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Women in Horror : Once, twice, three times a villainess.

Once, Twice, Three Times a Villainess: Karen Black, Sex, and Twist Endings in Trilogy of Terror

by Angela Englert

Karen Black initially rejected Dan Curtis’ TV anthology Trilogy of Terror (1975), joining the production only after her then-husband, Robert Burton, was cast in one of the film’s sparse supporting roles. So she was the star, but she did it for her dude, which is appropriate given the movie’s ambivalence about women’s empowerment. Afterward, she may have had cause to regret it, as she believed that her performances in the film – because there were many – typed her as a horror actress. She was probably right, and she wouldn’t have been the first whose fearless brilliance in a genre movie closed doors rather than opened them. But she was fearless, and she was brilliant. Even if Trilogy were a proper theater-release film, her work would never have been acknowledged by the Academy, not in a movie where she gets chased for a third of it by a puppet, but no one will ever persuade me that Karen Black in Trilogy of Terror didn’t earn herself a statuette, even if it might have been shaped like a Zuni doll.

Trilogy was based on three Richard Matheson short stories, and they each bear the hallmarks of the spring-loaded twist endings and pulp horror he excelled in. If the punchlines seem a bit dated better than 40 years on, it’s at least partially because we’ve been audience to so much they have influenced in that time, from Fight Club to Puppet Master. The three vignettes featured in Trilogy center on three very different women, all played by Black, each taking the lead character’s name as the title of the piece. While there is no continuity among them, Trilogy ends up naturally being about all the ways a (white, heterosexual) woman in the 1970s could be victimized, not neglecting how she might best victimize herself. 

The first story, “Julie,” is probably my favorite, and it’s still disquieting and quite fresh. Julie teaches at a college, and Chad (played by Black’s husband, and I’m not sure whether that makes this one more or less icky) is her student. We first meet Chad when he and a friend are sitting in the quad rating the attractiveness of the women around them. When Chad spies Julie, herself much more on the Velma than the Daphne side of things, he finds himself wondering what she looks like “under all those clothes.” It’s an idea he can’t shake, and so he pursues her with the unblinking predation of a Duran Duran song. When Julie yields to his advances, he takes her to a drive-in movie and drugs her soda. With Julie unconscious, Chad abducts her and at least takes pictures of her in sexually provocative poses. Later, he will use the pictures to blackmail Julie into a nonconsensual affair and – it is implied — pretty much any depraved thing Chad can imagine. The twist is revealed to Chad abruptly, as Julie suddenly refuses his commands during an assignation and declares herself bored. Julie explains, “Did you really think that dull, little mind of yours could possibly have conceived any of the rather dramatic experiences we’ve shared? Why do you think you suddenly had the overwhelming desire to see what I looked like under ‘all those clothes?’” It turns out that Julie has been psychically topping from the bottom, as it were, using Chad’s sadistic exploitation for her own jollies. And now that she’s bored, she has poisoned Chad’s drink – nice touch, Julie – before moving on to the next unwary victim, cloaked again in the habit of a plain, nebbish teacher.

I think what bothers me most about “Julie,” and Julie for that matter, is her monstrousness depends on how she relishes the feigned powerlessness that makes her a victim of abuse. Not a D/s relationship, but assault, coercion, loveless abuse. If she were only a black widow luring men, especially a wicked man like Chad, to their doom, that would be relatively unremarkable, and it’s not hard to understand a powerful person wanting to be dominated in a sexual relationship. That’s a cliché. But Julie wants to be victimized, and she puts down elaborate roots in a life where she has fashioned herself into an ideal victim. It’s not simply about destroying Chad’s soul, if he has one, and it’s not simply about lying in wait, laughing behind her hand at his presumption of her innocence, though she seems to enjoy that, too, in the end. Maybe if Black’s portrayal were less persuasive, Julie’s portrayal would be less persuasive, and it would be easier to write her off as a kinky monster whose inconsistency is in service of a plot that takes a hard right turn into a twist ending. But Black gives Julie too much interior life to believe that, and we see this in her public humiliation by Chad, her private displays of grief for her concerned roommate. That’s where the real creepiness, the insatiable wrongness in ”Julie” asserts itself. It speaks to twin destructive myths about women’s empowerment and enjoyment of sex that still lurk in our culture everywhere from pornography to romcoms: that women make themselves powerful only at the expense of men and that women fundamentally want to be – let’s say overpowered by men. And that’s disturbing as hell.

Black similarly played both sides of a very bad penny in “Millicent and Therese.” Of the three stories, this is one that probably has aged the least gracefully, only because the twist – surprise, sisters Millicent and Therese are one person with two personalities and a blonde wig – seems fairly hackneyed by now. But I have to say that Black’s portrayal of the two “sisters,” plain, obsessive Millicent and gorgeous, licentious Therese, is convincing enough that it’s still possible to doubt the plot you see circling for a landing is what’s going to happen until it’s over. I particularly admire her zeal as Millicent, who anticipates Donald Pleasance’s Dr. Loomis in Halloween with passionate harangues about Therese’s inborn evil, seducing their father and murdering their mother, and her own plans to stop her, once and for all. And Black’s  self-satisfied malevolence as Therese is similarly unimpeachable.

The last part of Trilogy is the story that has made the biggest pop cultural impact, a one-woman play that has Black as Amelia, a woman torn between filial duty to a codependent mother and being an independent adult with a boyfriend. Amelia’s strained one-sided phone conversations with her mother and boyfriend are masterful work by Black, as she tries to juggle a standing dinner date with mom and a birthday dinner with her boyfriend. There’s so much emotional weight shifted in these scenes, particularly as Amelia finds herself rationalizing her mother’s demands to her boyfriend, abruptly starting a fight with him. Her loved ones alienated, Amelia’s night takes a bizarre turn for the worse as she’s chased around her apartment by her would-be gift to her anthropologist boyfriend, a surprisingly resourceful, possessed Zuni warrior fetish doll. The whole thing might have been silly, but Black sells it all, making her struggle with the toyetic, fanged symbol of her thwarted independence immediate and visceral.  After jamming the doll into a blistering oven, Black’s jagged smile reveals a final character in the story’s twist ending. Amelia has destroyed the doll, but becomes possessed by the Zuni warrior inside, who now waits to cut mother’s apron strings along with mother’s everything else.

There was no reason particularly Dan Curtis needed to cast one actress to star in each of the vignettes, but it was a wise choice, not only because Black’s consistently excellent, but her presence also draws attention to the reverberating themes of women turning on themselves. Not only is she every heroine, but she is also every villainess. It’s all in her. Without an actress of Black’s skill, it’s doubtful how well any individual story would have worked. They each require so much of their lead, not only to be plausible and pitiable, but fierce, physical, forbidding, and she largely has to do it all on her own. It’s a rare accomplishment that rightly has given Black a share of immortality and has given women still today a mirror of themselves in the eyes of a society that doesn’t know whether an unfettered woman is friend or foe.

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Women in Horror : What Have You Done to Solange?

‘What Have You Done to Solange’ Exposes the Legacy of Misogyny

By Leslie Hatton

Horror films have long been derided for using women—and women’s bodies—as props to be sexualized, violated, and discarded, with both Italian horror and American slashers being singled out for their misogynist portrayals of women. Massimo Dallamano’s What Have You Done to Solange? represents a unique entry in the horror canon. Not only is it a tightly-plotted Giallo and an early slasher, it also upholds and subverts genre tropes and cultural expectations through its depiction of women. Even the title of this film seems different from the norm, seeming to question the morality of what was done to the titular character and the implied trauma that resulted from this mysterious and unnamed action.

Source : http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film5/blu-ray_reviews_70/what_have_you_done_to_solange_blu-ray.htm

Set in London, but using Italian dialogue, What Have You Done to Solange? chafes against the restraints of the typical Giallo by contrasting the conservatism of a Catholic girls’ high school with the sexually charged atmosphere of Italian cinema. Although the film is about a series of murders of young women, it is told through the plight of Enrico Rosseni, a young professor of phys ed and Italian at St. Mary’s school who is considered the “cool” teacher for being far less conservative than the rest of the cast.

Enrico is cool, all right. So cool that he’s cheating on his wife, Herta, with one of his students. Herta is portrayed as a vengeful shrew who clearly suspects him of infidelity but the film presents Enrico as the sympathetic character. When one of Enrico’s fellow teachers, Professor Bascombe, casually mentions that he suspects Enrico of having an affair with Elizabeth, Enrico confirms it. One would expect him to lose his job or be reprimanded, but Bascombe brushes it off, even suggesting that no one could blame him with a wife like Herta.

Still, Enrico is not the only man to exhibit despicable behavior in Solange. Professor Newton continually peeps through a hole in a glass window into the girls’ locker room, in a scene that is the literal manifestation of the male gaze. Also subject to the male gaze is the dead body of the first murder victim Hilda Erickson. Inspector Barth of New Scotland Yard passes around the gruesome crime scene photos to the staff at the school. In one of the more literal cinematic examples of misogyny, it turns out that Hilda has been stabbed in the vagina. It’s death by rape, with a large knife as the substitute for the penis.

For all its grisly detail, Solange is a gorgeous film. Prolific porn director Joe D’Amato lensed the film, and elevates what could have been a sordid exploitation film into something approaching high art. D’Amato uses extreme close-ups of women’s faces to convey an intimate understanding of the struggles that they are facing, or in one scene when Elizabeth and Enrico are making love, the pleasure that Elizabeth is experiencing. At other times massive wide-angle shots indicate the lack of power of the characters in the film, such as the imposing stairwell at St. Mary’s school, or the park in which Enrico and Herta are having a picnic.

When Elizabeth and Enrico are kissing in the boat along the banks of the Thames, the camera is voyeuristic but refined, with dappled sunlight and green foliage obscuring the two lovers’ bodies. This scene is also vital because it sets the entire narrative of the film into motion. Not only does Enrico become enraged at Elizabeth’s hesitancy to have sex, shouting “There’s always something that stops you from being a normal girl!” (using “normal” as code for “sexually active”), he also dismisses what he interprets as a contrived excuse: Elizabeth claims to have seen a murder take place, and as it turns out, it’s Hilda Erickson who is the victim. Instead of being sympathetic and tender, Enrico clearly feels like he’s owed something, and in typical macho fashion, denies the validity of what Elizabeth has witnessed, until the truth is revealed in the news. Rather than apologizing, he begs her not to tell the police, fearing for his reputation, not hers.

Elizabeth, however, has been damaged, and it’s impossible not to sympathize with her. She suffers from PTSD and continues to have flashbacks to the murder scene. Intriguingly, Dallamano uses this to give Elizabeth some autonomy. Both of her flashbacks take place in sexualized situations, which only exacerbates the feeling of sex as an act to which one must submit. Then she works up enough courage to let her voice be heard, coming forward to the staff at the school about what she has seen: it was a man dressed as a priest who killed Hilda.

Not all men in Solange are as despicable as Enrico. Shockingly, it’s Inspector Barth who calls Enrico out on his bad behavior. He calls Enrico into the police station for questioning, not as a murder suspect, but as someone who has something to hide. “You are thinking about something other than Hilda,” he accuses him, voicing something many watching the film are probably thinking, something which Elizabeth doesn’t have the freedom to say.

Image source http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film5/blu-ray_reviews_70/what_have_you_done_to_solange_blu-ray.htm

More students at the school are killed and so is a local woman, all in the same way as Hilda Erickson: a knife to the vagina. The teachers and staff members at St. Mary’s school are questioned, but despite the revelation that it may be a priest, none of the priests at the school are considered suspects. Only after Elizabeth is drowned in the bathtub is Enrico determined to find out the identity of the murderer. Is it his conscience making itself known or merely the desire to clear his name? We never really know. He and Herta, who for some reason decided to reconcile, start asking questions and eventually the truth is revealed. Her name is Solange.

Now we have a character in the film to attach to its title, as well as a face. Camille Keaton, the protagonist of the iconic rape/revenge slasher I Spit On Your Grave from 1978, is Solange. In this film she is unable to get revenge on those who destroyed her life. She was part of a clique with other girls at the school who had orgies with older college boys. After Solange got pregnant, her “friends” feared exposure and in a twist of internalized misogyny, convinced her to have an abortion. The experience was so traumatic that she has been rendered mute, and is suffering from “infantile regression.”

Here the film presents contradictory depictions of women. While the sexual agency of the young women can be seen as a good thing, Enrico is disgusted when he learns about it, suggesting that the girls are probably on drugs, too. The double standard is obvious: he can cheat on his wife with a student, but those same students shouldn’t be having sex of their own volition.

As it turns out, it’s Bascombe, Solange’s father, who has been killing everyone responsible for his daughter’s predicament, something which seems honorable until you consider the sexualized nature of the murders. In his shame and rage, he took on the role of vengeful vigilante. His daughter’s suffering is written all over her face at the end, but not even Herta offers her solace. Solange is presented as damaged and unclean, as if her trauma is infectious. Inspector Barth says it best in the film’s closing line, “Solange has been paying for everybody.”

Misogyny victimizes women in multiple ways: it characterizes female sexuality as bad while upholding male sexuality as good; it transforms us into chattel; and encourages us to harm our fellow sisters in order to be favored in men’s eyes. What Have You Done To Solange? reveals that the damage has come full circle. At a time when victims of misogyny are condemned, harassed, and disbelieved, we must ask the sobering question of not what was done to Solange, but why it had to happen in the first place.

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Women in Horror : women who fight back

Shadows of the Mind: Women in Horror Who Fight Back

by Sharon Shaw

[Contains spoilers for the films The Descent (2009), The Babadook (2014) and IT (2017)]

I’ve been experiencing a lot of “I can’t do this” over the last couple of weeks, and, counter-intuitive though it may sound, watching horror movies is sometimes the only thing that can cut through the treacle that my brain becomes when I’m experiencing a depressive episode.

Why counter-intuitive, you ponder? Well, I’m glad you asked.

Horror has something of a poor rep when it comes to the portrayal of women, particularly, and for a significant portion of the genre this is well-deserved. It’s not unique in this; the traditional action movie, with its male-power-fantasy framework, is frequently guilty of having women characters who are thin on the ground at best, and thin full stop when they do turn up. Their agency is often lacking, and far too often their presence is mainly in order to take the role of prize, to be awarded when Johnny Template achieves his goal at the end of the film. While I am no stranger to the practice of empathising and identifying with someone who is of a different gender, sexuality or culture (I think it’s a great habit that everyone should get into as early as possible), it can be a bit isolating when you can’t find characters who look and feel like you that behave in ways that are meaningful, reassuring and strengthening. It can be even more isolating when the society you’re trying to fit into expects a certain type of behaviour that doesn’t match yours, and there are few examples to tell them different.

And I do mean few examples, not none. The action story plays with anger, giving guidance on how we can push back against frustration, and it can be a power fantasy for women as much as for men (the early Alien and Terminator movies and Mad Max: Fury Road are some of my absolute favourites). But I don’t think “frustration” tells enough of the story, and it’s fascinating to me how those examples all contain strong elements of horror; not just playing with anger, but with fear.

Horror is (or should be) what we experience when we witness the subjugation of someone who is already physically weaker and more vulnerable. Repetitive, boring or downright bad horror does nothing to challenge the status quo; women start out as vulnerable and end up as dead or driven insane. Slasher flicks and torture movies that just replicate this pattern are the worst because they reinforce it and numb the audience to true horror, eliciting the “freeze” response, so they end up laughing instead. There’s no fighting this reaction; its intent is to keep you still long enough that the predator doesn’t see you, and all you can do is wait for it to pass. If the message is “can’t win, don’t try”, then the story is worse than useless. If, however, the characters are framed as victims initially but are able to come back from the brink, even when the process is flawed or incomplete, this has great lessons when we ourselves feel trapped by fear.

The Descent (2009) is, for the most part, a story about a group of women who face their challenge with planning, determination and an innate drive to fight, no matter what. It does end on the consequences of the freeze response, but like the Little Match Girl, where the protagonist succumbs to cold and exhaustion even as she holds the key to her salvation in her hands, reads to me as a cautionary tale against it.

The Babadook (2014) shows a complex fear of emotional responses, and how the refusal to process or even acknowledge them can manifest as deadly threat. Amelia’s monster is a complicated creation of dismissed trauma, unaddressed grief, repressed self-doubt and shame. Eventually it threatens her son, and while he is able to stand up to her, Sam is too small and frightened to tackle the demon; she is the one who must hold her ground against the Babadook.

Amelia models a core of self that still remains under all the terror, that stubbornly refuses to let the monster have full sway over her house, her child or her mind. The moment that breaks me and gives me wings every time is the expression on her face when she plants her feet and roars at her antagonist, “YOU ARE TRESPASSING IN MY HOUSE!”

By distinguishing throughout the film between his mother and the Babadook (when Sam yells at it to go away it’s always slightly to the side of Amelia) he gives her the key to its eventual defeat and us a clue as to how we can tackle our own unwelcome reactions – by personifying them slightly outside of ourselves we may enable a detached confrontation which gives us half a chance of success.

Amelia also provides the massive revelation that accepting the presence of such a huge and hideous beast in our basement, while we may not be able to outright destroy it – or even want to, if it is bundled up with the loss of things we loved and have no desire to forget – is a form of resilience. If we give it regular attention, nurture if necessary, and make sure our loved ones (at least the ones who cannot protect themselves) are kept safely away from it, then we need not fear that it will once again grow huge and stalk unopposed through our house.

IT (2017) presents a take on the impotence of existential fear in the face of someone who has known a different kind of immediate, life-threatening fear. While trauma can cause manifold problems of its own, the necessary steps to heal it have the potential to inoculate and protect in times of crisis.

While Bev is damselled slightly by her capture and role as motivation for the boys to reunite and take on Pennywise (a specific choice for the film adaptation), there is something powerful in his inability to kill her, and particularly in his frustration that he cannot even make her afraid of him. She has been targeted by the monster through symbols representing her own body – hair and blood – which are initially terrifying, but she is able to reconcile with them in part because of the support she receives from her friends. They acknowledge the gore in the bathroom that her father cannot see, they help her to clean it up, and as a result she knows they are stronger together than they will ever be apart – and it is Bev who feeds this back to them at their moment of separation, even recognising that this is exactly what Pennywise wants.

This is what gives fire to the inner voice that commands her to strike at the clown twice, and at her father when he finally turns on her openly. In the book it is hinted that It is behind Mr Marsh’s obscene and violent behaviour, but for me the strength here is that he is not – Bev has already experienced a child’s greatest terror; that of the parent who not only fails to protect you but is themselves a threat to your very life. She has faced, and fought, this emotional betrayal, and the void that lies behind Pennywise no longer holds any fear for her – let alone the hyperdontial clown.

Fear can easily be the dominant emotion for a woman. It’s not overwhelming for all of us, and obviously it can affect those who aren’t women just as much (what with it utilising those pesky brain chemicals we all share in some measure). But socially, statistically, women (including anyone whose gender wasn’t designated correctly at birth) experience more vulnerability than men. We are soaked in it throughout our lives; we are often expected to suck it up and get on with life despite it. The #metoo movement and how widespread it is makes that clear; behind each one of those stories is guilt, shame and trauma, all of which are rooted in fear.

And this is why I think a horror movie – a good horror movie – can serve as a great power fantasy for girls and women. When they’re done right they’re like a gut-wrenching fairy-tale, and while the “stay inside the circle” story serves its purpose for young children, sooner or later this must give way to “how to fight the beasts outside the circle

“. We cannot stay sheltered forever. If some form of trauma hasn’t already taken away that safe cushion of dependence, life will eventually. We need guidance on how to handle it when it happens, and how to recover from it afterwards, and if we find the right stories, we will have exactly that.

***

Bio:
 
Sharon Shaw is the co-host of The School of Movies podcast, where she and her husband Alex have spent several years reading (some might say way too) deeply into the films, and occasionally TV and video games, that make up the pop culture landscape. She is also the editor of Alex’s book series, The New Century Multiverse, and a voice actor in the audio drama productions of the same.
 
 
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Women in Horror : My Bloody Valentine

My Bloody Valentine: Jaws in a Mine
by Kerry Fristoe

“…like a doll’s eyes.”

Following in the tradition of Grizzly in 1976 (Jaws on a Mountain), Snowbeast in 1977 (Jaws on a Mountain or Jaws Is a Yeti), Piranha in 1978 (Lots of Tiny Jaws in a River), and 1980’s Alligator (Jaws in a Sewer with Hunky Robert Forster), the 1981 Canadian slasher, My Bloody Valentine (Jaws in a Mine, Eh) features brutal murders reported as natural causes by local authorities to save a town from financial ruin. I started to write a detailed description of who played whom in each of these modern classics, but it was going on way too long, so I made a handy chart. Oh, and I’m not being snarky about the modern classics line. I dig these films.

Handy Chart™

 
Chief Brody
Chrissie
Hooper
Hooper/Quint hybrid
Mayor Vaughn
Quint
Shark
Grizzly
Christopher George
Two girls eaten by a bear
Richard Jaeckel
Richard Jaeckel & Andrew Prine
Joe Dorsey
 
Grizzly bear
Snowbeast
Clint Walker
Random vacationers eaten by a Yeti
 
Bo Svenson
Sylvia Sidney & Robert Logan
 
Yeti
Piranha
Bradford Dillman?
Teenage backpacking couple
 
Kevin McCarthy
Dick Miller
 
Tiny mean fish
Alligator
Robert Forster
Sewer workers
Robin Riker
 
Dean Jagger & Jack Carter
Henry Silva
Alligator, duh
My Bloody Valentine
Paul Kelman
Blond woman in mine
Lori Hallier
 
Don Francks
 
Harry the miner

 

Two miners, dressed in coveralls and gas masks, walk through a debris-littered mine shaft. They stop in a deserted corner and one of them undresses, revealing that she’s a beautiful, blond woman. As the pair caress each other, she tries to remove her partner’s gas mask. He resists her efforts and they continue with their tryst, breathing harder. As he grasps both her arms and lifts her, she closes her eyes expectantly, and he impales her on a pickaxe.

I’ll admit, that opening rivals Chrissie Watkins, clinging to a buoy, and the unexpected first kill in My Bloody Valentine sets the stage for the carnage to come.

It’s February 13th in Valentine Bluffs, Nova Scotia, and the entire town is preparing for the first Valentine’s Day dance in twenty years. The tradition ended two decades before when selfish mining supervisors, impatient to dance the night away with their dates, left the mine without ensuring the safety of their men. After a sudden explosion buried several miners, the townspeople rushed to dig them out, but they were too late. The rescuers got there just in time to see Harry Warden eating the remains of the others. Harry’s ordeal left him a little short on sanity. He runs amok, killing the men responsible and is committed to an asylum, vowing that if the town ever holds another Valentine’s Day dance, he’ll kill them all.

Apparently, they forgot about Harry and his promises. As the decorating and general character introductions continue, Mabel, the town person-named-Mabel, dies a grisly death at the laundromat and gets stuffed in a dryer. Not wanting to cause a fuss right before the Fourth of July Valentine’s Day, Chief Brody Newby (Don Francks) tells everyone it was a boat accident heart attack.

“This was no laundry accident.”
-Hooper, chewing on a Tide pod

The chief goes on with his day, the way you do when you find the mutilated body of a friend in a clothes dryer. He figures it’s an isolated incident. You know, probably kids. Everything changes when he opens a heart-shaped box of chocolates containing a human heart. I prefer caramels, myself. He cancels the dance and calls the sanitarium in a panic, looking for Harry. While he waits for a testy clerk to find Harry’s file, those darn kids decide to foil the chief’s non-plan and throw a party at the mine anyway. They start out partying in the canteen, but a few intrepid souls head down the mine for a little kinky mine fun.

By now we’ve met the cast of characters. Paul Kelman plays TJ, the mine owner’s son, who had the audacity to leave town and come back, so people look at him funny. Axel (Neil Affleck-not that one) is TJ’s former best friend who now dates his former best girl, Sarah (Lori Hallier). Keith Knight (Fink from Meatballs!) is the big, good-hearted Hollis, and Alf Humphreys plays Howard, the asshole.

When Chief Newby finds more corpses, he heads to the mine to stop the party—and the murders. Guess what? He’s too late. My Bloody Valentine is chock full of creative kills. The director, George Mihalka, and effects crew take advantage of the mine’s dark, claustrophobic setting to ramp up the spookiness factor and the murders are straight up gory. Harry favors pickaxes, boiling water, and even a shower to fulfill his promise to Valentine Bluffs.

I have a soft spot in my heart for My Bloody Valentine. I saw it in the theatre when it came out—with a boy! I had seen Friday the 13th in the theatre the year before. MBV has more heart (teehee) than the Voorhees family picnic and the characters are more likable. I don’t think I made the Jaws connection at the time, but I may have seen Jaws and the gang of copycat killer bear/Yeti/fish/gator/octopus/swarm of bees/other shark/still other shark/piranhaconda films one or two more times since then.

“Anyway, we delivered the coal.”
-Harry Warden

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Women in Horror : Short Fiction Queens

Women in Horror: Short Fiction Queens
Jenny Barber

Welcome to the 9th Annual Women in Horror Month! As any horror fan will tell you, women have been an inextricable part of horror short fiction for centuries.  From Mary Shelley, Amelia B. Edwards, Edith Wharton and Cynthia Asquith, to Shirley Jackson, Lisa Tuttle, Alison Littlewood, Priya Sharma, Tananarive Due, Nadia Bulkin and a vast and varied collection of other modern horror writers creating stories that span from the subtle supernatural to the surreal to the terrifying.  Women in horror can do it all, but for a multitude of reasons, tend to have a lower visibility for their work than the male of the species.

This time last year I took part in Mark West’s Women in Horror Mixtape blog where a motley bunch of fiction fans talked about their favourite horror shorts from women –  it was great fun to do and many excellent recommendations were made. (Check them out here – http://markwestwriter.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/the-women-in-horror-mixtape.html )  So when Aunty Fox put out the call for posts for this year’s WiHM, I knew a mini mixtape was the way to go because, a/ my short fiction love affair was started by anthologies and single author collections of horror stories way back in my preteens; and b/ any excuse for a list!

So here for your reading enjoyment are five of my recent favourites –

Ripper by Angela Slatter, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2016 (ed. Paula Guran)

First up is ‘Ripper by Angela Slatter. I’ll freely admit to being a huge fan of Slatter [www.angelaslatter.com] ever since reading her story ‘Lavender and Lychgates’ in the Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #22 anthology (ed. Stephen Jones).  (And if wonderfully told dark fantasy/fairy tales are your thing then immediately acquire yourself copies of her two collections – Sourdough and Other Stories, and The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, as the linked short stories are a-maz-ing!) But I digress… 

‘Ripper’ concerns Jack the Ripper and the mysteries surrounding the murders, as told by new copper Kit Carswell.  But unknown to the other coppers, Kit is actually a woman masquerading as a man, desperately balancing police duties with the need to care for and financially support her ill family while keeping the secret of her dual identity.  It’s Kit’s status both as a woman and a police officer that inspires the infamous Mary Jane Kelly to approach her and share the information vital to connecting the victims and luring the Ripper out; but despite things going horribly wrong for Kit and Kelly, it’s Kit’s intelligence and heroism, and the dead women of Whitechapel, who prove the key to the Ripper’s downfall.

‘Ripper’ is an excellent tale of mystery, magic, ghosts and women working together to try and survive the men around them and Slatter proves her storytelling skill with prose that hooks you from the start.

Kiss, Don’t Tell by Cassandra Khaw (audio narrated by Mae Zarris-Heaney), in Pseudopod #563

PseudoPod 563: Flash On The Borderlands XXXIX: Teratology

Cassandra Khaw is relatively new to me as an author – I’ve greatly enjoyed both her Lovecraftian Noir-ish Hammers to the Bone as well as her paranormal rom-com Bearly a Lady; I’ve also come across her short fiction in venues such as Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, The Dark Magazine and Clarkesworld Magazine, to name but a few. (Go hunt them down and read!)

But the story I’m recommending today is her flash fiction ‘Kiss, Don’t Tell’ which can be read or listened to over at Pseudopod – it’s a gloriously lyrical musing on hunger and the essence of monsters, with the unnamed narrator teasing her human lover about his ex. Khaw has an outstanding gift with language, weaving a gorgeous story that dances a visceral tango in your brain, unleashing seduction and danger with a poetic playfulness and a throbbing rhythm that gets under your skin; and I highly recommend listening to Mae Zarris-Heaney’s narration as it takes an already darkly sensual tale to whole new levels of woah.

The Curtain by Thana Niveau, in The Dark (December 2016)

The Curtain

And now to Thana Niveau [http://thananiveau.com] and the terrors of the deep!  I’ve read various Niveau stories in anthologies and magazines across the years and though I’ve barely scratched the surface of her prolific fiction output, from what I’ve read so far, ‘The Curtain’ is my favourite of hers.  It’s creepy, enthralling, and darkly entertaining, and gives the account of Martin, a diver, who goes treasure hunting the day after a storm. However, the storm damage has unleashed things that were best left contained and as Martin dives more wreckage, he uncovers bodies and the terrible secrets of the deep.

This is a story that oozes with terror, taking an already mysterious underwater world and twisting new horrors from it.  Niveau is adept at ramping up the tension until the inevitability of Martin’s fate becomes clear, yet also expertly creates a sense of wonder for the underwater environment. It’s well worth reading this story multiple times, as there are many small touches that take on new meaning once you’ve sailed passed the ending and come back for more.

Jade, Blood by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, in Nightmare Magazine #60 (Sept 2017)

Jade, Blood

Form the sea we move to the cenotes of the Yucatán and ‘Jade, Blood’ by Silvia Moreno-Garcia [www.silviamoreno-garcia.com].  I’ve enjoyed Moreno-Garcia’s short fiction in multiple venues, as well as her editorial tastes in the anthologies she’s edited (She Walks in Shadows and the People of Colour Destroy Horror edition of Nightmare Magazine are two particular favourites) – and happened to come across ‘Jade, Blood’ when I was catching up on my Nightmare Magazine reading. 

‘Jade, Blood’ tells of a lonely and unloved young woman, whose life as a novice leaves her empty and unsatisfied until she discovers a local cenote and looks deep into its water. The ensuing euphoria puts her meaningless convent life into sharp relief and she seeks to recapture her experience with a multitude of offerings to the cenote.  It’s a quiet tale, beautifully told, shaping an atmosphere of growing religious ecstasy and veneration for the ancient and bloody rites.

Collect Call by Sarah Pinborough, The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (ed. Marie O’Regan)

We end with a haunting tale from Sarah Pinborough. [https://sarahpinborough.com] Pinborough is a multi-genre, multi-format, powerhouse – you want crime, fantasy, romantic fairy tales, horror, thriller, adult, YA, media tie-in or screen writing, she’s got something for you and all are well worth checking out. 

I found her story ‘Collect Call’ in The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (ed. Marie O’Regan – an anthology that’s well recommended as you’ll find a wide range of female horror authors, both classic and modern, in its pages.) ‘Collect Call’ is beautifully told and manages the trick of being both quietly understated and peppered with short sharp bursts of potential threat.  On the face of it, it seems a simple tale – a man is stuck in a deserted town and is waiting for his dad to give him a lift home. During the wait he is joined by a slightly unpleasant woman also stuck in the same predicament but unable to get through to her own family, and both must wait while darkness approaches.

Pinborough has a deft touch with weaving strands of melancholy and hope, while delivering both sweetness and menace in a story that touches on the mysteries of death and human connection.

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Once you’ve tried these stories, don’t forget to check out the authors other work, as well as the anthologies, magazines and editors mentioned!

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Women in Horror : The Weird in the Normal

The Weird in the Normal.

by Su Haddrell

I’ve never really had a fear of anything. No real phobias. I grew up clambering around rocks and hanging out with six foot tall lads, so by that point nothing really scares you because you can’t fear anything if you want to join in the fun. I was pretty desensitised by horror from a fairly young age. I blame Monty Pythons Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog, who forever made viseral blood and guts scenes seem obscenely funny to me. But I LOVE things that weird me out. Things that stay in my head, nudging me and prodding me to savour them even though they’re strange or grotesque.

I don’t get scared by horror stories or films – they don’t make me want to keep the light on at night. But sometimes things freak me out because I keep thinking about them and that’s when I know I can use it in a story. My favourite female horror writer is Poppy Z Brite. I loved the wistful dreaminess of Lost Souls but it was Exquisite Corpse that captured me. Somehow Brite had managed to make the grotesque into something beautiful. The detail in the level of description drew me in and I found I couldn’t look away – I was swept along into the horror of it as much as her characters. She takes the normal bright lights of New Orleans and turns them into something dark – hot, slick nights that mask the stink of blood and rot beneath crowded streets and forbidden debauchery. By reading Brite, I learned that when writing horror; the devil is in the detail. The texture, the smell, the colour, the sound. The way a moment plays with your senses is what allows it to hang in your memory.

When I started writing horror, I found that I didn’t write messy bloody horror. I wrote weird, creepy horror. I wrote horror that savoured the strange. I like writing about normal people doing normal things when something odd happens. And then escalates. The squirming of a creature out of the corner of your eye. The unusual habits of the stranger sitting opposite you. All these ideas touch on that fear of the unknown. That ‘WTF’ sensation of not knowing what’s going on, but knowing that it’s not normal and being desperate to know more regardless of where the path takes you. I think that even if you don’t think you’re scared of anything, good horror will mirror a deep unknown fear. When you read it, you’ll blink and take a breath. Suddenly you’ll realise that your still mulling over that weird creepy moment a few days later. It twists and circles in your subconscious whilst you’re daydreaming on your lunch break or about to drop off to sleep. Good horror will crawl beneath your skin and settle there just long enough to remind you what fear is.

Sleep Tight.

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Women in Horror : Bengali Ghosts

Ghost story from Bengal 

by Aditi Sen

Bengalis love ghosts. In fact, ghost stories are a part of Bengali heritage. Ghosts are serious creatures, they are very particular about where they live, and have unique haunting habits. Bengali folklore is full of spooky tales—let me share a very popular one.

Terracotta Cottages in West Bengal

In Colonial Bengal, it was fairly common for men to work in cities and live in temporary lodgings often referred to as “messes” in Calcutta, while their families remained in rural Bengal. The men would work all week, go home on Friday evenings, then catch the Sunday afternoon train to get back to the city to work. Sometimes, when there was a lot of work, they would not be able to go home for a month or so. This story is about Gopal Das, who lived in a mess and was unable to go home for almost a fortnight.

Gopal took the early afternoon train home. When he reached the station in his rural town, it was almost dusk. His home was a mile-long walk from the station. One thing that caught his attention this time was the eerie silence at the station. There would always be a few people sitting there, but the station was empty, something he had never seen before. The little shanty around the corner that sold tea was closed, adding to the silence. He had never seen the station completely empty before. The silence created a strange sense of unease, as if the whole village had fallen asleep. It was already night when he reached home.

The house seemed unusually dark and quiet. Electricity had not reached his village yet, but there were always oil lamps outside the door. His mother opened the door. She had a small lamp in her hand, that hardly lit anything; he could barely see her. She seemed extremely reluctant to answer his questions, mostly replying in monosyllables. But she did inform him that the rest of the family wasn’t feeling too well, so they had all gone off to bed early. She was waiting to serve him his dinner, and she too would go to bed afterwards.

He washed himself quickly and sat down to eat. Dinner was rice and dal (lentil soup). After a few bites, he realized that the dal was unusually bland. His mother was sitting by his side waiting for him to finish his meal. He asked her if there was any lemon to flavour the dal. She nodded her head and stretched her arm to fetch the lemon. It stretched, stretched, stretched and stretched… first it reached the window, opened it, then reached the lemon tree, plucked a lemon, and came back inside and gave it to him. End of story.

There is a post-script to this tale. The entire village had died of an epidemic. It was now a ghost village. The mother’s ghost was waiting to feed her son who she knew was coming home that day. This a very common theme for ghost stories.  My grandmother told this story to me when I was a child; later, I heard it from many others. The context differed but the core idea was always the same.

Bengali folklore has no shortage of large spaces that are completely occupied by spooks: villas, forests, marshlands, hamlets. One major reason for Bengali ghosts having huge spatial benefit is simply because they died in large numbers to guarantee it. Bengal was so often afflicted by epidemics that in a fortnight everyone in a village could be dead. In 1896, the plague struck Bengal. This was followed by cholera and malaria in 1906. The 1921 census revealed the average death rate to be around 30.3%. In 1925, 4,97,473 people had died of malaria[i]. It is only natural that haunted landscapes would be an integral part of Bengal’s collective memory.

Only recently, I realized how almost every ghost story I loved as a kid is an important piece of history. There is no glory in dying of small pox or plague. This is not a dramatic, memorable death. Epidemics often get reduced to mere statistics. These ghost stories exist as an attempt to move beyond those deaths, and allow the victims to somehow continue to live. A man may lose everyone he loves, but there is comfort in the idea that, even though she has died, a mother will make sure that her son doesn’t go to bed hungry.

[i] Palit Chittabrata, Popular Response to Epidemics in Colonial Bengal in Indian Journal of History of Science, 43.2, 2008, 277-283.

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Women in Horror

A quick review my lovelies of Women in Horror so far here on Fox Spirit.

2nd Feb – K.A. Laity on the House on Haunted Hill
4th Feb – Sunday Snippet Winter Tales
5th Feb – K. Bannerman on disability, motherhood and personal autonomy in horror
6th Feb – C.A. Yates on A Monstrous Love (crimson peak)
7th Feb – Fear of the Female in Fiction (victorian)

On the 9th we have Aditi Sen with Bengali Ghosts 
11th is a new Sunday Snippet from Respectable Horror
12th we have the Weird in the Normal by Su Haddrell
16th Women who fight back by Sharon Shaw
18th Snippet Sunday with Pacific Monsters
20th Once,Twice, Three times a Villainess by Angela Englert

We have more great stuff coming up so do check back to see what’s happening on WiH here on the Fox Blog.

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Women in Horror : Fear of the Female in Vintage Fiction

JAN SIEGEL
Fear of the Female in Vintage Horror Fiction

The horror fiction of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century includes many writers who remain Best-in-Genre and whose influence is ongoing, but the fear-of-the-female trope which features so prominently in their work merits further analysis. Let’s examine a selection from the classics by way of example: Le Fanu’s Carmilla (featuring the first lesbian vampire), Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter, and Poe’s Morella and Ligeia.

There are different elements to consider. First, the protagonist’s search for an idealised romantic love. Each story employs the concept of a ‘soulmate’, seeing it as an archetype that can be deceptive and slightly sinister. It is an adolescent view of love, based more on fantasy than reality, leading too often to obsession – something that permeates all Poe’s work. The youth in Annabel Lee, fixated on his dead sweetheart, is a disturbing figure. The love-beyond-death idea is carried further into the darker realm with Morella, who reincarnates as her own child, and Ligeia, who takes over the body of her lover’s next wife. We have here the dichotomy of perfect love and romantic obsession: the two overlap, and that overlap forms the charm that snared male writers. There are no comfortable marriages here, no dull everyday relationships; lovers die young, return from death, or live on in solitary melancholy. Happy-ever-after is a compromise these writers never make.

Then there is the fear/fascination factor with women’s sexuality. These men may have encountered the female orgasm – it is echoed in the death-spasms of various heroines – but they’d never heard of the clit. The gender-gulf was huge, and women’s pleasure lurked somewhere in its depths, mysterious and just out of reach. Hawthorne’s Beatrice is a beautiful girl with a loving heart, imbued with poison from her father’s experiments: her very touch is death. The hero gives her the antidote, and it kills her. It’s tempting to box clever with this, seeing it as a Victorian allegory for the fatality of sex. But here it is Giovanni who falls short, when he accuses her of deliberately seeking to contaminate him – at this point, Hawthorne exposes the shallowness of his hero. And in many such stories, the allure of the sexual female – the vampire or lamia – is often juxtaposed with the lethal weakness of men. Poe both despises that weakness and wallows in it; Hawthorne deplores it; Le Fanu weeps for it. The weakness of man and the seduction of woman are united in an evil coalition.

Behind all this are the limitations of a society where the ideal of womanhood was always Eve and the deviant was always Lilith. The good-girl Eves are generally blonde, blue-eyed, and – we infer – slightly insipid; the Liliths are often raven-haired, with black eyes of mysterious depth and unnaturally white skin. Eve represents virtue; Lilith represents sex. Thus Lilith is almost a radical figure: a product of male fantasy, but also an attempt to create something beyond the conventional woman, to drown in the gender-gulf, if not to bridge it. Because ultimately, Carmilla/Morella/Beatrice is always the poisoned flower, the fatal temptation. These characters are strong, intelligent, innocent yet knowing, powerful but finally ineffectual. They invariably end up dead, not just because the writers have a naturally tragic bent, but because the sexual woman was a phenomenon beyond their reach. Forbidden fruit.

These stories delve into the shadows of Victorian morality while still subscribing to it. The female archetypes are viewed, inevitably, through the lens of their time, but the tragedy is not theirs alone. What we glimpse here is the frustration and desperation of those men whose desire for a more complete woman could only find expression as horror.

Men still fear and desire her, often in equal measure – but women want to be her. In today’s narrative, we are allowed to say so.

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Women in Horror : A Monstrous Love

‘A MONSTRUOUS LOVE’: CRIMSON PEAK AND THE WRITER

By C.A. Yates

Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak gets a rough deal. Routinely (and boringly) dismissed as not being “horror” enough because it’s not chock-a-block with scares and icksome carnage and because it has the temerity to feature what appears to be a bosom-heaving love story, it seems to have been largely overlooked. Del Toro’s work is always beautiful to watch and Crimson Peak is no exception, but I have a soft spot for it because it takes the usual outcome of such stories and, well, smacks it on the backside.

Most gothic romances are not the love stories the Cyril Sneers of this world so enjoy denigrating. Almost none of them end with a clichéd guy-saves-the-day-and-gets-the-girl denouement. Take Maud Ruthyn from Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, a heavy influence on Crimson Peak. She is married at the end of the novel but no one comes to save her at the end of her story. She escapes her wicked uncle and his machinations by herself. Gothic romances are, in essence, about the journey to adulthood. Heroines are almost invariably very young women, of marriageable age but only just, thrown into circumstances beyond their control that test them to the extreme. After her ordeal, the gothic heroine more often than not gives up her childish dreams of adventure and accepts her prescribed role in society, usually as a wife and mother. The genre is not admiring the strength these women show so much as it is punishing them for their desires and admonishing them into accepting their proper place. These are cautionary tales. Edith Cushing, our heroine in Crimson Peak, however, rips up the rulebook and eats it for breakfast. Hers is not simply a journey of self-discovery that’s going to put her back at hearth and home; Edith sets out to make sure she is who she thinks she is or, perhaps moreover, become what she wants to become. What is that?

A writer.

Edith Cushing is an iconoclast, determined to set her own course, to write her own narrative. Of course she is limited by the time and circumstances she is living in but when she is given the opportunity to step outside of that, she embraces it. Right from the first frame, Edith is literally telling her story. Everything is a flashback because we start at the end of the story. She crowds the camera with her close up, face slashed and bleeding, but that half smile… man, has she got what she wanted or what? Against all the generic odds, Edith has created her narrative largely under her own agency. Of course there are times when others are directing proceedings and she is uncertain, afraid even. This is still a tale of self-discovery, of self-affirmation. There are lessons to be learned, a story to be written, and the movie is peppered moments of significance that have a direct connection to writing – the act of writing and the creation of story itself, illustrating and strengthening Edith’s goal while foreshadowing the fulfilment of her chosen fate.

Near the beginning of the movie, Edith’s father presents her with a pen with which to write her manuscript. It is obvious he encourages her passion even though he does not fully understand it, being a man of a more practical nature. As he says himself when he gives her the gift, ‘I’m a builder, dear. If there’s one thing I know the importance of it’s the right tool for the job.’ Although Edith eschews it, declaring that she wishes to type her work because her handwriting gives her away, she keeps it with her and it saves her life later on (proving the pen is mightier than the sword, but perhaps not the cleaver). 

Upon meeting Thomas for the first time, Edith doesn’t seem particularly impressed by him, and echoes her previously scathing tone when she makes fun of him about his meeting with her father. Not the behaviour one might expect from a gothic heroine on encountering her love interest. It is not until he picks up her manuscript and voices his approval that Edith is prompted to give him a more favourable second look.  Likewise, her awkwardness around her returned friend/admirer, Alan McMichael, is somewhat mitigated when she discovers his interest in and commonality with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – they are both ophthalmologists and share an interest in spirit photography.

When, ordered by Edith’s father who knows some of the truth, Thomas rejects Edith, he goes to town on her writing because he knows it will hurt her most, trashing it as ‘absurdly sentimental’ and naïve. He faults her lack of experience and advises her to ‘return to her ghosts and fancies’. Her deficiencies are made clear as well as public and, perhaps for the first time, having been moved by his previous endorsement of her work, Edith is truly tested. She is not going to get everything she wants simply because she is determined. Writing is work and she must experience life rather than have it handed to her if she is to succeed. Her nose is bloodied but not broken because the passion of Thomas’s speech, the anger with which he delivers these blows, build the foundation of what is to come next. When he returns the manuscript to her the following day and encloses a letter explaining the reasons for his outburst, she is given a second chance at the story and, taking his “notes” on board, Edith seizes the opportunity, running to him even as her father, who both tethers her to her mundane existence and was responsible for Thomas’s admonishments, is being brutally murdered.

Once at Allerdale Hall, the reminders that there is a story at stake continue apace. For example, upon stepping into the Hall for the very first time, Thomas asks his new wife if the place looks ‘the part’. With its sinking floor, tattered roof, and creaking skeleton, how can it not? Soon after, in an attempt to discover what has transpired sexually between her brother and Edith, Lucille attempts to shock by showing her an erotic fore-edge illustration on a book in the library. They sit surrounded by piles of books as the new bride confirms her husband has been ‘very respectful of her mourning’. It is also not for nothing that Edith makes real contact with a ghost in the house for the first time after her first physically passionate encounter with Thomas – a moment that is played out, and abruptly ended, on a writing desk. As her naivety diminishes, she truly begins to make progress with her story.

My favourite moment, however, comes when Lucille, having been discovered in flagrante with her brother and having literally forced matters to a head, stands calmly in front of the fire reading Edith’s manuscript. ‘You thought you were a writer’, Lucille observes disparagingly. ‘You have nothing to live for now,’ she says, as Edith prevaricates over signing the papers that are essentially her death warrant, and then throws the entire manuscript into the fire. It is in that moment that Edith fully realises her power as a writer and takes control of the situation. Her story is internalised, it is powerful, and it is hers. As Lucille herself is finally able to speak her truth, to assert her narrative, explaining about her baby and the ‘monstrous love’ she bears her brother, Edith formulates a plan; she has already palmed the pen, the very tool of writing, and sees what must be done. And do it she does. Right in Lucille’s chest.

All along, Lucille’s has been the main rival to Edith’s narrative. In the end, however, Edith has the better story and, moreover, she has imagination whereas Lucille, worn down by abuse as a child and desperation as an adult, is simply mad (the madwoman in the attic is a very gothic trope indeed). Make no mistake, our heroine wants romance but in an older sense of the word; in the sense of tall tales and faraway lands, and of tales in her own language and not that of the society that has never taken her seriously. She is dismissed by Mrs McMichaels as being set for spinsterhood and Ogilvy, the editor she shows her work to, focuses on its presentation rather than the story itself. She has yearned for opportunities to shape her work and when she crosses the path of a woman who has lived a life full of such opportunities, with Lucille, finally she can really get her teeth into it. Opportunity plus Imagination equals Victory, and so her narrative prevails.

The movie pretty much begins and ends with the close up of our heroine’s wounded, tearful, exhausted face. If you pay attention, you can see she begins to smile. As we listen to Edith’s monologue, which is, not incidentally, suggestive of someone composing the opening paragraph of a novel, we know she finally has what she has always wanted She has her story.

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