“The More You Deny Me, the Stronger I’ll Get”: On ‘The Babadook,’ Mothers, and Mental Illness

Most people I talked to and most of the reviews that I read about ‘The Babadook’ concluded that the film is about motherhood or mother-son relations. While I agree, I also really tuned in on the complicating element to this whole narrative, which is that the mother is mentally ill.

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This guest post by Elizabeth King appears as part of our theme week on Bad Mothers.


I don’t typically like horror movies. I have always been sort of a scaredy-cat when it comes to anything horror-related, and I was completely terrified when I watched The Babadook with my roommates several months ago. To tell the truth, I barely saw the Mr. Babadook creature himself, because I would immediately cover my eyes when I sensed an appearance was pending. For many reasons, the film is truly horrifying.

To summarize (and spoil) the film’s plot: the two main characters are a mother and son, Amelia and Sam. Amelia’s husband and Sam’s father died in a car accident while driving Amelia to the hospital while she was in labor and about to give birth to Sam. We join mother and son, several years later in the present day, and see that Sam ostensibly has some severe behavioral issues (including self-hard and violence towards others), and that Amelia has not yet recovered and found peace after her husband’s untimely death.

One evening, Sam pulls a book off of his shelf for Amelia to read to him at bedtime. What he brings to her is a book neither of them have seen before, and the contents quickly reveal themselves to be very dark and violent. The title of the book is Mr. Babadook, and Mr. Babadook is a threatening, scary, and sinister monster that foretells of his haunting of homes and ability to provoke violent behavior and terror from others. Naturally this scares the hell out of Sam, and he fixates on this character both as an object of his fears, and the sense of protection he feels for his mother. As Sam’s obsession and fear of the Babadook worsen, Amelia’s nerves fray, and she is emotionally and physically exhausted trying to care for her son and ease his fears. Her exhaustion turns to madness, and she eventually turns on Sam, drugging him and attempting to harm or kill him.

The film resolves in an extremely satisfying way (the best I have ever seen a horror movie end) with the family managing to face their fears after being consumed by them, and saving their own lives as mother and son. So yes: the film is disturbing and exceptionally scary by my standards, but with a message so powerful that it warrants further conversation.

Most people I talked to and most of the reviews that I read about The Babadook concluded that the film is about motherhood or mother-son relations. While I agree, I also really tuned in on the complicating element to this whole narrative, which is that the mother is mentally ill. Throughout the film, Amelia is very obviously in the deepest darkest depths of a major depressive episode, initiated by her husband’s death, and felt helpless in the face of her maternal responsibilities. I interpreted Mr. Babadook not as the difficulties of motherhood personified, but rather as an excruciating metaphor for depression, and the ways that mental illness can be further complicated and stigmatized when they are present in mothers.

Throughout The Babadook, Amelia is judged and later rejected by her sister when Amelia expresses her desperation regarding Sam’s behavior. Amelia can’t live up to her sister’s expectations of a perfect mother, and is therefore deemed unworthy of support. Sam’s school administrators also stigmatize Amelia’s condition and her parenting abilities, and appear to conspire against her instead of offering support. They all see her as a bad mother, when in fact she is struggling to cope with depression, and needs their help more than ever.

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Amelia is also in denial of her depression, and seems to internalize the “bad mother” judgement, in large part due to her understandably complicated feelings towards her son. She feels resentful and claustrophobic around Sam, as she sees him as the cause of her pain: the death of her husband. Motherhood not only was the birth of her depression (her husband died the day Sam, her only child, was born), but also what exacerbated her depression and ultimately made it unbearable.

What clinches the depression metaphor for me is Amelia’s strong denial and inability to acknowledge the extent of her problems. She repeatedly says she is fine, and never names her depression, which takes shape as the terrifying and destructive Babadook. Denial is never a good thing, particularly when addressing mental illness. As the Babadook says, “The more you deny me, the stronger I’ll get.” This is perhaps the most true threat the Babadook made, and also the best possible way to describe what will happen when depression goes unchecked. Unacknowledged depression like Amelia’s is bound to reach a tragic critical mass unless measures are taken to cope and heal.

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As her depression symptoms intensify (we see repeated scenes of Amelia staying awake all night, not eating, lacking the energy to work, becoming paranoid, etc.), Amelia devolves into the Babadook, and is totally possessed by her illness. As a result she seeks to eliminate the ostensible source of the problem: her son. Instead of being a mother to Sam, the illness warps Amelia into an imminent threat that Sam has to protect himself against. And yet, the one person who doesn’t see Amelia as a bad mother is the subject of her angst and pain: her son.

At the extremely touching and horrifying climax of the film, Sam has his mother bound with ropes on the floor of their basement at the peak of her possession by the Babadook, Sam yells at his mother, “I know you don’t love me! I know the Babadook won’t let you!” I was simultaneously terrified of what was happening, and heartbroken by Sam’s message to his mother. He needed her to understand that it wasn’t her, it was her depression, the unaddressed grief she felt that was destroying their family. She was a good mom and wanted to love her son, but the Babadook’s power over her made it impossible for that to happen.

After Amelia, with Sam’s help, is able to confront her pain and can no longer deny her depression (she screams at Mr. Babadook: “This is my house!” a sign that she is ready to reclaim her life), she and Sam are able to cope and move forward. At the very end of the movie, we see Amelia tending to the Babadook creature, shackled and very tightly locked away in the basement of her home. She tells Sam that they can discuss the creature when he’s older. Not only has Amelia confronted her depression, she also acknowledges that while she will never be able to completely subdue the pain of her husband’s death, she must face it.


Elizabeth King is a freelance writer based in Chicago, Ill. She is an ardent feminist and environmentalist, and a huge fan of ice cream. You can find her on Twitter @ekingc, and Instagram @mr.sweatpants.

‘Splice’: Womb Horror and the Mother Scientist

‘Splice’ explores gendered body horror at the locus of the womb, reveling in the horror of procreation. It touches on themes of bestiality, incest, and rape. It’s also a movie about being a mom.

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This repost by Mychael Blinde appears as part of our theme week on Bad Mothers.

NSFW | Trigger warning for survivors of sexual assault
Warning: Spoilers abound!

Splice explores gendered body horror at the locus of the womb, reveling in the horror of procreation. It touches on themes of bestiality, incest, and rape. It’s also a movie about being a mom.
Though it received somewhat lackluster reviews, I encourage anyone interested in feminism and film to give Vincenzo Natali’s sci-fi body horror film a try. Splice features female characters who are intelligent, emotionally complex, and in control. They’re not perfect, but they are three-dimensional characters whose decisions drive the story. (One of them morphs into a male, but we’ll get to that.)
Splice asks a lot of questions about the terms and conditions of conception, gestation, birth, and motherhood, all without stabbing the viewer in the eye with reductive answers.
It also features some campy moments. Hipster scientists shout things like “It was the only way!” Academy Award winning actor Adrien Brody expresses his frustration by throwing down not just his jacket, but his scarf as well!
If you can stomach the juxtaposition of big thinky concepts and stilted clichéd dialogue, you will find Splice a thoroughly enjoyable mindfuck of a film.
Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) and Clive Nicoli (Brody), long-term partners in romance and biochemistry, have developed a method to splice the DNA from various animals together to create hybrid creatures.
Viewers are actually birthed into the film from the perspective of Fred, the couple’s latest scientific endeavor, a male companion to their first hybrid, Ginger.
Splice
Splice

Elsa and Clive aspire to splice human DNA to develop cures for genetic diseases, but the pharmaceutical company funding their research puts a halt on all splicing until the duo can synthesize the medicinal protein necessary to create a commercially viable lifestock drug.

Newstead Pharma’s financial interests are represented by Joan Chorot (Simona Maicanescu), who insists Elsa and Clive begin “Phase Two: The product stage.”
Joan Chorot (Simona Maicanescu) in Splice
Joan Chorot (Simona Maicanescu) in Splice
Joan doesn’t get a lot of screen time, but her brief appearances are a pleasure to watch. She’s articulate and always in control. It’s awesome to see a woman kicking ass in the role of the money-grubbing corporation, and Joan is a stellar example of how to do it right.
After their splicing research is shut down, Clive suggests they quit, but Elsa convinces Clive to proceed with the human splicing and to generate an embryo.
Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) in Splice
Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) in Splice
In both the romantic and the professional relationship between Clive and Elsa (and this is a movie very much interested in the conflation of work and sex), Elsa is in charge.
Over and over, Elsa insists that they take the next step. She is the opposite of what I call the Male Protagonist’s Girlfriend — a  pretty lady bystander who supplements the male protagonist’s story arc.
Elsa and Clive also deviate from the typical representation of long-term monogamous heterosexual partners: it is he, not she, who desires to have a child:

Elsa: “You are talking about having a kid.”
Clive: “Is that so unreasonable?”
Elsa: “Yeah, because I’m the one who has to have it…”
Clive: “Come on. What’s the worst that can happen?”
Elsa: “How about after we crack male pregnancy?”

Meaningfully, this discussion is cut short by an alert sent from the machine housing the hybrid fetus. When they arrive at the lab, the embryo is all grown up and preparing to evacuate the biochemically engineered womb.
Though Elsa doesn’t gestate and birth the baby from her own body, the birth experience is physically traumatizing for her. She becomes trapped in the birth canal and is injected with poisonous serum. In a rare moment of control, Clive saves Elsa. But after the birth, Elsa again takes charge: she refuses to allow Clive to kill the female hybrid and insists that they raise her in the lab.
Weirdly, the couple begins to function less like scientists and more like normal parents: frustrated because the baby won’t eat, stressed out because it won’t stop crying. However, unlike most parents, their baby has a stinging whip tail, and they are forced to relegate their progeny to the laboratory’s basement to keep her existence a secret.
Elsa (Sarah Polley) in Splice
Elsa (Sarah Polley) in Splice
Elsa becomes more and more emotionally attached to the creature, and eventually names her Dren. Clive is worried about their secret being revealed and disturbed by Elsa’s displays of maternal affection. Nevertheless, he resigns himself to raising her, and Dren grows to be a young adult in a matter of months.
One night, Clive and Elsa realize they haven’t boned down lately. Clive doesn’t have any condoms, but Elsa says, “What’s the worst that could happen?” – suggesting that she’s decided she wouldn’t mind gestating a child, maybe? – and they have at. This is the first of three sex scenes in Splice.
Cinematically, their lovemaking is depicted as underwhelming. Neither Elsa nor Clive take off any clothing. Creepily, Dren watches.
Meanwhile, pressure is building at the pharmaceutical company.
Their presentation at the shareholders’ meeting goes disastrously wrong. Unbeknownst to Clive and Elsa, their specimen Ginger has changed into a male, and Ginger and Fred tear each other apart and splash guts and blood all over the audience. Not good PR.
In deep shit with the company, Clive and Elsa are forced to relocate Dren to Elsa’s deceased mother’s farm.
Here we learn the backstory of Elsa’s childhood; themes of feminism, motherhood, and family history come into play.
We learn that Elsa’s mother forbade Barbies and makeup. Elsa explains that “She said makeup debased women.” The word “feminist” is never used in Splice, but Elsa’s mother’s Barbie-banning and makeup-denying seem emblematic of a certain type of feminist parenting.
We also learn that Elsa’s mother raised her in substandard living conditions, relegating her to a ramshackle, barely furnished bedroom.
Initially I viewed this as a problematic conflation of being a feminist with being a neglectful person and bad mother. But it’s far more complicated than that.
Elsa expresses her love for Dren by giving her the very things her mother denied her.
Dren (Delphine Chanéac) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) in Splice
Dren (Delphine Chanéac) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) in Splice
But the Barbie and the makeover don’t make Dren happy; in fact, the Barbie explicitly makes Dren sad. Looking into a mirror, she holds the doll’s long blonde tresses against her bald head and becomes upset.
Over the course of the film, Elsa locks Dren up in a lab, then a basement, and eventually her mother’s barn, and Dren resents her for it. Elsa seems unable to break the cycle of her own mother’s physical and emotional neglect.
Perhaps the idea is that makeup is not a substitute for ideal living quarters and engaged parenting. What matters isn’t whether or not you give your daughter a Barbie, but whether or not you lock her in a barn.
And it turns out, Dren really is Elsa’s genetic daughter. To his chagrin, Clive discovers Elsa used her own DNA to create Dren: “Why the fuck did you want to make her in the first place? Huh? For the betterment of mankind? You never wanted a normal child because you were afraid of losing control. But an experiment…”
He doesn’t finish the sentence, but it seems clear that Elsa is using science as a way to disassociate herself from motherhood while still being able to create and raise a child. Presumably we’re to understand that Elsa’s desire for complete control stems from her tragic upbringing: “Look at your family history,” Clive exhorts.
Elsa tries to convey her genetic connection to Dren by explaining to her: “You’re a part of me, and I’m a part of you. I’m inside you.” She strives to smooth over their mother-daughter animosity, but the two wind up in a physical altercation that results in Elsa knocking Dren unconscious, tying her up, stripping her naked, and removing her tail and stinger. This scene has undertones of both castration and rape. Elsa has become a monstrous mother scientist.
Clive is horrified by Elsa’s actions, but she informs him that she is going to use Dren’s amputated stinger to finally synthesize the protein and heads to the lab, where she succeeds.
Elsa (Sarah Polley) in Splice
Elsa (Sarah Polley) in Splice 
She tells off her obnoxious supervisor: “When some real scientists get here, come take a look.”
While Elsa’s away, Dren seduces Clive. If Elsa’s sin is her obsessive need to control, Clive’s sin is his inclination to relinquish control.
This is the film’s second sex scene. Cinematically it is sensual, queer in a fantasy-mythical-creature sort of way, strange but beautiful. Ominously, Dren grows back her tail stinger. Then Clive notices Elsa has come back and is watching them. She storms out and he chases her. Back at their apartment, Clive and Elsa decide that they finally have to kill Dren.
But when they return to the barn, it turns out Dren is already dying. After she dies, Clive’s brother (who also works in the lab) and their supervisor show up. He announces he knows their secret and demands to see the human-spliced creature. Elsa informs him that Dren is dead, throws a shovel at him and says, “See for yourself.”
Except Dren is no longer buried behind the barn. Like Ginger, she has morphed into a male, and in the film’s climax, he kills everybody but Elsa.
Dren as male in Splice
Dren as male in Splice
A note on the gender transition: I am uncomfortable with the representation of Dren’s metamorphosis from female to male. It is predicated on the idea that transitioning from a female body to a male body is horrific, and it exploits trans individuals by sensationalizing the transitioning body as evil and freakish. It’s not trans positive. I understand that Splice’s story necessitates this metamorphosis and that Dren isn’t exactly a human, but let’s call out problematic shit when we see it.
Chasing women through the woods at night is a staple of slasher flicks, but this movie isn’t about slashing – it’s about splicing. Dren chases Elsa through the woods, but instead of slaughtering Elsa, Dren rapes her.
This is Splice‘s third sex scene. Cinematically it is gut-wrenchingly horrifying, as any rape depicted onscreen needs to be in order to convey the awfulness that is sexual violation. Dren’s rape of Elsa is as disgusting and awful as Dren’s sex with Clive is beautiful and sensual.
When Elsa screams, “What do you want?” Dren replies: “Inside…of…you.”
Clive stabs Dren with a branch (wielding the metaphorical phallus) as Dren orgasms, but Dren is not killed, and attacks Clive. Elsa pulls her pants back on and bashes Dren in the head with a big rock. This critically injures Dren, who takes a moment to survey the situation – then stabs Clive with his tail. Elsa bashes Dren in the head again, killing Dren once and for all.
Elsa is the character who cut off Dren’s stinger and the one who deals Dren the death blow. And yet in his final moments, Dren chooses to kill Clive. Why?
Because inside of Elsa is a womb, the growing space for a new creature. And sure enough, in the film’s resolution we discover that Elsa is pregnant. Of the three sexual encounters that take place in this movie, the reproductively viable encounter is the rape. Elsa lives to be the final girl not because she wields a chainsaw, but because she wields womb. (And a big rock.)
Unlike Veronica of The Fly (“I want an abortion!”) or, more recently, Elizabeth of Prometheus (“Get it out of me!”), Elsa decides to gestate her monster progeny to term.
I appreciate both The Fly and Prometheus because each asks its audience to empathize with a woman who desperately needs an abortion. I also appreciate Splice for asking its viewers to honor Elsa’s decision not to abort. Joan makes it clear that Elsa has a choice: “Nobody would blame you if you didn’t do this. You could just put an end to it and walk away.” (Would that this were the standard response to women experiencing unwanted pregnancies!)
But Elsa does not to put an end to it. Why does she decide to bring it to term?
Sure, the company’s giving her a shitload of money for gestating Dren’s offspring. But throughout the film, Elsa has insisted on moving forward with human splicing experiments. Perhaps she sees this as a necessary extension of that research.
Or maybe this is another chance for Elsa to use science to mediate motherhood. Is the pregnancy Elsa’s punishment, or her redemption? We’ll never know. All she says is, “What’s the worst that could happen?”
The film closes with a shot of the two women, the film’s only surviving characters, looking out a window.
Splice

Mychael Blinde is not a scientist, but she is afraid to give birth. She is interested in representations of gender in popular culture and blogs at Vagina Dentwata.

‘Viy’: Incestuous Mother as Horror Monster

For women, male anxieties over female abusers combine great risk of demonization with great opportunity to forge connection. Men, like women, understand boundaries primally through their own bodies and identification. Rejecting one’s own abuse teaches one to fight against all abuse; excusing it teaches one to abuse.

'Viy' was the USSR's first horror film'Viy' was the USSR's first horror film
Viy was the USSR’s first horror film

 


Trigger Warning: Discussion of maternal incest, paternal incest and the rape of men.


Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol disassociated himself from his 1835 story Viy by framing it as an unaltered “Little Russian” (Ukrainian) folk tale, but it is actually a strikingly original, vividly visual and deeply felt Gothic horror that bears only slight resemblance to folklore. Though Mario Bava’s 1960 Black Sunday is officially based on Viy, the most faithful adaptation is a 1967 Soviet production with effects by stop-motion legend Aleksandr Ptushko. I’m analyzing this classic, not the recent remake.

Trainee monk Khoma Brut “never knew his mother,” while the story’s vampiric witch (she drinks baby’s blood) is introduced in a maternal, housewife role. As Katherine Murray discusses on Bitch Flicks, “the substitution of witch for mom or giant for dad is a safe way of exploring children’s fears about their parents.” Gogol’s major source is Zhukovsky’s translation of Robert Southey’s “A Ballad, Shewing How An Old Woman Rode Double, And Who Rode Before Her,” where a monk reads prayers over his cursed mother’s corpse, while demons lay siege to the church. Though not literally mother, Viy‘s vivid witch is the archetype of horror’s monstrous mothers. In 1893’s The Death of Halpin Frayser, the hero blunders into the “blank, dead eyes of his own mother, standing white and silent in the garments of the grave!” While struggling with his undead mother in a haunted forest, Halpin dissociates and views events “as a spectator” before dying horribly. In Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 horror classic, Vampyr, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s alluringly lesboerotic Carmilla is reimagined as a menacing, maternal vampire-hag, while in “Lies My Parents Told Me,” (Season 7) of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spike vamps his mother and she accuses him of sexually desiring her, forcing him to stake her. The event is so traumatic that Spike can be controlled by it, until he defuses his trigger by facing the memory (contrast the show’s dismissive treatment of Faith’s attempted rape/murder of Xander in Season 3’s “Consequences” and Buffy’s violation of Spike’s stated sexual boundaries in Season 6’s “Gone”).

In her discussion of the female Gothic, “The Madwoman’s Journey From The Attic Into The Television,” Bitch Flicks‘ guest writer Sobia notes, “while male writers of the time were tackling subjects like rape and sexual assault head on, the women were using complicated metaphors to confront these issues. I would argue that for the male writer, given the distance they already have and maintain from these topics, it was easy to tell the story of the assault happening to an Other.” Just as Godzilla‘s semi-goofy lizard embodied Japan’s nuclear trauma, so Gogol’s fantasy creations are not necessarily trivial, as unreal displacements of real anxiety. Viy parallels the female Gothic’s allegorical approach to rape, contrasting sharply with unreal yet realist rape fantasies like Murmur of the Heart (flippant maternal incest for shock value), White Palace (Susan Sarandon’s rape of an unconscious James Spader, who refused consent before passing out, as romantic liberation), and Wedding Crashers (Vince Vaughn’s rape by Isla Fisher as hilarious).

Nikolai Kutuzov's witch transfixes Khoma
Nikolai Kutuzov’s witch transfixes Khoma

 

The boisterous tone of Viy‘s opening fades rapidly, as three seminary students, lost in the dead of night, draw up to a housewife’s misty gates and are allowed to stay on condition that they sleep separated. Leonid Kuravlyov’s robust and jolly Khoma beds down alone in a stable. His placid chewing is paralleled with the stable’s cow, reducing him metaphorically to livestock. Initially, Khoma views the looming witch as a joke: “It’s getting late, Granny, and I wouldn’t corrupt myself for a thousand in gold. *laughs* You’ve gotten old, Granny.” Gogol’s prose: “the sophomore [lit: ‘philosopher’] shrank back; but she still approached, as though she wished to lay hold of him. A terrible fright seized him, for he saw the old hag’s eyes glitter in an extraordinary way.” Filming the witch’s stare in uncomfortable close-up, the Soviet adaptation achieves a viscerally uncanny effect, intensified for hetero-male audiences by male actor Nikolai Kutuzov’s playing the witch, until the stumbling Khoma knocks the cow’s yoke symbolically onto his own neck. Khoma appears stunned. In Gogol’s prose, his reaction is more clearly tonic immobility, or freeze response: “the sophomore tried to push her away with his hands, but to his astonishment he found that he could neither lift his hands nor move his legs, nor utter an audible word.”

Finally, the witch grasps him and forces herself onto his back. After a dizzying aerial ride, Khoma drives the witch to earth by invoking Christ and beats her with savage anger, until she transforms into a weeping damsel-in-distress, who dies as he staggers away. The sexual dimension of the riding is clearer in Gogol’s prose: “his legs… lifted against his will… a wearying, unpleasant and at the same time sweet feeling… a demonically sweet feeling… suddenly he felt some kind of refreshment; he felt that his step began to grow more lazy… her wild cries… became weaker, more pleasant, purer.” Gogol uses supernatural paralysis and running motion to allegorically express concepts as crucial to understanding male rape as they are widely disbelieved: firstly, the effectiveness of sexual threat in inducing an involuntary freeze response and, secondly, the possible coexistence of “demonically sweet” arousal with traumatic mental repulsion and violation.

The eerie repulsion of Natalya Varley's undead witchThe eerie repulsion of Natalya Varley's undead witch
The eerie repulsion of Natalya Varley’s undead witch

 

Once dead, the witch can become youthfully beautiful, revealing her aged ugliness as a device to emphasize the unwanted and repulsive nature of the pseudosexual encounter. Khoma is forced to read prayers over the dead witch, as her dying request. Gogol’s witch is as pitiful as she is aggressive, crying a tear of blood and inducing Khoma’s guilt for killing her – “he felt as though those ruby lips were colored with his own heart’s blood” –  before demonically rising to violate him again. Khoma is told of Mikita, a huntsman whose infatuation with the witch “completely sissified him” before he allowed her to ride him; he was “burned completely out,” leaving only ashes, proving the fatal seriousness of the riding Khoma has survived. The film’s church scenes are masterpieces of brooding Orthodox iconography, steadily ratcheted tension and jolting jump scares. As the witch rises from her grave, Khoma desperately draws a chalk circle around himself, bolstering its charmed impenetrability by fervent prayer as demons fumble for him.

The frail boundary of chalk serves as a powerful imaginary line of bodily autonomy that the hero desperately defends, and our anxiety over its penetration drives the film’s second half. Khoma is forced to return on the third night by threats and the promise of a thousand in gold (for which he earlier refused to “corrupt himself”), being caught as he tries to flee. After dancing in wild abandon, his macho bravado drives him to return to the scene of horrors, intoxicated, to prove that “Cossacks aren’t afraid.” Khoma thus strives for some sense of control by proactively inviting a seemingly unavoidable threat. This is a common response to chronic abuse. On the final night, gigantic grasping hands grope for Khoma, while a wild assortment of nightmare ghouls crawl out of the church’s woodwork. The witch orders them to bring the Viy, a stumbling grotesque with dangling eyelids, from under the earth. Ghouls raise the Viy’s eyelids, unveiling his glittering stare. Khoma swears he will not look, but cannot resist turning as the Viy’s heavy footfalls approach. The Viy immediately stabs his finger at him, ghouls descend and Khoma dies of fright beneath their grasping hands. In a coda, his friend declares, “If he had not feared her, the witch could have done nothing to him.” As with Spike’s vampire-mother, it is Khoma’s fatal fear of facing the buried monster that is his doom, not the supernatural itself.

A frail circle of chalk is all that protects Khoma from gigantic grasping hands
A frail circle of chalk is all that protects Khoma from gigantic grasping hands

 

Gogol’s earlier 1832 horror, Terrible Vengeance, shares deep parallels with Viy. Like Viy‘s beautiful witch, its sorcerer is superficially attractive, amusing crowds until a religious icon exposes his monstrous true face. The heroine, Katerina, fears the sorcerer and is ambivalently detached from her father, suffering horrifying dreams that he incestuously desires to marry her. Her husband, Danilo, eventually discovers that the father and the evil sorcerer are one, and are conjuring Katerina’s spirit from her body by night. That spirit’s statement that Katerina “does not know a lot of what her soul knows” remarkably suggests repressed memory and dissociation. Like Khoma’s pity for the weeping witch, Katerina feels bound to liberate her father even after realizing his true nature, yet simultaneously self-loathing for her inability to separate from him. Terrible Vengeance portrays a nightmare vision of intergenerational abuse, where ancestors feed forever on each other’s corpses in a deep abyss. The original sinner gnaws his own flesh and shakes the earth in his efforts to rise, eternally growing and distorting into a buried grotesque like the fearful Viy. In Mikhail Titov’s 1987 animated adaptation, Katerina, maddened by the loss of her husband and child, dances in wild, defiant intoxication, as Khoma does after his night terrors, even drawing a circle of fire to ward off her father, like Khoma’s of chalk. Such profound parallels between the quasi-maternal incest of Viy and the explicitly paternal incest of Terrible Vengeance send a clear message: it’s not about gender. Though Gogol’s sexually monstrous mother-figure has captured male imaginations and spawned imitations in a way that his sexually monstrous father has not, because of the overwhelming male authorship of our culture, yet both images are rooted in a potentially interchangeable empathy for survivors of sexual abuse.


[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEenjdEp8h4″]

Titov’s Terrible Vengeance. Triggery allegory


For women, male anxieties over female abusers combine great risk of demonization with great opportunity to forge connection. Men, like women, understand boundaries primally through their own bodies and identification. Rejecting one’s own abuse teaches one to fight against all abuse; excusing it teaches one to abuse. When Alex Forrest of Fatal Attraction spooked male audiences, we could have pointed out that her behavior is stalking, experienced by one in six women in the USA, and her attempt to force Dan’s paternity is reproductive coercion, experienced by 16 percent of pregnant women. Instead, Susan Faludi’s Backlash read Alex as representing the demonization of feminism. Yet, Alex is an abuser. As Stephanie Brown points out for Bitch Flicks, you may meet Alex as you progress through life. Society does not technically favor men over women in intimate relationships. It favors abusers over victims, and codes abusive behaviors as masculine. As for bad mothers, Freud’s Oedipal “seduction theory” was created under intense pressure from the psychiatric establishment, as an alternative to his earlier exposure of parental incest’s links to PTSD in “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” So, why do feminists apply Oedipal interpretations, that evolved by mirror logic from rape apologism, to dismiss texts like Viy? Ultimately, whatever nightmares they fuel, bad mothers are neither monsters nor demonically unnatural women. They are flawed humans. By resisting the gendering of abuse, can we evolve human understanding?

Misogyny?
Misogyny?

 

The paranoid repulsion towards female sexual aggression that pervades the work of Nikolai Gogol has seen him uncritically labeled a misogynist, by virtually all modern commentators. Yet, renowned misogynist Nikolai Gogol formed intense friendships with women like Alexandra Smirnova-Rosset, corresponding on philosophical topics with rare respect for her intellectual equality, and addressing her as “drug” (“buddy”). Renowned misogynist Nikolai Gogol wrote the 19th century’s most psychologically insightful and empathetic portrait of a female experience of paternal incest.  Renowned misogynist Nikolai Gogol understood abuse far better than mainstream feminism. Time to stop dismissing and listen to the boys. Time to face Viy without flinching.

 


See also at Bitch Flicks:Child-Eating Parents in Into the Woods and Every Children’s Story Ever


 

Brigit McCone freely admits to being a Gogol groupie, writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and social justice warring.

The ‘Poltergeist’ Remake Delivers Scares but Buries the Politics of the Original

Though the remake provides plenty of scare factor and makes excellent use of new technology (both at the level of cinematography and within the narrative itself with various nods to iPads, iPhones, drones, etc), it lacks the critical edge of the original.

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This guest post by Natalie Wilson previously appeared at Skirt Collective and is cross-posted with permission.


The Poltergeist remake functions as an old-fashioned haunted house movie gussied up with new special effects, new technology, and a fair dose of contemporary references. For horror buffs, it’s a worthy scare-fest, but if you like political bite in your horror, give it a miss. At a slight 93 minutes, a lengthier run time would have allowed a heightened focus on the critical undercurrents which only serve as VERY subtle background in director Gil Kenan’s version.

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The original 1982 film, co-produced and co-written by Steven Spielberg, was more directly political in its depiction of an “all American family,” the stultifying effects of suburbia, and the dangers of “burying” ugly historical realities. As this review notes, the original provided “a sly commentary on the tribulations of suburban life, colonialism, the ill-treatment of Native Americans, the break-down of the nuclear family unit, and the damaging excesses of capitalism and consumerism.”

Though the remake provides plenty of scare factor and makes excellent use of new technology (both at the level of cinematography and within the narrative itself with various nods to iPads, iPhones, drones, etc), it lacks the critical edge of the original.

In the remake, economics are the driving factor forcing the Bowen’s move to a new house. While this review argues the film “works well as a study of a squeezed middle-class American family struggling to survive in a punishing economic climate,” I didn’t find the film studied this climate so much as dropped references to foreclosures and the current economic downturn, all while having the Bowen family live in a house that exudes middle-class comfort, technological upgrades, and plentiful yard-space.

If this is “the least sucky house” the family can afford, they hardly hold up as economically deprived. In one scene, Eric, the father (played by Sam Rockwell) is depicted as painfully embarrassed that two of his credit cards are declined at the filmic equivalent of Home Depot. To assert his ability to purchase (a key part of new American manhood), he then goes on a shopping spree at the mall, bringing home an iPhone for his teen daughter, jewelry for his wife, and a drone “toy” for his son. The Bowens are thus far from economically oppressed – rather, their white middle-class lifestyle is not as easy as it once was. In fact, the street name of their new digs, “Paradise,” ironically points to the fact their economic hardship is pretty slight compared to many.

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The original film, in contrast, focused not on economic hardship but on the stultifying effects of suburban life with a trailer that ominously intoned their new house “looks just like the one next to it, and the one next to that, and the one next to that.” Like other Spielberg films, ET, and, more recently, Super 8, Poltergeist revealed suburbia is not all it’s cracked up to be and that perhaps we would be better giving up the notion of the “all American family.” In one telling scene between the parents, the dad is holding the book Reagan: The Man, The President while the mom smokes pot and reminisces – a scene that Eye for Film argues represents “succumbing to middle-class conservatism.” While the original bucked such conservatism, the remake instead pines for its loss.

Admittedly, the remake depicts domesticity as similarly stultifying – especially via mom Amy, played by Rosemarie DeWitt , who is in a writing rut and berates herself for being a bad mother. Though DeWitt is compelling, her role does not live up to JoBeth Williams’ portrayal due to the film’s troubling return to “traditional family values.” While the original included reversals of gender norms, with the mom depicted as far more proactive and powerful than the father, and even had the mother venturing to the “Other Side” to save her daughter Carol Anne, the remake returns the power to the father and has the son, Griffin, be the “superboy” that ventures to the “Other Side” to save his sister. Sadly, the iconic swimming pool scene with the mother fending off an array of skeletons is absent – so too is the powerful and enigmatic medium Tangina Barrons (played by Zelda Rubinstein).

In her place we have Carrigan Burke (played by Jared Harris) — meaning the film takes the largely female-driven paranormal team from the original movie and centers it on a white male reality TV ghost-busting star who insists, macho-style, “I am the only one who can lead those souls into the light” (why didn’t the filmmakers take a page from the forthcoming female remake of Ghostbusters??). To add insult to feminist injury, Dr. Powell (played by Jane Adams) is Carrigan’s ex-wife who clearly longs to rekindle their romance and her job in academia is presented as a sadly lackluster in comparisons to Carrigan’s reality TV fame. Ugh.

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Given the remake emphasizes closets as particularly dangerous, another lost opportunity is the chance to play up “being closeted” – why not, for example, have some character, any character, be “out,” and use this as a vehicle to extend the stultifying family norms the remake fails to fully explore? There is a great electric drill scene in the closet in the remake, but it would have been all the better if instead of typical hetero-dude Boyd, they coded the character Boyd as a gay “Boi” – just think of the closet jokes and shenanigans that could have ensued!

Further, given we have a new ending (I will avoid overt spoilers), why not emphasize cars and our reliance on oil as death trap? Why not play up our seeming cultural inability to escape the horror of suburbia and the lure of the shopping mall? Why jettison the original cemetery back-story instead of putting it to more political use? Indeed, it would have been more powerful to address the politics of race head on this time around – something the original (and its sequels) failed to do. Instead, Indigenous Peoples are put under erasure – yet again – with only a trite joke during a dinner party scene about “sacred burial grounds.”

The remake also jettisons any commentary on sexism. Whereas the original had the teen daughter rebuke street harassers, a rebellion that is tied to her mother’s similar subversive streak, the remake makes no reference to gendered harassment (except if you count the somewhat awkward exchange the dad has with the female employee of the quasi-Home Depot as his credit cards are turned down). Here, the film could have taken guidance from the recent It Follows, a film which similarly harks back to old-school horror while offering a condemnation of rape culture. To its credit, the film’s shift towards young Griffin as the savior is well-done, especially via its emphasis that it is normal for boys as well as girls to be nervous, scared, emotional, and in need of reassurance. Notably the dad emphasizes the normality of this, admitting he too is scared, and, in so doing, denies the gendering of fear/emotion. Indeed, Sam Rockwell is great in the role – wish that he could have been paired with a mom more akin to the feisty one from the original!

Poltergeist-reboot

While the original holds its own as a classic fright-fest, even being deemed “one of the scariest horror movies ever made,” the remake has plenty of good scares but lacks political punch (as do MOST horror films, admittedly). While the remake offers a more immersive view of the “Other Side,” making very good use of 3D to evoke threatening fleshy corpses as far as the eye can see, it fails to unearth what lies beneath our “sucky houses” in suburban “paradise.”

A trailer for the original film intoned “Poltergeist. It knows what scares you” – sadly, the remakes knows this too, but only on a visual level – the deeply buried socio-political realities that provide potency to horror are as absent as that infamous corpse-filled swimming pool…

 


Natalie Wilson teaches women’s studies and literature at California State University, San Marcos. She is the author of Seduced by Twilight and blogs for Ms., Girl with Pen and Bitch Flicks.

 

#iamnotavessel: Joss Whedon’s Romantic Reproductive Coercion

Whedon and director Jeunet thus systematically demolish Ridley Scott’s original metaphor by consistently representing Ripley’s experience of forced maternity as akin to both chosen motherhood and loss of self, and essentially different from the forced impregnation and reproductive coercion of the male characters.

Ripley, loving her "beautiful, beautiful little baby"
Ripley, loving her “beautiful, beautiful little baby”

 


Written by Brigit McCone.


The Alien saga offers some of the most powerful images of bodily violation in pop culture, from the metaphorical rape of the facehuggers to the victim’s resulting fatal impregnation. Ridley Thelma and Louise Scott* fostered male empathy by casting John Hurt as the victim of this violation, while Sigourney Weaver’s badass Ellen Ripley defeated the monster. The sequel, Aliens, saw Ripley voluntarily assume maternal responsibility for a young girl, Newt, and fight an iconic battle against the Alien Queen to save her adopted child. In Alien3, Ripley realized she had been impregnated with an Alien Queen, and made a conscious decision to destroy herself and it. Then, in 1997, celebrated male feminist Joss Whedon scripted a fourth film in the series, Alien: Resurrection, which revived Ripley as an Alien/human hybrid clone.

When her identity is challenged, Ripley/Alien smiles, “I’m the monster’s mother,” equating motherhood with forced cloning in a lab. Realizing that Aliens have escaped, Ripley/Alien grins, later clarifying, “I’m finding a lot of things funny lately, but I don’t think they are.” Merging with the Alien has rendered her emotional responses irrational. As Ripley/Alien is anguished at being forced to destroy a room full of fellow clones, Ron Perlman’s pirate snorts “must be a chick thing”, in a franchise founded on transgressive gender-bending. Ripley/Alien weeps openly at the death of the Newborn, an Alien/human hybrid which has already devoured the brains of two people (including the film’s final person of color), which Brad Dourif’s scientist described as her “beautiful, beautiful little baby.” Whedon and director Jeunet thus systematically demolish Ridley Scott’s original metaphor by consistently representing Ripley’s experience of forced maternity as akin to both chosen motherhood and loss of self, and essentially different from the forced impregnation and reproductive coercion of the male characters.

Classic reproductive coercion
Classic reproductive coercion

 

Maternity may be forced, but motherhood is always voluntary. An adopted mother is a true mother, as Ripley is to Newt. An egg donor, a surrogate or a clone is not automatically a mother, as Ripley is not to the Newborn. Reducing the complexity of motherhood to automatic biology also implies that bad mothers are unnatural, rather than flawed humans, which aspiring writers may wish to explore in this Theme Week. As for Alien: Resurrection, Whedon’s ending was changed and he claims “they said the lines…mostly…but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do.” However, three aspects of Whedon’s role as author of Alien: Resurrection still deserve scrutiny. Firstly, that it consistently rewrites and undermines the original feminist purpose of Ridley Scott’s Alien. Secondly, that it is only one of numerous dehumanizing portraits of forced maternity in the work of Joss Whedon. Thirdly, that Whedon’s status as a vocal male feminist does not restrain him from perpetuating this trope.

Sixteen percent of pregnant women surveyed by Lindsay Clark M.D. had been subjected to reproductive coercion (the sabotaging of birth control or the use of threat by male partners to force pregnancy). In a survey of women using family planning services, fully 35 percent of those who experienced partner violence had also been subjected to reproductive coercion. Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction is an iconic representation of terrifying reproductive coercion, but I can think of no equivalent portrayal of reproductive coercion by male characters targeting women, despite its staggering frequency in reality. Nobody wants to confront the possibility that a child might be unwanted, especially by their own mother. However, if we can’t admit that an acid-spitting, brain-eating Alien-child might ever, possibly, be unwanted, our denial has become dehumanizing. Male-authored horror, focusing disproportionately on women as victims of supernatural possession, almost invariably implies that women can be drained of selfhood and controlled by reproductive coercion, supporting the ideology of real-life abusers.

In The Omen, Gregory Peck’s father must confront and attempt to destroy his demon spawn while, in Rosemary’s Baby, Mia Farrow’s mother gently rocks her demon spawn’s cradle with a tender smile. Paternity is an emotional bond mediated by rational judgment, while maternity inevitably entails loss of the rational self. Some female directors have challenged this trope. In Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, a mother’s love is alienated by her child’s sadism, joining the conflicted but humanized mothers of Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, and Kimberley Peirce’s reimagined Carrie. Meanwhile, Roman “Rosemary’s Baby” Polanski, self-confessed rapist, has stated publicly that the birth control Pill “chases away the romance from our lives.” While celebrated male feminist Joss Whedon probably wouldn’t endorse that statement, his romanticized reproductive coercion nevertheless reflects that ideology.

"Instinct"
“Instinct”

 

Sady Doyle has praised Whedon’s Dollhouse for its exploration of the sinister implications of reducing women to manipulable male fantasy. As Doyle argues, Dollhouse can even be read as an interrogation of Whedon’s own role, as a writer who converts living actresses into creations of his fantasy. However, Doyle also highlights problems with the second season episode “Instinct,” which suggests that Echo’s being forcibly imprinted, to believe herself a mother, produces a biological response that cannot be erased, even though the woman’s entire personality can be erased, “because the Maternal Instinct has magical science-defying powers of undying devotion which are purely biological and not at all circumstantial” (Doyle’s words). Although the show’s entire point is the essential creepiness of depriving a human of consent, ‘Instinct’ suggests that the maternal instinct is capable of converting forced maternity into a positive experience. Nor is Dollhouse the only example of this.

Dawn, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is conceived by monks reprogramming the characters’ memories and emotions, echoing Dollhouse‘s premise. Since Dawn is an innocent and vulnerable being, Buffy’s decision to protect her is consistent with her established character as a natural rescuer, akin to Ripley’s decision to protect Newt at any cost. However, the show barely allows Buffy five minutes of outrage over the monks’ traumatic violation of her memories and emotional self (without even considering the implications of her fake robot pregnancy in the comics, or Black Widow’s becoming “monster” by sterilization because… dude). Like Echo’s positive experience of forced maternity, Buffy’s maternal instinct towards Dawn effectively cancels out the violation of Dawn’s conception. In the third season of Whedon’s Angel, the evil Darla’s entire personality alters through pregnancy, as she becomes mysteriously infected by the soul of her Prophecyfetus, recalling Ripley’s personality shift through Alien impregnation. Not only is Darla/Prophecyfetus redeemed by an explicitly unwanted pregnancy, but expresses her redemption through self-annihilation, staking herself to allow her baby’s birth.

Self-annihilation is likewise the ultimate expression of Buffy’s maternal instinct, the heroine killing herself for Dawn, her corpse bathed in the hopeful light of a new dawn (subtle). I can’t recall any comparable example of voluntary, fatherly self-annihilation as redemptive in the work of celebrated male feminist Joss Whedon (and even Michael Bay gave us Armageddon). Simon’s sacrifices, as adopted father-figure (and safeword-wielding controller) of sister River Tam, are rewarded with Kaylee’s love in Serenity, while Angel heroically chooses to wipe his son’s memory when paternity becomes too troublesome, and Giles dramatically rejects Buffy when she becomes too independent. Sure, there are complex undercurrents of male self-loathing and idolized female sacrifice going on here, but I can’t see how that actually empowers Whedon’s (routinely mind-controlled) women. As Angel points out in Angel‘s fourth season: “our fate has to be our own, or we’re nothing.” By this measure, Whedon’s women are constantly reduced to “nothing” by maternity.

Buffy Summers, model mother
Buffy Summers, model mother

 

When it comes to reproductive coercion, nothing beats the treatment of Cordelia Chase on Angel. Already forcibly impregnated by mind-controlling demon spawn in the first season’s “Expecting,” Cordelia agrees in “Birthday” to become half-demon herself, as an act of self-sacrifice to spare Angel from head-splitting visions. She eventually “transcends love” to become an omniscient “higher being” of pure light, but finds herself “so bored” by this power, echoing the vocal dissatisfaction of Whedon’s Ripley, Call, Buffy, Willow, Faith, and River Tam. If Whedon’s superstrong women didn’t all commiserate with each other about the terrible burden of power, they’d barely pass a Bechdel. In Season Four’s opener, Angel is trapped at the bottom of the sea, hallucinating visions of happiness with Cordelia. In one vision, Cordelia pledges her love as self-annihilation, foreshadowing the amnesia inflicted on her when she rejoins Angel, “I can’t remember what it was like, not knowing you”, before Angel vamps and drains her blood. At another vision’s cheerful feast, Cordelia exclaims “kill me now before my stomach explodes,” foreshadowing her next demon pregnancy, in which Cordy’s mind will be possessed yet again by the soul of her Doomfetus, just as Darla/Prophecyfetus and Ripley/Alien were.

Jasmine, the possessing being, forces Cordelia to seduce Angel’s son, Connor, primarily to provoke conflict between the male heroes, but also to conceive Jasmine’s Doomfetus vessel. Appearing in a vision, as the maternal mouthpiece of The Powers That Be, a reproductively purified and ex-evil Darla informs her son, Connor, that the fate of the world now depends on his choice, since Cordelia’s agency has been reproductively annihilated (Darla merely implies that last part). Cordelia is then forced into a coma by the birth of her demon spawn, just as Darla was dusted while giving birth, or Whedon’s Alien Queen decapitated by her Newborn. Meanwhile, Cordelia/Doomfetus has found time to bring forth a Doomsday Beast to destroy the sun (women are great at multitasking), forcing our hero, Angel, to lose his soul for various complex reasons, but mainly to confirm Cordy’s boundless power as mindless maternal mouthpiece. Powerful as she is, Cordelia’s lack of agency nevertheless reduces her, by Angel’s own logic, to “nothing.” Incidentally, Whedon’s treatment of actress Charisma Carpenter did nothing to dispel this impression.

Unmarried, pregnant Cordelia Chase is literally demonized
Unmarried, pregnant Cordelia Chase is literally demonized

 

This feels familiar to an Irish viewer. Our feminine ideal, the “Wild Irish Woman,” gave us warrior goddesses, but never prevented pregnant girls being institutionalized as slave labor (a cultural demonizing of unmarried mothers criticized by Dorothy Macardle and Mairéad Ní Ghráda, before Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters and Stephen Frears’ Philomena drew international attention). Our pirate queen got her nationalist anthem, but our women had their pelvises broken by crippling symphysiotomy until the 1980s without anesthetic, for fear caesareans would encourage use of birth control. We boast history’s second female minister in government, army officer Constance Markievicz, but just last year, a woman raped by the murderers of people close to her underwent forced hydration (she was on hunger strike, becoming suicidal after five months pleading for an abortion) before a coerced C-section (her visa status prevented travel). Believe us, there is no connection whatsoever between celebrating women’s warrior spirit and respecting their reproductive rights. I’m a fan of Buffy. I also understand that teams of writers are involved, though Joss Whedon is ultimately responsible for the content of his television shows. I hate his portraits of reproductive coercion because this ideology repeatedly tortures and kills the most vulnerable women in my country. It’s nothing personal. Images of late-term abortions are commodified by Ireland’s forced maternity lobby, while the faces of suicidal rape victims and the corpses of women who died, denied medically necessary abortions, cannot be shown, ironically out of respect for their personhood; this is why fictional images of forced maternity become a battleground for hearts and minds. Ultimately, this torture of Ireland’s most vulnerable women is also the end goal of America’s forced maternity lobby.


* Yes, I know the rape scene in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is problematic. It’s not like the rapid rise in ass-kicking heroines was matched by a rise in female authorship. Time for a “Microscope on Male Feminists” feature?

 


Brigit McCone writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling, ducking and covering in anticipation of Whedonite backlash.

 

 

‘It Follows’: More Dread Than Bloody Red

It’s not the best horror movie I’ve seen, but it’s a decent flick that can be added to the pantheon of solid fares to check out this year. Many of my horror comrades hated it or were disappointed, but I encourage everyone to see it just for the masterful use of dread instead of the usual one-note slasher or gore-riddled bloodfests that are passed off as great horror cinema. The genre I love is more concerned with spectacle rather than genuine fear.

"It Follows" movie poster.


Written by Lisa Bolekaja.


It Follows answered the question I was curious to know in the first seven minutes.

“What happens to you after it follows and catches you?” Short answer: you get jacked up. I’ve said this on Twitter and I will say it again here. I sincerely apologize to my fellow viewing audience for laughing with great joy after the first victim is killed. I do have home training. But I was giddy.

Opening scene

 We are introduced to an unknown young woman, visibly anxious as she runs out of her family home wearing flimsy underwear and heels in the middle of the night. It’s like we caught her in a state of undress after a long day at work, or maybe after a date, but we never know because there is a great 360-degree camera pan that sets the tone for the rest of the film. The writer/director David Robert Mitchell is forcing the audience to not trust anything or anyone that moves within eyesight. The 360 camera turns are used to great effect numerous times in this film which creates a relentless creeping dread. We never see what kills our first victim, but we do view the aftermath, and it ain’t pretty. While the audience I was with had a collective “Oh shit” moment after gazing upon the unnaturally twisted remains, I laughed with giddiness because I was now fully engaged. The discordant sound design and music score added to the atmosphere of this slow deliberate terror. Imagine if Portishead  had made a horror soundtrack without any singing. It caught my attention, and held it for the first half of the film.

Disclosure: I am a horror connoisseur.

This is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because I’ve enjoyed horror from across the globe and from every era. (I even enjoy bad horror. Stinkers can be a lot of fun to hate watch. I relish it.) It’s also a terrible curse because as hardcore as I am, it’s hard to impress me. I radiate so much joy whenever a new horror film comes out, but then I am quickly disappointed when it doesn’t live up to the hype. Granted, It Follows has a lot of hype surrounding it (“The scariest movie to come out in 10 years!” is a recent example), but most of the overblown hyperbole is because horror, in particular American Horror, is in a sad state of affairs. Overused tropes, clichéd jump-scares, little to no character development, plus sequel after goddamned sequel has stifled the genre. (Don’t get me started on re-makes.) So anything that looks a wee bit fresh and tries to be serious is pounced on as the next great thing. And alas, many filmmakers don’t respect horror. There, I said it. A lack of respect has given rise to a collection of recent horror films that are mediocre at best and straight trash at its worst.

 It Follows in those first seven minutes made me believe there is some hope for us jaded Horror Hounds. It’s not the best horror movie I’ve seen, but it’s a decent flick that can be added to the pantheon of solid fares to check out this year. Many of my horror comrades hated it or were disappointed, but I encourage everyone to see it just for the masterful use of dread instead of the usual one-note slasher or gore-riddled bloodfests that are passed off as great horror cinema. The genre I love is more concerned with spectacle rather than genuine fear. (Remember all the Saw sequels that just gave us diminishing returns each time out? Yawn.)

What makes It Follows click on all cylinders in the first half is the empathy we have for our protagonist Jay (Maika Monroe). She reminded me of the classic old school white female heroines in the mold of Sissy Spacek or Jamie Lee Curtis. The set designs, the cars, and even the hairstyles have a retro 70s feel. The color scheme looked slightly muted, a little drab, and this added a dark texture to the film that takes place in Detroit. The mentions of 8 Mile and the demarcation line separating white Detroit and Black Detroit are quite evident.  One of the characters talked of her parents warning her about crossing over that implicit physical/racial line due to safety concerns. Just as there is a transgression of the division between the supernatural seeping into the natural world, there is a definite class transgression between rich and poor (and the inferred racial one between Black and white).

Our hero, Jay can no longer trust anything or anyone she sees.

What draws us to Jay is her longing to be loved and to have a boyfriend. She’s pretty much a dreamy-eyed plain Jane, but she spruces up quite nicely when she goes on a date with Hugh who uses the alias Jeff (Jake Weary), and this is where her troubles begin. What Jay doesn’t know is that Hugh is slumming with her. Pretending to be interested in Jay for companionship, Hugh has transgressed class lines. He uses the lower class Jay to save himself from the unknown entity that stalks his upper class suburban landscape.

After some hot sweaty sex in the backseat of Hugh/Jeff’s car (which she initiated), Jay eventually finds herself tied to a wheelchair still in her underwear from the afterglow of lovemaking. Hugh/Jeff quickly runs down what her fate will now be. Apparently fucking the wrong person in this world will give you something worse than an STD or AIDS. You now get the unwanted attentions of an “It” that will literally follow you around. And this It can be anyone you know or don’t know. It takes on the embodiment of anyone in order to get close to its intended next victim. Hugh/Jeff tells Jay that the only way to get rid of It is to have sex with someone else, passing on the creeping dread to them. This all smells of the influence of The Ringu Virus films and all the superior J-Horror/K-Horror that the U.S. has ripped off and repackaged. However, I respect David Robert Mitchell’s attempt to spin an oldie but a goodie into something new. The catch is, if you pass It onto someone else, and they get killed before they have sex with a new partner–Surprise!—It will come back after you. Ain’t that a bitch? This menace is truly relentless and inescapable.

Loyal friends and a loving sister help Jay search for her one night stand Hugh/Jeff.

Our emotionally bamboozled protagonist enlists the help of her younger sister and a rag tag bunch of friends to survive. This is what made the film work for me overall. Her friends are just regular teens, no snarky, overly beautiful, or unrealistic characterizations. Just awkward young people yearning to help her. They know something has gone horribly wrong in Jay’s life. They presumed a date rape, but when Jay tells them her new reality, they don’t shine her on or call her crazy, they support her even when they don’t fully believe in the supernatural weirdness. All of this works well, especially when Jay is the only one who can see It –random strangers of all ages, with pale flaccid faces (sometimes naked) , making slow and eerie movements towards her no matter where she goes. Much like many Asian horror flicks, the beauty of It Follows is that nothing is explained and we don’t waste time trying to figure out the mystery of how it all started. Jay either has to have sex knowing she’s dooming another life or forever be haunted until her own death. She eventually gives in to a form of protective weaponized sex that isn’t degrading. The teens-having- sex-and-then-dying trope (Ahem, Halloween and Friday the 13th)  is subverted into something new and dilemma-inducing.

"It" has no chill.

Unfortunately, all promising starts often fizzle out, and halfway through the film the plot lost steam for me. There is some elaborate scheme to try and stop It, but the execution of said scheme doesn’t quite make sense. I also felt that some of the rules of the world got jettisoned, which led to a lackluster ending. There’s nothing wrong with open-ended finales, but I was bored the last 20 minutes, mainly due to the loss of character/plot momentum.

Love it or hate it, It Follows is a thoughtful addition to the horror genre. Hopefully David Robert Mitchell has more dread-inducing gems up his sleeve. But please, no sequels.

"It Follows" poster done in the classic 70's motif.


See also at Bitch Flicks: An interview with David Robert Mitchell and Maika Monroe


Staff Writer Lisa Bolekaja enoys watching classic Horror Films when they play at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in the summer. Co-Host of Hilliard’s Guess’ Screenwriting Rant Room Podcast, and a story editor for Apex Magazine, Lisa’s newest short story “Three Voices” comes out next month in Uncanny Magazine.

The Future Is Behind You: David Robert Mitchell and Maika Monroe on the Chilling, Thoughtful ‘It Follows’

The fact that ‘It Follows’ is a horror film, and a surprisingly effective one, is almost secondary to the respectful way it develops its characters, particularly its protagonist, Jay, portrayed in a breakout performance by Maika Monroe.

The film is a huge sleeper hit, by low-budget indie standards. This week, it expanded to an astonishing 1,655 theaters nationwide. I spoke with Monroe and Mitchell recently by phone about how the film was made and what makes it so unique.

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This is a guest post by Josh Ralske.


In 2010, writer-director David Robert Mitchell made his feature directorial debut with the charming and insightful The Myth of the American Sleepover. Unlike many contemporary coming-of-age comedies, Sleepover evinces nostalgia for youth, but shows tremendous respect and honesty in its treatment of its adolescent characters, male and female, and is beautifully shot, with the smooth camerawork tracking the teens, and a gradually darkening palette giving a sense of the potential trials of impending adulthood. The influences, notably George Lucas’s American Graffiti and Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, are evident, but Mitchell has his own gently observant style.

In a way, It Follows picks up where Sleepover left off. Poignant drama over a first kiss or a missed opportunity at love is replaced with the uncertainty of first sexual encounters and an underlying genuine terror at the responsibilities of adulthood. The fact that It Follows is a horror film, and a surprisingly effective one, is almost secondary to the respectful way it develops its characters, particularly its protagonist, Jay, portrayed in a breakout performance by Maika Monroe.

After what seems a lengthy courtship, Jay has a sexual encounter with Hugh (Jake Weary), who infects her with a kind of sexually transmitted poltergeist: a malevolent entity that can take the form of any person, and will stalk Jay until it kills her, or until she has sex with someone else, passing it onto that unfortunate person. Hugh (who turns out to be using a fake name) tells the terrified Jay that if the slow moving entity succeeds in killing her, it will move back on to him. Jay has to balance the immediate physical danger to her life with the moral quandary of passing along the curse. She’s lucky enough to have a support system: her tough-minded sister, Kelly (Lili Sepe), brainy pal Yara (Olivia Luccardi), sexually confident dreamboat neighbor Greg (Daniel Zovatto), and her friend Paul (Keir Gilchrist), who’s had an unrequited crush on Jay since they were children. Once she convinces her friends the threat is real, the group goes to great lengths to help Jay save herself. In a way, the film is sort of like a more thoughtful, slowed down, and thematically denser version of the Final Destination films, with a relentless, inexorable force pursuing a group of kids, as they desperately seek a way to put a stop to it.

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The film is a huge sleeper hit, by low-budget indie standards. This week, it expanded to an astonishing 1,655 theaters nationwide. I spoke with Monroe and Mitchell recently by phone about how the film was made and what makes it so unique.

“Calm” is an odd way to describe a horror film, particularly one as chilling as It Follows, but that’s the word Mitchell uses, and it’s apt. This is a beautifully structured film.

“There’s a simplicity to it, to a certain degree,” Mitchell says, “and it’s actually quite complicated in other ways. It’s very simple and balanced, and calm most of the time, but there’s also a certain amount of staging and planning that goes into making it feel that simple and calm.” The film’s camerawork is intrinsic to its slow-burn paranoid terror. “We have a very steady, cool, objective camera a lot of the time,” Mitchell explains. “We often use a very wide-angle lens, and we leave a lot of space in the frame, so you can kind of see along the edges. If the characters are in the foreground, you can see into the background, and the idea was to actually place the audience within the environment that the actors are within. So that you are sort of an active participant within the film.” This effectively puts the viewer on edge, on the lookout for that slow-walking human-shaped monster on the edge of the frame. In one chilling sequence, when Jay and Greg visit a local high school looking for a lead on “Hugh,” Mitchell’s camera does a slow 360 degree pan around the pair, showing the entity moving slowly toward them outside the school, then unnervingly coming to rest on Jay and Greg, viewed through the window of a school office, and as unaware of the entity’s current location as we in the audience are.

IT FOLLOWS

“The goal is to be very deliberate,” Mitchell says. “Pretty much everything in the film was about being very precise and specific. Everything needed to be a choice. You don’t always hit this, but the goal is for everything to be a deliberate part of a plan. Nothing just happens because that’s what we have to do. I didn’t want to have to put a cut in a sequence unless I wanted a cut in the sequence. I didn’t want to have to move the camera unless I needed to move the camera. Everything had to be a very strong choice.”

For Monroe, in her first starring role, acting in the film was a strange, but intense experience. “It was just physically and mentally very demanding,” she tells me. “It was having to be in a dark place for almost the entire five weeks, which is not easy to do. Every day, screaming, running, crying. It’s not easy.”

Despite the intensity of the process, because of the way the film was made, Monroe had little sense of what its impact on audiences would be. “You’re filming it, and most of the time you just feel kind of ridiculous, or you’re just not thinking about trying to scare someone. I’m just more focused on the role and making it as real as possible. It only comes up with an audience, and seeing how an audience reacts, you think, ‘Oh, this might actually be scary!'” Having watched Myth before accepting the role of Jay, Monroe says, “When I was reading it, I wasn’t sure how it was going to translate into a movie, or how audiences would take it, but I had complete faith in David.”

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Monroe also co-starred in another buzzed-about indie horror film, Adam Wingard’s The Guest and has a longtime interest in the genre. “Well, I grew up watching. I remember the first horror movie I watched was The Shining. My dad showed me that. And then Blue Velvet, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street. Those were all movies that I really loved and that really freaked me out. They scarred me for life. I really like them.”

Monroe remembers Mitchell asking the cast to watch David Lynch’s suburban nightmare, Blue Velvet, before making the film. A big fan of horror, he cites a number of other influences. “There’s a lot [of] stuff I like, and it’s probably entered into this, in some way. Creature from the Black Lagoon is probably my favorite horror movie. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the original, [and] the [Philip] Kaufman version from the ’70s is a tonal influence. The original Thing and the [John] Carpenter remake as well. I watched both of them religiously. The Shining. A lot of Cronenberg. Romero. Lynch. At least in terms of horror, these are some of the people that I love.”

Monroe was also struck by the setting of the film, a Metro-Detroit suburb that grows increasingly ramshackle and dilapidated as the characters approach the battle-scarred city.

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“Detroit’s just a fascinating place,” she tells me. “So many abandoned buildings where nature has taken over. It’s quite cinematic, in kind of a darker way. It was very cool to explore. I probably never would have gone to Detroit if not for filming the movie, and I think it was a really cool experience. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a place like it in the United States. It’s pretty fascinating. I feel like everybody should go there at some point.”

Mitchell set the film in the area, as he did with Myth, in part because he grew up there and knew what locations would look right on film. But there’s an undercurrent of despair to the film that the location suits perfectly. “Within the story, one of the things that I wanted to highlight a little bit was people talking about the separation between the city and the suburbs, and how sad that is, and shitty that is, to be honest,” he explains.

When I asked Mitchell about the strong female protagonists of his first two features, he seemed hesitant to engage the question. “I write stories about all different kinds of characters, but these are the two that I’ve been able to make. I don’t know.” He went on to explain, “I guess it depends on the film. In regards to It Follows, it just seemed like an interesting perspective to take. I think we’re sort of playing on one of the cliches of horror films — this sort of female protagonist — and I guess I just thought I could maybe add something a little unique to that. I don’t know what to say other than I think it’s interesting to write a female character. It’s just interesting to me as a writer/filmmaker to try to see things from different points of view. When I write a character, I try to put a little bit of myself into their personality, or I try to imagine myself in that world.” Mitchell apologizes to me for that answer, but I think his empathy with Jay and the other characters is a salient and laudable feature of his work to date.

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Despite the virtues of Myth, in a way, It Follows is a big step forward for Mitchell. It’s a more polished work and also one that lends itself to a wealth of interpretations. It’s a scary good time at the movies, for sure, but it also seems like the kind of film that will be studied and written about in thesis papers for generations to come.

“I’ve heard all kinds of interesting interpretations of the film,” Mitchell states, “some of which I intended, some of which I didn’t, but I love that. To me, this kind of movie is designed with that in mind.”

 


Josh Ralske is a freelance film writer based in New York. He has written for MovieMaker Magazine and All Movie Guide.

Vintage Viewing: Lois Weber, Blockbusting Boundary-Pusher

Thanks to Alice Guy and Lois Weber, filmmaking was once almost unique in its gender equity, before a centralized studio system eliminated the female directors.


Written by Brigit McCone.


 

Part of Vintage Viewing, exploring the work of female filmmaking pioneers.

 “No women directors have achieved the all-embracing, powerful status once held by Lois Weber” – film historian Anthony Slide

Lois Weber: social justice warrior
Lois Weber: social justice warrior

 

The career of Lois Weber demonstrates the importance of mentoring between women; entering Gaumont Company as an actress in 1904, Weber was encouraged by the original film director, Alice Guy, to explore directing, producing, and scriptwriting, while Weber mentored female directors at Universal like Cleo Madison and Dorothy Davenport Reid. Weber’s career also demonstrates the importance of precedent: elected to the Motion Picture Directors’ Association and the highest paid director in Hollywood, her success inspired Universal to promote female directors such as Ida May Park to replace her when Weber left to found Lois Weber Productions. Thanks to Alice Guy and Lois Weber, filmmaking was once almost unique in its gender equity, before a centralized studio system eliminated the female directors. The only survivor into Hollywood’s Golden Age, Dorothy Arzner, was great for transmasculine representation, but an indicator of how exclusively masculine-coded directing had become.

Three directors: Cecil B. DeMille, Lois Weber and Jeanie MacPherson
Three directors: Cecil B. DeMille, Lois Weber, and Jeanie MacPherson

 

For her first feature film, 1914’s The Merchant of Venice, Weber chose a Shakespearean classic whose brilliant female lawyer, Portia, resolves the plot’s dilemma. Her 1915 feature, Hypocrites, is a lush epic. Made the year before D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, Hypocrites parallels the medieval past and the present in a moral allegory, anticipating Griffith’s most admired film. Weber’s Hypocrites criticizes mob mentality and organized religion, as a medieval monk creates an icon of truth as a naked woman and is murdered by a mob for lewdness. Using innovative traveling double exposures and intricate editing, Weber constructs her naked star as a disembodied phantasm, who confronts congregation members with their own urges for money, sex and power, bypassing slut-shaming to examine society’s fear of the naked woman in the abstract. Fact mirrored fiction, as audiences flocked to Hypocrites for its nudity, before Weber faced a backlash of hypocritical outrage. Weber’s film also features vast canvases and landscapes, using mountains with interesting silhouettes and the highly reflective surface of lakes to compensate for the low light-sensitivity of early cameras. Film critic Mike E. Grost points out that this pictorial quality is associated with the cinema of John Ford, who started his directing career working for Weber’s employer, Universal, in 1917, two years after Hypocrites. [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJBJvEEPegI”]

Extract from Hypocrites, showcasing Weber’s pictorial allegory

In 1915, Hypocrites was banned by the Ohio censorship board, as was the racist The Birth of a Nation. The all-male Supreme Court’s judgement in Mutual vs. Ohio, that free speech protections should not apply to motion pictures, centers sexual “prurience” as their concern however, not hate speech. By 1915, female directors Alice Guy and Lois Weber had explored gender role reversal, gay affirmative narratives, social pressures fuelling prostitution, the evils of domestic abuse, and the hypocrisy of male censorship of the female form. The following year, Weber would condemn capital punishment in The People vs. John Doe, while the Supreme Court’s decision enabled widespread censorship of films by Weber and Margaret Sanger advocating birth control. By the time free speech protections were extended to film, with 1952’s Burstyn vs. Wilson decision, female directors had been eliminated from Hollywood’s studio system.

More than just social propaganda, Weber’s films were equally noted for her talent at drawing out effective performances, shown in this extract from 1921’s exploration of wage inequity and the credit crisis, The Blot. [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1ttuOKdPC4″]

Margaret McWade‘s dignified humiliation in The Blot (extract)

Though most of Weber’s films are credited to the husband and wife team of Weber and Phillips Smalley, Weber was the sole author of their scenarios. She went on to write and direct five feature films after her divorce from Smalley, while he never directed again. Nevertheless, film historian Anthony Slide claims that her productivity declined post-divorce as she could not function “without the strong masculine presence” of her husband. Her drop in productivity actually parallels most of her female peers, with outside investors playing an increasing role in 1920s Hollywood and preferring to back male productions. Despite setbacks, including the bankruptcy of Lois Weber Productions, Weber entered the sound era with lost film White Heat in 1934, depicting a plantation owner ruined after discarding his native lover and marrying a white society girl. This echoes Weber’s 1913 short Civilized and Savage, in which a heroic native girl nurses a plantation owner and departs unthanked. Though Weber’s brownface performance in Civilized and Savage, and her use of “tragic mulatto” clichés for White Heat‘s martyred heroine, can be criticized, both films are theoretically anti-racist. Weber died of a ruptured gastric ulcer, aged 60, in 1939, dismissively eulogized as a “star-maker” rather than a distinctive artist with her own voice and politics.


Suspense – 1913

“The Final Girl is (apparently) female not despite the maleness of the audience, but precisely because of it.” – Carol J. Clover 

In Carol J. Clover’s influential study Men, Women, And Chain Saws, she expresses surprise at finding feminist enjoyment in horror, where majority-male audiences are expected to identify with a female protagonist. But slashers were not the male creation she assumed them to be. Gothic horror was popularized by Ann Radcliffe, writing from the perspective of a vulnerable yet resilient heroine. Radcliffe’s Final Girl was raped by Matthew Lewis’ Monk, parodied by Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, and made lesboerotic by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, but her role as the conventional protagonist of horror was fixed, her impact discussed by Bitch Flicks‘ guest writer Sobia. Male artists obsessively sexualized the Final Girl, but didn’t create her.

In Lois Weber’s 1913 short Suspense, the Final Girl crosses into cinema, now unsexily a wife and mother. Ideologically, Suspense is not radical: Weber’s middle-class heroine is a damsel-in-distress, shrieking and clutching her baby as she’s imperiled by the house-invading “Tramp,” waiting passively for her husband to rescue her. What Suspense brilliantly achieves is a cinematic language of the female gaze, inducing male viewers to identify with the heroine. From the mother spotting the Tramp from an upper window in dramatic close-up, to the Tramp’s slow ascent, viewed from the woman’s position at the top of the stairs, to Weber’s close-ups of the mother’s terrified reactions, Suspense demonstrates that identifying with the imperiled woman is essential to produce… suspense.

Weber’s split screens, and the dread she builds by allowing the Tramp to initially lurk in the background, were also innovative. From George Cukor’s Gaslight to Hitchcock’s Rebecca to John Carpenter’s Halloween, directors would use Weber’s techniques of female gaze to induce the male empathy that they required for their suspense effects, creating the accidental feminism of horror that Clover celebrated. Though often remembered for her moralism, Weber mastered the craft of popular entertainment, scripting the original 1918 Tarzan of the Apes, and being drafted to recut the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera after initial versions tested poorly, successfully crafting it into an acknowledged classic. [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_wkw5Fr_I8″]


Where Are My Children? – 1916

“Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past, the woman of today arises.” – Margaret Sanger

"Must She Always Plead In Vain?" by legendary feminist cartoonist Lou Rogers, 1919
“Must She Always Plead In Vain?” by legendary feminist cartoonist Lou Rogers, 1919

 

A Cinema History slams Weber’s influential 1916 film with the claim that “even more strongly than D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, this film defends the superiority of the white race… the film is in the first place defending eugenics.” It is true that Weber’s film invokes eugenics in her courtroom defense of birth control, but her case studies are of impoverished white families in circumstances unsuitable for children – abusive relationships, overcrowded homes and ailing mothers. Weber’s argument, “if the mystery of birth were understood, crime would be wiped out,” actually anticipates research by popular book Freakonomics. The irony of Where Are My Children? — that birth control and abortion are available to women who can afford children, but not to the poor — mirrors current realities in Ireland. Though the activism of Women on Web has reduced the number of Irish women driven overseas for terminations over the last decade from over 6,000 yearly to around 3,000, the law almost exclusively impacts institutionalized women, illegally trafficked women, asylum seekers, homeless women, hospitalized women and victims of reproductive coercion – that is, groups most at risk of sexual exploitation.

Like Weber’s choice of a white actor for the Tramp of Suspense, and her argument in Civilized and Savage that civilized values are independent of race, her choice of white families as negative case studies in Where Are My Children? dodges eugenics’ racial aspect. To understand why she is using eugenics, one must appreciate the philosophy’s widespread acceptance before its adoption by Nazism, shaping US debates on immigration and converting celebrities George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill in the UK. Weber covers her bases by invoking religion as well as pseudoscience, using Calvinist concepts of election as a metaphor for the “predestination” of planned parenthood, with cherubs representing pregnancies that were unfilmable at the time.

The prosecution of Margaret Sanger inspired the film’s Dr. Homer. A Cinema History questions Weber’s feminist cred by demanding, “Why did Lois Weber turn this positive female character into a man?” Why A Cinema History considers eugenicist Sanger “a positive female character” while criticizing Weber is a mystery, but here’s why Dr. Homer’s a man: the success of Where Are My Children? emboldened Weber to make The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, starring Weber herself as a woman on trial for advocating birth control. The film’s original title Is A Woman A Person? echoes Ireland’s #iamnotavessel. The Hand That Rocks The Cradle was censored across the Northeast and Midwest, and is now lost.

Alison Duer Miller, sarcastic suffragette bitch (in a good way)
Alison Duer Miller, sarcastic suffragette bitch (in a good way)

 

The suppression of The Hand That Rocks The Cradle demonstrates the necessity of Weber’s patriarchal approach to Where Are My Children? (including remaining uncredited to obscure its female authorship), as classic deliberative rhetoric. Weber harnesses popular horror of abortion to present birth control as the only alternative to “stop the slaughter of the unborn and save the lives of unwilling mothers.” The hero, Walton, fails to consult his wife on having children, driving her to secret abortions which render her unable to conceive, punishing him with permanent childlessness. In a Dirty Dancing twist (another female-authored blockbuster), the housekeeper’s daughter dies by tragically botched abortion, blamed on the wealthy “wolf” who seduced her without consequence.

Though A Cinema History claims the film shows “how moral values have shifted since the 1910s,” their interpretation of Weber’s frankly depicted unwilling mothers, as “refusing motherhood out of pure selfishness,” rather suggests little has changed. Where Are My Children? is not a free expression of Weber’s eugenic or anti-abortion views (whatever they were), it is calculated propaganda for an age when advocates of birth control were prosecuted by male juries, under obscenity laws created by legislatures for which women were not yet entitled to vote. Watching Where Are My Children?, you see our foremothers going to the mattresses for freedoms we (even me, thanks to Ireland’s Contraceptive Train) now take for granted. Despite its outdated imagery, or precisely because of how that imagery reflects Weber’s anticipated audience, Where Are My Children? is a milestone in the struggle for reproductive rights.

Suggested Soundtrack: Joan Baez, “Baez Sings Dylan”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwrkAyH0-8A”]


See also at Bitch Flicks: Erik Bondurant reviews Where Are My Children


 Lois Weber was only one of many actresses who took creative control over their films by moving into directing in the silent era. Next month’s Vintage Viewing: Mabel Normand, Slapstick Star in Charge. Stay tuned!

 


Brigit McCone writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and memorizing lists of forgotten female artists (Brigit McCone is an extremely dull conversationalist).

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

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

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Diversity Sells — But Hollywood Remains Overwhelmingly White, Male at NPR

Feminism’s oppression obsession undermines women by Shikha Dalmia at The Week

The Latest: Black Women by Brianna Cox at For Harriet

Patricia Arquette’s Feminism: Only for White Women by Amanda Marcotte at Slate

Carnival of Souls: A Coming of Age Story for Queer Women? by Casey Quinlan at The Toast

Yes on Knope by Rachel Fields at Bitch Media

Leonard Nimoy’s Mr. Spock Taught Us Acceptance Is Highly Logical by Eric Deggans at NPR

Leonard Nimoy’s Advice To A Biracial Girl In 1968 by Gene Demby at NPR

Black History & Women in Horror Month: Get To Know Marsha A. Hunt by Ashlee Blackwell at Graveyard Shift Sisters

Interview: The Activist Survivors of “The Hunting Ground” by Michele Kort at Ms. blog

What Happened When a Handsome, White Actor Shed a Tear Over ‘Glory’ by Kirsten West Savali at The Root

Pussy Riot’s “Don’t Cry Genocide” Featuring Le Tigre Members Appears on “House of Cards” by Evan Minsker at Pitchfork

A Toxic Stew: Risks To Women Of Public Feminism by Barbara King at NPR

 

 

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

Patterns in Poor Parenting: ‘The Babadook’ and ‘Mommy’

This is not to say that Amelia and Die are not sympathetic characters. Both want to do the best for their sons, but neither can handle the stress and actual responsibility of disciplining them. I do not mean for this to seem like an attack on Die and Amelia’s parenting skills, but rather a way to look at the sudden appearance of women in film who are not good at parenting.

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This guest post by Deirdre Crimmins appears as part of our theme week on Unlikable Women.


Last year, two completely different films presented two very similar mothers. Though the lead characters from The Babadook and Mommy do not look alike, their parenting styles, and subsequently their sons, are uncanny. This representation of poor parenting by ill-equipped mothers deserves a closer look.

The Babadook is getting showered with praise as one of the best horror films in decades. It is the story of a widow raising an overactive, imaginative son. Samuel is a well-meaning 7-year-old who misbehaves more than not. He throws tantrums. He builds contraptions like backpack-mounted catapults. He has frequent meltdowns. Samuel is not an easy child and mother Amelia is at the end of her rope when a strange book appears on his bookshelf. The story in the book is that of Mr. Babadook, a modern and all too familiar boogeyman. From here the film dives into Amelia’s coping with this monster and her eventual possession by the Babadook.

Mommy is not a horror film at all, though it does have a few moments that are shocking. The film follows Diana, Die, as she tries to deal with her delinquent son, Steve. Fifteen-year-old Steve has just gotten kicked out of the boarding school for problem children and Die must choose between surrendering him to the government or taking him back to her home. She chooses the latter and tries her best to parent Steve as much as he will tolerate. To say that both Steve and Die have unusual boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate is a criminal understatement, as neither of them seems capable of acting like an adult. Even with such rich characters, curiously the most interesting character in the film turns out to be their neighbor, Kyla. For the purposes of this article I won’t have time to explore her further, but it should be mentioned that there is much more subtext in the film that merely the mother-son relationship.

Before diving into the similarities between Die and Amelia, and Mommy and The Babadook, first I will point out one major discrepancy: the two women look completely different. This is not to say that the actresses have different physical attributes, but instead the conscious costuming of each woman is a polar opposite of the other. Die is a flamboyant dresser who styles herself much younger than she is. Everything she wears is tight, embellished, low-cut, and over accessorized. Her hair has chunky highlights that have grown out. Amelia dresses very simply. When she is not in her plain nurse’s uniform she is wearing either a modest sleeping gown (much of the film takes place over night) or an equally unadorned house dress. She wears no real jewelry, and her hair is always pulled back into a bun. Based on costuming alone Die and Amelia would appear to have nothing in common. But as we begin to look at their histories and character flaws, we see that Mommy and The Babadook in fact have a lot in common.

Clothing comparison
Clothing comparison

 

One of the most obvious correlations between the films is that that neither film is American. The Babadook has seen great success in the US, but it is an Australian production. Mommy is Canadian and is in Quebecoise with English subtitles. This is not to say that Hollywood is not capable of portraying poor mothering on screen, but it is interesting that the most striking examples of bad mothers have not come from America. We often see the evil stepmother in fairy tales, but these women are not responsible for raising the children. Also, in fairy tales these children are shown as good children who have overcome their lack of a caring mother. Here we are looking at children that are kind of jerks, perhaps due to the fact that their mothers are not good parents.

The fact that both Amelia and Die are raising sons is also of note. Casually I have heard films about sons and mothers described as horror films and films about mothers and daughters described as melodramas. Psycho and Friday The 13th certainly support the theory; however Carrie and Mommy Dearest swiftly disprove it. Not a solid approach to examining films, but it does bring into question the unique relationship between mothers and sons. Amelia never truly understands Samuel’s obsession with building projectile devices. She supports his creativity as much as she can, but cannot relate to his mechanical talents or even his interest in war and destruction. Die herself has issues relating to Steve. She walks in on him masturbating and brushes it off with a laugh though he is clearly humiliated. Her lack of understanding how valued privacy is, especially for teenagers, is disturbing to the audience and frustrating for Steve.

Two sons
Two sons

 

To further the gender politics of their households and their similarities, both Die and Amelia are widows. Amelia’s husband was killed while she was pregnant with Samuel, a fact that he brings up to complete strangers which makes them quite uncomfortable. Die’s husband died many years earlier, however her predicament is more heartbreaking in that Steve remembers his father. He romanticizes their life together when his father was alive. What is clear about both Die and Amelia is that neither has ever moved on or accepted the deaths. Amelia is still in mourning for her husband and allows her inability to mature to impact her relationship with Samuel and everyone around her. Die is also still in love with her husband and has not moved on romantically, but she has accepted her loss as a part of her life. She is not as paralyzed emotionally as Amelia, but she is still in desperate need of therapy to deal with the loss.

Outside of their family dynamics both mothers rely on caring female neighbors to help them with their problem sons. I briefly mentioned Die’s secretive neighbor Kyla, and symmetrically Amelia also receives help from her neighbor Mrs. Roach. These women are not very good mothers, but they are both good at recognizing that they need help with their sons. Kyla helps Steve pass his exams for his GED, and Mrs. Roach takes Samuel to give Amelia a desperately needed break. These women are not capable of handling their sons on their own.

This is not to say that Amelia and Die are not sympathetic characters. Both want to do the best for their sons, but neither can handle the stress and actual responsibility of disciplining them. I do not mean for this to seem like an attack on Die and Amelia’s parenting skills, but rather a way to look at the sudden appearance of women in film who are not good at parenting. Too often women are shown as having an innate ability to be amazing mothers with little training or support from others. Rather, Mommy and The Babadook show that women are capable of being bad parents. Their maternal instinct is not strong, and their lack of connection to their sons has in turn created sons with disciplinary and behavioral issues. Women on film are frequently shown in terms of extremes: they are either sluts or saints. There is rarely a gray area for representations of women. By showing women who want to do well, but do not have the skills to parent well, it is a step in the right direction for showing women who are imperfect but fully formed characters. Neither Die nor Amelia fit into the mold of the typical mother we see in films, and the developing variety in portrayals of women is quite welcome.

 


Deirdre Crimmins lives in Boston with her husband and two black cats. She wrote her Master’s thesis on George Romero and is a staff writer for http://www.allthingshorror.com/. You can find her on Twitter at @dedecrim.

 

 

‘American Mary’: In Praise of the Amoral Final Girl

Directed by the Soska sisters, ‘American Mary’ features a complicated female protagonist who starts out as a likable badass but ends up as an amoral psycho. The film celebrates the power of bodily autonomy and depicts the horror of taking it away.

 

American-Mary-movie


Written by Mychael Blinde as part of our theme week on Unlikable Women.


Directed by the Soska sisters, American Mary features a complicated female protagonist who starts out as a likable badass but ends up as an amoral psycho. The film celebrates the power of bodily autonomy and depicts the horror of taking it away.

Trigger Warning: American Mary is a rape/revenge film and this essay discusses sexual violence.

This post is Spoiler Free! I want you to see this movie. (If you can stomach it.)

The film in a nutshell: We meet Mary (Katharine Isabelle) as she’s carefully practicing her surgeon stitching on a turkey in her kitchen.

American Mary, film

Mary is a med student whose financial situation has become dire. She “interviews” to become a stripper and by awesome happenstance winds up entering the underground world of extreme body modification.

American-Mary-dressed-for-doctoring

After she is suddenly and horrifically physically violated, Mary spends the duration of the film torturing the hell out of her attacker and becoming famous in the body mod community. I want to avoid spoilers, so suffice it to say that eventually, the shit hits the fan.

American Mary’s directors, Jen and Sylvia Soska, are Canadian twin sisters, and they make an appearance in the film as German twins who want to exchange their left arms to remain symbolically together forever. The Soskas’ production company is Twisted Twins Productions, and their first film is titled Dead Hooker in a Trunk.

American-Mary-Soska-twisted-twins

For an awesome interview with Sylvia and Jen, look no further than this Bitch Flicks piece: “Talking with Horror’s Twisted Twins.

The sisters discuss representations of violence against women in film, and they remark on the ability of horror films to inspire conversations that address our critical need to make the world a safer place for women:

Sylvia: The prolonged death of the Hooker in [Dead Hooker in a Trunk] was made with the intention of being very difficult to watch. We didn’t create the term “Dead Hooker in a Trunk,” there is a society wide stigma on these women that devalue them as worthless human beings…We are at a point in time where we need to get a zero tolerance for horrendously vile acts against women. We put these moments in these films because we want to open up a dialogue about it and it’s a lot easier to do with a genre film than other platforms.

The only acceptable way to represent sexual assault is to represent it as horrible and horrifying, and in American Mary, the Soska sisters succeed: their representation of Mary’s rape neither exploits nor glosses over her violation.

Jen:  The reason we put violence against women in our films is because it is so common in real life. It’s so common that people just turn a blind eye to it. The amount of letters and emails we’ve received from women who’d been sexually assaulted and had their attacker go unpunished was disgusting. They were so happy to see Mary get her revenge because there is so little justice in the world.

The directors also talk about depicting flawed female characters:

Sylvia: There is such a famine of a representation of women, it’s almost like you have to make an excuse for a female character if she does something that isn’t perfect or proper. But women are flawed. We’re human. We’re just like men, and we can be interesting and crude.

I’ll address the film’s depiction of Mary, her flaws and the flaws in her representation (there’s really just one little thing that bugged me) later on in this piece, but first, let’s take a sharp left turn and talk about body modification.

American-Mary-twin-skin-corsets

In horror, the mutability of the human body is typically presented as uncontrollable, and therefore terrifying. In American Mary, we get to see the creepy yet beautiful possibilities of controlled bodily mutability. Here, body modification isn’t horrible; it’s aspirational.

Body modification is an ancient practice. Human beings’ adeptness at manipulating our environments is a defining characteristic of our species, so it should come as no surprise that for pretty much all of human history we’ve been manipulating our bodies as well. (Cf. piercings, tattoos, circumcision.)

Courtesy of Bradley University’s Body Project:

We tend to think of human bodies as simply products of nature. In reality, however, our bodies are also the products of culture. That is, all cultures around the world modify and reshape human bodies. This is accomplished through a vast variety of techniques and for many different reasons, including:

– To make the body conform to ideals of beauty
– To mark membership in a group
– To mark social status
– To convey information about an individual’s personal qualities or accomplishments

People may seek to control, “correct” or “perfect” some aspect of their appearance, or to use their bodies as a canvas for creative self-expression.

Our society tends to be accepting of body modification that seeks to attain a look that’s more aligned with our conventional standards of beauty, but we tend to reject modifications that seek to depart from the hegemonic norm.

American Mary asks the viewer to like and root for characters who seek more radical transformations and unorthodox forms of self-expression. Though we are primed to expect these strange looking characters to be scary weird bad people, the body modders are actually the most likable folks in the entire film. They are helpful and thankful and kind. And while their modification choices may seem bizarre, their decisions to seek augmentations are presented in a way that is respectful both to their characters and to the community they represent.

First, we meet Beatress (Tristan Risk):

American-Mary-meet-Beatress

Beatress: “I’m lucky enough to be able to afford to make myself look on the outside the way I feel on the inside.”

American-Mary-Beatress

She explains: “In my travels, I met another girl like me, but she hasn’t been able to find someone to finish her. I want to hire you…She’s a nice girl who wants an unconventional operation.”

Then we meet this nice girl, Ruby (Paula Lindberg), who asks Mary (and by extension, the viewer):

American-Mary-meet-Ruby

Ruby: “I don’t think it’s really fair that God gets to choose what we look like on the outside, do you?”

As individuals, we should all have power over our own bodies, whether we want to shave our legs or dye our hair or pierce our skin or modify our secondary sex characteristics. We as a society should accept and respect the bodily autonomy of every individual, regardless of that individual’s personal choices.

Sometimes people want to make changes to their bodies that deviate from that which is culturally sanctioned. Who are we to stop them?

This guy had his penis and his balls removed and he’s doing just fine. This guy is famous in the body mod community for implanting magnets in people’s fingers. (With a magnet implanted, you can FEEL electromagnetic fields. I WANT ONE — how amazing to have an electromagnetic sixth sense!)

Whether aspiring to become more “normal” or more unique, we should all be afforded the opportunity to safely seek alterations to our bodies. Our bodies are our own.

Or at least they should be. With the terrifying depictions of both Mary’s rape and her revenge, the loss of control over one’s own body is the driving force of horror in this film.

Another facet of the film’s horror is the age-old adage that appearances are often deceiving. In American Mary, everything is the opposite of what the viewer has been cultured to expect: the body mod freaks are the good people, the seemingly respectable doctors are the villains, and the Mary we see at the end of the film is not the Mary we thought she’d become when we first met her stitching up her turkey.

Let’s talk about Mary and American Mary’s representation of an amoral lady protagonist:

American-Mary-prepped-to-perform

Mary is depicted by the Soska sisters and portrayed by Katharine Isabelle as smart, strong, resourceful, and funny. She has agency and complexity. She is a fully formed, dynamic character. She propels the narrative. This is her story. No Male Protagonist’s Girlfriend here.

Some reviewers feel that Mary’s sexy attire detracts from her ability to be considered a true icon of feminist horror. Courtesy of I Just Hate Everything:

American-Mary-sensible-shoes

In an interview with the Soska sisters, Steve Rose of The Guardian points out that “Katharine Isabelle’s wardrobe in the movie consists primarily of lacy negligees, lingerie and fetishistic surgical outfits.”

In response: “We’re very into third-wave feminism, where a woman can own her sexuality and not shy away from it,” says Jen.

There are moments in American Mary when the filmmakers play up Mary’s sexy sexiness more than necessary, but there are also moments when they utilize women’s scantily clad or naked bodies in ways that are refreshingly subversive.

I don’t think we need two lengthy sequences of the strip club owner’s fantasies of Mary dancing sexy dances for him.

American-Mary-sexy-Mary-dance-gif

I’m not so much bothered by the inclusion of these moments; OK, fine, show us that he’s got a twisted thing for her and remind us that she’s hot, whatever. It’s the lengthiness of these sequences, the extended time devoted to showing us Mary’s sexy body on display explicitly for the male gaze. These moments feel especially unoriginal and pandering in a film that’s otherwise so refreshingly transgressive in its approach to representations of women’s bodies.

For example, the scenes in which Mary performs surgery in her stripper outfit are a clever subversion of horror’s traditional representation of sexy lady torture victims.

American-Mary-performing-surgery-in-underwear

In these surgery sequences, the sexy lady is a woman with the power to save or take the life of the whimpering man lying (or hanging) in front of her. She might be clad in thigh-highs, but she’s the opposite of a victim.

I also appreciated the unabashed depiction of Ruby’s surgery. I won’t give away specifics, but let’s just say that American Mary takes a much different approach to naked breasts than any movie I’ve ever seen. It’s a paradigm shift for tits on screen.

While many reviewers enjoyed the first half of American Mary, they often disliked the ending, calling it a “murkier narrative that lamely sputters to its conclusion” (Hollywood Reporter) in which the Soska sisters “allow their film to turn slack and unfocused after an enticingly lurid, wickedly tense first half” (LA Times).

One reviewer (The Playlist) writes (emphasis mine):

Dreams slip into reality and fantasy assumes a nightmarish plausibility as Mary’s rationale melts away; one could argue her transformation into an avenging sadist takes the teeth out of the film’s medical industry critique, turning it into just another gothic story of one who abuses absolute power.

I suspect that these reviewers’ dislike of the ending stems from their discomfort at witnessing the abruptness of Mary’s transformation from a witty, strong, resourceful rebel into a sociopathic monster. Initially, the violence she enacts stems from a sense of righteous vengeance, but suddenly her violent acts are completely unjustified and totally reprehensible. We all start out rooting for Mary, but we wind up repelled by her.

In a wonderful essay entitled “Not Here to Make Friends” — also featured in her excellent book, Bad Feminist —  Roxane Gay writes:

Writers are often told a character isn’t likable as literary criticism, as if a character’s likability is directly proportional to the quality of a novel’s writing. This is particularly true for women in fiction. In literature as in life, the rules are all too often different for girls. There are many instances where an unlikable man is billed as an anti-hero, earning a special term to explain those ways in which he deviates from the norm, the traditionally likable. Beginning with Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, the list is long. An unlikable man is inscrutably interesting, dark, or tormented but ultimately compelling even when he might behave in distasteful ways.

Thanks in large part to feminism, our society now generally embraces representations of Strong Female Characters — at least when these Strong Female Characters are presented as morally upstanding. We’re still wildly uncomfortable with depictions of amoral anti-heroines.

There is a longstanding history in the horror genre of the Final Girl character. Traditionally, she is the most virtuous character in the film, the embodiment of morality, and her defeat of the monster represents Good triumphing over Evil. While the Final Girl doesn’t always win the battle (and sometimes doesn’t even survive), she typically remains virtuous throughout.

In a piece for Indiewire titledAmerican Mary Sets out to Modify the Way You Think About Women in Horror,” the Soska sisters explain their approach to Mary in the context of the history of the Final Girl:

American Mary evolves the final girl once again where not only is the final girl powerful, precise, and fearless, but she becomes her own undoing and takes on the roles of villainess and heroine simultaneously.

We viewers may want Mary to end the film a righteous hero, but to give Mary’s story a happy ending would be to suggest that there is a simple way to right the wrongs of sexual violation. This isn’t to say that survivors of assault can never overcome their trauma, but to point out that there is no easy answer to the question of how to process such violations of the body. Revenge can’t erase Mary’s experience of assault. Vengeance doesn’t make it all okay. Violence begets violence, and everything falls apart.

The final sequences of American Mary may be something of a surprise, but they make sense within the larger thematic context of the film: the horror of losing control of one’s own flesh and the devastation of physical violation.

American Mary is a stellar film and I’m excited to see more awesome work by the Soska sisters!

American-Mary-twins

 
 

Mychael Blinde writes about representations of gender in horror at Vagina Dentwata

‘At the Devil’s Door’: There’s More Than One Way to Mother a Demon

Many reviewers of ‘At the Devil’s Door’ compare it to ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ and rightfully so: both films are masterpieces of pregnancy terror and the horror of unholy motherhood. But the women in these two stories have vastly different experiences accepting their roles as mothers of demonic spawn.

At-the-Devils-Door

Written by Mychael Blinde.

Many reviewers of At the Devil’s Door compare it to Rosemary’s Baby, and rightfully so: both films are masterpieces of pregnancy terror and the horror of unholy motherhood. But the women in these two stories have vastly different experiences accepting their roles as mothers of demonic spawn.

I’ll begin with a recap of At the Devil’s Door and discuss its weaknesses (the dialogue) and strengths (everything else, seriously this is a wonderfully horrifying film). Then we’ll take a closer look at the final scenes of both At the Devil’s Door and Rosemary’s Baby. There’s more than one way to mother a demon.

Trigger warning for suicide, sexual violence and demonic horror.

Spoilers.

Here we go…

The Recap:

Writer/director Nicholas McCarthy opens the film with a bold move: a key character making a big mistake. Bad choices are a bedrock of horror, but typically we’re eased into a protagonist’s poor decision. In Devil’s Door, we meet a young (teenage) woman who’s opted to sell her soul for $500 from a whackadoo creepster in the middle of a creepy beautiful California nowhere.

The aforementioned creepster
The aforementioned creepster

It’s the stupidest thing a person can possibly do in a horror film, and yet here we are, and somehow it works. The dialogue may be stilted, but the imagery is fantastic, both creepy and clever.

Before sealing the devil deal and claiming her cash, the young woman, Hanna (Ashley Rickards), must play three rounds of a shell game with the creepy guy. We viewers play the game along with Hanna, following the battered paper cups, forced to look long and hard at the screen, being primed for the the exquisite eyestrain of the horror to come.

At-the-Devils-Door-shell-game

We notice that she picks what should have been the wrong cups both her second and third turns in the game — and yet the piece is under whichever cup she selects. Shell games are notoriously played dishonestly as a con trick, and yet instead of being wrongfully made to lose, Hanna is wrongfully made to win.

“He has chosen you,” says the creepster, and in exchange for the $500, he instructs her to go to the crossroads and speak her name aloud.

At-the-Devils-Door-Hanna-at-the-crossroads

It’s a bad decision, and very soon, Hanna is met with repercussions; she goes home and is horribly attacked by an invisible demon.

Then the film cuts to 20 years later and introduces us to Leigh, a real estate agent,

Leigh, played by Catalina Sandino Moreno
Leigh, played by Catalina Sandino Moreno

 

and her sister Vera, an artist.

Vera, played by Naya Rivera
Vera, played by Naya Rivera

 

The sisters care about but also appear uncomfortable with each other. Leigh is unable to have a child, and she seems to deal with the sadness and frustration at her infertility by encouraging Vera to find a man and start a family.

Vera and Leigh
Vera and Leigh

When Leigh is tasked with selling the house where Hanna lived during the days of her soul-selling exploits, scary things start to happen. In a return to Hanna’s story, we learn that she killed herself in her bedroom.

One rainy night while inspecting Hanna’s old house, Leigh encounters what looks like Hanna, but is actually the demon “wearing” Hanna.

At-the-Devils-Door-demon-Hanna

It forces Leigh to experience a vicious seizure. Vera awakens from a nightmare — in which a levitating Leigh says, “It’s looking for a home” — to a  phone call informing her that Leigh is dead.

Distraught by her loss, Vera begins to investigate her sister’s death, the history of the house, and its haunted inhabitant. Vera learns that Hanna, despite never having had penis-in-vagina sex, was pregnant when she killed herself.

Then Vera is attacked by the invisible demon, just like Hanna — except this time the demon flings Vera out the window from several stories up. At this point, Hanna and Leigh, Devil’s Door’s two other key characters, have both died. Did this film just kill its third key character?

Nope! Vera’s alive, and in one fell swoop of OMFG we see her wake up from a coma and learn that she’s eight months pregnant with demonic spawn (!!!). She insists on an immediate C-section and refuses to have anything to do with the baby.

Cut to six years later: Vera finally confronts her child, a daughter, with the intent to kill her. Her attempt is valiant, but ultimately, she cannot bring herself to plunge the knife, and so she resigns herself to motherhood.

At-the-Devils-Door-confrontation

 

The Film: 

The horror of this film is awesome and intense and creepy and I will sing its praises up and down and side to side in just a few paragraphs, but for a brief moment, let’s address the film’s biggest problem: way super clunky awkward unnatural dialogue. It’s REALLY BAD, and it plagues the entire film.

In the introductory (and concluding!) voice-over, the little girl (Vera’s demon daughter) speaks ominously about the Mark of the Beast, which doesn’t seem to have any significant relevance to any other part of the movie.

When Leigh encounters the demon disguised as Hanna during an inspection of the house, Hanna looks at Vera’s picture on Leigh’s keychain, and Leigh says, “That’s my sister, Vera. She’s an artist. She’s a special person. Kind of dark. I just want her to find someone and have kids.”

Yes, this moment is made meaningful in the film’s final sequences when Vera assumes her role as the demon’s mother, but no, the dialogue does not need to unfold so awkwardly and unnaturally.

Nevertheless, I will forgive the dialogue’s shortcomings, because this film features a compelling horror story arc and a fabulous slow burn of quiet, yet terrifying scares.

At-the-Devils-Door-crossroads-demon

 

The film does a fantastic job of depicting its monster primarily out of focus and in the background and the shadows.

At-the-Devils-Door-in-the-shadows

While I disagree with a lot of this review at The Dissolve (“McCarthy’s sophomore project…doesn’t have any individually compelling characters” — WHAT), I am totally on board with the reviewer’s analysis of the cinematography:

“Virtually every frame in this film is designed for maximum dread. Every composition is deep with pockets of empty space that work to weaponize the audience’s imagination.”

At-the-Devils-Door-Hanna-it-slips-inside-me

This film thwarts horror fans’ expectations: We expect that the woman reaching into the barrel or the drawer will be grabbed, that the baby being watched by a demon will be murdered, that the spawn of Satan will be hideous, that Vera will kill her child. Nope. The women retrieve their arms unscathed, the baby’s fine, the demon infant is beautiful, and Vera resigns herself to motherhood.

This is not to say that nothing scary ever happens — quite the opposite, the entire film is terrifying. By raising expectations of specific scares and then withholding them, the film builds lots of tension but offers little release. This restraint renders the key moments of sudden in-your-face horror all the more terrifying.

And while the dialogue may be lacking, the film uses the absence of dialogue in key moments to great effect.

At-the-Devils-Door-mother-daughter-confrontation

Hannah and Leigh and Vera — their stories overlap, yet they’re so disconnected from one another. Leigh has one encounter with Vera and one with Hanna, but the for rest of the film, she’s alone. Vera has one encounter with her demon girl.

At the Devil’s Door is about connecting with others, sometimes for good (sisters!) and sometimes for evil (demons!). There is a disjointed togetherness about the relationships of these three women and the way they impact each other’s lives, despite being so very, very alone.

At-the-Devils-Door-Hanna

At-the-Devils-Door-Leigh

At-the-Devils-Door-Vera

 

At the Devil’s Door and Rosemary’s Baby

Many reviewers have made connections between At the Devil’s Door and Rosemary’s Baby:

“A haunted-house story that eventually morphs into a pseudo-sequel to Rosemary’s Baby…” (The Dissolve)

“Who has the moxie to make it to the finale (which echoes a Rosemary’s Baby influence, to some degree)?” (Best Horror Movies)

“You’ve got lights going out, body possessions, levitations, Rosemary’s Baby-type pregnancies…” (Film Journal)

“McCarthy’s film has an obvious cultural ancestor in Rosemary’s Baby” (Syvology)

Rosemary’s Baby’s director, Roman Polanski, is an awful human being. Nevertheless, the film is one of the most iconic depictions of pregnancy horror, and the horror of unholy motherhood in our cultural consciousness. Its awesomeness is due mostly to its extreme loyalty to the text of Ira Levin’s original novel. The vast majority of the film – story, scenes, and dialogue — is taken straight from the book.

Rosemary’s Baby and At the Devil’s Door both feature a woman who is raped and impregnated by a demon, but who ultimately accepts her role as mother of the evil offspring. Despite their similar preggo-with-demon-spawn horror arcs, their stories are very different:

Rosemary’s Baby is a film about a long scary pregnancy; At The Devil’s Door features a sudden scary pregnancy. Rosemary wants to have a baby; Vera doesn’t. Rosemary accepts her child soon after he is born; Vera waits six years to confront her devil daughter. Rosemary never tries to kill her baby; Vera chases her daughter through the woods with a knife. Rosemary becomes empowered by motherhood; Vera becomes resigned to it.

My intention is not to argue that one representation is better than the other, but to examine the nuances of the two versions of the acceptance of an uncomfortable motherhood.

Let’s start with Rosemary:

Rosemary spends almost her entire story being pushed around (she is emotionally abused, drugged, raped, and impregnated), then finally, after giving birth, she takes control of her situation. With knife in hand, she confronts the evil coven who have violated her body, and she spits in her piece of shit husband’s face.

After witnessing the ineptness of the woman functioning as the baby’s caretaker, Rosemary exerts her power as the child’s mother, insists that the caretaker cease rocking the baby, and accepts her role as the devil spawn’s mom.

While the Rosemary’s Baby film is remarkably loyalty to the book’s text, the ending of the film departs significantly from the book’s ending. In the film, Rosemary wordlessly accepts the child. In the book, Rosemary not only confronts her malefactors, not only ousts the inept caretaker, but exerts her power over the entire coven, and over Roman, the coven’s leader, who orchestrated her rape and demonic pregnancy.

Here’s an excerpt from the end of the book, wherein Rosemary rejects the name Roman has given the child:

[Rosemary] looked up from the bassinet. “It’s Andrew,” she said. “Andrew John Woodhouse.””Adrian Steven,” Roman said

Rosemary said, “I understand why you’d like to call him that, but I’m sorry; you can’t. His name is Andrew John. He’s my child, not yours, and this is one point that I’m not even going to argue about. This and the clothes. He can’t wear black all the time.”

Roman opened his mouth but Minnie said “Hail Andrew” in a loud voice, looking right at him.

Everyone else said “Hail Andrew” and “Hail Rosemary, mother of Andrew” and “Hail Satan.”

Hail Rosemary! The book presents Rosemary’s acceptance of motherhood as an empowering twist at the end of a story so focused on the horror of male control of female bodies. The film’s ending is less emphatic, but still presents Rosemary in a position of power within the coven, though still clearly under Roman’s control.

When Vera chooses to be a mother to her devil spawn, she gains neither control nor power. Vera doesn’t embrace motherhood — she does everything she can to reject it, to destroy it — but instead she becomes resigned to it. In the very last moments of Devil’s Door, Vera is silent, and finally the girl speaks: “I knew you’d come back for me, Mommy.”

Vera accepts her demon child, but only because she cannot bring herself to kill it.

Speaking of killing your demon child, let’s not forget Hanna, who was also impregnated, but who thwarted the demon by killing herself, and therefore the fetus. “I think Hanna killed herself before whatever was happening to her had a chance to finish what it was doing,” says Hanna’s childhood friend.

Vera is confined first by a coma and then a hospital; the devil doesn’t give her a choice but to birth the spawn. But Hanna has a choice, and she chooses suicide to stop her body from creating a human monster.

In both instances, the viewer is asked to root for a woman who is pregnant and who really really REALLY needs not to be pregnant. I appreciate films that put the viewer in the perspective of a person who needs an abortion (cf. The FlyPrometheus). My hope is that these sequences plant a seed of empathy in audience members who don’t personally house a womb, who do not face the threat of unwanted impregnation.

Rosemary and Vera have different experiences taking on the role of mother to their devil children, just like different women have different experiences from each other when becoming mothers of not-demonic kids. Mothers are individual people existing in individual circumstances; no two experiences will be exactly alike. Stories about women who gestate demonic children explore the darker side of our cultural conception of birthing a baby and becoming a mom. Compared to Rosemary’s Baby,  At the Devil’s Door offers a much bleaker view motherhood.

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Mychael Blinde writes about representations of gender in horror at Vagina Dentwata