Chaney's Phantom, revealed!
The horror genre is nearly as old as cinema itself. The earliest feature-length scary movies grew out of the Expressionist movement in Germany: Wegener’s Golem trilogy (1915-1920), Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr. Galigari (1919), Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). In the States, Lon Chaney became the brightest star of silent horror by portraying monsters that were as pitiable as they were terrifying, like The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). As sound became the new standard, and as German filmmakers fled the Nazis for Hollywood in the early 1930s, Universal Studios released the horror pictures that have since become classics: Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man, starring Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr. respectively.
From those early days to the present, the horror genre, perhaps more than any other, has been a man’s world. Men sat in the director’s chair and stood in front of the camera as the hero or the monster. Boys and young men filled most of the seats in the audience as well. As a result, horror films became endless variations on the male biological imperative: the ceaseless, undeniable drive for sex. In this light (or darkness), women’s roles became simple and clear. On screen, they played the objects of the monster’s unnatural lust and the hero’s more civilized romantic desire, always powerless against both. The expectations for a girl in the movie theater, coaxed into seeing a horror picture by a boy on a date, were equally plain: when the monster appeared, she would reach for her male protector too. Even in more recent decades, when the hero sometimes became a heroine, like Nancy in the Nightmare on Elm Street series or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she fought the story’s demons with a man’s violence and dressed to fulfill his sexual fantasies.
From those early days to the present, the horror genre, perhaps more than any other, has been a man’s world. Men sat in the director’s chair and stood in front of the camera as the hero or the monster. Boys and young men filled most of the seats in the audience as well. As a result, horror films became endless variations on the male biological imperative: the ceaseless, undeniable drive for sex. In this light (or darkness), women’s roles became simple and clear. On screen, they played the objects of the monster’s unnatural lust and the hero’s more civilized romantic desire, always powerless against both. The expectations for a girl in the movie theater, coaxed into seeing a horror picture by a boy on a date, were equally plain: when the monster appeared, she would reach for her male protector too. Even in more recent decades, when the hero sometimes became a heroine, like Nancy in the Nightmare on Elm Street series or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she fought the story’s demons with a man’s violence and dressed to fulfill his sexual fantasies.
Patricia Arquette appreciates the subtlety of Nightmare on Elm Street 3.
These observations about the maleness of so many horror movies need not be condemnations in themselves, however. We might expect male artists of all sorts to explore the deepest, darkest aspects of their personalities as well as measures that might tame them. Yet the dominance of this lone perspective, approaching near exclusivity, is a problem for the horror genre. By the most basic measurement of aesthetics, to say nothing here about the social and political implications, watching the same story of men pursuing, seizing, and destroying women’s bodies over and over again is a bore.
Thankfully, we no longer have to settle for horror’s He-man Woman Haters Club. Female directors have made the most exciting and thought-provoking scary movies that have appeared on screens lately. Below are a few recommended titles.
First is Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987). Where a man’s vampire movie usually features a solitary male bloodsucker who revels in his otherness and supernatural powers, Bigelow’s story instead follows a family of vampires, young and old, male and female, as they travel in a darkened RV across a barren Western landscape, feeding upon the residents of small, scattered towns. Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) joins the undead clan unwittingly and becomes the first vampire on screen to struggle with the ethics of taking the lives of others to prolong his own. Yet the blood ties between family may be unbreakable, as the stern patriarch Jesse (Lance Henrikson) and looney eldest son Severen (Bill Paxton) insist. Bigelow would continue to explore the social dynamics of near-families under pressure in her following films, including the surf-heist romp Point Break (1991) and the Iraq war thriller The Hurt Locker (2008), which made her the first female winner of the Oscar for Best Director. Near Dark is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon.
Thankfully, we no longer have to settle for horror’s He-man Woman Haters Club. Female directors have made the most exciting and thought-provoking scary movies that have appeared on screens lately. Below are a few recommended titles.
First is Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987). Where a man’s vampire movie usually features a solitary male bloodsucker who revels in his otherness and supernatural powers, Bigelow’s story instead follows a family of vampires, young and old, male and female, as they travel in a darkened RV across a barren Western landscape, feeding upon the residents of small, scattered towns. Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) joins the undead clan unwittingly and becomes the first vampire on screen to struggle with the ethics of taking the lives of others to prolong his own. Yet the blood ties between family may be unbreakable, as the stern patriarch Jesse (Lance Henrikson) and looney eldest son Severen (Bill Paxton) insist. Bigelow would continue to explore the social dynamics of near-families under pressure in her following films, including the surf-heist romp Point Break (1991) and the Iraq war thriller The Hurt Locker (2008), which made her the first female winner of the Oscar for Best Director. Near Dark is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon.
In My Skin (Dans ma peau, 2002) dispenses with the supernatural entirely and places monster and victim, fascination and repulsion within one body. Writer and director Marina de Van plays Esther, a beautiful, career-minded young woman with a fashionable apartment and devoted boyfriend. One night at a party, she falls and injures her leg terribly. Rather than experiencing fear and disgust, though, she develops a morbid curiosity about her torn flesh. Soon the original wound ceases to satisfy her, and she takes drastic measures to indulge her growing craving, unconcerned with the obligations and relationships of ordinary life.
Fair warning: In My Skin is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. Fans of David Cronenberg, Takashi Miike, or de Van’s countryman and sometime collaborator Francois Ozon might imagine themselves prepared, but the lack of fantasy, slow pace, and lingering gaze of the female director's film might still shock them. Beware too, easy assumptions that In My Skin is a teen melodrama about a girl whose poor body image and low self-esteem have driven her to cut herself. Esther has survived her school years and begun building a genuinely lovely adult life, when a dark, counter-instinct suddenly surfaces and overwhelms her. The inscrutable and irresistible nature of this urge creates a horror about corporeality that runs far deeper than the pangs of adolescence. The movie’s conclusion might be its only shortcoming. The final shot, made famous by Hitchcock forty-two years earlier, is beautiful, but perhaps narratively ambiguous to a fault. Including two of de Van’s disturbing short films on the In My Skin DVD, available from Netflix, makes some amends.
Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) considers the fears of a mature woman. Amelia (Essie Davis) is recently widowed and works a depressing, low-wage job to provide for her bright, but emotionally troubled son Samuel (Noah Wiseman). As her daily disappointments and frustrations increase, a bizarre children’s book suddenly appears in the house, warning of the arrival of a fiendish monster. The gifted, but disturbed child echoes Danny Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), and the creature borrows its look from Asian ghost stories as well as Edward Gorey’s drawings, but the notion of a single mother’s waking nightmares becoming incarnate is entirely novel. And scary. The Babadook is available instantly from Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes.
Since we began with one vampire movie, we’ll end with another: Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), available instantly on Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes. Here another solitary bloodsucker stalks the low-lifes of a fictitious Persian underworld called Bad City. But this time she is female; supernatural powers have given her the independence denied most women in the real Iran and other repressive regimes. Nor does she use her powers for sublimated sexual conquest. Instead, she sucks the blood of evil-doers like the local drug dealer and aids the city’s other woman of the night, an abused prostitute. The reward for her righteous bloodletting — we don’t believe her entirely when she warns us that she’s “bad” — might be an unconventional friendship or even romance with another outsider, a young man who seeks refuge from his broken family and bleak surroundings in the leather jacket, muscle car, hamburgers, and rock’n’roll of the retro West.
Girl’s narrative is sparse; look and mood are its top priorities. The black and white photography is gorgeous, the pop tunes hit their targets, and the costumes are shabby chic. Coolest of all is wrapping the European vampire myth in the traditional Muslim headscarf and cape. Rolling her along on a skateboard also provides a low-tech, culture-clashing means of propelling her forward without moving her limbs, a longstanding image of ghosts and spirits in stage plays and cinema.
Let us hope that female directors in the horror genre proceed as smoothly into the future.
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