Let Me In – Bitch Flicks

Vampire Girls: Claudia and Eli

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

In the great monster mash team of terrifying children, the vampire girl is varsity captain. On the one hand, they are dolls forever: trapped in their prepubescent bodies for hundreds to thousands of years without a single curl losing its bounce. On the other hand, with hundreds of years of life come hundreds of years of experience, knowledge, even maturity. The great perverse contradiction of an innocent but worldly, pure but sexual girl beings that characterizes so many fantasies and paranoias about young girls comes to a larger than life reality with one part vampire bite added to sugar, spice, and everything nice. It’s a lot to take in. Especially since in practice, these horrific fantasies are much more complicated than they appear and often pack a harder punch than their makers bargained for. Because little girls aren’t dolls for men to play with. They have wills of their own, and one day they learn to use it with bite.

It’s worth mentioning that one of the most famous vampire girls in cinema is coveted by her makers for her girlishness. Claudia isn’t just raised in the vampire way by Louis and Lestat in Interview with the Vampire, she’s worshiped for it. From the moment she transforms from a dirty, malnourished urchin to a cherub-like creature that asks ever so sweetly for more blood, she is the apple of Lestat’s eye. He is charmed by her coquettish innocence and praises such traditionally feminine virtues as neatness. Even before this moment, Claudia represents hope for Lestat and Louis’ relationship and redemption for Louis’ conscience because of her apparent youth and innocence.

In the montage that depicts Claudia “growing up,” we see her surrounded by servants, dresses, and frills and privileges fit for a princess. One in particular has her standing on a pedestal in the center of a room–for trying on dresses, of course. But the imagery of her as a worshiped being, or perhaps a favorite doll upon a shelf is not to be dismissed. As Louis explains in his voice-over, “To me she was a child” and “to Lestat, a pupil.” Claudia is, in short, made into the desires of her makers.

This is not an uncommon motif in the vampire genre, or even in the broader spectrum of monster-making. Dracula makes his brides after his lusts, Frankenstein’s creature asks for a bride after his loneliness. Louis and Lestat are in good company, but Claudia manages to break away from the pack of female creations by sheer force of will and determined disobedience. She is more than discontent, she is proactive. And she isn’t alone.

Like all vampires, Eli was made by someone once upon a time. Both Let the Right One In and the American remake Let Me In are purposefully vague about the details of her origin story, but we can depend on the basic aspects of the common vampire myth to fill in some of the blanks. We don’t know what happened to her maker either, but their absence and Eli’s lack of preoccupation with them seems to support the idea that she doesn’t miss them. Instead, Eli roams the world as she chooses, finding human partners to help her survive along the way. She has broken away from the hold of whatever agenda she was created for and spends the film working her own. Like Claudia, Eli rebells against the routine of her lifestyle for her own desires. Her protector, Hakan, is comfortable in the way of their life and in their solitary household. He has a possessive devotion to Eli as evidenced by his behavior when the subject of Eli’s new friend, Oskar, comes up. Eli is quick to remind him that while he may play the role of her father to the outside world, he doesn’t have any authority authority over who she chooses to spend her time with.

Claudia’s rebellions are much less cooly carried out, perhaps in part because they are nearly always to some degree, unsuccessful. Like Eli, Claudia tries to gain some ownership of her identity through trying to control her appearance and how she is perceived by others. She tries to take her “perfect” doll-like appearance into her own hands by cutting her hair. She dresses older and when she is alone with Louis, she adopts the countenance of a woman as old as she feels rather than that of the child she looks like. These are different but comparable tactics to Eli insisting that she is twelve and maintaining an awareness and hold of childlike things such as puzzles and games. Both of these girls do not want to be overridden into someone else’s idea because of their circumstances. But Claudia cannot get what she wants out of her actions. Her hair grows back when she cuts it, strangers refuse to take her seriously when she dresses older, capturing and drawing grown women does not transform her by any manner of alchemy. But Claudia does accept her fate without a fight, perhaps lest Lestat mistake her for the dolls he buys her every year. So she breaks the rules, pushes her luck, and she tries her hand at a little bit of vampire-on-vampire murder. When Louis starts to show how uncomfortable he is about the deed, Claudia tells him “he deserved to die” and later, that she did it “so we could be free.” She knows, perhaps even better than Louis, that he is a created monster like her too.

Claudia and Eli are both determined, willful girls strong in their sense of self and what they want. It also feels fairly safe to say that the horror derived from them is from a fear of how much they can do and accomplish on their own terms and the consequences of getting on their bad side. I mean, these girls aren’t afraid of things getting a little bloody. At all. But it’s also worth noting that both of these films are invested in their perspectives. Interview with the Vampire is almost devoid of human characters and Let the Right One In is about Oskar and Eli’s growing relationship together. The loved ones in their lives adore them, seek comfort in them, and stand beside them. We read Eli’s notes and watch her quiet excitement as she gets back in touch with what she loves in the world. We see Claudia’s smile as she dances with Louis in France and her forlorn expressions as they share in their loneliness together. As frightful as the lengths these two girls will go to are, it’s hard not to want them to succeed. We are made to understand the frustration and anguish of their positions and the ache of hoping for something as universal and fundamental as control over one’s life and identity. Even though one of these girls succeeds in her story and the other does not, it says something that these films are able to clearly articulate that a little girl is not just pretty and cunning and mysterious. A girl is also every bit as complex and full of yearning as her older male counterparts. She can be as fierce as anything else that goes bump in the night. And sometimes? She’ll win. And you’ll be glad she did.

Kathryn Diaz is a writer living in Houston, Texas. She is currently pursuing a B.A in English at the University of Houston. You can follow her at The Telescope for more of her work.

Call For Writers: The Terror of Little Girls

Our theme week for November 2014 will be The Terror of Little Girls (see Leigh Kolb’s “The Terror of Little Girls: Social Anxiety About Women in Horrifying Girlhood” at Bitch Flicks).

Both the horror and thriller genres are rife with terrifying little girls. Sometimes these girl children are possessed by malevolent spirits. Sometimes they’re changelings or aliens, impersonating sweet, innocent beloved daughters. Other times, they’re ambiguous ghosts, haunting our protagonists for justice or revenge, and sometimes they’re just sociopaths who murder and torment their victims.

Scary children are certainly a prolific trope, articulating our culture’s fear of the loss of innocence as well as the unknowable, even alien, qualities of children. However, when we examine why the trope of creepy little girls is so prominent, we’re presented with an even more complex psychology. Little girls embody all that is good and pure; they are innocence and vulnerability. They are viewed separately from women because they symbolize all the potential that our culture embeds in the ideal of womanhood.

The films that depict terrifying little girls are acting out the deep-seated fear of the loss of our culture’s goodness and purity, virginity and innocence. There’s also a collective discomfort surrounding the fact that little girls become women and that womanhood is unpredictable and uncontrollable. Little girls in films like The Exorcist and The Bad Seed embody a premature, preternatural womanhood that is powerful, sexual, and taboo. And they must be stopped, killed if necessary, to neutralize their threat. The logic: though we can’t truly stop little girls from growing up into those subversive creatures known as women, we can engage in the futile fantasy that destroys them before that happens time and time again.

Feel free to use the examples below to inspire your writing on this subject, or choose your own source material.

We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know which film you’d like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts, and we respond to queries within a week.

Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.

If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.

Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).

The final due date for these submissions is Friday, Nov. 21 by midnight.

The Exorcist

Case 39

Night of the Living Dead

The Ring

Supernatural

Children of the Corn

The Addams Family

Phone

Village of the Damned

The Sixth Sense

The Children

The Shining

Alice, Sweet Alice

Silent Hill

The Brood

Orphan

The Bad Seed

Interview with the Vampire

Let the Right One In

Let Me In

The Omen IV: The Awakening

Horror Week 2011: The Roundup

Sleepaway Camp by Carrie Nelson

The shock of Sleepaway Camp’s ending relies on the cissexist assumption that one’s biological sex and gender presentation must always match. A person with a mismatched sex and gender presentation is someone to be distrusted and feared. Though the audience has identified with Peter throughout the movie, we are meant to turn on him and fear him at the end, as he’s not only a murderer – he’s a deceiver as well. But, as Tera points out, the only deception is the one in the minds of cisgender viewers who assume that Peter’s sex and gender must align in a specific, proper way. Were this not the point that the filmmakers wanted to make, they would have revealed the twist slightly earlier in the film, allowing time for the viewer to digest the information and realize that Peter is still a human being.

The Silence of the Lambs by Jeff Vorndam

Starling must unfortunately endure many such difficulties because she works in the male-dominated institution of the FBI. As an attractive woman, Starling receives lascivious looks from nearly every male in the movie. When she and her roommate go jogging in one scene, a group of men jogging the other way turn around to ogle the women’s behinds. Earlier, when Starling is looking for Agent Crawford’s (her boss) office, the men gaze at her as if she were an exotic delicacy. Hannibal Lecter’s psychiatrist Dr. Chilton tries to pick her up initially, “Are you familiar with the Baltimore area? I could show you around.” When she explains she has a job to do, Chilton becomes angry, “Crawford sent you here for your looks–as bait.” Lecter surmises that Crawford fantasizes about Starling and that is why she was selected for the assignment. Even the bespectacled etymologist asks her out. In fact, it is only Lecter who is more interested in getting in her head than her pants.

The Sexiness of Slaughter: The Sexualization of Women in Slasher Films by Cali Loria

The whores in horror are the signature flesh of the slasher flick. Women in this genre have long been given the cold shoulder: cold in as much as they are often lacking for clothing. Often a female character’s dearth of apparel becomes prominent at the pivotal point of slaughter: in cinema, women dress down to be killed. Filmmakers pair scopophilia with the gratuitous gore of killing–leaving viewers to male gaze their way into a media conundrum: When did sexual arousal and brutality towards women pair to become the penultimate money shot?

Amanda Young, Gender Erasure, and Saw’s Unexpected Pro-Woman Attitude by Elizabeth Ray

There are many things that set Amanda apart from most villains in horror movies, the most notable one being that she’s a woman. But more than that, she’s a woman who is not driven by: jealousy, vanity, or obsession over a man. She doesn’t indulge in vampiric, Sapphic tendencies meant to titillate male viewers. And she isn’t sexualized: while reasonably attractive, she isn’t a young, nubile twentysomething, and she dresses in plain, normal clothes, which neither accentuate nor hide her feminine features. And she isn’t demonized either: she’s a not a “bitch” or “whore” who deserves what’s coming to her. Her mundanity is what makes her so appealing: she’s not just an “everygirl,” she’s an everyperson, who, like Jigsaw, is a character that all genders can identify with and sympathize — but her femininity isn’t taken away from her in order to make her stronger or more appealing (she is not given a boyish nickname like “Chris” or “Billy” and doesn’t adopt masculine traits like Ripley did in Alien), which is the most important thing.

Hellraiser by Tatiana Christian

Julia is an interesting character because unlike Kirsty – who experienced a mutual loving relationship between both her father and Steven (her love interest) – Julia had no such thing. Instead, Julia experienced rejection from Frank, her main obsession/love interest and killed off all the men who showed any interest in her (Larry and her victims).

Drag Me To Hell by Stephanie Rogers

I vacillated between these two women throughout the movie, hating one and loving the other. After all, Christine merely made a decision to advance her career, a decision that a man in her position wouldn’t have had to face (because he wouldn’t have been expected to prove his lack of “weakness”). If her male coworker had given the mortgage extension, I doubt it would’ve necessarily been seen as a weak move. And even though Christine made a convincing argument to her boss for why the bank could help the woman (demonstrating her business awareness in the process), her boss still desired to see Christine lay the smack-down on Grandma Ganush. I sympathized with her predicament on one hand, and on the other, I found her extremely unlikable and ultimately “weak” for denying the loan.

The Blair Witch Project by Alex DeBonis

But the film itself denigrates Heather because she accepts responsibility, almost agreeing with the taunts. The most famous scene in The Blair Witch Project is Heather’s tearful confession into the lens. The substance of this confession is that she is responsible for what’s happening to them, but it’s infuriating that Heather takes responsibility and does so at this point. The confession scene tries to make Heather an Ahab-like figure. On the one hand, her tendency to tape allows the narrative conceit of the film to operate. When events take a turn for the eerie and tense, Heather’s obsession with documenting the experience keeps the cameras rolling and allows us to see the ensuing tumult. On the other hand, it puts her energetic striving for a quality film on trial and coaxes from her a confession for a crime she doesn’t actually commit.

The Descent by Robin Hitchcock

While a cave setting evokes female reproductive organs almost inherently, the set design here takes this metaphor to extremes. The women descend into the cave through a slit-shaped gash in the earth, and then must crawl head-first through a narrow passageway into the greater cave system, where the true danger of the monsters await.

The monsters, depicted as the products of evolution motivated only by a primal drive for survival, are the perfect elaboration of this cave-as-womb horror metaphor. And as a cherry on top, they rip the guts out of these women.

The Madwoman’s Journey from the Attic into the Television – The Female Gothic Novel and its Influence on Modern Horror Films by Sobia

In their landmark study, “Madwoman in the Attic,” Gilbert and Gubar embraced the figure of Bertha Mason (the insane, ghostlike previous wife of Jane Eyre’s hero, Mr. Rochester, whom he has locked up inside the attic…apparently for her own good and out of the goodness of his heart!) as somewhat of an alternate literary heroine, and started to analyze exactly what was at work in the common themes found in the literature that women were writing during that time period. As women attempted to write themselves into the purely patriarchal forms of literature that they had grown up reading, they faced the limits of the representation of women in heroic roles. So the gothic heroine emerged as somewhat of a compromise: a heroine who is perpetually endangered and perpetually courageous in the face of that danger. This is the precursor of the modern horror movie heroine who, against all logic, insists on checking out that pesky sound in the middle of the night or following the creepy voices outside of her room.

Let This Feminist Vampire In by Natalie Wilson

While the original film was also excellent, it lacked some of the more overt gendered analysis of the U.S. version. Though this may be due to discrepancies in translation (I saw the film both in Swedish with English subtitles and dubbed in English), the bullying theme running throughout the narrative was framed very differently in the Swedish version. In it, the young male protagonist, Oskar, was repeatedly told to “squeal like a pig” by his tormentors. In contrast, the male protagonist in the U.S. version, now named Owen (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee), is attacked by bullies with taunts such as “Hey, little girl” and “Are you a little girl?”

House of 1000 Corpses by Dierdre Crimmins

Inevitably the college kids pick up a hitchhiker, which is where the plot starts to get interesting. This hitchhiker, Baby Firefly (played by Zombie’s wife Sheri Moon), seems odd and off in her own world. She messes with the radio and giggles at the college kids. Both Denise and Mary instantly despise her and are obviously threatened by her sexuality, and as expected both Bill and Jerry like her. While this little battle starts to play out, and Baby is loudly drumming on the car’s dashboard, the car gets a flat tire. Of course the sexy female hitchhiker is a local and her brother can help fix the car. It is when Baby insists that the whole gang come over to dinner that this story finally becomes interesting.

A Feminist Reading of The Ring by Sobia

At the center of the mystery are Samara and her mother, Anna, both women whose sanity is questioned by the narrative. At first glance, the movie seems to be Anna’s creation, and it’s her face that we see in the images on the tape. Anna is implied to have been driven to the brink of insanity and eventually to suicide by Samara, who somehow creates images that burn themselves into the minds of those around her. Samara herself is an ambivalent figure that the movie does not seem to be sure about, which leaves her open to interpretation. While I was convinced of her pure evilness initially, subsequent viewings have made her emerge as a less sinister figure, especially given her portrayal in the Japanese version of the story.

Ellen Ripley, A Feminist Film Icon, Battles Horrifying Aliens…And Patriarchy by Megan Kearns

While both Alien and Aliens straddle the sci-fi/horror divide, one of the horror elements apparent in Alien is Carol Clover’s notion of the “final girl.” In numerous horror films (Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, The Descent), the resourceful woman remains the sole survivor, the audience intended to identify and sympathize with her. Oftentimes sexual overtones exist with the promiscuous victims and the virginal survivor. While Alien and Aliens display sexual themes (we’ll get to those in a moment), Ripley isn’t sexualized but remains the sole survivor in the first film. She’s also never masculinized as Clover suggests happens to final girls in order to survive.

Rosemary’s Baby: Marriage Can Be Terrifying by Stephanie Brown

Rosemary’s Baby is one scary movie. It’s about a woman’s lot in a hostile world. It is about a terrible marriage to a narcissistic and selfish person. It is about the fear of motherhood and giving birth. It is convincing as a terrifying movie about the supernatural, and as a life lesson about selling your soul to a metaphorical devil. I like horror to convince me that I have learned something about the dark side of human nature…not just play with gore, or supernatural themes, or catastrophic nightmares. It has to name a fear that we really have, or a truth we find hard to believe, and the best horror enlightens us by showing us the darkness that haunts our lives.

Thanks to all our Horror Week 2011 writers! (Previous Theme Weeks include Mad Men Week and Emmy Week 2011.)

Horror Week 2011: Let This Feminist Vampire In

This piece by Natalie Wilson previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on October 13, 2010.

Cross-posted at Ms. Magazine

Warning: spoilers

Vampires have become so common in contemporary texts that they have lost some of their bite. With most of them falling into the emo, brooding, love-struck and angst-ridden variety (Edward of Twilight, Damon of The Vampire Diaries and Bill of True Blood), the female vampire featured in Let Me In (the U.S. remake of the Swedish film Let the Right One In) presents a refreshing change. Abby (Chloe Moretz), the 12-year-old lonely-yet-resilient vampire in a world populated by male violence, is a feminist vampire worth rooting for.

While the original film was also excellent, it lacked some of the more overt gendered analysis of the U.S. version. Though this may be due to discrepancies in translation (I saw the film both in Swedish with English subtitles and dubbed in English), the bullying theme running throughout the narrative was framed very differently in the Swedish version. In it, the young male protagonist, Oskar, was repeatedly told to “squeal like a pig” by his tormentors. In contrast, the male protagonist in the U.S. version, now named Owen (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee), is attacked by bullies with taunts such as “Hey, little girl” and “Are you a little girl?”

Owen’s burgeoning friendship with the young vampire Abby (named Eli in the original) furthers this gendered meme when she advises him “You have to hit back … hit them back harder than you dare.” When she promises to help him, he says “But you’re a girl,” exhibiting the belief the bullies have instilled in him that girls are scared and weak. Even though an earlier scene showed Owen smiling as he views a girl punching the lead bully in the arm, this approval of female resistance has not erased the anti-girl taunts the bullies have polluted his brain with.

With an existence shrouded by his parents’ ugly divorce, the film suggests Owen has turned to voyeurism as an escape from his prison-like existence at both home and school. As Owen watches the world from his bedroom telescope and from behind his wide-eyed gaze, we see the daily injustices humans enact upon one another: bedroom fights, schoolyard torture, sibling abuse, interpersonal violence. Much of this violence is linked to codes of masculinity, including the muscling-up men do to create bodies capable of violence.

In comparison, vampire Abby’s thirst for blood becomes less violent and a lesser evil: Killing is something she resorts to in order to survive, in contrast to it being a sport (as with the bullies) or a means to secure and keep a mate (as with her “father” figure). The everyday violence in the film is more horrific and has more lasting effects than Abby’s monstrous thirst.

Unfortunately, the opportunity to further the suggestion that “average humans” are plenty monstrous is rendered less horrific in the American version by removing the references/suggestions of pedophilia in the original novel and film. Nevertheless, the remake provocatively suggests that our cultural proclivity to focus on exceptionally violent crimes of the “stranger danger” variety allows enduring, daily acts of violence to go comparatively unnoticed. Owen has adopted this view as well–he never mentions evil until he learns Abby is a vampire, failing to see that what the bullies do to him is actually more evil.

Though the film drips with gendered representations (although ones not as graphic, nor as queer as the original novel, as discussed here), reviews such as those in The New York Times and at MovieFone offer no gender analysis–an omission that seems particularly odd given the misogynistic bullying the film depicts as well as its focus on a girl vampire, a rarity in our male-dominated vampire tales of late.

To find such analysis, one most go back to reviews of the original film, including here at Feminist Review. Noting the tendency for a “queer sensibility about female vampires in film, whether explicit or subtextual,” Loren Krywanczyk argues the “gender non-normativity” of the two young protagonists presents us with a queering of gender as well as of childhood sexuality. Such queer readings are even more apt if Abby/Eli’s centuries-earlier castration (cut in the American film and only alluded to in the Swedish version) is taken into account.

While there has been much rallying against the necessity of remaking the film to appease Americans subtitle-avoidance (as here), I feel this new version offers yet another useful spin on a very complex tale–one a bit less queer but also one that links the cultural disdain for femininity to the ubiquity of horrific daily acts of violence. If only our mainstream news media would similarly let that argument in.

Natalie Wilson, PhD is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in the areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of the blogs Professor, what if…? and Seduced by Twilight. She is a proud feminist mom of two feminist kids (one daughter, one son) and is an admitted pop-culture junkie. She previously contributed posts to Bitch Flicks about The United States of Tara, Nurse Jackie, and Lost.

Guest Writer Wednesday: Let This Feminist Vampire In

Cross-posted at Ms. Magazine

Warning: spoilers