Orphan – Bitch Flicks

The Terror of Little Girls: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts for our The Terror of Little Girls Theme Week here.

Fucking with Fate: Sexuality, Loss, and Irreversibility in The Returned by Tina Giannoulis

The first episode opens on a 15-year-old girl, the eponymous “Camille” (Yara Pilartz), as she finds herself alone at dusk in the mountains above her town. She starts her journey back home, disoriented and a little confused but otherwise intact, despite having died in a school bus trip four years prior.

Little Girls in Horror Films: Setting the Stage for Female Double Standards by BJ Colangelo

The Terror of Little Girls: Social Anxiety About Women in Horrifying Girlhood by Leigh Kolb

Horror films hold a mirror up to these ideals, distorting the images and terrifying viewers in the process. The terror that society feels while looking at these little girls echoes the terror it feels when confronted with changing gender norms and female power.

Alarming Innocence: The Terror of Little Girls in The Crucible by Laura Shamas

Miller’s examination of the Salem Witch Trials, held in the Province of Massachusetts Bay from 1692-3, depicts the internal, secretive drive of a New England witch hunt, and how paranoia quickly escalates to devastate a marriage, a family, neighbors, and eventually, to cripple an entire community. The actions of little girls set it all in motion.

The Beth Thomas Story: How a TV Film and Documentary Captured a Child Enraged by Kim Hoffman

Tim and Julie didn’t know about the sexual abuse Beth had been subjected to as early as 19 months old by her father. They didn’t know she was suffering from Reactive Attachment Disorder, a condition that surfaces from past trauma and neglect into oceans of disturbing, detached, unresponsive, and apathetic behavior. They couldn’t possibly know that a young girl could be filled with so much—that much rage.

“The Demon” in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Ren Jender

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, a BBC production from 25 years ago, adapted by author Jeanette Winterson and based on her own autobiographical novel, is one of the few films in theaters or on TV which contains both a coming-out story and another parallel, equally compelling story. Seven-year-old, red-haired “Jess” (played as a young child by Emily Aston and as a teen by Charlotte Coleman) grows up in a small town in Lancashire, in the north of England, with her strict Pentecostal adoptive parents; her father, always in the background, is silent and her mother (Geraldine McEwan), front and center, quotes the Bible and denouncing the “heathens” all around her.

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

The crumbling cement in this relationship is the injured little girl lying on the table downstairs. Her parents are united only on the question of her safety. Unsurprisingly, Karen has no voice or agency of her own. The adults perceive her as entirely helpless— “Maybe it’s shock,” her mother says of her condition. “She can’t possibly take all the racket…”

Vampire Girls: Claudia and Eli by Kathryn Diaz

In the great monster mash team of terrifying children, the vampire girl is varsity captain. On the one hand, they are dolls forever: trapped in their prepubescent bodies for hundreds to thousands of years without a single curl losing its bounce. On the other hand, with hundreds of years of life come hundreds of years of experience, knowledge, even maturity.

Satan in a Frilly Dress by Gloria Endres de Oliveira

However, this form of social shaming does not seem to prevent some of his young disciples from subverting their supposed childlike innocence: when the town is suddenly riddled by mysterious and violent crimes, it is suggested that the children have something to do with it, their leader being Klara, a 13-year-old angel-faced blonde and the pastor’s eldest daughter.

The Volatility of Motherhood in David Cronenberg’s The Brood by Eli Levy

For Cronenberg, Candy represents the symbolic order and influence of the father, precisely what Nola wishes to eradicate. Candy is supposed to come “home to mommy” and have no fatherly influence. The characters in the film are defined by rigid gender constructs, or alternatively, through their attempts at living up to them.

“But I Do!”: Releasing Repressed Rage in The Ring by Rebecca Willoughby

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

Wednesday Addams, Smasher of the Patriarchy by Deborah Pless

She’s not nice, she’s not fragile, she’s not kind or sweet or even vaguely pleasant. She’s mean and angry and cynical and disaffected and sarcastic and snide and everything I wanted to be as a child. She’s also an intersectional feminist. And a little girl. She’s the best.

Femme Fatale in a Training Bra: Orphan‘s Esther and The Questionable Motives of Lolita Haze by Elizabeth Kiy

Movies where young girls are victimized are generally our idea of real world horrors, movies that are too sickening to sit through, but as much as they unsettle us, we expect them. We see these stories in the news every day. What is made truly terrifying and shocking in our culture is the advanced young girl already aware of her powers, and what she can get with them–a girl who knows how to move, how to dress, and how to manipulate.

Femme Fatale in a Training Bra: ‘Orphan’s Esther and The Questionable Motives of Lolita Haze

This post by Elizabeth Kiy appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.

The unnerving poster for Orphan — The unnerving poster for *Orphan*

It is very rare for a child to be a horror movie villain outside of a supernatural context. While we can turn off the movie, comforted that the children in Village of the Damned or the devil in The Omen’s Damien are fictional, we can’t entirely dismiss a child who simply goes bad, even if the narrative is as far-fetched as demonic possession and werewolves.

It frightens us because we know that an ordinary child going bad is somehow our fault, either as individuals or as a society. We have failed to intervene and save them before they were irredeemable.

In this light, Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita continues to captivate literary discussions due to its unreliable narrator. Humbert Humbert defends himself, saying 12-year-old Dolores Haze seduced and manipulated him. He excuses his sexual relationship with her based on the fact that she had already lost her virginity and therefore he was not corrupting her; she was already to be considered somehow adult. Though most scholars view Humbert’s explanations as lies told to diminish his culpability, it is our tendency as readers to believe our narrator and identify with him (a major reason why the book is so disquieting).

Dominique Swain is a grubby, bratty Lolita

When the 1997 remake of Lolita appeared in theaters, amid protests of its sexual depiction of a child, this reading of the character as the seducer and the party deserving of blame was used as a defense. Likewise, in 1959, novelist Robertson Davies famously described the story as “not the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child.” Despite the fact that “a corrupt child” is still a child who cannot consent to sexual activity, this view is mirrored in many real life court cases, where the abuse of young girls is excused because “she looked old for her age,” “she was already sexually active,” or that most horrifying of excuses, that paints a girl in a training bra as a whore in waiting: “she seduced me, she knew what she was doing.” If our culture finds the sexual desire of an adult woman to be monstrous and abhorrent, what are we to think of a child, this horror movie bogeyman-figure who seeks to ruin the lives of successful men, whose cries of victimization fall on deaf ears?

It’s a popular misogynistic narrative: the teenage femme fatale turns into a horrific stalker figure, bent on possessing a poor well-meaning man, usually a father figure or teacher. We’ve seen it time and time again in films like Poison Ivy, Devil in the Flesh, and The Crush, all with actresses of safely legal age for viewer lust and obvious attractiveness, and gratuitous shots of their bodies. There’s no question we’re meant to identify with the man and see him as an innocent victim, unsure why this monster-girl has seized upon him, as Joey Buttafuoco attempted to portray himself in the trial of Amy Fisher, the teenage mistress who shot his wife and was thereafter known as the Long Island Lolita.

Sue Lyon plays a glamourous conventionally attractive Lolita — Sue Lyon plays a glamourous, conventionally attractive Lolita

But this viewer-identification is only safe as long as we the audience feel comfortable lusting after the girl at its center. Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 version of Lolita upped the girl’s age from innocent 12 to an ambiguous early teens and eradicated glimpses from the book of Dolores’s gross childishness–the gum she was always chewing, her sticky fingers and snotty nose–that would disgust the audience and make Humbert clearly abhorrent. In addition, while still underage, actress Sue Lyon is of a more mature and glamourous physical type than the book’s Lolita, which makes viewers more comfortable with her sexualization. Dominique Swain in the remake, is the clumsy, sticky child that does (and should) turn us off and makes Humbert, not Lolita, the clear monster of the story.

The Colemans are charmed by sweet Esther

When it was released in 2009, Orphan was painted as a simple evil child movie, The Good Son with pigtails and a controversial anti-adoption stance. For awhile the narrative is conventional; Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) is a charismatic girl who can control and manipulate weaker children, like her new sister, Max, and adults. She attacks the girl who bullies her, kills a nun who promises to look into her back story and puts her adoptive brother in intensive care.

But the use of Esther as an advanced child, not only causally murderous but strangely sexual, adds a new dimension to this tale, marrying the evil child with the sexual stalker. Esther flirts with her adoptive father and attempts to kiss him and shocks her adoptive mother by stating matter-of-factly that she knows babies are made by men and women “fucking.”

There’s enough maternal and familial angst in the film to initially distract from Esther. The Colemans, a wealthy Connecticut family, decide to adopt a child to fill the void left after a miscarriage. Kate (Vera Farmiga) in particular feels the loss. Her husband and children are already wary of her because of her depression and alcoholism and refuse to believe her suspicions that something is very wrong with the angelic little girl they’ve brought into their home.

Through the film’s multiple acts, our view of Esther dramatically changes. Initially she is a perfect model child bullied for being sensitive and desperately in need of love, then she is a sociopathic child who hurts others without remorse, and finally, she is a crazy seducer, refusing to accept that she is not a sexy mature-bodied woman. In the film’s final act, we learn she is really a 33-year-old escaped mental patient with a pituitary disorder who has been posing as a child to be adopted by families and seduce the fathers.

Esther is made grotesque when she is revealed to be a 33-year old woman — Esther is made grotesque when she is revealed to be a 33-year-old woman

However, we see her strange sexual behavior before we learn that she is an adult woman, and it is clearly used to make us uncomfortable. As stated above, our culture’s fear of an overly sexualized child is rooted in our sense of guilt. We assume a child with this behaviour must be damaged in some way, must have fallen through the cracks of social services. Even if a child like Esther is a villain, we are obligated to feel sorry for her and speculate on the abuse she must have experienced. Orphan introduces Esther as a lonely, distanced child who has a difficult time relating to other people and children her age. It’s a narrative we’re already familiar with about children shuffled though orphanages and foster care, because in many cases it is a real life horror story.

Esther attempts to seduce her adoptive father

As such, we would ordinarily be wary of punishing Esther for her actions or question the degree of blame she deserves. A adult or teenage murderer must be killed or incarcerated to be disarmed, but what can we do with a little girl?

When The Bad Seed came out in 1956, The Hays Code put filmmakers in a difficult situation. Evil Rhoda (Patty McCormack) was not allowed to triumph, as she did in the source novel and play, as the code did not allow crime to pay, so the ending was rewritten to with Rhoda dying after being struck by lightening. Still, ending a film with the death of a child and using it as a cause for celebration would not sit well with audiences. A slapstick coda was pasted on, where Nancy Kelly, who played Rhoda’s mother, delivers a spanking to McCormack, intended to stress that it was only a movie and all meant in good fun.

In Orphan, the solution is to reveal she is not actually a little girl, and thus, can be punished harshly. We don’t need to worry about her parents or her upbringing or possible rehabilitation. We don’t need to feel sorry for her. She is officially a monster, a freak, so we can hit her with a shovel or throw her across the room and breathe satisfied. The reveal of her actual face, beneath the make-up and freed from her false teeth is horrifying in itself, as she suddenly looks like an adult woman. With this reveal, she becomes a legitimate monster, an adult face on a child’s tiny body, wrinkled and malformed, crawling around and fighting like an animal.

Esther views herself as trapped inside the body of a child and unable to live the life of a grown woman with a family and a lover. Because of her appearance, any attempt of hers to be a sexual being is automatically perverted.

Her jealousy of Kate, who has everything she is denied, contributes to the uniquely antagonistic relationship between them. Because Kate is able to see through Esther’s act, she is marked as her rival early on, even while Kate still sees Esther as her child. When Esther says “fuck,” she poses it as a challenge to Kate. If Esther is a child, there is nothing Kate can really do to her and not seem like the criminal. In most cases, being a child means you’re the one to be believed.

By the film’s end, as it devolves into a classic chase/fight scene, Esther and Kate become equals and Esther is validated as a romantic rival. These final scenes mirror chase/fight scenes between adult romantic rivals, like Fatal Attraction and Single White Female. It is very rare that an “evil kid” movie ends with the mother fighting the child, in these films the mother is usually killed earlier, as in The Omen.

In the end, movies like Orphan and stories like Lolita challenge our morality and our idea of what a child can be found guilty of. Orphan’s final twist allows us some relief from this uncertainty. If Esther’s not a child, if Lolita is aged up and filled out, we’re not allowed to be uncomfortable, even if it doesn’t change the meat of the story.

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

Little Girls in Horror Films: Setting the Stage for Female Double Standards

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

Horror films frequently utilize little girls as a “go-to” scare tactic. As the sound disappears in a dark and spooky house covered in cobwebs and shadows, a little girl’s laugh or even a song will echo throughout the halls. The contrast of something so seemingly innocent found in a dark and uninviting environment has been used for decades. Whether it’s the iconic and eerie request of the Grady sisters asking Danny Torrance to play forever (and ever, and ever, and ever) in The Shining, or the innocent announcement of “They’re Heeeeere” from little Carol Anne Freeling in Poltergeist, little girls are as much of a scaring staple as a shrieking cat or a set of wailing violins. While there are the exceptions like Damien in The Omen or Barto in The Unborn, for the large part, little girls are used much more frequently in killer kid/child possession/child ghost films. In the same breath, the safety of little girls is valued far more than the safety of little boys. This double standard shown with little girls in horror films perpetuates the idea that women, regardless of age, are constantly in a state of conflict.

Little girls are often what we associate with innocence. Girls are said to be born out of “sugar, spice, and everything nice,” which attaches a stigma to women from birth that is unrealistic. Society is conditioned to believe this ridiculous myth, which changes the way we value little girls over little boys. When little girls in horror films aren’t used as demons/ghosts/killers/etc. and instead exist as just human, the importance of their survival is much greater than any other character. Referring back to Carol Anne Freeling in the Poltergeist franchise, the entire film is centered on protecting and saving her. Carol Anne’s brother, Robbie, arguably endures the more traumatic events in the film, but the focus still remains on Carol Anne. Yes, Robbie’s trees, gravity, his own toys, and his bedroom are torturing and “taken” by the spirits in the house, but the entire focus stays on protecting Carol Anne. Never mind the years of therapy Robbie may require to help him after the tree outside of his room tried to kill him, we still only care about Carol Anne simply because as a little girl, we feel that she constantly needs protecting.

Even when little girls are presented as the villains, we still care more about their survival than little boys. The Swedish vampire hit, Let The Right One In, shows Eli, a vampire girl around the same appearing age as her male counterpart, Oskar. Eli is capable of taking care of herself (and proves it throughout the course of the film) while Oskar is frequently bullied and shown as weak and in need of protection every step of the way. However, Eli’s survival is the one we focus on the most. Whether it’s aggravation towards her helper, Hakan, and his insolence that has now put her safety in jeopardy, or the fact an angry townsperson is hot on her trail to kill her, we sympathize with Oskar’s bullying, but we don’t invest in his safety quite like we do Eli’s. We expect Oskar to “deal” with his issues like he always had done before, but with Eli, we constantly want those around her to “save” her, even though she could do it on her own if she chose.

In Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs, we also witness intersectionality at play. Poindexter “Fool” Williams, is a young African-American boy trapped in a house of horrors. While he appears to be about the same age as the Caucasian girl, Alice Robeson, we value her safety far more than we do Fool’s. From the get-go, Fool is presented as almost deserving to be in trouble because he’s a poor Black child, and the angelically white Alice is stuck living in a home with abusive parents. The threat from “Mommy and Daddy” Robeson is much greater toward Fool, but we still shift our focus toward Alice and sense a greater sense of distress towards her survival. Fool is presented as not only a troublemaking youth, but also as the undisputed hero of the film. We believe that this poor Black child is capable enough of making it out alive because “he should be used to survival” while we see Alice as weak and with a lack of “street smarts.” It’s a tragic truth, but this sort of value on the young white female is something that is commonly reflected in the way the media portrays lost children (aka: missing white woman syndrome).

At the same time, despite our value of the lives of little girls over just about anyone else in a horror film, girls are used overwhelmingly more than boys as a source of “evil” in horror films. Cathy’s Curse, The Exorcist, Silent Hill, The Bad Seed, The Ring, The Shining, Orphan, Night of the Living Dead, Alice Sweet Alice, The Last Exorcism, The Amityville Horror, Case 39, and countless other films have all portrayed little girls as the perfect vessel for pure, unadulterated evil. We are terrified of these evil little girls, but at the same time, we feel like they need to be protected over anyone else. These conflicting ideals are the very start of the double standards that women endure over the course of their lives.

Compare this to a film like Insidious, where the focus is on little boys, we still don’t invest in their safety. The son, Dalton, is transported into an otherworldly land, but the greatest sense of conflict occurs when the father, an adult, goes in after him. It’s almost as if we don’t care about boys until they become men, but we only care about women when they’re little.

The film Orphan is particularly interesting in that it shows a little girl as evil–a little girl as the ultimate object needing protection–and a little boy as someone we completely ignore. Esther, a deranged child adopted by a loving family with two existing children, plays the villain in this film. The existing daughter, Max, is a deaf girl about the age of 4, and her brother Daniel is closer to Esther’s age at 10-12. While Daniel is immediately skeptical of Esther, he is written off as being a pain-in-the-ass prepubescent boy, while Max is shown as the perfect daughter, loving and trusting…the way little girls SHOULD be. However, when Esther is revealed to be the personification of evil that she is, our focus shifts to protecting Max. Esther literally tries to set Daniel on fire and burn him alive, but we still fear for Max’s safety on a much higher level when Esther turns her attention to Max. Why? Because she’s a little girl, and little girls need saving.

Once childhood is over, these little girls grow up into other tropes and female archetypes that continue the path of double standards: the mother or the killer, the slut or the prude, the dumb blonde, or the geeky brunette. Women in horror films aren’t allowed to simply “be,” but instead are constantly being pushed into eerily specific archetypal boxes. This practice starts in the young representation of children and follows us for the rest of our lives. Art really does imitate life, regardless of how depressing the outcomes may be.

BJ Colangelo is the woman behind the keyboard for Day of the Woman: A blog for the feminine side of fear and a contributing writer for Icons of Fright. She’s been published in books, magazines, numerous online publications, all while frantically applying for day jobs. She’s a recovering former child beauty queen and a die-hard horror fanatic. You can follow her on Twitter at @BJColangelo.

The Terror of Little Girls: Social Anxiety About Women in Horrifying Girlhood

This repost by Leigh Kolb appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.

Horror films have a long-standing tradition of commenting on the social fears and anxieties of their time.

Another universally recognized truth of horror is that scary children are terrifying–especially little girls.

While an analysis of “creepy children” in horror films usually proclaims that they are providing commentary on a loss of innocence, and it would make sense that a little girl is the “ultimate” in innocence, it can’t be that simple. We wouldn’t be so shaken to the core by possessed, haunted, violent little girls if we were simply supposed to be longing for innocent times of yesteryear.

Instead, these little girls embody society’s growing fears of female power and independence. Fearing a young girl is the antithesis of what we are taught–stories of missing, kidnapped or sexually abused girls (at least white girls) get far more news coverage and mass sympathy than stories of boy victims. Little girls are innocent victims and need protection.

In the Victorian era, the ideal female was supposed to be pale, fainting-prone and home-bound. Feminist literary icons Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar write about this nineteenth-century ideal in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women:

“At its most extreme, this nineteenth-century ideal of the frail, even sickly female ultimately led to the glorification of the dead or dying woman. The most fruitful subject for literature, announced the American romancer Edgar Allan Poe in 1846, is ‘the death… of a beautiful woman’… But while dead women were fascinating, dying girl-children were even more enthralling… These episodes seem to bring to the surface an extraordinary imperative that underlay much of the nineteenth-century ideology of femininity: in one way or another, woman must be ‘killed’ into passivity for her to acquiesce in what Rousseau and others considered her duty of self-abnegation ‘relative to men.'”

The feminine “ideal” (and its relation to literature) coincided with women beginning the long fight for suffrage and individual rights. It’s no surprise, then, that men wanted to symbolically kill off the woman so she could fulfill her ultimate passive role. There was something comforting about this to audiences.

Rhoda Penmark will not lose to a boy. Or anyone else.

Fast forward to the 1950s and 60s, and the modern horror genre as we know it emerged and began evolving into something that provided social commentary while playing on audiences’ deepest fears (the “other,” invasion, demonic possession, nuclear mutations and the end of the world).

We know that horror films have always been rife with puritanical punishment/reward for promiscuous women/virgins (the “Final Girl” trope), and violence toward women or women needing to be rescued are common themes. These themes comfort audiences, and confirm their need to keep women subjugated in their proper place. It’s no coincidence that the 50s and 60s were seeing sweeping social change in America (the Pill, changing divorce laws, resurgence of the ERA, a lead-up to Roe v. Wade).

Terrifying little girls also make their debut in this era. Their mere presence in these films spoke not only to audiences’ fears of children losing innocence, but also the intense fear that little girls–not yet even women–would have the power to overthrow men. These girl children of a generation of women beginning a new fight for rights were terrifying–these girls would grow up knowing they could have power.

The Bad Seed‘s Rhoda Penmark (played by Patty McCormack in the 1956 film), genetically predisposed to be a sociopath, murders a classmate and the janitor who suspects her. Her classmate–a boy–beats her in a penmanship contest, and she beats him to death with her tap shoes. A little girl, in competition with a boy, loses, and kills. While in the novel Rhoda gets away with her crimes, the Hays Code commanded that the film version “punished” her for her crimes and she’s struck by lightning. It’s revealed that Rhoda’s sociopathic tendencies come from her maternal grandmother, a serial killer. This notion of female murderous rage, passed down through generations and claiming boys/men as its victim, certainly reflects social fear at the time.

In 1968, Night of the Living Dead premiered on big screens and has been seen as commenting on racism/the Civil Rights movement, Cold War-era politics and critiquing America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. However, little Karen Cooper’s (Kyra Schon) iconic scene has long disturbed audiences the most. Infected by zombies, she eats her father and impales her mother with a trowel. A horror twist to an Oedipal tale, one could see Karen as living out the gravest fears of those against the women’s movement/second-wave feminism. Possessed by a demon, she eats her father (consumes the patriarchy) and kills her mother (overtaking her mother’s generation with masculine force).

Little Karen Cooper consumes patriarchy and overtakes her mother.

Five years later, Roe v. Wade had been decided (giving women the right to legal first-trimester abortions), the Pill was legal, no-fault divorce was more acceptable and women began flooding the workforce.

Meanwhile, on the big screen, sweet little Regan MacNeil–the daughter of an over-worked, atheist mother–becomes possessed by the devil.

The Exorcist was based on a novel, which itself was based on the exorcism case of a little boy. Of course, the novelist and filmmakers wanted audiences to be disturbed and terrified, so the sex of the possessed protagonist changed (would it be as unsettling if it was a little boy?).

Chris MacNeil, Regan’s mother, goes to great lengths to help her daughter, and resorts to Catholicism when all else has failed. Regan reacts violently to religious symbols, lashes out and kills priests, speaks in a masculine voice and masturbates with a crucifix. This certainly isn’t simply a “demonic possession” horror film, especially since it was written and made into a film at the height of the fight for women’s rights (the Catholic church being an adamant foe to reproductive rights). Only after Regan releases her demon, which possesses a priest (who flings himself out of a window to commit suicide), does she regain her innocence and girlhood.

Tied and bound, Regan haunts and kills men, and reacts violently to religious images.

What her mother and her culture are embracing–atheism, working women, reproductive rights, sexual aggressiveness–can be seen as the “demons” that overcome the innocent girl and kill men (and traditional religion).

These films are have terrified audiences for decades, and for good reason. The musical scores, the direction, the jarring and shocking images–however, they also play to society’s deepest fears about women and feminism. For little girls to be possessed is the ultimate fall.

In 1980, The Shining was released. Yet another film adaptation of a novel (Stanley Kubrick’s treatment of Stephen King’s novel), this film contains two of the creepiest little girls in film history–the Grady girls. The Shining shines a light on crises of masculinity. Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, is a recovering alcoholic who has hurt his son, Danny, in the past. When he takes his wife, Wendy, and son with him to be caretakers of a hotel over a winter, his descent into madness quickly begins. Danny has telepathic abilities, and sees and experiences the hotel’s violent past. As he rides his Big Wheel through the hotel, he stops when he sees two little girls begging him to “Come play with us Danny. Forever.” These girls–dead daughters of Grady, a previous caretaker who killed his family and himself–are trying to pull Danny into their world. Danny sees images of them murdered brutally, and flees in fear. Meanwhile, Jack is struggling with his alcoholism, violence and lack of control of himself and his sensitive wife and child. When he sees Grady, Grady advises him:

“My girls, sir, they didn’t care for the Overlook at first. One of them actually stole a pack of matches, and tried to burn it down. But I ‘corrected’ them sir. And when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, I ‘corrected’ her.”

Danny is confronted with the horror of what men are capable of.

In this aftermath of the women’s movement, Jack (a weak man, resistant to authority) is being haunted and guided by a forceful, dominating masculinity of the past. He’s stuck between the two worlds, and succumbs to violent, domineering alcoholism.

But he loses. Wendy and Danny win.

While his predecessor succeeded in “correcting” his wife and daughters, that time has past.

Here, the flashing memories of the ghosts of the past are terrifying. The Grady girls provide a look into what it is to be “corrected” and dominated.

“Come play with us Danny,” the girls beg, haunting him with the realities of masculine force and dominance.

Starting with the late-70s and 80s slasher films (and the growing Religious Right/Moral Majority in politics), the “Final Girl” reigned supreme, and the promiscuous young woman would perish first. Masculinity (characterized with “monstrous” violence and strength) and femininity became natural enemies. These fights on the big screen mirrored the fights in reality. The Equal Rights Amendment was pushed out of favor and was never ratified, and a growing surge of conservatism and family values began dominating American rhetoric.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, we see a resurgence of the terrifying little girl. This time, she is serving as a warning to single/working/independent/adoptive mothers.

In The Ring (the 2002 American adaptation of a 1998 Japanese film), Rachel Keller (played by Naomi Watts) is a journalist and a single mother. She unknowingly risks her son and his father’s lives by showing them a cursed videotape. A critic noted:

“If she had never entered the public sphere and viewed the cassette in the first place, she would not have inadvertently caused Noah’s death, nor would she have to potentially cause the death of another. Rachel would, perhaps, have been better off staying at home.”

Single motherhood has often been the driving force behind horror plots.

In her investigation into the video, she discovers the twisted, dark past of the video’s subject, Samara, a young girl who started life troubled (her birthmother tried to drown her). She was adopted by a couple, but her adoptive mother suffered from visions and haunting events due to Samara’s powers. They attempted to institutionalize Samara, but eventually the adoptive mother drowns her in a well after Samara cannot be cured of her psychosis. Her adoptive father, Rachel finds, locked Samara in an attic of their barn, and Samara left a clue of the well’s location behind wallpaper. (Bitch Flicks ran an excellent analysis of the yellow wallpaper and the themes of women’s stories in The Ring.)

Samara’s life was punctuated by drowning, which has throughout history been a way for women to commit suicide or be killed (symbolizing both the suffocation of women’s roles and the return to the life-giving waters that women are often associated with). While Rachel “saves” Samara’s corpse and gives her a proper burial, Samara didn’t want that. She rejected Rachel’s motherhood and infects Rachel’s son. Rachel–in her attempts to mother–cannot seem to win.

Rachel “saves” Samara from her watery grave, but she still cannot succeed.

The ambiguous ending suggests that Rachel may indeed save her son, but will have to harm another to do so. This idea of motherly self-sacrifice portrays the one way that Rachel–single, working mother Rachel–can redeem herself. However, the parallel narrative of the dangers of silencing and “locking up” women is loud and clear.

And in 2009’s Orphan, Esther is a violent, overtly sexual orphan from Russia who is adopted by an American family. Esther is “not nearly as innocent as she claims to be,” says the IMDb description. This story certainly plays on the fear of the “other” in adopted little girls (much like The Ring) and how that is realized in the mothers. In this film, Esther is actually an adult “trapped” in a child’s body. The clash of a childish yet adult female (as culturally, little girls are somehow expected to embody adult sexuality and yet be innocent and naïve) again reiterates this fear of little girls with unnatural and unnerving power. The drowning death of Esther, as her adoptive mother and sister flee, shows that Esther must be killed to be subdued. The power of mother is highlighted, yet the film still plays on cultural fears of mothering through international adoptions and the deep, disturbing duality of childhood and adulthood that girls are supposed to embody.

Like Samara, Esther is a deeply disturbed daughter, capable of demonic violence.

In the last 60 years, American culture has seen remarkable change and resistance to that change. Horror films–which portray the very core of society’s fears and anxieties–have reflected the fears of women’s social movements through the faces of terrifying little girls.

While nineteenth-century literature comforted audiences with the trope of a dead, beautiful woman, thus making her passive and frail (of course, we still do this), twentieth and twenty-first century horror films force audiences to come face to face with murderous, demonic, murdered and psychotic little girls to parallel fears of women having economic, reproductive, parenting and marital (or single) power.

Little girls are supposed to be the epitome of all we hold dear–innocent, sweet, submissive and gentle. The Victorian Cult of Girlhood and Womanhood bleeds into the twenty-first century anti-feminist movements, and these qualities are still revered.

_____________________________

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

Call For Writers: The Terror of Little Girls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Exorcist

Case 39

Night of the Living Dead

The Ring

Supernatural

Children of the Corn

The Addams Family

Phone

Village of the Damned

The Sixth Sense

The Children

The Shining

Alice, Sweet Alice

Silent Hill

The Brood

Orphan

The Bad Seed

Interview with the Vampire

Let the Right One In

Let Me In

The Omen IV: The Awakening

Women with Disabilities: The Undiscussed Horror Staple of Female Characters

The slut, the virgin, the bitch, the girl next door, the mother, the creepy old lady, the evil little girl, and the final/survivor girl. Female archetypes and stock characters within the horror genre are rampant and well known. From a movie poster alone, we can often times figure out exactly what a woman’s place and purpose is in a horror film. However, there’s another “type” of woman that we frequently see in horror films that no one seems to want to talk about.

This guest post by BJ Colangelo previously appeared at her blog Day of the Woman and is cross-posted with permission.

Physically, sensory, or mentally disabled women have been popping up in horror films from the very beginning. The Man Who Laughs is often regarded as the first horror film, and the female lead was a beautiful, blind woman. From the very beginning of the horror genre, the damsel in distress character was the quickest way to write a story. “Girl needs saving from someone or something, man saves girl from someone or something, girl is indebted to man and thanks him by kisses or marriage, the end.” Whether it was because male writers needed to make their female characters SUPER vulnerable or whether they needed an excuse to make a woman “weaker,” adding a physical/mental/sensory disability to a woman became a quick way to differentiate female characters from the usual damsel in distress. The beginnings showcased disabilities as a major reason for the demise of female characters. 1959’s The Tingler had a creature that could only be killed by screaming. The death in the film that acts as the catalyst for the entire movie was centered around a woman who was a deaf/mute, and therefore, could not “scream for her life.” We can’t have a woman be brave enough not to scream when frightened, so we must make her mute.

Physical disabilities appear in many films as a way to hinder otherwise “strong” female leads. The 1979 midnight movie The Visitor showcases a woman forced into a wheelchair by her evil daughter in order to prevent her ability to escape her child, and to make her a weaker target for her boyfriend to impregnate her. More recently, we’ve been exposed to a protagonist who uses a wheelchair in Curse of Chucky, who also plays the only character with any sort of intellect and moral compass. Putting a character in a wheelchair completely raises the stakes. Stairs are out of the question, speed is a major concern, the ability to hide is greatly reduced, and the fact someone could easily come behind and control the movement and direction of a character is horrifying. However, throwing a wheelchair on a character immediately develops a sympathetic relationship between the character and the audience. We immediately understand the difficulties that can be present for being in a wheelchair, and before anything happens, we immediately feel for her. This concept presents itself regardless of the age of the woman in the wheelchair. Would You Rather contains an elderly woman in a wheelchair and from the very beginning of the film; she is immediately the character the victims of the game of “Would You Rather?” want to protect.

This then brings us to the characterizations of amputees. In horror films, amputated women seem to fall into two categories. We have women who have been amputated as some sort of a punishment, and women who have turned their amputations into something of empowerment. In Jennifer Lynch’s controversial directorial debut, Boxing Helena, we see a woman who is amputated solely so she cannot run away. In Saw VI, Tanedra Howard’s character must amputate her own arm to survive one of Jigsaw’s traps, and is later shown in Saw 3D as a painfully angry victim who, although survived death, has been forever punished as a one-armed woman, only gaining a positivity in the form of better parking at the mall. To counteract these women punished with amputation, we have characters like Cherry Darling in Planet Terror who have taken a very Ash J. Williams approach to amputation by replacing the missing limb with a weapon. Her machine gun leg has made her character an iconic figure and one of the most recognizable women with a disability in horror.

Sensory disabilities (blindness, deafness, muteness) are often used as a catalyst to further along story lines. Ms. 45, The Eye, The Beyond, Julia’s Eyes, and even Orphan included either sensory disabled protagonists or supporting characters. The loss of sight, sound, or speech is something that many people fear to begin with, so much like having a character with a physical disability, presenting a major character unable to see, hear, or speak immediately raises their stakes. Female characters are often blind or deaf, giving the freedom for story tellers to write circumstances they would normally be unable to construct. Why can’t Ms. 45 call the cops and find justice for her attack? She cannot speak. Why can’t little Max tell when her adopted sister Esther is plotting her demise? She cannot hear. Characters in horror films vitally depend on their senses for survival. Taking one of their senses away change the way the protagonist must play the game to be alive at the end of the film.

However, the most problematic portrayal of women in horror lies in the representation of mental illness and mental disabilities. Unfortunately, society already has a stigma in place for mental illnesses, and artforms reflect this poor mentality. In 2012, Bitch Flicks ran an AMAZING piece by Megan Kearns titled “That ‘Crazy Bitch’: Women and Mental Illness Tropes in Horror” that encompasses everything that I could possibly write about this topic. My favorite quote from the piece states:

“And the Crazy Bitch trope helps perpetuate mental illness stereotypes. It has many sister tropes infesting horror too. Like the Hysterical Woman, where female characters are depicted as overly emotional and irrational, The Madwoman in the Attic, a trope where a character with mental illness is locked away, isolated from society, and the Nervous Housewife, where men doubt women’s paranormal experiences and patronize them. Jen Doll at The Atlantic Wire gives us “10 tropes about women that women should stop laughing about,” including “the crazy.” As Doll astutely observes, calling someone “crazy” is a way to put people (often women) down and for the accuser to feel better about themselves, all while being insulting to those who who struggle with mental illness.”

Ultimately, it appears that the growing awareness of ableist behavior is changing the way we treat people with disabilities in cinema, especially with female characters in horror films. Female tropes and archetypes will always exist, but gaining a stronger educational grasp on why characters are written the way they are is the most sure-fire way to learn how to provide better portrayals and influence less offensive media. I must thank comic artist and Day of the Woman reader Shannon LeClerc for suggesting that I tackle this topic. Of course I in no way scratched the surface of disabled women in horror films (is there a book on this subject?), but the best way to make a change and gain a better understanding is to open a dialogue and actually discuss the situation. Women with disabilities are a prominent character type, and we will only gain a solid understanding if we talk about it.

BJ Colangelo is the woman behind the keyboard for Day of the Woman: A blog for the feminine side of fear and a contributing writer for Icons of Fright. She’s been published in books, magazines, numerous online publications, all while frantically applying for day jobs. She’s a recovering former child beauty queen and a die-hard horror fanatic. You can follow her on Twitter at @BJColangelo.

Horror Week 2012: That "Crazy Bitch": Women and Mental Illness Tropes in Horror

Vivien (Connie Britton) in American Horror Story

Ladies, how many times have you been called a “crazy bitch?” Once? Twice? 5 thousand times?? Or is that just me? This oh-so-not-lovely term of endearment gets tossed around waaaaayy too often. It’s bad enough when we get labeled the sexist term “bitch” — and it’s very different for us women to reclaim the word and its power, calling ourselves “bitch,” as we do here at Bitch Flicks. But it’s typically coupled with “crazy,” a problematic and offensive ableist term. Put them together and you have the Crazy Bitch, an all-too common trope in the media, appearing as victims and villains in horror.

Horror movies have undoubtedly been influenced by feminism. Some argue a “stealth empowerment message” exists in horror films for women with lots of ass-kicking female survivors and the rise of the Final Girl. Sadly, not all tropes have fallen by the wayside, including the Crazy Bitch. Ableist and sexist stereotypes of women and mental illness abound in horror movies and TV (American Horror Story, Orphan, Gothika,Nightmare on Elm Street 3, The Ring, Misery, etc.).

Now, my mother and some of my friends live with mental illness. For each of them, it’s a part of their lives but it doesn’t define them. So I’m acutely aware of the stigmas, misconceptions and prejudices surrounding mental illness. Mental illness — from bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and depression to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), schizophrenia and anorexia — is a legitimate medical condition requiring medication and/or therapy.

But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say mental illness isn’t “real” or they question why people with mental illness can’t get their shit together. Really, asshole? You wouldn’t dare say that to someone with diabetes or heart disease or cancer. So don’t say that ignorant shit. Ever.

Rather than dispelling myths, pop culture often reinforces mental illness stereotypes. As Bitch Magazine’s s.e. smith asserts:

“For those of us with mental illness(es), pop culture can be a constant reminder of the fact that we are considered both scary and public property, objects of curiosity, fascination, and revulsion.”

Samara (Daveigh Chase) in The Ring

And the Crazy Bitch trope helps perpetuate mental illness stereotypes. It has many sister tropes infesting horror too. Like the Hysterical Woman, where female characters are depicted as overly emotional and irrational, The Madwoman in the Attic, a trope where a character with mental illness is locked away, isolated from society, and the Nervous Housewife, where men doubt women’s paranormal experiences and patronize them. Jen Doll at The Atlantic Wire gives us “10 tropes about women that women should stop laughing about,” including “the crazy.” As Doll astutely observes, calling someone “crazy” is a way to put people (often women) down and for the accuser to feel better about themselves, all while being insulting to those who who struggle with mental illness.

The second season of the hit show American Horror Story is titled Asylum and set in a psychiatric institution. And of course the usual tropes emerge, like over-the-top shocking caricatures and the crazy nympho sexpots. But one of the most disturbing elements, besides the rampant gore, is when Sister Jude (Jessica Lange) utters, “mental illness is the fashionable word for sin,” reinforcing the pervasive stereotype that mental illness isn’t actually real.

Cait at Feminist Film analyzes the mental illness tropes in American Horror Story: Asylum:

“To appropriate this traumatic history and use it as a measure of “freakiness”, to scare and shock viewers, as it explores this strange asylum with a serial killer who skins women, a doctor who performs Mengele-like experiments on patients who have no family or friends, nuns who dream about doing the deed and take their sexual frustration out in a weird form of repressed anger, and apparently, aliens, is exploitative and negates much of the positive aspects that the psychological field has accomplished…

“Horror does not equal shock value, and that is precisely what American Horror Story: Asylum is attempting to do. Where the first season left off on misogynistic representations of women and glorifying bad boy murderers, the second season picks up on the exploitation and stereotyping of mental illness. In a world where mental illness is already still heavily stigmatized, this is an ignorant and unnecessary bastardization of mental health practices.”

Lana (Sarah Paulson) in American Horror Story: Asylum

But it’s not just the second season suffering from problematic depictions of mental illness. In season 1, Constance (Jessica Lange) calls her daughter Addie who has Down’s Syndrome a “mongoloid” and a “monster.” When Vivien (Connie Britton) says she was raped and she saw a ghost, her husband Ben (Dylan McDermott) doesn’t believe her and has her committed to a psychiatric ward. You know, because women can’t be believed or trusted. Because bitches be CRAZY!!

Creator and showrunner Ryan Murphy calls his TV series “feminist horror.” And some even claim Sister Jude is a secret feminist. Sure, there are plenty of interesting female characters. But that doesn’t automatically make it feminist.

Now, I don’t expect American Horror Storyto be sensitive or politically correct. Especially as gender and race problems clog up Murphy and Falchuk’s show Glee with its incessant problematic depictions of body image, race, gender and erasure of bisexuality. And the hospital staff in AHS: Asylum seems far more evil and sadistic than any of the patients. But considering the enormity of the stigma surrounding mental illness, the last thing we need is yet another movie or TV show perpetuating harmful stereotypes.

Many killers in horror films are unhinged or unstable, with many explicitly suffering from mental illness. In Orphan, Kate and John adopt Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) after a devastating miscarriage. Turns out, Ester is really a murderous 33-year-old woman with hypopituitarism, posing as a 9-year-old girl, who had been institutionalized in a mental hospital. In Carrie, Carrie’s mother Margaret White (Piper Laurie) has a mental illness and repeatedly abuses and eventually attempts to kill her telekinetic daughter. While never explicitly stated, Misery implies that torturous nurse Annie Wilkes suffers from bipolar disorder, as well as being a “virtual catalog of mental illness.”

Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) in Orphan

Ashley Smith asserts too many horror movies — like Orphan — “send a false message of mental illness.” They correlate mental illness and extreme violence, an offensive and dangerous stereotype. We shouldn’t fear mental illness or people who live with it. Yet that’s the message continually reinforced.

But apparently it’s not just the living we must fear. In Hollywood, ghosts suffer from mental illness too. House on Haunted Hill (1999), Session 9, and Asylum all transpire in haunted psychiatric hospitals or asylums where the former living who struggled with mental illness become terrifying ghosts haunting the living. In The Ring, Samara is the girl responsible for the video tape that kills people. She tormented her adoptive mother as well as driving horses to commit suicide. Before she died, she was institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital. Then she becomes a murderous ghost. Naturally.

Slate’s Torie Bosch argues haunted mental hospitals is a horror trope that just won’t die:

“Why would a mental illness like schizophrenia still plague someone after death? Would we expect a diabetic ghost to require insulin? A paraplegic ghost to require a wheelchair? Somehow, we’ve decided, the mentally ill are terrifying and threatening even when they’re dead. That seems unfair, given the stigma that they have to endure in life as well.”

Many horror films take place in psychiatric hospitals with women being committed because of their actions or recounting paranormal events. After protagonist Kristen battles Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, her mother erroneously thinks she was attempting suicide and hospitalizes her. Similar circumstances cause Kirsty in Hellbound: Hellraiser II to be hospitalized. In Gothika, Miranda (Halle Berry) is a psychiatrist who becomes institutionalized after she’s accused of murdering her husband. Her former colleagues think she’s delusional and suicidal after she tells them she sees ghosts. Miranda’s former patient Chloe (Penelope Cruz) — who Miranda didn’t believe was being raped, thinking she was fabricating the trauma — tells her, “You are not a doctor in here. And even if you tell the truth … no one will listen. You know why? Because you’re crazy.”

L-R: Chloe (Penelope Cruz) and Miranda (Halle Berry) in Gothika

In American Horror Story and many of these films, the women aren’t believed. As a result, they’re deemed dangerous and erroneously labeled mentally ill. Removed from society, they are punished for their actions.

Yes, we do see men struggling with mental illness in horror films. Halloween, Shutter Island, In the Mouth of Madness, and The Shining are all examples of men struggling with mental illness or in psychiatric hospitals. But despite the Final Girl in many horror films, we still see a wider variety of men represented. And men don’t have to worry about being labeled “crazy” the way women do.

Jezebel’s Jenna Sauers discusses the impact of calling women “crazy”:

“Reflexively calling women “crazy” is a habit young men need to learn to break. As a term, “crazy” is entirely of a piece with the long and nasty tradition of pathologizing female emotion (and particularly sexuality). Hysteria comes from hystera, the Greek word for uterus, after all: “crazy” has been a gendered trait in Western culture for thousands of years. The male gaze was for virtually all of human history synonymous with the medical gaze, and men assigned themselves the authority to determine which bodies are sick and which are hale.”

In his popular post, “A Message to Women From a Man: You Are Not ‘Crazy,’” Yashar Ali argues that men often call women crazy to emotionally manipulate them. He discusses “gaslighting” (taken from the classic film Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman), in which men diminish women’s concerns by dismissing them, making them neurotically question their perception and themselves. I’ve accused many men in my life of doing this — trying to mansplain to me and make me doubt myself. Ali explains why gaslighting affects so many women, regardless of their self-confidence:

“Because women bare the brunt of our neurosis. It is much easier for us to place our emotional burdens on the shoulders of our wives, our female friends, our girlfriends, our female employees, our female colleagues, than for us to impose them on the shoulders of men. It’s a whole lot easier to emotionally manipulate someone who has been conditioned by our society to accept it. We continue to burden women because they don’t refuse our burdens as easily. It’s the ultimate cowardice.

“Whether gaslighting is conscious or not, it produces the same result: It renders some women emotionally mute.”

Society polices women’s appearances, language and behavior. We can’t let the ladies get out of control. Who knows what could happen??? Calling a woman “crazy,” doubting not only her veracity but her very sanity, is offensive. It’s also an attempt to control women, demean them and strip them of their power. Women with mental illness are often silenced, invisible from the media aside from victims or villains in horror. When we do see them on-screen, they instill fear as they are depicted as violent, volatile and uncontrollable.

Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) in Misery

Gender Focus’ Jarrah Hodge writes about mental illness tropes in all films:

“Because women have been historically branded as “hysterics,” and women are oppressed in the media in general, women with disabilities report feeling particularly harmed by media misrepresentations of their realities…From the Joker in The Dark Knight to Angelina Jolie’s character in Girl, Interrupted, people with invisible disabilities (disabilities that aren’t physically apparent, including mental illness), are often portrayed as dangers to society who need to be contained and/or ‘fixed’.”

Horror movies aren’t necessarily about portraying mental illness (or anything for that matter) accurately. They strive to push boundaries, spurring us out of our comfort zone. They strip everything away to its visceral core. But it’s highly problematic the Crazy Bitch trope keeps appearing on-screen.

It might not be such a big deal if the media showcased positive representations of mental illness to counter or balance those we see in horror movies and TV series. But we rarely do. Women in general are continually portrayed as illogical, overly emotional, unreliable and unbalanced. The media often dehumanizes women with mental illness, depicting them as dangerous, brutal and sadistic. The perpetual message is that we need to be rescued from women with mental illness as they are a threat to not only themselves but to society.

The “crazy bitch” label — in both pop culture and reality — silences and dismisses women while simultaneously shaming and stigmatizing women living with mental illness. So Hollywood, let’s stop with all the prejudicial bullshit and just show us what we all really want to watch…a zombie apocalypse.

Horror Week 2012: The Nervous Wife: Horror Stereotype or Statement on American Masculinity?

This is a guest review by Tamara Winfrey Harris. Includes spoilers for Paranormal Activity (2007) and Orphan (2009).

There, outside the window, in the dark, are those eyes again. Yellow. Animal, but at the wrong height to be a coyote or fox–human height. And those amber, animal eyes are locked on hers. She slams shut the kitchen curtains and races to the living room window. The eyes are there, too, peering from the family’s wooded lot outside of town. Family. She thinks of her sleeping child down the hall and her heart beats faster. She shuts off the lights, hiding herself and her little girl from the gaze of whoever, whatever, is outside, and she dials the police. They arrive, lights flashing, just as her husband’s truck pulls into the driveway. They find nothing. The head cop chuckles, patting her on the shoulder, while looking at her husband, “Don’t worry. I think we just have a case of nervous wife here.”

Thank you, Paranormal Witness (Syfy, Wednesdays, 10 p.m. ET), for giving me a name for a ubiquitous horror trope. It goes like this: Woman begins to experience disturbing things. She shares this with her male partner (or other man), who responds by patronizing her, saying she is tired, silly, imagining things, nervous. It is only when the occurrences escalate and the male protagonist himself experiences something otherworldly that he will believe.

Call it The Nervous Wife, which is more concise than “women are super emotional, illogical and fearful and cannot be trusted.”

The Nervous Wife is a staple of the haunted house film genre, and now that paranormal shows are slowly taking over the small screen, it can be found there, too. In the first season of the FX channel’s American Horror Story, the character Vivien Harmon had to be committed and impregnated with a devil baby, and her teenage daughter dead and haunting the family abode, before her husband would believe that something spooky was going down.

Yes. Yes. I know. Science says ghosts and goblins and such don’t exist. True enough. It is natural for a body to be skeptical of supernatural claims. Would you believe it if you were told the portal to hell was in your laundry room? Likely not. The problem is that women in horror films are rarely, if ever, the skeptical ones. Logic is portrayed as a man thing. Little ladies are quick to believe the unbelievable. And to be frightened by it.

An example of this can be found in the horror juggernaut Paranormal Activity. In it, a young couple, Katie and Micah, live in a subdivision tract house that is plagued by threatening phenomena. Katie, who endured a brush with the supernatural as a child, is fearful and seeks relief from a psychic, who counsels that the best thing to do, until the home can be cleansed, is not to engage the spirit. In this instance, the male protagonist believes in the haunting; he does not, however, believe anyone’s advice on handling the problem. In a perfect illustration of male privilege and bullying in action, Micah dismisses the expert advice and laughs off Katie’s fear of an increasingly-menacing spirit. As his girlfriend becomes more frightened, Micah becomes more oblivious to her and her concerns. By the end of the film, their relationship feels uncomfortably emotionally abusive, with Katie withdrawing and Micah seemingly doing everything possible to provoke the thing that is terrorizing his mate.

There is often another feature of The Nervous Wife trope. Once the male protagonist (partner of The Nervous Wife) realizes a place is infested with spectres, he will not be cowed. Like a drunken dude bro outside the bar at 2 a.m., a dog protecting his territory, or Tom Petty–he won’t back down. He will rage. He will threaten to beat a demon’s ass. (The manly crew on The Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures is all about this method of posturing ghost busting, which makes them ripe for parody.) He will refuse to relocate. He will reject fear in favor of wrong-headed investigation. All this, even if it causes an escalation in dangerous activity or discomfort for his loved ones.

At first glance, the message is clear: Men are logical and brave protectors who do what needs to be done–even over the objections of lesser beings. Women, on the other hand, are emotional and fearful and need to be protected. But there is a twist. In most cases the female protagonist is proven right. And, as a result of his hubris and general assholery, the male protagonist sometimes meets a bad end, as in Paranormal Activity or Orphan, a horror/thriller where a doomed husband refuses to believe that his adopted child is really a murderous woman with hypopituitarism until he’s stuck on the end of her knife.

On Facebook, my buddy Barry pegged The Nervous Wife trope as “a statement against the traditional macho sexism of the American male.” Bravado, aggression and ignoring the needs of others is a losing approach–at least against the supernatural. I think he may be right, but The Nervous Wife trope is still troubling, even if it is a deserved jab at patriarchy.

The problem is that the trope, while weirdly subversive, is ultimately regressive. The aforementioned narratives all embrace rigid, traditional gender lines for male and female protagonists. They then reject masculinity as ultimately useless and harmful. But why are they so invested in base, simplistic and incomplete illustrations of masculinity and femininity in the first place? The women I know are far braver and more logical than their horror flick counterparts; the men more caring and thoughtful. And while I know Hollywood is not real life, I also know that it is possible to draw complex fictional characters that are not caricatures of their respective genders.

For once, I’d like to hear a horror husband respond to his wife’s concerns with “Let’s call the cops and check that out!” (because you are normally a really smart and level-headed woman and I trust your judgment), or a solicitous miss calm her demon-plagued boyfriend with a “Darling, you’ve been working too hard. Perhaps you’re just nervous.”

Tamara Winfrey Harris is a freelance writer living in the Indianapolis area. Her work focuses on race and gender, and their intersection with pop culture and politics. She is currently senior editor at Racialicious and a contributor to Clutch and Frugivore magazines. Tamara is working on her first book–a feminist exploration of black women and marriage, and the sexist and racist underpinnings of the “black marriage crisis” narrative.

Learn more about Tamara and her work at her website.