It all started with Possession. Zulawski’s film, formally speaking, is perfection – its deep blue hues, its labyrinthine locations, the hypnotic cinematography of Bruno Nuytten. But that’s not what drew me to return t it again and again. There was something terrible in that film, a desperation recognized in myself, in my inability to communicate effectively, and the frustration that would lead to despair, anger and hysteria.
My relationship with this film caused me to look at what kinds of warnings – or in some cases reinforcements – I was getting out of other films in which disturbed or neurotic women figured greatly.
But my starting point was a question, and that question presented itself easily: I wanted to know why I was crazy – and what happens when you feed crazy with more crazy.
Directors of pedigrees as varied as Roman Polanski and Andy Milligan have plumbed the depths of female neurosis because it’s such fertile ground. You could say that the entire catalogue of rape-revenge films are descended from Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960) and the medieval folk tales that inspired it, and that many of the characters in this book owe a certain debt to those created by directors as diverse as Michelangelo Antonioni, Richard Lester and Yasuzo Masumura.
Monica Vitti’s character Giuliana in Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964), for example, has been labelled “the neurotic personality of our time”. 1 While Red Desert lies outside the genre scope of this book, the detailed manifestation of female neurosis would have an impact on many filmmakers featured here.
Wound Gatherers
Like my biological mother, Julie was also a redhead, a small-framed feisty woman with a cackling laugh who was always smiling and dancing to hide what was certainly a crushing heartbreak.
This wasn’t the first time, and wouldn’t be the last, that my mother would experience physical violence in her own home. Over time I think she came to expect it, or perhaps even to believe she deserved it.
When I was about ten years old I remember overhearing her talking about a new film that disturbed her greatly, although I don’t know if she actually saw it or just read about it somewhere. The film was shrouded in controversy, so I don’t doubt that a newspaper article may have prompted her reaction. As a teenager I would eventually see the film, and I understood why it upset her, just as it upset many women at the time. It was Sidney J. Furie’s The Entity.
The film, released in 1982, explores the domestic abuse/woman-as-masochist stereotype by veiling it as a supernatural horror film. But what made the film’s uncomfortable hypothesis impossible to dismiss was that it was based on a true story.
Culver City, California, 1974: UCLA Parapsychologists Dr. Kerry Gaynor and Dr. Barry Taff were approached in a bookstore by a woman who claimed she had a ghost in her house. During a two-hour preliminary interview the woman (whose real name was Doris Bither) admitted that the ghost had beaten and raped her.
In the movie, Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey) is a single mother whose struggle to get by is aggravated by the presence of an extremely violent, foul-smelling and distinctly masculine ghost. The entity threatens her body as much as her sanity; it repeatedly and brutally rapes her, in one instance in front of her children, and another while she is fast asleep. Her boyfriend Jerry (Alex Rocco) is talked about more than seen; he is away on business trips for most of the film. As the entity’s attacks intensify, Carla assumes the role of the abused housewife, which is especially fitting since the absence of a patriarch in the home leaves room for the entity itself to function as a sort of drunk, violent husband. Furthermore, the entity attacks her in a friend’s home, and in her car, which causes her to retreat into the physical and emotional isolation that is characteristic of many victims of domestic abuse. Close-ups of her increasingly vacant, detached gaze signify her resignation to the violence.
After the attack in her car, Carla goes to see a psychiatrist named Dr. Sneiderman (Ron Silver) who insists that the attacks are the product of her imagination. “I’ve seen cases of hysteria that have raised welts, caused blindness, loss of hearing…” he explains, while calmly filling out a prescription for tranquilizers. He coaxes her to tell him about her childhood, believing, like any good Freudian, that therein lies the key. “As a kid I experienced every cliché in the book”‘, she admits, “I was scared of the dark, I was afraid of my father. He was a minister… when he held me it wasn’t in the way a father should hold a daughter.” So at the age of 16 she ran away, married a teenager who got her pregnant almost immediately, and things went downhill from there. Her young husband started drinking and popping pills excessively and got himself killed in a motorcycle accident before the baby was born.
The psychiatrist’s role in the film is pivotal, because he is the one character close to Carla who views her predicament symbolically. While her children, her boyfriend, and a team of parapsychologists all concur without doubt that something is living in the house with her that is not just the product of her own delusions, Dr. Sneiderman’s opposing stance resulted in the dismissal of the film by many viewers who felt that it appeared to advocate – or at least validate – the myth of therapeutic rape.
The attack while she is asleep (which boasts incredible FX by the late Stan Winston that show her breasts being manipulated by invisible fingers) is made all the more painful by Carla’s subsequent admission to the sceptical Dr. Sneiderman that she had an orgasm during the experience.
This admission only serves to strengthen his theoretical resolve. His interviews with her mirror the interrogation heaped upon abused women when they finally turn to someone for help: they are suspected of fabrication, provocation, even seduction. Sneiderman believes she has brought on the attacks herself; that she is not the victim of a demonic external entity, but of her own repression and secret need for abuse. He subscribes to Freud’s assertion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) that the unconscious seeks to return to the major unresolved traumas of childhood in an attempt to master the conflict. He believes that Carla has to be saved from herself; and for the most part, she agrees: “I do need your help”, she confides, “I really do. And I won’t fight you. If it’s really me creating all this, if I’m that sick, then I have to be stopped.” She wants to believe him. After all, if the source of the problem is in her, then so is the solution.
Again, she exhibits the behaviour of the masochistic woman who repeatedly returns to an abusive lover. In a sense, it’s traumatic bonding – the abuse only strengthens the ties between the abused and her abuser, because it is a shameful secret that is shared between them.
Dr. Sneiderman puts her before a panel of psychiatrists who agree with his prognosis that the attacks are mounted from within, that she is acting out some adolescent masturbation fantasy and repressing the desire to have intercourse with her son, who is the spitting image of her dead husband. She is analyzed as having a fear of sex bred into her by a strict Christian upbringing, and as ‘imagining’ her father to have had incestuous designs on her. Any chance of having a normal, healthy relationship with a man is sabotaged by her need to have ‘safe sex”, meaning sex through which she derives no real pleasure; so she creates a destructive fantasy to intervene.
But the panel’s observations don’t sit right with her; these people are objectifying her, and are insensitive in their accusations. A female psychiatrist on the board cuts to the chase: “Would it be a reflection on you as a woman if [the entity] left you, if you were cured?”
But self-blame is no less destructive; it’s an easy out that only feeds the negative cycles of abuse. After the events that led to her divorce, and bolstered by the incident at Columbia Court (which my father Oates – a psychologist – refused to believe ever occurred), my mother remarried, and this new relationship would bring its own challenges in the form of an ill-tempered stepfather whose behaviour would be tolerated because my mother felt to do otherwise made her a failure. If one views Carla’s situation in The Entity as the equivalent of domestic violence, Sneiderman’s assessment is not far off the mark: women who cyclically pair up with or return to abusive partners are more often than not re-enacting residual experiences, constantly returning to the source of trauma in an attempt to master it, to get it right.
In The Entity, Carla is eventually driven from her home; but as the film’s closing credits indicate, the entity follows her, and the attacks on her real-life counterpart were supposedly still occurring after the film had been made. If the film had provided some sort of closure – if Carla Moran had somehow defeated her spectral assailant – perhaps the film would have been received more favourably. Any misogynist elements would have been softened by the triumph of the woman at the end. But Carla doesn’t win.
She remains the victim.
The more recent film Paranormal Activity (2007 – which since this writing has gone on to spawn a successful franchise), while less fraught with controversial sexual politics than The Entity, deals with a similarly recurring haunting. A young couple (Kate and Micah) invest in a home video camera to record the nightly paranormal occurrences that have been plaguing them since they moved in together: banging and scratching sounds coming from the walls and the hallways, the movement of small objects, an odorous breath coming from an invisible source. But as Micah becomes more fascinated with the possibility of capturing a haunting on tape, Kate becomes increasingly agitated and fearful that the camera is antagonizing the entity and inviting more intense attacks.
Her trepidation is reinforced by a psychic who visits them and asserts that there is indeed a demonic presence in the house that is specifically interested in Kate, and that any tension between Kate and Micah, any tangible strain on their relationship, will only extend a further invitation to evil forces. The seeds of discord are certainly there, and increase as the couple suffers from sleep deprivation that heightens their mutual sense of anxiety. Kate objects to her boyfriend’s liberal use of the camera around the house – which acts as a buffer obscuring their personal communication – and his increasingly macho attitude about handling the problem himself, without the assistance of a professional demonologist. He challenges and taunts the entity even as Kate begs him to stop inviting more horror upon her.
Micah thinks it’s a game though, and to emphasize this, he brings a Ouija board into the house, to Kate’s furious objection. With the Ouija board left alone during an argument that takes the couple out of the room, the camera records the movement of the planchette across the board, spelling out a word that appears to be the name ‘Diane’ before spontaneously bursting into flames.
It is revealed that Kate is no stranger to these incidents; they’ve been happening to her intermittently since she was a child, and ended when her house suddenly caught fire and burned down with no apparent cause that the fire department was ever able to concretely determine. As Micah scours the internet looking for related information, he comes across a mirroring case a generation earlier, involving a young woman named Diane who suffered a haunting as a child, which ended when her home also burned to the ground. But Diane was also revisited by the entity as a young adult – and she didn’t survive its return. Kate sees much of herself in this girl Diane, and the precedent convinces her that it is the work of the same demon, which transferred its abuse from one victim to the next. She feels herself headed towards the same fate as the girl who came before.
However, Micah offers little emotional support. It becomes apparent that his defiant refusal to accommodate Kate’s wishes stems from a passive-aggressive resentment over the fact that she neglected to mention these hauntings before they moved in together. He feels that, by withholding this information from him, she made her choice – and now he has the right to deal with the situation in his own way.
Kate becomes listless and withdraws into emotional vacancy, resigning herself to a lack of control as her boyfriend and the demon engage in a dangerous battle of wills over her life. As in The Entity, the woman is only a pawn, being objectified, interrogated and ultimately silenced.
These kinds of films, in which an invisible antagonist returns again and again to an increasingly defeated victim – while operating superficially as ghost stories – are almost always analogous to other psychological issues, most notably the repression of traumatic memories and the cyclical acceptance of abuse.
The notion of a haunting coming back intermittently is something that has always interested me, based on the fact that many of the traumatic events of my own life have patterns of reappearance. A haunting is very much like a memory, as Barry Curtis noted in his book Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film (2008): “The experience of being haunted is accompanied by a crisis of objectivity and demands a process supplementing unreliable vision with other kinds of knowledge.”* As she grew older, my mother would wrestle with unwanted memories and delusional visions, just as I struggled with identical, recurring nightmares for most of my childhood, followed by a hysterically violent adolescence that repeated much of what my stepsister had gone through before. No one in that house was okay. We mistrusted and manipulated each other, creating an epic drama in which the unreal became real, the foundation of which has been lost over time.
When my mother remarried, I was thrilled. I loved my new stepfather Adam and his two teenage daughters, one of whom – Karen – would be coming to live with us in a large house that had previously belonged to Adam’s parents. Karen seemed the perfect big sister to me: she was ten years my senior.9
But Karen was less excited about the new setup; she and my mother held each other in reserved suspicion, competing for Adam’s attention and creating conflict that soon erupted into physical violence. My mother won out, and my stepfather’s frustration turned to Karen. He would hurl accusations at her; she would respond with typically teenage nihilistic vitriol; he would lose patience and start talking with his fists. My brother Burl would retreat, hiding in his room until it was over. But I would come rallying to my sister’s defence: I remember my stepfather dragging her down the stairs by her legs, and I jumped on his back – a mere 5 years old – punching and kicking to try to get him to stop hurting her. Karen ran away from home shortly thereafter, and it would be years before I saw her again.
She woke me up the night she ran away to tell me that all the belongings she was leaving behind were now mine. As a kid there was no person I idolized as much, and for years her room remained untouched; it was like a silent monument to her rebellion.
She attained mythological status in my mind once she fled the domestic scene, especially since I only heard about her in whispers for the next several years. I would think of her when watching Disney’s sole venture into horror territory, The Watcher in the Woods (1980) in which ‘Karen’ was the name of the missing daughter who haunted the forest from a parallel dimension. Karen’s room always figured heavily in my dreams; except in my dreams it was my room, which I took to be an unconscious wish to be her. I didn’t become my sister, but I soon filled the same role in our house.
My stepfather was easily agitated and often in a bad mood; he didn’t like his job or his boss, and he had a chronic mysterious pain in one of his legs that he refused to see a doctor about. The events with Karen had created an atmosphere of trepidation in the house, and my brother and I were instructed not to bother my stepfather unless he initiated conversation.
I could never tolerate this. I didn’t see how, as a young child, it was my fault if he chose to stay in a job he didn’t like, or to not get a prescription for whatever his ailment was. So while my brother would stay out of sight, I insisted on being front and centre. I would push my stepfather’s buttons even though I knew it wouldn’t end well.
The most extreme incident of physical abuse, for me, came in the year following Karen’s departure. It was Saturday morning and my father was reading the paper while I sat beside him at the table eating cereal, and waiting for my toast to brown in the toaster-oven. Not looking up from the paper, he told me to stop chewing with my mouth open. It was a habit I’d never grown out of, and I probably managed to stop for a minute or two before I started up again. The paper went slamming down on the table and my father arose quickly and grabbed my toast out of the toaster oven and slammed it into my mouth, its crisp edges cutting my lips as he shouted,
“You want to be a pig?! I’ll teach you how to eat!” He went to the freezer and grabbed a box of frozen shrimp, opened it, and began hurling the tiny rocks at my face with a force that raised red welts on my cheeks and forehead. I ran from behind the table towards my parents’ room, where my mother was still sleeping after working a late shift, but he grabbed me and dragged me toward the basement. I went flying down the stairs to the dark bottom as he yelled, “Stay down there and don’t move – and if you turn on the light I’ll come down and break your fingers off!”
I was afraid of the dark, and stayed down there for what seemed an eternity before I heard the sound of my mother getting up from her room to go to the bathroom. I bolted up the stairs to the bathroom door and began pounding on it, screaming for my mother’s attention. She opened the door and looked at me, a mess, welts on my face and blood lining my kneecaps and the corners of my mouth. She stood there for a moment before saying “I can’t deal with this”, and then went back into her room and closed the door, ignoring my continued pleas for her help.
This would become the familiar response whenever my stepfather lost his temper with me, although it would never again reach the same level of physical violence. Over the years, my mother would refuse to address this issue, as would any relatives – including my father in Winnipeg – to whom I would readily protest.
The fights continued well into my teens, although there were moments of respite and bonding. Despite everything I was probably closer to my stepfather than anyone else in my immediate family. Both possessed of volatile tempers, he and I would engage in brutal, noisy, violent altercations that would have everyone else in the house hiding from a flurry of projectiles. After a particularly vicious fight, the routine was always the same: my stepfather would wake me up in the middle of the night for the late-night creature feature on some Detroit station, bowl of popcorn in hand, and say, “Remember this next time you get mad at me.” In other words, my tolerance for real-life violence was rewarded with horror films.
The police were at our house frequently, although I never knew who called them. I loved the attention, the tension, the probing questions, knowing full well that if I said the right thing, my stepfather might go to jail. But I didn’t want him to go to jail. I just wanted him to stop being in a bad mood all the time.
Part of me must have thrived on the drama of the violence, otherwise I would have adopted my brother’s seemingly neutral stance instead of engaging in what now seems to me deliberate sabotage. My mischievous nature made it easy for me to be blamed for everything, while my brother sailed through any threat of punishment just by keeping his mouth shut. In retrospect I think he had the right idea. But there was something attractive about being able to endure the violence, and it wasn’t just the popcorn and horror movies I would get afterwards. As I mentioned, my mother tolerated it because she felt to do otherwise made her a failure. Why I put up with it was for a totally different reason: I knew it made my parents failures, and the more I could take, the more morally superior I felt.
It makes sense to me in hindsight why my mother loves made-for-TV movies so much. She’s a sucker for cheap melodrama, an inclination she passed on to me. The Burning Bed, Deadly Intentions – my mother, the eternal victim, had found the perfect small-screen reflection of her own anxieties, and she buried her troubles in the comfort of the prime-time ritual – commercial breaks meant a refill on beer, a few pills, a bathroom detour, and back to the ABC movie of the week. Until I moved into foster homes as a teenager I had no idea it wasn’t normal for a tiny woman to down a case of beer each day. But my childhood was only the beginning of her problems.
I’m tempted to say she never had a chance, but we all have a chance.
hexafu 