Theory - Flinching with Delight

A Final Girl Feedback Loop

Posted on August 20, 2022 by Glen — No Comments ↓

So, I sometimes wonder when the term “final girl,” first coined by Carol Clover in 1987 in her essay, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” later collected and expanded on in her influential book, “Men, Women, and Chainsaws,” entered common parlance. The idea was certainly not new when she detailed it, based on her observations of gender-genre tropes in slasher films (primarily of the late 70s and 80s), but rather, she put her finger on something that had arisen naturally out of a confluence of storytelling trends and business assumptions. And it is successful coinage – when someone sees the phrase for the first time, they immediately get to what/whom it refers: the last girl standing in a body count film, who probably didn’t party as hard as all of her friends and is more clear headed and responsible, who we probably haven’t seen have sex, who possibly has been investigating the odd things going on and has thus had to discover the bodies of people she knew, who probably isn’t blonde and might have a gender neutral name such as “Stretch,” “Jess,” “Ripley,” or “Chris,” who has had to run and hide and scream and survive until finally she turns and finds the strength to fight back and kill the killer, though she may end up a broken, traumatized husk by the end of it all – the name carries a lot.

Now, in discussing the trope, I always feel it’s obligatory to point out that Clover had a focus other than just describing a trend in horror, and she certainly wasn’t trying to prescribe how people should be making movies. In short, in my understanding of her text, she questioned why this female character, this recurring role was so foregrounded in a genre conventionally understood to be targeted at young males, a genre often thought to be misogynistic, offering the vicarious thrill of looking through a masculine coded killer’s eyes as he stalks and murders young women (again, this is the common perception, and the data doesn’t support the characterization – men die about as much as women in these flicks). The theory she offered was a case of cross-gender identification, wherein the femaleness of the role allowed it to exhibit traits of vulnerability and fear which would have been uncomfortable for the audience in a male figure, or even rejected and mocked (a supporting example might be Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 2, which features a final boy (Jesse, played by Mark Patton) and which was not well received, Patton being outed and ridiculed for his portrayal). This enables the (male) viewer to masochistically enjoy being terrorized, just as by identifying with the killer, (he) can sadistically enjoy terrorizing. The final girl abstaining from sex meant that the young male audience didn’t have to take the leap of watching their viewpoint character be penetrated before them. Quite the opposite, by the end of the film, she would take the weapon (his symbolic, penetrating phallus) from the killer and be the one doing the penetrating, in her rise to action, to wielding the investigative gaze, to violence, to rage, taking on more and more “male-coded” traits.

Now, this reading of the trope is not without critics. Isabel Pinendo, in her “Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing” from 1997, criticized how in reducing femaleness to traits like terror and victimhood, and ascribing traits like aggression and violence exclusively to maleness, this paradigm results in “nothing less than the impossibility of female agency,” herself seeking to discuss what pleasure experience female viewers can find in this material (which can also take on a sadomasochistic flavor – as Clover had theorized for young males), without having to accept the relegation of all power to the boys. Beyond that, it has been pointed out how some of the elements that make up the “final girl” are not so set in stone. There are many examples (going back to Laurie Strode, the ur-final girl) who drink or do drugs. There are many who are at least in long term relationships and even if it’s not explicitly shown, one can assume aren’t ‘virgins.’ There are many who don’t initially have any hint of coded-male qualities, but just happen to be the last one left – are just lucky to have enough plot-armor to survive to the final showdown.

But the trope does exist (if anything, over the years, the more known the trope is in popular culture, the more fully it has come to embody Clover’s description, even when a given film is purportedly ‘subverting’ the concept), and this brings me back to my initial question. When did horror film makers become consciously aware of the role as such? When did they become aware of Clover’s reading? When did descriptive analysis become inadvertent, prescriptive instruction? I wish I had some data here – I can only guess at people’s intentions and influences.

I assume that in the beginning, it was merely a case of financially motivated imitation. Halloween turned an impressive profit (more than 70 million on a budget of about 320 thousand) and everyone wanted to repeat that success (another obligatory note that Halloween wasn’t really the first of the genre, but it’s success did kick off the first big slasher cycle, running until 1982), launching what might be the most formulaic of horror genres – whereas a ‘vampire movie’ features a vampire and a ‘ghost story’ features a ghost, a ‘slasher’ doesn’t even have to include a slasher killer – but it’s got to stick to the formula: a group of (probably young) people, wanting to party and getting killed off one by one until one girl (probably a girl) is the only one left, who then uncovers what has been going on and dispatches the killer. In the beginning, I think a lot of people were just seeing that something was selling and they repeated it. Of course, there were variations, and from early on, there were attempts to surprise by disrupting the pattern (for example, the feminist satire of Slumber Party Massacre (1982) or the Scary Movie-esque parody of Student Bodies (1981)), but those disruptions also served to make the pattern more clear (by attempting to wrong foot the audience by not perfectly enacting a formula, it makes the audience think all the more about what that formula would have been, what their expectations are).

And audiences came. Not everything made money like Halloween (and it must be said that most were nowhere near as good as Halloween), but they made money. The more the pattern paid off, the more it was reenacted, and the more audiences came to look forward to certain elements. And sooner or later, academics noticed this and wondered what was going on. Why were filmmakers telling this story in this way? Why was it satisfying enough for a paying public that they kept coming back? Some theories were put forth, perhaps making undue assumptions about who the viewers actually were, and ignoring the potential experiences of viewers who were thus unconsidered. But even if incomplete, this scholarly work helped to illuminate the depth of potential meaning of a genre considered no more than trashy exploitation.

At some point, the academic notion of the “final girl” was folded into the creative process. I don’t know if Kevin Willamson read Clover before writing Scream, but it sure feels like he did, and even if he didn’t, by 1996, Clover’s reading of the ‘final girl’ could have just filtered into the zeitgeist enough to influence the text (and practically everything that came after it in the 90s teen slasher cycle and every post-modern, self-aware slasher/slasher parody that came in its wake). With its explicit presentation of “the rules” of surviving a horror movie, Scream seemed to help make the ‘final girl’ a much more known role (including to a general public who weren’t necessarily horror fans, but who saw this hit movie), even if that name was not applied, was still not in regular use (but I’m not sure the term wasn’t used in any of the sequels – Scream characters are so horror-literate that you’d expect it to come up). For one example of use, I know the term surfaced at least briefly in one of the Scary Movie parodies (released between 2000-2006) as Stacie Ponder, a blogger I’ve been reading for the last decade, uses this image for her blog, Final Girl.

For an example of the conspicuous lack of the term, I recently saw an interview with prolific horror B-movie actress Linnea Quigley from 1999 where she described her professional trajectory moving from being the victim who takes her top off (much of her career) to being the girl who lives to the end. Nowhere in the discussion is the term “final girl” used (and, as mentioned above, it is such a clear term, that once people know it, they tend to use it – it really cuts to the chase).

Or, for a later example, the 2006 film, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, a mockumentary following a slasher in training, is utterly focused on the concept of the final girl, with the killer so certain of her mythic importance to him, knowing they are two sides of the same coin, and manipulating conditions to draw her out, calling on her to become herself so that he can become himself. But he never says “final girl.” In the film, she is always the “survivor girl.” Now was this a conscious decision to avoid an already popularized term, or had it somehow not yet achieved cultural saturation?

The Cabin in the Woods (released in 2011, but filmed in 2009, for the sake of tracking chronology) also leans hard into the concept of certain essential roles (the whore, the fool, the athlete, the scholar, for example) who all must be sacrificed before finally “the virgin” is all that remains. In this case, the people running the show manipulate the players to take on these roles even if they would otherwise be against type, but the ritual of playing out this formula in this way, with the virgin as the only one to see the end, must be faithfully enacted. But still no “final girl,” per se.

However, at some point something changed: in recent years, there have been many fictional works which revolve around both the role and the term (many of which I hope to write about in the coming weeks): Grady Hendrix’s the Final Girls’ Support Group, Stephen Graham Jones’s My Heart is a Chainsaw, and from 2015 alone, two films: The Final Girl and The Final Girls. All of these, and many others, focus on the significance of the role – how inspiring and important it can be for some people, how one can live in constant comparison with its ideal. Even if Clover was more interested in why men would identify with this female character, the resilient, heroic final girl has become aspirational for generations.

For my part, I find a couple of things both effective and interesting. On one basic level, something that works for me is that vulnerability, but I wonder if it’s an issue of what (male) audiences (myself included) will watch and respond to, or if it’s an issue of how writers, directors, and producers expect they will react. I cannot honestly imagine that were I to find myself in some terrible, dangerous situation, I would be John McClaning it barefoot through the air ducts, taking out a building full of terrorists. I would probably be cowering terrified in a corner someplace. It is much easier to identify (outside of hero-wish fulfillment, and don’t get me wrong, Die Hard is a blast!) with a “normal” person who is duly scared of scary things, but through whom we get to vicariously rise to the challenge of facing that fear and vanquishing that horror, even if we have to run around screaming a lot first, even if we drop our knife when we shouldn’t and don’t check to make sure he’s really, really dead before we start running away – it’s easy to yell at the screen and claim that we wouldn’t make such mistakes, but I bet most of us would. When we go on this journey with this fragile, very human character, the heroic thrill of overcoming the threat is all the more exciting.

On another level, I find it fascinating how the trope has been so culturally reproduced as to become truly mythic. The first slasher cycle is largely characterized by non-magical assailants – just a crazy guy with a knife, or a pitchfork, or a drill, or a, you get the picture… (later, especially in the second half of the 80s, following the success of Freddy Krueger, and trying to do something new, there were many more supernatural killers). But somehow, the repetition of this simple structure – kids, party, killer, girl-who-lives – has resulted in a significant archetypal figure, one who resonates in people’s imagination – this is perhaps how myths get born.

She was born out of the lust of storytelling and business. She was named by academia, and once identified, the art form in which she lived came to better know itself, becoming more reflexive. She has subverted gendered expectations and she has been used to reify puritanical norms. She has grown into a full-out action hero and she has been fleshed out as a person, allowed to grieve and to grow. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter why a group of film makers first settled on a pattern – now she exists and carries (sometimes contradictory) meaning. She is an inspiring feminist icon. She is a harmful reduction of femaleness – not even female, so much as a man in narrative drag. She is a calculated attempt to sell women’s empowerment to make a buck. She is a re-gendered ‘everyman’ with whom all can identify, with whom all can vicariously journey through hell and return, tempered by the experience.

All of this is to say that as I just spent a couple weeks focused on one sub-genre (the Lesbian Vampire movie), I’m about to spend a bit of time with Slashers and the Final Girl. Check in weekly for more.

Queering Horror

Posted on June 28, 2022 by Glen — 1 Comment ↓

First, I should lay my cards on the table. I can’t lay claim to any of the letters of the LGBTQQIP2SAA… experience (hereinafter, in short, LGBT+), myself. However, I do find myself reading and listening to a lot that looks at horror from a queer perspective (e.g., the podcasts Horror Queers, The Gaylords of Darkness, and the sadly defunct Attack of the Queerwolf) and, as it is still Pride Month for a couple more days, I wanted to do something with the notion of “queer horror” and look at a couple examples that I enjoy. That said, I hope this is not received in any way as disrespectful. One might fairly ask why I, a straight-cis guy, should have something at all to say about queer-anything. All I can offer is that I write here about what I find interesting and I find this interesting and approach it with respect and appreciation. I hope that’s enough…

Muffinpines, Get Ready to be Babashook, 2017, drawing. USA. Babashook, Kylie O’Neil, 2018.

So to begin, I think there are a couple of reasons that I consume so much of this stuff. Firstly, the world of horror fandom can be a really varied place, featuring many thoughtful and insightful people, but also including some personalities that turn me off (e.g., the “horror-bro”), and explicitly queer and/or feminist content is simply a more pleasant listen; I feel I have more in common with an artist who would call themselves queer than an agro dude who would use that word to belittle someone or something. Secondly, I enjoy when discourse comes from a clear viewpoint. Having some inkling of the writer/speaker’s lived experience serves as a lens through which to view their opinion, making it all more personal, while also drawing attention to that lens itself. Now, to be fair, there are countless perspectives out there. One might look at horror from a Black perspective, or Jewish, or French, or Marxist, or Freudian, or as a person who does crossword puzzles, etc., but this is a very prominent one. You can find writing that looks at horror content from all of these other angles and more, but none of them have quite the profile in the world of horror criticism that queerness does.

Queer

And perhaps this is with good reason. ‘Queer’ is a once derogatory term, which has been reclaimed as a proud self-identifier of otherness (specifically in terms of sexual/gender identity). Horror is all to do with the ‘other,’ with what is outside the norm. What else is a monster? And while traditionally, the approach has been to posit that other as inhuman, abject, an object of fear, so much of the genre takes a position of at least sympathizing, if not outright identifying, with it. Who watches Frankenstein and roots against the creature (cue obligatory note that it and its first sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, which is very, very camp, were directed by an out gay man)? And even when the sympathies of the audience are not intentionally aligned with the monster or the monstrous experience on display (for another classic example, take Nosferatu, directed by another out gay man), there is still an inherent fascination, an attraction (sometimes conflicted) towards that which social/ethical/religious norms instruct us to abjure.

Especially given how focused the genre can be on the body, on flesh and fluids, on explicit, titillating, sometimes “gratuitous” sex and nudity, it is easy to make the leap from the allure of one deviation from the norm to another. I’d not be the first to observe that horror as a whole is, thus, pretty ‘queer.’

Reading a Film

But sometimes more so than others and in ways far more varied than I would venture to survey in such a short essay. So, what kinds of ‘queer horror’ might we look at here? One major branch consists in queer readings of horror texts with no explicitly LGBT+ characters. This may be informed by knowing that the writer or director, or some key member(s) of the cast were not straight/cis, but also sometimes a text just lends itself well to the reading.

A great example here is Fright Night (1985). No characters are identified as ‘gay,’ but there is so much to read into it: Charlie ignoring his girlfriend, who is finally ready to sleep with him, because he’s so fascinated by the suave, magnetic man who just moved in next door (who is a vampire); Ed, a weird kid in a kind of showy way, ostracized even by his purported friends, who is seduced to vampirism with the line, “I know what it’s like being different. Only they won’t pick on you anymore… or beat you up. I’ll see to that”; the tragedy of Peter Vincent, a very queer coded (British accent, delicate physicality, lots of makeup), older character having to kill Ed (as a wolf) and watch him suffer and die – it feels like there is a connection there, like Ed would have been able to come to him for support and community, had things only been different; and of course, the fact that Jerry the vampire comes to town with his servant/roommate/live-in-carpenter, Billy (apparently they travel around flipping houses together and collecting antiques), and their relationship seems genuinely warm and tender (and Jerry seems truly crushed when Billy is killed).

Somehow, even the totally hetero-seduction of Amy on the dance floor (under very “bisexual-lighting,” long before that was a thing) carries a soupçon of queerness in her awakening to her own sexuality, identity, and the extent to which she is done with this immature boy – when she bares her neck to be bitten, she chooses otherness for herself (ending up somewhat shark mouthed for a time). Of course, by the end, the seductive/disruptive vampire has been vanquished, Charlie and Amy are back together, and everything’s very straight, but that does not erase all that came before.

I think the case of finding queerness in Fright Night represents the lion’s share of queer horror. A queer reading here comes easily, but any text can be “queered” or read in this way, and I enjoy hearing about/reading how individuals have found their own stories and experiences reflected in work that may have honestly never considered them. Sometimes it’s a stretch, but even then, there is the pleasure of a totally personal engagement with a work, which is far more fulfilling than a claim at objectively judging a work’s artistic/literary merits, or lack thereof.

A Question of Representation

Sometimes, interpretation isn’t necessary to find a character who is explicitly LGBT+; it’s all on the surface. This representation might be positive, as in the case of the basketball coach in Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker, who is only ever shown to be a caring educator, seeking to help the traumatized young person in his care (who may also be gay – a plot point that is never firmly settled) navigate a world of murderous aunts and viciously homophobic police (though the real reason the film is so embraced is probably Susan Tyrell’s gloriously over-the-top performance, treasured by aficionados of high camp).

Sometimes, a case can be made for reading a film to be, even unintentionally, supportive of the LGBT+ community (I would argue this for Sleepaway Camp, but I don’t want to open that can of worms without a huge spoiler warning from the get go). Sometimes, a work may explicitly feature LGBT+ characters (such as an early 70s Lesbian Vampire film) but have obviously been made with a typical straight-male gaze in mind (though even in those cases, it can be compellingly liberating to watch a woman discovering what an improvement this alluring female vampire lover is over her brutish, abusive, and/or possibly deeply closeted and self-hating husband – e.g., Daughters of Darkness).

Very often, though, the representation can be toxic. This seems especially true with trans (or if not exactly ‘trans,’ then at least notably gender-nonconforming) characters, such as Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.

What fascinates me here is taking in how others navigate their own complex relationships with problematic texts. One may find certain elements noxious, or even harmful, and still treasure a given film. Hearing a trans person detail their complicated appreciation for Dressed to Kill, Psycho, or Terror Train, while reckoning with, challenging, and criticizing, or even decrying the perpetuation of the dangerous ‘killer-trans’ trope can be illuminating (outside of the purview of this essay, the same can be said, for example, of women, particularly survivors of sexual violence, who find comfort in exploitative rape-revenge films, such as I Spit on Your Grave).

This is an experience that I do not have personally, but I can find things uncomfortable; there can be that sense of ‘is this alright?’ ‘is it still ok to enjoy this?’ and sometimes I need to reckon with a film I love saying or doing something that I find ugly. Seeing how others thread this needle of engagement with work can be instructive. You can love something, and you can criticize it; you can find value and harm in the same place, and it is valuable to interrogate that juxtaposition. Life is complicated. (And of course, mileage may vary – a regressive, harmful message can simply ruin a film for a person as well.)

Queer as a Verb

The last strain of queer horror I’d like to look at is, I think, rarer, but might also be what interests me most, and it brings us first to a fairly academic discussion. In her book, Gender Trouble, Judith Butler framed gender as something not natural but rather, constantly performed, continually being performatively played into being; furthermore claiming that certain performances of gender, such as drag, can serve as a kind of strategy of resistance; a heteronormative text/image/concept (one which not only presents, but reifies a gender binary/heterosexual norm) can be twisted, played with, mocked and thus undercut – in other words, it can be “queered.” I am no expert in queer theory (but I did read a bit of Butler, Sedwick, Newton, and Sontag in grad school 20-something years ago, studying performativity), so I can’t say if Butler exactly coined the use of ‘queer’ as a verb, as something one does, but I associate her with it. Ok, so let’s bring this back to horror and how it can be ‘queered.’

In discussing the way that religious, reactionary types may decry the corruptive influence of horror, Stephen King noted that, ironically, “horror fiction is as conservative as a banker in a three-piece-suit”; you have “normal society” – it is disrupted by an (often external) othered threat; eventually that threat is conquered, and everything returns to normal, or the threat destroys all and it is a terrible tragedy. With respect to King though, I think that only describes one (perhaps dominant) kind of horror.

Another kind of horror is, for me, represented by the work of Clive Barker, who I intend to discuss in far greater depth when I finally finish re-reading his 6 volumes of the Books of Blood, comprising the vast majority of his short stories. (Look for that at some point.) One of the things that makes him so interesting to me is how much he doesn’t do what King described above. Sure, he brings in threats aplenty, and they can be violent, gory, weird, and very often obsessed with sex/the body/flesh, but so often his work culminates in a point where that threat, that horror becomes revelatory.

**Clive Barker – Midnight Meat Train 7, 2007**

Whilst their experiences are still horrific, characters so often undergo a transformation that approaches the divine. What originally seemed terrible – scary – disgusting, twists into something of beauty. By the end of the night, Kaufman in The Midnight Meat Train has witnessed untold brutality. It has been a nightmare: one that he wakes from mutilated and traumatized, but also with a sense of newfound purpose, of service, of glory. He falls to his knees and kisses the filthy streets of the city which had so disappointed him and to which now he pledges eternal loyalty. And I don’t think we, the readers, are supposed to be horrified by this. Elements of his journey were meant to be (and were) horrific, but having ridden this train with him, we attend his beatification in the spirit that he does, and the cognitive dissonance of the dread and the awe are delicious.

I’ve long felt that this is a kind of ‘queering’ of horror. It may have nothing to do with sexual or gender identity (though Barker, himself, is gay and does often include gay characters), but is it any less subversive to render that once deemed utterly contemptible, transcendent?

A Recent Favorite – Suspiria (2018)

In planning to write this text, I’ve revisited a number of films and watched some for the first time, and while I’ve enjoyed most, I took the greatest pleasure in re-watching one of my favorites of recent years (which I’ve briefly touched on before) through this particular lens: Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018), which can be viewed as a work of queer horror in multiple ways. It never explicitly states that any of the characters are LGBT+, but it is so easy to see romantic/sexual tension in their relationships – both between Susie and Sara and between Susie and Madame Blanc (not to mention among the feminist dance collective/witch coven in general). Furthermore, once those relationships are taken as a given, the story really comes to life so much more fully and is that much more emotionally resonant (I’ve heard that in the first draft they were explicitly presented, and so, in the final cut, they are still there even if the film never directly speaks of them). Also, Tilda Swinton plays a man, so that’s something. Guadagnino, himself, is out and the fact that the last film he’d made before this was the gay coming-of-age story, Call Me By Your Name, perhaps further frames the conversation. But for me, this also serves as an example of “queered” horror, ala Barker.

Even before I picked up on the chemistry between the characters, I loved the tactile physicality and sensuality of the film. It is a film about dancers and I believe in the dance of it. There is a relationship to gravity, to the body in space, to breath that all feels so totally of dance. And I love how the witchcraft is woven so fully through the work of that dance. The academy is not just a location where a secret cabal of witches hides behind the front of teaching dance (as it is in the 1977 original). The dance is the witchcraft. And it really is gorgeous, and dark, and the grounding of the dance makes the magic feel all the more solid and corporeal.

Into this space, so focused on the physical relationship between bodies, enters Susie Bannon, still a quiet newcomer to the academy, but no longer the delicate waif of the original (Jessica Harper was great, but it was a very different role). This Susie may giggle shyly, but she also stares back with a disarming directness, and she notably does so with two women there: her fellow dancer, Sara (who, like Susie, is also being groomed as a possible vessel for Helena Markos, the mostly unseen founder of the academy, lurking beneath the floorboards, dominating the coven and feeding on youth) and the other matriarch of the dance company (and its dominant creative presence), Madame Blanc.

The connection between Susie and Sara could easily be read as simply friendship, but there are moments that feel like more. When Susie has been having nightmares (a common occurrence in the school) and Sara runs to her and pushes her way into her bed, there is a sweet intimacy, a frankness that approaches sexuality. At a later moment, Sara returns to Susie’s room and is crestfallen to find it empty (Susie’s with Blanc at the time). Finally, in the film’s climax, after Sara has met a sad and bloody fate (having discovered something of the coven/academy’s intentions), Susie releases her from her torment with a sigh of “sweet girl” and cradles her as she goes. All of this still plays well if there is no hint of romance between them, but with it, the moment is all the more bittersweet.

On the other pairing, every scene between Susie and Madame Blanc feels like lovemaking – it’s just that no one actually has sex. But in the transmission of choreography in the dance studio, or asking and avoiding personal questions while eating a chicken wing, or staring at each other across a crowded table as all the others laugh and sing, or in the rare touch they may share, their desire and connection are palpable. At first, it seems that there is a power imbalance at work (which feels both potentially improper and as if that is part of the allure) – after all, Susie is the young, inexperienced dancer and Madame Blanc has run the company for years, but by the end, it is revealed just how much the truth is quite the opposite and how much Susie has been in control all along, tenderly leading and indulging her lover (of sorts). Again, the story tracks if there is no attraction, but I feel it’s strengthened – made more meaningful – by its presence.

But I think the piece is queerer than that, and it is here that I return to that Butler/Barker notion of ‘queered horror.’ While it takes its time, and is absolutely dense with its themes of power, abuse, responsibility, memory, guilt, and so much more, by the end, Suspiria is an absolute abattoir. Bodies have been broken (one in a bravura scene of dance, magic, and power). Viscera dangle from abdomens. Heads explode. Arterial sprays paint the walls. You might say it’s intense. But it isn’t scary. For me, I remember being in the cinema, just glowing with something like joy and melancholy. It is really a moment of beauty – sad and violent beauty, but beauty nonetheless. I danced all the way home.

And I feel that in this, Guadagnino has taken Argento’s dark fairy tale of scary witches preying on young dancers (which I love in its own right) and he has absolutely ‘queered’ it. Partly through the addition of the magnetic exchanges between these central characters, he has twisted the threat of the original film into a revelation of sensual power, and dominance, and gentleness. There is a kind of vengeance here, but also mercy.

From the very beginning, the witches are pretty much ‘out’. Susie doesn’t need to discover that the school is being run by an evil coven (she watches some instructors cackling and toying with a couple of pantsless, ensorcelled police inspectors and rather than being shocked, she titters to herself and the whole event passes without comment) – she has to instead discover who she is, and has always been, however repressed she was at home (her religious mother referring to her as “my sin. She’s what I smeared on the world”), and accept this in both its strength and its sorrow. This is the rare remake that doesn’t just go a different direction with the source material, but rather subverts it, turning it inside out to enact a totally different project of queer, female power.

The only way that it is truly similar to its precursor is in how much they are both works of excess: Argento’s being an excess of style, of sensory data, of color and sound, and glorious violence, and Guadagnino’s being an excess of ideas). They are otherwise opposite films.

So Much More

And so, this is all just to scratch the surface of the world of queer horror. There’s so much more to explore: from the haunting, tender self-discovery of Thelma to the John Waters-esque grotesque camp of All about Evil or Seed of Chucky, from the ambivalence of Nightmare on Elm Street II: Freddy’s Revenge (presenting a very coded young gay man as the lead – a rarity, especially at the time – but centering him in a story that presents his burgeoning sexual identity as a deadly monstrosity, his only hope of salvation being the love of a good woman) to the explicit, gay-porn themed modern giallo, Knife + Heart, from the Carmilla based, French, poetic Blood and Roses to the Carmilla based, lurid Hammer Horror, The Vampire Lovers (really, Carmilla is all over the lesbian vampires, unsurprisingly). There is a deep well. And though I still can’t claim any particular letters, I’m sure I will continue to take pleasure in these bloody parables of self-revelation, as well as others’ interpretations of the countless texts onto which queerness might be ascribed.

Threatening Innocence – The Bad Seed & Village of the Damned

Posted on April 22, 2022 by Glen — 1 Comment ↓

When you consider the things that scare people, some are obvious and some are not. Though most spiders and snakes won’t bite you, some can kill and it’s hard to know which is which. Though standing at a great height on a windless day, there is no reason to think you might fall, if you did, it would be fatal. Though most of us will probably never be stalked by a madman with a knife, that would certainly be unpleasant and we could be forgiven fearing such a thing. But then there are some fears that seem less rooted in realistic threat: open spaces, for instance, or public speaking, or a doll, or a clown.

I think films like Child’s Play or Puppet Master work because toys should be safe. They exist only to entertain children and therefore, carry a de facto innocence. They are in our homes, with our kids, and we trust them, but trust necessitates vulnerability and maybe that’s scary. So if they happen to carry the spirit of a serial killer or have been animated by an ancient Egyptian spell, and come to life in the middle of the night to prey on our children or ourselves, beyond just being a danger, the corruption of the trusted, innocent plaything lends an additional sheen of horror, of wrongness.

So, too with clowns, a common fear. Again, they exist to make kids happy, but their image inherently suggests that something else might lie beneath the façade of a painted smile. Thus, it’s not that surprising that, while most might be perfectly nice children’s entertainers, the monstrous clown, grotesque beneath the greasepaint, has become a common image of fear.

And if these markers of innocence, these things that become horrific because it’s wrong for kids’ things to be scary, if they can send chills down the spine, what about kids themselves? I doubt I’m alone in thinking they too can be eerie. They are human, but they’re not really like us – and are thus somewhat alien. They come from us and we try to “raise them right” to share our values and perspectives, but they retain their interiority and we can never really know what’s happening behind their eyes. We love and protect them, treasuring their innocence for as long as it lasts, but we also know that they can lie, and take, and act out of a wrathful, violent sense of having been wronged. I read somewhere that every two-year-old is essentially a psychopath, but that most of us grow out of it. I’ve never been a parent, but I can imagine it’s a terrifying thought that yours might not.

And so, with that, I’d like to look at two films today that offer iconic treatments of the creepy child: The Bad Seed and Village of the Damned. To really discuss them in some detail, there will be spoilers so I recommend seeking them out before going any further.

What Is It With Overly Mature Blonde Kids?

There are many currents that run through both works, some of which are surface similarities and some of which speak to a deeper resonance. In both cases we have creepy children with flaxen hair, who can be unnervingly adult in their demeanor, whose threat is linked to their heredity, who kill remorselessly to get what they want, and whose parent figures take it upon themselves to kill them. I think in both films, the creep factor is linked with this sense of a maturity beyond their years. For a child to be cold and calculating, to enact its own gaze, declaring itself a subject of equal or greater prominence as the adults around it, can be unnerving. Rhoda is often praised for her maturity, but sometimes her mother seems uncomfortable with it as well. The children of the village are never demure minors to be watched by their elders – they look back and with their look, they actively use their power, controlling people’s minds and bending them to their will.

We also have an interesting treatment of sociopathy in both cases, but they do differ in significant ways. Rhoda is described as a “natural little girl” who “knows what she wants and asks for it – not like these over-civilized little pets that have to go through analysis before they can choose an ice cream soda.” Unhampered by social mores, she unashamedly voices her desires and does what she needs to in order to realize them. If this means murder, that is no bother to her and she feels no guilt; after all, she wanted it, now she has it, and she’s not the one who drowned so why should she be upset? The children are also free from remorse, and it is there that their alien potency lies. In their words, “If you did not suffer from emotions, from feelings, you could be as powerful as we are.” It’s not only mental dominance, but rather this amoral freedom that gives them an edge. And in both films, their parent figure futilely tries to instill a moral sense, only to come up against a brick wall (though said wall becomes quite useful in the second film). Much of the horror of both films is the realization of the impossibility of that moral instruction. They are simply different and cannot be shaped by a ‘good upbringing.’

The Bad Seed (1956)

Based on a book, and later a play, of the same name, Mervyn LeRoy’s film is high family melodrama of the first order, and it is a treat. At its center is Christine Penmark, the mother of a young girl, Rhoda, the titular “bad seed.” Having grown up with loving and doting parents, and then loving and doting on a child of her own, Christine has always feared somehow that she was adopted. After noticing concerning behavior from her daughter, she presses the issue and learns that she had been born to a famous serial killer. Somehow this penchant for killing skipped her generation and has been planted in her beloved eight year old child, a child whom we know is responsible for at least three murders and by the end of the film is unashamedly planning a fourth. Christine poisons Rhoda and subsequently shoots herself in the head (in the first of three endings in the film – it had trouble with the Hayes Code and had to do some narrative gymnastics to secure a release). It is an emotional, intense film and the confrontation with a horrific truth, long dreaded and now impossible to deny, situates it in the genre even without the presence of a creepy killer kid.

Central to the story is the classic question of Nature vs. Nurture. The film is peopled with psychologists, crime journalists, and writers, and they are generally all of the opinion that the results are in and that environment alone shapes personality – a child from a good home, well raised, simply could not become criminal – it is only the socially and economically deprived who fall into a life of crime. The idea that a child could be born with such murderous inclinations is simply beyond belief. Thus, as Christine comes to this reckoning, she is alone in it and her concerns fall on deaf ears. I think in this, the story circles around issues of class in an interesting manner. It is clear that Christine comes from money (particularly in contrast to the Daigles, the parents of Claude, the child Rhoda kills), and it is unthinkable that a child of her station could commit a crime – that is something that only poor children do. Now, is the film’s stance progressive in showing how this villainy can grow even in the richest soil, or is there an ugliness in the suggestion that ‘bad blood will out’? After all, it is because Christine’s mother was a killer (from lower circumstances) that her daughter is doomed to be one as well. It is of central importance that Rhoda’s moral deformity is not just a question of happenstance, but rather of heredity.

The main thing that distinguishes this from today’s other film is how emotional it is. Christine is so distraught by Claude’s death and it is so shocking when Rhoda isn’t. Christine is confronted with the weight of that loss by Claude’s mother, Hortense (Eileen Heckart, who rather steals the show as the drunk, broken mother, with nothing left to lose, gasping for the truth). The juxtaposition of Rhoda happily banging away Au Clair de la Lune on the piano as Leroy burns to death on the lawn is chilling and the choice to focus solely on Christine’s face through the sequence is heartbreaking – she knows whose responsibility this is – hers. And ultimately, the revelation of Christine’s birth is a source of great trauma, and the degree to which she is tragically torn between the need to protect her daughter and to destroy the evil she has spawned is powerful. When she finally decides to give Rhoda an overdose of sleeping pills (which she happily gobbles up as a new vitamin), it is to protect her from a world which would hunt her as a monster. It’s all very effective and it’s a shame that the censors of the time forced the adoption of such a bizarre ending (which I won’t describe, but is fun in its sudden, out of left field, over-the-top ridiculousness).

Even with this oddly tacked on final moment, the total effect is enjoyably melodramatic and tragic, and it’s got a real bite.

Village of the Damned (1960)

The second film is also concerned with emotion, but more as a study of its absence. While Rhoda can be calculating, she also has a psychopath’s rage. In contrast, the children of the village are totally distanced from emotion, and this remove makes them uncanny. Furthermore, taking an unemotional, scientific approach is what distinguishes the main protagonists as well.

The story begins with a strange and intriguing occurrence. One day, everyone within the border of Midwich, a small British village, falls unconscious. In response, a military team investigates methodically, setting up a perimeter, seeing what happens when someone new enters (they pass out as well), and testing everyone when all is said and done. One moment sets the tone for the rest of the film. Major Bernard, unable to reach family in Midwich, goes to investigate. When nearing the town line, he sees a police officer enter to check out a crashed bus and immediately collapse. He doesn’t run in after him or try to help him at all, but immediately turns around and drives the other way to call in the authorities. What a reasonable thing to do.

It’s soon discovered that every woman of child bearing age is now pregnant (a fact resulting in some heightened emotion – both good and bad as some husbands have been away on work or some teens have never even kissed a boy) and those pregnancies develop rapidly, resulting in a batch of eerie, platinum haired babies all born on the same day, who can telepathically communicate with each other and have some power of command over others. We largely follow Gordon Zellaby, an older man with a young wife who finds himself the supposed father of one of these children. A man of science, he does not seem overly bothered by his lack of true paternity, but is thrilled at the possibilities the children may lead to: “they are one mind to the twelfth power. Now just think what it would mean if we could guide it…we cannot throw away this potential just because of a few incidents.”

Others in the town, in the government, or in other countries where this strange event also occurred are made uncomfortable by the kids, and in some countries we learn that the children, and even sometimes the mothers, were all killed (in the USSR, the whole city where they lived was nuked because they had taken control and there was no other way to stop them). However, Gordon defends their value to science and human progress, establishing a school that they will all be moved into, where he can try to teach them, instilling human values of empathy and kindness.

In the end, he comes to understand the threat they pose to humanity at large (planning to spread and start new colonies), he calmly sends his wife away under some pretense, and managing to block them out of his mind, he goes for his final lesson with a bomb in his briefcase and blows them all up. While The Bad Seed chews the scenery at every opportunity (delightfully so), this films plays it cool, and that is perhaps its central theme. The children’s lack of passion, of affect is both troubling and powerful. They are more open to Gordon than some others because he is able to approach them from a position of scientific curiosity and not outrage, and in the end, he defeats them by acting in a precise, calculated manner. It’s even easy to miss his change from their defender to their killer, and when I first watched it, I found that to be a flaw – something was missing.

While the first half had been so intriguing, in the second half, as we moved towards the climax, it was all so cool – where was the drama of this final decision? But on reflection, it is fitting that his was the only possible solution. The angry villagers with pitchforks and torches were immediately rebuffed and/or burned to death. The scientist who has simply made a reasonable decision and who goes to carry it out in a dispassionate manner can successfully mask his intentions and carry them to completion, thus saving the town, and possible the world itself. It is not that he lacks emotion (he seems to love his wife, had been initially quite happy at the prospect of parenthood, and played the piano wistfully waiting to go off and explode), but he can act without it, and thus triumphs.

What’s Worse – Fire or Ice?

While Rhoda lacks empathy or true tenderness, she experiences passions. She wants, and demands, and takes hotly, lashing out when not accommodated. The children of Midwich are rather the opposite, acting only out of a calculated biological drive to live and to spread. They do not rage or feel wronged; they do just that which is necessary. And which of these is really the larger threat?

In both cases, morality and ethics are absent. Neither cares about how others feel or what they think. But one is hot, chaotic, and probably far easier to identify with – we all get angry sometimes, feel wronged, want to have what we want when we want it – and the other is cold, reasonable, and organized. For my part, Rhoda is scariest in a personal sense – we know that the world is full of jerks and egoists who only care about themselves, and we constantly have to interact with them (though hopefully none of them will burn us alive, drown us, or push us down the stairs). Furthermore, the horror of a child being so irredeemable is really awful. But the children of Midwich represent something much scarier on a larger, necessarily impersonal, scale. In their uniformity and cold, functional intention, they are the drive of progress, of power, of the future, of any system or machine that cares not who gets crushed beneath its wheels as it moves inexorably forward. Do they have a whiff of Nazism in their Aryan appearance and drive to power and domination? Perhaps Rhoda is a more horrific person (because she is a person – a simplified perhaps, but well-drawn young sociopath), but the children of Midwich are a more chilling concept, especially since it probably can’t be forestalled by thinking of a brick wall: the future will come for us – it cannot be reasoned with – and it will break us.

But I’m sure your kid is great. A little angel. Nothing to worry about at all…

Delightfully Flinching in the New Header

Posted on February 5, 2022 by Glen — 1 Comment ↓

So, this has been in the works for quite some time, and now I’m happy to finally announce a brand-spanking new header for the site. If you’re on a mobile device, you may not see it, so here it is (with apologies to desktop users for the duplication):

Particular gratitude is due to the photographer, Klaudia Bałazy, and the models, Gabriela, Julia, Ola, Kasia (who also had the idea for the image), and Magda, all of whom I’m happy to collaborate with in La Folie – Retro Cabaret Show. Thanks all – I think it’s pretty groovy!

The image (at the top of the page – or if you are an e-mail subscriber – click through to check it out) grows out of a cabaret sketch we did for a Halloween performance. The idea of the sketch was to recreate the style of a silent horror film – all women in incongruously elegant gowns (ala The Old Dark House), exploring a creepy old manor by candle light, discovering a shrouded figure, and, fingers trembling, reaching out to reveal his monstrosity (ala Phantom of the Opera), before screaming in a building terror that edges on madness (ala Metropolis) – but funny.

It was a comedy bit after all, and the idea was to both pay homage to the visual sumptuousness of the silent era and to have some fun with the over-the-top-ness of the premise. One woman shrieking in fear might be scary. Four women, one seemingly straight laced husband, and the hideously deformed creature chasing them all sequentially startling each other like classic Scooby Do shtick and then silently shrieking in alarm was hopefully pretty funny.

It was a treat to work on and I think the effect achieved with relatively simple means (LED candles and one technician with a close handheld light source) was stylish, atmospheric, and playful. It is a real pleasure – a delight, you might say – to bring to life even a small idea that really tickles your fancy. And out of it was born a visual concept for this blog that took a few months to finally execute, but with which I’m really happy: five women, in chic dresses, screaming like something out of a classic film.

So, let’s talk about that. Once I finally finished assembling the image, I couldn’t help but notice that gender had been (perhaps inadvertently, but nonetheless, prominently) foregrounded. I mean, it is such a long standing criticism of the genre that it focuses on and fetishizes images of female suffering. Whether or not that critique is totally accurate has been fairly challenged, but perhaps the very fact that I didn’t include any guys – it just wouldn’t have been the iconic look I was after – does imply the persistence of a trend and suggest that it should be discussed.

On one level, this is evident throughout the history of the genre – looking at classic horror cinema from the silent era, the 30s Universal horrors, Val Lewton in the 40s, monster movies of the 50s, up to the slasher boom of the late 70s-80s, and beyond, a woman screaming is just such a central image. For some critics, this is a sign of an inherent misogyny – the viewer is invited to sadistically and vicariously get off on looking from the POV of the masculine threat at his prey. Others perceive a different, but not necessarily less misogynistic, approach – the woman is the endangered protagonist because her gender implies a vulnerability which makes the threat that much scarier – now, vicariously identifying with the female body situates us, the viewers, more as “victims.” Still others defend the trend as pure style or aesthetics (thus opening themselves up to new criticisms of objectification) – Dario Argento once famously said, “I like women, especially beautiful ones…I would much rather watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man.”

And others have read this totally differently. You could certainly take the degree to which the woman is in the middle of the horror narrative as positive; regardless of the reasons for it, compared to the majority of other genres, horror’s number of female protagonists (final girls, scream queens, imperiled ingénues, or what have you) is effectively quite progressive. Sure – women might be centered so that the protagonist can display “weak” traits that are unfairly coded as feminine (fear, hysteria, physical weakness). I’m pretty sure I remember Carol Clover describing how, in the figure of the “final girl,” the audience can have its cake and eat it too, identifying both with her feminized fear and with the moment when she stands up and fights back, taking on what are read as masculinized characteristics (and, of course, striking out with some penetrative sharp phallic object – Freud is all over this stuff).

But I think what this all really speaks to is how unrealistic the “strong” traits coded as masculine are. In a moment of real crisis, I expect most of us are more likely to freeze up, be incapable of acting, and hide in a corner weeping until ugly death comes for us. Exceptionally few would have the chutzpa to really rise as some hyper-masculine action star and lay waste to the threat, whatever it might be. I think these maligned traits, supposedly feminine, may actually be just the most realistic traits for any character to have. Facing true horror, honestly, who wouldn’t scream?

A striking example here is Barbara from Night of the Living Dead. The presentation of her character has oft been denounced as unfair to women. Of all of the figures in the seminal zombie classic, she is particularly useless, spending much of the film either hysterically freaking out or in a state of near catatonia. George Romero even took the criticism to heart and in the 1990 remake, which he wrote but didn’t direct, she was a total badass to make up for it. That’s fine – it’s actually a kind of good movie in its own right – but I think Barbara from the original rings so true. Here’s this young woman who sees her brother killed in front of her, gets chased by some weird madman to a house in the middle of nowhere, and comes to realize that the dead are rising and eating the flesh of the living! If there’s a more appropriate time to snap under the pressure, I can’t think of one and I think that put in her position, more people (men and women) would behave exactly as she does.

So, at the end of the day, sure – it’s impossible to deny that there are social inequities associated with the classic image of the screaming woman, but I think sometimes they are more linked with expectations that unjustly persist in society than with what the picture itself necessarily communicates. For my part, I really love the new image we’ve created here. I think it strikes a balance of terror and playfulness, with a classic cool vibe (and the gender focus is a part of that), celebrating the films themselves and reveling in the horror, while calling for some degree of reflexivity – some work of interpretation. Life is endlessly complicated and we are all probably ultimately unknowable to ourselves, so anything that suggests we take a moment for consideration is worthwhile.

In our sketch, it was finally one of the girls who enters into the house, finds the square jawed, masculine, husband type tied up in the basement, screaming for his life and saves him, before revealing that she’s actually a vampire and biting his throat. The point is that sometimes, you can be all things, having and eating your cake, enjoying the repeating image of the screaming woman and inverting that image to have one save the day, and inverting it once again to make her the monster. All of the aforementioned perspectives can be simultaneously correct – even when they contradict each other. Maybe especially when they do.