Big Sound Saturdays: Cosmic American Christmas

To spread some friendly holiday cheer, I spent what felt like a very long while thinking about what kinds of Christmas songs aren’t an abomination to listen to. Some might, and very frankly have, argued that Country Christmas is not the exception to the mall music rule, but I get it, I get it, goofy moralizing and cheeseball sweet songs aren’t for everyone. It’s fine. I do get it. But blues and jazz Christmas have been done very well without me, R&B Christmas has also been mixed and re-mixed…and then! Like a beacon of light from Yonder Star, a regular Thursday Facebook k-hole bottomed out into the Texas Tornados’ version of “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,” a Christmas miracle, the day is saved!

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The Mindy Project Recap: Season 4 Episode 1

The Mindy Project is one of those shows that I think a lot of people support in theory, but have trouble remembering when it comes time to actually watch something. There are a couple of reasons I can’t stan for the show completely (foremost being its deep commitment to the parade of plain white dudes…I realize this is a send-up of/homage to traditional rom-coms, which traditionally have featured Tom Hanks/Billy Crystal types, but can we get ONE love interest or major character who isn’t the most vanilla of vanilla scoops?)

Big Sound Saturdays: Hot Meat (Songs To Bake To)

 

 

I guess it’s probably true that even if there are things in the world that are inherent goods, weather isn’t one of them. Winter people confuse me and I don’t want to talk about it. Fall and spring people make sense, opinion-wise, but the whole thing seems ultimately kinda milktoast; why not just go for it? I’m for the summer, and not just its beginning—the long haul, California’s dry desert heat, New York’s simmering trash swamp, Virginia when it feels like the literal surface of the sun. I like that body-bake feeling that makes you want to lie down and toast forever in the sun rays, I never want it to end!

 

Finding the best jams for deep summer proved trickier than I thought it’d be. No formula for vibes, I guess. Inspired by my best friend in California, who covers herself in literal olive oil when we lay coast-side and bakes her body like a big pasta, by ghost towns swimming in desert people and ants, swampy crocodiles and livid punk rock, noble pups panting in the sun, lazy Sundays and The Hawaiian Craze, I couldn’t decide on a single sound so I put them all together. Riding into the sun with Lou Reed (no truer words than “it’s hard to live in the city”), Hot Meat comes from Bjork’s early punk band The SugarCubes’ eponymous title—this mix is truly of Songs To Bake To.

 

Listen here, then, for Shadow Music from Thailand, Hawaiian tunes from Kalama’s Quartet, Kenyan guitar jams from the Mombasa Swingsters and country guitar twangs from Speedy West, Cambodian Bodega Pop from Touch Saly, soul-crushing reggae from the Soulettes, heavy rock from Pavement and swamp pop from Rod Bernard and Myron Lee & the Caddies. Hot jazz from the Nite Owls! Detroit R&B! Kurt Vile! The late and ever-great Townes Van Zandt! In truth, this mix is a little bit of an excuse to make public once more TVZ’s gut-wrenching and ever-so-small “Don’t Let the Sunshine Fool Ya,” but Hot Meat, in its thrust for sounding deep summer, sings the opposite, too. I kinda like getting duped by the summer. Maybe it’s a good exercise in letting yourself go.

 

 

 

Summer Reads: Love Is Weird

This is an ode to my first summer love. The one that made me realize that my imagination made me powerful. It taught me that there were whole worlds rippling underneath the surface of my everyday life, that creativity, bravery, and love for others were the highest of all virtues. When school let out for the summer, it became my constant companion and I visited its house on Library Ave. several times a week. It was during these sweet summers that I developed my love of narrative and imaginative worlds that has informed every career-related decision I’ve ever made. With great pleasure I offer this post, an ode to the Fantasy Novel, to share and honor all the lessons it’s taught me about love and the real world.

Love is always sacred and profane, human and divine, real and illusionary: the best love is often tinged with the pain of impossibility. Fantasy shows us the sweeping cosmic romance and the bounded, earthly erotic, the everlasting friendship sealed with sacrifice. But, let’s not forget the most important lesson that fantasy teaches us about love: it’s freaking weird.

Rhinegold by Stephen Grundy:

Love is apparently very hard to distinguish from lust and it can definitely happen on first sight. This whole distinguishing process is made more difficult when the object of your affection is an all-powerful god who walks the earth in human form, planting his seed in the wombs of strong women in the hope that they will raise a hero of epic proportions (physically and metaphorically). Also, sometimes you love yourself and the idea of continuing your genealogical line so much that you accidently/kind of knowingly have sex with your twin sister. Though while this is usually grounds for a plague on your houses, that is not always the case.

Brunehilde, a strong woman, throwing herself into the flames, (but it’s fine, she’s a Valkyrie).

It’s clear that this book is also a labor of love, as Grundy (who studied English and German philology) produced a careful retelling that is part epic, part sexy romance novel. It’s got the best of the fantasy genre: dragons, rituals, heroes, sex,  dwarves, failed marriage plots, witches, shaman,  wolves, war, gods, religious tension, murder, and most importantly, mead.  For me, this book will always be the perfect embodiment of the fantastic, the epic, and the shamelessly erotic.

“The circus arrives without warning” | Instagram @erinmorgenstern

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern:

“Place me like a seal over your heart, for love is as strong as death.” Forever and ever amen.

When I think of this book, my mind conjures images of textures, smoothly rippling silk, plushy velvet, pebbly mounds of popcorn, and smells: caramel, cider, smokey late-autumn bonfires. This book has served as boredom buster, fantastic escape, and sartorial inspiration.

I have my husband’s ex-girlfriend to thank for this contribution to my list of books about love–she was working at a bookstore with this gem first hit the shelves.  Morgenstern’s playfully surrealistic novel traces the story of two young and gifted magicians who are competitors in an ancient game using the travelling Night Circus as the arena for their battles of imagination. Set in an ahistorical Victorian world, it’s everything I want in a romance: an intricate story of larger-than-life proportions supported by a cast of unusual, endearing characters who make me wish that I could be part of the circus.

The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind

Love is never simple and sometimes your biologically or magically induced physical body is  not compatible with the body of your one, true love–but this can often be overcome especially if you are an exceptional man who is determined to go until the ends of space and time in order to conquer all obstacles.  Also, you can love peasants, too and because you love them, you want them to become better than what they are and so you apparently decide the best way to do this is by quietly invoking the teachings of Ayn Rand.

Confession: The only reason I read these books is because I became obsessed with their TV series incarnation, Legend of the Seeker, my first year in college and I couldn’t wait for the second season to come out on DVD. The novel traces the adventures of Richard Cypher and Kahlan Amnel as they fight to restore balance and order in their universe (often with help from some badass dominatrices!)

House of Leaves

House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski:

Sometimes love is messy and convoluted and growing together sometimes means growing apart. But sometimes love can be transcendent and bodies moving together can speak in “two dark languages” that “rarely survive. As quickly as they’re invented , they die, unable to penetrate much, explore anything or even connect. Terribly beautiful but more often than not inadequate.”

Love is convoluted.

A long list of people recommended this book to me, but the most convincing pitch was from one of my students who told me that she thought it would really relate to our class’s discussion of Freud’s essay on the uncanny (the term “unheimlich” is featured in the novel). House of Leaves is a triplicate narrative that is, most simply, about a house that’s curiously bigger on the inside than it appears and/or measures on the outside. In many ways, the book resists traditional summary by its labyrinthine, multi-genre nature—there are many ways to read the novel, many of them decidedly non-linear (kind of like love, right?).

Adult Fairy Tale Anthologies: Black Swan, White Raven;  Snow White, Blood Red, (both edited by Datlow/Windling) and The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, etc.

Sometimes love can be really fucked up, but there gets to be a point where love is so fucked up that it’s actually not love anymore. Also, Stockholm syndrome is different from love, although they look suspiciously similar. But lust can totally lead to love. Sacrifice and violence are often intertwined with love and lust, and if someone goes through massive amounts of bodily harm for you, then they probably love you. Anyone who says they are killing you because they love you doesn’t actually love you and you should probably kill them before they kill you. Ogres are actually viable sexual  partners. Also, stepmothers never love you, no matter what.

Hagan creepin’

Tithe by Holly Black

Sometimes love can be relatively predictable: an exceptional girl who grows bored of her lame-ish friends meets a mysterious man with a dark secret. She tricks the mysterious man into maintaining a contact with her, thinking she can manipulate him with her exceptionality like she does all the other men in her life. But the exceptional girl quickly finds out that out she may be in over her head as she is thrown into a world that she never knew existed.

The greatest and most enduring pleasure of reading Tithe was the introduction of a fantasy-world aesthetic that still resonates with me: a kind of “Alice in Urbanland” amalgamation of a mystic faerie world with the lives of ordinary people living in rather ordinary towns

The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien

Because sometimes we all get by with a little help from our friends (especially when our friends are powerful wizards, able to command armies of dead warriors to fight on your behalf, or remember to bring spices in case you find taters on your journey to Mordor).

Virtual Horror: Social Media, Found Footage, and Unfriended

Last month, The Feminist’s Guide to Horror took you into the world of body horror where films focus on the human form as a bloody, suffering spectacle—this month we’re taking a turn into the realm of Found Footage horror, which is all about the power of suggestion. Found Footage horror is the land of amateur documentarians in pursuit of a supernatural mystery. It privileges local narratives and urban legends told from the first-person perspective of those who are most invested in discovering the truth behind these phenomena.

 

Found footage movies often go something like this: skeptical young people decide to explore some kind of supernatural phenomenon (either an urban legend, or some paranormal activity they themselves are experiencing) and plan to document their efforts through the use of a video camera so that their discoveries can be compiled and shared with the world. Something goes awry, and all we have left to explain what happened to them is found in the reel of footage they leave behind. There are variations on this theme, but typically these films thrive on the conversion–and often possession–of the skeptical characters as their investigative efforts lead down a rabbit hole deeper and darker than they ever imagined.

 

Classic found footage: The Blair Witch Project

 

Found Footage Forms

 

Though told from a first person perspective (or perspectives, if more than one character captures footage), our experience of the film is mediated through technology: we are self-consciously watching a film-within-a-film for the duration of the movie. In this way, found footage is unapologetically meta. These films rely on the fact that people are familiar with not only horror tropes, but the various devices used in horror cinematography. For example, as an experienced horror viewer, when I see a close-up shot of someone’s face directly followed by a camera pan to the left or right, I’m expecting there to be some sort of jump scare when the camera pans back to the actor’s face. Just  the expectation of that jump scare—a ghost in the corner moving swiftly towards the screen, a movement in a mirror, a sudden “bang” —is enough to keep me on the edge of my seat. In this way, much of the suspense of found footage films comes from the viewer having certain generic expectations about horror cinematography and then waiting in anticipation of seeing how those expectations play out.

 

So many places for a demon to appear!: Paranormal Activity 2

 

In that way, horror aficionados are ideal viewers for films like the Paranormal Activity series because though the writer and  director sets up these kind of jump scares in all the of the ways one can (plenty of mirrors, corners, furniture where people can pop out of, etc.), they deliver that scare such a small percentage of the time that you’re on the edge of your seat the entire movie.

 

Because of this, watching found footage films in the theater with a bunch of other people enhances the experience. I always try to see a new found footage film on opening weekend because I love the camaraderie that builds in the audience as we are collectively “faked-out” and respond to the intensifying suspense with increasing verbality; the premature screams of other viewers can cause me to jump even when the movie does not create that effect. As the small child approaches the closed closet door rattling on its hinges, reaching out his hand to reveal what’s inside, you better believe I’m mumbling “Don’t open the door, don’t open the door” under my breath.

 

Is Found Footage Connected to Other Genres?

Some trace found footage films’ narrative strategies back to the epistolary novel, where the plot is relayed through a series of correspondence or diary entries. Typically, the constraints of the “film-within-a-film” form forces the narrative to unfold chronologically as the camera-operator follows the rest of the group. Flashbacks are all but unavailable unless they occur though a verbal narration of past events by a character on screen. However, as begin to see in films like the Paranormal Activity series or, most recently in Unfriended, the ability for flashback can be recuperated if that flashback is achieved through use of another technological means (i.e., someone taping someone else while they are watching surveillance footage of the ghost’s nightly activities.)

 

 

Found footage horror is also connected to the documentary film form. Often the premise of the film is an investigative enterprise and filmmakers strive for a high degree of verisimilitude. For example, the actors in The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity used their real names as their character’s names. Often, the filmmakers will attempt to mimic the amateur filmographer, as is done in the sci-fi found footage thriller Cloverfield (Robert Ebert apparently called this style,  “shaky-cam”— Paranormal Activity mostly gets around this problem by having characters place cameras on tripods).These kind of cinematic choices serve as a kind of Barthesian “reality effect”, letting us know that we should believe the film takes place in the real world. One of the most impressive feats of a found footage movie is when it does not break its frame: every sound and picture is completely organic and can be derived from the scene itself (i.e., there are no shots taken outside of the perspective of the in-film camera operator).

 

Almost all of the found footage films that have been widely popularized deal with supernatural subjects, mainly ghosts or demons. Perhaps some of the scary appeal of these films comes from the possibility of seeing unbelievable things in a form that is completely bound to reality: if the ghost shows up, embodied, on camera, it’s harder to dispute. If the filmmakers achieve verisimilitude in their film-making, they build credibility, so that when the audience sees something bizarre on their film, it seems more real.

 

In the most successful movies of this genre, the film patiently allows viewers to be confronted with weird sounds and movements without clue-ing them in on their source. The climax of the movie is usually quite an intense—though often still suggestive—encounter with the entity that may include a few moments of bizzarity or violence, but this is typically not sustained. Fear is primarily created and sustained by the power of suggestion.

 

Because the genre depends more on narrative creativity and convincing special effects than makeup, gore, and post-production effects, these films often cost a fraction of a typical  Hollywood budget to produce, making it an accessible genre for amateur filmmakers. (Notable examples are The Blair Witch Project  which was made for an estimated $60,000 and  Paranormal Activity which was made for about $15,000.)

 

Unfriended as Social Media Horror

 

When I went to see Paranormal Activity 4, I was impressed by how the filmmakers managed to shoot the film through a video chat between a teenager and her boyfriend with occasional help from an Xbox Kinect, and another camera. The people at Paranormal Activity know what’s up: they were able to angle the main character and her laptop in ways that set up scares and their use of the Xbox and Macbooks for surveillance didn’t break the frame for me.

 

 

After that film, I was just itching for someone to push that concept the to the next level, and Unfriended, released widely last weekend,  did not disappoint.

 

The real art of the film is its form (the plot itself can be summarized surprisingly accurately by this Knife Party song). The film focuses on a group of teenagers on the one-year anniversary of the death of their “friend” Laura Barnes, who committed suicide after being horrifically cyberbullied  following the release of a humiliating video of her at a party. The group of teenagers gear up for what seems like a fairly normal group chat on Skype. Their easy camaraderie is interrupted by the presence of an unwanted, unknown interloper in their Skype conversation.

 

This film makes an important contribution to the found footage genre because it represents an attempt to contend with the ways that we are also now, in part, virtual selves. The identities that we cultivate online, our loose personage constructed from our search histories, is the consciousness that this film engages. It is entirely mediated through virtual reality. For the entire film we are bound to the laptop screen of one of the teenagers, Blaire.

 

Unfriended solved the problem of how to handle flashbacks in the found footage narrative. As the film opens, we see that  Blaire is watching youtube videos (we watch them with her) of Laura’s suicide (apparently taped on a crappy cell phone camera and uploaded), and then begin to watch what we would see later in full: the infamous video that eventually caused Laura’s suicide. By being able to use social media platforms like YouTube, or features like Facebook’s photo-albums, Blaire can show us the past while effortlessly keeping the film firmly rooted in the present.

 

As Blaire’s keystrokes lead us through the landscape of her iOS system we learn about her and as the plot heats up, we see her try to mediate between various entities—herself, her boyfriend, her friends, the ghost in the machine—through technological means. The negotiation between the virtual self and actual self is a key component of the film. As the movie progresses, Blaire and her friends’ physical bodies are punished for the sins of their virtual selves (a fitting reverse: the humiliating state of Laura’s physical body was ephemeral until it became virtualized in the form of the viral video).

 

The filmmakers also smartly make use of the technical foibles of social media platforms to create suspense. Using the annoying noise that Skype makes when it’s trying to recapture a lost call,  we never know when the video screen will flash on and the noise we hear in the background will also yield to a violent, graphic image. That device itself was really effective in creating and maintaining suspense.

 

Impressively, the film almost never breaks its frame.This made it even more disappointing when the frame did break, which happened in two ways a handful of times throughout the film. Occasionally, Blaire would minimize the Skype conversation to look something up and the volume of her friends who were still talking  would fade out without us seeing her adjust the volume on her laptop. This seems like a minor break to me, meant to refocus our attention on reading the important correspondence occurring on screen. The second and more egregious break occurred when a deep bass note began to play under the more suspenseful scenes. This use of bass note is a time-honored technique in horror; however, in a film that is so delightfully well-wrought in every other way, the presence of a sound that is unaccounted for within the iOS system, seems out of place and highly noticeable.

 

 

Throughout the course of film we learn much about the questionable behavior of this group of teenagers including their use of illegal drugs, drinking habits, cavalier sexual encounters, and lies, but those moral infractions (if you can call them that) are not why the teenagers are possessed and then punished in the film: they are punished as revenge for the way that they bullied one of their peers.

 

Other possession narratives often leave the audience feeling immune from the possibility of the events in the film ever happening to them: for example,“Well, this could never happen to me because I don’t play with Ouija boards,” or “If I found a creepy box like that, I wouldn’t make the mistake of opening”. Unfriended does not leave viewers this same kind of escape because so many of us are terrible internet citizens. The kind of mean-spirited trolling that led to Laura Barnes’ fictional death in the movie actually leads to death in real life. Even if the ghost in Unfriended is a fantasy, the premise for the haunting is all too real.

 

I’ve purposely focused this review on the structure of the film because I don’t want to spoil the plot for those who are going to see the movie this weekend. Ultimately, this is one of the first horror movies that tries to engage with the way that we are becoming virtual selves and negotiate the way that our virtual actions have consequences in the actual world. This is an important direction for film, and it’s exciting to see horror filmmakers leading the way.

 

Found Footage Watchlist:

• Cannibal Holocaust (1980): Often considered the “original” found footage film, a film crew is found dead in the Amazon, and the only evidence of their discoveries are captured on film…
• The Blair Witch Project (1999): Three student filmmakers disappear after investigating the legend of the Blair Witch…
• Paranormal Activity (2007): A couple start to hear noises in their house and set up a camera to investigate…(I’d also recommend Paranormal Activity 4, if Social Media horror is of interest to you)
• V/H/S (2012): A group of guys run into a stash of found footage way creepier than they bargained for…

The Feminist’s Guide to Horror: Part One

It’s Friday the 13th! Get your creepiness on and join Acro Collective’s resident horror expert as she expertly navigates the terrifying genre and dives deep into something your editor can barely look at: body horror?!?! 

 

The Feminist’s Guide to Horror Tropes and Genres:  Body Horror

Welcome to this twisted little corner of Acro Collective, where we dissect various attributes and genres of the “scary movie” in hopes of uncovering how the aesthetics and politics of horror intermingle. But first, let’s get technical.

Series Intro: What is Horror?

If asked to define horror, we academic-types may look to ye ol’ Oxford English Dictionary for guidance. Three of the definitions found there are still in common usage:

Horror, n.

2a. A shuddering or shivering

3a. A painful emotion compounded of loathing and fear; a shuddering with terror and repugnance; strong aversion mingled with dread; the feeling excited by something shocking or frightful. (The prevalent use at all times.)

5a. The quality of exciting repugnance and dread; horribleness; a quality or condition, and …a thing, or person, which excites these feelings

We can derive three important characteristics of horror from these entries. First, and perhaps most intuitive, horror instigates powerful feelings of loathing, fear, or aversion. Second, horror is exciting. The people, conditions or things that cause feelings of dread stir us up or unbalance our mental state. We are riled, energized, adrenalized, at the sight of the horrific. Third, horror is embodied—our physical selves react to excitation. We often shudder or shiver in the presence of horror.

Furthermore, hidden in the “obsolete” definitions of horror is another usage of the word that speaks to horror’s role in contemporary culture:

2b. Ruffling of surface; rippling.

Whereas the current definitions (2a, 3a, and 5a) speak to the affect of horror, this mysterious usage speaks the potential for horror to disrupt order in a productive way. Horror films can disturb our notions of safety, cause ripples in our faith in the human race, and reveal our monstrous natures. At their best, horror films can speak truth to power by providing new metaphors or alternative worlds that allow us to explore hegemony in our own culture.

The purpose of this series is to offer an introduction to the various complexities, controversies and dominant narratives in contemporary genres of horror film. The idea is that through parsing out the intricacies of visual horror, we can concurrently advance a discourse on recent films (or video games) that create spaces to explore female, queer, or subaltern narratives.

The History of Body Horror

Body horror—also known as biological horror or venereal horror—is a particular kind of fear or dread elicited by images that show the mutilation, degeneration or mutation of the human body. Films can contain moments of body horror—for example, when Natalie Portman’s character in Black Swan picks at a hangnail and pulls loose a long piece of skin—or they can focus specifically on a thematic exploration of human(oid) degeneration and mutilation, and thereby become a genre piece. Writer/Directors Clive Barker (of Hellraiser fame) and David Cronenberg (also known as the King of Venereal Horror, which may be the most unflattering nickname ever recorded) are widely recognized masters of body horror.

Classic Pinhead

Body horror both connects us to and alienates us from our own bodies. The feelings of dread, disgust, or discomfort stem from the familiarity we feel with the subject’s body—we can, on some level, imagine the pain that our own body would go through if it was under a similar state of duress. However, it can also separate us from our bodies by making the human form seem less “human”. Body horror forces us to face the potential for our own bodies to become monstrous.

Literary predecessors for body horror film exist in historiographic depictions of war, accounts of early modern executions, highly descriptive medical treatises, and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s short story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” in which the narrator describes the instantaneous decay of a human body into a putrid puddle of mush, is an early example of body horror in the literary canon.

One of body horror’s sister genres has come to be known as “torture porn”: films that usually feature elements of torture and confinement, are often heavy moralizing (for example, the Saw franchise) and sometimes revenge-driven. The “victims” in torture porn are often thought of as deserving of punishment and their particular treatment often corresponds, somewhat poetically, to the nature of their sins. Because these films often feature the mutilation of the body, it’s no surprise that torture porn relies on body horror to deliver its scares. Even its name, torture porn, invokes the presence of bodies.

Medical horror—where the practice of deranged medicine takes center stage—is an important subgenre of body horror. Some may consider the crop of TV shows about plastic surgery that show the procedures in great detail as members of this genre. More typically, medical horror involves unnatural experimentation on non-consenting human bodies, typified by films like The Human Centipede, humans are sewn together—spoiler alert—anus to mouth.

Body Horror and Body Modification

Body modification (altering the body or its appearance) has long been a part of horror’s collection of tropes. Typically, we see body modifications—or rather people with body modifications—featured as members of “alternative” subcultures in the backdrops of club scenes in film. Their piercings, tattoos, and unnaturally colored hair signify them as societal outsiders, strange, subcultural. Our cultural both vilifies and fetishizes people with body modifications (for example, National Geographic does this by exoticizing non-Western cultures that practice body modifications like tribal scarring or neck-stretching). As more surgical forms of body modification become more visible and prevalent in the Western cultural consciousness, some filmmakers have started to imagine plastic surgery as a kind of body horror.

An episode in the first season of Darknet (a Canadian remake of Japanese horror anthology Tori Hada composed of “snippets of people’s lives being interrupted by vivid instances of unexpected violence or shocking strangeness”) features a short sequence about a breast augmentation gone wrong. At the end of the episode we see the a video of the augmentation surgery listed on the fictional “Darknet” website, neatly snuggled in between videos of acts of violence committed by characters in the show. Inadvertently, the writers insinuate that breast augmentation is somehow perverse by associating it with horrific, violent crimes such as infanticide or ax-murdering. Because breast augmentation is typically associated with femininity or femaleness, this episode of Darknet participates in the standard narrative that characterizes female body modification as immoral. Darknet presents breast augmentation as unnatural and lumps it into the same category as violent crime.

Generally, body horror assumes that the modifications (a euphemism for everything from piercings, to mouth-to-anus surgery) made to the human body take something away from the overall integrity of that body. Changes made to the human form are generally thought of as denigrations, not enhancements. But recently, that assumption has been re-examined in American Mary, Jen and Sylvia Soska’s revenge fantasy/body horror hybrid that broke serious ground by providing a space for woman-centered discourse on aesthetics, body modification and the female form.

American Mary

With homage to other classic crime/horror and revenge fantasy narratives, American Mary does important new work by reframing body modification as a source of artistic expression, especially within communities of women. The film allies itself with the woman’s body and advocates for the woman’s right to pursue her own physical ideal, even when that goes against stereotypical views of “attractiveness” or compromises men’s sexual access to her body.

The film follows protagonist Mary Mason, a gifted surgical student who performs underground body modification surgeries as a way to pay her bills while finishing medical school. Through her business, Mary encounters an eccentric group of wealthy women who are part of the body mod community. Each woman is pursuing an aesthetic ideal that she feel represents her inner self.

The Soskas, who both wrote and directed the film, construct dialogue that actually explores the desires and motivations behind these women’s decisions to alter their appearances so drastically. One woman, Ruby, tells Mary that “I don’t really think it’s fair that God gets to choose how we look on the outside do you?” For Ruby and the others, body modification becomes a way for women to regain agency over their appearance. In an interview with Ariel Fisher, Sylvia Soska comments that this particular line has really resonated with the transgender community and the twins receive messages from transgender people saying that Ruby’s lines in this scene makes them feel like “I’m okay to be me”.

Ruby further explains that she’s “never had any of these surgeries to become a sexual object” but rather wants to become aesthetically beautiful without being sexualized at all—she literally wants to be a doll. Therefore, Mary modifies the commonly objectified aspects of Ruby’s anatomy—she removes her nipples and sews up her labia in order to make her seem more like Barbie doll, allowing Ruby to pursue her idea of desexualized perfection. In portraying body modification as a powerful display of agency, American Mary combats the narrative the body modification is shameful, inauthentic, or immoral.

But what makes American Mary body horror?

The elements of body horror are found in the surgical scenes, delicately shot in close-up, the body-under-operation devoid of sexual objectification. Additional horror comes from the violent encounters Mary has with men. Mary is drugged and raped when she attends a party hosted by one of the senior surgeons in the hospital, setting a revenge plot in motion that occasion scenes of torture as Mary “practices” body modification procedures on her assailant.

Practice makes perfect.

All of the people Mary operates on—with the important exception of her rapist—have given consent. In a world where most body horror movies show things being taken away from the human body, American Mary celebrates the additive magic of modification. Bodies are made better, more “authentic,” and more reflective of inner character though Mary’s surgeries. American Mary shows us that there is a way to make a film that revolves around women’s bodies, treats those bodies with seriousness and respect, but also delivers the same pleasures typically experiences in good old gory body horror.

Sylvia Soska has humbly described American Mary as “a little, independent horror movie that’s a character piece about a woman’s struggles in a male-dominated work place that features body modification”. For me, as a long time horror fan, this film was much more than just a character piece. American Mary allows us to reimagine body horror as a genre that is particularly capable of exploring the female experience without exploiting the female body.

It is worth noting that American Mary, by nature of its subject matter, does ask us to gaze upon the modified bodies and even if those bodies are not coded as subaltern or immoral, they are certainly seen as strange. Despite her work, Mary does not ever modify her body and she views her clients with respect, but also with clinical distance. This aspect puts the film at risk of undercutting its own progressive work by fetishizing difference.

By the third act of the film, we realize that the freedom and agency allotted to the female characters of American Mary has its consequences. Most significantly [spoilers ahead], Ruby’s husband responds to her modifications with violence. Not only does he reject his wife’s body, but he lays the blame for her transformation on the community of women who supported it—Ruby’s friend Beatrice who paid for the operation, and Mary who performed it. The control women hold over their own bodies, and their power to exercise their own desires regarding those bodies threatens male authority, or in this case, one male’s sexual activity. Issues of gender and agency in American Mary resonate with some current debates in American body politics—which to be fair, is its own genre of body horror.

Appendix: Films and Video Games of Interest

If you’re interested in checking out some body horror, here are a few films and video games to get you started. As you can imagine, this list barely scratches the surface—or should I say skin.

 

Film:

• Alien (1979): Ridley Scott’s classic horror/sci-fi hybrid starring Sigourney Weaver. The series screenwriter Dan O’Bannon has said that he intended the movie to attack men sexually by portraying homosexual oral rape and birth. Also, com does a nice job drawing our attention to all the penis imagery in the film, if that’s your thing.
• Contracted (2013): A young, queer woman suffers from a mysterious STD after being raped at a party. Murder and zombie transformation follow.
• Grace (2009): Vampirism, body horror, and breast feeding.
• Hellraiser (1987): Adultery, Murder, Sadomasochism, Puzzle Boxes! Classic body horror from Clive Barker.
• Teeth (2007): A darkly comedic horror film about a teenager who has teeth in her vagina.

 

Video Games:

• Bioshock: Players can equip various plasmids that disfigure the character’s body, while providing special effects.
• Far Cry series: Healing animations are graphic and could be viewed as a kind of body horror.
• Heavy Rain: There is a scene where the protagonist can be seen chopping off his own fingers.

Written by K.S.