s Honeymoon (2014), which is currently streaming on Netflix, unambiguously belongs on that list. As well as directing the film, Janiak also co-wrote it, with Phil Graziadei.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iZLPNFWLxk

The film focuses on a recently and (seemingly) happily-married couple, Bea (Rose Leslie) and Paul (Harry Treadaway), who are heading on a delayed honeymoon to the cottage in the woods where Bea grew up. Things go swimmingly until Paul discovers one night that Bea is gone. He eventually finds her (in a highly creepy moment) standing in the woods, in a state of dazed and virtual unconsciousness (think Katie in Paranormal Activity, although it’s even more unsettling since Bea and Paul are deep in the woods, not on a suburban patio). The couple writes the strange event off to sleepwalking — albeit with a hefty dose of anxious self-deception, since Bea has never walked in her sleep before.

From that night on, though, Bea’s behavior becomes increasingly strange. She’s withdrawn, silent, wanders off, and scribbles obsessively in her journal. And she starts to change: she uses words that aren’t quite right (saying she’s going to “take a sleep” rather than “take a nap”). She is apparently unable to remember things about herself, about Paul, and about their relationship. And Paul overhears her practicing ways to tell him she doesn’t want to have sex. Shortly after, events spiral into the horrific.

It’s never completely clear what happens to Bea, and Janiak brilliantly keeps that question open by evoking several possibilities, not least through covert references to other horror films. Since Bea’s strange behavior begins after she and Paul meet a man from her past, it seems at first that this could be an adultery film (Unfaithful, 2002). Or is it a possession film (The Shining, 1980, Paranormal Activity, 2007)? An alien film (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956, and the recent They Look Like People, 2015)? A zombie/infection film (The Evil Dead, 1981, Cabin Fever, 2002, or Severed, 2005)? I thought of all these possibilities at different moments, prompted by the film’s rich suggestiveness.

There are also definite hints in Honeymoon of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Stepford Wives (1975), both films about paranoia and violence within a seemingly banal domesticity. Janiak’s camera, along with the screenplay, creates a stifling claustrophobia around Bea and Paul as they head off into the woods alone together, the drive overlaid with voiceovers of stories about their first date and their wedding, all signaling an extreme insularity. Indeed, the film starts with a shot of Bea recording herself (somewhat unwillingly) on camera at their wedding, saying: “I guess I’m the first one to do this. I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to say. I’m now a wife.” These opening lines of the film link her becoming “wife” (about which Bea herself seems incredulous) to an inability to speak, as if marriage has silenced her — and certainly, whatever happens to her later in the woods (is it just her honeymoon, in the end?) disrupts her ability to speak even more violently. As Bea speaks (or tries to) at the beginning, she is visually confined by a camera, by the car, and by the stark lines of roads, overpasses, and trees. The film thus brilliantly puts the everyday (marriage) on a continuum with the horrifying (possession?), connecting the problem of Bea’s troubled self-expression and containment, now that she’s married, to the later seemingly supernatural plot.

Once they get to the cottage, cracks soon surface in Bea and Paul’s marriage — tellingly, around the issue of babies. After their first night together, Paul tells Bea that she needs to “rest her womb,” a strange comment to which Rose reacts badly, saying she isn’t sure she wants a baby. Paul’s comment, which seems to surprise both of them, and which is clearly precipitated by the fact that they are now married, tellingly anticipates all the strange things Rose will say once she is “possessed” (or whatever it is that happens to her). Janiak suggests, more than once then, that perhaps it is marriage that is an utterly alien state.

It also becomes clear that Bea and Paul have some profound differences: Bea hunts, fishes and embraces the outdoors, and Paul seems more comfortable in the cabin. His constant closeness to her in the many interior scenes seems oppressive, seems to exert a pressure on her to stay with him, indoors. Indeed, the viewer soon senses that the claustrophobia we feel about their relationship (well, I certainly did) may well be shared by Bea.

The claustrophobia that infuses the film, and the sense that Bea is not immune to its grasp, is intensified by one of the clearest intertextual references in the film: Bea starts writing her name and her husband’s name (“My name is Bea,” “My husband’s name is Paul”) over and over in her journal, and the evocation of The Shining is clear, specifically Jack Nicholson’s character slowly losing his grasp on reality when trapped in a snow-bound hotel with his wife and son and with the demands his family inevitably imposes. Bea’s repetitive writing of her husband’s name, and things about their relationship, moreover, mimics the way, early in the film, they had told stories about their relationship, pushing what might have seemed benign in the beginning into the realm of something more disturbing. Bea seems to be trying to paper over the cracks, to convince herself she’s something (“wife”) that deep down she doesn’t want to be.

This is where The Stepford Wives in particular comes in: are the seemingly supernatural elements of the plot symbolic of Bea’s struggles with intimacy and the weighty expectations of married domestic life (sex, cooking, and reproduction)? Janiak’s expert writing and directing definitely leaves open this possible subtext of the film — especially given what happens at the end.
The ending, which I won’t give away, draws on several scenes in the film in which rope figures prominently, as Bea and Paul take turns tying each other up for various reasons. The meanings of these scenes increasingly turns toward the sinister, from play toward overt entrapment. While it’s Bea who gets tied up at first, the tables are turned at the end in ways that could be expressing desires that Bea may not have allowed herself consciously to feel, and that are expressed instead through the plot of her “possession.”

The use of ropes in the film actually reminded me of the late nineteenth-century short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In this story, the narrator, who has just given birth, is forced to “rest” in bed by her physician-husband (just as Paul tells Bea to “rest her womb”), and the coerced and numbing inactivity of body and mind impels the narrator into madness (raising another possibility for what happens to Bea). At the end of the story, the narrator ties herself up with a rope and is creeping around her room, a scene so horrifying to her husband that he faints. In Gilman’s story, the rope (as well as the entrapping room itself) represents the confines of patriarchal marriage — and I would argue that uses rope very much the same way, although the film’s final instance of someone getting tied up pretty much completely inverts Gilman’s ending.

The weight of this film rests on its two actors, who are virtually alone, with the fleeting (albeit important) appearance of a man from Bea’s past and his wife. Rose Leslie and Harry Treadaway are both absolutely sensational, superbly carrying this weight. Leslie does a fantastic job of expressing a sense of disquiet (in her marriage) well before things turn toward the truly strange — and Treadaway is great at expressing the kind of unambiguous, puppy-dog adoration — the desire never to let his wife out of his sight — that undoubtedly produces Bea’s ambivalence.

While what happens to Rose and Paul may in the end be about forces beyond their control, like every good horror film, Honeymoon exploits the cracks in “normality” before the truly uncanny erupts. Janiak (whose previous credits as director include only a couple of TV episodes) both knows good horror films (referencing them throughout) and knows how to make one.

I should add that it seems Sony has tapped Janiak to direct and co-write (along with Graziadei, her partner from Honeymoon) the upcoming remake of the 1996 cult hit, The Craft. As The Hollywood Reporter points out:

“The news of a female director coming on board to direct a female-centric feature project is welcome news to Hollywood, as it breaks after the studios have come under fire from the American Civil Liberties Union for ‘systemic failure to hire women directors at all levels of the film and television industry.’ Janiak’s hiring was already weeks in the works; the filmmaker impressed execs with her take on a female empowerment tale.”

Like The Craft, I think Honeymoon, too, is a “female empowerment tale,” as well as an extremely good horror tale. Leigh Janiak is definitely a director to look out for!

This post is revised and expanded from a review that appeared on a blog Dawn Keetley co-runs, about all things horror Horror Homeroom. She also teaches gothic and horror literature, film, and TV at Lehigh University in PA and has edited a collection of essays on The Walking Dead entitled We’re All Infected (McFarland, 2014).