Episode 101 -- Powers of Horror (Film), Part 1

Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb.

And I'm Moira Down again.

Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the ride.

So, Adrian, today for spooky season, we are talking about some classic horror movies.

That's right.

Yeah, we're calling this powers of horror movies.

I had powers of like feminist horror also.

Like

where are we putting the parenthetical is I think a nice little game we can play because what we're looking at, I think in these films, and we're taking some like classic films, not really new ones.

We're looking at the sort of peak of the horror genre from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s.

And we're looking at what is scary about gender or what is gendered about fear in these films.

That's right.

As we do in our typical way.

Yeah.

So just to explain how this list came together, Maura picked two movies she was passionate about or interested in.

Then she changed the list that she was passionate about or interested in.

And I also then wanted to change my list.

And so I did the normal thing and made Strangers on the Internet, aka our Patreon patrons, decide what I was going to watch.

And I love your choices.

But in the end,

This, you know, bizarre process that we should probably avoid ever doing again actually yielded a fairly cohesive list.

It's four movies from the 70s.

It's all 70s movies.

Really?

Yeah.

They're all movies that have been remade to greater or lesser success, which we should talk about.

Because as you say, like the ability of horror film to pose gender question obviously should evolve with time.

So it's really interesting to watch someone remake a movie like this.

Now, we watched mostly the originals, but we can talk and allude to the remake.

There are important changes that were made when filmmakers tried to port those over into the 21st century.

So this is actually going to be a two-parter because we have way too much to say about these interesting films and about the many things they make us think of in that decade.

For now, I want to thank all our Patreon listeners who told me what to watch and I loved it.

If you too want to tell me what to watch, you can subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com.

And we should also mention for our San Francisco listeners that once the spooky season is over, it is in bed with the right live season.

We're going to do a live show at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco.

Tickets are going fast.

We get daily updates for some reason from the venue and they're good.

People are buying this stuff.

Yeah.

So get your tickets now.

Yeah, if you're on the fence about coming, like.

come.

We're going to show you a good time.

But also, like, those tickets are selling.

We might sell this place out.

So like, if you're, if you're thinking about it, just come.

Just come on and hang out with us.

Yeah.

Get a sitter.

Call in sick from work.

Quit your job, leave your wife, come hang out with us.

Come hang out with us.

We're your real family.

Well, before we dig in, I wanted to pull back and look at horror as a genre and at some of the sort of like mainline feminist critiques of this genre to sort of illustrate the way that we're approaching these movies.

Because the thing about horror movies is that as a genre, they are traditionally and still really overwhelmingly both made by and consumed by men, right?

Particularly young men are the like biggest by some margin demographic that goes to see horror movies.

And this is a genre that has like very, very strict conventions.

And in those conventions, one of the recurring themes of the horror movie is that it features the grisly deaths of very young women, right?

Often following like revelations of or prolonged scenes of like those women's sexual encounters.

So in the movies that are the pinnacle of this genre, and that is those movies made from the 70s through the mid-80s, among these like very like rigorously observed formulaic,

like repeated conventions, there's often in, I find like the first acts, a lot of like moralizing judgment of the characters who are like the targets of the the killer, right?

It invites the viewer to take on the perspective of the killer.

So you'll see these, you know, often young people being mean,

being vulgar, being cynical.

Being slutty.

Slutty, but also like cruel.

They're often cruel a lot of the time.

They're often like talking shit about each other, about like people who they're pretending to be friends with.

That's a thing that they do a lot.

They're often like stealing or lying.

You know, they're engaged in these like sort of morally culpable acts that makes you, as a viewer, sort of like not like them so much.

And that is something that I think contributes to the sort of like classic Laura Mulvey male gaze reading of the horror film, which is this notion that the camera has a masculine perspective.

And that when you're watching a horror movie and, you know, the viewer is watching these young women being tortured and killed, that they're taking a kind of like sadistic or voyeuristic pleasure in women's inadequacy, in their marginalization, and in their suffering, right?

So that's kind of like the standard feminist reading of horror films.

And like, look, I think it's one that's like pretty robustly justified, right?

It's like not totally in fashion anymore.

It's a little old-fashioned.

But, you know, you watch these movies, especially from the 1970s.

And I think this is true in basically all the movies.

we watched for this episode.

They have these like lingering shots of women's bodies, including like women's bodies that are being tortured and murdered.

They have like really explicit comparisons of the weapons that the killer uses to like murder and dismember these women to like penetrating phalluses, right?

The knife, the gun, the chainsaw, these all become like penises in like really heavy-handed ways.

Yeah, I mean, like there is in one of the Friday the 13th a scene where a cheerleader does splits on a trampoline and Jason is underneath it with a machete.

So like, yeah, it's not particularly subtle.

Yeah, you're being, you know, penetrated with a knife, with a gun, often in the actual vagina, right?

Like it's pretty straightforward.

And something that is also characteristic of this genre is like stylistic references to pornography.

It is shot in often the same kind of like color saturation, the same sort of like lingering gaze on the body that is being like opened, right?

That's something that I think critics of horror now, or like a lot of fans of the genre sort of like roll their eyes at that interpretation.

They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I don't think it's an interpretation of the genre that we can just like dispense with in our analysis because it's not trendy or like because it's too easy a reading that seems like vulgarly obvious, because it really is like a major part of these films.

And I think like a pretty like intense part of their draw, right?

There's a reason that men go to watch women being dismembered and it's not like a reason that we have to read in flattering terms for those men.

Right.

And then that's also like where I think we can bring in Carol Clover.

And this is a book you actually recommended to me, Adrienne, a long time ago.

And I finally got to like look at it and read, to be honest, not all of it, but like big chunks of it for this episode.

And that's her 1992 book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws.

Do you want to give like a like brief synophos for our listeners?

Yeah.

So the book is basically an inquiry into what she calls the male viewer stake in horror spectatorship.

And I should say then she says horror, much like Maura just did, I think she's mostly thinking about the slasher film or the extended slasher film genre, which really is sort of like, as Maura was saying, the defining horror vernacular of the late 70s, early 80s, although a lot of the movies we're going to be talking about are not in fact slasher films, right?

So she does a kind of a tweak on Mulvy.

She doesn't say Mulvy's wrong.

She sort of wants to think about visual pleasure, which is what's Mulvy's great insight, but like what the affordances are of perspective of whose point of view we're seeing the events through, and the fact that like there's still a story being told, right?

So she thinks that the female victim in horror movies is not just this object

of sadistic fantasies, domination, violence, et cetera.

but also very crucially a site of identification through which male viewers can work out their own repressed fears sort of of bodily vulnerability, inadequacy, and exclusion.

That is to say, just because there's a woman on screen doesn't mean that a male viewer is supposed to only see her as an object.

There is an offer here of identification.

This is why she thinks horror movies tend to provoke its audiences into a shift of loyalties, right?

Halfway through.

First, you judge and resent these people who are going to get picked off by the machete or by the chainsaw.

And then you switch over to kind of cheering identification with the phrase that she sort of, I think, introduced into the critical vocabulary, the final girl, right?

The one who's going to survive at the end of the film.

Right.

The victims.

transform into these objects of resentment and contempt from the first acts.

Into the final act, you come to identify this victim who also becomes a kind of a hero, right?

That's sort of like the standard horror genre's like shift in audience loyalties between, I would say, like X2 and 3.

And, you know, I would push back on you a little.

I do think Clover is kind of saying that Mulvey is wrong.

But like, we have these two readings

that I think we can integrate or we'll try to integrate into like our own analyses of these films, right?

You have the Laura Mulvey reading that identifies the horror film as like a site of misogynist sadism for the viewers, you know, where like women are sort of marginalized and made into these like quasi-ritualized objects of contempt.

And then you have the Clover reading that identifies the horror film as a site of this kind of like secret unconscious identification with women for its male viewers, right?

So like a site of sort of like sadistic domineering power.

in Mulvey and a sort of like a site of reckoning with the male viewers' own like bodily vulnerability in the Clover.

And I think you can like fairly call one of these readings like reparative in the Eve Sedgwick sense, right?

Like Clover is trying to sort of

avenge horror audiences or like give a more sympathetic account of their motives that brings them into like a kind of reconciliation with these women characters, which initially seem to be the objects of like their cruelty, right?

But I think a more honest or thorough or like, I don't know, interesting account of the horror genre might sort of combine these two ideas, right?

So it's the misogyny and domination that's present in the male horror viewers' pleasure towards the victimized women on screen.

It's both sincere.

I do think there's like what we can kind of simplistically or like definitively at least call a misogynistic, sadistic pleasure in these viewers.

But that misogyny serves as a necessary disavowal and distance that then allows those viewers to like engage morally, maybe like more unconsciously with the ways that they see themselves in these women.

Right.

So it's like kind of ironic, I guess, like through misogyny that men sort of can encounter and at the same time sort of reject their own sense of vulnerability.

This isn't like, I'm not like breaking new ground here.

This is like, this is like the pretty standard like psychoanalytic interpretation of misogyny, right?

I mean, the other thing I would point out is that like, we didn't mention Mulvey wrote visual pleasure and narrative cinema in 1975, or at least it came out in 1975, meaning that the horror wave was sort of just getting started.

And Clover is writing in 1992, right?

So there's almost 20 years between these two pieces.

I also often think about the fact that like

Mulvey, I think, is starting to articulate the extent to which cinema, especially genre cinema, could be turned turned into a handmaiden of anti-feminist backlash and i think clover from a little bit more of a temporal distance is saying well there's something else going on here which is if you think about the final girl who emerges from something like the texas chainsaw massacre right these heroines that are scarred covered in blood and have this like insane stare right they're just like mute and like harrowed and furious often there's a rage in the final girl yeah I often think that like the figure that most resonates with in the mid-1970s is not a woman, but is going to be a soldier returning from Vietnam.

And I think she kind of thinks that like the way that the trauma myth around soldiers and around male victims sort of starts fucking with gender categories, that is something that I think...

for Malvi was not quite as central, but like I think Clover is sort of seeing that.

She sees almost the forebears of Reaganism there, I think.

There's a kind of like sense of rage and desire for revenge often in the final girl, right?

Yeah, but at the very end, like the very final shot, she's also just exhausted, right?

It's another moment of identification because we're exhausted.

We're like, no more of this, please.

And obviously, very frequently, the killer will come up for one more time and then get shot or whatever, right?

Like, it's like, please, no more.

That is her expression.

And I think the question of the post-traumatic hero sort of in the 70s, I think, is pretty important here.

And it is one where I think Clover would say that one really cuts across gender lines, meaning we can't assume that women on screen are women in the audience and the camera is male, right?

Like there's some kind of slippage happening because of the power of trauma in some way.

I will also make here the comparison psychologists, feminist psychologists in the 1970s made, which is the comparison between the traumatized Vietnam veteran and the traumatized rape victim, both of whom are having their suffering disavowed or like refused of like recognition or mirroring in the society around them.

That's a kind of politically tricky subject because the rape victim has been the object of violence and the Vietnam veteran has been the person committing a lot of violence.

Yeah.

But that's something that I think.

conventional like psychological understandings of trauma don't really grapple with because as the feminist psychologist noted to their both interest and I think disturbance like a lot of the the psychological

symptoms are very similar among those groups and maybe just as a very brief note in offering people movies to pick from as my homework I did avoid there's an entire sub-genre of horror film in the 1970s which are rape revenge films yeah and I was like I'm not fucking watching that so if you're thinking more as sort of being like oh it metaphorically represents rape it's like no it often graphically represents rape well I mean there's rape symbolically in a lot of these slasher films.

And then there's

Bam, like 10 years ago, did a whole series on

like female revenge movies, many of whom were the rape revenge genre, like Miss 45.

Some of them resist, I think, like sort of the pop feminist reclamation.

Like, uh, they are often like really like misogynist exploitation films

in which the rape revenge is sort of cast as as simultaneously horrifying, you know, the thing that like women's repressed rage that requires their domination and exclusion from power, and then also sort of like ridiculous or more voyeuristically interesting, morally interesting.

Aaron Powell, yeah.

While Moira will remain resolutely on the analyst's couch, I will say that a materialist or historical reading of this is also that we're starting to get the grindhouse kind of pushing into the multiplex.

Like sexual assault had always been a plot point in sort of like Roger Corman cheapies and that kind of stuff.

But in the 70s, this all sort of gets much more mobile.

And then with home video, you start getting that stuff at home.

So it's also, this is also about horror audiences kind of shifting, right?

There was a kind of horror film that was just pure sexploitation, but you had to go to a weird movie theater on 34th Street to see it at all.

Well, in the 70s, that sort of breaks up, right?

With famously Deep Throat being distributed very, very widely.

Like these boundaries kind of break up, meaning you're also kind of watching everyone kind of, like I'll talk about this when we talk about the British film market.

You're watching people who make these movies kind of cast about for like, what do these freaks actually want?

So I think it's interesting how like gender sort of enters also into that.

Like it's also a way these movies make themselves solicitous of new audiences, right?

And sometimes they seem quite canny and sometimes like you're just working on your own shit.

Like there's no way someone, you know, in in a Topeka multiplex wants to see this shit, right?

Yeah, something Clover says that I think is really interesting is that the horror film is

similar to like the folktale in that its authors and producers often seem to be working more on instinct than on conscious understanding of how the genre works.

So, on the one hand, it's a genre with very strict conventions, and on the other, it's one that doesn't always seem aware of itself.

Like, famously, Alfred Hitchcock didn't know why psycho was such a big hit.

And he went to some Stanford scholars, I guess.

Stanford mentioned some Stanford scholars to be like, why

do people love this so much?

Because he didn't understand exactly what he had made himself.

And there's something about the sort of ad hoc nature

of the horror film that can make it very like compellingly revealing that way about like the things that are operating sort of beneath the surface.

And that also, I think, makes it a really great and like furtive place for audiences to like work out some sort of, you know, the repressed stuff they've got going on.

So, you know, do you want to dig in?

What are our four movies before we like drag our listeners along any further?

So we are looking at, in order of release, The Wickerman from 1973.

This is the one that our Patreon patrons asked me to look at.

We're looking at Carrie from 1976.

We are looking at Susperia from 1977.

And we're looking at Alien from 1979.

Am I right that Susperia is the only one of these that is not American, or is the Wickerman British?

Wicker Man is British, very British.

The Wickerman's British.

Okay, so we've got, I've never seen The Wicker Man.

I have seen Mitsomar, which I understand is sort of like a riff on Wicker Man.

But I had actually never seen either of the movies that I watched for this one.

I'm going to be honest with you, Adrian, I am kind of a wuss.

I feel like I spend so much of my life terrified anyway, you know, just in a state of like trembling anxiety at all times that I don't really need to feel that also in my leisure hours.

So I am not actually very well versed in horror.

Yeah, I should say I am likewise quite squeamish, but I have seen a lot.

Yeah.

I don't know why.

I guess I'm just a masochist.

Well, you're our genre expert, right?

Like you really have sort of a grip on this stuff.

I love genre cinema for exactly the reason that you outlined, which is that when filmmakers operate more on instinct and in kind of an instinctive relationship with a particular audience, more sort of can make it onto the screen than if it's all pushed through the straining sieve of like awards baiting and multiplex appeal.

Maybe I should start us off then because I have the first one and you haven't seen this one, The Wicker Man.

Yeah, go for it.

So this is like a movie about the horror of folktales in the sense that there is something like sort of creepy in like sort of the cultural id, right?

Yeah, the Wicker Man, for those of our listeners who like Moira are a little squeamish, it's intense, but if you are not looking to be completely grossed out, there are literally, I think, maybe 60 seconds at the end of the movie that you might want to look away from.

Everything else is absolutely fine.

For a horror film, and I should say, I watched the director's cut of this.

A bunch of cuts exist for this.

I found on Canopy just the director's cut.

It has way more singing than I remembered for a horror film.

It's funnier than you'd expect any horror film to be.

Like, my husband walked in at some point.

He's like, Wait, that's supposed to be a horror film?

And I'm like, Yeah, no, it is.

It is kind of creepy if you think about it.

But, like, I acknowledge that what's happening right now where people sing these like ribald songs, it is is just kind of funny.

So this would be one that would definitely allow you to sort of ease into the genre.

It's directed by Robin Harvey.

It was written by Anthony Schaefer, who also wrote Alfred Hitchcock's serial killer film Frenzy.

The plot is basically, we follow a officer of the Highlands Police in Scotland who gets an anonymous letter saying there's this girl.

that has disappeared, a young girl of 12, on an island.

So she can't have left the island by herself.

And her mother seems to be totally unconcerned, right?

And so he decides to investigate.

And he flies to a place called Summer Isle, which appears to be somewhere in the Hebrides from sort of context clues.

The aerial shots make it look like the Isle of Sky to me, but I think it's supposed to be further out.

And basically, the islanders are immediately and comically hostile, right?

He lands his seaplane and is like, Can you roll out with the dinghy and get me?

And they're like, nah.

And he's like, what the fuck?

so they're rural people

who are suspicious of outsiders well it's not even that they're suspicious they're polite but like never forthcoming which makes the movie

if people are not ready for it it's extremely repetitive because this guy named Howie will constantly sort of ask the same questions and keep probing and keep like hitting the same thing.

And they all basically lie to him constantly in the dumbest ways possible, right?

So like he's like, oh, there's a picture missing.

Who is that of?

And they're like, oh, we don't know.

And like, he finds the picture ends of the girl, right?

Like, oh, the mother claims that she doesn't have a daughter.

And then like, you know, obviously it turns out she's registered at the school or whatever.

Like every lie just like pulls him deeper and deeper into this plot.

And at the same time, he like starts exploring this island, which is this like, yeah, this very, well, insular commune

where everyone is completely weird, won't talk to him.

Everyone is vaguely horny.

Lots Lots of making out.

The pubkeeper's daughter throws herself at Howie.

People are sort of fornicating ritualistically in the fields.

And whatever they're hiding, they're all in on it.

And I should say that the main character, whom we follow, is portrayed as this very kind of Victorian moralist.

He's just outraged by all of this, right?

And he initially sort of tries to sort of keep his mouth shut about what he's seeing, but he completely freaks out sort of one day in.

His first night there, I think a patron at the pub entertains a young man while everyone is singing about that they're doing it upstairs and he's trying to sleep.

Meanwhile, Christopher Lee, who plays Lord Summer Isle, the Lord of this Island, is sort of standing outside, like musing about the circle of life while watching two slugs do it.

So it's like, what is happening?

It's all very goopy, very like, yeah, hippie commune,

though with somewhat older people sometimes.

What year is this?

1975?

73, 73.

73, okay.

So very early post-hippie era.

Exactly.

When like sort of the backlash to the free love,

you know, sexual revolution is just sort of forming and the...

disgust reaction is like bubbling up and gaining a little more like popular purchase.

Yeah, he gives you real backlash vibes.

Like I think one of the earliest scenes, he says, this is still a law-abiding Christian country as out of fashion as this may seem, right?

And so he goes to the church.

He finds out the church is a ruin.

The altar is covered in rotting apples and some kind of weird offering to some kind of earth goddess.

And as a viewer, you get a sense quite early on that there's, you may notice something that Howie doesn't, which is that people are parceling out information just parsimoniously enough.

to keep this guy chasing his own tail, right?

He keeps asking the same questions over and over again.

He seems to be working the same theory over and over again.

He thinks that these people basically sacrificed this girl or planning to sacrifice her as a virgin sacrifice to their earth goddess, right?

As the hippies do.

Like they love earth goddess like pagan revival,

working out their own impulses through the pretext of a communing with nature kind of a thing.

This sounds like, I don't know, I'm like maybe a little less squeamish about sex in public than this guy is, but this does sound like something hippies would do do in his, in his defense.

If you're like, God, the fucking hippies, like they're up to something creepy.

The film features literal hippie punching, yes.

He's like, me annoyed about Burning Man.

You know, he's like, God damn it.

Like, these people are narcissists.

But yeah, so he meets Lord Somerisle, played by the wonderful Christopher Lee, who explains to him that basically what happened on this island is that one of his ancestors sort of returned everyone back to the old ways, the old religious ways.

Like a pre-Christian paganism.

Yeah.

And that since then, basically, the island has had this incredible bounty.

And one thing that Sergeant Howie already knows is that that bounty has failed last year.

And so he's like, uh-huh, they're going to sacrifice that poor girl.

And they're going to try and get their crops back this way.

Right.

And throughout this, the women keep trying to throw themselves at him.

There's tons of nudity in this.

And he's like, no, no, no, I'm saving myself for marriage.

And they're like, well, are you married?

And he's like, no, I'm not.

And then the twist, and this is where people need to pause or skip if they don't want to have the spoil to them.

It turns out the girl is perfectly alive.

She is a lure.

The virgin they're looking to sacrifice is Sergeant Howie.

Yeah, it's always an outsider, right?

That's also what they do in Mid Somar.

They get the lore's anthropology.

They get these like anthropology grad students to come out to like their festival.

And then they're going to sacrifice all these outsiders.

Yeah.

So he ends up and then he gets put into this wicker man that is then set on fire and he and he dies in it.

And that's how the movie ends.

It's, I think it's a really interesting movie.

I mean, it really sort of, along with, I think, two or three other films sort of started the folk horror genre, like there really wasn't such a thing beforehand.

And I think in the British context, you can sort of tell why this existed, right?

The folk horror genre sort of emerges in the 70s as a reaction to gothic horror, right?

So gothic horror is all about like dark corners falling down ruins, etc., etc.

Folk horror, by and large, and if people have seen Mitsomar, they've seen this, largely has horrible things happen in beautiful sunlight, surrounded by flowers, like trees swaying in the breeze, bees buzzing ominously, or whatever, right?

Like, and you can sort of tell it's like it's meant as an antipode to the gothic horror, where it's like, there's a bat in the belfry, you know, and like this is much more like, ooh, there's a cute kitten.

Oh, now, what's happening with the cute kitten?

And historically, that's exactly how it emerged.

I looked at this article by a historian named David Sanjek, who pointed out that like the folk horror genre can be seen as responding to a crisis in gothic horror.

Because of course, gothic horror through the hammer horror studio in the UK had been sort of what the UK film industry had always done.

I don't know if people have seen a lot of these, but these are, if you think about the basic setup of a hammer horror film, they are a small Dartmoor community is set upon by a monster, right?

So you have the community, which is sort of Christian, which is sort of healthy, which is sort of normal, and then you have this monstrous outsider that has to be pushed away.

And Asanjik points out, that really kind of breaks down under the sort of assault from the United States.

Like after 1968, American horror cinema starts really swerving towards like a situation where it's unclear who the monster really is and where community often is figured as monstrous.

Sanjek is mostly thinking of something like Night of the Living Dead, right?

Where like the whole point is your own child, your own spouse, your own neighbor could turn on you and kill you, right?

Like that's where it sort of flips.

But you might also think of something like Rosemary's Baby, where it turns out the kindly neighbors who bring you, you know, some rhubarb cake are like actually Satanists.

And also then the evil that is being spawned is literally inside of your body.

Yeah, it's it's part of you.

Yeah, Yeah, and your husband's in on it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So basically the argument is that like, yeah, there was something here that really destabilized the way Hammer films tended to work.

And Hammer really was having a hard time at that, you know, sort of commercially as well.

It just really wasn't connecting with the zeitgeist.

Folk horror tends to nuance the formula even a little differently because

on the one hand, like, yes, like these villagers burning Sergeant Howie kind of is supposed to be a bad thing, but you're also supposed to feel kind of relieved that this scolding, you know, uptight Pris sort of like gets his comeuppance in the most hilarious way possible.

Like, I'm not going to say these villagers are the film's heroes, but let's just say in the longer cut, the film starts with a title card thanking Lord Summer Isle and the community of Summer Isle for allowing the film crew to film there.

So they're like, yeah, no, we're with them, right?

Like it's, it's,

right.

The community is both creepy, but also kind of justified.

And this like outsider who's sort of the final girl, except he's a boy, they're just like, Christ, what a jackass, right?

Yeah.

The blurring between hero and villain is, I think, a pretty typical feature of horror movies of this genre, right?

Like the villain will always have a sympathetic backstory.

Yeah.

And the victims will always like have it coming at least a little bit.

You know, there's a

like a kind of moral parasimilitude there, but it also is something that evokes in audiences the sense of like shifting and divided loyalties, as well as sort of like a gruesome pleasure that might, you know, provoke a little bit of like reflection or like reflective self-disgust.

Maybe if you're walking out of theater and you're like, man, I probably shouldn't have liked watching that guy burn alive quite so much as I did.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: And that's the other thing, right?

Like when we're thinking about Mulvi and visual identification or narrative identification too, right?

Like if an outsider comes into a community and wants to find out what happened, we identify with that person because we as film viewers obviously want to know what happened, right?

And the Wicker Man is interesting in the way that like, it's like, oh, you're going to burn for that fucker, right?

Like it's very funny in that way.

But also, of course, at a certain point, you sort of figure it out and you're just like, oh, look at this fucking asshole sort of bumbling around.

Like the twist is good.

But the fact that he like kind of keeps tilting at the same windmills does become quite obvious.

So like it is, as you say, like there is a shift when we're like, ah, fuck this fucking guy.

Um, I should say that this movie was remade.

Have you ever seen this remake of The Wicker Man?

I have not seen any Wicker Man, no.

Okay.

So, it was remade by Neil LaButte, a very problematic filmmaker and not a very good one, in 2006.

It is famous, nay, infamous, for the sergeant role is played by nana the Nicholas Cage, an absolute fucking Nicholas Cage

at his cageiest, let's say.

He's going to steal the Declaration of Independence.

He's going to get inside that big Wicker Man.

Yeah.

Well, he doesn't even get into a Wicker Man.

He gets bees poured all over him during which he shouts, killing me won't bring back your fucking honey.

And not the bees.

Oh, no, the bees.

It's so good.

But in the 2006 version, Lebut, as is his wont, makes subtext text and has Cage kind of run around a island off the coast of...

I guess Puget Sound or something like that in a kind of matriarchal commune run by Ellen Burston, which

leads to endless scenes of Nicholas Cage in a bear suit for reasons that really don't need getting into, punching little girls in the face.

I mean, it's it like, do not watch this movie, but there are great clip compilations on YouTube and you owe it to yourself to check those out.

This might actually be a good moment to transition to Carrie, my first movie, which I think is our temporal next one.

That is.

So I'm glad glad you mentioned this sense of like mixed frustration and identification and rejection of the main character in the Wickerman, because I think that's something that like really characterizes the early parts of Carrie, like the first act of Carrie, which is a 1976 Brian De Palma film based on a Stephen King novel.

And it's like early Stephen King.

He said he wrote this when he was like right out of college.

And Stephen King is basically like, yes, this is how I dealt with being afraid of feminism, right?

He's like very forthcoming about his own political and psychological investments in a lot of his work.

And I think like maybe particularly in Carrie.

So he wrote this, I want to say in like 1973, and the movie was released in 1976.

And in the first scene, Carrie, who is this like really exaggeratedly sheltered and like victimized and shy high school senior gets her first period in a gym shower and doesn't know what it is.

And this is like a very like straight Laura Mulvey scene.

It's a girls' locker room with like way more nudity than the high school girls' locker room ever actually had.

You know, just like very young, like very like 1970s skinny actresses sort of like running around topless in this scene.

And Carrie is in the shower after gym class,

and there's like a very lingering shot of her thigh that starts bleeding.

And like, sort of these saturation with blood is something that happens sort of recurringly through Carrie.

So we're meant to understand Carrie as almost preternaturally passive, right?

She is

the scion of a single mother who's like really religiously obsessed and extremely, like, potently and visibly sexually

And she has not told Carrie what menstruation is.

So, Carrie, you know, if when you're bleeding from your insides and you don't know what it is, that's actually quite scary.

I will say something.

I can always tell

when a menstruation scene has been like written or directed by a man because they always make

they always make menstrual blood look like ketchup.

It's like, and like, not to gross out you, Adrian, or or any of our more squeamish listeners, but it does not look like that.

And so the sort of like gushing like bright red blood of this scene, it can only be evoking violence, right?

And there's this traumatic incident where all the other girls who are sort of always mean to and rejecting Carrie with like a level of investment and attention that like the shy Christian girl doesn't really get, like more than like obsessively bullied, that girl, at least in my own experience, like mostly got ignored, right?

It's not that there wasn't any contempt.

It was that like she was just sort of outside of the social world.

But that's not Carrie.

Carrie is a target of like active rejection and active hatred.

And all the girls like pelt her with tampons and with menstrual pads.

Lag it up.

Yeah.

Log it up.

I remember that.

Yep.

And she is sort of terrified and screaming and like crying, sinking down naked in the shower, bleeding, and has to get rescued by a gym teacher, a very severe woman gym teacher wearing way more makeup than any of my like severe woman gym teachers ever wore.

Yeah.

And like in the ensuing like denouement scene, the gym teacher is like talking to the principal in his office while Carrie sits outside and waits to get sent home.

And she's like, God, I understand.

I'm frustrated with her too, because it's just your period.

Why are you crying and screaming like that?

Right.

And there's this sense that Carrie is sort of like incapable of functioning in the world.

She's a social outsider, but she's also deficient, right?

In this way that has been revealed by her menstruation.

She can't handle it, but also like it's this truth about herself that she now has to come to recognize, which she really didn't know about.

And I think that's interesting because Carrie also has, we come to suspect and then finally learn, a degree of psychic power.

right?

So she can

move things and really crucially, she can destroy things when she's very, very upset.

And now that she's menstruated,

those psychic powers become a lot more acute, right?

So when she's being tormented in the locker room, the light bulb in one of the fixtures on the ceiling like bursts, right?

And when she's getting sort of like berated a little bit and is talked down to in the principal's office, the ashtray, this is the 1970s, so people are smoking inside at their jobs at a public high school.

The ashtray on the smug principal's desk like falls over and shatters.

And this is, you know, something that menstruation has like sort of unleashed from Carrie, right?

This physical initiation into sexual maturity has also prompted this kind of like dark power of her emotions.

So she goes home and her Bible thumping mother just reads out Bible passages about the sin of Eve while Carrie is like crying and asking why she didn't tell her that this was going to happen to her.

And Carrie is forced into a literal closet.

It's like a broom closet where there is a statue of Saint Sebastian that she's forced to pray to.

And Adrian, do you know Saint Sebastian?

Has this like crossed your path at all?

He's the one with the arrows.

Yeah, Saint Sebastian was like an early Christian martyr.

His legend is that he was like a Roman centurion who was secretly Christian at a time when that was illegal.

And he gets martyred by being tied to a pillar and shot through with a bunch of arrows.

And Saint Sebastian is

far and away one of the horniest sort of like saint cults that we have.

Yeah.

He's always rippling.

Yeah, he's like in the like Renaissance depictions of Saint Sebastian more than earlier ones.

He's like always like weirdly mostly nude.

He's tied up and he's penetrated with these like long phallic arrows.

It reminds me a little bit of that like famous statue of Saint Teresa, like the expression on Saint Sebastian's face.

like he's doing fine he's

the ecstasy of saint sebastian is like it's the ecstasy of penetration right yeah and it's also like a way where a lot of renaissance painters smuggled in homoeroticism into a lot of these depictions right so saint sebastian is chosen for a very specific reason because you get the sense that all of the mother's rage and darkness is in all her rejection of menstruation.

It's all about sexual repression in this like very Christian mid-century way, right?

So, I think there's something like in the treatment of menstruation that I kind of want to dwell on, right?

I see the treatment of menstruation in Carrie on the one hand as sort of like a typical Christavan object, right?

It's like something that is part of you, that is bodily, that is nevertheless sort of like dark and rejected, right?

But on the other hand, Stephen King does this other thing with menstruation where it becomes a symbol of power.

And this is where I'm really interested in like the historical moment that this came up because Stephen King in the early 70s and like mid-70s is writing in a moment where sort of radical feminism, which I imagine he was

probably not a student of, but would have been exposed to in the sort of like mediated way that it gets, you know, digested through the cultural zeitgeist,

was splitting up, right?

And on the one hand, you had sort of like the socialist feminists and the like strict social constructionists going off on one direction, but you also had the rise of what we call cultural feminism, which tried to

invest more in women's, you know, bodily and perceived cultural difference from men.

And to find in these not sort of a source of oppression to be transcended the way you might in a more like liberal feminist tradition, but like sources of power, right?

There was a search for what they called a women's culture.

There was a sense of need to reinvest in sort of like destigmatization, but also like positive affirmation of things like menstruation and childbirth.

This stuff can get kind of turfy

in a way that I think we discussed a little bit when we talked about Mary Daly with Susan Stryker in an early episode on the transsexual menace by Janice Raymond.

Empire.

Transsexual Empire.

Oh, the transsexual empire.

I'm sorry.

I'm like, I'm mixing up my references.

Yeah, the transgender menace is a response to the transsexual empire.

Yeah.

And so there's this sense of like, well, what if menstruation wasn't gross?

What if it was, you know, kind of like ritualistically powerful?

What if it was a source of women's quasi-mystical positive difference?

And that's something that King is doing in a different valence by making menstruation the source of like the onset of Carrie's powers, right?

And so what happens is Carrie is, you know, if you have been living under a rock since this movie came out and don't know the plot of Carrie, Carrie gets lured to the prom by her like popular girl tormentors.

One of them in what like might be sort of like a condescending bit of pity, actually,

gets her boyfriend to invite Carrie to prom.

And then these other girls and her boyfriend John Travolta sort of stage this like humiliation moment where they rig the prom queen election so that Carrie will win.

And then they dump a bucket of pig's blood on her, recreating the humiliation of her first period on like a much more public stage and like ripping away, like offering and then ripping away this moment of like social acceptance and integration into like mainstream.

acceptable femininity, right?

Something that her mother had predicted in the famous line, they're all going to laugh at you.

They're all going to laugh at you.

That was pretty good.

Her mother is also always wearing a cloak.

I'm like, when is this?

Yeah.

But Carrie then uses her psychic powers to lock everybody inside the high school and burn it down.

And she then goes on this spree where she's covered in blood, her blood-soaked prom dress, and she kills her tormentors.

And then she goes home and her mother is like, I'm so tormented with guilt at how I loved the sex that conceived you that now I'm going to murder you.

So her mother is also having this sort of like psychic unraveling about, you know, feminine sexuality.

And Carrie, now endowed with the power of rage and also the power of like female sexual maturity, spoiler alert, compels the knives of the family kitchen to fly across the room.

and pierce her mother in exactly the same pattern that the statue of St.

Sebastian in the prayer closet is pierced, right?

So her mother sort of is sexually penetrated and has this kind of like ecstatic orgasmic death scene in a way that also sort of like just takes her off of the page.

Right.

So like the sexual politics of Carrie are very 1970s, right?

It's the idea that sexual repression is the enemy and sexuality is a source of power.

And we should say that like Carrie doesn't defy her mother until she gets asked to the prom but it's like kind of angelic looking guy the like popular guy that asked her to prom is like tan but he also has like this like cherubic blonde hair and who's not ultimately like he's in on some of it but not all of it that that's a very typical king thing too that like that's what's different from the wicker man it's it the the community is never just one group that's all the same.

The bullies sort of range in their level of sadism and their investment in this scheme.

Some of them don't seem to know exactly what's going on or what's about to happen.

And I think that's very common with his high schools too, that he really is quite attuned to the gradations of power and of malice that you can find in the average 17-year-old.

Yeah, that's something that's really particular about Carrie is that you have a range of responses to Carrie from her community from like outright contempt, like really sadistic contempt contempt from like some of the popular girls to, you know, condescending and pity, like pity mixed with frustration from like the gym teacher, right?

Who is initially frustrated with Carrie, but then becomes like her defender

to like, you know, kind of sympathy and begrudging affection, which is what she gets from prom, where her date is like, you know, like trying to get her to have fun.

He was sort of put up to taking her to the prom, but then he's like trying to get her to dance.

I think they do kiss.

He's like sort of surprised at himself by the like recognition that he's actually enjoying his time with her, even though she's not his social equal.

She's not a figure of status, right?

Her status is very, very low and excluded.

And he becomes sort of sincere in what was his sort of like initial insincere desire to spend time with her.

Which kind of makes the finale such a gud punch, because this is the other thing that King then loves to do, to say, oh yeah, you're all such different individuals and you're all going to die exactly the same way right like carrie's rage once it is uncorked makes no difference it can't make a difference right like she she will just blow them all away which is i think central to the ambivalence of carrie which is that she kills a lot of people who don't deserve it right it's not a a straight you know cathartic revenge fantasy where she only kills you know the people who have done her harm she kills those people and then she kills also a lot of people who are trying to be nice to her I'm most interested in the mother and in the sexual politics of the mother, right?

Cause this is like a straight dichotomy between like sexual expression good, sexual repression bad in like a very mid-century way.

I'm like, yes, you are a white man writing in the 1970s.

Like, uh, like Carrie's mother, like figuratively, but like she gets fucked to death, right?

Like Carrie is like fulfilling her desires by giving her this like violent penetration.

Yeah.

And like she like literally orgasms as she expires, right?

So this like sexually repressed crone

as a figure of scolding, sadism, and violence whose problem could be solved if she just got fucked is, I think, something that's like also a recurring theme that like has a little misogyny in it.

Like we should say, so though, I think this is where we have to be careful.

That like, I mean, there's King and then there's De Palma, who is just like a raging misogynist.

I don't know anything about Brian.

De Mala.

What's his deal?

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

No, I mean, like, this is the thing.

Like,

he's someone who indulges in kind of misogynistic tropes.

I mean, probably more so in his later output, but like he basically takes Hitchcock and dials up the misogynies, I think, sort of his general M.O.

King also presents the book.

I don't know if you've read Carrie.

It's more what we would call a heteroglossia.

Like there are

different people get to speak.

It's almost someone trying to piece together what happened with this girl, Carrie, Meaning, a lot of things where Diploma sort of creates this sense of obviousness in the book is sort of like a little contested.

Like one person may think this is true, the other may not, right?

So there is, it's not entirely about King's proclivities.

It's really much more about Diplomas.

At the same time, it is true that like King seems to, I mean, he's in some way like a comic book reader in that way.

He wants to say, hey, these things can be bad.

They can be dangerous.

But trying to to tamp them down can be even more dangerous.

But because he's a horror writer, he's not like, oh, they're not cuddly, right?

Like, she's going to kill you.

But trying to keep this in is dumber, honestly.

It's just going to make it worse.

In some way, a power, a destructive power harnessed is better than a destructive power denied.

There's something about Carrie and maybe about this notion of like the repressed, right?

The return of the repressed that reminded me a lot, actually, of Frankenstein, the sense of the

social outcast

who

is made monstrous by their social rejection, right?

Like the monster is a very empathetic creature who nevertheless like murders a little boy

and several other figures whose sense of like

frantic loneliness as being the source of his monstrousness, right?

Like the loneliness of the monster

is what makes him monstrous and also what keeps him away from what he needs for his flourishing.

And that's something that you see in Carrie, right?

Carrie

is made

into

this,

you know, subject of like rage and

fury and dark power by the same forces that like could have prevented that.

But then the attempts to sort of heal her or integrate her into a social world in which she can be an equal and experience like companionship, love,

like these are also thwarted by the very monstrousness that's been, you know, inculcated by her initial rejection.

Yeah, I think that's right.

There is a sense that like trying to contain what Carrie is about to experience is kind of a fool's errand to begin with, which is like this interesting thing.

Like, is she a victim of liberation?

Like, is that what ultimately King is talking about?

Or are we supposed to cheer on liberation?

Like, it's a deeply ambivalent text about a woman's liberation.

At the same time, we should also say that King himself is kind of, in interesting ways, and this is something I think that Clover actually quotes in her book, is actually kind of ambivalent about like the gendered aspects of that liberation.

There's an interview, I think, where he says, quote, Carrie's revenge is something that any student who has ever had his gym shorts pulled down in phys ed or his glasses thumb-rubbed in study hall could approve of.

And Clover, I think, is really right to say, like, sure, in the mid-1970s, someone says he, we might think he's thinking of that universally, but who has their gym shorts pulled down and their glasses thumb-rubbed?

King is imagining a boy in that moment, right?

Like, there is something about Carrie's rage that like makes her more of a stand-in for like set-upon like boys.

Like, as you say, the relentlessness of these girl bullies kind of feels homoerotically tinged in a way that like feels more appropriate to high school boys, to be honest.

Oh, Adrian, you would be surprised.

No, but there is something where I think, you know, this is the Clover sort of paradigmatic example, right?

She compares in a very like heavy-handed Freudian way, the like blood of menstruation and Carrie's terror at menstruation is like made a one-to-one analogy in Clover to like the male fear of castration.

I always sort of like, I'm like, when Freudians start talking about castration, they always lose me a little bit.

I'm just like, I just don't think men are that afraid of having their balls cut off.

I mean, I'm afraid of having any part cut off.

I'm not sure.

Like, please, just, I want all of it.

I'm, I'm pretty.

But it's your masculine potency, Adrian.

It's, it's your ability to act in the world.

Jesus.

I mean, can't we just say that like having a part of you cut off feels like it would be real bad?

But, you know, she is the stand-in for the socially ostracized and victimized in a way that I think in our own era, we're like really, I mean, like, quite literally oppressed by the psychology of people who are like mad that they weren't cool in high school.

And all those guys are men, right?

We've got these like malignant nerds in power in the form of like your Mark Andreessens and your Elon Musks and your like J.D.

Vance's.

Big balls.

Yeah.

And they're like, their exclusion from, you know, social metrics of like status and cool has now been like revisited on all of us in like a really terrible revenge.

And that's a, that's a very male paradigm that is now given here like an unusual like female avatar.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So maybe we should leave it there for part one.

We're going to go on to talk about a film from 1977, Suspiria by Dario Argento, and about Ridley Scott's Alien, which was by far and away the largest vote-getter on the poll I did on Patreon.

So I'm very excited to talk about both of those.

We'll talk about the remakes and sequels a little bit on all of these, but I think we'll need to be kind of brief on that because it's just so much to talk about.

But I'm excited that we get to spend the spooky season together in this way.

Thank you so much for listening.

I had a great time.

In Bib With the Right is made possible by hundreds of listeners who support us via patreon.com.

Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshizumi and Katie Lau.

Our title music is by Katie Lau.