by Sady Doyle
Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Salt Lake City, UT: Project Gutenberg Ebook, 2013.
Radcliffe’s ornate prose and glacial pacing may strike some readers—including this one—as a bit of a slog, but nevertheless, this gives a taste of the intensely feminine vulnerabilities excavated by the Gothic.
THEORY
Moers, Ellen. “Female Gothic,” excerpted from Literary Women: The Great Writers. KNARF Project, University of Pennsylvania Department of English. Accessed January 22, 2019. http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/moers.html.
A much-cited delineation of the genre. I’m also, obviously, indebted to her thoughts on Mary Shelley and motherhood.
CHAPTER FIVE: BIRTH
FILM
Aronofsky, Darren. mother! Streaming. Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures, 2017.
A fascinating and unnerving attempt to write the primordial Mother back into Christian myth. Nature is personified as an ever-giving housewife whose Jehovian husband offers the neighbors dominion over their house, to increasingly catastrophic results.
Cameron, James. Aliens. Streaming. Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1986.
Contains some of the least subtle pregnancy imagery of a pregnancy-obsessed series, including Ripley’s nightmare of demonic “childbirth.” That said, the real, primal glory of this installment is the Queen, a twenty-foot-tall, perpetually pregnant, mucus-dripping vagina dentata. The war of space marines—wielders of patriarchy’s weapons, bearers of tools and rules—against the primordial Queen and her acid-blooded children makes for a story that is essentially Tiamat: In Space!
Cronenberg, David. Dead Ringers. Streaming. From a novel by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland. Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1988.
Emotionally repressed gynecologists rape women in an effort to control and subjugate their inherently “mutant” sexual anatomy. If you tried to adapt Of Woman Born as a soap opera whilst dosing the crew with psychedelics, this is what you’d get.
Flender, Rodman. The Unborn. Streaming. Los Angeles, CA: Califilm, 1991.
A woman tries to abort her fetus, gets denied because she’s over eight months pregnant, goes to a back-alley abortion provider—who, in what appears to be a major oversight, just hangs out in the lobby of the main abortion clinic, like an unlicensed cab trying to pick passengers up at the airport—and is defeated when the fetus not only survives the abortion, but swears revenge. The angry fetus then tricks the abortion-getter into leaving her apartment, accosts her, uses its mind-control powers (???) to make her breastfeed it, and when her husband comes home, stabs him right in the eye. The woman is forced to hunt her aborted fetus down, gun in hand, in the hopes of ending its reign of terror. I haven’t even mentioned the subplot about the militant lesbian feminist Lamaze coach, played by Kathy Griffin. I love this movie very much, and believe it should be taught in schools like The Catcher in the Rye.
Hadžihalilović, Lucile. Évolution. Streaming. Paris, France: Potemkine Film, 2016.
French film about a society of sea-worshiping, mermaid-like women who impregnate boys. Illuminates the terrors of pregnancy and patriarchal medicine by changing the gender dynamics; its most gruesome scare is just footage of a C-section.
Lowe, Alice. Prevenge. Streaming. London, UK: Kaleidoscope Entertainment, 2016.
A woman is commanded to kill by her evil fetus. Wonderful at conveying the conflicting senses of alien invasion and primal power that pregnancy can bring. Probably the only horror movie directed by and starring a pregnant woman.
Scott, Ridley. Alien. Streaming. Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1979.
A classic, and the chest-burster scene shows the series was obsessed with monstrous births long before the Queen showed up.
Spielberg, Steven. Jurassic Park. Streaming. From a novel by Michael Crichton. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures, 1993.
this Page.
LITERATURE
Aeschylus. The House of Atreus: Being the Agamemnon, the Libation-Bearers, and the Furies. Translated by E. D. A. Morshead. Salt Lake City, UT: Project Gutenberg EBook, 2018.
There have been a lot of high-profile translations of all or part of this trilogy—I’m partial to the Anne Carson Agamemnon, and the Robert Fagles translation I read in college sparked an enduring love of the work—so I’m defaulting to the most widely available, not the best. Still, no matter whose version you read, it is disappointing when the Furies sell out.
Anonymous. Beowulf. Translated by Frances B. Gummere. Salt Lake City, UT: Project Gutenberg EBook, 2013.
Again, one of many translations; Seamus Heaney’s is worth checking out, but this one’s free. When the Geatish warlord Beowulf defeats the monster Grendel, he’s forced to face an even more terrible threat—the monster’s mother. Responsible for the very useful adjective aglaeca, which means “horrifying and violent” but also “awe-inspiring and great.” When Grendel’s mother is called aglaeca, we call her monster. When Beowulf is called aglaeca, it’s usually translated as hero.
Anonymous. “Enuma Elish: The Epic of Creation,” excerpted from The Seven Tablets of Creation, translated by L. W. King. Sacred Texts. Accessed January 26, 2019. http://www.sacred-texts.com/ane/enuma.htm.
this Page.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or: The Modern Prometheus. Salt Lake City, UT: Project Gutenberg EBook, 2008.
this Page.
NONFICTION
Asma, Stephen T. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009.
A comprehensive look at historical monstrosity; especially useful for his explanation of monstrous birth and Aristotelian theories of generation.
Garbes, Angela. Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy. New York, NY: Harper-Wave, 2018.
It is shocking how much medical science does not know about pregnancy—or, for that matter, about the body of anyone who isn’t a cis man. In the United States, many pregnant people aren’t given the help they need to have healthy births, they aren’t taught enough about their own bodies to know how pregnancy will affect them, and they aren’t treated or screened by doctors for even the most common postpartum complications and injuries. Garbes covers all this, and points out the often unappreciated powers of pregnant bodies along the way.
THEORY
Chu, Andrea Long. “Extreme Pregnancy.” Boston Review. Summer 2018. http://bostonreview.net/forum/all-reproduction-assisted/andrea-long-chu-extreme-pregnancy.
Chu recounts saving her own sperm before transition as a means of grappling with the “naturalness” (or lack thereof) of reproduction. Chu argues that, even though we know biologically essentialist views of reproduction and gender are bad for us, we cannot seem to give up “nature as an object of desire.”
Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
Famously argues that women will not be free until we’re freed from reproduction. I’m less than inspired by Firestone’s vision of mechanical wombs—it seems to me that we can take the burden off women just by sharing the work of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting with a wider variety of genders—but her calls for the end of the patriarchal nuclear family ring true.
Halberstam, Jack (writing as Judith Halberstam). Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.
Halberstam’s definition of the monster as the liminal figure of inhumanity that produces our definition of “human” is threaded all through this book, and particularly in its discussions of freakishness.
Rothman, Barbara Katz. “Beyond Mothers and Fathers: Ideology in a Patriarchal Society.” In Maternal Theory: Essential Readings, edited by Andrea O’Reilly. Bradford, Canada: Demeter Press, 2007.
Rothman connects the ideologies of patri
archy, technology, and capitalism to show how babies have become “products,” and mothers—including exploited lower-class women, such as surrogates and biological mothers in impoverished countries—have become cheap, devalued labor.
Walker, Barbara G. The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. London, UK: Pandora, 1995.
The “women’s spirituality” movement within feminism is often regarded as a boondoggle, characterized by sloppy scholarship, gender essentialism, and hard politics melting into New Age mush. I remain fond of it because of its core insight: if women are to change the world, our myths must also change. Walker’s book is a sort of Key to All Mythologies for the goddess movement. I find that she oversteps her bounds when dealing with nonwhite cultures, and I wouldn’t cite anything in here without checking it against a more academic source, but at her best, she traces the shape of something—a primordial female force that is all about snakes and moons, birth and sex, blood and black water—that inspires genuine awe.
CHAPTER SIX: FAMILY
FILM
Amenábar, Alejandro. The Others. Streaming. New York, NY: Dimension Films, 2001.
The best Turn of the Screw adaptation that doesn’t actually adapt The Turn of the Screw. Stars Nicole Kidman as a tightly wound, overwhelmed single mother tormented by both her creepy, light-averse children and her increasingly sinister servants—though we come to realize just how sinister Kidman herself is before the movie is out.
Clayton, Jack. The Innocents. DVD. Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1961.
A more direct adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, scripted by Truman Capote, which (though it makes the ghosts more real than I’d like) effectively plays up the sexual hysteria at the heart of the tale. Famously contains a very weird scene in which a small child Frenches his nanny.
Kent, Jennifer. The Babadook. Streaming. Toronto, ON, Canada / Kew, Victoria, Australia: Entertainment One and Umbrella Entertainment, 2014.
The story of a single mother with an ambiguously disordered son. The mother becomes increasingly abusive toward the boy as she begins to blame him for all her suffering, with the titular demon—who taunts her to “come see what’s underneath”—standing in for her depression and rage. Outside of The Fifth Child, this is the grimmest depiction I know of motherly labor.
LeRoy, Mervyn. The Bad Seed. DVD. From a novel by William March and a play by Maxwell Anderson. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros, 1956.
A woman slowly begins to understand that her prepubescent daughter is a violent psychopath. A withering look at mid-’50s domesticity; the ending is so disturbing filmmakers had to attach two or three false, reassuring endings after the fact before censors would permit it to be shown.
Nakata, Hideo. Dark Water. Streaming. From a novel by Koji Suzuki. Tokyo, Japan: Toho Company, 2002.
Single motherhood is even more heavily stigmatized in Japan than it is in the United States. That pressure fuels this unexpectedly moving ghost story. A single mother tries to keep custody of her little girl after a divorce, while living in an apartment haunted by the ghost of a fatally neglected child; the center cannot hold, and the conclusion makes me cry every time.
Rosenberg, Stuart. The Amityville Horror. Streaming. From a book by Jay Anson. Los Angeles, CA: American International Pictures, 1979.
Ed and Lorraine Warren are horror’s favorite grifters; this was one of their first famous cases. Though the Warrens themselves are cut out of the film version, all their favorite haunted-house tropes—from ghosts as the embodiment of marital discord to unexplained swarms of flies—are on display.
Wan, James. The Conjuring. DVD. Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema, 2013.
The canonization of the Warrens continues apace, with an admittedly decent ghost story that portrays Ed and Lorraine as a supernaturally wholesome presence restoring order to the Perrons’ demonic, child-eating house. Granted, Wan does this by eliminating more or less all of the useful context for the story, but that’s to be expected.
LITERATURE
Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. New York, NY: Penguin Horror, 2013.
A woman spirals out of control in a haunted house that seems to know, and mirror, her history with her mother. Every ghost story you read is trying to be this book, and usually failing.
James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw. Salt Lake City, UT: Project Gutenberg EBook, 2018.
this Page.
Lessing, Doris. The Fifth Child. New York, NY: Vintage International, 2010.
this Page.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2007.
The ghost stories of mothers of color are rarely told. This is the big, canonical exception: the story of a mother who kills her youngest child to spare it from slavery, and what happens when the baby comes back.
NONFICTION
Brittle, Gerald. The Demonologist: The Extraordinary Career of Ed + Lorraine Warren. Los Angeles, CA: Graymalkin Media, 2013.
This thing is amazing: a square, earnest, Christian family counseling manual wherein one of the counselors is a “clairvoyant” and demon dolls occasionally strangle their owners in their sleep.
O’Connell, Meaghan. And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 2018.
In recent years, feminists have leaned into writing about motherhood as work, and the emotional exhaustion and ambivalence that comes with caring for small children. O’Connell is an early practitioner of the form; this book expands upon her popular parenting essays to create a memoir of unexpected pregnancy, traumatic birth, and complicated matrescence.
Perron, Andrea. House of Darkness, House of Light: The True Story, Volume 1. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2011.
this Page.
Purkiss, Diane. At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies, Hobgoblins and Other Troublesome Things. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2003.
A history of fairy faith as reproductive horror, encompassing Greek lamiae, Irish changelings, and The X-Files. One of my favorite books ever written.
THEORY
Badinter, Elisabeth. Mother Love: Myth and Reality. New York, NY: MacMillan Publishing Co., 1981.
this Page.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution—Tenth Anniversary Edition. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 1986.
Epochal study of maternal ambivalence and how “motherhood” has been taken away from women and put in the hands of male authorities. The lines about ambivalence are quoted in nearly every contemporary book about motherhood, and for good reason.
CHAPTER SEVEN: BAD MOTHERS
FILM
Cronenberg, David. The Brood. DVD. Atlanta, GA: New World Pictures, 1979.
A mother literally gives birth to her own rage, over and over, in the form of evil mutant babies that go out and kill her enemies. This is not one of the more subtle entries on our list.
Cunningham, Sean S. Friday the 13th. Streaming. Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1980.
Some slashers are tense and gritty; some are surreal and nightmarish. Then, there’s Friday the 13th, which is just silly. The franchise takes a knowingly trashy premise—a child drowns because of horny camp counselors, leading to the rise of a killer who exclusively targets sexy teens—and just sort of goofs off for as long as it takes to fill out any given movie’s run time. Admittedly, the premise makes a lot more sense in this first installment, where (a) Jason Voorhees is actually dead, and (b) the killer is his prudish and enraged mom.
Demme, Jonathan. The Silence of the Lambs. DVD. From a novel by Thomas Harris. Los Angeles, CA: Orion Pictures, 1991.
Jodie Foster’s Clarice set a new template for women in horror—competent, non-objectified, adult; she was reincarnated as Dana Scully just a few years later—and Hannibal Lecter is one of the great modern mon
sters. Which makes it all the more frustrating that this is the movie responsible for Buffalo Bill.
de Palma, Brian. Carrie. DVD. From a novel by Stephen King. Beverley Hills, CA: United Artists, 1976.
Obviously. this Page.
Hitchcock, Alfred. Psycho. DVD. From a novel by Robert Bloch. Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1960.
Robert Bloch wrote a novel in which a psychosexually stunted Gein clone decapitated a blonde in the shower. It was Alfred Hitchcock’s choice to turn her death into a barely coded sexual encounter—that rhythmically stabbing knife!—and by so doing, create an entire cinematic vocabulary of sex = death = sex that still more or less defines horror. Granted, Hitchcock did this because he was a massive creep who did, in fact, find it hot to traumatize blonde women. You take what you can get, I suppose.
Hooper, Tobe. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. DVD. Los Angeles, CA: Bryanston Distributing, 1974.
Gein was famously haunted by phantom smells, claiming the world “smelled like flesh.” If any movie smells like flesh, it’s this one, which takes the cadaverous decor and skin masks of the Gein case and transposes them from chilly Wisconsin to a sweaty Texas summer. You can smell the rot through the screen.
Philippe, Alexandre O. 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene. Streaming. USA: IFC Midnight, 2017.
Documentary. The first kill in Psycho is a cinematic landmark, and notably, provided the title for this book. This film examines the primal encounter of dead blonde and bad mother from just about every angle. (The scene of noted creepy actor Elijah Wood figuring out in real time how to play Norman Bates is a delight.) Contains more information on how Psycho arose from ’50s ideas of the family and encroaching cultural paranoia about “overbearing” moms.
