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glitter_n_goreI'm not sure why it's taken me so much longer to get through this deconstruction than I anticipated. In my defense, February is a short month. For the second half of my look at female-centric horror films--and what I suppose is my last entry for WiHM this year--I'm talking about Silent Hill and The Moth Diaries. If you hadn't noticed, I'm doing these in chronological order, with the most recent movie last. Have things gotten any better over the years?
Full disclosure: I LOVE the Silent Hill videogames by Konami. Not actually a gamer per se, but I watch a lot of walkthroughs because I like the storylines and graphic work that goes into fantasy and action survival games. The first movie, directed by Christophe Gans, follows Rose DaSilva and her adopted daughter Sharon as they journey to the titular town. Sharon has been muttering its name during bouts of sleepwalking, so Rose hopes taking a trip out there will jog the girl's memory and sort this thing out. One car crash later, Rose wakes up to find Sharon gone, and then riddles, alternate dimensions and eldritch hellbeasts ensue. Also, there's a Sharon-shaped doppelganger named Alessa running around to confuse things even more. It's a little convoluted as plots go, yes, but it has that in common with the game, so we can overlook that. Plus it's awesome. Not a perfect adaptation by any means, but the director and crew clearly committed a great deal of meticulous attention to detail in the set design that gave it the same eerie, ethereal look as the games. I'll try to contain my squee.
The first thing fans of the game will tell you is the main character was originally a man, who in the adaptation transformed into Rose. Matter of fact, screenwriter Roger Avery's original script didn't have any male characters at all, but the studio wouldn't move forward with the project until he wrote in Sean Bean's character and one of the cops. I find this role reversal fascinating, because that one small change is what makes this movie pass the Bechdel Test. Furthermore, the change doesn't alter the storyline one bit (it's altered in other ways, but this isn't why), and in fact Rose is a much better developed and well-rounded character than Harry ever was. She's still a player proxy, but with Radha Mitchell in the driver's seat, she feels like a real person.
However, the one I really want to talk about is Alessa. Jodelle Ferland has the potentially vexing task of playing not one, not two, but three separate characters--and she is amazing at it. It would take too long to explain exactly what and who she really is, but you know in the third X-Men movie, when Jean Grey came back from the dead and got in touch with her darker half and turned all evil and crazy and started deatomizing everything? It's kinda like that. Only instead of two personalties fighting for dominance in the same body, here we have one personality that can split itself via astral projection--and a little help from a quasi-demonic creature who may or may not be Evil. This role was extremely simplified from the Alessa we meet in the game: she gets her powers not from any innate psychic ability, but from a parasitic entity that feeds on rage; she's accused of being a witch (again with the witches--what are you trying to say, Hollywood?) not because of any special abilities, but because she doesn't have a father; and for no discernible reason except to give the makeup folks another monster to costume, she gets a rape-as-backstory footnote as well. What's frustrating is that Alessa is defined entirely by her victimhood in the movie, whereas in the game she was a proactive anti-hero type with a lot of guts and determination despite all the horrible things people did to her (which didn't include rape).
I like this movie a lot; it's tense and weird, the set designs are beautiful, and I applaud the filmmakers' decision to cast contortionists in costumes as the monsters instead of relying on CGI. I have the DVD and I've watched it along with the extras over and over. But looking at it through this particular lens, it pains me to admit that the women here are decidedly gender-locked, and not in a good way: Rose and Dahlia are defined by motherhood, Sharon by her damsel-in-distress role, and Alessa might have been a more neutral character if Gans hadn't slapped the "witch" label on her and shoved in the rape backstory. The main villain, Christabella, is a bit more neutral as the resident straw zealot. So the only character that could conceivably be either male or female story-wise is the antagonist. Interesting.
Finally, the last and most recent film I want to bring up is The Moth Diaries. Directed by Mary Harron (yes, that's American Psycho's Mary Harron), this adaptation of Rachel Klein's novel is set in an all-girl's boarding school in New England. Everything is fine during the new semester at first, apart from the main character Rebecca dealing with the death of her father, until new girl Ernessa appears and things take a turn for the Gothic. This movie is . . . okay. It's an admirable return to form for the vampire genre--it's slow paced, heavily atmospheric, mysterious, and steeped in allegory--but the execution is almost unbearably dull. Also, the way these characters talk, in combination with the setting, dress code, and current technology, made me wonder exactly what decade this was supposed to be.
Harron said in an interview that she wanted to explore the mutually destructive nature of the relationships between teenage girls in this movie, and actually that aspect of it comes across quite well. Using vampires in a boarding school as a metaphor for friendship, betrayal and rumors in that painful transition between childhood and adulthood is a brilliant concept that I wish I saw more often, and I like the quietness of this movie. There's no big, loud, action-packed climax, and you're never quite sure whether Ernessa is really a vampire or if Rebecca is losing her mind--this wouldn't be the first time Harron cast an unreliable narrator as her protagonist. Also, there's a heavy lesbian overtone to the whole thing: Rebecca's main worry where Ernessa is concerned is that she's stealing Rebecca's best friend away, and while it's never stated outright, it's implied that Rebecca's feelings for this girl might be more than just friendship. Oh, and let me just say shame on me for not having read Carmilla yet, because I know there are tons of references in here that I'm not getting. The Dracula references are easy--the best friend/first victim's name is Lucy, for crying out loud--but I need to catch up on my vampire lore.
My main point in all this is that the focus of the story is on the relationships between the female characters--how they relate to each other, depend on each other sometimes to catastrophic effect, how they feel towards one another and how that guides the decisions they make. It's very clearly a film about women, for women, written and directed by women. Some of the parts are underdeveloped, and the characterizations are a bit sloppy overall, but like the roles in Suspiria, they don't feel gender-specific, trope-heavy or otherwise offensive. I appreciate where the movie's trying to go, and there's enough that I liked about it that I feel okay recommending it to people. It's a flawed but earnest undertaking, and it's also the only movie I picked with a female director. And no witches.
So, what have I learned by taking on this little project? It takes more than just an all-female cast to create a movie that doesn't fall into any shortcut tropes on how women in movies should behave. (Hint: we aren't all "witches." Also, witchcraft isn't inherently evil. Just sayin'.) Another thing I learned is that shoving in some of those shortcut tropes doesn't necessarily make a movie bad--all four of the movies on this list were ones that I personally enjoyed. So, the real trick to putting female characters on-screen isn't a matter of quantity, but quality. Characters should be well-rounded, interesting, flawed, and proactive, and while their gender should be a part of them, it shouldn't define them or overwhelm their other qualities.
What's next for female-centric horror?
Well, the second Silent Hill movie, Silent Hill: Revelation, is a hot mess plot-wise, silly, gratuitous and laden with expository monologues. But the main character, Heather, is an active, intelligent and fully realized person, whose motivation isn't dependent on gender in the slightest. The latest adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie comes out this October, and this time it's being directed by Kimberly Peirce, whose previous credits include The L Word and Boys Don't Cry.
Call me optimistic, but I think that's progress.
Full disclosure: I LOVE the Silent Hill videogames by Konami. Not actually a gamer per se, but I watch a lot of walkthroughs because I like the storylines and graphic work that goes into fantasy and action survival games. The first movie, directed by Christophe Gans, follows Rose DaSilva and her adopted daughter Sharon as they journey to the titular town. Sharon has been muttering its name during bouts of sleepwalking, so Rose hopes taking a trip out there will jog the girl's memory and sort this thing out. One car crash later, Rose wakes up to find Sharon gone, and then riddles, alternate dimensions and eldritch hellbeasts ensue. Also, there's a Sharon-shaped doppelganger named Alessa running around to confuse things even more. It's a little convoluted as plots go, yes, but it has that in common with the game, so we can overlook that. Plus it's awesome. Not a perfect adaptation by any means, but the director and crew clearly committed a great deal of meticulous attention to detail in the set design that gave it the same eerie, ethereal look as the games. I'll try to contain my squee.
The first thing fans of the game will tell you is the main character was originally a man, who in the adaptation transformed into Rose. Matter of fact, screenwriter Roger Avery's original script didn't have any male characters at all, but the studio wouldn't move forward with the project until he wrote in Sean Bean's character and one of the cops. I find this role reversal fascinating, because that one small change is what makes this movie pass the Bechdel Test. Furthermore, the change doesn't alter the storyline one bit (it's altered in other ways, but this isn't why), and in fact Rose is a much better developed and well-rounded character than Harry ever was. She's still a player proxy, but with Radha Mitchell in the driver's seat, she feels like a real person.
However, the one I really want to talk about is Alessa. Jodelle Ferland has the potentially vexing task of playing not one, not two, but three separate characters--and she is amazing at it. It would take too long to explain exactly what and who she really is, but you know in the third X-Men movie, when Jean Grey came back from the dead and got in touch with her darker half and turned all evil and crazy and started deatomizing everything? It's kinda like that. Only instead of two personalties fighting for dominance in the same body, here we have one personality that can split itself via astral projection--and a little help from a quasi-demonic creature who may or may not be Evil. This role was extremely simplified from the Alessa we meet in the game: she gets her powers not from any innate psychic ability, but from a parasitic entity that feeds on rage; she's accused of being a witch (again with the witches--what are you trying to say, Hollywood?) not because of any special abilities, but because she doesn't have a father; and for no discernible reason except to give the makeup folks another monster to costume, she gets a rape-as-backstory footnote as well. What's frustrating is that Alessa is defined entirely by her victimhood in the movie, whereas in the game she was a proactive anti-hero type with a lot of guts and determination despite all the horrible things people did to her (which didn't include rape).
I like this movie a lot; it's tense and weird, the set designs are beautiful, and I applaud the filmmakers' decision to cast contortionists in costumes as the monsters instead of relying on CGI. I have the DVD and I've watched it along with the extras over and over. But looking at it through this particular lens, it pains me to admit that the women here are decidedly gender-locked, and not in a good way: Rose and Dahlia are defined by motherhood, Sharon by her damsel-in-distress role, and Alessa might have been a more neutral character if Gans hadn't slapped the "witch" label on her and shoved in the rape backstory. The main villain, Christabella, is a bit more neutral as the resident straw zealot. So the only character that could conceivably be either male or female story-wise is the antagonist. Interesting.
Finally, the last and most recent film I want to bring up is The Moth Diaries. Directed by Mary Harron (yes, that's American Psycho's Mary Harron), this adaptation of Rachel Klein's novel is set in an all-girl's boarding school in New England. Everything is fine during the new semester at first, apart from the main character Rebecca dealing with the death of her father, until new girl Ernessa appears and things take a turn for the Gothic. This movie is . . . okay. It's an admirable return to form for the vampire genre--it's slow paced, heavily atmospheric, mysterious, and steeped in allegory--but the execution is almost unbearably dull. Also, the way these characters talk, in combination with the setting, dress code, and current technology, made me wonder exactly what decade this was supposed to be.
Harron said in an interview that she wanted to explore the mutually destructive nature of the relationships between teenage girls in this movie, and actually that aspect of it comes across quite well. Using vampires in a boarding school as a metaphor for friendship, betrayal and rumors in that painful transition between childhood and adulthood is a brilliant concept that I wish I saw more often, and I like the quietness of this movie. There's no big, loud, action-packed climax, and you're never quite sure whether Ernessa is really a vampire or if Rebecca is losing her mind--this wouldn't be the first time Harron cast an unreliable narrator as her protagonist. Also, there's a heavy lesbian overtone to the whole thing: Rebecca's main worry where Ernessa is concerned is that she's stealing Rebecca's best friend away, and while it's never stated outright, it's implied that Rebecca's feelings for this girl might be more than just friendship. Oh, and let me just say shame on me for not having read Carmilla yet, because I know there are tons of references in here that I'm not getting. The Dracula references are easy--the best friend/first victim's name is Lucy, for crying out loud--but I need to catch up on my vampire lore.
My main point in all this is that the focus of the story is on the relationships between the female characters--how they relate to each other, depend on each other sometimes to catastrophic effect, how they feel towards one another and how that guides the decisions they make. It's very clearly a film about women, for women, written and directed by women. Some of the parts are underdeveloped, and the characterizations are a bit sloppy overall, but like the roles in Suspiria, they don't feel gender-specific, trope-heavy or otherwise offensive. I appreciate where the movie's trying to go, and there's enough that I liked about it that I feel okay recommending it to people. It's a flawed but earnest undertaking, and it's also the only movie I picked with a female director. And no witches.
So, what have I learned by taking on this little project? It takes more than just an all-female cast to create a movie that doesn't fall into any shortcut tropes on how women in movies should behave. (Hint: we aren't all "witches." Also, witchcraft isn't inherently evil. Just sayin'.) Another thing I learned is that shoving in some of those shortcut tropes doesn't necessarily make a movie bad--all four of the movies on this list were ones that I personally enjoyed. So, the real trick to putting female characters on-screen isn't a matter of quantity, but quality. Characters should be well-rounded, interesting, flawed, and proactive, and while their gender should be a part of them, it shouldn't define them or overwhelm their other qualities.
What's next for female-centric horror?
Well, the second Silent Hill movie, Silent Hill: Revelation, is a hot mess plot-wise, silly, gratuitous and laden with expository monologues. But the main character, Heather, is an active, intelligent and fully realized person, whose motivation isn't dependent on gender in the slightest. The latest adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie comes out this October, and this time it's being directed by Kimberly Peirce, whose previous credits include The L Word and Boys Don't Cry.
Call me optimistic, but I think that's progress.