Hereditary

Introduction to the Monstrous-Feminine

In The Monstrous-Feminine, Barbara Creed discusses women in the horror film, not as victims, but as the monster, with the female reproductive body as the cite of horror. In this blog post, I will be assessing the film Hereditary through Creed’s analytical lens. The blog is divided by Freud’s theory of the uncanny, “that which ‘is undoubtedly related to what is frightening - to what arouses dread and horror’” (53), which Creed explains falls into three main categories:

(i) - those things which relate to the notion of a double: a cyborg; twin; doppelgänger; a multiplied object; a ghost or spirit; an involuntary repetition of an act.

(ii) - castration anxieties expressed as a fear of the female genitals or of dismembered limbs, a severed head or hand, loss of the eyes, fear of going blind.

(iii) - a feeling associated with a familiar/unfamiliar place, losing one’s way, womb phantasies, a haunted house” (53).

(i) - those things which relate to the notion of a double: a cyborg; twin; doppelganger; a multiplied object; a ghost or spirit; an involuntary repetition of an act.

In the film, Annie makes a series of small models of the places and people around her--synthesizing literal doubles. In addition, Annie is haunted by the ghost/spirit of her mother whose figure she sees in and outside of the house. These apparitions would be interpreted by those around her as hallucinations. Creed explains that schizophrenia, the experience of delusions and hallucinations, “is already assimilated to female behavior” and that “Lenne’s definition of what constitutes the monstrous is questionable on a number of counts, particularly his statement that the horror of schizophrenia is somehow ameliorated not only because it is understandable but because it is a supposedly ‘female’ illness” (4). The term “schizophrenia,” which is associated with the feminine, literally means “split mind,” a split between that which is real and that which is not. Annie does experience a split between her conscious and unconscious mind, as while sleepwalking she tried to burn her children by coating them in paint thinner. Annie also imagines that, after following a trail of ants into her son’s room, he is consumed with the ants crawling in and out of the orifices of his face. 

This oscillation from the ‘real’ world to Annie’s delusions and hallucinations can be seen as border crossing. As Creed explains, “...the concept of a border is central to the construction of the monstrous in the horror film; that which crosses or threatens to cross the ‘border’ is abject” (11).. Creed continues by stating that this border can be “...between the normal and the supernatural” (11). The border that Annie is engaging with is between that which is real or normal, and that which appears unreal or supernatural. Annie, in crossing this border becomes a site of abjection. Abjection is “that which does not ‘respect borders, positions, rules’, that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order’” (8). Annie can also be seen as abject as her children break away from her. As Creed explains, “in the child’s attempts to break away, the mother becomes an ‘abject’” (12). As a mother, Annie embodies the inside/outside dichotomy of abjection. As Creed notes, “an individual who appears clean on the outside may be corrupt on the inside. The dichotomy of pure/impure is transformed into one of inside/outside” (48). The nature of the womb represents “the impossibility of ever completely banishing the abject from the human domain,” as the inside of the womb is deemed unclean (49). In Hereditary, the womb-having characters are all possessed internally. While they appear clean on the outside, they have been corrupted from the inside.

Possession in Hereditary can be seen in the grandmother, mother, Annie, and daughter, Charlie--hence the title of the film. Creed explains that “possession becomes the excuse for legitimizing a display of aberrant feminine behaviour which is depicted as depraved, monstrous, abject -- and perversely appealing” (31). It is this possession that allows Annie to express her hatred for her son, a monstrous reaction. Referring back to Freud, this possession can be seen as the involuntary repetition of an act. It is possession that is assumed to be the cause of Charlie’s clicking tick. As Creed explains of the movie The Exorcist, “One reason for Regan [the young girl]’s possession/rebellion appears to be her desire to remain locked in a close dyadic relationship with the mother” (39). This dynamic can be seen between Charlie and her grandmother, with whom she had an extremely close relationship, and as a result of which she is possessed. Referring again back to Freud, the involuntary repetitious action that Annie performs possesses her to both bang her head on the attic door multiple times in succession, as well as repeatedly saw at her own neck.

Interestingly, Creed notes that “woman is constructed as possessed when she attacks the symbolic order, highlights its weaknesses, plays on its vulnerabilities; specifically, she demonstrates that the symbolic order is a sham built on sexual repression and the sacrifice of the mother” (41). It is only after questioning the patriarchal figure of the family, her husband, that Annie becomes entirely possessed. As Creed explains, there is “maternal ‘authority’ and ‘paternal laws’” and it is “woman’s fertilizable body which aligns her with nature and threatens the integrity of the patriarchal symbolic order” (12, 50). When questioning her husband, who tells her to calm down and not burn Charlie’s journal, she is hysterical, eventually throwing the journal into the fire. As soon as she tosses the journal into the fire, her husband is immolated, consumed by flames. In failing to follow his patriarchal laws, she is attacking the symbolic order, and is thus deemed possessed.

(ii) - castration anxieties expressed as a fear of the female genitals or of dismembered limbs, a severed head or hand, loss of the eyes, fear of going blind.

We see this anxiety illustrated when Charlie’s journal is revealed to have a series of images of Peter with his eyes crossed out and when Charlie decapitates a bird. In addition, the decapitation of all of the females in the family serves to replicate the castration associated with female genitalia. Creed explains that “...bodily disfigurement as a religious abomination is also central to the slasher movie, particularly those in which woman is slashed, the mark a sign of her ‘difference’, her impurity” (11). The women’s decapitation in the film can be seen as a mark of their difference, as while the women serve to host and conjure the demon, their bodies are insufficient for this male host. The female body is abject, dirty, and inadequate. Creed explains that “...ancient religious and historical notions of abjection - particularly in relation to the following religious ‘abominations’: sexual immorality and perversion; corporeal alteration, decay and death; human sacrifice; murder; the corpse; bodily wastes; the feminine body and incest. These forms of abjection are also central to the construction of the monstrous in the modern horror film” (9). In Hereditary, we see these religious abominations committed against the family, as the grandmother’s corpse is dug up and beheaded, Charlie’s head is seen rotting by the side of the road, Peter is sacrificed so that his body may be used to host Charlie and the demon, etc. Creed explains that “within a biblical context, the corpse is also utterly abject. It signifies one of the most basic forms of pollution - the body without a soul” (10). Hereditary is littered with corpses, particularly those of females--the ultimate abjection.

(iii) - a feeling associated with a familiar/unfamiliar place, losing one’s way, womb phantasies, a haunted house.

While the family’s house has likely been in Annie’s life for a long time, the house is alien to her. It is barren, poorly lit, and demonic symbols are inscribed in the woodwork. The house seems haunted, as Annie hallucinates ants crawling through the house and into her son’s face. In addition, while it is implied that her mother’s followers have moved her body to the attic and decapitated her, there is always a sensation that paranormal forces are at play and that the horrible things happening in the home are the result of a haunting.

Creed makes clear that the place which a female monster inhabits acts as a symbolization of the female reproductive system. Creed continues by stating that “in many films the monster commits her or his dreadful acts in a location which resembles the womb. These intra-uterine settings consist of dark, narrow, winding passages leading to a central room, cellar or other symbolic place of birth” (53) “The symbolization of the womb as a house/room/cellar or any other enclosed space is central to the iconography of the horror film” (55). I would assert that in Hereditary, the treehouse is the womb/symbolic place of birth, as Charlie spends much of her possessed alone time in there, and Annie sleeps in the treehouse when she wishes to reconnect with Charlie. The treehouse is warm and glows red on account of a space heater--iconography associated with the womb. It is also inside of the treehouse that Charlie is introduced to her cult following from within Peter’s body, and is anointed as the demon king, another symbolic birth. 

As for the house, Creed explains that “...the body/house is literally the body of horror, the place of the uncanny where desire is always marked by the shadowy presence of the mother” (55). The grandmother’s house is literally marked with demonic inscriptions, iterations of desire that allow the grandmother to loom even after she has passed. Creed continues by explaining that “when the house is the central location, the narrative usually leads us back to some terrible crime committed by or against a family that once lived there” (55). The house is both haunted by the crimes of the grandmother’s past and continues to haunt the family in the present.

The demon is introduced to the human realm through cult ritual. When Charlie dies, Annie is taught a summoning ceremony by Joan, a member of her mother’s cult, and conducts this ceremony again in her home. As Creed explains,“ritual becomes a means by which societies both renew their initial contact with the abject element and then exclude that element. Through ritual, the demarcation lines between human and non-human are drawn up anew and presumably made all the stronger for that process” (8). By continuing summoning rituals where her mother has left off, Annie is again boundary crossing, this time between human and non-human realms. It is through ritual that the connection between the family and the demon can be made stronger and the incarnation process can be completed.

The Shining

Identification in Horror

Carol J. Clover’s book Men, Women, and Chainsaws is most concerned with the critical analysis of sex in the horror film. While young male viewers represent the majority of horror film audiences, their identification practices in horror allow them to identify with both the perpetrator (often male) and the victim (often female). As Clover explains, “...the force of the experience, in horror, comes from “knowing” both sides of the story” (12). Clover introduces the female victim-hero, who the male audience will at first root for their victimization, but ultimately they identify with her and revel in her success as the hero (4). As Clover explains, the horror film is primarily oriented around identification with the victim, contrary to previous literature. This “raises questions about film theory’s conventional assumption that the cinematic apparatus is organized around the experience of a mastering voyeuristic gaze” (9). As Clover continues, the horror film “engage[s with] repressed fears and desires and [reenacts] the residual conflict surrounding those feelings” (11). Horror allows for unique viewing practices that allow the spectator to disavow their own identity temporarily to engage with their repressed fears and desires through an oscillating lens of perpetrator and victim, male and female. In The Shining, audiences oscillate from Jack’s hallucinations and delusions to Wendy’s perspective as she is victimized by Jack to Danny’s perspective as he also is victimized by Jack, the spirits trapped within the hotel, and as he speaks with his imaginary friend Tony. The audience is permitted into the world of all of the prominent figures within the film, seeing from their perspective, and thus the identification with the characters is informed by the different perspectives permitted by the apparatus.

One and Two Sex Theories

Clover discusses the one and two sex theories, which inform both the sex of the characters and the world that they inhabit. The two sex model states that men and women are essentially opposites. The one sex model, however suggests that men and women are one and the same--a vagina is merely an inversion of a penis (13). It is from the one sex model that the concepts of “penis envy, phallic women, and anal menstruation/intercourse/birth” are all derived from one sex thinking (14). As Clover describes of a boy being beaten, his “identifications are so fluid that the question of whether it is in male or female form that he imagines himself being “loved” by his father is, for all practical purposes, moot” (15). In essence, the boy is able to oscillate between a conception of both a male and female form of himself to understand which side his father prefers. This oscillation is important to understand in the case of Danny Torrence who, as Wendy explains to the psychologist who visits their home, was injured by Jack in a drunken “accident,” after which Tony, Danny’s imaginary friend emerged. As Clover iterates, “women begin to look a lot like men (slasher films), men are pressured to become like women (possession films), and some people are impossible to tell apart” (15). Tony can be read as a possessive spirit, inhabiting Danny’s body, as he takes over Danny, writing REDRUM on the wall of the hotel, and in another scene says to Wendy “Danny isn’t here Mrs. Torrence.” Thus, by being possessed, Danny is oscillating into a female state, what Freud described as “slidingness,” by representing the one-sex model in a two-sex world. The one-sex model derived from the world of horror, and the two-sex world being the status quo.

The Terrible Place

The Shining gives an excellent exemplification of the terrible place in the Overlook Hotel--a remote estate built on cursed land, far away from any civilization, snowed in, with only a two-way radio for communication. As Clover explains, “the terrible place [is] most often a house or tunnel, in which victims sooner or later find themselves is a venerable element of horror” (30). The terrible place can more specifically be relocated to the bathroom in which Wendy locks herself to hide from Jack. In the terrible place, the victim experiences “dawning understanding, as they survey the visible evidence, of the human crimes and perversions that have transpired here” (31). This revelation moment occurs as Wendy sees that Jack has been writing the same sentence over and over again “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” As Clover explains, what once seemed to be a safe place with walls to keep evil out quickly becomes the same walls that hold the victim inside (31). Clover continues by describing the iconic moment in post-1974 slashers that is exemplified in one of the most memorable scenes from The Shining--the moment when the victim locks themselves inside of a small space to hide, and the killer hacks into the room. Importantly, this action is “inevitably seen from the victim’s point of view; we stare at the door (wall, car, roof) and watch the surface open to first the tip and then the shaft of the weapon” (31). In The Shining, it is impossible to forget Jack’s axe breaking the bathroom door as Wendy screams next to the blade. From her perspective, we see Jack peak his head through the axe hole in the door and exclaim “HERE’S JOHNNY!” Jack’s weapon choice is also quintessential to the slasher genre, as a gun would never do the trick. Slasher perpetrators like to be up close and personal, taking the victim’s life with their own hands.

The Final Girl(s)

While we’ve already discussed the final girl in our analysis of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I would assert that both Wendy and Danny Torrance are the final girl in The Shining. Danny is permitted to be the final girl on account of his exemplification of the one-sex theory, as described above, and the fact that “sex, in this universe proceeds from gender, not the other way around,” thus the nature of Danny’s possession (along with the dissociative psychological effects he presumably experienced during his previous abuse) allows him to be, for our purposes, a girl (13). Danny is just as much of his father’s victim as Wendy. We see both Wendy’s point of view as Jack slashes through the door, and Danny’s point of view as he runs through the hedge maze. Clover proposes the formula “point of view = identification,” meaning that in both of these instances the viewer is identifying with the female/feminized victim (45). Most importantly, we have the “active, investigating gaze” of the final girl, which complicates theories of spectatorship, with the male gaze being the only active gaze (48). Both Danny and Wendy not only look at Jack, but investigate a way to escape the atrocities that Jack is about to commit. I would thus assert that Wendy and Danny are our “female victim-hero” (4). Perhaps Danny even more so than Wendy, because Danny’s gaze is the most informed. Danny sees the twins in the hallway, Danny sees the old woman in room 237, and Danny even foresees the future. Danny is the most seeing character in the entire film and his gaze, like that of the final girl, is the most active.

Ganja and Hess

Traditional Horror Conventions

The horror film is derived from culturally constructed fears of “Otherness” and “the Other.” As Harry Benshoff explains in “Blaxploitation Horror Films: Generic Reappropriation or Reinscription?,” in the American horror film, there is an oscillation “between the ‘normal,’ mostly represented by the white, middle- class heterosexuality of the films' heroes and heroines, and the ‘monstrous,’ fre- quently colored by racial, sexual, class, or other ideological markers” (31). Normality is threatened by the monster, and the monster must be destroyed to relieve the anxieties created by “otherness” and to return to normality.

Blaxploitation Horror

Inversely, blaxploitation horror films change the traditional identification structures of the horror film. As Benshoff explains, “normality” is also present in the blaxploitation horror films, but “audience sympathy is often redirected away from those figures and toward the figure of the monster, a specifically black avenger who justifiably fights against the dominant order-which is often explicitly coded as racist” (37). In essence, while social structures of heterosexuality and whiteness are still present as figures of normality, the audience identifies more with the black monster. As the monster annihilates the figures of normality, the audience is satisfied, even pleased. Importantly, there must be a “reappropriation of the monster as an empowering black figure...the softening, romanticizing, and even valorizing of the monster” (37). Despite its focus on representing African American culture and challenging social structures predicated on white supremacy the blaxploitation horror film genre cannot be deemed fully progressive, “because the very formula of the genre demonizes difference, be it based on gender, sexuality, or race” (42). The blaxploitation horror film puts black figures as protagonists at the forefront, but simultaneously reinscribes racist tropes as well as harmful ideologies regarding women and homosexuality.

Black Film Aesthetics in Ganja and Hess

In Ganja and Hess, we see many deviations from the conventional horror film--from it’s art house style and elliptical storytelling, which Manthia Diawara argues is “important to the creation of a black film aesthetic” (43), to the blurring of the line between normality and the monster, to the “twoness” of the African American psyche. In the film, by splicing between the past and present--for example, when Ganja describes her dream of being murdered by Hess, followed by clips of her being stabbed outside wearing African robes--the film replicates the diasporic sensation of the African American psyche in being both connected to a past homeland, ancestry, and identity, simultaneously with the present. The film blurs the line between normality and the monster as it blurs the lines between good and evil. Ganja and Hess don’t kill for sadistic pleasure, they kill out of survivalist necessity. Hess even feels remorseful, vomiting blood after commiting a murder and eventually seeking out religion as penance.

“Twoness” in the African American Psyche

As Benshoff explains, “many of the films also play out interesting variations on WE.B. DuBois's concept of "twoness" in the African American psyche” (39). For me, this double identity was akin to the concept of the cyborg, neither human nor machine. This consideration of “twoness” also allows for queer readings of the blaxploitation horror film in its discussions of nonpatriarchical/non-westernized sexualities and dual sexual identities--i.e. bisexuality. More importantly, we see the figure of the “white” black man, who despite his external blackness, distances themselves from black culture. In Ganja and Hess, we see the “twoness” of the African American psyche enacted through Ganja and Hess. The mere term African American denotes a split identity between homeland origins and transplantation to the present location. Ganja and Hess are black figures who have removed themselves from black culture and feed off of those of lower capitalistic status--enacting the same damage as those who used African slave labor--feeding off of the productive power of the other. Ganja and Hess have been immortalized and turned evil by African voodoo, but can only be saved by Western Christianity--another iteration of the split identity between homeland origins and the indoctrination of the western white savior’s culture. Part of the reason that Hess isn’t a particularly queer character, as Benshoff argues in “Monsters in the Closet” that most vampires are, is because of the “black macho ethic...the strong black male avenger; even if monstrous...was romanticized and celebrated (41). While Hess as a vampire may be bisexual, a reiteration of not only the vampire trope but also of the idea of “twoness,” I would argue that the filmmakers, both informed by misoginy (illustrated by the ineffective black mother) and a desire to have a macho black male avenger, did not wish to engage with this particular iteration/interpretation of the diasphoric experience.

Women and Homosexuals in the Blaxploitation Horror Film

Despite its use of alternative modes of storytelling to illustrate the African American experience and psyche, Ganja and Hess enacts the same damaging tropes that Benshoff identifies in blaxploitation and blaxploitation horror films. He states that these  films “tend to uphold male-dominated (hetero)sexuality  and participation in the genre’s usual demonization of women and nonpatriarchical sexualities...western, sex-negative Christian ideology...both conservative Christian pundits and radical black militants often cited strong black women (and effeminate or gay black men) as something that was "wrong" with black culture (40-41). In essence, black women and homosexuals were seen as cites of humor and failure within the black community and were represented as such. The only iteration of motherhood seen in the film is when Hess is next to a female victim lying on a bed, covered in blood, while a baby cries. This scene supports the argument that blaxploitation horror films cannot be fully progressive, as despite racially progressive themes, we see the harmful gendered trope of the black maternal figure as a failure. As explained by Kathleen Fitzgerald in “Recognizing Race and Ethnicity: Power, Privilege, and Inequality,” “black mothers are portrayed in popular culture as bad mothers, in that the matriarch has low morals and does not make her family her priority” (357). This mother, in prioritizing sex, has orphaned her child.