Sex, Blondes, and Horror: A Trifecta by Emma Hartman

Hair color means virtually nothing. Scientifically, it’s determined by an excess, or lack, of a polymer called eumelanin which determines someone’s particular shade of brown, blonde or red. It has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence, purity or morality but that hasn’t stopped society from tying it to a whole bunch of absurd symbolism. In an instant it seems like the world of Barbie, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Betty Cooper was erased in favor of characters like Chris Hargensen, who plans a prank so brutal and cruel it results in the demise of most of her Senior class, Pamela Voorhees, a deranged serial killer mother hell-bent on avenging her son, and Tiffany Valentine, trailer park trash turned murderous, sociopathic doll. 

The theme of the villainization of blonde women dates back to Ancient Greece with Aphrodite, best known for being the goddess of love, lust, beauty, pleasure, passion and procreation, etc. and her long golden hair, which might have been a real riot at the time but fast forward the 15th century and men don’t want anything to do with sex and the impurity it implies, so Aphrodite is equal to sex, and sex is evil. Et voila. In fact, this trope can even be traced back to biblical times. Eve is described as having flowing locks and statistically would have had blonde hair and isn’t she one of the worst women in the Bible besides Delilah? Eve:  a temptress, rule-breaker, and the creator of childbirth and all sin, including lust.

But all this still begs the question “Why are blonde villains scary?” We’ve covered how blonde women are seemingly the root of all evil, etc., etc. but what makes these women chilling enough to earn their place in classic horror films like Chucky, Friday the 13^th and Carrie? Like most things, if you dig long enough, you’ll typically find the core of any given problem is either based around sex or money. In this case it’s sex, but again what’s so scary about that? 

Due to our friend Aphrodite, blonde women are now universally viewed as walking sex symbols but as a nation where the idea of purity culture is so deeply engrained in us, the idea of sex or anything relating to it has become horrific and now the ideas of sex, blonde women and horror have become so severely intertwined and meshed to a point where it’s almost impossible to separate them from each other. There’s was even a movie made in 2014 that manages to tackle all three titled “It Follows” and is commonly known as a metaphor for an STD. The plot follows a girl’s sexual encounter that quite literally haunts her till the end, threatening at any given moment to kill her. I’ll bet you’ll never guess her hair color.

Discussion Questions: 

1. Do you think blondes are more likely to be characterized as stupid and naive or bitchy and calculating? Why?
2. Why would Stephen King choose to make both his protagonist (Carrie) and antagonist (Chris) blondes?

The Horror of Liminal Spaces: What Makes Them So Terrifying? by Ella Craig

Intro:

Across the ages, liminal spaces have been used to scare audiences by creating an eerie and unsettling atmosphere. There is a strange sense of uncertainty that comes with them, an unexplainable feeling that can only be associated with suspense. The textbook definition of a liminal space is as follows: “the physical spaces between one destination and the next.” Their existence is not about themselves, but rather about the actions that take place while passing through. General examples of these spaces include: malls, hallways, grocery stores, school buildings, even roads. 

The design of these spaces is often cold and bare. There is no demand for them to be welcoming because the inhabitants of these spaces usually fill that void to the point where it isn’t noticeable. However, when these places become abandoned or deserted, they can be quite scary. These places are so off-putting because people never go to these places with the intention to stay; they’re used as a connector between two separate destinations. A few well-known examples of these spaces could be the hallway scene in The Shining, or the long corridor shot from Us.

Although most liminal spaces have a more frightening effect when used with an absence of light or people, there are exceptions to this when shot with a “wider” lens. This way, the audience is able to experience more of the setting and can still experience the same creeped out effect. 

Liminal spaces are not limited to being just physical, though; oftentimes, what makes horror movies so frightening is that they deal with psychological liminal spaces–being forced to stay in a certain emotional state for an extended period, usually resulting in a build of tension that results in a dramatic climax. A known example of this could be in Carrie, as the emotions she has had to repress after facing copious amounts of bullying from her peers for years leads to the inevitable “snap” that happens at the end of the book.

Adolescence is a recurring theme found in psychological liminal spaces, so a large majority of horror movies that use this concept deal with teenagers transitioning into adulthood. This goes hand in hand with confusion, mental health problems, etc. These themes are easy to play with when combined with horror as they can be malleable to use when creating an alarming setting. Another quick example of this can be seen in Donnie Darko as he struggles with vivid hallucinations. The central question of the film is whether or not Donnie deals with schizophrenia or if his visions are more supernatural, leading him to be perceived as insane and disjointed. 

Discussion Questions:

-Do you think that psychological liminal spaces apply to all psychological horrors? If not, what are the differences?

-Are there any traceable patterns you see in horror movies when liminal spaces are used? How does the camera shot used affect the power of the scene?

“Suffer the Little Children” and Doubt by Benjamin Azencott

Horror writer Stephen King is well known for his many horror novels, such as Carrie, It, and The Shining. Today, however, I would like to talk about a horror short story of his, “Suffer the Little Children,” and how he uses doubt in it to create horror. 

The story goes as follows: Miss Sidley, a strict third-grade teacher, notices one day that one of her students, Robert, seems different. In the corner of her eye, she believes that she sees him change into something monstrous. This image continues to haunt her, as she notices more and that children in her school seem “off”. In the bathroom, she hears children gossiping about her and then sees their shadows morph. After a confrontation with Robert, she is almost run over by a bus when she runs away from him in fear. The story wraps up with her murdering twelve of her students before she is stopped, convinced they are monsters. She winds up in a mental institution, where she kills herself.

The story as is, where young children are being replaced by monsters and tormenting their teacher, is horror enough, but Stephen King uses doubt to add another layer of horror to the story. While the story is written in the third person, it is limited because it is told through the viewpoint of Miss Sidley, who is not necessarily a reliable narrator. 

Describing her, King writes,

She was graying, and the brace she wore to support her failing back was lined clearly against her print dress. Small, constantly suffering, gimlet eyed woman. […] Her tongue was a schoolyard legend. The eyes, when focused on a giggler or a whisperer, could turn the stoutest knees to water (King 1).

She is aging, and also suffers from chronic back pain, which she needs to wear a brace for. On top of that she is also extremely strict, constantly on the lookout for student’s wrongdoings. These character traits show that she is potentially unreliable. When she does first notice Robert “changing”, it is through the reflection of her glasses that she checks to see if students are behaving. King describes it as, “just a flicker of it, just a frightening glimpse of Robert’s face changing” (King 2). When she turns around to look at him, he is completely normal, and none of the students seem to have noticed anything, either. So did Robert actually “change,” or did Miss Sidley just mis-see what happened? All the factors seem to add up that it could easily just be a misunderstanding.

Whether or not he did “change,” this image continues to haunt her, even in her dreams, and the next day she is unrested and nervous. Once again she has an incident, this time in the girls’ lavatory, where she sees two children and believes she sees their shadows change. King writes,

She stared at the hunched shadows and suddenly screamed at them. The scream went on and on, swelling in her head until it attained a pitch of lunacy. And then she fainted (King 3).

By now it is clear that Miss Sidley is simply not well. Constantly in pain, no sleep, and fainting in the middle of the school day from the shadows she sees. Her first encounter with the monsters is simply just a slight flicker in the reflection of her glasses. The second is just a few shadows changing shape. While she believes them to be real, both could very easily just be tricks of the light.

The rest of her encounters with the monsters, where she actually sees them change right in front of her, might make one believe they actually exist. But Miss Sidley’s combination of age, pain, fear, and sleep deprivation mean that we cannot necessarily trust what she is seeing. Just as we doubt her, she doubts herself. 

King writes her thinking:

I was looking for something, and when there was nothing, my mind just made something up (King 2).

It was all in your mind, Emily. All in your mind (King 6).

The reader cannot trust Miss Sidley, but cannot know for sure that she is wrong either. In this way King uses doubt to add horror to the story. When the story ends, the reader still doubts whether or not Miss Sidley was correct or just hallucinating. King presents the reader with two potential stories: One where a teacher is being tormented by monsters that are replacing her students, and another where a hallucinating, abusive teacher murders twelve innocent students in cold blood, both equally horrifying. 

Discussion Questions:

• In Carrie, there isn’t much doubt as to what is happening in the book. Does Stephen King create more horror with doubt, like in this story, or without it, like in Carrie?
• What is some other horror media you know that uses doubt or unreliable narrators? How do they accomplish it, compared to King’s “Suffer the Little Children”?

“The Woman in the Room” Write Up by Caroline Anthony

Summary – In “The Woman in the Room” by Stephen King, our narrator John contemplates whether he is able, and more importantly willing, to kill his mother, who is dying slowly of a cancer in her stomach. The story begins with him asking this exact question to himself: Can he do it?, and describes him ruminating on all the different medications that the mother is taking, then to the pills that he plans to give to his mother in order to kill her. He is thinking about this while in the elevator on his way to his mother’s hospital room, where it is revealed that he is usually very very drunk (almost two six-packs of beer drunk) when he makes these visits, but here he has not had anything to drink. When he enters the room, his mother asks him to move her legs down twice, forgetting after she asked the first time, and the reader is brought into a flashback about John’s grandmother, who was in a similar situation when he was a boy, and provides backstory on how his mother had dealt with this situation. We flash back into the present as the mother chokes on her water, which surprises John even though he means to kill her anyway. Then, in a flashback to a conversation with a doctor, it is revealed how dire her situation is; she is essentially going to be bed-ridden and miserable for the rest of her life. Back in the present, John asks her to move her hands, then retrieves her purse from the closet and gets her to grab something out of it. He then offers her the pills, which she takes, then promptly falls asleep. John goes out to drink, then comes back and kisses her on the head. Then he goes home and waits for a phone call, wishing he’d given her another kiss.

Craft Element Analysis – 

The craft element that I am going to focus on is tone. Salesses describes tone simply as “an orientation towards the world,” which I think is an interesting way to describe tone in general, but especially under through the lens of King’s writing. I have read a few other stories by King, all horror except for one sci-fi novel that still did a great job at being scary, and his way of achieving this, since the first horror book I’ve read has always interested and surprised me. You see, King, though he may be describing something indeed disgusting, still mainly relies on general word choice to set the scene, or I should say the tone. This kind of description is again evident in “The Woman in the Room;” though not explicitly a horror piece, the language used throughout paints it almost effortlessly as one. Right off the bat we get the description of “a sound coming from her mouth like splintering popsicle sticks,” which in and of itself is a sharp and unpleasant sound, the description of which he is using to describe something his mother does, which already beings the characterization of them both about three lines into the story. He sprinkles in lines like this throughout the story, whether he be describing the setting of the hospital:

This is the old wing of the hospital, and it smells like the sweet-smelling sawdust they sprinkle over puke at a county fair…

the other patients in the hospital:

They all walk slowly, as if someone had unscrewed the tops of their organs like mayonnaise jar and liquids were sloshing around inside…

or again, his mother herself:

She is straining in the bed, not really moving except her eyes, but straining inside her body, something is moving in there.

Phrases like this build up a dreading, distasteful feeling in the reader, both for the main character and for the situation itself, thus illustrating King’s unique way of capturing tone.

 What can I use for my own writing? – 

Like I mentioned before, I have always admired the way King uses the connotations of words to spin his own narrative out of the connotations themselves. I find this makes his work very strong in capturing exactly what feeling he wants to capture, whether the reader necessarily realizes it or not, and I think implementing this aspect of almost writing-between-the-lines could certainly make my work stronger as well, even if I’m not writing horror or just generally unpleasant situations.

Discussion Questions – 

1. Why was John’s discussion with his brother important to include in the piece?
2. Why does King place so much emphasis on the flashbacks and the fact that a similar situation had happened before?