Culture Wars and Horror Movies: Gender Debates in Post-2010’s US Horror Cinema 3031532783, 9783031532788

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Culture Wars and Horror Movies Gender Debates in Post-2010’s US Horror Cinema Edited by Noelia Gregorio-Fernández Carmen M. Méndez-García

Culture Wars and Horror Movies

Noelia Gregorio-Fernández Carmen M. Méndez-García Editors

Culture Wars and Horror Movies Gender Debates in Post–2010’s US Horror Cinema

Editors Noelia Gregorio-Fernández Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades Universidad Internacional de La Rioja Logroño (La Rioja), Spain

Carmen M. Méndez-García Departamento de Estudios Ingleses Universidad Complutense de Madrid Madrid, Spain

ISBN 978-3-031-53277-1    ISBN 978-3-031-53278-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53278-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Culture Wars Revisited: Navigating Gender Dynamics in Post-2010 Social Horror  1 Noelia Gregorio-Fernández and Carmen M. Méndez-García References   7 Part I Female Bodies/Disposable Bodies   9 2 Woke  Gal Gone Bad: Populism and Gender Trouble in Wrong Turn (2021) 11 Eduardo Valls Oyarzun Culture Wars, Populism and “Unpolitics”  12 An “Unpolitical” Allegory  16 Populist Horrors in the Rural Slasher  19 Intersectional Suppression and Gender Invisibility. Conclusion  25 References  29 3 Living  Deliciously? The Borderless Horror of Female Empowerment 33 Elena Furlanetto Magic and the South: Il legame  39 The Voices Know Things About Us: Voces  44 Wouldst Thou Like to Live Deliciously? The Witch  47

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Contents

Conclusion  51 References  52 4 The  Culture That “Can’t Anymore”: Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) as Pilgrimage of a Traumatized Society 55 Marta Brkljačić References  75 Part II Female as Creation Force Revisited  77 5 Mother! Nature: Creation, Apocalypse, Climate Skepticism, and Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017) 79 Zachary Ingle References  93 6 Monsters,  Women, and Magic: Intersecting Hierarchies of Gender and Religion in The Witch (2015) 97 Cristina Casado Presa References 112 7 Decay and Fear: Take Shelter (2011) as Social Horror115 Nisa Harika Güzel Köşker Anxiety and Loss of Resources 118 Conclusion 131 References 133 Part III Gender(ed) Anxieties 135 8 Antebellum (2020): White Supremacist Masculinities and Black Lives Matters in the Trump Era137 Juan José Arroyo Paniagua and Steven K. McClain Senator Denton vs. Dr. Henley 143 Captain Jasper vs. Amara 150 Conclusion 156 References 157

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9 Gaslighting,  Captivity, and Trauma: Notes on MeToo Horror Films161 Todd K. Platts MeToo and the MeToo Horror Film 163 The Gaslighting Cycle 167 The Captive Woman Cycle 171 The Trauma Cycle 174 Conclusion 176 References 176 10 From  the Female Grotesque to the Crone: Beware of the Older Woman in The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014)183 Marta Miquel-Baldellou Introduction 183 Abjection: Bodily Wastes, Border, Mother 187 Uncanniness: Others, Doubles, Mirrors 190 Under Constant Surveillance: From Pathologization to Vilification 193 Demonizing the Older Woman: Horror Archetypes and the Allegory of Possession 195 The Older Woman’s Gaze: From Spectacle to Spectator 198 Conclusion 199 References 201 11 Mutilation  and Dual Body in The Perfection (2018): A Reading on Queer Horror205 Laura Blázquez Cruz The Perfection: Contextualizing the Film and the Plot 205 The Boundaries, the Insane, the Queer 207 Mutilation as Control of One’s Own/the Other’s Body 211 Conclusion 217 References 218 Index221

Notes on Contributors

Juan José Arroyo Paniagua  graduated in English Studies at Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, in 2018. He holds a Master’s Degree in North American Studies from Complutense University of Madrid and the Franklin Institute of University of Alcalá de Henares. He is also a specialist in masculinities from University of Castilla-La Mancha. Arroyo is, at present, a Ph.D. candidate in Literary Studies at Complutense University. His doctoral dissertation, currently titled “‘A man much for himself’: Masculinities in the Works of Cormac McCarthy,” analyzes the representations of masculinity McCarthy portrays in some of his works. Arroyo’s academic interests range from North American literature to film studies, TV shows, video games, and the English language. Laura  Blázquez Cruz  holds a Ph.D. in Languages and Cultures from the University of Jaén (2023) and is a professor and researcher in the Department of English Philology. Her research pivots around the study of monstrosity from the psychological, ontological, and representative spheres, covering different arts, and focuses on the body as a frame and field where politics, biology, and technology converge. She has carried out research stays at the University of Lisbon with a scholarship obtained in a competitive process. Some of the papers she has written and presented in conferences deal with the monstrosity of the androgynous body (University of Salamanca), the transgender in the cinema (University of Athens), or the relationship between post-memory and the ontological (Poland). In addition, she has written articles about dystopia in cinematographic discourse, such as “Narrativas de la desmitificación y la distopía americana en ix

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Rob Zombie: La casa de los 1000 cadáveres (2002) y Los renegados del diablo (2005)” (2022), and “Vigilancia y homogeneización visual: Pilares de la construcción del bio-poder en La Naranja Mecánica (1962) de Anthony Burgess” (2023). Marta  Brkljačić  is a postgraduate doctoral student at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia, enrolled in Doctoral Studies in Literature, Performing Arts, Film and Culture (started in October 2018). Having double majored in English Language and Literature (2017) and Comparative Literature (2018), her current focus is theater studies, dramaturgy, theatrical performance, visual arts, and adaptation in a broader artistic and cultural sense, with a special focus on the adaptation of literary works into classical ballet. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis on this specific field of adaptation. She is fluent in English and a native speaker of Croatian. Cristina  Casado Presa  is Associate Professor at Washington College, Maryland, USA.  Her teaching and research activities have primarily focused on the field of gender studies and the study of non-traditional female characters. In recent years, she has devoted her research to representations of the monstrous and the feminine, particularly focusing on the figure of the witch. She has written articles and edited a volume on the subject, and she is currently working on a monograph about the witch in contemporary Spanish literature and culture. Elena Furlanetto  is Researcher in American Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. She authored Towards Turkish American Literature: Narratives of Multiculturalism in Post-Imperial Turkey (2017) and co-edited two essay collections: A Poetics of Neurosis: Narratives of Normalcy and Disorder in Cultural and Literary Texts (with Dietmar Meinel, 2018) and Media Agoras: Islamophobia and Inter/Multimedial Dissensus (with Frank Mehring, 2020). She has written articles and book chapters on the influences of Islamic mystic poetry on American romanticism, on Islamophobia in film and media, and more recently on Creoleness and early American literature. Her research and teaching interests also include Orientalism, postcolonial literatures, comparative empire studies, and poetry. Noelia Gregorio-Fernández  holds a Ph.D. in American Studies. She is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the International University of La Rioja, Spain. She has been a visiting

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scholar at the Chicano Research Center (UCLA, 2014), JFK Institute of North American Studies (Frëie Universitat of Berlin, 2015), and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (Columbia University of New York, 2016). Her lines of research focus on the ethnic representations in media, Chicano cinema, and the transnational models in American literature and culture. She has written about Latino ethnicity in contemporary U.S. cinema, American culture, and cultural identity and cinematic representation in several publications such as Atlantis, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Post Script, or Cinemas d’Amérique Latine. Her second monographic work, Una mirada al cine chicano: Robert Rodriguez en la era transnacional, was published in 2020 in the Benjamin Franklin Library collection at the Editorial Universidad de Alcalá. Nisa Harika Güzel Kös¸ker  is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Ankara University, Turkey. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from the same department and served as the department chair between 2017 and 2023. She is the recipient of the doctoral research scholarship granted by The Council of Higher Education in Turkey. She conducted research on nineteenth-century American women’s writing in the English Department, Rare and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the National Archives. She is the vice president of the American Studies Association of Turkey and specializes in American women’s writing and cultural studies. Zachary  Ingle  holds a Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies from the University of Kansas, USA.  He is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication at Hardin-Simmons University, Abilene, Texas. He coauthored The 100 Greatest Superhero Films and TV Shows (2022) and edited four volumes: Robert Rodriguez: Interviews; Gender and Genre in Sports Documentaries; Identity and Myth in Sports Documentaries; and Fan Phenomena: The Big Lebowski. Ingle’s articles have appeared in Post Script, Literature/Film Quarterly, and Journal of Sport History. His favorite horror films are Psycho and The Exorcist, and his favorite subjects to research and teach include African American cinema, horror, and the intersection of religion and film. Steven K. McClain  is a graduate of the University of Virginia’s College of Arts and Sciences, USA. In 2019, he completed a Doctorate in Literary Studies from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His research

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interests have included animal studies, pedagogy, and English- and Spanish-language science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In 2021, he wrote “Decolonizing the Novum, Queering the Cyborg in Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed” in Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction. A Professor of English Language and Literature in the Department of Foreign Languages at the Universidad del Norte, Barranquilla, Colombia, McClain is the author of The Monsters of Inkwhich Well: An Octosyllabic Science Fiction (2022). Carmen  M.  Méndez-García is Associate Professor of American Literature in the Department of English Studies at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Her doctoral dissertation, “The Rhetorics of Schizophrenia in the Epigones of Modernism” (2003), was based on her research as a visiting scholar at Harvard University in 2001 and 2002. She was also a participant in the 2010 Study of the U.S.  Institute on Contemporary American Literature at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, funded by the Spanish Fulbright program and the U.S. Department of State. Current research and teaching interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. literature, postmodernism and contemporary fiction, the countercultures in the United States, spatial studies, gender studies, medical humanities, and minority studies (especially Chicana studies). Marta  Miquel-Baldellou  is a postdoctoral researcher and a member of the Dedal-Lit Research Group at the Centre of Literatures and Cultures in English, University of Lleida, Catalonia, Spain. She is currently participating in a government-­funded research project which looks into the matrix of aging studies and creativity in contemporary cultural manifestations. Her research revolves around comparative literature, age studies, film theory, and horror fiction. She has presented papers at different international conferences, and her articles have been published in volumes edited by international publishing houses, such as Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Peter Lang, Brill/Rodopi, Routledge, and Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Todd  K.  Platts is Professor of Sociology at Piedmont Virginia Community College, USA.  The bulk of his scholarship has focused on horror cinema, with his most recent research focusing on horror films in the 2010s, including a box-office analysis of horror films at the North American box office from 2006 to 2016, an analysis of film reviews of Get Out, a postmortem of the post-9/11 zombie cycle, examinations of the

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Insidious and Purge franchises, an investigation of Blumhouse Productions’ curation of its franchises, and several assessments of commentary on horror cinema in the age of Trump. He has also written works on Italian and American zombie cinema, slasher films, horror movies in the 1960s and 1970s, and the history of zombies in Western popular culture, to name a few. He recently co-edited Blumhouse Productions: The New House of Horror (2022) and edited an anthology on The Conjuring (under review at Edinburgh University Press). Eduardo Valls Oyarzun  is Associate Professor of English and American literature at Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. He specializes in Victorian culture, gothic, and horror in fiction and film, with a keen interest in the ideological deconstruction of the genre. In addition, he has researched extensively on the critical connections between philosophy, literature, and cinema. His most recent publications comprise the articles “Deleuzian Time and the Elemental Rhythms of Nature in Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967)” (English Studies 103.1, 2022), “A Matter of Extreme Indelicacy: Neo-Victorian Critical Memory in Kind Hearts and Coronets” (Nordic Journal of English Studies, 20.1, 2022), and “Chambers of Consciousness and Houses of Life: Nietzschean Hermeneutics in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan” (Neophilologus 107.2, 2023).

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Culture Wars Revisited: Navigating Gender Dynamics in Post-2010 Social Horror Noelia Gregorio-Fernández and Carmen M. Méndez-García

Culture wars have ferociously exploded in the American political setting, especially since the 2010s, by promoting confrontation as the final political practice. Twenty-first-century culture wars, encapsulated in a not-so-­ latent populism, have become a form of polarization and simplification of social interests and political ideas, poised to accomplish the unity of the people above and against its parts, and constituting a political mode where

N. Gregorio-Fernández (*) Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Universidad Internacional de La Rioja, Logroño (La Rioja), Spain e-mail: [email protected] C. M. Méndez-García Departamento de Estudios Ingleses, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53278-8_1

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war and politics form a seamless connection. New culture wars have constructed today’s United States public opinion in polarized terms, wrangling over issues of abortion, homosexuality, religion, feminism, multiculturalism, popular culture, education, and what it means to be American. During the last decade, American culture wars have multiplied and branched out, so much so that Helen Lewis recently declared in The Atlantic that “the world is trapped in America’s culture war” (2020), suggesting that American culture wars have expanded in terms of ideological and sociopolitical concerns beyond the country’s borders. However, among these diverse polarized manifestations, culture wars have revealed a strong emphasis on gender, specifically on women’s sexual assault, harassment, and related topics connected to prevailing cultural norms imposed on women and the systems of power in the current US polarized society. The horror genre has resurfaced in the second decade of the twenty-first century as the perfect medium for (re)presenting polarized liberal and conservative sociopolitical views about women, specifically under Donald Trump’s presidency. In this volume, we will be delving into the close-knit relationship between the horror genre and the status of women in the context of cultural wars. The general dissatisfaction with how women are portrayed in movies has become intertwined with numerous contemporary horror films, particularly those made after 2010, which can be seen as instances of a critical perspective seeking to grasp the societal gender divisions prevalent in present-day American society. Yet, even more expansively, it can be claimed that culture wars feed off the bountiful terrain of women in horror, illustrating #MeToo and notions of consent, gender justice, aging, physical and emotional abuse, women’s corporeality, misogyny, and queer representation as central to their storytelling. Whereas traditional readings of horror films have focused primarily on the mistreatment of women, there have also been some moments of resistance and empowerment in past decades, as we can see, among others, in Alien (Ridley Scott 1979), Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham 1980), and Scream (Wes Craven 1996), excellent examples of screen representations that shifted the perception of women in the genre and paved the way to current, more progressive gender representations in horror movies. During the last decade, the aesthetic, affective, and ethical dimensions of the connection between the horror genre and the depiction of women have turned into a sociopolitical exploration of the widespread discontent

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of women concerning trauma, violence, sexual harassment, and sexualized forms of representation. It is not by chance that these culture wars-­ embedded movies overlapped with the awareness campaign against sexual abuse and harassment known as #MeToo, a motto first used by Tarana Burke back in 2006 but extended as a worldwide breakthrough thanks to the The New York Times report against film producer Harvey Weinstein’s acts in 2015 (Santora and Baker). This volume explores the current partisan split in the United States regarding gender and culture wars and its complex and timely commentary on twenty-first-century US sociopolitical relations. Within this context, the horror film genre in the second decade of the century has adapted and repurposed existing and new gender identities in historical and political contexts. These identities have been reimagined as integral components of new cultural initiatives, even on a transnational scale, as will be analyzed in some chapters of this volume. While performing in the foregoing capacities, gender in horror films deploys an inclusive range of narratives, variously and variably inspired by, and based on, sociopolitical divisions in the contemporary United States. Moreover, it has come to involve a diverse array of approaches to and patterns of revisiting, treating, retelling, and rethinking women within the horror film genre that draw meaning from culture wars. This volume extends the literature from recent years that has explored the emerging phenomena of gender debates and cultural conflicts in the horror genre. Among others, we can find Victoria McCollum’s edited volume Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear (Routledge, 2019), in which the horror genre adapts itself to the transformation of contemporary American politics as a renewed potential for political engagement in a climate of civil conflict; Samantha Holland and Robert Shail’s Gender and Contemporary Horror in Film (Emerald, 2019), which studies how contemporary horror movies depict femininity, sexuality, masculinity, the process of aging, and other pressing matters; Adam Lowenstein’s Horror Film and Otherness (Columbia University Press, 2022), which offers a new definition of horror and why it matters for understanding social otherness and ongoing metamorphoses across the “normal” self and the “monstrous” Other; Natalie Wilson’s Willful Monstrosity: Gender and Race in twenty-first Century Horror (McFarland, 2020), an analysis around four primary monstrous figures—zombies, vampires, witches, and monstrous women—, and Joe Vallese’s recent edition of It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (Feminist

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Press, 2022), a critical space open to the queer community’s subversive readings of current horror US movies. The contributions in this volume seek to examine different perspectives of gender, queer, and women’s representation in horror films released in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Drawing from a range of portrayals that span from the #MeToo movement to women aging on screen, along with ecocritical approaches and queer horror considerations, the depiction of gender in horror movies is more than ever a reflection of the uneasy relationship between a still predominant traditional social order and the empowering representation of women and queer people associated with the culture wars. The moments of resistance that allow for strong female and queer representation onscreen intersect with the conventions of the horror genre through female protagonists who struggle against ideals of what their role in society should be. The perceived crisis of moral values, the portrayal of aging women, and religious and spiritual ecofeminist connections are used metaphorically in terms of the conceptualization of female creation and the natural world and its destruction and, subsequently, what emerges from its ruins. In addition, the exploration of some of the alternatives offered by new or unconventional forms of manhood and masculinities attempts to revisit the horror genre from an ecocritical perspective in which female creativity and nature are united. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the social horror genre has served as a protean but easily identifiable locus for complex representations of the connection between women and ecological concerns, echoing or questioning the claims of second-wave and third-wave feminisms, with a specific dark aesthetic and tone that foregrounds its socio-political dimension. Revitalizing both the interest in the horror genre itself and the representation of ecofeminism, and questioning the idea that women are inherently closer to nature, culture wars and their portrayal in social horror films revisit pivotal concepts such as the abject and the monstrous-feminine as legitimized, empowered dualisms. All in all, this edited volume (volume 2 of the “Culture Wars and Horror Movies” project) includes contributions that seek to explore gender perspectives in contemporary horror movies by focusing on topics as diverse as the mistreatment, stereotyping, and misrepresentation of female disposable bodies; ecocritical approaches to religion and spirituality that use the concept of female creation metaphorically; and new, contemporary ways to represent gender anxieties within the current context of culture wars. While the essays belonging to each one of these parts approach the

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subject matter from various angles, ranging from feminist and post-­ feminist theories to ecocritical views, this volume targets primarily the ways and means by which women are stepping out of the shadows in the context of culture wars, and how this particular momentum can be traced in contemporary horror movies. Part One, entitled “Female Bodies/Disposable Bodies,” focuses on traditional representations of women as a source of malice and impurity and on how recent films have addressed such fears and transmuted women from objects into agents, bringing fresh perspectives to the gender dynamics of earlier horror fiction and film. Eduardo Valls Oyarzun opens the section with an examination of Wrong Turn (Mike P. Nelson 2021) as an example of the counter-liberal stance on matters of gender in horror films. By relocating the slasher trope of the “Final Girl” in a context of populist discourses, Valls Oyarzun offers an analysis of the film as an endeavor to change the established perspective of women’s corporeality and their portrayal as just disposable bodies in the horror film tradition. In the next chapter of this section, Elena Furlanetto focuses on the universality and global nature of current social horror films, offering a transnational perspective of cultural tradition(s) of gender violence in horror movies from three different countries. Starting with the analysis of Italian and Spanish films Il legame (The Binding, Emanuele de Feudis 2020) and Voces (Voices, Ángel Gómez Hernández’, 2020), Furlanetto argues that The Witch (Robert Eggers 2015) responds to a geographic and culturally specific tradition of misogyny that presents female bodies as a repository of ancestral horror. Ending this section, Marta Brkljačić’s essay takes into consideration the phenomena of suicide and homicide in Midsommar (Ari Aster 2019) from the perspective of women’s bodily experience. Brkljačić examines the cultural phenomenon of justified female sacrifice and its socially dictated oppressiveness on women’s corporeality, normalized as a cultural phenomenon created and maintained by white men. Taking on a perspective beyond the male gaze, this chapter delves into the phenomena of socially “justified” female sacrifice in the form of physical and emotional disposability, while dealing with the horror of unsustainable human relationships and the social trauma of detachment. In many ways connected to the above, Part Two of the volume, entitled “Female as Creation Force Revisited,” continues to look at themes from previous chapters, this time from the perspective of creation and/or theocentric environmental activism. Zachary Ingle analyzes Mother! (Darren Aronofsky 2017) and its female protagonist as connected to the film’s

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biblical and ecological motifs in the context of culture wars, especially in how religious communities (particularly US evangelicals) and conservatives battle issues like climate change and “creation.” Cristina Casado Presa focuses on The Witch (Robert Eggers 2015) as a collage of images and stereotypes that conjure feminist and neo-pagan revisionist myths about witchcraft by addressing the fears and anxieties regarding intersecting hierarchies of gender and religion in our days and the implications in the current sociocultural landscape in the United States. Further investigating the connection between ecological consciousness and gender, Nisa Harika Güzel Köşker reflects on Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols 2011) and its blend of ecological and psychological horror, thus exploring the relation between human damage and nature and the indifference to this destruction through the lens of the female protagonist. Güzel further explores the contingent connection between the destruction of nature and social constructs such as gender or family as part of problems produced by capitalist patriarchy in American society, combining the critical issues of ecological deterioration and impositions posed on gender relations by patriarchy with the film’s specific focus on a nuclear American family. Part Three, entitled “Gender(ed) anxieties: New Perspectives,” brings this volume to a close with four exploratory pieces, in which the re-­ elaboration of traditional representations of oppressive masculine power, as well as socially gendered anxieties about physical and emotional abuse, aging, and the evolution of queer representations, take center stage. Juan José Arroyo Paniagua and Steven McClain’s chapter examines Antebellum (Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz 2020) as a piece at the intersection of neo-Confederate ideologies and the concept of “hegemonic masculinity,” relating to depictions of cultural warfare in horror movies. By reflecting upon depictions of neo-Confederate slavery and notions of masculinity, this analysis considers white and black masculinities in relation to violence, gender performance, and the male body. Social fears and anxieties generated from the ebbs and flows of the culture wars are also the central focus of Todd K. Platts’s essay, which articulates the sociopolitical landscape that helped to give birth to a number of #MeToo horror films, such as growing demands to address sexual assault as a social issue, by providing a synoptic overview of what he identifies as the gaslighting cycle, the captive women cycle, and the trauma cycle in recent horror movies. Marta MiquelBaldellou analyzes the film The Taking of Deborah Logan (Adam Robitel 2014) as a space in which the fears of aging take horrific proportions, by exploring the social anxieties and stereotypes that new conceptualizations

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of aging and gender have produced, especially in women. As MiquelBaldellou demonstrates, the representation of older women as disturbing sources of cultural anxiety revisits the established association of the older woman with a source of dread and uneasiness, thus conforming to Barbara Creed’s notion of the monstrous-feminine. Laura Blázquez Cruz’s chapter closes this section and the volume by revisiting the queer representation in the horror genre. Within the current US polarized sociopolitical environment, The Perfection (Richard Shepard 2018) serves as a representative work about political changes in gender policies under Donald Trump’s presidency. Blázquez Cruz argues that part of this foundation lies in the conception of purity amongst the most conservative and religious communities, rejecting those queer situations or queer individuals that transgress the most traditional social limits into the abject. The ten essays in the volume, focused on current sociopolitical events and their representation in horror film, underline the vibrancy and complexity that characterizes the study of issues of gender in the genre. As the chapters evince, the current reformulation of traditionally stable ideas about gender in the context of culture wars often leads to opposing, if not contradictory, representations in film. While some of the approaches might be more oriented toward questions of representation and stereotyping, and others toward a revision of current activism, individually and taken as a whole these ten essays remind us that the experience of horror films is often that of a gestalt whereby gender and sociopolitical anxieties are inseparable. What becomes evident is the lack of permanence that currently characterizes notions of gender, femaleness, and femininity, with the analysis of films capturing all the subtle nuances that may emerge from the stories and experiences represented.

References Aronofsky, Darren, dir. 2017. Mother! Paramount Pictures. Aster, Ari, dir. 2019. Midsommar. A24. Bush, Gerard, and Christopher Renz, dirs. 2020. Antebellum. Lionsgate. Craven, Wes, dir. 1996. Scream. Dimension Films. Cunningham, Sean S., dir. 1980. Friday the 13th. Paramount Pictures. De Feudis, Domenico Emanuele, dir. 2020. Il legame. Netflix. Eggers, Robert, dir. 2015. The Witch. A24. Gómez Hernández, Ángel, dir. 2020. Voces. Entertainment One Films Spain.

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Holland, Samantha, and Robert Shail. 2019. Gender and Contemporary Horror in Film. Leeds: Emerald Publishing. Lewis, Helen. 2020. The World Is Trapped in America’s Culture War. The Atlantic, October 27. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/10/ internet-­world-­trapped-­americas-­culture-­war/616799/ Lowenstein, Adam. 2022. Horror Film and Otherness. New York: Columbia University Press. McCollum, Victoria, ed. 2019. Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear. New York: Routledge. Nelson, Mike P., dir. 2021. Wrong Turn. Lionsgate Entertainment and Constantin Films. Nichols, Jeff, dir. 2011. Take Shelter. Sony Classic Pictures. Robitel, Adam, dir. 2014. The Taking of Deborah Logan. Eagle Films. Santora, Marc, and Al Baker. 2015. Police Question Film Producer After a Report of a Groping. The New  York Times, March 31. https://web.archive.org/ web/20171014233641/https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/31/nyregion/har vey-­w einstein-­p roducer-­q uestioned-­b y-­n ew-­y ork-­p olice-­a fter-­ groping-­accusation.html Scott, Ridley, dir. 1979. Alien. 20th Century-Fox. Shepard, Richard, dir. 2018. The Perfection. Netflix. Vallese, Joe, ed. 2022. It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflection on Horror. New York: Feminist Press. Wilson, Natalie. 2020. Willful Monstrosity: Gender and Race in 21st Century Horror. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland.

PART I

Female Bodies/Disposable Bodies

CHAPTER 2

Woke Gal Gone Bad: Populism and Gender Trouble in Wrong Turn (2021) Eduardo Valls Oyarzun

This chapter sets out to explore the ideological issues ingrained with the unitary narratives of populism in the context of the backwoods horror film Wrong Turn (Mike P.  Nelson 2021). The essay submits an allegorical reading of the film whereby the culture clash between a group of urbanite hikers and a secret Southern backwoods cult known as The Foundation epitomizes the type of political dynamics—the “us vs. them” opposition, the preservation of conflict to promote divisive identity work, etc.—that define contemporary right-wing populism in the US. Wrong Turn deploys strategies of the rural slasher to enact these dynamics and to put forward an alternative to the populist discourses found in the political space of The Foundation. However, the liberal position the film eventually posits offers, in turn, a counter-liberal stance on matters of gender. Indeed, by re-­ signifying the slasher trope of the Final Girl and framing it within an overt political contention, Wrong Turn arguably manages to indict Trumpian politics in terms of class and region but falls short of finding the same

E. Valls Oyarzun (*) Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53278-8_2

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results in terms of gender. As a result, the film ends up resorting to the old patriarchal gendered-biased conventions the trope—and hence the film— is laden with.

Culture Wars, Populism and “Unpolitics” Culture wars are, first and foremost, wars. As empty as the statement may sound, from a political perspective, it foregrounds a key concept to understand the phenomenon overall: i.e., culture wars are not wars in a metaphorical sense, they do not seem like wars or simply play out as such, but rather they are, indeed, actual wars. This is possible due to the instrumental conceptualization of war as political contention or the resolve of conflict by subduing a contender, an underlying idea in modern political thought that dates back, at least, to Carl von Clausewitz. Clausewitz inscribes “war” in the structure of “political intercourse”—“War is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse, with a mixture of other means” (2010, 402)—and, even then, not as the key policy in the overall contention, but solely as the “general features” or the outward form of the policies dictated by the negotiation as such. From a theoretical perspective, Clausewitz’s thesis allegedly downplays warfare and its impact on the political struggle, as if war were nothing but the undesirable consequence of a particularly harsh policy or the collateral product of an otherwise inevitably thwarted course of events in the negotiation. However ancillary the role of warfare might seem in the context of “political intercourses,” resorting to war—i.e., deploying war as general policy—implies a specific type of political contention aimed solely at “the compulsory submission of the enemy to [the subject’s] will,” which, in essence, constitutes the “ultimate object” of war as political instrument (2010, 101). To Clausewitz, “violence” or “physical force” (101) is the means to achieve this submission, but the ultimate political goal informed by the “general features of policy” (2010, 402) expressed in war informs, indeed, said submission. All in all, what Clausewitz hypothesizes here is the macro- and geo-­ political correlative of what Antonio Gramsci in turn describes as the production and coercive exertion of “hegemony” (2018, 934–935). The political dynamic involved in Clausewitz’s instrumental conception of war matches Gramsci’s analysis of how the “apparatus of the state … enforces” hegemony, i.e., the “general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group,” “on those groups who do not “consent” either actively or passively” (2018, 935) to said political direction. Gramsci

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however theorizes the war-like imposition of hegemony (in Clausewitz’s terms, the “submission of the enemy to [the subject’s] will”) only in response and “anticipation of moments of crisis of command and direction,” that is, “when spontaneous consent has failed” (2018, 935). The subjugation of the enemy, the submission of their will, sets off then in and by conflict; when the rise of counter-hegemonic practices and discourses calls for expedient coercion war becomes thus the dominant political paradigm. Culture wars—like all wars for that matter—surge, unfold, and thrive then in political environments that promote conflict as chief and final political practice. “Populism,” as the “polarization and simplification of social interests and political ideas” set to achieve “the unity of the people above and against its parts” (Urbinati 2014, 6; emphasis added) constitutes a political mode particularly productive of said environments. The notion of conflict is so integral to “populism” that war and politics become, like in Clausewitz, an extension of each other, albeit in reverse, for in populism, Paul Taggart suggests, “there is a strong undertone of politics being the continuation of war by other means” (2019, 82). The rhetoric of warfare in populism manifests “in three key ways” (83). Firstly, it prompts the construction of the subject in polarized, dialectical, and relational terms. “Populism,” Nadia Urbinati expounds, “treats pluralism of conflicting interests as a show of litigious claims to be overcome by creating a polarized scenario that simplifies social forces and giving the people the chance to immediately take sides” (Urbinati 2014, 131). The choice embedded in said scenario justifies the construction of a “we” or “the pure many” and a “them” or “the corrupt few” (131). Secondly, the “them” becomes thus alienated and objective, giving rise to the political structure of conflict, i.e., the dialectic of the “subject/friend” vs. the “other/ enemy” as well as to the political justification of the total imposition of the former over the latter (Taggart 2019, 83), that is, the establishment of a new “hegemony.” Last but by no means least, “simplification and polarization” as Urbinati elaborates, “produce verticalization of political consent, which inaugurates a deeper unification of the masses under an organic narrative and a charismatic Caesarist leader impersonating it” (2014, 131). It is the context of this narrative, under the aegis of the Caesarist individual subjectivity, wherein culture wars—as a political instrument of populism—can be properly envisaged. The narrative Urbinati refers to provides the subject with a political version of “practical identity,” in the sense suggested by Christine M. Korsgaard, to wit, “a description under

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which you value yourself … you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking” (1996, 101). This description means the stratification of a manifold of conceptions and representations that are nevertheless culturally bound. Culture wars then can be conceived as a type of identity-work, the enforcement of the populist “organic narrative” as the dominant cultural discourse informing, on the one hand, the populist political subject and, on the other, the purpose of its political action. If, as Irene Thomson upholds in connection with American culture wars, “‘orthodox’ versus ‘progressive’ cultural warriors clash on issues of abortion, homosexuality, feminism, school prayer, multiculturalism, popular culture, … university curricula” and the like, it is because the clash itself—as a performative act—implements a process of polarization around “classic American conundrums” (2010, 1, 3) or what it means to be American (identity) in connection with said clash as political action. This is precisely why political action in a populist environment is markedly “unpolitical,” meaning it betrays “the repudiation of politics as the process for resolving problems” (Taggart 2019, 81) and resorts instead to “other forms of activity,” like cultural war (81), as is the case in Thomson’s example. Yet all these populist “unpolitical” actions decidedly aim at preserving, rather than settling, conflict with the corrupt other—“them’”—to maintain political subjectivity under the aegis of hegemonic unity (Urbinati 2014, 131) and certainly above “its rationalist translation into deliberative speech” (131). Identity-­ work as identity-conflict thus becomes paramount to safeguard the integrity of the subject and becomes the very content of the “unpolitical” dynamic populist subjectivity promotes. The “hegemonic unity” underpinning populist “organic narratives” makes identity-work especially arduous when diverse and heterogeneous nuances come into play. Consider, for once, the limited intersectional dynamics of the populist discourse. Intersectionality articulates the ways in which “multiple aspects of identity”—“gender, race, ethnicity, class,” etc.—“converge and interact” in producing social and political meanings “in a world patterned by structural inequalities” (Warhol and Lanser 2015, 27). Identity-narratives under the populist aegis can afford a certain degree of intersectionality if it helps uphold the political subject and/or enforce populist political action. Interconnectedness of multifarious aspects of identity, however, typically becomes problematic or even challenges “hegemonic unity” in that a multiplicity of identity nuances increases the chances of conflict within the body politic (i.e., “the people”). Arguably,

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both “orthodox” and “progressive” polarized subjectivities alike rarely endorse unconventional identity intersections and conversely favor discreet and limited, to some extent pre-informed connections that may facilitate simplification “for creating a politics of identity” (Urbinati 2014, 134, 151). This is particularly true of right-wing populism. As David A.  Snow and Colin Bernatzky contend, “right-wing populism is much more exclusionary” than “progressive” populisms on account of a “triadic character” essentially “dyadic,” “left-wing populism” (2019, 131) lacks. The distinction involves a third political actor, construed as a “negative other,” that is, a “presumably elite ‘favored’ and/or ‘protected’ group … that is used as a comparative referent for framing the obstacles to the ‘pure’ or ‘true’ people’s interests and rightful standing” (131). The negative other, by definition, is an empty category, occupied by whatever group preemptively arises as the cultural opposite of the right-wing fold— “welfare recipients, various racial/ethnic or religious groups and nationalities, immigrants, feminists, LGBT individuals … and so on” (131–132). The underlying indeterminacy of the “negative other” and the “anti-­ pluralism” its construction spawns (Snow and Bernatzky 2019, 132) critically complicate, if not downright prevent, intersectional dynamics in an otherwise diverse and multifaceted identity-landscape, which right-wing polarized discourses hardly recognize. And they enforce a pre-requisite category, what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari label the “majoritarian” type of subjectivity ([1980] 2021, 105–106), one that presupposes “a state of power and domination,” a “standard measure” or “constant and homogeneous system” set before political negotiation and which does not allow “[determinations] different from that of the constant” to affect said system, as these determinations are conceived as unprivileged and as subsequent variations of the referred “constant” (105). The following sections probe into this particular risk by analyzing the backwoods horror film Wrong Turn (Mike P. Nelson 2021), both as adaptation and as stand-alone oeuvre.1 Wrong Turn can be construed as an allegory of how right-wing populist elicits culture war and manages to take its unpolitical tenets to an extreme. The culture clashes the film produces, typical of the backwoods horror film (Murphy 2013), re-enacts the populist dialectics of war as a sort of slasher duel, only to thematize a way to overcome the populist menace through empathy and supportive 1  Wrong Turn (2021) is a remake of the eponymous film directed by Rob Schmidt (2003), as well as a reboot of the six-outing franchise Schmidt’s original spawned.

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understanding. However, overpowering the populist menace comes at a cost, in that the intersectional identities involved in the coalition of subjectivities set to triumph over populism subtly downplay crucial gender issues and—subtly too—erase female subjectivities from such intersectional programs. Ultimately, Wrong Turn operates as if conservative gender politics, the subduing of femininity to majoritarian—i.e., patriarchal—structures such as the middle-class family, were a pre-requisite to establish the only possible way to escape populism.

An “Unpolitical” Allegory Mike P. Nelson’s remake of Wrong Turn fits into the category of adaptation as “a creative and interpretative act of appropriation” (Hutcheon [2006] 2013, 4; emphasis added). Nelson’s take on the “Eliza Dushku-­ starring hicksploitation film” (Allen 2021) eschews the most controversial elements of the original—to wit, the conventional logic of body horror as a token for moral “depravity” (Sutton 2017, 75–76)—and substitutes them, as will be seen, for a much more politically multi-layered type of backwoods horror film (Murphy 2013, 148). In the process, the film qua adaptation literally “adapts,” that is, “adjust[s],” itself as it is “[made] suitable” (Hutcheon [2006] 2013, 3) to fit and thematize its contemporary milieu of populist-driven, late Trumpian politics. Wrong Turn relates the misadventures of a group of urbanite hikers from New Jersey who penetrate the backwoods surrounding The Appalachian Trail near the fictional backwater town of Wrenwood, Virginia. As the hikers leave the trail in search of an old forest of the Civil War, they are attacked by the fur-clad, feral-looking members of a partly religious, partly political cult called The Foundation, which is led by a chieftain known simply as The Venable (Bill Sage). The Venable abducts Jen Shaw (Charlotte Vega), the de facto leader of the hikers, and keeps her as her wife until she escapes with the help of her father, Scott (Matthew Modine), and a local from Wrenwood, Nate Roades (Tim De Zarn). The Venable traces Jen back to her suburban home to force her back to the woods. She complies but only to kill the Venable and his three Foundation acolytes in truly violent fashion. Wrong Turn operates in an out-and-out milieu of American cultural opposites, political clash, and identity conflict. The long, hefty centerpiece of the first act pits the group of urban hikers against the patrons of a local pub in Wrenwood. Nate, the voice of the locals, approaches the tourists

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and advises them to be careful on the “Appalachian Trail,” as “there’s something dangerous up there” (Nelson 2021). He even volunteers some help were they to have “any questions or need a guide,” for he “and [his] pals … know this land like the back of [their] hands” (Nelson 2021). Nate’s otherwise kind offer sounds ominous enough, in keeping with the traditional backwoods horror conventions. These become even more blatant when Adam stereotypes Nate and his friends as ignorant, “sipping-­ moonshine” hicks (Nelson 2021). Nate then takes issue with Adam and derides the progressiveness of the out-and-out urban, generation-Z clique. He resents their laid-back disposition as well as their upper-middle class upbringing, which he sneers at through hackneyed accusations of idleness and freeloading: “You goddamn hipster freaks are the problem with this whole world,” Nate challenges Adam, “I’m betting not a goddamn one of you ever worked a real fucking job in your life” (Nelson 2021). Jen then retorts, and illuminates Nate—in a half brazen, half humble, oddly defiant tone—on the various occupations of her friends: Darius Clemons (Adrian Bradley), “an out-and-out socialist” (Allen 2021), is a CEO for a green-­ economy company, Luis Ortiz (Adrian Favela) and his boyfriend Gary Amaan (Vardaam Arora) own two successful restaurants, Adam Lucas (Dylan McTee) is an app developer, and his girlfriend, Milla D’Angelo (Emma Dumont), is an oncologist. Jen, though, “makes coffee for a living” as she has “two master’s—art history and dance” (Nelson 2021). but she is humane enough to detect a potential health issue in Nate’s eyes and refer it to Milla for professional advice, which the latter contributes. Jen thus proves her point—they might be “goddamn hipster freaks,” but they are certainly not idle class—without dialing down the assertive, somewhat defiant tone. Nate takes the blow, but in keeping with the horror trope, he ominously warns them they will be meeting again (Nelson 2021). The cultural clash helps establish the polarized political positions the film plays upon. The progressive, urban Northerners—the “woke” fold— represent a perfect version of “Bernie Sanders-grade socialism” (Allen 2021), not just on account of the liberal views the hikers bestow, but also of their self-less conception of a functional, cohesive, and egalitarian community as prime political goal. Darius, Jen’s boyfriend, epitomizes the political vision of the group somewhat in his desire to build “a community where people are valued on their skills and their character, not their bank account or their skin color: everyone works, everyone shares” (Nelson 2021).

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The locals, conversely, unfold as a synecdoche for the “curdled Confederate dreams” (Allen 2021) of rural red-state America, dreams that have been neglected by the political elites and their systematized bias for the “goddamn hipster freaks,” i.e., their (negative) “Other.” Sporting an ad for “KA-BAR knives” in his t-shirt and a belt buckle that reads “no one ever raped a 0.38”—appropriately engraved with a gun barrel pointing at the viewer from the upper groin (Nelson 2021)—Nate not only epitomizes the political stance of the polarized right-wing but also informs its identity with two key issues in conservative Southern culture, interacting: gun control and patriarchal privileges. The multifaceted—albeit limited— intersectional depiction of the character enforces the simplified conservative political subjectivity at odds with the progressive and all-too-inclusive portrayal of the hikers, but it also identifies political conflict as the main source of horror in the film (Allen 2021). Wrong Turn, accordingly, is downright “unpolitical” in that political action is continuously informed by unresolved—and unresolving—conflict and antagonism. Even the war-like rhetoric seeps into the narrative unobtrusively. The film does not shy away from recalling the Civil War and stressing the differences between the North and the South, somehow positing the underlying cultural clash as a new manifestation of the Southern political trauma, as if the war—in true populist fashion—were still active and being fought—continuously—on the cultural plane. It is in this “unpolitical” context that The Foundation makes full populist sense. The Foundation epitomizes the type of political clash set up in the first act of the film, only tenfold and introducing strong Trumpian overtones all around. The Foundation is led by a charismatic, Caesarist leader, the Venable (Bill Sage), whose groomed and clean outward appearance— more fitting in a middle-class, suburban milieu than in a feral commune— visually marks the authoritative “gift of grace” (Weber [1905] 2002, 72) which justifies his leadership. The pronounced “extraordinariness” of The Venable is paradoxical in that it separates the leader from the community even as it “is what enables” said leader, thinking with Taggart, “to lead, or to channel, the ordinariness of their [community]” (2019, 83). This is a feature that mirrors the type of charisma right-wing populisms, whether led by “Berlusconi, Babis, Trump or Perot,” tend to articulate (Taggart 2019, 82–83). Furthermore, The Foundation constitutes a shrewd commentary on post-truth. The simplified ideology of the cult vindicates a “true and honest,” “blessed and ideal” America (Nelson 2021; emphasis added). The

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Venable later enforces these values in the scene of the trial, branding truth as the only law. The Foundation punishes crime in kind—Adam’s execution mirrors the homicide he perpetrates—but punishes dishonesty—the “bearing of false witness”—with the sentence of “darkness” (Nelson 2021), as the guilty parties are condemned to lose their eyes and live in a tunnel under the village. A punishment of darkness articulates actual ideological “misrecognition” (Althusser [1970] 2014, 263) within The Foundation, namely, with Althusser, the demotion of the subject from their very subjectivity, their banishment from the “imaginary” social “relations” that constitute the ideology of the community (258). In other words, the guilty parties are repudiated and cannot participate in communal life for not being good, “ideal,” and most crucially, “honest” Americans. The way The Foundation enshrines “truth” and “honesty” implies a genuine populist repudiation of political practice as negotiation of meaning, so much so that the cult can be construed as the very embodiment of “unpolitics.” The Foundation was established “to avoid the Armageddon [that] was coming between the States,” i.e., the Civil War, as the families which founded the cult already feared “in 1859 … the collapse of America and wanted to protect their way of life” (Nelson 2021). By specifically signaling to honesty and truth as the prime founding values of an “ideal America” (Nelson 2021), the ideology underpinning the customs of the cult suggests that “the quotidian practice of compromise,” negotiation “and bargaining that politicians pursue” (Urbinati 2014, 151) are the ultimate cause of America’s downfall. Arguably, the path to war constitutes then a general symbol of politics as an ineffective process, one that leads to the obliteration of the people—the pure “we”—and the violation of their—oversimplified—ideals. If post-war America, the film fancifully suggests, is still fighting the Civil War through culture and identity conflicts, The Foundation enforces a meta-ideological alternative that antagonizes the very process of engaging with conflict and antagonism itself. Everything in The Foundation echoes, if not downright enforces, the “unpolitics” of populism as a practical, yet sinister solution to the—already populist—culture clash that presides over mainstream politics in America.

Populist Horrors in the Rural Slasher Simply put, The Foundation is at war with culture war, which is in turn construed as a politically normative extension of the Civil War. Wrong Turn enacts the conflict accordingly, deploying specific horror strategies

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of the slasher genre as visual correlative for the war-like rhetoric of populism. Here is precisely where the film swerves from the original Wrong Turn. Schmidt’s 2003 film portrayed a “small group” of inbred, “severely deformed people” who, Travis Sutton summarizes, “[entrapped] unsuspecting travellers,” without clear “motivation for their evil behaviour”— “perhaps for sport or to satisfy their cannibalistic appetites” (2017, 76). The lack of purpose behind the villainous and deformed body prompts “the horror film” in general “to fall back on … earlier notions of sin and disability,” whereby actual physical deformity signals moral depravity and transgression (2017, 76). Schmidt’s Wrong Turn framed said moral depravity within the conventions of what Bernice M. Murphy brands as the “backwoods horror film,” a sub-genre that conceives the “countryside” not as the “idealised versions of rural life found in … American popular culture” (2013, 133), but rather as “the perfect backdrop of terror,” populated by “a peculiar species, usually referred to in US horror films as hillbillies, rednecks or mountain men” (Bell 1997, 96). “Backwoods inhabitants” epitomize the reversal of the “pioneer spirit and rugged individualism” as they become “signifiers of resentfulness and savagery” (Murphy 2013, 134). The stagnation of the pioneer spirit—due to the “so-called ‘closing of the frontier’”—and the ensuing inability to progress on behalf of those who embody said spirit thematize the “backwoods” as “the physical and conceptual margins of the nation” (134, 137). Significantly, Murphy notes, this “conception of the backwoods inhabitant became associated with the South” (135), as American culture recognizes “the area” as a “compelling Other.” This is a “nightmarish region distinct from the rest of the US,” which allows the “national audience to localize certain anxieties—mostly to do with race” but also with class—“without feeling threatened themselves” (137). The South of the “hillbillies, rednecks, and mountain men,” in short, opens a portal to scrutinize “uncomfortable or unwelcome,” certainly “conflicted” memories of a cultural past contemporary America struggles to forget (145–146). Murphy goes on to establish two categories of backwoods horror films. “Type 1,” or “the Deliverance (Boorman  1972) influenced narrative,” puts forward a “corrupt version of the positive figure of the frontiersman: the backwoods male gone rogue who takes out his economic and sexual frustrations on middle-class outsiders” (2013, 147). More often than not, “Type 1” dwells on the politics and negotiations of masculinity as well as how said negotiations inform regional, cultural, and class conflicts (2013,

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147). “Type 1” is less frequent than “Type 2” (more about this type shortly), and its elements of horror are indeed present but also scarce or downplayed—style-wise—as the stock Deliverance-inspired film by and large favors the action thriller genre over horror conventions (Murphy 2013, 148). Contrariwise, “Type 2” or “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (Hooper 1974)  type (2013, 148) is much more frequent to find and hardly roams outside the overall boundaries of the horror genre. “Type 2” operates with somewhat more primordial, less overtly political fears, yet still manages to comment on the “‘problematic’ working-class family” or community of the backwoods “as a hive of crime, addiction and degeneracy”—epitomized by the inbred, cannibalistic, savage, “callous and psychotically idiosyncratic,” run-of-the-mill inhabitant of the backwoods (Murphy 2013, 148–149). David Bell crucially refers to “Type 2” as “the rural slasher” (1997, 97), which in turn helps pinpoint the “psychosexual fury” (Clover 1992, 27) inherent to the slasher genre as chief source of horror in the Texas Chain Saw-inspired film. Despite a passing reference to Deliverance (Schmidt 2003), the first Wrong Turn works as a straightforward Type 2 film. The cannibalistic family stalking the group, led by Eliza Jessie (Eliza Dushku), of young, mostly upper-middle-class city slickers are indeed adept, resourceful hunters. They are well-organized and even behave rationally—within limits—in given circumstances, yet they only operate successfully, in true Type 2 fashion, “at the cost of their humanity” (Murphy 2013, 150). It is because of the downgraded subhuman status the film swerves away from political commentary to exploit physical violence and torture dynamics as a source for psychosexual horror. The raw violence of Schmidt’s film is significantly more graphic and delivered in proximity when aimed at women than at men. Men typically receive shots and arrows from a distance or are simply killed out of sight. Women, conversely, fall prey to their predators in typical slasher fashion, that is, at close range and with penetrating weapons, thus favoring the physicality and symbolically tactile proximity the slasher thrives on: “[knives] and needles, like teeth, beaks, fangs, and claws, are,” visually as well as culturally, “personal extensions of the body that bring attacker and attacked into primitive, animalistic embrace” (Clover 1992, 32). These elements are also underwritten by the Final Girl trope the character of Jessie (Eliza Dushku) embodies. Overall, in the cannibalistic community of Wrong Turn (2003), the utopian enterprise driven by the pioneer spirit devolves into the predatorial, masculine, self-referential “psychosexual fury” of the slasher (Clover 1992, 27). As the West Virginia

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landscape downgrades steeply from frontier to backwoods, the purported ethically driven colonial spirit of yore now becomes a self-contained (both literally and figuratively) re-affirmation of masculinity as an aimless, self-­ centered, meaningless but dangerous, reactive force. Nelson’s 2021 Wrong Turn does not shy away from the graphic, horrific violence the earlier version showed, but inscribes it within a larger political framework, so much so that the film arguably sits somewhere between Murphy’s Type 1 and Type 2 formulae of the rural horror film, as it reworks the gruesome primal fears of Type 2 within an overtly cultural and political critique à la Type 1. The expectations raised by the former Wrong Turn play out consistently in Nelson’s remake, for the latter enacts similar horror dynamics to those of Schmidt’s version. The Appalachian backwoods are yet again swarming with man-hunting traps, as well as stealth hunters from a long-lost, eerie native community. This works akin to the original Wrong Turn, that is, as a “reminder of the fact that one of the defining characteristics of the backwoods settler was a dependence upon hunting and trapping,” which “in the horror film … becomes often indicator of cruelty and brutal utilitarianism” (Murphy 2013, 164). The kills in the reboot, however, tend to be more gender-­ blind than in the original. Nelson’s Wrong Turn recovers the visual distance between the hunters and their prey: a massive, rolling spiked log, launched from afar, takes care of the first victim, Gary. Milla falls into a pit and gets impaled before being shot with an arrow from a safe distance by one of the deerskin-clad hunters. Adam steps into a trap himself, gets caught in a steel chain knot, is violently towed back several tens of feet, and ends up swallowed by a dark pit. Man-hunting antics like these feel simultaneously at home and at odds with the rural slasher genre. There are still prickly weapons at work, but they are used from afar, as the land works as an extension of The Foundation. The carnal proximity Clover deems central to the slasher genre as visual surrogate for sexual violence here switches to a sort of guerrilla warfare. A hoard of phones, car keys, glasses, footwear, and other sinister memorabilia found by the urbanite hikers is not merely the by-­ product of predatory human hunting, as was the case in the original film. Now, the hoard reads partly as political strategy—it enforces a war-like conflict—and partly the result of military tactics. The phones are taken to sever connections between the victims and abroad. So are the car keys. The pile of glasses recalls images of Nazi looting, especially from Jewish

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people, in World War II imagery, and prepares for the punishment of “darkness,” which involves scorching the eyes of the victim. This slasher battle, this type of ongoing and enduring, somewhat recurring war-like conflict thematizes the political dynamic The Foundation enforces to propel its identity work. This becomes apparent when the Venable defends The Foundation as the true “Blessed and Ideal America” at the core of the trial scene. After being accused of barbarism by Jen, the cult leader reacts ardently and accuses his victims of prejudice: THE VENABLE: Barbaric? Hmm? Our families built this place. Men and women of all races and creeds came here to avoid the Armageddon they knew was coming between the States. We have everything we need. Everyone works. Everyone contributes. Our food is fresh and plentiful. We have no cancer, no poverty, no war. No one hates another because they have while another doesn’t. You tell me, whose world is more barbaric? No! Take them … Your sentence is darkness. Here, you will see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. (Nelson 2021)

The utopianism of The Venable’s honest and true “America” establishes a pure “we” that blatantly rejects contemporary, middle-class, “corrupted” America—i.e., “them”—because of its inability to articulate a functional and caring community. Then, the horrific disenfranchisement of the dishonest, the duplicitous, or the liar articulates the new hegemony achieved through the “unpolitical” practices of populism—the man-­ hunting slasher duel as surrogate for populist war—and protects the pure populist subject from corruption. The Foundation thus comes across as a sort of populist utopia that transcends political divide through unpolitical strategies, i.e., the sources of physical horror in the film. Lastly, the accusations of “barbarism” the Venable cynically tries to counteract identify The Foundation with the politically disenfranchised underdog, one that has not been recognized as a political actor, but which now demands vindication. There is no war within The Foundation, the Venable points out with pride, but the need to vindicate and become recognized as a political actor justifies the ongoing conflict, its perpetual war with the corrupted, mainstream political America. The stale and aimless degeneration of the pioneer spirit that informs backwoods horror films, particularly Type 2 or the “rural slasher” genre, channels in Wrong Turn a fringe political subjectivity associated with populist strategies instead of the typical sexual politics and musings over

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masculinity showcased by former instances of the genre. Yet the fact that the slasher here unfolds as an “unpolitical” practice does not mean Wrong Turn eschews either the “psychosexual fury,” or the gender politics that drive the rural slasher. The fury is certainly not averted, but as per the political commentary the film posits, it is institutionalized, far removed from the symbolic order of horror (i.e., the rules of the slasher) and inscribed into the political struggles the film enacts. The “psychosexual fury” of the slasher works in the visual symbolic order due to its immediacy. The murder of the slasher, with assorted “knives, hammers, axes, ice-picks, hypodermic needles, red hot pokers, pitchforks and the like” serves to re-enact erotic intimacy, both ironically and horridly, usually as symbolic punishment precisely for the commitment of sexual transgression (Clover 1992, 33). As has been argued, Wrong Turn reworks this intimacy and reinscribes it in a broader political milieu. Thus, The Foundation does not just foster individual slasher psycho-­killers but rather constitutes a whole institution operating as such. The film makes this point abundantly clear in the way it introduces The Foundation as a “slasher” menace and how it is later presented as a cult. Early shots of the urban clique in the lonely Virginian roads are taken from the woods; members from The Foundation appear already in Wrenwood, although seen from afar, at a distance; the hunting scenes in the backwoods hardly reveal the hunters, but hardly also do not hint their presence. These visual clues mirror the foreboding use of space and point of view—particularly “voyeuristic distance” and depth—the slasher commonly relies on (Clover 1992, 45, 179), but only to present the menace as an overall communal, hence cultural threat. The Foundation operates thus as a collective subject, not an individual symbolic force of sexual avenge. In keeping with this collective construction, as well as the resignification of violence in the film, the sexual energy pertaining to “the primitive, animalistic embrace” between “attacker and attacked” (Clover 1992, 32) here becomes a matter of State for The Foundation, so much so that male fury turns into a matter of misogynistic domination and rape culture. An immediate outcome of this is the institutionalized rape of Jen, who ends up living submissively, posing as the loving wife of The Venable, to spare both her companions’ and her own lives. Even though Jen’s offer comes across as an unpremeditated thing, the way The Foundation has been in control of the urban group suggests this upshot is somewhat designed by the Venable and The Foundation. In any event, the rape is

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institutionalized as it is justified by the political hierarchy of The Foundation, which allocates the Venable’s will as the law. In Schmidt’s version, the sexual consumption of women came about through the symbolic consumption of the flesh. In the more sophisticated, heavily hierarchized community of The Foundation, however, sexual consumption becomes literal, ongoing, and systemic, an ideological state apparatus of the community itself. The attacks in the forest are aimed ultimately at sexual domination and consumption, but the raw immediacy of the first version gives way now to the political assimilation of sexual consumption in the form of rape culture.

Intersectional Suppression and Gender Invisibility. Conclusion The Foundation is not the only political space in Wrong Turn that encourages patriarchal submission. As this final section will show, the coalition of political subjectivities the film posits as alternative to the populist dynamics of The Foundation privileges an idea of femininity dependent on the majoritarian standard of patriarchy, even as the film struggles to do otherwise. Gender invisibility is not a minor issue in this context, for it suggests the political subjectivity that counters populist “unpolitics” prompts a similar process of simplified identity populist discourses are prone to. Intersectionality, as has been suggested in the first section, becomes here of the essence, as it helps unveil the real effect on women purportedly gender-blind identity work promotes: Intersectional analysis identifies the many groups of people rendered invisible or substantively harmed by institutional practices that claim to be colorblind., gender-blind, and indifferent to sexual orientation and disability. As Crenshaw noted, intersectional analysis can demonstrate that institutions deemed “women-friendly” may in fact be harmful to some women, as well as to some men and to those who reject gender binaries altogether. (Montoya 2016, 381)

Montoya’s concern lies in the sociological consequences prompted by rendering vectors of intersectional dynamics invisible, even as others are privileged and thus made visible by said dynamics. A similar case can be made of identity discourses, which are unavoidably bound by culture and ideology, as they belong to and operate in particular “social locations” (Lanser

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2015, 27). Since ideology has a way to “[represent] as obvious and natural what is partial, factitious, and ineluctably social” (Boumelha 1985, 5), “intersectional theory” aims at debunking ideological obviousness, or, with Lanser, its purported “common sense.” Intersectionality, thus, “calls on us to observe the structural and circumstantial effects of convergences of persons in particular locations rather than to presume commonalities that may once have passed as ‘common sense’” (Lanser 2015, 27). Intersectional analysis allows thus to deconstruct the purported gender-­ blindness of a specific identity discourse that masquerades as gender-­ friendly, but that really privileges other identity vectors whilst promptly reasserting feminine invisibility. Wrong Turn as political allegory is ripe for such intersectional analysis. Following the logic of the slasher, the film ushers in a bona fide Final Girl who ultimately gets to kill her stalker-murderer. Yet because the gender dynamics of the film are subdued to the larger picture of cultural/ political commentary, the generic element of the Final Girl, mostly at work in the coda of the film—when Jen comes back home and gets to kill the Venable in her own suburban turf—plays out awkwardly in connection with the “phallicization” of the traditional Final Girl (Clover 1992, 50). The reason lies in that the Final Girl is arguably effecting an allegorical killing as well as a symbolic one, and the political subjectivity in both cases privileges the simplified, single-axis discourse of the populist allegory rather than the symbolic emancipation the slasher usually projects. The allegorical resolution of Jen’s rescue thematizes the political dynamic that counters populism in Wrong Turn. Scott and Jen escape from The Foundation despite the violent resistance of their captors, but only to find themselves trapped in the woods. Nate appears then, Deus ex machina, to help and protect the escapees. The formerly scorned hillbilly, the voice of red-state America now reaches out to the suburban, educated, upper-middle-class victims, Jen and Scott, out of empathy and understanding. The alliance between these culturally opposite subjectivities becomes paramount to thwart the plans of The Foundation, even as it enacts a de facto reconciliation of the culture clash inherited after the Civil War. Further, the bond Nate finds with Scott is a sense of kinship and family, which offsets in turn the idea of “family” The Foundation has built its creed upon. The founding fathers of “an Ideal and Blessed America” were indeed “a dozen families” (Nelson 2021); at the trial, the Venable insists the “family”—specifically—of Adam’s victim “is owed retribution”

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(Nelson 2021) and vindicates that the “Ideal America” was founded by their “families” (Nelson 2021). The “family” is a constitutional part of the cult, a core structural institution their members very likely must comply with. The family that trumps (pun intended) said structure, however, is both a standard and an alternative type of family. On the one hand, it is a structure that complies with the suburban, upper-middle-class family. On the other, it represents a dysfunctional set in which a widowed, remarried father (Scott) struggles to reconnect with his somewhat estranged daughter, whilst said daughter strives to navigate the intricacies of the new familial context. Additionally, the agency of this familial group is warranted by Nate, here enforcing the ties of familial kinship in red-state America. Ultimately, the alliance of opposite subjectivities effects a comfortable political coalition between red-state America and, in Nate’s words, those “goddammed hipsters” against the “unpolitical” tenets of The Foundation. This coalition of two family men and a woman prompts actual political cooperation, and efficiency naturally ensues. The film finds thus an allegorical way out of the stale and sterile opposition of the polar divide—the “us vs. them” dynamics—in contemporary America that simultaneously deactivates populist political culture and reaffirms family as the core institution to cohere the nation and the land. The affirmation of this political subjectivity—the family man—is, however, deeply problematic as it downplays gender in the intersectional identity discourse it enforces. This identity can be construed as white American, northern, middle-class, urban, and male, that is, the majoritarian—and thus, visible—category. Jen is a resourceful young woman, intellectually capable and determined. As per the requisites of the “backwoods horror genre,” she emerges as an “embattled ‘Final Girl’” (Murphy 2013, 5); not in the backwoods, though, but in suburbia, which adds notable nuances to the character. At the end, the film moves away from backwoods horror to “home”—or rather neighborhood—“invasion.” By killing the Venable, Jen liberates herself, her family, and suburban America, all in one stroke. She even manages to liberate Ruthie (Rhyan Elizabeth Hanavan), a little girl, possibly The Venable’s daughter, from the “wrong” family and bring her to the white, suburban, northern, and especially male fold. As the credits roll, the final shot shows a long take of Jen escorting Ruthie back to Jen’s home to the tune of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.” The shot underscores the possibilities of a united community reaching across the political divide to do away with unpolitical practices.

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As a Final Girl, Jen arises as the lone survivor who manages to kill the mastermind behind the murder of her friends and her rapist, but she does not come across as fully empowered. When Jen walks back home “in the light of day,” stained in blood, as per the generic blueprint of the slasher, “she has delivered herself,” thinking with Clover, “into the adult world” (1992, 49) yet she has done so only to reaffirm the very maleness said world articulates. As Carol Clover goes on to argue, If the experience of childhood can be—is perhaps ideally—enacted in female form, the breaking away requires the assumption of the phallus. The helpless child is gendered feminine; the autonomous adult or subject is gendered masculine; the passage from childhood to adulthood entails a shift from feminine to masculine. (1992, 50)

Wrong Turn relies on this construction of the adult world as masculine, independent, and, crucially, dominating, in that said world hinges around the phallus as a symbol of the political subject. Nate, The Venable, and Scott occupy patriarchal positions in their respective milieu, all of them emerging as independent figures leading social structures of varying degrees. Jen partakes of this masculine adult world too, yet only to a limited extent. If the traditional slasher underscores independence and recognition as the goal or fulfillment of the female rite of passage to adulthood the genre enacts, the film flounders to project such independence in the main character. Overall, Jen plays out as that “projection of female empowerment promised to resonate with” female audiences, to use Richard Nowell’s definition (2011, 131), yet decisively submits her independence to masculine structures of class and patriarchal dominance. Earlier in the film, Jen changes a tire single-handedly, to Darius’s amazement, who claims in turn that Jen’s resourcefulness is “making [him] look bad” (Nelson 2021). Jen quickly apologizes with a shy “sorry!” to which Milla brazenly retorts, “don’t be! Fucking girl power!” (Nelson 2021). In the backwoods, even as Darius and Adam seem to compete for the alpha role, Jen comes off as an ingenious, enterprising leader, one that shows the courage, character, and good judgment her male counterparts ostensibly lack. Further, Jen counters two of the three patriarchal roles in the film. She successfully antagonizes both Nate—arguing against his patronizing demeanor—and, most notably, The Venable—first by saving both her life and her partners, then by killing him. Jen, conversely, never overcomes the patriarchal structure her northern, suburban family represents. Not only

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does her father play a pivotal role in her rescue, but after their ordeal she gladly submits to his protection and safeguard, both personally and professionally (Nelson 2021), like a prodigal daughter, even as she is an expecting mother. Jen’s role as a Final Girl aims at reaffirming the majoritarian masculine world of independent adulthood  - the “state of power and domination,” the “standard measure” or “constant and homogeneous system” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2021, 105)—ingrained with the genre, but only to subdue her own femininity as the oversimplified or “stratified” “minority” (291), dependent on the majoritarian category and inscribed as a standard in said world. If the odyssey Wrong Turn displays grants Jen independence, it is as a moderate, socially conservative political subject, certainly not as woman qua woman. The film’s resolution projects Jen’s identity as a loving daughter and caring mother-to-be in middle-class, northern suburbia. Yet the first two gendered vectors—daughter and mother—are subdued to the patriarchal family structure the film seems to posit as common ground to cohere America beyond populist threats. Wrong Turn envisages a middle-­ class family at the core of America, but a patriarchal family nonetheless, the phallus safely located and reaffirmed at the center of the institution. Wrong Turn sets out to find ways in which the populist discourse behind culture wars can be successfully antagonized. Jen thereby epitomizes the type of empathic approach that deactivates “unpolitics.” Jen’s triumph does away with populist subjugation, a fine ending in terms of the political allegory Wrong Turn arguably suggests, but it comes at the cost of defining her feminine identity within the same patriarchal limits The Foundation, for one, seems to enforce. This makes her odyssey a political journey to overcome the deep political divide America endures, and it works in terms of class (upper-middle class vs. working class), space (rural vs. urban), and region (north vs. south), ostensibly not, however, in terms of gender.

References Allen, Nick. 2021. Wrong Turn 2021. Movie Review. Roger Ebert.com. https:// www.rogerebert.com/reviews/wrong-turn-movie-review-2021. Althusser, Louis. [1970] 2014. Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses. In The Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses, translated by G. N. Goshgarian, 232–72. London and New York: Verso.

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Bell, David. 1997. Anti-idyll: Rural Horror. In Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalization and Rurality, ed. Paul Cloke and Jo Little, 94–108. London and New York: Routledge. Boorman, John, dir. 1972. Deliverance. Warner Bros. Pictures. Boumelha, P. [1982] 1985. Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Clover, Carol J. 1992. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. [1980] 2021. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Bloomsbury. Gramsci, Antonio. 2018. The Formation of the Intellectuals. In Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al., 929–935. New York: Norton. Hooper, Tobe, dir. 1974. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. New Line Cinema. Hutcheon, Linda. [2006] 2013. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Korsgaard, Christine M. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lanser, Susan S. 2015. Toward (a Queer and) More (Feminist) Narratology. In Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, ed. Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser, 23–42. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Montoya, Celeste. 2016. Institutions. In The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, ed. Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth, 367–385. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murphy, Bernice M. 2013. The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness. London: Palgrave. Nelson, Mike P., dir. 2021. Wrong Turn. Lionsgate Entertainment and Constantin Films. Nowell, Richard. 2011. ‘There’s More Than One Way to Lose Your Heart’: The American Film Industry, Early Teen Slasher Films, and Female Youth. Cinema Journal 51 (1): 115–140. Schmidt, Rob, dir. 2003. Wrong Turn. Lionsgate Entertainment and Constantin Films. Snow, David A., and Colin Bernatzky. 2019. The Coterminus Rise or Right-wing Populism and Superfluous Populations. In Populism and the Crisis of Democracy. Vol 1: Concepts and Theory, ed. Gregor Fitzi, Jürgen Mackert, and Bryan S. Turner, 130–146. New York: Routledge. Sutton, Travis. 2017. Avenging the Body: Disability in the Horror Film. In A Companion to the Horror Film, ed. Harry Benshoff, 72–88. Oxford: Wiley. Taggart, Paul. 2019. Populism and ‘Unpolitics’. In Populism and the Crisis of Democracy. Vol 1: Concepts and Theory, ed. Gregor Fitzi, Jürgen Mackert, and Bryan S. Turner, 79–87. New York: Routledge.

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Thomson, Irene Taviss. 2010. Culture Wars and Enduring American Dilemmas. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Urbinati, Nadia. 2014. Democracy Disfigured. Opinion, Truth, and the People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. von Clausewitz, Carl. 2010. On War. London: Penguin Books. Warhol, Robyn, and Susan S.  Lanser, eds. 2015. Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Weber, Max. [1905] 2002. The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism. Edited and Translated by Peter Baher and Gordon Wells. London: Penguin.

CHAPTER 3

Living Deliciously? The Borderless Horror of Female Empowerment Elena Furlanetto

“Another pig fantasy, killing the imaginary female monster.” (John Barth, Chimera)

On Friday, October 28, 2022, a 42-year-old man with links to the US extreme-right and conspiracy movements smashed the rear glass door of Nancy Pelosi’s home in San Francisco. Confronted by her 82-year-old husband Paul, he hit him with a hammer, causing a skull fracture. The intended victim was not Paul Pelosi but his wife, as the assailant, David DePape, reportedly shouted, “Where is Nancy?” The history of femicide, violence, and abuse against women has been foregrounded over the last decade by the work of Me Too activists. The movement was born in 2006

E. Furlanetto (*) University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg-Essen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53278-8_3

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under the lead of New York activist Tarana Burke1 and gained momentum in 2017 when actress Alyssa Milano, unaware of Burke’s precedent use of the word and of her movement, urged women who had been sexually harassed or assaulted to write ‘me too’ as a reply to her tweet. The movement—in both of its expressions—fought to discard sexist automatisms and routines that paralyzed women’s personal and professional development and was extremely successful in showing that “sexual harassment and violence are ubiquitous and deadly in every stratum of every society” (Chandra and Erlingsdóttir 2020, 1). In addition, #MeToo brought into relief the intersectionality of abuse against women, a component of the life of actresses and politicians, as well as of women in less privileged positions. Most recently, media visibility, political power, and prominence exposed women, such as Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and many other women in politics and outside of it, to harassment.2 The glass-shattering, hammer-swinging intruder did not target Pelosi because she is a damsel in distress, but because she is a power-­ wielding woman. But something else is worth noting: the continuity between the news coverage of this deplorable act of violence and horror films is painfully evident. We can hear the noise of the glass shattering, see the gloved hand slide through the broken window and wrap around the handle—then cut to Paul Pelosi, abruptly waking up to a dark silhouette looming in a corner of his bedroom. This is most surely not the way things played out that night, but my voluntarily sensational language points to the continuity between the way this event was narrated in the media and American horror imaginaries. In a podcast episode for The Jacobin Show titled “Is Culture Dead?” film critics Eileen Jones and Catherine Liu suggest that horror might be particularly fit to convey the absurdity, despair, and end-­ of-­the-world quality of this historical moment. EILEEN JONES: We have no way of expressing what we are in right now. We are not just thinking we are in end times like many, many generations before us, we pretty well know we are. Yet there is no corresponding, at least that I know, certainly not in the cinema that I am seeing, that is really reflecting the extremity of what our circumstances are.

1  In its original form, Me Too was a movement aimed to “raise awareness about sexual abuse,” especially among “marginalized Black women.” Chandra and Erlingsdóttir 2020, 1. 2  See Barbaro 2022, see also Rodriguez and Gerson 2022.

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CATHERINE LIU: I think it does exist in some way in horror … [The horror genre] really did get to the moment where we are at. (“Is Culture Dead” 2022)

Horror may be a productive—if not prophetic—narrative language for pandemics, environmental catastrophes, and technological dystopias, but, as the continuity I outlined above suggests, also for violence and abuse, especially when aimed against women. Giti Chandra and Irma Erlingsdóttir, editors of the Routledge Handbook to the Politics of the #MeToo Movement, also draw a triangulation between violence against women, horror, and this unique historical moment. Commenting on Angela Davis’s use of the word “pandemic” with reference to “the gender-based violence that kills or threatens the well-being and lives of millions of women and the vulnerable all over the world,” Chandra and Erlingsdóttir argue that Davis’s malaise metaphor “speaks to the power of the horror inflicted upon millions” (Chandra and Erlingsdóttir 2020, 1; emphasis added). The following pages attempt an exploration of the ways in which horror communes with the discursive forces unleashed by #MeToo movements in the US and globally.3 Since #MeToo is a transnational phenomenon and the film industry can no longer be regarded as Hollywood’s monopoly, and I will expand on this point later, I will take into consideration three films from three different countries: Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2015), Domenico Emanuele De Feudis’s Il legame (The Binding, 2020), and the Spanish Netflix production Voces (Don’t Listen, 2020) directed by Ángel Gómez Hernández. At first reading, these three films meet the criteria of what Caetlin Benson-Allott (2018) calls the “horror Renaissance,” a wave of “comparatively highbrow” films that privilege low-intensity terror over jump-scares, and social critique over cultural conservatism. Additionally, the plots engage a post-#MeToo world by centering on abuse, violence, and hatred against women. All three films, however, confuse the empowering trajectories they put their female characters on: they all dwell in the ambivalence

3  A more concise version of this argument with different case studies and a more overtly transnational focus has appeared as a journalistic article in 2021 (Furlanetto 2021). The epigraph is from John Barth (1972, 282).

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between the exposure and exploitation4 of abuse against women. #MeToo, in fact, raised similar concerns when it was accused of “fetishizing, and capitalizing on, of personal stories” while trying to inspire survivors to break the silence (Chandra and Erlingsdóttir 2020, 3). In the films, this ambivalence appears in three forms: first, even in the presence of male violence and trauma, the abused feminine body remains the primal site of horror; second, these demonized bodies belong to rebellious women who confront their gynophobic societies; third, the films draw from overtly patriarchal traditions such as southern Italy, medieval Spain, and Puritan New England, but they seem more interested in harvesting these sites of patriarchy as repertoires of horror rather than renouncing or subverting their legacy. In short, this article explores manifestations of the monstrous feminine across three movies from three countries and in three languages as manifestations of #MeToo-infused cinema on a global level. These three films, although they parade feminist concerns and show an awareness of the urgency to discuss and historicize female oppression, eventually opt for ambivalence and remain suspended between empowering narratives and patriarchally desirable endings. Jess Derr notes that scholarly research on the impact of #MeToo on horror cinema is still in “its infancy” and remains relegated to footnotes and narrow perspectives (2002, 3).5 Yet horror, especially in its more sophisticated and recent turn to post-horror, is germane to the discursive forces of #MeToo and may offer a productive channel for their narrativization.6 In The Witch, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) is the target of her family’s spite and relentless accusations, drenched in the religious fundamentalism of Puritan communities and their mistrust of womanhood. In Il legame, a young man causes her lover to abort her pregnancy through a ritual he cannot master, and that eventually turns her into a 4  This polarity owes to Benson-Allott, who, in her discussion of The Gift, wonders if the film is “exposing or exploiting the horrors of toxic masculinity” (2018, 74). See Carrera Garrido (2018) for an evaluation of ambiguity—and, more specifically, “silences in the text” (188). 5  See also, on a slightly different but adjacent topic, Frey and Jannsen (2018), Harrison (2018), Aharoni and Ayalon (2022), and Posada (2020). 6  Derr (2022), via Steven Rose, defines post-horror as “aesthetically . . . marked by ‘visual restraint and stylistic minimalism’ and as such tends to lack the overt violence and gore, fantastical monsters, and jump scares” (6). Most interestingly for the purposes of this article, Derr adds that the post-horror genre strives to “avoid the perpetrator-focused, retributivecentric ideals Tarana Burke’s #MeToo seeks to avoid” (6).

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monstrous creature. In Voces, a house is haunted by a woman who was tortured and killed by the Spanish Inquisition centuries earlier. In this sense, these films capitalize on the abuse of women, their pain and fear, and the constant threat around their bodies as generative fictions, conscious that #MeToo has sensitized global audiences to this kind of narrative. To put it with Derr, “accounts of sexual abuse and harassment arising out of #MeToo constitute their own modern horror story” (2022, 3). Nonetheless, these films position themselves ambivalently vis à vis the aims and struggles of the #MeToo movement and its disruption of patriarchal paradigms. Scholars such as Derr and Benson-Allot observe that while some post-horrors stage successful trajectories of empowerment, others deprive the heroines of agency and healing, or something in between. While the stories they are telling are a product of heightened concern and sympathy for women’s traumas and experiences, they also problematically perpetuate the traditional reliance of horror on what some have called the feminine sinister (Abalia 2013) or the monstrous-feminine (Creed 2007), that is, the ancient connection between the woman and the monstrous via her alleged proximity to nature, reproduction, the occult, the primitive, and the sensual.7 Building on these premises, I will move one step forward and suggest that post-#MeToo horror recruits female empowerment, agency, and voice as additional loci of horror within the framework of the monstrous feminine. Female liberation as horror is no novelty: in his introduction to Man, Women, and Chain Saws, Carol J.  Clover ([1992] 2015) reads Carrie and its eponymous protagonist through the lens of the “female victim-hero,” a figure who has experienced abuse and has acquired some degree of “monstrosity,” but weaponizes both to seek revenge (4). Yet, while Carrie and other “knife-wielding victim-heroes of slasher films and the grim avengers of their own rapes” (6) are, by all extents and purposes, survivors, and even thrivers, the same cannot be said about the women in Il legame, Voces, and The Witch, who oscillate between the role of victim and perpetrator. Starting from the legitimate assumptions that, first, women have been the victims of patriarchal oppression and silencing throughout Western history, and second, that horror is the return of the repressed bursting out of its banks and calling for recognition (Benson-­ Allott 2018, 74), women returning as empowered, vociferous speakers present horror filmmakers with a brilliant device. The Witch, Il legame, and 7

 See Creed (2007, 43) and Hauke (2021).

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Voces serve excellently as examples of this hypothesis, as they locate terror in the bodies of women doing what #MeToo has encouraged them to do, that is, “testifying pain and reclaiming agency” (Derr 2022, 11). Several voices call for a global opening of the discourse around film: Benson-Allott writes that “the generic and narrative innovations of the horror renaissance are not limited to American cinema” (2018, 14). A transnational perspective gains particular urgency in light of recent developments, such as the watershed Academy Awards to South Korean film Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019) in 2020. Streaming platforms, too, played a major role in diversifying the offer and downsizing Hollywood’s English-­ speaking hegemony. Films from all continents quietly filling our streaming recommendations normalized subtitles and disarmed the equivalence of film and Hollywood in the public imaginary. This global turn, however, must be regarded alongside the tendency of the horror genre to build on the nation’s own cabinet of fears. This is particularly true for the United States, where the horrors of colonial settlement, the witch trials, the massacre of Native Americans, the brutality of slavery, and the staggering violence on the frontier seem to be inexhaustible sources of terror. The American South has been endlessly exploited as locus horridus in the Southern Gothic, and productions such as The Witch are epiphenomena of an eerie New England demonology that does not seem to ever lose momentum.8 The Witch in particular, Alexandra Hauke notes, is one of the latest examples of how anxieties rooted in the American colonial past still have a firm grip on contemporary horror imaginaries.9 Although the US has succeeded particularly well in writing the nation through horror and horror through the nation, this is also true for other film traditions. Italian director Pupi Avati claims he could sign a contract 8  Every season of the anthology television series American Horror Story (FX) is steeped into national horror narratives. Season 3, Coven, draws from New Orleans’s rich heritage as point of convergence of American and African magic traditions. In season 6, Roanoke, a house is hunted by the specters of the lost colony of Roanoke. 9  Hauke shows that the genre of folk horror is a notable exercise of this introspective local gaze: “Folk horror, as a literary and cultural form, offers new insights into the connections between past events, structures, and practices and contemporary epistemologies. In American folk horror, the myths of discovery and the realities of colonization—as well as the presentday repercussions of these horrors, especially for marginalized groups—constitute a recurring backdrop. These tales often hark back to actions carried out and ideologies put in place during the establishment of Puritan settlements. Many scholars have noted the substantial impact of the Puritans, Pilgrims, and the Promised Land on American national narratives” (38).

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with an international distribution company for his local-color film Il Signor Diavolo (Mr. Devil, 2019) because it does not matter if a child sitting in a dark room is French, English, or German—they will be afraid. One “does not need a passport” Horror Italia 24 2019)10 to be afraid of the dark, but what hides in the dark might, as definitions of the monstrous, the horrid, and the deadly are steeped in culturally and socially specific historical horrors. Another incentive for a transnational reading of horror in the post#MeToo age specifically is that other national cinemas have responded to #MeToo before Hollywood did: Tim Posada (2020) located the “first horror movie of the #MeToo era” in the French film Revenge (Coralie Fargeat, 2018). Bill Mesce laments that over the last few years, mainstream Hollywood filmmaking has been “dominated by franchise sequels, remakes, multiverses, crossovers, ad infinitum, ad nauseum [sic]” and points at top-20 domestic earners of 2019, of which “only two … are not a sequel, remake, or franchise spin-off” (2021). This, and the planetary success of non-American productions such as Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019) and the Netflix series Squid Game (2021), begged audiences to turn their attention to non-American markets, finally disentangling film from Hollywood exceptionalism.11

Magic and the South: Il legame Il legame (The Binding) opens with Francesco (Riccardo Scamarcio) driving his fiancée Emma (Mía Maestro) and her daughter from a previous marriage, Sofia (Giulia Patrignani), across the Apulian landscape to his ancestral home, where Emma and Sofia meet Francesco’s mother, Teresa (Mariella Lo Sardo). The film’s concern with the fascinazione (binding), a magical practice of southern Italian folklore, has pertinent points of contact with this article’s focus on female agency and its demonization in post-#MeToo cinema. The first few seconds of the film foreshadow the 10  Signor Diavolo uses the Po Valley as an epicenter of terror. It draws from the desolated landscapes of northern Italy at the edges of winter, the fog rising from the canals, the darkness separating the dispersed houses, and the vast, dark unknown stretching in between. The film also problematically locates horror in a boy’s disabled body, in a similarly ambivalent choice to denounce the peasants’ fear of the Other and the abject, but at the same time explore the points of contact between disability and horror aesthetics. 11  Literature on the post-COVID Hollywood crisis is still in an embryonal phase, but a discourse on the movie’s “death” can already be detected online. See “Is Culture Dead” (2022), Mesce (2021), Gura (2021), and Bilton (2017).

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crucial role agency, or rather the lack thereof, will play in what is to come. An on-screen definition of fascinazione taken from Ernesto di Martino’s 1959 book Sud e Magia (Magic and the South) explains how the spell interferes with a person’s ability to act according to their own will: Binding indicates a psychic condition of impediment or inhibition and a sense of domination determined by a powerful malign influence which affects a person’s autonomy and capacity to decide and choose … binding, commonly known as the evil eye, is carried out through magic rituals that establish the binding between victim and practitioner. (1959, 8)12

De Martino’s Sud e Magia is, unsurprisingly, no feminist book. The concept of fascinazione, on which the film builds its supernatural narrative, draws from deeply gendered cultural dynamics ingrained in Italy’s patriarchal past. De Martino writes that a fascinazione proceeds “from an envious gaze” (1959, 8) cast by a magical agent over the object of their envy, who will be rendered powerless, incapable of acting and deciding for themselves, like Sofia, who, hit by a fascinazione, “doesn’t even have control of her own body” (De Feudis 2020). Not only do De Martino and De Feudis categorize envy as a primarily feminine sentiment,13 but they also present magic itself as a prop of passive femininity. In the realms of courtship and the romantic, De Martino explains, it is the woman who resorts to magic, as men have no need for it: while men can steer the course of romantic involvement through traditional courtship and the device of the “first step,” women must recur to magic to make their wishes come true— or, outside the realm of the romantic, to steer the course of the events in their favor. Il legame partially subverts this assumption when Francesco uses magic to vanquish his lover’s resolution to go forth with her  This same passage appears in Il legame (De Feudis 2020).  De Martino defines envy as typical of mothers: when infant babies “are thriving, one must be extremely careful, because they are exposed to the other mothers’ uncontainable envy” (34; my translation). For a fascinating exploration of Black motherhood and horror, see Rizvana Bradley (2017). The article explores Black maternal loss as source of horror in Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017), and includes reflections on the centrality of motherhood in monstrous-feminine and horror imaginaries: “the symbolization of maternity in and as the space of the womb has been essential to the imagination of the horror film genre” (Bradley 2017, 46). It is perhaps worth noting that Get Out also relies on loss of agency and the inert body as horror scenario: in this case, a body that remains conscious but is deprived of willpower and personhood has ramifications into the domains of African American identity, the trauma of enslavement, and racist dispossession. 12 13

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pregnancy: in this case, a man uses magic to steer the course of events in his favor, but the film is more invested in the spell Ada casts on Sofia, a fascinazione born out of a mother’s desire to possess another mother’s child. With its lonely women inhabiting vast ancestral homes, keeping the balance among the primordial forces in land, stone, and water, Il legame seemingly gestures towards empowerment and a celebration of the matriarchal in southern Italy. Yet, the film eventually fails its women by reiterating the ambivalence between the exposure and exploitation of gynophobia, and by maintaining a woman’s abject body as site of the monstrous. When the spectator meets Teresa, they know they are in the presence of an extraordinary woman. Francesco worries about his mother, all “alone” in an enormous house; “Teresa is not alone,” replies Sabrina (Raffaella D’Avella), Teresa’s lifelong friend, and perhaps something else (De Feudis 2020). The companionship of the two women, who have lived under the same roof for decades, subtly nods at the revolutionary choice of female cohabitation in a fiercely heteronormative society. The house is a place Teresa “put together with many sacrifices” (De Feudis 2020); it is complicated to maintain, she admits, but she has always managed and will continue to do so. Teresa masters herbal medicine and ancient remedies; she is a maker of talismans, a healer of trees and people, who “come to [her] to get help” (De Feudis 2020), Emma catches her muttering spells behind closed doors. Yet, the film quickly reconfigures Teresa as a mouthpiece of a patriarchal order: there is a hiatus between her and Emma, a strong-­willed divorcée with a daughter and a demanding job, whom she presses about her career, parenting style, and relationship with Francesco. I will return to Teresa’s ambivalent positioning in a moment. Before that, let us turn our attention to Ada, the lover of Francesco’s youth and mother of his unborn child. She is the expression of the monstrous feminine and the return of the repressed in Il legame. Teresa senses Ada’s malignant power in the effects of the fascinazione on Sofia’s body, after she got bitten by a tarantula: “It’s her, she’s come back” (De Feudis 2020). Many years before, Ada became pregnant with Francesco’s child, and refused to abort it. Francesco, unable and unwilling to become a father at such a young age, improvises a ritual to induce an abortion, but releases forces that possess Ada’s body. As Emma brings Sofia to the house, Ada sees a chance to obtain what she always wanted—a child—and casts a spell on Sofia via the tarantula’s bite. Through the fascinazione, Ada can

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empty Sofia’s body of agency and bind it to hers as the child to the mother’s. The film oscillates between a depiction of Ada as victim and perpetrator, between sympathy and repulsion for her body, disfigured by possession. But Ada’s ‘comeback,’ malevolent as it may be, is an attempt to reclaim what has been taken from her through cunning and brutal force by a man she loved. When Francesco gives his version of the past to Emma, he leans into the stereotypical narrative of unreasonable womanhood: in Francesco’s version, Ada spontaneously loses the child because of a mysterious illness, goes mad with grief, and disappears, never to be seen again. Teresa’s version revises Francesco’s in a way that exposes his agency but refuses to condemn him: TERESA: Ada didn’t lose the baby because she was ill. Something happened to her. And Francesco was to blame. When Ada became pregnant, Francesco wasn’t ready to be a father. He was just a boy with his whole life in front of him. He tried to make her change her mind, but Ada put her foot down, she wanted that child whatever the cost. So then my son made the biggest mistake of his life. He tried with a ritual, in secret, to make her lose the baby. He wanted everything to go back to how it had been, but he didn’t know how to do it. He didn’t have the skill to call on those forces, to control them. I tried to cure her, but by then it was too late for her. I had a duty to protect my son. (De Feudis 2020).

In this passage, Teresa does, in fact, protect her son—both physically and discursively—from the consequences of his abusive behavior. Interestingly, the English subtitles leave out one of Teresa’s lines, rendering “cercó di farle cambiare idea, di farla ragionare” as “he tried to make her change her mind” (De Feudis 2020). Perhaps assuming that the two parts of the sentence meant the same and to avoid redundancies, the English version elides the second part of the sentence, “di farla ragionare”/“to reason with her, or to put some sense into her” (De Feudis 2020). This phrase implies that the mother, like her son, dismisses Ada’s will as madness. She, too, relegates Ada to the sphere of the emotional and points to her son as the voice of reason. While this moment of the film darkens Francesco’s aura and transfers him from caring to abusive masculinity, Teresa becomes a ventriloquist’s dummy to a patriarchal system—identified with but not restricted to southern Italy—that unfailingly condones male abuse of female bodies.

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Voces (Ángel Gómez Hernández, 2020) offers a comparable male narrative ultimately overriding a woman’s voice: when Ruth (Ana Fernández) asks her father Germán (Ramón Barea) why her mother committed suicide, he claims not to know but admits to having “always thought there was something dark behind the death of your mother, when she left us in such a horrible and senseless way” (Gómez Hernández 2020; emphasis added). By connoting her choice to take her own life as “fuera de logica” (illogical), Germán deprives his wife of will and agency and, like Francesco in Il legame, leans into the narrative of female irrationality as a shield for the consequences of male abuse. The spectator is left to wonder why Germán’s wife may have killed herself and cannot help but ask if the “darkness” behind her choice may—or may not, but it may—be abuse. After the origin story has been delivered and the spectator is given the whole picture, the focus in Il legame shifts onto Ada. Although she appears as a beautiful, vulnerable young woman to Francesco, her true body is spider-like, glass-eyed, and deformed. As she crouches over Sofia, a close­up of her scarred wrists evokes the violence of the exorcism performed on her years earlier in the attempt “to help her, to cure her,” as Teresa puts it (De Feudis 2020). Male abuse on Ada’s abject body continues as Francesco attacks her, slams her against the floor, and strangles her. In a country like Italy, plagued by an epidemic of domestic violence and femicide, this distressing scene begs the question of whether violence is critically deployed to reference a problematic social order, or capitalized upon.14 I am personally inclined to see Il legame as a rather uncritical narrative on abuse: when Francesco beats Ada, all he sees is a monster, not a woman, and the audience is invited to do the same. As in the other two films addressed in this article, at first reading, Il legame exalts feminine power and agency and condemns abuse. Its mission seems to unearth the strong matriarchal forces, natural and supernatural, that agitate in the depth of the Italian South. Photographs taken from the book Sud e Magia and shown along with the end credits document the materiality of feminine magic in the South through objects and portraits, and trace a lineage between the magical women of history and those in the film. Yet, Il legame misses a variety 14  Data from summer 2022 show that, in Italy, a woman is killed on average every three days, and although there is a decrease in general crime, this particular one is rising. Most femicides happen in the domestic sphere, where the perpetrator is often a partner or expartner. See for example Angela Giuffrida. “Italy Records a Big Increase in Femicides over the Past Year.”

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of opportunities for convincing feminist positioning. First, Francesco’s deceivingly subdued but eventually abusive masculinity cannot compete with the feminine body as the primary site of horror. Second, Il legame is exactly what the title announces: a quest for bonding. The possessed mother’s desperate attempt to bond with a child generates a host of sisterly connections around it: it complicates the bond between mother and daughter and between two mothers, and it deepens the one between the mother-in-law, her ancestral home, and her lifelong companion. Eventually, the film does not explore the subversive potential of these encounters beyond what is functional to the vanquishing of the abject feminine body, which is pitied and demonized in equal parts. Derr celebrates post-horror as a genre that engages more complex emotions than abuse, rage, and violence, shifting attention from the monster to the survivor in an attempt to “center survivors and amplify their voices” (2022, 6). The issue of voice is central to all these three films: horror in The Witch is intimately connected to Thomasin speaking truth to power; it is self-evident in Voces, where the antagonist was a witch who spoke too much and too loudly. Il legame follows this trajectory, too: Teresa tries to do justice to Ada’s past by telling her entire story and illuminating the true perpetrator. But why, if Francesco is the real ‘monster’ in the economy of the film, it is Ada’s agency that needs to be vanquished, by force if necessary? Why is Ada, and not Francesco, the site of fear? Bitten by Ada’s feral canines, Francesco is briefly transfigured into a swollen, glass-eyed monster, vomiting blood. Even in this case, it is not as a consequence of his actions that Francesco becomes monstrous, but through the intervention of and contamination with the monstrous feminine. The last scene nods at a hypothetical sequel where Francesco may become the haunting and haunted body—but this scenario remains, for now, purely theoretical.

The Voices Know Things About Us: Voces Eric (Lucas Blas) has trouble sleeping—“they always wake me up … The voices” (Gómez Hernández 2020)—and is rattled by the parents’ frequent moves, whom he follows from one house bought, renovated, and resold to another. From these first scenes, Ángel Gómez Hernández’s Voces seems to pivot on the problematic equation of childhood, mental illness, and horror, but the film takes a drastic turn after Eric drowns in the front yard pond. From that moment on, the film finds a new center in

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Daniel’s (Rodolfo Sancho) quest for the truth about his son’s death and veers towards the familiar issues of women’s agency and abuse. A negligible film overall, I turn to Voces by virtue of its interest in the female voice and its suppression by a patriarchal order: here, as in the other two films, women’s voices and agency represent a prominent resource for horror world-makers. Female agency remains a relatively marginal issue until the film nears its end: until then, the plot is mostly steered by male characters. While Daniel’s wife and son become victims of the evil that resides in the house and manifests itself through voices telling people to kill themselves and others, Daniel appears to be its keenest observer. He is the closest to the house’s materiality as he is in charge of renovation works; he explores it, paces through it at night, and stands firm in his resolution not to leave it. When Eric dies and begins to speak through electric devices in the house, Daniel calls on “the only one who can help”: an elderly author and expert on supernatural voices, Germán Domingo (Ramón Barea). In Voces, men are in charge of tackling and solving the mystery, which they approach with scientific and archaeological rigor. This will become relevant when the film will stage a struggle between traditionally male and traditionally female epistemologies. An hour into the film, an unseen woman behind a door tells Germán’s daughter and assistant Ruth (Ana Fernández) that 300  years earlier the house used to host an inquisition court that “must have tortured and killed dozens of innocent women” (Gómez Hernández 2020). Eager to find an explanation for the house’s inexplicable malice, Germán dismisses his daughter’s sympathy for the victims and locates evil not in the inquisition’s violence, but in the women it was directed against: “it’s hard to believe someone deserved to be burned, but even though it was usually an injustice, evil has existed” (Gómez Hernández 2020). Like Il legame, Voces also misses several chances for feminist self-scrutiny. Earlier, Teresa rationalized abuse and advocated for his son’s helplessness—if not innocence; here, Germán declines the daughter’s offer to sympathize with the victims of the inquisition and rebrands them as “evil.” When they descend into the house’s basement, Daniel, Germán, and Ruth find a gallery of instruments of torture and the corpse of a woman in a cage, covered with flies. When Germán touches the cage, a flashback of the witch’s story appears to him as in a vision: an angry mob surrounds an elderly woman with a penetrating, supernatural voice, almost like the sound of multiple voices in one. The English subtitles, once

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again, silence her by leaving her semi-audible words untranslated and making her perspective inaccessible, especially to audiences who do not speak Spanish. In a later scene, Germán sees her tongue being removed with a gruesome instrument. “It was her voice,” he concludes, “that’s why they tried to silence her forever” (Gómez Hernández 2020). When Ada is fought and overcome by the joint forces of the women of the house, Il legame asks viewers to feel compassion for the fate of the demonic girl via a relatively long medium shot lingering on her anguished face. This does not happen in Voces: although the woman chooses to show Germán her past, and he understands that the inquisition punished her for being a loud, vociferous, perhaps articulate woman, he is neither moved to pity nor does he cease to see the witch as a locus of horror. On the contrary, he volunteers to finish the inquisitors’ job and burn the witch’s corpse to dissolve her power over the house. She defends herself by confusing Germán with multiple voices in the darkness, until she shows herself to him as a monstrous, wide-­mouthed woman. In these scenes, Voces pitches two elders who stand as representatives for oppositional epistemologies against one another: Germán, a belated inquisitor, a mouthpiece for science, technology, and reason, all of which have traditionally marked male intellect, and the unnamed witch with her voices and her army of flies. The fly, the witch’s messenger and perhaps her avatar, builds a bridge with the tarantula in Il legame and with the stereotypically gendered knowledge they represent. Painful and weaponized interactions with tarantulas and flies create a hybrid of woman and animal, which, according to Eira Rojas, is “a contrarian method of positioning the female body and female experience in defiance of the patriarchy” (Rojas n.d.). In De Feudis’s interpretation, however, the bond between woman and tarantula is something to be urgently dissolved, by force, if necessarily. Similarly, in Voces, the fly is a harbinger of death and murderous instincts, a dweller of humid interstices in need of sanitation. In Il legame and Voces, the woman-­ animal hybrid as a metaphor for a “self that refuses the static and regulatory cultural forms of femininity” (Rojas n.d.) must be vanquished to re-establish patriarchal paradigms. The Witch takes a different approach, as the supernatural woman-animal interaction between Thomasin and Black Phillip is conducive to a liberatory ending which, nonetheless, maintains the usual ambivalence. Teresa’s, Thomasin’s, and the Spanish witch’s ability to commune with animals and trees is primarily an expression of a primitive, subordinate knowledge predicated on the closeness between

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women and nature. Il legame is perhaps the most invested in this resilient sexist trope when it points at an intimate, even biological proximity between trees and women—Teresa wants to cure Sofia “like she does with the trees” (De Feudis 2020). The trope of the wronged woman seeking revenge is neither a novelty nor an invention of the #MeToo era; in these three films, however, this trope is inserted in narratives that initially demand a reflection on feminine power, knowledge, and agency, but eventually withdraw from compassionate ending and rigorous critiques of histories of male abuse, opting out of exposure and for exploitation. Voces, like Il legame and The Witch, is a film about male abuse. In the end, Eric’s drawings show Daniel the hard truth: that he, like Francesco, has murdered his own child. Yet Daniel and Francesco are reluctant “monsters,” monsters by contamination. If Francesco becomes monstrous only after having been bitten by Ada, Daniel kills under the spell of the witch. Once again, the film shields his male perpetrator from judgment and has him maneuvered by a stronger will, that of a woman, leading him to behaviors he disavows as not his own. The connection with femicide is, once again, within reach: the media coverage of this and other “passion crimes” foregrounds the responsibilities of the victim, who had empowered herself, demanded her independence, moved on and away, allegedly driving her former partner to commit a “crime of passion.”

Wouldst Thou Like to Live Deliciously? The Witch The terrors of the inquisition allow me to segue into Robert Eggers’s The Witch, released between the two Me Too movements in 2015.15 The protagonist’s family stands before a Puritan tribunal due to doctrinal divergences and awaits judgment. The father’s (Ralph Ineson) unwillingness to compromise leaves no other option but exile. The family of seven set out into the wilderness to search for a suitable piece of land to farm; lamentably, they settle on the edge of a forest haunted by witches. Under the pressure of possible starvation, the family grows increasingly distressed and begins to suspect that the witch is one of them. The figure of the witch is once again center stage in the eponymous film, where it poses the same question of ambivalent feminism and assumes the same duplicitous 15  The complexity, depth, and doubtless appeal of Eggers’s The Witch have produced a flurry of scholarship. Among others, see Briefel (2019), Metz (2016), and Olivetti (2020).

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posture towards female empowerment as a desirable trajectory for the oppressed protagonists and source of horror. Alexandra Hauke is reluctant to read Thomasin’s (Anya Taylor-Joy) rebirth as a witch as a way out from the strictures of Puritan society: in her view, “an alignment with the Devil … does not constitute an opportunity for full agency but rather conditional freedom under the wings of another master” (Hauke 2021, 11). On a similar note, Chloé Germaine Buckley agrees that the female witch is a “deeply ambiguous figure that proves problematic for feminism and its project to subvert or otherwise destabilize misogynist symbols” (quoted in Hauke 2021, 42). Witchcraft itself is, in the film as in history, not an exclusively feminine attribute: it is highly fluid and mobile, attaching itself to male and female, adult and child; the title does not label one specific character, as the titular witch may be Thomasin, the unnamed witch who haunts the woods, or the persecutory narrative that pushes Thomasin’s family over the edge and into mutual destruction. The film centers on the family’s eldest daughter, Thomasin, whose first lines stand in stark contrast with her diminutive appearance, submissive body language, and anxious look. I here confess I have lived in sin. I have been idle in my work, disobedient of my parents neglectful of my prayer. I have in secret played upon thy sabbath and broke every one of thy commandments in thought, followed the desires of mine own will and not the holy spirit. I know I deserve all shame and misery in this life and everlasting hellfire. (Eggers 2015)

These lines say little about Thomasin but speak volumes about the early American settler society around her; they delineate a Puritan ethics and sensitivity that erases personal needs and imagines a self in perfect alignment with divine prescriptions. More than that, Thomasin’s introductory lines invite us to see her as the abject of a society where her belonging is negotiated in terms of self-annihilation: Thomasin may very well speak of Puritan New England with Julia Kristeva’s voice in Powers of Horror, “a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture” (1982, 2). The fierce self-abjection ingrained in these lines and the belief in sin as a magnet for malignant forces mark Thomasin’s body as a major locus horridus of Puritan society, but I believe Thomasin’s self-affirmation, tentative at first

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and eruptive as the film nears its end, to be the film’s central horror dispositive.16 Thomasin spills water, drops eggs, forgets to lock the goats in the shed before dark, and exasperates her mother Katherine (Kate Dickie) for no particular reason: “What is the matter with thee, Thomasin, what is the matter with thee?” (Eggers 2015). Her inattention suggests a slightly deviant personality, a dreamy disposition that grates against the dictates of the Puritan order. It is under her care that baby Samuel vanishes in the woods, but under no circumstances would a twenty-first-century spectator hold her responsible for that. Thomasin is immersed in a gynophobic society that suspects of her beauty and youth and materializes, above all, in her mother’s low-intensity hostility and the pressure she puts on her daughter, more so than on any of her siblings.17 Thomasin’s relationship with her mother contributes to the delineation of her character in terms of abjection: returning to the vocabulary proposed by Kristeva, abjection befalls a child who “has swallowed up instead of maternal love … an emptiness, or rather a maternal hatred” (1982, 6). Samuel’s disappearance exacerbates the mother’s antipathy against Thomasin, but what unleashes the crossfire of witchcraft accusations and the haze of mutual distrust among the family members is a different episode. Exasperated by her sister Mercy’s nagging, Thomasin tries to intimidate her into silence by telling her that Samuel was kidnapped by a witch, not a wolf as in the official, child-appropriate version, and that witch was she: Aye, it was a witch, Mercy. You speak aright. It was I. ‘Twas I who stole him. I be the witch of the wood. I am. I am that very witch: When I sleep, my 16  Aviva Briefel helpfully argues that the movie’s horror narrative is specifically predicated on “the monstrosity of female longing and nostalgia” (2019, 6). She adds that an integral part of the movie’s attempt to rigorously reconstruct New England in the 1630s implies that the “female experience” can only be accessed “through that which history itself has converted into the unholy, the unspeakable, the unhuman” (6). Briefel also virtually agrees that Thomasin’s transformation is “subtle at first, extreme in the end” and adds that it is so because it “closely follows the stages of possession that could supposedly befall young Puritan women” (7). 17  There are multiple signs that, as Mercy tells Thomasin, “mother hates [her]” (Eggers 2015). See, for example, when Katherine reproaches her for no apparent reason, or blames her for losing her silver cup, which in fact her husband took and sold: “Thomasin, what hast thou done with the silver cup? … How thou could lose me [sic] father’s silver wine cup in this hovel I do not know” (Eggers 2015). Katherine is the first to suggest Thomasin should leave the household.

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spirit slips away from me [sic] body and dances naked with the Devil. That’s how I signed his book. (Eggers 2015)

This intriguing confession alters Thomasin’s very being. Her posture changes: she walks defiantly, almost sensually, towards her sister, who cowers in discomfort: chest forward, shoulders down and swinging, lips pouting. The strings of her dress are undone. This episode roughly coincides with her mother’s announcement that she “hath begat the sign of her womanhood” (Eggers 2015) and is therefore ready to leave the house and serve another family. To prevent his older sister from being sent away, Caleb sets off at night to find food, loses his way, is captured and bewitched, and dies as a consequence. After Caleb’s excruciating passing, Mercy accuses Thomasin of witchcraft, and Thomasin accuses the twins, setting off a chain of violence. Her father urges Thomasin to confess, to “speak truth,” but the truth Thomasin speaks is not her father’s but her own: You took of Mother’s cup and let her rail at me. You confessed not till it was too late. Is that truth? You are a hypocrite. You send Caleb to the wood and let me take the blame of that too? Is that truth? You let mother be as thy master. You cannot bring the crops to yield! You cannot hunt! … Thou canst do nothing save cut wood. (Eggers 2015)

In a final, deadly confrontation, Katherine accuses Thomasin of bewitching the entire family: It is you. The Devil is in thee and hath had thee. You are smeared of his sin. You reek of evil. You have made a covenant with death. You bewitched thy brother, you proud slut. Did you not think I saw thy sluttish looks to him, bewitching his eye as any whore? And thy father next! … You killed my children, you killed thy father, you witch! (Eggers 2015)

At that point, she tries to strangle her daughter, but Thomasin stabs her in self-defense. These scenes highlight the red thread between female agency and horror in the Puritan imaginary on which the film is built. The parents’ bursts of violence against Thomasin show that Puritan society does not have the means to process female agency and empowerment; unable to read and sustain these two conditions, it inevitably defers them to abject models of womanhood, such as witchcraft.

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In the end—with most of her family and their animals dead and the twins vanished—Thomasin is left alone on the farm with Black Phillip, a male goat and the embodiment of Satan who had been with them all along. Phillip speaks to her seductively: in exchange for the proverbial signature on his book, he offers Thomasin a life of wonder and power: “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously? Wouldst thou like to see the world?” (Eggers 2015). Following Hauke’s warning, one should be wary of triumphant readings: the signature—guided by Satan’s hand as Thomasin cannot write—is as much a sign of affirmation as it is of submission, of exerting agency as well as of being deprived of it. The same is true for the witches’ Sabbath Thomasin joins in the conclusive scenes, where a circle of women are lifted into the air and float and laugh uncontrollably: it is an exhilarating lifting of the spirit out of the actual “horrors” of Puritan fundamentalism, but also another case of fascinazione, in which the body is emptied of agency, given away to a magical, controlling being.

Conclusion In these pages, I followed Jess Derr’s lead in exploring how Me Too and #MeToo radiate through three horror films that center on abuse against women. My hypothesis has been that discourses on female agency, power, and voice propelled by Me Too and #MeToo, but also the heightened attention on abuse against women, found their way into cinema and especially into horror, a genre that may be the most apt to vehicle the gravity and extremity of this historical moment. I have suggested these three movies as representative of the continuity between horror and Me Too and #MeToo’s concerns, but also as marked by a fundamental ambivalence between the exposure and exploitation of abuse. This and other ambivalences beg a series of questions about the legacy of Me Too and #MeToo: for example, in the context of films that reflect on women’s agency and abuse of women, why has the demonization of male perpetrators across the media and public discourse that marked the #MeToo years not transferred the site of horror from the female to the male body? Why does the abused female body, in these films, remain a major site of fear and, in Il legame and Voces, the perpetrator of supernatural violence? Why do these movies’ male abusers only amount to unconvincing monsters driven by superior female agencies? Do these movies condemn the patriarchal societies they engage in or merely exploit the wealth of their potential for gynophobic violence?

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These horrors, and arguably many other productions of #MeToo years, may have responded to the discourses around #MeToo, but they also became vulnerable to some of the movement’s contradictions. Some have pointed out that the movement—at least in its later, hashtagged version— has done more to “erect and illuminate” (Derr 2022, 7) perpetrators than explore the reverberations of their behavior on their victims. This is true for Voces, a doubtlessly perpetrator-centered film. Others have condemned the virulence of harassment accusations made in the wake of #MeToo. “American men are afraid,” writes The Guardian’s Jessica Valenti. Words such as “sex panic,” “criminalization of courtship,” and, ironically, “witch hunt” (Valenti 2017) have been thrown around in the attempt to describe the climate of insecurity and discomfort afflicting men after Me Too and #MeToo had inspired thousands of victims of harassment to speak up and offered a vocabulary to articulate their experiences of abuse. In this climate, it is perhaps unsurprising that female empowerment, agency, and voice would expand the depths of the monstrous feminine.18

References Abalia, Andrea. 2013. Lo siniestro femenino en la creación plástica contemporánea. PhD. dissertation, Universidad del País Vasco. Aharoni, Shlomit and Ayalon, Liat. 2022. ‘I Was Born a Man—I’m Close to Myself’: Israeli Film Directors and Cinema in the MeToo Era. Journal of Aging Studies 63. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S08904065 22000421. Barbaro, Michael. 2022. The Man Who Tried to Kidnap Nancy Pelosi. The Daily, November 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/podcasts/the-daily/ pelosi-attack-congress-violence.html. Barth, John. 1972. Chimera. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Benson-Allott, Caetlin. 2018. They’re Coming to Get You… Or: Making America Anxious Again. Film Quarterly 72 (2): 71–76. Bilton, Nick. 2017. Why Hollywood as We Know It Is Already Over. Vanity Fair, January 30. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/why-hollywood-aswe-know-it-is-already-over. Bradley, Rizvana. 2017. Vestiges of Motherhood. Film Quarterly 71 (2): 46–52. Briefel, Aviva. 2019. Devil in the Details: The Uncanny History of The Witch. Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal 49 (1): 4–20. 18  This article owes much to the caring support, proofreading, and feedback of my student assistant, Laura Maria Hartrampf.

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Carrera Garrido, Miguel. 2018. Silencios y Metáforas: Analogías en el uso de la ambigüedad en ‘El Huésped’ de Amparo Dávila y el cine de terror (pos)moderno. Brumal. Revista de investigación sobre lo Fantástico 6 (2): 187–206. https://revistes.uab.cat/brumal/article/view/v6-n2-carrera. Chandra, Giti, and Irma Erlingsdóttir. 2020. The Routledge Handbook of the Politics of the #MeToo Movement. New York: Routledge. Clover, Carol J. [1992] 2015. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Creed, Barbara. 2007. The Monstrous-Feminine. London: Routledge. De Feudis, Domenico Emanuele, dir. 2020. Il legame. Netflix. De Martino, Ernesto. 1959. Sud e Magia. Einaudi. Derr, Jess. 2022. Surviving More Than Monsters: Post-Horror in the Age of #MeToo. Master’s Thesis, Villanova University. Hwang Dong-hyuk, dir. 2021. Squid. Game. Netflix. Eggers, Robert, dir. 2015. The Witch. A24. Fargeat, Coralie, dir. 2018. Revenge. Rezo Films. Frey, Mattias, and Sara Janssen. 2018. Researching Sex and the Cinema in the #MeToo Age. Film Studies 18 (1): 1–13. Furlanetto, Elena. 2021. Universal Darkness: In Defense of Horror. Finnegans, https://finnegans.it/en/english-­universal-­darkness-­in-­defense-­of-­horror-­by-­ elena-­furlanetto/. Gómez Hernández, Ángel, dir. 2020. Voces. Entertainment One Films Spain. Gura, David. 2021. Barry Diller Headed 2 Hollywood Studios. He Now Says the Movie Business Is Dead. NPR, July 8. https://www.npr.org/2021/07/ 08/1014095135/barry-­diller-­headed-­2-­hollywood-­studios-­he-­now-­says-­the­movie-­business-­is-­dead. Harrison, Rebecca. 2018. Fuck the Canon (Or, How Do You Solve a Problem Like Von Trier?): Teaching, Screening and Writing About Cinema in the Age of #MeToo. MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, November 9. https://maifeminism.com/fuck-­the-­canon-­or-­how-­do-­you-­solve-­a-­problem-­like-­von-­trier-­ teaching-­screening-­and-­writing-­about-­cinema-­in-­the-­age-­of-­metoo/. Hauke, Alexandra. 2021. The Wicked Witch in the Woods: Puritan Maternalism, Ecofeminism, and Folk Horror in Robert Eggers’ The Witch: A New-England Folktale. Gothic Nature 2: 37–61. Horror Italia 24. 2019. Con Pupi Avati|Il Signor Diavolo|La paura è universale. YouTube, August 20. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujfOYnLqKx0. “Is Culture Dead? w/ Catherine Liu & Eileen Jones.” 2022. Jacobin Show, September 15. https://shows.acast.com/jacobin-­radio/episodes/jacobin-­ show-­is-­culture-­dead. Bong Joon-ho, dir. 2019. Parasite. CJ Entertainment. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Mesce, Bill. 2021. Going, Going… Gone? Is Hollywood Dying? Tilt Magazine, August 8. https://tilt.goombastomp.com/film/dying-­movies-­is-­hollywood-­ dead/. Metz, Walter. 2016. New Englanders, Out of Their Minds. Film Criticism 40(3). https://quod.lib.umich.edu/f/fc/13761232.0040.306/%2D%2Dnew-­ englanders-­out-­of-­their-­minds?rgn=main;view=fulltext. Olivetti, Kerry A. 2020. Lost Without Breadcrumbs: Family, Scapegoating, and the Rationalization of Abuse in Robert Eggers’s The Witch. Marvels & Tales 34 (2): 239–255. Peele, Jordan, dir. 2017. Get Out. Universal Studios. Posada, Tim. 2020. #MeToo’s First Horror Film: Male Hysteria and the New Final Girl in 2018’s Revenge. In Performing Hysteria: Contemporary Images and Imaginations of Hysteria, ed. Johanna Braun, 189–203. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Rodriguez, Barbara and Gerson, Jennifer. 2022. ‘Where Is Nancy?’: How Threats Against Women in Power Are Tied to Threats Against Democracy. 19th News, October 31. https://19thnews.org/2022/10/paul-­nancy-­pelosi-­attack-­ political-­threats-­women-­democracy/. Rojas, Eira (n.d.). Feminine, Feminist and Sinister: Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Occult Imagery as Subversive Narrative Strategies. Eira Rojas: A Gathering of Miscellanea. http://www.eirarojas.com/feminine-­feminist-­ and-­sinister-­p-­4. Valenti, Jessica. 2017. So Men are Afraid after #MeToo? Think about What It’s Like for Women. The Guardian, December 12. https://www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2017/dec/12/me-­too-­american-­men-­scared-­women-­ criminalize-­fear.

CHAPTER 4

The Culture That “Can’t Anymore”: Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) as Pilgrimage of a Traumatized Society Marta Brkljačić

It can be said that the notion of human sacrifice permeates Western society. Contemplating religion’s social and historical role as a medium of communication and its place within Western civilization, Walter Burkert (1983, 2007) attempts to clarify the sacralization of killing and the ideology of sacrifice through the interpretation of Ancient Greek sacrificial rituals. Even as contemporary culture has lost the resemblance and connection to older cultural practices, and their continuity has long been disrupted, the sacrificial practice and ideology are largely sustained through Christianity. Logocentrically oriented (its sources are the written word and oral tradition), Christianity is disinclined to mystify its practices, which are centered around the figure of a man who becomes the object of faith through an ultimate act of sacrifice. However, keenness on sacrifice in ancient traditions is connected to the motif of “a maiden’s tragedy”

M. Brkljačić (*) University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53278-8_4

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(Burkert 2007, 321; 1983, 297), especially preserved in the well-known Greek myth of Kore-Persephone. While ancient ritual sacrifice possibly represents “an encounter with death, through which death is overcome” and is emotionally integrated as an unchanging, repetitive fact of life (2007, 320; 1983, 296), the “modern world, whose pride is in the full emancipation of the individual … relegate[s] death to the fringe of existence and thought” (2007, 321; 1983, 297), marginalizing emotional engagement, while the contemporary culture becomes a culture of isolation and emotional detachment in a globalized world, disregarding individuals as emotional bodies. Culturally, both the disregard for emotional states and objectification of bodies seem to be especially reserved for women. From both physical and a psychological perspective, the fact that, as E. Ann Kaplan puts it, “most women, no matter where in the world, still live in heavily misogynist and racist cultures” still needs to be explained, even more so since “many women have won the right to positions of power and are exercising that right as best they can” (2004, 1244), is socially horrific and traumatic. Kaplan locates the accommodation to and retaliation on “the fact of male dominance” in focusing “beyond the male [imperial] gaze” (1244). Ironically—and irony is perhaps Midsommar’s (Ari Aster, 2019) greatest source of subliminal comic relief—written and directed by a man, Midsommar takes on a perspective beyond the male gaze, exploring the phenomena of socially “justified” female sacrifice in the form of physical and emotional disposability, while dealing with the horror of unsustainable human relationships and the social trauma of detachment. I believe Midsommar must be approached with its allegorical potential in sight. Summaries of the plot focus on a young couple’s journey to a Swedish midsummer festival with uncanny and bizarre consequences, but the horror may be put in very few words: a psychology student, Dani Ardor, is left severely traumatized after her sister kills herself and their parents by filling their home with carbon monoxide. The sister verbalized the act in a laconic e-mail: “i just can’t anymore. everything is black. mom and dad are coming, too. goodbye” (Aster 2019). This “inconsolably hideous tragedy” (Edelstein 2019), I argue, is Midsommar’s original horrific place or horror locus, and everything else is symbolically organized around it. The horror locus is conceived in relation to the notion of locus amoenus or “pleasance,” an established literary topos for an ideal landscape or a charming place (Curtius 2013, 195–9). I suggest that the Hårga settlement can be taken into consideration as a fictional setting originating from

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Midsommar’s previous setting and that it serves as an alternative articulation of Midsommar’s original horror locus pertaining to detachment and loss of emotional connection. The Hårga setting visually inverts the original horror locus into a locus amoenus, where the horrific and the uncanny can be emotionally explored, analyzed, and successfully “mapped” (Wolfe 2021, 216). The film opens with a still of a detailed tableau reminiscent of medieval embroidery (somewhat reminiscent of the Bayeux Tapestry, especially in that it depicts a successful conquest).1 It is a sort of a bardic “‘hear ye, hear ye!” backed with orchestral fanfare (which then dies out somewhat tragi-comically, dispersing into dissonance), and the image literally opens up to a narrative sequence of interchanging wide and close-up frames, showing a winter-time forest landscape, followed by an urban settlement in its midst. The frames of the woods appear against a soundtrack of traditional Scandinavian singing. This singing, known as kulning (or kaukning), is typically performed by women, and functions as a herding call, as well as a means to repel predators. Its melancholic, high-­pitched sound is abruptly cut off by the harsh ringing and the phone call connecting to a voice machine with a woman’s voice spilling out. Dani (Florence Pugh), we find, is calling out to her own herd: her sister, her parents, and her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor). The call is unanswered, and Dani embarks on a journey to understand why.2 Placed at the very beginning of the film, the tableau tells us what to expect: a story about a self-formative journey in a fictional setting where only how the spectators feel about the story is real. The tableau is auto-referential, pointing out a fictional context framing another fictional context, and suggesting the genre of a fairy tale, as Aster himself has mentioned and some others have noticed.3 The protagonist of this tragic and illuminating tale has a fatal flaw: Dani Ardor (and in fairy tales, nomen est omen) is a young woman perceived as 1  Interestingly enough, Aster mentions Disney (a very American source of fairy tales) as a source of inspiration for this. See Wilkinson 2019. 2  Wolfe points out this as a millennial generational struggle, where “characters must search for familial connection amongst their peers and deal with the psychological consequences of difference and distance” (Wolfe 2021, 210). 3  Sonia Rao (The Washington Post, 2019) and Steve Rose (The Guardian, 2019) also mention the Brothers Grimm and the Wizard of Oz (Rose referencing Aster’s words from Rachel Handler’s brief pre-release report on Midsommar), respectively. Taking into consideration how many a classic fairy tale utilizes horrifying aspects, this is not surprising, and anyone who believes the narrative shift to the faraway woods that seclude the Hårga settlement is some completely unrelated horrific account should consult the opening frames of Midsommar.

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emotionally overbearing. Not exactly naïve, Dani is somewhat self-­ oppressive in trying to accommodate other people. Despite the attempts to be emotionally supportive of everyone she has a close relationship with, she is abruptly left to fend for herself in the aftermath of a personal tragedy. This self-care follows as an allegorical journey to a different setting where Dani will emerge emotionally transformed. The rite of passage is the most prominent allegorical feature of Midsommar, encompassing the individual and the communal aspect, as well as the aspect of artistic conception, its execution, and its audience. Observed against Midsommar, the Kore-Persephone myth describes a maiden sacrifice “approved” by a higher power (Zeus) and, “as almost always in sacrificial myths, the tragedy of the maiden is only a preparation for what is to follow” (Burkert 2007, 286; 1983, 262). Similarly, Midsommar involves an abrupt loss, followed by grief and joyous relief, where “life has gained the dimension of death, but this also means that death contains a dimension of life” (2007, 285; 1983, 261), focusing on the protagonist’s journey upwards. Monica Wolfe points out how Midsommar “demonstrates that tropes of the dark, the gross, and the unsightly are not necessary to the definition of horror” (2021, 211). While I agree, I believe that Midsommar still utilizes the dark, the gross, and the unsightly, with respect to its original horror locus. This locus, as it has been suggested, is originally not found in the Hårga settlement but in Dani’s settlement. Therefore, Dani’s home, the place where she both physically and mentally exists before entering a foreign community, is the locus defined by tropes of the dark, the gross, and the unsightly. And even though “the bright segment” of the new locus does not lead to “bright content” (2021, 211), it seems ridiculous to expect so if we focus on Dani’s perspective, which is possibly about deconstructing the unhomely homely content and reconstructing it as the homely unhomely.4 This means mapping the horror locus as a locus amoenus and rephrasing the tropes of the dark, the gross, and the unsightly as the bright, the agreeable, and the captivating to make it inhabitable. While Midsommar may seem like a “clash of cultures comedy” (McDonald and 4  Discussing the definition and production of the uncanny in The Uncanny, Freud states: “Unheimlich is clearly the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, vertraut, and it seems obvious that something should be frightening precisely because it is unknown and unfamiliar” (2003, 160) but that “something must be added to the novel and the unfamiliar if it is to become uncanny” (161). After an extensive etymological discussion, he concludes: “The uncanny (das Unheimliche, ‘the unhomely’) is in some way a species of the familiar (das Heimliche, ‘the homely’)” (169).

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Johnson 2021, 67) in the supposed folk-horror sense (where modernity and tradition, Christianity and paganism, non-ritualized and ritualized, verbal and non-verbal, the new world and the old one collide), the visitors’ culture and the culture of the Hårgas are not different in their mentalities—only in their expression. The cultures which clash in Midsommar are more likely the feminine and the masculine.5 The folk-horror genre helps redefine social relationships, primarily between femininity and masculinity, in “a range of culture shocks” (McDonald and Johnson 2021, 67), which we can suspect to be only allegorically removed. Following Gary Heba’s distinction between coherent (monoglossic) and incoherent (heteroglossic) horror narratives, where the first one focuses on “conflicts between conventional cultural binaries” ultimately resolved by successfully destroying an external “Other,” and the second one focuses on “humanity’s limited abilities to control the horrors, or worse, on humanity’s capacity to create its own horrors that cannot be contained by the coherent master narrative” (1995, 108), we might find Midsommar coherently incoherent. While it functions “as cultural critic … thus unveiling the social roots of horror” it also implies the “dominant culture as the source of horror” through a clash of contrasts which is resolved only through the awareness that we are looking at different sides of the same coin. Midsommar does this by flipping the perspective on one fictional setting, establishing another, meta-fictional setting of a dominant culture depicted as a “monstrous” subculture in the middle of Hälsingland woods. In this process, the previous setting becomes easier to perceive in a deliberate and conscious change of perspective. Dani invites herself along on the trip to Sweden because she is at an impasse. She is depicted as a troubled individual even before the horror of abrupt loss strikes, and this is evident in her effort to rationalize her ever-present anxiety. Christian’s friend’s suggestion that Dani is not really going to Sweden with them soon before they are shown traveling is paired with the scene where Dani stares at herself in the mirror, and I would argue that it suggests both an allegorical dimension to Midsommar and Dani’s conscious introspective effort to get there. Dani’s inquisitive gaze, directed initially to her own self, thus “exposes the struggles of individuals, all the while making us 5  A dichotomy Wolfe also notices and discusses: “Midsommar’s interaction with the horror genre conventions of dark and light sets the foundation for a larger mapping of binary oppositions: urban/pastoral, masculinity/femininity, capitalist/communist, academic knowledge/folk knowledge, technology/nature, and more” (2021, 210).

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aware that they are symptomatic of larger societal structures” (Marhouse 2016, 238). Wolfe sees Midsommar making a “political intervention through the uncanniness of space and place” (2021, 211) as the “standard globalization age hero[es] … navigate new space of the Hårga commune by the standards of their own culture’s ideologies, projecting what they already know onto the space of the unknown,” and “what we assume to be the Other—the Hårga people—is actually yet another colonial power mirroring the One” (212). The supposed “bright side” of the globally inclined Western civilization is a visual extension of its “dark side.” In a globalized world, ideologies of the older and the newer West become fused, even though their styles of presentation differ. Both territories are filled with a detachment that brings an underlying sense of individual anxiety which cannot be put into words because everything seems to be in perfect order. Even as we accept the culturally ingrained binarity as “a filter through which to understand global happenings” (218)—and here, “global” primarily concerns the globality of Dani’s fictional setting—Midsommar prompts us to recognize its instability and conceptual similarities of the “perverse urban” and the “idealized pastoral” space (220), where brightness is also darkness. In observing how Midsommar reflects current cultural preoccupations with globalization, Wolfe highlights the “isolating individualism of the perverse urban space” (2021, 218). Achieving independence is a contemporary young adult’s rite of passage, in a society which tolerates only so much dependency on others. This resonates with the culture of independence so well-established in the US, which reflects the American Dream of individual prosperity wary of any sort of communism in pursuit of happiness. Dani fears she leans too much on her boyfriend, afraid she’s becoming a chore and that she’s “the only one that’s leaning” (Aster 2019). However, a female friend (who is only a voice over the phone, which could be interpreted as Dani’s inner feminine voice in the context of Dani’s introspective tendencies) tells her that the ability to learn and open up is what intimacy is about. Even though Christianity preaches taking care of those in need, (mental and emotional) vulnerability is still a possible social taboo, frowned upon from a distinctly masculine perspective, which is evident in the way Christian and his friends talk about both Dani and her “attention-seeking” sister, in a constant display of “crass arrogance and casual disregard of a wounded woman” (McDonald and Johnson 2021, 79). Dani sticks with a person who wants to dispose of her because of her alleged dependency, while Christian goes through all the expected motions

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in a rehearsed way, with an undercurrent of detachment. Midsommar suggests that the feminine perspective chronically suffers from being at another’s disposal. It is a sacrificial complex, the complex of being “always here if you need anything,” and it is the kind of compassion dubbed “crisis mode” whenever it involves strong emotion. Wolfe states how Midsommar “at once recognizes … and rebukes” (2021, 216) the traditional Western philosophical dichotomy, which “equates men with rationality and reason and women with emotion” (217). Sure enough, Dani’s “emotional” body demonstrates how both strong emotional expressions and rationalization go hand in hand. Put under the magnifying glass of her own analytical gaze, the camera gets close enough to pick up on a range of emotional expressions, and the Hårgas further illustrate Dani’s engagement with the environment, even as that environment may be considered as an extension of her emotional self. It is important to establish that this is not a case of narcissism. The designated narcissist is more likely Christian, who is too self-absorbed to devote himself to anything, even though he plays the part. Wolfe further observes that while “Dani’s emotion certainly does not seem irrational … Christian’s lack of emotion does” (2021, 217). The fact that he can’t be bothered to choose a topic for his PhD dissertation, which he then does capitalizing on a colleague’s idea, is apparently the greatest of white American middle-class (male) young adult’s struggles. It shows, however fleetingly, Christian’s lack of actual interest in the subject matter—and this subject matter is actually human traditions and practices. Christian’s repressive tendencies6 are a part of the relationship David Church (2021) describes as “horror by gaslighting.” According to Church, Midsommar is a “post-horror film that represents gaslighting in one of its most classical forms: the heterosexual male’s psychological abuse of his female partner” (104). This is an important point because, at the very beginning of the film, Dani is striving to connect. These attempts are unsuccessful. On her pilgrimage to emotional and psychological independence, as we might take the Hårga part of the narrative, then, Dani is also 6  The overall toxicity of Christian and Dani’s relationship is symptomatic of the toxicity of the masculine (Rose 2019) towards the feminine perspective in contemporary globalized Western society, i.e., the supposed mutual clash of reason and emotion. While Dani is shaping her emotional distress into something the mind can articulate alongside the body, Christian’s emotional effort is not at all apparent. And yet, it seems to be a given that he does have the means to emotionally connect and, therefore, that he must be using them in some way, even though we get the sense that any kind of emotional expression is received as excessive at worst and inconvenient at best.

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grieving the loss of intimacy and the rift between the ideas of femininity and masculinity. Church states: “the gaslighting relationship at the film’s emotional core is complemented by Midsommar’s roots in the folk-horror subgenre” (110). However, the actions we are witnessing within the setting of the Hårga community are not simply the product of “local theologies”—rather, they rephrase the “theologies” of Dani’s previous locus. Emotional bodies are not only central to ancient ritual practices but are the foundation of theatre. When the travelers enter the Hårga territory, the upside-down frame announces the spectators are about to enter an inverted world, a new territory of expression. The new, unusual (savage, pagan, occult, conservative, primitive, and whatever else comes to mind) community is marked with similar troubles as the familiar one we have just abandoned. The Hårga community, we are told, is “like theatre”. Therefore, it might be considered a fictional community where rules and boundaries are different from what we experience in everyday life. In that sense, the Swedish midsummer festival is very much a theatrical way of processing Dani’s traumatic life experience, filled with a general lack of understanding and compassion, especially in the aftermath of the unfathomable loss of life/connection.7 It is important to mention that this lack is not something Dani can pinpoint to exactness but rather something that she senses looming over her existence. Dani feels what Antonin Artaud would describe as universal “cruelty [which] connects things together” and by which “the different stages of creation are formed” (2010, 74). This “essential” cruelty reminds us that “we are not free and the sky can still fall on our heads” (57). According to Artaud, theatre is a kind of “soul therapy” teaching everyone involved that “existence through effort is cruel” (74). A fact beyond verbalization, the element of cruelty requires a spectacle, and “metaphysics must be made to enter the mind through the body” (70). Artaud compares it to the plague, a delirium-inducing, communicable “psychic entity” (11) that leads to a “revelation, urging forwards the exteriorization of a latent undercurrent of cruelty through 7  Death itself is an unfathomable disconnection that can only be approached as a fact of life, an event which is unavoidable from the  viewpoint  of the living. Rather than rationalized, from the perspective of the living, death can only be felt through emotional assets, namely fear and grief. This is what Burkert claims to be the effect of the Eleusinian Mysteries (the practice rooted in the motif of a maiden’s tragedy): to find peace in the acceptance of death as an unchanging fact. Without the ideas of immortality and the afterlife as the goal, there is just the exchange of darkness and light, in which the journey itself, the emotional wandering in search of Kore, symbolic of exploring mortal fears to discover the joy of life, is the goal.

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which all the perversity of which the mind is capable, whether in a person or a nation, becomes localized” (20). Artaud also deems that “from a mental viewpoint, cruelty means strictness, diligence, unrelenting decisiveness, irreversible and absolute determination” (72). It is a “very lucid, a kind of strict control and submission to necessity,” mirrored existentially in philosophical determinism (73), and theatrically in “the extreme concentration of stage elements” (88). In the Hälsingland woods, the community is compassionate in a most Artaudian manner, cruel to be kind, while Dani and the others are the audience physically situated at the center of their carefully staged happenings. Artaud’s notion of theatre has much to do with the unconscious; it’s a “double” of the reality that cannot be put into words (34–7). For Artaud, theatre is “spatial poetry” (52) seeking to break the “subjugation to the text and rediscover the idea of a kind of unique language somewhere in between gesture and thought” (63) by raising everything “to the dignity of signs” (66). Such is  Aster’s visual direction. This is obvious not only in the visual setting of Midsommar but also in the approach to acting, where the Hårga community are what Artaud would call “hieroglyphs,”8 focused on creating a “pure stage language” (90), as opposed to the outsiders, who (in this sense) do little else than speak words that often seem both empty and deceitful.9 The Artaudian notion of theatre hides nothing and shows everything, delving fearlessly into any contemporary subject and revealing the pseudo-­ civilized human condition (2010, 88). This, I believe, is compatible with the structure of Midsommar, a film that is somewhat “like theatre” in making the metaphysical concepts tangible through a series of symbolic, ritualistic processes in the wake of one specific introductory event based on the maiden’s sacrifice motif. The ideal of the Hårga community, like Artaud’s conception of theatre (2010, 61), lies in the totality of life as a harmonious mechanism, where aspects of reality blend together in perfect harmony. This is a locus amoenus trait, as the Hårga setting becomes a place where we can potentially enjoy the integration of the horrific and the 8  “The actors and costumes form true, living, moving hieroglyphs. And these three-­ dimensional hieroglyphics are in turn embellished with a certain number of gestures, strange signs matching some dark prodigious reality we have repressed once and for all here in the West.” (Artaud 2010, 44). 9  In the Artaudian sense, Dani is articulate in a deeply non-verbal way. Florence Pugh’s superbly expressive face makes Dani stand out among the members of her own, disinterested community and makes her more like the Hårga people. Dani’s words are a tool for connection, not deception.

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uncanny with the nice and the familiar. Dani’s rite of passage also consists of questioning and re-defining the relationship between life/attachment and death/detachment, the familiar and the uncanny, and the totality of their relationship, enabled through grief. What is unfathomable in Dani’s previous setting becomes standard and even perfunctory in the allegorical setting of the Hårga community, where everything happens for a reason, and everybody is well aware of their role. We are looking at Dani’s personal midsommar, and this is confirmed upon discovery that her birthday is on the first day of the festivities that Dani’s group is there to witness. Age, it is clarified, is like the seasons for the Hårgas. Spring, or the youthful age, is up to eighteen, then comes summer from eighteen to thirty-six, and this is considered the age of pilgrimage. Not coincidentally, with this information, we can deduce Dani’s age: since it is now mid-summer, Dani is likely twenty-seven years old, depicted in the middle of her pilgrimage. This age, which in reverse reads “seventy-two,” is numerologically significant: the working age of fall is from thirty-six to fifty-four, and then comes winter, the age of mentorship, from fifty-four to seventy-two. “What happens at seventy-two?” (Aster 2019) Dani asks Pelle but is not given a verbal answer. Instead, she is given a physical demonstration of that which she did not (could not and should not) directly witness in the previous setting. The group watches two elders, a woman and a man, jump off a cliff after a last supper, which at first appears to be simply a very ceremonial festival opening. After one of them (the man) fails to die immediately, a woman from the crowd gathered below approaches to finish him off. Afterward, a “mistress of ceremony” explains to the visitors (who display varying degrees of horror and outrage) that the spectacle they just witnessed “is a long, long, long observed custom,” which she describes as “recycling” based on the notion that things need replacement before they become useless. “Instead of dying in pain and fear and shame,” she clarifies, “we give our life as a gesture, before it can spoil” (Aster 2019). Giving life as a gesture is a truly thespian notion, because actors are living people whose art manifests from their mental and physical existence. It further prompts us to reconsider the Hårgas as hieroglyphs serving the purpose of uncovering what is hidden beyond Dani’s verbal articulation (and what we as the spectators feel we know about our own setting in connection to the ones we are presented with on film), and letting “the masks fall” (Artaud 2010, 21). In the “almost permanent sunlight, which is an eerie mix of bucolic and sterile” (McDonald and Johnson 2021, 66), we can reflect on the

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previous, very dark setting as somewhere nightmarish and horrific. Not only has the nightmare unfolded long before the visitors’ contact with the Hårgas, but the latter offers an ironically “brighter” perspective on the dynamic between an individual and a community. In a (mostly manipulative) conversation with Dani, Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) accentuates the synonymous relationship between community and family, where a community is a “real” family that “holds her members.” In theory, the Hårgas seem to share everything not only physically but also emotionally, and we can take this as a globalized, plague-like expression of the feminine perspective’s longing for connection. The mansplained intimacy between the people in this community is what resonates with Dani’s own feelings about relationships. However, the manner in which the Hårga community decidedly does not “hold” their elders over a certain age, but does away with them (as is the case with the ill, the deformed, and the non-white, or any anomaly that defies the imposed order of things), clearly shows a lack of acceptance. Furthermore, misogynistic tendencies are apparent from the moment the visitors enter the new community: Pelle’s brother specifically addresses the men first, and an embrace between men of the Hårga community is unnaturally long and intimate (something we never see between men and women). Going by the provisional embrace of women, the “emotional” bodies appear to be less embraced. Midsommar seems to display a case of brotherhood vs. sisterhood, where the individual identity of an individual brother or a sister, man or woman, is overpowered by the communal one, and the only true bond is found in the company of those who are physically and, therefore, it is assumed, emotionally exactly like ourselves. Even though women are never declared secondary, their role within the Hårga community is, unmistakably, tending to others (and those are primarily men, depicted as quite unconcerned). Women in Midsommar have their own community within a community, a community of “emotional” bodies; however, personal choice concerning one’s body, or at least the illusion of it, is seemingly reserved for men. The elder woman (Gunnel Fred) asks Christian to verbalize how he feels about Maja (Isabelle Grill), yet we do not witness Maja even once interviewed on her feelings10 about Christian and the expectations from her role of a sacrificial maiden. At the Hårgas, sexual intercourse is described as free and communal, which sounds almost progressively liberal. However, a sexual 10  What Christian is unable to verbalise because he is, ultimately, a strange and inarticulate visitor on an emotional turf, Maja perhaps does not need to verbalise, because she is the host.

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encounter with the opposite sex is not necessarily a pleasurable experience for women,11 quite the contrary. It points to a source of contemporary social trauma concerning the female body, a type of oppression that persists despite the semblance of emancipation. As with the traditional virgin/temptress dichotomy, there are echoes of the perception of sexual intercourse as something that the female body has to endure without any criteria, regardless of the male partner’s level of proficiency or investment, lest she risk being labeled as unattainable and frigid. While the guys gallantly advise Christian to find a girlfriend who “actually likes sex” (as opposed to liking the individual, a sign of emotional attachment), thus absolving him of any responsibility on the front of pleasure-giving, ironically, Dani witnesses a mating ritual between him and Maja, the “temptress” who puts up with him because tradition expects it. As mirroring disposable vessels, both Maja and Dani are disregarded physically and emotionally, and this loss of self is as empowering as it is traumatic. In the traumatic experience, both women have only other women to lean on. As a reaction to the horrific experience of loss, the collective “A-A-A-A” sound (in the following scene) is simultaneously a less verbal and an emotionally more eloquent articulation of Dani’s initial “no, no, no, no,” a great example of how “the plague takes dormant images, latent disorder and suddenly carries them to the point of the most extreme gestures” (Artaud 2010, 18). Upon seeing Midsommar, one might reconsider the notion of freedom from a feminized perspective, trapped in a desensitized social context. Among the welcomingly oppressive Hårgas, there seems to be no choice but to be either what is considered ideal or to perish altogether. Anything less is not tolerated. Although it might seem like an uncanny product of the Hårga ideology, which, quite biblically, separates the tare from the wheat, the general binaries dissociation stems from the contemporary civilized world, where these binaries are solidarized and integrated in theory but separated in practice. There seems to be a cultural struggle to reconcile the notions of voluntary individual sacrifice and the cruelty of  the effort it takes to (emotionally) survive with the notions of freedom, prosperity, integration, and equality which supposedly shape a true community that “holds” the individual life. The sheer devotion of the Hårgas to self-sacrifice is what makes it so bizarre. It reflects Dani’s character, a 11  Ironically, it is questionable how pleasurable or consensual the encounter may be for the drugged and coerced Christian.

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woman who is concerned with others to the point of self-oppression. However, it is still a matter of free will, and where one maiden has willfully perished, another willfully emerges, as the Maypole dance suggests. A metaphorical dance until one “can’t anymore” (not to exclude it as a metaphor for life in general), the Maypole dance is a dance with a sole “survivor” (which Dani already is in the context of her previous setting). Dani becomes so immersed in the process that she even starts speaking Swedish, adding to the totality of her theatrical expression (which includes costume, gesture, facial expression, voice, movement, song, and dance). In becoming the May Queen, Dani finally physically12 obtains the main role as a woman in a community, even though she, ominously, cannot stomach the “good luck” herring. Not coincidentally, this very first taste of independent feminine power is the point at which Christian, for the first time, actively wonders what’s going on and expresses discomfort with the entire setting. Seeing as he partakes in the birthday of Dani’s new, powerful individuality, the fact that Christian forgets Dani’s birthday is both gracefully ironic of Aster and heavily indicative of Dani’s personal and social insignificance in the male eye. This Dani herself allows because she cares about Christian: “I forgot to remind him” (Aster 2019), she justifies. Midsommar depicts women as taking responsibility for something that is not themselves, without question, because this is apparently what women do. If we are to believe that knowledge, however much revisited, is powerful, the paradox of women being analytical and observant, repeatedly taking things into consideration, and gathering constant insight, yet still  dismissed as “emotional” and subservient to men who generally  seem to be much more disinterestedl is disturbing. However, we also ought to consider this sacrifice as the price of individuality. On the final day of the festivities, the nine human offerings resemble elaborate dummies, silly sacrifices for an imaginary ideal of total harmony.  They  make little sense in a world 12  Physicality is important to the Hårgas, as we might have already inferred from their practice of giving life as a gesture. We see Dani as a physical presence in the film: in Florence Pugh’s body, which is an important artistic medium (the actress is giving her life as a gesture, embodying a character) in the general context of the film as an artistic product. Becoming the May Queen symbolically puts Dani on display and into perspective as the woman. In becoming the May Queen Dani is confirmed as an important presence. This happens at the very end of the film, and therefore, ought to be treated as a sort of conclusion to what we already know—that Dani’s perspective is not to be dismissed because she is an important presence in the story. In the previous setting, we might take it as a given and take it for granted. In the Hårga setting, we are forced to pay careful attention to it.

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­ isinclined to the reality of sacrifice but are acceptable in the Hårgas’ thed atrical context. Real-life harmony requires the kind of compassion in which there is acceptance for all that is living (positive) but also for what is dead (negative). There is unease in this kind of integration, and perhaps we could say that, from Midsommar’s  feminine perspective, the struggle to live at other people’s disposal is the cruelty of effort one must put in to match the cruelty of the Universe. A radically literal sacrifice strikes as uncanny and pointless because it does nothing to actually sustain human life in the contemporary culture inclined to emotional dissociation from the negative end of the spectrum, where fear and loss reside. If what sustains life in Burkert’s interpretation of the Eleusinian Mysteries is coming to terms with the undisputable death, then Midsommar extends that into emotional awareness. What Midsommar offers is, I think, the importance of a compassionate perspective within a global cultural context we cannot escape. The rite of passage for the young adult in contemporary Western society, or a society which considers itself global in any way, should, perhaps, be about the ability to form an individuality which can lean on others and let others lean on them in physical and emotional need (whether it is a disability, or emotions belonging to the end of the spectrum considered “negative” such as grief, fear, pain, and shame), and not simply about detached exploitation of relationships, which is perceived and encouraged as strong independence. Without an emotional connection, there is no community, only isolation. A social utopia of harmonious integrity where individuality is truly embraced and tolerated is impossible without the possibility and the ability to fluctuate along the spectrum: to be what is considered “weak,” as well as what is considered “strong” and be able to embrace loss as well as gain, without branding these modes of existence exclusively as either “worthless” or “valuable,” or branding the emotional capacity (or lack thereof) as an exclusively feminine or masculine trait. As a traditionalized masculine perspective brands the practice of reaching out to make a connection clingy and burdensome, it causes a rift between masculinity and femininity that seems exceptionally hard to breach. Following the almost fairy-tale trials and the symbolic struggle to reconcile these perspectives, Dani’s smile at the very end is gleeful at worst and self-deprecating at best, recognizing both the possession of power and terrible powerlessness. As shown through Dani, despite the fact that they are “including both reason and emotion” (Wolfe 2021, 217), women are easily reduced to emotional bodies and perceived as an irrational Other: terrifying and unforgiving.

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There seems to be no middle ground when it comes to the patriarchal ideas of femininity. In addition to the frigid (virgin)/insatiable (temptress) dichotomy in the physical sense, women are emotionally branded as either overly attached or too radically independent. The durability of these binaries is perhaps indicative of Western civilization’s more recent struggles to reconcile notions of femininity with notions of masculinity. In the context of the maiden’s tragedy motif, Burkert mentions the Sumerian goddess Inanna (2007, 287; 1983, 263), a figure that precedes other mythological articulations of femininity which tend to separate concepts such as love, home, fertility, marriage, dependence, benevolence, and subservience from concepts such as death, war, leadership, assertiveness, cruelty, and independence. The Goddess Inanna also famously visits the Underworld; however, unlike Kore-Persephone, she does so of her own free will and not out of naivety or helplessness, or because a higher power demands it. Inanna is betrayed by both her sister—the terrifying Queen of the Dead— and her lover (who takes her throne), yet she ultimately does not depend on the will of others and emerges victorious. At the Hårgas, Dani observes a wall covered in framed photos of previous May Queens. Even though there is never more than one Queen at a time, they are the only individuals allowed to be free with their bodies, as well as emotions. This is visible from their somewhat candid poses in the photos, as opposed to the staged, strictly directed elements (including people) which make up the Hårga settlement. Furthermore, all of the May Queens show various degrees of personal emotion, drawing attention to the fact that these are individuals with different personalities. The achievement of the May Queen is obtaining the freedom and power to do as she pleases. This power may initially confuse or even sadden her because, although she could be any “commoner” resilient enough to see the Maypole dance through, the freedom she earns is precisely what makes her uncommon, and, therefore, inherently lonely. This, I think, is the tragic beauty of Dani’s final emancipation, which I find hard to see as brainwashing one’s self into compensation, as Church sees it (2021, 115). As the May Queen, no one holds the right to control Dani. It could be said that Dani’s ardor burns people in punishment for rejection, and there definitely is some feminist self-indulgence in the “pagan woman incinerating man Christian” image, reviving “the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone” (Federici 2014, 11). Perhaps Dani’s is a vengeful fire to end all grief, turning the frown on Pugh’s expressive face quite literally upside down and indicating resistance to the colonized feminine perspective that is destined

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to be at others’ disposal (11; 220). Here, the turnabout is not only the proverbial fair play but also a necessary point of conclusion to the protagonist’s journey. The inverted frame upon entering the Hårga setting foreshadows Dani’s emotional turnabout, which should not shock us, as transformation is the point of a rite of passage. Therefore, the final sacrifice could be seen more as a final lesson in reversibility of perspective than vengeance.13 Let’s take a closer look at the image of death that the spectators, ironically, might not be inclined to visually explore, in contrast to the gruesome yet locally fathomable images of people filled with hay and flowers, organs on display, and stuffed into bearskins. We notice that Terri Ardor’s room is a dark, cramped space filled with books. Her face is something like a fixed mask of horror, with wide, unfocused eyes and a mouth shaped in a primal scream around a long plastic tube taped to her face. Terri’s lifeless body reclines at the foot of what might be seen as a contemporary altar of knowledge and communication.  A study desk  is the room’s centerpiece where Terri’s final message to Dani shines like a beacon on the laptop display, symmetrically framed with high-stacked volumes. In a way, this image is Midsommar’s epistemic take on the “indispensable link between representation and things” (Foucault 2002, 5) because, even though it might convey the idea of a specific act, the disembodied, worded message itself is not enough to convey the act. Talking about the horrific act cannot be done either, for “it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say” (10). In Midsommar, the only possible verbal articulation of this event is “no,” a verbal alternative to inarticulate sounds of agony. And so, we are faced with the image of Terri, the (however brief) image of death. Instead of verbally processing this setting, we watch it be articulated with bodies in space, as Midsommar introduces the Hårgas to rephrase Dani’s emotions. Dani is faced with an unfamiliar familiarity of her horror locus—the locus of emotional detachment—and it is something she needs to “map” to make “manageable,” or rather, something she needs to re-Terri-torialize “to understand the practices of this unfamiliar culture” (Wolfe 2021, 215). Except, the culture that shocks Dani is her own. Namely, the long-observed “custom” of the oppressive white “world committing suicide without realizing” (Artaud 2010, 22), failing to 13  Being burned alive, Christian is aware but numb, as he had been since the beginning of Midsommar. The benefit of the Hårga setting is that it puts this, and everything else concerning the original horror locus into a more direct perspective.

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connect emotionally (we witness Dani’s attempts at first). The landscape Dani is trying to map is her sister’s dead body—a maiden’s tragedy— against a background of hallmarks of the contemporary civilized world. Terri is marked as Dani’s existential double, which is only vaguely indicated in declaring them sisters but is much clearer at the moment prior to entering the Hårga settlement, when Dani, enclosed in a dark space, stares in the mirror and sees Terri’s fixed mask replacing her own face. On the one hand, Dani’s double is disposed of willingly and with personal resolution: Terri gets rid of herself by herself. This is initially incomprehensible. On the other hand, the Hårgas are disinclined to be studied or written about, and, as Wolfe points out (2021, 215), they outright reject this academic imperialism by disposing of their colonial tourists. From an allegorical perspective, it is Terri’s take on life in the form of a maiden sacrifice (i.e., the repressed that bothers Dani) that also does not wish to be studied or written about. In a culture oriented towards personal gain, the “dark side” of life where there is loss needs to remain nameless, locationless, and imageless, lest it turn on those who wish to invade its territory unprepared for the sacrifice that is emotional immersion. Language and rationality are preceded and permeated by intuition and emotional experience of the world, and postulating Dani as Terri through a mirrored image brings attention to the intertwined duality of ever-shifting perspectives: the life/ gain/take dimension of death/loss/give becomes the death/loss/give dimension of life/gain/take (Burkert 2007, 285; 1983, 261). If Terri symbolizes the inarticulate darkness, only a painful degree of clarity can balance out the state of confusion, anxiety, and fretfulness that follows it. To return to our original horror locus: on a dark winter night, in a quiet town in the middle of the woods, Dani’s unarticulated fear of loss/disconnection came true. The fear of the bad which is out of our control is a very common one. Or, how Susan Sontag puts it when discussing illness as a social metaphor: “the need for an apocalyptic scenario which is specific to ‘Western’ society, and perhaps even more so to the United States” (2001, 151) is something like a specific “taste for worst-case scenarios [which] reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable” and “expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.” (152) In this sense, cultural distress “giv[ing] rise to the desire for a clean sweep” (152) is expressed through the female body, an entity traditionally described as more “emotional.” Allowing its allegorical possibilities, Dani’s uncanny stemming from her experience of a horror locus becomes the spectators’ fictional uncanny (Freud 2003, 190–2) in the form of the Hårgas, whose

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environment is very controlled. Wolfe points out the connection between knowledge and exerting control: “to be mapped is to be known, to be categorized, and to be marked as a passive subject” (2021, 216). To rest in peace, one maiden must be physically, emotionally, and ideologically re-territorialized as another who is an active subject. These are the “humanities” (Foucault 2002, 385) of Midsommar, a film that visually explores and articulates a maiden’s tragedy in both negativity and positivity. Introducing the Hårga community as Dani’s imaginative complicity with the disastrously detached culture she belongs to, Midsommar visually separates the realms of the inarticulate and the articulate through darkness and light, and through contrasted settings of closed and open spaces. The uncanny is expected in the dark, the realm of dreams, fears, and premonitions—the “bad place” where Dani originates both literally and metaphorically. The new setting, in contrast to the old one, is an attempt to “map” the uncanny and make it known, put it under control. Terri’s dark and cramped room can be considered an altar of the colonizer’s knowledge, academic knowledge presented as “emotionally disengaged, masculine (and male), and based in a particularly late-capitalist form of reason” (Wolfe 2021, 219). And where this knowledge has an “exchange value” from a masculinized perspective, for the Hårgas, an uncanny locus amoenus conceived from a feminized perspective, “knowledge maintains community and acts as a vehicle for traditions of togetherness” (219). If knowledge is capital, and Terri was rich, we cannot help but wonder why her life was worthless enough to be so easily disposed of. Furthermore, we cannot ignore the image of Dani’s family and the Hårga’s familial philosophy (of disposal), which both imply that traditions of togetherness are, quite literally, dead. In the course of Midsommar, we are bound to reflect on the exchange value of emotions, and  the benefits and the misfortunes of attachment. Lacking such exchange with those around her, Dani is ultimately alone. The tragedy articulated through Terri’s body is the beginning of the realization that contemporary culture is a culture of isolation, even more so amidst America’s hallmarks of freedom, opportunities, and embracing diversity. It reverses and challenges the “basic” articulation of social dynamics, which “connotes simple, self-evident suppositions: that an individual cannot live in isolation, that he is dependent on the societal grouping from which he came; that the death of the individual is an integral part of communal life, for which reason the encounter with death is unavoidable” (Burkert 2007, 320; 1983, 296). In the contemporary

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cultural sense, the death of a community seems to be an integral part of individual life, and this individuality is burdened by isolation. Tied to a society traumatized by its own communal death, the “emotional” body in Midsommar depicts “the triumphant ecstasy of survival” (Burkert 2007, 320; 1983, 296) at the end as well as “the willingness to die” at the beginning. In an attempt to tame her homely unhomely space, which is the “perverse urban space” (Wolfe 2021, 219–20), marked by emotional detachment and late-capitalistic exploitation, where individuals are isolated into functions, Dani re-feminizes the action of mapping her original horror locus. Sontag’s typically Western affinity for worst-case scenarios is depicted as characteristic of the female consciousness in Midsommar, whether we see it as a choice or an imposition. If the collective cry is anything to go on, women seem to share the experience of being treated as less, secondary, and disposable, and Dani’s wide-awake response to traumatic events is as admirable as it is Pavlovian. On the one hand, there’s endless, fearful anxiety, and on the other, the need to understand to help (others and herself). In Midsommar, both could be considered default positions in the feminine aspect of the human condition. Not only that, but Dani receives similar support from other (however marginal) female characters throughout the narrative, while the male characters either ignore her, mistreat her, or abandon her altogether. The fact that Dani can never be equal to “one of the guys” or have a mutually loving, “old world” relationship with a significant male Other makes the abrupt death of her sister, Dani’s existential Other who just couldn’t anymore, more traumatic. The female gaze in Midsommar insists on dragging the uncanny into the light and into colorful articulation, the protagonist desperate not so much to escape the pain of trauma, as to welcome it on a lucid turf, where it cannot scare her (and therefore control her) anymore. Dani uses the state of constant physical alertness and mental anxiety to this advantage, turning them into tools of empowerment. The element of “uncontrollable power,” Heba observes, is the “most disturbing element of incoherent horror movies” (1995, 112). Dani’s final position of power is a reversal of the uncontrollable sense of dread she experiences in the beginning; it is an act of embracing the “monstrosity” to defeat the monster. Dani’s possible “madness” (Church 2021, 115) corresponds to the trauma of overly rationalizing and the cultural imperative that complex emotions be constricted to verbal expression or, possibly, repressed. Dani’s fear-dream of being left behind is also a dream-fear, something ephemeral and fleeting, which bleeds from one realm of consciousness into another.

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It is a surreal throwback to the horror locus, where togetherness and community are dead, the dark side of the American fairy tale, where, as an “emotional” body, Dani has already been left behind. In the end, Midsommar is not exactly about scorned women incinerating men in revenge—even though the image is as culturally shocking as it is ironic—because that would make it about a man where it revolves around a woman and her capacity to merge with the horror of detachment. It can be said that sacrifice springs from emotional capacity, and the general point of Midsommar is that women are representative of a repressed culture of emotional bodies, wherein lies the tragedy of a maiden’s sacrifice. In the contemporary enlightened environment, “emotional” bodies seem terrifying and larger than life: the stuff of nightmares, the stuff of fairy tales. Playing with the notions of cult and sacrifice through the folk-­ horror genre, Midsommar exposes the social horrors of the globalized West in an artful way. It suggests how the liberating notion of enlightened independence might become oppressive in the context of Western civilization, considerably marked by patriarchal white man’s supremacy, imperialistic tendencies, and colonization of foreign territory, as well as by Christianity (intentionally or unintentionally) gaslighting older traditions and “mansplaining” the sacrificial practice for the masses. As for the hero’s rite of passage, we might be left wondering if Dani’s is a satisfactory transformation because it does not seem quite so from the viewpoint of a society that has disconnected  with the aspect of sacrifice reconciling  the apathetic Queen of Death with the exuberant Queen of Life. The suggestion that Dani is coerced into “effectively replacing one gaslighting relationship with another” (Church 2021, 116) by joining a cult, implying that she is emotionally compensating instead of evolving, feels a bit misplaced if we remember Midsommar’s allegorical tableau. Dani’s special journey maps the origins of anxiety in a broader sense of long-observed customs in a cultural setting which maintains a narrative of togetherness in disposing of that which escapes control. Broadly speaking, this could be considered a contemporary Western kind of cult mentality, where individuals belong to a global community, but the community does not belong to them. What is presented as a locus amoenus, an idyllic social space of harmony and acceptance, simultaneously reflects a society traumatized by forced individual emotional detachment and repression in the name of prosperity, freedom, and independence. It is a place where sacrifice is just there. Yet, from another angle, giving life as a gesture, as the Hårgas do, is perhaps the only way to bond in a society where becoming aware of

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detachment is an inevitable traumatic experience, a rite of passage for the global individual. Like a “beneficial plague” that gives a clearer perspective on life and the self, “divulging our world’s lies, aimlessness, meanness and even two-facedness” (Artaud 2010, 21), Midsommar visually explores the possibilities of embracing the culture of expressive emotional bodies in spite of detachment and the propensity to dismiss the female gaze as an “emotional” viewpoint, contemplating the need for a mindful balance and fluidity of perspectives. As in Dani’s case, the search for a no man’s land where togetherness is possible, sacrifice is meaningful, and relationships are not suffocatingly toxic (as Terri’s deadly umbilical cord suggests) begins with the willingness to embrace both the horror and the potential of being emotional bodies.

References Artaud, Antonin. 2010. The Theatre and Its Double. Translated by V.  Corti. London: Alma Classics Ltd. Aster, Ari, dir. 2019. Midsommar. A24. Burkert, Walter. 2007. Homo necans: Interpretacije starogrc ̌kih žrtvenih obreda i mitova. Translated by N. Filipašić and N. Zubović. Zagreb: BREZA. Church, David. 2021. Horror by Gaslight: Epistemic Violence and Ambivalent Belonging. In Post-Horror: Art Genre, and Cultural Elevation, 102–141. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Curtius, Ernst Robert. 2013. European literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Translated by W. R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Edelstein, David. 2019. Ari Aster’s Midsommar Is an Ambitious, Blurry Horror Trip. Vulture, June 19. https://www.vulture.com/2019/07/midsommarreview-ari-asters-ambitious-blurry-horror-trip.html Federici, Silvia. 2014. Colonization and Christianization: Caliban and Witches in the New World. In Caliban and the Witch, 219–243. New York: Autonomedia. Foucault, Michel. 2002. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. 2003. The Uncanny. Translated by D.  McLintock. London: Penguin Books Ltd. Heba, Gary. 1995. Everyday Nightmares: The Rhetoric of Social Horror in the Nightmare on Elm Street Series. Journal of Popular Film and Television 23 (3): 106–115. Kaplan, E. Ann. 2004. Global Feminisms and the State of Feminist Film Theory. Signs 30 (1): 1236–1248. Mahrouse, Gada. 2016. Teaching Intersectional and Transnational Feminisms through Fiction and Film. Feminist Teacher 26 (2–3): 233–239.

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McDonald, Keith, and Wayne Johnson. 2021. Folk in Hell: Rurality in Transition. In Contemporary Gothic and Horror Film: Transnational Perspectives, 57–80. London: Anthem Press. Rao, Sonia. 2019. The Horrifying Midsommar is a Breakup Movie, According to Director Ari Aster. The Washington Post, July 19. https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/07/11/horrifying-midsommar-is-breakupmovie-according-director-ari-aster/ Rose, Steve. 2019. Midsommar: What the Hell Just Happened? Discuss with Spoilers. The Guardian, July 8. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/ jul/08/midsommar-what-the-hell-just-happened-discuss-with-spoilers Sontag, Susan. 2001. Illness as Metaphor; AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Picador. Wilkinson, Alissa. 2019. Ari Aster on His New Film Midsommar: ‘I Keep Telling People I Want It to Be Confusing.’ Vox, July 2. https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/7/2/18744431/ari-aster-midsommar-interview-spoilers Wolfe, Monica. 2021. Mapping Imperialist Movement in Postmodern Horror Film Midsommar. Journal of Popular Film and Television 49 (4): 210–222.

PART II

Female as Creation Force Revisited

CHAPTER 5

Mother! Nature: Creation, Apocalypse, Climate Skepticism, and Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017) Zachary Ingle

In their 2010 video “Christian Groups: Biblical Armageddon Must Be Taught Alongside Global Warming,” the satire news source The Onion mimicked the notion of creationism and evolutionism being given equal respect in many American state courts with the idea that since differing opinions about the origins of our universe exist, then equal weight must also be given to the “conclusion” of our planet. The faux report states that the Kansas State Supreme Court has “upheld the right of a school district there to present both global warming and the biblical Armageddon as legitimate theories about the end of the world” (Christian Groups 2010). This bit of biting satire hits at a key phenomenon in American society; while evolutionism is no longer the central rallying cry for fundamentalists

Z. Ingle (*) Hardin-Simmons University, Abilene, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53278-8_5

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as it was one hundred years ago,1 anthropogenic climate change—despite scientific consensus—is now one of the most divisive topics in American society. Returning to this Onion video over a decade later also gets at how creation and apocalypse are linked in one of the more controversial horror films in recent years, Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017). Few films this century have been as divisive as Mother! Numerous critics included the film in their “top ten of the year” lists, despite its infamy as one of the few films to receive the dreaded “F” Cinemascore rating from exit audiences, most of whom reportedly expected a more traditional star-­ driven horror film, not an art film with overt biblical allegories and graphic violence (particularly the infamous infanticide). Yet the film stands as one of the most extraordinary horror films of the 2010s, an intentionally timeless story that still speaks to our current cultural moment, one in which large segments of the population are resistant to support measures to combat climate change on the grounds of it conflicting with their identity as evangelicals/political conservatives. While the horror genre has often been a field where controversial political issues could be explored, such as in Gojira (Godzilla, Ishirō Honda 1954), Night of the Living Dead (George Romero 1968), Candyman, Bernard Rose 1992), the release of the critically acclaimed Get Out (Jordan Peele 2017) catalyzed discussions of the genre’s potential for social commentary, from the “elevated” horror of Antebellum (Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz 2020) and Men (Alex Garland 2022) to more mass-­ appeal works like the The Purge series (2013–2021). The culture wars can be seen in rather obvious horror media like the polarized communities at conflict in The Hunt (Craig Zobel 2020) and American Horror Story: Cult (Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk 2017), but films that address issues such as ecology in Mother! can also be mapped onto the divisions between conservatives and liberals in the US, specifically in how to best address environmental issues. Mother! is one of several major American films in the last decade that heavily featured theological themes of creation (as distinct from creationism), including The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick 2011) and Aronofsky’s previous film Noah (2014), or similarly, theocentric environmental activism as in First Reformed (Paul Schrader 2017). Considering that Aronofsky has proved himself as invested in religious themes as much as 1  Although admittedly still controversial enough in some US states and cities school boards insist on views of creation and intelligent design be given equal weight in public schools.

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almost any major contemporary filmmaker, this trend reached its apotheosis in Mother! While an abundance of Hebrew Bible and New Testament references (with Aronofsky’s interest in extrabiblical Jewish and Gnostic traditions also on display) abound, the film recalls Noah’s sermon on environmental destruction and acts as a castigation of the devastating effects of Anthropocene (Handley 2018; Moore and Shapiro 2018). In this chapter, I address the film’s biblical and ecological motifs in light of the culture wars, especially in how religious communities (particularly US evangelicals) battle over issues like climate change. Indeed, Aronofsky has explicitly stated in interviews that the film is about climate change, discussing the issue with the biblical story as a backdrop. Immediately after Mother!‘s release, numerous think pieces, YouTube videos, and blogs were dedicated to dissecting the various biblical connections in the film. As one of the top reviews on Letterboxd stated it: “kinda [sic] like a charlie kaufman movie… if he did a bunch of coke and speed read the bible.” Javier Bardem is credited as “Him” but often referred to as the Creator (and will be labeled so throughout this chapter to avoid confusion). “Mother” (Jennifer Lawrence) clearly embodies Mother Nature, who wants “to make a paradise” and later insists, “This is my house” (Aronofsky 2017). A stranger, credited as “Man”2 (Ed Harris), arrives on his own, with his wife (“Woman,” played by Michelle Pfeiffer) appearing the following day. Besides the brief glimpse of a scar on the Man’s side (suggesting the removal of his rib), further clues abound to inform the viewer that the Man and Woman are meant to correlate to Adam and Eve, including the Woman’s curiosity over a crystal in the Creator’s study (his sanctum sanctorum) that results in it shattering to pieces on the floor; the Creator then banishes Man and Woman from his study, paralleling the expulsion from the Garden of Eden after the disobedience over the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Soon after, Mother is appalled by the Woman’s sexual frankness (akin to a pre-Fall Eve, not yet naked and ashamed) and even catches the couple in a passionate embrace. Their two sons, played by brothers Domhnall and Brian Gleeson, embody Cain and Abel, respectively; as with the biblical brothers, a disagreement devolves into the older brother slaying the younger. Yet this devotion to the Genesis stories is certainly not an innovation in Aronofsky’s work. His intense fascination with the Torah and Hebrew 2  All of the characters have generic names in the credits referring to their roles, such as “Herald” and “Cupbearer,” one of the many clues that Mother! functions as allegory.

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extrabiblical literature was clear from his debut film, Pi (1998), with its references to the Kabbalah, the Garden of Eden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. As for The Fountain (2006), besides the obvious motif of the Tree of Life, the film also prominently features the themes of death and rebirth present in Mother! (even if The Fountain explores this theme with images indebted to Mayan beliefs and Buddhism as much as Christianity). The Fountain even opens with Genesis 3:24: “Therefore the Lord God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and placed a flaming sword to protect the Tree of Life.” Before The Whale (2022), Aronofsky’s only films where he was not credited as writer or co-writer were The Wrestler (2008) and Black Swan (2010); these two, superficially less religious than the rest of his oeuvre, initially seem void of references to the creation myth. Jadranka Skorin-Kapov, however, does connect Lily (Mila Kunis) in Black Swan to Lilith, that proto-Eve who was a symbol of “dark seduction and uninhibited sexuality” (Skorin-Kapov 2016, 99), banished from the Garden of Eden. Just based on Black Swan alone, this reading would normally seem like a stretch, but certainly seems plausible in light of Aronofsky’s intense fascination with the Garden of Eden story. Of course, Noah was indebted not only to the account of the character in Genesis 6–9, but also to 1 Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, and Rabbinic midrashim (as Aronofsky and co-screenwriter Ari Handel explicitly admitted [Greydanus 2014], but also echoed by Kosior 2016, Macumber and Abdul-­Masih 2018, and Moore and Shapiro 2018. To further limit Aronofsky’s scope, he has so far shown interest in only the first eleven chapters of Genesis, those that can—to use Karl Barth’s preferred term—be called a “saga” (Barth 2010), that proto-history before the story of Abraham, Sarah, and their descendants told in the rest of the book. These first eleven chapters cover creation, the Garden of Eden story, the story of the descendants of Adam and Eve, and Noah, culminating in the Tower of Babel when the peoples were given different languages and dispersed.3 The Noah narrative was one that captivated 3  While allusions to the Tower of Babel have not yet appeared in Aronofsky’s films, he did include it in the graphic novel version of Noah, published a few years before the film and based on an earlier screenplay. In an interview, Aronofsky mentioned a through-line from Noah to the Tower of Babel to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Abraham narrative, “the same story over and over again . . . [the] arrogance of men rises up, and then they need to be destroyed and punished” (Skorin-Kapov 2016, 170). For possible connections between Aronofsky’s version of Noah and the Abraham narrative (especially as interpreted through the lens of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling), see the section “The sacrifice of Noah versus the sacrifice of Abraham” in Skorin-Kapov (2016, 138–142).

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Aronofsky as a child, so much so that a poem he wrote on it as a seventh grader won a UN contest and he was allowed to actually read it at the United Nations (Greydanus 2014). After the fratricide scene in Mother!, Aronofsky maintains his thematic interrogations of the Genesis saga, including a flood scene in the second part of the film. At several points in the narrative, Mother expresses her concern over the rather inconsiderate guests who lean against a sink that is not yet braced. The resulting flood clears everyone out of the house, save for the Creator and Mother. Even before Noah’s famed flood—what Skorin-Kapov calls “the most celebrated intrusion of water” (2016, 149)—water had been key in all of Aronofsky’s previous films: “From faucets dripping to toilets flushing to protagonists submerging themselves in bathtubs to the shores of Coney Island to the fountain in the title of a film and to the Big Flood” (Skorin-Kapov 2016, 149).4 Water has long functioned as an archetype for regeneration, purity, and rebirth; in this scene, it clears all of the unwelcome intruders from the home, allowing Mother her own rebirth, an opportunity to live alone with the Creator again. Another primal fluid that serves as a theme in Mother!—blood—also recalls Aronofsky’s previous work. Writing her book on Aronofsky before the release of Noah, Tarja Laine connects the blood in Black Swan to Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, as blood transgresses the boundaries of what we consider “inside” and “outside” (Laine 2017, 138). Considering all of the allegory and metaphor in Mother!, perhaps a theological association with blood’s prominence in the Hebrew Bible is more adequate. Recalling the human heart clogging the toilet that proves the inciting incident in Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Mother discovers an unidentifiable human organ (also possibly a heart). She also fixates on the blood stain on her floor that will not disappear despite her meticulous attempts to clean it, which arguably becomes the first major overt horror element, a stain of blood that seeps into her basement, perhaps a parallel to the centrality of animal sacrifices under the Mosaic law and cultus of the Torah. Throughout the film, Aronofsky highlights the anthropocentric sentiments that Mother encounters from her inconsiderate house guests who feel welcome to make their presence known in a house they deem “too big for two” (Aronofsky 2017). The Woman attempts to persuade Mother that there remains little to no value in painting and otherwise sprucing up 4  When asked about water as a recurring motif in his films, Aronofsky mentioned that it could be due to his astrological sign: Aquarius (Skorin-Kapov 2016, 170). This motif recurs in The Whale, with the beach flashbacks, references to Moby Dick, and of course, its titular aquatic mammal.

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their home (the one that she wants to “make a paradise”), that it is just “setting” compared to having a child. Worth remembering is that Aronofsky’s original title was Day Six, the day in the Genesis 1 creation narrative in which God created not only the terrestrial animals (following the marine animals and birdkind of the fifth day), but as the pinnacle of the account, also created humanity in God’s image. In orthodox Christian theology, the Trinitarian Godhead (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) was sufficient and thus did not need to create humans, but chose to do so,5 contradicting Mother’s expressed wish to the Creator: “I want to be alone with you” (Aronofsky 2017). But the Creator does not want to be alone with her, exhibiting such a desire to relate to his “fans” (who honor and adore him just as much as they ignore and are uncaring toward Mother) that he cannot turn them away as they return to the home en masse. After what appears to have been a passionate night of lovemaking following the guests’ removal after the flood, Mother wakes up, knowing that she is now pregnant. This morning-after, postcoital news inspires the Creator to compose poetry again, proclaiming that this is “most beautiful news” (Aronofsky 2017). Her rather bizarre, seemingly non-sequitur response—“I’ll just get started on the apocalypse” (Aronofsky 2017)— prepares the audience for what is to come in the third act. The Creator writes a new poem (on parchment), which Mother reads, causing an apocalyptic vision of her home burned and the earth around it scorched, before suddenly all is restored to beauty. His poem sells out on its first day of publication, and immediately a new wave of fans/devotees returns. It is here that the film skips from Genesis to something more aligned with the New Testament and distinctly Christian traditions, as various rituals arise, some instigated by the Creator (including smearing a black smudge on their foreheads, a practice common on Ash Wednesday). As Mother Nature becomes Madonna, the climax is all the more harrowing for the viewers due to her being so visibly pregnant, but also its aesthetic. Part of this is due to Aronofsky’s evolution away from the strong formalist6 tendencies found in earlier works like Pi, Requiem for a Dream 5  What the film has to say about theism vs. pantheism vs. panentheism is beyond the scope of this chapter. 6  Formalism is that approach to filmmaking that emphasizes those capabilities unique to cinema, such as editing (montage), slowed and sped-up motion, variation in shot proximity and level, shallow focus, nondiegetic sounds, and lenses that differ from natural vision (e.g., wide-angle, telephoto, zoom). In contrast, realism (associated with theorists like Andre Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer), attempts to more closely mimic how we audiovisually perceive the world and is primarily associated with longer shots (in duration and proximity), deep focus, natural lighting, a moving camera, and diegetic sound.

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(2002), and The Fountain, so an excursus on the evolution of Aronofsky’s style is worthy of our attention here. Pi’s distinctive look, one that sets it apart from so many of the other impactful independent American films of the 1990s, was due to its reportedly being the first feature shot on blackand-­white reversal 16 mm film. Although not as daringly experimental as something like Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo (1989), Pi still recalls that film’s cyberpunk aesthetic. While the stark black-and-white lighting of Pi gave way to the more conventional color cinematography of Requiem for a Dream, the latter film’s reliance on split screen aesthetics and “hip-hop montage” editing style arguably confirms its status as a recognizably formalist film.7 The Fountain was avowedly more conventional and less experimental than Pi and Requiem for a Dream, but its fantastical mise-en-­ scène still retained a formalistic flair. The Wrestler, Aronofsky’s first (and to date only) time working with a cinematographer other than Matthew Libatique, resulted in a more realistic cinematographic style, opting for longer takes and less conscientious editing, traits largely retained in Aronofsky’s work since. Mother! adapts this more realistic style as the story is told almost entirely from Mother’s perspective, for she is almost always shot in close-up (reportedly for 66 minutes of the 121-minute film), from behind, or from her point of view. With the hordes of fans descending on their home and resulting disregard for Mother’s pregnant status, she fights back, but the inhabitants turn on her until the Creator comes to her rescue. Although some read Mother! as misogynistic in its treatment of its titular character, the film is a natural extension of Laine’s thesis that Aronofsky’s films center on “bodies in pain” (the title of Laine’s book on Aronofsky). These bodies belong to those who have masochistically chosen to suffer, from Max in Pi attempting to relieve his migraine distress through the use of a drill, to the controlling drug addictions of the four characters of Requiem for a Dream, to the rigorous physical training and rather unnatural forms of self-mutilation a professional wrestler or ballerina impose on themselves in The Wrestler and Black Swan, respectively. While still offering the standard biblical overview of the film, Molly Bandonis sees much more in Mother!, stating her case that the film should be viewed in light of the “cyclical nature of gendered violence” during the #MeToo reckoning of 2017 and the “interruption of male control (over female bodies, natural resources, and marginalized populations” [2019, 10–11]) counteracting the misogynistic interpretation of this rather visceral depiction of Mother’s suffering. 7  Skorin-Kapov connects Aronofsky to the Soviet formalists, but to Dziga Vertov’s montage theory (particularly the kino-oko, or “cine-eye”), not Sergei Eisenstein’s (2016, 11).

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The Creator’s main creative task for much of the film is his poetry, while Mother, despite not having the same title, creates by birthing new life. She births a son (an obvious Jesus parallel), which immediately after leads to a showdown between the two over the possession of the baby, with Mother asserting that her motherhood takes priority over his fatherhood. He disturbingly waits for her to fall asleep, staring at her until she can stay awake no longer, and his commandeering of the baby launches Mother!‘s most controversial scene, the infanticide. The Creator passes the newborn around and the crowd snaps its neck (visible, but a split second in a long shot) and eats it (only the remains are seen) in a perverted if admittedly rather literal demonstration of the Eucharist (surpassing even transubstantiation, the Catholic dogma that the Eucharist becomes the literal body and blood of Christ when the Mass is observed). This was reportedly the scene that incited walkouts among theatergoers, but the specter of infanticide recalls Noah’s willingness to slay his own grandbaby if it were a girl (which he decides against after much hesitation, despite the birth of twin girls). Indeed, the Zealot’s (Stephen McHattie) proclamation during the Eucharist scene, as the gathered devotees cannibalize the baby’s flesh as it is passed around, “Do you hear that? That’s the sound of life! The sound of humanity!” (Aronofsky 2017) only further critiques the aforementioned anthropocentric outlook of the guests. Humans destroy the gifts of their gods—each other, their environment, even what is positioned in the film as the Creator and Mother’s greatest gift that they bestow together as one flesh. The violence in the household continues to spiral out of control, leading to the most heavy-handed element that supports the strong environmental allegory. Mother spills the oil near the basement furnace before setting the entire house on fire, an apocalyptic, fiery finale foreshadowed several times throughout the film, from the Man smoking in the home (despite Mother’s insistence that smoking is not allowed) to the burning breakfast that sets off the smoke alarm earlier in the film, to the Molotov cocktail during the riot scene. As mentioned above, anthropocentric views of creation emphasize the creation of humans on the sixth day (recall that original title of Day Six) as a pinnacle of creation, but Aronofsky’s film appears to take a much more negative view toward the creation of humans, one more in line with how we discuss the damaging effects that the Anthropocene has on the planet. The term “Anthropocene” describes our current epoch when humans initiated their tremendous (and ultimately destructive) impact on the Earth. Some (Ellis et al. 2019) date its origins as early as the rise of agriculture

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(over ten thousand years ago), when the Earth’s human population may have just been around four million, but it can also be dated much later (Crutzen 2002), to a time period when the Earth’s ecosystems and atmosphere were more directly affected by the ecological damage of humans, such as the Industrial Revolution (global population around one billion), the birth of the nuclear age, or even the 1960s.8 In both Noah and Mother!, the damaging effects caused by the existence of humans occur rather early. In Mother!, the rude behavior of the Adam and Eve figures begets the violence and murderous actions of their sons, soon giving rise to the funeral party that sets everything in motion with their casual disregard for the home. Noah’s somewhat more “primitive” world is similarly in disarray, looking more apocalyptic than the antediluvian, Edenic paradise associated with the Garden. Noah opens with flashing images from the Garden of Eden myth—a serpent, the fruit. But ten generations later, humanity has devolved into warring factions, bent on the destruction of each other and the Earth. Like Adam in the Garden, Noah sees it his duty to “protect what is left of creation,” going so far as to correct his son Ham for picking a flower: “Only collect what we can use, what we need” (Aronofsky 2014). This starkly contrasts with the disregard for animal and plant life in the film by those outside of Noah’s family, made rather obvious by the landscape’s blackened soil, littered about with skulls. One of the major indicators of the depravity of humans is their ravenous appetites toward the animal kingdom, as they tear into animal flesh as though they were zombies (or as the communicants feast in Mother!). Antagonist Tubal-cain (mentioned only in Genesis 4:22 as a blacksmith and a descendant of Cain), presumably chosen by Aronofsky and Handel due to his name evoking Cain, mentions that eating animals shows the superiority of humankind over the animal kingdom. Such statements as this one from the film’s antagonist led to Aronofsky (who identified as a vegan at the time of the film’s release) being criticized for releasing vegan propaganda. In another slight departure from traditional readings of the Genesis account, Noah is not saving his family in order to ensure humanity’s survival; in a direct contradiction to the biblical narrative (Genesis 6:18; 7:7, 13; 8:16, 18), in Noah only one son is married (Shem 8  The Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy’s Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy has recently proposed a mid-twentieth century start due to increased radionucleotides as a result of atomic bomb testing. See Jeong and Kaplan 2023.

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to Ila, who they all assume is barren due to a childhood wound as the lone survivor of a village massacre). So less “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 9:7), but rather Noah’s proclamation, “We’ll complete the task [i.e., save the animals aboard], and then we’ll die” (Aronofsky 2017), even though Noah eventually feels compelled to continue humanity’s existence. Just as Noah connects apocalypse and creation, Mother! does so as well, and it is this link that proves rather intriguing in light of the culture wars, more specifically climate skepticism (or skepticism about the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change) among US evangelicals. For decades, Christians have taken the blame for not being on board with the modern environmental movement, at least since Lynn White Jr.’s famous broadside that Christianity “especially in its Western form … is the most anthropocentric religion in history,” as it “not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends” (White 1967, 1205).9 While White’s status as a medieval historian may have limited his conceptual understanding of Christian views on creation (White rather given to sweeping generalizations in his descriptions of global Christianity over two millennia), his thesis would become one of the most cited in the modern ecological movement.10 The understanding among some Christians that humans have the right to “exploit nature,” or to hold dominion over the planet and its organisms, has frequently been blamed for their resistance to both the ecological and animal rights movements. This anthropocentric worldview connects to both Noah and Mother! and what they have to say about the damaging effects of the Anthropocene on our planet. Yet another aspect within some Christian circles has also been blamed, one more apocalyptic. The first Earth Day was held in 1970, the same year Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth was published, a book that greatly popularized dispensational eschatology, a folk eschatology that focuses on the imminent return of Christ to Earth. Heightened by the speculation over turmoil in the Middle East, this work, the bestselling nonfiction work of the decade in North America (Walters 1979), supported a dispensationalist reading of the Bible by prophesying that such figures and events as the Antichrist, rapture, Great Tribulation, and Armageddon were most likely arriving in the 1970s and 1980s. 9  White further asserts, “By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects” (1205). 10  For more on the impact of White’s thesis, see LeVasseur and Peterson 2017.

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Dispensational theology has become quite popular in more conservative evangelical circles as well as the general population in the US (especially after the popularity of the Left Behind multimedia franchise of novels, children’s books, graphic novels, films, and video games in the 1990s and 2000s). It arose in the nineteenth century, only decades before the insistence on young Earth creationism in some Christian circles, itself a view of creation developed as a means to combat Darwin’s theory of evolution. To this day, such dogmatic adherence to the origins and end of the universe is often held in tandem. Of course, this adds an extra layer of meaning to Mother!‘s finale, as this creation story devolves into apocalypse. In her work The Gospel of Climate Skepticism: Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Climate Change (2019), Robin Globus Veldman questions this line of thinking, i.e., that the resistance of conservative evangelicals toward the environmental movement in general is especially tied to their eschatology. But this “end-time apathy hypothesis” (as she labels it) has nevertheless become standard conventional wisdom among ecologists, as well as popular discourse surrounding why many conservative Christians fail to become as invested in environmental concerns. Although apathy toward environmental concerns has been strong since the rise of the Religious Right in the 1970s and 1980s, Veldman discusses the major evangelical leaders and denominations that have actively worked toward increased climate skepticism, particularly since the Obama era, who actively reversed a noticeable “greening” trend among evangelicals during the early 2000s. For instance, environmentalists saw as a positive development the launch of the Evangelical Climate Initiative by the National Association of Evangelicals with their 2006 report “Climate Change: An Evangelical to Action” and a list of prominent signatories.11 But, according to Veldman, such reports have largely fallen on deaf ears in evangelical churches as evangelical media sources, in their alliance with the Religious Right and the Republican Party, have vociferously attacked such stances as partisan 11   This document can be downloaded at https://www.influencewatch.org/app/ uploads/2020/08/climate-change-an-evangelical-call-to-action.-08.20.pdf. Also reproduced in Veldman, 235–239. The NAE’s report “Loving the Least of These: Addressing the Changing Environment,” drafted in 2022, tried to persuade evangelicals yet again to care more about the environment and be more active in combating climate change, alleging (rather obviously) that it not only affects everyone on the planet, but those in poverty disproportionately. This newer statement can be downloaded at https://www.nae.org/loving-­ the-­least-of-these/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CLoving%20the%20Least%20of%20These,as%20 stewards%20of%20God’s%20creation.

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and not historically Christian concerns (Veldman 2019). Consequently, views over climate change have become one of the key battlegrounds in the culture wars of the twenty-first century. Veldman conducts her study on what she identifies as “traditionalist evangelicals,” a “subset of conservative Protestants from historically white denominations who have become politically engaged with the hope of restoring Christian values to their central place in American culture and law” (Veldman 2019, 19). Thus, by her working definition, this is a group that spans various traditional theological groupings like evangelical, fundamentalist, charismatics, etc., although it does exclude most Black Protestants within the US, whose politics can often diverge despite similar theology. As for the issue of climate change, a 2014 Pew Research Center poll revealed that only 28% of White evangelicals thought that climate change was primarily caused by human activities, much lower than the 41% of White mainline Protestants, 45% of White Catholics, 56% of Black Protestants, and 77% of Latinx Catholics (Veldman 2019, 2). Veldman’s focus is also a group where over two-thirds self-identify as Republican. The percentage of Americans who identify as evangelicals historically hovers around 25–35% (again, depending on definitions), but looking specifically at White evangelicals (the group under study here), could now possibly be as low as 15% (Blake 2021). Still, whatever the figure is, White evangelicals remain a group with considerable vocal presence and political clout. As Veldman notes, because the actions of the US in general are so key in the global decisions to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the lofty number of American evangelicals makes them “relevant players in the global effort to develop a response to climate change” (2019, 154). Indeed, they were a key link in the chain that would eventually lead to the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement during the Trump administration (Veldman 2019, 214). From her own qualitative fieldwork with various focus groups in numerous evangelical churches representing nine different denominations in the US state of Georgia, Veldman helpfully distinguishes between “hot millennialists” and “cool millennialists.”12 The former category, which also happened to be in the minority, was more heavily focused on the end 12  See Veldman, Chapter 3. She mentions the hot millennialists as explicitly more vocal within the Seventh Day Adventist and Assembly of God churches, while the cool millennialists in her book representing Church of Christ, Church of God, and Southern Baptist churches.

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times; eschatology came up more often in their conversations and occupied a more central place in their theology. More confident in their eschatological interpretations, this group also, perhaps surprisingly, was much more likely to believe that anthropogenic climate change was a reality, but one prophesied in the Book of Revelation and hence inevitable. Thus, “climate change was not itself a problem, but rather a portent of things to come” (Veldman 2019, 75). Cool millennialists, again the majority, expressed more agnostic views about how imminent the return of Christ would be, but were more likely to fall into the typical patterns leading to climate skepticism. Veldman discovered that her participants did not consider themselves anti-environmentalists, but rather championing a more practical environmentalism, advocating for recycling, not littering, keeping their waterways free of pollution, etc. Such thinking recalls a statement from a 2007 Jerry Falwell sermon: “Every Christian ought to be an environmentalist of [a] reasonable sort … We should certainly pick up trash. We ought to beautify the Earth as best we can. We ought to keep the streams clean. But we shouldn’t be hugging trees and worshipping the creation more than we worship the Creator, and that is what global warming is all about” (Veldman 2019, 184). In other words, this is a sort of environmental outlook that remains focused primarily on local concerns with little awareness or empathy for the global scale and how climate change affects everyone. Consequently, issues such as climate change were such a low priority that they hardly registered in their daily thoughts and actions. Other major factors that have been proposed for this climate skepticism include their political conservatism, anti-science attitudes (going back to the controversy over teaching evolution in schools, but which has seemingly worsened in more conservative circles during the Covid-19 era), and a preference for individual over collection action (Veldman 2019, 12). But Veldman considers evangelicals’ religious identity as being even more essential in regard to climate skepticism in particular: again, in the late 2000s, it became so critical that “rejecting environmentalism and concern about climate change came to be seen as a way of affirming one’s identity as a Bible-believing Christian” (13). Thus, Veldman concludes that the end-time apathy hypothesis holds less sway than previously thought, that evangelical Christians in the US are more likely to remain skeptical of anthropogenic climate change due to their “embattlement mentality,” their belief that such skepticism had them on the “right” side of the culture wars. (On a personal note, this resonates with my experience being

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raised in a fundamentalist Baptist church in Texas in the 1980s and 1990s; I had long blamed the insidious effects of dispensationalist eschatology— which left us profoundly indifferent to environmental concerns—even though it was probably the “embattlement mentality” that moved past this apathy to more downright hostility toward the modern ecological movement.) Even though creation and apocalypse might be linked in both Noah and Mother!, Veldman contends that most evangelicals are less sure (more living by the motto of “God is in control” than “the world is ending soon anyways”). Perhaps this explains why many evangelicals around the globe may be less invested in this climate skepticism; while it is admittedly not a uniquely American phenomenon, it does seem to be exacerbated within its borders. In Brazil, for instance, which has almost as many evangelicals as the US, with 30% of the population identifying as evangelicals or Pentecostals (a total number third, only behind the US and Nigeria), climate skepticism is less of an issue, as their views toward their environment are roughly the same as the population at large (this despite their base of support for right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, who denies the scientific consensus on the issue [Smith 2019].) Although Veldman does not look at how evangelicals in other countries understand and work toward addressing climate change, this research on Brazilian evangelicals would apparently support her thesis that climate skepticism is less about theology and more a characteristic of American evangelicals’ alignment with the Religious Right. The issue of climate change and other devastating effects of the Anthropocene on our planet are clearly seminal issues in both Noah and Mother! While I have not read any comments from Aronofsky suggesting that he had an “evangelical” agenda when he decided to both adapt a cherished biblical story and make his own biblical allegory in order to convert a group with tremendous clout in the US, the culmination of his interests in the Torah, specifically that saga in Genesis, should not go unnoticed. Aronofsky has steadfastly maintained his interest in these themes of creation and apocalypse in his work since Mother! Despite not being written by Aronofsky, The Whale, based on Samuel D. Hunter’s 2012 play of the same name, continues this linkage. One of the main characters in The Whale, Thomas, is a door-to-door missionary for “New Life,” a church in the Idaho setting described by others in the play/film as possibly heterodox and cultish. Thomas firmly grounds his reasons for evangelizing in the eschatological, noting that Christ’s return is imminent, evident in “signs”

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such as turmoil in the Middle East: “I mean, I think there’s really good reason to believe that we’re living in end times … The idea that there’s a better world coming to replace this one, that we can be released from this life, from our worldly desires and faults …” (Aronofsky 2022). This (pre) millennialist sentiment that God will destroy the world anyway and replace it with a newer, better one baffles protagonist Charlie (whose gay lover was a devoted member of the conservative group despite his sexual orientation), for it seems incongruous with how a loving, creating God should act. He puzzlingly proposes that Thomas’s eschatology then would seemingly suggest that “God creates us, expels us from paradise, then we wander around for thousands of years killing each other before he comes back and sends most of us to hell” (Aronofsky 2022). Again, note not only Aronofsky’s inclusion of the Garden of Eden story in his film, but also humanity’s violent tendencies, a rather obvious theme in Noah and Mother! But Charlie, ever optimistic despite his 600-pound weight, lack of mobility, and rapidly declining health, reveals a desire for a Christianity more rooted in love for others, less reliant on proselytization, and a belief in the imminent return of Christ than New Life promotes. In conclusion, Darren Aronofsky remains one of the most idiosyncratic auteurs to have arisen from the 1990s American indie film scene. His thematic concerns, including the Genesis narrative(s), “bodies in pain,” and environmental messaging are all present in Noah, Mother!, and The Whale. As someone deeply impacted by reading James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) while in college, I could not help but think of that titular phrase while rewatching Mother! with its explosive finale. Imagine my surprise when looking up its origin, seeing yet another example of the Genesis saga clashing with a fiery apocalypse. The phrase “fire next time” originates from the spiritual “Mary, Don’t You Weep:” God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time. One of the more controversial films of the 2010s, Mother! furthermore only proves more enriching when viewed through this lens of climate skepticism and the culture wars.

References Aronofsky, Darren, dir. 1998. Pi. Artisan Entertainment/Summit International. ———, dir. 2002. Requiem for a Dream. Artisan Entertainment/Summit International. ———, dir. 2006. The Fountain. Warner Bros. Pictures.

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———, dir. 2008. The Wrestler. Fox Searchlight Pictures. ———, dir. 2010. Black Swan. Fox Searchlight Pictures. ———, dir. 2014. Noah. Paramount Pictures. ———, dir. 2017. Mother! Paramount Pictures. ———, dir. 2022. The Whale. A24. Bandonis, Molly. 2019. Complicity in Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017). Film Criticism 43 (3): 10–12. Barth, Karl. 2010. Church Dogmatics Study Edition 21. Edited by T.F. Torrance and G.W.  Bromiley, G.  W. III.1 The Doctrine of Creation. Translated by G.W. Bromiley. London: T&T Clark. Blake, Aaron. 2021. The Rapid Decline of White Evangelical America? Washington Post, July 8. Boorse, Dorothy, lead author. 2022. Loving the Least of These: Addressing the Changing Environment. National Association of Evangelicals. https://www. nae.org/loving-­the-­least-­of-­these/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CLoving%20the%20 Least%20of%20These,as%20stewards%20of%20God’s%20creation. Bush, Gerard, and Christopher Renz, dirs. 2020. Antebellum. Lionsgate. Christian Groups: Biblical Armageddon Must Be Taught Alongside Global Warming. 2010. The Onion, May 24. https://www.theonion.com/christiangroups-biblical-armageddon-must-be-taught-al-1819594934. Crutzen, Paul J. 2002. Geology of Mankind. Nature 415 (23). Ellis, Erle, Kees Klein Goldewijk, Marie-José Gaillard, et al. 2019. Archaeological Assessment Reveals Earth’s Early Transformation through Land Use. Science 365: 897–902. Garland, Alex, dir. 2022. Men. A24. Greydanus, Steven D. 2014. Interview: Noah Writer-Director Darren Aronofsky and Co-Writer Ari Handel. National Catholic Register, March 21, https://www. ncregister.com/news/interview-noah-writer-director-darren-aronofsky-andco-writer-ari-handel. Handley, George. 2018. Anthropocentrism and the Postsecularity of the Environmental Humanities in Aronofsky’s Noah. Modern Fiction Studies 64: 617–638. Honda, Ishirō dir. 1954. Gojira (Godzilla). Toho Co., Ltd. Jeong, Andrew, and Sarah Kaplan. 2023. Earth May be Starting a New Geological Chapter. What Is the Anthropocene? Washington Post, July 12, https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-­e nvironment/2023/07/12/ anthropocene-­epoch-­meaning-­crawford-­lake/. Kosior, Wojciech. 2016. The Crimes of Love: The (Un)Censored Version of the Flood Story in Noah (2014). Journal of Religion & Film 20 (3). https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol20/iss3/27/. Laine, Tarja. 2017. Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky. New York: Berghahn.

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LeVasseur, Todd, and Anna Peterson, eds. 2017. Religion and Ecological Crisis: The “Lynn White Thesis” at Fifty. London: Routledge. Macumber, Lindsay, and Magi Abdul-Masih. 2018. A Journey into the Heart of God: Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (2014) as a Subversive Kabbalistic Text. Journal of Religion & Film 22 (3), https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/ vol22/iss3/5/. Malick, Terrence, dir. 2011. The Tree of Life. Searchlight Pictures. Moore, Lila, and Marianna Ruah-Midbar Shapiro. 2018. Humanity’s Second Chance: Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (2014) as an Environmental Cinematic Midrash. Journal of Religion & Film 22 (1), https://digitalcommons. unomaha.edu/jrf/vol22/iss1/35/. Murphy, Ryan, and Brad Falchuk, creators. 2017. American Horror Story: Cult. FX. Peele, Jordan, dir. 2017. Get Out. California: Universal Pictures. Romero, George, dir. 1968. Night of the Living Dead. Image Ten. Rose, Bernard, dir. 1992. Candyman. TriStar Pictures. Schrader, Paul, dir. 2017. First Reformed. A24. Skorin-Kapov, Jadranka. 2016. Darren Aronofsky’s Films and the Fragility of Hope. New York: Bloomsbury. Smith, Amy Erica. 2019. Evangelicals in Brazil See Abuse of God’s Earth as a Sin—But Will They Fight to Save The Amazon? The Conversation, Nov 6, https://theconversation.com/evangelicals-­in-­brazil-­see-­abuse-­of-­gods-­earth-­ as-­a-­sin-­but-­will-­they-­fight-­to-­save-­the-­amazon-­126098. Veldman, Robin Globus. 2019. The Gospel of Climate Skepticism: Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Action on Climate Change. Berkeley: University of California Press. Walters, Ray. 1979. Ten Years of Best Sellers. New York Times, December 30: BR3. White, Lynn, Jr. 1967. The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis. Science 155: 1203–1207. Zobel, Craig, dir. 2020. The Hunt. Universal Pictures.

CHAPTER 6

Monsters, Women, and Magic: Intersecting Hierarchies of Gender and Religion in The Witch (2015) Cristina Casado Presa

“Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” This popular quote belongs to Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, when she meets Dorothy in the iconic film Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming 1939). This classification of the witch character through opposing terms of light and darkness, and good and evil, has led to representations that show a complicated, fascinating, and influential figure that continues to captivate us today. Thus, this chapter will explore characterization, themes, and social constructs within the film The Witch, directed by Robert Eggers and released in 2015. Set in New England in the 1630s, the film follows the story of a Puritan family who has been banished from a colony over a religious dispute. Once in their new home, located at the edge of the woods, the family soon begins to be plagued by witchcraft. Subtitled A New England Folk Tale, the film draws on both reality and myth to create the story of the family’s terrifying

C. Casado Presa (*) Washington College, Chestertown, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53278-8_6

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experiences while presenting a collage of images and stereotypes that conjure feminist and neo-pagan revisionist myths about witchcraft. The following pages will consider if the film, within the context of a folk horror genre, uses the depiction of witchcraft as a symbol of resistance to gendered violence and oppression, and it will discuss the ways witchcraft grants (or does not grant) agency to women. Finally, the chapter will address how this dark tale uncovers fears and anxieties regarding intersecting hierarchies of gender and religion and its implications for the current sociocultural landscape in the United States. For a long time, female representations in horror films were created as one-dimensional images within traditional male-centered texts. When we talk about earthly women as opposed to supernatural ones, these characters in the genre have often been what Carol Clover described as the “Final Girl” ([1992] 2015), but they were rarely the lead girl. Even more frequently, these fictional women have appeared as a strongly sexualized love interest, overshadowed by male characters, and corseted in the stereotype of the damsel in distress. At the same time, and largely due to Linda Williams’ influential essay “When the Woman Looks” (1984), an affinity has become recognized and underlined between these female characters and the monster. However, when the monster is a woman, she becomes an entirely different creature. It was towards the end of the 1960s, during the second feminist wave, that the women’s liberation movement aroused interest and spurred public vindication of the image of certain female figures linked to monstrosity, images that were traditionally engraved in the Western collective unconscious by the patriarchal system. As Barbara Creed (1993) points out in her study on the horror film The Monstrous Feminine, all societies possess a conception of the monstrous feminine, of everything considered monstrous in a woman, which is shocking, terrifying, and abject. In a volume that analyzes characters such as the amoral mother, the vampire woman, the beautiful murderer, the non-­ human animal woman, and the famous vagina dentata, Creed emphasizes: “There is one incontestable monstrous role … that belongs to woman—that of the witch” (75). Creed reminds us how, for ages, the social and healing facet of the witch has been left aside, and, both in historical and mythological facets, “the witch has inspired both awe and dread” (75) She has been characterized as “a monstrous figure with supernatural powers and a desire for evil … She is thought to be dangerous and wily, capable of drawing on her evil powers to wreak destruction in the community” (75–76). While this malevolent representation of the witch

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persists in culture, it is undeniable that this figure has also experienced a considerable transformation. We still see terrifying and reviled witches, but these portrayals coexist with many other new representations, which has resulted in a tangled web of iconography and symbolic meaning. The witch archetype was a highly recognizable, fully developed cultural icon long before she was depicted in movies. Witches carrying out evil deeds have been conventionally depicted in Western art and culture in the shape of women. Particularly, the predominant iconography found in the construction of the cinematic narrative is largely derived from fairy tales or folklore, classic literature, visual art, and books such as the Malleus Malleficarum, the infamous fifteenth-century codex used by clergy and inquisitors to persecute witches. These representations oscillate between the old crone with wild hair and wearing rags, and the stunning seductress who bewitches men with her charms: the witch may be an attractive and mysterious woman, but also an abhorrent, stigmatized and, very often, demonic figure. These varying ideas about the character and appearance of a witch have contributed to shaping the many iterations of the cinematic witch. We can find movies like Häxan (Benjamin Christensen 1922), a silent horror film that traces the historical roots and superstitions surrounding witchcraft from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, often based in the aforementioned Malleus Malleficarum, and that essentially constitutes a treaty on the history of witchcraft. On the other hand, Richard Quine’s 1958 film Bell, Book and Candle paved the way for future harmless re-­imaginings of the subject. Kim Novak’s character, both charming and mysterious, led the way for countless other adaptations of the same theme: the witch with the face of an ordinary woman. Alternatively, in Suspiria (1974), the Italian director Dario Argento created a completely different model of a witch that endures to this day: a pitiless, powerful, unpredictable, and beautiful woman who can also terrorize through her mysterious power and stunning malevolence. Many of these attributes can still be seen in Anjelica Houston’s Grand High Witch, surrounded by her evil followers in The Witches (Nicholas Roeg 1990), a movie based on the 1983 novel by Roald Dahl. In a separate style, The Witches of Eastwick (George Miller 1987), adapted from the 1984 novel by John Updike, embodied the sexual side of the witch. Incidentally, the decade of the 1990s saw the emergence of a witch aimed at younger audiences, and we find films like The Craft (Andrew Fleming 1996), in which the teenage witch embodies a union between modern witchcraft, adolescence, and agency; and The Blair

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Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez 1999), which recalled the power of myth from the perspective of an unsettling vision of women and their eternal duality of good and evil. As we can see, when it comes to witches, reality and fiction intersect with imagination, religion, dreams, fears, legend, and the idea of crime and punishment, which has led, on occasion, to conflicting iconographies of the figure. As Heather Greene states in Bell, Book and Camera (2018): The witch is, at her most basic, a woman who lives in the space society has chosen to abandon. She practices crafts that her community marks as unacceptable or that religion defines as sinful. She is the adolescent girl discovering her sexuality, the woman who commands it, and the crone who no longer needs it but still understands it. That is the witch; she is all of those things and more. At her very essence, she is the woman who knows too much—about society, about life, and about herself. She is both the oppressed and the empowered. (1)

Green’s ideas align with Diane Purkiss’s, who defends in The Witch in History (1996) a positive feminist vision of witch folklore, but does not directly contradict other perspectives. Purkiss considers that witchcraft allowed these women to exercise a power that had previously been denied to them and they used it to express themselves at a time when women had very little influence in a predominantly male society (1). Therefore, Greene agrees with Purkiss that the witch is not the sole creation of patriarchy, but also was a figure of fantasy that women heavily invested in to allow themselves to express and manage otherwise unspoken fears and desires, centered on the issue of motherhood and children, and that investment has not translated into the big screen. Other authors, like Pilar Pedraza in her book Brujas, Sapos y Aquelarres (2014), consider that talking about witches and cinema leads naturally to feminism. Pedraza also laments that when it comes to witches, “they are always under suspicion,” or are being presented through “modern Dianic witchcraft, [which] makes them ecologists or alternative therapy gurus,” or even worse, “television tarot readers,” and ignores their “antisystem social power,” denying them the place they deserve (307), at least until Robert Eggers in 2015 seized several of these concepts and more to ultimately shape the character set out in The Witch. The Witch is recognized as a part of the renewal of the body of art known as “folk horror.” It is a term hard to describe considering a

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significant part of what it designates is based in feelings, intuition, and perception. However, there appears to be a common understanding of what folk horror conjures: apparently idyllic locations that conceal horrible secrets, where beliefs that predate Christianity and long-forgotten gods still prowl in the shadows. Adam Scovell traces the term to works such as James B. Twitchell’s The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (1983). Scovell’s definition of folk horror combines a daunting presentation of the landscape together with a sense of isolation, from which a distorted set of beliefs or moral code develops (2017, 17–19). He also describes it as a subgenre of horror that draws on the British landscape, paganism, and folklore. The term was popularized by the three-part BBC documentary, A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss (2010), more specifically within its second part, “Home Counties Horrors.” While the focus of this installment is put on British Hammer movies from the 1950s and 1960s, towards the end of the episode, and while acknowledging the exhaustion of the British popular horror film formula by the late 1960s, Gatiss simultaneously notes the existence of “fascinating final flourishes,” among which we find “a loose collection of films that we might call Folk horror” (Jardine 2010). Researchers of folk horror also concur on the importance of three films widely regarded as essential to the genre, not in vain are they referred to as the “Unholy Trinity.” Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves 1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard 1971), and The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy 1973) were the first group of films to be used in an early definition of the genre. They were also responsible for the association of folk horror with a film production in which ancestral traditions and pagan rites take center stage in isolated and rural environments. These three movies acted as a blueprint for the folk horror genre, which in its first wave was indisputably British. It maintained “an obsession with the British countryside, its folklore, and its superstitions” (Jardine 2010), and the height of the first wave of folk horror coincided with the end of a significant counter-­ cultural era that had entirely debunked preconceived conceptions about social hierarchy, gender, sexuality, and imperialism. It was the start of a time when New Age ideals of personal transformation began to take the place of socialist revolutions, as Andy Paciorek notes in Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies, Essays & Interviews (2018): “that period emerged from a sense of post-hippy disillusionment in which the ideals of the back-­ to-­the-land movement no longer seemed ideal. Coupled with the 1960s

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resurgence of interest in paganism and the occult, Folk horror movies arose when ‘the ground became sour’” (13). Over the last decade, folk horror has seen a significant rebirth. Its return should not be surprising, given our widespread fears about environmental degradation, rapidly developing technology, and disillusionment with political institutions. Yet, these new iterations of the genre still build on history and tradition that delve into the darkness of the land: “upon juxtaposition of the prosaic and the uncanny … It is strange things found in fields, lights flickering in dark woods, the darkness in children’s play, being lost in ancient landscapes … the devil having a cup of tea with you … the power of ritual and the power of storytelling” (Janisse 2021). Contrary to what we have observed with the first wave, this second wave of folk horror resists limitations to one country or era, as demonstrated by recent movies inspired by different folklore and myths. A few of the films that helped to define the resurrection of the genre are Kill List (Ben Wheatley 2011), The Wailing (Na Hong-jin 2016), Midsommar (Ari Aster 2019), Lamb (Valdimar Jóhannsson 2021) and, of course, The Witch (Robert Eggers 2015). A connection between folk horror and supernatural horror films centered on the occult is inevitable since the association between witchcraft and paganism is obvious; however, it goes further. As Chloe Germaine Buckley recalls, the witch is not a figure exclusive of folk horror, but the two are entwined due to the connection to counter-cultural discourse (Buckley 2019, 24). As Miller and Semley state in “Children of the Wicker Man: Anti-Enlightenment and the Folk Horror Revival” (2019), “unlike most horror, in which an interloping monster is either destroyed (in order to purge a threat to an established order) or otherwise incorporated into that order, folk horror operates by implicating the viewer in the dissolution and destruction of that order” (Miller and Semley 2019), and one of the most powerful aspects of The Witch is its ability to arouse the audience’s concern regarding the subjectivity and loss of the main character. Robert Eggers presents multiple historical possibilities that are left up to the viewer’s interpretation. We may believe it is certain that a witch prowls the woods close to the family’s home and that one of their farm animals is the Devil in disguise, or that the family’s paranoia after being expelled from their Puritan community causes an irreparable rift among them and with society. Regardless of their own reading, the audience witnesses how a family creates its own hell and destruction by being subjected to

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constant isolation while living in a dangerous, superstitious, and fears-­ filled land. The Witch offers a grim mood, an antagonistic nature, and rigorous realism. The conversations in the movie are based on documents and stories from the Early Modern period (Briefel 2019). The iconography and folklore of New England enrich the story, which, in addition to being based on the history of a geographical region famous for witchcraft, contains icons associated with this practice: goats, crows, hares. All these elements, as well as the rites the witch performs and how her powers manifest, contribute to the creation of an uncomfortable and insecure atmosphere. While the feminine is traditionally considered to be weak, especially through the prism of the masculine, Eggers’ representation of witches is revealed as provocative, an untamed nature that returns our gaze, and highlights “always a sense of danger, loss, it is a denier of territories, languages … , it is not respecting the borders, places and rules” (Kristeva 1982, 12), what is defined as abject. It is not just her physical appearance that makes the witch abject. Kristeva argues that “it is not a lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection, but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4). The film underscores and explores this concept. As Creed (1993) has argued, the formation of the monster as abject operates as a confrontation between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability: the witch represents the boundary between the ordinary and the supernatural, between good and evil. As Chusna and Mahmuda (2018) remind us, the notion of abjection arises in religious discourse as well. Religious stereotypes of women as sinners, for example the biblical Eve, historically led to a pervasive belief that women were inherently bad. The woman as sinner has come to represent all that is “lustful, untrustworthy, cunning, deceptive, seductive, and evil in the cosmos” (12), which makes her abject. Creed proposes that abjection occurs where the individual fails to respect a border, as she draws on Kristeva’s idea of the construction of abjection: the woman as a witch in Puritan society, as depicted in the film, fits those characteristics. The historical, literary, and cinematic associations to witchcraft enrich the narrative, as Eggers skillfully integrates these elements into the family drama. This creates a chilling interplay where every supernatural occurrence sparks familial conflicts, steadily escalating the tension until the film’s dramatic climax.

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The protagonist is Thomasin, the eldest daughter. The first time we encounter Thomasin, a year has passed since the banishment. Thomasin, her parents, Katherine and William, and her siblings, Caleb, Jonas, and Mercy, now live on a farm near the woods, and Katherine has given birth to Samuel, her fifth child. We see Thomasin praying and begging for forgiveness for what she regards as terrible transgressions, which include breaking every commandment with her thoughts: O most merciful father: I here confess I have lived in sin. I have been idle of my work, disobedient of mine parents, neglectful of my prayer. I have, in secret, played upon thy sabbath and broken every one of thy commandments in thought … followed the desires of my own will, and not the holy Spirit. I know I deserve all shame and misery in this life, and everlasting hellfire. But I beg thee, for the sake of thy Son. Forgive me. (Eggers 2015)

While modern viewers might perceive those offenses as innocent, Thomasin’s words are not trivial when it comes to the Puritans and the role of women in society, since Puritans envisioned a world in which divine and demonic forces vied for souls, and the temptations of witchcraft posed a perilous danger to their objective. Tragedy strikes when Thomasin is playing with her baby brother near the woods. Thomasin shuts her eyes while playing peekaboo with Samuel as he rests on the ground. When she opens them, he is gone. Following Samuel’s disappearance, suspicions arise and accusations ensue, and they all appear to be directed towards Thomasin. In the next scene, it is revealed to the audience that Samuel was abducted by a witch who resides in the woods. The witch is old, unkempt, and clad in a crimson robe. She murders Samuel, rubs her body with his entrails, and makes an ointment. The witch is thus presented as a recreation of the prevalent archetype of the malevolent crone who preys on children, constructed as deviant, monstrous, and demonic, consequently de-personified, dehumanized, and abject. As Elizabeth Reis (1999) states, the witch is the “anti-mother” … a disgrace to her femininity and disregards religious and social concerns. In Puritan society women were held to strict expectations and motherhood was considered the most significant aspect of female identity and an inherentability. For instance, rejecting maternal instincts would be considered a signifier of corruption by the Devil … During this time, women who did not adhere to feminine expectations were at risk of genuinely believing they were witches as they were so thoroughly

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permeated by religious ideologies that they considered themselves vile and evil by nature. (2–3)

The disappearance of Samuel labels Thomasin as unfit to be a mother, which equates to her being a witch. As Chloe Carroll explains, “expectations are placed upon Thomasin to conform to the family structure by serving their needs in preparation of when she will have her own family” (Carroll 2019), and Thomasin has failed to live up to those expectations, which makes her an outcast within the confines of her overzealous family, and within Puritan society, as a woman who does not fulfill her prescribed role as future wife and mother. Although Samuel’s disappearance is blamed on a wolf, the family seems ambivalent to that explanation and harbors suspicions about Thomasin’s involvement in the incident. These suspicions grow stronger when Thomasin identifies voluntarily as a witch when Mercy taunts her about what happened to the baby, mocking her about the witch in the woods. In Thomasin’s words: “I am that very witch. When I sleep my spirit slips away from my body and dances naked with the Devil. That’s how I signed his book. He bade me bring him an unbaptised babe, so I stole Sam, and I gave him to my master. And I’ll make any man or thing else vanish I like” (Eggers 2015). While she is just trying to scare her little sister, Thomasin also has a taste of power when she succeeds in terrifying Mercy; her newfound identity, as it was with the witch in the woods, will be highlighted by means of abjection. In one scene, we see that Thomasin accidentally drops an egg while collecting them from the henhouse; the broken shell reveals a dead and bloody chicken within. Later in the film, when Thomasin is milking a goat in the stable, blood instead of milk flows from the animal’s udder. As stated by Kristeva, “abjection reaches its apex when death … interferes with what … is supposed to save … from death” (1982, 70). In this case, we can consider these images of death invading life, both pointing to failed motherhood, in the shape of an interrupted pregnancy and the corruption of mother’s milk. As Creed states, “the modern horror film often ‘plays’ with its audience, saturating it with scenes of blood and gore, deliberately pointing to the fragility of the symbolic order in the domain of the body where the body never ceases to signal the repressed world of the mother” (1993, 13). Being an adolescent, and as she transitions into a woman, Thomasin’s abjection is also intertwined with her passage from childhood to womanhood. This transformation plays a pivotal role in presenting

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Thomasin as an abject, as it is reminiscent of superstitious notions of the terrifying powers of menstrual blood. In Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700: A Documentary History (2001), Kors and Peters refer to superstitions associated with witchcraft and include Claude Thosolan’s claims about witches causing infertility in women and making men insane. Tholosan also made note of a certain ingredient witches use in their craft: “and with menstrual blood, contact with which can kill trees, they make an ointment with the help of the devil that makes men wild with sexual passion” (quoted in Kors and Peters 2001, 164). Tholosan believed that, through witchcraft, men could be controlled and turned lustful. In one scene, Thomasin is forced to remove her father’s dirty garments in front of Katherine, creating a tense situation. This leads Katherine to lament that they never should have left the plantation and to wish for Thomasin to be sent to labor for another family. Nonetheless, while Samuel’s abduction by the witch leads to Thomasin becoming the anti-mother, it is her ordeal with Caleb that will brand her as sensual and impure. We see Caleb glancing at Thomasin’s breasts on many occasions, and when Caleb goes to hunt in the woods, Thomasin insists on accompanying him despite his initial reluctance. However, a hare spooks Caleb’s horse, separating them. While wandering in the woods, Caleb discovers the witch’s cottage. While again clad in a red cloak, this time the witch is a lovely and supple young woman. She smiles at Caleb, who cannot help but to go into her arms. Then, her hand turns old and ugly, and she grabs Caleb’s head like a claw, pushing his mouth to hers. The witch is again presented by means of abjection, as “an element of the human that is neither us nor not us, neither inside nor outside, and therefore destabilizing to the boundaries that define us” (Kristeva 1982, 68). In this case, it evokes a myriad of ancestral fears related to women, especially their sexuality, by establishing a highly explicit visual association between sexual intercourse and death. According to Freud, “woman is different from man forever incomprehensible and mysterious, strange and therefore apparently hostile. The man is afraid of being weakened by the woman, infected with her femininity and of then showing himself incapable. The effect which coitus has of discharging tensions and causing flaccidity may be the prototype of what man fears” (Freud 2007, 267). The scene is reminiscent, above all, of the sexual aura that many popular narratives attribute to witches: traditionally, witches shamelessly exhibit their bodies, openly practice sex, express their sexual desires explicitly, and carry out rituals for which the carnal element is essential. As Jules Michelet

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points out, “by a monstrous perversion of ideas the Middle Ages regarded the flesh, in its representative, woman (accursed since Eve), as radically impure” (2017, 87). This conception of the sin of the flesh is reflected in the character of Thomasin, which underscores the demonization of female sexuality and the consequent exoneration of male lust, as women are blamed for it. At this point, Thomasin has been effectively othered by her family. She is a daughter in a patriarchal structure; at the same time, she is not a child anymore, which puts her in direct opposition with her mother, Katherine, who has been subjugated to patriarchy to the extent that she sees her daughter as a threat to her position in their family’s structure. Thomasin is seen as an abject figure as she is represented within patriarchal discourse as an implacable enemy of the symbolic order. She is believed to be dangerous and cunning, able to harness her evil powers to destroy her family. Finally, she appears to be the only sibling unaffected by the horrific events, although she is always around when they happen. These veiled feelings become evident when Caleb is found naked and delirious in the pouring rain by Thomasin. He shows clear signs of demonic possession until he finally dies, and Jonas and Mercy condemn Thomasin: “He is witched! … ‘Tis she!” (Eggers 2015), and they accuse her of “stealing Sam and give him to the Devil, turning Flora’s milk to blood, make a bargain with Satan and sign his book” (Eggers 2015). Thomasin tries to defend herself and, in return, blames her younger twin siblings for communing with the Devil in the form of their goat, Black Phillip. Nevertheless, Katherine doesn’t question the children’s accusations, as she wants to rid the farm of Thomasin. Likewise, her father seems certain of Thomasin’s culpability and plans to turn his daughter in to the town council and accuse her of witchcraft. Yet again, an aged, naked witch assaults the children after rousing them from sleep as she sips goat’s milk, while Katherine has visions of death and decay involving Caleb and Samuel. The morning after the twins have vanished, William is killed by Black Philip, and Katherine strikes Thomasin, finally blaming her openly for all the family’s misfortunes and accusing her of seducing William and Caleb: “The Devil is in thee and hath had thee. You are smeared of his sin. You reek of Evil. You have made a covenant with death. You bewitched thy brother, proud slut; And thy father next! You took them from me! They are gone! You killed my children! You killed thy father! Witch! Witch!” (Eggers 2015). As the altercation escalates, Thomasin kills her mother in self-defense.

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At the end of the film, Thomasin follows Black Phillip to the woods, where a group of witches dance around a bonfire. The last scene depicts Thomasin naked and covered in blood, ascending into the night sky while laughing in joy, choosing to acknowledge her monstrous nature. Confronted by the constraints placed upon women who acquiesce to passive roles within an unchanging societal structure, Thomasin opts for the diabolical nature of the witch and becomes a hero, as per Carol Clover’s interpretation of the term in her study on gender in modern horror film: “hero insofar as she has risen against and defeated the forces of monstrosity, monster insofar as she has herself become excessive, demonic” ([1992] 2015, 4). Thomasin embracing her witch identity entails adopting a representation of femininity that refuses to be subservient or supplementary to the masculine principle. In Christine Larner’s words, the witch is a “feminine, adult being who does not submit to the masculine idea, of what constitutes the correct feminine behaving … She has the power of the word, to defend herself or to curse” (1987, 84). In the last minutes of the film, when the Devil addresses Thomasin with the words, “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” (Eggers 2015), witchcraft is presented to her as a space for diversity and multiplicity, a world of possibility, and an alternative to a life in the shadows. More importantly, it is Thomasin’s final decision to embrace the monster and voluntarily transform, and to celebrate her Otherness and abjection. Thomasin’s flight captures a mixed nature of pleasure and pain and seems to tear her from this world, leading her to an exaltation that puts her outside herself, beyond her senses, and literally elevates her into a new state and space, where women are no longer defined by opposition to masculinity, nor forced to assume those roles and stereotypes that the cultural construction of gender necessarily entails. At the same time, the film highlights the shortcomings of the traditional female model, molded through various mechanisms of repression and oppression that consider women to be inferior beings and easy prey. Thomasin’s powers are seen as part of her “feminine” nature; as Kristeva reminds us, in those societies that lack centralized institutions of power, a rigid separation of the sexes is imposed through ritual. In such societies, the two sexes are in constant conflict. Women are considered “fatal schemers,” and the feminine is seen as “synonymous with a radical evil that must be repressed,” being “irrational, scheming, evil” words used to define the witch (Kristeva 1982, 70). In such societies, political and religious institutions preserve the patriarchal structure that keeps women under control,

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turning them against each other, as is the case of Katherine, subordinated and limited to her role as wife and mother. Katherine defines herself through her relationship with her husband and children, the proper place for women in Puritan society. Women like Katherine find themselves trapped in these imposed social roles, fearful of sin and the punishment that comes with it, making them victims of a system that doesn’t even recognize them as people. The Witch incorporates the complex relationship between gender, the nature of the crimes charged, and the role of women in society. Thus, the witch becomes a denunciation, a presence that disrupts the existing status quo, makes visible what has become invisible, and becomes an emblem of struggle and resistance. When inquired about the feminist subtext in The Witch, Eggers has said: “I didn’t set out to make a feminist empowerment narrative, but I learned that writing a witch story is one and the same” (quoted in Zwissler 2018, 21). When asked if she considers Thomasin’s fate a “happy ending,” actor Anya Taylor-Joy answered: “yes, because it was the first choice she really got to make. Yes, because it meant empowerment. Yes, because society left her no other option: if she went back to the plantation, she’d face the same accusations” (Joho 2016). Additionally, as Laurel Zwissler (2018) recounts, the word “feminist” appears in the names of a significant number of reviews of the movie. Nathalie Lagerfeld analyzes the gender politics of the film, and she describes Puritan patriarchy as “more frightening than an axe killer,” and concludes that “after watching all she endures in her “normal,” patriarchal society, we audience members are on board with her choice” (quoted in Zwissler 2018, 5). Britt Ashley at BitchScreen states, that “the real terror here wasn’t a witch hiding in the woods, but rather the God-fearing men at home, dutifully deciding the fate of the women around them” (quoted in Zwissler 2018, 5.) Aviva Briefel praises Eggers for his commitment to historical authenticity, which she considers turns the film into a “inherited nightmare” (2019, 5) and believes that this meticulousness produces a counter narrative and offers a “set of gendered experiences that history cannot represent,” as the film rejects the notion of confining female monstrosity (6). Yet, this feminist outlook of the final sequence of The Witch has been considered problematic in many aspects. Authors like Zwissler acknowledge the movie as a critique of patriarchy, but “the feminist vision it represents … is not one of hope” (2018, 1). She argues that the reception of this witchcraft film is full of contradictions, as it is placed in a cultural context in which most films and television shows about witches reflect the more contemporary notion that witches are

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feminists, as acknowledged by Eggers himself. However, Zwissler argues that, in the case of The Witch, “conflating witchcraft and feminism is a misapplication of a contemporary idea onto the historical worldview depicted in the film” (9). Alison Buckley believes that “Eggers’ modern folk horror film does nothing to stabilize or affirm the witch as a feminist icon” (2019, 22 Even positive takes on the film often make note of how the “deeply ambiguous figure [of the witch] proves problematic for feminism and its project to subvert or otherwise destabilize misogynist symbols” (22.) After all, Thomasin commits herself to the Devil, and when she ventures into the woods at the end of the film, she is following Black Phillip, identified as another male figure, which could be considered as simply adhering to another oppressive system. Furthermore, we can argue that promoting the historical witch to an image of female freedom could be viewed as hypocritical and cynical, considering the enormousness of their suffering, but as Carroll explains, “though Thomasin may not be a radical feminist openly attempting to dismantle the patriarchy, she is stripped of agency and embodies fears and ambivalences surrounding women and female power” (2019), and agrees that the social and religious persecution of Thomasin mirrors issues in contemporary society. She concludes that “through the witch, women can find their source of empowerment and rebel against a society that seeks to revert them to their historical status as the oppressed and the lesser” (2019). Let us also remember that the film is subtitled as A New England Folk Tale, which implies that it is not a recreation of factual events. In this respect, Jess Joho believes that the ending “forces us as an audience to make a conclusion about what lore like this means about who we were as people back when we believed in it. Who we are now,” (Joho 2016) as the film resonates with contemporary concerns, especially the renewed attacks on women’s rights and sexuality through oppressive patriarchal power and social subjugation. Thus, the term witchcraft has been used also as both a humorous but nonetheless insulting, pejorative, and as a more serious charge. As Buckley (2019) and others recall, right-wing critics in the US questioned whether Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton practiced witchcraft, which even prompted the Twitter hashtag #WitchHillary, as Anna North (2016) points out and the witch stereotype continues to be used most obviously in popular culture as an attack on women who don’t conform to the norm. On June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned the Roe vs. Wade landmark decision in which the Court ruled that the Constitution

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conferred the right to abortion. Therein, Justice Alito quotes Sir Matthew Hale, a seventeenth-century jurist who authored the most referenced justification for the marital rape exemption. In his own words: “the husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract.” (quoted in Hasday 2022). Another notable action in Hale’s repertoire includes, as Laura Basset states, condemning two women to death for witchcraft, a decision made even as the reality of witchcraft was already in question. “As many have pointed out,”—Basset adds—“to ban abortion is not about and has never been about protecting fetuses. It started as a way to galvanize conservative voters … to motivate misogynistic people who really only care about punishing women” (Basset 2022). Thus, the witch character resonates with many women nowadays, and the last years have seen the popularization of slogans such as “we are the granddaughters of the witches you couldn’t burn” (Thawer 2015, 3). Using the motif of the witch to further their cause, these women invoke the persecution and marginalization of women throughout history, as well as the transformational potential associated with the witch figure. Nevertheless, their utilization of historical references encompasses something unique compared to what traditional sources offer. As Silvia Bovenschen (1978) points out, “it contains historical and social fantasy aspects, is anarchic and rebellious, and denies chronology and historical authenticity” (84). The witch is, in consequence, a cultural body in which her being configured as a symbol of resistance, her association with immorality, sin, evil, and transgression, as well as her being used for centuries as a mechanism to control women, figuratively, and literally, coexist. It is thanks to works like The Witch that representations of the character shed both the idea of the “good or bad witch” and the unidimensional approaches to the witch’s image, making possible a resistance that was denied to her historical counterpart. The message is still there, constant, and powerful: witches-women with mysterious abilities and powers are always threatening. After all, they are women of great strength, who, through their spells and curses, exhibit the ability to take on masculine powers, the possibility of creating a secret community that can only be revealed to initiates, and live outside power structures. In this way, the witches’ world becomes a space in which femininity can be completely developed and offers a feminine creative potential that is not viable in any other context.

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In conclusion, films like The Witch prove that these depictions of the monstrous feminine are vital because they serve as a mirror for our society. The film fearlessly confronts what is often shunned or unsettling, exploring the realms of terror, uniqueness, and the unconventional. Alongside, Eggers highlights that witch hunts might belong to the past, but the ideologies that fueled them remain influential in modern society. Throughout history, women and the feminine have been particularly identified with “Otherness,” the very concept upon which patriarchy has supported male rule. Therefore, female monsters play a crucial role in facilitating transformative societal shifts. As gender and monstrosity are cultural constructions tied to the ideological norms of each society within a specific historical period, monstrous beings reflect and embody generic and sexual prejudices. Thus, Eggers’ elevation of the witch and reclamation of her as a symbol of power denounce and reject the continuity of control and brutality on the female body, reveals a persistent demonization of wicked women in contemporary society and incites resistance.

References Argento, Dario, dir. 1974. Suspiria. Italy: Produzioni Atlas Consorziate. Aster, Ari, dir. 2019. Midsommar. A24. Basset, Laura. 2022. In Leaked Abortion Decision, Justice Alito Relies on Jurist Who Supported Marital Rape, Executed ‘Witches.’ Jezebel, May 3. https:// jezebel.com/supreme-­c ourt-­r oe-­v -­w ade-­d raft-­c ites-­s ir-­m atthew-­h ale-­ 1848872890. Bovenschen, Silvia. 1978. The Contemporary Witch, the Historical Witch and the Witch Myth: The Witch, Subject of the Appropriation of Nature and Object of the Domination of Nature. New German Critique 5: 82–119. Briefel, Aviva. 2019. Devil in the Details: The Uncanny History of The Witch (2015). Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal 49 (1): 4–20. Buckley, Chloé Germaine. 2019. Witches, ‘Bitches’ or Feminist Trailblazers? The Witch in Folk Horror Cinema. Revenant Journal 4: 22–42. https://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/witches-­bitches-­or-­feminist-­trailblazers-­the-­witch-­in-­ folk-­horror-­cinema-­chloe-­germaine-­buckley/. Carroll, Chloe. 2019. ‘Wouldst Thou like to Live Deliciously?’: Female Persecution and Redemption in The Witch. Frames Cinema Journal. Magical Women, Witches & Healers 16. http://framescinemajournal.com/article/wouldst-­thou-­ like-­to-­live-­deliciously-­female-­persecution-­and-­redemption-­in-­the-­witch/. Christensen, Benjamin, dir. 1922. Häxan. AB Svensk Filmindustri, Janus Films.

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Chusna, Aidatul, and Shofi Mahmudah. 2018. Female Monsters: Figuring Female Transgression in Jennifer’s Body (2009) and The Witch (2013). Humaniora 30 (1): 10–16. Clover, Carol J. [1992] 2015. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London; New York: Routledge. Eggers, Robert, dir. 2015. The Witch: A New England Folk Tale. A24. Fleming, Andrew, dir. 1996. The Craft. Columbia Pictures. Fleming, Victor, dir. 1939. The Wizard of Oz. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Freud, Sigmund. 2007. The Psychology of Love. New York: Penguin. Greene, Heather. 2018. Bell, Book, and Camera: A Critical History of Witches in American Film and Television. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. Haggard, Piers, dir. 1971. The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Tigon British Film Productions. Hardy, Robin, dir. 1973. The Wicker Man. British Lion Films. Hasday, Jill Elaine. 2022. On Roe, Alito Cites a Judge Who Treated Women as Witches and Property. The Washington Post, May 9. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/09/alito-­roe-­sir-­matthew-­hale-­misogynist/. Janisse, Kier-La, dir. 2021. Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror. Severin Films. Jardine, Rachel, dir. 2010. A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss. BBC Four. Jóhansson, Valdimar, dir. 2021. Lamb. Sena and TriArt film. Joho, Jess. 2016. The Witch Isn’t an Empowerment Narrative and That’s Why It’s Great. Kill Screen, February 23. https://killscreen.com/previously/articles/ the-­witch-­isnt-­an-­empowerment-­narrative-­and-­thats-­why-­its-­great/. Kors, Alan Charles, and Edward Peters. 2001. Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700: A Documentary History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Larner, Christina. 1987. Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Michelet, Jules, and A.R.  Allinson. 2017. Satanism and Witchcraft. Texas: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. Millar, Edward, and John Semley. 2019. Children of the Wicker Man: Anti-­ Enlightenment and the Folk Horror Revival. The Baffler, July 15. https:// thebaffler.com/latest/children-­of-­the-­wicker-­man-­millar-­semley. Miller, George, dir. 1987. The Witches of Eastwick. Warner Bros. Pictures. Myrick, Daniel, and Eduardo Sánchez, dirs. 1999. The Blair Witch Project. Haxan Films. Na Hong-jin, dir. 2016. The Wailing. 20th Century Fox.

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North, Anna. 2016. The Witching Season. New York Times, October 22. https:// www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/opinion/sunday/the-­witching-­season.html. Paciorek, Andy. 2018. Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies, Essays & Interviews. Durham, UK: Wyrd Harvest Press. Pedraza, Pilar. 2014. Brujas, sapos y aquelarres. Madrid: Valdemar. Purkiss, Diane. 1996. The Witch in History. London and New York: Routledge. Quine, Richard, dir. 1958. Bell, Book, and Candle. Columbia Pictures. Reeves, Michael, dir. 1968. Witchfinder General. Tigon British Film Productions. Reis, Elizabeth. 1999. Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Roeg, Nicholas, dir. 1990. The Witches. Lorimar Film Entertainment. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur Publishing. Twitchell, James B. 1983. The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (1983). Ohio: Discover Books. Wheatley, Ben, dir. 2011. Kill List. IFC Films. Williams, Linda. 1984. When the Woman Looks. In Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Mary Anne Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams, 83–99. Frederick, MD: American Film Institute/University Publications of America. Zwissler, Laurel. 2018. ‘I Am That Very Witch’: On The Witch, Feminism, and Not Surviving Patriarchy. Journal of Religion & Film 22 (3).

CHAPTER 7

Decay and Fear: Take Shelter (2011) as Social Horror Nisa Harika Güzel Köşker

In recent years, eco-horror, as part of the social horror movie genre, has expressed radical perspectives about the human impact on nature in American cinema. The increasing recognition of the fact that the present state and future of the biosphere are closely linked to human health has led movie makers to come up with novel ways of illustrating this social and ecological concern. Since Transcendentalism, nature in the American philosophical tradition has been construed as the sole cure for all the ills that industrial capitalism and uneven urbanization cause. Building upon the benign and therapeutic aspects of nature, American Transcendentalists detected the severe incongruity between urban life and life in nature to draw the attention of nineteenth-century readers to the untimely corrosion of nature and human life as early as the 1800s. Ralph Waldo Emerson lucidly worded this disparity in his seminal prose narrative Nature (1836),

N. H. Güzel Köşker (*) Ankara University, Ankara, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53278-8_7

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in which nature takes the mold of a permutation and a mixture of delight and apprehension as follows: “crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear” (Emerson [1836] 2009, 17). Merging the connotations of wilderness with various overtones of human fear and pleasure at the sight of incredibly reparative means of nature, Emerson highlights that “the power to produce this delight” lies in the joint capacity and harmony of both nature and human beings (18). Nonetheless, human damage to nature and indifference in the face of its deterioration have replaced all the previous optimistic cultural associations about nature with their opposing counterparts in the American consciousness. As nature has been gradually exposed to visibly amounting human destruction in the last couple of decades and as the consequences of this fact have become even more visible and life-threatening, a need for a more comprehensive perception of ecology has rendered itself more urgent. Horror movies focusing on ecological problems have widened the scope for environmental and social issues to be reconsidered from a distinct perspective, offering several ways for the audience to evaluate this intertwined relationship between human damage to nature and its disastrous consequences. As such, this chapter explores the ways in which Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter (2011) is a striking cinematographic epitome of the rising apprehension for the ecological problems based on human damage on Earth. Looking for better ways to imagine the relationship between nature and human life, the movie transcends the expectation of a mundane apocalyptic dramatization of the end of the world in its portrayal of the connection between human damage to nature and the impact of social constructs such as capitalist materialism and patriarchy on individuals. In such a web of intersecting forces, the movie’s emphasis on the concern for ecological decay parallels the displacements and transformations the movie characters go through in their private and social lives. Portraying the male protagonist as the head of the family under extreme psychological pressure in relation to an impending natural crisis, Take Shelter further explores the contingent connection between the destruction of nature and social constructs such as gender or family as part of problems produced by capitalist patriarchy in American society. That Take Shelter combines the critical problems of ecological deterioration and impositions posed on gender relations by patriarchy with its specific focus on a nuclear American family, provides yet another way to view the movie through a perspective that

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incorporates ecological apocalypse and the question of gender, the loss of female resourcefulness in the struggle to remain alive in a capitalist patriarchal social structure. The relation between nature and femininity, as it has long been reiterated by many ecofeminist critics so far,1 with respect to the ability to cope resourcefully with the extraordinary or unusual conditions in Take Shelter has gone unnoticed so far in the criticism of the movie as the focus was more on the apocalyptic representations of the storm. Though this synchronized damage has proved itself as the initial and central critical stance of ecofeminist scholars, it can be argued that the movie adds to this concern the critique of American capitalism and its unfair quotidian practices in the life of ordinary people who feel oppressed under its gross influence. The movie reminds the audience of the fundamental ecofeminist conjecture that patriarchy has been oppressive both on the female gender and nature concurrently, destroying sources, powers, and resourcefulness of women and nature. Nature in the movie as a reacting force also informs the immediacy of cultural conflicts that reflect all these social tribulations between the oppressor and the oppressed or barriers set before nature, and the oppressed individuals and groups. The movie hence epitomizes the exploitation of the human and nonhuman environment, and all the subversive points problematized in the movie challenge the amnesia to which humans have long been exposed by patriarchy. Digging down to the social commentary that the combination of such elements offers, Take Shelter thus examines the critical contingency between the oppressive outcomes of the capitalist patriarchy and the simultaneous devaluation of nature and women and all the ensuing cultural clashes. Though the relationality between gender and Nature, together with their destruction, has been the initial point of argument in ecofeminist theory, the movie still persistently draws attention to this contingent link with a focus on the capitalist patriarchy’s dysfunctional and oppressive implementations. As Fredric Jameson argues, “it seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the Earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism” (1994, xii). Take Shelter hence urges its audience to 1  As Karen J. Warren indicates, due to all forms of male dominance, “Nature is a feminist issue,” an idea that has also been deployed as the “slogan of ecofeminism” (2000, 1). Not only women or segregated groups, but all subordinate or “unjustifiably dominated” groups including “animals, forests, the land” as well as “nonhuman animals, plants, and ecosystems,” have been “unjustifiably exploited and dominated” within “unjustifiable relationships and systems of domination and subordination” (1).

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consider what such a link between oppressive social mechanisms and “environmental interpretation” means, since it “requires us to rethink our assumptions about the nature of representation, reference, metaphor, characterization, personae, and canonicity” (Buell 1995, 2).

Anxiety and Loss of Resources Released in 2011, three years after the Great Recession of 2008 and two years after the Bush administration came to its end, Take Shelter highlights the critical contingency among human life, nature, and their future. Though Nichols’s work has been widely viewed as a movie that delved into the idea of apocalypse, it prominently features the significance of the human damage to nature and the exploitation of female resourcefulness in equal measures. That the movie combines the psychology of survival with social issues highlights the challenging socioeconomic constructs, such as patriarchy and capitalism that lead to the deterioration of nature and human life. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari contend, capitalism “has haunted all forms of society, but it haunts them as their terrifying nightmare, it is the dread they feel of a flow that would elude their codes” (1983, 140) in a land where the Earth has become “the primitive, savage unity of desire and production” (1983, 140). Take Shelter epitomizes how the rupture in the balance which has long been imagined to be established between humans and nature has been widened over centuries by human-­ induced hazard, giving way to the urgency for their expression and elaboration. Thus, in Louis Althusser’s terms, both capitalism and patriarchy in the movie materialize as the ruling forces in the lives of the ordinary American people and as forms of ideology that “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (2001, 109). In light of all the critical insights that the movie offers, Take Shelter can be construed as an intriguing blend of ecological and psychological horror that presents the audience with questions about the exploitation of nature, ecological damage as well as human confinement, and the ensuing psychological disorders. Though the movie seems to center on the main character, Curtis, and his psychology and corporeal agitation originating from his nightmares and the threat of an upcoming storm, it pinpoints a variety of issues that combine social issues such as patriarchy’s oppression of nature and women and the loss of nature’s sources and female resourcefulness, and the related sociocultural concerns. The recurrent threat of the storm in Curtis’s nightmares discloses the movie’s tendency to combine

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nature’s reaction and the characters’ stress and anxiety in the face of social and ecological constraints. In this sense, Take Shelter lays bare a degree of consciousness with a variety of issues that the audience can register all at once. The implications of the patriarchal representations of powerful masculinity in Curtis’s characterization—though he loses this sturdy and secure image of himself in the course of the cinematic diegesis—and his wife Samantha’s relatively passive stance in relation to Curtis further point to the breaches in what is presented as a social system or order structured within and by patriarchy. The socioeconomic rupture in the functioning of the capitalist patriarchal system, with its immediate focus on the dysfunctional family with continuous financial struggles, indicates the submissive role of Samantha as the homemaker and Curtis as the head of the family. The fact that Curtis’s actions determine the decisions they take familywise leaves Samantha helpless in her struggle to keep the family intact both psychologically and financially. Since as Paul Santilli maintains, “the experience of horror signifies a breakdown in the symbolic categories and valuations of a culture” and “this experience has ontological significance because in horror the human is exposed to the naked fact of being” (2007, 173), the economic struggle of the family parallels the storm’s intimidating presence in Curtis’s nightmares, which altogether symbolize the ruptures in the symbolic and ecological (dis)order that patriarchy and capitalism have long produced. The central conflict around which the various structures cohere is Curtis’s anxiety or mental restlessness as the horror narrative of the movie takes the audience through his mind and nightmares. Nichols’s movie is initially approached from a perspective that combines the idea of apocalypse and ecology. Yet, considering the connection between Curtis’s amounting agitation and his relation to his wife, the movie is further engaged with the dysfunctional familial affairs as part of restrictive gender norms and patriarchy’s oppressive mechanisms which are closely linked to these initial concerns. The movie’s focus on such an interrelation also provides insight into the link between restrictive gender norms and an apocalyptic representation of the ecological crisis. Critic Amy Wallace discusses that “at its core, the film, which Nichols wrote as he was starting a family, is about the anxiety that comes with responsibility or having something to lose” (Wallace 2016). Though this commentary seems to be related to Nichols’s private concerns, it in fact explains Nichols’s fascination with ambiguity that pervades Take Shelter. As Wallace further contends, “Nichols is fascinated by people’s threshold for ambiguity—with less

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spelled out, the audience gets more engaged” (2016). Through the link of ambiguity that is conjured up in the impending storm and Curtis’s mental restlessness, Take Shelter identifies a variety of social issues such as familial dysfunction, economic inequality, social restrictions, cultural conflicts, and ecological degeneration. Another critic, Agnes Woolley, aptly discusses in her article that Take Shelter “dramatizes the imaginative impasse that prevents collective action over environmental degradation by denying the film’s viewers a secure epistemological framework through which to interpret events” (2014, 177). Woolley maintains that such an intuitive element “presents a challenge to the rationalist discourses that have shaped humanity’s relationship to nature historically, which are further destabilized by Nichols’s aesthetic and generic ambiguity” (177). Woolley calls what Wallace (2016) names “ambiguity” the “alternative forms of knowledge arising from intuition and insight, presented here as quasi-prophetic” as opposed to the “empirical, evidence-based rhetoric in which climate change is most often couched” (2014, 177). As the central conflict in the movie, Curtis’s anxiety, reflected in his nightmares and mental disorder, challenges the reader to reconsider how this state of locating the senses of the audience on the threshold operates to challenge the amnesia of the violence that patriarchy has long exerted over individuals and nature in numerous ways. Just as it throws the audience’s senses into a disconcerting crisis until the end of the film, it also keeps blurring the line between reality and fantasy, making the audience feel unsure about Curtis’s dreams and reality itself. The dubious and even intangible portrayal of the existence of the storm as the primary element of ecological horror dislocates the perceptions of the audience as well about its indefinite nature or orientation until the very end of the movie. Thus, this ambiguity moves Take Shelter to a critical space that qualifies it as more than “a paranoid, apocalyptic tale that explored what a man will do to protect the ones he loves” (Wallace), rendering it on the social level an epitome of ecohorror that points to a rupture in the symbolic order. In view of the arguments of the ecohorror criticism, Take Shelter as a cinematic form can be viewed as one of the instances in which “nature strikes back against humans as punishment for environmental disruption” (Rust and Soles 2014, 509). Christy Tidwell defines ecohorror as “narratives in which nature enacts violence on humans in response to the damage caused by human behaviors,” contending that “in this figuration, nature is out there, separate from humanity” (2014, 538). Considering such loss of

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connection, the ambiguity of the strange storm and its ensuing terror in Curtis’s life pose the question of whether “nature is the enemy of humanity” (538). Nevertheless, beyond such a concern, as Lance Newman contends, writing about nature is “not a stable form of reaction to a stable problem (the ideologically driven human domination of nature). It is a dynamic tradition of response to the rise and development of the capitalist ecosocial order” (2002, 18–19). Take Shelter’s stance towards environmental decay proves “how nature writers see and understand nature has everything to do with how they see and understand the society whose relations with it they hope to change” (18–19). In its representations of natural and social problems, the narrative of the movie traces already existing and potential vulnerabilities to the question of deteriorating environment—the alterations in climate with the example of the storm—and its terrifying response back to human life, and still, it concurrently explores the social and gender issues as it underlines the parallel oppression of humans and nature. Hence, Take Shelter, as a social thriller, additionally gives voice to the representations of femininity as part of the criticism of social order that is, in fact, disorderly as it proves itself in the dysfunctional relations of the family members. As David Greven argues, modern horror “repurposes defunct Hollywood genres while serving as a repository of unresolved anxieties within those genres, and gives contemporary expression to ongoing cultural conflicts over gender, sexuality, and the family” (2011, 12–13). The impact of patriarchy is obvious in the structure of the family, with Curtis at the center of every decision he makes for the family. Samantha’s relatively compliant role, on the other hand, leads to a loss of her energy that parallels nature’s loss of vitality and threatening response in the form of a storm. Through Curtis’s psychological condition, the movie effectively dramatizes the critical issues of human damage to nature and nature’s multifarious responses as destructive consequences of this harm. The movie abounds with images of corrosion and decline in nature as opposed to the deterioration of human health and dwellings such as home and shelter, as a constant reminder of the human harm to nature and their displacement. The contingent link between the possibility of survival and potential ways to avoid such decay and dispossession is laid bare in Curtis’s possible diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and his daughter Hannah’s deafness, which altogether conjures a narrative dwelling for the audience through which to view and critique the exploitation of nature. The blurred boundary between reality and Curtis’s nightmares/delusions/hallucinations and

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Hannah’s silence throws the audience into a crisis, urging them to question the potential reasons for both nature’s responses and Curtis’s psychological restlessness. Curtis’s emergency states are unsettling, stressful, and traumatic for him, his family, and the audience. Hannah’s deafness further operates as a metaphor for the human-induced damage and human unresponsiveness to this destruction. The movie thus positions nature as a significant entity in Curtis’s traumas. The startling relation between Curtis’s psychological disorder and the impossibility of settling down in a dwelling as he struggles to build a shelter brings to the surface the disconnection of humans from Earth. The overarching anxiety qualifying Curtis’s nightmares is a combination of displacement and horror emerging with the approaching storm. Take Shelter opens with a backdrop of a big old tree whose leaves have become one with the sky. The point where the leaves of the tree meet the sky becomes a manifest sign of the embodiment of nature that is under threat when oily raindrops start falling on Curtis’s palm. The very first ambiguity that the movie poses in the initial scene confounds the audience as to whether the thick, oily rain and black clouds are real or not, with a focus on the shift in the fast-changing scenery. From the very beginning, the sharp contrast between the gray tones of the sky—the threat the weather poses—and the scenes of the serenity of nature is always evident. Even when the audience sees the blissful moments of the family in the earlier scenes, there appears a tinge of peril that may give rise to a potential rupture in the harmonious family picture. The traces of such a threat posed by the weather changes materialize in Curtis’s mind as a form of danger when he listens to the news broadcasted at times on TV. In another scene, the tension in the movie rises when one of Samantha’s friends sees Hannah playing with a stick with a rusty screw on it while Samantha is chatting with them in the house. Such small things are connected to the serious problems between Curtis and Samantha: the stick in fact belongs to the heap of wood and hardware that Curtis is using to build the shelter. For Samantha, the heap is not meant to be there, while for Curtis, it symbolizes escape from danger. The weather also acts as the omen of their lack of communication as Curtis becomes more and more immersed in his nightmares and keeps postponing an explanation to Samantha. The things that conjure fractures in their lives create what may seem confusing to Curtis and Samantha, yet they are the very things that may clarify the ongoing ambiguity in the end. The storm gives way to an understanding of how nature works and how manifold human interventions have impaired

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the workings of nature. The forms that nature takes in the movie reflect both its decay and the restlessness of the characters in various ways. When Curtis notices the gray clouds while he is at work, he is perplexed as these clouds soon turn into heavy rain, which leads to Curtis and his coworkers having to stop working on the construction site. This moment of heavy rain is also when Samantha teaches Hannah to spell the word storm in sign language in front of the window to make it a part of Hannah’s memory. Hannah’s deafness, as a metaphor for humans’ indifference to the deteriorating environment, climate change, and the misuse and exploitation of Earth resources, can also be viewed as a hindrance to Curtis’s perception of reality. Samantha and Curtis’s sensitivity in replicating Hannah’s deafness when they say they are still whispering and still taking off their boots during her sleep is indicative of the opposition between nature’s own way of functioning and the artificial interruptions with its natural course. Hannah’s sensory disability can be regarded as the lost link between nature and humans, as well as the human failure to perceive harm. Thus, that Hannah still “cannot connect” (Nichols 2011), as Samantha articulates, with other kids signifies less about Hannah’s disability than about the question of sympathy and socialization among kids and adults, just like the human failure to understand nature’s responses to all sorts of human-­ induced decay. Looming as the most visible element of ecohorror, the storm as part of the constant apocalyptic overtone in the movie parallels the rise in Curtis’s mental infirmity. Curtis’s audial and visual hallucinations appear as impairments that blur his vision of reality and decompose his bodily health. The black clouds for Curtis and the audience alike become even more intimidating when they reappear more menacingly in Curtis’s nightmares and as his nightmares provoke psychological and corporeal aftereffects. In his first nightmare, Curtis sees an approaching storm together with the whirlwind while tidying up the scrap heap in the backyard. As the storm approaches, their dog, Red, becomes aggressive and bites Curtis’s hand after unleashing itself. The effect of the nightmare is so powerful that Curtis still feels the pain in his arm when he wakes up and does not want Red to play with Hannah in the morning. He is disturbed both psychologically and somatically as the nightmare gets nerve-wracking with the links he forms between his nightmares and real life. He yells unreasonably at the breakfast table when Hannah plays with Red and leaves the house without eating. Curtis conveys the corporeal effects of Red’s bite in his nightmare to his workplace, where the tension and fear caused by the

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uncontrollable weather are also manifest. In the construction company Curtis works for, Curtis’s boss’s concern over the rain and its duration reveals his anxiety about losing time as the timing of the construction depends on the weather. While Curtis focuses on the pain in his arm, his boss is insensitively concerned about the construction schedule and therefore the money. Though his boss states that they cannot have control over the weather, he gets angry as Curtis says that they could not finish the work in the East 82nd construction area due to a two-hour-long rain. His boss’s command to complete construction by the end of the day increases Curtis’s anxiety even more and makes him feel more intimidated by the weather. Just like the black clouds that act as reminders of decay and doom, the company’s economy that is dependent on the weather endangers the workers’ jobs and survival in the capitalist system. The dependency of the business on the damage produced in nature is indicative of the ongoing process of degeneration. As is apparent in Curtis’s boss’s talk, destructive human interruption with the workings of nature reduces chances for survival, leading to individual and social unrest, ecological decay, and potential disasters. Curtis and his fellow workers’ relation to their work and the company’s demands can be regarded as an appropriation of humans to the demands of capitalist industrialism. No matter how much they earn, their work never suffices to make the living they dream of, leaving them without the value of their labor. Arguing that ideologies are encoded in distinct forms of social structures of human life, Deleuze and Guattari maintain that capitalism “institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities, thereby attempting, as best it can, to recode, to rechannel persons who have been defined in terms of abstract quantities” (1983, 34). In capitalist social structures then, “everything returns or recurs: States, nations, families. That is what makes the ideology of capitalism ‘a motley painting of everything that has ever been believed’” (34). This assemblage of the things that capitalism embraces also refers to people’s (dis)belief in the very institutions of the state on a larger scale and the family on the micro level. The very idea of the belief structures is what humans cling to for a sense of belonging, while it is also discernable that the same socioeconomic constructs detach humans from nature as they urge them to serve destructive purposes. The fact that the functioning of the construction site of the company depends on the weather institutes the economic relation of humans to nature. As humans have separated themselves more and more from nature by the very acts of contaminating

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and destroying it, nature has become responsive to all human mistreatment and stripped them of its benevolence and sources. The tension arising from the conflict between the weather and Curtis’s boss’s insistence stands as an obstacle to the completion of the work for Curtis. Curtis’s efforts to carry out the construction are again interrupted by the breakdown of one fragment of the machine and the flocks of birds that disturb him. This disturbance comes as a response to his increasing sensitivity to the harrowing changes he detects in the environment. He discerns the flocks of birds that never flew in such an unusual manner, whereas his friend, Dewart, does not notice them at all. Curtis’s sensitivity grows into an alertness that provides him with the ability to perceive the changes in the weather, and that contributes to the impact of the nightmares and impairment in his perception of reality. The world around Curtis no longer seems coherent in space and time. That the perspective concentrates on Curtis’s attention to the birds and the threatening sky highlights the overlooked role of the decomposing nature. The striking parallel between the corporeal workings and psychological aspects of the human body, as represented in the characterization of Curtis and natural degeneration is reinforced in a similar fashion. Curtis’s metabolism and similarly nature grow more responsive to any sort of decomposition in this process as he loses power and control over his perceptive abilities. With a gradual withdrawal from reality, his psychological immersion in the threat of the storm becomes even more visible. Curtis loses his capacity to communicate with people, as is illustrated in the parents’ conference scene. Curtis’s muddy boots, which he could not find the time to change as he was late for the meeting, present a sharp contrast with the clean surroundings of Hannah’s school. The sign language that Curtis needs to acquire is symbolic of the consciousness that he needs to gain in relation to his own deteriorating health and communicative qualities. That Samantha has already learned sign language provides her with a vision and an insight into Hannah’s psychological needs that help them communicate easily. Curtis seems to have acquired the sign language only in his second nightmare, in which he crashes the car in the middle of the oily rain and the storm that altogether make his vision imperfect. He hits his head on the steering wheel and tries hard to regain consciousness as he hears the loud and explosive sound of the thunder and strangers hitting the car window. The nightmare becomes even more suffocating when a stranger with a blurred face breaks into the car and tries to strangulate Curtis, and another person takes hold of Hannah and takes her out of the

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car. With this torturing feeling of being choked, it becomes much harder for Curtis to wake up, mainly because he is still under the impact of the tormenting sensation, and he is wringing wet with sweat. After this nightmare, Curtis builds fences for Red to keep him under control and out of Hannah’s way, using the shelter in the backyard to take measures. The news about the gas clouds that echo in the household adds to Curtis’s anxiety after this nightmare. When Curtis hears about an eleven-­ hour confinement of the people at Burkesville after the gas clouds spread around the six-acre property, his anxiety grows. The news reports that the escape from the property was almost impossible because of the wreckage, and Walter Jacobs’s wife and brother-in-law were found dead, though the rescue teams made several attempts to save the Jacobs family. Walter Jacobs is said to have survived despite an eleven-hour exposure to the gas cloud. Curtis repeats the words “eleven hours and no way out” (Nichols 2011) to be able to believe in the authenticity of the event, while Samantha seems to be comparatively less responsive to the incident when she just utters the word “awful” (Nichols 2011) without ever watching TV. This apprehension that appears with this news aggravates after the third nightmare, which becomes a critical turning point in Curtis’s life as it lucidly materializes the corporeal effects of his degenerating psychology. After he hears the strong sound of thunder and sees Hannah watching the muddy rain in front of the window, where he notices a stranger through an imperfect vision due to the heavy rain, the tension peculiar to his nightmares gets higher and higher as once again another stranger attempts to break into the house, the earth begins to tremble, and all furniture rises into the air. Curtis’s similar reaction to this nightmare brings him face to face with the same sentiment of displacement and suffocation. Now, he has Hannah in his arms, and with such an image in his mind, he wakes up scared to death. Additionally, this time, the somatic effects are to be observed more severely as he urinates in the bed out of fear. This specific incident urges Curtis to see Dr. Shannon and pushes the line between reality and vagueness, which has been more blurred by his nightmares, into a potential point of resolution at the end. All these gradually worsening nightmares unsurprisingly damage Curtis and Samantha’s relationship. Curtis draws away from Samantha as her questions agitate him. Curtis’s sharing his restlessness only with the doctor is more than a preference: he relates to the doctor that he needs medication, defining Red’s attack as having left a pain in his arm that does not go away. Leaving the doctor with a prescription for sedatives and late for

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the family lunch, Curtis seems to lose his mental balance and forgets to attend the meeting, later announcing to the family members emphatically that he will build a shelter. Though he wishes to dig down to the root of his mental problem after seeing the doctor by following its genetic legacy from his mother’s diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, his nightmares lead him to develop an obsession with the idea of the shelter, which seems to help him escape the symptoms and enhance his motivation. Going to the public library with Hannah and putting her to reading, he takes the book “Understanding Mental Illness: Research and Clinical Practice” (Nichols 2011) to find some clarity; nevertheless, his agitation intensifies, and he buys canned food and first aid essentials to be stored in the shelter. In all of Curtis’s attempts to build a shelter, the movie gives voice to the question of survival in the affinity it forms with Curtis’s illness. As he thinks over the amount of conserved food needed to live for a week in a shelter or asks the salesman for the newest gas mask (Nichols 2011), Curtis feels immersed in the struggle to create a space for survival where he and his family can remain alive. The problematization of the issue of survival in relation to the threat of the storm in the movie also draws the audience’s attention to the contrast between urbanization and nature and the ensuing problems caused by socioeconomic processes whereby people feel lost in the chaotic urban life. Curtis’s wish to take a bank loan to build the shelter pushes him to mortgage his own house despite the high-interest rates and thus merely makes him less in control. When he sees lightning while driving, Curtis questions whether he is the only one who sees the lightning. The audience likewise cannot help pondering on the ambiguity caused by the duality between reality as seen by other characters and Curtis’s potential hallucinations. Furthermore, though Curtis gets sound sleep for a little after receiving the medical treatment, his sensitivity grows as he seems to hallucinate, hearing thunder on the construction site when there are no clouds in the clear sky, and everything seems calm to Dewart. Somatic responses emerge again with nausea and vomiting, at the end of which he finds himself before a container trying to throw up. In another scene where he has a seizure and bleeds during his sleep, Curtis again feels suffocated; however, he does not want Samantha to call 911. He later explains to Samantha that he dreams of powerful thunder, thick, oily rain, and people fighting. In this dream, he tells Samantha, he saw Dewart attacking him with a pickaxe and hurting his leg. Curtis tells Samantha that it is hard to explain and reason out all these happenings since he states that this is not only a dream but a feeling (Nichols 2011).

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Considering his dreams and their somatic outcomes, Curtis’s mental illness functions as a metaphor for an acuity to perceive the discrepancies between reality and hallucinations (or delusions), whose roots can also be observed in the consequences of such socioeconomic processes. In his elaboration on the correlation that Deleuze and Guattari form between capitalism and schizophrenia, Brian Massumi clarifies that The “schizophrenia” Deleuze and Guattari embrace is not a pathological condition. For them, the clinical schizophrenic’s debilitating detachment from the world is a quelled attempt to engage it in unimagined ways. Schizophrenia as a positive process is inventive connection, expansion rather than withdrawal. Schizophrenia is the enlargement of life’s limits through the pragmatic proliferation of concepts. (1992, 1)

Though Curtis’s mental illness has not been diagnosed clearly in the movie, the clinical findings of the physicians he sees point to the shared legacy of schizophrenia from his mother. Upon visiting his mother after Dr. Shannon’s advice, Curtis detects the similarities between his mother’s symptoms and his and realizes how oppressed his mother was in her marriage. She relates that life was troublesome when every burden was on her shoulders (Nichols 2011). While his mother’s words refer to the oppressive mechanisms of patriarchy, they also clarify how desperate she was and how vulnerable she has become as a result of the loss of her resourcefulness due to this subjugation in her marriage. Similarly, the lack of communication between Curtis and Samantha drains Samantha’s strength away, leaving her feeble and unable to act on her own in family issues. Like Curtis, she is struggling against the oppressive apparatuses of capitalism, though she works hard to comply with the workings of the system for Hannah’s implant treatment. She is loving, caring, and nurturing as is expected of her socially, conforming to her role to maintain an ideal harmonious family. Though her role as a resourceful wife and mother is foregrounded at the beginning, Samantha’s creativity and productive acts that support the family financially do not suffice when Curtis starts digging down the earth to build the shelter. In this sense, Curtis’s explanation of his nightmares and the sentiment of an undefinable horror are but unintelligible reasonings for Samantha, yet Curtis feels psychologically dispossessed due to the changes in his life in a fashion he has never felt before. Curtis’s feeling of displacement from the Earth with the omnipresent fear of the storm and his failure to maintain his roles as a father, husband,

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and worker enhance the impact of his nightmares on his well-being. The distance Curtis has gained from his family and business further materializes in the dream in which Samantha is seen soaking wet in her dress in the kitchen on a stormy and rainy evening. The knife they both look at on the kitchen counter foreshadows the tension between them in the next scene, where his boss fires Curtis for taking the work machines from the construction site without permission. The tension rises when the camera focuses on Curtis shaking his head slowly as if to say no to Samantha. Curtis’s gradual disengagement from his job and the financial struggles of the family are parts of a larger capitalist circulation connected to Curtis’s employer’s effort to keep his company safe by firing Curtis. Curtis’s inconsiderate behavior that gets him fired, such as conflict with his boss, his taking the caterpillar out of the construction site, and his disregard of Samantha’s decisions exasperate Samantha as they eventually lead to the loss of health insurance for Hannah’s treatment. Consciously or unconsciously because of his illness, Curtis ignores Samantha, making decisions on his own without ever asking her, whereas Samantha struggles to maintain the family on both financial and spiritual terms. Though he knows about the expenses that are coming up, Curtis cannot help losing the money, piling up more loans, and risking Hannah’s treatment. Even when Curtis explains to Samantha his disorder, Samantha’s energy seems to be drained away by all these troubles. Though she tells her friend they are fine, she knows deep inside that Curtis is not acting reasonably. Since Samantha lost her resourcefulness and power to continue amid all these crises in her life, she asks Curtis’s brother, Kyle, to contact Curtis; however, Curtis seems to have already lost his connection with his brother, which also embitters the existing familial disconnection. Kyle’s attempts to convince Curtis to stop building the shelter are futile. At the same time, Kyle’s statement as to the banks’ insensitive attitude towards people is another testimony to the harsh workings of the capitalist system that merely values money by devaluing people. The fact that only two weeks are left for the termination of the health insurance for Hannah’s treatment, and that human health is connected to money through health insurance also materialize as trouble for survival when Curtis gets fired. His boss clarifies that Curtis has broken many rules and he would go bankrupt if he did not let him go. The risks and value of the economy as it is appraised by the employer in essence compose the fundamental part of the market economy and the materiality of American capitalism. Curtis’s disharmonious connection to his work proves to his employer that each

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personal act has substantial consequences in the capitalist circulation that ceaselessly pursues economic progress regardless of individual wants. From the employers’ perspective, Curtis’s confusion brings stagnancy and risks the pace of the business, the very circulatory act of which guarantees its operation and improvement. In this sense, the intimidating storm, around which Curtis’s anxieties gather, reflects the disconcerting nature of capitalism. The feeling of displacement Curtis experiences thus suggests another point of critique for the idea of home. Curtis’s insistence on building the shelter points to the reversal of human habitats, challenging the audience’s expectations about the conventional image of the human settlement in a harmonious relation to nature. The Earth, in Curtis’s nightmares and hallucinations, with all its natural phenomena, appears as a mere danger for humans. Curtis’s retreat is a symbolic representation of a threatening withdrawal of all the human species from nature. Considering the ecological context, the Earth is to be the place where humans are supposed to live without any reservations and in harmony with nature; however, the Earth has become “the surface on which the whole process of production is inscribed, on which the forces and means of labor are recorded, and the agents and the products distributed.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 140–141). As nature has long been transformed into a space where it has become difficult to lead a life with the construction of urban areas, it has lost its natural entity and given way to the supremacy of socioeconomic imperatives and demands. Since the social structure incorporated into the once pristine nature has become a horrendous nightmare for Curtis, and because of his destabilizing nightmares, he distances himself from his family and people, feeling increasingly dispossessed and displaced. Samantha’s efforts are discernable in the cinematic diegesis the movie composes in relation to the idea of femininity. While Curtis’s deteriorating health leads to his dissociation from the conventional constructs of powerful masculinity, Samantha gains insight into the workings of capitalism in her struggle to maintain harmony in their lives and Hannah’s healthcare. Initially, she is characterized as a representative of the empowered woman who seems to transcend the symbolic social order. Her belief in the goodness the beach condo may bring to their lives, and her efforts to get out of the social order of the urban space dovetail with her struggles to settle down in the more natural setting of the countryside. Hannah’s deafness gives shape to Samantha’s plans about their house as well. She looks for a new home where Hannah does not need to cross the street, an effort that

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channels her struggles to increase her and her daughters’ perceptiveness and connection to her surroundings. Getting permission for Hannah’s implant surgery is another problem Samantha faces: she knows that she needs to fight for the implant operation, as very few health insurance companies will cover the surgery, which they cannot afford in their current financial condition. She calls the eight hundred numbers for weeks to reach the insurance company to ask for the approval of the treatment. Though Samantha’s relation to nature may seem to be an extension of the conventional understanding of duality that is traditionally thought to exist between nature and women, Samantha’s perceptiveness of nature violates the conformist bounds of masculinity’s desire to control it. In “patriarchy,” where “absence and silence are normative” (Ruether 1985, x), her insightfulness and reparative actions stand in sharp contrast with Curtis’s profession as a worker for a company that digs up holes on Earth, changes, and disrupts the natural balance. Furthermore, Curtis’s relation to his work, together with his impairing nightmares opposed to Samantha’s saving money for the beach house through her handwork tailoring clothes, are all at the center of the dynamic economy that is indispensable for survival in the capitalist social structures. Although Curtis’s illness drains her energy away, Samantha’s familiarity with sewing and embroidery enables her to gain subjectivity and a means to earn money to make a living, whereas Curtis’s efforts to build a shelter can be viewed as a retreat from the very world Samantha is struggling to survive on. In the face of Curtis’s turbulent life, ridden with nightmares, hallucinations, and visions, Samantha’s interest in creative and productive acts is guiding and vitalizing the dead parts in their life.

Conclusion The claustrophobic shelter experience functions as a replica of the suffocating real world. It is Samantha who urges Curtis to meet the Earth again as she says, “it is over, get the keys, open the door” (Nichols 2011). Torch in his hand, Curtis approaches the door suspiciously, enunciating that he can still hear the storm. It takes time, however, for Curtis to see the reality before opening the door, though Samantha convinces him, articulating that “there is no storm outside” (Nichols 2011). Samantha knows that Curtis should be the one opening the door to save them and to regain his consciousness as she says, “this is something you have to do” (Nichols 2011). The critical moment of encounter with the daylight with the

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lingering warmth of the sunshine is blinding for Curtis after the nerve-­ wracking darkness. It is hard for Samantha to convince Curtis to open the door at such a moment, as his psychological perception of and corporeal reaction to the storm peak. When Curtis is finally able to open the door, the blinding rays of the sunshine and the usual undisturbed flow of life around him relieve him after the overwhelming hours of horror and stress with oxygen masks on their faces. What follows Curtis’s apprehension is Curtis, Samantha, and Hannah embracing one another in peace after Curtis convinces himself that everything is finally fine. Curtis arrives at a point where he listens to and appreciates the doctor’s advice to stay away from the shelter. Though the doctor states that he needs to commit himself to serious treatment at a healthcare facility, he finds comfort in the beach house away from the urban chaos until the last appearance of the storm. The final scene of the approaching storm confirms the movie’s stance in relation to natural decay. It is not until this scene that the movie gives the audience the chance to question Curtis’s disease when the storm is perceived again as evidence that verifies the possibility of such a natural phenomenon. When Hannah and Samantha bear witness to the black clouds with the giant whirlwinds over the ocean and when the oily raindrops fall right on Samantha’s palm, the existence of the storm seems no longer to be questioned or only in Curtis’s imagination. Only after they distance themselves from urban life can Samantha see the storm lucidly. That the camera shoots the windows that mirror the threatening storm through Samantha’s back verifies the credibility of the impending storm, giving way to a vision that disperses the ambiguity in the minds of the audience and the vagueness that Curtis has felt throughout as to the certainty of the storm. Samantha’s confirmation with the word “OK” (Nichols 2011), her affirmative nod, and Hannah’s sign language for the word storm clarify the reality of the natural phenomenon. Hence, Take Shelter again subverts the audience’s expectations as Curtis’s experiences of displacement throughout the movie had been presented as imaginary. Though Take Shelter as an example of social horror does not offer an alternate view to the dominant and oppressive gender norms and practices and the resulting sociocultural conflicts, it effectively gives a critical voice to discussions on these issues, exploring all at the same time how environmental issues are indeed social concerns that form the current cultural and social modes of thought, combining the complex issue of gender and patriarchy’s oppression both on nature and gender relations. Take Shelter thus epitomizes

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that social horror as a cultural form effectively voices the dramatization of unsettled social inhibitions with its specific focus on the renewed relevance of social and gender issues in relation to the ongoing ecological concerns.

References Althusser, Louis, and Ben Brewster. 2001. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: New York University Press. Buell, Lawrence. 1995. The Environmental Imagination:  Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Preface by Michel Foucault. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. [1836] 2009. Nature and Other Essays. New York: Dover Publications Inc. Greven, David. 2011. Representations of Femininity in American Genre Cinema: The Woman’s Film, Film Noir, and Modern Horror. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jameson, Fredric. 1994. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Massumi, Brian. 1992. A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Massachusetts: MIT Press. Newman, Lance. 2002. Marxism and Ecocriticism. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 9 (2): 1–25. Nichols, Jeff, dir. 2011. Take Shelter. Sony Classic Pictures. Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and Mastery of Nature. London and New York: Routledge. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. 1985. Womanguides: Reading Towards a Feminist Theology. Boston: Beacon Press. Rust, Stephen A., and Carter Soles. 2014. Ecohorror Special Cluster: ‘Living in Fear, Living in Dread, Pretty Soon We’ll All Be Dead’. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21 (3): 509–512. Santilli, Paul. 2007. Culture, Evil, and Horror. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 66 (1): 173–194. Tidwell, Christy. 2014. Monstrous Natures Within: Posthuman and New Materialist Ecohorror in Mira Grant’s Parasite. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21 (3): 538–549. Wallace, Amy. 2016. The Mysterious Vision of Jeff Nichols, Hollywood’s Next Blockbuster Auteur. WIRED, January 8. https://www.wired.com/2016/03/ jeff-nichols-midnight-special/.

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Warren, Karren J. 2000. Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Woolley, Agnes. 2014. ‘There’s a Storm Coming!’: Reading the Threat of Climate Change in Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21 (1): 174–191.

PART III

Gender(ed) Anxieties

CHAPTER 8

Antebellum (2020): White Supremacist Masculinities and Black Lives Matters in the Trump Era Juan José Arroyo Paniagua and Steven K. McClain

Culture wars—that is, confrontations between two different groups, which can be labeled respectively as “cultural conservatives or moral traditionalists” and “liberals or cultural progressives” (Hunter 2001, 46)— have been the focus of numerous horror films in the past few years. In this chapter, we examine ways in which Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s

J. J. Arroyo Paniagua (*) Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain ESIC University, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] S. K. McClain Universidad del Norte, Barranquilla, Colombia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53278-8_8

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opera prima Antebellum1 (2020) is relevant to an examination of TrumpEra US cultural warfare. In order to do so, we will explore the historical context in which the film appeared in relation to events of national importance, including the 2019 “Unite the Right Rally” in Charlottesville, Virginia. Additionally, aiming at contrasting the two opposites in Hunter’s aforementioned definition of culture wars, we will weigh the film’s portrayal of masculinist neo-Confederate ideologies (i.e., the cultural conservatives) against real-world sociopolitical movements, for example, Black Lives Matter (that is, the cultural progressives). In order to familiarize readers with the plot of Antebellum, we will begin our analysis with a brief summary of the film’s principal characters and events. It is a night out on the town. Dr. Veronica Henley (Janelle Monáe), a Columbia University professor of American Constitutional History, and two friends are enjoying dinner after Henley’s conference delivery. When it is time to say their goodbyes, Dr. Henley calls an Uber, gets in the car, and drives away. Soon, Henley’s real Uber arrives. Dr. Henley, oblivious to the fate that awaits her, is kidnapped and transported to Antebellum—a place that can be described as a horrific theme park, a concentration camp owned by Senator Blake Denton (Eric Lange). When Dr. Henley awakes, she quickly discovers that her garments have been replaced with pre-Civil War attires and that she is now imprisoned in a fictitious plantation where African Americans are enslaved. On the Antebellum plantation, the horrors of the past are reenacted by a group of bloodthirsty, sadistic neo-Confederates led by Senator Denton and Captain Jasper (Jack Huston). From that moment onwards, Dr. Henley’s sole purpose is to escape said horror. The critical reception to Antebellum was negative, scoring 30% on Rotten Tomatoes. Though the film has been cataloged as “ostensibly a horror movie” (Travis 2021), Antebellum’s horror is not similar to that of, for instance, the Alien and Halloween franchises. The critical success of director Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) helped to popularize concepts such as “Black horror” and “Blacks in horror”—see, for instance, Isabel Pinedo’s (2020) analysis of Peele’s film. According to Viktória Prohászková’s “The Genre of Horror” (2012), an analysis of horror—a genre which resists definition due to its similarities to “science fiction, 1  In this chapter, we will make use of an italicized “Antebellum” to refer to Bush and Renz’s film, and an unitalicized “Antebellum” when referring to the in-film setting of Senator’s Denton’s plantation.

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thrillers, detective, and crime stories” (132)—may be carried out through a consideration of horror categories and subgenres. Employing Prohászková’s terror taxonomy, Antebellum can be labeled a work of “rural horror,” which is defined as “the horror that is situated in places far from civilization” (133). A property hidden in plain sight from both civilians and authorities, Denton’s plantation, accessible to a select few, is located within the premises of “Louisiana’s Premier Civil War Reenactment Park” (Bush and Renz 2020). Antebellum is also a work of “folk horror,” a subcategory that deals with “a conniving suspicion of the outsider and an isolated community more often than not engaged in a summoning for ritual sacrifice” (McDonald and Johnson 2021, 57). In the folk horror case of Antebellum, the film’s African American characters are treated as outsiders subject to the secret machinations of neo-Confederates whose rites of summoning take the form of kidnapping. As folk horror, Antebellum’s viewers are “invited to witness at length” (Prince 2004, 246) scenes of murder or mutilation in settings which, in accord with the subgenre’s “four key happenstances” established by Andy Paciorek, include “landscape, isolation, skewed moral beliefs and a form of summoning” (McDonald and Johnson 2021, 58). Antebellum’s folk horror happenstances make use, for example, of the isolated landscape of Denton’s Louisiana plantation, its neo-­ Confederate creeds of gender, and the serial acts of enslavement-summoning perpetrated by plain-clothed plantation agents as witnessed during Dr. Henly’s aforementioned kidnapping. Dr. Henley’s kidnapping is a crime carried out in civilian dress by Captain Jasper and Elizabeth, the daughter of Senator Denton and a neo-Confederate zealot. Antebellum may also be labeled as “Blacks in horror” and “Black horror.” Cinematographic works of “Blacks in horror” like Antebellum present “Blacks and Blackness in the context of horror, even if the horror film is not wholly or substantially focused on either one. Nevertheless, these films possess a particular discursive power in their treatment of Blackness” (Coleman 2011, 6). Furthermore, films labeled as “Blacks in horror” are said to “present some of the most important images in understanding how Blackness is represented” (6). On the other hand, “Black horror” films “are often ‘race’ films. That is, they have an added narrative focus that calls attention to racial identity, in this case, Blackness—Black culture, history, ideologies, experiences, politics, language, humor, aesthetics, style, music, and the like” (7). Based on these definitions, Get Out can be classified as both Black horror and Blacks in horror, since the Blackness of protagonist

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Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) is coveted by the film’s white characters, for example, Jeremy Armitage (Caleb Landry Jones). In Get Out, the white characters make use of the “sunken place,” that is, “a void within which black subjectivity is constricted and isolated while a white person controls his/her fate” (Pinedo 2020, 95). Antebellum also makes use of a sunken place. Instead of Get Out’s psychological prison, Antebellum’s sunken place is a concentration camp where reenactments of Confederate plantation hierarchy are carried out by white supremacists. Critics have argued that “Antebellum really isn’t a horror movie—instead, it’s one whose real-life horrors needed balancing out more carefully” (Travis 2021). One may wonder what those real-life horrors are. Both Get Out and Antebellum are products of their time. It is clear that social movements such as Black Lives Matter played an important role in the production and content of these films. Because this chapter is focused on Antebellum, it is necessary to provide a summary of what Black Lives Matter is in order to better contextualize our argument later on in the chapter. It has been argued that Black Lives Matter began as a “response to a court case” (Chase 2018, 1092), i.e., State of Florida v. George Michael Zimmerman. As explained by scholars, “George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin and the jury’s verdict in Zimmerman’s criminal trial sparked outrage among many and brought light to what would become a disturbing trend” (1092). Alicia Garza—together with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi—explains that the three of them created Black Lives Matter “as a call to action for Black people after seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was post-humously [sic] placed on trial for his own murder and the killer, George Zimmerman, was not held accountable for the crime he committed” (2014). Garza, Cullors, and Tometi conceive Black Lives Matter as a “response to the anti-Black racism that permeates [North American] society and also, unfortunately, [its] movements” (2014). Martin’s murder served to confirm a sentiment that Americans live “in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise” (Garza 2014). As a result, Martin’s death led to an America in need of “a rallying cry to express its discontent and communicate the message behind this generation’s civil rights movement” (Chase 2018, 1098). In Garza’s words, Black Lives Matter is “an ideological and political intervention” which aims to affirm “Black folks’ contributions to [US] society, [their] humanity, and [their] resilience in the face of deadly oppression” (Garza 2014). Furthermore, Opal Tometi explains that though Black

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Lives Matter is “often called a ‘civil rights’ movement,” in reality it is a “battle for full civil, social, political, legal, economic and cultural rights as enshrined in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (Tometi and Lenoir 2015). According to its creators, Black Lives Matter “is a struggle for the human rights and dignity of black people in the US, which is tied to black peoples’ struggle for human rights across the globe” (Tometi and Lenoir 2015). However, every movement, regardless of how just it may be, has its detractors. The United States has a history of social revolutions and civil rights movements born from racial conflicts. It is not the purpose of this chapter to offer a list of these confrontations, nor do we have the space to do so. Instead, we are going to focus on two specific events that took place in recent US history, which we believe Antebellum is in part a product of and a response to. Firstly, on the night of August 11, 2017, on the grounds of the University of Virginia, “hundreds of neo-Nazis and white supremacists assembled and marched on the university” (Rowley 2018). Frontline journalist A. C. Thompson reports that he arrived in Charlottesville—where the University of Virginia is located—for what he deems to be “the largest gathering of white supremacists in a generation. They called it ‘Unite the Right,’ and it was drawing individuals from at least 35 states” (Rowley 2018). Moreover, the event’s neo-Nazis and white supremacists carried “flaming torches” (Shapira 2020) and chanted “You will not replace us,” “Blood and soil,” and “White lives matter” (Rowley 2018). White supremacists then attacked a group of antifascists who confronted them. However, the events that took place the following day were much more brutal. Secondly, on August 12, Charlottesville—a city “built with the help of enslaved people” (Shapira 2020)—was transformed into “a national symbol of racism and anti-Semitism” (Shapira 2020). Scores of neo-Nazis and white supremacists gathered in the city to prevent the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.2 Thompson, a witness present during the events, explains that

2  For analysis regarding the intersection of neo-Confederate ideology and the “Unite the Right” rally, see Segrest (2017): “Just as the removal of Robert E.  Lee’s statue in Charlottesville provoked the largest white supremacist rally in this century, the ongoing meaning of the Civil War roils beneath many of the alt/far-right movements, some of which take the form of neo-Confederacy” (23–24).

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hundreds of people had shown up to protest the white supremacists. Most were non-violent, but some—black-clad, militant anti-fascists—had come to fight. And while police looked on, the crowd grew more aggressive. A group of white supremacists formed up with shields and clubs and pushed straight into the protesters. Some of them fought back, but no one was arrested, and the violence continued to escalate. (Rowley 2018)

There are two key violent moments that happened afterward. The first one took place around noon, when “a group of white supremacists cornered protestor Deandre Harris in a parking garage next to a police station. They beat him with poles, metal pipes, and wooden boards. Police did not intervene to break it up” (Rowley 2018). An hour later, “the mood among counterprotesters was soaring” (Hendrix 2018) until “the brawling turned into something else—an act of terror. A grey Dodge slammed into a crowd of protesters. Twenty people were rushed to the hospital. 32-year-old Heather Heyer was pronounced dead” (Rowley 2018). The driver, twenty-year-old James Alex Fields Jr., was “charged with killing Ms. Heyer and wounding numerous other people in a crowd” (Robles 2017, 17). Given how horrible the events that took place in Charlottesville were, President Trump’s subsequent comments sparked controversy. Journalists have explained that “[a]ccusations of racism have shadowed Mr. Trump over his decades as a real estate mogul, reality television star and president” (Weiland 2018, 20). After Charlottesville, Trump “blamed ‘both sides’ for the violence, eliciting widespread criticism for what was seen as drawing a moral equivalence between hate groups—some of whom supported his candidacy—and those who protested them” (20). White supremacist groups praised Trump for his comments, including David Duke, a one-time Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Duke tweeted: “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa” (Rowley 2018). Trump’s lack of condemnation for events in Charlottesville and others that were to come (e.g., George Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020, and the assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021), combined with compliments white supremacist groups have paid him, have served to divide the nation, allowing extremist right voices a platform. Events of the “Unite the Right” rally figure prominently in Antebellum’s plot. For example, both the inaugural march of the “Unite the Right” rally on the grounds of the University of Virginia and Antebellum’s nocturnal parade of its neo-Confederate soldiers include torchlit chants of

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“Blood and soil” (Bush and Renz 2020). Moreover, the selfsame Robert E. Lee monument, a pro-Confederate statue whose preservation served as ostensible motivation for the 2017 rally’s organizers, also appears in the film’s Louisiana plantation setting. Garza’s aforementioned condemnation of the targeting of Black lives is clearly shown in Antebellum in the characters of Dr. Henley, Eli, and Amara. Largely lambasted as a “muddled attempt to revisit the horrors of American slavery” (Scott 2020), minimal critical attention has been paid to the importance of Antebellum as a new US work of cinematographic Black horror and Blacks in horror, which serves to speculate regarding the masculinities of neo-Confederate gender performance. Reportedly inspired by a nightmare had by co-­ director Gerard Bush—a dream in which “a woman subjected to unspeakable brutality on a slave plantation ‘[screamed] desperately for help across dimensions’” (Abramovitch 2020, 24)—Antebellum has been likewise classified as a “nightmare that looks an awful lot like real-life American history” (Zacharek 2020, 108) and an “intriguing exercise in speculative horror undone in the end by its own tangled messaging” (Greenblatt 2020, 73). An analysis of Antebellum is, as such, urgent, useful, and justified not despite criticism leveled at the film, but because of it. Given Antebellum’s negative reception in the tabloids of popular media,3 the film—a work imperfect in its execution but important in its implications— has been passed over both by recent film analysis and by critical studies of contemporary horror. This chapter’s exploration of the crimes of masculinity perpetrated by Antebellum’s neo-Confederate characters seeks to bridge the aforementioned gap in the academic literature examining Black horror and Blacks in horror. In two separate subsections, we study Dr. Henley and Senator Denton’s confrontation and Captain Jasper’s murder of Amara in violent scenes in order to analyze how Denton and Jasper make use of neo-Confederate ideologies of masculinity on Antebellum.

Senator Denton vs. Dr. Henley In an article entitled “The Confederate Memorial Tartan,” Edward H. Sebesta explains that the neo-Confederacy “is a reactionary movement with an ideology against modernity conceiving its ideas and politics within 3  Exceptions include Peter Debruge (2020) Variety review in which the film, therein characterized as a “potent, politically charged cross between The Handmaid’s Tale and an M. Night Shyamalan movie,” is likened to Octavia E. Butler’s acclaimed novel Kindred (1979).

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a historical framework of the US Civil War (1861–1865) and the history of the American South” (quoted in Hague et al. 2008a, b, 8). Antebellum’s Senator Denton represents the ultimate embodiment of the neo-­ Confederacy, and he can be seen as directors Bush and Renz’s representation of white supremacist movements and extreme right political ideologies during Trump’s administration. The neo-Confederacy opposes civil rights for “African-Americans, other ethnic minorities, women and gays” (quoted in Hague et al. 2008a, b, 8). Via the publication of magazines such as Southern Partisan, neo-Confederate ideology has “romanticized the Old South and distorted the events of both the Civil War and Reconstruction” (Hague et  al. 2008a, b, 6). As a result, the neo-­ Confederacy “valorize[s] white men” and comprises the belief in and the need for a social hierarchy at the top of which white men ought to rest dominantly (6). In 1994, the Southern Poverty Law Center stated that the neo-Confederate League of the South was “racist in its belief that African Americans are inferior to whites and is therefore a hate group” (8). In the case of Antebellum, neo-Confederate racist ideologies of white-­ male supremacy are portrayed through the characters of Senator Denton and Captain Jasper. In Antebellum, Dr. Henley is described as a “sociologist, activist, and NYT best-selling author” (Bush and Renz 2020). She gives interviews in TV news programs, attends conferences, and publishes academic works that deal with racism. Dr. Henley, therefore, has the power to be heard, read, and seen by the public. She is, as a result, a danger to the delusional ideas of the neo-Confederate hierarchy, the order Denton promotes. In an interview scene, Dr. Henley is confronted by Timothy Paul, a white character who contends that Henley is “defending the plight of the Black man, or just in [her] case, the Black woman” (Bush and Renz 2020). However, Paul also argues that Dr. Henley is “doing a disservice to the argument, much less [her] people by conflating race with basic common sense” (Bush and Renz 2020). Dr. Henley responds: “The disenfranchisement of Black people in America is by design written into the actual DNA of this country. Your argument, however flawed, has been successfully promoted and propagated through repetition. We hear it over and over again. But I’m here to tell you that this vicious circle of iniquity will soon be broken” (Bush and Renz 2020). Later in the film, when Dr. Henley is presenting her new book, she states: “The book highlights intersectionality, race, class, and gender. I wrote Shedding the Coping Persona—The Metamorphosis of a Revolution as a roadmap to revolution for a historically marginalized

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people” (Bush and Renz 2020). Moreover, Dr. Henley shares with her audience attending the book presentation what her position is on racism, recognition, and the respect the Black community deserves: I learned very quickly that Black people, Black women in particular, we’re expected to be seen, not heard. Or we risk being perceived as threatening to the patriarchy. Or, God forbid, we continue to be branded as “the angry Black woman” … To the patriarchy we’ve been practically invisible. But their arrogance is their greatest vulnerability and our greatest opportunity. And it brings me to a quote by Assata Shakur: “The only thing that we have to lose are our chains.” Liberation over assimilation. They’re stuck in the past. We are the future. Our time is now. It’s now. Right now. (Bush and Renz 2020)

As can be seen from the above, Dr. Henley—very much in the fashion of Garza, Cullors, and Tometi—represents a pillar of equality and revindication of equal rights for Black people. Sure enough, her comments and popularity do make her a threat to Denton’s neo-Confederate ideologies. Moreover, said retrograde ideology is made evident in the film’s final confrontation between Dr. Henley and Elizabeth—after Dr. Henley has killed both Denton and Jasper—when the latter states: “You are nothing but a cotton picker. You think you’re better than us? You ain’t better than me, fucking cunt” (Bush and Renz 2020). Elizabeth, in agreement with her father’s ideology, considers Dr. Henley inferior to her just because of the color of her skin. However, Elizabeth cannot understand why her father had become so obsessed with Dr. Henley: “My father kept insisting. He said you were spread in such filth. I told him you weren’t worth the risk, but he couldn’t resist. Movement be damned! He just had to have you. Every single one of you I picked except for you. His favorite girl” (Bush and Renz 2020). In contrast, Senator Denton’s belief is in accordance with neo-­ Confederate ideology. Using rhetoric that resembles the chants—i.e., “blood and soil” and “you will not replace us”—made by white supremacists during the violent altercations above discussed, Denton explains to his men: “We will sacrifice our blood and fertilize this soil of our homeland. This is the only hope we have at retaining our heritage, our way of life. This land was always ours. It is our rightful inheritance. And rest assured, our national state will not be stolen from us” (Bush and Renz 2020). Through merciless employment of neo-Confederate ideologies of

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punitive gender, Denton governs “a hierarchical society, opposed to egalitarianism and modern democracy” (Sebesta 2000, 56). Denton’s histrionic, heterosexist hierarchy is a clandestine criminal organization, supplied by kidnappers, and undergirded by the white supremacist supposition that “equal rights for all racial and ethnic groups [is] a foolhardy idea” (Sebesta and Hague 2008a, 131–132). Moreover, as additional evidence of the lack of relevant plot detail from which Antebellum at times suffers, the origin, geographic extent, and financial function of Denton’s neo-slavery plantation remains mysterious.4 That being said, it is clear that Denton’s violent fits of masculinity are staged in Antebellum in the reenactment context of the theme park’s anachronistic recasting of Confederate culture. Senator Denton’s repeated plantation performance of hierarchical masculinity is most clearly evidenced during his first act battery of Dr. Henley, a scene during which Antebellum’s neo-Confederate gender injunctions’ harrowing products are on grisly display. Denton’s torture of Dr. Henley— an event following her recapture subsequent to her attempted escape—is worthy of analysis. Despite its gratuitous violence, the scene’s criminal content offers pressing insights into neo-Confederate codes of masculinity. The scene is used by directors Bush and Renz, we argue, to criticize a hidden sentiment shared by many white supremacists in Trump’s America, i.e., there is a hidden part of the US and its politics that longs to go back to pre-Civil War times; times in which Denton and Jasper’s behavior was praised and admired. Denton is quick to incorporate shows of false chivalry during his torture of Dr. Henley. A Confederate-costumed Denton—entering the sparse plantation cabin in which Dr. Henley has been confined following her capture—removes her fetters. Denton, then initiating a sequence of gendered call-and-response orders—mandates enforced through escalating physical punishment—issues his first challenge. It is a directive Denton delivers from a conciliatory crouch whose paternalistic, theatrical politeness is akin to Jasper’s genuflection preceding his point-black killing of Amara, a scene later analyzed in this chapter. Addressing Dr. Henley, a character cloaked in the nineteenth-century-period dress of a female laborer, Denton—making use of white-supremacist vocabularies of race 4  With regard to data gaps in plot information regarding the workings of Antebellum’s plantation, see Alison Willmore (2020), who states that “[t]he film keeps the workings of its evil organization as vague as possible, which would be less maddening if it didn’t invite the audience to constantly wonder how it functions” (2020).

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and gender—declaims: “Say your name, girl” (Bush and Renz 2020). Denton is initially refused cooperation by a kneeling Dr. Henley, a character who has been renamed “Eden” in accord with the role into which she has been forcibly cast. In swift response to a silent Dr. Henley’s perceived disobedience, Denton—partially dismantling his Confederate costume’s military markers of masculine authority so as to aid his ensuing sexual assault5—removes his period hat, belt, and yellow gloves. Battering a collapsed Dr. Henley with the uniform belt he has ceremoniously removed, Denton—in agreement with neo-Confederate gender codes which award him access to and full employment of the bodies of the hierarchy’s gender inferiors—states: “It brings me no joy to do this” (Bush and Renz 2020). Denton’s declamation is significant. It is a claim through which his violent sexual assault of Dr. Henley is, in Antebellum, recast as a gentlemanly gesture akin to Jasper’s execution of Amara. Under Denton’s speech-act direction, his attack on Dr. Henley is, in the ethical deformations of Antebellum, transmuted into a chore of just, selfless duty undertaken by a determined patriarch tasked with the education of a troubled child. Henley’s infantilizing assault is, as such, made to appear as an ethical obligation Denton satisfies begrudgingly in obedience to the highest demands of his neo-Confederate creeds’ unbending codes of masculine conduct. Denton is, in summary, a monster wielding metamorphic masculine masks for the purposes of sexual depredation. Proceeding in his predatory masculinity’s repeated plantation performance, Denton orders Dr. Henley, screaming after Denton’s battery, to be silent. It should be noted that Denton’s order is—in its intent—a gendered stylization of both Dr. Henley’s bruised body and the required behaviors indicative of her submission to his command. It is a conduct that would, according to Denton’s criminal code, confirm his masochistic, masculine dominance. Seeking, through mutilation, to reshape the Black bodies of Antebellum’s costumed enslaved, attempting to recast their renamed characters, and to order their truncated speeches before exacting their exits, disappearances enacted in the plantation’s crematorium, Denton’s directive that Dr. Henley remain silent during his assault is, however, disobeyed. 5  Regarding limitations in Antebellum’s treatment of sexual assault, see Jourdain Searles’s “Antebellum,” article in which it is stated: “Antebellum becomes one of the first horror films to focus on the sexual assault of Black women suffered on plantations. And yet that distinction seems almost accidental given how casually rape is presented in the film” (2020, 56).

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Contrary to Denton’s neo-Confederate conscription script, Dr. Henley is not silent. In answer to her continued screams, Denton exclaims: “You will speak only when I instruct you to speak” (Bush and Renz 2020). Relatching the uniform belt with which he has committed the scene’s first sexual assault in order to reassemble the Confederate costume through which he assumes the plantation hierarchy’s highest gender post—a position from which he commits acts of sexual assault with impunity—Denton, his costume’s boot planted on Henley’s back, declares: “I’m responsible for you now, and I will tame your savage ways” (Bush and Renz 2020). Adding irreparable physical injury to egregious insult, Denton then brands Dr. Henley following her refusal to, in Denton’s words, “comply” (Bush and Renz 2020) with his request that she—again addressed using the white-supremacist moniker “girl”—says the name “Eden” with which she has been renamed following her kidnapped recasting as an Antebellum slave. In relation to his neo-Confederate masculinity’s mutilating performance of body stylization through branding, Denton claims that he— given Dr. Henley’s attempted escape’s implied violation of the gendered codes of racial hierarchy which govern his actions—may not choose otherwise than to punish Dr. Henley’s wrongdoing. At pains to appear humble in his neo-Confederate duties and, in his estimation, constrained by white, masculine scripts of right action, Denton states: “You’ve given me no choice” (Bush and Renz 2020). Denton is, in other words, just following orders as dictated by neo-Confederate masculine ideology. Denton’s deeds are, moreover, masculine obligations of supposed racial supremacy enforced through serial rape which, among their multifarious and nefarious methods, also include cremation should Dr. Henley repeat her attempted escape. In what would constitute the final mutilation in Dr. Henley’s obligatory body stylization, Denton warns Dr. Henley—then a woman-ward of Antebellum—stating: “Try to escape again, and I’ll drag you to the burn shed myself” (Bush and Renz 2020). Following Denton’s determined acts of torture, Dr. Henley does, in a desperate bid to interrupt her mutilation, concede to employ “Eden,” a verbal disguise-­ prosthesis meant, as in the case of Denton’s burning brand, to mark her, through punishment, as property. Then, instructed by Denton to say her “name with pride and conviction” (Bush and Renz 2020), Dr. Henley, in false compliance, states: “Eden. My name is Eden” (Bush and Renz 2020). Having acquired from his female prisoner the verbal compliance his gendered neo-Confederate creed demands, Denton—electing a masculine mask of lesser violence in order to enact a role of white, paternal

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goodwill—interrupts his assault of Dr. Henley, pats her punished frame, compliments her cooperation, and issues two commands. Gathering his period hat and officer’s yellow gloves so as to reconfigure the General’s costume behind which his crimes of masculinity are committed, Denton orders Dr. Henley, who is collapsed atop the table under which she has been beaten and over which she has been branded, to “stop that crying” (Bush and Renz 2020) and prepare a chicken dinner. Denton’s paired orders—commands for silence and food preparation preceding his exit from the cabin—are telling. Having exacted Dr. Henley’s prescribed gender performance through torture, a self-satisfied Denton reaffirms his racial hierarchy’s sequence of gendered authority through which a white, masculine right to spoken command is subsequently met with a female obligation of silence. It is, for Dr. Henley, a swift, quiet compliance during which domestic duties—in the scene’s case, a supper— are done. Having exhausted the sociological script on which his neo-­ Confederate crimes’ performance depends, Denton exits Dr. Henley’s cabin cell and, on hierarchical horseback, crosses in front of the torchlit crematorium which serves to cow his captives. Exiting Antebellum, Denton then reenters the Louisiana territories in which he—playing the part of a senator—is (in the absence of his more conspicuous Confederate costume) permitted to pace the stages of state and/or national government, a role through which he—it may be assumed6—enacts policies serving to protect the properties on which Antebellum is hidden. In summation, Denton’s reenactment-enactment of his neo-­ Confederate masculinity’s multifaceted mutilations are sexed crimes perpetrated, as in the case of Dr. Henley’s battery-branding, for the purposes of gendered body stylization. Denton’s deeds are, moreover, a “performance of heterosexuality among men” (Quinn 2020, 395), that is, among the rank-and-file white supremacists participating in Antebellum. These men serve both as sinister audience/participants in Denton’s projects of sexual sadism and as period-garbed, rifle-ready plantation goons obedient to his orders in exchange for legal impunity following crimes committed on Antebellum. Furthermore, during Denton’s heterosexist performance, the “targeted woman” (Quinn 2002, 395), i.e., Dr. Henley, “is required, 6  The spectator, informed that Denton is a senator, is then refused additional clarification regarding Denton’s government post. The possible ties between state or national policies promoted through Denton’s past or present senatorship and the defense of the criminal function of the Antebellum plantation must be, as a result, forcibly inferred.

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but her subjectivity and active participation is not” (395). It is a fact evidenced in Denton’s orders—often heroically disobeyed by a resilient Dr. Henley—that “Eden” remain a mute spectator to her captivity’s many mutilations while Denton’s plantation-staged “patriarchal order prohibits forms of emotion … that patriarchal society itself produces” (Connell 2005, 85–86). In other words, Dr. Henley, beaten and branded by Denton, is then prohibited the consolation of grieving through Denton’s ominous order that she—sobbing following injuries he himself has inflicted—“stop that crying” (Bush and Renz 2020). Disguised in period garb while pinned under the gloating boot of Denton’s General costume, Dr. Henley is permitted—on pain of cremation—neither to cry nor to cry for help. It is a gendered wrong Dr. Henley rights in her heroic feats of grisly retribution during the murderous catharsis of Antebellum’s climax, a sequence whose executions neither Captain Jasper nor Senator Denton survive.

Captain Jasper vs. Amara Grouped with recent audio-visual “slave narratives that have been rejected or deeply critiqued” (Boyce Gillespie 2021, 20)—works which include Kasi Lemmons’s Harriet (2019) and Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation (2016)—Antebellum depicts violent projects of neo-Confederate masculine enforcement from its earliest scenes, action in which Captain Jasper serves as a gleeful, murderous antagonist to the film’s enslaved Black characters while punishing their foiled attempts at escape from Denton’s plantation. In accord with Beirich and Hicks’s “Gender, Sexuality, and Neo-Confederacy,” Jasper’s summary execution of the enslaved character Amara following her cooperation in Dr. Henley’s discovered escape, reflects neo-Confederate “interpretations of gender and sexuality,” a “culture of honor” through which “men ruled their families, women were subordinate, [and] supposedly lesser races knew their place” (2008, 76). During Antebellum’s aforementioned inaugural execution—a sequence that merits analysis given the chilling ideological implications of its white supremacist agents’ actions—Captain Jasper leads a greyuniformed, rifle-­ armed neo-Confederate gang in subduing Eli, a

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character later referred to by Dr. Henley as “Professor.”7 During Eli’s desperate attempt to prevent his wife Amara’s murder, a self-assured, uniformed Jasper—in a choreographed expression of his neo-Confederate character rank as “overseer” in Denton’s reenactment plantation—is seated comfortably on horseback. Meanwhile, an enslaved Eli, stripped of his shirt and cuffed in a tall bell collar, is left on foot to an uneven fight against numerous neo-­Confederate captors. In a gruesome gesture of inverted chivalry, Jasper waits patiently atop his hierarchy-marking horse mount for Amara to flee to a sportsmanly distance before pursuing her, a chase Jasper conducts while drinking from a flask with smirking, alcoholic bravado.8 In his neo-Confederate calculations of masculine role-playing, Jasper seeks to and succeeds in interrupting Amara’s attempted escape from the plantation in a dramatic defense of neo-slavery, the institutional cornerstone of his Old South reconstruction of a “perfect biblically based society” (Beirich and Hicks 2008, 78). It is also of note that Jasper commits the first of his many on-screen felonies while both drunk and drinking. In a demonstration of hypermasculinity, i.e., “an exaggerated display of the overtly ‘masculine,’ both in appearance and behavior” (Beynon 2002, 162), Jasper seeks to mark his victims as inferior given that he sees himself succeed in overpowering both while impaired through drink. Additionally, Jasper’s task as kidnapper-executioner of Amara is an operation that requires his firm command of the plantation’s neo-Confederate soldier-­ reenactors, white men of lesser rank in the plantation’s military hierarchy whose ready obedience to Jasper’s criminal orders also serves to mark, in the sociological ledgers of the Old South, Jasper’s perceived masculine superiority.

7  It is worthy of note that Antebellum’s marked exclusion of relevant biographical information for its central characters—data which would, for example, clarify Eli’s “Professor” appellation—is a script feature also apparent in the film’s rushed depiction of its neo-Confederate characters as “moustache-twirling pantomime villains with no motivations beyond an overwhelming hatred of Black people” (Latif 2021, 62). Similar data gaps of note include the mystery of the “Ghanian Queen,” a title attached to Amara in Antebellum’s end credits. During the film, the honorific “Ghanian Queen” is neither used nor explained. 8  To aid in unraveling Antebellum’s scant, characterization of Captain Jasper, see Antonia Abbey et al. for additional information regarding the neo-Confederate-adjacent intersection of “psychopathy-related personality traits … hostile masculinity and heavy alcohol consumption” (2011, 460).

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Upon recapturing Amara—a violent maneuver carried out through the use of a lynching-adjacent, noose-like lasso thrown from horseback by Jasper’s neo-Confederate inferiors—Jasper, dismounting, kicks Amara onto her back. Jasper then removes his uniform gloves (a histrionic flourish resembling behaviors employed by Senator Denton in the aforementioned cabin scene), and crouches at Amara’s side in a show of feigned compassion. When asked by Amara to kill her, Jasper—drawing his gloveless right hand along Amara’s head in a gesture of sexualized condescension met by Amara’s determined revulsion—replies: “Now don’t you worry, girl. I will accommodate you” (Bush and Renz 2020). In addition to Jasper’s employment of the term “girl” as a means of attempted verbal denigration consistent with well-known white supremacist practices, Jasper’s readiness to “accommodate” Amara is likewise significant. Jasper’s subsequent execution/accommodation of Amara’s stated wish to die—a request delivered under duress following protracted torture—serves as evidence of Jasper’s meticulous performance of neo-­ Confederate masculinity, a gender system in which “hypervirility is prized, [and] violence is expected and extolled” (Beirich and Hicks 2008, 78). Jasper murders Amara in a show of neo-Confederate chivalry through which he honors her final request. It is a man’s act of feigned obedience to the wishes of a woman carried out through exaggerated displays of false civility. It is, moreover, a “polite” execution which, in point of fact, conforms to the dictates of Jasper’s plantation hierarchy, a system that celebrates Jasper’s gendered right to deal with “inferiors” violently in gentlemanly defense of white supremacist structures, systems under which the enslaved—i.e., Amara, Eli, and Dr. Henley—would “serve the whole, under the guidance and protection of the patriarch” (76–77)—that is, Captain Jasper and Senator Denton. If criminally polite in character and ostensibly gentile in dramatic execution, Amara’s is also a murder which figures prominently in the performance of Jasper’s terrorist masculinities.9 In Antebellum said masculinities

9  Relevant to future studies of the terrorist-masculinities of Antebellum’s neo-Confederate men, see Johnson (1995), where “patriarchal terrorism” is defined as a “form of terroristic control of wives by their husbands that involves the systematic use of not only violence, but economic subordination, threats, isolation, and other control tactics” (1995, 284).

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are costumed gender roles enacted in Denton’s theme-park plantation.10 In obedience to the creed of gendered neo-Confederate ideologies, Jasper’s execution of Amara is an act after which her corpse is towed toward the slave quarters from which she attempted to escape in preparation for her cremation in the farm’s hovel-like crematorium. It should be noted that Denton’s crematorium is a structure neighboring fields in which the plantation’s enslaved characters are forced to harvest cotton, only to burn the cotton they have collected.11 Denton’s farm—producing no produce—is, as such, fictitious. It is a macabre agricultural theater whose reenactment of pre-Civil War slavery, overseen by Jasper, is enforced by the hovering specters of grey-garbed neo-­ Confederates and the smoking sentinel of their plantation crematorium, the “burn shed” (Bush and Renz 2020) in which Dr. Henley will, at the film’s pyrotechnic conclusion, exact her first revenge on her neo-­ Confederate captors. Additionally, Jasper is, in Antebellum, obedient to the neo-Confederate gender hierarchy, which rewards him with the hurried military obedience of his white plantation underlings and the unpunished excesses of his unchecked authority over the plantation’s enslaved Black characters. Jasper’s seemingly invulnerable plantation position is awarded in exchange for his submission to the dictates of Denton. Jasper’s gendered performance of neo-Confederate masculinity is, moreover, literalized by the historical reenactment seen on the plantation. On Denton’s farm, for example, Jasper’s “action of gender requires a performance that is repeated” (Butler 1990, 140). As a “set of repeated acts” that are criminal in character, Jasper’s gender includes the “repeated stylization of the body” (Butler 1990, 33), that is, his uniformed frame on top of a horse and the bodies of persons placed freely (in the case of neo-Confederates) or forcibly (in the case of enslaved Black characters) under the alcoholic

10  Instrumental to the film’s dramatic conclusion, an ending whose twist has been characterized unjustifiably as “excruciatingly banal” (Latif 2021, 62), the plantation-setting’s name, location, and proprietorship is clarified by a sign seen during its demolition following Dr. Henley’s heroic escape. The sign reads: “Antebellum Louisiana’s Premier Civil War Reenactment Park. All major credit cards and Apple pay accepted. Anyone disturbing the peace of this plantation will be prosecuted. Blake Denton Owner” (Bush and Renz 2020). 11  As a sequence worthy of further analysis in future studies examining the gendered function of Denton’s planation, see Eli’s forced participation in the destruction of harvested cotton.

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whims of his homicidal command, a masculine authority second only to Denton’s. For example, upon their arrival at Antebellum, newly kidnapped Black characters—transported on horse cart, dressed in worn reproductions of period garb and chained—are (with the film’s audience) subjected to Jasper’s rehearsed induction ceremony. It is a grinning, monomaniacal monologue during which the gendered performance to be played by the newly enslaved, and the often-mortal punishments to be suffered by them in case of disobedience, are made clear through a speech delivered by Jasper from a vacated horse cart bed doubling as a stage. During his lengthy, neo-Confederate initiation, Jasper defines the purpose of Antebellum. He states: “This here is a reform plantation … commandeered by the ninth infantry of the Confederate Army of the thirteen states” (Bush and Renz 2020). Jasper informs his prisoners that: “Whatever small freedoms you might have enjoyed, I’m here to tell you that’s over” (Bush and Renz 2020). The plantation reformation to be inflicted upon the farm’s kidnapped persons includes—in addition to serial rape and murder—silence and the employment of period costumes. In violation of Paul B.  Preciado’s assertion that gendered human agents are “speaking bodies”12 (2002, 18), by rule of Jasper’s injunction, his fettered audience will not be permitted to speak “unless one of the white folk on property gives [them] permission to do so” (Bush and Renz 2020). During the Black characters’ silent enslavement—work during which Jasper instructs his kidnapped spectators to “[l]et the sound of Confederate victory bring joy to [their] labor” (Bush and Renz 2020)—their threadbare Antebellum costumes aid in establishing the “unrecognizability” (Butler 2006, 184) of their gender, a maneuver through which the Black characters’ personhood does not, in turn, receive recognition in a neo-Confederate social hierarchy in which clothing—specifically Confederate uniform or farm laborer frocks—serve “to advertise the social, professional, or intellectual standing of the wearer” (Woolf 2019, 137). Moreover, the repeated criminal acts of masculinity perpetrated by the plantation’s neo-Confederates make hierarchical use of Butler’s aforementioned body stylization (1990, 45) through which uniformed whites are 12  In absence of Kevin Gerry Dunn’s 2018 English-language translation of Manifiesto contra-sexual (2002), we have provided our own English language translation for Preciado’s term while making use of Julio Díaz and Carolina Meloni’s Spanish-language translation of Preciado’s seminal work.

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marked as men of greater worth than the plantation’s enslaved while being men of lesser rank than Antebellum’s protagonist-officers. Additional examples of hierarchical body stylization which figure in Antebellum’s plantation include Elizabeth’s utilization of female-coded, period gentry garb during her black-gloved inspection of the plantation’s Black laborers. It is a self-satisfied appraisal of the bodies of kidnapped persons, completed in conjunction with Jasper’s aforementioned induction speech, during which Elizabeth, making use of a stick, prods her father’s prisoners while complimenting and criticizing their bodies in turn. Seeking the opinion of a white adolescent in attendance, Elizabeth then renames a kidnapped Black character “Julia.” Although Antebellum’s plot ambiguities prevent confirmation, it is worthy of note that the costumed body stylization inflicted on “Julia” may also include anatomical transformations related to an obligatory pregnancy secondary to ritualized rape perpetrated by an unidentified male neo-Confederate, a trauma following which “Julia” commits suicide. Furthermore, the film’s hierarchical gender performance of masculinity is a tool, an implement/weapon wielded repeatedly by neo-Confederate soldiers, through which “cultural conflict”—i.e., the “struggle for domination” in the “contested … arena of ‘public culture’” (Hunter 2001, 53)—is decided through cyclical acts of obedience-based body stylization/mutilation. The plantation’s hierarchy’s inferiors—that is, the enslaved—are, on pain of death, subjected to the violent directives of neo-­ Confederate officials regarding their bodies, their bodies’ dress, and those bodies’ obligatory and forbidden behaviors. On Antebellum, white male agents order the modification of Black bodies while resistance to the same is rewarded with cremation. For example, during Jasper’s induction monologue, he informs the plantation’s newest chained captives that they will “be given instructions by one of the overseers as to [their] daily duties,” and that these tasks, dangerous and dehumanizing by design, “ought to be followed obediently and with a smile” (Bush and Renz 2020). In a show of hierarchical body stylization—a procedure through which the bodies of the lesser persons in the neo-Confederate pecking order are made available to their white superiors for utilization, modification, or disposal—a grinning Jasper then grips the face of an unnamed enslaved Black woman. Jasper pulls the character’s mouth into a smile which, mimicking his own, serves to punctuate his orders that the plantation’s enslaved will both do as they are told and appear content during punishment.

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Finally, Jasper’s hierarchical, hypermasculine procedures of criminal body stylization also include his order that the kidnapped “whistle while [they] work” (Bush and Renz 2020), a directive after whose issue both the assembled neo-Confederate soldiers of lesser rank and Antebellum’s enslaved are (exiting the farm at rifle-point) dismissed by Jasper in preparation for the nocturnal arrival of Senator Denton in the self-directed disguise of a nineteenth-century Louisiana war commander. Denton’s General-guise is, in summary, a gendered costume whose masculine content is not, as in the case of his captives, subject to the body-modifying commands of lesser men so long as he, through violent means, occupies his hidden neo-Confederate sanctuary’s highest rank.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have examined ways in which Antebellum, despite its troubled critical reception, can serve as a cinematic touchstone in an exploration of Trump-Era US cultural warfare. We have sought to clarify the film’s content through a consideration of the historical context attending the film appearance, including the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2019 “Unite the Right Rally.” Additionally, we have explored how the felonious assaults of Senator Denton and the costumed crimes of Captain Jasper represent a gruesome gender performance of masculinity cast from the creeds of neo-Confederate ideology. In Antebellum, Denton and Jasper’s displays of overt, masculinized torture make repeated use of “shows of physicality and ‘hardness’” (Beynon 2002, 162) through which neo-Confederate strategies of gendered hegemony are, by way of “hybridization, and reconfiguration,” made “capable of transforming [themselves] in order to adapt to the specificities of new historical conjunctures” (Demetriou 2001, 355), that is, to the twenty-first-century legal statutes governing the Louisiana territories in which Denton’s neo-slavery plantation is hidden in the plain sight setting of a Civil-War-themed tourist attraction. Seeking to serve its spectators as a work of Black horror, Antebellum—if troubled in its plot’s execution—may be, nonetheless, seen to respond “to a history of Black cinematic representation that ranges from non-existent to racist, both by reclaiming how Black life is portrayed on the silver screen and by directly and unrelentingly confronting America’s violent racial history” (Booth 2020, 753). Moreover, future examinations of the film’s toxic masculinities—i.e., the “constellation of socially regressive male

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traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, and wanton violence” (Kupers 2005, 714)—may be served in new considerations of the significance of Antebellum’s repeated references to the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. In summation, Antebellum, anchored in the context of Black Lives Matter as well as the violent events perpetrated by white supremacists preceding the 2020 US presidential election, is a filmographic work which, despite the rigorous dismissals of its critics, merits study in relation to its unique depictions of neo-Confederate masculinity.

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Robles, Frances. 2017. Three Charged After Violence in Charlottesville. New York Times, August 27. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/26/us/ charlottesville-­arrests.html Rowley, Richard. 2018. Documenting Hate: Charlottesville. Frontline, August 7. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/documenting-­hatecharlottesville/. Scott, A. O. 2020. Antebellum Review: Look Away, Dixie Land. The New York Times, September 6. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/movies/antebellum-review-janelle-monae.html. Searles, Jourdain. 2020. Antebellum. Hollywood Reporter 426: 56. Sebesta, Edward H. 2000. The Confederate Memorial Tartan. Scottish Affairs 31 (1): 55–84. Sebesta, Edward H., and Euan Hague. 2008a. Neo-Confederacy and the Understanding of Race. In Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction, ed. Euan Hague, Edward H. Sebesta, and Heidi Beirich, 131–166. Austin: University of Texas Press. Segrest, Mab. 2017. Flagged Up, Locked, and Loaded: The Confederacy’s Call, the Trump Disaster, and the Apocalyptic Crisis of White People. South: A Scholarly Journal 50 (1): 22–36. Shapira, Ian. 2020. White Supremacists Made Charlottesville a Symbol of Racism. Black Residents Say It Still Is. The Washington Post, August 11. https://www. washingtonpost.com/local/white-­s upremacists-­m ade-­c harlottesville-­a -­ symbol-­o f-­r acism-­b lack-­r esidents-­s ay-­i t-­s till-­i s/2020/08/11/7455df10-­ da61-­11ea-­809e-­b8be57ba616e_story.html Tometi, Opal, and Gerald Lenoir. 2015. Black Lives Matter Is Not a Civil Rights Movement. Time. https://time.com/4144655/international-­human-­rightsday-­black-­lives-­matter/. Travis, Ben. 2021. Antebellum Review. Empire, April 1. https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/antebellum/ Weiland, Noah. 2018. White Nationalists Plan to Mark Charlottesville Anniversary with Rally. New York Times, August 12: 20. Willmore, Alison. 2020. Desperate to Be Relevant Antebellum Is Cinema’s Latest Failed Attempt to Speak to ‘The Moment.’ Vulture, September 18. https:// www.vulture.com/2020/09/antebellum-­political-­films.html. Woolf, Virginia. 2019. A Room of One’s Own; And, Three Guineas. London: Penguin Classics. Zacharek, Stephanie. 2020. Slavery’s Horror, Played Out in the Present. Time 196: 108.

CHAPTER 9

Gaslighting, Captivity, and Trauma: Notes on MeToo Horror Films Todd K. Platts

Horror has long been noted as a genre that absorbs and reflects extant social fears and anxieties into its texts, a tendency that transforms it into a unique barometer of the collective fear and dread generated from the ebbs and flows of the culture war(s), including, most notably for this chapter, issues of gender as they relate to the MeToo movement. Horror’s grappling with gender dates back to the gothic writings of Mary Shelley and Ann Radcliffe (Jancovich 1992, 18–21), but did not self-consciously emerge in cinema until the latter half of the studio era (c. 1930–1948) with films like Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock 1940), The Spiral Staircase (Alfred Hitchcock 1946), and Gaslight (George Cukor 1944) (see, e.g., Snelson 2009, 178–181). By the 1960s and 1970s, horror cinema cast a shadow over women’s (sexual) liberation with possession films like The Exorcist (William Friedkin 1973) and The Sentinel (Michael Winner 1977) as well as the womb with pregnancy horror films as represented by

T. K. Platts (*) Piedmont Community College, Roxboro, NC, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53278-8_9

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Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski 1968) and It’s Alive (Larry Cohen 1974) (Platts 2015, 154–156). Into the 1980s, the genre took a regressive turn with slasher films such as Friday the 13th (1980) and Prom Night (1980), which seemed to punish women’s advances in sexual empowerment (Wellman et  al. 2022, 660–679). While gender never left horror cinema, its prominence seemingly waned until the present era (Sharrett 2021, 27–31). The timing of this resurgence has been seen as no coincidence. Writing on the rise of female-directed horror in the 2010s, Kermode et al. (2017) aptly note, “at a time when the world seems particularly out of control, it’s little wonder that the genre should be expanding and diversifying.” It, thus, should come as no surprise that the advent of the MeToo movement, which exploded in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s shocking presidential victory, found its way into numerous horror films, ultimately coalescing into three overlapping, but thematically distinct, cycles: the gaslighting cycle, the captive women cycle, and the trauma cycle in what this chapter will term MeToo horror films. The MeToo horror film can be defined as a film that uses the elements and aesthetics of horror cinema to dramatize the assault and abuse of women (and some men) brought to light by the movement. The chapter uses a wide definition of horror to encompass films intended to shock, disturb, and/or scare their audiences (Clasen 2017, 3). In brief, gaslighting films wrestle with the psychological aspects of abuse and assault against women, captive women films deal with the violence against women, both metaphorical and physical, and trauma films confront the mid- and long-­ term consequences of the two. More specifically, the gaslighting cycle consists of films highlighting the struggles of victim-survivors in their attempts to convince friends and authority figures of their continued terrorization at the hands of their abuser, with examples including Unsane (Steven Soderbergh 2018) and The Invisible Man (Leigh Whannell 2020). The captive women cycle involves films where aggrieved white men metaphorically regain their presumed lost power through the imprisonment of women and the likes of Don’t Breathe (Fede Álvarez 2016) and Bad Samaritan (Dean Devlin 2018). The trauma cycle consists of stories centered around the mid- to long-term trauma experienced by survivors of physical or sexual assault at the hands of an uncaught, unknown, or resurgent perpetrator and includes Halloween (John Carpenter 2018) and Black Christmas (Sophia Takal 2019). Other contemporary sub-cycles of horror involving “women’s issues” coexist with MeToo horror films, such

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as the re-emergence of the witch in films like The Witch (Robert Eggers 2015), The Autopsy of Jane Doe (André Øvredal 2016), and Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino 2018) and have been linked by some to the MeToo movement, but can best be understood as ruminations on female empowerment and the continual negotiation of gender(ed) politics (cf. Creed 2022; Pisters 2020; Sharrett 2021, 27, 31). In the ensuing paragraphs, the chapter, instead of providing in-depth readings of individual films, intends to articulate the sociopolitical landscape that helped birth MeToo horror films, such as the politicization of misogyny as embodied by Donald Trump and the nomination and eventual swearing-in of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as well as industry conditions that allowed horror cinema to turn back to the political and put more women in the director’s chair (though sexual parity in the industry is far from being achieved and many of the films surveyed in the chapter have male directors). From there, the chapter will provide synoptic overviews of each cycle, highlighting representative themes across a collective of films and their relation to the MeToo movement.

MeToo and the MeToo Horror Film The phrase “Me Too” was first used by Tarana Burke in 2006 as a means to build solidarity and empathy amongst women (and, to a lesser extent, men) who experienced sexual harassment and assault (Rodino-Colocino 2018; 96–99, Tippett 2018, 231). The MeToo movement built from prior feminist efforts—especially those from the 1960s—that called attention to the quotidian sexism that worked to silence women and their experience with sexual violence (Loney-Howes 2019, 22–30). It was catalyzed by the rage stoked over the election of Donald Trump and his lengthy record of sexual assault allegations, as well as the broader failure to address such issues at a social and institutional level (Zacharek et al. 2017), and gained further momentum in 2017 when Ashley Judd accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault, and actress Alyssa Milano invited victims to speak out under the MeToo hashtag in October 2017 (Fileborn and Loney-Howes 2019, 3; Hogan 2022, 214; Tippett 2018, 231; Zacharek et  al. 2017), spreading predominantly on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook thereafter (Chen et al. 2018, 373–376). The movement not only helped to spotlight how commonplace sexual abuse was and remains, but also “revealed the ways in which the law can be misused

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to enable and conceal harassment” (Tippett 2018, 234). Within the film industry, the largest casualty of MeToo was Harvey Weinstein, a once esteemed film producer whose clout allowed him to get away with decades of abuse (Auletta 2022). Despite the visibility of the movement and Weinstein’s trial and conviction, convictions of abusers have remained rare because of statutes of limitations, “insufficient evidence,” or accusers refusing to cooperate with investigators after reporting incidents (Dalton 2018). During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump’s rallies were rife with misogynistic signs, t-shirts, and rhetoric (Harp 2018, 194–197; Landsbaum 2016). A small sample includes a sign that read, “Don’t be a Pussy Vote for Trump,” a button proclaiming, “Life’s a Bitch Don’t Vote for One,” and a shirt stating, “She’s a Cunt Vote for Trump” worn by a man who attended a rally with his wife and three children. As Dustin Harp notes, derogatory gendered words like bitch, cunt, and tramp “are typically used to describe women who are strong, uncompromising, angry, or uninterested in pleasing men” (Harp 2018, 195). Instead of condemning these expressions, Trump fed into them. At many rallies, Trump stoked crowds with chants of “lock her up.” The chant referred to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server over federally maintained servers for public communications, but doubled as a wish fulfillment to remove powerful women from positions of influence. Trump also described numerous women as “nasty,” including Hillary Clinton, Mette Frederiksen, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Carmen Yulín Cruz, Mazie Hirono, Meghan Markle, Omarosa Manigault Newman, April Ryan, and Mary Berra (Blade 2019). This is not to mention the countless other misogynistic comments made by Trump to women like Megyn Kelly, E. Jean Carroll, Rosie O’Donnell (Prasad 2019), his own daughter, and the infamous Access Hollywood tape where Trump bragged that he could do anything to women given his power, including “grab[bing] ‘em by the pussy” (Nelson 2016). In September 2018, then-President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh, who also had a long list of sexual assault allegations, to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. Despite the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, among other accusers, Kavanaugh assumed office on a vote divided across party lines. The hearings and their aftermath helped inspire a short-lived countermovement called #HimToo, which attempted to discredit claims against Kavanaugh and other accused offenders as colored by false accusations and animus (Boyle and Rathnayake

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2020). The hearings also impacted the writing of Black Christmas; according to director Sophia Takal, “[the hearings] had just happened, and I think I was really struck by how emotional he was, how aggrieved he was” (Ito 2019). As the above-mentioned events unfolded, several important industrial trends were also occurring that witnessed women making significant progress in the business, trends that have allowed for franker treatment of gender issues (McCollum and Clarke 2022a, b, 3). The advocacy group Women and Hollywood was founded in 2007 to agitate for gender diversity and inclusion in cinema (“About” n.d.). In taking stock of the 2010s, their report noted “there have been plenty more wins [than loses] for women in the biz over the past ten years” and cited Kathryn Bigelow becoming the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Director in 2010, Ava DuVernay becoming the first woman of color to direct a film with a $100+ million budget, the entrée of women into the superhero genre, the toppling of Harvey Weinstein and the MeToo movement, and the protest against the Cannes Film Festival for its exclusion of women directors as the biggest moments of the decade (“The Biggest Moments of the Decade for Women in Film” 2019). In 2020, Hollywood released a record number of films directed by women, a figure that fell slightly in 2021 (Lang 2022). These gains notwithstanding, women are still significantly underrepresented in the directing, scripting, and producing of films (“Statistics” n.d.), a dearth that is significant insofar as it can lead to a lack of diversity in stories, characters, and representations (Harrington 2020, 161). Of the major genres, horror has, perhaps, the most uneasy relationship with women. Since the 1930s, women have routinely been portrayed as damsels in distress and objects of violent desire. The sentiment was summed by Alfred Hitchcock, who was quoted on the set of The Birds (1963): “I always believe in following the advice of the playwright [Victorien] Sardou. He said ‘Torture the women!’ The trouble today is that we don’t torture women enough” (quoted in Spoto 1983, 483). Famed Italian horror director and producer Dario Argento similarly quipped, “I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or a man. I certainly don’t have to justify myself to anyone about this” (quoted in Jones 1983, 20). Despite all of this, women have always comprised a significant segment of the audience for horror (see, e.g., Berenstein 1996, 60–87; Charles 2020; Cherry 1999, 187–200;

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McCollum and Clarke 2022a, b, 1–2). The genre also dedicates more screentime, however problematic, to female characters than any other (McCollum and Clark 2022a, b, 1). While female directors have been unrepresented in the industry, it is “especially [so] in horror,” according to Emine Saner (2007). Almost ten years later, Phoebe Reilly (2016) joked that “female horror directors aren’t mythical beings” when documenting recent women-directed breakout hits in the genre. The release of The Babadook (Jennifer Kent 2014), Raw (Julia Ducournau, 2016), Revenge (Coralie Fargeat 2017), and XX (Jovanka Vuckovic, Annie Clark, Roxanne Benjamin, Karyn Kusama,2017), among others, led to the authoring of numerous trade articles proclaiming a renaissance of female-directed horror (see e.g., Kermode, Carter, Lodge, and Bromwich 2017; Galuppo 2017; Reilly 2016; Wang 2017; Yamato 2018) and a growing number of academic monographs and anthologies on the trend (see e.g., McCollum and Clark 2022a, b; Peirse 2020, Pisters 2020). While inroads have been made, much remains to be accomplished. In 2018, Jason Blum, an iconic producer of horror cinema, was asked why he had not theatrically released a film directed by a woman.1 His response, “There are not a lot of female directors period, and even less [sic] who are inclined to do horror” (quoted in Patches 2018), was met with near-­ immediate and universal backlash. Writing for The Atlantic, David Sims (2018) appropriately pointed out that it was not a lack of female talent in directing films, but a lack of opportunity. Shortly after the interview, Blum took to Twitter to issue an apology and told Variety, “I am passionate about hiring women, and I totally made a mistake in the way I represented that. We already work with a lot of women” (quoted in Nyren 2018). Blum has since produced several female-directed horror films such as The Keeping Hours (Karen Moncrieff 2017), The Lie (Veena Sud 2020), Nocturne (Zu Quirke 2020), The Craft: Legacy (Zoe Lister-Jones 2020), Bingo Hell (Gigi Saul Guerrero 2021), Black as Night (Maritte Lee Go 2021), The Manor (Axelle Carolyn 2021), and Torn Hearts (Brea Grant 2022), but Black Christmas remains the lone film to receive a wide-­ theatrical release.

1  In defense of Blum, the company produced a few films directed by women, such as Plush (Catherine Hardwicke 2013) and The Keeping Hours (Karen Moncrieff 2017). At the time of the interview, Blumhouse was producing Veena Sud’s The Lie (2018) and Sophia Takal’s “New Year, New You” (2018).

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It is amid the myriad of these forces from which the MeToo horror film gestates. In contrast to other prominent horror cinema of the 2010s and 2020s, MeToo horror films rarely incorporate elements of the supernatural and do not contain monsters of the sort studied by folklorists; that is, those “supernatural, mythical, or magical products of the imagination” (Gilmore 2003, 6). Instead, as the following analysis makes clear, MeToo horror films rely on seemingly ordinary people. Several further notes concerning the chapter’s analysis are in order before proceeding. The categories of analysis are meant to be instructive, not rigid constructions. Admittedly, they can easily blend into each other (and some can be cataloged differently). The films included within each cycle are far from exhaustive. Lastly, in the effort of charting general patterns witnessed across a variety of films, the analysis also favors breadth over depth.

The Gaslighting Cycle Gaslighting entails the process wherein an abuser psychologically manipulates the subjective reality of an abusee to the point where the abusee is meant to feel mistaken, paranoid, or crazy (Church 2021, 102, 107; Sweet 2019, 857–857, 865–868). The term derives from a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton entitled Gas Light and its two cinematic adaptations, Gaslight (Thorold Dickinson 1940) and Gaslight (George Cukor 1944), wherein a husband attempts to have his wife declared mentally ill and taken to an asylum so he can claim her inherited jewel collection. Gaslighting can also include individuals other than the abuser, such as law enforcement personnel, counselors, friends, and family who, wittingly or unwittingly, reinforce the subjective reality created by the abuser, causing the abusee to further question their conception of reality and sanity (Sweet 2019, 857–857, 865–868). Gaslighting is not a singular event, but a process dedicated to dissolving a person’s agency through manipulation and/or deceit (Rietdijk 2021). Films in the gaslighting cycle include, but are not limited to: Shut In (Farren Blackburn 2016), Clinical (Alistair Legrand 2017), Gerald’s Game (Mike Flanagan 2017), The Perfection (Richard Shepard 2018), Unsane (Steven Soderbergh 2018), The Invisible Man (Leigh Whannell 2020), The Lodge (Veronica Franz and Severin Fiala 2020), and Hypnotic (Suzanne Coote and Matt Angel 2021). Though thematic distinctions separate the films, they are joined by the following characteristics: covert psychotropic drugging or the use of psychiatry against women, domestic violence, and ineffectual institutional response.

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The secret drugging of victims appears in Shut In, The Perfection, Clinical, Unsane, The Invisible Man, and Hypnotic. Shut In and The Perfection limit this plot point to characters unassociated with mental health care. In the former, a son drugs his mother in an attempt to disorient her into believing he remains a paralyzed invalid after an accident and has hidden a mute child in the house’s crawlspace. In the latter, an aspiring musician is drugged to cut off her hand to save her from an arcane sexual ritual performed at her music school. Meanwhile, Clinical, Unsane, The Invisible Man, and Hypnotic implicate mental health institutions and/or mental health professionals. With the exception of Hypnotic, where a psychiatrist uses hypnosis to insert his late wife’s memories into an unsuspecting patient, these films show women who are drugged for their presumed hysteria and/or anxiety, but are telling the truth about their abuse. Significantly, the narratives of the films tie into an observation made by Paige Sweet, who identifies the mental health system as a key locus of gaslighting where abused women are frequently barred from and forced to use mental health services, which intensifies the gaslighting by marshaling the stigma of mental illness against them (Sweet 2019, 867–868). The critique of the mental health system is strongest in Unsane and The Invisible Man. Unsane’s Sawyer Valentini seeks help at a behavioral clinic only to be admitted and kept against her will. Her stalker, David, has assumed the identity of a nurse at the clinic. During the movie, David drugs Sawyer to make her appear insane, falsifies records to show she has been released, and imprisons her in a solitary confinement cell at the facility. All of Sawyer’s claims are dismissed on account of her “craziness.” The Invisible Man features the gaslighting of Cecilia Cass at the hands of her ex-husband, Adrian Griffin, who uses reflective technology to render himself invisible after faking his suicide. Cecilia is framed for murder and admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where she is further terrorized by Adrian while her behaviors are taken as further evidence of her psychosis. Both films feature female protagonists attempting to convince others of their abuse at the hands of vindictive men. Instead of offering these women respite from their experiences, the mental health apparatus only serves to heighten their abuse. David Church (2021, 104) argues the standard gaslighting narrative entails a heterosexual male psychologically (and even physically) abusing his female partner. Accordingly, it should come as little surprise that domestic abuse and violence serve as key aspects of many narratives within the gaslighting cycle, including Unsane, Secret Obsession, The Invisible

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Man, The Lodge, and Hypnotic. Of the films cycle, Unsane and The Invisible Man have received the most critical commentary. Unsane was taken as prescient commentary on the MeToo movement and garnered mostly praise for its blunt portrayal of the psychological aftermath caused by sexual assault. Jess Joho (2018) noted that Unsane “tackles the depressingly common experience of women who are first sexually assaulted, then gaslit into believing that they themselves, not their predators, are the ones to blame” while also capturing “the repression and eventual explosion of female rage stemming from these abuses—and society’s desperate attempts to suppress that rage for fear of its powerful consequences.” Transforming the invisible man from a scientist driven mad by his invisibility to an “abusive, domestic monster” (Bacon 2020, 23) in The Invisible Man was taken as a particularly apt metaphor for the MeToo era. John Nugent (2020) noted, “the invisibility concept is a compellingly appropriate means to explore abusive relationships, agoraphobia, gaslighting, and toxic masculinity”. Owen Gleiberman (2020) proclaimed it was “a social horror film grounded in a note-perfect metaphor” where “the abuse remains (literally) out of sight. She’s every woman who’s ever had to fight to be heard because her ordeal wasn’t ‘visible.’” Where Unsane and The Invisible Man offer standard visions of abusive gaslighting (minus the fact the survivor protagonists remain resilient and never break), the other films take the metaphor to different extremes. Jennifer Williams from Secret Obsession awakens from a car accident next to a man pretending to be her husband. As it turns out, Jennifer has amnesia, and the stranger, Ryan Gaerity killed her real husband, Russell Williams, and now poses as him. Ryan painstakingly constructs a world where Jennifer believes he is Russell. This entails altering photographs of Jennifer and Russell to show Jennifer with Ryan. Jennifer grows suspicious of Ryan and, with the help of Detective Frank Page, kills him. The gaslighting in The Lodge comes not from a possessive lover, but from stepchildren who self-consciously drug and manipulate a woman who is the lone survivor of a cult mass suicide. Taken together, with the exception of The Lodge, these films mostly show seemingly ordinary men with the veneer of respectability engaging in behavior antithetical to their public identity. It is this sort of behavior the MeToo movement brought to the fore of the public consciousness. Films in the gaslighting cycle routinely show failed institutional responses to the abuse of women. This facet of the cycle dovetails into the indictment of mental healthcare, but also includes the ineffectiveness of

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law enforcement and other patriarchal protective institutions. Nearly every film in the cycle shows women who are simply not believed by people and institutions meant to protect them. Though writing of Unsane, Laura Kremmel’s (2018, 156) observation applies to other films in the cycle: that they give voice to “the overwhelming challenges to women who want to come forward to report stalkers, abusers, sexual predators, and rapists. Not being believed leads to not being seen as reliable, rational, or sane: is this person delusional? For women in this vulnerable position, this is the real horror.” Instead of helping victims of assault, institutions and personnel entrusted to help make matters worse. The women from Clinical, Unsane, and The Invisible Man find themselves institutionalized when they seek help, a troubling fact encountered by many women who make their abuse known. The critique of patriarchal institutions offered in the gaslighting cycle is arguably undermined in some of the films by portraying detectives and other helpful male characters as saviors of the victim protagonists, thereby jeopardizing the potential for progressive or radical commentary. Here, governmental institutions are corrupt and inept, as many conservative criticisms would have it, but are redeemed by virtuous “good guys,” operating within but also beyond institutions. Detectives helped to save the heroines in Secret Obsession, The Invisible Man, and Hypnotic. Detective Frank Page manages to discover Ryan Gaerity’s assumption of Russell William’s identity just in time to save Jennifer Williams from being murdered in Secret Obsession. Detective James Lanier transforms from skeptic to believer in The Invisible Man. Towards the film’s end, James helps Cecilia tape a confession from Adrian and even abets Cecilia’s slashing of Adrian’s throat. Detective Wade Rollins assists Jenn Thompson in unraveling the nefarious past of Dr. Collin Meade from Hypnotic. Meanwhile, it is a fellow psychologist, Dr. Bennett Wilson, who comes to the aid of Mary Portman in Shut In. Dr. Wilson discovers the son of Mary Portman is not a paralyzed invalid after witnessing him walking away from his wheelchair after an unfinished Skype call. Undercover investigative journalist Nate Hoffman from Unsane befriends Sawyer Valentini at the corrupt psychiatric institution and reveals to her how the clinic defrauds insurance companies and supplies her with a hidden cellphone that allows Sawyer to contact her mother. In total, films of the gaslighting cycle show how difficult the world makes it for victims of harassment and emotional abuse to make their voices heard—they are repeatedly ignored, minimized, and/or outright

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denied. While the violence of the gaslighting cycle was often covert or secondary to other forms of violence, the captive women cycle brings misogynistic violence to the narrative fore.

The Captive Woman Cycle A long-running media-spanning gender trope is the endangered female character bound, chained, caged, and/or isolated at the hands of a nefarious male antagonist. She remains helpless and vulnerable until a heroic male or males save her. Dawn Keetley (2019, 97–98) argues that there has been an increase in horror films since 2010 that feature a white man as the antagonist with story arcs structured by the presumed dwindling of male power and privilege as fashioned by the financial recession of 2008–2009 and captured in Donald Trump’s calls of “lock her up!” Keetley (2019, 101) maintains that a sense of injury lies at the center of the cycle, men who “feel slighted, dismissed, or materially harmed by women,” which, in turn, “legitimates a violent and compensatory aggression.” Films in the captive woman cycle include, but are not limited to: Don’t Breathe (Fede Álvarez 2016), Pet (Carles Torrens 2016), Split (M.  Night Shyamalan 2016), Bad Samaritan (Dean Devlin 2018), 10X10 (Suzi Ewing 2018), Apostle (Gareth Evans 2018), Greta (Neil Jordan 2018), Secret Obsession (Peter Sullivan 2019), Alone (John Hyams 2020), The Paramedic (Carles Torras 2020), Sightless (Cooper Karl 2020), What Lies Below (Braden Duemmler 2020), Don’t Breathe 2 (Rodo Sayagues 2021), Fear of Rain (Castille Landon 2021), and Intrusion (Adam Salky 2021). Like the gaslighting cycle, several themes cut across the films of the captive woman cycle: aggrieved and/or damaged masculinity, sexual control, the use of wealth in keeping women captive, and, to borrow from Carol Clover, the existence of a “terrible place” (2015, 30–31). Aggrieved masculinity can be described as a phenomenon wherein (mostly white) men feel as if their cultural hegemony is under attack and that what is rightfully theirs has been or is being stripped from them (Kimmel 2017, 6). This feeling has stoked a form of identity politics steeped in anger, misogyny, and white ethnonationalism in an attempt to “take back” what is theirs (Beckman 2021, 239–245), which includes women who have rejected them. The forceful claiming of women, some of whom have denied men, appears in Don’t Breathe, Don’t Breathe 2, Pet, Split, Bad Samaritan, 10X10, Apostle, The Paramedic, Sightless, and Intrusion.

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The Don’t Breathe films, 10X10, and The Paramedic use pregnancy/ denied fatherhood as an animating force behind aggrieved masculinity. In Don’t Breathe, a blind veteran (named Norman Nordstrom in the sequel) has entrapped and impregnated a woman in his basement who was responsible for the death of his daughter. A vengeful father abducts and imprisons a former nurse in order to extract a confession that she was responsible for his wife’s death in 10X10. In The Paramedic Angel, a recently paralyzed paramedic, becomes vengefully possessive of his ex-­girlfriend when he learns she is pregnant. In each film, a patriarchal figure attempts to reclaim what he feels has been taken from him, a family that was denied from him by a (lecherous) woman. Pet and Sightless involve men who are obsessed with the women they capture. Seth, an introverted man in Pet, asks Holly out on a date after extensively researching her online. After being denied, Seth stalks, abducts, and locks her in a cage under the quixotic notion that he will save her. As it turns out, Holly’s journal reveals that she has killed people. After a series of mind games, Holly is able to free herself, whereupon she keeps Seth in a cage to unleash her sadistic tendencies. Clayton of Sightless blinds and abducts violinist Ellen Ashland. Ellen is kept in a soundproof room designed to resemble a city apartment replete with a neighbor, traffic noises, and people portrayed by Clayton. Clayton’s obsession with Ellen stems from his being held captive by his father for three years after his mother’s death. Ellen’s music provided him solace at the time. Split, Bad Samaritan, and Intrusion show men who abduct women in order to feed their sadistic impulses. Split displays a man, Kevin Wendell Crumb, stricken with dissociative identity disorder. He kidnaps three teenage girls to sacrifice to “The Beast,” a personality of his hellbent on ridding the world of the “impure.” Bad Samaritan’s Cale Erendreich is a wealthy serial killer and a true sadist who wallows in the misery of the many women he has kidnapped and murdered. In Intrusion, Henry Parsons abducts and locks a woman in a secret basement in his high-tech house to play out his long-held homicidal yearnings. In these variants of the captive woman cycle, there is a desire by the male antagonist to exert total control over women. Much like Trump triumphantly bragged about grabbing women, these men feel justified in their violent actions; they are entitled to their behaviors. Apostle contains one of the most extreme variants of the captive woman trope. The film is about a cult inhabiting a remote Welsh island. It turns out the cult keeps a female deity imprisoned in tree roots in a cave. She is

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fed human or animal blood to bless the village’s harvest. Her body is ravaged by years of abuse from the male elders of the cult who use the deity for bountiful crops. She is relieved of her misery through burning. Strongly related to aggrieved masculinity is the notion of the sexual control of women found in the films of the captive women cycle, such as Don’t Breathe, Don’t Breathe 2, Gerald’s Game, Apostle, and The Paramedic. Don’t Breathe contains one of the more excessive instances of sexual control. Norman impregnates a woman with a turkey baster and keeps her chained in the basement until she gives birth. The sequel attempts to redeem the character, to show that he is not such a bad person after all. The move paralleled the attempts to excuse many of the men outed by the MeToo movement. The convoluted character arc was met with stinging rebukes by many critics. Mary Beth McAndrews (2021) expressed her disdain thusly, “[Don’t Breathe 2 is] a morally repulsive story that refuses to acknowledge its main character’s horrific past.” Alison Willmore (2021), perhaps best sums up the character, “Norman Nordstrom (Stephen Lang) is a rapist and a murderer who kidnapped the woman involved in the car accident that killed his daughter, impregnated her using a turkey baster, and locked her in his basement to gestate what he considered to be the replacement child he was owed.” Gerald’s Game version of this plot might seem the most anodyne, but, nonetheless, still contains problematic undertones. The film is about a couple, Jessie and Gerald Burlingame, who are experiencing marital problems and decide to have a romantic getaway at a remote lake house. At the house, they decide to engage in roleplay, which involves Gerald handcuffing Jessie to the posts of a bed. So far, everything has been consensual. Gerald, however, begins revealing fantasies about having his way with his wife. Gerald’s fantasizing prompts Jessie to call off the roleplay, but Gerald suffers a heart attack, leaving Jessie cuffed to the bed. The female deity of Apostle is portrayed as continually ravaged and desiccated by the abusive male elders of the village. When Angel discovers his ex-girlfriend is pregnant in The Paramedic, he kidnaps and temporarily paralyzes her in an unhinged attempt to win back her love. Several films in the captive women cycle involve a particularly wealthy male, and in the case of Greta, a female, using his financial privilege to hide the abduction of their female captives. This plot point features in Don’t Breathe, Bad Samaritan, 10X10, Greta, and Intrusion. In each instance, the antagonist maintains (often elaborate) hidden rooms in their homes (and sometimes remote or clandestine dwellings) designed to keep their

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captives confined and hidden from others. These aggrieved men can be seen as representative of many Trump voters, who, contrary to stereotypical depictions of “broke, ignorant patriots,” actually comprised mostly upper-middle-class white men with incomes above $70,000 who greatly feared their loss of dominant status (Smith and Hanley 2018, 197–201). The antagonists of these films are either middle-aged professionals or retirees who target mostly young women for their presumed transgressions. Closely related to the keeping of hidden rooms is the terrible place. In Clover (2015, 30–31), the articulation of the “terrible place” is tainted by structural decay and/or ominous clutter and the monstrousness of its tenant(s). It features in Don’t Breathe, Pet, Split, Bad Samaritan, Greta, 10X10, Apostle, Sightless, and Intrusion, wherein it not only houses the captive woman, but is also the lair where the misogynistic impulses of the antagonists are played out. For Dawn Keetley (2019, 106), captive women films entail not only symbolic attempts at remasculinization through violently putting women “back in their place,” but women fighting back against their captor(s). In this way, the films metaphorically grapple with misogynistic wish fulfillment and the organized movement addressing it. The films in the cycle, however, are temporally limited to the here and now as opposed to the aftermaths wrought by their narratives. That aftermath provides a central animating force in the trauma cycle.

The Trauma Cycle A common consequence of sexual and psychological abuse is the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) evinced in 31 to 84% of battered women (Jones et al. 2001, 110). Instead of detailing events that led to PTSD, films in the trauma cycle start with women living with the aftereffects of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. Trauma films are the smallest cycle in the sample and is comprised of Halloween (John Carpenter 1978), Black Christmas (Sophia Takal 2019), and Men (Alex Garland 2022). PTSD and toxic masculinity are the common threads linking the films. Characters dealing with the consequences of past abuse feature prominently in all the trauma films. Set forty years after the infamous babysitter murders depicted in the 1978 original Halloween, Halloween (David Gordon Green 2018) shows Laurie Strode, a survivor of Michael Myers’s murderous rampage, living in the traumatic baggage of her attack. She lives as an alcoholic recluse prepping for the inevitable return of Michael

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Myers. Her mannerisms have alienated her from her adult daughter and her daughter’s family. According to Morgan Pedroza (2021, 142), Laurie’s characterization “calls attention to the ways that trauma wounds and warps, alters one’s ‘sense of self’ and one’s way of relating to others, and fundamentally changes one’s ‘world-view.’” Black Christmas’ Riley Stone is struggling with the consequences of rape at the hands of a fraternity brother at a patriarchal college. Instead of featuring a final girl, the film features a group of sorority sisters banding together to combat the misogynistic fraternity. As Kristen Lopez (2019) characterizes the plot point, Black Christmas takes horror “away from the male-directed final girl and [lets] women take the reins.” Men details the story of a recently widowed woman, Harper Marlowe, who decides to spend time alone in a small village after the recent suicide of her husband, James. James killed himself in response to Harper’s request for a divorce, telling her that she would be forced to live with the guilt. In the village, she has uncomfortable and unsettling run-ins with various, similarly looking men (all played by Rory Kinnear). Men speaks to a long history of how “men will just not leave [women] alone” and blaming women for the “crimes and failures” of men (Scott 2022). Across these films, toxic masculinity lies at the heart of the trauma experienced by the women. Halloween’s Michael Myers has no apparent motives for his homicidal tendencies, but it is suggested, from the 1978 film, that he is driven by antipathy toward women’s sexuality due to his stabbing his sister to death after she had sex (the boyfriend was allowed to live). This, however, is complicated by Halloween Ends (David Gordon Green 2022), which suggests evil stems from innate drives present in everyone and are brought to fruition by environmental cues. Black Christmas’ indictment of toxic masculinity is more overt. Not only does campus security and administration disregard Riley’s rape; the college’s classics professor, Professor Gelson, openly promotes misogynistic writings in his class while the fraternity housing the person responsible for the rape operates with impunity even after harassing Riley and her sorority sisters. This aspect of Black Christmas resonates with the fact many survivors of trauma are met with death threats and ridicule (Rosewarne 2019, 176), something thoroughly revealed by the MeToo movement. In Men, flashbacks demonstrate James had long emotionally abused and manipulated Harper. Instead of identifying flaws in himself, he chooses to blame Harper for their failing relationship. As many abusers do, James also

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blames Harper for the abuse he inflicts on her, even his unnecessary suicide. The trauma cycle shows how the torment of abuse has long-lasting repercussions for survivors. Just because the abuse is no longer happening does not mean it is still exerting influence on the individual.

Conclusion The MeToo horror film continues a consistent trend of horror cinema of reflecting broadly felt social stress into its texts. As a complex social movement, any individual film will be incapable of capturing all of its nuances. Hence the existence of three overlapping cycles: the gaslighting cycle featuring characters whose subjective sense of reality is being manipulated by an abuser, the captive women cycle wherein aggrieved men abduct and imprison women, and the trauma cycle that sees survivors of violence struggling with the repercussions of their experiences. While the MeToo movement can be credited for ushering the lingering issue of sexual assault into the limelight, Lisa Corrigan (2019, 264) points to its sobering shortcomings, including the white cooptation of a hashtag started by a Black woman, celebrity whitewashing, the muting of male victims, and the failure to acknowledge the abuse of LGBTQIA+ people and women of color. Just as the MeToo movement has shortcomings, so do the films dramatizing it. As noted above, several films in the gaslighting cycle have males saving or helping to save women. Likewise, while some of the films give voice to issues disproportionately experienced by women, they still present sexist stereotypes. For instance, Glenn Kenny (2018) explained how 10X10 starts with a “misogynist abduction hook,” but flips “to another misogynist trope, that of the virtuous male duped by a jezebel.” As a synoptic analysis, however, a deeper analysis of the ambivalence in these films is beyond the scope of this chapter. That important work will be left to other scholars.

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CHAPTER 10

From the Female Grotesque to the Crone: Beware of the Older Woman in The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014) Marta Miquel-Baldellou

Introduction In his seminal volume on horror movies, Robin Wood refers to the confluence between sociological studies and psychoanalysis as discursive disciplines that shed light on what remains oppressed and repressed in our culture (1996, 164). Social oppression ultimately leads to internal repression, and what is intrinsically repressed is ultimately projected outwards as incarnated by the figure of the monster, which embodies evolving fears that befall society. As the times evolve, the masks of the monster have been changing along with the social and individual sources of dread. In the last decades, as a result of the demographic changes that have been taking place, whereby the aging population has been rising exponentially, owing to factors such as increased life expectancy and decline in birth rates, old

M. Miquel-Baldellou (*) University of Lleida, Lleida, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53278-8_10

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age and its effects have turned into a most widespread cause for concern that has found reflection in horror cinema. Film theorists like Cynthia Miller and A.  Bowdoin van Riper (2019) have recently drawn attention to contemporary cinematic textualities that bring to the fore the dread of growing old from a personal and collective perspective. According to Miller and van Riper, cinematic images of aging cast elders in roles ranging from victims to villains (5) as indicative of the prevailing ambivalent attitudes toward old age, while they graphically depict the fears of aging badly, swinging from the grotesque extremes of bodily functions (3) to the eccentricities of thought and disposition (4), thus describing old age as a cause of abjection and uncanniness. From early exponents, such as M. Night Shyamalan’s fairy-tale-gone-wrong picture The Visit (2015), to more recent proponents, like Ti West’s slasher-­ pseudo-­erotic movie X (2022), there has been a proliferation of cinematic textualities exploring social and personal fears about old age and the process of growing old. In the field of aging studies, scholars like Sally Chivers contend that, for women, the aging process has always meant a horror story (2013, xvii). Accordingly, Dafina Lemish and Vurda Muhlbauer refer to “the double marginalization of age and gender” (2012, 165), as female monstrosity serves as a reflection of larger social fears of women as a whole. These statements acquire literal undertones in age-related horror pictures in current times which feature older women as disturbing sources of anxiety. As a forerunner of contemporary horror movies, like Natalie Erika James’s Relic (2020) and Axelle Carolyn’s The Manor (Carolyn 2021), whose plots focus exclusively on female old age, it may be argued that Adam Robitel’s The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014) laid the foundations of contemporary horror pictures addressing fears and concerns surrounding the figure of the older woman. Robitel’s movie revolves around a medical team—comprising Mia Medina (Michelle Ang), Gavin (Brett Gentile), and Luis (Jeremy DeCarlos)—who intend to make a scientific documentary and record the everyday routines of Deborah Logan (Jill Larson), an aging woman who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, while she is living with her daughter, Sarah Logan (Anne Ramsay). Although Deborah starts exhibiting symptoms that are initially considered ordinary for someone suffering from this disease, her actions gradually appear to defy normal explanations and even suggest the intervention of some unknown supernatural forces. Deborah’s creepy conduct in her old age is related to her involvement, as

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a young woman, in the disappearance of a criminal physician, Henri Desjardins (Kevin Campbell), who committed a series of cannibalistic murders of young girls in an attempt to recreate an ancient ritual that would grant him immortality. The symptoms of the degenerative illness that are befalling Deborah thus coalesce with the demonic possession to which she is subjected on behalf of the late male doctor, who intends to use Deborah’s body to abduct a fifth young girl and conclude the ritual whereby he is to defy death. The horror trope of possession thus turns into an allegory of old age, which acquires particular insights in relation to gender discourses, insofar as the movie reinstates how older women have been ostracized and pathologized by masculinized medical discourses. Hence, although Robitel’s movie addresses the plight of female aging from a contemporary perspective, it is rooted in the tradition of horror moving pictures portraying older women—and, particularly, the aging female body—as commonly generating anguish and disquiet. In retrospect, as Timothy Shary and Nancy McVittie claim, in the decade of the 1960s, horror movies, which mostly aimed at attracting young audiences, began to address latent anxieties about aging in a post-­ war society, featuring older actresses in the twilight of their careers who personified the worries about the constraining roles assigned to aging women in society (2016, 78–9). As Shary and McVittie further argue, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) involved a turning point in horror cinema, since it deviated from the portrayal of fantastic monsters and resorted to the figure of an older woman to trigger fear, hence inaugurating a series of horror movies introducing a sinister aging female as a source of dread, which gained popularity and became known as hag horror. Analogously, film critic Peter Shelley refers to horror movies featuring older women that began to gain high acclaim in the 1960s, as the subgenre of Grande Dame Guignol, which portrayed disturbing older women refusing both to act their age and behave according to gender prescriptions until they are made to conform. As Shelley further claims, in these pictures, the portrayal of older women is rooted in the archetype of the vamp or femme fatale (2009, 6)—as a female version of the male vampire—or in the Dickensian character of Miss Havisham entangled in nostalgia for her lost youth (8). Joining these two opposing stereotypes, in contemporary horror movies like Robitel’s The Taking of Deborah Logan, the figure of the older woman is initially characterized as ostensibly benevolent and victimized, but gradually displays traits that reveal a shocking and sinister nature which goes

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beyond the apparent symptoms of old age to acquire supernatural dimensions. Rooted in classic cinematic textualities, Robitel’s movie offers a blatantly horrific depiction of what it means for women to grow old, as it complies with the notions of the grotesque and abjection, as well as the concepts of the uncanny and Otherness, which have conventionally been used to describe older women. According to Mary Russo, the grotesque evokes the cavernous anatomical female body (1995, 1), which is associated with the womb and the tomb, thus endowing the female body with features denoting both origin and termination. The concept of the female grotesque also relates to Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, which fluctuates from the maternal body to the decaying corpse (1982, 101). Drawing further on the notion of the female grotesque, Russo envisions it as a “cultural projection of an inner state” (1995, 9) in relation to the Freudian concept of the uncanny, as something that is frightening, albeit familiar (1991, 184). On the basis of the cultural portrayal of the aging individual as an uncanny subject, as Amelia DeFalco explains, old age becomes a process of alienation that produces a doubling of the self (2009, 5), since the aging process suggests an internalization of difference which is marked from outside, causing women to become doubly afflicted in old age as female and aged (2009, 107). As the character of Deborah Logan succumbs to old age and disease, Robitel’s movie revisits ancestral and cultural fears related to the older woman as a disturbing source of abjection and uncanniness. Insofar as Robitel’s portrayal of female aging emphasizes the grotesque and abject traits of the aging female body, along with the uncanny and alienating features characterizing the self, it conforms to Barbara Creed’s notion of the monstrous-feminine (1993), since  Deborah incarnates an older woman as an imposing source of horror, while  her depiction also evokes the figure of the crone. As Barbara Walker explains, in an ancient matriarchal view of the universe, the crone was considered an all-powerful mother (1985, 12), who was not loving and nourishing, but rather menacing and destructive. According to Walker, ancestral male fears of femininity—such as the castrating vagina dentata (18) or the petrifying Medusa’s gaze (57)—are rooted in myths involving the figure of the crone. In this respect, Maddi McGillvray claims that, since the crone has been traditionally interpreted as a symbol of female persecution, some feminists have approached it as a metaphor of female subversiveness (2019, 78), thus paving the way for interpreting cinematic portrayals of the crone,

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such as Robitel’s movie, from a feminist perspective owing to the transgressive depiction of the older woman that is conveyed in these pictures. Accordingly, although Robitel’s picture presents tenets characterizing textualities that age scholars, such as Margaret Gullette (1997), have described as decline narratives—insofar as Deborah’s old age is described through physical decay and mental deterioration—it also discloses her overwhelming, albeit destructive, power in her old age as indicative of the ancestral figure of the crone. Bearing in mind this premise, it is the aim of this chapter to claim that Robitel’s picture conforms to a narrative of decline in terms of female aging—insofar as it highlights grotesque aspects, involving the abject and the uncanny, which the male gaze has conventionally associated with the aging female body—but also to argue that Robitel’s movie artfully vindicates the character of the older woman through her association with the ancestral figure of the crone.

Abjection: Bodily Wastes, Border, Mother The characterization of Deborah Logan in Robitel’s movie complies with Russo’s notion of the female grotesque, whereby the older woman’s body is envisioned as irregular, multiple, and open (1995, 8). As an older woman who is gradually possessed by an evil spirit—as a metaphor for disease and also old age—her body becomes a site of contestation whereby the boundaries of what is self and what is Other collapse and converge into one another. In her old age, the character of Deborah symbolically evokes the cavernous maternal body, but also turns into a cave of abjection, arising from a pervasive ancestral revulsion against the aging female body. As Creed claims, horror movies recreate the notion of the abject by means of displaying images of bodily wastes, addressing the notion of the border, and depicting the maternal figure as a symbolic location of conflicting desire (2021, 43), in a tripartite characterization of abjection that is recurrently evoked in the portrayal of Deborah as an aging woman. According to Kristeva, the bodily wastes that destabilize identity fall into the categories of the excremental, which threaten identity from without, and the menstrual, which menace it from within (1982, 71). In old age, Deborah loses control of her biological bodily functions—like urine, feces, and vomit—which threaten her identity from the outside. As Kristeva argues, such bodily wastes drop so that the subject lives (3), thus stirring the specter of the cadaver as the embodiment of ultimate abjection, with close-up shots of Deborah’s aging naked body that gradually conjure the

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abject image of a corpse. Besides, upon being questioned about the identity of Henri Desjardins, Deborah vomits and defecates a mixture of soil and worms, which she has ingested from the garden where she buried him while he was still alive, hence reverting the process and giving him symbolic birth, while picturing her mouth as a vagina dentata, in a metaphor of pregnancy and castration that simultaneously evokes the womb and the tomb. As evidence of abjection from within, Deborah’s identity is menaced by her menopause since, insofar as she is no longer purged of blood through her menstruation, she alternatively develops an eagerness to bite and cause blood loss in her old age. As Creed argues, the pervasiveness of the bleeding female body in horror—which conjures the image of the gaping wound—suggests castration anxiety that not only evokes woman’s castrated condition following Freudian premises, but also the concern about castration on behalf of the male (2021, 46). Deborah’s white gown showing stains of blood subtly refers to a substitute rite of initiation that arises as an alternative sort of menarche in her old age. Possessed by Henri Desjardins’s spirit, Deborah pursues and bites Cara Minetti, a young girl entering the stage of her first menses, in an attempt to bridge the gap between menarche and menopause and, by extension, between youth and old age. Moreover, Deborah also develops a skin condition whereby she displays scaly patches that are reminiscent of birth as a violent act of expulsion, thus symbolically bearing the traces of placenta, in one of the images that Kristeva uses as illustrative of the abject (1982, 101). In so doing, as an aging mother, Deborah symbolically gives birth to her aging self, who is no longer maternally nourishing, but aggressively devouring. Throughout Robitel’s movie, Deborah thus shows signs of shaking off her skin like a snake, as she is constantly associated with the pervasive presence of snakes and even ends up transforming into a giant reptilian creature that devours human victims. In terms of aging, as Juan-Eduardo Cirlot explains, snakes illustrate the cycle of life, since they evoke rebirth insofar as, when the snake shakes off its skin, it symbolically disposes of its old age (2002, 287), thus enacting an everlasting cyclical process that ensures longer life. Henceforth, recurrent images of bodily wastes endorse the blurring boundaries of Deborah’s identity as an older woman, thus conjuring pervasive abjection as reflected in her aging body. Given the distortion of boundaries  that it implies, the notion of the abject is also related to the concept of the border, which separates the self from that which threatens its integrity and, as Creed asserts,  it is

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controlled by the split of two orders that respectively stand for the maternal authority and paternal laws (2021, 45). As Creed further explains, there is a period in which the maternal authority exercises itself without guilt, when mother and nature merge with each other, while, when the symbolic makes its entry, shame and guilt come into play, as the order of the phallus imposes itself (45). In Robitel’s movie, despite representing male authority, when Desjardins fell ill, he underwent a symbolic process of emasculation, whereas, as a single mother, Deborah felt compelled to adopt a masculinized role as a professional woman and single parent of her daughter, thus subverting the established gender roles traditionally assigned to men and women. According to McGillvray, female monstrosity reflects larger social fears toward women for their transgressive capacities to subvert patriarchal structures (2019, 78). As illustrative of the border within the notion of the abject, Deborah defied the law and killed Desjardins when he threatened to abduct her daughter, thus exerting her female dominion over his male authority. Owing to her actions, in her old age, Deborah feels threatened by a repressed male presence that returns to life in order to punish her and reestablish the patriarchal order. Lastly, as Creed further argues, the abject is usually constructed in horror movies by means of the constant repudiation of the maternal figure (2021, 65). If Deborah protected her daughter Sarah in her childhood, as an adult, Sarah looks after her mother in the course of her disease and old age. Nevertheless, their relationship proves intricate, as Sarah resents the fact that her mother sent her to a boarding school when she was a child, unaware that her mother’s decision responded to the purpose of protecting her from Desjardins’s advances. As Deborah’s health deteriorates, her body transforms from that of a loving and nourishing mother into a violent and ghoulish apparent corpse that turns into the quintessential representation of the abject and calls to mind Creed’s notion of ‘the body without soul’ as one of the basest forms of pollution (41). If, as a young mother, Deborah saved her female child, in her old age, she appears willing to reenact her role as a mother upon taking a female teenager, Cara, under her protection. Nonetheless, when Deborah is possessed by Desjardins, she becomes vilified as an aging mother for wishing to extend her role beyond her older years, inasmuch as, rather than feeding the young girl, she truly intends to devour her, thus picturing Deborah as an older mother who becomes an embodiment of the monstrous. In addition to categorizing her as representative of abjection, to use Shary and McVittie’s term, this distancing portrayal of the older woman also

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contributes to aligning the aging female with a shocking Othered subject (2016, 86), thus turning older women into a source of the uncanny, inasmuch as they are categorized as outwardly familiar, but inherently alienating.

Uncanniness: Others, Doubles, Mirrors As the older woman’s body turns into an alienating entity in Robitel’s movie, attention is drawn to the figure of the Other that appears to lurk inside. In her seminal volume on old age, Simone de Beauvoir claims that “within me is the Other … who is old: and that Other is myself” (1972, 420), thus implying that aging foretells a potentially disturbing experience of symbolic depersonalization. As DeFalco claims, owing to the inherent connection between female identity and corporeality in patriarchal culture, women are expected to experience old age as a more frightening process of dissemblance (2009, 96), insofar as their former youthful image turns into a virtual specter that contrasts with their current aging body, thus establishing “a radical divergence from the self” that produces the splitting of subjectivity (108). As DeFalco further explains, degenerative illnesses menace to disrupt the notion of stable selfhood that is virtually maintained through storytelling (53), since narratives of illness imply transferring the narrative voice to another (54), insofar as the self is taken hostage, while the storyteller necessarily appropriates the narrative and participates in some symbolic ventriloquism, as the patient is no longer capable of speaking for herself. In the movie, Mia is in charge of telling Deborah’s story, whereas, as a victim of Alzheimer’s disease, Deborah undergoes a relentless process of alienation, since, even if her body ratifies her identity, her failing mental faculties reveal the self as literally Other. Moreover, Deborah is doubly alienated by her illness and the mediatic representation of her degenerative process, which is constantly replicated and mark her as twice afflicted. As a case in point, when Deborah is shown some recordings of herself as she loses control and succumbs to violent outbursts, she states, “it’s obscene” (Robitel 2014), and asks the medical staff why they did not prevent her from acting so unlike her, instead of standing apart and recording her actions, which categorize her as Other. Above all, though, Deborah also describes her own self as Other, since she can hardly identify herself with the subject appearing on the screen. Following another violent attack against the medical staff, which obliges them to take her to the hospital, Deborah concedes, “I felt peculiar, now

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I feel right” (Robitel 2014), thus subtly acknowledging her process of depersonalization fluctuating between ferocity and docility. According to Otto Rank, the terror of the double lies in “a wish-defense against a dreaded external destruction” (1971, 86), which involves protection against impending death and evidence of approaching dissolution, since, in childhood, the double functions as an insurance against the destruction of the ego, whereas, it ultimately reverses this role and turns into the harbinger of death. As Deborah succumbs to the effects of illness and to the evil spirit that is taking possession of her, she degenerates upon confronting death, but also acquires unprecedented strength and determination. Throughout her aging process, Deborah embodies the internal conflict between different Jungian archetypes, since she displays the split between the persona and the shadow—insofar as her refined ways give way to ferocious attacks and offensive expletives—while she also displays the schism between the animus and the anima—since Deborah’s dormant masculine side as a woman and Desjardins’s latent feminine side as a man collide and transcend the psyche. Nonetheless, the characterization of Deborah’s double as uncanny is mostly grounded in her categorization as old. In analogy with the subdued memories of past traumatic events, Deborah’s aging double, who remains repressed and awaiting to emerge, reveals itself as an experience of the uncanny, since it is at once familiar and strange. As DeFalco claims, old age involves gaining insight into the existing uncanniness within oneself, thus making us aware of the Other within (2009, 12), while degenerative illnesses associated with old age, such as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, magnify these symbolic intrusions of the Other and offer extreme cases of disrupted selfhood (14). This duality is often conveyed through spatial dynamics in the movie, since Deborah stays in front of the window, waiting to escape from the house, while, on other occasions, she finds herself locking the window to avoid any intrusion from outside, hence intermittently feeling a stranger and a host. Deborah experiences an oppressive sense of claustrophobic confinement, insofar as she feels entrapped in her own body, since Desjardins is taking possession of her, and also in her own house, as the young medical staff keeping record of the events are being hosted in her abode. The experience of self-estrangement that old age brings about is visually explained through Kathleen Woodward’s notion of the mirror of old age, whereby, in contrast with the Lacanian mirror stage of infancy, in which the infant embraces her reflected mirror image in an amorous gaze, in the mirror stage of old age, as Woodward explains, “the subject resists

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this identification rather than embraces it because what is whole is felt to reside within the subject and the image in the mirror is understood as uncannily prefiguring the disintegration” (1986, 110). The individual thus gazes at the aging body reflected in the mirror with a shock of recognition, as the Other who has been repressed emerges, hence involving an experience of the uncanny, inasmuch as the aging subject is considered familiar, but alienating, and differs from the inner youthful self. In Robitel’s movie, when Deborah succumbs to illness, she contemplates her decaying body in the mirror and, as if speaking to a stranger, her youthful self addresses her aging body reflected in the mirror, ordering it to “stop,” to use her own words, in an attempt to counteract the effects of aging and, by extension, the trauma of possession and depersonalization that she has begun to undergo. The contemplation of this aging double turns into a source of uncanniness, since it looks familiar, but cannot be embraced, as it is actually perceived as an intruder. As Deborah’s body is being possessed by Desjardins—as embodiment of the past, but also of old age—she alternatively perceives herself as familiar and alienating. Conversely, drawing on the Lacanian mirror stage of infancy—whereby the infant fantasizes about the unified image reflected in the mirror as opposed to her still fragmented self—Deborah indulges in the fantasy of embracing an alternative younger self. When Desjardins gains full possession of her—literally turning into the Other within as a metaphor for old age—Deborah replicates his actions when he ate the flesh of young girls to implement a ritual that would grant him eternal youth. A scene in which her daughter Sarah tells Deborah they have to wrap up the porcelain dolls because, in her illness, she has developed the habit of eating them becomes foretelling, inasmuch as Deborah will be attracted to young Cara in order to devour her so that, as an older woman, Deborah can symbolically revert the aging process that is demeaning her. Accordingly, a figurative parallelism is established between Deborah’s engulfing of a younger self, as represented by Cara, with a series of Russian dolls enclosing one another, whereby the young self remains entrapped within the old body, which marks the transition from the female grotesque to the figure of the crone.

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Under Constant Surveillance: From Pathologization to Vilification According to McGillvray, Robitel’s movie resorts to the conventions of found-footage horror in order to keep a record of the transformation of an older female character from a dignified aging woman into a monstrous old crone (2019, 71). By means of the found-footage technique, the movie presents a series of scenes detailing Deborah’s process of decline that is described, at the onset of the movie, as comprising “a partly edited medical documentary, outtakes, and surveillance footage” (Robitel 2014). Handheld camera recordings intermittently juxtapose the illusion of actual events with a kind of amateurish method of filmmaking, which gives the impression of reality, while, conversely, the imposing presence of cameras contributes to disrupting the cinematic suspension of disbelief. Besides, references to the exact timing of footage bring attention to the scientific purpose of the documentary, while allusions to important dates from the past evoke aging as a personal event, hence establishing a schism between a chronological approach to old age and aging as a subjective experience. As Deborah’s symptoms along the course of her illness are scrutinized and magnified by means of the multiple presence of cameras, she is turned from subject into object of scrutiny. Deborah’s cultural invisibility as an older woman thus transforms into hyperbolic specularity, as her aging body acquires increasing specular centrality and turns into a spectacle. When the medical staff literally takes possession of the house to start recording the events, in unison with the demonic possession that Deborah is undergoing, the distinction between the effects of her illness and the pathologizing process of her condition becomes blurred. As Pamela Gravagne argues, in textualities dealing with Alzheimer’s disease, what is considered normal and pathological often meet (2013, 132), which contributes to establishing an ongoing linking of old age with a pathological condition. When Deborah is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and a group of medical researchers begins to keep a record of her daily routines, the stigma attached to this disorder merges with stereotypes related to the aging process. As Mia’s voice-over announces the purposes of their scientific research project, meticulous explanations about the degenerative symptoms are fully exploited through shocking images of decay and decline. Shots of brain scans evoke the fragmentation of the body, the close-up shot of an agonizing female patient on a stretcher conjures the image of a living-dead creature, and juxtaposed shots of disoriented

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patients and references to hallucinations summon the specter of folly, which contribute to portraying this degenerative disease—and, by extension, old age—as a horrifying experience. As Deborah warns at the beginning, “I’m not interested in being exploited or the butt of anyone’s joke” (Robitel 2014), although her timidity and meekness soon give way to outbursts of rage and viciousness that evince a subsequent process of degeneration and even of animalization, thus paving the way for the rise of the crone. As Gravagne further claims, in origin, Alzheimer’s disease laid its roots in the notion of senility, which entered the medical discourse as a juridical term during the Inquisition, to refer to elderly women who were no longer considered in control of their bodies and who were even accused of performing witchcraft (74). As a result of the cultural prejudices associating older women with evil, according to McGillvray, in popular fiction older women have traditionally been cast as vindictive witches, spell-­ casting gypsies, and resentful stepmothers (2019, 70), owing to ancestral patriarchal anxieties which contributed to the pathologization and even vilification of women in old age, but also disclosed the latent power that older women were alleged to possess. As Gravagne claims, it was assumed that the climacteric, which conventionally marked the advent of old age for women, brought about their mental decline and bodily decay, which led aging females to be medically pathologized and juridically typified, as a source of social difference (2013, 135). At first, the symptoms that Deborah displays are interpreted as markers of old age. Subsequently, as her doctor, Analisa Nazir, postulates by resorting to scanners and tests, Deborah begins to present symptoms that categorize her as a patient suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Nonetheless, when Mia’s research team reviews the recordings from the multiple surveillance cameras planted in the different rooms, they notice that Deborah’s strange behavior deviates from the standardized clinical picture of the disease. Henceforth, Deborah’s declining health, categorized as pathological and the result of old age and disease, is added to an increasingly bizarre conduct involving depersonalization that calls into question her personhood. The character of Deborah thus moves from exhibiting symptoms of old age as an elderly woman and as a patient suffering from Alzheimer’s disease to traits evocative of archetypes in the horror tradition—such as the ghost, the vampire  or the ghoul—and, in particular, of the trope of demonic possession.

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Demonizing the Older Woman: Horror Archetypes and the Allegory of Possession As Miller and Van Riper claim, the effects of aging badly are exaggerated in horror movies to the extent of taking on fantastic proportions (2019, 1). Furthermore, as Dawn Keetley argues, in comparison with the widely accepted premise that aging is experienced as a gradual process, in horror movies, old age is rather presented as a traumatic shock to the point that the aging subject suddenly turns into someone unrecognizable (2019, 58). In Robitel’s movie, as Deborah succumbs to the effects of old age, she acquires unprecedented rebellious ways and exhibits a sort of devastating power that brings to mind Creed’s notion of the monstrous-feminine. Accordingly, Deborah’s portrayal is remindful of a series of archetypal characters pertaining to the horror tradition—such as the ghost, the vampire, and the ghoul—which she appears to emulate based on the evidence from the surveillance feed. Her sudden manifestations dressed in a white gown are evocative of the figure of the ghost. As a result of sleepwalking, Deborah awakes in the middle of the night and appears to levitate as if she were a spectral creature, she also makes her appearance all of a sudden from nowhere in resemblance with a ghost, and her compulsive habit of living in the past is evocative of the Dickensian ethereal character of Miss Havisham, who has commonly been associated with a specter due to her reluctance to let go of the past. Besides, Deborah’s unusually active life at night as a sleepwalker recalls the archetype of the vampire. She often gets up  in the dark to leave her abode and return home in her white gown stained with blood, she bites one of the male members of the medical staff and a hospital security guard on their neck like a female vampire, and in so doing, she exhibits a deviant sort of sexuality in old age that calls to mind the vampire’s embrace. In particular, though, Deborah recalls a vampiric creature as she disrupts age conventions, since her appearance eludes her true age, insofar as she ages prematurely and she gains unprecedented strength, whereas she subsequently reverts back to her former condition. Besides, her eagerness to gnaw, and even devour, is reminiscent of the ghoul who preys on human bodies. As Deborah’s disorder worsens, she replicates the image of a body without soul, she moves from a nourishing parent to a devouring mother, and she exhibits the oxymoronic condition of the living dead, since she looks alive, but her appearance denotes death, thus engaging in a sort of life-in-death existence.

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Above all, though, Deborah’s rough behavior in comparison with her former gentleness is suggestive of the trope of demonic possession, which turns into a disquieting allegory of women’s old age as culturally constructed. Insofar as Deborah’s condition evokes demonic possession, a series of motifs in Robitel’s movie are evocative of scenes from William Friedkin’s classic The Exorcist (1973), based on William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel, which laid the foundations of the genre. As happens in Friedkin’s movie, the plot in Robitel’s picture revolves around the relationship of a mother and a daughter in the absence of a father figure; it also portrays the narrative of a female body in revolt—even if, in Robitel’s movie, the female protagonist is in her old age rather than in her adolescence—; the appearance of the devil is related to the action of unearthing some malicious tokens from the ground; and, besides, the presence of a priest is summoned in order to treat the increasingly bizarre condition befalling a woman. Accordingly, in resemblance with the initially innocent-­ looking female child Regan MacNeil in Friedkin’s movie, Deborah Logan rather arises as her counterpart in old age. The psychosomatic symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, which Deborah begins to display, find a symbolic correlation in the horror trope of demonic possession, and are also suggestive of older women’s plight, which reveals the broader pathologization of female aging—particularly, in relation to its effects on memory, language, and the dyad of age and gender performance. Deborah’s compulsive action of excavating in her garden is aimed at literally and symbolically unearthing memories and secrets from the past that remain repressed and await to come to the surface. As Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands claims, in cases of Alzheimer’s disease, memories connect bodies and landscapes (2008, 271). The obsessive reversion of Deborah’s past actions in her old age—as she now digs, and by so doing, she unearths repressed memories—literally conjures the suppressed presence of the male doctor, who possesses and instrumentalizes her aging body and subjects it to his male will in analogy with demonic possession. Furthermore, according to Gravagne, bearing in mind that language acquires great significance within a logocentric conceptualization of reality, patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease feel devalued insofar as their communicative abilities often become compromised (2013, 150). As Deborah’s linguistic abilities decline as a result of disease and of male possession, ageist and sexist prejudices that underline older women’s lack of voice in society are brought to the fore. In the course of her illness, Deborah ceases to talk and is deprived of her voice, whereas recorded

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audio tracks reveal Deborah’s enunciating phrases in French, even if her daughter confirms that her mother never learned to speak this foreign language. As Deborah is being possessed by the French male doctor and his alienating voice, in resemblance with a demonic possession, the Derridean notion of phallogocentrism is evoked as referring to the privilege of the masculine in the construction of meaning in a symbolic enactment of male ventriloquism which deprives Deborah of a voice of her own. The trope of demonic possession as a metaphor for the disease that is taking control over Deborah’s body and mind also disrupts conventional representations of female aging and social dictates about age and gender performance. Deborah initially introduces herself as a dignified aging lady when she knows that her actions and movements will be subjected to perpetual vigilance, although she gradually leaves behind her refined femininity to display a coarse and rebellious nature which remains latent and is ultimately brought to the fore in her old age. When she was younger, Deborah was a professional woman, she raised her daughter on her own, and saved her from Henri Desjardins’s mischievous advances, thus exhibiting a masculinized role according to the prescriptions of gender prevailing at the time, which evokes Mary Ann Doane’s notion of symbolic transvestism to which women were made to submit symbolically in order to take part in a men’s world (1982, 82). Her resolute manners in her youth— which recall her daughter’s tomboyish  demeanour in her middle age— stand in contrast with her submissive ways when she is first introduced to the medical staff. As Woodward claims, older women may feel compelled to resort to womanliness as masquerade in order to conceal a repressed, wished-for masculinity that emerges in old age (1989, 130). However, as Deborah succumbs to illness, memories of her past as a professional woman are stirred and merge with her present, thus reversing conventional gender roles and replicating the latent masculine presence that is taking possession of her. According to Lacanian premises, female sexuality has been represented as masking a lack so that, in order to be the phallus, woman rejects an essential part of her femininity in the sense that, as Luce Irigaray argues, woman reverts to masculine logic in a sort of masquerade whereby she experiences desire only as male desire (1985, 133). Besides, as she succumbs to demonic possession, Deborah’s gaze becomes more direct and confident in contrast with her former downward glances and timid looks at the camera. Accordingly, it is assumed that, by virtue of the demonic possession that is befalling her, Deborah turns into the subject of the gaze.

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The Older Woman’s Gaze: From Spectacle to Spectator Drawing on Laura Mulvey’s notion of visual pleasure, the dominance of the gaze has conventionally been assigned to the male. Conversely, women have traditionally been denied the possibility of scopophilic pleasure and have been relegated to the role of object of the gaze, hence turning into spectacle rather than spectator. As Mulvey further argues, the male gaze on the woman’s body has conventionally been interpreted as two forms of mastery to defy the threat of castration (1975, 10–16), which involved, in terms of aging, either fetishistic scrutiny upon dissecting the aesthetics of the young female body or sadistic voyeurism upon gazing at the older woman. As Linda Williams claims, in accordance with Doane’s premises, the fact of denying women the power to look seems grounded in the belief that turning women into subjects of the gaze would entrap them further in patriarchal structures of seeing, inasmuch as women would be looking at the mutilation of their own body (2021, 24). Accordingly, in Robitel’s movie, Deborah is initially obliged to contemplate her image on the screen, thus accepting her role as narcissist, which entraps her further into the patriarchal structure of the look. As a spectator, she contemplates her aging body and the effects of her illness, and in so doing, Deborah engages in sadistic voyeurism, as she gazes at her own difference and the identification of her nonphallic power. Although she is sadistically forced to stare at her reflected image, she is prevented from looking through her own gaze, since her look is influenced and mediated by the male gaze of the cameramen making the documentary. It is only when the possession of her body by a male spirit is completed that Deborah is allowed to stare at the camera defiantly, even managing to break the fourth-wall effect, thus appealing to the audience, while exchanging her submission to the male gaze for an autonomous control over the act of looking. Rooted in psychoanalytic premises, the threat of castration lies in the contemplation of the mutilated young female body, but particularly, of the specter of the older phallic mother as evocative of the sight of the Medusa, who not only paralyzes the male, but also endows the female with the power to look. In horror, the young female body is conventionally categorized as castrated and victimized, whereas the older female body is displaced onto the figure of the monster from which women have always been told to abscond. As an elderly woman, Deborah thus turns into this eerie figure, but as such, she is also granted the power to look instead of

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evading the gaze. As Williams claims, for the male, the real trauma is not that the monster—as a displacement of the female body—is mutilated, but rather that she holds the power to mutilate (2021, 25) and, by extension, the right to look, so that the eradication of the monster not only aims at exorcising female sexuality, but also at denying woman’s commanding gaze. According to Williams, in classic horror movies like Psycho, both victims and audiences were made to believe that the murderer was an older woman (2021, 30), thus aligning the older woman with the monster and suggesting that it was really the aging woman within the man who killed the young woman posing the threat of castration. Nonetheless, in Robitel’s movie, these premises are reversed and come full circle, since it is the man within the aging female body who actually kills the young woman incarnating the specter of castration. Desjardins thus resorts to Deborah’s aging frame in order to abduct and possess Cara’s young body, since, in a final scene, as Cara stares at the camera lens and, by extension, at the audience—in a reversal of the final scene in Psycho in terms of gender—it is implied that her defiant look is no longer Cara’s, but Desjardins’s. Hence, if in classic moving pictures women were only allowed to take control of the look by means of transvestism, thus looking male but being inherently aged and female, in Robitel’s movie, these dynamics are reversed so that women—particularly, older women—are granted the power of the gaze, even if it is also implied that they can only exert control over the gaze by virtue of male possession.

Conclusion Insofar as it portrays the disturbing physical and mental symptoms befalling the character of Deborah Logan as an elderly woman suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, in its representation of female old age, Robitel’s movie complies with textualities that age scholars, such as Margaret Gullette (1997), have described as narratives of decline. Placing emphasis on the process of decay of the body—which is characterized as grotesque and abject—and the deterioration of mental faculties—which reveals aspects of the uncanny and categorize the aging self as Other—old age and, in particular, female aging is depicted as a horrifying experience as a result of the coalition between old age and disease, which contributes to endowing the process of growing old with a pathological dimension, especially from a female perspective.

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Robitel’s movie thus revisits the culturally established association of the older woman with a source of dread and anxiety, thus conforming to Creed’s notion of the monstrous-feminine. This concept, which was exploited in early horror cinematic textualities, is updated and adapted to current times in Robitel’s movie as a result of the increasing social concerns about old age, which find correlation in the proliferation of contemporary horror movies that address the discourses of aging. Throughout the history of cinema, the monstrous female has often been portrayed through features pertaining to different horror archetypes, which are revisited in Robitel’s picture, such as the ghost—owing to conjuring a spectral embodiment of traumatic memories from the past, the vampire— as a result of deviant sexuality and disruption of the conventions of age, and the ghoul—since the voraciousness to swallow young bodies symbolically evokes an external older appearance in contrast with an internal younger self. Above all, though, Robitel’s movie resorts to the horror trope of demonic possession as a metaphor of old age and as a counterpart to William Friedkin’s classic The Exorcist (1973), since the possessed female body moves from adolescence in Friedkin’s picture to old age in Robitel’s movie. From a psychoanalytic perspective, inasmuch as Robitel’s picture portrays an older woman’s body being possessed by a male spirit, it also reverses the case of double personality in terms of gender addressed in Hitchcock’s Psycho, which conversely depicted a male body being subjugated to an older woman’s will and, in so doing, in contrast with Hitchcock’s picture, Robitel’s movie suggests that the actual evil lies in the male rather than in the older female. In compliance with this premise, film critics like McGillvray put forward that, even though Robitel’s movie does not approach female aging from an overtly feminist perspective, it is susceptible to being interpreted from feminist principles. Accordingly, given her portrayal as a shocking, albeit powerful, older woman in Robitel’s movie, the character of Deborah Logan evokes the archetypal figure of the crone, which has been vindicated by feminist critics as an aging mother figure endowed with an overwhelming destructive power. As Walker claims, the crone comprises tenets whereby older women have often been categorized from a male perspective as a source of horror, but also as the origin of unsurmountable power, such as the petrifying Medusa’s gaze, the castrating vagina dentata or the association with the sinful phallic serpent. From a psychoanalytic framework, aware of the virtual invisibility of the aging woman in psychosexual models of human development, Woodward (1995) puts forward the need to draw attention

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to the figure of the older woman. In Robitel’s movie, in the absence of a daughter of her own, Sarah rather turns her attention to her aging mother, Deborah, as the embodiment of the aging female figure. Robitel’s picture, released in 2014, inaugurated a series of contemporary horror movies that explicitly address the discourse of old age and, in particular, revolve exclusively around the anxieties associated with women’s process of growing old. As Diana Wallace argues, according to Ellen Moers’s periodization of the phases of female Gothic (1976), a first stage of development within the genre involved women’s fears of sexuality and marriage, whereas, in a second stage, narratives of the genre addressed the fears of birth and motherhood (2016, 232). Given the proliferation of contemporary horror cinematic textualities revolving around the figure of the older woman, it may be argued that, in the last decades, a third stage may be added to Moers’s categorization which addresses the fears related to women’s process of growing old, since they form the basis of many contemporary horror movies focusing on old age.

References de Beauvoir, Simone. 1972. The Coming of Age, translated by Patrick O’Brian. New York: Putnam. Carolyn, Axelle, dir. 2021. The Manor. Amazon Studios. Chivers, Sally. 2013. The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cirlot, Juan-Eduardo. 2002. Dictionary of Symbols, translated by Jack Sage. New York: Dover Publications. Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. ———. 2021. Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection. In The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant, 37–67. Austin: University of Texas Press. DeFalco, Amelia. 2009. Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Doane, Mary Ann. 1982. Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator. Screen 23 (3–4): 74–88. Friedkin, William, dir. 1973. The Exorcist. Warner Bros. Pictures. Gravagne, Pamela. 2013. The Becoming of Age: Cinematic Visions of Mind, Body, and Identity in Later Life. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. 1997. Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

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Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. 1960. Psycho. Universal Pictures. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. James, Natalie Erika, dir. 2020. Relic. IFC Films. Keetley, Dawn. 2019. The Shock of Aging (Women) in Horror Film. In Elder Horror: Essays on Film’s Frightening Images of Aging, ed. Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper, 58–69. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lemish, Dafna, and Vurda Muhlbauer. 2012. ‘Can’t Have It All’: Representations of Older Women in Popular Culture. Women and Therapy 35 (3–4): 165–180. McGillvray, Maddi. 2019. ‘To Grandmother’s House We Go’: Documenting the Horror of the Aging Woman in Found Footage Films. In Elder Horror: Essays on Film’s Frightening Images of Aging, ed. Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper, 70–80. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. Miller, Cynthia J., and A. Bowdoin Van Riper, eds. 2019. Elder Horror: Essays on Film’s Frightening Images of Aging. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. Moers, Ellen. 1976. Literary Women. London: Women’s Press. Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona. 2008. Landscape, Memory, and Forgetting: Thinking through (My Mother’s) Body and Place. In Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 265–290. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16 (3): 6–18. Rank, Otto. 1971. The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, edited and translated by Herbert Tucker. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Robitel, Adam, dir. 2014. The Taking of Deborah Logan. Eagle Films. Russo, Mary. 1995. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity. London and New York: Routledge. Shary, Timothy, and Nancy McVittie. 2016. Fade to Gray: Aging in American Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press. Shelley, Peter. 2009. Grande Dame Guignol Cinema: A History of Hag Horror from Baby Jane to Mother. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. Shyamalan, M. Night, dir. 2015. The Visit. Universal Pictures. Walker, Barbara. 1985. The Crone: Woman of Age, Wisdom, and Power. New York: Harper One. Wallace, Diana. 2016. Female Gothic. In The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, ed. William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith, 231–236. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. West, Ti, dir. 2022. X. A24.

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Williams, Linda. 2021. When the Woman Looks. In The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant, 17–36. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wood, Robin. 1996. An Introduction to the American Horror Film. In Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant, 164–199. Lanham and London: The Scarecrow Press. Woodward, Kathleen. 1986. The Mirror Stage of Old Age. In Memory and Desire: Aging, Literature, Psychoanalysis, ed. Kathleen Woodward and Murray M. Schwartz, 97–113. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1989. Youthfulness as a Masquerade. Discourse 11 (1): 119–142. ———. 1995. Tribute to the Older Woman. In Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life, ed. Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick, 79–96. London and New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 11

Mutilation and Dual Body in The Perfection (2018): A Reading on Queer Horror Laura Blázquez Cruz

The Perfection: Contextualizing the Film and the Plot The socio-cultural context in which the film The Perfection (Richard Shepard 2018) was released makes it an illustrative example of the division of thoughts concerning LGBTQIA+ issues among the American population. The culture war related to the notion of gender pervaded the 2010s in the US legislation, a period in which the progressive politics of President Obama opened the door to, among others, the recognition of queer folks in relation to marriage, adoption, and military service. However, with the arrival of Donald Trump to the American presidency, there were attempts to abolish and eradicate many of these achievements. Part of these attempts were connected to the conception of the term “purity” among the most conservative and religious communities which, according to Yoel Inbar et  al., tend to reject those situations or

L. Blázquez Cruz (*) University of Jaén, Jaén, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53278-8_11

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individuals that are located in-between or that transgress the most traditional social limits, that is to say, they tend to link this lack of specification of categories with impurity and, therefore, with the abject (2012, 538). Likewise, such policies associate gender with sex, both terms under biological parameters with a reproductive purpose. This association is not supported by the notion of gender that appears in the second wave of feminism, or with studies by Simone de Beauvoir in which she separated gender from the biological and defined it as something socially dependent: to this end, Judith Butler and others continue this trend in the third wave to include the transgender. It is during this period of political change in the United States that The Perfection was released, serving as a “time-capsule… of [its] age…” (Waldron 2022, 169), as an especially representative work on these gender policies, since it portrays the body as a liquid and diverse entity regarding the maneuverability of the subject and their free choice of gender. As it is a relatively recent film, it is necessary to start our study with a synopsis of its plot so as to facilitate a better understanding, contextualization, and interpretation of the analysis we offer in this chapter. Charlotte (Allison Williams) is a child prodigy, a cellist sent to the renowned Bachoff Academy of Music to hone her skills and potential until her mother’s mental illness forces her to return home. After the death of her mother a decade later, she can finally return to the world of music, the moment when she contacts Anton (Steven Weber), the owner of the academy, and his wife Paloma (Alaina Huffman), who invite her to Shanghai to participate as a member of the jury in an audition in which three talented young women compete for a place in the academy. While there, Charlotte meets another member of the jury, Elizabeth Wells, Lizzie (Logan Browning), the student who, years ago, came to the academy to replace her when she had to leave and who now has the success, fame, and wealth that Charlotte would have had if her family situation had been a different one. When the two meet, an instant friendship emerges, both out of mutual admiration and irrepressible sexual attraction, leading them to spend the night together and even embark on a vacation adventure the next day. However, the journey, a turning point in the plot, turns into a nightmare in which Lizzie loses one of her hands. Three weeks later, back at the academy in Boston, alone and with her hand amputated, Lizzie explains that she was found unconscious on the side of the road with a makeshift tourniquet and insists that Charlotte had planned everything out of

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jealousy so that she drugged her with a medication that caused her hallucinations. Showing an evident lack of empathy, the center’s director tells her that there is no space for her in the academy, not even as a teacher. Immediately afterwards, Lizzie kidnaps Charlotte to take her to the academy and once they are both there, the latter reveals that her purpose was no other than to save her from Anton and the rest of the teachers at the center who, trying to force the students to achieve musical perfection, abuse them sexually as punishment for mistakes. Lacking a hand, Charlotte considers, Lizzie would be expelled and would stop being sexually abused. Together—this partnership to be understood at many levels, as the reader will notice—, they plan a singular revenge against the teachers at the academy.

The Boundaries, the Insane, the Queer The spatial context of the film revolves around the prestigious Bachoff Private Music Academy in Boston. Although not all the action occurs in this place, this is the epicentric point of reference of the film. It is an elitist space, socially privileged in that it caters to a select few students’ needs and promises fame and prestige to those who study music there. It is a school that students from all over the world aspire to attend in order to achieve the necessary preparation for perfection. In turn, it is also a point of origin from which, once the aforementioned process of improvement in pursuit of musical virtuosity has concluded, Anton’s protégés focus on worldwide recognition. Also, as an extension of the prestigious academy in Boston, we find Shanghai, the city where auditions for applicants are held, among which one will be the beneficiary of a four-year scholarship at the music training center. In relation to the framing of spaces, an establishing shot, more of a panoramic view of Shanghai than anything specific, stands out, showing a city shrouded in a dense fog of pollution. Apart from this image, which is framed as a kind of visual metaphor of the endemic pollution, we have the reference of one of the assistants to a viral fever that is invading the country, just at the moment in which one of the guests vomits during the ceremony: “I hope it isn’t linked to what’s happening down south… Some sort of hemorrhagic fever near the Hunan border, passed in the air, real contagion-like stuff” (Shepard 2018). Both the static shot and dynamic scene underscore that these areas are permeable to contamination, literally through pollution, and figuratively through sexuality as well. In fact, these

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are viral spaces—anarchic and open—that contrast greatly with the rigidity and precision that characterizes that canon of musical performance that is extrapolated to the social environment related to it, that is, the protocols and strict social conventions associated with them. This is why two levels of relationships are perceived in this society: the first is the one in which conventional heteronormative relationships are strictly fulfilled, that is, the marriage union as a necessary marker dictated by tradition; on the other, the viral—and, therefore, the chaotic—, represented by non-normative sexuality, that is, homosexuality or extramarital relationships that try to remain hidden within the social theatricalization. An example of this occurs during the convention when Lizzie tells Charlotte that the mother of one of the candidates and the father of another are having an affair, so sexuality is described with negative connotations since they are meetings outside the marriage bond, without reproductive purposes, a typology which Gayle Rubin classifies as “Bad Sex” (2002). This negative connotation is due to the fact that in such encounters, in the words of Paul B. Preciado, the body becomes a set of viral doors through all its orifices (2022, 119), which allows the transmission of the uncontrollable, of the Other. Likewise, after the audition, Charlotte and Lizzie have a lesbian encounter that continues during the vacation trip they undertake to rural western China, intending to get away from the—social—urban centers, entering borderline and decadent spaces, “weird towns, as far away from first class as [they] can get, unplugged from everything and everyone” (Shepard 2018). It is there, precisely, the peripheral dimension where non-heterosexual sexuality, the excluded and the abject, are manifested. In fact, place and body find a relationship of mimesis during this displacement beyond the space of the normative. At the starting point of the trip, Charlotte and Lizzie stop to eat in an unhealthy restaurant area, and it is in this spatial framework that the latter begins to feel unwell before getting on a bus that, abounding in the nauseating context since as Charlotte points out, “hasn’t been cleaned since maybe ever” (Shepard 2018). From this point, both travel through a natural, snowy desert area far from any sign of civilization, while the discomfort is accentuated by stomach pain and headaches. The cause is none other than the intoxication that Charlotte intentionally provokes after making Lizzie believe that the remedy she is taking for a hangover is, in fact, medication to control her mental illness, which, together with alcohol, can cause hallucinations. These, in fact, are the trigger and activation of the abject.

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From a psychoanalytic point of view, Kristeva defines the abject as that which “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules… The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (1982, 4) and relates it to the formation of personality in the oral, anal and genital phases, as well as the fluids associated with each of these orifices. In fact, after the sexual encounter—the genital stage—and the involuntary intoxication by drugs, Lizzie experiences the journey through the arid desert with such stomach upset that the bus is forced to stop in the middle of nowhere, a geography of loss, a “non-place” (Augé 2000, 83) so that she can defecate, although, after resuming the journey, the indisposition continues and she vomits on the window, an action that we interpret as bodily rejection of food; but also, figuratively, this expulsion of food implies Lizzie’s refusal of norms, her renewal and disconnection with respect to the academy, which is the institution that provides her with her professional growth and, consequently, her economic support and, indirectly, back to the beginning of the cycle, her nourishment. Lizzie’s indisposition is aggravated by Charlotte, who, with the purpose of increasing the hallucinatory state of her travel companion, makes her believe that there are worms in the vomit, insects that have a clear and close connection with the abject, putrefaction, and bodily dissolution. In fact, these insects—an important symbol in the film—relate corporeality with the underground, with the subterranean, since they serve as an enunciation of the body in the form of a corpse and, in the case of corporeality and life, with a sort of “sublife” (Cirlot 2005, 261). Clearly, the corpse and the insects, like ghouls, define a corporeality that previously was— subject—and now, in its decomposing state, has ceased to be—object—, the most exponential example of the abject (Kristeva 1982, 3) and of the life-death duality, an in-between state. Significantly, it is these invertebrates and her bodily invasion—though hallucinatory—that cause Lizzie to maim her hand with the axe Charlotte, her delirium-inducer, gives her. Evidently, this mutilation and absence of a limb is the second presence of the corpse motif, in this case, of a metonymic nature. Apart from the main weight of the abject and the places of exclusion, we must consider the marked role of madness in the narrative. Mental alienation is, in fact, the genesis of the invisibility of both artists and constitutes a narrative resource that is directly related to the infectious. In the shots that show the moment of Charlotte’s mother’s death, parallel editing is used, alternating her face in the present and in the past during her training at the academy, along with later film shots that reflect her

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submission to aggressive psychological treatments, neatly endorsing an unstable mental state. Likewise, we infer the possibility that Charlotte has inherited the disease from her mother, since she carries with her the medication that the latter had taken while she was alive. In fact, this drug is the vehicle by which Charlotte infects Lizzie with madness, more specifically through sexuality, since it is the one she uses to drug her lover after their sexual encounter. In this way, relationships outside the heteronormative, that is, active homosexuality and madness, appear closely linked in the film’s discourse. As Alejandro Melero explains, relying on Michel Foucault’s theories on madness, the idea that persists in the different works of the French philosopher is that dementia is the “result of different socio-cultural practices, and that the reception and acceptance or rejection of itself is determined by the appearance of various mechanisms of power” (2011, 51). Underlining what we have already pointed out, Foucault considers that madness and homosexuality are two culturally related terms due to their marginal nature and concludes that the latter—and, therefore, queerness—can be considered a type of social deviation dealing with groups that move away from sexual practices whose purpose is not reproductive1 and, therefore, are relegated to the realm of Otherness, to be more specific, condemned and confined to detention centers such as mental hospitals or prisons. For Charlotte and Lizzie, the institutional representation that executes their social expulsion is embodied in the figure of the bus driver, who, after noticing the mental alienation and disturbing behavior of one of the female travelers—absorbed and alienated in her particular nightmare related to the abject—expels both of them from the bus, making it impossible for them to integrate into the social nucleus within the destination they intend to arrive at. The driver is, consequently, the bridge figure between civilized places, the person responsible for taking and guiding a part of society from one social nucleus to another, overcoming the obstacle or social void that symbolizes nature in its most primitive state. As Mcnay explains, following Foucault’s theories, the deviant is excluded and rejected from the social nuclei since society does not want to recognize itself in such referents of the disease (1994, 17). 1  In The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 (1990), Foucault explains that in the twentieth century and under the premise of biopower, sexual practices are regulated under the protection of canon law, Christianity, and civil law (37). Therefore, the institution of heterosexual marriage is basic for the proper functioning of the body of the State through the regulation of individual bodily practices.

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Mutilation as Control of One’s Own/the Other’s Body Until now, mutilation in the film has been associated with madness, with an unstable mental state that leads to a distancing between the person and the social environment. However, it must be considered that dismemberment and bodily rupture also have an opposite interpretation, in this case, that of total control of “being-in-the-world” (Heidegger 2001), not as something biologically given and imposed from birth, but as a matter that can be willingly regulated and determined, the body as a lived experience, a “Body without Organs” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 150). The fact that both characters in the film are left out in the open turns the space into a rite of passage since we have to understand this arid area as a primal place, clean of any social classificatory meaning, where bodily mutilation has a reading of physicality in change, of social reclassification through the transformation that is generated after mutilation, as it occurs with sex change operations in which the person who undergoes such an intervention experiences the creation of their own body, decides on their somatic space, transforms their biologically imposed corporeality and designs their identity. In this way, the subject is able to abandon the socially imposed classificatory labels of the body and also able to create their own social counter-discourse, which implies empowerment within the sexual politics of the body through queerness. Indeed, for Charlotte and Lizzie, bodily dismemberment begins in this primitive place, in the crucial moment when Charlotte’s mother has passed away and Elizabeth is at the height of her musical career. It is a phase in which both have already reached the pinnacle of their artistic career at the expense of spending all their time practicing music to achieve sublimity and, in Charlotte’s case, devoting her efforts to taking care of her sick mother. That is to say, the original place is a zero geographical point as well as a genesis time point from which the bodies begin to be transformed, which can be, somehow, related to their rebirth, a rebirth by mutilation. According to Jack Halberstam in “In a Queer Time and Place,” the notion of time based on queer parameters differs greatly from heteronormative parameters, as “[it] develop[s]… in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (2005, 1), those that, for Solana, embody time (2017, 44). Thus, queer time is an “outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic

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practices” (Halberstam 2005, 1), one that does not follow the objective chronological order of stages in life according to biological and economic norms, that temporality which begins when the person is capable of selfdefinition in gender issues, a moment that usually coincides with bodily transformation. Charlotte’s distancing from the professional field occurs when she acquires the role of caregiver, closely linked to the normative female body, and, in this sense, it is evident that the academic and social projection becomes incompatible with it for this virtuous woman is, in a metaphorical way and during this period, disabled since she is not able to practice cello. This mutilation precisely parallels the one she carries out in her aggression against Lizzie, her substitute during her period of inactivity at the academy. Although it is a self-mutilation in terms of execution, it is a passive crime through the aforementioned involuntary intake of narcotics by Lizzie, turning her body into an object because Charlotte modifies it without consent and without her being aware of it. With this, Charlotte manages to take control of this other body, which, in turn, opens the possibility of readmission into the privileged world of entertainment and the expulsion of Lizzie, since the absence of this limb makes it impossible to practice cello or any other activity within the elitist context of the academy. The metonymic act of mutilating the right hand reduces Lizzie’s body to a precarious and non-functional state, both in her work environment and in her social sphere. In fact, the maintenance of her corporeal life is not guaranteed, because, in the words of Martín de Mauro, the living body has become vulnerable while its interdependence with other humans is affected to the point of making it also impossible to ensure its body permanence in time (2022, 17). In addition, we notice a figurative projection of the body mutilation in the natural environment, since, at this point, the trees that surround the scene appear felled, as a sign of biological sterility and, as experienced by the cellists, also as a lack of a nourishing social environment and invisibility. In the case of Charlotte, the invisibility is caused by her disappearance from the academic world once she was forced to dedicate herself to taking care of her mother, while in Lizzie’s case, the aforementioned mutilation makes it impossible for her to play the cello, so her social projection is interrupted at all levels. Being it as it may, Charlotte is not the only one who seizes Lizzie’s body, since there is a second expropriating figure, that of the academy, which ultimately judges her artistic, labor and social capacity for this queer body “does not conform to the prescribed ‘truths’ of heterosexuality

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and… demands to be accepted as it exists” (Cooper 2018, 4). The academy is presented as a utopian environment in which musical excellence is sought through the performativity of the female body, a location that “maintain[s] a general relation of direct or inverse analogy with the real space of society. They are society perfected or the reverse of society” (Foucault 1998, 178). The academy is, by all accounts, a place based on unreality as it is a dimension in which “maximum happiness, beauty, timelessness and the sublimation of all real things that perfect the human being converge” (Toro-Zambrano 2017, 35), a prospective place that makes possible “the construction of the present as a horizon of meaning” (34), although unattainable due to the manifest asynchrony between the present and the desire for that future goal of perfection, a category and concept that, objectively, does not exist. Once both cellists return to the academy, Lizzie pretends to have kidnapped Charlotte with a desire for revenge, but their real purpose is to enter the nuclear place of the chapel, a space for the divine from where she can initiate the regeneration of this social organization and thereby redefine the function of the place. In fact, the chapel is the location where, during the years in which the students receive their academic preparation, they are subjected to periodic musical evaluations by a committee made up of Anton, Paloma, Geoffrey, and Theis in search of excellence and sublimity that are the highest representative of the academy. The chapel is also associated with silence due to the soundproofing of the space. At the same time, these trial concerts serve as a synesthetic orgasmic experience, a product of melolagnia, auralism, or scopophilia, and, likewise, as an ideation of punishment because the slightest mistake the students commit derives in sexual abuse by the male collective, forcing the rigorous control of the artists’ body through performance, both visual and auditory, if not physical. With this ritual in mind, the purpose of the cellists is to have Charlotte performing in front of the teachers, with the recurring threat of abuse in case of imperfect execution. As expected after a long time without rehearsing, mistakes follow one after the other and this triggers the bodily threat. It is at this moment that the film turns into a slasher as the bodies of the community members undergo a transformation process. On the one hand, Lizzie’s clothing aligns during the scene with a masculine profile, since she wears a suit jacket as a waiter who serves drinks to the instructors while they are enjoying the concert. This masculinized appearance allows her, in Judith Butler’s terms, to “undo [her female] gender” (2004) through

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cross-dressing. In addition to this, after Charlotte’s failed performance, Lizzie pretends to want to abuse the student with her stump, so that her missing limb becomes a phallic symbol, that is, a “crossgender” or “transgender” (Butler 42) process occurs through clothing, bodily modification for the symbolic construction of the male genitalia, as well as the performativity through the feigned intentionality of vaginal rape. On the other hand, the members of the academy suffer somatic modifications at different levels, depending on their degree of responsibility within the institution. Thus, Geoffrey and Theis are poisoned by means of the drink that Lizzie serves them during the concert, that is, these bodies that enter the chapel as subjects remain, in the end, inert, inanimate, become corpses and, consequently, suffer conversion into abject matter, a process similar to that of Paloma, whose death also includes stabbing. The expression of body horror is more extreme in the case of Anton, the epitome of the consecration of Lizzie’s and Charlotte’s intentions. As the ruling figure of the institution, his body modification is carried out through the mutilation of all his extremities, in such a way that the absence of hands and legs makes it impossible for him to play any musical instrument, as well as to teach because these are his bodily tools for music, either in performance or didactic and pedagogical terms. However, the amputation is not limited to the limbs, as he is also castrated, thus becoming a eunuch. It is from this DIY surgery that he is stripped of any physical protrusion, which is extrapolated to the social sphere, since his new physicality immobilizes him and places him in a position of exclusively auditory perception—not surprisingly, his eyes and mouth are sewn—as well as a passive object—not an agent anymore—, solely to be contemplated. In this artistic environment, bodily deformity makes the freak show another variant of art to show the world, since the manifestation now transcends the merely musical materialization to become the carnal art that reinvents the bodies of the academy, which transform from being executing tools of an instrument, that is, means for the artistic end, to becoming the contemplative end, in a “spectacle [which] requires sight lines and distance [since] freaks are… beings to be viewed” (Russo 2000, 93). Lizzie’s and Charlotte’s bodies must necessarily be analyzed together due to the agential nature of both characters as narrative twins, united by their professional goal, jealousy, desire, and, finally, revenge, as a common goal and against the same enemy. The two are asynchronous mirror figures in the genesis of the film since they occupy the position of virtuous cellists

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who have reached musical excellence—for this reason, they are tattooed with the musical note that indicates such reality and, with it, they acquire world fame—although they enjoy this position at different times. First, when Charlotte leaves the artistic world to care for her mother, Elizabeth enters the academy and becomes her replacement; later, after the amputation, Charlotte takes Elizabeth’s place on stage. That is why, after the rivalry turns into sexual fusion, the two femininities seek simultaneity in the frame, which is materialized at the conclusion of the film, at which time both bodies are represented as incomplete although they create a synergy and symbiosis for each other to outline the perfection. Referents in the imaginary of musical sublimity in the academy, the corporealities of Charlotte and Lizzie merge into a single body through the cello—a sort of spine and human-instrument hybridization—recreating the children united by the torso that Ambrosé Paré includes in his catalog On Monsters and Marvels (2011, 32),2 these abnormal figures belonging to the world of the freak show. The cello, thus, ceases to be an external appendage and there is a break with the conception of traditional art since, as Karina Hodoyán and Josefina Alcázar point out, artistic creation unfolds in and from the body of the artist (2016, 14). Consequently, the music is played by two hands in perfect synchronization, each one of them—one’s left hand and the other’s right one—belonging to each of the biological bodies that make up the singular composition. In this new organism, there are two physical brains—since there are two heads—, but, symbolically, it is only one, in this case, that which allows the perfect coordination of the upper extremities with the purpose of reaching perfection through the union of two bodies sexually marked as opposites—according to the masculine-feminine binary dichotomy—, though this only happens in a somatic communion after the sparagmos, that is, the extirpation of one of the two arms of each of the cellists. In addition, for this symbiosis there is a change in Charlotte’s physical appearance, from a normatively feminine physicality—marked by the use of makeup, long hair, and a long dress that emphasizes her chest—towards the use of neutral makeup, short hair and in-between clothing, consequently making the social markers of the feminine invisible. Lizzie’s appearance, on the other hand, makes her femininity visually explicit once 2  This figure of two sisters joined at the torso is featured in P.T. Barnum’s sideshow with the conjoined twins Chag and Eng Bunker (1811–1874), as well as in the exhibition of the twins Millie and Christine McCoy (1851–1912) at John Pervis’ show.

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again, so the final result is a gender-dual corporality or symbiosis. This fusion is inherited from the traditional image of the androgynous, which in classical times was considered the representation of divinity by presenting characteristics of both genders in a single body, divine bi-unity, and eternal return,3 although the main difference is that, in this work, gender duality is manifested through the union of two bodies instead of a single one. This aura of deity is also present in Shepard’s film when considering the setting for the final transformation in the chapel, a chamber in the academy that only the privileged can access when attempting to ratify musical perfection. The figure of both cellists united by the musical appendage as a construct of perfection and harmony in an exhibitionist pose finds a perfect and faultless background in that halo of light that is drawn in the back of the room, symbolizing divinity. In short, as evidenced in the bodily changes that take place in the film, the slasher becomes the modus operandi that transforms the rigid social space at the center of the dominant culture into a space of the heterogeneous, what Foucault calls “heterotopia of deviation” and which he defines as those places: In which individuals are put whose behavior is deviant with respect to the mean or the required norm… on the borderline. [As far as the internal operation the] heterotopia has a precise and specific operation or another, depending on the synchrony of the culture in which it is found. (Foucault 1998, 180)

Thus, the chapel becomes an area of the abnormal, the deviant, the deformed, and the diverse, the place of the Other excluded by biopolitics and the social order, the place of freak corporeity. Through spatial metamorphosis, the core of the academy becomes a location for the admission of the rejected, just as it happened in the sideshows of the second half of the nineteenth century. Located outside the cities, these liminal spaces 3  Although the disillusionment of the myth of the androgyne (Libis 2001, 164)—which was even blamed for Original Sin—arose in medieval times, there are extra-canonical documents in which the divine character of such a figure is preserved. An example is the Trimorphic Protennoia, within the Nag Hammadi codex (year 180), in which the possibility of Jesus’ sexual ambiguity and self-procreation capacity is raised. The following lines are proof of this: “I am androgynous. (2)/[I am Mother (and) I am] Father since [I] (3)/[copulate] with myself. I [copulate] with myself (4)/ [and with those who love] me” (quoted in Turner 1990, 402–33).

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were the refuge and home of the so-called freaks, relegated to the status of monsters for having imperfect and/or unfinished bodies. Unable to find their space in the usual social concentrations, these “marvels” sought exile and, paradoxically, benefited from the exhibition of their bodies to integrate once again into society and get artistic visibility, since “the confusion of the itinerant… was… the best opportunity to flee and try to remain safe from the cruelty of marginalization” (Gallego Silva 2016, 271). This can be extrapolated to Lizzie’s and Charlotte’s performativity and physicality, both being transgressive and transforming agents of the space of victimization carrying out the mutilation of the people of the institution as well as their own. In this way, they become the long-awaited Final Enby4 among the queer community, surviving figures in the elitist and conservative context, the American society under Trump’s policy where, as Waldron states, tradition reflects that the queer either dies or is portrayed as the monstrous anti-hero who is ultimately rejected and relegated to the margins of society (2022, 172). Thanks to this, the academy becomes a space for inclusion and redefinition, while the bodies are reshaped, reidentified, and given a new meaning, facilitating the assertiveness of both cellists and the displacement “from liminality to visibility” (Ioannidou 2022, 2).

Conclusion Richard Shepard’s psychological horror The Perfection pivots around homosexuality as framed in the margin, outside the dominating and heteronormative epicenter of society—represented in the film by the elitist music academy and its unsound methods in search of sublime talent—, also associated with madness and hysteria, the movie meeting the slasher 4  “The Final Enby” concept is an adaptation of the well-known term Final Girl, that female figure who, in the slasher genre, manages to become the survivor and who, in a certain way, is born as a plea for female empowerment in a primarily masculinized context. However, for Clover, the portrayal of this figure in film productions is subject to the taste and point of view—and identification with this heroic image—of the primarily male audience. Not in vain, for the author, “the Final Girl is boyish, in a word. Just as the killer is not fully masculine, she is not fully feminine-not, in any case, feminine in the way of her friends” (Clover 1993, 40). In order to avoid the reductionism that implies relegating the final survivor to a binary established gender, in the present study we use the notion Final Enby, the latter being a concept orthographically adapted from the pronunciation of the initial letters of Non-Binary (/ɛn/−/bi/). With this, we pursue the inclusive objective of referring to a final figure in which any person has a place, regardless of gender beyond that socially established as feminine or masculine.

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standards here, as rage and desperation rule, but also showing its productive and resourceful potential when epitomizing the creative resilience of the marginalized. In fact, homosexuality and insanity—associated with the abject—form an operative symbiosis in the summoning of the Other, a resisting reading Charlotte and Elizabeth embody against that legitimized power that relegates queerness to the boundaries, as Foucault states in Madness and Civilization (1988). Beyond its sensationalist appeal, its use of the slasher mode and the impending hallucinatory visions of literal and figurative dismemberment— chaos and deformity granting a new order—versus the apparently exemplary but oppressive reality in Bachoff Academy have a main role in The Perfection, describing, in a hyperbolic way, the processes—a rite of passage—by means of which the protagonists overcome exploitation and dominate their own essence and corporeality. It is through body shifting and strategies, more precisely with surgical mutilation, through the multiplicity of limbs, by means of cross-dressing or physical blending or amalgamation—which could be interpreted as a form of sorority and the performativity Judith Butler (2004) refers to—that Charlotte and Lizzie exert their power and allow the construction of gender and assertiveness. After melting into each other—a symbol of assimilation and inclusion—, the spider-like physicality of the talented and finally visible musicians metaphorically spins the silk, projects, and conceives a perfect and idyllic melody and choreography—synchronicity and precision through empathy and emotion, replacing automatized modes—, a composition they personify themselves as both creators and creation. Charlotte and Lizzie emerge as divine and enthroned actants in the temple of deconstruction and inverted roles, embodying a new syntax and grammar, a new coordination and subordination, a new subject and object paradigm, successfully subjugating the patriarchal maniac and castrating the traditional system.

References Augé, Marc. 2000. Los no lugares, espacios del anonimato. Una antropología de la sobremodernidad. Barcelona: Gedisa. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Cirlot, Juan E. 2005. Diccionario de símbolos. Barcelona: Siruela. Clover, Carol J. 1993. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Cooper, Melody Hope. 2018. Some-ness in No-When: Queer Temporalities in the Horror Genre, PhD dissertation, Marshall University. De Mauro Rucovsky, Martín. 2022. Bios precario. Biopolítica y precariedad en Latinoamérica. Madrid: La oveja roja. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel. 1988. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage. ———. 1990. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. London: Penguin. ———. 1998. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Vol. 2. New  York: The New Press. Gallego Silva, Jorge. 2016. Filosofía y estética del cuerpo en el circo desde la perspectiva del concepto de biopoder, PhD dissertation, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos de Madrid. Halberstam, Jack. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York and London: New York University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 2001. Zollikon Seminars: Protocols, Conversations. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Hodoyán, Karina, and Josefina Alcázar. 2016. Arte-Acción y performance en los muchos Méxicos. San Francisco: All USF Faculty Authored Books. Inbar, Yoel, David Pizarro, Ravi Iyer, and Jonathan Haidt. 2012. Disgust Sensitivity, Political Conservatism, and Voting. Social Psychological and Personality Science 3 (5): 537–544. Ioannidou, Elisavet. 2022. From Crisis to Compensation: Reinventing Identity and Place in the Sideshow and the Laboratory. Humanities 11 (10): 2–17. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Libis, Jean. 2001. El mito del andrógino. Madrid: Siruela. McNay, Lois. 1994. Foucault: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press/ Cambridge University Press. Melero, Alejandro. 2011. Hacia la construcción de una teoría queer española. Foucault y la homofobia del tardofranquismo. La torre del Virrey 10 (1): 49–54. Paré, Ambroise. [1575] 2011. On Monsters and Marvels. Translated by Janis Pallister. Reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Preciado, Paul B. 2022. Dysphoria Mundi. Barcelona: Anagrama. Rubin, Gayle S. 2002. Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality. In Sexualities II: Some Elements for an Account of the Social Organisation of Sexualities, ed. Ken Plummer, 188–202. London: Routledge. Russo, Mary. 2000. Freaks. In The Horror Reader, ed. Ken Gelder, 90–96. London: Routledge. Shepard, Richard, dir. 2018. The Perfection. Netflix.

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Solana, Mariela. 2017. Asincronía y crononormatividad. Apuntes sobre la idea de temporalidad queer. El banquete de los dioses 5 (7): 37–65. Toro-Zambrano, María Cristina. 2017. El concepto de heterotopía en Michel Foucault. Cuestiones de Filosofía 3 (21): 19–41. Turner, John D. 1990. NHC XIII, I: Trimorphic Protennoia. In Nag Hammadi Codices XI, XII, XIII, ed. Charles W. Hedrick, 371–454. New York: Brill. Waldron, Abigail. 2022. Queer Screams: A History of LGBTQ+ Survival through the Lens of American Horror Cinema. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland.

Index1

A Abject, 39n10, 41, 43, 48, 50, 83, 98, 103, 104, 106, 107, 186–189, 199, 206, 208–210, 214, 218 Aging, xii, 183–200 Aging and gender, 7 American culture wars, 2 American politics, 1, 3 Antebellum, 80, 138–142, 138n1, 144, 146–150, 146n4, 147n5, 149n6, 151n7, 151n8, 152–156, 152n9, 153n10 B Binaries, 25, 59, 66, 69 Black horror, 138, 139, 143, 156 Black Lives Matter, 138, 140, 156, 157

C Capitalist, 59n5, 72, 116, 117, 119, 121, 124, 129, 131 Christian, 57, 59, 60, 61n6, 65, 65n10, 66n11, 67, 69, 70n13, 79, 84, 88, 90, 91 Civil War, 16, 18, 19, 26, 138, 139, 141n2, 144, 146, 153, 153n10 Climate change, 80, 81, 88, 89n11, 90–92, 120, 123 Confederate, 18, 138–157, 141n2, 151n7, 151n8, 152n9 Conservative, 16, 18, 29, 62, 89–91, 93, 111, 170, 205, 217 Counter-liberal, 11 Creation, 62, 80, 80n1, 82, 84, 86–89, 91, 92, 100, 103, 211, 215, 218

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53278-8

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INDEX

Cultural clash, 17, 18 Culture wars, 12–15, 19, 29, 80, 81, 88, 90, 91, 93, 138, 161, 205

Final girl, 11, 21, 26–29, 98, 175 Folk horror, 38n9, 98, 100–102, 110, 139

D Domestic violence, 43, 167

G Gaslighting, 61, 74, 162, 167–171, 176 Gender in horror, 3–5 Gender representation, 2 Gender violence, 5 Genesis, 81–84, 87, 92, 93

E The Earth, 86, 87, 91, 117, 118, 128, 130, 131 Ecofeminism, 117n1 Ecofeminist, 117 Ecological, 81, 87, 88, 92, 115–120, 124, 130, 133 Emotional abuse, 170 Ethnicity, x F Family, 16, 21, 26–29, 36, 47–51, 65, 72, 87, 97, 102, 103, 105–107, 116, 119, 121, 122, 124, 126–130, 167, 172, 175, 206, 211 Female agency, 39, 50, 51 Female bodies, 42, 85 Female disposable bodies, 4 Female sacrifice, 56 Feminine, xiii, 26, 28, 29, 36, 37, 40, 43, 47, 48, 59, 60, 61n6, 65, 67, 68, 73, 103, 104, 108, 111, 112, 191, 215 Femininity, 16, 25, 29, 40, 46, 59, 59n5, 62, 68, 104, 106, 108, 111, 117, 121, 130, 186, 197, 215 Feminism, 14, 47, 100, 110, 206 Feminist, 36, 40, 44, 45, 69, 98, 100, 109, 110, 117n1, 163, 187, 200

H Harassment, 34, 37, 52, 163, 170 Homosexuality, 14, 208, 210, 217 I Invisibility, 25–29, 169, 193, 200, 209, 212 The Invisible Man, 162, 167–170 L Liberal, 11, 17, 65 M Male body, 51, 200 Masculine, 21, 28, 59, 60, 61n6, 68, 72, 103, 108, 111, 147–151, 154, 156, 191, 197, 213, 215 Masculinities, ix, 20, 22, 24, 36n4, 42, 44, 59, 59n5, 62, 68, 108, 119, 130, 143, 146–149, 151n8, 152–157, 152n9, 169, 171–175, 197 #MeToo/#MeToo movement/MeToo movement, 34–37, 36n6, 39, 47,

 INDEX 

51, 52, 85, 161, 163, 165, 169, 173, 175, 176 Misogyny, 163, 171 Monstrous feminine, 36, 37, 40n13, 41, 44, 52, 98, 112, 186, 195, 200 Monstrous women, 3 Mother, 29, 39, 41–44, 49, 49n17, 50, 98, 104–107, 109, 127, 128, 168, 170, 172, 186–190, 195–198, 200, 206, 208, 209, 211, 212, 215 Mother!, 80–83, 81n2, 85–89, 92, 93 Mother Nature, 81, 84 Mutilation, 85, 139, 147, 148, 155, 198, 209, 211, 212, 214, 217, 218 N Nature, 37, 47, 59n5, 85, 88, 88n9, 103, 105, 108, 115–118, 120–122, 124, 125, 127, 130–132, 185, 189, 197, 209, 210, 214 Neo-pagan, 98 O Older women, 184–186, 190, 194, 196, 197, 199, 200 P Paganism, 59, 101, 102 Patriarchal, 12, 16, 18, 25, 28, 29, 36, 37, 40–42, 45, 46, 51, 69, 74, 98, 107–110, 117, 119, 150, 152n9, 170, 172, 175, 189, 190, 194, 198, 218

223

Patriarchy, 25, 36, 46, 100, 107, 109, 110, 112, 116–121, 128, 131, 132, 145 Polarization, 13, 14 Political action, 14, 18 Political struggle, 12 Political subject, 14, 28, 29 Populism, 11–16, 19, 20, 23, 26 Populist discourses, 11, 14, 25, 29 Populist environment, 14 Populist menace, 15 Q Queer, 205, 207–212, 217 R Religious, 15, 16, 36, 80, 82, 91, 97, 103, 104, 108, 110, 205 Right-wing, 11, 15, 18, 92, 110 Right-wing populism, 11, 15 S Sexual abuse, 34n1, 37, 163, 174, 213 Sexual assault, 147, 147n5, 148, 162–164, 169, 176 Slasher, xiii, 11, 15, 19–26, 28, 37, 162, 184, 213, 216–218 Social anxieties, 6 Social horror, 115, 132, 169 Social otherness, 3 Sociopolitical, 138, 163 Stereotyping, 4, 7 T Transnational, x Trump, Donald, 162, 163, 171, 205

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W Warfare, 12, 13, 22, 138, 156 The Witch, 35–38, 44, 46–51, 47n15, 97, 100, 102, 103, 109–112, 163

Witchcraft, 49, 50, 97, 99, 100, 102–104, 106–110, 194 Women’s corporeality, 2, 5 Women’s representation, 4