Horror – Page 9 – Bitch Flicks

‘AHS: Coven’: Gabourey Sidibe’s Queenie as an Embodiment of the “Strong Black Woman” Stereotype

Firstly, a definition of sorts: the myth of the “strong Black woman” is loosely defined as a Black woman who is emotionally hardy to the point of feeling no pain. She is never fazed or hysterical. She is cold and calculating. She has no personal needs or desires and doesn’t complain. She can take a beating and come out on the other side unharmed. This is supposed to be seen as a good thing. Black women are “so strong” that no amount of abuse will break them. They will always keep plodding on. “Strong black women” are superhuman.

This guest post by Cate Young previously appeared at her blog, BattyMamzelle, and is cross-posted with permission.

Last week, I read a great article by Nichole Perkins on Buzzfeed that talked about the way the character development of the leading ladies of both Scandal and Sleepy Hollow were working toward dismantling the harmful depictions of “strong Black women” in media. It was a great read, and I loved that someone else shared my conclusions about Olivia Pope’s characterization.

What stuck out to me however, was Perkins’ characterization of Gabourey Sidibe’s character Queenie on American Horror Story: Coven as a negative embodiment of the “strong Black woman” stereotype. She says:

Then there is Gabourey Sidibe as Queenie on American Horror Story: Coven, a “human voodoo doll” whose supernatural power is the inability to feel pain, even as she inflicts said pain onto someone else. […] These Strong Black Women feel no emotional pain, tolerate severe physical trauma with no reaction, and menace others with stone faces.

I love American Horror Story: Coven. But even though I had immediately made the connection to the racialized violence against Black bodies this season, I hadn’t picked up on Perkins’ perspective of Queenie as an SBW. After seeing the episode “The Replacements,” I not only vehemently agree with her, I also want to expand on her observations.

Immediately, we can see the issues with this so-called “positive stereotype.” It paints Black women as unfeeling, and incapable of emotional pain. It justifies abuses perpetuated against them as “not as bad” because “they can take it.” In essence, it makes Black women a target for “warranted” violence, because the belief is that said violence will not affect them.

Now, on Perkins’ original point, AHSC‘s Queenie is a Black witch (superhuman) whose magical power is to literally injure herself without feeling pain. The only way she is able to inflict pain on other people is to inflict it on herself first. Her suffering is part and parcel of her experience. And yet, she feels no pain, therefore hurting her isn’t really hurting her is it? She can take it! With Queenie, Ryan Murphy has conceived of a character that is the literal embodiment of a harmful stereotype.

That’s not all. In “The Replacements,” Fiona Goode (Jessice Lange) appoints the racist Madam LaLaurie (Kathy Bates) as Queenie’s personal slave as punishment for her bigotry. LaLaurie is openly racist towards Queenie and uses every opportunity she can to demean her, and “remind her of her place” even though their “traditional roles” have been effectively subverted. Queenie takes it all in stride until she realizes who exactly LaLaurie actually is and recalls her reputation for torturing her slaves.

Later though, the minotaur that LaLaurie created comes back to haunt her, sent by former lover Marie Laveau (Angela Basset). Terrified, LaLaurie begs Queenie to protect her. The very same woman who she said wasn’t worthy to be served at breakfast, should put her own safety on the line to save her. And she DOES. Despite all of LaLaurie’s ill treatement, Queenie still feel compelled to protect her against the present threat. This plays into ideas about Black women being in service to white women, but never equal to them. Think The Help and Hilly Holbrook‘s “Home Health Sanitation Initiative.”

The other major issue I had with this episode was the presentation of Queenie’s sexuality. Queenie is presented as being the only one unworthy of love or sex. Early on, we learn that Queenie is the only virgin in the house. Later she tells LaLaurie that she is fat because “Dr. Phil says that kids from broken homes use food to replace love,” indicating quite explicitly that love is not something she feels she as access to. After confronting the minotaur to save LaLaurie, she offers to have sex with him as she masturbates:

You just wanted love, and that makes you a beast. They called me that too. But that’s not who we are. We both deserve love like everybody else. Don’t you want to love me?

So, not only is Queenie not worthy of love or sex, the only love/sex is entitled to is from a literal beast. And let’s not even get into the demonization of black sexuality by literally and figuratively turning a Black man into a beast. Queenie’s sexuality is degraded as being less than, a fact that she seems aware of. She is so “desperate and deranged” that she loses her virginity to an animal.

The use of the word “we” is significant to me also. Not only does Queenie see the minotaur as a beast, she sees herself as one too. She has internalized the idea that her blackness correlates to bestiality, and has now literally given into that characterization. The fact that she sees herself as equal to an animal that is subhuman and that that idea isn’t challenged in any way is a very problematic and racist way to portray black sexuality.

There is a lot of anti-Black sentiment tied up in Queenie’s character and it makes me uncomfortable and unhappy. It could be argued that half the story is about a racist slave owner who was renowned for her cruelty, and so anti-Blackness is to be expected in the narrative. But in my opinion, not enough is done to subvert those stereotypes. Having Fiona declare that she hates racists simply isn’t enough if every interaction of Queenie’s upholds the existing status quo. It is a disservice to have a talented actress like Sidibe, who has already been heavily maligned because of her weight, be characterized in a way that reinforces ideas about why she isn’t suitable for better more complex roles in Hollywood.

This isn’t the first time that AHS has had a problem with women. The show has a long history of disempowering women through rape, so it’s not surprising that it would also have a problem with Black women specifically. But to play into deeply racist ideas about Black womanhood is unsettling to me in a completely personal way. Having Queenie be characterized as a superhuman beast who is unworthy of love is a powerful message to send in a world rife with anti-Blackness where #stopblackgirls2013 can trend for an entire day. I can only hope that the rest of the season gets better.

Cate Young is a Trinidadian freelance writer and photographer, and author of BattyMamzelle, a feminist pop culture blog focused on film, television, music, and critical commentary on media representation. Cate has a BA in Photojournalism from Boston University and is currently pursuing her MA in Mass Communications so that she can more effectively examine the symbolic annihilation of women of colour in the media and deliver the critical feminist smack down. Follow her on twitter at @BattyMamzelle.

‘Mr. Jones’: Beautiful Nightmares and Bothersome Storytelling

There is so much potential within ‘Mr. Jones,’ and yet so little awesomeness, resulting in a convoluted found footage misfire, another tired story about a Male Protagonist and his Girlfriend.

ESCAPE YOUR NIGHTMARES — unless your nightmares are about confusing movies, in which case ENTER YOUR NIGHTMARES

Written by Mychael Blinde.

Lest you think I fall in love with every found footage film I see, I offer you my review of Mr. Jones — a film that takes fascinating approaches to its mythology, camerawork, and representations of gender, then smashes them on the ground into a boring, convoluted mess.

Written and directed by first-time writer/director Karl Mueller, Mr. Jones (2013) failed to impress reviewers:

Given the sloppiness of Karl Mueller’s directorial debut, it feels less like innovation and more like an attempt to cover up shortcomings, as if he had the kernel of an idea and only begrudgingly filled it out. (The Playlist)

Writer-director Karl Mueller has put in a lot of effort to make sure Mr. Jones looks different and is constructed differently from any contemporaneous indie-horror project and/or mockumentary. And that’s what makes Mr. Jones such a bummer. So much work, so much thought, put into something so shitty. (The Dissolve)

It’s difficult to write about Mr. Jones without revealing spoilers or my utter disdain for the two main characters, so here’s a recap:

A young, white, financially secure, beautiful, heterosexual, able-bodied, cis couple move to The Woods to live in a Cabin, isolated from society.

Meet Scott (Jon Foster), the Male Protagonist

and Penny (Sarah Jones), the Male Protagonist’s Girlfriend*

Scott has this vague but enthusiastic notion that he’ll create the most super best amazing nature documentary of all time, revive his relationship with Penny, and reinvent his entire life. This lasts for approximately one minute of the exposition, voiced by Scott as a narration for his documentary:

Scott: Do you ever dream of waking up to birds instead of your alarm clock? Have you ever wanted to blow all your money on extremely nice camera equipment to make a nature documentary so beautiful people who saw it would never want to watch another movie again?…Do you ever wish you could kiss your wife the way you did on the night you first met?

Then he reveals that he’s stopped taking his unspecified meds and has no idea what the hell he’s doing with this project. He worries that he has dragged his girlfriend away from her successful career and her emotional support system on a half-baked fame-seeking whim:

Scott: Have you ever started to suspect you made a huge mistake?…Have you ever moved to the woods for a whole year to work on your relationship, only a month in you missed your TV more than you thought?…What if Penny put her photography career on hold for you, so you are too ashamed to admit that the documentary you moved here to make wasn’t that well thought out anyway?

Scott spends his days immobile in a hammock while Penny encourages him to take up his camera and make an effort to film. After a month and a half of this behavior, Penny is understandably upset about Scott’s neglect of the project for which she has made so many sacrifices:

Penny: I gave up everything to come out here with you, I left my job, my friends. And you promised me, you PROMISED me that you would be responsible.

But we are asked to forget about Penny’s frustration with Scott when birds start flying smack into their cabin in the middle of the night. (Do you ever dream of waking up to birds instead of your alarm clock?)

Then Scott encounters a creepy figure creeping around creating freaky scarecrow-like statues out of natural elements:

Scott’s like, Woah, dude’s a psychopath! And Penny’s like, He’s Mr. Jones — a famous reclusive artistic genius living off the grid! Let’s make him the subject of your documentary and hey — I’ll make a coffee table book!

Penny makes a list for Scott of all the Mr. Jones experts in the world — conveniently, every one of them happens to live in New York! Here the film takes a more formal approach to the documentary style and gives us several interviews with one woman (art historian) and five men (art dealer, anthropologist, newspaper reporter, metaphysical author guy, and an “Alleged Scarecrow Recipient” — seriously, that’s how he’s titled in the doc).

This film is a total Bechdel Test FAIL. There are only two women in the entire movie and they’re never even in the same room. Two women, seven men.

Thus proceeds a convoluted download of Mr. Jones info, and while some of it is truly creepy, lots of it just don’t make sense. (More on this later.)

Meanwhile, Penny is in The Woods, taking pictures of Mr. Jones’s statues for her book.

She has an awkward encounter with Mr. Jones during the day, then has a scary night in The Woods. Her takeaway from the experience, as she documents it, is a sense that Mr. Jones helped her get home to safety:

Penny: I just feel like I need to record this before I forget, ’cause I feel like I just woke up from a dream…You know how in a dream you can tell if someone is trying to hurt you or help you?…It’s like I could feel his intentions…and I don’t feel scared.

Scott returns to The Woods and he and Penny decide together that the obvious next step here is to break into Mr. Jones’s abode and film his home, his studio, and his art without his consent.

Yes, they’ve just learned that this guy is not only a respected figure in the art world, but also a potentially dangerous (but maybe also protective?) magic man, and their response is to break in to his home and touch and film his things.

I understand that as a horror fan there are times when I must forgive a character’s blatant stupidity. Horror is a genre built on the backs of bad ideas. But the decision to violate Mr. Jones’s privacy and document his work without his consent is not only stupid, it’s disrespectful and douchey. Scott wants to make a famous documentary, Penny want to make a huge coffee table book; they want to create their own art, so they feel entitled to access his art and the space in which he creates it.

Their stupid and entitled plan gets even stupider and more entitled when Scott the brainiac decides to swipe one of Mr. Jones’s smaller creations. It just happens to be the creepy center piece in a huge creepy underground shrine, no big deal, he simply blows out its eye candles and shoves it in his backpack.

To steal or not to steal — that is the stupidest question ever OMG NOT TO STEAL

Scott and Penny make it back to their cabin safely, but now their car won’t start and the sun won’t rise and they’re trapped in a nightmare world in which alternate versions of themselves are evil enemies.

Here Mueller moves the film away from Scott’s POV documentary and features footage filmed by phantoms in the nightmare world — a surprisingly successful tactic.

Mr. Jones inexplicably gets sucked up into the sky (I THINK???). Ultimately, Scott must return to the shrine and replace the stolen figure, then don Mr. Jones’s mask and take on the role of creepy protector.

The only way to defeat the nightmare world is to don the trappings of nightmares and create nightmarish images — I love this concept, but alas! I found the execution super boring…

We watch Scott stumble around for a while, chased by his nightmare self, then — TA-DA!! — he’s the hero and he rescues his girlfriend! The Male Protagonist does it again: he makes a bunch of bad decisions and then he saves the day! Great job, Scott!

Scott maybe becomes the next Mr. Jones??? I’m not really sure because of the confusing final scenes and the mind-scramblingly frustrating mythology we’re offered throughout the film.

Let’s talk about the Mr. Jones mythology. First, the aspects I thought were great:

I love the concept of the Mr. Jones character: this amorphous being who is creepy as fuck in both aspect and artistry, and yet whose creepy creations actually offer protection from that which is truly terrifying, the real monster of this movie: the fear haunting our minds.

The statues are stunning, truly the scariest part of the entire film.

Mr. Jones suggests that creating something scary has the power to ward away fear. There’s a delicious paradox embedded in that idea, and a jumping off point for a conversation about the creation and consumption of horror movies. Why are horror fans drawn to scary stories? What purpose do they serve in our minds, our lives, our culture? Do we seek horrific images in order to confront and reject our fears?

Unfortunately, all of this is ruined by the sloppy slap-together of the convoluted, contradictory mythology presented in the film’s documentary-style interviews.

For example: In one of the interview-with-the-experts clips, we’re informed by the art dealer that “[t]here are nine verified Jones pieces in the world — nine.”

Yet in other clips, other experts make it sound like there are far more than nine Jones statues in existence:

Author: It is hard to believe that one person, after so many years, could be responsible for building all of these totems and sending them all over the world. So there’s some that posit that perhaps there is a secret group or a sect at work here, building these things and sending them out for ceremonial purposes.

So which is it? Are there nine Jones pieces, or dozens? And what exactly is the deal with the recipients of these statues? What is the impact of the Mr. Jones statues on their lives?

One of the experts, the art dealer, was a recipient of a Jones statue. He put it in his gallery window, experienced an uptick in gallery traffic for a while, then went back to life as usual.

Scott: So what happened next?

Art Dealer: Well, eventually they just stopped. And that was it. And I thought Mr. Jones was done.

Another expert, the metaphysical author guy, says that the people who received these statues went whackadoo and moved to The Woods.

Author: I met a lot of people that were mailed totems by Mr. Jones, and most of them just say that they were disturbed and moved on. But if you actually start talking to the people around them, their husbands, their wives, their friends, their colleagues, their parents — then you start to get a different story. And you dig deeper into the lives of these people, and you notice even more drastic changes, extreme personality shifts, disappearances, housewives leaving their families and moving into the woods, it’s disturbing.

The “Alleged Scarecrow Recipient” destroyed his Mr. Jones scarecrow, and now suffers from undisclosed life problems and ongoing nightmares that he’s chasing himself around and in danger of spilling evil out into the world:

Alleged Scarecrow Recipient: You have no idea what you’re dealing with, this guy — you don’t know what he’s capable of…You have no idea what these things do to your mind…they get inside your mind and they explode.

But according to the anthropologist, the scarecrows are protective figures:

Anthropologist: These talismans were created by the holy men to patrol the borders of these two worlds as they overlapped…to keep the chaos and insanity and nightmares of the dream world from entering our own.

So…are we to understand that the people who reject the scarecrow/dream-guardian figures go mad? Do they become the new versions of Mr. Jones? Is that what happens to Scott? If a recipient accepts the scarecrow, like the art dealer, nothing really happens? But if they are disturbed by the figures, then they abandon their families and move into the woods? And if they destroy the figures, then they live forever in a nightmare world of fear? Are we to understand that Mr. Jones is trying to protect the people to whom he sends his statues? Or is his aim to imbue more people with his magic powers and inspire them to create more creepy protective totems?

I can accept when a film refrains from explaining a major, obvious quandary — see, for example, my feelings about the final scenes of Mockingbird – but I cannot accept when a movie offers inconsistent, inconclusive explanations and paints a messy picture of its mythos. This shatters the credibility of the in-film documentary and craps on the interesting questions the movie raises about the creation and consumption of horrific images.

Speaking of horrific images, let’s talk about the camerawork in Mr. Jones.

First, the bad:

In the film’s exposition, we learn that Scott has rigged his camera so that it shoots both his POV and a close-up of his face, which Penny thinks is the most brilliant thing ever, and I think was a big mistake. Found footage films can be difficult enough to follow without jumping back and forth between a character’s POV shot and close up of the character. As one reviewer from The Dissolve puts it:

Also tedious: those two-way camera get-ups, which turn most of the action sequences in Mr. Jones into a hard-to-follow assemblage of “shaky face shot,” “shaky first-person shot,” “shaky face shot,” and so on, for minutes on end.

Found footage films get a lot of shit, but one of the coolest things they can do is put the viewer in the POV perspective of a character experiencing nightmare circumstances. The sequence with Scott in the tunnel system in particular would have been way more effective if Mueller had kept the POV shot through the entirety. This scene was an opportunity to offer viewers the nightmarish experience of navigating through an ever-changing underground maze. It could have been disorienting in a way that approximated the sensation of the maddening dream logic Scott is experiencing. Thanks to the shifting back and forth between POV and character close-up, it wasn’t.

I will generally tolerate confusing and/or uncomfortable camerawork if I think it’s trying to do something interesting or if it resonates meaningfully within the context of the larger horror in the story. But all this approach did was and take me out of the nightmarish nature of the tunnel sequence, and reinforce my feeling that Scott is a narcissistic dreamer who cares more about navel gazing than putting effort into creating something.

The good:

I appreciate that Mueller found a way to transition his found footage film from personal POV shots to something more flexible without smashing the film’s premise. (Another example of success with this is the use of telekeneticams in Josh Trank’s Chronicle.) The inclusion of the phantom film shot by the nightmare universe version of Scott is a clever way to explain the shift away from jerky-hand-cam character POV shots, the frequent downfall of many a found footage denouement.

Unfortunately, most of these phantom film shots consist of Scott stumbling around in fear and confusion, and Penny as alternately a scary nightmare universe version of herself and a helpless damsel in distress. Then Scott the Male Protagonist leads the way and saves the day!

So…lets talk about this film’s approach to representations of gender.

The good:

Penny, the main female character, has energy and agency, intelligence and ambition.

The bad:

Penny uses all of her energy and agency and intelligence and ambition to serve Scott and his project. Her project, the coffee table book, is a supplement to his creation. The Male Protagonist’s Girlfriend is a depressingly pervasive trope in film and television: she is a character who has no real purpose in a story except to support the Male Protagonist in his chosen journey. Penny gets Girlfriended from the get-go: from start to finish, she serves to support Scott. That’s all she is and all she does.

Scott is the impetus for the film, the creator of the documentary, the voice of the exposition, the hero in the resolution (I THINK???). We’re in Scott’s world, and Penny’s there to be supportive and get rescued. (Never mind that she has to be rescued because Scott was an idiot who stole from his creepy neighbor’s underground tunnel shrine.)

There is so much potential within this film, and yet so little awesomeness, resulting in a convoluted found footage misfire, another tired story about a Male Protagonist and his Girlfriend.

*Is Penny Scott’s girlfriend or his wife? In his expository voice over, he says “Do you ever wish you could kiss your wife the way you did on the night you first met?” But at one point in the film she calls him her “boyfriend.” Just one more confusing thing about this movie. I don’t think it really matters; the point is that they’re life partners but all that really seems to matter in the film is his life.

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

‘Mockingbird’: A Unique Approach to Horror, But a Trite Approach to Gender

For filmmakers, the easiest way to make an audience like a character despite the fact that he’s a lazy failure of a human being is to steep that character in privilege. We’re always expected to root for young straight white cis men, whether their laziness makes them waste away their lives, or their ambition makes them endanger their entire family.

Written by Mychael Blinde.

Unlike every other person who saw this movie, I think Mockingbird is a brilliant found footage horror film experiment. (OK, there’s one other guy who likes it, but most reviewers really really don’t.) Mockingbird takes a unique approach to horror film structure and tone, and it builds to an unforgettable climax. Unfortunately, its approach to representations of gender is totally forgettable and anything but unique.

***The majority of this post is spoiler free; I’ll give you a clear warning when I’m about to discuss the ending all the reviewers hate so much.***

Mockingbird (2014) is the second film written and directed by Bryan Bertino, whose first film, The Strangers (2008), though now beloved in certain horror film niches, was not well received by critics. Mockingbird went straight to VOD and the consensus of reviewers is that the production company buried this film because it’s not a good movie.

From the Mockingbird review on Best Horror Movies:

“How many trailers have you seen for the film? Probably not many. With the fan friendly Blumhouse behind the project, perhaps we should guess that something just isn’t clicking with this one. If there’s any company out there right now that’s definitely going to stand behind their releases, it’s Blumhouse. But they’re not standing behind this one, and yes, there is most certainly a reason for that, Mockingbird just isn’t the picture that fanatics are hoping for.”

Here’s the film as summarized on Netflix: “A woman, a man and a couple each receive a video camera and instructions to keep filming — or face terrifying consequences.”

I love Bertino’s The Strangers because it combines great horror storytelling with an awesome representation of a female character in a horror film.

Unfortunatly, Mockingbird does nothing to challenge tired, stereotypical representations of gender in film. It presents the wife as the character who freaks out, and the husband as the character who makes a plan and goes for the gun. It relies on the problematically gendered trope of the lovable loser dude.

So, if it doesn’t challenge representations of gender and pretty much everyone who reviewed it says it’s total crap, why on earth would I call Mockingbird brilliant?

Because its triple story structure builds toward the most heartbreaking ending I’ve ever experienced in a horror film.

Let me explain:

Mockingbird intertwines three storylines: two are perfectly parallel, but the third clashes completely with the tone, plot, and pacing of the first two.

While the couple and the woman become increasingly terrified in their own homes…

…the man is happily running around town dressed like a clown, super enthusiastic about this kooky quest he’s on and dreaming about winning $10,000.

First, let’s unpack the gendered trope of the lovable loser dude, and then I’ll explain why I like and root for Leonard in spite of the fact that he occupies this problematic Slacker role.

Am I saying that Mockingbird is totally the worst most stupid awful misogynist film ever? Not at all. I’m saying that it does nothing to think outside the box in terms of its approach to men and women in horror.

Am I saying that we can’t like Leonard? Quite the opposite, actually — my positive review of this film is predicated on how much I liked Leonard as a character.

We viewers need to notice the privilege afforded to the Slacker character, and we need to recognize that this is a gendered trope invested in oppressive sociocultural hierarchies. We need to take all of this into consideration, but that doesn’t mean we cannot like and root for Leonard.

There are lots of great lovable losers out there, characters like Parks and Recreation‘s Andy Dwyer — good-natured dudes who exhibit a stupid but endearing exuberance.

Barak Hardley’s Leonard has an Andy Dwyer quality: a zany zest for life couched in total lack of ambition or drive. Like Andy, Leonard doesn’t hesitate to show gratitude to his peers. Like Andy, Leonard expresses his sexual desire for women while still managing to seem like he respects them.

From the moment we viewers are first birthed from the box on Leonard’s doorstep into his grungy world, we are met with his trademark mixture of excitement and nervousness about what he believes to be some kind of sweepstakes contest:

“Awesome! Awesome! Awesome!”

When he finds another box containing a clown costume:

“Yes! Yes! Yes! A clown outfit! Oh! I get to wear clown makeup! Yes!”

Any horror fan worth hir salt circle will realize pretty much instantly that Leonard’s excitement is misguided. Reviewers don’t like that Mockingbird telegraphs its ending so early; they don’t like that it’s obvious where all of these intertwined arcs are headed.

From the Mockingbird review on We’ve Got This Covered:

“Established as a cut-together game show of sorts, Mockingbird eliminates any appearance of legal enforcement since the baddies presumably edited all the remaining footage. From this hint we can immediately start determining how the contest may conclude, a situational assessment that Bertino all-but confirms by telegraphing plot-points hours before they happen (at least it felt like hours).”

But I thought that was the most fascinating aspect of Mockingbird: I knew where Leonard’s story was headed, but clearly he didn’t. Throughout the film, he functioned as the comic relief, but I knew that his comedy would ultimately wind up served back to me as tragedy, tragedy with a side of red balloons.

Leonard’s unbridled enthusiasm broke my heart; he was so excited and grateful to be a part of what he thought was a contest. He had no idea he was in a horror film until the final scene of the movie.

Lines like these in particular pulled on my heartstrings:

“I think this is gonna be a really good night for me.”

“This is without a doubt, the coolest moment of my life.”

And this line just broke my fucking heart:

“OK, just promise me that you guys aren’t just making fun of me. Just please be real.”

Then when he’s practicing his “Surprise!” in the mirror, smiling and nervously counting down — this moment made me SO SAD. Because what happens next is anything but a surprise.

* * * * * * * * *

Mockingbird reviewers also express frustration with the film’s unoriginal approach to home invasion terror: the boring banging outside the house, the standard-issue found footage shots:

“There seems to be a new film releasing every few weeks at this stage that takes on the same ‘shaky cam’ format, most with little success. Is it completely dead as a sub genre? I think not, as there is still room for greatness to be done. Mockingbird, however, is not the film that is going to win over the naysayers.” (Horror News)

I have to agree that the sequences of the couple and the woman bring nothing unique to the home invasion terror table. However, I think the banal nature of this approach to found footage terror serves to emphasize Leonard’s tragic exuberance, the most meaningful and fascinating aspect of the film.

Many films suggest that it’s totally worth it to risk it all and go for the gold; Mockingbird tells us that taking risks can be dangerous, that shooting for the stars can result in tragedy — even for young straight white cis men. It shows us the downside of relentless positivity, which is a surprising thing for a horror film to do.

And finally, BIG SPOILER TIME: Let’s talk about that ending everybody hates so much…

…….dun

………………………dun

………………………………………..DUN:

THE TORMENTORS ARE CHILDREN.

Most reviewers absolutely detest the final moments of the film:

“The climax feels insulting to the audience that has gone along for the ride, and is completely devoid of any meaning or merit. It just highlights all the issues you had throughout the viewing experience, and exposes the film for the poorly conceived idea it is.” (Horror News)

“With Mockingbird…I specifically remember that horribly dumb ending that retroactively ruins the best moment of in the movie.” (Horror Movie a Day)

Reader, I will forgive you if your mind can’t stomach the suspension of disbelief required to enjoy this film, because frankly, it is pretty damn ridiculous.

The tormentors are children? Really? Is this believable? NO, absolutely not.

Nor is it believable that Leonard would be so great at applying clown makeup, or that his face would stay so fresh throughout the rainy night. Nor is it believable that these 1995 cameras could sustain the battery power and footage capacity to document so many hours of activity. It’s all totally ridiculous.

BUT — if you can bring yourself to suspend disbelief, then you’ll be able to enjoy the way that Mockingbird turns an established horror story on its head:

Instead of the traditional tale of the Monster Clown attacking innocent children…

…Mockingbird is a story in which the clown is the sympathetic character and the children are the monsters.

And the revelation that the tormentors are children explains so much about strange things that transpire throughout the film:

It explains why Leonard is tasked with juvenile acts like, “I’m farting and I’m peeing in the women’s room,” and being kicked in the balls. It explains why the terror experienced by the couple and the woman consists of childish pranks with sinister twists: ding-dong-ditching, prank phone calls, chalk arrows leading the way.

What Mockingbird doesn’t explain is why these kids are going around making strangers kill each other. Yes, it’s frustrating that we don’t get an explanation, but maybe we should take a page from Leonard’s book: when he’s talking about his reluctance to enter a women’s restroom, he says, “Let mysteries exist. I don’t need to know all the answers.”

Have you seen Mockingbird? Did you hate it?

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

‘A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night’ and Scares Us

Nice girls aren’t supposed to walk alone in the dark, even in the movies. So in the generically titled ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night,’ the debut feature from writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour we in the audience wonder what a woman in a black cloak (a traditional Iranian garment called a chador) is doing on the streets of a largely empty desert town in the wee hours. We see her witness a pimp (Dominic Rains) exploit and then cheat a sex worker (Mozhan Marnò). We soon find out the woman in the chador, The Girl–we never find out her name (played, unforgettably, by Sheila Vand) is no ordinary woman, but a vampire with fangs that retract like a cat’s claws–or a switchblade.

Nice girls aren’t supposed to walk alone in the dark, even in the movies. So in the generically titled A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, the debut feature from writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour, we in the audience wonder what a woman in a black cloak (a traditional Iranian garment called a chador) is doing on the streets of a largely empty desert town in the wee hours. We see her witness a pimp (Dominic Rains) exploit and then cheat a sex worker (Mozhan Marnò). We soon find out the woman in the chador, The Girl–we never find out her name (played, unforgettably, by Sheila Vand) is no ordinary woman, but a vampire with fangs that retract like a cat’s claws–or a switchblade.

The film takes place in a parallel California which contains a Farsi-speaking, Iranian enclave called “Bad City.” We know we’re not in Iran because the pimp has visible tattoos and later we see a woman in public with her hair and much of her body uncovered. Also The Girl wears her chador in such a way that we see her hipster, stripey, boat shirt (too short for modest dress) and skinny jeans underneath.

In spite of its surface differences, the film to which Girl has the greatest parallel is probably David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Like that film, every sumptuous, black and white shot is framed and lit with care, creating an alternate universe for the audience to lose themselves in. And as in Eraserhead, even what we hear is fussed over in a way that grabs our attention: incidental sounds are recorded close. The proximity doesn’t alienate us, the way less skillful dubbing in other films often does, but gives us a heightened sense of intimacy, as if we are almost touching the characters.

When The Girl interrogates The Street Urchin (a young boy played by Milad Eghbali) the film shows a truth that many films, including horror films, elide–but that the other recent acclaimed horror film directed by a woman, The Babadook, also addresses–the first person who scares us when we are children is often a woman, whether it’s a mother or another woman authority figure. Tilda Swinton has said that her character in Snowpiercer was based on a particularly terrifying nanny from her own childhood. Few lines in films this year have been more chilling than the one The Girl leaves The Street Urchin with after she threatens him: “Be a good boy.”

Like Michael Almereyda, who, in the ’90s made a stylish black and white film about a woman vampire among New York hipsters, Nadja (its star, Elina Löwensohn, had eyes you couldn’t look away from, much like Vand’s) Amirpour combines familiar elements in an unfamiliar way for maximum resonance. In Almereyda’s modern day New York Hamlet (from 2000), he famously incorporated a video of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh talking about “being” in the background of a scene, priming us to later hear Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy.

In Girl Amirpour gets at how women in modest Muslim dress (including those from Iran) are used for xenophobic and anti-Islamic fear-mongering (often in the guise of “feminism”) in the US (like in the recent ad campaign for Homeland) but also uses a chador’s resemblance to a cape to give us an eerily familiar–but new–“Dracula” silhouette. When The Girl rides on the skateboard The Street Urchin leaves behind (after he runs away from her in terror) the chador billows around her as she rolls down the road, and she becomes, without CGI trickery, a bat in flight.

Americans often read chador on women to mean vulnerability, but like the frail-seeming, pale, young, blonde Mae in another beautifully-shot, vampire Western (also directed by a woman, the pre-Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow) 1987’s Near Dark, who, when her cowboy boyfriend lassoes her as a “joke” takes hold of the rope and pulls him in, The Girl has hidden reserves of strength. The Girl becomes an avenging angel in black, attacking the men we see abuse women, using her “traditional” quiet passivity to draw these guys close. As the abusive men do with the cat who is many times in the frame (rarely has a filmmaker caught how much of our daily lives our animals witness) they ascribe motivations and personas to The Girl which are more about their own perceptions than about who she is or what she is thinking.

Like a number of films Girl has an early scene, fast becoming a campy cliché, in which a woman suggestively sucks the finger of a man. But when The Girl takes the pimp’s forefinger into her mouth, he gets more than he bargained for.

And as we do with Mae, we see that The Girl is lonely, and a hapless, good-looking guy, Arash, played by Arash Marandi touches something in her. When they meet, he’s coming from a costume party where he’s taken some of the club drugs he was dealing and is still wearing a vampire cape as he stares into a street light. She immediately becomes protective of him.

Vand’s presence burns through the screen. She has the intensity of the great silent actresses–and in many of her scenes, the ones in her room plastered with ’80s music posters, dancing by herself to Farsi synth-pop records or even when she interacts with other characters, she often does not speak. This film is low on back story but Vand’s face, especially her huge dark eyes (we see her put on her heavy eyeliner in the bathroom mirror before she goes out) tells us what she is feeling in every scene.

Amirpour’s camera (the magnificent cinematography is by Lyle Vincent) lingers over Arash’s beauty–his high cheekbones and large, long-lashed eyes under a dark, curly version of James Dean’s pompadour–in a way few male filmmakers would. His clothes (a plain white t-shirt and jeans that hug his muscled body) also evoke Dean’s. And even though the pimp, Saeed, is a villain, meant to repel us, Amirpour lets us take in the attractiveness of his body, especially in a shirtless scene with The Girl when his pants hang very low and we see the full extent of his tattoos–and his muscles.

LA has enough Iranian-Americans in it that some have nicknamed it “Tehrangeles” (after Iran’s capital), but I can’t think of another film produced near there (Girl was actually filmed in Bakersfield) in which most (or all) of the cast is of Persian descent, but no one is a terrorist or a relic from the old country. These characters speak Farsi to each other but, except for Arash’s father, with his drug addiction and collection of pre-revolutionary framed photos of family (complete with 60s-style teased hair on the women), these people aren’t living in the past–even The Girl’s retro record collection, clothes and bobbed hair reflect present-day fashion.

We can never know for sure, but just as with Black actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw giving two terrific, completely different star-turns in movies in one year but the media still largely ignoring her, I wonder if Amirpour’s flawless visual sense, skill with actors and unique reworking of a genre many of us thought didn’t have an original angle left would garner more attention if she were a white guy. Girl is distributed in partnership with VICE‘s film arm and has even made some year-end, top-10 lists, but I had to go to New York to see it and whole countries (like Canada) have yet to get even limited distribution. Nevertheless Amirpour continues to work on films unimpeded. Her next work is about cannibals. I can’t wait until its release.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YGmTdo3vuY”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

‘The Taking of Deborah Logan’: Alzheimer’s, Possession, and Mother/Daughter Love

‘The Taking of Deborah Logan’ is a story about the horror of evil afflicting a deteriorating mind, but it’s also a tale of the strength of a mother and daughter’s love. Deborah is driven by female characters, and while not a perfect film, it serves up the scares and aces the Bechdel test.

Evil Lives Within You, But Your Daughter Lives With You And She Will Kick Evil's Ass — Evil Lives Within You, But Your Daughter Lives With You And She Will Kick Evil’s Ass

Written by Mychael Blinde.

The Taking of Deborah Logan is a story about the horror of evil afflicting a deteriorating mind, but it’s also a tale of the strength of a mother and daughter’s love. Deborah is driven by female characters, and while not a perfect film, it serves up the scares and aces the Bechdel test.

First-time director Adam Robitel presents this found footage movie in the form of a medical documentary gone supernaturally screwy. In this interview, he explains:

What I always wanted to do was start in one space, with a very grounded medical documentary and by the end, turn the movie completely on its head as we careen into full horror movie realm.

Lots of horror fans profess irritation with found footage, but I find it fascinating. Unfortunately, Deborah doesn’t really add anything new to the sub-genre in terms of unique camera work (cf. Paranormal Activity III’s fan-cam or Chronicle’s telekineticams). And yes, the climax falls prey to the same problems as many other found footage films: lots of crashing around in confusion and crappy visibility. (There is, however, one fantastically shocking climactic horror moment like nothing I’ve ever seen before — I will not spoil it for you, but keep your eyes on Deborah because DAMN.)

Still, for the majority of the film Robitel does a solid job of utilizing standard found footage techniques (house cams, whip pans, night vision).

And Deborah manages not to feel too derivative, because the subject of this found footage film is uncommon within the genre: a mother, a daughter, and the sacrifices they make to save each other.

Mother Deborah and daughter Sarah in the beginning of the film

The strength of mother/daughter love is not the most obvious theme of The Taking of Deborah Logan. (The obvious theme is that the deterioration of the human mind is terrifying and akin to demonic possession.) But if we viewers take a step back, we can see how much this film is driven by mother/daughter love and sacrifice: the mother saving her daughter is the reason for the mother’s possession, and the daughter saving her mother is the arc of the entire film.

Michelle Ang as Mia, PhD student and first-time filmmaker

Deborah begins with PhD student Mia (Michelle Ang) introducing herself and her two-man camera crew to Sarah (Anne Ramsay), the adult daughter of Deborah Logan (Jill Larson). Deborah is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and in an effort to help her mother keep her house, Sarah has arranged for Deborah to participate in Mia’s documentary in exchange for money from the project’s grant.

Hello, Deborah! It's a pleasure to meet you... — Hello, Deborah! It’s a pleasure to meet you…

Here’s what we learn about Deborah when Mia introduces her in the documentary:

Mia: After the premature death of her husband…to a pulmonary embolism, Deborah was forced to provide for two-year-old Sarah on her own. She leveraged their house as collateral, and would go on to start a highly successful switchboard answering service for the town of Exuma.

In her preliminary interview with Mia, Deborah describes her role as switchboard operator: “I was the nexus of this town. Doctors, lawyers, town hall, everybody.”

Deborah also details the actions she takes to fight her deteriorating condition, and she expresses her frustration at the futility of her mind’s inevitable decline:

Deborah: I do all my little puzzles. I do crosswords. I’m lifting weights. I am doing everything that I have read will help to stave off the progression of this disease. Stave it off. There’s no cure.

Deborah's (lady!) doctor: "Deborah's not someone to go down without a fight." — Deborah’s (lady!) doctor: “Deborah’s not someone to go down without a fight.”

But Deborah’s not just fighting Alzheimer’s; she’s battling a spiritual parasite — and it’s a fucking EVIL one.

Jill Larson is most famous for her role as Opal on All My Children, and according to several different interviews, she had never seen a horror movie before filming Deborah. Nevertheless, as she absolutely nails her role as a savvy single mother afflicted with the frustrating and frightening deterioration of her once sharp mind.

Deborah in a moment of confusion and disorientation

Larson’s portrayal of Deborah’s possession is complex: she conveys a mixture of confusion and fear and desperation and anger and evil, and she appears pitiful, then horrifying, then pitiful again — sometimes in the same scene.

On her approach to the role, Larson says: “My time in soap operas…taught me to invest in situations that sometimes stretch the imagination.”

After a romp through the woods in the middle of the night, Deborah starts to look scary

There exists a cultural trope of the ugly old evil women — a trope which thrives on the notion that older women are scary and unnatural, grotesque, lusting for power and filled with an abject evil.

Evil crones as depicted by Disney and Sam Raimi

And yes, as the evil overtakes Deborah, she does become both ugly and powerful.

After a romp through an abandoned wing of the hospital in the middle of the night, Deborah's looking even scarier — After a romp through an abandoned wing of the hospital in the middle of the night, Deborah’s looking even scarier

But Deborah isn’t an evil crone — she’s a good person who is unhealthy of mind through no fault or moral failing of her own. In fact, Deborah is being targeted by the evil spirit as revenge for a brave, heroic deed she committed long ago. Her representation is a departure from the traditional (and trite) evil crone.

Sarah attempts to help her mother as the switchboard goes vengeful-spirit KABLOOEY

The moments we see Deborah naked are not played as gross-out moments (think, for example, the bathroom woman in The Shining). What’s striking about Deborah’s naked body isn’t that she looks gross, it’s that she looks so fragile, so frail.

Her neighbor and lifelong friend, Harris, says of Deborah and her plight: “She’s a fighter. And she’s brave…But how do you fight your way through something you can’t see or know?”

How does Deborah fight her way through Alzheimer’s and spiritual parasitism? With the help of her loyal, brave, determined daughter.

In the beginning of the film, Sarah makes sure the crew knows to say "thank you" to Deborah for her hospitality — In the beginning of the film, Sarah makes sure the crew knows to say “thank you” to Deborah for her hospitality

Sarah is there for Deborah every step of the way: from seeking financial aid to seeking an exorcism. At the beginning of the film, Sarah makes sure that the documentary crew is polite to Deborah, and at the end she makes sure that the evil corpse is burned to smithereens. In the climactic sequence, Sarah shouts at Deborah over and over: “Fight him, Mom! Fight him!” From start to finish, Sarah helps Deborah fight her way through.

Sarah is brave and faces the scary darkness and strange sounds of the house

Sarah is actually supposed to be the subject of interest and the true focus of Mia’s project:

Mia: The story of Alzheimer’s is never about one person. My PhD thesis film posits that this insidious disease not only destroys the patient, but has a physiological influence on the primary caregiver.

Sarah makes huge sacrifices for her mother. She is the character who figures it all out; she has the brains to find the dead body, the guts to grab it, and the presence of mind to destroy it. Sarah is the hero.

She’s also gay.

Reader, I do not identify as gay, and if you do and you think my thoughts are off base here, or if you have any thoughts to add, please share them with me. Here are mine:

I think it’s a great thing to see a gay lady occupy the role of the horror film hero, and I think Sarah is a great gay lady hero. She is a likable, brave, smart, and loyal. And because Sarah’s sexuality is not particularly relevant to her mother’s possession, we get a representation of a gay character who just happens to be gay — it’s not a plot point, it’s just the way things are. Of course I am not suggesting that this is what all representations of gay characters should look like — I’m just saying that I think it’s nice to see a character who happens to be gay, like a zillion other characters in a zillion other movie happen to be straight. I think that this is a positive, beneficial representation.

Speaking of positive, beneficial representations, let me add that I appreciate the number of women with key roles in this film. Deborah, Sarah, Mia, the doctor, and the sheriff — women drive this film. Women and Alzheimer’s.

Robitel explains why Alzheimer’s lends itself so well to the horror genre: “Alzheimer’s deals with two of our most primal fears: Losing our minds and our own inevitable mortality.”

Reader, here’s another disclosure: I have no personal experience with Alzheimer’s. I have misgivings about enjoying this film, because I know that inherent within its plot is the potential for exploitation. But is the representation of Deborah Logan an exploitation or an exploration of the disease? Are we viewers exploiting people who are struggling with Alzheimer’s? Or does Deborah shine light on the challenges faced by people with Alzheimer’s, and celebrate the strength and sacrifice of both patient and caretaker?

The film seems aware that exploitation is a potential issue and addresses the concern head-on: in the opening scenes, when Mia and the crew are first speaking with Deborah about the project, Deborah explicitly states, “I’m not interested in being exploited. I’m not the butt of anyone’s joke.” Deborah never makes its protagonist or her Alzheimer’s the butt of any joke. The film asks us to admire her strength, to pity her deterioration, to fear her possession, and to root for her salvation — it never asks us to laugh at her.

Robitel on his approach to Deborah and the disease:

We wanted to treat Deborah with dignity because it makes her a nice, round character and it also makes her decline all the more upsetting. That said, at the end of the film we realize that this is something else entirely. We knew if we stayed too “real”, it would have felt exploitative. We wanted the audience to have the discussions and start a conversation, but were very mindful that it needed to go more into the expressionistic horror to provide the ‘escape valve’ of entertainment.

The realization that Deborah’s sickness “is something else entirely” starts about a half an hour into the film. Her doctor examines a weird, scaley rash on Deborah’s back and then informs the documentary crew: “This condition is not typically associated with Alzheimer’s. Although when the immune system is compromised sometimes co-infections can occur.”

The doctor’s line is example of one of the many parallels Deborah draws between physiological/psychological deterioration and demonic possession. Robitel states: “Alzheimer’s is a pretty organic metaphor for possession and I think the best horror films take the horrors of real life and then turn them on their head.”

Here’s Larson on what makes the film so scary:

I think a lot of the scary elements come from bringing the audience into a situation that many of us can recognize, because many of us have been touched by Alzheimer’s in one way or another and recognize how frightening it is.

And here she shares her personal experiences with the disease:

I had lost my mother three years before we shot the film. She had Alzheimer’s so I have a lot of feelings about the disease including genuine terror of ending up like that myself.

My instinct is to embrace possession as metaphor for mental deterioration (and vice versa), and to respect this film’s musings on the horror of degenerative diseases and the capacity for strength in a mother and a daughter’s love.

What do you think?

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

‘The Babadook’: Jennifer Kent on Her Savage Domestic Fairy Tale

Jennifer Kent: “I didn’t start with motherhood being the primary focus, but it is a very important part of the film, and I’m very adamant not to make this woman the evil mother. That’s why I placed the film very much inside her experience.”

This is a guest post by Josh Ralske.

Australian writer-director Jennifer Kent’s feature debut The Babadook is the surprise hit horror film of the year. (Read Sarah Smyth’s review here.) With no stars and a limited budget, Kent cannily tells the story of Amelia (Essie Davis), a widow still wracked with grief over the death of her husband six years earlier, and Amelia’s troubled young son Samuel (Noah Wiseman), whose obsessive fear of monsters verges on the manic. One night, Samuel pulls an unfamiliar book from the shelf for his mother to read to him, Mr. Babadook. Amelia reads the book, unleashing the titular monster into their home. The mother and son, and the movie, increasingly retreat into their own horrific private world, terrorized by a fairy tale-like creature that seems intent on driving Amelia into madness.

The narrative is simple, and pointedly familiar, but The Babadook is notable for the complexity of its two main characters, and the remarkable performances that bring them to such vivid life.

We spoke with Kent on the phone about the film’s creation and its success.

Bitch Flicks: Congratulations on all the acclaim that the film is getting.

Jennifer Kent: Thank you. It’s been a real trip. It’s been a long and fantastic journey for this film. It’s been amazing.

BF: How did you get the idea for the film? Are you a parent yourself?

JK: No. No, I’m not. Obviously the mother/child relationship is really important in the film, but what i was really focused on was her, on this woman and her suppression of something she found impossible to face. That was the starting point for me. I feel if you suppress things in life, you don’t just affect yourself; you affect everyone around you. So then the choice to have that little boy in the picture, and to make him a kind of mirror to her was how it worked out. But it wasn’t, for me, entirely a story about motherhood, although that is a really important factor in the film.

BF: I understand what you’re saying about it being a very personal story, and starting with Amelia’s character, and what’s refreshing about it is how complex her character is. She isn’t just one thing. She’s not the type of female protagonist that you see in a typical horror film.

JK: I didn’t start with motherhood being the primary focus, but it is a very important part of the film, and I’m very adamant not to make this woman the evil mother. That’s why I placed the film very much inside her experience. Even when the shit hits the fan later in the film, we’re still experiencing it largely from her perspective, and I wanted her to be complex. She’s trying so hard. She’s a loving person. She’s drowning. She’s a drowning woman in this situation, but she wants to do the right thing, and I was interested in exploring that. I’m the type of person, when I read or hear about these parents killing or harming their kids… Of course it’s a tragedy, and the act of those parents is abominable, but they’re not monsters. They’re human beings. And my empathy and my sensitivity around these things made me curious. How does one get to that place where they become this monstrous mother? How does that happen? And so that’s why, I guess, I feel proud of that character, of Amelia. No one’s saying that she’s a one note character.

BF: Your empathy for the character really comes through. Could you talk a little bit about casting Samuel, and your conception of that character, because again, it’s not a child character that I’ve seen in any other film. He’s a very unique movie kid.

JK: Yeah. If you met [Noah], you’d be shocked, because he’s the opposite of Sam. He’s very quiet and sweet. That’s all acting. And he is an empathetic kid. He really loved Sam. He really felt sorry for Sam, because his mom wouldn’t listen to him. And he was right. And I think the quality that I was looking for in the little boy who would play Sam was that empathy. And of course, Sam’s a strange kid, and very annoying at times, but ultimately, he loves his mom and he wants to protect her. So I needed a child who could embody all those qualities. And someone who could be directed. A lot of kids that come into these auditions, they’re like machines. But they can’t necessarily change and give you a subtle performance. But Noah could, and the key to that for me was improvisation. So we played games and we imagined things with the boys who got down to the final short list. And Noah was a standout in that way: vivid imagination, very emotionally intelligent. And robust. You know, I didn’t want a kid that was going to collapse on the second day of shooting, saying “I wanna go home.” He was there for the six weeks of shooting, day in and day out, and when I think about what he did, it’s an extraordinary thing for a 6-year-old to achieve.

BF: Yeah, that’s amazing. I didn’t know if you’d found a kid who was just sort of like that, or if you’d found someone capable of bringing that character to life without necessarily being that way. That’s interesting.

JK: Yeah, he was really fun and sweet. And in fact, one interesting thing about that process is that kids don’t want to be disobedient, so it was really hard to get him to be that way in rehearsals. I had to give him permission to be naughty, because yeah, kids are socialized — unless they’re brought up badly — to be well-behaved. So yeah, it was a real process for him.

BF: Did you set out to make a horror film? Is that a genre that you’re interested in generally? I noticed the clips from Black Sabbath and House of Exorcism and of course, all those great George Méliès clips that Amelia sees on TV. Is that the type of work that drew you to this type of story?

JK: Yeah. I mean, I love horror. I love it! I even will see most of the modern stuff, and I always hope it’s gonna be good. But I definitely have watched a lot of Italian horror, lot of everything. So it’s in me. It’s in my DNA, but it isn’t the thing that rules me. And I have to say… I can’t speak for other filmmakers, but I imagine it wasn’t something that ruled them either. They start with an idea and a story and that’s what happens. I think there’s a danger in becoming subservient to a genre, going “Oh, I’m going to make a movie that’s going to scare everyone.” I needed to look deeper than that, and that’s why… It’s such an interesting thing, how bad horror can be, and I think when it’s really bad, it’s just made by people who don’t get it. Who don’t understand how powerful it is. You can really discuss deep issues with horror, in a way you can’t through drama. It’s one of the most cinematic genres as well, because it’s very closely linked with dreams. So yeah, I’m a fan.

BF: I agree with you that you can touch on these deep human issue through the genre. It doesn’t just have to be about saying “boo.” Amelia’s grief in the film is such a powerful thing that seems to be the genesis…

JK: Yeah. How would you discover that in drama? It would be very hard to not make it melodramatic. To put it in this realm actually makes people feel what Amelia’s feeling, on some level, and have empathy with her. I’ve noticed that the film doesn’t work with people who have low empathy [laughs] as human beings. It’s not a film for them. The people who it scares have more of that going on in their systems.

BF: Well, I liked it. I thought it was scary. So, I guess I check out on the empathy scale.

JK: So you’re a decent human being. [laughs]

BF: Yeah, I guess. If that’s your barometer for that. It’s really interesting to me. It has these very classical elements to it with the sense of isolation and the darkness and the way the Babadook himself is portrayed. There’s an old-fashioned quality to it. Could you talk about how you decided to visualize this monster?

JK: It was something that just felt right, this kind of childlike world. I’m really drawn to myths, and I guess I wanted to create a new myth in a domestic setting. Old children’s books, old fairy tales — you know, the brutal ones, the real ones — they touch on something very primal. They look childlike and innocuous, but deep down, there’s something really savage and sinister there. So that was my starting point for the world of the film. The book is obviously a very important part of it, so I wanted the Babadook to spring from the book, in terms of its style as well. And there’s something about the old horror that is very childlike, because it’s done in what we would consider now a very simple way, all in-camera techniques, but there’s something still very powerful about that, I think. Sometimes even more powerful than CGI and a lot of complicated post-production work. When something happens in camera, and you’re seeing it with the naked eye, you feel — I feel, anyway — differently. It feels like it’s happening there and it’s more real to me.

BF: I think it’s very effective, and it is an extension of the book in a way that works really well. Could you talk about the book itself? It was great. Very memorable, very vivid work that Alex Juhasz did.

JK: We looked for ages for an artist. We looked at lots of Australian illustrators, and we even worked with a couple in developing the Babadook look, but Alex was unique in that he’s actually an American artist. I saw his work and it was beautiful but really strange. I was drawn to him and his work. He has this thing of being able to keep his work original, but also took direction. So we were able to develop the look of the creature according to how I needed it to operate. So it wasn’t just finding an illustrator to make these beautiful pictures. He really understood the need for it to support the story. He was a good storyteller. And he also had a lot of work in stop motion animation. He designed the opening credits for United States of Tara, and he’d worked a lot with Jamie Caliri, the stop motion animator who did Lemony Snicket‘s end credits. He had a lot of experience that proved invaluable when it came to animating the book. He’s a bit of a genius, Alex.

BF: The illustrations themselves really set the tone for what’s to come.

JK: They come to life, so they needed to be energetic and have an ambitiousness to them.

BF: For women filmmakers, in the states at least, it can be particularly challenging to get a first film made and shown. Is that something you want to address?

JK: I’m not so much aware. I don’t think of myself — I know I’m a woman, of course, but I don’t feel ruled by it. I think a film is hard to make, full stop. I think a person’s first feature is a real trial by fire, no matter if you’re male, female, or otherwise, and it’s not something that I feel really informed me. It certainly didn’t hinder me. Not in Australia, anyway. And I must say, I’ve had a lot of meetings with various people in America since Babadook premiered in Sundance, and admittedly, I haven’t done any work there yet, but I’ve never felt encumbered or restrained by my gender in that context. I’m not saying sexism doesn’t exist, but I don’t give it much time. I’ve got too much to do.

BF: Do you think, though, that — I don’t know, that scene where Amelia is using the vibrator… I’m not sure there are many male filmmakers that would’ve thought to include a scene like that, but it’s an important scene in terms of understanding who Amelia is and what she’s dealing with.

JK: My gaze and my way of looking at the world is inherently feminine, from a feminine perspective, and there are things in that film that probably wouldn’t be written by a male writer. But I don’t know. Isn’t that the way with all films? They come from the person who makes them. I understand what you’re saying, Josh, I’m just trying to… it’s a complex issue. Yes, there’s sexism in the world and there’s an incredible imbalance of males to females represented in all films. Most films are about male stories. So yeah, maybe I just put a female story out there, and the fact that it’s unique says that we still have a long way to go in terms of making more female stories come to life. I hope I can put a few more out there. Female stories with women at their core.

BF: Me, too. Congratulations on this film. It’s very effective and well done. Do you know what your next project is going to be yet?

JK: I’ve got two films I’m working on, and I’ve come back from America with about 25 scripts to read, so I’ll be plowing through them. And it looks like I’m going to jump onto a TV series, to write and direct in America. A miniseries, but that hasn’t been announced, so I’m hesitant to talk about it. A lot of opportunities have come up. I’m in a very fortunate position at the moment, and hopefully we’ll be making something sooner rather than later.

BF: I’m looking forward to seeing what you do next. Thanks a lot for taking the time to speak with me.

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

What We Talk About When We Talk About Suck

So, you just saw a terrible movie and you want to tell the world about it – not so fast. How we frame our discussions about sucky movies depends on who’s listening, and whether we’ve got common ground.

Written by Katherine Murray.

There’s no such thing as a movie that’s universally hated, or a movie that’s universally loved. No matter how awful something is, there’s always somebody who likes it and, no matter how wonderful something is, there’s always somebody who thinks it’s garbage – that is the wondrous variety of human taste.

That said, if there’s one movie that almost everyone agrees is bad, it’s Neil LaBute’s 2006 re-make of The Wicker Man.

Starring Nicholas Cage at his Nicholas Cage-iest, The Wicker Man is a two-hour exercise in casual misogyny, featuring a confusing and unsuspenseful plot. It’s so bad that the YouTube videos designed to make fun of it literally do nothing but show scenes from the movie, exactly as they played out.

It isn’t hard to find people who agree that The Wicker Man was terrible, and it isn’t hard to find people who agree that it was misogynist – what’s weird is that discussions of misogyny in the film usually begin and end with the statement, “Nicholas Cage dresses up as a bear and punches women in the face.” And, while that is entirely terrible on multiple levels, it’s not the most offensive thing about the movie. The most offensive thing about the movie is that it takes for granted that there’s something disturbing and sinister about women who don’t take orders from men.

Billed as a horror story, The Wicker Man follows a detective who’s investigating a case outside his jurisdiction. That means that, when he travels to the remote community where the mystery’s taking place, he doesn’t have the power to make any of the citizens of that community – who are predominantly female – cooperate with him. Instead of adjusting his strategy and approaching them in a friendlier way, he starts off by screaming at everyone he meets, and then acts surprised when they don’t want to help him. Yet, the fact that the female characters recoil from him rather than scrambling to follow his orders is treated, by the movie, as though it’s a sign that Something Is Wrong.

The movie also features a large number of sequences where Nicholas Cage asks a woman a direct question, and the woman a) gives a vague answer that doesn’t help, b) answers with a total non-sequitur, or c) pretends not to understand what he’s talking about in a deliberate attempt to make him feel crazy. In other words, it’s just like talking to your wife – please, take my wife!

At the very end of the movie, when All Is Revealed, it turns out that Nicholas Cage’s ex-girlfriend purposely got pregnant so that she could guilt him into taking an interest in the welfare of their child, and use that as leverage to lure him to the freaky matriarchy she lives in, so that she and her womyn friends could sacrifice him to their pagan god, ‘cause women be bitches like that.

There’s no shortage of angles to take when you’re discussing the misogyny in this film, but the one that seems to resonate most with mainstream audiences is, “Nicholas Cage dresses up like a bear and punches women in the face” – which he does, for the entire final act – because we have achieved a state of gender-awareness in our culture where dressing up as a bear and punching women in the face is almost universally seen as a bad thing to do. Presenting a worldview in which powerful women are inherently threatening, women’s reasoning ability is suspect, and women use sex and pregnancy as a way to trap and manipulate men is actually more misogynist to me than having a guy dress up like a bear and punch women in the face, but that puts me out of step with the general discussion.

In other words, it’s really easy to get buy-in for the idea that The Wicker Man sucks, but we might not be adding much to the discussion of misogyny when we do that.

In fact, the truth is that I find myself not wanting to argue about exactly why this movie is misogynist, because I’m afraid that, if I start disturbing the soil around that one, I’ll quickly uncover the truth that most people don’t understand that misogyny is more than punching someone in the face. I’m afraid I’ll discover that most people hate this movie because it offends their sense that men should be chivalrous toward women – that they would be totally fine with everything else, if only he didn’t dress up like a bear and start punching.

I’m also afraid that the only reason people are really willing to criticize the content of The Wicker Man is because it’s also poorly made from a technical standpoint. If they were enjoying themselves more – if it were a little better-looking, and, technically, more well-crafted, I’m not sure it would be so easy to toss out this level of scorn.

Sin City is a film that is technically well made (so, one step up from The Wicker Man) and still completely blatant in its misogyny (with racism added to spice things up). I can tell you from personal experience that it’s a lot harder to have a conversation about why you hate Sin City than it is to make fun of The Wicker Man.

The first thing that Sin City’s defenders will tell you is that it is hateful on purpose (as though doing it on purpose makes it better). Frank Miller and the movie are imitating film noir – that genre where dames were dames and the hero was a hard-luck, working class guy who was awesome at bare-knuckle boxing, and gay people arrived in a cloud of evil smoke. I get that that’s on purpose, but all it means is that Sin City did a really good job of mimicking something sexist. If it’s not challenging, or examining, or interrogating the sexist thing in any way, then I need another reason for why someone thought that was a good idea.

The problem with criticizing Sin City is that it gets us into a discussion about whether a work of art can be both technically proficient and fundamentally unworthy in some other way. In other words, it gets us into a discussion of what we mean when we say a movie is “good.” Given the history of moral censorship in the United States and Canada, people are rightly cautious of the idea that we should declare things good or bad based on whether or not we agree with their values. At the same time, completely removing yourself from the meaning of a movie, or the ideas it’s trying to express, and focussing just on whether the camera was in the right place, and the pixels were coloured correctly, seems to be missing the point.

Sin City is a staggering technical achievement, and the tone I use when I criticize it is different because of that. It’s not like The Wicker Man, where you can just write it off, and be satisfied that everyone agrees with the broad-stroke message, “This movie was totally bad.” People have passionate feelings about whether or not it’s possible for a misogynist story to be good if it’s also well-executed. They have passionate feelings about whether it’s even appropriate to consider a story’s misogyny (or racism, or homophobia, or other ideological content) in rendering a verdict about it. The truth is, philosophically, I don’t know if it should be possible for a misogynist movie to be “good” – but I know that I can’t quite hear myself saying, “I found this completely hateful and, oh my god, it was the best!”

Just to be clear, for anyone who doesn’t remember the film, Sin City is about three tough, underworld men who interact with subservient women – mostly prostitutes and exotic dancers. The women have no power, no ability to look after themselves, no ability to make decisions – whenever they try to act, they just make things worse. The Black one is “wild” and she thinks it’s sexy when a guy hits her in the face. The Asian one doesn’t talk and carries samurai swords. The one who’s a stripper is told that she’s “strong” because she can really take a beating without screaming or crying about it. All of the women are sexually available to the men at the centre of the story. At one point, the prostitutes tie up one of the men, and it seems like they have the upper hand, but he reveals that he could have escaped at any time and was just humouring them.

It is horrible.

And yet, unpacking the horribleness of Sin City requires a deftness and care that isn’t required for The Wicker Man. You don’t have the automatic buy-in that comes from Nicholas Cage in a bear suit. You have to start talking about what you mean when you say something’s “good.” Imagine how difficult it would be if the misogyny were just a shade less obvious.

Gone Girl is the reason I’m writing this post because, holy shit, it is hard to talk about Gone Girl.

Megan Kearns did an admirable job of explaining what’s wrong with this movie, and I won’t re-tread the same criticisms, but my reaction, watching it opening weekend, was one of total shock. I could not believe the dedication with which this script was trying to score misogynist bingo. Like, I thought it was written by an MRA hate group. The overriding message, intentionally or not, is that, when a woman says a man attacked her, you should never, ever believe her, because it’s probably part of a nefarious scheme she cooked up just to get revenge on him for something, and women are crazy like that.

Unfortunately, we already live in a world where, every time a woman says a man attacked her, a thousand people who don’t even know her rush forward to call her a liar. We live in a world where guys I actually know said this Jian Ghomeshi stuff was probably a lie before any of us even knew what it was. We live in a world where one of the same guys said that whether you need a girl’s permission to punch her in the face during sex is “kind of” a murky issue (it’s not).

Watching Gone Girl spin out a misogynist fever dream about the lying liars we call women was unsettling enough, but a cursory search of the internet also revealed that this has been a longstanding argument since the novel came out, and that things seem to have settled in a place where it’s not cool to be annoyed by this story. In fact, trying to have a conversation about why you don’t like Gone Girl is like walking through a mine field that calls you a misandrist bitch. Don’t you believe that some men are trapped in abusive relationships? Don’t you believe that some women lie about rape? Don’t you think that people manipulate each other sometimes? Or can you just not handle the idea that any woman in a movie isn’t perfect? Does every woman in every movie that you deign to like have to be a role model? Can you handle the idea that some women aren’t very nice?

Honestly, it just makes me more entrenched in my original assessment that this wasn’t a very good movie.

Gone Girl is, I think, less well-made than Sin City, but worlds beyond The Wicker Man. What makes it difficult to talk about is that the problems with the story – as I’m choosing to call them – are much less concrete than dressing up like a bear and punching someone in the face. In order to talk about Gone Girl we have to talk about the much more abstract question of whether it seems appropriate, given the current political climate, and the rate of violence against women, and the difficulty women have in being believed when they report being assaulted by men – in that climate, do you think it’s appropriate, or do you think it necessarily constitutes a hostile act, to tell a story where the moral is that women are crazy liars and no one should ever believe them?

That’s harder to deal with than Nicholas Cage in a bear suit.

I don’t know the proper way to talk about movies that suck – or the proper way to determine whether they suck at all – but the answer might be that, instead of deciding whether or not something sucks, or how many stars it should have on a scale of one to five, we should talk about movies not as wholes to be judged, but collections of various elements, some of which are great (or fine) and some of which are problematic.

Don’t get me wrong – I love to say “suck,” and I doubt that I’m going to stop – but it occurs to me that I’m less prepared to argue for why any of these movies sucked than I am to argue for why I found particular elements troubling. I think that might be what I’m talking about, when I talk about suck. And I think I might be more eloquent, if I paid more attention to that.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

“But I Do!”: Releasing Repressed Rage in ‘The Ring’

These abstract symbols not only frighten, but link events in the real world to Samara’s cursed tape: this particular creature recalls the “spiders, snails, and puppy-dog tails” that little girls are decidedly not supposed to be made of. When Rachel engages this videotape, notably created by the patriarchal forces that might be seen to repress Samara, she sees Samara in a sparse hospital room in fast motion, staring at the clock as its hands whirl around and around.

This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.

If horror films with little girls at their centers express anxieties about puberty, female potential, or the morphing of charming young women into screeching harpies, then The Ring is probably one of the best examples. Its little girl, Samara Morgan, seems to be just plain inexplicably evil.

If recounted chronologically, her “real world” back story goes something like this: Samara was adopted by Richard and Anna Morgan when Anna failed (repeatedly) to conceive. I should note that I’m not talking about the sequels, which to me are clearly made not because we necessarily want to know more about the story and the characters, but because the first film enjoyed some financial success. Anyway, after the adoption, strange things begin to happen at the Morgan’s horse ranch, including the animals going crazy and drowning themselves. Anna begins seeing things, and believes the terrifying images are generated by Samara. The Morgans decide to seek psychiatric treatment for Anna and for Samara; at some point both are released, but Anna is still disturbed. Believing Samara to be the source of her visions, Anna suffocates her daughter and throws her into a well, then leaps off a cliff near their home.

But Samara isn’t dead, and spends seven days expiring at the bottom of said well. Afterward, well, even if she wasn’t evil before, she certainly has an axe to grind. Samara’s supernatural obsession becomes “showing” people terrible “things,” through her strange psychic ability, which gives her the power to create media—this special talent eventually takes the form of a cursed videotape that kills the viewer seven days after watching. Usually this process involves a very waterlogged and very scary-looking Samara crawling out of a leaky television set and looking at the victim with her very angry eye, whereupon that victim also suddenly becomes very scary-looking and waterlogged, but also totally dead.

When I saw the film on its release, I slept with the lights on for seven days. Yes, me: horror film aficionista, one who has seen some pretty intense stuff in the service of her dissertation research. Right. While at the time I was kind of obsessed with figuring out just why the film scared me so much, now I am kind of obsessed with one scene—hell, just a few shots—and one line of dialogue from the movie.

It’s probably not the scene that immediately springs to the mind of most folks who have seen the film. It’s not the last terrifying moments in Noah’s (Martin Henderson) life where a slimy Samara (Daveigh Chase) slithers out of a television screen and stalks him across his studio apartment to fulfill her awful curse. It’s not even the first of many interruptions of the linear narrative with shocking or weird images: where in the midst of Rachel’s (Naomi Watts) conversation with her bereaved sister Ruth (Lindsay Frost), we’re treated to a brief shot of poor Katie (Amber Tamlyn), the film’s first victim, crouched in a closet with a horrifying look on her dead face. It’s the scene when Rachel, previously rebuffed by Mr. Morgan in her search to discover who Anna Morgan and her daughter were, returns to his farm at night (brilliant move in a horror film) and stumbles upon a videotape of Samara Morgan’s psychotherapy.

We know that something significant is about to happen because—aside from the usual horror film suspense buildup—Rachel is surprised by a centipede as she rifles through a box of the Morgan’s belongings. She’s seen this centipede before in the fabled videotape that kills you, and throughout the film images from the tape seem to intrude little by little onto the real world. These abstract symbols not only frighten, but link events in the real world to Samara’s cursed tape: this particular creature recalls the “spiders, snails, and puppy-dog tails” that little girls are decidedly not supposed to be made of. When Rachel engages this videotape, notably created by the patriarchal forces that might be seen to repress Samara, she sees Samara in a sparse hospital room in fast motion, staring at the clock as its hands whirl around and around. An off-camera doctor indicates that they are in hour 14 of therapy–a therapy where Samara is wired with electrodes, plugged into a wall, and asked a variety of questions. The doctor makes several inquiries before she responds. But the most disturbing and important moment occurs when, just after Samara asserts that she loves her mommy, the Doc indicates that Samara is hurting her. When he says, “You don’t want to hurt anyone,” Samara responds: “But I do, and I’m sorry. It won’t stop.”

A revelation! A young girl supposedly given up by her family, subsequently adopted, and then poked and prodded by medical science and creepy male psychologists admits to having feelings other than love, maternity, and joy? Amazing! So although as a society we might locate a lot of anxiety in the maturation of young girls, this film—at least for a moment—doesn’t repress the idea that young girls might have feelings other than the ones society tells them to have. What’s problematic, of course, is that the film sees this admission as evidence of Samara’s evil. While the film overall may not be very progressive in terms of its depiction of women, and young girls in particular, it does have this ONE MOMENT of openness, like a valve releasing some of the pressure of repression.

In addition to admitting that she wants to hurt people, Samara is plagued by the idea that her adopted father is going to leave her in the institution, that he doesn’t love her. Eventually, her mother kills her, ostensibly because her idealization of what it means to be a mother didn’t come true exactly as she envisioned it. Because her adopted daughter isn’t “sugar and spice and everything nice” all the time. The expectations that society doles out for young girls and for mothers is far from realistic. Is this disconnect the real horror?

I’d like to take a moment to point out that Aiden (David Dorfman), Rachel’s young son, is far from a normal kid. He’s able to channel that creepy-but-probably-our-hero vibe that was perhaps first perfected by Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense just a few years before The Ring. Rachel is also probably not up for a Mom-of-the-Year Award; like Anna and Richard Morgan, she and Noah haven’t been the best parents in the world. Ruth Goldberg has written insightfully about the mirroring present in The Ring between Anna and Richard Morgan and Rachel and Noah with Aiden in Barry Keith Grant’s book on horror film, The Planks of Reason. It’s very clear that while Aiden is a model kid—picking out not only his clothes for Katie’s funeral, but Rachel’s as well, and being extraordinarily self-sufficient because Rachel is working all the time—Rachel and Noah are far from model parents. While she certainly doesn’t seem to share Anna Morgan’s homicidal ideas, Rachel’s life is not exactly constructed to be conducive to having a young child; she relies on Aiden’s capable nature to take up the slack. So really, part of the “terror” of little girls has to do with their mothers—the expectations that society heaps upon them for a “perfect” child, and that they must always, under all circumstances (including unrelenting evil) love their offspring. Certainly reality is far more complicated, and motherhood and childhood much more complex. If The Ring is expressing THAT anxiety, then the film’s success should be evidence that this is a conversation society needs to have.

On that note, one final word on sequels. I might have tipped my hand in the paragraphs above about my general feelings for them, but I do at the end of the day have a hard time believing that any film project is mounted for purely financial or business-oriented reasons. I have to think that there’s just too much work involved in an endeavor like filmmaking to justify it with solely materialistic motives. Therefore, if there are sequels to The Ring (which there are, but which I judge to be inferior in many ways to the style of the original—which was not even an “original,” but that’s another essay), then it’s because there’s some deeper driving force behind the need to express the anxieties at their center. So, I’ll tentatively say: onward to The Ring 3! Perhaps the most frightening things about this film in the end are its telling links to some of the more frightening aspects of our own society. If it takes sequels to work those issues out, bring them on.

Rebecca Willoughby holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University. She writes most frequently on horror films and melodrama, and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

Self-Made Orphan: Why We Cringe When Karen Cooper Snacks on Her Dad

This guest post by Julia Patt appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.

Kyra Schon had exactly one line—“I hurt”—and less than ten minutes of screen time in George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead. Much of her role consisted of lying supine on a table. Her big scene happened 84 minutes into a 95-minute film. Her character is not a perennial favorite on the creepiest kids in cinema lists. (Although when she does appear, she’s No. 1.) But before Regan MacNeil showed us her infamous head-spinning trick, before Damien took the world’s most sinister tricycle ride, and before Samara hauled herself out of the television and into our nightmares, there was little Karen Cooper, who ate her dad and stabbed her mom with a garden trowel.

It’s impossible to understand Karen without discussing her parents, Harry (Karl Hardman) and Helen (Marilyn Eastman); initially, her family is all that gives her context in Romero’s strange new world. But the Coopers always bothered me in Night of the Living Dead. They didn’t seem to belong. After all, almost half the film passes before they appear. Ben (Duane Jones), our protagonist, has spent a good chunk of screen time securing an abandoned farmhouse against the undead. All the stuff you want a good survivor to do, he does: barricade the doors and windows, look for supplies, and settle the nearly catatonic survivor-girl Barbra (Judith O’Dea) on the sofa. Forty minutes in and we’re all ready to weather the long night of Romero’s undead apocalypse.

And then the Coopers emerge from the cellar snarling with metaphorical significance—i.e., the nuclear family staggers out of the underworld to reassert its importance. We’re what you’re meant to defend, they seem to say. Of course, their presence also highlights the awful truth of any zombie apocalypse film: there are no safe places.

If the dead don’t overrun a stronghold, you will have to deal with the living eventually.

By the way, good luck if the living you have to deal with is Harry Cooper. He’s all the worst characteristics of the patriarchy packaged and amplified: aggressive, entitled, self-centered, oddly petulant, and arrogant. He won’t apologize for not coming up to help, despite hearing Barbra’s screams. Instead, he lashes out at Ben for criticizing him. When the others refuse to join him in the cellar, he throws a temper tantrum. He’ll board up that door and leave them to rot, understand? Moments later, he furiously demands they share the supplies Ben’s scavenged from the house. “We’ve got to have food down there,” Harry blusters. “We’ve got a right.” Helen, his wife, is not much more compelling. Bitter and cynical, she can’t resist poking at her husband’s neuroses:

“That’s important, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“To be right and for everyone else to be wrong.”

We know from just a few lines of dialogue that this is no close-knit couple or loving family, for all that its structure might evoke white picket fences and suburban houses. (Note: it’s unclear where the Coopers come from, but they seem neither rural nor urban.) And in case we miss the point, Helen sums up their situation this way: “We may not enjoy living together. But dying together isn’t going to solve anything.”

The crumbling cement in this relationship is the injured little girl lying on the table downstairs. Her parents are united only on the question of her safety. Unsurprisingly, Karen has no voice or agency of her own. The adults perceive her as entirely helpless— “Maybe it’s shock,” her mother says of her condition. “She can’t possibly take all the racket…” her father objects to bringing her upstairs. She is, they believe, the thing to be protected, shielded from the horror of the events outside. Like the house itself, if they can get her through the night, it will all be OK.

What no one understands in Romero’s first film is, of course, that the undead have already infected Karen. While audiences of Dawn of the Dead and every zombie movie after know that a bite is a death sentence, the characters in Night of the Living Dead haven’t fully realized what they will have to sacrifice. The news reports in the background that families “will have to forgo the dubious comfort of a funeral.” But the problem is much more insidious and frightening: families will have to forgo the comfort of family in order to survive.

It only takes a brief moment of contact for the Coopers to lose Karen. And no amount of hand-holding or parental influence will undo the contamination. While many debate the extent to which Night of the Living Dead is a political allegory, Romero has repeatedly stated he wanted the film to capture the social unrest of the 1960s. Once exposed to the chaos of the world outside, Karen is irrevocably changed. She is about to become part of the danger. Only Ben seems at all cognizant of the fact that she may pose a threat to them. “Who knows what kind of disease those things carry,” he points out when her parents acknowledge that she’s been bitten.

Until the end of the film, Karen remains what she seems: a sick little girl. She dies and rises amidst the chaos of the house being overrun by the undead. After a struggle, Ben shoots Harry, who went for his gun. Harry stumbles down to the cellar and staggers towards his little girl, hand outstretched in what should be a touching scene between parent and child. The next time we see the two of them, Karen crouches over her father—now dead or unconscious— a handful of meat in her hands and his blood on her lips. She does not need his affection, but she will take sustenance from him.

Undead Karen takes a bite out of dear old Dad

Helen finds them this way and, having drawn Karen’s attention, backs into a corner, horrified. Karen advances and then stabs her mother with a garden trowel in an almost surreal, Hitchcockian sequence. Helen is helpless against her undead daughter. All she can say is “baby,” which Karen does not acknowledge or recognize. Her murder of her mother is ultra-violent; she deals several blows to Helen’s abdomen, thus destroying the origin of her own life.

Romero’s living dead regularly use tools

The film and the scene disturbed audiences to no end, and Karen Cooper has become one of the iconic images of Romero’s films. As said, her moment is brief. Yet, it sticks with us. If we compare Karen to the other women in the film, she initially does not seem unlike Barbra, who is mostly helpless and overwhelmed. She must depend on the others for her survival; alone, she wouldn’t make it. Predictably, these young women are fragile, delicate, and need protection. They are not meant for the horrors outside the house.

This appears to be true up until Karen’s point of resurrection. Where Barbra is devoured, Karen is transformed. Unlike her parents, who are trying to hold onto the old social norms, or Ben, who will do anything to survive, Karen joins the restless mob of the undead. Not consciously or willfully, it’s true, but the end result is the same. Although briefly a victim, she becomes the monster and destroys the remains of her family. She cements her status as a member of the undead by consuming her father and increases their numbers by murdering her mother. These two acts definitively separate her from humanity. She neither wants nor needs the shelter of the family unit.

What’s subversive about Karen Cooper, then, is that she doesn’t just die. In the eyes of society, a good, innocent little girl would simply perish when she encounters something so monstrous. Instead, she joins it. Embodied in her, the new generation does not save us or give us hope. Rather, they become part of the chaos. And no amount of reasoning or pleading will sway them.

Julia Patt is a writer from Maryland. She also edits 7×20, a journal of twitter literature, and is a regular contributor to the Tate Street High Society literary blog. Follow her on twitter: https://twitter.com/chidorme

‘Haunter’: Where Ghost Power Meets Girl Power

In ‘Haunter,’ Abigail Breslin plays a teenager who galvanizes a team of young women to challenge their evil oppressor together! Oh, and they’re all dead.

“We can send this bastard to hell, but we have to do it together.”

Written by Mychael Blinde.

In Haunter, Abigail Breslin plays a teenager who galvanizes a team of young women to challenge their evil oppressor together! Oh, and they’re all dead.

Haunter (2013) is a scary – and yet feel-good! — teenage-lady-driven horror film. It’s creepy but not gory, and Breslin and her character, Lisa, are both fantastic.

The most recent film by Haunter’s director, Vincenzo Natali, was Splice, a film I very much enjoyed.

A wonderful film about wombs and monsters.

Haunter’s horror is very different from the science-driven horror of Splice. In Natali’s words: “I would almost call Haunter ‘fantasmagorica.’ It’s somewhat of a fantasy with darkness lurking around the edges.”

Splice-Haunter — In other words, fewer sluggy hybrid monsters ripping each other to shreds. More fog.

Speaking of films that Haunter is not like, Haunter is not like The Sixth Sense or The Others. In those films, the protaghostnist’s status is revealed as the final twist, whereas in Haunter, we learn relatively early on that Lisa and her family are the dead characters.

We meet Lisa just a few days after she’s discovered that she, her mother, her brother, and her father are all stuck reliving the same Sunday over and over again, trapped in their house by a thick fog that distorts space and prevents escape.

Carol, Bruce, Lisa, Robbie, and Edgar. The family doesn’t have a last name.

Not that Lisa’s family is remotely interested in escape – they seem blissfully unaware of the daily repetition and express concern for Lisa when she tries to explain it to them.

“Some clothes are missing from the laundry. Do you know where they are?”

Lisa is frustrated with her family’s denseness, and also alarmed to discover strange and creepy things happening around the house… and she keeps hearing someone whisper her name.

Then an evil presence intrudes on her family in the guise of a telephone repairman. This character is named Edgar Mullins, but actor Stephen McHattie is credited as The Pale Man.

“Whenever you hear strange noises in this house, or voices calling out to you, ignore them.”

The Pale Man confirms what we, the audience, already suspected: this repeated Sunday – the day before Lisa’s 16th birthday – is her death day. Lisa is the ghost, and the voice she’s hearing is from the world of the living.

The Pale Man warns her: “If you should try to contact the living, or anyone else, you and your family will suffer in ways you cannot fathom.” But Lisa figures out that the living are already suffering, and that she’s been summoned by the living teenager in the house, Olivia, who is seeking Lisa’s help.

Lisa and Olivia, sharing a house and yet worlds away.

Lisa proves herself to be a smart, brave, and determined protagonist. She sends out a message to all of the Pale Man’s victims: “We can send this bastard to hell, but we have to do it together.”

And sure enough, she teams up with Olivia and with all the other young lady ghosts killed by the Pale Man’s evil, and together they vanquish him! Lisa restores order and peace to both life AND the afterlife.

This is a wonderful exception to film after film after film after film of male characters saving the day. It’s especially nice to see a teenage girl not only carry this movie, but succeed as the hero, and to see so many female characters join together to defeat their oppressor.

By making Lisa and her family ghosts and cluing the viewer into their ghost-status early in the film, Haunter sidesteps the most pervasive problem in haunted house films: the JUST GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE HOUSE problem. (I mean, REALLY, why did they even move there in the first place?!)

The question Haunter inspires isn’t, “Why don’t they just leave the house?”

Instead, Haunter asks:

If YOU were stuck in a house reliving the same day over and over, would you risk tangling with powerful forces beyond your control to escape? What if lives are at stake – but you’re dead?

Abigail Breslin:

I wanted to find a horror movie to do that was really smart and unique and different. And when I read this, I thought it was really exciting. I loved the character and the story—and it took me like three reads before I truly figured out what was going on. I love that you can’t really call the shots. It’s not really your typical horror flick. I love supernatural stories—demons and ghosts…I want the suspense, the spine-tingle, the story you’re trying to unravel.

Haunter does get a little confusing at times, primarily because the house exists in one physical space and yet on different planes of existence:

Vincenzo Natali:

Even though the film takes place entirely in this house, the house is in itself a kind of universe. It’s a universe composed of various strata of different time periods and I loved the way the script opened up. We thought we were in one kind of world and then as this thing unravels, we realize that it’s something much larger than that.

I think this overlapping of worlds and women was an interesting idea to explore, and worth the minor confusion. The overlapping timeframes allow these young women to work together to overthrow the malevolent Pale Man.

Sure, he might be scary…

…but she’s scarier!

I never thought I would be so happy to see this face.

I read Haunter as a film about the triumph of teamwork against a tyrannical patriarchy.

The film is driven by the fear of male control and aggression, fear of men’s anger and their capacity for violence. The Pale Man kills by inspiring a murderous rage in the husband/father figure, which results in the death of the entire family.

Trigger Warning for domestic violence. It gets intense. — Trigger warning for domestic violence. It gets intense.

Here’s how Natali describes the Pale Man:

He is the Minotaur in the maze. Or the spider in the center of the web. He is the manipulator. He’s that thing you don’t see, but you know is there and waiting for you.

He is the patriarchy: he enforces an invisible oppression through the systemic subjugation of women. Then a brave young woman overcomes her subjugation and inspires a group of women to join forces, to create a new and better world for the living and the dead alike.

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Mychael Blinde writes about representations of gender in popular culture at Vagina Dentwata.

Talking with Horror’s Twisted Twins: An Interview with the Soska Sisters

To get an idea of the Soska sisters, picture ‘The Shining’s Grady twins, only all grown up and in control of their destinies. Just in time for Halloween, Jen and Sylvia Soska spoke with us about their favorite horror movies, the hardships of working as female directors in masculine genre, their work on ‘See No Evil 2’ and what’s next for their careers.

To get an idea of the Soska sisters, picture The Shining’s Grady twins, only all grown up and in control of their destinies.

As kids, Jen and Sylvia Soska were drawn to horror movies, fascinated by the spectacle of the genre and the mystique of the Final Girl. When they grew up, they tried acting, only to find the roles they were offered as a set identical twin actresses, were either infantilizing or fetishistic.

Fed up, they wrote, directed and starred in Dead Hooker in a Trunk , a low-budget strike-out at the constraints they faced in film school. Next came cult favorite, American Mary, a dark journey through the world of body modification and the controversial rape-revenge genre. One of my personal favourite horror movies, American Mary features a fascinating central character in Mary Mason (Katherine Isabelle), who morphs from anxious med-student to a cold as ice antihero we can’t help but root for, even as she becomes a monster.

Their new film See No Evil 2, a sequel to the 2006 WWE Studios production, See No Evil, is an entertaining and well-thought out slasher flick that knows the genre conventions well enough to simultaneously play around with them and celebrate their fun. All the familiar elements from the sisters’ previous films are there: three dimensional female characters, gore and gleeful violence, splashes of humour, and a Hitchcock-style cameo, now paired with the terrifying figure of wrestler Glenn “Kane” Jacobs, a longtime favorite of the sisters, as the hulking serial killer, Jacob Goodnight.

Just in time for Halloween, the Soska sisters spoke with us about their favorite horror movies, the hardships of working as female directors in masculine genre, their work on See No Evil 2 and what’s next for their careers.

Bitch Flicks: What horror films do you remember scaring or affecting you as children?

Sylvia: Poltergeist– it was our first horror film that was the catalyst to our mum explaining how filmmaking really works and us falling deeply in love with the genre. I remember The Stand was the next thing to really scare the shit out of me. I saw Hellraiser at a very young age, but I was so into prosthetics that it was just beautiful to me.

Jen: Alien, too. I remember being so scared at the end and my mum telling me not to worry because Ripley always wins. I was witnessing the evolution of the final girl without even knowing it.

BF: How did you realize you could create your own films?

S: By being pushed to the point where we made a punk rock FU in the form of a short film faux trailer called Dead Hooker in a Trunk. We are life long failed actresses that wanted to use our martial arts experience to get into stunt work that ended up in a crappy film school which was for us the last straw. They took away our budget for our final project, so we decided to write, direct, produce, star in, and do the stunt work for our own project. We were annoyed so we made sure to make it as batshit insane and offensive as possible. And come graduation night, it played to half the audience walking out and the other half cheering so loud you could barely hear the crass dialogue. That was what started it.

J: Robert Rodriguez and his book Rebel Without a Crew was a huge influence, too. Rodriguez has his epic Ten Minute Film School segments where he shows filmmakers how to do what he does in his films. I used to think I wanted to be an actor before I realized how much more fulfilling directing and writing is. You get to create this whole world, and stories, and characters. As an actor you’re usually chasing work you don’t even want just to be working.

BF: Can you tell me about the change from being actresses to filmmakers in charge of your own productions? Was the change empowering?

S: It was so empowering. Neither of us are fans of labeling, but being twins – people just put you in this box. As kids, it was cutesy, talk at the same time stuff, as we grew older it became overtly sexual, talk at the same time stuff. As we got into our twenties, we knew we wanted to do something different. I love watching films and always fantasized about what I would do if I could make films, I never thought it could be a reality. To have the job of creating the characters that we do and making the films that we do is an amazing opportunity.

J: It felt like coming home. In a weird way all the skills we had that we didn’t think had anything to do with one another just came together. I love filmmaking. We’re natural story tellers so being able to turn our ideas, concepts, and characters to the big screen is the most unbelievable feeling.

BF: Why are you drawn to horror? What came first, an interest in filmmaking or in horror? Did you seek out horror or fall into the genre due to its accessibility to low budget production?

S:I never even realized the effect horror films had on me until I went into filmmaking. I see all of my interests like horror films, comic books, video games, and wrestling reflected in what I do now because I grew up on that stuff and it moulded me into the strange individual I am today. The reason why DHIAT was low budget was because we didn’t know how hard or expensive making a movie would be. We read Rebel Without a Crew, we saw Grindhouse in the theaters a million times and thought, yup, we gotta make a feature film called Dead Hooker in a Trunk. We have to do that.

J: I’ve loved horror movies as far back as I can remember. It’s definitely not because it can be done inexpensively at even a low level. Surely documentaries and dramas are even easier to do on a small budget. Horror is just so much fun. You go to horror film festivals or conventions and you find the happiest, most out going people in the world. People who are into horror just seem to be happier, nicer people. Maybe it’s because we get out all our aggression on the screen, ha ha

BF: Have you ever wanted to experiment with a different genre?

S: Absolutely. It started with us wanting to tackle every sub genre within horror – so far we have body horror and slasher, maybe grindhouse if you really want to stretch the genre, and I don’t know what our ABCs of Death 2 segment, T is for Torture Porn, would be categorized as. We are just in post production on our first action film, part of the WWE Studios and Lionsgate Film Action Six Pack Series, called Vendetta, starring Dean Cain, Paul “Big Show” Wight, and Michael Eklund. It’s the macho-est thing we have ever done – it’s very gritty and super violent.

J: We definitely want to tackle each and every sub genre in horror. I wouldn’t say there’s really any genre we wouldn’t want to take on. It all depends on the project. We’d even make a kids movie if they’d ever let us, ha ha. I’d really love to make a Western. We’ll be doing our first comic book adaptation when we bring Jimmy Palmiotti’s Painkiller Jane to the big screen.

BF: Can you tell me a bit about some of your influences?

S: I adore Lars Von Trier’s work, it’s so unforgivingly bleak yet beautiful what he does. Takeshi Miike is just a master of tone and gore. Mary Harron is my hero, seeing her speak was the reason why I wanted to be a director – she’s so eloquent and her films deliver such a punch. We learned how films got made from Robert Rodriguez – we adore his work!

J: I love Joss Whedon. His writing, humor, characters, and story arcs are just incredible. I’ve loved him since he worked on Roseanne, but it was Buffy that really made me fall for him and his stereotype breaking, unconventional characters. And his out of nowhere, heart breaking favorite character deaths.

BF: Do you ever experience any prejudice or roadblocks as women in horror? Has that effected your sensibility? Difficulty getting funding?

S: Always and I think it might be forever. No matter how many cool people are out there, there will be hateful people that are bigoted, cruel, and disrespectful. We paid for our first film, my parents – who are the most wonderful and supportive people on the planet – re-mortgaged their home to invest in American Mary so it could happen, and then there came Lionsgate and WWE Studios who loved our stuff and wanted to team up to make some cool films. Getting funding is difficult, there are some misogynistic pricks out there but there are also a lot of cool people who don’t suck at life; with our time working with these studios – we got cool people who were funding the projects.

J: Oh, sure. But sexism is an issue much bigger than the film industry. I’ve encountered it everywhere I’ve worked and usually paired with ageism. We’ve never encountered it from someone who is actually successful and happy with their lives. It’s more often miserable people, often ones who somehow failed forward and are wanna be filmmakers themselves who end up just resenting us.

BF: Do you feel your films have a female sensibility? What other horror films do you feel might have a female sensibility? What would your dream film be?

S: Definitely, but it’s because Jen and I don’t believe in disposable characters. Everyone who exists in one of our films is important and unique. I think it comes from our acting days when we’d find ourselves going for roles that were lame just because we wanted to be working. Some awesome horror films with female sensibility would be Stoker, Excision , Spring , Martyrs, Inside, and Audition. You really get to see real, flawed female characters taking centre stage in these very amazing films. Being Hungarian, the dream project that we really want is Elizabeth Bathory, the Blood Countess.

J: You can kill a hundred people in a film and have it not connect at all with the audience or you can kill a single person in a very real and emotional way. I think women have more of an eye for suffering. I totally agree with Sylv. It would be such a thrill to bring the Hungarian Murderess, Elizabeth Bathory.

BF: Do you feel you have a certain responsibility as female directors working in horror? Why is it important to have a female voice in horror?

S: Yes, because there are so few of us working. Not because there is a lack of female directors, but a serious lack of female directors being hired. Thank God you have directors like Jovanka Vuckovic making Clive Barker’s Jacqueline Ess and Kathryn Bigelow kicking ass all kinds of ass, and this is the same filmmaker that made the amazingly bro-tastic Point Break. That said, I want to see more. When you don’t have the perspective of half your population weighing in artistically there is a problem. There are too many stories not being told.

J: I wish I had more female role models growing up. The directors I loved that had the biggest influence on me were all male directors. John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Clive Barker, Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch… It’s really important for us to do well so that other little girls can be inspired to be filmmakers, too. We need to hear more female voices.

BF: You’ve set out to cast women in lead roles in your films. Dead Hooker in the Truck was originally intended for an all women cast. There are several prominent female characters in See No Evil 2. Why is this important to you? Why do you cast yourselves in your films?

S: I have watched too many two-dimensional throwaway female characters. I have read for too many of them. I think it’s time to see the modern woman reflected properly in our entertainment. I want to see as versatile and complicated characters as are traditionally given to leading men. We play a lot with gender stereotypes in our films. I think gender is a big issue right now, things are slowly starting to change, and I want to be a part of that. As for our own cameos in our films, it’s something we loved that Hitchcock used to do. That and kill blondes.

J: I spent too much of my acting days chasing after roles I didn’t really even want. The options out there for women, let alone identical twins, was incredibly limiting. I like to write the kind of roles I would have killed to play or even audition for. We don’t believe in throwaway characters. Everyone that’s there needs a purpose and to look hot isn’t enough of one. I love Joss Whedon’s answer to “why do you write strong women?” “Because you’re still asking me that.” Women are every bit as strong and complex and interesting as men, but that’s just not often reflected enough in the films we see coming out. Women have such a capacity for evil. Just check out David Fincher’s Gone Girl. It’s such a beautifully executed film.

BF: What is your process working together? Do you each tackle different things? How has working with a partner changed your approach or refined it?

S: Jen and I are born collaborators. We went to school together, we’ve always been roommates, we’ve shared the same jobs, we have collaboration down to a fine art in a creepy The Shining hive mind kind of way. We have similar interests, but we are very different people. We take different paths to get to the same place. It is definitely more refined now, we just know what needs to be done and just divide and conquer. Jen’s awesome to work with on set, I’m really lucky.

J: I’ve never not had a partner. I’m a twin. I’m very lucky to have been born with such a talented artist, best friend, and strong business partner. Sylv is awesome. She’s so darkly creative. We have the same sensibilities and humor, but we’re very different. We always arrive at the same goal, but the ways we get there are very different. We really do compliment each other.

BF: How has being twins shaped your careers? Twins are quite a horror trope in itself, has that influenced you in your lives and attraction to horror?

S: My whole life I’ve walked into rooms and hear people talk about us being twins. It’s cool, but I wanted to be something more than that and it’s proven to be a difficult task. We felt confidant that being filmmakers could be recognizable than being twins. I remember the first time I heard someone call us the Twisted Twins and I fucking loved it. We are definitely seen as a sideshow oddity, which doesn’t bother me. I’m a freak, I like freaks. I love being a twin. It seems sad to me to not have a twin.

J: I’ve gratefully never had to know what it’s like to not have a twin. It’s really the greatest thing ever. I feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t have a twin. Because we’re twins we have always stood out in a crowd and grew up with people staring at us. Being an identical twin is also like having a backstage pass to the greatest shit. You will definitely see duality in our films. We love symmetry, you can see it in our cinematography. We like to show two sides to each of our characters. We’ll repeat little things, lines, or actions. Often in foreshadowing.

BF: How do you feel about your reputation as cult favorites?

S: I feel like we showed up under-dressed and over-loud with these crazy films and some people totally got it and decided to support us; and other people just loathe our existence. I like that the people that do like our films really fucking like them, that’s more than you could ever ask for!

J: It’s an insane honor! I can’t believe it, it’s just so surreal. I’m so grateful. It’s so weird to me that all the stuff we were made fun of for liking and being into growing up are the things people really seem to like about us now. I think all us nerds just grew up and took over, ha ha.

BF: As horror films, your films feature a lot of violence against women, how do you feel about this? Is it empowering to shape these narratives yourselves with a female voice? For example, American Mary works as a rape revenge story and Dead Hooker in The Trunk features a prolonged flashback to the beating of a prostitute.

S: The prolonged death of the Hooker in DHIAT 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. When working girls go missing, people don’t really care. We wanted people to care about the Hooker, we wanted to show that yeah, there’s a lot of silly stuff in the film to laugh at, but when it comes to the physical destruction of this woman, it’s not a joke. 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.

J: Mary had her morals compromised and her ideals of being one of the guys, one of the surgeons she so admired, destroyed steadily before the rape. That was just the last thing she believed in taken away from her. Her idol fallen in a big way. 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.

BF: Can you tell me a bit about See No Evil 2 and how you got involved in it and working with WWE?

S: After American Mary, we took meeting after meeting to get to work on our next film, an original monster movie called BOB, but all they wanted to see was a watered down version of American Mary. It was getting depressing. People think after you have a critically acclaimed film everything just falls into place, it doesn’t. When we got the offer for See No Evil 2, we were super excited. We are huge WWE fangirls, we started watching when the Kane character was introduced, and it was a cool slasher – it was a dream project. Lionsgate and WWE have been incredibly supportive collaborative partners.

J: We really love horror and want to take on every sub genre in horror. Not too many directors get the opportunity to.

BF: What was it like approaching a story for a sequel rather than an original story and working with someone else’s script? How did you put your personal spin on the project?

S: It was really fun, but that’s in large part because of the writers, Nathan Brookes and Bobby Lee Darby, because they have very similar sensibilities to us. They are very rad Brits and that like to horribly murder people in their scripts. As soon as we got involved, we all got into the story, what we had, what we could do to push it more, it was a very collaborative process. Then you get Danielle Harris and Glenn ‘Kane’ Jacobs involved and the script evolves moreso. We got to put a lot of ourselves into the film – Tamara [Katherine Isabelle’s character] is Jen on a date.

J: Ha ha, only a good one. I’ve been known to take dates on Buffy~esque walks in the graveyard. I would be the first one to suggest going down to the morgue, especially to take a peek at Jacob Goodnight. It was important for all the characters to matter and be strong, but especially the girls. I like that we were able to continue on our signature of keeping our audiences guessing. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I won’t go into much more detail. You can definitely feel our humor and sensibilities in this one.

BF: What was it like working with Kane?

S: An amazing experience. As a fan, I had inhumanly high expectations on this hero I grew up watching. Somehow, he managed to be even better than that. Glenn is so professional, so hard working, and just a genuinely wonderful human being. He’s so smart, he brought so much to making this the next evolution of Jacob Goodnight, and he is so psychically capable that we could really show off his Hulk-strength in the film. I loved working with him. I actually cannot wait to work with him again, there’s a lot of roles someone like him can play.

J: Really a dream come true. A big part of why we were so excited to come onto the film was the opportunity to meet and work with Glenn. We started watching as he was introduced as Kane on WWE. To have our lives come so full circle is incredible. And so surreal. Glenn is an amazing performer as well as an athlete. He’s just fantastic to work with. I love him.

BF: How does See No Evil 2 fit in with your previous films?

S: I think the characters in See No Evil 2 could easily exist in a world where Badass and Mary Mason also live – there are from that same universe in our heads. It’s an art house slasher homage that is also very self aware – not many studios would let you do something like that with such a profitable franchise.

J: There’s a running theme in our films where seemingly everyday characters, people who could be you, me, our friends, get thrown into something life changing and end up getting tough and evolving. It’s very much the same in See No Evil 2. If you pay attention, you can also see the big beats for each character that also results in their outfits transforming more and more final girl as they go. We like to put a lot of heart in our films and you will care for these people that you see brutally murdered.

BF: You worked with Katharine Isabelle for a second time in See No Evil 2. Is it important to you to create a stable of actors and reliable people to work with again and again? She’s getting to a bit of a horror icon herself, as is Danielle Harris. Chelan Simmons has also been in her share of slashers. Can you tell me a bit about how you work with actors and what qualities make an actor fun to work with? Were these people you sought out to work with? Did you look to people with a reputation as horror icons?

S: We build a bit of a film family on these things, we have such an amazing crew in Vancouver – they are so good at what they do and they’ve been with us through so much, you will definitely see lots of names repeating in our various films. The same goes for the cast – you keep collaborating because there’s this magic that can happen as you keep getting more comfortable about each other. I love actors and the more I get to know them as people, the more I’m like, oh, they would be perfect doing this. Working with Katie on Mary, I got to know how ridiculously funny she is. You never see the hot girl also being the funniest one. Tamara came from us wanting to see that.

I know a lot of the actresses in SNE2 have done a ton of horror movies, that was intentional in the casting. We wanted a pedigree to the whole thing. It was so cool to work with Danielle and Chelan – they are just so good at what they do. I can’t wait to be able to work on the next thing with them. I know Danielle is about to direct her second feature and I cannot wait to see that. Can you imagine the kinds of films a woman like that will create? Badass.

J: We try to hunt down the very best people. People who love film and love what we’re doing. Life’s too short to work with dicks and it’s crazy to think people who work in film aren’t always super grateful to be where they are. We become very close with our cast and crew. They’re the people we call friends, some even family, like Katie. We love working with our friends. And actors are so capable. Just look at Michael Eklund. I could work with him on every film I do for the rest of my life and I know he’ll just keep surprising me and blowing us away with his performances.

S: We strive to build up that core. You see a lot of directors team up with the same talent because you become friends and want to do more and more with them and give them chances to play a range of different characters. I’m really so blessed to have been able to work with so many amazing people.

BF: A spoiler question…

You played with the concept of the Final Girl with the ending of See No Evil 2. How do you feel about the idea of the Final Girl?

S: I love the final girl so much. I have cheered many a Final Girl on in my living room, but I always see the Final Girl. We like playing with gender stereotypes, so Seth is the final boy. If you rewatch the film, he does all the final girl moments – love interest willing to die for to save, has an encounter with Jacob but survives, throughout loses more clothing for sexed up/battle damaged look (this was an intentional transition look for all of the cast), gives ‘everything is going to be ok’ speech, everyone else is dead, and the final impossible showdown. I hope we get to make three — Seth has more to do and Jacob’s still not dead.

J: I loved killing the Final Girl. And we killed one of horror’s true icons, Danielle Harris. She is the perfect final girl. We wanted to set up both Danielle and Katie as being potential final girls all the while building up our final boy, Seth, played by the wonderful Kaj-Erik Eriksen. Seth is a mix between Ash (Evil Dead) and Seymour (Little Shop of Horrors). He’s the hot, really sweet, nerd who turns out to be as tough as nails. I loved having him go head to head with Jacob Goodnight and just take all that damage.

BF: What projects do you have in the works at the moments?

S: There are a few things in development that we’re really excited about. A huge one is Painkiller Jane, written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Craig Weeden, which is a big screen adaptation of the badass graphic novel heroine. It’s one of the best scripts I’ve ever read – which makes sense because Jimmy co-created the character. It’s an honest to goodness, straight from the comic, foul languaged, super sexy, hardcore violent, kickass chick cop buddy movie with a superhuman flair. It’s like The Heat on crack.

J: We just finished up Vendetta, our first action movie starring Dean Cain, Paul “The Big Show” White, and Michael Eklund. I’m so happy with it. It’s like a Punisher movie taking place in a men’s prison. And you’ve never seen Dean Cain be this much of a badass. It’ll be out sometime in 2015. We’ve got quite a few things in development, including our high concept, original monster movie called, BOB. Nothing would make me happier than to be doing BOB next. It’s so weird and heart felt and honest and brutal and hilarious. I cannot wait to be making it.

Sylvia and Jen’s new film See No Evil 2 is currently available DVD and Blu-Ray as well as On Demand and Digital HD.

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

‘Jennifer’s Body’: The Sexuality of Female Possession and How the Devil Didn’t Need to Make Her Do It

And now Anita is “needy” no more because she has tasted the power, lived to tell the tale and will use her new demon passenger to right the wrongs that she sees fit. Even though she’s possessed, you can sense that she will guide herself and the demon within and take control of it. Freedom is a beautiful thing, even if you have to be possessed to make it happen.

Needy, being a good friend to a bad girl.

This guest post by Shay Revolver appears as part of our theme week on Demon and Spirit Possession.

Female possession has been used as a plot device to show what could happen to a woman who strayed from the norm. It was engrained into our subconscious that if you weren’t a good little girl and didn’t toe the line you could, and probably would, be possessed. It would be horrible, you will become deformed, unattractive and suffer like never before. Whether you were a believer or not, you knew that being possessed was never a good thing.

You also learned very early on that if a girl was possessed and acted badly, it really wasn’t her fault and all the boys would run to save her because it was a horrible fate and all the bad things she did while possessed weren’t really her fault because, the devil or (insert demon here) made her do it. The messages in these films, that I both loved and loathed, were clear: if you had a vagina you weren’t to blame for your bad behavior and the devil is gonna get you if you don’t act like the perfect little girl that fits nicely into the mold that our society has set forth.

The devil didn't make me do it — The devil didn’t make me do it

This myth and the tropes within were the status quo for many, many years until Jennifer’s Body came along in 2009 and did something that even I didn’t see coming. It showed a different side of female possession. Sure, Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) gets possessed, and true, she does some horrible things while under the influence of her demon and, yeah, she only got possessed because she did something that good little girls and nice young ladies don’t do, but what’s great about the whole situation is that in the midst of all of the horrible that follows the possession you don’t feel sorry for her. At least, not in the traditional way; you’re actually amused at all the carnage that follows because she looks like she’s having fun and she turns the tables on every horror movie trope you knew you hated or thought was laced with misogyny and seasoned with a heaping spoonful of the requisite female apologetics. Jennifer is bad, but she wasn’t made that way by the possession; had this been a regular old teen movie she would have played the anti-hero that you loved to hate and once possession takes hold she’s like Regina George in demonoid form.

One of the best things about Jennifer’s Body is how inappropriate it is and unapologetic it is for its inappropriateness. Jennifer’s Body is filled with pure naughty, campy fun. But it’s also filled with something even more interesting. It holds a mirror up to society and the dynamics of not only female friendships but also female sexuality. Not only is it the story of a girl “gone wild” in different kind of way, we get treated to two female possessions that have two totally different results. The first one is the possession of the film’s namesake, the flirtatious, wild child Jennifer Check and the second is that of her friend the quiet, good girl next door, Anita “Needy” Lesnicki. Jennifer pushes through and has fun with it and Anita tends to be fearful of the change and eventually comes to grips with her new interior angel and begins to embrace it and relish in her newfound freedom, even if that freedom starts off with her behind bars at a mental hospital.

The film gives us two different views of the same story. When it comes to Jennifer, on one hand she does seem to get “punished” in what feels like the generic, horror film, female possession fashion for ditching her friend and going alone into a van with a group of boys (GASP), but unlike every other female possession film this demon makes her not only stronger but more fearless and she knows how to use her powers. She turns the tables on every guy who crosses her path and takes to her new self like a champ. She doesn’t cry out for help or to be saved, she plays along and enjoys the freedom that the possession gives her and actual enjoys herself a bit. The demon doesn’t take control of Jennifer’s body, or force her to do something that you can sense she really doesn’t want to do. It engages the parts of her that were already there. No one flinches at Jennifer’s post-possession overt sexuality because that was a quality that she possessed before. In fact, her previous overt sexuality is what the demon uses to seduce her prey and from the first ingestion of the school’s football captain to the last man the demon leaves standing she wields her sexuality like an artist. She didn’t get taken over and changed into something opposite of what she was before, i.e. the usual nice girl who should be saved because she was so sweet before; instead it just turns her up to 11.

The other possession in Jennifer’s Body happens to the title character’s best friend, Anita , who gets possessed as an accidental side effect of trying to save Jennifer. Anita knows who her friend is and finds herself attached to her, hence the nickname “Needy,” in a super codependent way. After all of the killings that the possessed Jennifer commits, she shows up at Anita’s house, drenched in blood after her last male kill and tries to seduce Anita as a preamble to the demon, or is it Jennifer 2.0, telling the tale of how she came to be possessed. This confession leaves Anita a little more than freaked and she sets out to help her friend. She does everything that the good girl is supposed to do, including going to the library and researching what has become of her friend Jennifer. The film ends with Anita being forced to stab her best friend in the heart to kill her because she is a succubus and she killed her boyfriend along with a slew of other horny teenage boys. Of course, the good girl, Anita, who has actually saved the day, gets caught by her bestie’s mother wielding the knife over her now dead, or re-dead, daughter, and she’s shipped off to an asylum. It is from that asylum that Anita retells the story and it is also where she will escape from and set out to find the band that turned her friend into a murderous succubus and she kills them all.

Anita’s possession comes from a place of the girl who did everything good and right. She was a good friend, loyal girlfriend, smart, nice, modest. Pretty much everything that girls are supposed to be in these movies. When she gets possessed and retains Jennifer’s powers via a non-fatal bite during the catfight, literally, from hell she goes on to seem happy about it. She’s finally free. She is no longer “needy” or insecure. She finds strength in the knowledge that she can do anything. But, the question lingers does Jennifer want to be saved? Does Anita? Killing and cannibalism aside, what’s so wrong with a girl enjoying herself? Why does it need to be punished?

In movies where female possession is used as the main form of horror, it has always been hard for me to decipher if the reason that so many people attempt to save the “damsel in distress” is because she’s so altered that she needs it, or if it’s because she has become powerful, unstoppable, cognizant, aware, and free. Is it so much better to put the genie of strength back in the box? Is it so necessary for women to conform to society’s norms and expectations that any deviation from these norms causes society to feel fear? Is the dread coming from the empathy we have for the poor girl being possessed, from the feeling that it could happen to us, or from the knowledge that being powerless is a feeling that most women have? It’s should scare us that in movies like this we are only allowed power through artificial, usually male allowed or induced means, and when we become too powerful, the power gets taken away because we can’t handle it or shouldn’t have it. There is often an undertone in these films that the real problem isn’t the demon, it’s the vessel.

The thing that makes Jennifer’s Body so great is that even though Jennifer dies, Anita, the girl who probably needs the strength that possession carries, gets to live and keep her power. There is something empowering about watching her joyfully skip away from the asylum and hunt down the band responsible for her current condition and Jennifer’s possession. She knows that she has the strength that she needs to survive and carry on but also that she’s no longer afraid. The fear of speaking her mind or exploring and existing outside the lines is gone. The possession allows her to speak and live freely, to live outside the lines and define her own goals, needs, and desire. The empowerment comes not from watching her go medieval on the men behind the curtain, but from the innocence on her face as she confronts them. There is something beautiful about taking a genre that has long punished women and turning it on its head. There was no man to save Jennifer here, only another woman, a friend, and she stands tall in victory when the dust settles. And now Anita is “needy” no more because she has tasted the power, lived to tell the tale and will use her new demon passenger to right the wrongs that she sees fit. Even though she’s possessed, you can sense that she will guide herself and the demon within and take control of it. Freedom is a beautiful thing, even if you have to be possessed to make it happen.

Shay Revolver is a vegan, feminist, cinephile, insomniac, recovering NYU student and former roller derby player currently working as a New York-based microcinema filmmaker, web series creator, and writer. She’s obsessed with most books, especially the Pop Culture and Philosophy series and loves movies and TV shows from low brow to high class. As long as the image is moving she’s all in and believes that everything is worth a watch. She still believes that movies make the best bedtime stories because books are a daytime activity to rev up your engine and once you flip that first page, you have to keep going until you finish it and that is beautiful in its own right. She enjoys talking about the feminist perspective in comic book and gaming culture and the lack of gender equality in mainstream cinema and television productions. Twitter: @socialslumber13.