Women in Horror: The Murders of Molly Southbourne by Tade Thompson

* spoilers *

Molly Southbourne is not a normal child. Her parents keep her at their farm at all times, homeschooling her and never allowing her into the city. You might think it cruel, but the circumstances deem it necessary. Every time Molly bleeds, a complete physical copy of her is made. The new molly inevitably will try to kill her whether it's immediately or in a few days. Her first memory is of her father bludgeoning her double to death. At age 5, her parents teach her to fight and drill rules into her. Don't bleed. If you bleed, blot, burn, and bleach. If you find a hole (where a molly emerged), find your parents. Before this, the parents tried to keep it secret to keep Molly safe and free from fear, but it led to numerous lies and Molly almost being killed. At age 9, she is taught how to dismember a pig with minimal mess and risk to her for optimal molly disposal. Molly's inner monologue is analytical and cold, observing the small details about the world and people around her.

Everything changes at age 14 when Molly menstruates. She tries to hide the blood since it's forbidden, but it keeps flowing. Because her parents never thought to teach her about the inevitable changes in her body, 5 mollys try to murder her at once. Her parents are very loving and practical, but nor perfect. At 16, Molly explores herself and her abilities and pushes the boundaries set for her, making herself bleed on purpose and escaping to the city. Of course, she still has normal teen questions about her body. Eventually, she goes through a dark period where she allows her period to produce mollys and cuts herself daily both to provide emotional release and to produce mollys to kill. Normal parent and child mistakes could mean that someone dies instead of the normal emotional scars that everyone else has. Once 17 hits, Molly is back to adhering to the rules set by her parents and becomes emotionally stable once more.

The mollys affect everyone she is close to and eventually kills them. Months into college where she lives somewhere besides the farm for the first time, she finds her parents murdered by a hidden, starving molly. Two men have sexual relationship with her more for physical than emotional connection. When she finds out small mollys are forming inside of those men, Molly is rightfully distraught and wants to train a molly to be her so she won't inflict this pain anymore. These mollys are thought to be less than human, but their lives are brutally short. What makes them less human than Molly? These mollys are symbolic for the pain we inflict on the people around us. They all wear her face but have none of her emotions or personality outside of rage. In any relationship, you can't help but hurt each other in some way. This novel personifies this and attaches more danger to it. The emotional battles of life from small infractions to teen angst to huge blowouts become physical ones where lives are at stake.

The Murders of Molly Southbourne is a tale many can relate to despite its bizarre trappings. Living is pain and this novel examines if that pain is worth it by upping the stakes. The book is very short at only 128 pages and packed densely with this fascinating story. I was a little skeptical of a male writer with this story, but the story feels realistic despite the fantastical elements. The only thing that I could criticize is that Molly more introverted, less outwardly emotional, and more calculating to contrast with "normal" girls and many girls are like this despite societal pressure. Other than that minor detail, this novel hit me hard and I read the entire thing in one sitting.

My rating: 4.5/5 fishmuffins

Women in Horror: The Living Dead Girl (1982)

* spoilers *

Two men break into a crypt to dump toxic waste and steal the jewelry off of the dead. The spilled toxic waste awakens a beautiful heiress named Catherine Valmont from her grave. She kills the graverobbers and drinks their blood. Afterwards, she wanders to the Valmont mansion where she used to live and is photographed by Barbara. Catherine then attacks the real estate agent and her boyfriend in the midst of their lovemaking in the middle of the night. Catherine remembers her childhood best friend Helene and answers the phone when she happens to call, playing the music box and refusing to answer. Barbara wants to find the mysterious woman she photographed and Helene drops everything to see what's happening at Valmont Mansion.

When I watched The Living Dead Girl, I was expecting an exploitative, gory movie with few merits. However, it's one of the most emotional zombie films I've seen with some flaws mixed in. Catherine Valmont is resurrected (of course looking beautiful and perfect despite being dead for years). At first, her demeanor is flat when she isn't hungry and she wanders back to her home almost in a trance. The more she drinks blood, the more she remembers about her life. Her first real connection to humanity comes in her childhood friend Helene. As children, they took a blood oath and promised to love each other even to following the other to death. Their love, whether platonic or not, has endured and gives Cathering an anchor to the human world. This relationship is portrayed so beautifully and emotionally that it elevates the entire film.

Helene loves Catherine no matter what. So many say that, but she saw the people Catherine murdered, cleaned up the mess for her, and sought out more to keep her alive. Helene would move heaven and earth for Catherine, which makes it so much more heartbreaking when Catherine refuses to go on living on other people. Helen tries to change her mind and fails, sacrificing herself instead. When Catherine becomes aware again, her heartbreak and anguish seem to drive her to madness. This relationship is in contrast with Barbara, an actress, and her boyfriend Greg. Greg pushes Barbara into being a photographer when she hates it and wants to continue acting. Also, he dismisses things that interest her and doesn't pay much attention to her at all. They aren't even married and they already seem bored, fed up with each other, and constantly at odds. The more conventional relationship is lackluster and hollow in comparison to the intense connection between the two women.

This isn't a perfect film and it suffers from problems such as the treatment of nudity. Women are exclusively nude in this film. Catherine has some random moments of nudity that may imply a less than platonic relationship with Helene. I didn't really have a problem with the choice until the scene with the real estate agent and her boyfriend in Valmont Mansion. During their night tryst, the woman is fully nude the entire time while the man's nudity is only implied. When he gets up to investigate a noise and dies, he is completely covered by a blanket while she is killed spread eagle on the front steps of the mansion. This uneven treatment shows how sexualized violence seems to be only acceptable when women are the victims. Even when not being murdered, women are unabashedly nude (even when killed) while the one man is purposefully completely covered up.

The Living Dead Girl or La Morte Vivante is a surprisingly emotional movie about the love between two women. The intensity of their relationship and the tenderness with which it was portrayed made the film so much better than expected. The film does have troubling elements, especially with the nudity, and the effects are laughably bad. However, it was a worthwhile viewing of a film I took a chance on and had never heard of.

My rating: 3.5/5 fishmuffins

Women in Horror: Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

After Jack and Jill go through their door, life goes on at Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, a cover for children still looking for the doorway to whatever fantastical world they were expelled from too soon. Some have found their doors, others haven't, and more children arrive seeking their doors. Nadya and Cora are looking for a door in a pond when a girl in a sugar dress falls from the sky into the water. Her name is Rini from Confection, a nonsense world, and she's looking for her mother who was unfortunately killed by Jill. Cora, Nadya, Christopher, and Cade go on a quest to several different worlds to find Sumi and prevent Rini from disappearing bit by bit.

This world of fantastical worlds and portals is always a treat to read. Each book is a novella but packed full of dynamic characters, their development, and the best world building I've read. More worlds are seen in this book than ever before. The Halls of the Dead are burned into my mind with its elegance, darkness, and stillness where Nancy enjoys being a living statue. The Lord and Lady of the Dead force the group into a bargain for Sumi's soul. Confection is a nonsense world where everything is made of candy except for the people. The sea is soda; candy corn fields pepper the land; even the royal guards' armor and weapons are candy wrappers and hard nougat. The food never rots or goes stale and the people never get cavities or malnourished from constantly eating candy. Because of the nonsense of the word, Sumi's death has caused a weird situation where both realities (where she does and doesn't live) exist at the same time until one overtakes the other. All of the worlds, no matter how fanciful, have a layer of reality and horror where bad things happen to good people and people die due to selfishness or greed.

The motley crew who help her are only together because of circumstance, all but one waiting for their chance to return to their world. Each character seen in has moments of insight into them even if they aren't part of the main plot. Eleanor is doomed to see and help so many find their door while she remains aging decade after decade, apart from her own world. Cora is my favorite new character, a girl who lived as a mermaid in an undersea world. Her round shape is a point of shame in our world because of the implications of that shape as lazy, slow, and somehow worth less than other shapes. She proves each of those points wrong but is still affected by the fatshaming rhetoric. Christopher is another of my favorites who is in love with the Skeleton Girl and plays a flute to call the dead made of his own leg bone. I would love to read Kade's story as he was chosen for his world due to his frilly dresses as a child that did not at all reflect who he really was and the warrior became in the end. He is the only one satisfied to stay at Eleanor's home. I love each and every character that comes to the Home and I want to see everyone's backstory plus their adventures in that other world

Beneath the Sugar Sky is another fascinating look into the fantastical world of portals, other worlds, and the people who travel through them. Seanan McGuire's writing is simply amazing. She populates her worlds with women, people with disabilities, transgender people, and people of all different cultures and points of view. Their story focuses more on their friendships whether just starting or extended for years which is nice to see since so many books primarily focus on romance. It's so refreshing to see all types of people going on adventures, not just the able bodied, male, or white. The next book in this series was just announced and I'm already hyped for it. I will read every book by Seanan McGuire or her horror/sci-fi pseudonym Mira Grant.

My rating: 5/5 fishmuffins

Women in Horror: Ms. 45 (1981)

* spoilers *

Thana is a mute woman who lives in a small. modest apartment with a nosy, loud landlady nearby at all times. She works as a seamstress in the Garment District in New York with a condescending, too friendly boss and supportive coworkers. The city as a whole is hostile to women shown in a variety of ways. Street harrassment is commonplace, shown as Thana and her coworkers walk to lunch with men lining the streets yelling lewd comments and then equally lewd insults when ignored or rebuffed. The situation is only slightly more over the top than realistic with the amount men and the frequency of their come ons and insults. This is still many women's experience even today. No one ever knows when one of those shouting men will attack the women they harrass, which is exactly what happens to Thana.

On the way home one day, a masked man accosts her in an alley and rapes her at gunpoint. It takes place in the first 10 minutes of the film. The scene is shocking and brief. Thana lays among the garbage, reeling from pain and shock, until she can gather herself and her belongings to walk the rest of the way home. Thana, relieved to be in the safety of her home, doesn't realize that a burglar has entered her house through the bathroom window. He also rapes her in a much more extended, graphic scene that ends with her smashing his head in with an iron. Thana cleans up her apartment, impassively cuts up her rapist into pieces, and puts his parts in garbage bags. The horror of the day hits her when she takes a shower and flashes back to the attacks as his viscera and blood clog the drain. This small moment encompasses Thana's trauma that she later tamps down underneath her anger.

Thana keeps the rapist's .45 gun and carries it with her as she goes to work. Bit by bit, she disposes of the corpse parts around the city in trash cans or on the sidewalk. One day, a man who harrassed her follows her with one of the bags she dropped and she tries to run. He corners her in an alleyway and she shoots him out of fear of yet another sexual assault, killing him. At first, she's sickened by the kill and runs home. Afterwards, her attitude changes when she realizes that she can get revenge by killing as many rapists and sexual assailants as possible. Her demeanor and dress change entirely. Confidence and sensuality replace her usual timidity. Bold combinations of red and black replace her usual wardrobe of drab colors. Her usually bare face is now colored with bold black eyeshadow and red lipstick. Thana invites attention now that she fights back when she tried to blend in to stay safe before.

Thana's reign of terror targets exclusively men. She starts by killing men who approach her, first letting them think she's an easy, oblivious mark. The men murdered include a predatory fashion photographer, a pimp beating a prostitute, a slew of gang members, a Saudi businessman and his driver, and a fired salesman. Some mistakes are made along the way, but she keeps up her crusade. These scenes are a reversal of what usually happens as Thana has the power over these men trying to victimize her and most likely getting away with it. It's honestly gratifying and cathartic to watch. The men of the city are now scared to be in public, an experience typically felt by women. Reality rears its ugly head when the men murdered are seen as innocent victims instead of the predators and criminals they really are.

From the beginning of the film, two people regularly condescend and infantalize Thana: her landlady Mrs. Nasone and her boss Albert. Mrs. Nasone is incredibly nosy and never passes up an opportunity to violate Thana's privacy. At the beginning of the film, Mrs. Nasone treats her like a child due to her disability, refusing to listen to her. Once Thana dresses and acts differently, Mrs. Nasone completely rejects her and deems her a bad influence. She practically has a heart attack when Thana says she's not going to be home one night. Apparently having a romantic relationship (which she falsely assumes) is completely beyond the pale for a disabled person. Thana's boss Albert treats all of the women poorly, tearing their clothes apart and screaming at them in front of everyone. He treats Thana as if he's doing her a huge favor to even employ her and doesn't hesitate to disparage her disability as abnormal. He also touches her inappropriately as if he is entitled to her body and basically threatens to fire her unless she goes to a Halloween party with him. Both people are infuriating in the way they interact with her.

Thana's crusade against men culminates at the office Halloween party. She dresses as a sexy nun and brings along her trusty .45. Her boss shows her off to everyone as if she's a prize he won and of course leads her to a room to be alone. Once there, she murders him and then turns her gun on every man in the party. Once she kills indiscriminately (and beforehand when it's implied she kills Mrs. Nasone's dog), it's much harder to sympathize with her. Her misanthropic feelings encompass more and more people until it's simply hard to justify. One of her fellow seamstresses stabs her in the back, ending her crusade and her life. Thana feels completely betrayed and shocked by the attack. She had always felt safe with other women and lost sight of how her actions would look to others. The ending is still tragic in that Thana only wanted to live her life in peace. 

Ms. 45 is a suprisingly good film for an exploitation movie. It does a wonderful job at showing how dangerous it feels at times to be a woman and exposing a real part of our society. Zoe Tamerlis Lund portrays Thana amazingly well without every uttering a word. Her facial expressions and body language say everything. The only part I didn't enjoy was Thana supposedly killing Mrs. Nasone's dog and then having the dog come back at the end. It seemed a cheap way to get the audience to pull away from Thana and seems to absolve Mrs. Nasone of her horrible behavior. Other than that, this film is surprisingly relevant and well done.

My rating: 4.5/5 fishmuffins

Women in Horror: Final Girls by Mira Grant

Dr. Jennifer Webb has created a revolutionary method of virtual reality therapy. Incomplete information about the program is available to the public in order to protect the information. Her company offers a controlled horrific scenario that use fear to deeply encode emotional responses. The situations are intentionally over the top so they won't be mistaken as something that really happened as a memory. The method is supposed to offer an experience that feels completely real with neurochemistry affected as if the situation were real life. It's essentially viewing and manipulating dreams as they happen. The experience puts the patients in a virtual reality pod with drugs to enter a hypersuggestible state and control the effects of the fear so it doesn't harm them. Afterwards, people have nightmares but no other lasting side effects.

Enter Esther, a journalist for Science Digest who regularly debunks pseudoscience as a passion project and a job. Her father was irreparably harmed by regression therapy, a method proved to be bunk, so she takes frauds very seriously. Her crusade is admirable and her emotions drive her in stark contrast to Dr. Webb's controlled and perfect veneer. Esther goes to the lab to report on the therapy as an observer and sees adult sisters who have been through it with shockingly effective results. It effectively healed years of damage, but she didn't get to see them beforehand to compare. Esther can't refuse when offered to try the experience without even consulting with her therapist before agreeing to something that could deeply effect her. Already she has deemed it as fraudulent, so she goes in with no concern after signing a mountain of paperwork.

The scenario starts with Esther 13 years old, living with her father in a new home and city after her mother died, a reversal of reality and also a very typical start to a horror film. Dr. Webb joins her and becomes her best friend. Jennifer is the more outgoing one that rails against expectations and gender roles especially in science and math. Esther is in her shadow, but acts as the power behind her friend with journalism as her main interest. They grow close through their false lives together. Unfortunately, while the women are in the virtual reality, an assassin comes in to steal the technology software and design and kill Dr. Webb. It could be used to brainwash and make She changes the scenario to years later while they are 16, an age deemed to volatile for the therapy, and amps up the horrific scenarios, bypassing safeguards in place to protect them. It starts out as bullying classmates and ends up with a graveyard full of zombies attacking their whole town.

While the ending is a bit abrupt, it's so heartwarming and touching. The friendship developed between the two women is profound and closer to sisterhood. Before, they were two women content to be alone in their careers and passion projects. What started out as Webb's manipulation for a good article became a true sisterhood although they didn't escape some damage from the assassin's uneducated and uncaring exploitation of the program.. The whole story is unlike anything I've read, but having women on each side of the story was amazing to read. They are all different kinds of women, exceptional at their chosen job, and convinced of their side. Be warned that this book is a novella, so it's only about 150 pages. However, Final Girls is an amazing and compact story that tells so much in such a small amount of time.

My rating: 5/5 fishmuffins

Women in Horror: Bite (2015)

* spoilers *

Soon to be married Casey goes on a trip to Costa Rica with her best friends as a bachelorette getaway. Drinking heavily and exploring the beautiful landscape are high on their list of things to do until Casey wakes up naked on the beach after a black out and she gets bitten by some sort of water creature. Once home, her insecurities intensify as her sores get infected and spread. Her body starts to change alarmingly while she tries to cling to normalcy.

Bite both taps into the societal expectations and treatment of women and features some uneven, unintentionally hilarious parts. Casey has cold feet about her upcoming wedding before she goes to Costa Rica. The most contentious issue is that she doesn't want kids while Jared and his mother expect it without discussion. She hasn't spoken to him about it and wants to avoid it as long as possible. For a trip meant to get away from her problems, it proves to worsen each one plus reveal cracks in her friendship. Once she returns home short a ring and plus a gross bug bite, Casey goes through the motions of being a loving girlfriend, but doesn't accomplish anything for the actual wedding or address her insecurities about the future to herself or to her boyfriend Jared. Beyond her love for dogs that simply serves as an early warning for her transformation, we are never shown her interests, her job, or anything about her beyond her ability to deny reality and avoid her problems.

The other people in her life are mostly caricatures meant to represent societal pressures. Jared's mother has outdated views of women. Women should stay in the home, take care of her husband, and only show a flawless facade. Sex is dirty and should only be saved for procreation and marriage. Obviously, she hates Casey and sees her as a flaky, selfish harlot who will destroy her son. Jared's mother is a cipher for the older generation's views of marriage and sexuality. Casey's two friends only see Jared's money and privilege, not factoring in his personality or their compatibility at all. Kirsten is a true friend and cares for Casey while Jill purposefully sets out to destroy her as competition. Kirsten and Jill represent Casey's generation where competition and privilege often overshadow friendship and happiness.

Jared himself may as well be Patrick Bateman. He's a high powered business man with no sympathy for anyone, rude comments about coworkers, and no tenderness or time for his fiancee. Working constantly, all of the things he has to say relate to his work and he never even thinks to ask her how she's doing or what she did that day. After she comes back from her trip, Casey resolves to have the painful conversation and makes dinner for him as a wife would. Instead, she becomes ill and initiates sex despite his protests that they should wait until marriage. Their tryst is interrupted by a boil erupting on her leg. Instead of showing concern or helping her clean up while she's obviously not feeling well, Jared opts to storm out, frustrated at the interruption and her rejection of him. As the film goes on, his emotions don't seem genuine and his actions are asinine. He's the most obvious caricature as he and his actions are very one dimensional and shallow.

When she begins her transformation, Casey sees boils and sores form all over her body filled with yellow pus and blood. Her hearing improves to an alarming degree, thick mucous forms in her mouth, and all over her body when she sleeps. Through all of this, she covers every sign of sickness with makeup or clothes. Everytime someone expresses concern for her, she insists that she's fine. Women are pressured to look their best, act happy, and smile at every public moment in their lives. This situation is more extreme than most, but that conditioned impulse doesn't go away. Casey doesn't call a doctor until she tests positive for pregnancy, either from her blacked out time in Costa Rica or from an incident with her fiance. As her transformation gets more and more severe, acid and supersonic screams spew from her mouth in addition to amber colored eggs that eventually coat most surfaces in her home. Her anxiety and distaste of pregnancy becomes a grotesque reality as all she does is produce an endless amount of eggs, a situation she never wanted. In this state, Casey kills multiple people on purpose and on accident, proving to be toxic to everyone as she coats her apartment in mucous and eggs.

This film has a lot to say about women and society, but some parts are not well done such as the Costa Rica trip, logic, and visual effects. Casey was raped while blacked out in Costa Rica in full view of Jill, who does nothing to stop it. The rape had no other significance beyond showing how horrible Casey's friends are, which could have been shown in a different way. The last third of the film has some unintentionally hilarious scenes that include Casey's supersonic scream causing Jill and Jared in the throes of lovemaking throw up on each other. I'll never know why anyone walks into that disgusting apartment. The smell and look of it should send people running away. I wish the tranformation of the apartment was a little more gradual. It looks normal one minute and then everything is coated with grime, mucous, and eggs all of a sudden. The CGI effects are incredibly bad and distract from the rest of the film.

Overall, Bite is a fun movie with amazing practical effects and a story that critiques how society treats women. Elma Begovic as Casey transformed from a pretty woman to a hybrid bug monstrosity convincingly despite the thin writing for the human character. Her apartment and her appearance reflect each other as each degrade and become unrecognizable. The ending is one of the best parts as a woman is bitten by one of Jared's bugs, showing that this doesn't end with Casey and her circle of friends; it effects all women. I loved even the cheesy parts and I will be revisiting this imperfect film in the future.

My rating: 4/5 fishmuffins

Women in Horror Month 2018

It's time for Women in Horror Month once again! This year is a new era in entertainment as women are being supported by the public and by others in the industry to expose sexual predators. It's amazing to see actual consequences for perpetrators and critical views of people who support them. It's not perfect as women are still asked what they did to provoke attacks or told they should have acted or dressed a certain way to avoid attacks. Predatory directors and actors still receive work, awards, and success despite their disgusting actions. Overall, the situation is getting better and will continue to get better as standards are raised for what is acceptable.

In regard to horror, women's stories are often told and lean more towards women with agency and power, such as Gerald's Game and Tragedy Girls. Some films tackle how women are treated and conditioned to be by society such as Raw. Others find humanity and layers even in monsters like Hounds of Love and Capture Kill Release. Last year was an amazing year for horror, but like the overall Hollywood state, we need to support more women as directors and behind the scenes roles. There is still a ridiculous amount of push back and hate when anything is billed as being created by women. Transwomen are still demonized in horror, a toxic trope from years past. It's crucial that we identify the good things and the things that need to change in this time of change.

We'll see what the future holds and do what we can to make sure it's better and better. This year, I'll be reviewing books and films made by women or featuring women and analyze what it says about them or their place in society plus lists, podcasts features, and whatever else strikes me in this subject.