CinemArchetype 27: Androgyne/Alien

I'll confess, it's not the horror in Florida a few weeks ago, the Pride Parade this past Sunday, or the passing of the great collective of chameleonic trickster personae, artistic incarnations, and unobtrusive music genius known as David Bowie that has compelled me to re-open my CinemArchetype files once more. They could have been considered complete. Certainly the basic core archetypes have all been accounted for, aside from the obvious ones (i.e. the hero, the terrorist, rabbit, the frickin' idiot) but Jung's access to pop culture was limited by the times. If he'd have seen Ziggy Stardust he'd have a whole treatise by now. No, the reason I print this now is that I'm confused and overwhelmed by the heat, unable to finish things that hit closer to home.

So the query is, are aliens all one gender, or beyond gender, or have cross-dressers and fabulous gay culture icons conscripted the alien look to help us contextualize their gender flexibility within our known parameters? Insecure men don't beat up aliens to prove their Earth heredity, and we don't fire aliens from school jobs. We wouldn't believe they were aliens even if they told us (just like you could be totally fey in the 70s and no one would guess you were actually 'one of them' - just expresssive, artistic, which was encouraged back when I was a kid, thank god). Oh well, we gained some things in some places, lost some in other. Ask not what color the elephant is in the room, for he's electric pink. And if you can't handle it, honey, go back to Janice!

1. Tim Curry as Dr. Frank N. Furter

ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975)

It took me a long time to see this movie after being turned off by just how lockstep all the 'call and response' stuff was at the show they had outside my dorm in college. Where if you didn't know exactly what you were doing you were glowered at mercilessly. Yeah, said I, that's real "free" of y'all. But lately I saw it at home free of liens and was so blown away by Tim Curry's wry swagger and fey gonzo cool that I clean forgot about all that. A true demonstration of the force and strutting seductive sensual freedom that's to be had when tapping into the source voltage of both genders at once, he's a walking ad for flaming bisexual transvestism, and his inevitable return to his home planet (or death) feels like our loss even more than his. We've not seen his like since, try as John Cameron Mitchell might--god knows we don't see it here on campus, where androgyny and transvestitism carries a rather noble and saintly joyless stamp, as if the PC lockstep of the post-grad young faculty and tolerance committees will turn against you just as quick as they turn on anyone who uses the wrong gender pronoun to describe you in a letter (as happened to me when I didn't address a student in their preferred plural). No matter, I don't hold it against the student 'themselves' or the lockstep Horror crowd at the RHPS, terrified to throw their rice a beat too late or soon, or even the lockstep professor nervously parroting the latest PC dogma --I'm just an old reprobate iconoclast realizing that when the old white guy old guard has collapsed and the freaks have won, I shall instantly realize those old guys were right to be alarmed, and-- like fuckin' Robert Ryan in THE WILD BUNCH-- I'll wish to god I was with 'em. Or--to slide gently back down into topic-- Dr. Frank N. Furter, who gleefully punks out Janice and Brad in the first half but-- once they're on his side and 'loosened' up--regards them with jealous suspicion.

Notes Jean Kim - 

"The moment of reckoning is the entrance of Tim Curry’s seminal character: the camera languorously showing his glamorous heels, bustier and Cheshire grin. Even as a straight female, I have to admit my breath was taken away at Dr. Frank N. Furter’s grand arrival. He oozes sensuality from every pore: raw, unadulterated, glitter-honey charisma. The teasing, rolling rhymes, the “an—ticipation” dragging you to the cliff’s edge. It’s one of those star-making movie moments where you know, as the viewer, that cinema won’t ever be quite the same... 

"Curry’s confidence riffs off similar gender-bending antics from that other fairly young, rebellious artistic arena, rock n’ roll, particularly the glam rock scene. David Bowie, Lou Reed & Velvet Underground, Mick Jagger: the rigidity of gender identities matter less than the braggadocio, the impertinence, the sass, the sexual chocolate. It is the power of the human artistic spirit: the inner fire is king and queen at once. There is power in both genders and their aesthetic wonderment to draw on, to create, to mix, to inspire." 

2. David Bowie as Thomas Jerome Newton

The Man who Fell to Earth (1976)
Dir Nicolas Roeg

Coulda done Ziggy for this list but that's more a concert film, and a short-lived concept, though that is my favorite album of old DB's, listened to constantly my freshman year of college (til I learned all my punk friends were gay and hadn't told me). For this purpose though, the alien aspect fits more perfectly, especially in his home planet flashbacks, though there his wife and kids are clearly gender-specified, rather than some cloned gender neutral tribe. I like Bowie in the film, and Candy Clark, and love Roeg in general (because of Performance and Masque of the Red Death) but to me the movie never really comes together, though I do relate with becoming a TV-addicted alcoholic hermit.

Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust period in the early 1970s had a staggering influence on me. I had been writing about androgyny in literature and art in my term papers in college and grad school, so Bowie’s daring experiments seemed like the living embodiment of everything I had been thinking about. It’s hard to believe now, but when I submitted the prospectus for Sexual Personae in 1971, it was the only dissertation about sex in the entire Yale Graduate School. I completed it in 1974, while I was teaching at my first job at Bennington College in Vermont. One of the supreme moments of my life as a student of culture occurred in October 1973, as I was watching NBC’s “Midnight Special” in my apartment in Bennington. It was a taping from London of “The 1980 Floor Show,” Bowie’s last appearance as Ziggy Stardust—a program oddly never broadcast in the U.K. Bowie looked absolutely ravishing! A bold, knowing, charismatic creature neither male nor female wearing a bewitching costume straight out of the Surrealist art shows of the Parisian 1930s: a seductive black fish-net body suit with attached glittery plaster mannequin’s hands (with black nail polish) lewdly functioning as a brassiere. I instantly realized that Bowie had absorbed the gender games of Andy Warhol’s early short films, above all “Harlot,” with its glamorous, sultry drag queen (Mario Montez). Hence I viewed Bowie, who became one of the foundational creators of performance art, as having taken the next major step past Warhol in art history. I never dreamed that someday I would see that brilliant fish-net costume inches away in a display case at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, where I was lucky enough to catch the V&A’s Bowie costume show two years ago. It was a sacred epiphany, like seeing a splinter from the True Cross. - Camille Paglia, Salon

Probably the key figure in helping gay teens to--if not come out--at least get flashier, more expressive, amidst my generation in particular, Bowie showed a way to stay chameleonic, undefinable --we didn't have to declare our sexual preference like some college major. More than gay, Bowie that made it OK to be an alien, beyond all dualities set by society, beyond sex yet sooo sexy. This confident, gorgeous, stylish, intelligent alien accepted us! Bowie didn't worry about us accepting him, her, whatever, because he accepted himself, and so could see us with love and without judgment. And through the example of that unprecedented generosity, the merely gay or bi or trans amongst us became easier to accept, and become. 

3. Jaye Davidson as Ra

STARGATE (1994)
Dir Roland Emmerich

Though he speaks in a deep otherworldly long-dead language, The mighty Ra is quite the fey little aesthete, keeping his weaponry, ships, and entourage decked out in a unified and very chic combination of HR Giger-style anthropomorphism and the ancient Egypt we all know. The art direction is so superior to the actual narrative the film becomes like a museum. But hey, it's fun to imagine the entirety of ancient Egyptian iconography as one crazy fashionista alien's own unique Hugo Boss meets Erich von Daniken haute couture. Davidson's Ra is a beyond-duality Apollonian super androgyne to make Camille Paglia proud. If Paglia ever does write goddamned volume two of Sexual Personae, I imagine she'll find time to mention Davidson, who alas wasn't in too many films aside from this and Crying Game, his big 'breakout.' Supposedly he found filmmaking and stardom particularly stressful - and so would you, in all likelihood. But he was the first actor we thought was a girl until the 'reveal' and as such Crying Game was a sensation. He broke the ice.

4. Slavitza Jovan as Gozer (the Gozarian)

GHOSTBUSTERS (1984)
Dir Ivan Reitman

An 80s film to its giant marshmallow craw, naturally GHOSTBUSTERS' exterior dimensional villain, Gozer, is going to look like a butch hyper-glam Sheena Easton and appear in front of a giant all-seeing eye pyramid projection screen, flanked by two mighty slors. Confusing even downtown New York performance artists as to his/her gender, Gozer the Gozarian's face and demeanor are the epitome of the then-in-full effect MTV fabulous of the moment --and as such are a bold and brilliant 'distinctly 80s Manhattan club scene' choice. S/he doesn't get too many lines but when s/he does s/he speaks in an old lady Pazuzu-homage voice. "Then dieeeee!" - that's fierce, Gozer! Lavender lightning is always haute!! 

5. John Rhys Davies - 

VELVET GOLDMINE (1997)

Dir Todd Haynes 

Haynes' film unfolds in some half-awake reverie set to some great T. Rex, Stooges, Eno covers and glamsy originals, and offers a rare stunning performance by the uneven Ewan McGregor as an Iggy Pop-type, but it's the gorgeous eyes and face of Davies that lingers in even the straightest dude's locket memory. In fabulous outfits like the one above, Davies plays a kind of a Bowie/Jobriath glam alien pop meteor who fakes his own assassination, but why? That's the whole question but you know as well as I: to dodge the Thatcher-era British taxman and because fans were making life wearisome. Showing up once in awhile at the druggier glam shows, under Bowie MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH-style wide-brim slouch hats (to pout that there's still a music scene without him?), only a terribly miscast Christian Bale (clip-on costume earring and oily pancake make-up presumably lifted from mum's drawer) as a bisexual rock journalist seems to notice him. Oh Bale, you're such a square rock journalist you might as well be written by Cameron Crowe! Not only that, but when McGregor acts circles around you, like a shark coming to life at the smell of your blood, that's a sad crazy night.

My problem with Todd Haynes has always been his devotion to a kind of sickly housewife 50s color scheme, which I personally abhor (maybe it's from being very bored as a kid at the homes of various grandparents?), and his weakness for Eisenstein fetish editing collapses any kind of narrative cohesiveness or drive, If it wasn't for the ceaseless parade of songs to anchor them, Haynes' films would leave time behind altogether, and become just a particularly gay episode of MTV's 120 Minutes. While that kind of associative reverie stuff is fun to edit, it's often frustrating to watch, especially if you're not enthralled by a certain era of suburban decor and Haynes' unique 'one step out of the closet looking in' dourness. His gay pop odysseys are like a less flashy or raunchy or druggy version of Greg Araki's, which means nothing to anyone unless they've endured an Araki movie all the way to the end, a fate which I have so far been lucky enough to escape.

See also HEDWIG and THE ANGRY INCH - god knows I did - at the Jane Theater and on the screen. I still cry to "The Origin of Love." I'm oily human - it was the 90s man. Damn right that was me at Wigstock 98. Gimme danger, widdle stwanger

6. Richard Lynch (as God?)

GOD TOLD ME TO (1976)

Dir Larry Cohen 

He's an artificially transplanted alien-human hybrid who can turn people homicidal with a glance, and he has a woman's sex organs built into this burn victim chest, sort of, and he's, well I can't spoil it, let's just say he's Richard Lynch.

I'm fascinated by the life imitates art trajectory of self-inflicted burn victim Lynch... who (intentionally) doused himself with gasoline and set himself ablaze during a strong acid trip in the 60s--and yet works steadily, nearly always playing roles that have him dying in fire, or having something to do with fire. I mean I would never be able to get within a mile of match if I were him! Man, that's gutsy. I don't buy him as a cult leader either here or in BAD DREAMS, but I'm in awe of him anyway. A living example that some of those old LSD wives tales could very well be true (the babysitter who put the turkey in the crib and the baby in the oven, for example). Not to get off topic but let me go on record and say that LSD should be strictly monitored by the government with agent 'guides' being consigned to sell it and provide a kind of communal garden / arts and crafts room which to monitor dosage and provide a chill-out tent -kindergarten teacher- therapist - shaman - counsellor safe space. Lord knows I'm qualified from years of experience in the late 80s and would love that as a job. Instead you got people like Dennis Hopper and Bruce Dern in THE TRIP.... or worse, doctors who keep you in a hospital gown in a busy ward with overhead neon lighting and intercom announcements and industrial solvents... on the other hand a kid in the throes of a depression or dared by his friends could take 100x too much practically as easy as taking the right amount - especially if it's liquid. God knows the strength of the dosage the CIA used in their unethical experiments, or Lynch was on when he set himself ablaze.

All in all, it's another fine example of Larry Cohen's unique ability to steal shots on busy city streets, full of unusual casting (Andy Kaufman, probably the only guy brave enough to march with the cops in the St. Patrick's Day parade in full dress uniform while Cohen and company filmed him guerrilla style as he prepared to pull out a gun and start shooting blanks at random people) and good tough acting with characters who all look like people instead of actors and mixing his high concept weirdness and social messages alongside it - straddling a zone between Cronenberg body horror and Scorsese urban grit poetry-- with streaks of humanism and wit all his own.

There's also a 1985 sci fi film I haven't seen called ENEMY MINE with a similar child bearing but male-ish alien played by Louis Gossett Jr. It bombed because no one wanted to imagine themselves being marooned with Dennis Quaid, least of all stuck in one of those 'a soldier from each camp during a war are marooned together and must find their common blah blah to survive' plots. I wouldn't even have known the alien wasn't a regularly defined 'male' if the film wasn't added to an El Rey Mother's Day marathon.

7.a. John "Bunny" Breckinridge - The Ruler - 

PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)

7.b. Bill Murray as Bunny 

ED WOOD (1994)  

As Imdb notes: "A serious auto accident prevented Breckinridge from getting a longed-for sex-change operation in Mexico." Is his last name, "Breckinridge" linked to Myra? It is, apparently... and makes sense - they certainly ran in the same decadent glitterati circles. And then we can follow these threads outward into the universe..

"Charisma is the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self-love." - Paglia, 521

8. Grey Aliens

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1979)

Just why do we associate greys with dudes, when they're quite clearly beyond such things as gender? Reagan famously told Spielberg he didn't know "how close to the truth this really is," after a White House screening, one thing I'm reasonably sure didn't happen at the first US-alien conference (in 1954) was the musical communication, because fuck that hack John Williams to think UFOs communicate with bassoons and known musical scales. I know a filmmaker needs visualization and audio for such things, but everyone knows communication with greys is always telepathic. You've probably picked up their signal in your sleep a dozen times, or via the galactic cell phones that drifted into our damper climates millennia ago, the psilocybe cubensis mushroom, or via Salvia Divinorum, DMT, or dying, or a bad flu, or any psychic ability not hopelessly intertwined with schizophrenia--your brain has to be clear enough you can recognize the external-internal voice in your head--and the way you feel a connection with them is very yin/yang - like their female energy courses through you as if speaking through your unconscious ego. They are facets of our constitution, like Voldemort's soul within Harry Potter (Deathly Hallows 2 is on behind me). The most important facility we have, that ESP, is denigrated by mainstream science for the same reason the church used to. That what it cannot control or measure or monetize, mustn't interfere with that which can until that position become untenable. It's not the 'see no evil / hear no evil' concept, but the refusal to consider any other form of input, that makes us blind and deaf to the alien's screaming for our attention.

9. Patricia Laffan as Nyah

DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS (1954)

Dir David MacDonald

Leave it to the Brits (pre-Hammer) to drain the sexy potential out of the old "Martian women need Earth men to mate with" set-up (originated the year before, 1953, in the classic Cat Women of the Moon). Tall, imperious, with a voice like Bette Davis as Queen Elizabeth I, (and a dashing black cowl hood combo), Laffan's Martian Nyah is, in her unsexy way, damned sexy, but it’s all too clear that the makers of this film are missing the point: alien women here to get 'specimens' shouldn't look like disciplinarian schoolmarm androgynes if they want to get recruits. If her planet's desperate enough to want to mate with men from the paltry cross-section of tavern guests, she's got my sympathy (I'd go in a heartbeat!)

10. Tilda Swinton -

ORLANDO (1992)

Dir Sally Potter 

Not every transitional or non-binary character made this list, they are maybe not alien enough, still lacking that 'alien' aspect, i.e. not adding to something more than the sum of both, but Tilda Swinton has it and rocks it, the female non-musical version of the David Bowie alien archetype in the film that put director Sally Potter on the map, and Swinton--hitherto a Derek Jarman figure--as 'the' mainstream androgyne to beat ever since. Starting as a young nobleman blessed (or cursed) with immortality by Queen Elizabeth, Orlando changes in dress, gender, class and demeanor like a snake sheds its skin, all the while navigating the social climbing/falling spheres within a surreal ever-evolving England. Speaking directly to camera, she transcends any notion of objectification or subject-as-spectacle. Through her we see how going from male to female is not a castration (a 'loss' of essence) but a remembrance of being all-encompassing, like wood rejoining fire and air rather than disintegration.

11. Brigitte Lin - Asia the Invincible

SWORDMAN 2 (1992)

Dir Tsui Hark

Lin really shines in the chance to play a role where she starts out as a guy but in her supernatural fighting ability leads to a softening of the skin and feminization of self, a side effect of mastering a rare martial arts manual that demands auto-castration, which I've heard mention in a few other films --as eunuchs were once a ruling class of immortal warriors. Without knowing both the yin and yang, male and female power centers, one can't enter the top spheres of martial arts. Once changed s/he keeps her maid lover but falls in love with Jet Li (and has them sleep together later while she's off killing his brothers). Why, Jet? Because he makes her laugh with his philosophical simplicity and deep love of alcohol (naturally I relate), preferring wine to the follies of man and his continual struggle for power and rule; Lin's sacrificed his/her balls to have ultimate power while Li's sacrificed all interest in the world (or is trying to) in favor of a continual buzz and settlement on Ox Mountain (if he ever gets there). It's really beautifully played between them, as Jet Li has such an innocent semi-bewildered look in his eyes, like he's imagining a cheery childhood moment at all times. Together they're a flutter of robes like two butterflies right before she kills them with his/her choice weapon: sewing needles.

 Anne Carlisle - as Margaret / Jimmy + Alien POV

LIQUID SKY
(1982) Dir. Slava Tsukerman

O, those androgynous women and mildly manly men who spend their 70s-early 80s nights milling around tiny black box combo art gallery / fashion studio storefronts downtown, engaging in never ending private fashion shows in vain attempts to stand out from a stable of similarly face-painted and ennui-and-opiate-withdrawal-driven clotheshorses! This is what the East Village NYC in the late 70s-early 80s was all about, before Giuliani and the internet fucked it all up. Meanwhile a German scientist named Johann (Otto Von Wernher) has followed a George Foreman grill-sized spacecraft to the roof above the East Village penthouse flat Margaret shares with her knife wielding Valerie Solanis-style performance artist heroin dealer lesbian girlfriend Adrian (Paula E. Shepherd). The alien is represented by a giant solarized color style eye POV, observing all the action through a color-twisted prism and killing those who dare reach anything so jejune as an orgasm. It maybe hides behind the white mask in the center of the weird neon hula hooped painting in the center of the apartment. When Margaret's lovers 'climax,' a cigarette burn in the celluloid behind their head sucks them right out of the film, leaving her free to resume her high fashion Fassbinder-ish moping. Her own inability to have an orgasm (due to either drugs, ennui or some combination) saves her neck, and even allows her to notice her little alien guardian with mild affection rather than distaste. Though she never sees it (them?), they form a bond as touching as that between the disembodied Virginia Leith and her similarly unseen closet monster in The Brain that Wouldn't Die!  

If this was a guy playing both roles it might just be the usual camp drag theatricality but Carlisle brings a depth of wry deadpan wit and existential sad resolve that's Weimar Cabaret-level decadent without ever descending to camp, belying her tender age of 26 with a sophistication worthy of Dietrich and an androgynous punk edge worthy of Tim Curry. When she announces she's from Connecticut ("Pilgrim stock!") in one of the film's key and classic scenes, we realize Connecticut is America's Valhalla-gone-Gomorrah and Carlisle is the persona we all hoped Edie Sedgwick would be in Ciao! Manhattan. She takes both her male and female roles over the edge, even going down on herself while fashionistas (before there was such a phrase) jeer jadedly. (more)

12. Voice of Billy Boyd as Glen/Glenda

SEED OF CHUCKY (2004)

Dir. Don Mancini

I'll never forget my ex-almost lover's wife driving me to the train after a weekend at Woodstock and her kid in the back, maybe ten or nine, announcing "I'm going to practice my box stitch," with a kind of randomness that was quite moving. When I was his age neither I nor any living boy I would dare make such a statement with such casual disregard for gender norms, especially in front of a male stranger. I knew then that we might be going to hell in a handbasket as a globe, but at least things were getting better on some levels, and kids today were growing up free and clear of those old straitjackets, at least in tony Woodstock. Practice your box stitch, kid, I thought, and sew our nation whole again.

So more and more there are 'out' kids of all ages, unable or unwilling to commit to old gender confines as they mature. It's all good, of course, as those kids grow free and beautiful while the repressed children wither on the vine.Then there's Glen/Glenda in CHILD'S PLAY. The toymaker forgot to give him/her genitals and his short hair could just be Mia Farrow-esque. Maybe the future will show him/her to be a trailblazer, too. I reviewed the film back in the day but can't remember much about it, except of course that Don Mancini's love of the genre shows in every frame and that Jennifer Tilly (as herself!) has a field day. I've never been a fan of Chucky's whole blue collar balding ginger whiny voiced giggling sadism, but I respect it, and dig that Glen/Glenda has more of a sophisto twang. 

Honorable Mention: Denver Pyle as "Uncle" Bene 

ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN (1975)

Dir. John Hough

Speaking of weird kids, this Disney classic was one of the few of their live action films I liked when mom took my brother and I to see it at the theater when I was a mere eight yars-old. That said, the brother and sister alien's long-awaited guardian, Uncle Bene--our first glimpse of these humanoid aliens as adults--proved one of my first true WTF moments at the cinema. All through the movie, we kids in the audience are imagining an array of badass alien features. The plucky orphan alien kids have been trying to reach him the whole movie long and now--as the kids stand by their good samaritan curmudgeon's trusty camper and look up yonder hill--suddenly here he comes, lumbering cheerfully over the green rolling mountain like some denim-wrapped Hoppity Hop. With a shock of blinding white hair, his male breasts and belly jiggling merrily within his tucked-in pale farmer robin's egg blue workshirt, he's as nonthreatening an adult figure as the 70s could provide. 

There was no intention, perhaps, consciously, on Disney's part, to make him seem androgynous, but time and social progress has made him so. Age and weight contribute to a male's levels of estrogen, and there's nothing wrong with an alien having plenty of both. What makes him so weirdly gender neutral is, were he to talk to the camera and wave us on in for a very special tour of the old farm, like old Mr. Green Jeans on a Captain Kangaroo vignette, we wouldn't blink twice. But as an alien we're suddenly put in that classic Freudian uncanny seat where the familiar and harmless is made strange and conspicuous by context. It works perfectly because it doesn't work at all. We expected a silver lame jumpsuit and black eyes, not this friendly fresh-shaved Saint Nick, ready to lead the kids by the hand off to their alien secret agrarian commune. By his late arrival and cheerful grin he becomes something unreal, maybe not dangerous but certainly highly strange, like Billy Gilbert with his reprieve in His Girl Friday (1941) or Matthew J. Clark with his "Repent" stickers in Twentieth Century (1934)

Even stranger is how we sigh in relief anyway to see his friendly face. After the Dickensian strife and struggling with shady millionaire Ray Milland, all the evil henchmen and callous scientists, seeing such a nonthreatening adult character come rolling along to lead us away into a bright telekinetic tomorrow is cause for merry relief. How this character can keep the kids and their community free of meddlers like Ray Milland one doesn't need to know, not anymore. As adults their powers must surely keep them as safe and off the grid as they'd want. With his big belly laugh joyousness, Pyle is a Buddha with white hair and a country and western smile that says I'll see you next Christmas... 

But you won't see me.

BabaDOOK! Jennifer Kent's Psychotropic Fairy Tale

Films aren't bad just because they're familiar and use overused cliches. Think about it, mate, and you'll see great art sometimes comes in colors so familiar you want to scream in overwrought ecstasy like a glue-high teenage time-traveling John Waters in post-Disney Times Square. Soap operas are often trite, cliche'd and overwrought but that doesn't mean we should dismiss Douglas Sirk; costume dramas are often barrenly obsequious but that doesn't mean we should dismiss Jane Campion; and monster under-the-bed suburban mythopoetic fairy tales are often insufferably whimsical and Danny Elfman-scored but we can't dismiss The Babadook. A quick Sheila can take the Gorey-Addams-Grimm signifiers overused by Tim Burton and go deep into their source, the nightmare parable fore, the zone where men (and boys like Burton) dare not go (it's too close to the, um... you know what). It has to be a resourceful and courageous Shelia to go there, but if she's brave and resourceful enough she can slither her scoop down past the popcorn saltless center for the black brass kernels at the bottom of the lowest ebb nightmare bucket. Mmmm-hmmm, good on ya, Sheila! Tim Burton can't even look you in the eye now.

Such a Sheila is the newest great lady Australian filmmaker Jennifer Kent, and The Babadook (2014), out on DVD and Blu-ray this week, but crafts from that Gorey-Addams-Burton cloth a Shining-Repulsion (1) collapse of the consensual real. It's the story of a mom and her squirrelly son going totally bonkers--she half-crazy from lack of sleep and sexual frustration and he from prolonged anxiety about his missing father--and co-creating a poltergeist-ish manifestation of their collective unconscious energies, and if--with its magician's hat and bony fingers--the title monster can come off a little This Way the Wicked Kruger Comes Depp-ensian Dr. Caligari Cat in the Hat 'high on mercurochrome- whimsical, it still has more than enough genuine menace to make it closer to Kubrick than Disney... most of the time, anyway. 

Like our daily dreads, the pop-up book Amelia (Essie Davis) finds on the doorstep starts out Gorey-normal but soon evolves into a genuine, disturbing murderous threat, with drawings of Amelia herself, possessed, stabbing her child to death, gone as crazy as James Mason at the climax of Nicholas Ray's Bigger than Life. (1956), making the book half-R.L. Stine, half legitimate death threat, with pull-tabs.

It works because at the core of this archetypal mysterious ghost intruder lurks a great hybrid archetype, and unassimilated animus for mom Amelia (Essie Davis), representing her dark id/shadow wish fulfillment (to be free of her difficult brat once and for all), and a grim devouring father figure for the boy, Samuel (Noah Wiseman). We all know this nightmare figure, so common to sleep paralysis, usually the opposite gender to us, they wait until we're almost asleep, or trying to spend a little me-time, if you know what I mean, then start thumping on doors or rattling chains, hammering away at our nerves as we try to repress your inner rage, until it breaks off and comes back in poltergeist form and your sense of reality shifts and the border between dreams and reality collapses. 

And Kent gets it--probably better than any filmmaker yet--how gigantic adults seem in the eyes small apprehensive children. I had forgotten it myself, having not been a child in quite awhile, but Kent brings it all back, to ground zero of childhood nightmares, that sense of relative smallness. Even Kubrick never quite dared deal with that monstrously large parent element. The one time Jack Torrance seemed bigger than normal he was looming over a model of the maze and neither mom nor son could see him. But Kent shows how children see themselves as normal size and adults as (relative) giants. As her mood gets blacker, Amelia gradually seems to grow to ogre-size; our perspective changes and she's shot from low angles, and her anger at Samuel morphs her (sans CGI) into some dark evil thing. 

When I was very young I used to have nightmares about my mom creeping into my room like a vampire to drink my blood. I can still remember how she moved, like she was simultaneously swimming in slow motion and moving too fast to run away from.  When I was scared in the dead of night I'd run in to her room to wake her so she could stand guard while I went to the bathroom.  This one time though, she sat up slowly and straight like a vampire rising from a coffin and moaned really low... and it was like my nightmare was coming true. I knelt in submission, buried my head in my hands and started crying and screaming, "I'm your son! I'm your son!!" 

We joked about it for years, but at the time I knew true fear. 

Is there anything worse a very young boy can imagine than his mom, his one true protector, turning evil on him? It's easy to forget you ever feared her once you get past the breakwaters of adolescence; the passage of mom from benevolent giantess to a sweet if nagging allowance-payer is a one-way street and we're glad to not have to look back. We modulate our perceptions so that we presume we've always seen from the same height, but a film like The Babadook can remind us, as good horror movies do, of all the terror we grew so hard to forget. 

As I wrote about The Shining, cabin fever is a very hard thing to study, as just showing up to study it rapidly dissipates it. One is either killed like Scatman Crothers or sucked up into the madness, as with the semi-sympathetic father whose poor brain oscillates between giggling sadism and paternal sympathy for Marilyn Burns in Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Those kind of characters are so rare in horror that when they show up we take notice. Like Frederic March becoming Mr. Hyde halfway through the terrorized Miriam Hopkins' plea for help, Amelia in The Babadook or Ray's ogres in Bigger than Life and In A Lonely Place exhume that fear our source of comfort will turn on us. Having very little (adult) experience reading children's books I can't be too scared of the Babadook book in theory. But I have relied on The Thing (1951) for most of my life to save me in times of trouble, and if I put it on during one of my regular dark nights of the soul and the film had changed, if Captain Hendry was now a sadist in league with Dr. Carrington, and tortured people or something, that yawning terror of my mom sitting up in bed and moaning like some beanstalk vampire giant in the dead of night would come roaring back. Films are great in that sense, they can be edited but they can't really change, especially on DVD. 

But the Babadook terror rolls in both directions: The vulnerability and trust involved with familial love hinges on acceptance of uncanny extremes, for a mother must love even the most loathsome of creatures--the beast, the frog, the rat, the touched and wayward Richard--giving them, at the very least, a kiss, an embrace, a bottle and a place to sleep it off in, in order slowly grow them into a prince. If the mother can't provide this, the child snaps and begins to darken into something worse, trying to create for others the terror he feels as a result of his mom's ambivalence. And the mom, via the uncuttable psycho-umbilical root that connects them even past death, that root no machete or pill can sever, comes tumbling down the well after him, barking at him not to put her in the root cellar. 

Coraline

(SPOILERS) But while, for example, the horrors of cloistered, sexually dysmorphic animus shadow-projectors, like Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanski's Repulsion (or Mrs. Bates in Psycho), ended their isolation with their murders and sins exposed, pinned to the patriarchy-enforced consensual reality cork board like still-twitching wasp wings (and old Jack Torrance never quite made it out of his maze), the mom in Baba passes through the Repulsion needle and out of the Overlook cabin fever, past even Ring 2's child services and suspicious neighbors, into the safe press clippings of the Taxi Driver "hero" fantasia. Developing farther in fact than any psychotropic horror character before, Amelia gets all demons safely integrated rather than merely repressed or succumbed to; she learns that madness, once harnessed, becomes genius. If you're not willing to let go of all self constructs, from surface persona right down to your twitching core, you will not not re-merge with undifferentiated consciousness. Amelia's strength as a mom lies not in Ford tough Magdalene invulnerable cloaking and burning as we might expect, but raw Aussie gumption and the power that comes when you finally get down so low, as the saying goes, you can touch off from the bottom and push yourself up to the surface like a rocket, far faster than if you were merely swimming. John Ford had the Depression, war, the harshness of the era, and drink to propel him into genius. Spielberg though, had only his childhood enduring schoolyard bully anti-Semitism, but he was saved by the power of fantasy and Ford's westerns. I've got a personal history with drugs, alcoholism, recovery, decadence, years of undiagnosed depression, spiritual enlightenments and disillusionments, W.C. Fields, Camille Paglia, and Howard Hawks. We all got something to draw on, is my point; childhood trauma informs the choice of comfort. My mom as a vampire translated to a lifetime love of Dracula.

Admittedly, the children's book / nursery rhythm gimmick, while creepy, is also overly familiar: from Edward Gorey (left) and Charles Addams-ish drawings -to everything Tim Burton ever made. But they're all usually tempered with some degree of levity. "Good fright, pleasant screams," as the creepy narrator of The Inner Sanctum radio show used to say. When the death threat implied is tempered with 'just kidding' bad pun, one misses the macabre tone of unedited nursery rhymes or Grimm's Fairy Tales, which offer little Gorey/Burton/Addams-esque macabre winkiness and lots of genuine dread, made all the more chilling by their bland, Hallmark-cheery facade. I was amused by Gorey as a child but now I look at his stuff and think he's way too disturbing for my adult sensitivity. Maybe it's that as children we know where death is, we were just there not so long ago, and so death can't suddenly surprise us. For very young children the big fear is never death--which is too abstract and far away--but of pain, and most of all being lost, separated from one's mother in a strange place, with no phone number or direction to the parking lot. For parents it's that death is suddenly far closer than what might be deemed safe. Babadook's children's book gimmick would be just cliche if not for its blunt unremitting threat, moving slowly and gingerly from playfully macabre to outright hostile, threatening, malicious, obscene even as it never strays from the psychosexual Lynchian ostrich nasal lampshade Joe Campbell crucible in order to harden into what might be a 'next stage in a woman's life" sequel to coming-of-age myths like Twilight, Maleficent, Frozen, and Snow White and the Huntsman.

"I'll make you a bet, the more you deny, the bigger I get!"

All in all, it's pretty Freudian, especially when the pop-ups begin. And the score emphasizes and distorts Amelia's disintegrating mentality; in one great scene Amelia looks for her son and you hear his calling her, muffled and echoed in the mix, making it hard to pinpoint (we're never sure if it's just a hallucination). While the kid is being terrorized, she's downstairs and the cuts back and forth exhibit a profound grasp of the way the repressed emotions and sexual frustrations of a widowed parent can spontaneously generate autonomous external threats, as in Dr. Morphius' monster "from the Id" in Forbidden Planet or (single mom) Jessica Tandy's Birds.

All told, mythically-speaking, Kent and Babadook is what Jane Campion and The Piano used to be, a female furie and her bloody offspring masterpiece, up from down under, come to wade through chthonic swamps of menstrual blood and societal taboo, dragging her son, daughter, piano, canoe, and civilization and darkest shadow id behind her, surrendering to, and then conquering, her darkest shadows as she slouches towards us. In Kent we maybe have found a female Polanski-esque Nicholas Ray to shake the "Yellow Wallpaper" madness and horror back to its primal core, the childhood fear that one day you'll wake up and your parents will be gone, leaving only their demons, their madness, addictions and dysmorphia to babysit you through your slow genetic deflowering. You can't run. You can't hide. You can only endure and stand up, unafraid, unbowed, present your warrior stance, emit your battle cry, and let unflinching courage drain your demons down to shaking junkie shadows. 

Unconditional love: no monster can survive it. And vice versa. 

NOTES:

1.) See Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror (SHINING); 

Nicholas Ray in the Grey Flannel Darkness: BIGGER THAN LIFE; 

Le Rayon Bleu de Deneuve: REPULSION

2) See: Age of Asherah: Rosemary's Baby, and:

Make-Up yr Mind Control: 33.3 Ways of Reading Eyes Wide Shut

Thanksgiving with the Matriarchy: THE DARK SECRET OF HARVEST HOME (TVM-1978)

This rare and delightfully strange TV movie, based on the Thomas Tyron novel, makes fine post-autumnal equinox-style viewing. It's all in the name: harvest, home, and it's about family, and agrarian matriarchal cults that bring back the old ways via agrarian paganism... but.... I've said too much already. They may be listening, the cornucopia held up to the door to hear my whispered clacking.

Anyway, 'tis a strange feminist-phobic film of some fair equality about the evils of both city life and the older, simpler ways. David Ackroyd (no relation to Dan) stars and sounds just like a hopped up Cassavettes as the nosy parker who can't stop investigating the mysterious death of some shunned girl seven years past. (He's an artist, writing a book about the place). Normal New England life carries on without but cross the covered bridge into "the Coons" and you're in another world. Co-starring a young Rosanna Arquette as the daughter, quick to drink the Kool-aid so to speak, and Joanna Miles as the wife whose years of expensive therapy can't compare with a few simple home remedies from the town's matriarchal leader, the "Widow Fortune" (Bette Davis, having quite a time of it). Similarly Arquette has asthma in the big city but viola - one massage from Fortune and she's better than any inhaler can make her. TV vets like Linda Marsh as a neightbor, Lina Raymond as a sexy single brunette with scary eyes for Akroyd and a 'touched' daughter with second sight who picks the corn maiden and corn king every seven years. Michael O'Keefe, rocking a great New England accent, plays the first choice for king, but his fancy longing to use tractors instead of horses proves his undoing. 

I haven't seen it since I was a kid, and I never saw the end. Mother made me go to bed beforehand and I didn't dare displease her. I missed the ends of countless movies in those hard years, a symbolic blindness all my own. But I heard the end from mom at breakfast, and in this way I never forgot THE DARK SECRET OF HARVEST HOME.

It's a long slow burn over two nights --we get lots of weird little touches but the horror elements do take their time to arrive. What did the blind neighbor--once an outsider like Akroyd--see too much of?  Who cut out the tongue of the nosy ragman who keeps snooping and poaching in the forbidden woods patrolled by trigger-happy bootleggers? Why do women run everything like some Neil LaBute nightmare come to life? Why is Akroyd's tone-deaf ignoring of the idea that some secrets are better left unknown not result in a sooner shunning? It all builds to a slow relentless head on 'Harvest Home' the big secret ceremony of which only women are invited and no man may witness, except the corn king, of course. 

This wasn't the only late 70s matriarchal TV going on in the late seventies - there was also STAR MAIDENS (A 1976 British-German TV series about a planet where women dominate) and ALL THAT GLITTERS (Norman Fell's evening soap with a similar theme). Is it pure coincidence none of the three are on DVD, or even VHS, or are ever screened? Same goes for movies like FRAULEIN DOKTOR. What are the men in charge of shepherding TV and film to DVD so afraid of?

Is it the perfect family film to see on YouTube while your dad watches football, or your grandparents aw gee over the family fare that chokes TCM on holidays? It would. Long live the sisterhood of the scythe!

Bad Lieutenant, Port of Call: Summerisle (Neil LaBute's WICKER MAN)

Having finally shrunk my balls enough to reach the end of Neil LaBute's WICKER MAN remake, I see what a fool I was to give up so many times before, and what a genius Nic Cage is to risk coming across as such a terrible actor. I was so used to the central figure of manly authority in a horror film being the 'good guy' I kept pressing stop against my will. But it finally dawned on me that here he's the villain, and doesn't even know it. And yet his Nic Cage-iness is the exact same as it would be if he was trying to rescue the Declaration of Independence! Genius.

It helped me, I guess, to have seen ANTICHRIST and BAD LIEUTENANT 2: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS in the interim between attempts. All I needed was to wait for those two movies to finally be made, and Boom! La Bute's WICKER comes into clear perspective. On that note, may I recommend the three as a triple feature?

So, there. See? There's no need to sacrifice me, now, to your bee gods now, gentle ladies, fair ladies of Fårö...

Let me clarify, I don't think LaBute's a misogynist, anymore than Von Trier or Herzog. They all merely believe as I do that if women ever truly shucker free--all the way and completely--from patriarchy's handcuffs, then as Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz once put it: "Say goodbye to your nuts!" That's not misogyny, any more than INGLORIOUS BASTERDS is anti-Semitic. These sorts of hatreds generally come from a place of unconsciousness, once brought to light from the muck through art, yadda yadda, they're often dispelled (or at least temporarily exorcised). And LaBute packs this MAN with plenty of very powerful, frightening, intelligent women, all going up against one lone, coarse, ineffectual male cop --and I bet that's pretty far from a misogynist's idea of a good time. Even for us sensitive males, a truly liberated, sexually aggressive female is one of the most terrifying creatures on this or any earth, and here on Summerisle one can't even trust in God all of a sudden, because God is suddenly not even a "He" and everything gets dark and scary and one's balls shrink and release hormones of queasy dread that hit like an extra dose of blood-chilling gravity.

And the same goes for Nic Cage --that national treasure. Whenever we think our man Cage is totally sucking, it's probably that he's just so far ahead of the curve we're afraid to follow lest we get hit by a truck careening around the bend. Not unlike the character he plays in the BAD LIEUTENANT 2, Cage's cop in WICKER doesn't care if we root for him or not, he's got his own road to ho, an arc that transcends words like "reckless," "brave," "idiotic" or "inspired."

Perhaps this WICKER has acquired such a dismal rep because it is neither a CHILDREN OF THE CORN GONE WILD as its targeted demographic likely hoped (based on the generic 'scary pastoral kid' poster, nor a "noir antihero loses his marbles" art movie, but rather something much more difficult to handle: a damning critique of patriarchy wrapped up in teen remake horror trimmings, with just enough polish that we believe in its structure as a "Where the *)@^&# is my daughter, you monster?!" movie, the kind with frantic cop fathers throwing away their rule books and/or drinking alone while staring at half-burnt family photos or yelling into the faces of apathetic mayors. WICKER even pretends to be such a film until it suddenly springs shut with a mouse trap-snap square on the sac of our manly American values. "How'd it get burned how'd it get burned how'd it GET BURNED???!" Cage screams in progressive loops to the one girl who doesn't hate him, and we realize it's already too late, for us, for him, for everything except another season's apple or honey haul. Pointing a gun at an unarmed woman in order to steal her bike, Cage is, as one sister puts it, "quixotic." The missing child has become the new windmill.

Just as the fun of the original was in feeling the last two thousand years of Christian stigmata stains burnt from our eyes via a single dose of Pagan Lasik, so too the fun here is seeing how--without the people of Summerisle kowtowing to his manly whims--Cage's patriarchal righteousness is revealed as immature bullying and violent hysteria.  Cage here is like the sister's boorish boyfriend in REPULSION or the sleazy neighbor in CARNIVAL OF SOULS, only we're conditioned by his star wattage to think he's the hero, because he thinks he's the hero, and the film posits him in just that framework (the 'child is missing' scenario being the 'cheap shot' way to get a viewer involved, outraged, concerned, glued to the screen - as he in turn is glued). Like the hero of an action film, too, Cage is outnumbered, and we're conditioned to always consider the outnumbered lone male worrying about a missing child to be the good guy.

Alas, LaBute's subtle tweaking of this expectation all but dooms his message for anyone but those of us who love to see this type of safety-first Clyde crushed to death under Tura Satana's headlights.

I guess more than any other film, the original included, LeBute's remake is more like Sam Peckinpah's STRAW DOGS (1974), in the sense, and it offers a similar story arc and intentional confusion over whether the lead actor is a hero or villain: Dustin Hoffman in that film is a representative of the "civilized world" entering a strange, cut-off remote society and expecting viewers to laugh along with him as he jibes the locals for the first 1/3 of the film. Critics in general were unkind to the movie, many failing to pick up on the idea that Hoffman's outsider was the real villain and even calling the film sexist thanks to a morally ambivalent rape scene. You can imagine LaBute suffering the same misunderstood confusion over WICKER MAN. In a critique of the patriarchy, one must apparently never be ambiguous or stir up unresolved social anxiety if you want to win over a crowd.

Finally, now that there's BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS and ANTICHRIST to situate it, however, even WICKER MAN makes gonzo sense. In the first, director Herzog is terrified/ambivalent/enthralled by the forces of chthonic nature, forces reflected in BAD's flood-faded colors and Post-Katrina New Orleans water lines; in WM, LaBute is terrified/ambivalent/enthralled by a strong cabal of women, reflected in the patronizing warmth of Ellen Burstyn and the sudden mood swings of Lee Sobieski; for ANTICHRIST, Von Trier just cuts, literally, figuratively and otherwise, right to the chase, right to the chthonic meat of things, where nature and the feminine entwine into one massive castrating green wooded Medusa, and then Von Trier does some pruning. Taken together the three films perhaps indicate that patriarchy has to repress and belittle the feminine, for the very simple reason that otherwise women will realize it's much better to kill men off once they've served their reproductive purpose, or send them off to work in the fields as castrated slave labor. Hasn't anyone seen CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953)? What's the matter with you people? You think this is a joke? A child is missing!

The 1973 original was (perhaps) more bearable for American audiences because of the British accents which made the colloquial strangeness even stranger (not close to home enough to stick in the proverbial craw, as LaBute's version does) and it should be noted that the original was similarly box office-stricken in its own home country of Great Britain (due largely to bad marketing and brutal editing).

In the Americanized rendition, Nic Cage goes deep Yankee tourist: unconscious of the world around him, condescending, arrogant, even boorish, expecting that wherever he goes people will "get" his outmoded hipster posturing and that all women will bow and scrape before him when he flashes his badge and waves his gun around, jurisdiction be damned.  When they don't, his only option is a roundhouse kick to Lee Sobieski's heaving bosom. But that still doesn't work.

In the end the movie resonates for the same reason it annoys: we hate that which reminds us of our own unconscious Ugly American-in-a-china-shop deformities. In BAD LIEUTENANT, Cage made us feel the chronic pain of his character and revel in chemical relief and the joy of dancing ever on the edge. In WICKER MAN, it's not his pain that's alleviated, but the pain of any woman, minority or child who ever endured an unwarranted and inappropriate "pat-down" or otherwise had to suffer the preachy condescension of an arrogant male official. It's always amusing to see these patriarchal bullies squirm when the shoe is on the other foot, until of course we realize that we the audience are the ones squirming... in embarrassment. Ask not for whom the man burns, he burns for bees... until there's no other foot left.

=====

Read also Kim Morgan's"The Bitch is Back" on her Sunset Gun, which originally, back in 07, gave me the courage to keep trying to make it through. And remember, just because you wear a bear suit doesn't mean you can punch out pagan women! You need a pope hat do the that. Or to paraphrase Lauren Bacall: Be careful of those double standards, Steve. You're liable to trip over your cross and break your neck!

Bad Acid's Greatest: 70s Paranoid Feminism Edition

"White guys take acid. White guys take acid and go see the Exorcist." -- Richard Pryor (Saturday Night Live, season 1, Dec. 1975)

I was just eight years old when Pryor said that on my new favorite show, Saturday Night Live. Even then I "got it" - white guys were sick thrill seekers for whom extreme horror (and THE EXORCIST was considered the ne plus ultra extremis for the time) wasn't enough, we had to boost it up with this dangerous mind-melting drug, LSD. We liked to plunge into the heart of darkness abyss with eyes wide open, screaming. Pryor had yet to set himself on fire from freebasing and he was way ahead of the curve as far as openly discussing, live on TV, an array of drug effects without  condemnation. He made me want to be that brave. He planted the seed for this site. I was naturally far too scared and too young to even think about seeing THE EXORCIST but I never forgot Pryor's statement. As a white man I knew seeing EXORCIST on acid was my destiny. Twenty years later, home alone with a VHS, that destiny was fulfilled.

Now, if you think The EXORCIST would be less scary on acid then you don't understand acid. You might be afraid of your shoe, but no film can tap an unconscious dread that's already tapped. In point of fact, EXORCIST becomes funny on acid, if the film is no longer riding a zeitgeist wave of shock, which on acid you can tap into like an electric socket. The film was still in theaters when Pryor said those words, and it was considered the ultimate test of courage to go see it even dead-straight. It was considered cursed in a way, like the Samara's RING video (see my 2007 opus, Mecha Medusa and the Otherless Child.)

A good acid trip can change your life forever. You transcend notions of time and history. You notice how how we're all one giant orgasmic organism of consciousness that transcends illusions of time, space, and permanence. You realize that you're in a cosmic prison and only love can set you free, and it does... until around Tuesday, when you wake up depressed, the big payback for your endorphin expenditure. But for just awhile there's this exaggerated awareness that transcends the mundane minutiae of your setting. Everything is alive with potential danger and it's impossible to judge a true threat from a misidentified everyday happening. Someone pulls out a pen, and you jump as if it was a sword. Someone pulls out a sword, you laugh as if its a rubber chicken. Someone pulls out a rubber chicken, you suddenly get very serious... what are they hiding?

Now if it's a bad acid trip, on the other hand, all you see is dying and how humans are like decaying blood bags floating through a knife factory. Everyone's just waiting to be punctured, oblivious to their decay. A horror film seems relatively sobering by contrast; you feel every stab on the screen more vividly than you would if you were really stabbed (if you were tripping). It's cathartic because it distracts you from your own mortality, which thanks to acid is now staring you in the face like a member of the audience in a black robe who wont move his scythe so you can sit down. In that state you probably wouldn't even notice if you yourself were stabbed by some dope addict behind you in the Times Square grindhouse. You'd probably apologize for getting in the way of their rubber chicken, never harboring them any grudge.


The best 1970s horror films capture this metaphysical disconnect, the thousand yard stare of those gone beyond (or to Vietnam) and back again and the way not knowing if things are real or not can make you delusional. In LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (1972, above) a schizophrenic young woman and her condescending bald husband (and a third wheel Meathead-type) move into a big old Victorian house out on an island off of New England, to "get away from NYC" which overstimulates the emotionally fragile and empathic Jessica (Zohra Lampert); she hears strange whispers in her head, and has an eerie interest in making brass rubbings at old graveyard. She comes to the New England island where their new home is, to make things extra "is she really dead this whole time?" weird, she's riding in the back of a hearse, the two dudes up front! When she sees a barefoot child staring at her during one of her many graveyard walks, she's scared only until other people see the child too. When the boys in her orbit see the weird shit she sees first, she smiles and acts like it's a personal victory; her fear of being thought of as nuts overrides her fear of the supernatural. When she doesn't know the right way to react, and we feel her pain, especially if we've ever had the LSD world tour of schizophrenia that is a bad acid trip.

Made at a time when psychedelic drugs had changed the face of American culture, LET'S SCARE .... DEATH (or LSD!) is nothing short of elegant in the way it blurs the line between subjective and the “real" to demonstrate how paranoia can bend the nature of reality itself, exposing even the most realistic objectivity as a paranoid conspiracy. Polanski set the bar high for this in ROSEMARY, by having Mia Farrow's paranoia be utilized to cast doubt on the reality of her situation (maybe she's just hallucinating!) at the same time as we know the supernatural is behind it all (she's not!). Polanski and the makers of JESSICA prove you can unsplit the difference between the real and the delusional, and that in fact, the difference is--as quantum physics proves--literally all in your head either way. Terrifying yet intelligent, supernatural yet psychological, poetic yet realistic... and just plain straight-up spooky, LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH has it all. Even the enigmatic Dr. Mystery agrees with me from his Zombie Bloodbath blog: At once a fine example of the 1970s American film; a post-Manson, post-Altamont cultural fear of post-1960s life; a compassionate and empathetic portrayal of mental illness; a fine character study; and a freaky-ass scary movie, Let's Scare Jessica to Death should be more widely seen.

One thing Altamont taught us was that following your lovelight too trustingly can really lead you down some dark dangerous corners. That's what the LSD horror movie is all about, in fact I think it can be broken down into a few key points:

1. A lead character who can't distinguish reality from fantasy, leading to ambiguity (is she really trying to kill me? Or is she coming onto me? Or am I just nuts?)
2. A feeling of helpless dependence on the establishment gradually giving way as said patriarchy collapses.
3. The "pod people" feeling, that those around you don't understand or are in on some massive conspiracy. They're all laughing at you, or planning to replace you.
4. Fear of children going wild or becoming possessed or endangered or a threat and not knowing how to save them, stop them, or get away from them.
5. Feminist subtext!



THE EXORCIST plays to nearly all these phenomena, as we slowly are made to realize the patriarchy has no clue how to tame the wild unconscious of a fatherless girl as she reaches the age of menstruation and poltergeist projection. Ditto CARRIE (1976), where again a fatherless child (Sissy Spacek) has to deal with menstruation issues and the latent unearthly powers they bring. In EXORCIST, the single mom (Ellen Burstyn) is the hero; in CARRIE, the single mom (Piper Laurie) is the villain, and for my mind, CARRIE is the more painful of the two to watch, just because poor Carrie has nowhere to turn; not even home life can help, as her insane mom is waiting to dispense draconian punishments in the name of keeping Carrie's soul "pure." At least Ellen Burstyn in THE EXORCIST is, like, cool. But at the same time Carrie has her night of vengeance and dies to fight another day. All Linda Blair can hope for is a level seven memory wipe.



Aside from devouring moms, devil children, and traumatic menstruation, feminist heroines had to contend with their disbelieving, condescending husbands. THE STEPFORD WIVES (above, 1975, from the novel by ROSEMARY scribe Ira Levin) finds Katherine Ross trying to avoid being replaced by a passive android after her robotics engineer husband moves them into a closed, flower-strewn upscale community. In THE SENTINEL (1977), fashion model Christina Raines is roped into becoming a zombie nun on behalf of those who would keep the demons in their place. Similarly, fashion photographer Faye Dunaway finds herself seeing through the eyes of her would-be killer in EYES OF LAURA MARS (1978), as a kind of punishment for her masculine fascination with violence. And in THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA (1976), Millie Perkins can't tell if she really killed the men whose deaths she sees on the news, or someone else. All she knows is that their being on TV means they are as gods. Her memories of her seafaring father are clouded in nautical mythology that clears only to realize macabre horrors (like--in the most genuinely surreal and chilling scene--dad waiting naked for her to return home from school by hiding naked in the closet where she hangs her coat) that show how father-daughter incest is like driving a mirror shard straight down the center of a girls' psychosexual development, where reality is even more horrific and surreal than the fantasy generated to cloak it. Her cutting off men's testicles in bed is both a rebellion against sexual conscription and a mythological reference to the birth of Venus (after Poseidon's testicles were cut off and cast into the sea).

In short, women in these 70s horror films find freedom from patriarchal encirclement only to wind up in some new level of hell (i.e. LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR, 1977), as if what awaits women who reach beyond the white picket fence is a freedom to succumb only to pagan sacrifice, either as victim or perpetrator, and the whole point of such sacrifices--in a way--is to erase the distinction.

A really cool and relevant TV movie, I think (my parents made me go bed before I could see the ending), that is currently unavailable on DVD, is THE DARK SECRET OF HARVEST HOME (1978) starring Bette Davis and a very young Michael O'Keefe and Rosanna Arquette. This one is awesome because it's not a patriarchy, but a matriarchy! The women rule things and make, um, sacrifices? to ensure the harvest? You dig? Camille Paglia-style? We wouldn't see another good matriarchy movie for another couple decades (i.e. JOHN CARPENTER'S GHOSTS OF MARS ) so for god's sake, send the harvest home... to DVD! Tell me you read this and I'm not just talking to a voice in my head from taking too much acid while watching... you know... the world turn like a worm through an empty skull socket universe!