Time September 21/September 28, 2020TimeOff Opener
S
omeTimes women represenT fragiliTy and
innocence in horror movies, symbols of purity
worth saving; what would King Kong have been
without his tiny captive inamorata Fay Wray?
Other times they’re sympathetic companions or spokes-
people for misunderstood monsters. But their allure goes
further and deeper than that— especially when it’s women
who are doing the looking.
Today the term the male gaze is thrown around more
loosely than its originator, filmmaker and film theorist
Laura Mulvey, intended. Even when there’s a man behind
the camera, the lens doesn’t always simply cater to man’s
desires. Women love watching other women; we identify,
we admire, and sometimes we feel a frisson (or more) of
desire. Other times we recoil, though that may only inten-
sify our fascination. So what happens when women film-
makers take control of the horror genre themselves?
The summer of 2020, a mini-epoch of isolation, has
provided the perfect conditions to see. In the past two
months, we’ve seen horror attuned to women’s experiences
in canny, unnerving ways. Most of the women in these
movies (all available to rent or purchase on streaming plat-
forms) aren’t heroic in the superhero sense. But they’re
also not the girl who needs to be saved.
In Amulet, the directorial debut from actor Romola Garai
(who also wrote the script), an ex-soldier from Eastern Eu-
rope, Tomaz (Alec Secareanu), has taken refuge in London,
working odd jobs and sleeping in a flophouse. He finds a
temporary home in a decrepit house with a young woman,
Magda (Carla Juri), who dutifully cares for her ailing
mother, kept locked in a room upstairs.
Magda appears to be the trapped innocent, the woman
who needs saving; she’s also a fabulous cook—but what,
exactly, is she serving up? Garai has some grim fun with
notions of what men expect women to be vs. who they
really are. The movie is marred by a confusing coda that
muddies its ending, but it does feature one enduring
image: a squirmy, newborn batlike thing that emerges
from a womb with all its teeth. If that’s not a childbirth-
anxiety metaphor, I’m not sure what is.
Sometimes the scariest things we give birth to aren’t,
at least literally, living things. In Shirley, directed by Jose-
phine Decker and based on a novel by Susan Scarf Mer-
rell, Elisabeth Moss plays a fictionalized version of Shirley
Jackson, the author of the elegantly chilling 1959 ghost
novel The Haunting of Hill House. Moss’s Shirley is mar-
ried to a seemingly jovial Bennington academic (Michael
Stuhlbarg) who actually exerts brutish control over her.
He invites two young newlyweds, Rose and Fred (Odessa
Young and Logan Lerman), to move into their comfortably
ramshackle home, a cheap way of get-
ting domestic help: incapacitated by
neuroses —and drinking —Shirley can
barely get out of bed, let alone make
prog ress on her novel.
But when she’s able to function, she’s
blazingly charismatic, with a knowledge
of witchcraft, folklore and the tarot.
Shirley isn’t easy; like her husband, she
can be manipulative to an almost mon-
strous degree. But her powers are finite
and human. When she confronts a blank
page, she’s really staring down a demon.
Her sexual currency has diminished
too. Her husband has taken up with the
ostensibly more attractive wife of a fel-
low academic. Shirley isn’t strictly a hor-
ror movie, but it stirs up the murk of
so many women’s fears: If I can’t create
something of worth, does that mean I
too am worthless? If I have a child, what
part of myself do I lose—and do I ever
get it back? Shirley has a strange, heady
earthiness, like a perfume sourced from
an enchanted, treacherous forest—one
you enter at your own risk.
Many sources of anxiety defy cat-
egorization by gender: men must feel as
much stress as women do when it comesMOVIES
Women filmmakers
capture the fear of 2020
By Stephanie Zacharek