Tag: psychological horror

Horror, Movies

Obsession Review: Feminist Subtext Gives This Horror Film Staying Power

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Went to see Obsession this weekend, and it was a dark, heavy horror film that seemed to come out of nowhere. The director and writer Curry Barker is a twenty-six-year-old YouTuber who got his chops doing comedy bits with his friend Cooper Tomlinson on their channel that’s a bad idea. Then in 2024, he released a sixty-two-minute found footage horror movie Milk & Serial online that was enormously popular and got the attention of producers. He made Milk & Serial with an $800 budget, but Tea Shop Productions producer James Harris was able to secure about a million dollars to shoot Obsession. I’ve got a soft spot for DIY artists, and learning the background of Barker just makes me like the movie even more.

Curry Barker while shooting Obsession.

The Obsession actors were wonderful and really elevated the material, particularly Inde Navarrette, who played Nikki, the object of desire in Obsession. The story rests on “The Monkey’s Paw” premise: Be careful what you wish for. Bear is the male lead (played by Michael Johnston), a young man in his twenties who’s living in his dead grandmother’s house with a cat and appears to be suffering from failure to launch. He hangs out with a group of three friends at the music store where he works, a fantasy dead-end job if I ever heard of one. Can you imagine a music store staffed by an owner and four employees in their twenties surviving in this economy? You’d think there would be a deep passion for music suffusing the dialogue, but that never really happens. Odd but perhaps effective since the scope is narrow in this movie, giving it a suffocating, claustrophobic feel once the film gets rolling along.

Inde Navarrette as Nikki in Obsession.

Bear carries an unrequited love for Nikki, one of his coworkers at the music store and part of his core friend group. Everybody seems to be aware of the torch he carries, even Nikki, but as far as Bear knows, only his coworker Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) has the details about the situation. Ian’s great piece of advice to Bear is to neg Nikki and tease her about how she used to be called “Freaky Nikki.”

The four coworkers have a regular standing date for trivia night at a bar, where Bear intended to reveal his feelings for Nikki, but before that happens, he finds his beloved cat dead. This ends up being a troubling part of the movie for me, because it comes back to the cat carcass again and again, and I’m firmly in the corner of no animal abuse. I just don’t like it. I’ll forgive it in this movie because it is innovative, and I can see how the obsession moves from soul to soul.

Bear decides not to go to trivia night so he can mourn his cat, but as he looks at pictures of Nikki on his phone, she calls him, cajoling him into joining the group. She mentions that she dropped her crystal necklace down a sink drain and that she’s putting in her two weeks at the store because she needs to do something different with her life. Nikki is an aspiring novelist and working on a love story but says she needs to feel love first.

This establishes a deadline for Bear; he only has so much time to act before he no longer sees his crush on a regular basis. Bear pops into a magic shop, intending to buy a replacement crystal necklace for Nikki, and Barker really nails the aesthetics of this store, which appears in two scenes, where all the witchy goods are displayed: crystals, tarot, herbs, and a bewitching red-and-white box called One Wish Willow that costs $6.99. (Apparently, these scenes were shot in the magic shop the Green Man in Burbank, California.) I can practically smell the incense as a bored witch talks to someone on her headset while giving Bear a desultory rundown of what different types of crystals mean. Bear’s attracted by the One Wish Willow, even after the witch tells him people have come back with lots of complaints about that product. He ends up purchasing it and joins his friends for trivia night, where Sarah and Nikki talk about their books in progress and whether it’s appropriate to write at work. Bear gets several chances at the bar to confess his feelings to Nikki but suffers a bout of nerves each time and backs down.

After trivia night, half the group wants to continue partying while Nikki just wants to go home, so Bear offers her a ride home. Bear is given the perfect opportunity to declare his feelings after several stop-start conversations inside his car outside her doorstep. But he does not. No, once Nikki leaves for good, he opens up his One Wish Willow and wishes that Nikki would love only him out of everybody else in the world.

One Wish Willow: Be Careful What You Wish For!

And then she does, and the horror starts. She reappears in a stalkerish move right outside his driver’s side window, and in a flash, it’s apparent that Nikki’s whole personality has changed. Gone is the independent young woman with her own agency, making a major life decision to support her art. Now everything is centered around how she can be with Bear always, and Inde Navarrette excels at putting the creep into Nikki. Her wardrobe changes to pick-me girl fashions, and her face crumples at any perceived rejection from Bear. She obsessively watches him, and Bear enjoys this for a while as they go through their honeymoon phase, exclusively spending time with each other, but there are telltale glitches showing that the real Nikki is not on board with these changes: the aforementioned cat scenes and moments where she pops out of her adoring haze to say, “What the fuck?” There’s also a party scene where she reads some of her writing after her body’s been taken over, launching into an incestuous Hansel and Gretel monologue: “’Hansel, come lay with me like the old women taught us when we were children,’” I said. …Hansel is my soul. Love only the branch of a willow tree could conjure. Brother, you will be inside of me tonight.

Nikki (Inde Navarrette) and Bear (Michael Johnston) in Obsession.

I found a feminist subtext to Obsession, and I think that’s why the movie is sticking with me. In the friend group at the music store, it’s the two young women Nikki and Sarah (played by Megan Lawless) who have grand plans for their lives and are taking steps toward making that happen, while the guys, Bear and Ian, seem content to remain at status quo. These are some lazy-ass guys who want the cool girl by their side for drinking games and their hobbies, yet completely lose their shit when their woman’s so devoted she can’t even pee or poop without her man around.

The crazy wears thin after a while, and we get to see a subverted version of the Alison Bechdel test. Sarah and Nikki were originally friends, but the new Nikki now sees Sarah as a threat and won’t allow her to have any interaction with Bear. This woman exists exclusively for Bear and nobody else can interfere. The grisliest scene provoked an intense response from the audience in the theater, many uttering, “Oh my God,” over and over again, and I found myself doing the same.

That’s the horror of a perfect woman built by man. Be careful what you wish for.

Astrology, Books, Crime, Horror

Joyce Carol Oates Astrology: A Dark, Unsettling Literary Birth Chart (Part 1)

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Part 1 of a 4-part series on the astrology of Joyce Carol Oates

A portrait of Joyce Carol Oates with a thoughtful expression, featuring the text 'The Astrology of Joyce Carol Oates Part I' alongside various astrological symbols in the background.

In college I had a subscription to the New Yorker because I’d learned in various workshops and the lit I consumed that this was where great writing could be found. I’d read the short stories that appeared in each issue, studying them and often wondering, What makes this great? Most of the stories left me strangely cold. I couldn’t connect with them and thought maybe I didn’t have enough life experience yet. Maybe I had to live in New York to understand.

But then I stumbled across Joyce Carol Oates’s “Zombie” in the magazine. Just the title alone was enough to make me read it, and I was transported by the short, clipped sentences of a serial killer who yearned for a companion and decided to make one. I could feel his pining and how desperately the narrator was misunderstood, even though he committed horrible crimes. I’ve always been attracted to the darker things in life, and this story (loosely based on serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer) made me actually feel and believe I understood such motivations. What witchery! I was in love.

Immediately, I went to the library and found the Oates section, where there were so many works, she had her own shelf. I read the inner flaps of each novel and collection of short stories, deciding what I would read first, and picked out Foxfire, a story about a girl gang. What a perfect first Oates novel for me. As an English major at the University of Iowa, most of my time was spent reading and discussing white male authors, so I was ecstatic to find a woman writer with dark, gritty work mining all that disturbing territory that I loved. And she had so many books—I would never run out, I thought.

Since that time more than thirty years ago, Joyce Carol Oates’s works have been a backbeat to my life and a huge influence on my own writing. From the horrific food porn of Wonderland to her fictionalized odyssey of Marilyn Monroe in Blonde, I’ve been reading her work, noticing themes about American life that Oates comes back to again and again. Right now, I’m preparing to reread Joyce Carol Oates’s canon, starting from her very first collection of short stories By the North Gate to her most recent novel Fox. I’ve also been looking at her astrological chart, studying it like I once did the New Yorker, trying to figure out what makes her such a talented writer and how she’s sustained such a long career. Here’s a look at her chart, and in the first part of this series, I’m going to be focusing on the first quadrant.

Astrological birth chart of Joyce Carol Oates, showing planetary positions, aspects, and signs, with details on Sun sign as Gemini and Ascendant as Aquarius.

Her ascendant is at 28 degrees of Aquarius, which is potent; there are thirty degrees in a sign and with Oates’s near the end, she’s able to harness all the power of it and act with a sense of urgency. Aquarians view the world through a humanitarian lens and are known for being curious about the people around them and how they can become their best selves, making a better society. Often, a rising Aquarius comes off as cold, withdrawn, and emotionally distant to others; they’re the intellectuals of the zodiac and live in their heads, taking apart anything they encounter, trying to see what makes it tick. And they can be shy.

The first house of the zodiac, the ascendent, shows us how Joyce Carol Oates approaches life, and it is first as an intellectual. She stands on the sidelines, taking everything in, and she does have that Aquarian trait of shyness. She went to Syracuse University on a scholarship and was so shy she couldn’t even read her stories aloud during her writing workshop; her teacher had to read her stories to the class. Oates graduated in 1960 as valedictorian of her class and was horrified to learn that she was expected to give a speech in front of hundreds of people. The only way she might escape this was if the graduation ceremony was rained out, which had never happened before. Oates did the work and wrote a speech, revising it many times, but she kept saying over and over again, “I don’t want to give a speech. I don’t want to give a speech.” The day of the graduation was sunny as people gathered at Archibald Stadium, but soon heavy, gray rain clouds began rolling in and a steady drizzle started as the ceremony began. The drizzle turned to sheeting rain, and at first people cracked open their umbrellas on the bleachers, but eventually parents started fleeing, and the chancellor interrupted his own speech to say, “You’re all graduated.”

The first house is also associated with one’s style, and Aquarians are known for their eclectic choices. They like bright, saturated colors, different textures, and shapes, and you can see that sense of style in how Joyce Carol Oates presents herself to the world. She loves big statement necklaces and earrings, scarves, and hats–her fingers always adorned by a couple of rings.

A collage of images featuring a woman with distinctive features, showcasing various outfits and poses in different settings.

Her first house spans three zodiacal signs–Aquarius, Pisces, and Aries–a phenomenon known as intercepted signs, which is an indicator of a person having a karmic lesson that still needs to be learned. Pisces is the intercepted sign in her first house and is known for its artistry and psychic abilities. Some say that an intercepted sign indicates the person having a difficult time expressing those qualities, but Oates has two planets in her first house, making it quite dynamic.

She has Jupiter in her intercepted sign of Pisces, where the planet is in its domicile, meaning this is one of two placements where Jupiter shines and does its job to the best of its abilities. Jupiter is a benevolent planet known for luck and expanding everything it touches, and of course, we can’t talk about Joyce Carol Oates without discussing her tremendous output. She’s even been cruelly mocked for this ability, as in James Wolcott’s infamous essay “Stop Me Before I Write Again: Six Hundred More Pages by Joyce Carol Oates,” which appeared in a 1982 issue of Harper’s magazine. But this expansive and abundant scope of how she makes sense of the world is a part of her identity–she was born to be a writer and to write a lot.

In her first house, she also has Saturn in Aries, where the planet is in its fall and struggles to function. Saturn is considered a malefic planet and is the exact opposite of Jupiter. It’s about time, structure, discipline, coldness, and contraction, but the zodiacal sign of Aries is impatient and hot, so Saturn doesn’t do well there. It’s an awkward fit, and regarding her writing, Oates can struggle to turn off the faucet. But I can also see Saturn and Jupiter combining here, with Saturn giving form and discipline to her boundless imagination. Oates identifies as a formalist where she’s most concerned with the structure of literature, the building blocks of sentences, words, and punctuation, and Saturn is all about structure.

She has Uranus in her second house, and because Oates is a rising Aquarius, that makes Uranus her chart’s ruler. Uranus is the planet of sudden surprises and innovation, and the second house is all about values and personal finances. Uranus is also associated with new technology and the internet, and Oates has quickly adopted those innovations that give form to writing. About a decade ago, she joined Twitter and has since then delivered some of the sickest burns. My recent favorite is the takedown she did on Elon Musk who bought Twitter and renamed it X:

A tweet by Joyce Carol Oates reflecting on a wealthy man's lack of appreciation for common experiences and emotions, highlighting the contrast between wealth and cultural engagement.

She’s also been an early adopter of Substack, an online platform where writers can share their work through subscriptions and make money off their words. Her second house starts in Aries, all about energy and initiating things, but it ends in Taurus, which is associated with nature and agrarian culture, definitely one of Oates’s values. She likes going out daily for walks, runs, and bicycle rides in nature, and this is where she likes to work out ideas for her stories. She also grew up on a farm and acknowledges her childhood in Lockport, New York, as an integral part of her writing: “I am drawn to write about rural and small-town upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer’s recurring dreams are likely to be set in childhood places. Our oldest memories are the most deeply imprinted in our brains—the first to be absorbed into our physical being, in neurons; the last to be lost, as consciousness fades to black.”

Taurus extends into the third house of her astrological chart, which rules siblings, communications, and short trips. That makes sense to me as Oates uses nature and setting as a conduit for her stories, and the third house ends in Gemini, which rules communications and duality since it is quite literally the sign of the twins. Oates’s sister Lynn Ann was born on her eighteenth birthday, and Joyce was allowed to name the new baby, which she took very seriously. Lynn was autistic and nonverbal, and Joyce’s mother took care of her youngest child at home until Lynn was fifteen and physically attacked her mother, injuring her. They then had to institutionalize her for their own safety. Joyce and Lynn Ann shared an uncanny physical appearance and could have been twins, identical, born eighteen years apart. But where Joyce had been gifted with language, Lynn was nonverbal and existed in a physical world ruled by sensations.

Horror, Movies

31 Days of Horror: Umma (2022) Review: When Motherhood Turns Into Horror

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I was on a JetBlue flight to California for my pick yesterday (October 6), and my choices were severely limited. You would think with the month being October, they would have come up with some Halloween-themed programming. That was not the case. After some mad texting with my sister before takeoff, we settled on Umma since neither of us had seen it. Umma was a very short movie with Sandra Oh as the lead, who I love, and I was initially excited because the JetBlue notes said Sam Raimi directed the film. How odd, I thought. That’s something that ought to have been on my radar, a new Sam Raimi horror movie. But lies! He did not direct the movie—JetBlue must not use a fact checker for their programming notes. Instead, he produced it, which I found out later when I had proper Internet access. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQdXvvtu-iI

Somehow, sandwiched between five kids to the front and back of me, I started my movie about thirty minutes into the flight. And I was underwhelmed.

The adjectives I would apply to this movie overall are pale and thin. It’s a bit of a nothing story with Oh playing overprotective mother Amanda, who is a beekeeper making her money selling honey and doing quite well after a social media post goes viral. She has plans to expand the business with her daughter Chris (Fivel Stewart) to keep up with skyrocketing demand for the product, but Chris has other ideas for her future.

Amanda has a peculiar illness where she’s allergic to electricity, most likely stemming from abuse as there are several flashbacks with imagery of hands being electrocuted. That results in Chris and Amanda living in an old farmhouse lit by kerosene lamps, which gives the movie a beautiful, old-timey aesthetic. I’m not sure how they tend to all the other beekeeping and honey-making duties without electricity, but somehow, we’re led to believe that they get it done. Amanda does get help from her accountant and business partner Danny (Dermot Mulroney) who shoulders a good part of the work. He has a niece visiting him for the summer, River (Odeya Rush), who helps to show Chris what a normal young woman’s life looks like. Chris is socially awkward after being homeschooled by Amanda and has absorbed her fear of the outside world.

There are glimmers of real promise in Umma—some of the acting between Oh and Stewart are magical and crackled off my tiny JetBlue screen. I also appreciated the theme of filial piety and nods to Korean mythology. I got just a taste and wished there had been so much more. There just wasn’t enough story, I thought, for the whole movie to hang together. Iris K. Shim wrote and directed this film, and looking up her previous work, I’ve added her documentary The House of Suh to my list of movies to watch. I do hope she will write and direct another horror movie. She’s working with some wonderful elements, but I don’t think the big picture has been fully realized yet.

The rest of my weekend, I was fully immersed in my astrology retreat and didn’t watch any other horror movies, though I collected a lot of ideas. There was a huge contingent of horror movie fans at the event, and I’ve got a huge list of films and series on my To Be Watched list: Martyrs (2008), The Ritual, Kill List, The Dark and the Wicked, The Servant, and Trollhunter. Just when I think I’m well-versed in horror, I realize how much I still have to learn. So it looks like my 31 Days of Horror series will have to extend into November, but with the amount of titles I’m adding to my TBW list, I might have to turn this project into something larger. Maybe there’s 365 Days of Horror in me.

Horror, Movies

31 Days of Horror: The Sadness (2021) Review: When Violence Becomes Contagious

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After the twisted, delirious showing of Titane last night, my sister was on her A game trying to deliver tonight. She selected the Taiwanese zombie film The Sadness, a Shudder original that’s available to stream on that channel. Kristi was chortling because of a review posted by a horror aficionado who said this was the type of movie that people walk out of the theaters on and that even he, a gorehound, found deeply upsetting. Definitely not a  movie I would pick out for myself, but rules are rules. So I finished my dinner before we started watching and kept my yellow notebook beside me to jot down notes in if things got too extreme. www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwZMZOS_dh0

Kat (Regina Lei) and Jim (Berant Zhu), a likable couple, wake up to what will be their last normal morning, though they don’t know it. Kat and Jim have a little tiff because of the trip they’ve planned for the next week. Kat works a 9 to 5 and has to negotiate hard to take off any of her allotted ten vacation days a year; meanwhile, Jim is freelance and has to take work when he can get it. And a big job has arrived for just that week of planned vacation, and he can’t afford to turn it down. They go about their morning doing the usual mundane things—getting dressed, rustling up breakfast. In foreign movies, I’m always so jealous of what the characters are eating for breakfast: bowls of noodles, an eggroll and pork-fried rice, or in this case, a bao dumpling with hot sauce. I should try one of these variations when I get back from California next week, just for something different.

There’s a tense, ominous atmosphere already with news about the Alvin virus spreading, and much of the public not believing in the doctors who say it’s something akin to rabies. And though this movie is violent and disturbing, there are some shots that are just heartbreakingly beautiful, which was really jarring to my emotions. One comes while Jim takes Kat to the train station on his motorbike. In slow motion, they pass a gruesome scene with police cars, an ambulance, and the aftermath of blood and violence, and Kat touches Jim’s back, just a reassurance that they are okay during this moment of chaos. However, that just marks the beginning of the chaos.

The Alvin virus infects humans and rapidly turns them into zombies unlike any I’ve ever seen. These zombies move quickly like the ones in 28 Days Later, but they do it with a rictus of a smile on their faces and talk dirty, saying the most vile things. Once I got over that shock, I realized that these zombies were also capable of sexual violence and almost seemed to seek it out.

It’s a Grand Guignol of a movie with slaughteramas that are almost beautiful with thick sprays of blood, but then the flesh creeps when the zombies lower their suspenders or pants and you realize what’s happening off-camera.

Horror, Movies

31 Days of Horror: Titane (2021) Review: A Violent, Intimate Vision of Body Horror and Identity

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I was a big fan of Julia Ducournau’s Raw when it came out in 2016 and have been waiting a long time for a follow-up from her. This year her Palme d’Or-winning feature Titane is available to stream on Hulu, and so that’s how we spent our Tuesday night. www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzq-_f1fW_s

The body horror that’s part of Ducournau’s style emerges within the first twenty minutes of the film, as well as some of her commentary on the hell of being a woman. And she goes harsh. There were several scenes where I had to put my hands up in front of my face. (Always peeking through my fingers, but the hands are up just in case.)

I saw a lot of similarities between Raw and Titane right away. The protagonist of the film is named Alexia (Agatha Rousselle), just like the sister of Justine, the main character of 2016’s Raw. And Garance Marillier who played Justine in Raw appears as a Justine in Titane as well, though for a shorter period of time. It makes me wonder what the significance of these names are for Ducournau and if this will be an emerging theme in later works.

Alexia is involved in a terrible car accident when she’s younger caused by her father trying to discipline her while driving. She suffers a traumatic brain injury and has a steel plate put in her head that appears to alter her personality. When Alexia is finally discharged from the hospital, the first thing she does is hug and kiss the car involved in her accident. She has more affection for it than she does for her own parents.

Several years later, Alexia has grown up into a tattooed young woman who works as a model at car shows. Rather than just posing with the automobiles, Alexia writhes and moans Tawny Kitaen-style on her car, putting together an erotic dance that outshines all the other car models. She’s obviously the star in this niche world. Alexia’s fan base is rabid as she signs autographs, and she’s even chased by one of her overeager worshippers and lets him catch her. This is how the audience learns that she’s a serial killer. Sexual urges seem to lead Alexia into murdering her victims; she starts to engage aggressively with different partners, but then it’s almost as if something shuts off and she gets bored, leading to murder.

News programs appear in the background of early scenes detailing missing children and the recent victims of a possible serial killer, which makes me wonder if Alexia has been killing for a very long time. Alexia still lives with her parents, but after she discovers she’s pregnant with very odd symptoms, she locks them in their room and takes off. In a train station, Alexia discovers that there’s a police sketch of her likeness in connection to the recent murders, but near those are also a photo of a boy who went missing years earlier. With a horrific bathroom makeover, Alexia is able to masquerade as a skinny boy and is reunited with her “father” Vincent (Vincent Lindon), the hyper-masculine captain of a fire brigade.

The pregnancy and Alexia finding acceptance for who she is through Vincent happens in the fraternity-like atmosphere of the firehouse. When the firemen are not battling disaster simulations and situations, they hold rave parties near the firetrucks, and Alexia treats them to one of her special car dances. Some are disgusted while others love it.

I’m with the latter half. Titane was gross, fun, and I completely loved it.

Horror, Movies

31 Days of Horror: The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015): A Cold, Quiet Horror of Isolation and Possession

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Today was my choice for our daily horror movie, and I went for The Blackcoat’s Daughter, which was available to watch on Showtime. My reasons: It has Kiernan Shipka in it, who I love, and takes place in a Catholic boarding school. I’ve always been attracted to those boarding school settings that are perfect for witchcraft and covens. If I see a plaid skirt, I’m in. It’s been a dreary day in New York with lots of rain coming down from the remnants of Hurricane Ian. So with a Chinese food order on the way and my legs tucked under a leopard blanket, we started the movie.

At an upstate New York Catholic boarding school called Bramford Academy, two girls are left during the start of winter break: Kat (Kiernan Shipka), a freshman who seems disconnected from most of her classmates and staff, and Rose (Lucy Boynton), an upperclassman who believes she is pregnant and has lied to her parents about when to pick her up.

Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton).

Kat seems to have a vision about her parents dying in an accident and engages in increasingly odd behavior as the girls rattle around alone in the academy with only two older nuns to watch over them. At night, Rose hears moaning coming up through the heater vents, and when she goes down to the boiler room, she finds Kat prostrating herself in front of the furnace.

Left alone long enough, something changes.

This sequence comes to an end with some disturbing contortions from Kat while sleeping, the kind I associate with demon possession. And then we cut to a new storyline where the subject switches to a third girl named Joan (Emma Roberts) who has escaped from a psychiatric hospital and is trying to put some distance between herself and it. There’s no indication whether this storyline is happening simultaneously with Kat and Rose’s or precedes or comes after it.

She’s picked up by a man named Bill and his wife in a creepy scene where I kept waiting for some sort of sexual overture to happen. Instead, Bill (James Remar) pays for Joan’s hotel room while they are on the road heading to a town that’s just past Bramford. And while visiting with her in her hotel room to get her story, he tells Joan that he believes God put her in his path. This all happens while Joan sits in a towel with a prominent puckered scar on her shoulder that matches another on her chest. Later, he shows her a picture of his daughter Rose, who’s now deceased.

The absence leaves room for something to take hold.

There’s some more back and forth between the characters’ storylines, and the audience now knows that Kat and Rose’s story comes first. In the second section featuring Kat and Rose, Kat continues to be creepy. She tells Rose twice, “You smell pretty.” We see Kat’s calendar marked with winter break and then there’s a big heart drawn over February 14 earlier in the month. An alternate title for the movie is actually February, what I think of as the bleakest month in some parts of the United States. But the heart makes me think that maybe Kat was trying to flirt with Rose? I don’t know—there’s not much to work with here.

Through Kat’s perspective, the audience sees a black-horned shape that haunts her in nearly every scene. When she tries to call her family, she gets a disembodied voice telling her to kill everyone. The nuns, Rose, and Kat sit down for lunch, and Kat has a breakdown that ends in a murderous rampage. She turns up Ed Kemper–style in front of the furnace in the basement boiler room and is shot by a frightened cop.

A horror that settles rather than strikes.

After this, we’re back to Joan’s storyline, and going by the prominent bullet scar on her body, I’m guessing she’s supposed to be Kat. I’m not sure if the Joan section makes much sense to me. I can see similarities in the hair, but the two actresses appear to be around the same age so the difference in the timeline doesn’t gel for me. But I understand the impulse to try and tie the story up neatly. A lot of this movie left me cold, and I don’t think it was just the rainy day. I liked the puzzling little details that seemed to fit together neatly by the end of the movie, but I couldn’t really find much heart pumping the story along. This was the first feature film by director Oz Perkins, who comes from quite a horror pedigree as he’s the son of Anthony Perkins. He’s also directed I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House and Gretel & Hansel. I quite liked the retelling of Gretel & Hansel; it was so atmospheric and gothic and real feminist horror, I thought. But I haven’t yet seen I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. Maybe I’ll slate it for later in the month, on the days when I’m traveling. I like it that Perkins has chosen to do horror focusing on women’s stories and want to see how he further develops.

Horror, Movies

31 Days of Horror: Hatching (2022) Review: When Motherhood Turns Monstrous

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Thirty-one days of horror started three years ago when we were at the height of quarantine. October has always been a favorite month with lots of events—readings and get-togethers with my chapter of the Horror Writers Association, haunted houses, and always a big Halloween party on the thirty-first. But with everything still closed at the end of 2020, we had to come up with another way to celebrate. So my sister and I decided to watch a horror movie for each night of October, where we took turns picking a film each night. The only rule was that neither of us could have seen it before.

It’s become a wonderful experiment where I watch things I would never normally pick out for myself, and there’s a huge sense of competition because we always want to outdo each other with our choices. There have been a few stinkers, like The Lighthouse and Climax. But generally, it has elevated my horror game. We usually end up watching a fair amount of foreign horror films because those end up being the movies we haven’t seen yet. And a lot of times those are really scary for me because they don’t follow the American horror tropes that I know so well.

My sister had been thinking on her choice for a couple of days and selected HATCHING, a 2022 Finnish horror film that’s available on Hulu. I watched the trailer and was looking forward to sinking my teeth into this one. It had a Grimm fairy tales feel to it, but also included sports and modern twists. We had to restart the movie at the beginning because somehow the settings were tuned to English narration. We were getting a very creepy monotone voice saying things like “IFC logo appears with blood dripping off the I; girl appears in blue leotard; there is tickling.” Disturbing already and worth a laugh, but we prefer to hear the foreign movies in their original language with English subtitles. And sometimes I can even understand some of the words with my hodgepodge knowledge of German, Spanish, and Italian.

Once we got HATCHING properly started, I was creeped out by the perfect polish of this perfect Finnish family in their perfect house. Lots of blond hair, two children playing, and fuzzy zoom-ins of Mom and Dad kissing while their daughter looks on fondly and her brother rolls his eyes. Then the tableaux is shattered as a bird strikes the living room window.

Picture-perfect IKEA family.

We zoom out of this stylized family portrait in its IKEA-style setting and now see that Mom’s holding her phone on a selfie stick as she cobbles together content for her vlog. She’s an influencer using her family as props and intends for the focus to always fall on her. However, it’s her daughter Trija, her oldest child on the precipice of puberty, who steals the film. And it’s a wonder to see. Siiri Solalinna plays Trija, and the many expressions this young actress uses to portray this people-pleasing daughter are like quicksilver, portraying so many facets of her character.

“Eye of the Tiger” Trija (Siiri Solalinna) in Hatching.

My favorite is eye-of-the-tiger Trija when she’s training hard as a gymnast for her first big competition, something that Mom (Sophia Heikkilä) has been amping up on her channel. The intensity of her eyes as she jogs could burn down trees. Mom ends up being a stage mother of staggering proportions, forcing her daughter to practice routines until her hands are blistered. Trija finds an egg in the creepy woods and bonds with it while her mother is away during the weekends for “vlogging” conferences—yeah, right.

Something is growing—and it won’t stay contained.

Eventually, this egg hatches into something, and I can’t say I was in love with the look of the thing when it emerged. It was giving me goofy Howard the Duck vibes, but it does morph through the course of the film becoming something deep and meaningful for Trija as this mother-daughter saga unfolds.

What you suppress doesn’t disappear.

There are some genuine gross-out moments where I was holding my hand over my mouth, feeling my gorge rise. I thought, You’re not going down that road. But yes, director and writer Hanna Bergholm did, and I’m not mad about it.

All in all, a wonderful film to start off 31 Days of Horror.

Art, Books, Horror

V.C. Andrews and the Dark Fairy Tale Behind Flowers in the Attic

by horrorfeministaLeave a Comment on V.C. Andrews and the Dark Fairy Tale Behind Flowers in the Attic

V. C. Andrews’s books have become cult classics, but when they first came out, her publisher wasn’t sure how to classify them so they were labeled horror and actually outsold Stephen King’s work at the time. Andrews was born Cleo Virginia Andrews in Portsmouth, Virginia, and lived there most of her life—much of it while ill and confined to bed and a wheelchair.

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Andrews fell down a flight of stairs when she was in high school, and after she had surgery, she began to suffer from arthritis that fused her spine. She was only able to complete high school with the help of private tutors and then worked as an artist, drawing portraits of apple-cheeked girls and still lifes of flowers that are quite at odds with the dark portraits later used to illustrate her series. She lived alone with her mother Lillian until she died of cancer at sixty-three.

A sketch of a woman with an elegant hairstyle, looking thoughtfully to the side. The artwork features soft lines and shading, capturing her facial features and expression.
A young girl dressed as a ballet dancer sits on a vintage chair by a window, gazing thoughtfully with a slight frown. She has blonde hair adorned with a pink ribbon and wears a tutu and ballet slippers. The room is softly lit, with floral decoration on the floor.

 

Her editor, Ann Patty, bought the ninety-eight-page manuscript of Flowers in the Attic in 1978, though it needed a lot of editorial guidance. Before she offered to buy the book for a $7,500 advance, one publishing insider said the manuscript had been rejected more than twenty-four times by various editors. Patty told a marketing director who complained about Andrews’s stilted dialogue, “It’s her style—it may be awful, but it is a style, and it will be read as original.”

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Patty had already gone through two revisions with Andrews (the first one causing the manuscript to increase to six hundred pages), and in her second editorial letter, she said, “I’ve frequently noted where you start sentences with adverbs or reverse the natural order of a sentence. It’s good to do this sometimes, but you do it too much, and it often makes for rather awkward reading.”

 

Andrews was influenced by fairy tales when she was young. “I loved the fairy tales. But there is an element of horror in fairy tales, so that when I would go through the woods, I was always looking for something—a witch, an ogre, something scary—and it was never there, and that was a little bit disappointing. I didn’t want a real horror, liked a rapist or a murderer, but I wanted a fairy-tale horror,” she said.

 

Youth is an obsession in Andrews’s books and it appears to have been a topic that was always on her mind. After an unflattering article ran in People magazine, where she said her age was inflated and photographs portrayed her as an ancient recluse, Andrews rarely gave interviews. “The first interview I ever had was with People magazine,” said Andrews. “And they told me, quite frankly, that they come to get dirt. They ask all of your friends and everybody they can find, ‘Tell us the dirt about V. C. Andrews.’ And when they don’t find any, they make up things. For instance, I wouldn’t tell her my age. So she went around and found somebody who told them I was older then I was. I said, ‘You must have found an enemy.’ And the reporter said, ‘What are you trying to hide?’”

 

Andrews was so angry about the interview and pictures printed that she wrote her relative: “How dare you say those photographs in People’s magazine are good? They were awful! I don’t look like that old woman peeking out of the window! I hated the photo of me in the chair! I refuse to allow pictures of me sitting in that thing—but they sneaked in one, and I couldn’t tell when the photographer was shooting the entire time she was here—about six hours. We were taken out to lunch in a nice French restaurant, then back home, and all the time I was interviewed. Taped too. Dolly Landon wrote thirty pages and it was edited down to that short amount you read—thank goodness. From now on I am demanding editorial and pictorial control or NO interview! I showed the magazine to my photographer friend and he said the one in the window had been airbrushed to make my face shadowy and spooky—all to sensationalize the type of books I write. No wonder movie stars hate journalists! I’m with them all the way! They snoop, pry, question, when my life is none of their damn business!”

 

Andrews said a lot of people assumed her work was autobiographical—that she was a victim of incest and had been locked away by relatives who wanted her unseen, as happens in her famous Dollanganger series. “They see me as an abused child who has really suffered. They feel sorry for me, terribly sorry that I have gone though this awful abuse and was then locked away. A lot of them say, ‘Don’t be ashamed that you are in love with your brother.’ All of these kinds of things,” said Andrews.

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Instead, Andrews said her family was very nurturing and supporting. “A lot of people think I was tortured, but my parents didn’t do anything. They didn’t beat me. They didn’t whip me. They didn’t lock me away. I didn’t even go hungry. And I had a lot of pretty clothes,” she said.

 

Her editor says that the Dollanganger and Casteel series, which make up the authentic V. C. Andrews canon, along with stand-alone My Sweet Audrina (numerous other series are written by ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman hired by the Andrews estate), are both based on true stories. Andrews heard them when she was in the hospital for surgery. It was “some doctor there,” says Patty. “So I’d guess that some aspects of it were true—at least the aspect of kids being hidden away. Whether the twins were real, the sex, the time frame, probably not. I think it was just the concept of kids hidden in the attic so the mother could inherit a fortune. The idea for the Heaven series is also based on a true story and how that all came about—I will write about that in the memoir I’m writing about my relationship with Virginia and her books.”

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Sources:

http://www.completevca.com/art_people.shtml

http://the-toast.net/2013/08/12/planting-flowers/

V.C. Andrews: A Critical Companion by E. D. Huntley

Horror, Movies

Best Sister Horror Movies: Five Films About Sisterhood, Trauma, and Survival

by horrorfeminista3 Comments on Best Sister Horror Movies: Five Films About Sisterhood, Trauma, and Survival

I’m lucky enough to have two sisters, and the relationships I have with them are some of the most important in my life. Because we have so much shared history and are close in age, I don’t think there’s anybody who knows me better, maybe even better than I know myself. But at the same time, there’s a lot of competition and rivalry between sisters that just makes me want to snarl sometimes. That’s why sister horror movies are some of my favorites in the genre. When you have sister characters, there’s natural, built-in conflict. You know there’s nobody who would have your back more but who you might want to drop-kick a minute later. As of right now, here are some of favorite sister horror movies.

1. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? is my top sister horror film. Two aging, reclusive sisters have a battle of wills that has been years in the making. Blanche, the older sister, has respect and good will as a silver screen star, who was cut down in her prime in an automobile accident that was believed to have been caused by her younger sister Jane. She’s been in a wheelchair ever since then with Jane taking care of her. Jane had a successful career in her youth as a vaudeville performer who went by the name Baby Jane. She supported her family during these early years, but when she grew up, her talent did not. She’s been riding Blanche’s coattails ever since, a position that she resents. Now, Jane is a blowsy drunk out of touch with reality, who decides to stage a career comeback by reviving her stage persona Baby Jane, complete with floppy hair bow and ruffled pinafore. Bette Davis pulls out all the stops in this performance, and I love her bravery in bringing such an ugly caricature to life. What I also like in this movie is that each of the sisters had a position of power at some time in their sibling relationship, and then the positions were flip-flopped. Typically in a sister story, one sister is more dominant than the other—more beautiful, more talented, more something—but in reality, I’ve found that these positions switch all the time. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, the two actresses playing Baby Jane and Blanche, hated each other, and this really comes through in the scenes where they fight, making for good, dishy fun. Since we have a wheelchair at our disposal, my sister Kristi and I have threatened for years to be Baby Jane and Blanche for Halloween. I’d be Baby Jane.

2. Night of the Comet

This eighties gem came out when Halley’s Comet could be seen from Earth, and people were getting a little pre-millennial. Sisters Regina and Samantha end up staying the night in protected spaces while everybody else has comet parties, and they remain human as a result. The rest of the population has either turned into red dust or zombies. Thankfully, the Belmont sisters had a father in the military, who taught them how to fight and use guns, so they’re able to protect themselves and other stragglers that they come across. There’s some sibling rivalry when older sister Regina has chemistry with what appears to be the last guy left on earth, but Regina and Samantha have sister-bonding moments, too. Night of the Comet is B-movie horror in the same vein as Evil Dead II. It’s goofy and a real time capsule of eighties fashion, reveling in neon and pastel colors, asymmetrical collars, and big, glorious hair.

3. An American Crime

An American Crime is a devastating movie based on a true story, and it will haunt you for days. It’s billed as a drama, but trust me, it’s horror. Sylvia Likens and her younger sister Jenny are the children of carnival workers who travel around a lot. When their mother and father get ready to go on the circuit again, the father decides to board his daughters with Gertrude Baniszewski, mother of their new friends, for $20 a week. When the second week’s payment doesn’t show up, Gertrude whips Sylvia and Jenny. Sylvia asks to take most of Jenny’s punishment when her sister falls because of the brace on her leg, and after that, Sylvia becomes the focus of Gertrude’s abuse, sparing Jenny. But it doesn’t stop with that. Gertrude enlists the help of her own children in the torture of Sylvia, so there are sisters beating on sisters. Catherine Keener gives an incredible performance as Gertrude Baniszewski, and there is such nuance to it that you can see the glimmers of how abuse originates, the cycle that goes on in perpetuity if left unchecked.

4. Ginger Snaps

Ginger Snaps showcases the Fitzgerald sisters, Ginger and Brigette, who are so close in age that they’re in the same grade in high school. Ginger is slightly older, and these two sisters of the weird, whose shared passion is death photography, have a pact to be together forever—in life or death. Ginger and Brigette are late bloomers—hard to believe, but it’s a movie and some suspension of disbelief is necessary. They sneak out, and Ginger is bitten by something wolflike that claws open her chest. Brigette gets her home, and they find that the wound is magically healing. At the same time, Ginger experiences her first period. Following this are some comical body horror moments as Ginger deals with tampon shopping, extreme body hair, and a torrential flow. With this flood of hormones and magic, Ginger also becomes extremely sexual and starts experimenting with boys. The two are pulling apart and bickering, but Brigette is determined to save her older sister from becoming a werewolf. Mimi Rogers appears as the girls’ mother, and I feel like her role could have been so much more. She plays a square mother in hair scrunchies and sparkly sweaters trying to usher her utterly strange daughters through adolescence. She’s daffy but willing to do anything to help her girls. I think a great sequel would include the mother, but so far the two movies following Ginger Snaps have focused on one or both of the sisters.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=011YdVip2KM]

5. A Tale of Two Sisters

A Tale of Two Sisters is a moody, atmospheric Korean horror movie that takes a couple of viewings before all of the puzzle pieces come together. But I like it because the movie takes American horror clichés and stands them on end, creating even more scares because they don’t play out the way they’re supposed to. In A Tale of Two Sisters, older sister Soo-mi, the dominant one, and Soo-yeon, the younger, dowdier sister, accompany their father and new stepmother out to their country house. The father seems disinterested in the girls’ situation, and they end up involved in great conflict with their crazy-acting stepmother. The scenes are bizarre and nonlinear, but they do come together in the end, and the mystery is eventually resolved. It’s a different kind of movie, but it will keep you thinking for days about the complex bond that sisters share and what happens when somebody tries to break that.

Are there any other sister horror movies that deserve to be on this list? Let me know if you can think of any, because I’m always looking for more.