Mychael Elaine – Bitch Flicks

‘The Faculty’: Gender, Dialogue, and Naked Alien Space Monsters

How did these male filmmakers make a movie marketed to men full of female characters who actually get the majority of the dialogue? I’m about to crack the code and share the secret — are you ready to become enlightened? Here’s how they did it: They included female characters and gave them lines. WHAT. Yes, it’s that simple.

Written by Mychael Elaine.

Do you love feminism and space monsters? This essay is for you!

A note to my non-binary readers: This essay takes a super reductive approach to gender. In order to address systemic sexism in the film industry, I’m using charts that graph dialogue spoken by characters listed either as “Male” or “Female,” and I’m using language like “men” and “women” as though there were nothing outside of that binary. It is not my intent to erase you. It is my hope that soon we will experience such a proliferation of non-binary representation that graphs like these become outdated because they don’t include you.

A note to my binary readers: Are you wondering what this “non-binary” thing is all about? Here are some links to resources that will help you understand what it means and why it’s important.

In The Faculty, six teens grapple with angst and aliens at their small town high school. The film was released in 1998, way before smartphones, when movie-teen research happened in makeshift garage labs and movie-teen scientific conclusions were drawn from classic works of literature. (#oldmillennial #oregontrailgeneration)

Eighteen years later, women are shattering glass ceilings all over the place, but men still talk way more than women, at work and in films. From a Time article titled “Why Women Talk Less Than Men at Work” published last month:

“Study after study has shown that women are interrupted (by both genders) more than men; that men speak significantly more in meetings than women do (one study found they account for 75% of conversation); that even when women speak less they are perceived to have spoken more…”

Here’s how this all plays out in the dialogue breakdown of high-grossing, blockbuster films:

Data courtesy of Polygraph — click here to visit the site and explore their data.
I’ve made slight modifications to my screenshot of Polygraph’s site for clarity.

Like the Bechdel Test, Polygraph’s analysis brings beautiful, cold, hard data to aid in discussions about representations of gender in popular culture. It isn’t surprising to look at this data and see how much men obviously dominate film dialogue, but boy is it depressing. So how do we fight against it?

Enter the space monsters.

A quick glance at The Faculty might lead you to believe that male characters speak the majority of lines in the film. Here are three reasons why:

The Faculty’s key creators are men: director, Robert Rodriguez; story, David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel; screenplay, Kevin Williamson.
The cover of the DVD and the movie poster both feature male characters most prominently.
There isn’t much dialogue in the trailer, but the three people who speak are all men. (A woman gets to scream, though! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAREPRESENTATIONAAAAAA!!!!)

All signs point to a film made by men, for men. (Of course, ostensibly the film was made for all genders. Thank you, patriarchy!)

But look at where The Faculty lives on this graph:

I’ve made slight modifications to my screenshot of Polygraph’s site for clarity.

How did these male filmmakers make a movie marketed to men full of female characters who actually get the majority of the dialogue?

I’m about to crack the code and share the secret — are you ready to become enlightened? Here’s how they did it:

They included female characters and gave them lines.

WHAT.

Yes, it’s that simple.

There’s a scene in the film where the teens are wondering why on earth aliens would be on earth in their little town in Ohio:

Stan (mocking): Alright Casey… let’s go alien for a second… Why here? Why Ohio?

Casey: If you were going to take over the world, would you blow up the White
House, Independence Day style, or sneak in through the back door?

Women don’t speak in The Faculty’s trailer and aren’t featured prominently in the movie’s promotional materials – instead, they sneak in through the film’s back door.

Am I arguing that we should purposefully exclude women from promotional materials to “trick” men into watching films filled with ladies? Absolutely not. But in 1998, women couldn’t blow up the cinematic White House, Ghostbusters 2016 style.

And let’s face it, it’s 2016 and this happened…

In a perfect world, men would never fall prey to the mindset that if a story is about women then it is exclusively for women, but they still do. And they’re still being raised to do so. One tactic to combat the disparity in women’s representation in films is to make like a parasitic alien and get sneaky.

How do women infiltrate this movie? The Faculty makes it look easy.

First of all, there are lots of great lady side characters: Salma Hayek as Nurse Harper, Bebe Neuwirth as Principal Drake, Famke Janssen as Ms. Burke, Piper Laurie as Mrs. Olson.

Then, of the six main characters, three are women and three are men. And, as an added bonus, the women aren’t damsels in distress – they are afforded agency and impact on the film’s plot.

Delilah (Jordana Brewster) is confident and competent and takes no shit:

Stokely (Clea DuVall) is intelligent and insightful and brave:

Stokely also takes no shit

Mary Beth Louise Hutchinson (Laura Harris) is charismatic to the max and also the powerful evil space alien intent on taking over the planet:

Ah yes, Mary Beth Louise Hutchinson. We’ve talked about gender and dialogue, now let’s get to the naked space alien.

Some might argue that this is yet another needlessly exploitative display of the female body in film, perpetuated by yet another group of male filmmakers. And those who would argue this are not wrong – women’s bodies are exploited pretty much everywhere and all the time.

But here’s why I dig Mary Beth’s naked alien scene. Naked women in horror films are often victims of horrible atrocities. This time it’s the naked woman who wields all the terrifying power. When tough-guy Zeke first sees her in the locker room walking around naked, the teenage boy is not filled with lust, but with fear. You can hear the horror in his voice when he asks, “Mary Beth…why are you naked?”

Her nudity is terrifying: her nakedness is out of place; she is out of place – she is a powerful and dangerous adversary. And even though ultimately she morphs into a giant worm-blob and Casey smashes her with gym bleachers, this moment — the scary naked woman moment — is a subversion I always enjoy.

Despite all of the above, The Faculty is not perfect. Here are a few issues:

Lack of Diversity: The DVD and poster might lead you to believe that Usher is the only character of color in the film. Other than Salma Hayek, this is pretty much true. This movie is full of white people. White people space aliens.

Don’t invest time in this movie if you are looking for characters of color, characters with disabilities, or queer characters. (Stokely is briefly identified as a lesbian, but it turns out she’s faking it to make people stay away from her, so…)

Yucky Masculinity: The film suffers from some pretty standard icky representations of men. It glorifies the asshole with a heart of gold (Zeke loves science!) and romanticizes the Nice Guy ™ (Casey loves Delilah!).

Plus What’s With the Ending? I can’t wrap my head around it. Everyone is coupled up all happily and heterosexually, like it’s the end of a Shakespeare comedy and time for everyone to get married. Zeke is on the football team? He and Ms. Burke are a… couple? Stokely is wearing lavender?!

Maybe the message is that only when you defeat naked parasitic space aliens will you achieve self-actualization. But part of me wants to believe that there’s something more sinister going on here. Does the teens’ conformity to societal norms mirror the conformity of those infected by aliens? Are socio-cultural expectations the true mind-controlling parasite?

Probably not.

Anyway, here’s my conclusion: The Faculty isn’t a feminist masterpiece, but it proves that it is possible for men sell a film to a male audience and fill it full of women who get to take up time and space. Women should get to take up space. All marginalized people should get to take up space.

We need to pay attention to who gets to speak, and how often they speak, and for how long. We need to be cognizant of the disproportionate allocation of dialogue to men and to women, to white people and to people of color, to the privileged and the oppressed. We need to make space for all minority groups, on our movie screens and at our places of employment. We can’t do that if we don’t pay attention to who gets to speak.

Mychael Elaine is a Bitch Flicks staff writer and writes about representations of gender in horror films at Vagina Dentwata.

‘Splice’: Womb Horror and the Mother Scientist

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

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

NSFW | Trigger warning for survivors of sexual assault

Warning: Spoilers abound!

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

Though it received somewhat lackluster reviews, I encourage anyone interested in feminism and film to give Vincenzo Natali’s sci-fi body horror film a try. Splice features female characters who are intelligent, emotionally complex, and in control. They’re not perfect, but they are three-dimensional characters whose decisions drive the story. (One of them morphs into a male, but we’ll get to that.)

Splice asks a lot of questions about the terms and conditions of conception, gestation, birth, and motherhood, all without stabbing the viewer in the eye with reductive answers.

It also features some campy moments. Hipster scientists shout things like “It was the only way!” Academy Award winning actor Adrien Brody expresses his frustration by throwing down not just his jacket, but his scarf as well!

If you can stomach the juxtaposition of big thinky concepts and stilted clichéd dialogue, you will find Splice a thoroughly enjoyable mindfuck of a film.

Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) and Clive Nicoli (Brody), long-term partners in romance and biochemistry, have developed a method to splice the DNA from various animals together to create hybrid creatures.

Viewers are actually birthed into the film from the perspective of Fred, the couple’s latest scientific endeavor, a male companion to their first hybrid, Ginger.

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

Newstead Pharma’s financial interests are represented by Joan Chorot (Simona Maicanescu), who insists Elsa and Clive begin “Phase Two: The product stage.”

Joan Chorot (Simona Maicanescu) in Splice — Joan Chorot (Simona Maicanescu) in *Splice*

Joan doesn’t get a lot of screen time, but her brief appearances are a pleasure to watch. She’s articulate and always in control. It’s awesome to see a woman kicking ass in the role of the money-grubbing corporation, and Joan is a stellar example of how to do it right.

After their splicing research is shut down, Clive suggests they quit, but Elsa convinces Clive to proceed with the human splicing and to generate an embryo.

Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) in Splice — Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) in *Splice*

In both the romantic and the professional relationship between Clive and Elsa (and this is a movie very much interested in the conflation of work and sex), Elsa is in charge.

Over and over, Elsa insists that they take the next step. She is the opposite of what I call the Male Protagonist’s Girlfriend — a pretty lady bystander who supplements the male protagonist’s story arc.

Elsa and Clive also deviate from the typical representation of long-term monogamous heterosexual partners: it is he, not she, who desires to have a child:

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

Meaningfully, this discussion is cut short by an alert sent from the machine housing the hybrid fetus. When they arrive at the lab, the embryo is all grown up and preparing to evacuate the biochemically engineered womb.

Though Elsa doesn’t gestate and birth the baby from her own body, the birth experience is physically traumatizing for her. She becomes trapped in the birth canal and is injected with poisonous serum. In a rare moment of control, Clive saves Elsa. But after the birth, Elsa again takes charge: she refuses to allow Clive to kill the female hybrid and insists that they raise her in the lab.

Weirdly, the couple begins to function less like scientists and more like normal parents: frustrated because the baby won’t eat, stressed out because it won’t stop crying. However, unlike most parents, their baby has a stinging whip tail, and they are forced to relegate their progeny to the laboratory’s basement to keep her existence a secret.

Elsa (Sarah Polley) in Splice — Elsa (Sarah Polley) in *Splice*

Elsa becomes more and more emotionally attached to the creature, and eventually names her Dren. Clive is worried about their secret being revealed and disturbed by Elsa’s displays of maternal affection. Nevertheless, he resigns himself to raising her, and Dren grows to be a young adult in a matter of months.

One night, Clive and Elsa realize they haven’t boned down lately. Clive doesn’t have any condoms, but Elsa says, “What’s the worst that could happen?” – suggesting that she’s decided she wouldn’t mind gestating a child, maybe? – and they have at. This is the first of three sex scenes in Splice.

Cinematically, their lovemaking is depicted as underwhelming. Neither Elsa nor Clive take off any clothing. Creepily, Dren watches.

Meanwhile, pressure is building at the pharmaceutical company.

Their presentation at the shareholders’ meeting goes disastrously wrong. Unbeknownst to Clive and Elsa, their specimen Ginger has changed into a male, and Ginger and Fred tear each other apart and splash guts and blood all over the audience. Not good PR.

In deep shit with the company, Clive and Elsa are forced to relocate Dren to Elsa’s deceased mother’s farm.

Here we learn the backstory of Elsa’s childhood; themes of feminism, motherhood, and family history come into play.

We learn that Elsa’s mother forbade Barbies and makeup. Elsa explains that “She said makeup debased women.” The word “feminist” is never used in Splice, but Elsa’s mother’s Barbie-banning and makeup-denying seem emblematic of a certain type of feminist parenting.

We also learn that Elsa’s mother raised her in substandard living conditions, relegating her to a ramshackle, barely furnished bedroom.

Initially I viewed this as a problematic conflation of being a feminist with being a neglectful person and bad mother. But it’s far more complicated than that.

Elsa expresses her love for Dren by giving her the very things her mother denied her.

Dren (Delphine Chanéac) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) in Splice — Dren (Delphine Chanéac) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) in *Splice*

But the Barbie and the makeover don’t make Dren happy; in fact, the Barbie explicitly makes Dren sad. Looking into a mirror, she holds the doll’s long blonde tresses against her bald head and becomes upset.

Over the course of the film, Elsa locks Dren up in a lab, then a basement, and eventually her mother’s barn, and Dren resents her for it. Elsa seems unable to break the cycle of her own mother’s physical and emotional neglect.

Perhaps the idea is that makeup is not a substitute for ideal living quarters and engaged parenting. What matters isn’t whether or not you give your daughter a Barbie, but whether or not you lock her in a barn.

And it turns out, Dren really is Elsa’s genetic daughter. To his chagrin, Clive discovers Elsa used her own DNA to create Dren: “Why the fuck did you want to make her in the first place? Huh? For the betterment of mankind? You never wanted a normal child because you were afraid of losing control. But an experiment…”

He doesn’t finish the sentence, but it seems clear that Elsa is using science as a way to disassociate herself from motherhood while still being able to create and raise a child. Presumably we’re to understand that Elsa’s desire for complete control stems from her tragic upbringing: “Look at your family history,” Clive exhorts.

Elsa tries to convey her genetic connection to Dren by explaining to her: “You’re a part of me, and I’m a part of you. I’m inside you.” She strives to smooth over their mother-daughter animosity, but the two wind up in a physical altercation that results in Elsa knocking Dren unconscious, tying her up, stripping her naked, and removing her tail and stinger. This scene has undertones of both castration and rape. Elsa has become a monstrous mother scientist.

Clive is horrified by Elsa’s actions, but she informs him that she is going to use Dren’s amputated stinger to finally synthesize the protein and heads to the lab, where she succeeds.

She tells off her obnoxious supervisor: “When some real scientists get here, come take a look.”

While Elsa’s away, Dren seduces Clive. If Elsa’s sin is her obsessive need to control, Clive’s sin is his inclination to relinquish control.

This is the film’s second sex scene. Cinematically it is sensual, queer in a fantasy-mythical-creature sort of way, strange but beautiful. Ominously, Dren grows back her tail stinger. Then Clive notices Elsa has come back and is watching them. She storms out and he chases her. Back at their apartment, Clive and Elsa decide that they finally have to kill Dren.

But when they return to the barn, it turns out Dren is already dying. After she dies, Clive’s brother (who also works in the lab) and their supervisor show up. He announces he knows their secret and demands to see the human-spliced creature. Elsa informs him that Dren is dead, throws a shovel at him and says, “See for yourself.”

Except Dren is no longer buried behind the barn. Like Ginger, she has morphed into a male, and in the film’s climax, he kills everybody but Elsa.

Dren as male in Splice — Dren as male in *Splice*

A note on the gender transition: I am uncomfortable with the representation of Dren’s metamorphosis from female to male. It is predicated on the idea that transitioning from a female body to a male body is horrific, and it exploits trans individuals by sensationalizing the transitioning body as evil and freakish. It’s not trans positive. I understand that Splice’s story necessitates this metamorphosis and that Dren isn’t exactly a human, but let’s call out problematic shit when we see it.

Chasing women through the woods at night is a staple of slasher flicks, but this movie isn’t about slashing – it’s about splicing. Dren chases Elsa through the woods, but instead of slaughtering Elsa, Dren rapes her.

This is Splice‘s third sex scene. Cinematically it is gut-wrenchingly horrifying, as any rape depicted onscreen needs to be in order to convey the awfulness that is sexual violation. Dren’s rape of Elsa is as disgusting and awful as Dren’s sex with Clive is beautiful and sensual.

When Elsa screams, “What do you want?” Dren replies: “Inside…of…you.”

Clive stabs Dren with a branch (wielding the metaphorical phallus) as Dren orgasms, but Dren is not killed, and attacks Clive. Elsa pulls her pants back on and bashes Dren in the head with a big rock. This critically injures Dren, who takes a moment to survey the situation – then stabs Clive with his tail. Elsa bashes Dren in the head again, killing Dren once and for all.

Elsa is the character who cut off Dren’s stinger and the one who deals Dren the death blow. And yet in his final moments, Dren chooses to kill Clive. Why?

Because inside of Elsa is a womb, the growing space for a new creature. And sure enough, in the film’s resolution we discover that Elsa is pregnant. Of the three sexual encounters that take place in this movie, the reproductively viable encounter is the rape. Elsa lives to be the final girl not because she wields a chainsaw, but because she wields womb. (And a big rock.)

Unlike Veronica of The Fly (“I want an abortion!”) or, more recently, Elizabeth of Prometheus (“Get it out of me!”), Elsa decides to gestate her monster progeny to term.

I appreciate both The Fly and Prometheus because each asks its audience to empathize with a woman who desperately needs an abortion. I also appreciate Splice for asking its viewers to honor Elsa’s decision not to abort. Joan makes it clear that Elsa has a choice: “Nobody would blame you if you didn’t do this. You could just put an end to it and walk away.” (Would that this were the standard response to women experiencing unwanted pregnancies!)

But Elsa does not to put an end to it. Why does she decide to bring it to term?

Sure, the company’s giving her a shitload of money for gestating Dren’s offspring. But throughout the film, Elsa has insisted on moving forward with human splicing experiments. Perhaps she sees this as a necessary extension of that research.

Or maybe this is another chance for Elsa to use science to mediate motherhood. Is the pregnancy Elsa’s punishment, or her redemption? We’ll never know. All she says is, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

The film closes with a shot of the two women, the film’s only surviving characters, looking out a window.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The directors also talk about depicting flawed female characters:

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Bradley University’s Body Project:

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

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

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

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

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

First, we meet Beatress (Tristan Risk):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written by Mychael Blinde.

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

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

Trigger warning for suicide, sexual violence and demonic horror.

Spoilers.

Here we go…

The Recap:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leigh, played by Catalina Sandino Moreno

and her sister Vera, an artist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Film:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the Devil’s Door and Rosemary’s Baby:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s start with Rosemary:

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

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

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

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

[Rosemary] looked up from the bassinet. “It’s Andrew,” she said. “Andrew John Woodhouse.””Adrian Steven,” Roman said
…
Rosemary said, “I understand why you’d like to call him that, but I’m sorry; you can’t. His name is Andrew John. He’s my child, not yours, and this is one point that I’m not even going to argue about. This and the clothes. He can’t wear black all the time.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘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.

‘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.

‘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.

‘Sinister’: Or as I Like to Call It, “Don’t Move Your Family into a Murder House”

‘Sinister’ is a film in which the viewer is expected to root for a man whose personal dreams trump his entire family’s sense of safety in their own home – which is fucked up and frustrating and detracts from a film with some incredibly freaky moments.

Sinister-Ellison-and-Tracy — “What if I don’t tell my wife it’s a murder house? Then it’s cool, right?”

Written by Mychael Blinde.

Sinister is a film in which the viewer is expected to root for a man whose personal dreams trump his entire family’s sense of safety in their own home – which is fucked up and frustrating and detracts from a film with some incredibly freaky moments.

Sinister-Moving-Day-at-the-Murder-House — Moving day at the murder house!

Here’s the story in a nutshell: True crime writer Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) hasn’t published a hit in a decade, so he has the genius idea to move with his wife, son, and daughter into a house where the previous occupants were hanged from a tree in the backyard. What better way to reclaim his true crime fame and fortune? And the house was so cheap! Murder houses are the best!

Good thing they dressed Ellison like this so we know he’s a serious writer.

He finds a projector and a series of seriously intense and utterly horrifying snuff films in the attic and is like, SWEET! STATUS UPGRADE HERE I COME! Increasingly terrifying things begin to happen in the house and to its occupants, but so what if Ellison is subjecting his family to a living nightmare? After he publishes his book they’ll all be living the dream! HIS dream!

SPOILERS:

Perhaps you’ve seen the film in its entirety and are thinking, “But what about the ending?! Ellison is punished for his actions! Therefore the moral of the story is that it is wrong to force your family to move into a murder house and to lie to your wife about it and to stay there even when super ominous shit goes down repeatedly and your family hates it there – the film doesn’t endorse his behavior!”

To which I’ll reply: Sure, the film doesn’t endorse his behavior, but it does ask us to like Ellison Oswalt, to sympathize with his struggles, and to respect his decisions. Sure, he gets punished – along with his ENTIRE FAMILY who are ALL COMPLETELY INNOCENT – but the film doesn’t ask us to want him to be punished. We’re supposed to root for Ellison.

Sinister writer C. Robert Cargill and Sinister director and writer Scott Derrickson were both conscious of the character’s inherently unlikable nature when creating the film, and in interviews they explain that Ethan Hawke was cast specifically because of his charisma and likability:

Cargill:

“How we ended up with Ethan was that Scott and I knew we had written a relatively unlikable protagonist and needed an actor who could win the audience over with pure charisma. Not a lot of actors can do that. Ethan was at the top of a short list.”

Derrickson:

“After I wrote the script, I loved it and I was very excited about it. But then I kind of had a panic attack and I thought ‘this guy is so unlikable, he’s so flawed, is the audience going to turn on this character and just not like this movie because they don’t like Ellison Oswalt?’ I really racked my brain trying to think of an actor who the audience wouldn’t turn on and would find consistently interesting even though he was making bad decisions from the beginning. It really came down to Ethan. I thought Ethan was the right guy for the movie above anybody else.”

The film’s creators strive to justify Ellison’s stupid decisions in several different ways throughout the film. Here are all the reasons we are given as to why Ellison makes the incomprehensible decision to move his unwitting family into a murder house, and why he doesn’t move out immediately when things get weird, in roughly the order we’re given them:

– Ellison is all about justice; he is like the Superman of literary dudes.

Here’s Ellison calling the police after finding the snuff films. When they answer his call, he hangs up — he’s decided to go it alone.

When Ellison’s wife, Tracy (Juliet Rylance), expresses her frustration with the many ways his true crime research negatively impacts their children’s lives, he responds with:

“Bad things happen to good people and they still need to have their story told. They deserve that much.”

This is classic Manpain – Ellison is burdened with the emotional anguish and literary responsibility to make things right for people he’s never met and to whom he has no relation. Not only must he provide for his family, but he must bring about justice for these strangers, at any and all costs. Nobody’s paid the price like he has paid the price.

– Ellison’s dream in life is to be a famous writer.

“Dear Diary: So far life is super great in my new murder house!”

Later in the film, Tracy – again! – expresses her frustration with the many ways Ellison’s true crime research negatively impact their children’s lives, and he responds with:

Ellison: What else do you want from me?!

Tracy: How about a home where we feel safe, Ellison? How about a life that doesn’t involve our kids drawing and painting the sick details of some horrific tragedy? Or working out their deep-seated anxieties by doing bizarre shit in the middle of the night?…There are plenty of other ways you can provide for this family.

Ellison: Doing what? Teaching? Editing journalism textbooks?

Heaven forbid he support his family by writing college textbooks – that’s no path to fame and fortune. Much better for him to risk irreparably scarring his children’s psyches by raising them in a murder house!

– Tracy will leave him and take the children with her if this book “goes sour like the last two.”

Let’s take a moment to talk about Tracy. She is a woefully underwritten character whose only role in the film seems to be getting mad at Ellison for all the stupid things he does, and then forgiving him and supporting him some more, raising the kids and making him coffee – “Your father’s very particular about his coffee,” she tells their daughter Ashley (Clare Foley).

After (FINALLY!) discovering the truth about her new home’s grisly history (almost an hour and a half into a two hour movie!), Tracy calls Ellison out on his narcissistic, myopic bullshit:

Ellison: Don’t you understand that writing is what gives my life meaning? These [books] are my legacy!

Tracy: I have always supported you doing what you love, Ellison. But writing isn’t the meaning of your life. You and me, right here, this marriage, that’s the meaning of your life. And your legacy, that’s Ashley and Trevor. Your kids are your legacy.

It is incredibly satisfying to hear Tracy say all of the things I want to scream at Ellison, but she inevitably returns to her role as the dutiful, supportive wife, and the Oswalt family continues to stay in the house. This is a story about a man and his dreams and his nightmares and his goals and his fuckups, and she’s relegated to the sidelines, has absolutely no agency, no purpose except to support Ellison and take care of the kids. And she is literally the only adult female in the ENTIRE film.

Her threat to leave Ellison feels like the filmmakers feeding us another reason for Ellison to continue his “work,” despite his family’s growing sense of fear – another burden on his man-pained shoulders.

– He’s doesn’t believe in “any…um, you know…stuff.”

“Whatever it is, I’m sure I can fight it with a bat. I don’t believe in any of that…um, you know…stuff that you can’t fight with a bat.”

After Ellison is ripped through the floor of his attic – the power went out in the middle of the night and he heard weird thumping noises up there, so naturally he clamored on up to go spelunking – he meets the town’s Deputy.

Actual quote from the film: “I wouldn’t sleep one night in this place. Are you nuts? Four people were hung by their necks in the tree in your backyard.”

The deputy is never named; there’s a running joke that his name is (or might as well be) “Deputy So and So.” He plays the Fool to Ellison’s King Lear (another guy who makes a monumentally stupid decision in the beginning of his story that causes everyone in his family to die). Deputy So and So provides comic relief (and I found him to be pretty darn hilarious), but he also serves to shed light on Ellison’s position in this supernatural situation and to speak truth to Ellison’s power.

When Ellison finally freaks out enough about the house’s eerie happenings to seek guidance, he reaches out to the Deputy:

Ellison: Now, I don’t believe in any…um, you know…stuff.

Deputy: Stuff, you mean, the supernatural, the metaphysical, the paranormal, that type of stuff?

Ellison: Right.

Deputy: Right. Of course you don’t. You never would have moved into a crime scene if you did. But here we are, having this conversation.

Ellison is a guy who sincerely does not believe that there exist such things as ghosts, or demons, or evil pagan deities – and if he really didn’t believe in any of that stuff, then the attack of the evil house monster is totally not his fault, right?

Except it’s still a murder house! Even if there were no malevolent presence, his kids would still be taunted and traumatized in school, he still would have to lie to his wife – it would still be a violation of his family’s sense of security.

Nevertheless, his disbelief is trotted out as yet another reason why a viewer should be accepting of his decisions to move to the murder house, stay in the murder house, and watch all the murder footage making faces like this:

It’s not Ethan Hawke’s fault that Ellison is so stupid; the fault lies the premise of the film.

So what’s truly driving Ellison? His sense of justice? His literary aspirations? His love for his wife? His manly skepticism about all things supernatural?

He’s doin’ it for the fame!

Here are two quotes from two separate interviews with the director, Derrickson:

“[H]e stays in the house because he has an even deeper fear of losing his status. It’s really a film about a guy who is trying to recover his lost fame and glory. And his fear of not recovering that riches and fame is the driving fear in the movie.”

“He’s staying because as much as he’s afraid of what’s on those films, as much as he’s afraid of the weird things that are starting to happen, he’s much more afraid of not regaining his status as a great true crime writer.’

There you have it, folks. The filmmakers want us to like a guy who’s more afraid of losing his status than losing his entire family’s sense of safety in their own home.

Ellison accomplishes very little during his time “researching.” He watches snuff films, writes obvious questions on sticky notes, drinks, watches snuff films, drinks, watches old interviews from when he was briefly famous, drinks, and then watches snuff films again.

Ellison doesn’t solve the mystery; Deputy So and So figures it out. And when we finally reach that pivotal moment, when the family’s inescapable doom is revealed, the crucial information that the Deputy has uncovered seems like it should have been discovered way earlier in the investigation.

In a Sinister review titled Mr. Boogie, meet scarier Mr. Google, film critic Peter Howell writes:

“It’s a given that people do dumb things in horror movies, such as failing to switch on the lights when they enter a dark room. Ellison does all these things and more. A certain indulgence is required, but Sinister writer/director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill expect too much.

“Dumb becomes lazy way too often…Why doesn’t Ellison flip when he discovers a scorpion and a poisonous snake in his attic? Why does he need glasses, but takes them off to peer into the darkness?

“Most important of all, why doesn’t Ellison just use Google to research the links between the killings at his house and similar ones across the U.S.?”

Being forced to watch Sinister’s selfish, ineffective, narcissistic protagonist run around being an idiot for two hours ruins the few aspects of this film I do find to be well executed (pun intended): the found footage and the night terror sequences.

The found footage films are shot on actual 8 mm, and both the music and the visuals are utterly horrifying. I won’t post any pictures of them here — the images are that disturbing. The night terror scene – in which the son, Trevor (Michael Hall D’Addario), unfurls out of a cardboard box screaming – is another astoundingly terrifying moment:

Also, I am fascinated by films that implicate the viewer in a character’s crime: Ellison isn’t supposed to watch the found footage, so by extension neither is the viewer, and yet here I am watching him and watching it, complicit in his sin. How does our willful consumption of this hideously gruesome material impact our lives?

But these great moments are invariably spoiled by Ellison’s obnoxious Manpain.

And now presenting the graphic violence in the context of its impact on Ellison!

We see the most gruesome of the snuff films’ content reflected in his glasses, or blurred behind him while he turns to booze to ease his pain. We see the images projected onto his body:

Ellison’s body becomes the locus of the murder footage.

The message becomes

HEY MEN: Everything is about you! Even other people’s murders are about you! GO AND LIVE YOUR DREAM! Lie to your wife if you need to! Traumatize your children! Only you can instill justice in this screwed up world! Only you can make things right! Only your status matters! YOU ARE THE DECIDER!

The family doesn’t leave the house until Ellison is directly confronted by the supernatural being in a face-to-face, unequivocally malevolent encounter. When Ellison tells Tracy that they have to pack up and leave immediately, she hesitates for the briefest moment, and he has the audacity to scream at her: “GO!!!” Nevermind that she never wanted to move into this house in the first place – or that even before she knew it was a murder house she wanted to leave! — now that HE feels frightened, it’s time to get out immediately.

The unfortunate consequence of prioritizing the likability of this mind-numbingly stupid male protagonist: the one woman in the entire film is relegated to the sidelines, serving no purpose but to yell and be yelled at, to make coffee and get murdered.

________________________________________________________________________________

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

Why This Bitch Loves the B—

I avoided ‘Don’t Trust the B— in Apartment 23’ for quite a while; at a cursory Netflix glance it looked like anti-feminist tripe featuring catty women pitted against each other in a false dichotomy of “nice” and “bitch.” Then I watched it.

I could not have been more wrong.

This cross-post by Mychael Blinde previously appeared at her blog Vagina Dentwata and appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

I avoided Don’t Trust the B— in Apartment 23 for quite a while; at a cursory Netflix glance it looked like anti-feminist tripe featuring catty women pitted against each other in a false dichotomy of “nice” and “bitch.” Then I watched it.

I could not have been more wrong.

There are two points I want to make in this piece:

Don’t Trust the B— showcases a twisted yet surprisingly heartwarming female friendship that is fundamentally predicated on respect, and this mutual respect leads to personal growth for both women.
I endorse the use of the bowdlerized “B—” in the show’s title as well as the word “bitch” in the show, and I even think that the use of the word “bitch” in the context of this show has the potential to have a positive impact on women’s lives.

"Oh brave new world!" — “Oh brave new world!”

Viewers are introduced to the series via June, an intelligent and optimistic Midwestern gal who moves to New York for an exciting new position at a big financial firm, only to discover that the firm has imploded and as a result she is left with no job and no apartment. Despite the dire nature of her circumstances, June is determined: she will not give up and go back to Indiana — she will take control of her life and somehow find a way to stick it out in New York. (Tenacious ladies FTW!)

After meeting with a montage of potential (utterly awful) roommates, June meets Chloe, who presents herself as the picture perfect BFF lady roommate. As soon as June signs on and pays first and last months’ rent, Chloe starts walking around naked and barging into the bathroom and being a total asshole all the time.

But June does not capitulate to Chloe’s con artistry; instead, she escalates the altercation: she sells all of Chloe’s furniture. When June stands up to Chloe, their friendship begins to take root.

In an interview with Collider, show creator Nahnatchka Khan explains:

If June was weak, Chloe wouldn’t respect her, and for Chloe, respect is everything. If she doesn’t respect you, forget it. June is strong in a different way than Chloe. She’s strong in a more surprising way. Chloe does things that shock people, but then, June also steps up in a way that feels surprising and unexpected.

Show creator/executive producer/writer Nahnatchka Khan (left), executive producer/writer David Hemingson (a little bit less left), and the core cast of Don’t Trust the B– — Show creator/executive producer/writer Nahnatchka Khan (left), executive producer/writer David Hemingson (a little bit less left), and the core cast of *Don’t Trust the B–*

Because of their fundamental respect for each other, over the course of the show’s two seasons these two very different women are each able to learn from the other. June teaches Chloe that girls can play pranks on each other, and Chloe teaches June that “sexy” shouldn’t be narrowly defined by the people featured on the covers of magazines. Chloe teaches June that she can be a “casual sexer,” and June teaches Chloe that it’s OK for her to care about other people.

Chloe and June enjoy brunch and friendship

Dreama Walker’s June is a joy to watch: her strength and determination in the face of adversity, her glass-half-full approach to life, her verve.

She’s an ambitious woman navigating the boys’ club world of finance, and she’s not afraid to walk away from a tremendous career opportunity when she discovers a gross misogynistic ethos pervades the company that hired her. It should be noted that June is no prude: she clearly has sexual desires, and while she’s sometimes hesitant to act on them, she’s never ashamed of them. Only someone with spectacular strength, spirit, and optimism could stand a chance of weathering Hurricane Chloe, and June is ever up for the challenge.

And let’s talk about Krysten Ritter’s Chloe –

I challenge you to name another female character on TV who is such a total sociopathic manipulative narcissistic asshole and yet so incredibly likable. Sure, the anti-hero is all over television, but it’s male characters: Gregory House, Walter White, Don Draper, all the guys in this book so aptly titled: Difficult Men. Chloe is unique, as Buzzfeed points out in the list “9 Reasons to Save Don’t Trust the B— in Apartment 23”:

2. There’s no other character like Chloe on TV.

She’s a treasure. The joy of Chloe is that there’s always a method to her madness. Even when she’s nasty and vindictive, she has a greater plan. Sometimes the end doesn’t justify the means, but she’s doing her best by being the worst.

Deep, deep, deeeep down, Chloe is extremely loyal to those closest to her. Her approach to everyone and everything is typically maniacal and manipulative, which renders her moments of (albeit often twisted) altruism all the more meaningful.

For example, in the pilot episode, Chloe has sex with June’s cheating scumbag boyfriend on June’s birthday cake for no other reason than to prove to June that she needs to DTMFA. “That is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me,” June says, and she means it.

Khan provides an insight into Chloe’s psyche and why we embrace her often horrific antics:

She does have her own moral code. She’s not just a sociopath. You understand why she does what she does, once she explains it to you. It’s weird, fucked-up logic, obviously, but you’re like, “Oh, okay, all right, I see what she’s going for.”

My favorite example of this occurs in “Sexy People…”, the episode in which Chloe takes over People Magazine to prove a point to June about the mutability and marketability of “sexy” in popular culture:

Chloe: I had them mock this up down at the office. I became the managing editor of People Magazine today.

June: Yeah, right.

Chloe: It’s true. I’ve taken over a bunch of companies before…You just gotta walk in like you own the place, fire the first person to ask you a question, fire the second person to ask you a question, and then gaze out the window and draw a peen on the board. It’s the traditional intimidation-confusion-submission technique.

We root for Chloe in her quest to take over People’s Sexiest Man Alive issue, no matter how atrocious her methods. In fact, even the recipient of Chloe’s worst treatment (Brenda, smackwich) ultimately states that Chloe was the best boss she’s ever had. We, the audience, are asked to love Chloe in all of her bitch glory.

Don’t trust the B— — *Don’t Trust the B—*

This brings me to my essay’s second subject: the word “bitch.”

Just prior to the launch of the series, articles sprang up questioning and condemning ABC’s use of “Bitch” and “B—”:

Michal Lemberger, in “What ‘B—’ leaves out” (Salon), acknowledges that while “bitch” is often used to denigrate women, it can also be used by women to elevate other women:

Any woman who is labeled a bitch is someone who won’t give what’s asked of her. She has broken the social contract that demands women be pliable and accommodating. Which is precisely the opposite of its meaning when used as a compliment. A woman who admiringly calls another woman a bitch is declaring her admiration for someone who won’t conform to those expectations.

Nevertheless, she takes issue with the use of the “B—” in ABC’s show title:

Despite the gains women have made, gender relations in America remain troubled: Widespread wage gaps still exist, as does a paucity of women at the highest levels of power. We’re still arguing about why women get blamed for their own rapes. The list goes on and on. The words we use to refer to women show us how far that process is from being complete.

Megan Kearns, in “Don’t Trust the B— in Apartment 23: The Upcoming TV Show and the B Word” (Bitch Flicks), vehemently takes issue with the title’s use of the B—:

It’s not within a cultural vacuum that this show chose its title. The creators and ABC all know it demeans women. But they obviously don’t give a shit. What’s new?

I respect every woman’s right to object to words that have historically been used to subjugate women. But I also endorse every woman’s right to reclaim this oppressive language, to seize control of a hateful, harmful word and reshape it to facilitate empowerment.

I believe that the use of “bitch,” in the context of Don’t Trust the B—, has the power to create a positive impact on women’s lives. This show, created by a woman, paints a bitch as a fearless woman who knows who she is, what she wants, and how to get it. We root for the bitch!

Andi Zeisler, co-founder and creative/editorial director of Bitch Magazine, writes in “The B-Word? You Betcha.” (Washington Post):

My own definition of the term being what it is, I can confidently say that I want my next president to be a bitch, and that goes for men and women. Outspoken? Check. Commanding? Indeed. Unworried about pleasing everybody? Sure. Won’t bow to pressure to be “nice”? You bet.

Outspoken, commanding, unworried about pleasing everybody, won’t bow to pressure to be “nice” – this sounds like Chloe…and it also sounds like June. In fact, sharing these qualities is what allows this unlikely duo to forge their friendship. Sure, Chloe takes “bitch” to the comic extreme, but hey, that’s the genre.

Don’t Trust the B— in Apartment 23 is by no means an absolute paragon of feminist values. There’s lots of problematic sociocultural stuff to unpack here, like impossible standards of beauty and white central characters orbited by peripheral characters of color. What shouldn’t be considered problematic by feminist communities is the show’s use of the word “bitch.”

America can’t yet handle using all five letters of the word “Bitch” in a network show title, but there is no question as to what B— means. The bowdlerized version allows Khan to use the controversial word, and the way she uses it pushes our culture’s conception of “bitch” toward Zeisler’s definition – a good thing for women and a great thing for June and Chloe!

Mychael Blinde is interested in representations of gender and popular culture and blogs at Vagina Dentwata.

Horror Week 2012: ‘Paranormal Activity’: The Horror of Waiting, of Watching, of Things Unseen

This guest review by Mychael Blinde previously appeared at Vagina Dentwata and is cross-posted with permission.

Please don’t film the demons!

I’m partial to the Paranormal Activity trilogy for three reasons: the clever camera work, the pitch perfect execution of tension building and release, and the films’ focus on women’s stories and histories. (The first half of this essay features only minor spoilers. You will be warned when the spoiler shit gets real.)

The first Paranormal Activity came out in 2007 during the outset of a scary thing called a subprime mortgage crisis. All three films tap into our anxiety about the bargains we make to ensure wealth and prosperity. Coincidence? Maybe.

But probably not.

Katie, Kristi, and Julie

Katie (in the first film), Kristi (in the second), and their mother Julie (in the third) all have ginormous houses because their mother/grandmother made a deal with the devil.

Grandma

Each film opens with a display of the sizable house and the occupants’ expensive accoutrements: PA 1 opens with Katie pulling up to the house in a fancy car on a beautiful suburban street, where her boyfriend Micah is filming his big screen TV. In the opening of PA 2, viewers take a tour with newborn baby Hunter and are introduced to multiple living rooms and “man caves,” flat screen TVs, a fireplace in the bedroom, a pool and a hot tub. PA 3 conveys the family’s wealth with both the size of the house and the expensiveness of the multiple cameras (it is 1988, after all).

Each film uses the hugeness of the house to create anxiety about the myriad dark corners and empty rooms. All three films exploit doorways; thresholds are the locus of fucked up shit:

These movies may be about the anxiety of wealth, but they were each made with a small budget relative to their box office intake. They do a lot with very little.

For example, the first film’s stroke of genius: the timestamp. Fucking brilliant. Here’s how it goes: The camera is on a tripod in the bedroom.

Katie and Micah are sleeping and time is fastforwarding and nothing’s happening, and time is fastforwarding and nothing’s happening, nothing’s happening, nothing’s happening. And then suddenly, the clock switches to REALTIME.

And you think, The clock must have stopped for a reason. Something’s going to happen. And they’re sleeping. And nothing’s happening. Nothing’s happening. Nothing’s happening. Fuck, what’s going to happen? Something’s going to happen! Let it fucking happen already! And then it happens and you’re startled – but the tension is released.

I call that a horrorgasm: tension builds and builds and builds and then finally the horrible thing happens, and it scares you but it feels good. The Paranormal Activity trilogy elicits multiples.

The timestamp from the first film still haunts me. Whenever I wake up in the middle of the night, my mind thinks OH FUCK I’M IN REALTIME WAS THAT A SOUND IN THE KITCHEN?

In the first film, the kitchen isn’t really a locus of horror. It’s featured in the requisite horror fake out: What’s that weird sound? Is it a demon? Nope, it’s the ice maker. Hahaha!

In the second and third film, horrible things happen to women in kitchens. Scary fucking things.

The second film’s genius is the multiplicity of cameras, capturing footage of the front stoop, backyard, the kitchen, the living room, the front door, and the nursery.

Add to that a handheld camera…

I told you, these people have money.

Here’s how it goes: Shot from the front door: nothing’s happening. Shot from the backyard: nothing’s happening. Shot from the kitchen: nothing’s happening. Shot from the living room: nothing’s happening. Shot from the foyer: nothing’s happening. Shot from the nursery: nothing’s happening. Shot from the backyard: nothing’s happening. Oh shit, did that pool cleaner thing move?

It’s tedious and somewhat irritating, but if the goal is to build tension before the real shit goes down, it works. Because boy does the shit go down…eventually.

In my estimation, the third film does an excellent job of utilizing both the timestamp and the multiple cameras – it was smart to use more than one camera like the first film, but also smart not to incorporate as many as the second film. To the cinematic mix, the third film adds an astoundingly effective method of capturing horrifying footage: strapping a camera to a fan. GENIUS.

If horror films have taught me one thing, it is that scary shit awaits behind corners. Liminal spaces are frightening places. The camera on the fan, constantly in motion, is constantly turning corners, showing you awful things, and terrifying you with the horror of the thing you cannot see. This is particularly well executed in a sequence involving the babysitter.

Speaking of the babysitter…let’s talk about the representation of female characters:

[WARNING: HEAVY DUTY SPOILERS AND CRITICAL ANALYSES AHEAD. ALSO NOT AS MANY PICTURES]

The horror genre has a tradition of terrorizing women, of chasing them through the woods and attacking them in houses. It also has a tradition of The Final Girl, a trope that is simultaneously empowering and reductive: the only survivor is a virginal woman who wields a phallic weapon and destroys the monster.

The PA trilogy features a different kind of Final Girl: she doesn’t kill the monster – she becomes it.

Here is the plot of each of the three films: a woman/women/girls are terrorized by a demon. A man puts cameras and captures scary-as-fuck footage until he is killed in a horrible way by a woman’s body powered by demonic forces.

“I’m a man and this is my house and I can protect it if I gain enough knowledge about my demonic adversary. Oh wait, no I can’t.”

Who is responsible for the demon’s success? Well, the demon itself, obvs, and the coven of women who made a bargain with it. But what about the three men who insist on filming the paranormal activity? Their actions certainly don’t seem to help the situation in any of the three films.

Micah (first film) is the cameraman most explicitly responsible for the escalation of the demonic presence. He insists on bringing a camera into their home, and he asks Katie “Do you know of any tricks to uh…make stuff happen?” and asks the psychic “Is there something we can do to like make stuff happen, you know, to like get it on tape?” Katie objects to Micah bringing home a Ouija board, but he does it anyway. He argues against bringing in an exorcist. He tells her, “This is my house, you’re my girlfriend, I’m going to fucking solve the problem.”

Micah’s actions and attempts to chronicle the demonic disturbances only seem to exacerbate those disturbances. James MacDowell at The Lesser Feat argues that Katie is subject to “a persecuted wife melodrama.” Jenn at XXBlaze claims that Micah is “a big stupid douche.” I agree with both of them.

I spent the entire movie thinking, “This asshole’s going to get his girlfriend killed.” But PA 1 flips it around, and it is demonically-possessed Katie who winds up killing Micah.

In the second film, Katie’s sister Kristi, Kristi’s husband Daniel, their toddler son, and his teenage daughter all live in the house afflicted by the paranormal activity. It is Daniel who decides to install cameras all over. He’s not a shithead like Micah; in fact, he isn’t even really excited by the activity. He’s the only one of the three cameramen who is a skeptic about its status as paranormal. He does fuck up by firing the nanny – the only person in the entire movie who actually understands how to engage with the demonic entity – because he doesn’t believe in “that stuff.”

Unfortunately, in Paranormal Activity 2, “that stuff” is real, and it really kills him.

The third film features footage of Katie and Kristi as children living with their mother (Julie) and stepfather (Dennis).

It is Dennis and his friend/employee Randy who take to setting up cameras all over the house. Dennis seems to have the least culpability – he neither desires the paranormal activity like Micah, nor does he deny that anything supernatural is going on like Daniel. Nevertheless, he winds up killed.

I don’t think the PA films suggest that the filmmaking is the catalyst for the paranormal activity, but I do believe they imply that the filmmaking exacerbates the demon’s antics.

In the first film, when Katie is frightened by the increase in the intensity of the activity, she tells Micah “Maybe we shouldn’t have the camera.” (Micah’s response is, “Uh, hello, this is some really golden shit.”)

In the second film, Katie tells Kristi: “It thrived on fear. The more we paid attention to it, the worse it got…You need to ignore it.”

In the third film, when a particularly fucking horrible thing is happening to Katie, Kristie shouts, “Just ignore it! Just ignore it!”

Focusing on the demon in one’s mind goads the demon; focusing on the demon with one’s camera seems to do the same. To varying degrees, each of these films implicates the man who set up the camera(s) – and by extension, the viewer.

See, Micah is an asshole, but we’re just like him: we want to see it, we want to see evidence of an entity. We strain to see it, to see any indication of it. We don’t sit down to see these films hoping to watch a bunch of people sleeping peacefully through the night. It’s called Paranormal Activity, not Paranormal Nothing’s Happening.

Micah winds up dead, and we wind up afraid of our ice makers.

Ironically, it is the physical manifestation of evil – when we see the demon possess a human body – that makes the endings of each of the three films so anticlimactic. The chief horror of these films lies in the visible invisibility of the entity.

Don’t get me wrong: a possessed person can be absolutely horrifying. But in a film so focused on the scariness of not being able to see the adversary, this sudden transition feels…weak.

My co-thinker on the matter pointed out to me that even though the lady becoming the demon (or the demon becoming the lady) kind of demystifies the evil, any visible adversary would have been anticlimactic. She points out that the filmmakers could have really fucked up by trying to show the audience a demon in demon form. I agree with her.

And despite the meh resolutions, the overall message of the trilogy is chilling: the compromises we make to ensure our wealth and prosperity may very well come back to bite us in the ass (or lower back). There Is No Such Thing As A Free Ginormous House.

The vast majority of these films are so cinematically strong (the horror of waiting, the horror of watching, the horror of things unseen) and so committed to the stories of their female characters (whose history is the catalyst for the events that unfold) that I’ll forgive them for their crappy endings.

I’m not sure I’ll be able to forgive Paranormal Activity 4.

I don’t have a problem with the fourth film departing from the first three by jumping forward in time. I think that featuring a woman filming herself via her laptop is a clever next-step in the PA tradition of innovative found-footage cinematography. I’m also glad that they’ve decided to continue keeping the focus on a female character.

So what’s the problem?

Look at the conventionally attractive young woman sleeping in her bed! It’s SEXY scary!

Yes, there are moments in the first three movies when the women are sexualized — but a sexualized woman’s body was never used to sell them.

I’m afraid to watch Paranormal Activity 4, but for the wrong reasons.

———-

Mychael Blinde is interested in representations of gender and popular culture and blogs at Vagina Dentwata.

Horror Week 2012: ‘The Strangers’: The Horror of Home Invasion and the Power of the Final Girl

Guest post written by Mychael Blinde. Originally published at Vagina Dentwata. Cross-posted with permission.

The home invasion horror film The Strangers received bad reviews. Like, really bad. Critics wrote things like:

“What a waste of a perfectly good first act! And what a maddening, nihilistic, infuriating ending!”

and:

“Kind of like what The Shining might be if you took out the ESP. And the ghosts. And the chilling atmosphere. So call it The Sucking.”

But The Strangers totally works for me as both a horror fan and a feminist. Here’s why:

As a horror fan:

The film opens with Kristin (Liv Tyler) and James (Scott Speedman) driving to his parents’ rural summer home in uncomfortable silence. We learn that they have come from a friend’s wedding, at which James proposed to Kristen. Kristen has rejected his proposal, not because she doesn’t love James, but because she isn’t ready to get married.

The sense of discomfort and unease we feel at the couple’s awkward, painful situation transforms into a sense of fear and alarm with a loud knock on a large door at 4 in the morning. We are emotionally invested in the characters when the shit starts to go down — and boy does shit go down. But The Strangers takes its time.

The cinematography contributes to the film’s tone of discomfort: the camera is never steady, and the subtly shaky hand held shots jostle the viewer. Director Bryan Bertino makes great use of wide angle shots, forcing the viewer to strain hir eyes looking for the killer in the peripheral screen space.

Kristin (Liv Tyler) in The Strangers | I spy with my little eye a creepy-as-fuck guy!

The sound effects are equally disconcerting. The Strangers assaults the audience with banging and crashing, and most terrifying of all, with silence. It insists that its audience listen; diegetic sounds like a repeating record player situate the audience in the film’s world. And in case you had any doubts, Liv Tyler can scream.

The aesthetic has a vaguely 70s feel (the car, record player), but The Strangers dates itself as late 00s by the two silver flip cell phones. The 70s props and look, paired with the strong sense of rural-areas-are-scary-places-full-of-psycho-killers urbanoia and the masked* assailants call to my mind The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it is not the psycho killers who invade the house, but their victims.

James (Scott Speedman) and Kristin (Liv Tyler) in The Strangers

The Strangers is a more like Funny Games: it’s a home invasion horror in which the violence is presented as horrible, inexplicable, and inevitable. Director Michael Haneke created Funny Games as a reaction to (and criticism of) the Quentin Tarantino style of glamorized violence. Funny Games explicitly asks its audience to think about why we enjoy watching horrible things being inflicted upon people.

The Strangers doesn’t take things that level of meta cinematic criticism, but it makes its point.

The Strangers | “Why are you doing this?” “Because you were home.”

Sometimes humans do awful things to other humans for no reason at all. Violence is always horrific, and sometimes it is senseless and inexplicable. In the wake of the shooting at the screening of The Dark Knight Rises — a movie that certainly falls into the category of stylized violence — the representation of violence as ugly and meaningless in The Strangers resonates strongly with me.

As a feminist:

Kristin is the character with whom we spend the entirety of the film. In the beginning, while James goes to get her more cigarettes, and later when he stupidly breaks the first rule of surviving a horror film and goes off on his own, the audience stays with Kristen.

Not only is she the film’s protagonist, she’s a woman who is not presented as a helpless idiot. When the shit gets real, she puts on pants.

The screenplay makes a point of establishing Kristin’s affinity for her bridesmaid’s dress. After the couple arrives at the house Kristin, takes a bath, and instead of changing into sleepwear she puts on her dress again. She explains to James that this is the only day she gets to wear it, and says, “It makes me feel pretty.”

Kristin (Liv Tyler) in The Strangers

Director Bertino could have easily left Liv in her flimsy pink dress for the duration of the film.** Not only would this have accentuated her vulnerability, it would have offered ample opportunity to include titillating look-how-sexy-she-is-while-she’s-being-attacked shots.

But Bertino opts not to portray violence as sexy. When masked weirdos attack, pretty is not a priority; Kristin doesn’t hesitate to change into something more sensible for combating psychotic murderers: pants!

It is Kristin who loads the shotgun after James confesses he’d lied about going hunting with his father and doesn’t know how to work it. Ultimately, James fires the gun, but by loading it Kristin proves she isn’t an incompetent damsel-in-distress. Throughout the film she strives to fight back.

Kristin (Liv Tyler) in The Strangers

In Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol Clover identifies a film trope common to the horror genre: the Final Girl, the last woman left alive who ultimately wields the metaphorical phallus and kills the monster.

The Final Girl phenomenon is problematic because it is predicated on society’s sexist notion that women are the weaker sex. But scream time results in screen time, and while watching a movie like The Strangers, with whom is the viewer being asked to identify? The masked maniac? Or the woman frantic to survive? (Hint: it’s not the maniac.)

The character of the Final Girl offers women a chance to play protagonists in films marketed to men, which offers men the chance to identify with female characters. Which is awesome.

Kristin doesn’t exactly fit the requirements for Final Girl status, but she is the character with whom viewers of The Strangers are encouraged to identify, and she is presented as woman who is neither stupid nor incompetent.

Yes, The Strangers is derivative. Films about home invasion have been made before, and a movie about a woman being terrorized by a masked assailant isn’t exactly original. But in spite of its myriad predecessors, The Strangers manages to keep things creepy as fuck — all without resorting to tired sexism or misogyny.

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*“Dollface,” “Pin-up Girl,” and “Man in the Mask.” What do you make of the way the masks gender the assailants?

**Liv does end up back in that pink dress in the film’s bleak climax, but she is never sexualized.

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Mychael Blinde is interested in representations of gender and popular culture and blogs at Vagina Dentwata.