JPC: You’ve been writing about horror movies for years, and my dissertation was on the American Gothic. I didn’t write about movies, but I began thinking about them through that lens around that time. My grad school boyfriend and I became obsessed with the movie The Exorcist for some reason. We watched it a lot. He even mentions us going to see the re-release at a Philadelphia theater in a book he wrote. That was the extended cut of the film, the anniversary edition, and I remember being struck by how much of the newly released material pointed to the idea of Regan becoming uncontainable and unknowable because she is moving from childhood to adolescence. I felt that the additions bogged down the pacing of the movie but also helped me think through what was being suggested about the dangers of girlhood (both to the self and to the patriarchal order). Girlhood as gothic horror. It’s something you know a little about.
JMG: Well, there’s my obvious obsession with religion and the supernatural and the search for proof of the existence of something more which I came by natural but was exacerbated by my mother’s death and my own grief. I think so much of my life has been horrifying that I feel comforted and affirmed by horror movies about women either trying to save their families or watching the world crumble around them (Poltergeist, The Babadook, Mother!) or being terribly gaslit that these things aren’t even happening when they are very obviously happening (Rosemary’s Baby, hell, even Nightmare on Elm Street). Parents and spouses who don’t believe you--or that you can’t believe or trust--are especially terrifying.
JPC: I really think this is your next book, by the way. An exploration of your own passage from girlhood to womanhood as refracted through grief and the Catholic fascination with suffering, and how movies help you think about that. And just gave you comfort. And the southern gothic. It all works together.
JMG: The Catholic writer Eve Tushnet wrote a beautiful essay situating The Song of Bernadette as a horror film, which spoke to me because Bernadette is my patron saint and I spent so much time watching Jennifer Jones in that film as a child in Catholic school and always found it terrifying. It covers a lot of the territory we enjoy in more conventional horror--an adolescent girl experiencing the uncanny and then being gaslit to bits by the patriarchy. “Authority, in horror, lies with those to whom powerful men do not listen,” Tushnet writes. There are also movies most wouldn’t consider horror that horrify me. I think I might put Woody Allen’s Manhattan in that category now. Watching Mariel Hemingway in bed with Allen and contemplating how the film normalized his obsession with young girls is more stomach turning than The Exorcist at this point.
JPC: Yes, we both just watched Allen v. Farrow, and the care with which it chronicles a dynamic hiding in plain sight--the discounting of women’s narratives in service of the myth of male genius--is chilling. The woman Mariel Hemingway’s character is based on is interviewed in the documentary series, and her experience was one of coming to realize that the whole trajectory of her adult life had been affected by that relationship, one in which an older, respected man preyed on her. She felt at the time that she was an active participant in the relationship, but as she grew up, it became increasingly apparent just how young she had been and how manipulative the dynamic was.
I’ve always been interested in how the passage from girlhood to womanhood is uncanny for women, and the representation of that in film and literature. There’s a loss of agency and freedom of movement and thought. It’s a transformation that makes one the object of a whole dense network of pre-existing psychosexual … bullshit. Where do we see those narratives about the dangers inherent to body and mind in entering into the heterosexual economy? We see them in fairy tales and in the gothic retelling of fairy tales in literature and film (Rebecca, The Piano, the short stories of Angela Carter). And we see them in horror movies. (See this great essay by Danielle Pafunda on the subject.)
I have this poem in the book that’s currently out to publishers (When We Were Fearsome) that riffs on the connection between families and Freud’s notion of the uncanny:
Crux Moments
What do you do with a wintry mix and a tiny human
who won't keep his socks on is a question your PhD
might help you with. Gothic moments in American realism
is what your dissertation was on and also what happens when
you lean in at 4:30 a.m. to check on the baby and he's there
staring back at you with wide-open eyes. Redeployment of Freud's
concept of the unheimlich is helpful in literary study and also
in thinking about how the baby looks when he's suddenly sitting
up looking around at the air above his head, when seconds before
he was deeply asleep. Are families uncanny? Only when
you can't fall back to sleep and start thinking about Salem witches
and spirit orbs and the job market. Whether you ever grew a small
human in your body or cared for one or regarded one with interest,
think about the strands of the Marvelous and the Real. Think about
the cloud cover; the interplay of consciousness; the slowing down
which precedes a quickening of the imagination; a onesie made of stars.
In the poem I sort of gloss over the idea that families are uncanny. But of course they are. Just the idea of living in close proximity with other human beings who you ostensibly deeply know when, in fact, we never know all that is going on in another person’s mind-- that unknowability of the familiar is ripe for gothic plotlines. And there’s the specific dynamic whereby having children is, in a literal sense, bringing a stranger into the family. Who is this person? And who do you and your partner become after the introduction of children? Parenthood changes the dynamic between people who were once lovers. You become a different self. And then the question becomes, do you remain recognizable to yourself and each other?
That’s what Freud built his theories on. All the repression and pyschosexual drama that is a middle-class nuclear family. Of course, then he tried to shut down what that meant for women by explaining “hysterical” symptoms as resulting from their own overly-active imaginations.
Anyway! I have long bemused people with getting overly into cultural readings of movies. I remember watching a 1970s or early ‘80s movie on video with an old friend--The Changeling or Burnt Offerings or The Amityville Horror--and commenting on how horror is latent in all nuclear families because of all the barely-suppressed brutality of patriarchy, and she just gave me this totally exasperated look. Is it like explaining a joke to talk about it? Or do people not see what they’re looking at? It’s like how people watch news accounts or crime dramas of murdered women as if they are these dramatic anomalies, but no one stops to put it in the context of the threat to all women of living under patriarchy.
The return of the repressed! People love those stories. They resonate with us because these cultural texts speak the unspeakable. Like Rosemary’s Baby! Roman Polanski can go straight to hell, but the performances in that movie! Poor Rosemary… Poor Mia Farrow…
JMG: Rosemary’s Baby is the ultimate tale of religious gaslighting. That moment when she assents to be the mother of her child, knowing who he is, knowing who these people are, is one of the greatest moments in horror. It’s echoed in The Witch too--the moment of assent, when the heroine commits to what she has fought against for so long because it’s the only way toward agency. It explains to me my own willingness to have been a traditionalist Catholic, the promise of some measure of protection by the patriarchy for my assent. The horror is when that promise is empty, which it always turns out to be. So I don’t read the end of The Witch as a triumphant step toward freedom (though there is an impulse to raise your glass and say, good for her! Like Lucille Bluth) but as a capitulation to misogyny, a capitulation to the existing narrative of what women are allowed to be and how. The only way Rosemary can live into her motherhood is to assent to the cult. The only way the girl in the Witch survives is the coven. The only way forward is capitulation. Like you said, it’s coming of age as a loss of agency.
After watching Allen v. Farrow the scenes of Rosemary on the phone with her doctor or on the phone with her husband seem so strangely prescient of Farrow’s taped conversations with Allen. The pain in her voice, the fragility, and then the coldness and lies meeting her on the other end of the line, the feeling that she must be crazy, because how could this actually be happening in her own family? But there’s really nothing prescient about it. It’s the way it is and always has been. All the more chilling that Roman Polanski is an abuser too and clearly knew what he was doing in these scenes of psychological torture.
JPC: No, there’s nothing prescient about it, but it’s very chilling. It’s the unheimlich-- that moment when something previously familiar (I almost wrote “previously family”) becomes unfamiliar. I think of Mia Farrow finding those Polaroids of her daughter and of Allen’s voice on the phone. It really does echo Rosemary realizing she can’t turn to the patriarchs for help, her phone call with the doctor.
JMG: It literally happens in Allen v. Farrow. The doctors they take Dylan to are in the bag for Allen!
JPC: It’s the same old story recurring. The erasure of the woman’s voice in the service of men getting what they want. It should be known but it’s like waking up with a stranger. It’s horrifying.
It’s difficult to find ways to discuss how these dynamics have played out in our own lives. I’m not one to suggest that a writer must air all her traumas, though I support those who do delve into the difficult stuff. I think in my own work, I tend more toward hinting at harsher realities, “telling it slant,” to paraphrase Dickinson. I love how movies give us a way of starting this conversation and get me thinking about tools for telling the stories we-- you and I, but also any women writers-- want to tell.