Women in Horror – Page 2

Red, Blue, and Giallo: Dario Argento’s ‘Suspiria’

I was neither a discerning nor an educated viewer, but even so I quickly cottoned on to the fact that certain Italian directors had produced some above-average horror flicks in the 1970s, characterized by a cavalier attitude toward nudity, pervasive Catholic imagery, and lashings of gore. Ignorant of the term giallo, I proceeded to dub this subgenre “spag-horror,” which isn’t actually an awful name for it.

As my initiation into the worlds of sex and violence, many European horror films of the 1970s no doubt occupy a Freudian subspace of my psyche. Probably the Ur-example of this genre and its strange, ambivalent attitude toward women and sexuality is Dario Argento’s 1977 meisterwerk, Suspiria.

This post by Staff Writer Max Thornton appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies. It was previously published as part of our theme week on Women and Gender in Foreign Films.

I started getting into film when I was a teenager. Growing up with daily power cuts, both scheduled and unscheduled, is not conducive to childhood as a cinephile, and anyway my parents did not consider film a “real” art like literature or music – I can vividly remember being forced, at age seven, to quit Video Club and join Chess Club instead, because my mother did not think that sitting around watching videos constituted a worthwhile extracurricular.

(I am still breathtakingly terrible at chess.)

So, partly as the cultivation of an indoor hobby in response to the unpleasant British climate, and partly as the world’s meagerest teenage rebellion, I started watching films. In particular, I sought out horror films, thanks to the friendly proprietor of our local video rental store (now sadly gone the way of all such places in the Netflix age), who would happily rent the bloodiest, goriest, most revolting 18-ratedmovies to an obviously-14-year-old me, always with a cheery, “Enjoy!”

Most of these.

I was neither a discerning nor an educated viewer, but even so I quickly cottoned on to the fact that certain Italian directors had produced some above-average horror flicks in the 1970s, characterized by a cavalier attitude toward nudity, pervasive Catholic imagery, and lashings of gore. Ignorant of the term giallo, I proceeded to dub this subgenre “spag-horror,” which isn’t actually an awful name for it.

From its kickass score by prog-rockers Goblin to its borderline incomprehensible plot, I love damn near everything about Suspiria. For starters, it’s set in a ballet school, which is a direct line to my heart; and it features Udo Kier (UDO! KIER!); plus, it’s a strikingly female-dominated story. Argento says of the film: “there are only three men in it: one is blind, one can’t speak and the other is gay. It’s the women who have the power.” Which is such a problematic statement on so many levels, but let’s just focus on the undeniable fact that the film is mostly about women.

The film opens with American dancer Suzy Banyon (played by a young Jessica Harper – did you know she writes children’s books and has a cookery blog now??) arriving at a German airport on a rainy night. Pretty much the first thing we see is her repeated attempts to hail a taxi; her young face, rain- and wind-swept above the virginal whites of her clothes, expresses a vulnerability that will recur throughout the movie. Her big, frightened eyes peer out of the taxi at the gushing storm-drains, the phallic tree-trunks in the spooky woods, the bright red facade of the ballet school (on the subtly named Escher Strasse). Untoward goings-on, shockingly enough, are underfoot at the school, and Suzy soon finds herself completely out of her depth as things get steadily creepier.

Suzy and Sara, swimming.

What’s particularly interesting about Suspiria, especially in relation to the giallo genre as a whole, is its lack of nudity or overt sexuality. There’s a pretty good reason for this, as Argento explains:

To begin with, I imagined the story set in a children’s school, not of teens. I thought that it could be interesting that the school was for very young girls, eight, ten years old. This was the first version. The distributor strongly opposed this choice, and the film was made also with American money, from Fox, and they were against that too. So I changed the script and raised the girl’s age, but I kept a sort of childish attitude, so the characters behaved like children. The decor too… I used little tricks, for example the doors have the handles not at a normal height, but at face level, the height at which a child of 8 years old would find the handle. It gives the impression of dealing with children, even though they have adult bodies.

I don’t think it’s reading too much into the film to find some Freudian undertones in the whites and reds, in the repeated motif of water, in the pivotal role of irises. There is a strong fairy-tale quality to the film’s artifices, its primary colors, scenes awash in blue or red; the story of the young girl entering a world of danger and threat carries echoes of Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White – Bruno Bettelheim would surely have something to say about that.

Make no mistake, this is a pretty violent movie. There are some quite fantastically grotesque murders. Within the first fifteen minutes, we see a still-beating heart stabbed and a woman’s face split in two by plate glass. Throughout, the lily-white garments of the murdered women are streaked and splattered with bright red blood. We also get a revolting maggot infestation, some magnificently scary chase scenes, and a truly bonkers climactic sequence.

Red, the color of a very murdered woman.

And yet Suzy retains a sense of childlike innocence and vulnerability throughout, relating to her friends and teachers like the little girl she was originally written to be. It’s a very weird juxtaposition, and I think it crystallizes the strange combination of female empowerment and ingrained misogyny that characterizes classic European horror. What, in the end, are we to make of stories where women are both the brutally murdered corpses and the proactive investigators of the mystery; both the pure childlike heroine and the monstrous villain; both desexed and penetrated by sharp objects; both agents and victims?

It speaks volumes to the general lack of such female-dominated stories in our broader culture that I even find myself asking this question.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

A Study in Contrasts: ‘The Hunger’

Perhaps for the movie’s purposes, that doesn’t matter: the story seems to be far more driven by the desire to create an artistic film, rather than an intellectually/ethically/scientifically engaging narrative. The scientific aspect for example—the part of the film I found personally most engaging, that it is possible to tamper with the natural life-cycle, halting the aging process in its tracks—is touched upon but it seems, at least to me, to be more of a plot device for bringing Sarah into Miriam’s life than an attempt to explore an ethically challenging issue. The biology behind Miriam’s present state and the fate of her lovers is similarly irrelevant.

John Blaylock in the opening scene, set to music by Bauhaus

This guest post by Amanda Civitello and Rebecca Bennett appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.

The Hunger, the 1983 art-house vampire flick by director Tony Scott, is perhaps the definition of “cult film,” with its plot, characterization, soundtrack, and costuming skirting the line between camp and Art. It might not be an especially good movie, despite its all-star cast – Catherine Deneuve stars as the immortal vampire, Miriam; David Bowie plays her centuries-old lover John; Susan Sarandon stars as Sarah, a scientific researcher who becomes Miriam’s new love interest – but it’s frequently beautiful and grotesque, often at the same time. It is, after all, a lavish vampire movie whose vampires are educated, cultured, and well-traveled, but definitely not “vegetarian.” Miriam and John live in a luxurious New York City townhouse decorated with antiquities that serve as a kind of timeline of her existence; she, after all, is an ancient Egyptian. John is a far more recent development (the 18^th century) in her life, for the curse of Miriam’s existence is that those whom she turns enjoy an extraordinarily long lifespan, but are not immortal. Over the course of the film, we realize that John’s accelerated aging has put Miriam on the search for a new lover, so that she will not be alone when he finally expires. Dr. Sarah Roberts, a gerontologist, enters Miriam’s life at the perfect time. Ultimately, The Hunger succeeds as a work of visual art but fails on its narrative: rather than engage with the ethical issues raised by ancient vampires living and hunting in contemporary New York, it often refrains from exploring these complex tensions, privileging the visual over the story, making for a rich picture whose story falls flat. For those looking for a “classy” vampire movie for Halloween, this might be it – but be warned, art-house or not, The Hunger is incredibly bloody.

[RB]: The first thing that strikes me in watching the film is the interesting juxtaposition between the contemporary (1980s) and the classical. You see this in the soundtrack, of course, but also in the costuming and the set design. The Blaylock townhouse, for example, is filled with a seeming hodgepodge of antiquities and yet its inhabitants are thoroughly modern.

[AC]: I think it makes sense to approach the film this way, because it’s most successful as an audio-visual experience; it’s far less successful as a story. Let’s start with the music, because that’s something that almost overwhelms the film itself. The soundtrack is really beautiful in its blending of classical work (Ravel, Délibes, Allegri) with the original soundtrack by Howard Blake, and the occasional contemporary popular work.

[RB]: And this is most effective when there’s more than one kind of contrast. For example, the scene in which the aging John attempts to feed is backed by upbeat hiphop but set within a vintage-looking space, with archways and pillars. Alongside the presence of the beatbox and rollerblades, there’s this fairly antique vampire attempting to murder someone for sustenance. Tony Scott reinforces and even exploits our natural tendency to compare and contrast in the way the scenes are constructed.

[AC]: And there’s the contrast between Miriam and John’s cultured daytime existence and the primal, animalistic nature of their nighttime excursions. I think the soundtrack is used really effectively to that end. Consider the love scene between Miriam and Sarah – which is largely responsible for the film’s cult status. It begins with an impromptu concert in which Miriam plays Délibes’s “The Flower Duet,” from the opera Lakmé, and then, as they go to bed, changes to a vocal performance of the duet. It’s a beautifully romantic, soft love scene, set as it is against such a heady, operatic song. And then Miriam removes the cap from her ankh pendant, and suddenly there’s blood – and through it all, the soundtrack continues with the duet.

[RB]: This is also the case when John murders Alice, one of their music students. She’s playing a beautifully haunting piece of music which continues even as John slits her throat. There seems to be a persistent juxtaposition of the horrific and bloody against the beautiful, such as during the love scene between Sarah and Miriam. The movie’s costuming is similarly effective. As well as simply serving to emphasise just how divine Deneuve truly is, there’s something of a vintage feel to her clothing which reiterates what we already know about her character—that Miriam is a centuries old vampire. I think it’s worth comparing Miriam and Sarah to make this distinction. Sarah is consistently dressed in distinctly modern clothes—androgynous suits and cotton t-shirts. Miriam, on the other hand, though hardly decked out in the eighteenth century garb we see in the flashback to the beginning of Miriam and John’s time together, seems to be somewhat inspired by the elegance of the 1940s.

[AC]: The Hunger is one of those films in which Deneuve was exclusively dressed by Yves Saint Laurent (another is Indochine). Sarandon was not. There’s such a contrast in the design and aesthetics of their clothes; using YSL sets Deneuve apart from everyone else, who wear whatever the wardrobe department rustled up. Miriam’s distinctive look – a big part of what Sarandon’s character deems “European” – is in large part the YSL look. YSL is for the modern, classically elegant, powerful woman – and I think that’s basically Miriam’s character, in a nutshell. That’s important when you’ve got Miriam, dressed to the nines in YSL suits and veiled hats, prowling a nightclub for unsuspecting people to murder. Because she’s wearing clothes that are identifiably YSL – and that don’t exist as “costumes” – the film is able to reinforce that contrast between Miriam’s refinement and animalism while emphasizing her modernity. She might be a glam vampire, but she’s not an Elizabethan caricature.

Classical music — Miriam, John, and their young music student, Alice

[RB]: You learn something new every day! YSL or not, I do still think that Miriam’s costumes serve to emphasise the fact her “otherness” for lack of a better word, as well as the rather dangerous brand of elegance and sensuality which draws people like John and Sarah into her web.

[AC]: I think the film encapsulates that attraction really well, but is confusing on other points. I haven’t read the novel (or its subsequent sequels), but I think part of the reason why the story fails is because it doesn’t elaborate on the novel’s ideas about the nature of vampirism, which takes a sci-fi approach. In the novel, Miriam wasn’t ever human; she’s a different kind of species that resists aging and is very hard to kill. She learns that she can transfer some of her traits, like an extended lifespan, to a lover by sharing blood. This explains why her lovers can’t be turned completely, and why they hover as empty shells. The central premise of the film doesn’t really make sense without this justification. If you approach the film with more traditional vampire lore in mind, you’re searching for a reasonable explanation for why the lovers she turns don’t turn all the way – and moreover, you have to try to work out how Miriam managed to get the way she is. The novel’s reasoning makes far more sense.

Club dudes — The Manhattan nightclub John and Miriam frequent in order to hunt

[RB]: Perhaps for the movie’s purposes, that doesn’t matter: the story seems to be far more driven by the desire to create an artistic film, rather than an intellectually/ethically/scientifically engaging narrative. The scientific aspect for example—the part of the film I found personally most engaging, that it is possible to tamper with the natural life-cycle, halting the aging process in its tracks—is touched upon but it seems, at least to me, to be more of a plot device for bringing Sarah into Miriam’s life than an attempt to explore an ethically challenging issue. The biology behind Miriam’s present state and the fate of her lovers is similarly irrelevant.

[AC]: One thing that I really wish the film had actually addressed is the tension of Miriam’s existence. We know that the fact that she’s condemned a parade of lovers to a miserable half-life, locked away in steel coffins but still “conscious,” tortures her. She actively looks to science to extend John’s life by following Sarah’s research; when it becomes apparent that he has declined beyond all hope, she mourns. And yet, she still turns her attention to someone new. Why?

[RB]: I suppose as distraught as Miriam might be by the loss of John and her many other lovers, loneliness would be worse. She loves her companions, but it would be worse to exist alone rather than remain faithful to the memory of what they once were and mourn perpetually. Or perhaps it simply serves to drive the narrative forward!

[AC]: And what does that say about her as a character? On the one hand, while it isn’t anything new to see a female villain, Miriam has a conscience. It’s almost as if she can’t help herself.

[RB]: I think it’s significant that she’s motivated by that fear of loneliness. After all, her former lovers are all trapped in those steel coffins because she cannot bear to kill them and end their suffering. It’s incredibly selfish – as is her plan to turn Sarah – but incredibly sad as well.

Miriam mourning — Miriam in mourning for John

[AC]: I have to say, I really despise the ending (in which her former lovers extract their revenge on Miriam, helping Sarah to make Miriam like them), because it doesn’t make sense. In the DVD commentary, Sarandon says, “All the rules that we’d spent the entire film delineating, that Miriam lived forever and was indestructible, and all the people that she transformed [eventually] died, and that I killed myself rather than be an addict [were ignored]. Suddenly I was kind of living, she was kind of half dying… Nobody knew what was going on, and I thought that was a shame.” And I think she’s right. Beyond being implausible in a narrative sense, the ending basically rewrites everything we’ve come to know about Sarah. I think it would have been a more satisfying end to the film to have seen Miriam in London, alone at her piano or, alternatively, with a new lover. It would have been a far more powerful statement for Sarah to have killed herself, and for the final scenes to show Miriam facing the prospect of eternity alone.

Amanda Civitello and Rebecca Bennett are the two halves of a very happy couple who became close while collaborating on this review of Sleepy Hollow, which probably makes them the first Bitch Flicks couple. Together they founded and edit Iris | New Fiction, a new, nonprofit literary magazine of fiction, poetry, and visual art for LGBTQ+ teens and their allies. Catch up with Amanda at her site and twitter, and say hi to Rebecca on twitter.

‘Night of the Living Dead’: Early Reception and Gender Performances

In terms of gender representations, both men and women are shown as the worst possible version of themselves. Barbra swings back and forth from being near catatonic and unable to communicate, to wild and hysterical. Ben even slaps her at one point to get her to snap out of her state. She is weak and unable to deal with the emotions of seeing her brother attacked. Barbra would have already been killed and reanimated were it not for the über masculine Ben to save her from the perils that lie outside.

This guest post by Deirdre Crimmins appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.

George Romero’s 1968 horror classic Night of the Living Dead is a film that needs to be put into its proper context to truly appreciate it. With this week’s focus on cult films, which are defined by their reception rather than standing alone as artists’ endeavors, it makes sense to first look at the film’s early history of release before diving into its mainly problematic gender representations.

Night of the Living Dead was a micro budgeted independent film, made by a group of filmmakers who had most of their filming experiences with advertising. Romero had a life-long love of horror films (shooting one as a child on Super 8 led to a mishap that ended with him getting sent to boarding school), and he knew horror had potential for great profits. After all, the ghouls (the modern zombie was essentially invented in this film, but Romero only referred to his reanimated dead as “ghouls” because the term zombie referred specifically to Haitian voodoo victims) in his film required very little makeup and were a cheap monster to create.

The film famously had two major setbacks early on. First, Romero decided last minute to change the film’s title from Night of the Flesh Eaters. Unfortunately, the copyright declaration on the original title card was not reinstated on the new one, and Night of the Living Dead has been in public domain ever since its initial release. The second setback was a scathing review by Roger Ebert. He had gone to see the film when it was playing as a matinée. In the pre-multiplex era the earlier screening times were typically reserved for young children, and Night of the Living Dead was mistakenly programmed to be shown to a very young crowd. Ebert lamented:

The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying.

After this review, other critics began discussing how to handle ultra-violence in film. The expected suggestions of censorship, and comparisons to pornography were thrown around as the film suffered at the box office. It wasn’t until Night of the Living Dead gained popularity in European film festivals that critics began to see the film as something truly groundbreaking.

It is tough to see the film today as you would have 45 years ago, but the film itself really was something special. To compare it to a contemporary horror film is one way to highlight its distinctiveness. Rosemary’s Baby was released in 1968 as well, and is an equally worshipped horror classic. That film, however, is in color, had recognizable actors starring in it, was beautifully scored, and was clearly a big budget production. With this comparison, Night of the Living Dead was essentially the Blair Witch of its time. It was set in a farm house and actually filmed at a farm house rather than an ersatz farm house in a studio lot somewhere in Hollywood. The camera work is imperfect, and the sound is not polished. The performances are raw and from unknown actors. The ending of the film is frequently compared to Vietnam War footage, and that is exactly the frame of reference that audiences at the time were bringing to the film. It felt more real than anything else they could see in the theater, and the effect is brutal.

The film is at its core an outbreak film. Some sort of other worldly satellite debris is causing the dead in to come back to life and to feast upon the living. This is very unfortunate for Barbra (Judith O’Dea) and her brother Johnny (Russell Streiner), as they are on their way to a cemetery to lay a wreath. Very quickly they are attacked, Johnny is killed, and Barbra is left to hysterically seek shelter. She finds a farmhouse which is presumptively safer than the outside, but she is not alone. Ben (Duane Jones) is a determined, organized, and armed man, who is on the house’s first floor. In the basement a young couple, Tom and Judy (Keith Wayne and Judith Ridley) hide from the ghouls along with the Cooper family (Marilyn Eastman, Karl Hardman, and Kyra Schon). As soon as Harry Cooper emerges from the basement, he and Ben fight about the best way to get out of the house and travel to one of the safe zones that the emergency broadcasters keep urging survivors to evacuate to.

Despite Barbra’s shortcomings, she is not the most negative character in Night of the Living Dead. Both Ben and Harry’s overly masculine performances are what ultimately lead to the group’s downfall. They are completely unwilling to compromise or even band together to save all of their lives. Instead they bicker and insult one another, looking like a pair of Galapagos albatrosses in the middle of mating dance. It is their pig-headed defiance, which means that they each resort to death before compromising their gender performances. Had either one of them been more intent in survival over ego, they all may have survived.

None of the characters in Night of the Living Dead are the sort of folks that you would want to grab a cup of coffee with. Though this was long before the introduction of the slasher sub-genre, Romero was on to something with maintaining characters that you don’t mind seeing killed. No one in the audience was mourning Harry or Barbra when each of them was eaten by the undead. Ben’s death is tragic, but more due to the timing of it than his good nature. In the end the most interesting characters are the ones that are encircling the house, waiting to feast. And isn’t that a wonderful prediction of the zombie film as we know it today?

Deirdre Crimmins lives in Boston with her husband and a non-spooky black cat. She wrote her Master’s thesis on George Romero and is a staff writer for http://www.allthingshorroronline.net/.

‘Slumber Party Massacre’: Deconstructing the Male Gaze

Slumber Party Massacre came up while I was searching for female directors in the exploitation genre. Although it came off as yet another sensationalistic and gory 80s slasher, it stuck out, mainly due to its ridiculous title or the fact that most of the characters were female. Upon viewing it, what shocked me was not so much the gore and violence, but I was surprised by the clever humor, the funny characters, and most of all the incredibly veiled feminist satire.

The women of Slumber Party Massacre in the locker room — The women of *Slumber Party Massacre* in the locker room

This guest post by Emanuela Betti appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.

Slumber Party Massacre came up while I was searching for female directors in the exploitation genre. Although it came off as yet another sensationalistic and gory 80s slasher, it stuck out, mainly due to its ridiculous title or the fact that most of the characters were female. Upon viewing it, what shocked me was not so much the gore and violence, but I was surprised by the clever humor, the funny characters, and most of all the incredibly veiled feminist satire.

The movie was written to be a mock parody of exploitation movies, as well as a satire of masculinity in the slasher genre. However, the movie was marketed as a straight slasher movie, which ended up causing a lot of mixed opinions: while reading through reviews, some critics brushed off the movie as a boring slasher with gratuitous T&A, while others actually caught the humor and satire, and revered its feminist perspective. Slumber Party Massacre is actually a very feminist movie, and it’s a biting satire of the male gaze that exists in cinema. Through its witty and clever humor, the movie deconstructs the prevailing sexism and masculinity in the slasher genre, offering one of the most entertaining feminist exploitation movies ever made.

Slumber Party Massacre is very women-centric: both in the characters and the women behind the scenes. The film was directed by Amy Holden Jones, one of the few female directors to delve into the exploitation genre, and written by feminist Rita Mae Brown. This fact alone should make you want to pay attention to the small details, which in this movie are actually not that small but thrown right into your face.

The story revolves around Trish, a young high school girl who throws a slumber party at her house, and Valerie, Trish’s neighbor, who doesn’t attend the party and spends a boring evening at home. As you can already guess, the girls at the slumber party are eventually harassed by a silent killer. The movie begins in a typical suburban neighborhood, and we are introduced to Trish’s bedroom. Trish is the stereotypical image of innocence and femininity: her bedroom is full of plush toys and fluffy pinkness. We then move to a school setting in which we are introduced to Valerie, who is somewhat of an outsider to the popular group of girls led by Trish, but is an essential character in the story.

She doesn't see the dead body — She doesn’t see the dead body

One of the first scenes that made me raise an eyebrow was the shower scene: after gym class, the girls are in the school showers, where we see a lot of T&A, and not even in a clever or artistic way. That scene confused me—I couldn’t understand why a movie directed and written by women would objectify the female body in such a demeaning way. Maybe, at the end of the day, the director just wanted to make a buck? And didn’t really care? I later realized that nudity (and objectification) is actually a very important element in the story, along with sexual innuendos. An example is the killer’s weapon of choice, a 12-inch drill which he sometimes holds in suggestive places (like his crotch, as a phallic metaphor). Also, there are countless instances in which boys from Trish’s high school, or the killer himself, are staring, spying, or quietly watching the girls. I realized that the gratuitous nudity was not so much for the gratuity, but to directly point out how this group of girls is the target of a voyeuristic threat, and are purposely being objectified through these male character’s gazes to show that they are in fact the victims of the killer’s drill, but also of the male gaze. There is a scene that says it all, in which the kids walk past a dumpster where the body of one of the victims is lying in the trash, unnoticed. The movie is about what we see and what we don’t see, or more specifically, knowingly watching and unknowingly being watched. This is the basis for the concept of the male gaze in cinema, which is finding pleasure in looking at a person as an object, who becomes the unwilling or unknowing victim of the gaze.

What makes this movie such a clever satire is the twist placed on the male gaze, which we see in Valerie. The objectification of Trish and her friends is emphasized by the contrast with Valerie and her younger sister Courtney (probably the most interesting female character in the whole movie) who are actually the ones doing the objectifying. During the evening, Courtney pulls out an issue of Playgirl from under her sister’s bed, and later on, both girls casually look at full-page spreads of naked men. Trish and Valerie are opposites, not only in their personality and social life, but also in their role with the gaze. Throughout the movie, we never see Valerie naked, and there’s a good reason why; while Trish is the passive victim of the gaze, Valerie is the bearer of the gaze, she enjoys looking at pictures of naked men and is immune to the killer’s gaze. Valerie is the true heroine of the movie, and she saves the day by finding an equally phallic weapon (a machete) and “chopping off” the killer’s drill, basically castrating him metaphorically.

If there were are any doubts on whether Slumber Party Massacre is an intelligent feminist satire or just a regular slasher, all questions are answered when finally, after the killer goes on a bloody rampage without speaking a single word, he finally utters some of the most horrifying lines: “All of you are very pretty… I love you,” and “you know you want it, you’ll love it.” Those seem like the words of a rapist, and although the killer didn’t rape any of the girls, he did violate them: just like a rapist victimizes a woman by violating her body, the male gaze, which roams rampant in Hollywood cinema, violates women on the screen by turning them into objects.

Along with sharp satire and sharp commentary, Slumber Party Massacre is full of clever humor. There’s the scene where Valerie is relaxing at home, watching an old slasher movie while she’s a character in one herself (and the events on TV seem to sync up with what’s happening next door). Then there’s Courtney grabbing a drink from the fridge without noticing a dead body inside, or one of Trish’s friends eating a slice of pizza over the delivery boy’s dead body. Amy Holden Jones and Rita Mae Brown do a wonderful job at providing entertainment and humor, alongside a refreshing and sharp feminist viewpoint. If there’s any movie that made me respect cheesy exploitation movies, it’s this wonderfully cheesy slumber party slasher full of pizza, nudie magazines, and girls chopping off metaphorical penises.

Emanuela Betti is a part-time writer, occasional astrologer, neurotic pessimist by day and ball-breaking feminist by night. She miraculously graduated with a BA in English and Creative Writing, and writes about music and movies on her blog.

‘All the Boys Love Mandy Lane’ Cannibalizes Its Feminist Message

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane manages to convey that toxic rape culture narrative in subtle ways, like when she’s alone with a boy who says, “Can I hold your hand? Can I kiss you?” and she turns her head to let him kiss her cheek. I felt my stomach turn during this scene; she was alone with a boy who clearly had sexual intentions, and Mandy Lane’s cheek move seemed like an appeasement, like a way to delay any unwanted sexual contact without making him angry. Unfortunately, it’s also a move that men often read as coy, as “teasing” … and it puts women in another double bind: she doesn’t want to piss him off and risk him potentially hurting her, but she also doesn’t want to do anything sexual with him. This kind of behavior gets women labeled “teases” all the time, and it’s a way to take responsibility away from men who believe, incorrectly, that the slightest amount of sexual contact—kissing, hand holding—means a woman automatically wants to take things further.

Written (with spoilers) by Stephanie Rogers.

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane attempts to send a feminist message. Unfortunately, that message spontaneously combusts at the end of the film. It gets so much right, though, especially in its depiction of sexual harassment, catcalling, stalking, and society’s obsession with women who embrace virginity versus women who embrace their sexuality. In fact, all these boys love Mandy Lane (Amber Heard) because they see her as a conquest, a beautiful, “pure” teenage girl who functions as a prize, a trophy. In essence, they believe that the boy who finally gets to sleep with Mandy Lane will also get those coveted bragging rights, a boost to his masculinity cred—and patriarchy loves nothing more than requiring men to constantly reaffirm their manhood to their bros. For instance, when they talk about Mandy Lane, they say things like, “I’ve got first dibs,” which effectively mimics the locker room talk we’ve lately come to associate with fraternity emails showcasing sexual assault tips.

Another viewer could easily dismiss all this as harmless “joking,” but thankfully, the film allows us to experience things through Mandy’s viewpoint. We see her pull away from boys who try to kiss her, who pull the strap of her shirt down, who put their hands in her hair. We watch her spin around when she realizes someone outside her window is watching her change her clothes. She appears uncomfortable most of the time, as if she feels somewhat responsible for the actions of the boys around her. I imagine many women can identify too closely with Mandy Lane, asking themselves, “Am I dressing too provocatively? Is this harassment entirely my fault?” It’s the narrative of rape culture, one that both men and women have come to internalize: if a woman doesn’t want to be noticed, then she shouldn’t walk around looking so hot all the time.

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane manages to convey that toxic rape culture narrative in subtle ways, like when she’s alone with a boy who says, “Can I hold your hand? Can I kiss you?” and she turns her head to let him kiss her cheek. I felt my stomach turn during this scene; she was alone with a boy who clearly had sexual intentions, and Mandy Lane’s cheek move seemed like an appeasement, like a way to delay any unwanted sexual contact without making him angry. Unfortunately, it’s also a move that men often read as coy, as “teasing” … and it puts women in another double bind: she doesn’t want to piss him off and risk him potentially hurting her, but she also doesn’t want to do anything sexual with him. This kind of behavior gets women labeled “teases” all the time, and it’s a way to take responsibility away from men who believe, incorrectly, that the slightest amount of sexual contact—kissing, hand holding—means a woman automatically wants to take things further.

The director (Jonathan Levine) balances Mandy Lane-as-Madonna by including two sexually active high school girls-as-Whores: Marlin (Melissa Price) and Chloe (Whitney Able), who’ve both had some sort of sexual contact with the three boys in their clique—Bird, Red, and Jake—at least enough to point out who has the smallest penis in the group. Marlin, Chloe, and the three bros decide to spend a weekend at Red’s ranch, and they invite Mandy along. For some reason, Mandy agrees to go (under the guise of making new friends), but it isn’t clear until the end of the film why Mandy truly accepts the invitation. For whatever reason, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane turns into a lightweight home invasion massacre out of nowhere, but it still makes some thoughtful commentary on bodysnarking and teen sexuality before ruining itself with conventional horror movie tropes.

Interestingly, the only locker room talk happens with the women after their respective cheerleading practice (Marlin and Chloe) and track workout (Mandy Lane, who literally runs away from a boy during her run, her former friend Emmet). Chloe calls Marlin “chubby” when Marlin shows off her new bellybutton ring to which Marlin responds, “I’m not fat.” Mandy watches these interactions almost always in silence as if making a mental note for herself. The bodysnarking happens again between Chloe and Marlin, once they’re ranch bound, during a trip to the bathroom at a rest stop; Marlin says to Chloe, “You really need to trim that. It’s like Sherwood’s Forest down there.” Chloe gives her a “whatever” look, but later, we find Chloe trimming her pubic hair on the toilet at the ranch. Again, Mandy Lane never participates in the bodysnarking but listens and watches quietly instead.

Once they hit the ranch, though, the film begins to unravel. It goes way too far in its Virgin/Whore depiction, painting both Chloe and Marlin as sex-crazed and shallow. (Marlin gives a hand job and a blowjob in the span of 20 minutes but not without flashing her breasts to a man at the rest stop, too, and Chloe won’t stop talking about banging the local ranch hand, Garth.) Mandy Lane, on the other hand, watches quietly, makes no judgments or accusations, and appears Madonna-esque and mysterious, almost too sticky sweet. We know something isn’t right here, and I thought at first Mandy Lane represented the virginal, Say No to Drugs, Final Girl from conventional horror films.

When one of the boys steals a fuse and shuts off all the lights at the ranch, Mandy Lane gets stuck fending off another boy in the dark, this time Jake, who leans in repeatedly to kiss her. Interestingly, Mandy Lane almost never says “no,” but her body language communicates how little she wants to do with Jake. This narrative suggests, importantly, that some men and boys think nothing of continuing to push and push until a woman fiercely says “no.” Again, that rape culture narrative plays out here, and because the film operates from Mandy Lane’s perspective, the audience feels bad for her and (hopefully) feels less bad for, and even angry with, the boys for making her feel so unsafe.

Honestly, the film could’ve ended for me somewhere around there as an astute commentary on how rape culture impacts the actions of both men and women. It could’ve ended as an astute commentary on how bullying and bodysnarking (especially by other women) impacts a woman’s self-esteem. But the writer (Jacob Forman) and director decided to take All the Boys Love Mandy Lane in a boring direction that tried way too hard for a shock ending. The body count racks up. Both the men and the women die, taking away any potential interpretation that the killer is merely punishing the men for their actions toward the women. Instead, the deaths of Chloe and Marlin—the Whores—suggest that anyone with a sexual appetite at all deserves punishment.

Other viewers might not need their fun horror films to carry A Message, but this one went, for me, from an epic feminist masterpiece to mundane, sloppy, and forced. Ultimately, Mandy Lane turns out to be way less innocent than she appears, and the film makes the audience hate her. And when a film makes the audience hate the character who represents the film’s important themes—the insidiousness of rape culture, for instance—then that film fails tremendously to say much of anything.

Stephanie Rogers lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she sometimes watches entire seasons of television in one sitting.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Television vs. the Movies: Which Does Better by Women? by Lisa Wade at Pacific Standard

Women’s Films and Social Change by Maggie Hennefeld at Highbrow Magazine

Girls on Film: 8 femme-centric movies from the Toronto International Film Festival by Monika Bartyzel at The Week

Toronto: ’12 Years a Slave’ Wins Audience Award by Etan Vlessing at The Hollywood Reporter

Double Consciousness in Lee Daniels’ The Butler by Jonathan Harrison at Sociological Images

Oprah’s Oscar Buzz and Hollywood’s ‘Sassy Black Lady’ Problem by Akash Nikolas at The Atlantic

Is There Any Satisfying Way to End a Modern Drama? by Matt Zoller Seitz at Vulture

Riddick Me This: What’s Sexism Got to Do With Monsters? by Zev Chevat at The Mary Sue

My Life as a Warrior Princess by Jennifer Sky at The New York Times

Michelle Maclaren, Gwyneth Horder-Payton, And How TV’s Female Action Directors Are Showing Up Movies by Alyssa Rosenberg at Think Progress

Danai Gurira talks Mother of George by Wilson Morales at blackfilm.com

My Summer With Agent Scully by Sarah Mirk at Bitch Media

Salon Pictures Announces Slate of Women Directed Films by Kate Wilson at Women and Hollywood

‘Stay in the Love’: An Interview With Laverne Cox of ‘Orange Is the New Black’ by Christopher Carbone at The Nation

Shonda Rhimes to Produce New Show with Scandal’s Dan Bucatinsky by Von Diaz at Colorlines

Why won’t cinema embrace female superheroes? by Al Moloney at BBC

The Feminist Power of Female Ghosts by Andi Zeisler at Bitch Media

Do We Really Need a Feminist Press? by Leora Tanenbaum at The Huffington Post

Books on the Boob Tube: 10 New Fall Shows Based on Books by Joanna Scutts at Word & Film

The six ways we talk about a teenage girl’s age by Soraya Chemaly at Salon

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

There’s a New "Final Girl" in the House—and She’s a Beast: A Review of ‘You’re Next’

Movie poster for You’re Next

Written and Lovingly Spoiled by Stephanie Rogers.

Crispian: Where’s Felix?

Erin: I put a blender on his head and killed him.

You’re Next is sick, and I mean sick like “disgusting” and sick like “badass” because somewhere in my 34-year-old brain, I’m also 12.

It’s no secret if you’ve been reading my posts over the past 6 years that I love horror films and, more than anything, I adore the Final Girl in horror films. I want to be the Final Girl, tripping my way through the woods with a shard of glass sticking out of my leg while the audience roots for me to kill the bad guy. The Final Girl, in fact, might be my favorite iteration of the Strong Female Character in that the writers allow her to show weakness—which makes her desperate acts of murder to save herself even more appealing; she gets to be both the freaked out damsel in distress and the hero of the story.

Erin, the Final Girl, wielding an ax

From a feminist perspective, the Final Girl’s combination of strength and weakness accompanied by the (often male) audience’s ability to identify with her plight, further emphasize her importance. The horror film genre in general affords men an opportunity to identify with a female protagonist, and that rarely occurs in other genres. Go horror.

In Carol J. Clover’s book, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, she argues—to quote Wikipedia—“that in these films, the viewer begins sharing the perspective of the killer but experiences a shift in identification to the Final Girl partway through the film.” And in You’re Next, I couldn’t help but smile when Erin bashed in the head of a masked bad guy with a meat tenderizer while the audience cheered. (I smiled because the audience clapped for a female lead, not because I’m a sociopath.)

The quintessential animal masks

The film starts off like an average, run-of-the-mill horror film. The first woman character appears during what looks like pretty unfulfilling sex. My first thought? She’s about to die. Because women characters in horror films always get the death punishment for having sex—which is, I’ll admit, a problematic element of the genre. (A tiny part of me wondered if she might survive given that it wasn’t a steamy sex scene as much as a gross dude getting off while she lightweight grimaced.) Alas, she succumbs to the trope; then the words “You’re Next” appear in blood on the wall before the shitty bedfellow bites it … and so begins the latest incarnation of the Home Invasion journey.

Get ready for your sex punishment

It may take place in a mansion, but the kitchen and the basement are where shit gets real. The weapons include kitchen knives, blenders, meat tenderizers, and a slew of screwdrivers, as well as a machete (duh) and for some reason a fucking crossbow like it’s The Hunger Games. I liked that the terrorized family members needed to defend themselves with household appliances rather than a random gun they’d hidden for a rainy day. (I almost never buy it when victims pull out their stowed away guns, and those films lean a little too close to a dangerous message: Buy a gun to protect your home, America; otherwise you’ll die at the hands of lunatics, and it’ll be all your fault. The NRA told you so!)

Thank you, You’re Next, for avoiding that convention and making me look at blenders and meat tenderizers in entirely new ways.

Dude, you are SO next

The film follows a very rich, white, nuclear family whose matriarch (Barbara Crampton) and patriarch (Rob Moran) invite their children (and the significant others of their children) over for a nice, functional (ha) 35th Wedding Anniversary celebration and to see the brand new mansion they purchased. This brand new mansion happens to sit in the middle of nowhere with very limited cell phone service. Oops! And it also becomes clear almost immediately that the three brothers borderline despise one another, and the lone sister Aimee (Amy Seimetz), a total Daddy’s Girl, has been pretty much pampered her whole life. Of course the matriarch, Aubrey, hears a loud-ass noise that shakes the chandelier before the kids arrive, and the husband does that whole, “You’re a crazy bitch, but I’ll check it out anyway just to humor you” thing that always cracks me up in horror films. The message? Listen to women, dumbasses, because they know what’s up.

Little Sister and Daddy’s Girl, Aimee, freaks out when everyone starts dying

Aubrey, portrayed as a hysterical mess who can’t stop crying, gets a pass from me. I found her response to the creepy loud noises and then the subsequent deaths of her children via crossbow (and a slow-motion sprint that ended with a clotheslining to the jugular) the most normal response of the whole bunch. These take-charge mofos who mindlessly cover their dead family members with a sheet and move on need some serious psychoanalysis.

One of the masked men looks down on Erin after she jumped through a fucking window on purpose

The father, Paul, the former Man of the House, completely loses his shit at one point, going into a catatonic sob-state that made me chuckle in delight. The witty, suck-up, kind of dick oldest bro Drake (Joe Swanberg) makes incessant condescending comments to the middle brother, Crispian (A.J. Bowen), about his inability to do anything with his life; and Felix (Nicholas Tucci), the youngest, sits back with his girlfriend, rolls his eyes, and observes the dysfunction.

Just your typical dudbro family emasculation sesh.

It took me approximately ten minutes into the movie to realize this home invasion violence was all about money. Specifically white people with money. And the punishment of white people with money, a la The Purge. Can I just say kudos to Hollywood for taking a step back from the Mancession narrative for five seconds? Before the audience can identify with these rich white people and feel bad for their plight, we’re already laughing at them. They’re ridiculous. And the only seemingly respectable person of the lot is a darker-skinned young Australian woman named Erin (Sharni Vinson) who grew up in a Survivalist Camp and has a crapload of student loan debt.

Sorry, murderers. Your crossbow suddenly don’t mean shit.

Erin (Sharni Vinson) looking a little worn out

Erin rocks. Erin is possibly my favorite Final Girl ever. That’s right; I’m putting her right up there with Ellen Ripley in Alien and Laurie Strode in Halloween. This Final Girl, while more advantaged than her predecessors with her Survivalist Camp superhero skills, also doesn’t get boxed into what has become a Final Girl trope: a young virgin, or a woman who’s never shown having sex, who’s rarely sexualized, who often appears as the “androgynous nerd” stereotype—Jena Malone in The Ruins is a good example of this—and who plays a straight-laced nondrinker or drug user (Erin insists they stop for alcohol). Erin is the new and improved Final Girl 2.0; the home invaders may run around in creepy Fox, Lamb, and Tiger masks, but Erin is the most animalistic of the bunch.

And that brings me to the women in the film.

Zee, Felix’s girlfriend, tries some sick shit in this scene

I didn’t like that Felix’s girlfriend Zee (Wendy Glenn), the mostly non-speaking goth chick, turned out to be a villain. Why couldn’t the sweet, blond sister, Aimee, be a villain? Change it up, Hollywood! But I did like, for what it’s worth, that a woman got to be a villain—a somewhat likeable villain in the end—and that the filmmakers gave the audience an opportunity to identify with both a woman protagonist and a woman antagonist … who, for once, weren’t fighting over a fucking dude.

All in all, I very much enjoyed every dude’s “um wait whut” reaction to Erin’s skillz with a meat tenderizer. I liked that many deaths at the hands of Erin took place in a kitchen, a space where women were—and occasionally still are—forced to serve and clean up after men and children. You’re Next makes Erin queen of the domestic space but in a way that gives her power over her captors. The entire film could, in fact, be read as a cautionary tale for keeping women locked up in the domestic sphere or otherwise. Erin may not have served them in the conventional sense, but they definitely got served.

“Lookin’ for the Magic” by Dwight Twilley Band: the theme song from You’re Next

Think There Aren’t Feminist Themes in ‘The Purge’? Think Again

Movie poster for The Purge

Spoiled by Stephanie Rogers.

Turns out, the best way to see the latest violent horror film is to watch it in a packed theater in Times Square. The audience laughed together, squealed together, shouted at the screen together, and collectively bonded over the most ridiculous features of the movie as well as the more progressive aspects.

As the credits rolled, a young Black woman sitting behind me stood up and yelled, “And the Black dude survives!” I mean, hadn’t we all been thinking it? We’re so used to filmmakers killing off characters of color, especially in horror films, that watching a Black dude walk into the sun at the end of a movie after saving a bunch of rich white people stood out as a fucking anomaly. The Purge is certainly problematic, but it surprised me to feel a sense of … hope at the end of it. Could this reversal of the white savior trope start a new trend in filmmaking? And did a film finally punish a Rich White Dude instead of celebrating his successes at the expense of others? And what would movies even be like if these became the new tenets of onscreen storytelling?

I like to do this thing sometimes where I show up at films with absolutely zero information about them. The Purge looked like a fun movie to try that with, and I’m glad I did it; if I’d known the premise of the movie in advance, I doubt I could’ve talked myself into paying 75 dollars to see it and spending 45 minutes slow-walking 3 blocks to the theater in the most crowded area of Manhattan. Luckily, the plot made itself clear within the first few minutes.

Video footage of the annual Purge

It takes place in the future, nine years from now in the United States, which boasts a government known as The New Founders of America (NFA). The New Founders have instituted an annual day of murder and mayhem dubbed The Purge, allowing anyone to roam the streets freely in search of people to violate so that they might purge themselves of their lurking hate and rage. It lasts twelve hours and during that time no emergency services or police officers exist, making it a free-for-all. Not everyone is required to participate, but people are encouraged at least to indicate their support of The Purge by placing a vase of blue baptisias (baptism, get it?) on their front doorstep in a gesture of solidarity. While the family the film focuses on, The Sandins, appears not to necessarily enjoy The Purge or participate in the “festivities,” they support its existence, mainly because the institution of The Purge lowered the once-staggering unemployment rate to 1%, saving the economy and making the annual crime rate almost nonexistent. The main characters see it as a tolerable, necessary evil, and besides—they’re the richest people in their state-of-the-art secured neighborhood; what’s the worst that could happen to them?

“Don’t forget to put the Baptisias on the porch, Honey!”

Well, they could help a Black dude avoid getting murdered by a bunch of creepy, self-proclaimed “highly-educated” white people in their twenties, who roam the gated suburbs carrying machine guns and machetes and wearing masks like they just wandered off the set of The Strangers. Your bad, Sandins, your bad.

WTFWTFWTF

Let me take a step back.

The Sandins actually fucking suck for the most part, at least in the beginning. Ethan Hawke plays James Sandin, who works as a security developer and who clearly profits off the The Purge; the Sandins own the biggest house in their subdivision—a jealous woman neighbor sarcastically “jokes” that The Purge Survival Systems that James sold to everyone in the hood obviously paid for the new addition to the Sandins’ home—and James himself gloats during that night’s family dinner about his rise to the spot of Top Seller at his security firm. (Rich White Dudes profiting off the hardships of others … does that sound familiar to anyone?) Mary Sandin (Lena Headey) gives the impression she’s a homemaker; we see her cooking dinner and chiding her children (Zoey, a high schooler and Charlie, a younger teen) as she readies them for the pre-purge lockdown, and she leaves the house only to place the baptisias on the porch and speak with the neighbor who envies her family’s wealth. The Sandins seem truly clueless about the extreme jealousy all the less rich white people (minus the token, light-skinned woman of color) feel toward them, but the audience gets the message all over the place: Sandins, consider yourselves fucked.

Uh-Oh

On the surface, The Purge aims to critique the sick shit going on in our country right now, albeit very problematically. Dan Gainor, VP of Business and Culture at the Media Research Institute called The Purge “an obvious attack on the Tea Party and Christians” and also argued that:

… the movie is a direct attack on the NRA, an organization filled with millions of law-abiding gun owners. The loony left’s reflexive hatred of the 2nd Amendment is founded in the concept that people who don’t break the law are somehow evil for exercising the Constitutional rights.

Okay, Dan Gainor.

The truth? No anti-Christian or even anti-gun message exists in The Purge, although the director, James Monaco, has said in interviews that the film does, in fact, allude to an indictment of gun culture. In reality, The Purge employs extreme gory violence that undercuts any potential critique of violence, and the gruesome knife scenes and weaponless face shattering against tables stick out way more than the gun stuff. At times, The Purge even seems to support gun ownership; the Sandins wouldn’t have survived those twelve hours without guns, and owning a gun for the protection of oneself and one’s domestic space is a much-touted NRA message. The anti-Christian thing, too, is a reach. The characters worship money for sure, and the film critiques that, but neither Christianity nor any religion ever come up.

Unfortunately, The Purge becomes muddled in its message about government; Big Government runs amok here—an old school conservative’s nightmare—and The New Founders essentially sanction the murder of the have-nots, the people on the lower rungs who can’t afford James Sandin’s security system to cordon themselves off from the annual purgers. If anything, it supports the old school conservative argument against Big Government, and a viewer could easily read it as a cautionary tale for a federal government that holds too much influence over its citizens.

State-of-the-Art-Secured McMansion

On the other hand, neo-cons of 2013 seem to think they dislike Big Government while simultaneously inviting it into wombs all across America, so who the fuck even knows anymore. The point is, The Purge wants to yell from the rooftops, “How awful for the government to endorse the murder of its citizens!” but ultimately yells, “How awful for the government to endorse the murder of its citizens … but, wait, look how well it works when we rid the country of these homeless welfare seekers!” The Purge tries to have it both ways and fails to deliver any real cohesive message regarding guns, religion, or the role of government.

But I definitely heard the slam against the one-percenters loud and clear, and what a welcomed fucking change from the endless dumping of Hollywood Mancession films into the multiplex. The Purge imagines a science fiction-esque United States where the rich take over entirely and wage a violent war against the lower classes, even going so far as to pass a Constitutional Amendment (the 28th) to require its existence. (Most government officials naturally receive legal protection from harm during The Purge.) Simply put: this futuristic United States decides that murdering those most in need makes more sense than uniting together in support of them. In this way, the film does seem to offer a critique of the country’s current fringe groups (the Tea Party, most Republicans) by illustrating a worst-case scenario for a society that values capital over people—and fuck if it didn’t scare me a little.

This is the scariest person I’ve ever seen on film

Because this is a film about class relations and capitalism, the less rich (white people) end up turning on the super rich (white people) during the night—another nod to the idea that unregulated capitalism leads only to societal destruction. The end of the film includes audio of newscasts that play over the credits, with broadcasters reporting that the high number of deaths made that year’s Purge the most successful ever. So, while the film might not necessarily conclude with any real epiphany by the United States and its citizens (yay for killing the homeless!), it allows the audience a glimpse into the lives of a few one-percenters who try to destroy one another, all because of money. Oh, and because Charlie Sandin (a not-yet-sociopathic teen) decides to help a Black dude. “And the Black dude survives!”

As a feminist movie critic, I adored these flips on conventional horror tropes, and several of them exist.

Charlie uses his Robot Baby (omg) to help hide the Black dude from his parents

The White Savior: The Black dude, who seriously remains nameless, shows up in their neighborhood after the Sandins’ purge lockdown (where a hardcore security system barricades their entire home). Charlie Sandin hears gunfire in the streets and sees in the surveillance cameras the Black dude yelling for help, covering a bleeding wound. Charlie zooms in on the man’s terrified face and decides, “Duh, I need to help this guy.” So he unlocks the security system and yells for the shocked-as-hell Black dude to come inside, much to the dismay of his parents. At first, I thought, “This white savior trope again?!” but it didn’t last long. While Charlie helps the man, the older Sandins clearly want no part of it, especially after a group of asshole college kids (that I will forever refer to as “the highly-educated murderers”) threatens to break into their home if they refuse to release the Black dude back into the streets. See, “that homeless swine” belongs to them, and if they don’t get to kill him, they’re more than willing to kill the entire Sandin clan instead. So, duh, the parents torture the Black dude—in an effort to throw him back to the highly-educated murderers—while Zoey and Charlie freak the fuck out like, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING.”

Charlie watches the Black dude on surveillance cameras

The Protective Patriarch: All of this occurs in the name of James Sandin protecting his perfect, white nuclear family. He simultaneously apologize-stabs the Black dude several times while saying, “I’m sorry. I need to protect my family.” Mary Sandin, though, gets her, “James, you’re no better than the people out there!” on—because women and children always play the role of Moral Compass when men go astray. That trope unfortunately remains intact for the rest of the film, culminating with Mary’s decision not to murder her new home invaders (the less-rich jealous neighbors, at this point; did we NOT know they were gunning for the Sandins, too?). At one point Mary says, “Too many people have died tonight, so we’re going to end this night in fucking peace.” Or something. Even the Black dude says to James, “You need to protect your family,” offering up himself to the highly-educated murderers, but James experiences a swift change of heart and refuses to sacrifice him. Thanks to the women and children.

And in a way, I liked that the women and children felt compelled to protect the Black dude and not throw him to the wolves/preppies; I didn’t read their desire to do so as an employment of the white savior trope because these highly-educated murderers aimed to roll in there and kill everybody regardless. So the Sandins weren’t saving the Black dude as much as they were making it only slightly more difficult for him to get murdered. “And the Black dude survives!” in the end. And saves (most of) the Sandins. And walks off into the sun. After looking at Mary Sandin and saying, “Good luck” all deadpan. Ha.

Zoey secretly making out with the bro her dad hates

The Sexual Teenage Girl: Zoey Sandin interests me. Her character follows conventional horror film tropes from the get-go: she dates an older boy, much to the dismay of her disapproving dad because Daddy’s Little Girl. She sneaks around behind her family’s back, and her boyfriend even hides out in her room, staying put for the Sandins’ home lockdown. They make out on her bed while she wears a fucking schoolgirl outfit slash uniform; the scene screams INNOCENT VIRGIN about to HAVE SEX and then DIE because THIS IS A HORROR MOVIE. But. Her dad kills her boyfriend instead in a good ol’ Purge Family Shootout after her boyfriend pulls a gun on James out of nowhere (presumably to purge himself of the rage he feels for not being allowed to date Zoey), and James fires back in self defense. Zoey, a little devastated, runs off and hides for some reason, probably because THIS IS A HORROR MOVIE and groups never stick together.

Eventually, the highly-educated murderers breach the Sandin barricade, and we find Zoey hiding under her bed while—duh again—she sees one of them STOP beside her bed. THIS IS A HORROR MOVIE. While this happens, she overhears another murderer—who’s stroking a photo of Zoey—say, “Exquisite. Save her for me, won’t you?” I immediately thought, please don’t rape her please don’t rape her because THIS IS A HORROR MOVIE, and horror films dole out punishment to their sexually provocative heroines hardcore. But the true highlight of The Purge, for me at least, occurred when Zoey murdered the fuck out of the photo stroker, saving (most of) her family and flipping the Sexual Activity Is Punishable By Death convention on its ass.

Zoey hides under her bed (THIS IS A HORROR MOVIE)

So, all in all, and as unwieldy as The Purge gets (not unlike this review), I couldn’t help but enjoy most of it. The Rich White Dude gets punished, and the minority characters (including women) survive. That shouldn’t be a progressive movie ending in 2013. It is.

Up the Stairs, Out the Front Door: ‘Nyctophobia’

Nyctophobia, a film by Emily Bennett

This is a guest post by Emily Bennett.

If you asked me a year ago if I liked scary movies, I would have responded with the immortal words of Sydney Prescott in Scream: “What’s the point? They’re all the same. Some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can’t act who is always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door. It’s insulting.”

When Scream first came out, I remember being completely obsessed with the film. I watched it at a friend’s slumber party and never told my parents. I secretly made a collage of Skeet Ulrich and hid it in my closet for months. And I remember, every time we’d have a slumber party, someone would bring out some horror movie that we weren’t allowed to watch. Halloween, Arachnophobia, and the dreaded It were favorites.

Drew Barrymore stars in Scream

I remember my friends and I stuffing pillows into our pajama tops, pretending we were big-breasted girls running away from the killer. None of us thought we could play the killer, so we would run around the house, with huge pillow breasts, screaming in terror. We thought this was what horror films were about. And we thought they were really, really scary.

Once I hit high school, I stopped having slumber parties and started going to acting classes. A LOT of acting classes. I was so devoted to learning my craft that I became an acting snob. And I mean a complete snob. I refused to watch anything without Marlon Brando, James Dean, or Vivien Leigh. My horror film days were over. They were garbage compared to what I was watching and studying, as far as I was concerned.

Fast forward to a few months ago. Devon Mikolas cast me in his horror feature House of the Witchdoctor. I was fortunate enough to act alongside the brilliant Bill Moseley, Leslie Easterbrook, and Dyanne Thorne. I was thrilled! A paying film gig! Then I started to do my research…

I watched nothing but horror films for weeks on end. And I was fascinated, because I was finally seeing them with adult eyes. Don’t get me wrong, The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby held up completely. But other films that had scared the crap out of me suddenly offended me. Some of them were pure obscenity, in fact. There seemed to be no purpose to the female characters’ suffering, and because of that, it wasn’t scary to me anymore.

After filming House of the Witchdoctor, I returned home and started to write. That childhood love of scary movies came back to me. I decided I wanted to write, produce, and star in my first horror film. It took me no time to decide on the subject of the film. I chose what I felt is the most quintessential fear we all had as children: Nyctophobia, or fear of the dark.

I wanted to write a seemingly weak male character (Dennis), and a seemingly overpowering female character (Martha) to explore gender stereotypes that exist in horror films. And I wanted to place the male in the fearful role. Writing another “big-breasted bimbo” horror flick didn’t interest me. Instead, I wanted to explore fear in a different way. Hopefully, the end result of the film is that audiences can enjoy it without feeling that they’ve already seen it before.

Using the crowd sourcing site Seed&Spark was the best decision I could have made for my first film. Instead of being lost in the Kickstarter crowd, I was featured on the site, giving me a HUGE advantage. In the wake of the “Zach Braff Kickstarter debate,” I’m so encouraged that an unknown producer, such as myself, could raise enough money to make a film. I believe crowd sourcing may change the landscape of film for the better, and I’m grateful to be a part of that movement. (This is not a statement for or against Zach Braff’s film.)

Honestly, I don’t have an overarching message to women filmmakers, other than JUST KEEP MAKING FILMS. In the end, I don’t care if a man or a woman made a film, as long as it’s thought provoking and not formulaic. I don’t want to keep seeing the same old horror films with “some big-breasted girl who can’t act who is always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door.” When I watch a horror film, I want to be terrified. And the old formula is just not terrifying anymore. We’ve all seen the same big boobs running away from their death. I’d like to see something else now. So I’m going to write my own films and see what happens.

Emily Bennett was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina. She attended The South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, then moved to London to attend The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (3 year BA program). After graduation, Emily acted extensively in New York City and Chicago. Most recently, she starred in Devon Mikolas’ House of the Witchdoctor with the wonderful Bill Moseley and Leslie Easterbrook, premiering at Crypticon Kansas City later this year. Nyctophobia is the first of several films Emily hopes to complete in the next year. Her upcoming horror short Delete will hit the web in June. Once Nyctophobia is completed, she will begin production on her next film Chat Room, starring the devastatingly brilliant Callie Stephens. Ultimately, Emily hopes to combine these films into an anthology to showcase both her vision and the brilliant talent of her cast and crew members.

‘Inside’: French Pregnant Body Horror At Its Finest

Guest post written by Deirdre Crimmins for our theme week on Infertility, Miscarriage, and Infant Loss.

Content note: Discussion of violence directed at women and violent images ahead. Spoiler alert.

Horror films have a unique way of showcasing exactly what we fear, but they often do so in a subtle way. While is it goes without saying that ax-wielding maniacs are to be feared, these films often slyly expose the issues that our society is too shy to deal with head on. In the 2007 French horror film Inside (directed by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury), fertility, reproduction, and infant loss are dealt with in a refreshingly direct and uncompromisingly bloody outcome, with no room for subtlety.

The film takes place during the course of Sarah’s last night alone before having her child’s delivery induced the next morning. Sarah (Alysson Paradis) lost her husband in a terrible car accident just a few weeks earlier. The crash is shown multiple times through the film, which illustrates the haunting presence of the loss in every moment of her day-to-day life. We see the crash from the perspective of her child in utero as well, which also frames this unborn child as a character in the film.

With the circumstances of Sarah’s pregnancy she is denied the typical rituals of birthing. She has no partner to help her pick out the child’s name. The birth date is decided by her doctor in a cold and clinical office, removing the excitement and surprise of delivery. Rather than spending the night before the birth readying the nursery and enjoying their last night together as a childless couple, Sarah is all alone.

That is, Sarah is alone until she is stalked by a mysterious stranger who appears at her door. The stranger is a woman (played by Béatrice Dalle) dressed all in black who tries everything she can to get Sarah to open the door. After an initial creepy stand-off, the woman forces her way in to the home, and the horror begins. This nameless woman wants Sarah’s child, and she is not waiting around for the birth.

The next hour of the film is a bloody cat and mouse chase between Sarah and this woman. The film is smart, and incredibly gory. Neither of these women hold back on violent acts to get, or keep, what they want.

Sarah

To begin to examine a horror film, there are several questions that can aid in the dissection of its purpose. When looking at Inside it can be helpful to pose this question: Where is the horror? By looking at the source of horror in the film, we can better understand what we are to fear.

Clearly the first level of horror in Inside is in the intruder. Her bloodlust for Sarah’s unborn child drives her violence. Initially, it is this desire for the child that is problematic. We find out later in the film that not only was this woman pregnant recently, but that she lost her child in the same car accident that killed Sarah’s husband. This unveiling in the plot is what shows the complicated relationship that Inside has with infant loss.

With this we see that another dimension of the horror in the film lies in the intruder’s loss of her pregnancy. She was nearly full term, and we see the car accident from inside her womb. The well-developed, though unborn, child is distressed by the jolt the crash delivered, and reacts as the amniotic fluid clouds up with blood. One can only imagine the pain suffered by the loss of a pregnancy at this stage, however the emotional havoc she sustains cannot justify her attack on Sarah, can it? Sarah was driving the car, after all. Is it too much of a stretch to demand from Sarah what Sarah took from her? It obviously is too much to ask, however the logical leap is not a far one to make.

Outside of the blame for the lost child lies a classic example of body horror. Films that contain plenty of gore are often, though not exclusively, “body horror” films. Here it is the body itself that is the source of the horror. The pain, blood, dismemberment, and other organic fluids in the film are definite sources of horror in Inside. The fact that the intruder is treating Sarah like merely a vessel that holds a child, and treats Sarah’s body with so little respect that this is clear, is horrific. Sarah is chased, tortured, and ultimately given a non-consensual cesarean, all to the horror of the audience. This treatment of Sarah and the fact that her body, and in particular her pregnant body, is the source of much of the horror in the film, that makes this a body horror film.

Despite the horror of two women battling one another for an unborn child, the film is quite feminist. Both of these women are smart (deranged and depressed respectively, but both make choices to further their own agendas in constructive ways). Sarah does have men who show up to attempt to rescue her, but with each effort these rescuers are outsmarted and brutally killed by the woman in black. Also, neither Sarah nor the intruder are ever shown as weak due to their womanhood. Both are shown as strong, self-sufficient people who just so happen to disagree over who should get to keep Sarah’s child.

Woman in Black

Though Inside deals with the horrors of the body, and the emotional response to losing a child, it does not treat pregnancy with romanticism or nostalgia. Sarah and the intruder are treated as believable characters that are each reacting to the extreme situations that they have found themselves in. It is this even-handed treatment of pregnant women as still functioning members of society, and not dainty figurines that have no autonomy, which makes the film a horror that you can empathize with. By putting well rounded, relatable characters in (hopefully) unrelatable situations you can just sit back and watch the blood flow.

Deirdre Crimmins lives in Boston with her husband and two black cats. She wrote her Master’s thesis on George Romero and works too much.

Where Is My Girl Ash?: On "Evil Dead" 2013

Written by MaxThornton.

Warning: spoilers are invoked herein, and they’ll swallow your soul!

I try not to look forward to things; I’ve been hurt too many timesbefore. But I couldn’t help feeling just alittle excitement for the Evil Deadremake, tempered though it was with trepidation.

Almost certainly not true, if you’re the kind of person who wants to see an Evil Dead remake.

The movie turned out to be a lot of fun: not mindbending by any means, but certainly a good time for a gorehound on a Saturday night. (And be sure to stay right through the end credits!) Its attitude toward gender, though, is an oddity I am still trying to process.

We had been told that Jane Levy as Mia was the Girl Ash. This is, of course, a genderflip of a genderflip (Ash in the original Evil Dead having been a male Final Girl) – or rather, it would have been if we’d gotten it. The equating of Mia with Ash seems to have been based entirely on the climactic sequence, the use of a certain implement, and a rather magnificent reiteration of Evil Dead II‘s “I’ll swallowyour soul!”/”Swallow this” exchange. Apart from this, though, the story is really far more centered on Mia’s not-terribly-interesting brother David (played by Shiloh Fernandez). Mia might be the focus of the plot, such as it is, and she might be the Final Girl, but – unlike Ash – she spends most of the movie possessed by the titular malevolence.

In fact, the whole possession business is handled in a bizarrely and really problematically gendered way. For one thing, the word “bitch” is employed a HELL of a lot. Both male and female characters refer to the possessed as being a “bitch” or “Satan’s bitch.” This version of the Book of the Dead is peppered with color commentary describing what the possessed will do and how to defeat them, and it consistently describes them as “bitches.” I mean, I realize that as a queer feminist among queer feminists I am not living in mainstream society, and I realize that I am writing this for a website with “bitch” in the title, but I honestly haven’t heard that word used with such wild abandon since this.

And the reason it matters is that, for almost the entire movie, it is female characters and only female characters who get possessed. There’s even a scene that cuts between the female characters being possessed and the male characters discussing plans of action. I don’t understand why the filmmakers thought it necessary to treat possession by the Evil Dead in this way, and it’s a decision that came close to ruining the entire experience for me.

This guy? 100% as douchey as he looks.

I do think that a lot of the differences between the original and the remake simply reflect the changes in horror conventions over the past 30 years: the pretty unnecessary pre-credits flashback sequence; the recovering-junkie plotline, which gives the characters an actual reason both to stay in the woods and to disbelieve an increasingly freaked-out Mia; the general fleshing out of characterization and backstory (which makes it all the more noticeable that one of the five characters has almost none); the post-Cronenbergian relish with which the movie utilizes bodily fluids, wallowing in spit and vomit and piss as well as more traditional gore; the hardcore blood and grossness – including one instance of an RN misusing a hypo in a way that makes this trans guy very nervous about his next testosterone shot – which makes it seem even more adorably quaint that the original was once a “VideoNasty” in the UK; and the much more visual nature of the horror overall. Obviously this is partly a budget thing, but in the original, the Evil is never actually seen when it’s not possessing someone – it’s simply evoked through POV shots using sound effects and Shakicam. Whereas in this one there is an inexplicable Evil Mia lurking in the woods, because, thanks to the influence of J- and K-horror, you gotta have your pale creepy dark-haired possibly-dead girl.

It’s perhaps more interesting, though, to compare the character relationships and the reallocation of memorable scenes between the original and the remake. I very much enjoyed the replacement of Ash and Linda’s romantic relationship with David and Mia’s siblinghood, because I generally find it more interesting to see people interact in ways other than romantically. When David gives Mia a necklace very similar to the one Ash gives Linda in the original, it’s a direct signal to fans that this is going to be the primary relationship in the movie.

I very much did not enjoy the tree-rape. First of all, it’s kept in (which, fuck); second of all, it’s made even more visceral and gruesome and drawn-out (which, double-fuck); third of all, it happens to Mia, the supposed focus and alleged Girl Ash. Thought experiment: try to imagine a world containing a version of Evil Dead in which a male Ash got raped by a tree. I’m guessing it’s not our world.

I’m so sorry about the tree-rape. I hope this puppy makes you feel better.

I was also deeply disappointed by the possessed-handsequence. As I wrote back in October:

I want to see a female Ash. I want to see a woman in a movie who is as goofy and prone to slapstick as Bruce Campbell in the original Evil Dead films. I want to see a woman in a movie who follows Ash’s character arc, from cowardly dweeb to loudmouthed braggart with a chainsaw for an arm.

Spoiler: I did not get this. I am still waiting for this. Filmmakers, if you’re out there and you care at all about the narrow slice of audience that loves really gory horror movies and also feminism, please make this movie. Evil Dead 2013 is a pretty decent horror film, but it leaves an awful lot to be desired on the feminism front.

———-

Max Thornton blogs at GayChristian Geek, tumbles as transsubstantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: "John Would Think It Absurd": How ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ Fails in Translation to the Screen

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

This is a guest post by Marcia Herring.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” – the short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman – is almost universally recognized as a work of feminist horror. The nameless narrator, put on bed rest by her doctor husband, and perhaps suffering from post-partum depression, seeks release in the written word and eventually comes to believe that something is lying hidden behind the gaudy yellow wallpaper of her room. Fine fodder for a horror film, if you ask me. The tenuous line between a “true” haunting and the psyche of a woman treated less than human is a theme often explored within the horror genre, often pointing shakily toward the frailty of women lending to their traumatic supernatural experiences. It might have been nice to see an adaptation of “The Yellow Wallpaper” that addressed those themes and countered with themes of its own, offering that same supernatural phenomena as an escape or perhaps a savior from a traumatic real life. Unfortunately, 2011’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” co-written and directed by Logan Thomas, is not that film.

The film begins by introducing us to the three leads: John, his wife Charlotte (a nod, certainly, to Charlotte Perkins Gilman), and her sister Jennifer. They are moving to a new town after a fire took their house and young daughter Sara. This move comes prompted by an odd gentleman who seems to have sought them out as particular inhabitants: the house comes pre-furnished, and the 1900s realtor asks for nothing more than one month of rent to secure the property. The situation, while convenient (all too convenient, we horror veterans assume), is still less than ideal. All of the family’s money was lost in the fire, so John attempts to find work in town. Meanwhile, Charlotte turns to a strange room in the attic for inspiration while working on a short story. Then supernatural aspects begin to come into play.

When it seems like the presence of their daughter has followed them into this new lodging, Charlotte is comforted, and John increasingly and illogically distressed. (Perhaps, I guess, he is reacting to scenes that missed the final cut of the film.) Jennifer brings a medium friend to help attempt to figure out what is going on at the house, but whatever haunts the walls isn’t going to play nice. [Watch the trailer here.]

To call “The Yellow Wallpaper” an adaptation of the Gilman short story is a harsh overstatement – Director Thomas and co-writer (and star!) Aric Cushing have created a film that unfortunately both relies on the viewer’s familiarity with Gilman’s short story and sets itself up for failure because of its complete disregard for anything included in said story. Unless a viewer has read Gilman’s “Wallpaper,” they won’t understand the strange, wordless scenes in the wallpapered attic room (a room that isn’t given any other context), or the one or two throwaway lines from the story. And if indeed the viewer is familiar with the “source material,” Thomas’s “Wallpaper” will come off as something so bizarrely ignorant of its source text that viewing will be negatively affected.

To look at the poster, one might guess that “Wallpaper” is a film about evil sisters! Perhaps rising up against poor, poor John.

That isn’t to suggest that “Wallpaper” might be a good film without the literary allusions. Far from it. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is muddied with grit and fog and overbearing crashes and bangs of director-composed score. By the time we start to sense where the story might be going, Thomas throws in a twist (or four) that are so far from rational that I actually spent time pausing the film to wonder if I had missed something in a previous scene or if I had mistakenly begun watching another film. “The Yellow Wallpaper” has it all: sloppy editing, a few attempts at CGI and a half-baked mythology all crammed into the last half-hour of the film. Ending with a predictable and expected wink-wink-nudge-nudge scene, the film rolled into the credits while I scratched my head and wondered what, exactly, I had just watched. Anything that might hint at the ending, or any real horror, is left off screen and only referenced as an addendum – not as premonition.

Even as straight horror without any implications of living up to an established narrative, “Wallpaper” plays against some traditional horror conventions – and not in a good way. The traditional horror female experiences the paranormal with a kind of jouissance in direct opposition to the linear/logical “male” perspective that does not allow for any presentation of reality beyond the norm. The story that seems to be building in Thomas’s “Wallpaper” is one of haunting, a missing presence (I say “seems” because [SPOILER: one of the final twists explains that everything is really about vampires].) Charlotte believes the spirit is a benevolent one, somehow connected to her daughter. She takes comfort in this, and she should.

But John, burdened not only with maintaining the household through means both monetary and sane, all without the moral support of his peers that Charlotte, as a woman, is afforded, but also with the fear that can come only from one so logical coming to understand that supernatural events, while completely illogical pass the “seeing is believing” litmus test. He perpetuates the same patriarchy he falls victim to. Perhaps, if he lived in a society where men were permitted – encouraged, even – to take advantage of the homosocial bond in times of grief and confusion, John would not fall so heavily into that linear/logical “male” role that is eventually his downfall.

Charlotte and the titular wallpaper. Only in this story, it has no relevance to the plot.

The film (and the path chosen by directors) reminded me of 2006’s adaptation of Wide Sargasso Sea. This adaptation of Jean Rhys’s classic novel (a feminist look at the Madwoman in the Attic of Jane Eyre) is also written and directed by men, redesigned to star a man, and sympathetic to the male’s plight at the expense of the original female protagonist. Both films go out of their way, in sympathizing with the linear/logical world of the male, to distance themselves from any logic or sympathy to be found in jouissance or explanations that are not predisposed.

One of the many lessons here is that literature, like history, has become another commodity in which the male perspective and experience is privileged. In case it was left to doubt, I do not recommend “The Yellow Wallpaper;” in fact, the scariest thing about Thomas’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is that two men apparently read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story and thought: “But what about the husband? What about the men?”

———-

Marcia Herring is a recently relocated writer from Missouri. She is still working on her graduate degree, working in retail, and writing freelance for ThoseTwoGuysOnline.com (one of the guys is her brother) and Lesbrary. She spends most of her free time watching television and movies. She wrote an analysis of Degrassi, Teens and Rape Apologism, contributed a review of X-Men First Class, and reviewed V/H/S, Atonement and Imagine Me & You for Bitch Flicks.