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Re-donning the Slasher Goggles: Don’t Fear the Reaper

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So this post is going up a little late. As I’ve much written about, it can be hard to choose my topic each week and this last one was no exception. I watched one early 80s folk horror about which I’d heard really good things, and while I appreciated aspects of its concept and enjoyed its madcap weirdness, certain weaknesses of its execution kept me at arm’s length and I just couldn’t get into it. I watched an absolutely gorgeous arthouse horror from a filmmaker I’d long had a blind spot for, but I need to rewatch it to order my thoughts before writing and while I loved it on initial viewing, watching it again immediately just felt a bit like homework (but I’ll do it soon – I promise). I even made it out to the cinema and saw Cocaine Bear, which I rather enjoyed, but don’t have sufficient thoughts about to fill a whole post.

Past that, I’ve been doing a bit of travel around Croatia, where I’m currently “workationing” (hooray for remote work), and that means lots of time sitting at cafes reading, and in the last couple of days, I burned through the end of a book and having enjoyed it so much, found myself going back to the beginning and almost re-reading the whole thing the next day. So let’s talk about that. Let’s return to Proofrock, Idaho for the second installment of Stephen Graham Jones’s “Lake Witch Trilogy,” Don’t Fear the Reaper.

Don’t Fear the Reaper (2023)

I think I’m going to have to do this in two parts. To do the book justice, it’s necessary to get into certain details which could rather spoil its reading. But at the same time, I really liked it and would like to offer some explication of its value to potential readers. Therefore, I will go into it first sans spoilers. And then, after a break, will discuss key elements and later revelations for a select readership that has already finished the book.

Last summer, during a few weeks of discussing the concept and some stand out examples of “the final girl,” I devoted a post to the first book of this cycle, My Heart is a Chainsaw. At the time, I had no idea that it was even part of a trilogy, so satisfyingly did it reach its conclusion (and from an interview I heard, I have the impression that it was written as a stand-alone piece, which the author later decided to return to and build on). When I heard this volume was coming out, I was even initially hesitant, feeling that the original hadn’t needed continuation (a sentiment that often arises when it comes to Slasher franchises), but I’m so glad I picked this up.  Graham Jones manages to really deepen and expand upon themes of the first work, very satisfyingly allowing characters to grow and mature, while also exploring how the effects of the first novel ripple through this town and the lives of its citizens, surfacing in a new explosion of violence.

And on top of that, the book just feels like a sprint. Whereas Chainsaw took its time, getting us behind the eyes of Jade, its narrator and eventual final girl, navigating us through a rich collection of characters and contexts that all set up possible causes of and motives for the deaths that were occurring, interspersed with her pontifications on Slasher theory, the lens through which she viewed her world, before Jade had to finally rise to the occasion, stepping into the shoes of the idealized role she’d never thought herself qualified for in a final act blood bath, Reaper just hits the ground running and doesn’t let up till it gets where it’s going. Full of intense, cinematic sequences, it is a page turner, as they say – an exciting, often gory, emotional roller coaster that left me pumping my fist in the air following its triumphant last sentence. In the lead up to releasing Reaper, I started seeing t-shirts with the slogan “Jade Daniels is my final girl” popping up on social media – for good reason. She’s an easy character to rally around.

Official shirts available here.

In many ways, this functions as a Slasher sequel, and it’s a good one. As Randy enthuses in Scream 2, there’s a bigger body count and it’s gorier with more elaborate death scenes. But in other ways, it gives space to elements that wouldn’t ordinarily be focused on (not to mention hosting characters with a degree of self-aware genre knowledge that puts poor Randy to shame). Four years have passed since the events of the first book and their weight hangs heavily on all those who survived. The town has generally recovered since the Lake Witch slayings and subsequent fire and flood, but beneath the surface, the town of Proofrock is haunted by those who were lost, by the horrors the survivors witnessed, by wounds that linger, both physical and otherwise. Into this space, Jade returns, having been subjected to a lengthy trial following her heroic and cathartic turn in the climax of the first book. No good deed goes unpunished.

Notably, Graham Jones has allowed her to change, to grow up a bit. Throughout the first volume, she sees everything through her “Slasher-goggles,” having embraced slasher films and tropes as a kind of coping mechanism to deal with a slate of traumatic experiences she’d been subjected to. In seeing things through as she does in the first book, she is allowed some personal resolution – some things are laid to rest, or at least are contained at the bottom of the lake. Though it is so unfair that she alone was prosecuted (unsuccessfully) for her actions, the fact that the trial took her out of her once toxic context seems to have been good for her. She is in a more stable place. She doesn’t need to lean on the mythic resonance of her favorite films as she once had.

Ironically though, other characters have now done their homework, having lived through their own real life slasher film, and Jade (or Jennifer as she would now rather be called) is no longer the only one so versed in the lore of the sub-genre. In fact, she would rather not dwell on the material she once depended on, and resists others’ attempts to make her view new events through her old lens. Fascinatingly, these others each have a different relationship to the material. For one, it is research for survival – determined to endure whatever is thrown at her, she has obsessively worked through every slasher and tawdry thriller she can find. Another seems to have shared a similar history with Jade, living through childhood trauma and mythologizing the figures of slasher cinema, but whereas Jade was destined for the heroic, he has become a sleazy predator. Finally, a third character seems to have studied these filmic texts as models for their own cycle of murders – the movies, as Billy Loomis once said, not making psychos, but making psychos “more creative.”

Into the mix as well, comes the nigh-mythic serial killer, Dark Mill South, a hulking silent butcher right out of a later installment of Friday the 13th, Halloween, or Hatchet. He is an intimidating figure and the scenes in which Jade confronts him are some of the most gripping in the book. Also, just as her Native American (Blackfeet) heritage has done so much to shape (and sour) her relationship with her community and family, his has also contributed to the shadow he casts, particularly the implication that his many, varied, horrific killings are all to be taken as vengeance for the mass hanging in 1862 of 38 Sioux warriors, ordered by Lincoln. Dark Mill South is clearly a monster – he has done horrific things (and the time we spend inside his perspective does nothing to soften that view), but the sense that he could be enacting a kind of vengeance for such a violence of the past, that his crimes are in fact a form of justice, as brutal and implacable as an act of nature, helps contextualize him as a Slasher killer in a classic-mythic sense.

Thus, though she has successfully moved on in a number of ways, when high school kids start showing up dead all over town, just as she’s getting home, Jade is pulled back in, and will once again have to wade through a river of gore to protect those she cares about. But that is one thing that’s different this time. Four years earlier, she’d been so isolated, the weird horror kid from a “bad family” crying “slasher” to deaf ears, her relationships mostly antagonistic. This time, she does have a small community around her. Most of the town still may view her with suspicion at best, but she is now tied to some other survivors of the last massacre. She actually has a couple of friends and loved ones who she does not want to lose, for whom she will fight.

And perhaps at this point, before we get into any discussion of later developments, it’s a good time to stop if you haven’t read the book and think you might at all like to. If so, do start with My Heart is a Chainsaw. Enjoy.

This is Graham Jones – horror folk always seem so nice.

Ok, I’ll assume if you’re still here, you’ve either read both Chainsaw and Reaper or never will. So now I’m just going to geek out a bit. One thing I really appreciated was how in her roaring death cry to pierce Dark Mill South and “find the off switch,” I flashed on the mama bear at the end of the first book. Jade spent her young life failed by her family (and worse), but in this moment, she can do for her chosen family what wasn’t done for her. It’s a lovely moment. As is the denouement regarding Sheriff Hardy and Melanie. If only that meant the actual killer had been brought down.

In the first book, there is much discussion of red herrings in the Slasher genre, particularly in those that revolve around the mystery of the killer’s identity (which I’d hazard to say is actually most of them – the silent, named, masked killers cast a long shadow, but far more are unseen murderers waiting for a final act reveal).  The first time around, Jade, through her goggles, was endlessly trying to figure out what was going on. Theory after theory fell flat though because life isn’t a clean story and, well, there were actually a few killers to reckon with (in both cases, these elements are repeated). This time, even though clues are littered throughout the book, and Jade and Letha even have an extended discussion about “final girls who are actually the killer,” it’s still so easy to get distracted by the looming figure of Dark Mill South, who does, in fact, finish some kids off, but otherwise is a minor contributor to the mayhem, a convenient cover story who just happened to be brought in by the storm at just the right time. This misdirection begins before the story does, with the quote from Carol J. Clover about how the killer is invariably male.

In contrast, in both the Melanie/Spirit Elk and the Cinnamon/Ginger (or was it always only Cinnamon?) storylines, the past is coming to bear and revenge is being dealt, whether for complicity in one death many years ago (classic slasher stuff) or rooted in a twisted sense of balancing the scales following the last slaughter and a misplaced blame for the one person who actually managed to stop it last time. And while Dark Mill South is in the ground and Hardy and Melanie are reunited beneath the ice, Cinnamon is still out there, free and unaccused. It leaves things intriguingly open for the final volume. While at the end of the first book, I felt everything had been quite wrapped up, this time, I am rather waiting for the final installment, and wondering what new repercussions will follow from this one. Also – how much of a time jump will there be this time? It seems unlikely that Jade will avoid at least some length of a prison sentence.

I loved this book for many of the same reasons that I so enjoyed the first. It is both a successful, interesting, fun thriller, and at the same time, such a love letter to a much maligned genre that so many of us take so much pleasure and find such deep satisfaction in. I love how through Jade, and now also through Letha, Armitage, and Cinnamon, these “dead teenager pictures,” are revealed as emotional texts, as therapeutic, as inspiring, as art, as important. How many movies have shown some variant of sportsball as a metaphor for life, as a vehicle for a mythic hero’s journey, as the crucible in which identity is formed? We all find meaning where we do, and in finding it, create it.

And that is what we have here. It is so satisfying seeing a character like Jade, who has latched onto these works of fiction (which the general public and ‘reputable critics’ would scorn) for survival, go through so much, suffer but still be compelled to investigate, fight but also be driven to understand, and ultimately grow into a powerful woman who can and will do what is necessary, whether that means killing the killer with an appropriately phallic weapon, helping a loved one find peace, or taking the fall for a friend. It’s moving to go on the journey with her, to witness her becoming.

It’s also really fun.

Final Girls Books – The Final Chapter

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I feel that in the last few years, the trope of the “Final Girl” has really been having a moment. Of course, the character has been around since at least the mid-70s, and has been very present in horror cinema ever since, but lately, there’ve been a lot of works which really use her name, or which are directly about the idea of the character. Behind the Mask (2006), The Cabin in the Woods (2011), Final Girl (2015), and The Final Girls (2015) all revolve around positioning the main character to explicitly take on the role (even if not all of them use the term). Recent spins on the Slasher formula have played with the role, with Happy Death Day (2017) starting with a ‘mean girl’ caught in a Slasher time loop who must be all of the other victims before she can finally grow as a person to become the final girl, defeat the killer, and leave the loop, and Freaky (2020) doing a body swap with the final girl and the slasher-killer (the original title being “Freaky Friday the 13th), such that her experience of both inhabiting this strong, violent male body and observing the killer in her own is instructive, helping her, once more in her own skin, find the chutzpah to finish him off. Furthermore, “legacy sequels” such as Halloween (2018), Scream (2022), or Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) all circle back to their original final girl (though Sydney was never absent from her franchise and Laurie did this before in Halloween: H20), picking up with her many years later to see how the trauma she endured has affected her life, shaped her character, before thrusting her back onto the killing floor.

And this final girl renaissance hasn’t only been on screen. In 2017, Riley Sager published his thriller, Final Girls (which I’ve not yet read), and in 2021, two authors who I have previously written about here (Grady Hendrix and Stephen Graham Jones), both published Final Girl themed books: Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group and Graham Jones’s My Heart is a Chainsaw. Both of them are about characters who are not only final girls, but for whom the concept of the “Final Girl” is a significant, psychologically organizing principle, a mirror which they hold themselves up to and in which they find themselves lacking, but it’s a role they are thrust into nevertheless.

I’ve been wanting to write about both and since I’ve been on a final girl kick these last few weeks (see here and here, and also check out my guest spot on a podcast here, discussing the 2015 The Final Girls), I thought this was a good time to reread both novels and share some thoughts on them. I’ll endeavor to avoid spoilers in this discussion, so these might be shorter reviews, but I really recommend both books very highly.

The Final Girl Support Group (2021)

In his very entertaining, thrilling, and sometimes quite touching novel, Hendrix posits a world where the slasher killings of 80s films all actually happened (before then being made into films), and in which the young women who had survived these massacres later came together in group therapy, periodically meeting through the decades, to help one another continue to live, carrying the weight of what had happened to them, of what they’d had to do to survive. The main character, Lynnette Tarkington (based on Linnea Quigley’s character from Silent Night, Deadly Night who gets impaled, topless, on deer antlers), a core member of the group, has always felt distanced. She survived a massacre, but she wasn’t really a “final girl,” so much as a victim left for dead, who didn’t die. She never killed her killer, but she has been shaped by the nightmare that she lived through just as the “actual” final girls in the group have (each of whom is modeled on a classic final girl and generally has a name implying the actress who played her).

Thirty years later, she lives an isolated life, focused solely on survival: her apartment is a fortress, she has trained endlessly in self-defense, she is always armed, and she follows compulsive routines to ensure that no one can ever follow her home to her sanctuary. The only regular contact she has with others is with her plant and the group and so, when it seems that some person or group is targeting final girls, her carefully maintained world starts to collapse. At first, no one believes her as she starts to see the signs of a coordinated attack upon her ranks – all of the members of her group have their psychological quirks and she is no exception, coming off as an over-reacting survivalist-conspiracy theorist, and she is on her own to uncover what is happening and why, and to somehow stop it.

The book is just a treat – a quick, exciting read, full of twists and turns and endless references and Easter eggs to tickle a horror fan (just tracing the names and influences of the different characters is fun), but also, as is generally true for Hendrix, there is real emotional depth. Lynnette is an interesting character to follow – we don’t know (and neither, really, does she) how much her perceptions reflect reality and how much they are the paranoid fantasies of someone who lived through hell and has been forever scarred by the experience. The mystery is engaging, some sequences of threat or violence have an edge of horror, and there’s plenty of comic life to the proceedings, but at the end of the day, the heart of the book is the resilience of this woman who has suffered so much and keeps going, the friendships (however strained) between these women who have shared such terrors, and the way a role, a concept can haunt a person, shape a person, make demands on a person. All the women of the story carry a complex relationship with the idea of being “a final girl,” though we most experience Lynnette’s – and this exploration of the tensions between the ideal and reality, between being a free person with her own agency and being a figure in a set, self-perpetuating narrative, between the isolating impulse to survive and the responsibilities we take on for those we open ourselves to is what it is really about. And it is a rich theme to delve into.

Beyond that, Hendrix just makes fun books. Each chapter title is another horror sequel reference. Between each chapter, there is always an interstitial text – some document from the world of the characters – a letter, a newspaper clipping, text from a card left at a memorial for victims of a massacre – it all makes the novel an interesting space to inhabit. Sometimes these documents offer clues to what is actually happening, but often they simply give the world heightened specificity, offering intriguing glimpses into the lived-in space of the various characters. All in all, it is a compulsive, rewarding read, and I will continue to pick up whatever Hendrix puts out.

My Heart is a Chainsaw (2021)

Stephen Graham Jones offers a main character with a very different background, but one whose sense of self is just as tied up in the concept of the “Final Girl.” Jade is a Blackfeet high school senior in Proofrock, a small Idaho town on Indian Lake. Ostracized from her peers, and with a troubled home life, she is an intense, encyclopedic horror fan, particularly into Slashers, in which she finds the comfort of a familiar formula, the mythic resonance of ritual played out again and again, the vicarious power trip of the faceless killer, safe behind a mask, and the inspiration of the willful, transformed, victorious final girl. But for reasons which eventually become clear (which are at the heart of her troubled character), while she dreams of living out the fantasy of the slasher narrative, she never sees herself as a candidate for filling that beloved role.

And so, when she starts to see the signs of a slasher cycle beginning in her small lakeside town, she starts casting about to find one who could, and finds her in Letha Mondragon, a new girl who has joined her graduating class shortly before the end of the year. Letha’s just moved to town as her father is a member of a coterie of wealthy types moving in and developing the former National Park land across the lake, and in Jade’s eyes, she’s perfect: athletic, beautiful, serious, investigative, and most of all, pure – she is everything Jade feels she is not, and so she takes it upon herself to introduce Letha to the ways of the slasher film, hoping to prepare her to rise to the challenge when her time inevitably comes. Of course, everyone thinks she’s crazy.

Thus, Jade is generally on her own, and often in trouble with her parents, her school, her job, and the law as she investigates the series of strange deaths which are plaguing her town, all the while trying to convince Letha of the role she has to play, blind to how she is growing into it herself, incapable of seeing her own strength, her own resolve, convinced that because of who and what she is, because of what she has lived, she could not be more than an observer, an early victim, at best a “Randy” (who in Scream tells the others the ‘rules’ of surviving a horror film). She is a fan – not a hero.

Without going into any details, as this book is full of them, and there are loads of false starts and red herrings along the way before arriving at an incredibly brutal explosion of strange and vengeful violence, I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that in climbing through the blood and gristle of this sometimes gory tale, Jade is thrust into a confrontation with her own story, her own past, her own identity, both changed by the process and becoming more truly herself.

This emotional arc weaves through a sometimes twisty narrative where we are never sure what is really happening. There are so many possible clues, and Jade’s many working theories and assumptions are often mistaken. All of this serves to deliver a fun mystery to unravel, both of who is killing all these people, in these very varied ways, and what Jade’s deal is under her tough horror-kid façade. It pays off both in excitement and mystery, deeply felt rage and vengeance, and ultimately a kind of promise of a life Jade hasn’t known. It’s a ride.

What a Coincidence

The two books share some core structural elements. Both feature a central character who everyone discounts, a Cassandra who alone sees a rising threat, both of whom compare themselves unfavorably with the ideal of the ‘Final Girl,’ and yet are sustained on the concept of the indomitable survivor who, as Graham Jones writes, “is finally turning around to fight, is insisting on her own life, is refusing to die, isn’t going to take even one more moment of abuse.” Both books name each chapter with a reference to some Slasher film. And both include additional texts between the chapters, My Heart is a Chainsaw presenting a series of extra-credit papers that Jade wrote for her very patient history teacher over the years in which she expounds on Slasher film history, tropes, themes, and analysis. On one level, these are often fun love letters to the genre, but Graham Jones also weaves through them significant insights into Jade’s character (one of these becomes a significant plot point when these collected texts are given to Letha, intended as a kind of textbook to prepare her for the coming storm).

What is it in the zeitgeist that led both of these authors, contemporaries in current horror fiction, to engage with these particular themes at exactly this time? Though the stories are quite different, the parallels in what both texts circle around are striking. In both cases, we deal not only with this particular horror film trope, but with what it means to survive a kind of trauma, and how a person can define themselves in terms of, or in opposition to that experience. And both do this in relation to this storytelling device – a character type who has come to particular prominence of late. Is it related to the #metoo moment, assaults on abortion rights in the US and around the world, a growing sense of the way women have continued to be targeted as victims even as society pats itself on the back for being more equitable? Or is it maybe not so gendered – is the ‘girlness’ of the final girl a red herring?

Could it be that we live in an era of constant existential threat? Climate change, pandemics, domestic terrorism, global conflicts, constant mass shootings, police violence and the subsequent civil unrest, intractable political divisions that make it feel like society is on the cusp of absolute collapse…do we feel so under assault that “the one who survives, the one who finds a way to fight back against impossible odds, the one who has suffered like no one else, but nevertheless persists, the one who refuses death” is just more appealing than ever before? I don’t know – we used to live in fear of a nuclear holocaust, hell – there was The Holocaust, and as I understand the statistics, as you go further back in time, humans were more and more likely to die due to violence than they are now. But somehow that feeling of constant threat has just grown. Maybe for that, the media is to blame – or the ugly echo chambers of social media – or maybe it’s just the cumulative fatiguing effect of living with stress.

But maybe it’s all just coincidental – a story and the character at its heart has just grown more popular – we are more aware of it, and thus, we grab hold of it as a useful metaphor – as we have always done, especially with horror.

Anyway, they’re both really good books. I liked them. You should read them.

An Exorcism Exception

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So, while I love a wide variety of horror content across all sub-genres and media, one kind of story tends to rub me the wrong way: the possession-exorcism (though just last week, I did write about an interesting take on the subject). Sure – they can be really creepy, there are a couple of classic examples that are really great, well made movies, and it is a very, very popular theme, but it almost always turns me off. They often leave an aftertaste of proselytization, seemingly advertisements for the Church, Catholic or otherwise (in recent years, the Warrens led Conjuring films have been notably unpleasant examples, though they primarily present as hauntings).

Now, there are other kinds of films dealing with demonic or diabolical elements or religious imagery that don’t do this. I think it is because, while they may contain religious elements, they are not about (or even particularly in support of) religion the way an exorcism film can be. Van Helsing holding up a cross to ward off a bride of Dracula I can accept as a simple trope of Vampire fiction without feeling like it’s supposed to teach me to let Christ into my heart. Films can directly feature the Devil as an antagonist, but somehow Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate, reveling in his bombast, or Black Philip in The VVitch asking if Tomasin wouldst like to live deliciously, don’t make me feel uncomfortable, as if I’d made the mistake of inviting in two polite, well-dressed chaps who want to give me the good news. I mean, sure, I generally want horror to make me uncomfortable – but not that way.

So what is it about this story? Why does it have this particular effect on me? On one level, a possession film is so often about someone in denial about the “truth” – that radical evil is real and that we are helpless against it without faith, specifically faith in “the Lord.” The story is all about this horrific realization on the part of a protagonist, whether the mother of the demoniac in question or a priest who has lost his faith and must regain it to prevail (both from the Exorcist), who only after accepting this knowledge has a chance of casting out the evil presence.  Scientific methods may be used to try to diagnose the problem, but they will all fail until the only remaining solution is that of the holy man with a cross. And oddly enough, I feel the filmmakers often may not even intend such a message or experience – they are just trying to tell a scary story and are thus leaning on certain generic conventions, but in so doing, the resultant film can have the vibe of a church basement Halloween Hell House – where they are having great fun creating horrible things (because that is, of course, fun), but it is all in service of scaring the visiting kids away from sin.

Maybe I’m overstating it, but it’s the feeling I get personally.

So if I’m so put off by possession narratives, why am I even writing about them? Well, because I have an exception here – a book that takes the story in a really different direction and delivers a totally distinctive tone. And sometimes, when you find a really good book, you just want to go door to door and tell people about it.

My Best Friend’s Exorcism (2016) by Grady Hendrix

First, I have to say – it is very hard to impossible to really get into what I think is so great about this novel without explicitly discussing the ending, and I feel it features a turn that really can be spoiled. I’ll give a fresh warning before I get to that part and if you think you might like to read the book, do yourself a favor and go pick it up before finishing this text. It’s a really quick read – the first time I did so, I tore through it in one sitting on a flight from Warsaw to NYC, only pausing for meal and bathroom breaks.  

Ok, so this is the story of Abby, whose best friend, Gretchen, gets possessed by a demon, which in turn, must be exorcised. By the end it is. Hooray. Simple, right? But where it is special is in the relationships between the girls.

We start when they first become friends on Abby’s tenth birthday party: an E.T. themed event at the local roller rink (spanning the years 1982-1988, 80s pop culture looms large in this story, very much the air that these friends breath, the idiom they speak – sometimes in shouting misheard Phil Collins lyrics, sometimes in playing Madonna dress up and getting in trouble with one religious mother who does not approve of the material girl, or in this case, just needing E.T. everything). Gretchen, the new girl in class, is the only one to show up, rather than going to a much fancier party being thrown by another kid she doesn’t know; somehow kismet strikes and they really click, thus starting a lifelong friendship. The book takes its time with this utterly non-scary but equally foundational episode, and then carries on taking its time with the next 5 years of the girls’ lives and friendship. I was surprised on re-reading it to find that this only makes up about 50 pages of the book – it had felt like so much more; really getting the connection between them, from running jokes to secrets shared, to embarrassing details of parents’ lives uncovered.

Then, when they’re 16, Gretchen gets possessed and everything goes wrong. The horror elements come quick and hard in this middle stretch: ominous, shadowy figures in the woods, owls bloodily slamming into windows, the feeling of a hand on the neck when no one’s there, creepy voices on the phone at night, beloved pets murdered, white fleshy worm things vomited out. Hendrix pulls no punches in delivering revulsion and shock. But he manages this while at the same time maintaining a somewhat blackly comic tone (I’ve read comparisons to Heathers). But the worst thing is in no way supernatural, but rather just the simple horror of your closest friend changing, betraying your secrets, becoming cruel, becoming someone you can’t trust, someone who hurts people, who is downright evil, and whom you somehow still love. Friendship and love necessarily entail vulnerability, and Abby has no walls to guard her from Gretchen’s malice. She doesn’t need much convincing to believe her friend is possessed by a demon.

So she finds herself an exorcist and now’s a good time to go pick up the book if you think you might like to read it. I’ll wait.

…

Ok, so here is where Hendrix’s book really distinguishes itself from the exorcism pack (and I’ll describe it even though you hopefully just finished reading it). Abby finds an exorcist, Brother Lemon – an earnestly absurd Christian weightlifter with whom she kidnaps, in order to save, her friend. In the process of the exorcism, the demonic presence reveals itself and we get all the typical supernatural spookiness and fluids. Now, Lemon knows all the steps but has never done this before and comes close to killing Gretchen before Abby stops him. He leaves in disgrace and Abby, alone with her friend and something else, has to finish the job.

She starts by following his playbook, reciting prayers and such. It’s kind of working, but she doesn’t believe these words. They are empty symbols for her, and finally, unable to abandon her friend, determined to go down with her if she has to, she finds the words that are true: the misremembered lyrics of a Go-Gos song that played at her 10th birthday party, a litany of singers or actors or shows or jokes or games they have watched or told or played together. The power of Christ might not compel this demon to leave, but maybe the power of Phil Collins can. The power of all the little references and memories, things they have loved and laughed over, secrets they have entrusted one another with. These are authentic things. Absurd and silly and seemingly inconsequential, and real. It is an amazing, exciting, moving sequence.

And it manages to make this the rare exorcism that works for me by basing it on something I can actually believe in. Faith may be necessary for the procedure, but faith need not be religious. Abby acts out of faith, not only in her friend, but in the very concept of Friendship, actualizing not only the love between them, but Love, itself: making out of the frivolous detritus of childhood, icons of power. This was the second time I read it and while the middle section of horrible events lost some effect without the element of surprise, the climax landed just as hard as it had the first time, on a plane, trying to both stifle guffaws and ugly crying – cause that’s kind of embarrassing sitting next to a stranger.

Grady Hendrix has been a really enjoyable discovery for me in the last few years. This was the first book of his that I’d read, but since then I’ve worked through the rest of his available output (some are sadly out of print) – covering a range of horror topics, but all with a kind of light touch – not necessarily comedy, but something humanistic and, for lack of a better word, fun. Whether exploring a haunted Ikea in Horrorstör, a Faustian heavy metal parable in We Sold Our Souls, following middle aged housewives hunting the undead in The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, or most recently, delving into the life changing trauma of being a survivor in The Final Girl Support Group, he offers interesting and entertaining spins on well-worn ideas, that come alive in character without sacrificing the horror. My Best Friend’s Exorcism is no exception.

Horror as Mirror – House of Psychotic Women

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So recently, I see a lot of attention rightfully being given to the excellent Folk Horror documentary, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, released this fall and currently available on Shudder.  I made reference to it just last week. It is a comprehensive and thoughtful study of, if not exactly a genre (as it questions whether generic boundaries might usefully be set in this case), then a mood, a mentality of film.  The director, Kier-La Janisse, with a very wide range of filmic examples and drawing on a variety of critical, academic, and film practitioner voices, effectively surveys a rich international landscape of the meetings of folk culture and practices and horror filmmaking, sometimes revealing a lingering fear of the past, or of the inevitable future, or, particularly in those outside of the English tradition, simply drawing on elements of traditional folklore and thus exhibiting striking cultural specificities. It’s fascinating stuff.

This is not, however, Janisse’s first foray into cataloguing and analyzing an extensive collection of films.  I first encountered her oeuvre through her engrossing book, House of Psychotic Women: an autobiographical topography of female neurosis in horror and exploitation films. I’d never really encountered a work such as this before.  At once deeply personal, grounded in thoughtful analysis, and wide ranging in its scope, it walks quite a line between memoir, scholarship, and compulsive fandom.

Janisse focuses on “horror and violent exploitation films that feature disturbed or neurotic women as primary or pivotal characters,” films with which she has a very personal relationship, with which she has been obsessed throughout her life as a mirror of her own personal struggles. The appendix alone (which actually comprises about half the book, presenting short descriptions of all the included movies) is worth the price of admission, lucidly detailing a tremendous number of films (some at least heard of by a mainstream audience, but many quite obscure, even to genre enthusiasts) through a reflective and compelling lens and inspiring the reader (or, at least me) to seek out as many as it is possible to find. She approaches each respectfully, on its own terms, however artistically serious or exploitively irreverent its own creators may have considered it. From Troma productions to the New French Extremity, from Rape-Revenge flicks to Austrian Art House cinema, and far, far more, these films are taken seriously and appreciated as meaningful artifacts of psychological life, of shared culture.

But the first half is really the heart of the book.  Here, Janisse neither approaches the films chronologically nor generically, but rather, autobiographically, bouncing from one to the next as it is more or less useful for reflecting on some aspect of her own life, of her own character, of her own story. Her project is nicely set up in the preface:

“Over the past ten years I started keeping a log of these films, accompanied by rambling, incoherent notes and occasionally wet pages. I have drawers full of these scribblings: they’re spilling out of manila envelopes in my closet and they’re all pieces of a puzzle that I have to figure out how to put together. But my starting point was a question, and that question presented itself easily: I wanted to know why I was crazy – and what happens when you feed crazy with more crazy.”

The result is anything but rambling or incoherent, but it is unlike any kind of film criticism or description I’d read before (it’s possible that something like this has long existed in some kind of academic-adjacent circles, but it was new for me). The work is richly researched and informed by a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of film history and a kind of scholarly rigor, but it is utterly led by the personal; it is absolutely a program of self-inspection, explicitly and shamelessly subjective in its view of the films under discussion, and then, in turn, using those films as tools to interrogate the author’s own thoughts and choices, all while investigating how and why those films have had such a draw for her – what functions they have served.

Janisse is unflinching in presenting her own struggles with depression, substance abuse, self-destructive behavior, and, in fact, outwardly destructive tendencies. Her relationships with family and friends and lovers all come under the microscope as necessary elements of analysis. There is horror in the films, in her story, and in the act of self-revelation. And somehow, as an author, she pulls off this trick wherein her life’s very real difficulties illuminate the films being discussed just as much as those films shed symbolic and psychologically enlightening light upon those very trials and tribulations.

As someone who has taken up a project of writing about horror, discussing the material that I am so often drawn to, this book is as inspiring as it is intimidating. To approach the content from such a personal place, all while really doing the work, both in terms of research and in terms of self-analysis, is an impressive and moving feat. And it seems such an effective way of discussing the material.  We already sail an endless sea of film criticism, literary theory, movie reviews, and fan responses. And all of those can be fine things – I certainly consume my fair share – I also, in this blog, seek to contribute something as well. But it is noteworthy how novel her peculiarly intimate approach is, naturally offering what nobody else can, as nobody else has lived her life. It is a great reminder that anyone with thoughts, responses, and feelings has something to add to the conversation (but also, that it is best added with real precision and thoughtfulness).

Furthermore, the book is just beautiful. From the cover, drawing on imagery from Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, to the sensational vast array of black and white film stills and posters that are peppered throughout, to the 30-something full color pages in the center of the book, collecting striking poster art and images from the referenced films, the whole volume is an art-object, deserving a place on any coffee table. If only I had one…

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Just as an aside, speaking of mentally unstable female characters in films, thanks to the Gaylords of Darkness podcast bringing it to my attention, last night I watched the 1952 Marilyn Monroe thriller Don’t Bother to Knock (directed by Hammer and Amicus mainstay, Roy Ward Baker) and wow, it is a treat.  I don’t really want to describe it much as I think it’s better to go in cold, but apparently, it was her attempt to be taken seriously as an actor and not only a sex symbol starlet and it is a striking, off kilter performance in an interesting, odd, and sometimes quite tense little picture.  I hadn’t even heard of it before, so if you can find a copy somewhere (and I see it’s available to rent on many platforms in the US – I can’t speak for other markets), I think it’s worth your time.