I am a Grady Hendrix Fan. Since picking up his 2016 novel, My Best Friend’s Exorcism (which I read all in one sitting on a transatlantic flight, trying to hide my embarrassingly ugly crying from the stranger in the seat next to me as I hit the climactic, eponymous, and very moving exorcism), I have eagerly awaited each new offering. Some have absolutely floored me, and some I have just appreciated, but I really like him and what he does. Each time, he takes on a new horror element (a haunting, demonic possession, vampires, evil dolls, slashers, a devil’s bargain, etc.) and weaves an effective, exciting terror tale around it, which is always deeply rooted in character and relationships in which I become fully emotionally invested. He’s always got a kind of light, playful authorial voice – while I wouldn’t categorize any of his books as “horror-comedy,” there is always something in the tone that feels “fun” if not “funny” per se. Past that, there are solid scenes of suspense, of disgust, of horrible things happening to perfectly nice people (and not-so-nice people receiving a comeuppance that goes way too far for comfort), of supernatural threat and wrongness – this is horror. But overwhelmingly, his books draw an emotional response from me. Of the seven novels of his that I’ve read, though some have worked for me better than others, there is not one that hasn’t made me cry by the end. Interestingly, he also seems to write exclusively about women, each book having a female protagonist, and past that, a largely female supporting cast.
Which brings me to his newest, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, which I finished about a week ago, staying up until four in the morning, trying not to wake my wife sleeping beside me cause I was making the bed shake from stifled sobs. Yup, I’m a tough horror guy – I can watch the most brutal gore – exsanguinations, disembowelings, flayings – without batting an eye, but show me a damn coffee commercial where someone comes home unexpectedly early and I’ll be blubbering like a baby. I’m an easy mark, is what I’m saying.
But I don’t think my strong response was all on me in this case – the book deals with some legitimately heavy real life horrors, layering onto them a supernatural element that, in addition to adding a folkloric threat, also just makes the realistic awfulness go down a bit more easily. I mentioned above the largely female cast of characters in his books, and that is the most true to date in this entry – about a group of pregnant teen girls in 1970 sent to a “home” in Florida to have their babies, giving them up for adoption (or sometimes even having them taken against their will) before finally going back to their “normal lives” as if nothing had ever happened. The fact that all of this is done under the guise of ‘helping them,’ ‘taking pity on these fallen girls,’ just makes it uglier. This is a true to life nightmare which so many real girls and young women have been subjected to, and the sense of crushing disempowerment in their story can be overwhelming.
Apparently, some years ago, Hendrix learned that two women in his family to whom he’d been very close had been sent to such homes, had been subjected to these cruelties, and that gave him the impetus to learn more about these places and engage with it in fiction. And it is a lot.
The girls have everything taken from them, in this case, even their names (on arrival at the home, the headmistress renames them all as one kind of flower or another (Rose, Daisy, Fern, etc.) so that they don’t share anything true of their “real lives” – they should not tell each other where they are from, what their real name is, or any details of how or by whom they came to be pregnant). Their parents have already abandoned them. They are disrespected at every turn, condemned for having already done the worst, most sinful thing imaginable. They have no agency over what they do, when they do it, what they eat, how they dress, or any aspect of their bodies. Medical treatment feels like assault and every adult who purports to be on their side, to be there to help them, is sooner or later uncovered as an agent of a hateful social machine fine-tuned to subjugate, marginalize, weaken, oppress, erase. Finally, four of the girls happen across a book, “How to Be a Groovy Witch” and start down a dark path to take back some power for themselves.
Hendrix mentioned in an afterward that in the first draft of the book, there were no witches. I don’t know if that means they never found the book, or if they did, but there was no “real” magic. Either way, I’m so glad the witches were added. (Quick, fascinating aside: I had the pleasure of watching a presentation on witches that Hendrix gave as a part of his current book tour, in which he pointed out how the witches in Macbeth, who are never named as such, but only referred to as the ‘weird sisters,’ in the first folio were called the ‘wayward sisters’ – a word that would come to be regularly used for young girls who had “gotten themselves in trouble” – it makes for a clever title.) As it was, it took over a hundred pages before the girls came across the book and started working even the simplest of spells, and by then, I was so hungry for it. This is not to say that the early part of the novel is not effective or well written, but just that the core, realistic nightmare of it all is hard to take and any taste of personal power is pretty sweet. Of course though, this being a work of supernatural horror, the book connects them with a group of “real” witches who do not have the best interests of the girls at heart. No matter who the girls turn to, there is inevitably an adult waiting to use them for their own ends.
But along the way, the power feels good. Even if it comes at terrible cost. Even it is dark, and makes them dark. Even if it is using them, burning them down, and will ultimately rob them of any remnant of selfhood in the end. Even if it is “evil,” whatever that actually means. In the hands of those who have been stripped of any power at all, the darkest, cruelest, most vengeful power feels deserved, feels “good.” Even if you know it isn’t – who cares? The feeling is no less true.
There are unsettling sequences (as well as some cathartic, glorious, magical sections) involving the casting of spells (and the price thereof) and the girls’ ascendance into a different, more than natural, more real, more frightening world, but it all pales in comparison to two scenes of plain, old fashioned, quotidian childbirth. Talk about body horror, and it’s entirely “normal” – it’s how we all got here. The two scenes exist in contrast to each other – the first cold, medicalized, in a hospital setting, and the other more “natural,” earthy, supportive – but both are cringe inducing nightmare fuel through and through. The first reduces the mother to an object to be worked on by a respected doctor and hospital crew who seem to view her as less than human. It is cold and disturbing – how empowered they are to disregard her own will, to work on her body without communicating what is being done or why, to drug her and cut her open and treat her as meat that is simply in the way of the baby being birthed, who will be given to a respectable family waiting in the hall. The second feels much more caring (a midwife guiding the birthing in her own home), but the girl almost dies, as does her child, and what her body goes through along the way, what she must endure, become, in order to see it through, it isn’t pretty.
Again and again, even when it seems that the girls have taken back some taste of agency, every single time, it seems to once again be stolen away. Even with magic. Even with witches. Even with teamwork. Even with love. The world is not fair (an obvious statement, but having it repeatedly hammered home thus takes a toll). By the end, the sense of ineffable rage at their unjust treatment just permeates every page. And that wrath eventually grows into something powerful – terrible in that power and yet, still beautiful. You want them to fight back – you want them to lay waste to everything in their path – even the “innocent.” You want that rage to have an outlet, for them to have an effect on their world, even if it is to “do harm, do wrong,” even if it is ultimately bad for them as well – that emotional drive, that need to reverse injustice is just so compelling.
And I think that is the essence of the book, and it brings me to the other thing I wanted to dig into in this post. In recent years, a term has been applied to a number of high profile films (The Witch, Midsommar, Pearl, Ready or Not, Teeth, etc.) – “Good for Her” horror. I think the exact meaning is a bit hard to pin down, but as with so much, you know it when you see it. For me, a “Good for Her” horror is distinct from simply a “Final Girl” who survives a slasher, turning the killer’s tools of destruction back on him, and it is also different from something like a “Rape-Revenge” movie, where a woman directly takes revenge on those who had previously assaulted her. In both of those cases, the protagonist fights back against and heroically kills “the bad guy(s).”
Rather, in this model (I hesitate to call it a sub-genre as I think it consists in a kind of viewer/reader response that can span genres), the (female) protagonist, by the end of the story, takes an action or actions that are morally dubious, enacting a kind of revenge on, not necessarily a villain, but instead simply those who have been bad to her (a crummy boyfriend, some kind of bullies, a sexist boss, etc.). If it were simply defeating the “bad guys,” that wouldn’t be morally dubious. It wouldn’t have the delicious bite of doing something “dark,” vengeful in a way that is “not-nice.” And it doesn’t have to be full on “evil,” but it is an action of self-interest, performed by one formerly socialized to do for others before herself, now bitterly empowered. At the end of a slasher, the final girl takes the masked killer’s blade and triumphantly penetrates him with his own phallic implement. In a Good-For-Her movie, the protagonist may survive some ordeal to leave her condescending father-in-law stuck in a trap where he’ll probably get eaten by a hungry crocodile as she walks away, head held high. She doesn’t need to kill him, but she doesn’t need to go out of her way to help him either. She’s done enough. She’s had enough.
In another example which well predates this term, I might look to a “Rape-Revenge” flick that does things a little differently – Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 (1981). Whereas the standard narrative for this kind of movie shows a woman sexually assaulted before hunting down and destroying the man or men who had done so, I think Ms. 45 is more interesting in how broadly the protagonist’s vengeance is applied. After being raped twice in one day, the mute seamstress Thana (Zoë Lund) is pushed over a line, takes the gun of her second assailant (whom she’d managed to kill in self-defense), and starts on a program of hunting and killing terrible men around NYC. And it is a “yes, all men” kind of deal. Initially, it seems she is giving them an opportunity to reveal themselves as “bad” before dispatching them, but by the end, she is relatively indiscriminately shooting anyone with a penis, such that we are even left to worry about the fate of a perfectly nice little dog when we realize he’s a (very good) boy. Applied so broadly, though most of the guys she shoots are clearly dangerous sleazebags, this takes on a different vibe than a direct revenge movie. There is a sense of injustice so expansive, suffusing her whole world, that her only options are either self-erasing acquiescence or full scale, blood in the eyes, losing-oneself-in-the-act androcide. There is a specific horror in that: the character fully justified in feeling her anger, her understandable need for retribution, but taking actions that exceed moral or ethical justification, and are ultimately self-destructive. There is that moral pinch that I really appreciate in a horror flick.
I think just this feeling is what is found in the much more recent spate of films that often get labeled with the “Good For Her” moniker. (Spoilers ahead) In Midsommar, Dani’s boyfriend, Christian, is not a monster. He didn’t kill anyone – he didn’t really do anything especially wrong – but as a couple, they are bad for each other, and she has been suffering, and he hasn’t helped. When she lets him get sewn up inside of a bear skin and burned as a ritual sacrifice as she finally feels at home, accepted and loved by her new community, we can feel happy for her, finally getting what she needs, finally advocating for herself instead of others, turning her back on one who has made her unhappy, but her newfound happiness is given ambivalent spice by Christian’s tortured screams. In The VVitch, the witches are unmistakably shown to be “evil” – stealing babies and anointing themselves with their blood, causing all sorts of gory, gruesome, harmful nightmares, and finally bringing about the bloody and sad destruction of Thomasina’s whole family, but when she makes her mark in the Devil’s book, chooses to “live deliciously,” accepting whatever eternal punishments might be the price of rising above her present repressed destitution, and floats, naked, into the flame licked night sky, laughing and free, I think it’s hard not to feel her ecstasy as ultimately a “good,” though the moment is made all the richer, weirder, more complicated, more delicious, by all of the “bad” that has been, and will be, its cost. Still, in spite of it all, I do genuinely feel in that moment, “hey, good for her!”
These are satisfying stories and the nature of that satisfaction is of interest to me. They share some common DNA with other models, but are clearly distinguished. And, I could be wrong in this, but it feels like this is a relatively recent trend – this kind of story told in this exact kind of way. That said, we’ve long celebrated male anti-heroes. Is this really so different? I feel it is. While I think there is a pleasure in vicariously following a “bad” guy who happens to be carrying the “good” of the narrative forward and is willing to do any ugly thing along the way, under no burden of supposed respectability or ethical behavior, I think these stories all start with a woman who is, in terms of her era and cultural context, “normal” – not a hero, not an anti-hero – just a “woman.” And that term (because we all understand certain things about the world in which we live) contains the implications of a kind of disenfranchisement in need of repair – the main character has been brought up not to rock the boat, not to be “bitchy,” not to make others feel bad, and to even feel guilty for having emotional responses towards and expectations of others – and it feels good to see her change, grow, learn to take what she needs, what she wants, and reject what she doesn’t. One can also find something like “good-for-her” moments in tales featuring protagonists from other marginalized communities, but these examples with specifically (and it must be noted, generally white, cis-het) women stand out as notable for grabbing the cultural moment. These are crossover hits while other stories with other kinds of protagonists may be overlooked by the masses and only appreciated by aficionados of specifically “queer horror,” “black horror,” “indigenous horror,” etc.
Just as an aside, one thing I’ve noticed: when I think of the most prominent examples of “Good For Her” Horror, they seem to overwhelmingly be made by male creators. Is this just because films in general tend to be, or is there something else to it? The VVitch comes from Robert Eggers, Midsommar from Ari Aster, Pearl from Ti West, Ready or Not from Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, Teeth from Mitchell Lichtenstein, and Ms. 45 from Abel Ferrara. I expect the trend goes on and on. There are some possible exceptions, such as Revenge (2017) from now Oscar nominated director, Coralie Fargeat (who has recently had such surprisingly mainstream success with The Substance), but while I think her earlier film is great, formally, I feel like its tropes map more cleanly on a traditional “rape-revenge” model.
So, if it isn’t simply symptomatic of gender inequality in Hollywood leading far fewer women to end up behind the camera, why is it that these stories are being so notably presented by men? Is it a kind of social guilt – leading to an attempt to ‘make right’? Is it a kind of facile universalism wherein the gender of the protagonist is, ironically, merely a screen onto which the director can project his own perception of inequitable treatment, and his own fantasy of empowerment, in turn inviting any audience member to do the same? (Who has never felt that life is unfair? I expect the most privileged experience that no less than the most downtrodden – politically, that certainly seems to be the case.) Is it a way to just make it feel “ok” to root for the “bad” choice – if a man did the same, would he come off as an insufferable, greedy asshole, or in order to have a man so socially put down, would he have to be some kind of miserable incel type, and we’ve all learned how actually monstrous that can be – and therefore, not ‘fun’? Are these all unfair readings, just spiraling on my blog, just looking to “problematize” great work that is doing something good, that people strongly respond to, including myself? I, a cis-het fellow, really love these stories, really vibe with their themes and can have a visceral response to their protagonists getting her bloody groove back. Does it detract from their power, does it call into question their ethos to recognize that few if any are actually being written or directed by women? I honestly don’t know, but it might be a fair question at least. But if the answer is “yes,” I must admit, I don’t think I’ll like them any less. I hope that’s ok.
Which brings me back to Witchcraft for Wayward Girls. A witch story is the perfect vehicle for a “Good For Her” moment, the whole concept being that a woman or a girl makes a compact with some dark force, clearly choosing to “do wrong” in order to have power – a choice she might not make if any inkling of power at all weren’t so very, very, impossibly hard to come by. And in this case, this is, as are so many other “Good For Her” examples, another story written by a man, an author who, for whatever personal reason, only seems to write female protagonists. For me, that doesn’t detract from the power of the story, and I can’t imagine (though it is, admittedly, a current trend) policing who gets to tell which tale – an author has a personal connection to something, does a ton of research and sets out to craft a moving, powerful, disturbing narrative to do it justice – I can’t imagine criticizing that. But as I’ve mentioned, I’m not a woman – I don’t know how female readers receive Hendrix’s characterization. Could, for example, one feel that he oversells the powerlessness and a woman would find small remnants of agency around the marginalia? I don’t know. I can only say that for me, it really landed. Just as all of the above referenced films have as well.
So, yeah, if you’ve liked any of Hendrix’s other books, I feel confident saying you should pick this up. If you haven’t read him and this kind of social horror doused with supernatural sauce sounds like your cup of tea (weird mixed metaphor – who puts sauce in tea?), I recommend it. Plenty of scary things happen – suspenseful scenes of supernatural assault in the night, tongues getting chopped off, wombs full of live eels, ancient powers rising in the night, turning their inhuman, unendurable gaze upon you and demanding fealty paid in blood, but hands down, the scariest stuff is all real – either the historical horror of these things really being done to young pregnant girls for years, or the contemporary horror inherent in the sense that, even if these exact homes no longer exist, the same inequity and essential disrespect persists, and possibly always will, the story only putting this awful fact into a starker contrast by means of its entertaining supernatural elements. Also, I’ve just got to say – birth – ooof. Now, that’s horror. Seriously, it’s amazing any of us are here at all.