B L O O D S P E a K Or How the Girl Grew up with Horror
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B L O O D S P E A K or How the girl grew up with horror by MacKenzie A. Weeks Advised by: Michael Sinowitz Convened by: Wayne Glausser Read by: Anne Harris DePauw University 2013 1 2 Acknowledgments There were many, including myself, who harbored serious doubts about the future of this project throughout the year‐long process of its completion. Despite this, due to my immense fortune, these same people, and many more others, can be directly credited for its success. Their unswerving dedication and support not only helped finish this work, but really accounts for the work as a whole. I feel ill‐equipped to express the breadth and depth of my gratefulness, but here, I’ll make a feeble attempt. First and foremost, I give all my respect and gratitude to my advisor, Michael Sinowitz, whose tolerance for me is only surpassed by his immeasurable intelligence and insight. Without him, I can safely say, there would be no thesis of which to speak. His support and encouragement in all areas have truly saved me. Thank you, deeply and sincerely. Many thanks are also due to my wonderful other committee members: the incomparable Wayne Glausser and Anne Harris, who guided my thesis to the form it now takes and offered themselves and their hard‐pressed time up for a project that was, at best, unconventional in its conception. I thank my parents, Dr. Tim and Kim Weeks, for their tireless encouragement, funding, and love during this tumultuous time, despite all else, now just as much as always, no matter what. Thanks for putting up with me. To Amelia Lant, who has been my perpetual cheerleader, solace, diary, drawing board, critic, and best friend during this time: thank you for believing in me when it seemed nearly impossible to believe in myself. Last, but never least, I must express the warmest, deepest, sincerest gratitude to the Honor Scholar program for allowing me this opportunity and preparing me for it with the most enriching, mind‐expanding, challenging, fun, fascinating courses and professors. Thanks to Amy Welch, Kevin Moore, Peg Lemley, and DePauw University for making this program and these participants so thoroughly excellent. To my other Honor Scholars, thanks for sticking it out with me. I salute you. Finally, thank you to horror films and those that make them, watch, them and love them just as much as I do. 3 4 Table of Contents Introduction … 7 Chapter 1: Silence of the Lambs … 11 Chapter 2: The Exorcist … 33 Chapter 3: Halloween … 54 Chapter 4: The Descent … 74 Conclusion … 97 Bibliography … 101 5 6 Introduction I watched my first horror film when I was six years old—admittedly a pretty tender age for explicit guts, gore, and psychological trauma. When the decidedly middling, Stephen King- helmed miniseries Rose Red aired on television in 2002, I perched, eleven-years-old, in front of the screen each night, rapt with fascination. A decade later, in my shared room at my sorority house, I would lay on the small day bed and stare dutifully at James Wan’s Insidious, a tense, haunted house-turned-possession story. From beginning to end, my life has been pursued by the horror film phantom. Since my first horror film, the genre’s held me in its vice-like sway, my fascination refusing to grow old or grow tired. For most of my life, I’d always regarded my horror fandom as a somewhat regrettable personality quirk, but in the past few years I’ve finally begun to embrace and question my commitment to the genre, forcing myself to ask, “Why is it exactly that you prefer watching Silence of the Lambs in the cloaked darkness of your room to watching rom-coms with your friends at slumber parties?” These are the women, the men, the characters onto whom I’ve sewn my life experiences, and how I’ve come to understand myself. It’s about time, I figured, to try to understand them. I began this whole process by trying to compile a list of all the horror films I’ve ever seen—an effort that proved to be too daunting to be fruitful. I gave up on that list and proceeded instead to write down my favorite scary movies. In this group were the ones that had stuck with 7 me, that I’d seen twenty times, or just once—because once was enough. To my surprise, even this list overwhelmed me at a page and a half. Clearly, I had to be more selective. From the group in front of me, I chose only a handful that were more than just films to me. More than just a horror film, each marked a moment or significance in my life or development, as a horror fan and as a human being. I ended up with four films: William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, John Carpenter’s Halloween, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, and Neil Marshall’s The Descent. I decided that it would be to these four that I’d give the critical shakedown. Before I touched the films, I wrote down, as best as I could remember, why these particular ones held significance for me. One happened to be my first horror film, while another stuck out as a salient abroad experience. Just the thought of each brought back charged memories that I knew were worth exploring. Something about these films said something to me then, and were worthy of the critical lens now. From the beginning, I wanted to try and understand why exactly I had become such a horror geek, and how that made any sense with my feminist beliefs and values. The more I looked at these films, the more I saw a parallel with my own growth and progress. As I tried to figure out my identity and my voice as a woman, I watched horror in many ways doing the same thing. First, internalizing the patriarchal discourse, then trying desperately to claw my way outside of it. First, hearing and believing that the patriarchy hated me and then realizing that this wasn’t a death sentence (pun intended). Because I couldn’t seem to approach horror without also somehow returning to myself, I knew a standard critical essay wasn’t the right format for my thoughts. Tipped off by an advisor, I began looking into a new genre of criticism that veered more towards the conversational 8 and personal. Nicholson Baker’s U and I , Elif Batuman’s The Possessed, and Jonathan Lethem’s probe into John Carpenter’s They Live served as crucial inspirations. Each presented a model of casual criticism, criticism as memoir, autoethnography—what have you—into which I could begin to pour my own mix of opinions and reflections. There’s no widely agreed-upon term for this type of writing, just as there exists no widely agreed-upon formula even for what this “genre” of writing entails. These invaluable books, however, gave me some idea of the medium’s vast possibilities and reassured my choice to pursue this format for my thesis. Extending further than format, critical influences for my work ranged from literary theorists, to philosophers, to feminist activists, and horror film fans themselves. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the pervasive and looming presence of Freudian and Lacanian thought in these pages, and in film and especially horror criticism as a whole. Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws, as well as Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous Feminine played heavily into my critical perspectives of the films I chose, as did the work of E. Ann Kaplan and Julia Kristeva. Using their work as a critical foundation, I revisited each of my favorite films, pulling out pieces I remembered striking me when I first saw them, or that struck me now, and applied this critical framework to their content and form. I supplemented these critical, argumentative discussions with personal recollections about my connection to each film, be it the experience watching it initially, or how it became relevant to my life in the long run. What resulted from this was a blend of facts and feelings, reflections and projections: a mixture of myself and of horror. In searching for a title for my work, I might not have chosen the most transparent one. “Blood Speaks: or How the Girl Grew Up with Horror Films,” I call it, and not arbitrarily. The more I watched, the more I saw that the women in the films I love didn’t have a voice. Horror is 9 notorious for silencing women, flattening them rather than filling them with motivations and desires and opinions. So instead, in order to understand what the women are trying to say about themselves and what the films have to say about them, I knew I had to look further than just their words. I had to look at their actions, their treatment, their trauma, their terror. In order to decipher their discourse, I had to look at their destruction. Through these horror films, the guts and the gore, the women came through in varying shades and strengths. It was my goal to shift through these entrails and in them, to find out something about the women from which they came. What I hoped to achieve was some sort of understanding about how women in horror have changed and how I’ve changed along with them—between the moments that they first crossed my eyes and now, when I pull them underneath the scrutiny of academia.