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Posted on August 31, 2020

“Blood Opera”: A Celebration of Stretch Brock

Imagine a Final Girl. She’s probably a teenager, virginal, with a hint of androgyny in her haircut, her outfit, or her name. When theorist Carol Clover identified the trope of the Final Girl, she noticed these commonalities, but there was one who was a little bit different. Stretch Brock (Caroline Williams), Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2’s DJ heroine, is no teenager and no virgin. In his response to Clover, Jack Halberstam called her “the most virile, certainly the most heroic, and definitely the most triumphant final girl.”[i]

Posted on August 13, 2020

The Return of the Girl-Monster – Part 2

Sara McCartney

In his groundbreaking book on queerness and horror, Harry Benshoff looked to the star of Cat People (1942) as not only a particularly sympathetic monster but a rare example of lesbian subtext in the early horror film: “Irena’s monstrous ability to turn into a panther and kill men […] serves as an oft-cited metaphor for lesbian sexuality in the films of this era.”[1] The early girl-monster is associated with sexuality that deviates from the strict heterosexual norm, whether by vampirically seducing and draining young women as in Dracula’s Daughter (1936), or by a more complicated mix of frigidity and passion. Irena could be read as queer in her avoidance of heterosexual intimacy, or read as too attracted to men, such that she is prone to improper and violent explosions of passion. The modern girl-monster, who almost exclusively preys on men, has left behind the Countess’s predatory lesbianism for the more ambiguous waters of Irena’s fraught passions. How queer is it? That depends on the movie.

Posted on August 5, 2020

The Rise of the Girl-Monster Part 1: Birth and Body

Sara McCartney

Beware the girl-monster, as deadly as she is beautiful. She is that compelling horror creature who is driven to bite, mutilate, and devour her victims out of an uncontrollable compulsion or appetite. She is most often characterized by her sharp teeth and unruly body, but rarely appears in the same form twice. The girl-monster is as old as the horror genre itself but, in the last 20 years, has enjoyed a renewed popularity and is, arguably, one of the most prolific horror cycles of the twenty-first century, as well as one of the least remarked upon.

Posted on July 27, 2020

Mexican Gothic: Pulpy Anti-Colonial Critique

Sara McCartney

From the title on, Mexican Gothic, the latest from Mexican Canadian novelist Silvia Moreno-Garcia, leaves no doubt about its genre or its self-awareness. Fans of the Gothic will find all its greatest hits lined up and ready for savoring – the crumbling house, the family with a secret, fraught sexual dynamics, ghosts of a restless past. Moreno-Garcia delivers it all with gusto. But more than mere homage, the novel’s pulpy plot invites a closer read to its treatment of race, colonialism, patriarchy – and some very scary ecology.

Moreno-Garcia locates her Gothic in 1950s Mexico; her heroine is Noemí Taboada, a high society beauty sent to check in on her beloved cousin, Catalina. Recently married to English expat Virgil Doyle, proud owner of a defunct silver mine, Catalina’s rambling letters home have aroused her family’s concern. No swooning damsel, Noemí is vibrant, cunning, and sharp-tongued. She’ll needs all that and more to escape the machinations of the Doyle family, who decide to make the most of Noemí’s intrusion.

Posted on July 20, 2020

Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl: A Bildungsroman for the Monstrous Child

Sara McCartney

The Icarus Girl, Helen Oyeyemi’s 2005 debut novel, lives at the intersection of three contemporaneous trends. Most scholarly attention locates it among Nigerian diasporic literature, which experienced a boom in American and English publishing at the start of the twenty-first century.[i] Indeed, The Icarus Girl remains Oyeyemi’s most overtly Nigerian novel. Less recognized is The Icarus Girl’s contribution to two of horror’s big turn-of-the-millennium booms – creepy kid movies, which were having quite a moment with offerings like The Ring (2002), The Sixth Sense (1999), and The Others (2001), and children’s gothic literature, whose prominent titles include The Series of Unfortunate Events (1999-2007) and Coraline (2002). Oyeyemi’s melding of these three disparate subgenres and their expectations creates a distinctly postcolonial and humanized uncanny child.