Tag: scary movies

The Haunted Feminine Part 1

Several years ago, I wrote a series of papers for a horror and sci-fi class at NYU about the trope of what I called the “haunted feminine” in certain horror/suspense films.  In the spirit of the season, I offer my analysis of some seriously scary movies.

“Supposing it is in my imagination: the knocking, the voices, everything.  Every cursed bit of the haunting.  Suppose the haunting is all in my mind […] I could say all three of you are in my imagination.  None of this is real.” –Eleanor (Julie Harris) to Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson) in The Haunting (MGM, 1963).

In her essay ‘Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,’ Barbara Creed examines the horror genre’s construction of the feminine as monstrous and abject.  While she focuses on the more violent and blood-oriented past and contemporary horror films, she does not particularly address the quieter aspects of horror.  Another trope of a sub-genre of horror complicates, perhaps even belies, the concept of the monstrous feminine.  It is what I shall call the haunted feminine, a trope most notably present in Robert Wise’s The Haunting and Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (Fox, 1961).  It consists of the presence of the haunted subject, always a sexually repressed female, through whom the film is primarily focalized.  Eleanor (Julie Harris) in The Haunting is the main target of the ghosts of Hill House, which she interprets as the house ‘wanting’ her.  Only the character of Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) in The Innocents actually sees the ghosts she believes possess the two children under her care.  The films do not at all make clear whether the hauntings actually take place in the ‘real’ world.  There are numerous indications that the hauntings may be merely projections of hysterical female minds.

Much horror scholarship rightly addresses the alliance between the feminine and the world of the horrific Other, whether as (complicit) victim or actual monster.  This concept allows for terror to be located in the physical body of the female—whether the monstrous alien mother in Alien (Fox, 1979) and its sequels, the possessed body of Linda Blair in The Exorcist (Warner Bros, 1973), or the powerful, pubescent body of Carrie (Sissy Spacek) in Carrie (United Artists, 1976) (Creed 44-59).  The haunted feminine locates the monstrous in the woman’s mental existence, not her physical one.  She may invent for herself ghosts and haunted houses, constructing narcissistic narratives wherein the house ‘wants’ her (The Haunting), or only she can ‘save the children’ from their ghostly possessors (The Innocents).  The susceptible mind of the woman becomes the site of monstrous apparitions: faces that spring from walls, banging on doors, cold spots, memories of past murders, ghosts walking along dark corridors, etc, etc.  These ‘innocent’ women elucidate their sexual and religious repression in the form of ghosts and possessions; the haunted world quite literally springs from the mind of a woman.

Haunting narratives emphasize female hysteria, connecting them to a sub-genre within film noir, the gothic women’s film, in which a female protagonist suspects her husband/lover of attempting to murder her (Doane 127).  The gothic women’s film narratives are usually focalized through the main female protagonist, establishing viewer identification with the woman’s plight.  The viewer experiences the same fears and doubts of the central protagonist, uncertain about the sanity of the husband and his possible murderous tendencies.  Many of these films show the woman’s terror to be justified.  Secret Beyond the Door (Universal, 1948), Love from a Stranger (United Artists, 1937), Gaslight (MGM, 1944),and Midnight Lace (Universal, 1960) all bring to light a monstrous masculinity.  Other films prove to be nearly hysterical fantasies in which the husband/lover is innocent of murderous impulses: Suspicion (RKO, 1941) and Lured (United Artists, 1947).  The female protagonists are usually active figures who take the initiative to investigate the male psyche, building up evidence for and against their husbands/lovers.  They have an advantage over their haunted counterparts, who face the less tangible possibilities of the supernatural world.  Most of the gothic women’s films come to a defined conclusion in which the mystery of masculine aggression is solved.   (One possible exception is Hitchcock’s Suspicion, depending on how one reads the apparently happy ending).  The wife either exonerates the husband/lover and catches the true murderer, or proves him guilty, to be either destroyed or cured.

The films that examine hauntings are typically more ambiguous and give their protagonists less initiative than their counterparts in gothic women’s films.  The haunting narrative’s emphasis on a woman’s repressed sexuality, and her subsequent Otherness, contributes to the hysterical nature of the narrative.  The main character of Eleanor in The Haunting best represents this repressed, dangerous figure, typing her as Puritanical from the very beginning.  Rejected by her sister, terrified of being left out or left alone, desperate for affection and attention, and finally developing a crush on Dr. Markway, Eleanor poses a perfect hysterical subject.  Her incipient sexuality, at once repressed, Puritanical and seething to escape, finds expression in the events of the haunting.  Freud discusses hysteria in women in Inhibition, Symptom and Fear as a reaction to the sexual act:

In women, direct fear of the sexual function is common.  We class this as a form of hysteria, as we also do in the case of the defensive symptom of disgust (Freud 154).

It is possible to read Eleanor’s persistent experience of the haunting as a manifestation of both her fear and desire for sexuality.  Eleanor violently rejects the coded lesbian Theo (Claire Bloom), who frightens her in virtue of her sexual status as Other, telling her:

“The world is full of inconsistencies, unnatural things.  Nature’s mistakes they’re called.  You, for instance.”

Eleanor’s rejection of Theo is a rejection of Otherness, of ‘unnatural’ sexuality. While the film never fully delineates Theo’s sexuality, her appearance, ambiguous name, jealousy of Eleanor’s relationship to Markway, rejection of the advances of Luke (Russ Tamblyn), as well coded references to her ‘partner’ and lack of marital status, establish her as a lesbian figure, or at least a figure outside established bounds of ‘acceptable’ sexuality.  Eleanor gravitates towards Theo as one who offers an alternative to bound heterosexuality, but turns to Markway as the hero of her dreams.  When Markway turns out to be married, Eleanor shifts sexual allegiance again, expressing a desire to be ‘united’ (read: married or sexually incorporated) with Hill House.  Eleanor’s final descent into madness occurs with the appearance of Markway’s wife Grace (Lois Maxwell), whom Eleanor suggests should sleep in the haunted nursery, the ‘cold heart’ of Hill House.  When Grace disappears during one of the film’s most frightening set pieces, the physical existence of the house and the haunting come together with Eleanor’s psychic breakdown.  Eleanor and the house fall apart together.  The haunting reads as a manifestation of Eleanor’s repressed sexuality.

The expressive feminine response to repression that manifests itself in the creation of the monstrous other, whether that other is a physical monster, ghost or a psychic projection induced by hysteria, works both for and against the possibility of claiming these types of films in general, and The Haunting in particular, for feminist or proto-feminist discourse.  Most feminist analysis of the horror film postulates the woman as monster, as sexual aberration, or disturbed victim that must be eradicated.  Linda Williams even goes so far as to claim that

The horror film may be a rare example of a genre that permits the expression of women’s sexual potency and desire […] but it does so in these more recent examples only to punish her for this very act, only to demonstrate how monstrous female desire can be (Williams 32-33).

Williams typifies horror as a genre that permits expression of female desire only to violently quell it in death and blood.  The Haunting and its ilk may fit this discourse to a certain extent: Hill House either kills Eleanor or she commits suicide in order to remain with it.  Eleanor can be read as both the victim of the house, and the cause of the haunting.  She is certainly complicit in her own destruction, as she desires union with the house that at the same time frightens and horrifies her, just as she is repelled and attracted to the sexual act.

The ambiguity of the haunting itself further complicates such analysis.  Director Robert Wise focalizes the majority of the narrative around and through Eleanor, privileging her point of view.  The spectator sees, in certain key scenes, more or less what Eleanor sees, hears and experiences.  The film creates an interior, psychological fear, heard and felt, but rarely visible.  The end leaves the viewer to wonder what was ‘real’ in the world of the film.  Was Eleanor simply a mad woman, projecting her fears and desires onto the surface of an uncanny old house? Or, was the house truly evil, haunted, attempting to keep her there as a wandering victim? Because the film never answers all the questions it posits, and refuses to explain the haunting in full, severe doubts are raised in the viewer’s mind about what is seen and what is not, what has been explained and what has not.  Because of this very ambiguity, the film fails to easily fit into an anti-feminine discourse about monstrosity.  Eleanor is both victim and cause, depending on how one reads the film.  She is sympathetic and unsympathetic—sympathetic if the house is really trying to destroy her, unsympathetic if she has narrated herself into a narcissistic tale of being wanted by the other world.

In the middle of the film, the four main characters crowd around a statue of Hugh Crain and his family.  Each gives their interpretation of the tableau, bending the narrative in one direction, then another.  No narrative construction, however, can fully explain the configuration of the statues.  That which remains unseen, pushed to the peripheries of the frame, becomes difficult to deconstruct and force into a paradigm.  The Haunting may very well be about a narcissistic, repressed young woman descending into suicidal madness.  It may also be about pervasive forces of another world preying on the fears of a susceptible mind. Eleanor is a woman haunted by desire, guilt, fear and loneliness.  Like Irena’s obsession over her village’s curse in Cat People (RKO, 1942), Eleanor becomes obsessed with the conception of the haunting.  The narrative of Hill House as haunted is both a cinematic reality and a projection of her mind.  She wants the haunting to be real because it enables her to belong to something.  Hill House exists in a world where ambiguity reigns, where the trope of the haunted feminine is monstrous and pathetic, the cause and victim of things that go bump in the night.

Creed, Barbara.  ‘Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection’ in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant, University of Texas Press: 1996.

Doane, Mary Ann.  The Desire to Desire, Indiana University Press, Bloomington: 1987.

Freud, Sigmund.  ‘Inhibition, Symptom and Fear’ in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, trans. John Reddick, Penguin, New York: 2003.

Williams, Linda.  ‘When the Woman Looks’ in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant, University of Texas Press: 1996.

Clayton, Jack (dir).  The Innocents, Twentieth Century Fox, 1961.

Cukor, George (dir).  Gaslight, MGM, 1944.

De Palma, Brian (dir).  Carrie, United Artists, 1976.

Friedkin, William (dir).  The Exorcist, Warner Brothers, 1973.

Hitchcock, Alfred (dir).  Suspicion, RKO Radio Pictures, 1941.

Lang, Fritz (dir).  Secret Beyond the Door, Universal Pictures, 1948.

Lee, Rowland V. (dir).  Love from a Stranger, United Artists, 1937.

Miller, David (dir).  Midnight Lace, Universal Pictures, 1960.

Scott, Ridley (dir).  Alien, Twentieth Century Fox, 1979.

Sirk, Douglas (dir).  Lured, United Artists, 1947.

Tourneur, Jacques (dir).  Cat People, RKO, 1942.

Wise, Robert (dir).  The Haunting, MGM, 1963.

*Paper originally written for Horror and Sci-Fi, Prof. Ed Guerrero.  Copyright Lauren Humphries-Brooks 2009

Bloody October: Poltergeist

LAST NIGHT: POLTERGEIST (1982)

You want to know where Paranormal Activity got it? Poltergeist.  With the combined might of Steven Spielberg (before he got too warm and fuzzy) and Tobe Hooper behind it, Poltergeist is one of the first, and best, of the suburban haunted house films.  A nice suburban house nice suburban neighborhood transforms into a portal to hell.  It all starts out innocently enough, with the little girl Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) sleepwalking and talking to the static on the TV.  Then something stacks all the kitchen chairs.  The beginning of the haunting is actually treated with a sort of glee, as the mother Diane (Jobeth Williams) experiments with the moving furniture in the kitchen. Then the “TV people” come and take Carol Anne away through the closet and things get much more serious.

I’ve seen Poltergeist numerous times now and I always forget just how damn good it is.  It’s a commentary on how disrespectful and thoughtless modernity can be.  It calls into question just how safe we are in our planned communities, how little we think of the past and what will burst through at a moment’s notice.  The adults initially treat the haunting as a game, until the most basic fear of every parent – their child being taken – is played upon with brilliant precision.

Poltergeist makes use of all the trappings of suburban life.  The dead come back because they’ve been disturbed when the planned community is  built on top of a cemetery.  It’s the revenge of the ancient on the unthinking, disbelieving modern, and the terrors are as primordial as they come.

There are few viewers who don’t relate to those childish nighttime fears, like your toys are trying to kill you, or the tree outside your window is going to grab you out of bed.  The very fact that the entrance to the other world is in a child’s closet is part of the most basic fears of childhood.  There is something in the closet, and it’s coming for you.

Bloody October: The Cabin In The Woods

Last Night: THE CABIN IN THE WOODS

It’s taken me this long to finally see the Joss Whedon penned The Cabin in the Woods.  Oh, how I wish I had not waited.  It’s … epic.  Somewhere in the vein of Tucker and Dale vs. Evil with a smattering of Scream.  Then again, it really does stand in its own category.  Five college kids go to a cabin in the woods and everything begins to go horribly, hilariously wrong.

My one objection is that it is not really scary.  It’s funny, it’s dark, it’s provoking, but there are few scares, mostly because we know at least part of what’s going on from the very beginning.  It helps if you have a working knowledge of quite a few horror franchises, are apprised of the rules of slasher films, and can recognize certain tropes without having them handed to you.  But there’s so little that can be said about The Cabin in the Woods without giving the game away, so I’ll just say that it’s well worth a watch.  And you don’t even have to keep the lights on.

Bloody October: Sleepy Hollow

Right, so as I have limited time but I really want to keep updating this here blog o’mine, I’m going to start posting short musings uponst the scary movies I watch this October. Why? Because the leaves are falling, the skies are going grey, the wind howls through the skeletal trees and it’s time to consume massive amounts of candy and have bad dreams about werewolves, non-sparkly vampires, haunted houses, nasty ghosts and Vincent Price.  Or Peter Cushing, whoever takes your fancy.

LAST NIGHT: SLEEPY HOLLOW (1999).

Ever will I defend Tim Burton, because of movies like this. To launch my October scary-movie-watching, there’s nothing better than Burton’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek tribute to Hammer horror. Johnny Depp plays Ichabod Crane, a pale-faced New York constable headed upstate to the wilds of the Hudson Valley to investigate several beheadings that have been blamed on the local ghost. He finds, natch, a bunch of weird locals, foggy and twisted woods, a few more beheadings and a lovely Burtonian waif in Christina Ricci. Cue gushing blood, heaving bodices, one hell of a carriage chase and a burning windmill.

Burton and Depp were at their best in the 90s. In some ways, Sleepy Hollow is the icing on the cake of Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns. References to Hammer films abound, from the outlandish blood, spinning heads and dark backstory, to the presences of Michael Gough and Christopher Lee in bit roles. The film doesn’t take itself too seriously, but neither does it turn the gothic and  romantic story into a parody. Depp as Crane is a likable but squeamish detective, tortured by the past and not terribly certain about the future. He avoids the caricature that has sadly colored his latest roles; watching it last night, I was struck with the realization that this might be the last time we see Depp the Actor instead of Depp the Star. The cast surrounding him from Ricci on down is uniformly excellent, all of them sinking their teeth into their parts with gusto – especially Christopher Walken in a non-speaking but pivotal role.

The film bears only a passing resemblance to Washington Irving’s folksy horror story, despite an excellent tribute in the middle of the film as the Horseman rides Ichabod down bearing a flaming pumpkin in his hand.  It does trade in folk tales and cinematic references – the burning windmill will please anyone who has seen the original Frankenstein.  The film looks and feels like a New York horror story with an edge of Hammer and Universal. Burton knows his horror. He does his best work when he tries to make a good story first and layers the Burtonian influences on second.

Sleepy Hollow is the way I always start my Halloween. It’s a more adult film than Beetlejuice or The Nightmare Before Christmas, and miles away from disappointments like Alice in Wonderland. I know viewers who don’t like Tim Burton who love this film. But it helps if you like Tim Burton.