Feminist Horror Plotting Against Patriarchy

BY ALISON GILLMOR

Ana Lily Amirpour's orror and feminism seem necessity. Historically, the genre’s great strength A Girl Walks Home like an unlikely pairing at has been its ability to explore dark and difficult Alone at Night is a black and white, first. After all, horror is a places. Horror probes the extremities of physi­ Persian-language, cinematic genre marked by cal vulnerability, the power of primal emotions, vampire spaghetti the transgressions and taboos lurking under the western with a ugly violence, menaced by surface of ordinary life. Done right, the horror feminist twist. masked men and packed with blonde sorority girls H genre is full of subversive possibility, and female who run upstairs when they should be running audiences, especially young female audiences, out of the house. Then there’s the iconic image of seem to be hungry for this promise. In 2009, the scary movie: the flash of a knife penetrating Entertainment Weekly reported that the major­ soft female flesh. ity of the North American audience for horror Recently, however, fans, filmmakers and cul­ movies is now female. tural critics have started to re-evaluate horror, It’s interesting to consider how 21st-century not just as a feminist possibility, but as a feminist female viewers are connecting with horror. In her

20 SUMMER 2015 HERIZONS book House of Psychotic Women, Canadian writer movie becomes a sneaky-smart feminist state­ and film programmer Kier-La Janisse exam­ ment—not to mention a prescient look at the ines her obsession with grindhouse exploitation 2008 financial crisis. flicks and extreme horror. A childhood scarred Over the last 25 years, feminist horror has by violence and family dysfunction drove her to received a boost from film theory and cultural this disturbing terrain, Janisse writes. But she studies. The notion of “the feminist spectator” “stayed there because of something in myself. And asserts the viewer’s ability to interpret popular that ‘something’ was decidedly female.” Movie culture through a feminist lens, so that canoni­ blogger Gita Jackson puts it this way: “Horror cal works like Night of the Living Head or The movies are one of the few places women are told Exorcist can yield new insights into our culture’s their fears are real.” For many women, the hor­ social, political and psychological stress points. ror genre is profoundly cathartic: It constructs Carol Clover’s 1992 study Men, Women, and imaginary spaces where they can work through Chainsaws is an influential reconsideration of true-life trauma. the horror genre. Clover points out that the last Defining feminist horror can be tricky. There person standing in the standard slasher flick are many approaches to feminism, so it fol­ is often a young woman, usually a resourceful, lows that there is no single infallible form for resilient brunette whom she calls “The Final a feminist film. The increase in the number of Girl.” In place of a gender-binary women behind the camera is crucial, but it’s not reading of horror, in which young an automatic guarantee of subversive content. In males identify sadistically with the Jennifer's Body (2009), written by Juno scripter killer and women identify masochis­ Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama tically with the victim, Clover argues (Girlfight), the disembowelling demon is now a that the experience of horror films hot cheerleader (Megan Fox) and the hapless, can be complex and fluid. helpless victims are now teenage boys. Merely Recent trends in mainstream hor­ reversing the usual gender roles, in this case, isn’t ror reflect the fact that postmodern enough to produce meaningful feminist subtext. audiences are increasingly savvy and It often requires only a subtle shift in viewpoint cinematically aware. Wes Craven’s to create a subversively feminist film. Take the super-meta Scream franchise and case of American Psycho (2000), based on a Bret producer Joss Whedon’s The Cabin Easton Ellis novel that many critics considered in the Woods upend horror tropes aggressively misogynistic. The 1991 book fol­ while simultaneously challenging lows the interior narrative of Patrick Bateman, conventional representations of gender, race Jen Soska and a Wall Street trader who tortures and murders and sexuality. Scream 3, for example, explicitly Sylvia Soska are women and men. delves into the buried history of Hollywood’s Vancouver film directors who Canadian director Mary Harron and script­ mistreatment of women, on- and off-screen. As were bored with writer Guinevere Turner transform Ellis’s brutal, the horror genre examines itself, gender issues standard horror deliberately banal prose into a hilarious, weirdly and set out are being brought out into the open. to produce high-spirited satire on male vanity. Patrick For the current crop of female filmmakers, the their own. Bateman (played with deranged glee by Christian horror genre also provides practical advantages. Bale) may be butchering women, but Harron Horror can be a place for outsiders, offering and Turner are taking a scalpel to social confor­ cheap and cheerful hospitality to indie voices mity, consumer capitalism and toxic masculinity. and fearless first-timers. Vancouver-born Jen and Patrick’s fetishization of brand names, his nervous Sylvia Soska, twisty twin sisters with a taste for bromances with other men, and his contempt the perverse, broke onto the scene with a $2,500 for women all reveal a fatal insecurity lurking debut film, called Dead Hooker in a Trunk. (The under his surface arrogance. Harron and Turner 32-year-old siblings originally tried to act in parody alpha-male posturing, as Patrick and his horror films but were so bored with the cliched Masters-of-the-Universe colleagues fret about female parts that they ended up writing, directing who has the best business cards and who can snag and producing their own stuff.) the most exclusive restaurant reservations. By Horror allows for DIY methods of funding, positioning Bateman’s masculinity as a constant, producing and distributing works. Iranian- desperate, ultimately hollow performance, the American filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour’s

HE R IZ0N S SUMMER 2015 21 premier feature, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Karen Lam's film was financed mostly through the crowdfunding Evangeline is a revenge story about a website Indiegogo. university student These cinematic developments have sparked a victimized by a gang recent spate of woman-led horror movies, and it’s of frat boys, who goes on to be empowered fascinating to see what a feminist version of “the by an ancient entity. return of the repressed” looks like. The sub-genre of body horror, for example, allows feminist film­ makers to examine the female body as a site of both vulnerability and power. The badass Soska sisters possess an unflinching curiosity about the extremes of human experience, and their second 61m, American Mary (2012), delves into The rape-and-revenge plot has a long history the underground subculture of body modification. in horror, with ’70s and ’80s films like I Spit Katharine Isabelle, a Canadian indie-horror dar­ on Your Grave and Ms. 45 provoking fraught ling with the self-contained coolness of a young debates over whether the genre is empowering or Bette Davis, plays promising medical student merely exploitative. The Soskas respond by treat­ Mary Mason, who drops out of school after she is ing Mary’s rape with restraint (especially by their raped by a manipulative professor. Cash-strapped usual gonzo standards), while going absolutely and rage-filled, she ends up performing illegal bonkers with the revenge story. surgeries for the bod-mod crowd, while plan­ Evangeline (2013), a no-budget debut by ning some non-consensual body modifications Canadian Karen Lam, covers some of the same for her attacker. territory, with the Vancouver-based writer and director using muted, evocative imagery to tell the story of a university student (Kat de Lieva) victimized by a gang of frat boys and left for dead in the B.C. wilderness. Empowered by an The film echoes the terror ancient entity, Evangeline pursues revenge, but her actions exact a spiritual cost. The story is at of the Pickton murders times clunky, but Lam’s supernatural elements are grounded in the grim realities of violence and the deaths and against girls and women. The film echoes the terror of the Pickton murders, the murdered disappearances on B.C.’s and missing women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and the deaths and disappearances on Highway of Tears. B.C.’s Highway ofTears. Female identity is another recurring theme in feminist horror. Mothers in horror can be scary— recall Margaret White, the fanatical Christian Body modification asserts the individual’s radi­ mother played by Piper Laurie in Carrie (1976). cal control over her own body, with procedures The Babadook (2014), an incredibly assured first that go way beyond the parameters of fashionable feature from Australian filmmaker Jennifer Kent, cosmetic surgery to alterations that can appear baf­ makes the revolutionary suggestion that being a fling to straight society (implanted horns, forked mother can be scary. In this anti-Hallmark Hall of tongues, filed teeth). In American Mary, a character Fame drama, Essie Davis plays Amelia, a woman named Ruby Realgirl has acquired a Barbie-doll struggling to raise her troubled six-year-old son. waist and pneumatic breasts that seem to pander Her husband has died in an accident on the way to the male gaze. But Ruby goes farther, asking to Sam’s birth, and Amelia moves through her Mary to remove her nipples and sew up her labia, days in a fog of financial worry, sleep deprivation giving her the smooth, impenetrable finish of a and suppressed grief. plastic doll. Ruby’s quest for inviolability can be Kent expertly delineates the son’s constant viewed as her own unusual form of sexual agency, “Mom, mom, mom” neediness, as well as Amelia’s and it becomes a poignant counterpoint to Mary’s increasingly exhausted retreat. Trapped in an darker story of rape and revenge. emotional deadlock, mother and son descend

22 SUMMER 2015 HERIZONS into a spiral of anxiety, isolation and instability. power of adolescent female sexuality, Ginger Snaps By the time the titular Babadook arrives, a spiky douses its lycanthropic action in buckets of gore, black figure from a mysterious pop-up book, it’s but it’s the drops of menstrual blood that feel unclear whether the terror involves supernatural truly taboo-busting. attack or mental breakdown. Ana Lily Amirpour’syf Girl Walks Home Alone The Babadook overturns our cultural expecta­ at Night (2014) is another sideways look at female tion that a mother’s love—always sweet, always adolescence, in this case an adolescence stretching sacrificial, always self-abnegating—will overcome toward eternity. The title of this unclassifiably any hardship. So entrenched is this sentimental cool film—a black-and-white, Persian-language, vision of motherhood that Amelia’s eventual American Mary vampire spaghetti western—is a bait-and-switch delves into the breakdown—a raw, writhing purge of maternal act. Its stock phrase is meant to make us nervous, subculture of body rage—is at once monstrous and deeply human. picturing the vulnerable, isolated girl and the van modification. The film’s complicated portrayal of Amelia is slowing, the figure looming out of the alleyway, grounded in the simple feminist acknowledge­ the dangerous stretch of scrubby vacant lot. But ment that, yes, sometimes motherhood is hard. this particular girl, played with enigmatic eroti­ Really, really hard. cism by Sheila Vand, is not prey but predator. Honeymoon (2014), an eerie little debut film The Girl, as she is called, dressed in what seems from American director Leigh Janiak, also deals to be half chador and half vampire cape, prowls with female identity. Paul (Harry Treadaway) the midnight streets of Bad City, a spooky semi­ and Bea (Rose Leslie of Game of Thrones) are industrial town hovering somewhere between newlyweds who head to Bea’s family’s Ontario Tehran and southern California. Meting out cabin in the chilly off-season for an affordable languid justice to various “bad men,” The Girl honeymoon. The Brooklyn hipsters are totally seems to be developing her very own odd, dreamy in love but a tad surprised that they’ve somehow Take Back the Night project. become married people—you know, like actual Just as The Girl wants to reclaim the night, a grown-ups. Bea, in particular, seems apprehensive new generation of female auteurs is set to take about the ramifications of being a Wife—you can back horror. And why not—it’s too potent a almost hear the capital “W ”—and, when Paul genre to be left to misogyny. By shining a light makes a joking, offhand reference to her “womb,” on our secret terrors, horror can take us past our Karen Walden's she starts panicking about whether she’s ready comfortable convictions to dark, difficult places. Ginger Snaps, to start a family. Horror movies aren’t always easy to watch, but, if starring Katharine These internal fears find external expression we look closely, we can see that discomfort often Isabelle and Emily Perkins, is a feminist when the couple encounters “something in the packs a subversive message. werewolf flick. woods.” After Paul finds Bea lost and wandering in the middle of the night, she slowly begins to transform into something else. Director Janiak plays deftly with the classic body-snatcher trope, but she uses it to address specifically female fears—about the potential loss of self in a rela­ tionship, about the demands of societal roles, about the pull of biology. Ginger Snaps (2000), scripted by Karen Walton and directed by John Fawcett, is a bitingly femi­ nist Canadian werewolf movie. (Fawcett went on to create the fabulously woman-centric television series Orphan Black.) Katharine Isabelle devours her breakthrough role as Ginger Fitzgerald, a high school girl who gets attacked by a werewolf on the night of her first period, neatly combining two monthly “curses” into one. Ginger may be a potential monster, but the prospect of con­ ventional middle-class womanhood scares her even more. A mordantly funny look at outcast suburban kids and at the spiky, unpredictable

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