Episode 102 -- Powers of Horror (Film), Part 2

Speaker 1 Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

Speaker 2 And I'm Warmer Donegan.

Speaker 1 And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

Speaker 2 So, Adrienne, today we are back with even more feminist readings of classic horror films. How are you feeling?

Speaker 1 I feel ready. I'm excited for this.
We're now getting to the movies that I actually really love.

Speaker 2 These are really good ones today. We're going to be talking about Sesperia, the Dario Argento version from 1977.
And we're also going to be talking about Alien, which is, I believe, from 1978. 79.

Speaker 2 79, a classic of the feminist horror genre.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. And we should say again that Maura did the work of coming up with her own list.
I came up

Speaker 1 with my list thanks to our Patreon patrons. So if you want to make me watch horror films or anything else, really, I'm just for sale at this point, you know, become a Patreon patron.

Speaker 1 It's a very fun community over there. I mean, a joke, but like, these were great suggestions and great votes.
And I was very excited to be so aligned with our patrons.

Speaker 1 And that's one of the great things that the Patreon allows us to do is to kind of get to know the community that sustains this podcast.

Speaker 2 I love our Patreon listeners. I love it when we put out a new episode and then I get to read the comments from people like giving us feedback and talking about what the episode reminded them of.

Speaker 2 I love our Patreon comments section. It like really warms my heart every time.

Speaker 1 And that goes twice over, of course, for our Discord in Discord with the Right, which likewise, there's incredible conversations happening there.

Speaker 1 So that's another perk that comes with a certain tier of Patreon patronage.

Speaker 2 Another bit of like clanging our tin cup and saying, please, sir, may I have some more is like, you guys should come to our live show, which is November 20th.

Speaker 2 It's coming up here in San Francisco at the Swedish American Hall. Tickets are going really fast.

Speaker 2 We're going to be joined by Matt Bernstein of A Bit Fruity and Sarah Marshall of You're Wrong About, probably like two of the biggest, coolest podcasts in my rotation.

Speaker 2 And I'm really, really excited for it. I think we're going to have a great time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I ran into Matt Bernstein this week, in fact.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you guys were hanging out without me. What the hell?

Speaker 1 Look, I ran into him at random and it was very wonderful. And he's excited for it.
And it's at the Swedish American Hall on Market Street here in San Francisco. Be there if you can.

Speaker 1 We will be recording the whole thing and you'll get to hear it one way or the other. But being there is going to be a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 All right, let's dig in. So last time we talked about The Wicker Man and Carrie, two films that I would say put gendered horror really at the front end, right?

Speaker 1 The Wicker Man is about a man who lives a very particular kind of Victorian and Christian masculinity, freaking the fuck out with a slightly more sort of gender fluid coded pagan society that he encounters on a Scottish island.

Speaker 1 And it turns out that he's sort of the butt of the joke because of his sort of both his masculine need to judge.

Speaker 1 He's constantly judging and constantly trying to sort of understand what's right and what's wrong.

Speaker 1 Whereas the islanders have a lot more sort of a free-flowing attitude towards the whole thing, but also by his need to know. He's a character who dies by curiosity, essentially.

Speaker 1 If he at some point said, like, look, fuck it, I'm out. Someone rent me a dinghy, like the movie wouldn't happen.

Speaker 1 But they know he's not going to do that because he's a dude and he's a particular kind of dude. So I think that the gender politics are really straightforward.

Speaker 1 Similarly, the gender politics in Carrie, which starts with a young girl, you know, having her first period, like also not super, like, you don't have to dig to be like, is this about gender somehow?

Speaker 2 It's not like really subtle. Like, Carrie is Stephen King's sort of parable of women's liberation

Speaker 2 and of men's fears of women's liberation. So, you have like Carrie White, who is a sort of psychically

Speaker 2 powerful or gifted, repressed young woman who is caught between her extremely like punitive, anti-sex, regressive Christian home life with her mother and the sort of like,

Speaker 2 you know, sexually promiscuous culture of the students at her school and is sort of like failing to meet both of these standards and explodes into rage out of her sense of like loneliness, really.

Speaker 2 It's like a very ambivalent film. You both sort of feel justified for Carrie.
You feel like her anger is, you know, legitimate.

Speaker 2 And also you feel like she is a stand-in for this terrifying power of the liberated woman who might not actually be quite a fit for the world in which she has now entered.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think that's true for a lot of 70s movies. How it's hard not to feel a little sympathy for almost all the parties involved.

Speaker 1 And at the same time, it's also hard not to feel some kind of fear and some kind of glee at the fate of just about everyone.

Speaker 1 Like you're supposed to hate everyone and love everyone a little bit on screen.

Speaker 1 I think that's true in the Wicker Man too, that you're supposed to be horrified that this guy gets, you know, burnt inside a Wickerman, but it's also kind of funny.

Speaker 1 And you're supposed to kind of root for the villagers and also like, they are kooks, right? Like, they're not well, but it all gets sort of dispersed in sort of shades of gray.

Speaker 1 And that's very different from the films that we're talking about today,

Speaker 1 where I really feel like it's not even about choosing sides. It's that one side is human and the other really...
isn't in some way, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's less of a like moving moral identification, right?

Speaker 2 Like one of the things that we talked about in our first episode on horror was this like genre convention of the horror film articulated by Carol Clover in her book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws, which is such a good title.

Speaker 2 So good. About how, like,

Speaker 2 from the first act to the third, the audience's allegiances are supposed to shift, right?

Speaker 2 Like, you're supposed to start out kind of rooting for the killer a little bit and seeing his targets as, you know, annoying or corrupt or like devious in some way.

Speaker 2 A lot of the like first act of a horror movie will feature like conspicuously calm and pleasant environments, right?

Speaker 2 Like a sunny autumn day in the American suburb with the birds chirping and the sounds of kids shouting to each other as they head home from school.

Speaker 2 And then sort of like the cynical behavior of the people who are going to get killed one by one, right?

Speaker 2 So you see like a calm environment in which comfortable people are behaving in, you know, selfish, short-sighted, morally culpable ways that then gets interrupted by sort of like the moral reckoning enforced by the killer.

Speaker 2 And Carol Clover articulates how the viewer is supposed to sort of like shift his allegiances from the killer to what she calls the final girl, right?

Speaker 2 The targeted victim who transforms herself into a heroine and survives the killer and becomes sort of like a proxy for the audience in the end.

Speaker 2 And that is something I think we traced fairly easily in The Wicker Man. I think you can make an argument for it in Carrie as Carrie being sort of embodying several different archetypes at once.

Speaker 2 There's also another final girl at the very end of Carrie. It's harder to do, at least for my film, Suspiria,

Speaker 2 where the good guy is always good and the bad guys just sort of like reveal themselves over the course of the film.

Speaker 1 It's almost both of these films, I think we could say, draw on some pretty recent tropes and then on some very old tropes.

Speaker 1 They're both kind of fairy tale movies, just with a lot more razor blades in them and acid blood.

Speaker 1 At least in Sesperia, the person that we see first entering the dance academy is the person who's going to persevere at the end.

Speaker 1 Like it really does feel like, you know, it's, it's Red Riding Hood going into the forest.

Speaker 1 She's going to encounter some monsters, but in the end, she is the one who will emerge bloodied but victorious.

Speaker 1 So it is true that there's very little sense of reversal and reverse identification in Argento's film. Should we start by maybe laying this film out for people?

Speaker 1 People probably know Sesperia, but it might be worth kind of getting the who, what, where, when, how established.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So Sesperia was remade in 2018 by Luca Guadanino.
We're not going to talk about that version of the movie. We're talking about the original 1977 Dario Argento Italian film.

Speaker 2 It's a surrealist horror fairy tale about a young girl who travels to a foreign land,

Speaker 2 encounters a mysterious evil that she has to sort of decode and then outwit and then flees out, right?

Speaker 2 And this is also a movie that asks the question that has haunted male horror directors from time immemorial, which is, is there anything scarier than a woman who isn't fuckable?

Speaker 2 And Dario Argento seems to think, like, kind of no.

Speaker 1 Well, to be fair, she's both very scary and super non-fuckable.

Speaker 2 We're not talking about the protagonist right now. We're talking about sort of the villain of Sesperia, who's revealed to be this ancient witch who is sort of inhabiting and running a dance school.

Speaker 2 So the film follows a young American ballerina, who's this naive, wafish brunette named Susie, who travels in the 70s to West Germany to enroll at the Tons Akademie, which is a prestigious ballet school, I believe in.

Speaker 1 In Freiburg, it's supposed to be in Freiburg. In Freiburg, yes.

Speaker 2 You're like, oh my God, don't watch the German.

Speaker 1 In a Roman soundstage, doubling, I guess, for the city of Freiburg.

Speaker 2 Yes, it's an Italian movie with an American protagonist set in Germany.

Speaker 2 And so she arrives at this dance school late at night in a storm, and she sees a woman screaming and fleeing from the front door.

Speaker 2 And later, we see that woman be murdered at the hands of this like ghostly specter after she tells a friend that something's not quite right at the academy, right?

Speaker 2 So before we even get there, there's like, dun, dun.

Speaker 2 It does not start with a scenic, conspicuously calm, suburban setting the way a lot of like American slasher movies of this period do.

Speaker 2 It starts with like a downpour and like intense heavy metal music. Also, like Dario Argento was collaborating with this like Prague rock band called Goblin.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And they did the soundtrack to Sesperia and it's very, very sonically intense.

Speaker 1 And it's great. I mean, it's also really cool.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's one of the rare movies where the DVD version, which I have here, comes with the soundtrack album. And you're like, yeah, that checks out.

Speaker 2 I gotta, I gotta have this.

Speaker 2 So she spends, Susie spends the night in town. She enrolls in the school the next day, but she quickly gets the sense, you know, that things are not right there.

Speaker 2 So she like makes eye contact with somebody who's working at the school. And then in a like a rehearsal, like a dance class, she like faints.

Speaker 2 And then after she has this episode, she's forced to remain in a small room. She's not like not allowed to board off campus as she was planning to.
She now has to stay at school.

Speaker 2 And she's given a very strict diet, which involves like weirdly a lot of food. They're feeding her way more than I think an actual dance school would allow its ballerinas to consume,

Speaker 2 including this like very thick glass of red wine, right?

Speaker 2 It's very blood-like.

Speaker 2 And one night, I think like later that night, as they're sleeping, maggots fall from the ceiling onto all the sleeping ballerinas because a shipment of food has spoiled in an attic storeroom.

Speaker 2 And so they all have to leave their rooms and go down to the gym to sleep in the gym. And while they're there trying to get some shut eye, they hear this like

Speaker 2 labored, raspy breathing, like the breathing of a dying creature, right?

Speaker 2 And one of them says, this girl, Sarah, says to Susie, oh yeah, that's the school's founder. That's the headmistress.

Speaker 2 They said she was out of town, but she's not out of town because I can hear her breathing. So then like the school's blind piano player, there's like two men in this whole movie.

Speaker 2 And one of them is this blind piano player who comes in with his seeing eye dog to play music while the dancers rehearse.

Speaker 2 And he gets abruptly fired the next day, and then he dies in a plaza late that same night when another ghostly specter possesses his dog and compels the animal to like makes a turn on him, rip out his throat.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 so things are, you know, getting weird. Susie and her friend Sarah begin sort of like exchanging their suspicions at the school.

Speaker 2 They're like in the dorm room late at night while Susie's like trying to choke down this glass of like blood wine.

Speaker 2 And Sarah is telling her all these things she's heard and all these things she's realized. And they're like trying to piece together this information that's been like kept from them.

Speaker 2 And one of the things that Sarah says to Susie is like, listen, the teachers don't leave at night as they say they do. They actually stay in the building.

Speaker 2 And you can tell because you can hear their footsteps going deeper into the building. It's never going out towards the door.
Sarah, of course, promptly disappears.

Speaker 2 And Susie starts seeking out answers from Sarah's old psychiatrist.

Speaker 1 Played by Udo Keir.

Speaker 2 Really?

Speaker 1 Yeah, the wonderful Udo Keir.

Speaker 2 Who's Udo Keir for our listeners?

Speaker 1 Oh, just like a wonderful B-movie actor. I think German, but like, yeah.

Speaker 1 He's sort of the, oh, that guy in like many movies from the 70s and 80s, like right into like Lars von Trier territory where he sort of tends to show up from time to time, sort of in the background.

Speaker 2 I think he's in melancholia as like the wedding planner who like canned even uh he's wonderful he's great it is kind of a delightful scene they're outdoors they're on this like big like brutalist plaza of like post-war german you know concrete forward architecture and he tells her the dance academy was rumored to have been founded by a greek immigrant woman who was actually exiled and killed because she was rumored to be a witch.

Speaker 2 The psychoanalyst with like an intense understanding of the occult, he's like, if you encounter a witch's Covan, they're actually, all the witches are just drawing power from their central queen.

Speaker 2 And if you kill the queen, they will all lose all their power and they won't be a threat to you anymore.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's just Freud. It's Johnson, they related to the unconscious.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Obviously. So, you know, she returns to school.

Speaker 2 And she discovers one night after following the sound of the footsteps that there is a hidden witch's lair in the back of the building, concealed by a secret door marked with a blue flower on the wall.

Speaker 2 And when she sneaks back into the witch's lair, she overhears all of her headmistresses and her instructors talking about how they plan to kill her as a human sacrifice.

Speaker 2 So she tries to escape and she is chased by her friend Sarah, who reveals herself to have been murdered and is a dead body that's been reanimated by the witches.

Speaker 2 But Susie stumbles upon the bedchamber of the school founder, that desiccated old woman whose heavy breathing she recognizes from the gym.

Speaker 2 Like she almost looks like the swamp thing, like the way that the body has decayed. It's like very dramatic and visceral.
And it sort of evokes that scene of the maggots with the spoiling food.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of like putrefaction in sesperia.

Speaker 1 Although it doesn't, it's been a little while, but like she goes back and forth, right? There are moments when you don't see her at all.

Speaker 1 She sort of goes invisible and she becomes sort of just like this shadow that Argendo shoots very nicely.

Speaker 1 I think through sort of rear projection where you can sort of see the outlines of her, but not herself. And then as she stabs her, her physical form sort of becomes manifest.

Speaker 1 And it is, as you say, like real gross. It's just pure putrefaction.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so it's, it starts as like this decaying corpse in a bed, a bed like surrounded by like a lace canopy. It's like very feminine.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And one of the items in this bed chamber is a like glass statue of a peacock. And Susie, in her, you know, haste and terror, knocks over this glass statue.

Speaker 2 And the breaking of the statue is what awakens the witch, who then turns on her and, you know, deploys invisibility and has this like zombie proxy of her friend's dead body that's out to kill her.

Speaker 2 And what Susie does is she sees that illuminated outline and stabs it with one of the broken peacock feathers. And that's what kills the witch.
And she runs out of the building,

Speaker 2 like grinning and triumphant and happy as it like explodes behind her and all the teachers, you know, die.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So it's what's interesting about Susperia, right? There is very little suspense in the movie in terms of its plot.
The individual sequences can be nerve-fretting, frankly.

Speaker 1 The thing with the dog is really scary to anyone who owns a dog, but it's always the thing that you expect to happen, right? Oh, this guy is alone on a square with his dog.

Speaker 1 Like, gee, I wonder what's going to happen. Right down to, as you mentioned, the wonderful goblin soundtrack, where I think the soundtrack keeps like hissing the word, witch.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And you're like, okay, I feel like it's going to be a witch. Like, if this is a vampire, I'm going to feel a little cheated.
Like, the movie almost is obvious to the point of being transparent.

Speaker 1 Like, there's there's no voyage of discovery here. Even alien where it's pretty obvious what's going to happen to these poor people on the spaceship.

Speaker 1 Like for us today, there is no suspense, but of course the life cycle of the alien itself is kind of a source of mystery if you haven't ever seen an alien movie before.

Speaker 1 There is very little here, right? You're like, oh, the headmistress was rumored to be a witch and she's super old. Like, oh, you think she might show up in the last reel? Real, real mystery here.

Speaker 2 This is how you destroy a witch's coven, by the way. I'm just going to drop that in in the end of Act Two.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, like,

Speaker 2 the film is

Speaker 2 not exactly, as you say, it's like not suspenseful. It's stressful.
Yeah. But it doesn't really have a ton of surprises, right?

Speaker 2 It is considered a staple of the Italian like mid-century pulp thriller horror movie genre called Giallo or Yellow.

Speaker 2 I apologize to our Italian-speaking listeners because I'm mispronouncing this, I'm sure.

Speaker 2 But, you know, it is a genre that relies heavily on like sexploitation, violence, and like dreamlike landscapes, right? So when this movie was released in the US,

Speaker 2 it was both a commercial success and a critical failure, like kind of a lot of the horror movies of this era. And reviewers noted that the movie has really thin character development, right?

Speaker 2 None of these people are particularly like three-dimensional or even really two-dimensional. They're like archetypes and like fast-forward buttons for the plot.

Speaker 2 It has an overemphasis on dreamlike visuals that sometimes come at the expense of the plot itself. You know, the movie is really like a sensory feast and it doesn't make much sense.

Speaker 2 Like the story doesn't totally cohere. It's just really, really

Speaker 2 incredible to look at. Yeah, pleasurable to look at.
You know, Argento uses this like jewel-tone color palette.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of like emeralds, a lot of pink in this movie, a lot of orange in this movie. It's very brightly colored and it's saturated in this beautiful 70s way.

Speaker 2 And every image is like a surrealist painting. There's a lot of strangeness evoked in all the imagery.
And that is really what it does.

Speaker 2 It sort of takes you bodily out of the ordinary world as opposed to logically.

Speaker 2 I was trying to like contrast this with some other like thriller movies or suspense movies that have like a puzzle box kind of a construction where they derive their pleasure

Speaker 2 from their plots, right?

Speaker 2 Where like each theme and character fits together into a final revelation in some like unexpectedly elegant way that can like delight you even if it doesn't surprise you, right?

Speaker 2 It's like a magic trick where the guy pulls the rabbit out of the hat at the end and you sort of retroactively understand how he did it. And that's really not what sesperia is like at all.

Speaker 2 It's more like a vivid nightmare for a trip or a drug trip, right?

Speaker 2 And so maybe a good time to note that the movie is named after Sespiria de Profundis, which translates to sighs from the depths, which is an 1845 book of like prose poems, kind of,

Speaker 2 specifically about drug use. by the English writer Thomas de Quincey, who's the guy who wrote Confessions of an English Opium Eater, right?

Speaker 2 So this is a book about the affective experience of narcotics. And it's sort of, you know, about this

Speaker 2 kaleidoscopic sensory overload.

Speaker 2 And I think there's something about the intense music, intense visuals that are supposed to sort of impose on the viewer's body, like a kind of sense of overwhelm that they might not get from trying to unlock the puzzle of the plot.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so I think, I mean, it's true that Argento, I think, is mostly known for giallo films, but Sesperia is kind of a strange one.

Speaker 1 I do think that a young woman investigating crimes in her immediate surroundings, that's a pretty common Jallo trope.

Speaker 1 I've seen like maybe, I don't know, a few dozen of these.

Speaker 1 More often, you do have like a private eye or something like that. And it doesn't always have to be a man.

Speaker 1 Sometimes it is young women, especially young women investigating violence against other young women, like their friend has disappeared. So that way it does fit in quite nicely.

Speaker 1 But one thing I think Jallo usually does is it plumbs the macabre and it plums the kind of outre, but it doesn't usually shade into the supernatural. Usually it's a serial killer, I think.

Speaker 1 Like often like

Speaker 1 it kind of strains credulity or realism, but it doesn't really sort of transcend reality. At the same time, I do think it's important to note that like Jiali are not

Speaker 1 procedurals or action films by and large. These are cheapies.
Like

Speaker 1 they're too cheap to crash a car. So you're not going to get a car chase.

Speaker 1 You're going to get a respectable looking man pulling up in a very much rented car that the filmmakers had exactly one day for and like investigate, I don't know, a local beach that they didn't have to pay to use or whatever.

Speaker 1 These are not sort of what the French call policier, right? It's not about the investigative work, meaning that the investigative work often has sort of a almost psychoanalytic quality.

Speaker 1 It's about like uncovering memories, sort of uncovering pathologies, et cetera, et cetera. I think that's really important here.

Speaker 1 Mora has already mentioned that the colors are insane, this thing.

Speaker 1 They're basically, it's as though Germany doesn't have just like incandescent light bulbs that don't have insane colors on them, right?

Speaker 1 It's just like every room is lit, you know, like a drag queen's boudoir.

Speaker 1 The other thing that this movie is famous for, which I think sort of ties it in with Argento's Jello output, is the use of perspectival filmmaking.

Speaker 1 We've talked a little bit about how for Laura Mulvey, it's so important to know who we're seeing the action from, what it means in Halloween, which comes out a year after Suspiria, to follow Jamie Lee Curtis from the position of what's then called the Spectre, a person we would later know as Michael Myers.

Speaker 1 And I think that Argento is really, really keen on this.

Speaker 1 The scene that you talked about in depth, where she discovers this witch mother, basically, is basically a bunch of point-of-view shots sort of stitched together.

Speaker 1 The camera will push into this weird bed where this corpse is lying, and then it'll film from that bed as Susie Banyan approaches, right?

Speaker 1 You're kind of going from between victim and killer, victim and killer.

Speaker 1 That's a very common trope that Argentro uses both in his sort of serial killer output and then these kind of more supernatural-tinged films, which is really interesting.

Speaker 1 On the one hand, I think it really is,

Speaker 1 as Laura Mulvey points out, it does seem to be all about about who gets to watch.

Speaker 1 At the same time, it's a lot more contested than a reading of an American slasher film might suggest in the sense that Argento is pretty ecumenical in the way it's both the victim and the killer.

Speaker 1 Victim, killer, victim, killer, right? Like we are, if we're identifying, we're really supposed to be identifying with both, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, they're shot both from the predator and the prey, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 And there's like three really like prolonged death scenes, two of women and one of a man, where you see the victim sort of like looking around for where to escape, trying to take the perspective of her fear.

Speaker 2 And then you will also see the point of view of like the spectral killer sort of like lying in wait. This happens, I think, more in the two scenes murdering women.

Speaker 2 The scene with the dog, you're actually more from the dog's perspective, sort of the camera is down on the ground.

Speaker 2 There's one where you're sort of like up on the roof of a building looking down at this man, which seems to me like maybe from the perspective of the killer, but it much more lingers on the victims as prey when it's killing women, which might bring us nicely to Sesperia's gender politics.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Oh, one quick thing about that.
It's also interesting that a lot of the death scenes, like, it's almost unclear why the killer needs to be there, right?

Speaker 1 One of the big ones, She gets killed by falling glass. Like, I mean, obviously, like, the killer's making that happen.
In another really upsetting scene, it involves razor wire.

Speaker 1 There's this kind of interesting thing where, like, on the one hand, you're right. The camera stalks the actresses, especially, like a predator would stalk prey.

Speaker 1 But then it's often the scenery itself, this incredible scenery that Argento has constructed that ends up sort of finishing the job, it seems to me.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the environment itself becomes a tool of death. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And you know, and I think there's one way

Speaker 2 you can read sesperia as sort of like a standard misogynist parable, right?

Speaker 2 There's the virginal young heroine sort of at the precipice of sexual maturity and this place played by Jessica Harper, who is like this pale brunette with these huge like saucer eyes.

Speaker 2 She's like a very snow-white kind of look.

Speaker 2 And that young ingenue encounters this dark underbelly of female power among a group of older women who are

Speaker 2 malicious, who are corrupt, and who are crucially like sort of aged past their sexual appeal, right? And so she uses the virtues that she embodies to defeat the corruption that they embody.

Speaker 2 And beauty and ugliness have these like very easy moral correlations where the beautiful women are innocent and good, and the old, ugly women are, you know, conspiring and evil, right?

Speaker 2 That's like kind of like the standard one.

Speaker 2 And the terror in this film is really kind of of everywhere, not just the terror of this disembodied spectral murderer, but it's also really, you know, on the other hand, a terror of physical decay, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah. You've got the maggots, you've got the harrowed breathing marking a kind of like physical decline and pain.

Speaker 2 You've got the putrid decay of the witch's body, which is like finally killed with a peacock feather of all things. It's like a symbol of flamboyant sexual allure.
allure.

Speaker 2 So like, there's not really a ton of men in this movie. Yeah.
It's a movie in which, you know, the men that do appear are like more or less kind of hapless or tools of women.

Speaker 2 You know, they're lures, they're marks, they're victims, and they're like pretty quickly dispensed with. Like the action is something that happens between women and among women.

Speaker 2 And it's about the good kind of woman, the young, sweet, pretty one, defeating the bad, old kind, right?

Speaker 2 And I think like when we look at the shots of this movie, and particularly that scene you alluded to with like the razor wire, although I think this also is very present in the initial murderer with glass at the start of the film, I think in many cases, when they take on the perspective of the killer, these are pretty like straightforwardly Mulveyan, like male gaze kinds of shots, right?

Speaker 2 You know, the murders are erotically charged, let's say. And Argento said himself of these scenes, he says, I like women, especially beautiful ones.

Speaker 2 If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or a man. I certainly don't have to justify myself to anybody about this.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, I don't know, you might have to justify yourself to me. But it's just like, it's so avowed, right? You can't even argue with it.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I sort of agree with him about the simple-mindedness of the violence against women in a lot of these scenes, right?

Speaker 2 They do sort of resist the feminist reclamation, which is why I feel a little stupid now, like trying to do that, which I think is like the movie sometimes, in spite of itself, you know, it also manages to depict a femininity that is like exhausting, it's demanding, it's sinister, but letting go of it threatens this like faith that's even worse, right?

Speaker 2 So, like, I don't think it's a coincidence that the movie takes place, like of all places at a ballet school,

Speaker 2 which is like almost the paradigmatic site of like femininity as a site of like pain and punishment in its reproduction, right?

Speaker 2 The beauty of the movements and of these women's bodies is produced by a lot of like, not just discipline, but like really like kind of sadism upon those bodies, right?

Speaker 2 And its enforcement of feminity is made violent in like very plain, obvious ways at the site of dance school.

Speaker 2 And the students at the school in the movie, like Susie Chief among them, are always being told what to do and disciplined back into these like arbitrary, ever-changing rules.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like you can't sleep there. You have to get back to class.
I don't care that you're feeling badly. You have to keep dancing.

Speaker 1 It's also a place where gender and age sort of, right away, true femininity only really can happen in a very specific part of your life, right?

Speaker 1 And which is why like having this like super old crone preside over the whole thing is kind of funny, right?

Speaker 1 Like the kind of femininity that's expressed through ballet is famously, you know, not something you can really like maintain into middle or let alone old age.

Speaker 2 Well, I think that's the horror at the core of suspiria, right? Is that you can sacrifice, you can do so much violence to yourself to achieve this feminine ideal.

Speaker 2 And as soon as you let up even a minute, or even if you don't let up, like the decay will come for you anyway, right?

Speaker 2 Age is depicted as a concern of vanity, I think, in a lot of our like understandings of women's approach to age, but it's also mortality. It's also the inevitability of death, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, if you

Speaker 2 drop the enforcement of femininity, if the enforcement of feminines somehow like breaks down, you know, the school can no longer function to make these disciplined perfect ballerinas.

Speaker 2 What's left over is like more horrible still because it's this ugliness, this decay, this age, this like female decrepitude and selfishness. So that's suspiria.
That's what I got.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, ultimately, sesperia is about a woman who wants to live forever, right? And has to grind up younger women in order to accomplish that fact. It's ultimately about

Speaker 1 accepting mortality, weirdly enough, for a horror film.

Speaker 1 We're not going to talk about Luca Guadanino's 2018 remake of this film, but of course it ends up trying to sort of create a twist on top of a bunch of other weird twists, some of which involve Tilda Swinton.

Speaker 1 So I'm always like pro-Tilda Swinton twists because I'm pro-Tilda Swinton.

Speaker 2 I will say for Luca Guadanino, he's always having fun. Yeah.
He's always having a great time.

Speaker 1 Although it is a long-ass movie, I got to say, I was like, can we get to the horror ring again? But

Speaker 1 the central twist is different from the Tario Gento version. It's the kind of thing where you're like, oh, cool, I see what you did there for like two seconds.

Speaker 1 And you're like, wait, but now the thematics don't make any sense, right? Which is that the Susie Banyan stand-in, I mean, spoiler alert, turns out to be the mater superiorum, right?

Speaker 1 Like, so she is actually the head of the coven. And you're just like, okay, but now none of it actually works.

Speaker 1 Like, Susperia in Argento's hands is simple-minded, as you say, but like it has a certain resonance because it ultimately is just kind of a fairy tale story, right?

Speaker 1 Like, the same way that a fairy tale doesn't have, you know, has a moral, they used to have morals appended at the end of them, feels pretty straightforward.

Speaker 1 And Guedaninho is sort of just mixing it up enough for that not to be the case anymore. And then you're like, but I'm not sure what this means.

Speaker 1 Thanks, though.

Speaker 2 He also casts Dakota Johnson, who is not a good actor.

Speaker 1 No, no,

Speaker 1 stop doing this, Hollywood.

Speaker 1 Previewing her role in Miss Webb as what the fuck did I just watch? Anyway, that is Hesperia. What a film.

Speaker 2 I had fun with it. I got to see it in actual theater because they played at the Roxy as part of their October, you know, horror classic series.
And so I got to be in a packed theater.

Speaker 2 I will say, I like to sit in the back of a theater. And this is kind of a bad idea because I'm short.

Speaker 2 And so whenever I sit down in a movie theater, I'm always like watching the tall people file file in, going, please don't sit in front of me, please don't sit in front of me.

Speaker 2 And these two men who were both like decently over six feet tall, of course, sit like directly in front of me. Oh, no.

Speaker 2 And then proceed to make out in the middle of the movie for like a solid like seven or eight minutes. And I'm like, well, you know.
To be fair.

Speaker 2 So gentlemen, please do that in the back row. Thank you.
Cause some of us are short and trying to see.

Speaker 1 Yeah, just uh, keep you canoodling to the razor wire scenes,

Speaker 1 sickos.

Speaker 2 So, let's move on to the next most romantic film in our roster, which is Alien. You got to watch Alien for this.

Speaker 1 I got to re-watch Alien for the, I don't know how many time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so this is a movie that probably does not need much of an introduction. It debuted in 1979, directed by Ridley Scott, written by Dan O'Bannon, and it has spawned countless sequels.

Speaker 1 I honestly lost track. I can think of like five or six, but that's not counting the ones where the alien battles the predator.

Speaker 1 And it now has it as a TV version, Alien Earth, the fifth episode of the first season of which is essentially kind of a remake or a riff on this movie.

Speaker 1 So that's what I meant last time when I said that these movies have all been remade.

Speaker 1 And it's far more faithful.

Speaker 1 It kind of is like the Gueraninho version of Suspiria in the sense that it's far closer to a remake of alien the original than any of the alien sequels which for all their faults each sort of try to take this gooey critter for a walk in a new neighborhood aliens the sequel comes out in the mid 80s i guess uh james cameron says like well what if we made a movie with these creatures that's essentially a vietnam war movie uh and all about like post-traumatic stress very interesting uh david fincher is like oh this thing bursts out of people's chests should we make the pregnancy metaphor a little bit more belabored?

Speaker 1 Makes Alien 3. Then I forget what happens, but Alien 4 is like just kind of odd.
But it's a sort of director showcase. People put their stamp on it.

Speaker 1 And really, the TV show is much closer to the kind of visual tropes that we get in that first film.

Speaker 1 Alien is a lot less flashy in its design outside of the famous sets for the alien ship and the alien itself.

Speaker 1 But in some way, right, like as as in Susperia, you can see a kind of frame of the original alien and be like, oh, that's the original alien.

Speaker 1 There's something very, very clear about how this film is visually organized. And even though it's a little more understated than the utter batshittery of Susperia, it has proven no less influential.

Speaker 1 Or it has proven even more influential because it can use kind of very basic parts of set design and framing to kind of be like, oh, yeah, we're in an alien universe now. So what's this about?

Speaker 1 For the 0.001% of people who haven't seen this, it is about a spaceship called the Nostromo, another literary reference in these movies that arrive with them, without really doing very much with them.

Speaker 1 Not sure why it's called the Nostromo. I'm sure there's someone who can enlighten me.
It's on its way back to Earth with, I believe, seven people on board who are in sort of cryostasis or whatever.

Speaker 1 They're sleeping.

Speaker 1 When we first meet them, and the first shots of the interior of the spaceship really are this empty house into which these seven people will emerge because their AI computer named mother has woken them up.

Speaker 1 And initially they sort of talk and they're it's a very interesting sort of beginning of the film where it's very clear they think they're being woken up by mother because they're about to get back to earth.

Speaker 1 Then it turns out no,

Speaker 1 they've discovered distress beacon. The distress beacon

Speaker 1 leads them to a very cool alien ship designed by H.R. Geiger, where I have to say

Speaker 2 the crew

Speaker 1 is far more careful than anyone else is in the sequels around all this alien goo, but still not careful enough.

Speaker 1 They bring back one of their crew, played, I believe, by William Hurt, onto the Nostromo.

Speaker 1 over the objections of warrant officer Ellen Ripley, played by wonderful Sigourney Weaver, who basically is like, we shouldn't bring this guy in because he has now, fun fact, a weird alien parasite attached to his face.

Speaker 1 In a foreshadowing for the entire franchise, they engage in some serial decision making, bring him in. He seems to be doing fine.

Speaker 1 And then in an absolutely iconic scene during a pasta dinner, has a small alien burst out of his chest in a scene that is so viscerally upsetting, it's just incredible.

Speaker 1 And that creature will start picking them off one by one, leaving in the end only a cat and aforementioned Ellen Ripley. So there are a couple of things to talk about here.
The end of Alien

Speaker 1 very much gets us to that final girl thing. Like the movie becomes in its final third, the tribulations of Ellen Ripley.

Speaker 1 The interesting thing is that I don't think it starts that way.

Speaker 1 The beginning of the movie, I mean, I've made this comment on another podcast, but I always think of it as like, it's kind kind of a trucker movie in space. These are these like blue-collar Joes.

Speaker 1 They've been at a cryostasis for like three seconds and they all light up and they're all like smoking and like joshing each other and like trying to figure out union contracts, et cetera, et cetera, right?

Speaker 1 Like it's very much the way Hollywood, New Hollywood would sort of show blue-collar workers, right?

Speaker 1 Part of this is that like while Sigone Weaver was pretty young when she did this role, everyone else on the crew is 40 and looks it.

Speaker 1 Like no disrespect, but like you know it's not one of those movies where like everyone implausibly claims to be like longshoremen but they're all like 25

Speaker 1 amazing yeah this longshoreman has had some great botox done like yeah yeah in this movie really these people i mean they're they're still hollywood looking but like they are picked to be older you you believe these people that they've been on years-long missions in outer space right

Speaker 1 and it takes a while for the film to even let on

Speaker 1 that Ellen Ripley is the main character. It really is only in the refusal to let

Speaker 1 the, you know, parasited crewman back on board that we sort of realize, like, oh, no, she's being positioned as the final girl.

Speaker 1 It's the first moment when she goes up against the rest of the crew and says,

Speaker 1 guys, this is not by the book and this is a terrible idea. And they kind of outvote her.

Speaker 2 Is she the only woman?

Speaker 1 No, there is another woman. Okay.
Veronica Cartwright. She's the the navigator.
And then, of course, his mother, who has a female voice. But yeah, she's not the only woman.

Speaker 1 At the same time, it's kind of noticeable that she's a little bit of the outsider. And I don't quite know.
I don't remember.

Speaker 1 Listeners can correct me on this, but I'm not sure I ever got the sense of why she's a bit of an outsider. It's interesting.

Speaker 1 Today you watch it and you're like, oh, there's Sigourney Weaver, right, who's amazing. And so you're like, well, gee, you know, I'm wondering who the main character is going to be.

Speaker 1 But like, there is something about the early movie that really starts feeling like an ensemble piece.

Speaker 1 And it really culminates in that scene where John Hurts, who basically has the alien burst out of his chest, that's sort of the moment when you get a sense of like, well, no, these people are not all created equal.

Speaker 1 We're not watching a community fend off this creature. They're all kind of on their own.

Speaker 1 The film was obviously famous for its incredible creature design and for its tagline, the writer of which just died this week, apparently.

Speaker 2 Oh.

Speaker 1 Do you remember the tagline of alien?

Speaker 2 No, I don't.

Speaker 1 what is it in space no one can hear you scream which is great oh that's an amazing line yeah so good oh yeah but that's alien a movie that gets to its mythic and gendered aspects i think kind of late unlike aliens which kind of begins with sigourne weaver being found drifting in space in an escape pod that she's jumped into after launching the alien into the void at the end of the first movie.

Speaker 2 With a cat, I imagine. And the cat.
Yes. Ripley and the cat.
Nothing bad happens to the cat. This is a very important thing to caution.

Speaker 1 Oh, no, they kill it in part three.

Speaker 2 Oh, no. I think.
Oh, right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and the kid, because David Fincher is a bastard.

Speaker 1 But that movie really starts almost with a kind of mythic, right? This survivor heroine who no one will listen to, who harnesses her fear that she's gained through experience.

Speaker 1 And you have all these like corporate men and military men being like, toots, don't get your knickers in a twist.

Speaker 1 And then, of course, like, cut to an hour later and they're like, why didn't we listen to Ripley? And Ripley's like, yeah, man, I'm telling you. But the first movie doesn't quite work that way.

Speaker 1 It's true that she's probably the most level-headed of the bunch, but none of the people on the ship seem to, except for the duplicitous android, ever sort of says anything like, oh, get out of our way.

Speaker 1 You're being too emotional. They're just like, Ripley, we want the commission.
Like, we are scared that we're going to get dinged, that we're going to get docked pay if we don't do the salvage, right?

Speaker 1 Which is sort of the blue-collar part of this. Like, like the truckers in a trucker movie, these people are trying to figure out how to make ends meet on this very exploited job.

Speaker 1 And they're like, look, this is just the reality we're dealing with. So it's kind of an interesting twist on like, it is a certain kind of masculinity, but it is a kind of a desperate masculinity.

Speaker 1 It's not like, look, girl, we know better. It's look, we need to bring some money home.

Speaker 2 It's pragmatism, which becomes like resourcefulness at the expense of responsibility. Yeah.

Speaker 2 There's a there's the, you know, the responsible woman versus like pragmatic man is like a tension you'll see sort of pulling in a lot of like comedy often. Like, I just need to get this done.

Speaker 2 We need to just get on with this is the sort of like indifference to procedure and almost cowboy eyes on the prize attitude that is very endowed with masculinity.

Speaker 1 And then the sort of like hall monitor, checking the rules, being more responsible and in the end, usually being proven right is the is the feminized position yeah and again i think it's worth if people want to explore gender in the alien films i think that watching alien and aliens back to back is really instructive because aliens is really all about kind of measured like james cameron looked at the first movie and was like what this is this is a story of two women one is a gooey space vagina basically that bursts out of people's chest she's a girl yeah well no aliens are girls well in the in the second movie there's a queen, right?

Speaker 1 There's the alien queen, and there is Ripley, who adopts this girl that they find on an abandoned space station where everyone has been killed by the aliens.

Speaker 1 And basically, these two space ladies then battle over this girl, which leads to the probably the best line in the entire franchise, right?

Speaker 1 Which is the alien queen menaces the little girl, and Ellen Ripley shows up in this exosuit and goes, get away from her, you bitch.

Speaker 2 Get away from her, you bitch.

Speaker 2 So good.

Speaker 1 But you get this kind of kick-ass sort of femininity and masculinity in aliens is like hysterical in both directions. It's like overconfident.

Speaker 1 going on complete meltdown the moment things don't go its way. It's very, actually very Trump administration, right?

Speaker 1 Like it's these people who like joke about like there are all these colonists whose daughters we have to liberate off their virginity. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Speaker 2 And then half an hour later, they're game over, man, game over, right?

Speaker 1 Like it's like they're just like they go from one extreme of like assertiveness to just complete meltdown.

Speaker 1 And Cameron very much tries to sort of position his women as like being like, look, this is the shit in which we find ourselves. I don't think dick swinging or freaking the fuck out really helps.

Speaker 1 Like, where does this tunnel go? Should we try this tunnel, right? And this kind of pragmatism.

Speaker 1 The first movie doesn't quite work that way. Ripley's decision making is a little bit less clear and their collective decision-making is a little bit less clearly gendered.

Speaker 1 But it is about like a workplace in which people sort of

Speaker 1 have to communicate across gender lines in ways that to them feel a little bit unusual. And I think that that's all about that movie being made in 1977, right?

Speaker 1 Which is that, like, yeah, if Scott's model is like a truck stop or a, I don't know, a coal mine or whatever, the fact that those were not particularly gender integrated workplaces, but they were starting to be, right?

Speaker 1 There were female truckers in the late 70s, although they don't show up on film very often, right?

Speaker 1 Like, I'm not sure he's doing this on purpose, but there is an element here of like a newly unionized workplace in which people still can't quite figure out the gender politics, which is kind of cool.

Speaker 1 The beginning of Alien to me feels almost like a cinema varieté kind of thing, except that there is a thing that's about to come out of someone's chest.

Speaker 2 So you're saying that they don't really lean in to

Speaker 2 the like Cassandra epistemic politics until later in the franchise. Because this is what Alien is famous for, right?

Speaker 2 This is its famous like feminist critique is there's a woman who's right, but nobody ever listens to her and they suffer because they don't take her advice. It's kind of like a

Speaker 2 almost revenge story for like women's testimony. But you're saying that it has to grow into that.
It doesn't start off with that message.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, there is an element of gender politics there in the sense that, like, so I don't understand Ripley's job entirely.

Speaker 1 A warrant officer, I thought, was entirely a military thing, and the Nostromo appears to be a commercial vessel.

Speaker 1 But I think we're supposed to read into that that the military and corporations have kind of merged, which like we're on our way there, I guess.

Speaker 1 But it appears to be her job to not not let this guy in and They disobey her orders it's she's not Cassandra she's just enforcing regulation as you say she's the hall monitor she's saying this is a bad idea it's not that she has any intuition or anything like that right like often with someone like Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween what distinguishes the final girl often is her intuition which can be of course quite female coded right like I don't know I can't I can't explain it but I just get a bad feeling about all this that is not as I remember that scene in Alien She really just like, look, we have these rules for a reason, and I don't think we should be doing this, you guys.

Speaker 1 There is, of course, a bigger gender politics, which is, you know, I've alluded to it a couple of times now that like a lot of H.R. Geiger's designs seem like if sex toys had teeth or whatever.

Speaker 1 Like, it does feel like.

Speaker 2 What do you mean by that?

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, like, the alien is a, I mean, people can all picture this, right?

Speaker 1 Like, is a long sort of phallic skull that can jut out another jaw a separate separate jaw so like very much about penetration at the same time the chest bursting scene is not subtle in the fact that it is a man essentially giving birth to this alien and what these aliens do is impregnate people impregnate men in particular although the second part it's a woman but whatever but like in that first film it is it is a man and in the third film it's made explicit that ripley births an alien out of her chest as she jumps into like molting iron ore for some reason.

Speaker 1 I don't remember. But, you know, we talked about the object last time.

Speaker 1 This is all about sort of the powers of horror, about like these things in your body that aren't supposed to be there, about your bodily kind of coherence being threatened, about another thing growing inside of you.

Speaker 1 And then there's also just like a kind of delight in mucus. The alien is famous for its acidic blood, but even beyond that, it's just a

Speaker 1 very gloopy creature. It's constantly dripping, it's constantly salivating.

Speaker 1 You don't have to be a Freudian to be like, is there some vagina dentata stuff going on here?

Speaker 2 So not exactly subtle.

Speaker 1 No, exactly, which then makes kind of the more realistic gender politics kind of interesting, right? This is what I mean.

Speaker 1 Like it's a movie that starts out being almost like the coal miners' daughters for like Harlan County, USA, or something like that, and then becomes like a fairy tale.

Speaker 1 And the same way it's gender politics start being like, oh, average American workplace, and then end up being like, squeak-goo thing the, you know, responsible church lady or whatever, right?

Speaker 1 It's very interesting. It's not quite the Clover argument about re-identification.
It's more that the story fakes us out a couple of times.

Speaker 1 We aren't quite sure what it's all about and what kind of movie we're watching until quite late into it.

Speaker 1 It's a little hard now that, of course, like an alien movie is its own genre and we all know what's coming but i do imagine that seeing it for the first time the movie plays with convention it's like you you think you're watching one kind of movie with one kind of gender politics and then you end up with something quite different oh and we should maybe say that like the tv show makes the kind of fairy tale aspects of this very, very stuttingly obvious by having the alien let loose on a island where there are a bunch of sort of androids that have human children's minds inside them that are all named after the lost boys from Peter Pan.

Speaker 1 Weird. Okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So like that TV show is sort of like trying to make that obvious that like this is ultimately using technology and kind of comments about capitalism to tell what's ultimately a fairy story.

Speaker 2 It all goes back to early childhood, folks. We're just back to Freud already.
Oh, yeah. On the couch again.

Speaker 2 On the couch again. This is a good spot to wrap up.
I had a lot of fun doing this with you. We should do this next year.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, there's already a bunch that people have brought up there.
I'm like, fuck, I got to watch that. Yeah, we got to.

Speaker 2 I got to rewatch it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm sorry to people who voted late for Scream.

Speaker 1 Scream overtook the Wickerman at the last minute. I think it's good for the coherence of these two episodes that they're all 1970s movies with recent remakes.

Speaker 1 At the same time, I do think watching Scream together would be super fun at some point.

Speaker 2 So fun. And it's a spoof on the genre itself.
It's like a setup of horror movies.

Speaker 1 It is. It's a meta-horror movie where the question is, what role does knowingness play in the gender politics of a slasher movie?

Speaker 1 If you make a slasher movie that knowingly spoofs gendered conventions, are you fully exempt from those gendered conventions or not, right? There are some interesting answers in Scream.

Speaker 1 I'll just very briefly say that, right? There is, on the one hand, like no.

Speaker 1 The movie very often sort of tacks onto the same kind of gendered tropes of identification and victimization that Mulvie would just chafe at.

Speaker 1 On the other hand, one thing that Scream doesn't have, it has this final girl, but it really has a group of final girls, not all of whom are women.

Speaker 1 It's usually a group of friends that survives at the end. It's usually the killer, it's usually not one person.
It's usually two killers working together or more. I think there's three at some point.

Speaker 1 And at least in the first Scream movie, you know, I think like something like four or five characters survive the movie, sort of together, working together in interesting ways.

Speaker 1 Some of them by taking the conventions of the genre very seriously. This would be the character of Randy who tells everyone like, don't have sex because like the killer will get you.

Speaker 1 And the ones that decide that the rules don't apply to them. That say like, look, these are dumb rules that someone came up with in the 70s.
Fuck them. We can make our own rules, right?

Speaker 1 And it's interesting in the way that like Scream, God, I'm like doing a whole dissertation on Scream, but like Scream sort of is trying to walk this tightrope between taking the kind of conventions of the 70s as gospel and then saying like, well, what if we don't?

Speaker 2 Something for next year.

Speaker 1 Something for next year to look forward to. Well, thank you for going into outer space and Freiburg, Germany with me, Moira.

Speaker 1 I'm excited to get to return to the much less scary pastures of Project 1933 next year.

Speaker 2 Thank you all so much for listening. We'll see you next time.
See you next time.

Speaker 1 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 Lyle.
Our title music is by Katie Lyle.