Women in Horror : Round Up

Well, this wraps up Women in Horror month and our series of guests posts, by women about horror.

Elvira, Hostess of Horror

We will do a quick link round up of all the posts so you can make sure you haven’t missed anything on our tour of movies, books and horrors from mythology, but first we just wanted to state the obvious. Women don’t only do horror in February. There are a huge number of talented writers, musicians, directors, artists and other female creatives out there living and breathing the horror genre. So while we hope our month of celebration has got you thinking about where you can find women doing horror and how women are treated or mistreated by the genre, we hope you won’t stop there. 

We recommend checking out, The Cultural Gutter, Popshifter, Ginger Nuts of Horror as great starting points. 

The blogs

K.A. Laity : The Haunting of Hill House
Snippet Sunday : Winter Tales
Kim Bannerman : Disability, Motherhood and Personal Autonomy
C.A. Yates : A Monstrous Love, Crimson Peak & The Writer
Jan Siegel : Fear of the Female in Vintage Fiction
Aditi Sen : Bengali Ghosts
Interview of Emma Bridges By Margret Helgadottir : Making Monsters 
Snippet Sunday : Respectable Horror
Su Haddrell : The Weird in the Normal
Jenny Barber : Short Fiction Queens
Kerry Fristoe : My Bloody Valentine 
Sharon Shaw : Women who Fight Back
Leslie Hatton : ‘What Have You Done to Solange’ Exposes the Legacy of Misogyny 
Snippet Sunday : Pacific Monsters
Angela Englert : Once, Twice, Three Times a Villainess: Karen Black, Sex, and Twist Endings in Trilogy of Terror
Amelia Starling : Female Spirits and Emotions in Japanese Ghost Stories
Snippet Sunday : Asian Monsters
Zoe Chatfield : Lost Cities (Unfriended)
Carol Borden : Cat People

Women in Horror : Lost Cities

Lost Cities by Zoe Chatfield

In April of 2015, I sat in a movie theater as I had done so many times before. Lights dim, trailers play, opening credits roll. But unlike times before, as I sat there, watching two characters – a boyfriend and a girlfriend – talk and flirt via Skype on screen, I heard my own voice playing out through the theater speakers. I am certainly not alone in the category of people who always find it a little odd to hear themselves in recordings (Is that really what I sound like?) And boy, is there a difference between hearing yourself talking in a video taken on an iPhone and hearing yourself sing through the giant speakers of a theater. It’s even more overwhelming when the song is one that you never wanted to share with people in the first place.

**

I am a part of a band with two friends that I’ve known since my freshman year of high school. We formed the summer after our senior year, and recorded 11 songs total (split into two releases) at the end of that summer and during our freshman year of college. We recorded “Lost Cities,” along with the other songs on a single microphone in the living room of a family friend’s illegal apartment in Hartford, Connecticut. (The apartment was in a building meant for businesses – the spaces for rent were intended as offices and studios. There were only shared bathrooms in the hall and he had rigged a shower in his kitchen that definitely wasn’t supposed to be there). I stood closest to the microphone, singing the melodies and the words I’d written. Emily stood a step or two behind me, singing harmonies, and Athena sat at a little Wurlitzer keyboard.

Some of the songs I was eager to share, happy with how they’d turned out. One was about my friend’s relationship with her boyfriend and how I thought they needed to break up. I liked it because I’d managed to use the ridiculous metaphor – and image – of someone wearing rainboots in a desert to talk about the state of their relationship in a way that I thought turned out to be pretty clever. It was also fun to sing, and we managed to write the song using only two chords on the piano without it sounding annoyingly repetitive. “Lost Cities” was also about love, but unlike my song about wearing rainboots in the desert, it was not one that I wanted to share. The song originated from a story familiar to many children of divorce: upset over a relationship that just needs to die already. Given the sensitive nature of the topic, and the fact that I was an eighteen year old still living at home, I was incredibly hesitant to perform it after putting music to it with the band. I was resistant to record it and put it online. It took debating and deliberating and a little bit of pressuring from peers. Finally, I gave in. We performed the song at gigs, we recorded it for our online release.

We uploaded the songs to Bandcamp with an album cover I (poorly) designed myself. It featured a picture I’d taken of my sister around the age of four, standing against a mural in New York City that consists of a tide of hearts dropping down from a helicopter like bombs. Besides promoting on our personal and band page on Facebook, we did nothing to announce the music to the world, and expected little to come of it – the songs were now out in the universe, for mostly just a few supportive family members and nice friends to listen to. Out of all the songs we recorded, this was the one I was most sensitive to, the only one I really didn’t care to “promote”. So of course, this song would become the one that now has over 1.5 million plays on Spotify, that has been heard by people in 58 countries around world.  In essence, it seems to be the song that will never die. It continues to, fittingly, haunt the band. It definitely continues to haunt me.

To say the least – given the complete lack of professionalism both in our recording and promotional process – we never expected to be contacted about licensing our song to be in a movie. What’s more, when we first agreed to it, we didn’t know the details of the movie we were licensing the song to.

**

At this point, I think I should provide more information about the song. Each verse begins with the phrase “Lost cities, what a pity” and goes on about a failing romance; for example, “No one knows when it’s time to accept a lost love and say goodbye.” The chorus plays off of wedding vows – “Til death, til death, til death do we part. Til death, til death, til the death of this love.” Then, Emily sings “ooo’s” that emulate the sound of wedding bells. 

**

We pondered over the type of movie and scene the song would be used for. None of us were particular fans of the romance genre, and assumed that that our song about love had landed somewhere in that realm. Probably something super cheesy. That was a guess we all agreed on. Some kind of break up scene. Or a couple getting into a big fight. Maybe one of them storms off, slamming the front door of a little apartment they share, as I sing – “destroy yourselves already, you’re halfway there….” Maybe a somber, lonely person is walking down the street as we sing – “don’t you see there’s no home, no home left for love here.”

I suppose we weren’t completely wrong in our guesses. There was a couple in the movie. And they did go through turmoil. However it came as a surprise (although looking back – we probably shouldn’t have been that surprised), that the song would actually be in a horror movie. (I guess “til death do we part” works better as literal than nuanced while playing in the background of some scene). The movie, Unfriended, originally debuted at a Canadian film festival before being picked up by Universal Pictures and re-released in theaters internationally about a year later. The movie takes place completely on computer screens (good for us – not only did the song play, but it showed the character opening it up on Spotify, our album cover and title sitting in the corner of the screen. This was particularly exciting for my little sister. She was seven at the time the movie came out in the United States and very proudly talked about how she was famous now. Don’t worry, we didn’t let her watch the film.) Six friends, including the couple I watched as I first heard myself subtly singing in the background, are on a joint Skype call when they start getting messages from a classmate who had killed herself the year before. You can probably fill in some of the blanks here… the ghost starts messing with them (the big game changer is that she’s using online platforms to communicate and haunt them). If you don’t want spoilers for this movie that’s been out for a few years now, don’t read the next sentence. Long story short, everyone periodically dies.

The last two people to die are the couple that start the movie off. In the beginning, they are flirting and happy. By the end, infidelity has been revealed. They’ve watched their other friends die in disturbing ways. “Lost Cities” plays twice in this one and a half hour time, in conjunction with the sad spiral their relationship takes. My songs about failing relationships and distaste for rom-coms may already be clues to a larger attitude of mine: an overall cynicism about romance. So it was definitely a little satisfying for the song to be a prelude for the scene when the couple in the movie dies. Much better than some normal break up scene when you know the couple will find each other again in the end. When you know there will be a happy ending. This had no happy ending. In that way, cheesy horror movies will always be more honest than cheesy romantic movies. Romance reveals our desires, our fantasies, what we wish our lives could be. Life rarely pans out to these dreams. Horror reveals our fears, our downfalls, the reality that we break under pressure, we regret mistakes when it’s far too late, that we are all imperfect people, and in this movie, bad people. It is more violent, more extreme, and at times, more otherworldly than our realities. But beneath the cheap scares, there is a truth. If I had to choose a genre for this song to appear in – this song that I had a fear of sharing at all – I’m glad it was horror.

The Music of the Lonely Dark

Author of The Lonely Dark, Ren Warom, takes time out to tell us about the music behind the writing. Enjoy. – Aunty Fox.

The Music of The Lonely Dark

I don’t work to music. I’m one of those terribly dull types who functions best in silence. However, I am frequently inspired by music; sound landscapes opening story landscapes in my head that I can revisit by listening to particular tracks. I think it’s rather common for this to happen, whether it be an artist, writer, or another musician – music seems to reach in and open doors inside of you, showing you places or connections you didn’t know were there.

I live in future worlds in my head, they’re the ones I cleave to. Strange worlds on the whole. When I sit down to write, however serious my intent (NB: I’m no nowhere near intellectual enough to be serious in my writing, but I suffer from unfortunate delusions of literature. Yeah. *Eyeroll*), I get sidetracked by odd details, weird little moments crop up and spread like bacteria until all attempts at the serious (or rather, I suppose, the intellectual) have been eaten alive.

Think of it like a vampire virus in blood; the weird gradually gobbling every sane moment until only the skin and meat jacket look similar. Remaining so until that moment the inner weirdness is revealed in sharp fangs and predatory intent, provoking the expectation/reality shockwave created by the illusion of normality. Gosh… that makes my writing sound waaay sexier than it is, so I’m going to run with it. Possibly to Paris. Or Gretna Green, because I’m cheap. Or rather because I’m poor. So romantic!

I appear to be digressing. Habit.

On rare occasions the strangeness infecting my writing comes in the form of musical inspiration. Lyrics that reach under the skin and mutate the words even before I can begin to build them into a story. So it was with The Lonely Dark. I first discovered Purity Ring when one of the YouTubers I watch included them in a roundup of her favourite music. The track she mentioned was called Fineshrine and, accompanied by a wonderfully surreal video, it made me want to know who this Purity Ring were.

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They are, to my delight, a Canadian electro-pop duo, and everything they do is just as wonderful strange as Fineshrine. The combination of eerie, beautiful music mixed with the peculiarity of the lead singer’s lyrics, all sung in her slightly child-like voice creates atmospheres of dreaming incongruity to become lost in. It was this atmosphere, as well as a combination of certain lyrics, that infested the DNA of The Lonely Dark. Changed it at a fundamental level from a story of exploration and horrifying discovery to one with an underlying tone of loss, loneliness and the too-real unreality of dreams.

Throughout the writing of The Lonely Dark, in moments when driving or doing household chores, or when my inspiration lagged and words refused to come, I would listen to Purity Ring and the world would open to me all over again, bringing me home when I was lost. I didn’t quite capture exactly what I wanted to (and oh how familiar is that? The frustration of writers everywhere!) but I am very proud of the story I created and I hope you might find in it some of what I sought to express.

Listen to Purity Ring. Read The Lonely Dark (Please!). If you can, do both together. They do, after all, share DNA.

NB: Just how many times did I write strange and/or weird in this thing? Where’s Roget when you need him!