Paranormal Activity – Bitch Flicks

Demon/Spirit Possession: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts for our Demon/Spirit Possession Theme Week here.

The Conjuring: When Motherhood Meets Demonic Possession by Caroline Madden

Punishment is the main objective of the demon Bathsheba in The Conjuring, and specifically she seeks to punish the mother figure of a family. The hauntings and road to possession begin when in 1971, Roger and Carolyn Perron move into an old farmhouse in Rhode Island with their five daughters. Slowly, they begin to experience paranormal disturbances.

Because Being Female is Frightening Enough: #YesAllWomen and The Exorcism of Emily Rose by Rebecca Willoughby

In the film a young girl, Emily Rose, perishes following a protracted period of “attack” by demons while under the protective care of Father Moore, a Catholic priest. Female attorney Erin Bruner is chosen to defend Moore against charges of negligent homicide in Emily’s death. Through the two’s connection to the girl throughout the film, each undergoes what I’ve called here a “conversion experience,” as they learn more about the possibility that demons really do exist—demons that can be read to correspond to the challenges that women face in culture every day. Even before the advent of #YesAllWomen, a film like The Exorcism of Emily Rose shows us how to overcome skepticism and create a connected community of individuals committed to sharing troublesome experiences in the service of awareness and activism.

Demons: Finding New Language for an Old Cult Classic by Lisa Bolekaja

I am a horror fan and most times I root for the monster. There, I said it. I root for what should be the feared. The dreaded Other. With all the loaded symbolism that the horror genre represents (fear of sex, fear of the unknown, fear of death and decay, xenophobia etc), I find it cathartic and often liberating to root for the disruption of life as we know it. I love watching humans deal with chaotic change.

Twin Peaks Mysticism Won’t Save You From the Patriarchy by Rhianna Shaheen

I do believe that Lynch and Frost meant to use BOB as “the evil that men do” and as a means to understand family violence and abuse, but they jump around the issue so much that it only reflects uncertainty. The show’s inability to hold evil men responsible for their actions is too reminiscent of our own society. As soon as we answer “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” the show does its best to rebury the ugly truth that we so struggled to uncover. After that it fully commits to understanding the mythos behind it. This is troubling to me.

The Strangeness of (Surrogate) Motherhood in The Innocents by Ren Jender

Part of what makes the excellent 1961 film The Innocents different is the main character, the governess, Miss Giddens (played by Deborah Kerr), is thrust into a parental role suddenly. We see her at the beginning in an interview with the children’s uncle, a handsome playboy (played by Michael Redgrave, Vanessa’s father) who tells her he spends much of his time traveling and the rest in his home in London. When he offers her the job at his country estate, he takes her hand (a bold move for the Victorian era, when the film takes place) and asks if she is ready to take full responsibility for the children, because he doesn’t want to be disturbed during his adventures in London and abroad.

Direct from Hell: Paranormal Activity and the Demonic Gaze by Alexandra West

Micah’s patriarchal control through the first half of the film is omnipresent as he mocks, coerces and films his girlfriend’s descent into possession. The second half of the film deals with the demon taking control of the film. Micah and Katie are too weak to properly deal with the situation and they lose sight of their safety. The audience see what the demon wants them to see; it is in control of not only Katie’s mind and body, but also what the audience is exposed to, creating an unstable and terrifying experience.

She’s Possessed, Baby, Possessed! by Scarlett Harris

When Phoebe is taken over by the deadly sin lust in “Sin Francisco,” she sexually assaults her professor and has sex with a policeman on the job, while Piper dances on her bar during her high school reunion when she’s possessed by an evil spirit. And almost all the evil women in the show are sexualized: the succubus, shapeshifter Kaia, the Stillman sisters in “The Power of Three Blondes,” the seer Kyra, etc.

Does Jennifer’s Body Turn The Possession Genre On Its Head? by Gaayathri Nair

Jennifer’s Body is not a traditional female possession film. The genre is generally typified by mild mannered asexual women who begin to act in overt and sometimes pathologized sexual ways once they become possessed. Jennifer’s sexuality, on the other hand is firmly established at the beginning of the film, from her clothing, the way she interacts with both her best friend Needy and the males in her school, to where she casually mentions that she is “not even a back door virgin anymore.”

The Shining: Demon Selection by Wolf

Jack is both a victim and perpetrator of domestic violence. Jack’s father was an abusive alcoholic who beat and berated him. When Jack drank he used to parrot his father’s words (“take your medicine” “you damn pup”). He is primarily verbally abusive. The last incident of drinking that pushed him to sober up was accidentally breaking Danny’s arm. Wendy, perhaps like Jack’s mother, lied for him but swore she would leave if he didn’t sober up.

The Notion of “Forever and Ever and Ever” in The Amityville Horror and The Shining by Rachel Wortherley

The nightmare that Jack and George share signifies their innate fear—the possibility of destroying the family they, as men, have built.

Rosemary’s Baby: Who Possesses the Pregnant Woman’s Body? by Sarah Smyth

To what extent does a woman, pregnant or otherwise, “own” her body? To what extent can or should a woman’s (pregnant) body be subject to social concerns? Physically and socially, where is the divide between the mother’s body and the baby’s body? By raising these questions, Rosemary’s Baby is not only concerned with the spiritual but, also, the social possession of the female body.

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

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

The Invocation of Inner Demons in Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession by Giselle Defares

Mark’s doppelgänger reflects Anna’s fascination with Heinrich’s persona: narcissism, religion, imagination, and his sexual freedom. Anna’s doppelgänger, Helen, is a pure, calm, and collected woman. That’s precisely what Mark wants–the opposite of Anna.

Direct from Hell: ‘Paranormal Activity’ and the Demonic Gaze

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

Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity became a worldwide sensation and one of the most profitable films ever made. Shot in 2007 but not officially released until 2009, the independent film made its mark on filmgoers and helped popularize the found footage horror format which began with the likes of Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and The Blair Witch Project (1999). After filming was completed, director Oren Peli had it tour the festival circuit where it generated a fair amount of buzz. Universal acquired it and the film languished in development hell. There were talks of a full-on remake doing away with the found-footage aspect and turning it into a traditional narrative with celebrities starring. But it would be Steven Spielberg who saw the film while Universal and Dreamworks were figuring out what to do with it and he suggested leaving it as it was, but re-film the ending so that it was open-ended and sequel ready.

The film opens with a couple, Micah (Micah Sloat) and Katie (Katie Featherston) who live together and are “engaged to be engaged”. Strange things have been happening in the house so Micah decides to take control over the situation and buy a camera to capture the events and determine the culprit. Katie invites a psychic over and tells him things like this have been happening to her since she was little. Things begin to escalate with the cameras capturing not only supernatural occurrences but also the deterioration of Micah and Katie’s relationship. Then the demon takes control.

In Laura Mulvey’s ground-breaking essay “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” she posited the idea of the “male gaze.” Looking closely at cinema from the 1930 through 1960s, Mulvey traces a pattern of fetishizing the female body, the camera examining and idolizing it which created an objectification of the body engendering the gaze as decidedly male. This creates the idea of woman as object rather than a human being with her own thoughts, concerns and motives. She is held captive by male desire. As Mulvey writes, “The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms or daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire.” Mulvey’s essay was published in 1975 and has gone on to become a staple of film studies course and film criticism.

Paranormal Activity, for the first half, is completely submerged in the male gaze. Micah’s camera picks up what he wants to see and what he demands of his only consistent participant, Katie. As the film begins, the unexplained incidents–which are the catalyst for Micah purchasing the camera–are dispersed with the couple’s normal life; Katie is annoyed at Micah following her around and filming her, Micah goads Katie for sex and brags about it and in one instance, when Katie is in the washroom, she screams. Micah runs for the door, pauses, returns to get the camera, and then runs to check on Katie. Katie, having been scared by a large spider in this case, surmises that Micah went and got the camera before helping her. His need to capture all the events that pass that could explain away Katie’s fear is surpassing his instinct to actually help her.

The tone of the film begins to shift when Katie invites a psychic over to help. Katie says this isn’t the first time this has happened to her as she was visited by something as a child and she’s worried that it’s all happening again. Micah continually scoffs at the psychic, making it clear that he’s threatened by his girlfriend turning to someone else for help rather than him. The psychic agrees with Katie that something is going on and that it has been following Katie for all these year. He fears that it is demonic, meaning it wants to possess Katie. The psychic also warns that constant filming and playing with this entity is inviting it in, encouraging it to enter their world. He gives Katie the number of a demonologist and tells her to get in contact with him. While Katie feels she finally has answers, Micah convinces her that it’s nothing he can’t figure out. Katie agrees to forgo calling the demonologist for the time being.

Some of Paranormal Activity’s most iconic scenes are of the couple sleeping. Micah sets the camera on a tripod and the film shows us a time-lapse version of them sleeping. The first few nights reveal small occurrences such as the door to the bedroom moving slightly though no windows in the house are open. Micah pores over the footage, reveling in the fact that he’s onto something and catching it all on camera.

The film takes a stark turn. Katie is sleeping less and less, weakening her and putting a strain on her and Micah’s relationship. They decide to go out one night. Before they leave, Micah sets up a Ouija board to try and communicate with the entity. Katie walks in on him setting it up and angrily tells him that this is exactly what the psychic told them not to do. As she storms off, Micah follows, leaving the camera filming the Ouija board. The camera captures the Ouija board moving on its own and eventually bursting into flames which extinguish on their own. The events escalate with Katie being pulled out of bed by an unseen force and bite marks appearing on her back. Micah, determined to make things right, decides to get them out of the house though they have been told the demon will follow. Before they leave, Katie tells him that they should stay. Micah, frustrated, says fine, leaving the camera behind to catch an eerie grin on Katie’s face. On the final night Katie gets up from bed, goes downstairs and screams. Micah runs to help her and several loud thumps are heard. Katie returns to their bedroom, hurls Micah’s body at the camera crawling toward the camera and in the final moments of the film, her face morphs into something demon-like. The epilogue text states that Micah’s body was found a few days later and that Katie is still missing.

The gaze of the film is subverted from the first night they film themselves sleeping. It is the demon’s entrance into their lives. Though Katie says she experienced something similar as a child, Micah’s involvement causes it to grow worse. The film becomes terrifying because the audience knows Micah is no longer in control. As he says in the film, “I’ve been doing my research. I’m taking care of this. Nobody comes in my house, fucks with my girlfriend, and gets away with it.” Micah’s insistence on controlling the situation is precisely what allows it to escalate. Rather than heed the psychic’s warning, Katie trusts Micah and leaves herself open and vulnerable to the external entity. The film takes a decisive turn after the Ouija board scene. The demon has become more powerful and is wreaking havoc on their lives. No longer are we viewing this world through Micah’s male gaze, we are viewing it through a demonic gaze. The biggest similarity between Micah’s gaze and the demonic gaze is that Katie is the subject. She is either being followed by Micah’s camera or the demon. The only time she takes control of the narrative, first by getting Micah to stay in the house and then by killing him, is when she is possessed.

Mulvey posited that something radical must shift in film to escape the dominant male gaze toward a more equalized gaze. While the film industry’s awareness of the lack of complicated female characters, female directors, and writers is growing there is still work to be done. Paranormal Activity is a fascinating examination of this shift, though not ultimately a successful one. Micah’s patriarchal control through the first half of the film is omnipresent as he mocks, coerces and films his girlfriend’s descent into possession. The second half of the film deals with the demon taking control of the film. Micah and Katie are too weak to properly deal with the situation and they lose sight of their safety. The audience see what the demon wants them to see; it is in control of not only Katie’s mind and body, but also what the audience is exposed to, creating an unstable and terrifying experience.

Katie’s only real power comes when she is possessed. Because Micah isolated them, he has no one to protect him. Katie who ultimately kills him and throws his body into a camera knocking it over and creating a Dutch Angle within the film and skewing the look and feel of the night-vision sleeping arrangement that the audience has become so used to throughout the film, signalling the dawn of something new that we are perhaps not ready to see quite yet. Katie’s (or what used to be Katie) greatest act of defiance is escaping the camera view. In the final moment of the film, “Katie” lunges at the camera and it goes black before the final text appears. All the audience knows is that she is gone and has escaped the camera’s gaze. It is no longer able to monitor her.

Paranormal Activity achieved a shift by mocking Micah’s machismo. His comments and actions when he is control fail to protect either of them. Film fans recognize the trope in horror films of not heeding direct warnings, which leads characters to danger. Micah’s male gaze is so out of control that he convinces Katie to ignore the help they have been given until it is too late. His hyper-masculinity is so performative that the audience can’t help but be weary of him and his intentions. Micah partially succeeded in his goal which was finding out the cause of the disturbances but failed because the answer was only revealed because the demon let it.

Alexandra West is a freelance horror journalist and playwright who lives, works, and survives in Toronto. Her work has appeared in the Toronto Star, Rue Morgue, Post City Magazine and Offscreen Film Journal. She is a regular contributor to Famous Monsters of Filmland and a columnist forDiabolique with “The Devil Made Us Watch It.” In December 2012, West co-founded the Faculty of Horror podcast with fellow writer Andrea Subissati, which explores the analytical side of horror films and the darkest recesses of academia.

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 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.