Director: Mary Harron
Cast: Christian Bale (Bateman)
Serial killer Patrick Bateman plunges an axe into a man’s face and uses a chainsaw to cut a woman’s body in half. ‘Basically, he’s a monster and there’s no explaining it,’ says director Mary Harron.19 Granted, to trace all of Bateman’s crimes to one root cause would be absurdly reductive, as in Bateman’s own glib explanation, ‘Hey, I’m a child of divorce. Give me a break.’ However, to claim that his actions are inexplicable is equally facile and problematic, for it risks a surrender to apathy (he’s an insoluble mystery, so there’s nothing we can do) or a demonisation of him (he’s just inherently evil, so all we can do is destroy him). Interestingly, Bateman himself concludes at the end of the film that ‘I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling [of my crimes].’ But is this true? A lack of one root cause does not mean that there aren’t multiple, interrelated reasons for his bad behaviour.
It is New York City in the 1980s, a time when yuppies like Bateman are being encouraged to think that ‘greed is good’. He and his fellow junior executives work for a Wall Street firm called Pierce & Pierce, a name that connects profit-seeking with stabbing. The cutthroat competition among these men is emphasised when, each time one of them tries to conquer the others by pulling out a better business card, we hear the sound of ‘a sword being whipped out of a sheath’, as Harron explains.20 When Bateman later attacks his colleague with an axe, he is merely taking this business rivalry over which man has the most clout to its logical – albeit extreme – conclusion.
This avariciously materialistic environment tends to ruin Bateman’s relationships with women. Purchasing magazines like Playboy and renting video porn, he comes to view women as sexual objects to be bought and consumed. When Bateman emerges from under the sheets after oral sex on a female, his mouth is bloody from having literally eaten her out. For Bateman, the meat market is not just a metaphor. He keeps a prostitute’s severed head in his refrigerator, as if for late-night snacking. He has female corpses hanging in his closet like animal carcasses in a slaughterhouse. And he takes a bite out of a woman’s leg before butchering her with a chainsaw, imitating what he saw done in a video of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
In a sense, Bateman is slavishly devoted to media images, even attempting to find his own identity in them. The problem is that no one can live up to the impossible ideal they represent. The escorts he hires for the night aren’t blonde enough, smoke when they shouldn’t, and fail to appreciate a fine chardonnay. Worse, they seem unimpressed by his big-shot job or the big biceps he flexes in the mirror during sex. Bateman needs the women he is with to be perfect so that they can serve as a reflection of him as the perfect man, and when they fail to live up to his media-driven standards, he takes it as an affront to his core being. His murderous rage at them is anger at himself for what he sees as his own inferior performance as a successful man.
‘Something horrible is happening inside of me,’ Bateman thinks, ‘and I don’t know why.’ But, based on all the evidence in the film, we do.21
Directors: Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer
Cast: Alexandra Essoe (Sarah), Louis Dezseran (Producer), Fabianne Therese (Erin), Pat Healy (Carl), Noah Segan (Danny), Shane Coffey (Poe)
Aspiring actress Sarah makes a Faustian deal with a devil-worshipping cult and sells her soul to become a Hollywood star. Her moral corruption shows itself as physical rot, with her hair and a tooth falling out, blood coming from her mouth and crotch, and a stomach ache that leads to her vomiting up maggots. She prostitutes herself to a producer for a movie part and goes on a Charles Manson-style rampage, murdering all her friends who served as her conscience and tried to stop her. As co-director Dennis Widmyer says, his movie is about ‘ambition manifested as a monster. The idea that to get what you want, how far will you go? What will you do and what would that do to you mentally and physically?’22
This ‘Hollywood horror’ film certainly reveals how frightening the success-driven Sarah becomes (its tagline is ‘She would kill to be famous’), but the more appalling horror may actually lie in the supposedly normal people surrounding her. Sarah’s friend Erin, also a wannabe actress, ‘jokes’ about stealing roles from her and sending in her own headshot for parts Sarah fails to get. At the restaurant where Sarah works part-time, her boss, Carl, presents himself as a respectable businessman running a family-friendly establishment, but he also leers at her in her tight-fitting top, and the place he presides over is called Big Taters (modelled on Hooters). Sarah’s male friends Danny and Poe – the first an aspiring filmmaker and the latter more of a private pornographer – shoot videos of their girlfriends cavorting in skimpy bikinis, and Poe grabs surreptitious footage, which he calls ‘Sick, Slutty Sarah’, of her when she is tearing off her clothes because she feels ill. In their exploitation of her body, these two guys and her boss are not so very different from the producer who subjects her to his satanic casting couch. And why should Sarah have to pull some of her own hair out, as she is asked to do at the audition, to show how committed she would be to a part? Why should any actress need to have sex with the producer, as Sarah is bid to do, in order to land a movie role? These are monstrous aspects of movie culture that must share a great deal of the blame for bringing out the monster in her. ‘Let me see the real Sarah,’ the producer says. ‘Embrace who you are.’ But they are the ones helping her to create this terrible creature and pushing her to become it. When Sarah slashes the envious and rivalrous Erin in the face, when she stabs sneakily invasive Poe in the back, and when she cuts her boyfriend, Danny, near the groin after he sleeps with Erin, Sarah is not without cause, for they have all helped to make her what she has become. When we first see Sarah at the beginning of the film, she is standing before her bedroom mirror and, despite looking model-perfect, pinching the flesh at her sides out of fear that she is fat – a fear that drives her murderous path to stardom, to be admired by millions on the silver screen. Did this fear really come from inside, or was it moulded by a culture that reduces women to their bodies and makes them feel inadequate?
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Cast: Elle Fanning (Jesse), Keanu Reeves (Hank), Abbey Lee (Sarah), Jena Malone (Ruby), Bella Heathcote (Gigi)
Sixteen-year-old Jesse, an aspiring fashion model, becomes the ‘It’ girl of the moment. ‘You’re going to be great,’ her agent tells her. ‘She has that “thing”,’ says her make-up artist. And a fashion mogul describes her as ‘a diamond in a sea of glass’. But what is the ‘It’ that Jesse has? ‘You can’t put your finger on it,’ says director Nicolas Winding Refn. ‘You can’t define it, you can’t imitate it. That’s what having “It” means.’23 Some viewers of this film have noted that there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly special about the way Jesse looks, other than her fresh face and youthful appearance, but that is precisely the point. Because Jesse is new on the fashion scene, characters project onto her their own ideal of what is beautiful. ‘Beauty,’ says Refn, ‘really comes in the eye of the beholder,’ and so ‘people essentially make up their own interpretation of what [Jesse] may or may not look like.’24 Unfortunately, rather than realising that Jesse’s allure is the result of their own projected desire for perfection, the people around her start to envy her beauty and to reduce it to something merely physical, like youthful flesh, which they try to possess. ‘Men want to sexualise youth,’ Refn comments, and ‘women want to consume it.’25 Thus a motel manager named Hank tries to break into Jesse’s room to eat some ‘hard candy’, and she has nightmares of him making her open her mouth wider and wider to swallow his knife. Hank then actually rapes the even younger girl – a ‘real Lolita’ – in the room right next to Jesse’s.
When Jesse is chosen for a fashion shoot over rival Sarah, who was last season’s ‘It’ girl, the older model smashes her own ageing image in the mirror. Jesse runs to help, but when she accidentally cuts herself on one of the mirror shards, Sarah sucks the blood from Jesse’s hand as if trying to drink in her youthful vitality and good looks. ‘Who wants sour milk when you can get fresh meat?’, a jealous Sarah wonders, denigrating herself as an old cow and representing Jesse as a calf to be slaughtered. Sarah’s words subtract the soul from beauty, leaving only its carnal dimension. There is a white statue of a female angel behind make-up artist Ruby when she praises Jesse for having ‘such beautiful skin’, but Ruby shows no regard for that spiritual side when she tries to force herself on the virginal Jesse, hungry for her flesh. Earlier, a live cougar had broken into Jesse’s room, and in the scene after Ruby pounces on Jesse, the older woman is shown reflected in a mirror alongside a stuffed wildcat. When Ruby’s advances are rejected, she goes to a morgue where, desperate in her desire, she kisses and fondles a female corpse that looks like Jesse. In a sense, this scene reveals what Ruby had done to Jesse, for in treating her beloved as nothing more than a body for her devouring kisses and mauling hands, Ruby had voided that flesh of spirit, reducing it to a kind of corpse. In her desire to possess Jesse’s beautiful skin, Ruby had thought of nobody but herself.
Interestingly, Ruby’s molestation of the corpse from chest to crotch is cross-cut with images of Jesse’s fondling of her own breasts and genitals, and the two women climax at the same time. As opposed to Ruby and her rapacious narcissism, Jesse can be seen as exemplifying a healthy self-love. To another model’s comment that ‘nobody likes the way they look’, Jesse’s reply is ‘I do’. Onstage during a fashion show with some other lookalike models, Jesse appears to be kissing them while simultaneously kissing her own reflection in a three-way mirror, as if she is able to balance self-love with regard for others. In other scenes, Jesse also appears to balance on the edge of a cliff overlooking Los Angeles, and at the end of a diving board above an empty swimming pool. Viewed from below, it looks as though she is half-flying, her beauty transcendent but also grounded in the flesh, a precarious balance of body and soul.
But Jesse’s masturbation scene could also be viewed as one of vainglorious self-infatuation, and soon after, she uses the diving board as a platform to declare herself more beautiful than Ruby, who is standing below her in the empty pool. It would seem that Jesse is increasingly corrupted by the envious women who surround her, pulled into their egomania and jealous rivalry. Subsequently, Ruby, flanked by fashion models Sarah and Gigi, will push Jesse off that diving board, and her broken body dies on the concrete below. The three women then cannibalise Jesse’s flesh, with Ruby bathing in her blood while watching Sarah and Gigi lick the remainder of it off their bodies in the shower – a nadir of narcissism and carnal appetite. Afterwards, Ruby lies naked in the moonlight with her legs spread, smiling as if about to give birth to herself as the image of her soulmate, Jesse. But while Ruby may imagine communing with Jesse’s spirit, the fact is that she destroyed her beloved’s beauty, emptying it of soul, and devoured her dead body. In the process, Ruby killed her own soul, so it is fitting that, rather than giving birth, she bleeds out from between her legs, with the departure of her vital spirit leaving her a corpse.
Director: Neil Marshall
Cast: Shauna Macdonald (Sarah), Oliver Milburn (Paul), Alex Reid (Beth), Natalie Mendoza (Juno)
Sarah, her husband, Paul, and their young daughter are in a car collision and the latter two are killed, with Paul being impaled by a pole that flies off the other vehicle. One year later, Sarah goes on a spelunking expedition with some female friends, who hope to help her overcome her grief. But as they are headed towards their destination in the Appalachian Mountains, Sarah drives recklessly through the wooded area, which is similar to the one where the car accident occurred. Does she have a death wish prompted by survivor’s guilt? Upon arriving at their cabin, Sarah imagines a pole breaking through window glass to spear her in the eye in the same way that her husband was killed, as though she remains haunted by the desire to join him.
Sarah descends into the mouth of the cave as if into an open grave, and after exploring the underground passageways for a while, she becomes trapped in a narrow tunnel and panics. ‘The worst thing that could have happened to you has already happened and you’re still here,’ her friend Beth reassures her, but is Sarah scared of being buried alive or of her own longing for the grave? ‘What it is about is a descent into madness,’ writer-director Neil Marshall said of his film.26 The caving expedition could provide the opportunity for Sarah to work through the trauma of the accident and move past her grief, but it could also be the occasion for a further decline into terminal melancholy and insanity. Despite being warned that the claustrophobic environment of the caves might induce ‘panic attacks’, ‘paranoia’ and ‘hallucinations’, Sarah begins to see savage predators crawling around in the tunnels. Marshall cautions us that ‘maybe the crawlers are just a figment of Sarah’s imagination’.27 In one scene, Sarah thinks she sees her daughter from behind, but when the girl turns around, her face is that of a viciously threatening crawler. If Sarah does not learn how to deal with the death of her daughter, that loss will become a menace from beyond the grave, dragging her down with it.
In another scene, a frightened Sarah ‘sees’ a crawler, turns around quickly to escape, and is startled to find her friend Juno standing there. As if to rouse Sarah from her paranoia, Juno says, ‘Look at me. There’s nothing there.’ Juno promises to help Sarah find a way out of the caves, but adds importantly that ‘I can’t do it unless you’re with me’. Yet in order to join up with Juno, Sarah must move past fearing her as an enemy. Juno had betrayed Sarah by sleeping with her husband, Paul. In fact, Paul was lying to Sarah about this very adultery just before the car accident in which he died. Moreover, Juno effectively abandoned Sarah after the accident, never visiting her in the hospital. Now, on this caving expedition one year later, Juno makes repeated attempts to apologise, but she is continually rebuffed by Sarah, leading Juno to say, ‘Why don’t you try and find us a way through?’ – referring to the caves and their troubled relationship.
However, what Sarah sees (or imagines) Juno doing in the caves only serves to increase her own paranoia. As Juno is defending herself against a crawler attack, she turns around quickly and accidentally sinks her pickaxe into Beth. Juno then leaves the wounded woman behind. A dying Beth later tells Sarah about the abandonment and about the affair Juno had with Paul, revealing that he had given Juno a ‘Love Each Day’ pendant. Juno’s desertion of Beth reminds Sarah of when Juno abandoned her at the hospital, and the pickaxing of Beth brings back the impalement of Paul, for which Sarah blames Juno. And so, overcome by an insane rage at her friend’s betrayals, Sarah skewers Juno’s leg with a pickaxe and then abandons her to the deadly crawlers. In effect, Sarah has herself regressed to the primitive state of a crawler, striking savagely at others. Rather than inspiring her to ‘Love Each Day’, the memory of her husband becomes a reason to take revenge and cause the death of Juno. Thus, when Sarah finally manages to climb out of the caves and into the sun, her escape is revealed to be a deceptive dream. The sight of Juno’s bloody ghost, representing Sarah’s guilt over what she did to her friend, frightens her into waking up back in the cave. Forgiveness and compassion would have allowed Sarah to see the light; revenge has only dragged her down again. Showing that she still has some longing for humanity within her, Sarah is briefly comforted by a vision of her daughter and a birthday cake – before the candles go out and Sarah is left in the darkness with the other crawlers.
Director: Eli Roth
Cast: Antonieta Pari (Village Elder), Ramón Llao (Headhunter)
How can you make a cannibal movie in these culturally sensitive times? Writer-director Eli Roth’s attempt is incoherent in interesting ways. When a group of student activists journeys to the Amazon to block the bulldozing of the rainforests and the destruction of indigenous peoples, they are captured by a local tribe. Horror-movie conventions dictate that the threat be made as scary as possible, so these natives are presented as repellently brutish and barbaric. With their bodies coated in red ochre, they look as though they have bathed in blood. The female village elder has a dead-white eye and strands of beads that look like snakes strung through her nose. The chief headhunter, painted a devilish black, has horn-like bones protruding from his nose and wears a collar composed of spiky teeth. Together, the two of them lead their tribe in committing atrocities on their student captives. While he is still alive, one student has his eyes gouged out and swallowed, his tongue cut off and consumed, and his limbs amputated prior to his torso being cooked in an oven. Village children delight in holding the flayed skin of a tattooed female student up against their bodies, and the headhunter enjoys playing with her severed arm and making faces at her flesh-stripped skull.
However, the movie emphasises that the tribespeople only attack because they mistake the students for the enemy (since, when captured, they were wearing construction uniforms in order to infiltrate the logging operation). Moreover, Roth has stressed how much the peaceful and polite natives in the village where he filmed liked portraying cannibals. ‘They were so nice and they just loved what we were doing,’ Roth comments. ‘These [local] women were so great at cutting the body,’ he says, adding, ‘I love the kids biting here. It’s so funny.’28 Perhaps we have all reached such a stage of mutual respect (and sufficient food and shelter) that we can applaud the good time that the villagers may have had pretending to disembowel the students, but it is hard not to see the film’s images of natives cannibalising whites as reinforcing racist stereotypes of indigenous tribes as savages. Positive accounts of happy attitudes behind the scenes and verbal justifications within the movie for the villagers’ attacks hardly seem to compensate for our visceral reaction to the visuals of flesh-devouring brutes.
Why do the natives have to be devilish savages, and why does the Amazon have to be a ‘green inferno’? Roth has an emotional investment in seeing the jungle as hell, in viewing its inhabitants as ‘absolutely barbaric, primitive man’,29 because he wants to experience an ‘adventurous, dangerous kind of filmmaking’30 where he and his crew journey deep into the primordial jungle and where they ‘could have died any number of times – there were floods, and there were rock-slides; there were tarantulas and snakes’.31 And, for the characters at least, there were cannibals who could cook and eat them. One of the earliest inspirations for his horror films, Roth has said, was ‘being Jewish and growing up hearing stories about the Holocaust. If you didn’t finish your food, my parents would be like, “You could have been in an oven in Poland.”’32 The student activists are kept in a communal cage like a concentration camp, and some of them are taken to an oven. ‘My God, I can smell my friend being cooked,’ one says and ends up eating part of that person. Is The Green Inferno Roth’s vicarious way of experiencing what it might have been like for his Jewish ancestors in the Nazi death camps? What terrible things would people be driven to do in order to survive? The tattooed pieces of skin are similar to inmate identification numbers, and one escaped character’s remorse over leaving another behind in the cage is reminiscent of Holocaust survivor’s guilt. When a tarantula threatens a male student’s exposed penis and when the natives threaten the female students with genital mutilation, these can be seen as Roth’s exploration of fears related to Jewish rites of circumcision. Finally, when a female captive is able to use a small flute passed down to her by her female ancestors in order to connect with the human compassion in one of her captors, we are reminded of the role that music played in the concentration camps as a means of sustaining hope.
Director: Jamie Babbit
Cast: Camilla Belle (Dot), Elisha Cuthbert (Nina), Martin Donovan (Nina’s Father), Shawn Ashmore (Connor)
Dot hasn’t spoken a word since age seven when her mother died. This traumatic or sympathetic muteness, her keeping as quiet as her mother in the grave, was then joined by a kind of deafness as Dot pretended – or convinced herself – that she couldn’t hear in order to feel closer to her remaining parent, her deaf father. Years later, when her father dies, the now-teenaged Dot is adopted by her godparents. Their daughter, Nina, and her bitchy best friend torment and ostracise Dot at school, deeming her a ‘freak’ and a ‘retard’. Cut off from her fellow students by their attitude towards her disability, Dot glides ghost-like down the school corridors in a deaf-mute daze. Divided from the living, she spends more time communing with the dead, playing Beethoven on the piano as she used to do for her father, who, like the deaf composer, could sense the instrument’s vibrations.
If Dot is like a gothic heroine haunted by her past, then Nina is like the girl in a horror movie whose fear of a monster invading her bedroom comes true, for her father comes to her at night and insists on having sex with her. The man she trusted to love and care for her turns out to be a monster who imposes his selfish demands on her. Dot, whose continuing and creepily close attachment to her own father could also be seen as morbid and unhealthy, is especially attuned to Nina’s suffering, and Nina tells her incestuous secret to Dot, finding her to be the perfect confidante because she ‘cannot’ hear and thus will not tell anyone else about it.
Dot also feels a growing likeness to – and liking for – a boy her age named Connor, who confides in her about his struggles with disability (attention deficit disorder) and his fears of sexual failure, assuming all the while that she is deaf. Dot agrees to make love with him, but when he then ignores her bodily needs and uses the occasion merely to prove himself a man, she later rejects him, prompting him to act possessively and domineeringly towards her, much as Nina’s father does to Nina. Connor also discovers that Dot may have been capable of hearing the secrets he told her about himself, which causes him to feel ashamed of what he revealed and angry at her for deceiving him.
In the end, Nina helps Dot escape from Connor. In addition, as Nina’s father is about to rape Nina for having finally rejected him, Dot, who has been playing the piano ‘for’ her deceased father, hears Nina’s cries for help and strangles Nina’s father with some piano wire. By banding together as ‘sisters’, Dot and Nina free themselves from their unhealthy attachment to their fathers, from the familial past that was haunting them. By attending to Nina’s calls for help, Dot finds that she can hear her own.
Director: Greg McLean
Cast: David Mazouz (Mikey), Radha Mitchell (Mother), Kevin Bacon (Father), Lucy Fry (Sister), Judith McConnell (Grandmother)
Meet autistic tween Mikey. While camping with his family in the Grand Canyon, he wanders off, falls into a cavern, and steals some sacred stones, bringing them back to Los Angeles in his backpack. At night in his house, he takes out the stones, fondles them, and places them in a strange formation in front of his bedroom wall, an act which invites demons to use the wall as a portal to invade the family home. Mikey’s inability to interact normally with his family led to his wandering off. His lack of safety awareness contributed to his fall. His obsessive focus on objects drew him to the stones, and his failure to understand society’s rules made it easier for him to steal. Finally, his interest in unusual patterns and his peculiar sensitivity to his surroundings led to the rock formations and contributed to making him a conduit for evil forces.
As Mikey’s parents ‘discover’ when they do some Internet research, ‘Autistic Kids Are Magnets for Ghosts’: ‘Unseen beings like autistic children. Because they process information and see the world differently, autistic children are more likely to see strange things. They often witness activities way before anyone else in the home. They are more sensitive to nuances.’33 With this dubious information, combined with the tagline of ‘Evil comes home’, the film plays on the idea of an autistic child being a kind of alien in our midst – affectless, weirdly remote, and seemingly attuned to paranormal frequencies. A charitable interpretation of the film would view it as making fun of our fear that autistic kids are especially susceptible to evil spirits, but it’s hard not to see the movie as mired in old superstitions and misunderstandings about developmentally disabled people as being monstrous and threatening. When Mikey’s mother is startled by his sudden appearance behind her in the attic, the fact that autistic children are often silent is made to seem creepy and frightening. When Mikey’s father finds the walls and ceiling defaced with peculiar markings and sees Mikey smiling, the boy’s inappropriate affect appears like an enjoyment of evil. Mikey’s inability to recognise proper boundaries results in his spying on his sister in the shower and his leaving of strange handprints on her bed. Because he does not have our common awareness of danger, he sets the house on fire, and his lack of empathy leads him to kill his grandmother’s cat. The film does not promote a better understanding of autistic kids when it makes them seem like incipient perverts, budding pyromaniacs, or serial killers in the making. In the alternate ending to the film, Mikey’s repetitive behaviour and his obsession with numbers are linked to the evil spirits’ destruction of the entire family, as the boy’s counting turns out to be a countdown to their doom.
Fortunately, it is also possible to view this as a film about a family that scapegoats their autistic child, falsely accusing him as the cause of their own fears and tensions, until they learn better at the end. The foul odours, faucets that won’t turn off, and laundry rising in ghostly shapes speak to the mother’s fears of being a bad homemaker, though she blames them on Mikey. The father is an architect and so has a special dread of his house burning down – a fire he pins on Mikey. And when a dog somehow gets in and attacks the father’s precious daughter, he charges absent-minded Mikey with having left the front door open. The bulimic daughter is extremely body conscious, which could make her anxious about being spied on in the shower, and it is interesting how her fear of being choked by strange hands relates to the times when she forces herself to vomit by sticking her own finger down her throat. With these suggestions that the family is projecting their own fears and blame onto Mikey, the film approaches an awareness that this autistic child has simply served as a catalyst, not a cause, as the stress of dealing with his disability exacerbates already existing tensions in the other characters. The film moves away from the supernatural (autistic kids as channelling evil spirits) and towards a psychological understanding of disabled children and ‘demons’. If ‘they bring out the darkness within people so [that] their victims destroy themselves or destroy each other’, then this is because people scapegoat them as ‘evil others’ rather than recognising and solving their own problems. At the end of the film, Mikey’s autism proves to be an advantage because he alone can return the sacred stones and placate the demons since he is the only one who is not afraid of them. What this suggests is that, unlike his family, who fear others because they blame them for their own problems, Mikey has not been socialised into those prejudices and dreadful projections. He is fearless because he senses that there are no ‘others’ and there are no demons. There is only us.34
Director: John R Leonetti
Cast: Ward Horton (John), Annabelle Wallis (Mia), Tree O’Toole (Annabelle), Alfre Woodard (Evelyn)
In late 1960s California, John and Mia are a young couple in love, living in the ideal suburban home and expecting a beautiful baby. Named after actress Mia Farrow who played the pregnant mother in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), the character of Mia is plagued by many of the same maternal anxieties, which form the nightmarish flipside to her dream of motherhood. Childbirth can be a moment of life or death, and Mia’s insistence that, if there is trouble during labour, the baby’s life be saved at the expense of her own indicates an underlying fear that either mother or child might ‘kill’ the other during delivery. Another cause for concern is that, no matter how hard parents try to be loving and protective of their children, the kids may grow up feeling deprived and resentful, like their neighbours’ teen daughter Annabelle who ran off to join a cult. Mia is also worried about her husband, John, who is completing med school and about to start his residency. Sometimes he is like the caring doctors she watches on the TV soap opera General Hospital, but at other times his solicitude seems to be a false front hiding his selfish and overbearing nature. When John presents her with a vintage doll in a white wedding dress, Mia says that the last time he said he had a gift for her, she ended up pregnant, a comment which relates the creepy doll to the baby in her womb, implanted there by her husband. (In Rosemary’s Baby, as the wife has sex with her husband on the night she conceives, she imagines that he is replaced by the Devil thrusting on top of her, impregnating her with his evil spawn.)
Mia’s mounting dread culminates in a scene where Annabelle, now a deranged cult member, joins forces with her Charles Manson-like boyfriend to kill her mother and then to invade Mia’s home to come after her. The assault by Annabelle combines Mia’s fear of being ‘killed’ by her baby during childbirth and her fear of being punished for her future failures as a parent by her grown-up daughter. When Annabelle’s boyfriend stabs Mia’s pregnant belly with a knife, the scene plays like a nightmarish version of intercourse with her husband, whose penetration of her implanted this baby that is causing her so much anxiety. Later, after the child is born, Mia will reach into the baby carriage only to be grabbed by the hand of an adult male demon, whose taloned fingers and phallic horns recall her fear of intercourse and inception. (In a real-life home invasion, members of the Charles Manson cult broke in and stabbed pregnant actress Sharon Tate, the wife of Roman Polanski, who had recently directed Rosemary’s Baby.)
After grabbing the knife from her boyfriend but failing to kill Mia, Annabelle cuts her own throat, bleeding on the doll, which thus appears to be crying tears of blood. This ‘blood connection’ between Annabelle and the doll, which is also named Annabelle, worries Mia (who is played by actress Annabelle Wallis). After all, the teenage Annabelle was a ‘nightmare daughter’ who killed her mother, and a ‘nightmare mother’ who wanted to stab Mia in the womb. For these reasons, the doll becomes the locus of Mia’s maternal and filial fears, reminding her of her own ambivalence regarding her infant daughter. The life-sized, cherub-faced doll looks like the perfect baby girl, but something is subtly wrong, whether that be her too-perfect porcelain skin, the artificial blush on her cheeks, or her beautiful blue eyes, which never blink. It’s as though the doll is a creepy version of Mia’s baby girl, a projection of the mother’s fear that her daughter is less than ideal. Mia so wants the suburban dream that anything other than angelic perfection seems demonic. The devil doll’s staring eyes and mocking laughter disturb Mia, who begins to act like a bad mother due to fear of being under attack, putting flies in her baby’s milk bottle and overheating her bathwater (in deleted scenes). When Mia finds the doll in her daughter’s crib, she bashes the little impostor against the crib rails and throws her to the floor, only to discover her actual daughter lying there, which prompts Mia to weep at the thought that she might have killed her own infant (who is fortunately revealed to be unharmed).
After nearly becoming a homicidal mother, Mia swings to the opposite extreme and decides to commit suicide in order to save her daughter. But despite these fraught blood relations, the movie eventually seems to realise that no mother or daughter should have to die so that the other might live. To move beyond this hysterical view of a world consisting of self-sacrificial angels or selfish devils, the movie creates another character, Evelyn, who accidentally did kill her own daughter and who pays the price for that death by killing herself in order to save Mia’s baby girl. By acting out the two extremes of murder and self-martyrdom, Evelyn frees Mia to be a regular mother to her ordinary daughter, to have a mother-daughter relationship that isn’t perfect but is good enough.
Director: William Brent Bell
Cast: Lauren Cohan (Greta), Rupert Evans (Malcolm), Ben Robson (Cole), James Russell (Brahms)
When a young American named Greta takes a job as a nanny in an isolated English mansion, she discovers that the boy she is expected to tend is really a life-sized doll, an uncannily exact replica of an eight-year-old called Brahms who died years ago. While at first she jokingly dismisses him as a mere toy, Greta becomes increasingly unnerved by the creature’s apparently animate behaviour, making her fear that the doll is alive or has been possessed by the spirit of the dead boy. As she is fixing her hair in a mirror, Greta hears a clattering behind her and runs to find Brahms’s playthings strewn about the floor of his room. In another scene, Greta is looking into her bedroom mirror when she is unsettled by the sight of the boy doll propped up in bed behind her, apparently staring at her. Later, after brushing her teeth in her bathroom mirror, Greta walks to the bed and turns the doll’s face away from her, only to have him turn it back! But this turns out to have been a nightmare she had while asleep. Greta is often troubled by sounds of a boy crying. One time when she runs to the doll to check on him, she sees a tear fall from his eye – but this is revealed to be from rainwater dripping from the ceiling.
The fact that so many of these ‘creepy doll’ moments have to do with mirror images of herself suggests that Greta is really being haunted by something within her own psyche. She recently lost a child to a miscarriage, and her unresolved grief may be the cause of her feeling that a dead boy has a claim on her, that she is still obligated to nurture this lifeless ‘child’, to help him and herself stop crying. However, by dressing, ‘feeding’ and reading to this substitute for her dead child, Greta is in danger of being dragged down into grief-stricken madness. When the boy doll ‘steals’ her dress to prevent her from going out on a date with a young man named Malcolm, this speaks to Greta’s own inability to move on with her life, as she becomes enslaved by such rules as ‘Never Leave Brahms Alone’.
The doll’s ‘jealousy’ regarding Malcolm is also a reminder of Greta’s possessive and abusive ex-boyfriend, Cole, whose violence towards her was what caused her miscarriage. When Greta imagines the doll spying on her in the shower or interrupting her intended lovemaking with Malcolm so that she must run and tend to the doll, she is being haunted by the memory of her lustful and selfish ex-lover. Indeed, Cole actually shows up to claim her, causing the doll child that Greta was holding to drop and break in a repetition of the miscarriage.
It turns out that the real Brahms did not die as a boy, but has been living inside the walls of the mansion, emerging in secret to manipulate the doll, which is why it seems alive. Now grown to be a young man, yet still wearing the mask of a boy, Brahms is the eerie embodiment of both Greta’s fears: her still weirdly animate dead child and her possessive and domineering ex-lover. In retrospect, the strangely staring eyes of the doll do seem to make him a creepy combination of innocent boy and menacing man. ‘He is sweet looking. I think he should look adorable, but [like] he has a knife hidden behind his back,’ says director William Brent Bell.35 In the end, when the hairy-chested Brahms, who is now a young man, forcibly pulls Greta towards his boy-masked face for a goodnight kiss, both the needy boy and the lustful male in him frighten her. ‘I don’t totally know if [she] is supposed to be his girlfriend or his mom – I think it’s a messed-up in-between,’ screenwriter Stacey Menear comments.36 Interestingly, the delivery guy Malcolm, who is Greta’s new love interest, isn’t sure whether she should call him a ‘grocery boy’ or a ‘grocery man’. Let us hope that she finds in him the best – and not the worst – of both.
Director: James Wan
Cast: Rose Byrne (Renai), Ty Simpkins (Dalton), Patrick Wilson (Josh), Barbara Hershey (Lorraine)
Renai is a young mother trying to have a career as a music composer. While seated at the piano where she is attempting to write a song (with the lyrics ‘I’m gonna be somebody; I just can’t be her today’), she suddenly hears a monstrous adult voice on the baby monitor, demanding ‘I want it now!’ Could some malevolent spirit be stalking her infant daughter, threatening to take her away? Or worse, is that what Renai herself secretly wants, the removal of her demanding child so that she can be left in peace to do her own work? While Renai is climbing a stepladder in the attic, one of its rungs breaks, and later her son, Dalton, falls from this same ladder, slipping into a coma. A box of Renai’s music, which had earlier vanished, now reappears near the ladder. Why didn’t she warn her family about the broken ladder? Did some dark part of her want her son to fall so that her music career could be restored to her?
If Renai is the evil entity menacing her son, this is a case of transgenerational haunting, for it has happened before: Renai’s husband, Josh, was himself haunted by his own mother, Lorraine, when he was a boy. With Josh’s father absent, Lorraine seems to have been her son’s sole caretaker. This burden led to a resentment which, though mostly hidden, would occasionally reveal itself in odd behaviour, such as the fact that Lorraine rarely celebrated her son by taking photos of him. The few pictures that do exist show the ghostly image of an old woman – Lorraine herself – creeping towards young Josh in a menacing manner. This rage that builds up in women when they must give up their whole lives to tend to their children is what haunts the families of Lorraine and Renai, as symbolised by the ghost of a doll-perfect mother who suddenly stops her ironing in order to shoot her entire family. ‘We wanted the ghosts to look like dolls, like relics from a different era, frozen in time, living the same loop over and over,’ says screenwriter Leigh Whannell.37
If mothers can haunt us through generations, so, too, can fathers, for the former’s rage at having to take on almost all of the parenting responsibilities is largely due to the latter’s absence. Like his own father, Josh is mostly a non-presence in his children’s lives, not even picking them up from school on the way home from work. Perhaps stunted by his own mother’s resentment, Josh still seems like a boy in search of maternal solicitude, wanting Renai to write songs about him and preserving his baby face by plucking grey hairs and using wrinkle cream. Josh’s frequent absences from home haunt his son, Dalton, whose own tendency to wander, which is described as an inheritance from his father, gets the boy into serious trouble because it leads to his fall and subsequent coma. The movie depicts Dalton as having been lured away by a male demon who wants to possess him. Dalton has sketched drawings of this demon, but Josh, absent father that he is, hasn’t noticed them, perhaps because the demon is the dark side of Josh himself, the criminal neglect that is menacing his own son. Now Josh must be the father he never had and become fully present to his son in order to bring the boy back from the coma. Josh must stop his own immature wandering and behave responsibly so that the transgenerational haunting can end and his son can grow up to be a real father.
Director: Jimmy ScreamerClauz
Cast of voices: Jimmy ScreamerClauz (Labby), Joshua Michael Greene (Tommy), Ruby Larocca (Tommy’s Mother and Sophia), Joey Smack (Tommy’s Father and Ralph), Brandon Slagle (Sophia’s Father)
Why make an animated cartoon that is not for children? First, this film’s fantastically warped characters and crude computer graphics effectively represent the wild imaginations of its kiddie protagonists. Second, the animation allows the film to depict extreme forms of child abuse without having to damage any actual child actors. Finally, the disturbing distortions and jarring glitches in the rudimentary animation add to the sense that these troubled children’s lives are not the happy idylls usually shown in kids’ cartoons or other programming for young viewers. For example, the film offers a darkly comic parody of the TV series Lassie where, instead of the friendly collie dog that would help young Timmy, a black Labrador named Labby gives the wrong kind of aid to Tommy. Himself an ‘unwanted’ child, Tommy finds out that his mother is beset with another unwelcome pregnancy, and he hears his parents berating each other for their repeated failure to use birth control. Labby tells the boy that his mother is carrying the Antichrist and that any milk she might give this next baby is tainted because she used up all the good milk on Tommy. The demonic dog then proceeds to rip the foetus from her womb, while also biting off the penis and tearing out the throat of the father. Actually, however, the dog is merely a voice in Tommy’s head, the part of his mind urging him to let loose his worst instincts, to respond in the most dysfunctional way to his dysfunctional family environment. It is really Tommy who kills his parents out of anger at them for not wanting him, and he who kills the baby out of sibling rivalry, believing that there is not enough of his mother’s meagre love for both himself and a brother. But now that his mother is dead, Tommy misses her – and Labby is ‘there’ again to ‘help’. Following the dog’s instructions, Tommy has anal sex with Labby while Labby is having intercourse with the deceased mother. A more objective shot reveals that there is no Labby, but only Tommy moving between her legs. Tommy had imagined the presence of the dog in order to avoid facing the fact of his own incestuous desires. While one side of Tommy may want to bring his mother back by infusing new life into her, another part wants to satisfy his selfish lust.
Dysfunctional family dynamics are further explored in the story of another boy, Ralph, whose Siamese twin brother does not survive. In their grief, his parents blame Ralph for the death of his twin, leading the boy to believe that he was not loved as much as his brother. Ralph meets a girl named Sophia, whose father has been exploiting her by making her star in child pornography. At first, the troubled kids seem to find a safe haven in each other’s company, with the boy feeling wanted by someone, and the girl glad to have somebody concerned about her feelings. Just as despair breeds despair with damaged parents having a deleterious effect on their children, so hope leads to hope as together the kids help each other imagine being freed from their family prisons, as symbolised when Ralph is able to release his bugs from glass jars so that they may live in Sophia’s garden. But then Sophia’s father gives Ralph one of her porn tapes, telling the boy that if he makes love with her, he could help her stop crying, and Labby whispers to Ralph that he could teach her what true love is. Confused by the father’s lies and his own ambiguous urges (as voiced by the dog), Ralph has sex with Sophia while her father films them and masturbates. Ralph may want to believe that he’s doing this for her, but his motives are increasingly selfish. Rationalising his own lust, he doesn’t stop when she tells him to stop. And when she touches his twin brother’s face (which is still attached to the side of Ralph’s own head), Ralph’s desire increases as if motivated by jealousy and possessiveness – two urges that often inflame the desire of porn viewers like Sophia’s father. When Ralph shows a moment of concern that Sophia doesn’t seem to be enjoying it, a panting Labby assures the boy that he should continue. Horrifyingly, the adults’ corruption has now been fully internalised.
Director: Scott Derrickson
Cast: Ethan Hawke (Ellison), Michael Hall D’Addario (Trevor), Clare Foley (Ashley), Nicholas King (The Boogeyman), Juliet Rylance (Tracy)
In an attic box, Ellison finds 8 mm home movies of families enjoying such all-American activities as mowing the lawn, playing on a tyre swing, partying by the pool, driving to a barbecue, and returning home to sleep safe and secure. Except that, for these families, the American Dream has turned nightmare, for their home movies are actually snuff films of being run over by the blades of a lawnmower, hanged from a tree, drowned in a pool, burned alive in their car, and stabbed in their beds. Something sinister has infiltrated these homes, and Ellison examines the found footage to see if he can determine the source of its uncanny creepiness, to pinpoint exactly where the familiar turned strange. Using his smartphone’s camera, he digitises the 8 mm movies so that he can freeze-frame images and enlarge them on his computer. He also finds another box containing extended cuts of the films, which reveal that the cause of each family massacre was one of their own children. Ellison himself has a family, and he begins to notice uncanny correspondences between his own kids and the little killers in the home movies. He finds his 12-year-old son, Trevor, screaming inside a cardboard box like the one the films came in, and the boy later draws a sketch of the hanged family. School rumours about the murder, combined with night terrors, could account for Trevor’s behaviour, or is the boy possessed? Soon after discovering Trevor in a box, Ellison sees a scorpion crawl out of one. Night noises turn out to have been caused by his seven-year-old daughter, Ashley, wandering lost in the dark, but later Ellison traces similar noises to their source in a snake rustling about in the attic. Are his son and daughter the proverbial ‘viper in one’s bosom’? Will he be betrayed by those closest to him? When Ashley paints a picture of the hanged family’s daughter sitting on a tyre swing, Ellison fears that the ghost of this dead girl may possess Ashley to murder her own family.
Looking more closely at digitised images of the home-movie murders, Ellison discovers what appears to be a mysterious man behind each of the killer kids, exerting a baleful influence on them. In one shot, this boogeyman is reflected in a pool, watching a family drown, much as Ellison also views the murders, such as the stabbed family whose image is reflected in his eyeglasses as he peers at the film. Director and co-writer Scott Derrickson has described this as ‘a horror film about a guy watching horror films’.38 Ellison seems appalled by what he sees, but then why does he keep watching? Ellison is a true-crime writer. He is ostensibly viewing these films as research for a book, and he has moved his family into one of the houses where a murder occurred. At a certain point, just as Ellison is realising that each of the murdered families had also lived in a house where another such murder occurred, the frozen image of the boogeyman on the computer behind Ellison begins to move, turning to peer at him, but then turns back before Ellison can catch him looking. It is as though Ellison is starting to see that, when he views the boogeyman, he is staring at his own reflection, gradually discovering that he himself is the man having a baleful influence on his own children. Who took his kids to live at a former crime scene? ‘My God, what on earth possessed you to move here?’ his wife, Tracy, asks Ellison, noting that he often looks ‘white as a ghost’ (as does the boogeyman). Whose obsession with watching images of murder, combined with a failure to keep them locked away in his office, haunts his children to the point where they lose their way in the dark, suffer night terrors, and then begin to draw and enact such terrible crimes? There’s ‘something that’s eating you up’, Terry tells him, ‘and whatever it is, it seems to be getting at Trevor as well’. At a key moment, Ellison sees ghosts of the killer kids all watching projected home movies of the murders. At first, the boogeyman is on-screen, watching and presiding over the crimes taking place there, but then the boogeyman is suddenly live and in Ellison’s face – very close to him indeed, revealing the dark side of this all-American father.
Director: Chan-wook Park
Cast: Mia Wasikowska (India), Dermot Mulroney (Richard), Matthew Goode (Charlie), David Alford (Reverend), Nicole Kidman (Mother), Alden Ehrenreich (Whip)
Described by writer Wentworth Miller as ‘a horror film, a family drama and a psychological thriller, all wrapped up in one’,39 this movie begins with some highly improbable events in the life of a young woman named India. Richard, her father, dies, and Charlie, an uncle she has never seen before, appears at the funeral, which happens to occur on the same day that India turns 18. Each year, Charlie has mailed saddle shoes to her on her birthday, but this year, in person, he hands her a pair of high heels and begins to flirt seductively with her. India discovers a cache of letters revealing that Charlie has loved her from afar for years, but only now is he acting on that desire. During one scene, he plays a passionate piano duet with her while a spider creeps up her inner thigh.
None of this makes much sense in terms of realism, but if we consider these events from India’s psychological perspective, there is a logic to them. It is Richard, her own ostensibly good father, who one day, as his daughter grows to be a woman, acts on his incestuous desire and molests India at the piano. Because she is unable to think of her father as bad, she splits him in two, imagining that her good father has died and that an evil uncle has taken his place. ‘Have you ever seen a photograph of yourself taken when you didn’t know you’re being photographed, from an angle you don’t get to see when you look in the mirror?’ muses India. ‘And you think, “That’s me. That’s also me.”’ Uncle Charlie is her father, Richard, viewed from another angle, a dark side of her father that she had never seen before. ‘You look like my father,’ she says to Charlie, and she discovers her father’s wallet – containing a photo of him and herself – inside Charlie’s suitcase. At the funeral, the reverend eulogises Richard as having been a ‘family man’, ‘devoted husband’ and ‘loving father’: ‘a model to our town and of what it means to be a man who walks through the world with openness, honesty, and integrity’. But afterwards, Charlie (in the screenplay) presses her about her father: ‘I want to know who he was to you, India … I want to know what he was like behind closed doors, when the neighbours weren’t watching … That’s when you get the real story. That’s when you get the truth.’40
The trauma of incestuous contact just as she is coming of age threatens to bring out a dark side in India, too. Alternately fearful and sexually forward, she ‘hates to be touched’ – ‘please leave before my mother wakes up,’ she tells Charlie – but she also finds herself responding in kind to his advances. When her mother slow-dances with Charlie, who is wearing her father’s belt, India jealously watches, just as he watches her as she interacts with boys after school. One boy, Whip, defends her from some lecherous louts, and she seems to feel some tenderness towards him, but then she bites his lip and he attempts to rape her – a turn from protector to molester that may remind her of her father. As Whip is on top of her, Charlie strangles the boy with her father’s belt, and India later masturbates to the memory of this scene, climaxing at the moment when Charlie breaks the boy’s neck. Because of the incest she has suffered, India has begun to associate desire with predation, sex with death.
However, in the end, just as Charlie is using that same belt to strangle her mother, India shoots him dead. Rather than giving in to her murderous desire to be with him, she protects her mother. Significantly, India has spent years on hunting trips with her father, who has taught her to wait until just the right moment to pull the trigger. It could be that, despite her father’s incestuous advances, India has found a way to remember and internalise his good side, to live her life as a defender of others against the kinds of assaults she has suffered.
Director: M Night Shyamalan
Cast: Bruce Willis (Crowe), Olivia Williams (Anna), Donnie Wahlberg (Vincent), Haley Joel Osment (Cole), Toni Collette (Lynn)
Dr Crowe receives an award for his successes as a child psychologist, but he fears that work has led him to neglect his wife, Anna, and he is shot dead by a former patient, Vincent, who claims that the doctor has failed to help him. There then ensues a partial wish-fulfilment fantasy in which Crowe comes back as a ghost and is able to make at least symbolic amends for his past mistakes. Vincent is beyond help, but the doctor’s spirit counsels and cures another boy like him, Cole. Crowe, who spends much of the movie in denial about being one of the ghosts (‘They only see what they want to see; they don’t know that they’re dead’), finally faces the fact that he is deceased and thus can never really mend his relationship with his still-living wife. Nevertheless, Crowe comes to believe that if he whispers how much he loves her to Anna while she is asleep, his wife will sense his continued presence and be comforted by it. Earlier, Crowe’s ghost has returned to their anniversary restaurant, but his spectral hand has been unable to meet hers across the table. He has also watched in jealous rage as Anna seems about to kiss a male co-worker. But in the end, Crowe reconciles himself to the reality that, despite the persistence of his spiritual presence, the absence of his flesh and blood means that her love for him will need to be enacted with another man who is physically present. Just as Crowe ‘regained’ his lost patient, Vincent, through another boy, Cole, so Anna will ‘regain’ her deceased husband, Crowe, through another man. It is in this complex sense that Crowe is right when he whispers to Anna, ‘I didn’t leave you.’
As for Cole, his father is absent due to a divorce, but the fact that the boy still wears the empty frames of his dad’s eyeglasses is a sign of how much Cole wishes his father were there. As part of counselling Cole, Crowe shows him the trick of the ‘magic penny’ which seems to vanish from the doctor’s left hand to his right, then to disappear from that hand to his waistcoat pocket, and finally to return to his left hand, but the boy correctly surmises that the penny never really departed from Crowe’s left hand. The penny seemed gone but was still present. When Cole’s mother, Lynn, asks him about a missing pendant that had belonged to his now-deceased grandmother, the boy replies, ‘Sometimes people think they lose things and they really didn’t lose them. It just gets moved.’ Later, Cole conveys a message from the ghost of his grandmother, who wants Lynn to know that – many years ago, back when they were both alive – she did attend Lynn’s dance recital, even though Lynn may not have been able to see her standing in the back. Just as she was present then while seeming absent, so the grandmother, now deceased, is still there in spirit, even if not in body. Like the pendant and the penny, she never really left. As Cole says, ‘Some magic’s real.’ When Crowe attends Cole’s school play, the boy’s absent father is there through Crowe, who embodies the dad’s ever-present paternal spirit, the eyeglasses watching over the boy. Afterwards, Cole says to Crowe, ‘I’m not going to see you anymore, am I?’ With the boy’s therapy completed for now, their doctor-patient relationship will end, and Crowe is dead and about to depart for the great beyond. Nevertheless, Crowe’s spirit will remain as a guiding father-figure to the boy and a loving husband to his wife. Having made its accommodation with harsh truth (the dead are, in a very real sense, gone), the film allows us to believe that, in some meaningful and comforting way, we will still be able to see dead people.
Director: James Watkins
Cast: Daniel Radcliffe (Arthur), Sophie Stuckey (Arthur’s Wife), Liz White (Woman in Black)
One of the highest-grossing UK horror films ever made, The Woman in Black is a ‘weird fusion of a classical British ghost movie and J-horror,’ says director James Watkins.41 Arthur is a solicitor in Edwardian-era London. After his wife dies in childbirth, a son is delivered to him, but Arthur, unable to overcome his grief, has difficulty forming an attachment to the boy. To settle the accounts of an estate, Arthur travels to a remote country mansion, accessible only by a narrow causeway through a frequently flooded marsh. According to Daniel Radcliffe (who plays Arthur), ‘It is a film about isolation, about how isolating death can be … The island that the Eel Marsh House is on is metaphorically representing his mental state. He becomes increasingly isolated as the tide comes in and blocks off the island from the land.’42 While occasionally visited by visions of his wife clothed in heavenly white, Arthur is also disturbed by sightings of a Woman in Black, whose mystery he dedicates himself to solving. As Radcliffe explains, ‘Here’s this guy who’s lost his wife, goes to this house, and starts seeing the ghost of a dead woman. The reason he stays there and almost tries to find her is that in there is some hidden desire, or instinct, to get some sort of assurance that his wife is in a better place.’43
Each time the Woman in Black appears, some child in the nearby village is mysteriously compelled to commit suicide and then to linger in this world as a ghost. The deaths of the children seem connected to the four elements – drinking lye (water), setting oneself alight (fire), sinking into mud (earth), and jumping from a window (air) – as if to represent their souls’ entrapment within the material realm. The film’s very atmosphere, thick with fog and soggy marshland, emphasises this materiality. Watkins notes that ‘the way the moisture hangs in the sky gives it a really heavy, foreboding sense’,44 and he says that when the land around the house is flooded, the ‘water comes in’ as ‘a tide, but it comes up through the mud’.45
Arthur finds out that the Woman in Black is the ghost of a mother whose son has been taken from her and later drowned in a marshland accident. Since then, her ghost has been wreaking vengeance by taking away other people’s children so as to inflict the same grief on them. Given that Eel Marsh House, with its flooded causeway, is a symbol of Arthur’s grieving mind, increasingly cut off from the living, and given that his investigation of the ghost woman is driven by concerns about his deceased wife, it could be that the Woman in Black and the Woman in White (his wife) are psychologically interrelated. Like the ghost woman, Arthur’s wife was a mother who had a son taken from her and given over to another (Arthur himself). Through a combination of widower’s grief and survivor’s guilt, could he not imagine her returning as a vengeful spirit to haunt him? Is not the Woman in Black a figment of that very fear? When Arthur digs the body of the ghost woman’s dead son out of the muddy marshland and gives him back to her, Arthur is trying to make symbolic amends for the tragic fact that he and his son lived, while his wife did not. It is a metaphorical way of reuniting the son with the mother so that Arthur can mourn his wife’s passing and continue living. But, unfortunately, Arthur’s attempt at mourning gives way to terminal melancholy. In his mind, his wife will not be satisfied with a symbolic expression of sympathy, no matter how heartfelt. And so, in the end, his wife appears as the Woman in Black and causes their son to stand on some railroad tracks, and when Arthur goes to save him, both are killed by an oncoming train. Arthur ends his survivor’s guilt and his sadness over having separated mother and son by bringing all three of them together again in death.
Directors: Chris Blaine and Ben Blaine
Cast: Cian Barry (Rob), Abigail Hardingham (Holly), Fiona O’Shaughnessy (Nina), Sean Verey (Josh)
Among the unusual aspects of Rob, Holly and Nina’s love triangle is the fact that Nina is dead. Having perished in a car crash, Nina nevertheless returns every time Rob and Holly try to make love, crawling out from under the covers or emerging from the mattress to join them in bed. Although she may seem like a jealous and possessive ex-girlfriend, the clingy Nina with her sticky blood is a manifestation of Rob’s continuing attachment to his former lover due to his unresolved grief over her loss. As Nina states, ‘This has nothing to do with me [as a malign spirit]. It’s him.’ Rob may want to love Holly, but as Nina says, ‘It’s me he can’t forget.’ When Holly kisses Nina and reaches out to pleasure her with a hand, welcoming her to their bed in an attempt to help Rob transition from his past partner to herself as the new one, this only makes things worse because it encourages his morbid obsession with his deceased ex. For Rob, who has already tried to kill himself so that he can join the dead Nina, sex has been contaminated by death. He can’t think of making love to Holly without imagining Nina’s bloody yet still alluring body drawing him in as it materialises from the mattress under Holly. Unable to stop seeing Nina’s broken body in the bed where Holly is lying, Rob now connects intercourse with bleeding and bodily damage, and orgasm with dying, which is why Holly seems to break apart under his thrusting and why his climax seems to be shared by the expiring Nina.
If Nina is a sign of Rob’s inability to detach from death and complete the mourning process, she is also evidence of a disturbance in Holly’s own psyche. In training to be a paramedic, Holly is attracted to a man like Rob whose near-suicidal grief means that he is in desperate need of saving. Thus, while wanting to help Rob resolve his grief over Nina, Holly also wants Nina to continue to haunt Rob so that Holly’s help will be required. In this sense, Holly is invested in Nina’s continued presence, being as haunted by her as Rob is, paradoxically desiring Nina’s ghost to keep on ruining Holly’s relationship with Rob so that he will still need her to heal him. ‘You’ve let me under your skin,’ Nina says to Holly, and when Holly breaks up with Rob because he is getting better, Nina tells her, ‘You’re not ready for someone who doesn’t need fixing.’
Working with her team as a paramedic, Holly goes to an accident scene where she succeeds in rescuing a car-crash victim who looks like Nina, holding the woman’s hand until she can be transported to a hospital. Feeling exultant that they have saved someone’s life, Holly has sex with a co-worker named Josh, but as he climaxes while glorying in his God-like omnipotence, Holly feels Nina’s bleeding hands reaching for hers. It turns out that Holly does not have a saviour complex after all. Unlike Josh, she refuses to delude herself into thinking that her hands have some amazing power to heal. If she continues to see Nina’s bloody and broken body, it is because Holly never loses touch with the reality of suffering. She wants to maintain the presence of death in her life in order to keep her compassionate connection with others through a shared sense of the body’s fragility. In the end, when Rob asks her if she is going to be all right, Holly shakes her head ‘no’ while saying ‘yeah’. Nina will haunt her for ever, but that’s okay. Whereas death threatened to make Rob’s life meaningless, it gives meaning to Holly’s life.
Director: George Ratliff
As one commentator put it, ‘Where haunted houses promise to scare the bejeezus out of you, Hell Houses aim to scare you to Jesus.’46 Hell House is a documentary about haunted houses designed by church groups to frighten visitors into having faith in God. Teens are led through a dark house where they can view tableaux of sinners suffering in this life and then being dragged to hell by demons. Unlike Disney’s The Haunted Mansion with its innocuous and child-oriented chills, and unlike such immersive events as Underground Cinema’s ‘28 Days Later’ where the scares serve no clear purpose and where young adults end up drinking and partying among the zombie actors, Hell House instils fear with only one meaning in mind and it is deadly serious: to bring sinners to Christ, lest they lose their immortal souls and be damned for eternity.
The single-minded intent of the experience, its fundamentalist Christian message, makes Hell House the perfect exemplar of conservative horror, fear designed to ward off threats to a traditional way of life – drug-free, monogamous and heterosexual. It is fear aimed at enforcing a dichotomous view of the world, a separation between us (as saved) and them (lost souls). Thus, a man is shown dying of AIDS due to his ‘homosexual lifestyle’; a woman bleeds out from a self-induced abortion following premarital sex; and another woman commits suicide after taking Rohypnol at a rave and being date-raped. All three are hauled off to hell to serve as a warning to watching visitors that a similar fate could befall them if they sin. Instead of inducing compassion for the suffering of these three unfortunates, the spectacle of their misery is meant to instil horror and aversion, to distance us from them and even to make us feel a certain sadistic glee at their supposedly just demise. Interestingly, one member of the church is able to show great sympathy for his son when the boy is afflicted with a seizure due to cerebral palsy. If only he could feel a similar empathy for the three victims in his haunted-house tableaux. In times past, his son’s shaking body might have been feared as a sign of demonic possession, and there are people today who may be alarmed by the sight of this man and his congregation when their bodies convulse and they speak in tongues – people who might see them as possessed by something other than the Holy Spirit. Yet they do not judge him. Would that this man were able to extend a similar compassion to those he condemns out of fear. ‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.’
Director: Alejandro Amenábar
Cast: Nicole Kidman (Grace), Alakina Mann (Anne), James Bentley (Nicholas)
It is 1945 on the island of Jersey, where Grace, her eight-year-old daughter, Anne, and her younger son, Nicholas, live in an isolated mansion. Because the children have a rare skin disorder that would cause them to suffocate if they were exposed to daylight, Grace insists on keeping the windows shrouded and the doors locked to preserve the darkness. Disturbing sounds and displaced objects begin to make the family fear that the house is haunted by ghosts of its former inhabitants. However, it is eventually revealed that Grace and her children are the ghosts haunting a new family trying to make the house their home.
Some viewers may think that, for much of the movie, Grace and her kids are unaware of being dead, but this is incorrect. They do know, but are in denial. Feeling deserted by her husband when he went off to war and in despair at the thought that he would almost certainly never return, Grace felt that she and her family had nothing left to live for, so she smothered her children with a pillow and then shot herself. But the realisation of what she has done is too painful, so instead of acknowledging their deaths and her own, she imagines that God has given her a second chance to be a good mother and not to give up. Now she protects her children with a fanatical devotion to their safety, but what Grace is really doing is shielding herself from the terrible truth of her misdeed. She keeps everyone in darkness so that this truth will not come to light. When Anne tells her that she senses mysterious intruders (the new family) in the house, Grace warns her that children who lie will be condemned to a limbo of eternal pain. Yet it is Grace herself who is lying, and by refusing to recognise their own deaths, she has sentenced her family to endless suffering in a limbo between life and death. Insisting that ‘there are no intruders here’, Grace enforces silence on the subject by ordering Anne to ‘stop breathing!’. Thus, Grace’s overprotectiveness smothers Anne again, repeating what she did with the pillow. Perhaps Grace suffocated her children before killing herself so that they would not have to go on living with the feeling of having been abandoned by their mother, as Grace felt she was by her husband. But in fact, by drawing her children so smotheringly close to her for their ‘protection’, she really ended up enforcing her own despair on them, making them give up on life.
Slowly, Grace begins to acknowledge that there are others present in the house, but she wilfully mistakes them for enemy entities appearing to attack her family. When Anne puts on a white dress and moans like a ghost, Grace ‘sees’ the spectre of an old woman trying to possess her daughter. Grace rushes to protect Anne by strangling the old woman, but in the process she chokes her own daughter. Grace herself is the ghostly woman possessing Anne, grabbing hold of her so that she will not speak the truth about how her own mother smothered her. In another scene, Grace enters a room with furniture and unidentified objects covered in white sheets. When she lifts off one of these sheets, afraid of the ghost that might lie beneath, Grace is spooked by the sight of her own face in a mirror.
Ultimately, Grace admits that she committed infanticide and suicide, and she begs her children for forgiveness. The fact that Anne and Nicholas can now stand, alongside Grace, in the sunlight without being harmed suggests that they can accept the truth and still forgive their mother. But as a mother who killed her own children, even if it was out of a loving desire to protect them, Grace cannot be sure of a place in heaven, yet neither does she feel that she deserves to be damned to hell. And so, rather than finding a new home above or below, the spirits of Grace and her children continue to haunt this house – at least until such time as a higher grace might be granted to them.
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Cast: Mia Wasikowska (Edith), Tom Hiddleston (Thomas), Jessica Chastain (Lucille)
In the early 1900s, a sheltered American named Edith falls for Thomas, a dashing aristocrat, who takes her away to England to live in his grand but decaying family mansion. As in many gothic romances, the film centres on a young bride’s anxieties regarding her new husband. The ghost of Edith’s mother warns her, ‘Beware of Crimson Peak,’ which turns out to be ‘the top of a mountain, a peak that, when it snows, turns blood red’ because of the crimson clay seeping up into the white snow from the ground below, as writer-director Guillermo del Toro explains.47 Thomas has developed a steam-powered drill by which to bore into the red clay and mine it for ore, and the crimson flowing from this rift not only stains the snow, it also bleeds up from below the house to darken Edith’s white dress. Representing both the husband’s phallus and the bride’s sex, Crimson Peak is a figure for Edith’s fear of intercourse and defloration, of what will happen to the virgin on her wedding night. Another concern common to brides is the thought of other women her husband might have bedded and who might have a prior claim on him. Is he still tied to someone from his past, or even worse, will Edith become just another in a long line of foolish females he has seduced and abandoned? Thomas, she discovers to her horror, has been marrying women for their money and then having them murdered – slain by his sister, Lucille, with whom he is in an ongoing incestuous relationship. The bodies of Thomas’s past wives are hidden in a room beneath the house, sunk in cauldrons of clay from which they rise as blood-red ghosts to scare Edith with the sight of the fate that might befall her.
But Crimson Peak is a twenty first century gothic, and so the film allows Edith to conquer her fears of men and sex. As del Toro says, ‘Rarely do gothic romances function without the heroine needing to be kept away from sexuality in order to remain pure for the tale, and to survive. That’s one of the things I wanted to break on Crimson. The main character can have sex and still be strong, and still be able to survive and triumph.’48 On the night their marriage is consummated, Edith makes passionate love with Thomas and – nothing horrible happens. She is neither injured nor abandoned. The film rewards her physical courage and psychological strength by granting her a reformed Thomas, who now appears as a faithful and protective husband who tries to defend her against his murderously jealous sister. In a sense, the Thomas of her nightmares is replaced by the husband of her dreams because the former was a mere fiction of her anxieties, which have finally been overcome.
Director: Michael Dougherty
Cast: Brett Kelly (Charlie), Dylan Baker (Steven), Connor Levins (Billy), Quinn Lord (Sam), Anna Paquin (Laurie), Lauren Lee Smith (Laurie’s Sister), Samm Todd (Rhonda), Britt McKillip (Macy), Jean-Luc Bilodeau (Schrader)
On Halloween night, red-headed Charlie, an overweight boy in an orange T-shirt, knocks over pumpkins and steals extra candy. As punishment, he is fed a poisoned candy bar by school principal Steven, who has had enough of misbehaving kids. Then, just as we think that Steven is about to bring a knife down upon his own rebellious, red-headed son, Billy, it turns out that the boy is actually helping his father with some ritual carving, but what they are cutting up is not a pumpkin, but Charlie’s severed head. The film suggests that, in order to avoid becoming a victim like Charlie, Billy attempts to join his father and become the aggressor. According to writer-director Michael Dougherty, ‘Halloween was about appeasing the dead. It was believed to be the one night when the barrier between the living and the dead was thinnest, allowing … supernatural beings to walk amongst us’; ‘costumes were worn as a way of disguising yourself as one of them.’49 In order to save himself from his monstrous father, Billy ‘disguises’ himself as a monster, but the risk of such a disguise is that it may stick, becoming his permanent self. ‘Don’t forget to help me with the eyes,’ Billy tells Steven. If Billy joins his father in cutting out the eyes – the most human part – of Charlie, who is Billy’s red-headed double, then the son will truly have been shaped into a soulless monster. ‘Let’s carve a scary face this time,’ Billy says, but the face he carves won’t ward off evil; it will become his own evil face.
Billy will become like Sam, a ghost child wearing orange pyjamas and a round burlap mask like a pumpkin head. When the mask is taken off, Sam’s deformed face is revealed to resemble that of a demonic jack-o’-lantern, the facial flesh itself having permanently taken on that shape. Dougherty notes that jack-’o-lanterns have their origin in bonfires that the ancient Celts would set ‘to protect themselves from evil spirits let loose on All Hallows’ Eve’. The power of these pumpkin heads is ‘rooted in the desire to harness a little bit of evil’50 as a defence against the greater evil of the threatening ghouls, but what if the evil that is harnessed ends up harnessing the self?
In another scene, virginal Laurie, costumed as Little Red Riding Hood, is accosted by a masked man in the woods who threatens her with rapacious bites, but she turns the tables on this wolfish predator. Trapping him in her little-girl’s red cloak, she has his fake fangs pulled out, thus making him the vulnerable ‘female’. She then performs a striptease, removing her costume and womanly skin to reveal a she-wolf underneath that tears off his clothes and bites his neck. Laurie’s female empowerment is impressive, but hasn’t she herself become an animalistic rapist? In order to avoid being prey, does she have to become a predator? ‘Just be yourself,’ Laurie’s she-wolf sister advises, encouraging her to attack, but we must wonder if this is the self that Laurie really wants to be.
Meanwhile, an autistic girl named Rhonda goes with Macy, Schrader and some other kids to an abandoned rock quarry where, years before, some special-needs children were killed in a school-bus crash partially engineered by parents who no longer wanted them. As the present-day kids stumble around in the dark, Schrader says, ‘I think I found a dead retard,’ and Macy replies, ‘That’s me, asshole.’ Perhaps defending against their own fear of being unwanted and abandoned, the kids pretend to be child zombies come back from the grave to scare ‘Rhonda the retard’, who ends up frightened and alone at the bottom of the quarry. Thus, these kids, instead of empathising with the dead, end up repeating their victimisation on Rhonda. When the real child zombies come to attack the kids, Rhonda refuses to save them, even turning her back on Schrader, the only one who had earlier shown any potentially loving interest in her or concern about how she was being treated. In leaving him to die with the others, Rhonda removes any last chance he had to change for the better, while possibly losing her own last chance as well, for she then turns to put on her witch’s hat, having become as evil as the costume she wears.
Director: Michael Dougherty
Cast: Emjay Anthony (Max), Luke Hawker (Krampus), Conchata Ferrell (Dorothy)
‘I love horror films,’ says director Michael Dougherty, who insists that Krampus is ‘definitely part of that genre, but I really think we’re genre-defying in that we’re mixing heavy elements of horror and humour and Christmas’.51 Arguing that Christmas has become ‘too commercial and saccharine and kid-oriented’, Dougherty is ‘adding a dash of [a] mischievous dark side’ by bringing in Krampus,52 an ‘actual ancient legend about a horned and cloven-hooved pagan demon who steals naughty children’.53 All kids know that there is a dark side to Santa, the letters of whose name, rearranged, spell Satan. Santa’s arrival down the chimney is, minus the benevolence, a home-invasion scenario. Any child rewarded for niceness could just as plausibly be punished for having been naughty. Santa’s diabolical double, Krampus, visits 12-year-old Max because the boy, as he grows older, is losing his belief in Santa Claus and his faith in the stability of his family, which once seemed to embody the Christmas-card ideal. Now his father overworks; his parents fight; and his sister is off with her boyfriend (what if she never came back?). Christmas is darkened by Krampus in much the way that Max’s formerly close-knit suburban family is haunted by the possibility of becoming like their dysfunctional, lower-class relatives who, when they come to visit, bicker, spout bigotries, and leave their own baby outside in the car. Krampus is like Santa’s white-trash cousin. But Max’s crass relatives, as a result of their hard-knock existence, are also better at facing the fact that the world isn’t always a holiday idyll. ‘We’re fucked,’ Aunt Dorothy says when Krampus attacks. ‘I’m old enough to know when life is coming at you with his pants down.’
Krampus, with his devilish horns, serpent’s tongue, and taloned hands, is the Santa Claws who grabs hold of a boy who no longer believes in a benign Saint Nick, and Krampus’s evil minions provide equal evidence of a faith that has turned: snowmen who were left out in the cold mount a sneak attack; gingerbread-man cookies bite back; a discarded toy jack-in-the box swallows children between its razor-sharp teeth. ‘All this might be my fault,’ Max thinks, considering that his lack of the Christmas spirit may have led these traditionally happy signs of the holiday to go bad. In a last-ditch leap of faith, Max pleads with Krampus to take his life and spare that of the others – an act of Christ-like self-sacrifice which, rather than bringing about salvation, merely prompts Krampus to throw the boy down into a fiery pit to join all the others! But a subsequent shot of Max waking up on Christmas morning to find his entire family safe and sound would seem to indicate that it has all been a bad dream – until the camera pulls back to reveal everyone encased in a snow globe within the grip of Krampus’s claw. This ending suggests that, at least in this world, faith may not always be enough to defeat evil.
Director: Bryan Bertino
Cast: Scott Speedman (James), Liv Tyler (Kristen), Gemma Ward (Dollface), Laura Margolis (Pin-Up Girl), Kip Weeks (Masked Man)
It has been said that the strangers’ attack on the young couple in this film is random and motiveless. It is scary to think that we could be besieged from anywhere at any time without any apparent reason, but so what? We all already know this to be true. A motiveless crime is not very interesting, and watching a helpless couple being tortured for 90 minutes is an exercise in masochism (or sadism). Fortunately, this film appears to have been crafted in a way that makes it more intellectually intriguing and humanly involving, for the attackers seem to be external manifestations of the couple’s own increasing distance from each other. In other words, ‘the strangers’ are really the couple themselves.
At a friend’s wedding party where James is a groomsman and Kristen a bridesmaid, he proposes marriage, but she turns him down, saying that she is ‘just not ready yet’. When the couple then go to spend the night at an isolated vacation house, they grow more and more estranged, unable to celebrate their engagement as he had planned. At one point, just as they are about to make love and possibly reunite (‘You are my girl,’ James says), a doll-masked woman interrupts them by knocking at the door and asking, ‘Is Tamara here?’ When told no, Dollface presses the question: ‘Are you sure?’ If Tamara is James’s former girlfriend (later manifested in the film as a woman in a pin-up girl mask), then Dollface’s question could represent Kristen’s doubts about whether he really does love her and her alone. Kristen sees a man in a burlap-sack mask staring at her from outside and then cowers at the sound of footsteps approaching her inside the house, but they turn out to belong to James. She spies the Masked Man sitting at a table with candles and champagne glasses – the same table James sat at earlier when he was depressed (and angry?) about her rejection of his proposal. Late in the film, James himself will emerge from a burlap bag, as if he were the Masked Man.
At one point, James feels a woman’s hand on his shoulder and turns to find that it’s Kristen’s. Later, he senses a similar hand, but this one belongs to a threatening masked woman. As he is backing into the house and away from a shadowy female figure, he is startled by what he fears is an attack from behind, but it’s Kristen. In this confusion between outside and inside, strange and homey, masked marauder and familiar face, the film suggests that James and Kristen are spooking themselves, each afraid of how different the other might turn out to be from who they originally thought. When James searches the house for a masked woman who may have got inside, he looks in the same rose-petal-scattered bed and bathtub where Kristen had lain earlier – the bride who is now not to be. Kristen sees Dollface standing at a table and touching the engagement-ring box, just as she herself did earlier. After she turned down his proposal, James had asked her what they should do, and Kristen answered, ‘I don’t know.’ James asks the same question about the strangers’ attack, and she repeats that reply. The attack is their fear of a ruined relationship and their attempt to face it and figure out what to do. ‘It’s just us and them,’ James says, but it’s really just he and she.
In the end, the couple are tied to chairs with her in her bridesmaid’s gown and him in his groomsman’s tuxedo. Kristen, wearing the engagement ring, turns to James and says, ‘I love you.’ As if cued by this declaration, Dollface drops her knife, and the strangers take off their masks (though we don’t see their faces). Could it be that the couple’s love for each other is strong enough to save them? However, the male stranger proceeds to plunge a knife into James. ‘Look at my face,’ Kristen begs James and he does, but a female stranger then stabs her. It would appear that, despite their new-found trust, they still do not recognise their loving selves. They do not have sufficient faith in each other or themselves for their relationship to survive. According to some of the song lyrics heard in the film, ‘When we’re all through … we’re [either] killed or cured.’ Unfortunately, it is not the latter.
Director: James DeMonaco
Cast: Ethan Hawke (James), Edwin Hodge (Injured Man), Rhys Wakefield (Mob Leader), Adelaide Kane (Zoey), Tony Oller (Henry)
In a near-future America, on one night of every year, people are permitted to commit all kinds of violence, even murder, with impunity. Allowing citizens to ‘release the beast’ – all their pent-up hatred and aggression – in this way makes them better able to remain peaceful throughout the rest of the year. Moreover, on ‘purge night’, the affluent remain safe within their gated communities. As suburban homeowner James reassures his family, ‘I know bad things do happen tonight, but we can afford protection, so we’ll be fine, just like always.’ It is only the poor and needy who are open to attack, and the eradication of these ‘non-contributing’ members of society helps to ‘unburden’ the economy. Sound like the perfect plan for a utopia? Here are three reasons why it’s not:
1. You can’t just behave like a beast one night and then go back to being a civilised human. When an injured man takes refuge in James’s house, the leader of the rampaging mob outside demands that James hand over the ‘dirty, homeless pig’ to be slaughtered. The leader describes his gang as ‘ready to violate, annihilate, and cleanse our souls’. He means that they will be purer if they get rid of that ‘dirty’ man, but what the leader’s words unwittingly reveal is that, if they murder this man, they will ‘violate’ and ‘annihilate’ their own ‘souls’, destroying their humanity. One female gang member strokes a machete. In love with violence, she is in danger of cutting herself. Another thug mimes shooting himself in the head with the gun he is holding, which is what he will metaphorically be doing if he guns down the injured man. The mob’s leader brags about the murders they are committing, but if they are so proud of their violence, why do they all wear masks? After all, on this night they have immunity from prosecution for their killings. Could it be that they don’t really want to be seen behaving like vicious beasts, that they have some residual conscience regarding their crimes?
2. Possessive materialism and competitive capitalism will rebound on the rich. James loves his daughter, Zoey, in the way he loves his luxurious house – as signs of his wealth and accomplishment. Mirroring James, Zoey’s boyfriend, Henry, also desires to possess her. A hungry growling is his way of saying ‘I love you’. When Zoey hears the story of a man whose love was so powerful it could kill people, she comments that the man should cut off his own penis. It is clear that she feels threatened by the grasping ‘love’ of the males around her. James’s possessiveness, which results in his disapproval of Zoey’s boyfriend, backfires when Henry fires a gun at him on purge night. James’s ‘hoarding’ of his daughter brings on Henry’s envy and violence. James’s desirable house was paid for by his earnings as a top salesman of home security systems, many of which he sold to people in his surrounding community. But, in a telling irony, his own security system isn’t enough to protect him against the wrath of his envious neighbours, who come to kill James and his family and to take away his grand possessions in a literal example of cutthroat competition. ‘You made so much money off of us and then you stuck it in our faces,’ one of them accuses, and now James must reap what he has sown.
3. James thinks of himself as separate from the predatory violence that occurs on purge night, as he and his family sit safely within their well-secured home while more impoverished people are hunted down outside. But in the competitive capitalist system of which James is a part, poorer persons are killed off every day, only this occurs more slowly and less directly than on purge night, as resources are gradually removed from less fortunate citizens in order to benefit the wealthy like himself. The systemic violence of a rapacious economy is still a form of violence, even if it succeeds in distancing its perpetrators, like James, from their victims. In addition, by profiting from the home security systems that make purge night possible (the rich would never allow such rampages if they themselves went unprotected), James is most definitely a part of the predation that is happening to others outside. He, too, is ‘making a killing’ off them. When the injured homeless man seeks a safe haven in James’s home and he has to decide whether to personally hand this man over to the mob that wants to kill him, James can no longer deny his own responsibility for the lives of the less fortunate. Finally forced to face the systemic violence that he and his family have been participating in and benefiting from, James decides that, morally, he can no longer afford to be part of it. James would rather give up his life in defence of this man than risk losing his own soul.
Director: Victor Salva
Cast: Justin Long (Darry), Gina Philips (Trish), Jonathan Breck (The Creeper), Patricia Belcher (Jezelle)
While on a car trip home from college for spring break, Darry and his sister, Trish, play a road game. Spotting a vanity licence plate (6A 4EVR), he reads it as ‘Gay Fever’ or ‘Gay Forever’, whereas she offers the more likely ‘Sexy Forever’. In conversation with his sister, Darry shows particular interest in her former boyfriend (‘Mister Poli-Sci Track-Team Guy’) and later in a ‘strip-o-gram’ hunky cop who catches her eye, while nothing is said about Darry himself having a girlfriend. When Trish notices the ‘rosy pink jockey shorts’ in Darry’s gym bag, he explains that some of his friends dyed them as a prank, and she jokes that ‘maybe they know something about you that you don’t’. Indeed, the evidence for Darry’s hidden homosexuality is mounting. When a truck begins to tailgate them, Darry comments, ‘He’s coming up right on our ass,’ adding ‘Fuck me – go!’ when they are rear-ended. Later, Darry uses a pair of his pink jockey shorts to tie down the broken trunk of their car.
In these ways, the film begins to suggest that what stalks Darry is the fear that he might be gay. Darry’s homophobia is then projected outwards as he imagines a queer monster lusting after him. Thus, while the brother and sister are seeking help inside a diner, the driver of the truck that rear-ended them breaks into their parked car and starts sniffing Darry’s dirty laundry. ‘And now he even knows my name,’ Darry says when he recovers his labelled underwear. Significantly, the Creeper (as the monstrous driver comes to be called) has singled out Darry for attention rather than the female Trish. As gay writer-director Victor Salva has said, ‘Let the guys be the object of desire for a while. It fits my sensibilities better.’54 Speaking to a psychic named Jezelle Gay(!) Hartman, Darry says, ‘You know, don’t you? … You know who it wants.’ Jezelle tells him, ‘There’s something in fear, something it can smell, something that tells it if there’s anything inside someone that it might like.’ It is Darry’s homophobia that attracts the Creeper to him, because that fear is a sign of repressed desire as well as dread. ‘I’ve dreamed this,’ Jezelle says, and the Creeper is both Darry’s worst nightmare and his most hidden wish.
After Darry spies the Creeper stuffing a sheet-wrapped figure down a sewer pipe, he insists on returning to the scene. This is ostensibly to check if someone needs help, but Trish questions why Darry is drawn back, suggesting that he ‘wants a little adventure’ and desires to ‘see if there’s something nasty at the end of that pipe’. Darry peers inside and ends up falling down the pipe, as if through an anal passageway. At the bottom, Darry finds a dying boy inside the sheet with a wound cut into his stomach. The boy prefigures Darry’s own future, as Jezelle has foreseen him with his shirt having been ‘torn just above a small rose tattoo on [his] stomach’, and in Jeepers Creepers 2 we find out that the Creeper does extract the skin containing the rose tattoo around Darry’s navel. Here the various images – the rear-ended car, the pink jockey shorts, the rose-tattooed navel, the torn shirt – all combine to represent Darry’s fear of anal intercourse as a deadly rape.
And yet the ending of Jeepers Creepers is intriguingly equivocal. When the Creeper puts his mouth near Darry’s and sniffs the boy’s sweaty face, Darry has reason to fear, for earlier he had watched while the Creeper cut off a male cop’s head and then French-kissed the tongue out of it. Now, the Creeper grabs Darry from behind and, pressed up against him, smells the boy’s neck, as the tendrils on the monster’s lizard-like head grow erect. It is the moment of maximum fright because the very thing that Darry has most dreaded is now, metaphorically, being done to him. ‘I don’t know if it’s a demon or a devil or just some hungry thing from some dark place,’ the psychic had said, but it could be that the Creeper only looks satanic because Darry is afraid of the hunger inside himself. As the Creeper flies away with the boy in his grasp, they are backgrounded by the moon, as if this terrible embrace were also a romantic clinch. And, in the film’s final shot, we see that the Creeper has removed the skin of Darry’s face and placed it over his own so that his eyes peer out. Or whose eyes are they? The end reveals that, behind the mask of Darry’s fear, there was his desire for the Creeper. The gay Creeper was Darry all along, his homosexuality hiding behind his homophobia. Referring to Justin Long, who plays Darry, Salva has said, ‘That is Justin [whose eyes we see] as the Creeper looking out at us through Justin as Darry [in the end]’.
Director: Alejandro Brugués
Cast: Alexis Díaz de Villegas (Juan), Jorge Molina (Lazaro), Jazz Vilá (China), Eliecer Ramírez (Primo)
In Juan of the Dead, the fear of a zombie attack serves as a metaphor for homophobia. Juan and his friends Lazaro, China and Primo are ostensibly united against the predatory ghouls, but in fact gay panic about his buddies afflicts Juan as much as the zombies do. In one scene where the men are assailed by the monsters, the lights go out and a cry is heard – ‘Don’t touch my ass!’ – as if friend and foe had become indistinguishable in the dark. During a search-and-destroy mission, Primo, a hulking gay bodybuilder, tells Juan to ‘step aside’ because ‘this is a man’s job’. Yet, at this very moment, Primo, who wears a blindfold because he faints at the sight of blood, is grabbed by a ghoul. Primo’s gayness is thus associated with effeminate fear and mere posing as a strong man. When Primo’s lover, the male-to-female transgendered China, makes a disparaging remark about the size of Lazaro’s male member, the insulted man cringes in embarrassment that his virility might be inferior to that of a campy queen – one who shrieked in fright at the sight of a cockroach. It is as though, by associating with gays, straight men dread being rendered soft and vulnerable, infected by a contagious weakness. In a scene where the friends run afoul of the military and are handcuffed naked together in the back of a troop truck, China flirts with a soldier, who grows increasingly more macho in ‘self-defence’. The men’s fear of being in such close physical proximity to each other eventually erupts when – a nightmare come true – one of the naked passengers turns predatory and lunges open-mouthed at the others. After escaping, Juan gazes in horror at the bite on China’s inner thigh, terrified that he himself will be ‘unmanned’ when this effeminate gay attacks him. Juan’s fight to free himself from being handcuffed to China is filmed as an ironic dance, deadly rather than romantic. Dismissing his friend as ‘a fucking pain in the ass’, Juan finally asserts his masculine dominance by beating China to a pulp with a paddle, much as he later uses a paddle to pound another zombie down onto a pipe the man has sat on, calling him a ‘sodomite!’ Although Juan had earlier told his friends that they weren’t there ‘to see who’s got a bigger one’, by the end of the film he is standing with his paddle upraised and grabbing his crotch, a triumphantly hetero hero.
The film is clearly as anti-gay as it is anti-ghoul, but it may also be open to alternative readings. This horror-movie spoof tends to mock Juan’s machismo, representing it as a desperate exaggeration while exposing his homosexual panic as ludicrously overblown. Furthermore, the gay China and Primo are shown to be effective zombie-fighters, the former deftly wielding a slingshot and the latter using his bare hands to break necks in scenes where we are expected to admire their ‘manly’ capabilities. Perhaps most interestingly, the film has Lazaro, when he thinks he has been bitten and is about to turn into a zombie, declare his heretofore hidden love for Juan and ask to fellate him – a request that Juan overcomes his homophobia to grant, unzipping his fly. While it is true that Lazaro goes on to say that the request was a joke and to laughingly call Juan a ‘faggot’, this potentially homoerotic moment between two best friends suggests that, at some level, one male coming at another with an open mouth may be as much desired as it is feared. Lazaro may be a homo-zombie, but Juan, for love of his friend, is okay with being ‘turned’.
Directors: Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury
Cast: Alysson Paradis (Sarah), Béatrice Dalle (The Woman), François-Régis Marchasson (Jean-Pierre)
Pregnant Sarah is in a car crash in which her husband, seated beside her, is killed. Afterwards, she sinks into a suicidal depression, losing all interest in her own life and that of her soon-to-be-born baby. On the night before she is to go to the hospital for the delivery, she is stalked and then attacked by a mysterious woman who seems to want to stab her in the womb with scissors. This stranger – known only as ‘The Woman’ in the credits – first appears right after Sarah wakes up from a nightmare, but in reality Sarah is still dreaming. The Woman is a fantasy projection of Sarah herself, a kind of dark double. This is how the Woman can be outside the house and then suddenly, inexplicably, inside: she is within Sarah’s own mind. This is why the Woman and Sarah look so much alike: they both have long, dark hair and round faces; they both end up covered in blood, with similarly placed wounds; and they are both filmed as window or mirror reflections of one another – that is, when they are not indistinguishable shadowy figures. The Woman claims to have been a pregnant passenger in the car that Sarah crashed into. Really? Is it not more likely that she is Sarah’s imaginary double?
As a grief-stricken widow unable to bear the thought that she would rather die than go on living, even if that means taking her baby with her, Sarah splits off that deadly portion of her psyche, creating a murderous doppelganger who appears to come from outside to threaten her and her child. Yet deep down, by providing herself with such an antagonist, Sarah is trying to reawaken her own will to survive and reconnect with the people around her, most importantly by saving the life of her baby. Thus, the Woman’s first appearance is as a person who rings Sarah’s doorbell, asking for help – the same request of others that Sarah unconsciously senses she must make. Earlier, Sarah’s boss, Jean-Pierre, a potential love interest following the death of her husband, is brushed off by her, and when he comes to her house that night, the Woman stabs him in the groin and face until he is dead. By permanently removing this man from her life, the Woman shows Sarah how much she really did want a relationship. Similarly, Sarah has been dismissive of her own mother, claiming that she prefers to have dinner alone that night, and when her mother stops by, the Woman contrives to have Sarah kill her ‘by mistake’ with a knitting needle – the same needle Sarah has been using to make clothes for her baby. Once her mother is gone, Sarah misses her terribly, realising how much she did need that maternal connection. While one half of Sarah – the side represented by the Woman – may wish that she had never been born or loved a man if the result was to be that she would end up as a pregnant widow, the murder of her mother and of a future romantic partner shocks her into seeing that death and disconnection are not what she really wants.
Sarah’s nightmarish realisations occur on Christmas Eve. At one point in the fight to protect her unborn baby, Sarah has her hand pinned to a wall by scissors wielded by the Woman, and later Sarah lies bloody and spreadeagled in bed. The references to Christ’s stigmata and his suffering on the cross show how the Woman’s persecution has brought out Sarah’s spirit of self-sacrifice. In the end, the two adversaries become allies – after all, they are actually the same woman – when Sarah, by saying, ‘It’s stuck,’ prompts the Woman to perform a caesarean section and cut the baby out of her, even though Sarah knows full well that this is likely to mean her own death. In the nightmare, Sarah thus demonstrates a willingness to give her own life for her child. In the end, when Sarah is shown eviscerated and dead while the Woman sits cradling the baby, we can see bloody murder and the theft of a child. Or we can consider that Sarah, having imagined making the ultimate sacrifice, has proven herself worthy to be a mother and is now rewarded with a vision of herself – as the Woman – with her baby in her arms.
Director: Jennifer Kent
Cast: Essie Davis (Amelia), Noah Wiseman (Samuel), Tim Purcell (The Babadook), Ben Winspear (Oskar)
‘If it’s in a word or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook.’ When Amelia reads to her son, Samuel, the story of Mister Babadook, the spindly, charcoal-black title character seems to emerge from the pop-up book to terrify the six-year-old boy. Rather than soothing her son to sleep, this bedtime storybook character only increases his fear, making reality into a living nightmare soon shared by his mother, too. ‘Wake up, Mommy,’ he tells her. ‘But you’re the one who’s asleep,’ she tries to convince him and herself. Samuel’s fear of the Babadook results in terrible behavioural problems that turn his frantic, sleep-deprived mother against her own son, whom she verbally abuses. This horror film explores ‘a big taboo subject’ – ‘mothers who can’t love their kids’, according to writer-director Jennifer Kent.55 Unable to cope with her son’s shrieks of terror and defensive-aggressive actions, the mother herself begins to exhibit monstrous behaviour in reaction to her son’s.
So what is the Babadook? In the film’s backstory, Amelia’s husband, Oskar, has been killed in a car accident as he is driving her to the hospital for Samuel to be born. Since the Babadook seems to wear Oskar’s clothes, one meaning of this monster could be that he represents Samuel’s fear that his mother will be taken from him as his father was. ‘I don’t want you to die,’ the boy tells her. The Babadook could also be Amelia’s unresolved grief over her husband, a melancholy that threatens to pull her and her son into death after him. ‘We can be together,’ she imagines Oskar saying; ‘you just need to bring me the boy’. Since Oskar perished on the same day Samuel was born, the Babadook may also embody her terrible tendency to blame her son for her husband’s demise. ‘You don’t know how many times I wished it was you, not him, that died,’ she tells Samuel. And the horrible idea that the husband’s death was somehow triggered by the son’s birth may be an extreme version of a more common fear: that once a child is born, a wife will have to give up all romance with her husband to devote herself entirely to maternal care of her son. In the film, the widowed Amelia’s wistful watching of television romances and her surreptitious self-pleasuring with a vibrator are both interrupted by the need to tend to her terrified son.
While the Babadook book may seem to be an avenue for fear to pop up into the world, the story also serves as ‘a warning of what’s to come if Amelia doesn’t face this thing’56 – her unresolved grief and unreasoning anger at Samuel over her husband’s death. ‘The more you deny, the stronger I get,’ the Babadook says, and Amelia reads in the book about herself as the incarnation of the monster, strangling Samuel and then cutting her own throat. It is only by acknowledging the despairing widow and monstrous mother she has become that Amelia can quell the creature – not by denying its existence within her, but by recognising her own rage and deathward-tending depression and dealing with them. This healing process is figured in a scene of Amelia embracing and protecting her son from the Babadook, while leaving a bowl of worms to lessen the monster’s hunger for fear.
Directors: Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead
Cast: Lou Taylor Pucci (Evan), Nadia Hilker (Louise), Francesco Carnelutti (Angelo)
While travelling in Italy, Evan meets Louise, the woman of his dreams. There is only one problem: she is a 2,000-year-old monster who, every 20 years, finds a man to impregnate her and gives birth to a new version of herself, using his DNA. If he is still with her at the time of her rebirth and transformation, she will kill him with one of her tentacles. Evan must convince her not to transform, but to give up eternity and fall in love so that they can spend one human lifetime together. If he fails in the attempt, he will die.
Before going to Italy, Evan has spent the last several years caring for his mother, who has eventually died of cancer. Evan’s romance with Louise is shadowed by horror because this new relationship is affected by his mother’s dying. While he deeply loved his mother, Evan had to put his own life on hold while tending to her, and now that she has passed, his melancholy over her loss threatens to drag him down to death with her, preventing him from beginning life anew with another woman. This is why Louise’s skin rots like that of his cancer-ridden mother and why he finds himself tending to her sickness (her current body is failing) rather than romancing her. In his own mind, Evan is still at his dying mother’s bedside. Immediately following his mother’s funeral, a friend suggests that Evan use his grief with girls in order to get a ‘sympathy fuck’, but the attempt to reinvigorate himself through sex fails. When Evan asks his friend to stay over, the man replies that he does not want to sleep in the mother’s deathbed – and Evan may feel the same.
Now Evan is in Italy, but when he looks at Louise, he still sees his mother. Louise is a young woman, but she is revealed to be years older than he. Variously equipped with claws, fangs and tentacles, she is a monstrous combination of biological life-forms, an evolutionary soup of all past creatures – an oceanic Mother Nature who gives life but who also takes it back into herself, as Evan fears his mother will do with him, pulling him psychologically back into her body to die with her. Evan begins working for Angelo, a man so attached to his wife that, when she dies, he cannot bring himself to date anyone else but only gazes forlornly out at the ocean. Will Evan’s continued ties to his dead mother similarly prevent him from seeing the young Louise? To be with her, Evan must conquer the association in his own mind between physical closeness to a woman and the threat of bodily decay and destruction. When another guy from the US speaks of females as ‘octopussy’, tries to have sex with Louise, and then is killed by her, Evan seems to see his worst fears confirmed. But Evan is not like that ‘ugly American’ tourist; he is committed to staying with Louise and overcoming his own immaturity. As if expressing Evan’s own terror when he was at his mother’s bedside, Louise says, ‘I don’t want to die and I don’t want to watch anyone die.’ Yet Evan himself is beginning to draw on inner strength. ‘I’ve seen what happens to you,’ he tells Louise (and his mother). ‘I mean, I’ve seen this at its worst, right? And I can deal with that part.’ Finding the courage to face illness, Evan is eventually able to confront death as well, to love his mother and to let her go, to find that closeness matters because it will eventually end. Because life is finite, ‘there’s motivation to make every second count’, he tells Louise. And that is the way every horror romance should end.57
Director: Lucile Hadzihalilovic
Cast: Max Brebant (Nicolas), Julie-Marie Parmentier (Mother), Roxane Duran (Stella)
Nicolas, a prepubescent boy in red swim trunks, dives into the sea and is mesmerised by the waving fronds of multicoloured fauna on the ocean floor – before being startled by the sight below him of a dead boy with a red starfish on his belly. ‘I like to have this ambiguity, this element that it’s both beautiful and repulsive, frightening and attractive,’ says writer-director Lucile Hadzihalilovic,58 who has described Evolution as ‘the nightmare of a ten-year-old child unable to tear himself free of the “maternal waters”’.59 The sea fronds are like the enfolding arms of a mother, wonderfully comforting but also potentially dangerous, for they threaten to drown the boy if he fails to grow up and separate himself from her amniotic embrace. (In French, mer [sea] and mère [mother] are homonyms.) The drowned boy with the red starfish gripping his belly is Nicolas’s own fear that his mother’s womb could become a watery tomb. In his bed at night, Nicolas dreams of a starfish reaching out one of its tentacles to grip his navel, and in another scene, the boy uses a rock to break off one of the creature’s five arms. In this way, Nicolas attempts to cut the umbilical cord tying him to his mother, to differentiate himself as a land-dwelling boy from his marine and maternal origins. A nightmare vision of his mother writhing with other women on the seashore, their bodies joined to form a starfish shape, shows us his fear of female flesh as something from which he must extricate himself in order to evolve. Nicolas imagines caesarean sections which result in stillborn babies – those who were unable to make the transition from amniotic fluid to land. In his feverish mind, a woman sticks his navel with a needle, extracting blood from him, as if she were a mother feeding off her own son rather than nurturing him to become independent. The navel penetration could also be a child’s way of imagining how babies are made, for after his belly button is fertilised, Nicolas is given an ultrasound and eventually gives birth in what is perhaps an attempt to deliver himself into the world.
As part of his growth into manhood, Nicolas begins to sketch drawings of a nurse, Stella, whose curls of red hair around her head he depicts as being like the wavy arms surrounding the centre of a starfish. The drawing, which the boy hides in his bed for his own viewing pleasure, shows Nicolas evolving from nature to culture even as he also transitions from his mother to a potential lover. In the film’s final scene, Stella wraps her arms and legs around the boy while putting her mouth to his as the two of them swim underwater, surrounded by the swaying of sea fronds. At once beautiful and frightening, the scene depicts the boy’s fear of drowning in a woman’s watery embrace while simultaneously showing his desire for the kiss of life. In fact, Stella proves to be more mermaid than siren, for by breathing air into Nicolas, she enables him to survive underwater until she can bring him to a boat that is headed towards land and a city inhabited by men. And so Hadzihalilovic concludes her film about ‘relationships to childbirth and the journey through puberty, seen here through the dark lens of a fantastic tale’.60
Director: Ole Bornedal
Cast: Natasha Calis (Em), Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Father), Kyra Sedgwick (Mother), Matisyahu (Exorcist)
‘It’s not my little girl any more ... It’s this thing looking back at me ... Tell me she’s still in there.’ What parents haven’t had these thoughts about their growing daughter, whether or not she’s actually been possessed by a demon? Kids can make life a living hell, particularly ones that are acting out in reaction to their parents splitting up. ‘The supernatural and divorce are intertwined, a metaphor,’ say screenwriters Juliet Snowden and Stiles White, explaining, ‘The daughter was possessed because ultimately the children are the victims of a divorce.’61 Pre-teen daughter Em opens a demon box alone because her neglectful father is too busy on the phone to tend to her. She slips a ring from the box on to her finger, binding her to the malicious spirit, because her parents’ marriage bond is broken. Shuttled between her overprotective mother and her negligent father, Em becomes a demon child with mood swings between the two extremes. While her germaphobic mother insists that shoes be removed so as not to track bacteria into the home, her father buys a house near the woods, resulting in an insect infestation where a swarm of moths flies down into Em’s mouth. Dietary restrictions make Em a vegetarian while at her mother’s house, but she gorges on pizza when staying with her permissive father. Schizophrenically torn between the two, Em stabs her father in the hand with a fork, eats raw meat from the fridge in front of her mother, and sees two fingers inside her throat while looking in the bathroom mirror, as if she were a binge-and-purge bulimic. Em overeats with ravenous hunger at a diner to show her father that she is starving for his affection, and she breaks table glasses and plates for her barefoot mother to step on to show her that rigid etiquette rules and hypervigilance cannot protect one from everything. In the end, Em’s mother learns to take a risk by allowing her daughter to be brought to an exorcist, and Em’s father shows he cares by offering up his body in place of his daughter’s for the demon to possess. The evil spirit departs from this family at the same time that the father and mother are reunited, and Em sits down to eat some pancakes with a healthy – not monstrous – appetite.
Director: James Wan
Cast: Lili Taylor (Carolyn), Joseph Bishara (Bathsheba), Vera Farmiga (Lorraine), Joey King (Christine), Hayley McFarland (Nancy), Shanley Caswell (Andrea), Mackenzie Foy (Cindy), Kyla Deaver (April), Sterling Jerins (Judy)
Carolyn, her husband and their five daughters move to a remote farmhouse in rural Rhode Island. Noting that ‘pretty much all of the family’ is ‘female’, director James Wan has said that this ‘gave the movie a very sort of feminine edge to it, and … a very maternal quality’.62 Indeed, this film is largely about the hidden horror of being a mother – a role that society pressures women to see as a privilege and a pleasure. The farmhouse was once inhabited by a mother named Bathsheba who killed her seven-day-old baby in front of the fireplace and then hanged herself. Any woman who would strike so directly and inexplicably at the sacred ideal of hearth and home must be a witch making a sacrifice to prove her love for Satan, but we might consider whether a constantly crying infant and post-partum depression might have had something to do with it.
‘How could a mother kill her own child?’ Carolyn asks Lorraine, a paranormal investigator who is herself a mother and who is called in to help when Bathsheba’s ghost tries to possess Carolyn and induce her to kill her own daughters. Christine feels someone grab her foot in bed; Nancy is dragged by her hair across the kitchen; Andrea has a demonic woman leap on her from the top of a wardrobe; Cindy hears a spirit voice say that ‘it wants my family dead’; and April sees the ghost of a previously murdered child in a mirror and is herself almost stabbed with scissors by her mother, Carolyn. Why do these safe domestic spaces – the nurturing kitchen, the womb-like bed and wardrobe – threaten to become a tomb? How can items associated with maternal care – scissors for cutting hair, a vanity mirror for putting on make-up – suddenly turn so deadly? The witch is said to target for possession ‘the one who’s the most psychologically vulnerable’, so it seems strange that Carolyn would be chosen, since she appears to be such a blissfully happy and confident mother. However, it could be precisely because she so thoroughly represses all her anxiety and dissatisfaction that these feelings creep up on her and nearly take hold of her entirely. Her husband is an underpaid trucker whose long-hauls leave Carolyn as the sole parent at home with five daughters to shelter and feed with very little money. The icy draughts that blow through the house and the foul odours of rotten meat show her fear of being unable to protect and provide for her family. Her daughters complain about the new house, annoy and worry her with their games of hide and clap, and interrupt what few attempts at love-making she is able to share with her husband. Through it all, Carolyn maintains a smile on her face, but the buried rage and resentment eventually come out and she attacks her family like a woman possessed by an evil spirit.
In one scene, Carolyn seems happy folding laundry for her kids while her husband is away, but the song on the radio – ‘the night fills my lonely place’ – suggests a certain discontent with the domestic life of a mother. Later, the paranormal investigator, Lorraine, is gathering laundry from a clothes line when a ghostly form appears in one of the sheets – a scare that seems to come from within the very doing of a maternal task. A mother herself, Lorraine is also susceptible to psychic invasion by the filicidal Bathsheba, as if Lorraine, too, harbours some unacknowledged ill will towards her own daughter, Judy. It may be that Lorraine resents Judy for making her feel guilty about spending so much time away from home on her investigative work. ‘I miss you,’ Judy tells her mother and has them exchange necklaces (‘This way we’ll always be together’), but instead of serving as a kind of umbilical cord to maintain a positive maternal connection, Lorraine’s necklace is used by the witch as a conduit to harm the daughter through the mother. Thus, Judy is haunted by the sight of malicious Bathsheba brushing a creepy doll’s hair – a demonic repetition of the loving way Lorraine would brush Judy’s hair, suggesting a latent menace within Lorraine towards her daughter. A further explanation for this menace can be found if we look at a prior paranormal investigation involving a farmer who, after being molested as a child by his father, became possessed (‘a dark spirit made its home in this man’) and turned into a killer of his own family. Lorraine has been particularly traumatised by this case, having seen something terrible in the farmer that she won’t talk about. Could it be that his case reminded her of when she, too, was abused as a child, instilling fear in her that she might grow up to become an abuser of her own daughter? Society must allow mothers to recognise that, like everyone else, they have troubled histories and present-day reasons for resentment. Otherwise, they will continue to be haunted and possessed by these dark feelings and visit them upon their own children.
Director: Don Coscarelli
Cast: Bruce Campbell (Sebastian/Elvis), Edith Jefferson (Elderly Woman), Larry Pennell (Kemosabe), Ossie Davis (Jack)
In the town of Mud Creek, Texas, Sebastian is wasting away along with other senior citizens being warehoused in a retirement home before their corpses are carted off to a funeral home. Lacking in élan and vitality, increasingly dispirited by the daily round of eating and excreting, Sebastian has begun to wonder whether there is ‘anything to life other than food [and] shit’. Enter the figure of what Sebastian most fears, the total reduction of self to mere body: an Egyptian mummy that sucks old people’s souls out of their anuses and then expels the residue down the toilet. Sebastian, who spends most of his time lying in bed in a state of torpor, is scared that the mummy will ‘violate’ him while he is asleep. The mummy’s own slumber was disturbed when his tomb was desecrated and his body placed in the back of a vehicle, from which it ended up being dropped into a creek, much as the senior citizens of Mud Creek are driven away and dumped after they die. The mummy’s curse is the curse of being old: entombed in decaying flesh, more and more immobilised, and eventually buried and forgotten.
Rather than wallow in self-pity or fall into apathy, Sebastian has to stand up and fight for life. He begins by doing battle with the mummy’s vanguards, some giant scarab beetles, whose threat he is initially inclined to dismiss: ‘Big damn bugs, all right? ... [But] what do I care? I got a growth on my pecker.’ The fact that, after defeating one of these ugly black cockroaches, Sebastian gets an erection for the first time in years suggests that the fight has enabled him to overcome his fear of impotence and penile cancer. Interestingly, unlike Sebastian, an elderly female resident of the rest home succumbs to a beetle attack. Earlier, we saw her steal some eyeglasses from a helpless fellow resident in an iron lung, and then she is gorging ecstatically on stolen chocolates when a beetle crawls under the bedcovers and up between her legs. Her defeat implies that masturbatory self-indulgence and preying on others weaker than oneself are not effective ways of dealing with old age.
For the right kind of inspiration, Sebastian turns to Kemosabe, a male retiree with the courage to put on a black mask and fire his six-shooters at the soul-sucking Egyptian mummy. And, just as this Tonto masquerades as his friend and hero, the Lone Ranger, so an African-American man named Jack is infused with the spirit of civil rights leader Jack Kennedy when he himself combats the mummy. Seeing his fellow senior citizens put up a fight, Sebastian, an Elvis impersonator, is moved to become the King he has ‘always fantasised being’, that ‘two-fisted Hound Dog’ who could ‘out-strum, outrace, out-fight, and outwit the bad guys’. No longer bedridden, Sebastian/Elvis mobilises with the aid of a walker and a motorised wheelchair. Refusing to be wasted without a fight, he confronts that ‘undead sack of shit’, the mummy. And, if ‘small souls are those that don’t have much fire for life’, he proves he has a big soul by setting fire to the mummy. He reclaims his dignity from the undead.
Director: Sam Raimi
Cast: Lorna Raver (Ganush), Alison Lohman (Christine), David Paymer (Jacks), Justin Long (Fiancé), Reggie Lee (Coworker)
An aged gypsy woman named Ganush applies for a mortgage extension to save her house from being repossessed, but loan officer Christine decides to deny it. Ambitious Christine, in line for a promotion, wants to prove her worth to Jacks, the male bank manager, and so she chooses profit over compassion. In a sense, she sides with ‘father’ Jacks against ‘mother’ Ganush. When the proud gypsy woman falls to her knees and grasps Christine’s hands to beg her for the loan, Christine backs away, horrified, creating a spectacle of misery that is witnessed by everyone in the bank and which Ganush considers to be a public shaming. Though Jacks approves of Christine’s cold-hearted calculation in refusing the loan, Ganush takes revenge by placing a witch’s curse on her and by returning to haunt her throughout the film.
But is Ganush a witch or does a guilty Christine just see her that way? The film explores Christine’s gerontophobia by having this gypsy woman embody a number of anxieties associated with growing old. This poor, foreign, decrepit female is everything that Christine fears to be, and yet the movie keeps reminding her that, as much as she might idealise wealth, whiteness and youthful strength (qualities she finds in male father figures), Christine – like everybody else – has a body subject to impoverishment, embarrassment, decay and death (weaknesses linked to the mother). Ganush has a thick Hungarian accent marking her as foreign, but Christine, who grew up on a Midwest farm, is also marked by her regional speech, even though she practises with language tapes to try to fit in. Ganush cannot help taking out her false teeth so that she can gum some candies at the bank – an appetite Christine views as grotesque because she, who was once ‘pork queen’ at the country fair, fears becoming fat again and no longer slim and successful. Christine’s farm-girl roots show when she brings a harvest cake, which she made with eggs laid by geese, on a visit to meet her fiancé’s patrician parents. Feeling their disdain for her humble background and having just admitted that she has an alcoholic mother, Christine looks down to see Ganush’s glass eye staring up at her from inside the cake. Ganush is the embarrassing mother Christine can’t leave behind, the bodily weakness that she is heir to in the same way that no one can escape being born of mortal flesh. Christine is disgusted when Ganush coughs up phlegm at the bank, yet Christine herself later gets a nosebleed and is publicly shamed when the blood splatters on her boss. Ganush’s yellowed fingernails appear claw-like and her false teeth seem sharp because Christine fears being dragged down into a world of decay and devoured by death. When Ganush’s corpse vomits maggots into Christine’s mouth, and when the old woman’s cadaver rolls over on top of her in a grave, it is the threat of her own decomposition and demise that is really haunting Christine.
And yet acknowledging bodily weakness can enable spiritual strength, for it is our shared sense of vulnerability that leads to compassion. Christine realises this in the end when she extends sympathy to a coworker and refuses to sacrifice him to save herself, thus making up for her shameful scapegoating of Ganush.
Director: M Night Shyamalan
Cast: Olivia DeJonge (Becca), Ed Oxenbould (Tyler), Deanna Dunagan (Nana), Peter McRobbie (Pop Pop)
Teenage Becca and her younger brother, Tyler, journey to a remote Pennsylvania farmhouse to visit their grandparents, Nana and Pop Pop, whom they have never seen before. Although the kids are at first comforted by Nana’s chicken pot pies and fresh-baked cookies, her crawling around at night and her projectile vomiting make them fear she is possessed. Similarly, the calming effect of Pop Pop’s folksy chats and quaint wood-chopping tends to be offset by his Alzheimer’s-fuelled paranoia and his sudden attacks on innocent people. In the opinion of one critic, The Visit is ‘a prime candidate for the most gerontophobic film ever made’: ‘the movie’s fear of the elderly is pathological … It uses dirty adult nappies as a source of hideous threat. Memory loss is presented as freaky, good for a scare … Essentially it presents old people … as if they’re already dead: smelly nightmares looming up at you in their soiled nightclothes.’63 But the fact is that many kids (and adults) are frightened by old people. Perhaps the film could be accused of exacerbating this fear, but it seems intended to have the opposite effect: it is horror cinema as exposure therapy, subjecting audience members to movie doses of terror so that they can face their fears in the theatre and then live a more anxiety-free life with their actual grandparents.
The movie’s characters are the means by which we vicariously confront our gerontophobia. Twelve-year-old Tyler keeps his emotions bottled up inside. Apart from the misogynistic rap songs he uses to defend himself against feeling rejected by older girls, he keeps a lid on all anger and despondency. His elderly grandfather, who was fired from his job and who suicidally ‘cleans’ his rifle, forces Tyler to acknowledge his own depression over feelings of inadequacy. The boy has been suppressing his rage out of fear of the monster he might become should he let it out. When Pop Pop rubs his dirty adult diaper in Tyler’s face, the anal-retentive boy must confront the ‘incontinence’ he fears in himself. Tyler finally lets it all out when he tackles his grandfather, thereby proving that he can channel his rage into effective action, unlike the time he froze on the football field. Tyler doesn’t have to be afraid of his grandfather any more because he need no longer fear himself.
As for Becca, she sees in Nana the spectre of her own miserable loneliness and anger at feeling trapped. Sometimes Nana sits alone in her rocking chair, wrapping her scarf suffocatingly around her face. At other times, she almost literally climbs the walls, growling and baring her teeth like a werewolf. Becca feels forgotten by her father, who divorced her mother and left the family. Due to the lack of his approval, Becca has been unable to look at herself in the mirror, fearing the lonely girl she might see there, abandoned because of her worthlessness. Becca does not want to end up as a lonely old woman, confined to her house with only domestic chores to do. When Nana asks her to climb inside the oven to clean it and then shuts the door, this fairy-tale image of Gretel in the witch’s oven forces Becca to confront her fear of being swallowed up by a life of domestic drudgery. Later, Becca peers into a mirror where she sees Nana’s lost and rage-filled face coming up behind her own, the spitting image of what she most fears she might become. Breaking the mirror to grab one of its shards and then turning to confront Nana face-to-face, Becca is able to use the shard to defeat the spectre of her nightmarish future self. By independently realising that she is indeed worthy of love and approval, Becca can stop projecting her fears onto her grandmother. Only by looking at herself can she conquer her gerontophobia.
Director: Chris Kentis
Cast: Blanchard Ryan (Susan), Daniel Travis (Daniel)
While on a scuba-diving vacation in the Caribbean, young couple Susan and Daniel are accidentally abandoned at sea. We shudder with them throughout a fearfully long day and night as, floating in their life vests, they wait in hope that their absence will be noticed and a search team sent to rescue them before they are set upon and devoured by sharks. This watery world is not their home. There is water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. They can breathe the air above, but if they inhale in the depths below, they will drown. Glimpses of dorsal fins fill them with terror, but visibility under the ocean’s surface is poor, so they live in constant fear of a sudden shark attack. They do not know where these ancient sea-creatures are, what they will do or why.
The prospect of violent death is frightening, but so, too, is the incomprehensibility of these alien creatures, who are but one part of an entire ocean environment that is unknown and beyond their control. ‘I can’t stand not knowing what is under me,’ Susan says. Cast adrift in this vast sea so devoid of humans or humane behaviour (the film’s original title was Blue Desert), the couple confronts both ‘nothing that is not there and the nothing that is’.64 They are brought to the terrifying realisation that the structures that give their life meaning do not signify in the same way for the creatures in this alien environment, just as the conventions that usually govern films do not necessarily pertain to this one. The couple can swim or stay put, remember or forget some coral landmark, wave their arms as a distress signal or remain motionless – the ocean appears indifferent either way. The sharks do not seem to care whether it is day or night, whether the couple get along or fight, whether fear or bravery is exhibited in the face of death. After blaming each other for their situation and panicking as the sun goes down and the sharks attack, the two show courage, offering reassurance and love to one another, and eventually dawn breaks. But none of this stops the sharks from killing Daniel, as the morning sun rises to reveal his dead body. The survival gear they have, the knowledge gleaned from watching TV documentaries, the knife that Daniel brandishes – these are of no avail against the sharks, nor is any of the other human technology successful, for the helicopter and speedboats mobilised to rescue them all fail to do so. Unlike in most movies, love and courage are not rewarded. Man-made explosives blow up the shark in Jaws, but here humans don’t triumph against these denizens of the deep.
Yet there are few scenes more poignant than the ones of Susan and Daniel floating together through this nightmare side by side, with her hand on his shoulder or with him being held by her. Doesn’t their ability to draw together in the face of probable and then certain death speak to the value of human love? In the end, when Susan removes her life vest and sinks below the waves, it may be because she fears that the sharks will be coming for her and she does not want to share Daniel’s fate. Or it could be a testament to the connection she had with her lover that she does not want to go on living without him.
Director: Karyn Kusama
Cast: Megan Fox (Jennifer), Amanda Seyfried (Needy), Johnny Simmons (Chip), Joshua Emerson (Jonas)
High-school cheerleader Jennifer turns succuba and begins seducing and slaying her male classmates. Why? The most likely answer is revenge for a rape. Four members of an indie band, intent on sacrificing a virgin to Satan in exchange for fame and fortune, lure Jennifer into the woods where they stab her repeatedly with a knife – an act that is filmed to resemble a gang rape. Desire for vengeance then turns Jennifer into a distaff version of her male predators, as she leads innocent guys into the woods where she uses her monster mouth to bite out their necks and feed on the flesh of their bellies. Traumatised by her rapists’ knife, Jennifer fights back by becoming a castrating vagina dentata, driven by their violence to the opposite extreme. And, just as the band members assaulted her in order to live up to the media image of successful rock stars as ‘ladykillers’, so Jennifer preys on guys because she sees her serial conquests as building up her image of irresistible feminine allure. ‘She’s eating boys,’ Jennifer’s friend Needy says. ‘They, like, make her really pretty and glow-y, and her hair looks amazing.’ According to screenwriter Diablo Cody, ‘Jennifer is a product of a culture that pressures girls to be skinny, beautiful, and just like movie stars.’65 It also seems significant that the boys Jennifer kills are ones Needy has shown some romantic interest in, so another reason for Jennifer’s slayings may be competition with her best friend. Indeed, Jennifer’s murderous assertions of independence may be mere cover for the fact that she is really just as needing of love and approval as her friend, especially given that, when Jennifer doesn’t kill, the only consequence is that she ends up looking as lonely and imperfect as any other girl.
But perhaps the real reason Jennifer is killing guys is not to take them away from Needy, but instead to eliminate them so she can have Needy for herself. The two girls have had a ‘sandbox love’ since they used to ‘play boyfriend-girlfriend’ together as children, and they are still close friends despite the social division that would normally separate a ‘babe’ like Jennifer from a Needy ‘dork’ – so close that an observing classmate calls them ‘lesbigay’. When Jennifer lures Needy’s boyfriend, Chip, away by telling him that Needy has been unfaithful, the lie has a kernel of truth in it: Needy has been unfaithful – to Jennifer with Chip. When Jennifer masturbates Jonas, a jock she plans to kill, asking him if he misses his slain football buddy, the reference to same-sex desire suggests that Jennifer’s slaying of Jonas is related to her longing for Needy. Needy, too, seems to be struggling with repressed desire for her friend. When the two hold hands at a rock concert, Needy drops Jennifer’s hand when she sees her looking at the lead male singer, and a mysterious fire breaks out, reflected in Needy’s glasses, as though her jealous rage had somehow started it. When Needy has sex with Chip, she looks up to see blood forming a heart shape in the ceiling while she telepathically senses that, in another location, Jennifer is feeding on one of her male prey. Needy’s terror at that slaughter occurs simultaneously with her orgasm, as if she is excited along with Jennifer by the elimination of the men separating them. Jennifer’s monstrous mouth has a strange fascination for Needy; she is both drawn to the female sex and afraid of her friend’s and her own lesbian desire. (Jennifer’s vaginal maw is like the ‘Devil’s Kettle’ whirlpool which threatens – or promises? – to draw people into a bottomless vortex.)
Finally, in a scene that blends girlish play and erotic attraction, Jennifer leans over and begins kissing Needy, who gradually responds with reciprocated passion as the two make out in bed. But Needy is unable to accept sexual desire as continuous with female friendship. Succumbing to homophobia, she ultimately and violently rejects Jennifer’s advances, ripping the heart-shaped BFF locket from her friend’s neck and stabbing her in the heart with a knife. Even before Jennifer is stabbed (an act which resembles the band’s knife-rape of her), all the life seems to go out of her when Needy tears off that locket, for it seems her friend’s love is all that she really lived for.66
Director: Jonathan Glazer
Cast: Scarlett Johansson (The Woman)
A predatory alien, disguised to look as beautiful as a Hollywood actress (in fact, Scarlett Johansson), cruises the streets of Scotland in a van, luring unsuspecting men to take a ride with her. (In truth, many of the men were regular Glaswegian guys unaware that their conversations with this woman were being filmed by hidden cameras. They gave their consent afterwards.) The banal dialogue of the males’ pick-up lines – ‘I think you are gorgeous’; ‘I’m all alone; you’re all alone’ – shows how formulaic and superficial these interactions are. Given that the men are so attracted to the external trappings of femininity, all it takes is some red lipstick, a fur coat, and black undergarments to draw them in. After being driven to a trysting site, one guy walks all around her, fascinated by her dark hair, her lips and her eyes, entranced by her appearance. At a different place, another man follows her as if mesmerised by the sight of her flesh as she performs a striptease in front of him. So driven is he by the desire to possess her body that he does not notice himself sinking into a sticky black substance. Submerged within the viscous liquid, this man with an erect penis reaches his hand up to try to touch the woman above, who has been able to walk on the liquid’s surface like Christ walking on water. With these images, the film suggests that the man’s sexual pursuit may ultimately be a desire for something higher, an emotional or spiritual connection beyond the merely physical. However, by viewing women mostly as bodies to be consumed, the man becomes mired in his own lust, sinking down to the purely physical level and unable to rise above that. The man then implodes, his innards sucked out of his skin where they run down a chute to be processed as food for the aliens. Having reduced women to sexual objects, to flesh at a meat market, the man has also done the same thing to himself, so it is fitting that he comes to such a beastly end.67
Director: David Robert Mitchell
Cast: Maika Monroe (Jay), Jake Weary (Hugh), Daniel Zovatto (Greg), Keir Gilchrist (Paul)
In an eighties slasher film, teenage sex was often met with death at the hands of a Freddy or Jason, who represented paternal punishment or the teens’ own guilt doing them in. It was Reagan-era repression killing the sixties spirit of free love. In It Follows, after a movie date, a young woman named Jay makes love with Hugh in the back seat of his car, but then this seemingly amiable guy turns nasty, saying that their intercourse has cursed her: she will die unless she has sex with someone else, thereby passing the curse on to him. Beyond the fear of sexually transmitted diseases as potentially fatal in the age of HIV-AIDS, this movie also deals with romantic teens finding that adult disillusionment can be psychologically deadly. As Jay muses after her back-seat tryst with Hugh, ‘I used to daydream about being old enough to go on dates and drive around with friends in cars … It was never about going anywhere really, just having some sort of freedom, I guess. Now that we’re old enough, where the hell do we go?’ The It that relentlessly stalks these teens is the fear that growing up will mean the death of their romantic hopes and dreams. That is why Its movement seems so slow and inevitable, stealthily creeping up on them. It is based on a ‘recurring nightmare’ that writer-director David Robert Mitchell had as a child: ‘the feeling that something was coming and would always be coming was very disturbing’.68
When Jay sleeps with Greg, a boy who does not love her, he is promptly stalked and murdered by It, which takes the form of his divorced and lonely mother who forces sex on him. Greg is killed by fear of a potential future of adult acrimony and desperate desire. Despite an awareness of Greg’s cursed demise, Jay’s friend Paul then offers to combat It and have intercourse with her. Paul and Jay have known each other since they were kids, but younger Paul cannot tell if the sexually mature Jay is ‘a girl or a monster’. For her part, Jay does not know whether Paul’s offer to sleep with her is altruistic or merely a cover for his own lust. ‘I want to help,’ he says. ‘Do you?’ is her dubious reply. After all, when they were still children, ‘horndog’ Paul went on to kiss Jay’s sister right after kissing her. But the fact that Paul determines to battle It in the same pool where he and Jay had their first kiss suggests he may still have the innocence and hope necessary to combat adult disillusionment. Perhaps Paul’s belief in love can inspire a renewed faith in the near-terminally jaded Jay? After the two have sex, they are shown walking hand in hand down a tree-lined suburban street, as in the romantic ‘image’ Jay used to have ‘of myself holding hands with a really cute guy’. A glimpse behind them suggests that someone or something may be following them, but perhaps their belief in each other will be enough to quell their unconscious fear of failed love. While ‘Jay opens herself up to danger through sex … sex is the one way in which she can free herself from that danger’, according to Mitchell; ‘love and sex are two ways in which we can – at least temporarily – push death away’.69
Director: Guy Maddin
Cast: Zhang Wei-Qiang (Dracula), CindyMarie Small (Mina), Johnny Wright (Harker), Tara Birtwhistle (Lucy), David Moroni (Van Helsing)
This revisionist version of Bram Stoker’s classic narrative presents excellent examples of ‘hypocrisy horror’, a kind of scapegoating where authority figures abuse their power and punish others for acts they themselves would commit. As in the original novel set in the late Victorian era, four male characters try to prevent two women from being preyed upon by the vampire, but here the men are really trying to repress the liberating force of female desire, as the women want to be bitten and freed from the males’ possessive control. As director Guy Maddin puts it, ‘I don’t even think Dracula exists. He’s just the embodiment of female lust and male jealousy.’70 Dracula is punished for exciting the women beyond the bounds of feminine propriety and for lusting after them in ways that Victorian gentlemen want – but are not allowed – to do, at least not publicly. Thus, when Mina reads the diary account of how her fiancé, Harker, succumbed to the bloodlust of some female vampires, she kneels and brazenly opens his trousers, but he rejects her advances. Enforcing the double standard by which men can clandestinely satisfy their lust with prostitutes while ladies must demur, Harker has Mina wrap up the diary in a nun’s veil, using repression to keep her pure. Similarly, when Lucy wonders, ‘Why can’t a woman marry three men?’ her suitors are horrified, for convention dictates that only one of them should get to possess her. Nevertheless, while her fiancé is sidelined, the other three all pump their blood into her body through a tube. This transfusion is also a penetration, which suggests a sexual rivalry over her and foreshadows the later scene where they will all pierce her with their stakes.
Earlier, the ringleader, Van Helsing, had ‘examined’ Lucy for signs of vampirism by sticking a tongue depressor in her mouth, feeling her chest and checking under her dress. Then, while peering voyeuristically through binoculars at Dracula’s appetitive affection for Mina, Van Helsing cranks a wind-up flashlight near his crotch. When Dracula strips off some of Mina’s undergarments, Van Helsing moves to cover them up. While this act may appear to be about preserving modesty, it also allows him to ‘get to molest her by putting his own coat over the top’ of her underthings, as Maddin points out.71 Finally, after diverting most of his sexual energy into violence and proving his superior prowess by spearing Dracula, Van Helsing surreptitiously picks up Mina’s undergarments and slips them into his coat. This is presumably so that he can indulge in private the very same desires he just destroyed Dracula for displaying.
Director: Neil Jordan
Cast: Gemma Arterton (Clara), Jonny Lee Miller (Ruthven), Saoirse Ronan (Eleanor), Caleb Landry Jones (Frank)
Over 200 years ago, a working-class girl named Clara is raped and forced into prostitution by Ruthven, a military officer. When Clara discovers that she is dying of tuberculosis contracted from men in the bordello, she saves her own life (in a sense) by seizing the opportunity to become a vampire. The buxom Clara still dresses in cleavage-revealing outfits and fishnet stockings, but now she uses her feminine wiles ‘to punish those who prey on the weak’ and ‘to curb the power of men’. Luring lustful males to her, she deploys an elongating thumbnail (‘the pointed nails of justice’) to penetrate their neck veins and feed off them before they can exploit her. But rather than being a dispassionate dispenser of justice, Clara seems trapped by her own desire to take revenge, to appropriate the men’s phallic power and rape them with it. Director Neil Jordan has described ‘this thumbnail that grows’ as being ‘like a strange erection’ that is more ‘terrifying’ and ‘sexual’ than fangs.72 In his view, Clara has ‘a rather shocking ability to use her sexuality and to treat killing as a kind of orgasm’.73 The fact that ‘morbidly sexy’ Clara is condemned to an eternity of feeding off men suggests that she has not freed herself from their baleful influence, but is still caught up in a dynamic of wounding and revenge.
Clara has a daughter, Eleanor, whom she tries to protect by sending her to a convent-like orphanage, but when Ruthven rapes Eleanor, giving her terminal syphilis, Clara ‘saves’ her daughter by making her a vampire. Clara sets herself up as a madam running a brothel, but she assures Eleanor, ‘It’s all right, angel. I’ll make sure you’re not involved.’ In this way, the mother tries to preserve her daughter’s ‘angelic’ purity, keeping her away from all ‘demonic’ sexuality. To Clara, this means all men, and so she also tries to separate Eleanor from her potential boyfriend, Frank. Unlike the hot-blooded, rapacious Ruthven, Frank, who is pale from leukaemia, poses no clear threat, yet Clara feels she cannot take any chances with her daughter, who is made to fear that any sexual contact with Frank ‘would be fatal’. And so, if the mother is overly embroiled in the hot world of deadly passions, the daughter is exiled to the cold world of forced abstinence and loneliness. As Eleanor tells Frank, ‘That’s me, where light barely penetrates and it’s cold … Everything outside of time is cold.’
In the end, Clara is able to find a male vampire who uses his sword to chop off another bloodsucking male’s head in order to save her. With this, the film suggests that there are still some men out there who are willing to defy the patriarchal order and curb their own voracious desires. As for Eleanor, she finds warmth in the blood of her boyfriend Frank, turning him into a vampire, but her act is not that of a predator who wounds in order not to be violated. Instead, believing in his gentle love for her, she ‘saves’ him as he is dying of leukaemia so that the two of them can be passionate and caring companions throughout eternity.
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Cast: Tom Hiddleston (Adam), Tilda Swinton (Eve), John Hurt (Christopher Marlowe), Mia Wasikowska (Ava)
Having survived as the undead for centuries, vampires Adam and Eve have developed a deep appreciation for the best in this world, all of the arts and sciences that make life worth living. In addition, their heightened sensitivity to the world around them has led to an ecological understanding of how everything on Earth is interdependent, as in the ‘spooky action at a distance’ of entangled particles as taught by quantum mechanics. In the film’s opening, Adam wakes up in Detroit and Eve awakes in Tangiers, but a spinning overhead shot merges both of them with a vinyl record revolving on a turntable. Though they are thousands of miles apart, the two are still connected by their shared love of music. By contrast, Adam calls humans ‘zombies’ because they walk through life with their senses deadened to the wonders of the world, viewing music only as a means to make money and greedily fighting over and using up the Earth’s resources – first, oil, and now, in the era of global warming, water. More humane than the humans, Adam and Eve do not prey on others but instead purchase their blood from black-market blood banks because they realise what a precious resource it is. For the electricity needed to power his guitars, Adam has built his own generator modelled on the dynamo of Nikola Tesla, whose revolutionary scientific ideas were allegedly suppressed by unimaginative and greedy power companies. ‘If we had followed Tesla, we’d have free energy all over the fucking planet,’ says writer-director Jim Jarmusch.74
Everywhere Adam looks, he sees humans wastefully depleting the world’s resources, not only oil and water but even their own blood. Adam’s friend, the vampire Christopher Marlowe, will no longer be capable of writing great works because his blood supply has been contaminated by humans who took too many drugs. And then there are the unevolved vampires like Eve’s sister, Ava, who sinks her fangs into Adam’s assistant, greedily draining the young man of all life. Adam sinks into a suicidal depression, planning to kill himself by firing a wooden bullet into his heart, but Eve crosses the miles that separate them to come to his rescue. As the two ancient vampires watch a pair of young human lovers kiss, they bare their fangs and move in on them. Have the vampires given in to their worst selves, feeding on and sacrificing others for their own survival? Or, inspired by the young lovers’ embrace, have Adam and Eve decided not to kill, but to turn the human couple into immortals like themselves, living on through them and the power of love? Do they become a vampire Adam and Eve, founding a new race of evolved beings who know that, in the end, only lovers will be left alive? As Jarmusch has said, ‘I’m not making a vampire story. I’m making a love story and they happen to be vampires.’75
Director: Catherine Hardwicke
Cast: Amanda Seyfried (Valerie), Shiloh Fernandez (Peter), Alexandria Maillot (Lucie), Billy Burke (Cesaire)
Back in mediaeval times, Valerie is about to accept Peter’s invitation to come away with him when her elopement is stopped by news that her sister, Lucie, has been killed by a werewolf. The lycanthrope had drawn Lucie into the woods by forging a note from the man she loved. Now this same nightmarish creature appears to Valerie and tries to get her to come away with him. It turns out that the werewolf is really the girls’ father, Cesaire, and his stealth attacks on them would seem to be a metaphor for molestation. Distanced from his wife who has been unfaithful, Cesaire grows too close to his daughters. ‘I have been so disrespected,’ he says. ‘I have settled for far less than I deserve.’ He first preys on Lucie, giving her the love bite he deludedly thinks of as a gift (‘By birthright, the gift would go to my eldest daughter’), and then he turns to Valerie as the next in line for his wolfish attentions. Appearing only at night, his face transformed by beastly desire, Cesaire is barely recognisable to Valerie as her father – a fact she also represses as too awful to acknowledge. But sometimes, during her daylight hours, she seems to half-remember and realise the truth. At a festival, when she sees a drunken reveller pretending to hump her father who is passed out on the ground, she pulls the man off him, and her father says, ‘You’re my good girl. I’m so sorry.’ In this rare moment, he would seem to be apologising for what he has done to her.
Later, in a monologue intended as a boast but which is also part confession, Cesaire says, ‘Valerie, come with me … One bite and you’ll be like me … It’s a gift my father gave to me that now I give to you.’ Having been preyed upon by his own father, Cesaire is the abused become the abuser, threatening to pass along a distorted view of love as lustful violation. And Valerie, as is sometimes the case with incest survivors, must fight the tendency to feel ashamed or to blame herself: ‘Maybe the wolf knew something I didn’t,’ she worries. ‘Maybe there was something dark in me.’ Because of her father’s actions, Valerie has also grown fearful of all men as potential marauders – even of her beloved Peter, which is why she does not follow his urging to come away with him, since it reminds her too much of her father’s. Peter does help Valerie expose and defeat her werewolf father – ‘You’re not so terrifying when the sun is up’ – but by having Peter bitten in the fight, the movie acknowledges that he, too, could give way to rapacious desire. ‘When the moon rises, I’ll be like him, a beast,’ Peter fears, and so he leaves her, vowing not to return until he has matured enough to keep his desire within consensual bounds.
Director: Bradley Rust Gray
Cast: Riley Keough (Jack), Juno Temple (Diane)
A mash-up of teen romance, coming-out tale and horror, this lesbian werewolf film has the tagline ‘Love is a monster’. Jack is a tough-talking skater girl who wears cut-off jeans and metal-band T-shirts. Diane is a fragile pixie in a babydoll dress. When Jack, butch and brash, comes on to Diane, the inexperienced girl is initially hesitant. ‘Do you like sushi?’ Jack asks. ‘I don’t know,’ Diane says and then spits it out. When Jack tries to engage in phone sex, the voice on the other end of the line says, ‘I’m not gay,’ and claims to be Diane’s identical twin sister, Karen. Later, Jack watches a web porn video in which ‘Karen’ was drugged and taken sexual advantage of by some unscrupulous men. ‘I told her she should say it was me [who was attacked],’ Diane reports, and we suspect that in fact it was – that Diane herself was the victim. Such experiences go some way towards explaining why Diane is so reluctant to make herself vulnerable again. The nosebleeds she gets around Jack signify Diane’s fearful anticipation of getting hurt. When Jack slips off Diane’s underwear in bed and adopts a position above her, Diane is reminded of what the men in the video did to ‘Karen’ and so pushes Jack away.
But Diane is not just afraid of being victimised by rapacious passion. She is equally frightened by her own ferocious desire, which, once unleashed, might become all-consuming. When Diane gets excited, she imagines herself transforming into a ravenous monster that rips out and devours Jack’s heart. It is as though, having repressed her sapphic passion for so long, Diane fears it will leap forth with uncontrollable strength if she lets it out. It could also be that homophobia leads her to dread her own same-sex desire as something monstrous. Even as she links her lover’s name to hers by writing ‘jackanddiane’ in her notebook, Diane also has nightmare visions of coarse female hairs braiding together and coiling around slimy viscera – an image that shows her inner turmoil over what lesbian love might mean. Luckily, no-nonsense Jack has a knack for allaying Diane’s fears with erotic humour that assumes a reciprocal and healthy desire. When Diane tells her that ‘I dreamed I ate you’, Jack’s response is ‘That’s nice.’
Yet Jack, too, is subject to her own personal form of dread, which comes true when Diane plans to leave her in order to go study abroad. ‘You’ve taken my insides and I’m not myself any more, and it’s just so evil,’ Jack accuses. In an expression of her wounded rage, Jack’s nose starts to bleed and she now imagines herself as a monster devouring Diane – the vicious version of something Jack told her earlier: ‘I just want to unzip my body and put you in there.’ The movie suggests that the two women can transform the monster back into romance, but only by admitting their shared vulnerability and their matching rage to feed the beast.76
Director: Lars von Trier
Cast: Willem Dafoe (He), Charlotte Gainsbourg (She)
When this film’s title appears, its final t is in the form of the female symbol: Antichris♀. In the movie, a woman smashes a man’s testicles with a block of wood, masturbates him until he ejaculates blood, and bolts a grindstone to his leg after drilling a hole through his flesh. The film won a special ‘anti-prize’ at Cannes for being ‘the most misogynist movie from the self-proclaimed biggest director in the world’.77 Is the horror in this movie merely an example of the director’s gynophobia run amok, or can the film be seen as having more feminist implications?
‘He’ and ‘She’ – the two are only identified as such in the credits – are a present-day couple living in Seattle. Studying the notorious witch-hunting manual known as the Malleus Maleficarum, she is writing a feminist thesis decrying the patriarchal persecution of women as witches. One day, as she is making love with her husband, their son opens his baby gate and falls out of a window to his death. She blames herself for putting her own sex drive above her son’s safety. The couple travel to a cabin in an Edenic, wooded setting, but her self-accusations, combined with her grief and despair over her son’s loss, infect her view of nature, which she now sees as ‘Satan’s church’. The hundreds of acorns that fall and die just so that one can take root and allow the tree to propagate, the baby chick that falls from its nest and is then devoured by a predatory bird – these sights remind her of her own negligence as Mother Nature, her own lust which led her to disregard her falling son. This jaundiced view of herself and her surroundings proves contagious for her husband, too. ‘I see her anxiety spreading to nature and to him,’ says writer-director Lars von Trier.78 In one scene, the husband watches a stillborn fawn dropping from the womb of a deer. He begins to blame his wife for the death of their son. The wife’s guilt is further fed by her reading of the witch-hunting manual. Rather than defending women, she now condemns herself and all females as servants of the Devil, forces for evil in the world. Believing that Eve’s lust caused the Fall of Adam and all mankind, she begs her husband to hit her during sex, to punish her sin. In effect castrating him and then cutting off her own clitoris, she tries to bring an end to Mother Nature’s mindless propagation, the physical desire that she now equates with death after the fall of her son.
Her desperate acts are a cry for help – something her husband, even though he is a psychotherapist, fails to see. Instead of bringing her back to reality through love, he lets his fear triumph, himself becoming infected by her belief that she is a witch. Acting like one of the inquisitors and torturers in the Malleus Maleficarum, he strangles her to death and then sets fire to her body, thus hanging and burning her as a witch. But in the film’s final image he sees hundreds of faceless women approaching him – all the anonymous women from the past whose pleas for help were ignored or misunderstood, one of whom was his wife. This film has not forgotten them.
Director: Robert Eggers
Cast: Harvey Scrimshaw (Caleb), Anya Taylor-Joy (Thomasin), Kate Dickie (Mother)
A Puritan family in seventeenth-century New England ekes out a meagre living on the edge of a wooded wilderness. To survive, all they have is each other and their trust in God. However, believing so fervently that everyone is a sinner and that wolves may come in sheep’s clothing, they let their faith turn to paranoid fear and suspicion. Accusing each other of being in league with the Devil, they fall into mutual recriminations and tear their own family apart. But what may be most interesting about The Witch is the way the title figure becomes an outlet not just for fears, but for unspeakable desires.
Teenage son Caleb talks of seeking delicious apples and takes sneak peeks at the breasts of his older sister, Thomasin. When caught looking, he is ashamed, but she understands his growing desires and laughs them off as natural and innocent. In adolescent play, he tickles her around the bodice and she pretends to chomp down on his head as if it were an apple. But Caleb’s sense of guilt, ingrained from years of strict religious instruction, is not so easily overcome. Out in the forest, he imagines a buxom young woman who first leans in to kiss him and then grabs his head to pull him towards her with a withered arm. Caleb is at war with himself, his budding sexual interest at odds with his belief that all such desires are prohibited as evil. Returning home to his family, he writhes naked in bed before their horrified eyes, vomiting up a poisoned apple – he has clearly tasted of the forbidden fruit – and screaming that he is being oppressed by a witch: ‘She’s upon me! … Sin, sin, sin! … She desires of my blood!’ Caleb blames himself for his own openness to her seduction and is afraid he may be damned: ‘My Lord, my Jesus, save me! I am thine enemy, wallowing in the blood and filth of my sins!’ The witch is thus a projection of what Caleb most desires and fears. Touchingly and yet tragically, he resolves the conflict between wish and prohibition by simultaneously dying and imagining himself as saved through an ecstatic reunion with God. ‘My Lord, my Lord, kiss me with the kisses of thy mouth,’ he says, adding, ‘How lovely art thou, thy embrace,’ as he wraps his arms around himself and falls back in bed, dead.
His sister, Thomasin, fights her own battle between guilt-induced worry and what she secretly wants. As a good Christian daughter, she is expected to be a mother-in-training, performing chores around the house and tending to baby Samuel whenever her mother hands him to her. She must remain on the farm and never venture into the woods. But, partly owing to her mother’s strict standards and constant criticism, Thomasin feels increasingly confined in a role that does not seem to suit her. She worries that she will make an inadequate mother – fears that manifest themselves when a goat she is milking produces blood, when an egg she drops reveals a dead chick, and when the baby inexplicably vanishes on her watch. We see a witch carry Samuel off into the woods and then smear the baby’s blood all over her naked body as an unguent enabling her to fly into the sky. This is surely the last thing Thomasin wanted to have happen, and yet, after being relentlessly blamed for the baby’s disappearance (‘She stole Sam … she gave him to the Devil in the wood’), the girl succumbs to madness, fantasising that she is a witch in order to release herself from religious guilt. How many times has Thomasin secretly wished not to have to gather those eggs or milk that goat? Didn’t some hidden part of her want to abandon that fussy baby and leave that family farm behind for ever? Now she imagines the Devil speaking to her to ask, ‘Wouldst thou like to see the world?’ She unlaces her bodice and slips out of her dress, ‘freeing herself of the confines of Puritan society’, according to writer-director Robert Eggers.79 Walking naked into the woods, Thomasin joins the witches there, opening herself up to their evil influence, her face ecstatic and insane as she flies away from everything.
Director: Danny Boyle
Cast: Cillian Murphy (Jim), Christopher Eccleston (West), Naomie Harris (Selena)
Rethinking zombies for the twenty first century, this film has no slow-stalking ghouls, but twitchy and fast-moving humans infected with a ‘rage’ virus, which is spread through vicious bites, vomited blood or arterial spray. Because it so closely resembles actual outbreaks of AIDS, SARS, Ebola and rabies, as well as disturbing instances of road rage and air rage, this film’s zombie plague is frighteningly rooted in reality. Rage is often a reaction to failed attempts at love. Civilised humans act with kindness and generosity, but these can open one up to potential attack. The movie begins when animal activists free a captive chimpanzee to end its suffering in an experimental laboratory, but the ape attacks, having been infected by the rage virus and now spreading it. Their caring act makes them – and us – vulnerable. Jim, the film’s protagonist, awakes from a 28-day coma to wander the empty streets of London, which seems entirely depopulated. Rephrasing Sartre’s ‘Hell is other people’, director Danny Boyle has said, ‘Hell is no people, really. When you’re truly, truly alone, it’s a terrible thing.’80 So Jim reaches out, calling ‘Hello?’ – only to be assailed by an infected child, whom he then batters to death in self-defence.
Humans that are bitten become infected with rage like the zombies, but the more insidious threat posed by these creatures is that, in the very process of fighting them, we can become as rage-filled, vicious and paranoid-aggressive as they are. As part of the war against the zombies, an army officer named West keeps an infected black soldier in chains as an ‘experiment’ to see how long it takes him to starve to death. By holding this man captive like an ape in a laboratory or like a slave, West treats him as subhuman, while showing himself to be primitive and barbaric. It is West’s response to the zombies as much as it is the zombies themselves that threatens to destroy the human race, leading to its devolution. West and his soldiers enjoy gunning down and blowing up zombies, using the creatures’ attack as an excuse to unleash their own aggression. And, in fighting against one of these soldiers whose aggression has raged out of control, Jim finds himself becoming nearly indistinguishable from the soldiers or the zombies as he bashes the soldier’s head against a wall and gouges out his eyes. In fact, Jim’s companion, Selena, fears he has become infected, but rather than engaging in a pre-emptive strike born of paranoia and killing him with her machete, she waits a moment, giving him a chance to show that he is still human. Metaphorically, it is her willingness to trust him, even though it makes her vulnerable, that allows him to recover his humanity and restrain his violent impulses. The film ends with Jim and Selena reaching out to the rest of the world by unfurling a big sign, letter by letter, so that HELL becomes HELLO. This trust is the only thing that will really stop our regression into barbarism brought on by the rage virus.
Director: Bruce LaBruce
Cast: Jey Crisfar (Otto), Katharina Klewinghaus (Medea)
In this horror/art/porn film, zombies are a metaphor with multiple meanings. Emo-teen Otto, sporting a hoodie, striped sweater and black tie, has the pale-faced, zoned-out look of heroin chic. He is a parody of the goth youths who have ‘a kind of macabre and morbid, almost romantic view of death’, says writer-director Bruce LaBruce.81 At the same time, though, Otto is meant to be a serious and sympathetic portrayal of a boy who has been ‘so traumatised by all the hostility and negativity directed at him for being a homosexual that he perceives himself as a zombie, as dead’.82 According to Medea, the radical filmmaker who wants to cast Otto in a movie, the living also persecute zombies like Otto because they find in him ‘an echo of their own somnambulistic, conformist behaviour’, a reminder of their robotic work routines and their mindless consumption of corporate products. Otto’s zombie-like behaviour is an exaggeration of, and a protest against, conformist heterosexual society.
But when Otto turns to gay culture, he finds a similar homogenising pressure there. While on a train, he sits across from a conservative gay couple who, having assimilated to the norm, mock Otto’s pretty-boy appearance. As LaBruce has said, ‘The most reviled thing culturally even within the gay community … is extreme effeminacy in men,’83 and so, to counteract this bigotry, he ‘wanted to make [Otto] a zombie who was a misfit, a sissy’.84 A local gay bar presents Otto with nothing but macho skinhead clones in bomber jackets and brand-name shoes. When one guy remarks that ‘it’s so dead’ in there, he inadvertently comments on the lifeless conformity of the scene. The name of the bar is Flesh, and Otto also finds that gay cruising, which may involve sex with strangers and an attraction to body parts as much as to persons, can be ‘kind of sad’ in its zombie-like sameness and alienation. ‘If you’ve ever cruised a public toilet or a bathhouse, it’s like Night of the Living Dead. You’ve got people in this zombie-like trance, in dark shadows with disembodied body parts,’ says LaBruce.85
However, he hastens to add that ‘all of it can be quite fun and exciting!’86 Here LaBruce flips the zombie metaphor around again to suggest that such anonymous gay sex can have positive potential. Medea is making a ‘politico-porno-zombie’ movie in which gay ghouls assault hetero men and, in a kind of cannibalistic sex orgy, turn them into an army of the undead like themselves. The film mocks by making literal the heterosexist fear of a ‘gay plague’, whereby homosexuals seduce and recruit straight males while also spreading disease and death to them. Another scene in Medea’s movie shows a gay male zombie eating another’s intestines and then sexually penetrating the stomach wound – an exciting experience which they both enjoy. Here LaBruce defies the heterosexist presumption that vaginal intercourse is the only proper way to pleasure. Two years later, LaBruce would continue this project of ‘exploring more orifices in unexpected places’ with L.A. Zombie (2010),87 in which a homeless gay ghoul brings a series of dying male strangers back to life by having sex in and then ejaculating over their various wounds. Calling it ‘zombie gorn with a heart’,88 LaBruce notes that his life-affirming form of ‘splatter’ horror ‘reversed this negative idea of AIDS or gay sex as toxic, poisonous’.89
Yet, despite some pleasingly promiscuous encounters, Otto does not feel entirely at home in the world of anonymous sex, and even though he has an erotic encounter with one particular love interest, the more traditional ideal of forming a romantic couple does not seem to suit him either. Much as ‘undead’ zombies are neither living nor dead, so the misfit Otto seems to occupy a place ‘in between’ gay and straight cultures without conforming to trends in either one. Perhaps this is why, at the end of the film, Otto remains unsure of his destination. And yet, backgrounded by a queer rainbow, he goes in search of someone who will embrace his unique difference.
Director: Marc Forster
Cast: Brad Pitt (Gerry)
World War Z is a zombie movie that sends mixed messages. Director Marc Forster has lamented the fact that people today ‘live in constant fear’, noting that ‘the government’ creates ‘scenarios people fear, because ultimately through fear you can control people’. He adds, ‘I wish we could live in a world where there would be no fear.’90 A horror movie about the threat of a zombie apocalypse is not likely to bring about that world. Especially when characters speculate that the zombie plague may stem from an ‘outbreak of rabies in Taiwan’ or from ‘the organ trade in Germany’, the film could be accused of divisive fear-mongering. But perhaps fear can be harnessed to prompt positive action for the general good. As one character says, ‘The problem with most people is that they don’t believe something can happen until it already has.’ If this film can stir us to believe in and fight a worldwide zombie epidemic, what about global warming? Unfortunately, the battle to reduce carbon dioxide emissions doesn’t look as spectacular in 3D IMAX as zombie-blasting action.
At least the film’s hero, Gerry, is a crisis investigator working for the United Nations rather than for any one country’s government or military, and his globetrotting quest to find a way to curb the zombie outbreak is a veritable model of international cooperation, involving persons of many different ethnicities and faiths. Of course, a white American male is still at the centre of it all, and he is the one who leads his family to safety, figures out the virus’s weakness, and risks death in an ultimately successful attempt to save the world. About midway through the movie, Gerry has an idea about how humanity might fight the virus. So why doesn’t he tell his boss about his hunch when he has him on the phone? That way, if Gerry were to die, others could test his idea, and the world wouldn’t have to die with him. It’s never exactly clear what Gerry does for a living, but perhaps the question should be, ‘What doesn’t he do?’ as, throughout the movie, he proves capable of doing everything. By contrast, the other characters all have pronounced weaknesses, from the Latino father whose stubbornness endangers his own family, to the black South African official who fails to keep Gerry’s family under safe protection, to the British-Indian intellectual who accidentally shoots himself, to the Italian scientist whose kicking of a can almost draws the zombies to attack them. Gerry himself seems flawless, serenely aiding others, as when he helps his daughter breathe during an asthma attack or when he tells a female Israeli soldier to take big breaths while he disinfects the stump of her amputated arm. Why couldn’t Gerry be the one who needs an inhaler, or the one who has to have his arm chopped off to prevent a zombie infection? The movie says that we all need to help each other because problems are global now – but mostly we need one man like Gerry to save us.
19 Mary Harron in Andy Burns, ‘Hip to Be Feared’, Rue Morgue, no. 157 (July 2015), p. 20.
20 Mary Harron, Audiocommentary, American Psycho Blu-ray DVD, Lionsgate Films, 2007.
21 For discussion of another movie about a power-mad human monster, Hollow Man (2000), see Douglas Keesey, Paul Verhoeven, Taschen, 2005, pp. 166–76.
22 Dennis Widmyer in Christopher Jimenez, ‘Shock Interview: Starry Eyes Directors Dennis Widmyer & Kevin Kölsch’, Shock Till You Drop, 14 November 2014, http://www.shocktillyoudrop.com/news/369925-shock-interview-starry-eyes-directors-dennis-widmyer-kevin-kolsch/.
23 Nicolas Winding Refn in Adam Woodward, ‘Nic’s Hot Line’, Little White Lies, no. 65 (May–June 2016), p. 10.
24 Nicolas Winding Refn in Mekado Murphy, ‘Nicolas Winding Refn Narrates a Scene from The Neon Demon’, New York Times, 23 June 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/24/movies/nicolas-winding-refn-narrates-a-scene-from-the-neon-demon.html.
25 Nicolas Winding Refn in Adam Woodward, ‘Nic’s Hot Line’, Little White Lies, no. 65 (May–June 2016), p. 11.
26 Neil Marshall, ‘The Descent: Beneath the Scenes’, The Descent Blu-ray DVD, Lionsgate Films, 2006.
27 Neil Marshall, Director and Cast Audiocommentary, The Descent Blu-ray DVD, Lionsgate Films, 2006.
28 Eli Roth, Audiocommentary, The Green Inferno Blu-ray DVD, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2016.
29 Eli Roth in Chris Tilly, ‘Eli Roth on the Horrors of The Green Inferno’, IGN, 1 March 2013, http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/03/01/eli-roth-on-the-horrors-of-the-green-inferno.
30 Eli Roth in Sean Plummer, ‘Cannibal Ferocious’, Rue Morgue, no. 148 (September 2014), p. 18.
31 Eli Roth in Chris Tilly, ‘Eli Roth on the Horrors of The Green Inferno’, IGN, 1 March 2013, http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/03/01/eli-roth-on-the-horrors-of-the-green-inferno.
32 Eli Roth in Steve Rose, ‘Eli Roth: “I Miss Films Where You Think the Makers Were Insane”’, Guardian, 11 February 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/feb/11/eli-roth-the-green-inferno-miss-films-where-think-makers-were-insane.
33 Deborah Schurman-Kauflin, ‘Autistic Kids Are Magnets for Ghosts: Those with Autism Often Are First to Recognize the Paranormal’, Psychology Today, 30 October 2013, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/disturbed/201310/autistic-kids-are-magnets-ghosts.
34 Heartless (2009) is another film to explore the ‘horror’ of disability, in this case a ‘monstrous’ birthmark. For analysis, see my entry on Philip Ridley in Lost Souls of Horror and the Gothic, edited by Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice M Murphy, McFarland, 2016.
35 William Brent Bell in Staci Layne Wilson, ‘William Brent Bell Talks Creating The Boy’, Dread Central, 10 May 2016, http://www.dreadcentral.com/news/165190/exclusive-william-brent-bell-talks-boy/.
36 Stacey Menear in Patti Greco, ‘The Boy Writer Stacey Menear Explains the Twist Ending and What Might Have Been’, Cosmopolitan, 25 January 2016, http://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/movies/q-and-a/a52604/the-boy-twist-ending-stacey-menear-interview/.
37 Leigh Whannell, ‘Horror 101: The Exclusive Seminar’, Insidious Blu-ray DVD, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2011.
38 Scott Derrickson, Writers’ Audiocommentary, Sinister Blu-ray DVD, Summit Entertainment, 2013.
39 Wentworth Miller in Christina Radish, ‘SDCC 2010: Wentworth Miller Interview’, Collider, 3 August 2010, http://collider.com/comic-con-wentworth-miller-interview-resident-evil-afterlife-3d-stoker-uncle-charlie/.
40 Wentworth Miller (aka Ted Foulke), Stoker screenplay, 18 January 2010, HorrorLair, http://www.horrorlair.com/scripts/Stoker-screenplay.pdf.
41 James Watkins in Constantine Nasr, ‘The Making of Hammer’s Gothic Ghost Story The Woman in Black’, Little Shoppe of Horrors, no. 28 (February 2012), p. 68.
42 Daniel Radcliffe in Constantine Nasr and Tony Earnshaw, ‘Daniel Radcliffe Talks about The Woman in Black’, Little Shoppe of Horrors, no. 28 (February 2012), p. 81.
43 Daniel Radcliffe in Constantine Nasr, ‘The Making of Hammer’s Gothic Ghost Story The Woman in Black’, Little Shoppe of Horrors, no. 28 (February 2012), p. 69.
44 James Watkins in Tony Earnshaw, Fantastique: Interviews with Horror, Sci-Fi & Fantasy Filmmakers, vol. 1, BearManor Media, 2016, p. 356.
45 James Watkins in Constantine Nasr, ‘The Making of Hammer’s Gothic Ghost Story The Woman in Black’, Little Shoppe of Horrors, no. 28 (February 2012), p. 71.
46 Ann Pellegrini, ‘“Signaling through the Flames”: Hell House Performance and Structures of Feeling’, American Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 3 (September 2007), p. 912.
47 Guillermo del Toro in Dave Alexander, ‘Del Toro’s Dark House’, Rue Morgue, no. 160 (October 2015), p. 52.
48 Ibid., p. 54.
49 Michael Dougherty in John Griffin, Trick ’r Treat: Tales of Mayhem, Mystery & Mischief, Insight Editions, 2007, p. 9.
50 Ibid., p. 56.
51 Michael Dougherty in Michael Mallory, The Art of Krampus, Insight Editions, 2015, p. 25.
52 Ibid., pp. 15–16.
53 Ibid., p. 9.
54 Victor Salva in Calum Waddell, Minds of Fear: A Dialogue with 30 Modern Masters of Horror, Midnight Marquee Press, 2005, p. 247.
55 Jennifer Kent in Michael Gingold, ‘Dare You Look at The Babadook?’, Fangoria, no. 338 (December 2014), p. 29.
56 Ibid., p. 30.
57 For more discussion of movie monsters and mothers, see Douglas Keesey, ‘Super 8 (2011)’, Kamera.co.uk Film Salon, 5 August 2011, http://www.kamera.co.uk/article.php/1206.
58 Lucile Hadzihalilovic in Dominic Preston, ‘Lucile Hadzihalilovic Interview: “The Adult World Is Something Mysterious”’, Candid, 5 May 2016, http://www.candidmagazine.com/lucile-hadzihalilovic-interview/.
59 Lucile Hadzihalilovic, ‘Director’s Note’, Evolution Press Kit, 2015.
60 Ibid.
61 Juliet Snowden and Stiles White in Atara Arbesfeld and Ezriel Gelbfish, ‘The Possession, Drawing on Jewish Sources, Is Hollywood’s Kabbalistic Version of The Exorcist’, Algemeiner, 30 August 2012, http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/08/30/the-possession-drawing-on-jewish-sources-is-hollywoods-kabbalistic-version-of-the-exorcist-video/.
62 James Wan in Kellvin Chavez, ‘Interview: Talking The Conjuring with Director James Wan’, Latino-Review Media, 15 July 2013, http://lrmonline.com/news/2013/07/interview-talking-the-conjuring-director-james-wan.
63 Tim Robey, ‘The Visit Review: “The Most Gerontophobic Film Ever Made”’, Telegraph, 9 September 2015, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/the-visit/review/.
64 Wallace Stevens, ‘The Snow Man’, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Alfred A Knopf, 1978, p. 10.
65 Diablo Cody in Jennifer Kwan, ‘Cody Exorcises Demons from Jennifer’s Body’, Reuters, 14 September 2009.
66 The vagina dentata theme was further explored in Teeth (2007). For analysis of this film, see Douglas Keesey, Contemporary Erotic Cinema, Kamera Books, 2012, pp. 32–3.
67 The 2009 film Splice features another sexy female alien, this one created by science. For analysis, see ibid., pp. 59–60.
68 David Robert Mitchell in Michael Blyth, ‘Tainted Love’, Sight & Sound, vol. 25, no. 3 (March 2015).
69 David Robert Mitchell in Charlie Lyne, ‘It Follows: “Love and Sex Are Ways We Can Push Death Away”’, Guardian, 21 February 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/feb/21/it-follows-teen-horror-movie.
70 Guy Maddin, Audiocommentary, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary DVD, Zeitgeist Video, 2004.
71 Ibid.
72 Neil Jordan in Liisa Ladouceur, ‘Blood Relations’, Rue Morgue, no. 135 (July 2013), p. 41.
73 Neil Jordan in Declan McGrath, ‘Life Among the Undead’, Cineaste, vol. 38, no. 4 (Fall 2013), p. 12.
74 Jim Jarmusch in Nick Pinkerton, ‘Jim Jarmusch: The Interview’, Sight & Sound, vol. 24, no. 3 (March 2014), p. 54.
75 Ibid., p. 50.
76 For discussion of another female werewolf film, Ginger Snaps (2000), see Douglas Keesey, Contemporary Erotic Cinema, Kamera Books, 2012, pp. 30–2.
77 Amy Simmons, Antichrist, Auteur, 2015, p. 10.
78 Lars von Trier, Audiocommentary, Antichrist Blu-ray DVD, Criterion Collection, 2010.
79 Robert Eggers, Audiocommentary, The Witch Blu-ray DVD, Lionsgate Entertainment, 2016.
80 Danny Boyle, Audiocommentary, 28 Days Later Blu-ray DVD, Twentieth Century Fox, 2007.
81 Bruce LaBruce, ‘Otto: An Introduction’, Incognitum Hactenus, vol. 3 (September 2012), https://incognitumhactenus.com/otto-an-introduction/.
82 Bruce LaBruce in Manlio Converti, ‘Interview with Director Bruce LaBruce’, Psychiatry Online Italia, 4 November 2013, http://www.psychiatryonline.it/node/4635.
83 Bruce LaBruce in Catherine Knight, ‘A Philosophy of Homosexuality – An Interview with Bruce LaBruce’, 4:3, 21 April 2015, http://fourthreefilm.com/2015/04/a-philosophy-of-homosexuality-an-interview-with-bruce-labruce/.
84 Bruce LaBruce in Ernest Hardy, ‘Deep Zombie Throat’, L.A. Weekly, 7 January 2010, http://www.laweekly.com/film/deep-zombie-throat-2163293.
85 Bruce LaBruce in Ariana Speyer, ‘Up with Bruce LaBruce’, Interview, 13 February 2009, http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/otto-bruce-labruce#.
86 Bruce LaBruce, ‘Otto: An Introduction’, Incognitum Hactenus, vol. 3 (September 2012), https://incognitumhactenus.com/otto-an-introduction/.
87 Bruce LaBruce in Sean Abley, Out in the Dark: Interviews with Gay Horror Filmmakers, Actors and Authors, Lethe Press, 2013, p. 50.
88 Bruce LaBruce in Richard Schemmerer, ‘Interview with Film Maker Bruce LaBruce’, Pride Review, 19 June 2012, http://thepridereview.blogspot.com/2012/06/interview-with-film-maker-bruce-labruce.html.
89 Bruce LaBruce in Gary Kramer, ‘Interview: Bruce LaBruce’, Slant, 19 September 2011, http://www.slantmagazine.com/features/article/interview-bruce-labruce/P2.
90 Marc Forster in Jamie Lincoln, ‘Marc Forster: The Eye of the Swarm’, Interview, 20 June 2013, http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/marc-forster-world-war-z#_.