James Wylder, Writer

The Witchfinders (wear masks)
​by James Wylder

There’s a certain type of Doctor Who story we’re all familiar with called the Celebrity Historical. You know, Team TARDIS meets this famous person or another: Rosa Parks, Vincent VanGogh, Shakespeare…it’s a staple of the show in it’s modern form. Usually, the episode is something of a beatification. The historical figure is shown as a hero in some way, their accomplishments lauded. In the last few years though, there’s been a few episodes that subverted this. Matt Smith had episodes where the historical figure was a rather nasty person like Richard Nixon or Hitler, and Peter Capaldi had no episodes with famous historical figures, only mythical ones like Robin Hood or Santa Claus. But what we hadn’t had was a sort of middle ground: a historical figure who is painted in shades of gray, with the episode coming down neither in favor of them, nor against them (the closest we got to this was Nixon meeting the Doctor, but the last moments we have with Nixon come down fairly on “he’s a bigot”).

That was until King James I showed up.

Making King James I purely a villain or purely admirable would be the obvious choices here, he’s leading Witchhunts throughout England after all. But then again, he assembled the King James Bible, a lot of people still like that too. He’s also pretty definitely gay or bisexual, unless you want to duck tape your eyes closed to the massive pile of historical evidence that yes, he was. So what to make of him? Maybe, instead of a saint of a villain, he’s just a really flawed person. And as it turns out, that’s a way more interesting take.

James I does a lot of bad things during “The Witchfinders”, and those things are never excused. We as the audience aren’t told, “Well, this is alright because...” he does wrong things, and they are wrong. But, at the same time we’re asked to empathize with James. He’s a man wearing a mask in order to travel about and not be accosted, followed by sycophants who butter him up that he knows he can’t trust. People try to kill him. He was abandoned by his mother, and still reeling with the loneliness of his life. And he has let bad things happen because of that. But the Doctor doesn’t think he’s irredeemable. She gives him a chance. And he still let’s her down in the end, but he’s not ungrateful. Unlike Jack Robinson, he doesn’t walk away from the Doctor cocky and vile. He says he owes her his life.

This mirrors, in many ways, the real man. James I did over see the torture of Witches, but over time grew to doubt that they were really finding witches at all.

It’s a complex look at a complex person, and even if there are some kinks to work out, this is a fascinating path for Doctor Who to take for how it looks at historical figures. More, please.

Also, more Alan Cumming please. If anyone comes back from Series 11’s guest stars, can we please have a sequel to this absolutely delightful performance? Watching James I hit on Ryan Sinclair was great, and watching Cumming seamlessly move between comedy and honest drama was fantastic. He was perfect casting, and I really would love to see more of his take on this character. He’s a pure delight.

Another thing this episode does well is allowing us the small pleasures we’d like: the Doctor and Graham wearing the big Witchfinder hat, for instance. Of course we want to see the Doctor wearing a big silly hat, and it gives us that.

It shouldn’t be understated also, that this episode handling the Witchhunts themselves so deftly is a coup for scriptwriter Joy Wilkinson. We’ve had some very difficult historical subject matter being dealt with this series, and Wilkinson did it well. Hopefully we see more from her too.

The running theme of bodily autonomy this series is key in Wilkinson’s script as well, our villains not only go inside human bodies to use them as macabre puppets, but our conflict stems around a healer being uncomfortable performing a medical proceedure on a patient. Every antagonist in this episode, from James I, to the town’s landholder, to the alien threat, wish to take people’s bodily autonomy. To bind them and torture them. To bind them and dunk them under water. To fill their bodies up. None of them respect other people’s rights to exist as bodies freely. To control other’s physical bodies is power, and it’s how they deal with their problems. How the landholder deal with being unable to cure her illness, how King James I deals with his sad life, and how the aliens deal with their imprisonment: they destroy other’s bodily autonomy to feel some sense of control.

The reveal that the aliens were imprisoned for War Crimes fits with this running theme perfectly: their lack of respect for autonomy is cosmic. They parallel the Stenza in this way. The names are different, but it rhymes.

How fitting then, that amidst these Witchhunts, the Doctor becomes the hero of bodily autonomy? She once called herself a Doctor of Hope, but maybe she is a Doctor in a physical sense, yet not only as a physician. A Doctor that knows that it’s not just our souls that need saving, but our flesh too. A Doctor who defends our right to live inside our own skin unmolested.

A Doctor I’d be happy to call for an appointment.

* * *

But oh yes, let’s check in on our running themes, shall we? We have all the usual ones, and the repetition of them is becoming pretty in our faces. So there’s something going on with these. With the reveal of the finale’s title and synopsis, I’m fairly certain that how the elements of this season come together isn’t going to be in a direct way, but in a thematic way. We’ve had these recurring elements of bodily autonomy (this week, that theme was your face...literally!), living beings with something else inside them, bad guys getting away, etc. Plus one new one I should have listed before in these essays: the Doctor doesn’t kill something, but someone else in the episode tries to or does it for her (Jack Robinson shooting the spider, Kevin shoving the Stenza off, James I shoving his torch into the bog zombie, etc). We’re leading to something in the finale, and I’m getting more and more certain that something is going to do with the Doctor facing a scenario where these repeated narrative elements come together in a way that she cannot walk away from, or not interfere with. Perhaps the Stenza will still return, but I don’t think it will be the Monster Mash some predicted or would like.

But time will tell. Let’s see then.
​

Doctor Who: Kerblam! (...azon)

I woke up this morning, stressed about money. Being a freelance writer isn’t easy, and gets more difficult when you’ve had a few health crisises in one year. Pulling up my feed from Kindle Digital Press, an Amazon Company (TM), I looked through the stark last few days of book sales. Book launches always peter out, that’s in their nature, but it still always sucks to reach the point where the luster has rubbed off for readers. My anthology is in the slow burn phase of it’s life, where it will remain. I remember that I need to continue the work of getting my books onto Audible, an Amazon Company (TM). I have a lot of work to do. I always do. I feel guilty for taking care of myself, after all, I have no salary. My time is mine for work.

If someone orders one of my books, they’ll roll off the printers, and an Amazon employee will package that book and send it out. Dropped on a doorstep, kerblam.

Meanwhile, in space, the same thing. But a different company name. Space Amazon… Spamazon… Kerblam!, that’s it, yes, Kerblam! is the biggest mailing retailer in the galaxy. They send antique lamps! And Fezzes! And their workers only get to see their own kids twice a year! They’re not allowed to talk or robots will come up and very politely threaten them! A big old happy place. We shouldn’t question it, not when our lives depend on it, our livlihoods. Even if our jobs are terrible, even if they disrespect our dignity, or reduce us to things machines could do, or give us little indignities that sting up our arms bit by bit till it sneaks up on us we have sores, its okay!

Kerblam! Is nice. They’re looking out for us. Sure, the manager is a brute who insults the nicest person alive, and sure they’re an autonomous entity that answers to no authority when people are dying, But that’s okay.

After all, at the end of the episode, the system at Kerblam murders an innocent girl, Kira, the nicest person alive, to try to show another one of it’s employees that he shouldn’t murder people. It’s not a fake out, they really murder her. But that’s okay. The Doctor even says that the system murdering her was because it was being kind and trying to save the guy who is going to kill a lot of people! How nice. We all know Kerblam is kind now, and that the Doctor did nothing about it’s murder of an innocent person and lets it walk away as though it was pure is because...it must actually be pure! It isn’t an indictment of the Doctor’s morals that she’d let that happen. Kerblam had our best interests at heart after all.

Which is why we should be so angry about Charlie, the terrorist who wants to kill people so more people get jobs. Charlie after all, wants to kill people, which is wrong (it’s not wrong when Kerblam does it though! Don’t misunderstand me! Bless Kerblam). The Doctor and friends stop him from murdering people which is good.

Kerblam then, in all it’s wisdom, closes the facility for a month while they get things together again. They give their employees two weeks pay (not pay for the full month though, let’s not be unreasonable), and the Doctor and co leave to deliver a necklace to the daughter of a nice man Charlie reprogrammed some of the adorable robots in Kerblam to murder.

The end of the episode seems strange. You have expect the Doctor to hang out of the TARDIS and yell, “Wait, what?”. Was this episode pro Kerblam? By the end, Kerblam is the good guys, the guy asking for more rights as a worker is evil and dead, and the middle managers promise change. The middle managers had been searching out the deaths all along?

Was this episode braver once, and did it get toned down somewhere in it’s process? Was it always just a subversion of Doctor Who tropes? Or does it really think that the endless stress of young people in our economy is a selfish cry that will lead to bombs and we shouldn’t ask for a better world?

Kerblam is, from a craft perspective, the best episode of this series of Doctor Who. The pacing is fantastic. The dialogue sings off the page, naturalistic but witty. There is the best action sequence we’ve had yet (with the chute!). The music is, once again, fantastic. The fake company looks like a real fake company! But the episode’s ending, with the murder of an innocent girl, with it glossing that over, with the demonizing of the person asking for change…it leaves a confusing sour note. Sweet and sour, mixed together. Results may vary on how it will sit in your stomach. If morality bothers you, you’ll probably be left uncomfortable. If not, I suppose it’s just fun! Kerblam is great! Smile!

There is a discord there. Did the writer miss the dissonance, or was the dissonance intentional? Is this a black comedy, or a defense of mega corporations? If you owed your income to a company, would you be brave enough to speak out against it? Or would you muddle that message? Would it come out whole, or in pieces.

I guess we’ll never know exactly what Kerblam meant to say.

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[This contains spoilers for: the original and new Halloween - pretty much the entire franchise in fact - and Dario Argento’s 1982 movie Tenebrae. Also, CW – discussion of violence, rape, PTSD and female suffering in the context of exploitation cinema.]


Thesis statement : Halloween, 2018 edition, is one of the best movies of the decade, and the product of the perfect hybridation of the classic slasher with the current trend of modern, deconstructive, socially conscious horror movies a la Get Out or It Follows.

That may not appear obvious. Blame the misleading trailers, maybe, but to the untrained eye, probably quite legitimately pissed off about the less pleasing tropes of the genre, it looks like another of these interchangeable pieces where some masked killer, to quote Halloween scholar and video essayist May Leitz, “do a stab” (1) on some (probably female and scantily clad) passer-bys.  And you can’t blame whoever thought that – with horror as a cheap-to-make, potentially very lucrative cash-in to throw at audiences during the dump months of the winter (2), toxic tropes accumulate very, very fast in loving and festering little piles spread around the popular consciousness.  With the old chestnuts, always - fetishisation of violence, and, of course, its treatment of women, which, if it shows a certain level of complexity – studied for instance by Carol Clover (3) - has steadily gotten worse since the codification of the modern slasher.

A downwards trend which is perfectly embodied by the Halloween franchise itself. History time! –

1. The Long and Painful Story of how slashers got misogynist-er

It doesn’t start with Halloween. It starts, mostly, with the Italian giallo – a singular genre mixing erotic pulp, murder mystery, and gory thriller, who had its turn in the limelight during the 1960s and 1970s, mostly at the end of the three big names of the underground South European horror cinema at the time, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, and of course, Dario Argento. A lot of the very specific stylistic trappings of these, like their surrealist hyperaestheticism, were eventually discarded in the conversion to American, more naturalistic norms that gave us the slasher. But quite a few survived: murders as setpieces giving the action its rhythm, and an Iconisation of the figure of the masked killer, often present throughout the narrative by synecdoche, close-ups on hands or hidden face. And, of course, the problem of the representation of female bodies and female suffering – note the “problem”. Because yes, while gialli were definitely an exploitative genre, they also are marked with a deep fascination with femininity and LGBT cultures – the hero is often a perfectly mediocre white dude, who ends up, somehow, plunged into a dangerous, confusing, secret world of queer and female mysteries. These freaks, these outsiders, might be alienated by the gaze of the filmmaker, but they are also celebrated, and shown as sexual, complex human beings in a way a lot of more mainstream, more respectable movies wouldn’t allow – Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) and Deep Red (1975), both Argento’s, show very sympathetic gay characters, for instance. Also, the mysterious killer turns out to be, in more than a few of these, a woman taking her revenge on the forces of patriarchy  - once again, monstrous but sympathetic: while the grey, dull heroes might be more socially acceptable protagonists for a movie, they carry a responsibility in the death and destruction that befalls them and their entourage. That complex dynamic is one Argento especially would explore in more depth in the later parts of his filmography, with the way he represents the mystique of female power and sexuality in the Three Mothers trilogy (4) - and especially with the flawed and fascinating Tenebrae (1982), in which a metatextual stand-in for Argento makes a case for why horror should be exploitative … before being revealed as the killer who exploits and tortures female bodies. Self-loathing much?

This trend was, if anything, amplified in the primeval slasher that is Bob Clarke’s 1974 Black Christmas – a movie whose “final girl” is a pregnant student hell bent on aborting, no matter what her controlling boyfriend or society might tell her, and who is never judged or looked down for it. To quote film critic Jourdain Searles – “In a way, the unseen killer in Black Christmas, and Peter, the male villain we do see, are a biting critique of the more toxic forms of masculinity. The killer alternates between childish tantrums and extreme brutality, as if just being in the presence of women throws him into a mental frenzy. Once he kills Clare by suffocating her with plastic wrap, he puts her in a rocking chair, and later we see he's placed a baby doll in her lap. He hides from women until he kills them, and upon their death enjoys having full control of their bodies.” (5)  And the original Halloween follows that, to an extent – there is a sick element of twisted voyeurism to the violence, yes, but it’s never coded along the moral lines that would develop as slashers became a solidified genre with affirmed conventions. The killings don’t have some kind of retributive quality to them; the killer doesn’t specifically target those who break some kind of moral taboo regarding drugs, or sex, or whatever – and while Laurie Strode is probably the “purest” character of the movie following these arbitrary lines, she still is shown smoking pot with a friend, and enables her fellow students to go and bone freely (her own lack of a sex life is really portrayed as her just not having the opportunity, not some kind of moral imperative). It avoids the clichés – while, paradoxically, codifying them.

That’s the paradox of the Halloween franchise, really. You can certainly fault the original on some respects, but you can’t accuse John Carpenter of not being a political artist, someone with radical ideas and a keen flair for provocation. His breakthrough movie is a condemnation of the American lifestyle – a look at the repressed evil which lurks beyond the white picket fences of US neighborhoods, ready to strike. Nobody has told Laurie or her friends about the fact a very real murder took place in their town a few years ago; in the end run, no one moves a finger to help her as she’s running, bloody and screaming, through the streets. (6) It’s everything but morally black and white or comforting – Carpenter, really, has always been fascinated by evil as a structure. Evil as the very narrative structure of cinema (Cigarette Burns). Evil as a physical constant, a law of physics (Prince of Darkness). Evil as unseen societal oppression (They Live). Halloween is not different – Michael Myers is not a person, he is The Shape, the hungry void that’s let into the world by a certain social context. Impossible to destroy, and still haunting the suburbia as an all-powerful Boogeyman, as the final shots of the movie – a series of empty rooms where his heavy breathing his heard, showcase.

And then … The sequels.

Halloween is a very bad slasher franchise, truth be told. If you binge a few of these movies, that’s going to be very obvious really quickly. And let’s forget all moral considerations there: talking just in terms of spectacle, there’s just … not much there. Franchises like Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street understand the appeal of the genre a lot better – as bad as their entries often get (especially when Jason is concerned), you still do come away with a sense that some fun was had. There’s some gore pageantry at work, increasingly convoluted, if not outright comical, murder sequences that have to at least make you pay attention to the movie a bit: party horns shoved into eye sockets, people turned into cockroaches and then smashed, a machete to the face prompting someone to comically fall down two flights of stairs that weren’t there two shots before … The slasher scene, for all its flaws, has a sense of craftsmanship and naughty fun that’s at least slightly endearing, and which proved extremely formative to some of the people working there: that’s how we got Rachel Talalay, after all.

Halloween doesn’t go that way at all. Its wildest flight of fancy, in ten movies, is either a weird visual leitmotif involving a white horse, or Busta Rhymes trying to karate kick Myers (yes, that really did happen). Michael Meyers is, after all, essentially a thematic shorthand in Carpenter’s movie, not an actual character or someone who’s supposed to be fun to watch. He just, well, do a stab. And there’s only so much ways you can film people getting stabbed. It’s not especially gory, nor especially fun. It just kind of happens: here’s a movie, here are victims, here is violence, and it plays in the same rhythmic pattern, movie after movie, time after time. Like a grey and dour ritual, scored by the same Carpenter synth track whose magic is irredeemably drained around the tenth time you hear it playing – because these are still movies which take themselves largely seriously, with Donald Pleasance going all Shakespearean in the background. And without the element of fun and playfulness, well, what you do end up is a pretty rancid process of fetishized violence, as described by Siskel and Ebert, with their characteristic nuance regarding horror movies:  “These films hate women, and, unfortunately, the audiences that go to them, don’t seem to like women much either…To sit there [in the theater] surrounded by people who are identifying, not with the victim but with the attacker, the killer – cheering these killers on, it’s a very scary experience.” (7)

Michael Meyers is a non-character, a non-entity. He is literally defined by absence: the absence of good, of a motive. A “pale, blank, emotionless” face. And yet, he ended up pretty much becoming the main character of the franchise, resisting an attempt by Carpenter to reboot the franchise as an anthology series with the very commendable Season of the Witch (1982). The female heroines can triumph and win, but never in a really meaningful way. See Laurie Strode: in the original continuity (movies one through six), she dies off-screen in a car crash. Her trauma, and pain, and character? Irrelevant, we’re here to see the bad man stab people. In the second one (H20 and Resurrection), she initially triumphs and kills the boogeyman, only for the following movie to reveal in a truly astoundingly stupid twist that it was actually someone else wearing the mask, leading her to be held in an asylum, and then killed unceremoniously in the pre-credits when Michael returns. Maybe Rob Zombie did better? Of course not. She ends up insane and potentially murderous, locked up in the same asylum as Michael (or maybe that’s just a hallucination as she is dying, depending on which cut you’re watching, but neither feel especially empowering). And she’s not even the character who gets the worst deal out of the franchise! That’s probably Jamie Lloyd, the cute child protagonist of episodes four and five, and daughter of the deceased (in that continuity – yes, this franchise is a nightmare to follow) Laurie. Two whole movies of struggling against the boogeyman, including one where trauma has rendered her incapable of speaking, and what happens to her in movie six? Well, she’s been kidnapped by a doomsday cult for a good fifteen years, probably raped by Michael Meyers (once again, it depends of the version you’re watching, but is “forced impregnation with artificially created fetus” such a better alternative?), and then gets killed through impalement on farming equipment.

So. There we have it: Halloween is both the direct heir of a tradition centered around a layered, if problematic, representation of women and femininity; and also one of the franchises that have most shamelessly profiteered from female suffering and exploitation, ritualized on screen, to get some big bucks.

Where do we go now, in a context where horror is getting a lot more overtly political – or at least, better at getting recognition for it –, and where the social tensions have reached a boiling point in our world? How do we make Halloween relevant again? Can we transcend that legacy and even try to aim for “empowering”?

Well. That’s where the 2018 version comes in, doesn’t it.

1. The Shape Burns

Here sounds like the right time for a confession: I don’t especially care for Carpenter’s Halloween. It’s a good movie – a masterpiece, even –, but not one that especially resonates with me: maybe it’s because it’s rooted in the very specific experience of American suburbia; but I think the issue I have with it is in the very nature of the film: it’s a very cold, almost experimental piece, when you get down to it, a clinical, scientifical look at the effects of evil on ordinary people, where the structure, and the mise en scène, in a very Hitchcockian way, matter more than characters and their emotional journeys.

That’s what’s so fascinating about Halloween 2018 – it’s not so much a sequel as the second part of a diptych. A radically different take on the same concept, which questions and completes its sister-film. An inverted, twisted mirror. Whereas the original was clinical and structuralist, this new iteration very much puts the emphasis on heat instead of cold, down to its choice of final setpiece – it’s a deeply emotional character-driven narrative, yes, but more than that, instead of being calm and distant, it’s a fucking angry movie.

It takes a look at the long and annoying history of the franchise, and decides that, no, this is not going to be swept under the rug – we are going to talk about this shit, and we’re going to talk about it now.

So, what does it have to say? What is it about? There are many ways to articulate the points the story is trying to make, but I think the best way to sum it up is to describe it as a narrative about the evils of centrism.

One of the best lines in the movie is uttered by Laurie’s daughter, tired to see her disheveled hysterical mum barging in her living room – “the world is not a dark and frightening place!” And, for a good hour, the movie wanders about that narrative, that artificial world which makes sense and feels safe. It’s not naïve – it’s never showing it as anything but an illusion: but it also explores it, peels back its layers slowly, and venomously pokes at the people who are interested in maintaining it.

Michael Meyers is still a black hole of a character: he doesn’t do anything but kill and be evil. And in a way, that could be perceived as a flow – Jourdain Searles, quoted earlier in this, complained that the movie misses an opportunity to explicitly condemn and explore the misogyny underneath his murders. But, by still presenting the Shape as an unknowable, quasi-Lovecraftian evil, it manages to tackle how society itself actively puts these women, and other minorities, in the way of evil: how it undermines them, belittles them, and essentially grooms them into victims. No one cares about the women, about Laurie and her family – when journalists go to find her, it’s only to ask questions about the killer who has haunted her life: he is the one who’s important, the iconic monster, the one audiences want to see. In an especially potent moment of screenwriting, they pretty much “both sides” the Laurie/Michael dynamic: sure, he tried to kill her, but hasn’t she done some bad things in her life, too? Surely he deserves some pity, people need to try and understand him. It would be laughable if it weren’t something happening every week in the real world, where every young man who decides to grab an assault rifle and shoot minorities is presented as a “deeply flawed” human being whose motives have to be more complex than simple racial hatred, who deserves understanding and patience. A man can kill and murder, and he’ll become a celebrity, even in prison; a woman has a life that’s less than perfectly immaculate, and she’s a witch, an outcast, a dangerous madwoman hanging about in the woods.

That, especially if you add to it the scene where Allyson, Laurie’s granddaughter, dismisses the old “Michael is Laurie’s brother” plot arc (which really, downgrades the series from quasi-cosmic societal horror to “one fucked up family”) as a story people tell themselves to make sense of the ugliness of the confusing reality, is remarkable in its own right. But the movie doesn’t stop there: it actually offers an answer as to “why” people conjure up these narratives. The answer? They just like to see people suffer.

The character of Doctor Sartain, Michael’s therapist, is wonderful that way: he pleads for his charge, over and over, despite all the horrors he has committed. And when he gets the chance to do it, he commits a murder of his own, wearing the iconic mask, and exclaiming – “so this is what it feels like!” The pen with whom he wrote about Michael, pleading pity for him, turns into a knife, in a great bit of visual symbolism. And the worst thing is, the movie is right about that. Centrism, the cult of civility, and politeness, of giving everyone a voice, is just a smokescreen, one that conceals the suffering of the oppressed and turns the spotlight on the woes of the oppressors. And its propellants are indulging in it because at best, they’re indifferent to the pain of minorities; and, at worst, because it serves their interests and/or their pleasure. Sartain throws Michael at the Strodes because, essentially, he thinks it’s fun. Because it satisfies his male, privileged curiosity, because it’s a nice little spectacle – just like generations of male writers, directors and spectators have found fun and entertainment in the reification of female bodies as slabs of meat to be carved up on the big screen. The Michael Meyers of this movie is Siskel and Ebert’s warning come true: his empty Shape is the vessel for the unsayable male pulsions bubbling under the surface of our society; under the anonymity of his mask, it could be any random white dude you encounter in the street. It could even be you - the movie forcing you to adopt, for a couple of scenes, the point of view of Michael, following him in long, carefully constructed shots, like if you were playing him in Third Person Shooter game.

Because really, in the world of Halloween 2018, no man gets spared by the script. The condemnations can be subtle, but they’re definitely there: Ray, Laurie’s son-in-law, is probably nice enough, but spends the movie in a state of empathy-less meatheadedness; Allyson has to deal with a boyfriend who, despite adorning himself in the woke trappings of gender-nonconformity, still tries to fuck other girls when she disappears for twenty seconds in order to have a phone call, and a typical Nice Guy ™ who assumes he’s entitled to bone her just because he’s nice and not-a-cheating-asshole. An especially good example is this scene where the true crime podcaster we spend a lot of the first act following, is reading the case files on the murder of Judith Myers over her grave, intercut with footage from the original movie’s opening – the almost lurid tone with which he describes the killings, intercut with the cult PoV shots, very much makes you feel as if he’s projecting himself in that scenario, becoming the murderer and enjoying the benefits of female pain. It’s especially interesting to note that this flash-back is the only point of the movie where explicit female nudity is shown: it’s very much a thesis, and the rest of the movie is going to be an antithesis. Its use of gore strikes a fascinating balance that way: acts of extreme violence are committed, yes, but the camera never really dwells on them, showing short flashes of some truly baroque murders, but never relishing in them; moreover, none of the female characters actually die on-camera, the movie relying on sound, synecdoches and out-of-frame murders to both raise the stakes and avoid any kind of lurid voyeurism.

There’s a desperation to the whole movie – this is not something that could really have happened in a pre-2016 world: it’s very much poking in the wasps’ nest which has been revealed by the fall of increasingly large portions of the world into savage conservatism. It feels like a slasher written by El Sandifer, with, as a motto “let us assume that we are fucked”. Just look at the murder of Vicky’s, Allyson best friend: she is dragged away and stabbed in front of the very kid she’s babysitting. Who, in another subtle screenwriting touch, happens to be black. The movie is very clearly implying that trauma, PTSD and the spectre of the Shape and the structural evil contained therein will pass on to another generation – that everything that plays out now will play out again, just like the holiday of Halloween comes back every year, just like this pumpkin in the opening credits, which reconstructs itself in slow-motion. In a way, it has resigned to the fact that it will, inevitably, be overwritten and cancelled out by some trashy sequel ignoring all the points it has just made – and you better believe it’s not please about it.

And yet, surprisingly, it avoids nihilism.

It’s thanks to Laurie Strode, really. Who is the emotional core of the movie, thanks in no small part to a frankly breathtaking performance by Jamie Lee Curtis, in what’s arguably her best role ever. It’s a painful thing to watch, it really is – someone doubting her own sanity, alone in a world that consistently belittles her, diminishes her, makes her feel like a freak and an outcast for daring to be a man’s victim who won’t shut up and pretend that “the world is not an evil place”. But, there’s the thing – she is allowed to be right. The movie validates her, at every single turn, and, in maybe its biggest twist, has her win in the end. She defeats Michael Meyers. Oh, maybe he’ll be back in another sequel, in fact that’s pretty much guaranteed by now. But here – she does more than just killing him, she robs him of his power. She literally invades the narrative of the original Halloween movie, stealing Michael’s place in iconic Carpenter shots: she forces the movie to iconize her and her struggle instead of the killer’s. Her fight isn’t just happening within the movie: it’s a metanarrative one, and she absolutely shreds her opponent. That’s what the final setpiece is all about, really: beyond a bunch of Home Alone traps, what really happens is a bunch of women banding together and taking back control of the narrative. They pose as helpless victims, only to then gang up on the man who ruined their lives and beat the shit out of him – they master the conventions of slasher movies and use them as tools to assert their agency and power.

That’s all the ambiguity of the final few shots, really. Michael disappearing from the burning cellar can be seen as sequel bait, sure – but it’s also a sign of his ultimate defeat. Without the fear of others, without the exploitation of female pain, he is nothing – sure, the evil he embodied is still out there, hence the breathing sound on the soundtrack, but The Shape is destroyed, because people have stopped believing in him. They’ve stopped letting the Shape shape their lives, and it burns away into sighs. The knife in Allyson’s hands, with which she stabbed Michael in a lovely bit of reversal of the classic phallic symbolism inherent to the slasher, becomes a trophy. A mark of female solidarity – a proof that some can indeed escape Halloween, triumphant.

And they need this solidarity. Because, as the movie showcased, the world is, indeed, a dark and evil place.

Happy Halloween …?


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Sources and footnotes:

1. LEITZ, May, “Local Trans Talks About The Movie Where He Do A Stab”, YouTube,  24/10/2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuiFY0gpR5g&t=31s

2. RAYMOND, Adam K., “Just How Bad of a Movie Month Is January?”, 1/7/2013, Vulture: https://web.archive.org/web/20150127031450/http://www.vulture.com/2013/01/january-worst-movie-release-month.html

3. Men, Women & Chainsaws : Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992)

4. But mostly just Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980). People tend to try and forget Mother of Tears (2007) ever happened, and they’re right.

5. SEARLES, Jourdain, “The Low-Budget Canadian Film That Inspired 'Halloween' and Launched an Entire Horror Genre”, Thrillist, 30/10/2018: https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/black-christmas-review-first-slasher-film-genre

6. LEITZ, May, “Halloween and the Suburban Nightmare”, YouTube, 29/09/2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwv3FsFj3_M&t=1s
 
7. EBERT, Roger, Siskel & Ebert at the Movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8hj66FIFmw

If you enjoy this essay, why not support us on Patreon and help make this possible? Go join the cool kids at http://www.patreon.com/jameswylder
The art for this post is by the amazing Anne-Laure Tuduri, you can see more of her art at: ​http://liria10.tumblr.com

Demons of the Punjab

No one is who we think we are, and most of the time, that’s okay.
Most of the time.
We can live our lives with the people we love content with a layer of secrets over it. Love is, sometimes knowing not to ask. But those secrets form something deep about us, something important. And it’s hard to think we really know someone till we know those secrets, and maybe we don’t.

Demons of the Punjab is a lot of things. It’s a reflection of family secrets, a continuation of the running themes of this series of Doctor Who, a history lesson into an awful and often untouched period in the history of colonialism in India and Pakistan, and a damn fine character study to boot.

Yaz gets to take center stage this week, and even more than during Arachnids in the UK, we get to take a delve into who she is as a person. That the episode is framed around the companion making a request of the Doctor is nice, its cute, and the Doc’s reluctance is a fairly nice subtle callback to her past experiences in “Fathers Day” and “Dark Water/Death in Heaven”. In a lot of ways, this is the episode that most feels like our characters have settled in as Team TARDIS. The first five episodes established our new era, and now we get to just fly around and have adventures, which is nice. That it took us so long (episode 6 of a 10 episode season) to get this far is different though, it’s a big change from the traditions of the past. It’s been common to want to get right into blazing into adventures, and there’s been a tried and true format for each re-introduction of the show: you do one episode in the past, present, and future (being in space counts as future) and then after you’ve established all that, you can blaze onto into whatever adventures you want. Here our pacing has been slower, more careful. We’re just now getting out of the wilderness.


And what a clearing it is. This episode focuses on death, and how those who survive death deal with it living on into the future. The episode is framed around Yaz’s grandmother, and so we know she lives, but knowing she lives doesn’t take away from any of the tension or drama. We know from the start that she’s carried these memories with her throughout her entire life. We know if things go badly, and they do, that this has been a burden on her. It’s a different way of carrying tension then we’ve been given, and it works.

While talking about an episode’s quality isn’t something I’m super interested in (something that lead to some problems with my Tsurunga Conundrum essay) I’m going to note that this is, in my humble opinion, the strongest episode we’ve gotten so far in the Chibnall era of Doctor Who. Indeed, the biggest flaw I can throw at it is we already saw the episode’s big twist about the monsters 7 episodes ago in “Twice Upon a Time” where the malevalent aliens turned out to be actually be kind fellows who were going around to see people before they died. That we just saw this plot not too long ago is…really my only complaint, and in a season where last week we saw one of the most common repeated Doctor Who plots done once again, that’s barely a complaint at all. Demon’s of the Punjab is moving, original, and like nothing we’ve seen before in Doctor who largely. We haven’t had something like the Partition of India on Doctor Who before. The last time we had an episode with the main plot taking place in asia was in the 1960's, with the Abominable Snowman, and it wasn't primarily concerned with the lives of everyday Tibetans.


The Thijarians, our “demons”, mirror the Doctor not just in how they mirror the end of Twice Upon a Time, but in how their planet was destroyed, and now they live on trying to be kind after the fact. It’s a nice parallel, though it does make me wonder if we’ll get a reveal the Stenza killed their planet off.

But the Thigarians aren’t the real demons, rather, that’s colonialism. This episode is unrelenting in showing the damage caused by the hasty and ill-planned partition of India, and does an amazing job of balancing thing so that no religion or ethnic group is entirely to blame for what happens. The blame falls on the people who were supposed to care for this area, and who let it down, giving excuse for violence and hatred and lust for power to spill over into bloodshed. This is an episode that ends with one of our favorite people being shot and murdered in cold blood. It’s not messing around. As it shouldn’t.

The Doctor and friends once again can only watch, letting events unfold as they are supposed to and not interfering. We’ve seen a lot of that this series, but it is a different turn for the show as a whole. The bad guys have gotten away.

One smaller parallel is the breaking up of the team into gendered groups, something we’ve seen a few times through the series now. Graham and Ryan get a scene with the groom, while Yaz and the Doctor get one with the bride. The team being split this way allows the Doctor who explore her new role as a woman, and her joy in being in female spaces, but also allows for Graham to show us a kinder form of masculinity.

Throughout this series, we’ve seen lots of nasty men. Plenty of examples of men who are so caught up in the petty way they want to see themselves that they miss the reality in front of them. Graham has grown to be a beautiful character, because though he’s flawed, he represents an alternate route of masculinity in the story. You don’t have to be violent and power hungry to be a man. You can be a good man, and be kind, and that’s a message I’m absolutely here for.

* * *

Let’s take a moment to try and look into our crystal ball at the end of the series, shall we? We’re now six for six on:
1. Villains getting away.
2. Someone having something in their body they don’t want (this time, the Doctor getting visions forced into her).
3. Synthetic/Organic blends (the alien goo in the jar, this time).
And we’re NEARLY six for six on things getting teleported in each episode (I can’t recall anything getting teleported in “Arachnids” but let me know if I forgot something in the comments).

So I think it’s fair to say that either these are all intentional things being played out for us to notice, building to something in the series finale in episode 10, or these are just weird co-incidences built in from the series being written with a writers room and they mean nothing. So, let’s assume they do mean something. This doesn’t mean they’re going to come together in some carefully woven and intricate plot, but it does mean I think these things are going to play out in the finale in a big way. So, here are the four ways I think the series could go for the finale:

1. The Evil League of Evil
Most/Some/All of the baddies we’ve let go during the series come back for the finale. Maybe only in a cameo, but a few of them form a core of badness and the Doctor has to defeat them.
This could also JUST mean cameos from the villains, tying things together.
Whatever their plot is, it will involve 1. bodily autonomy, 2. synthetic/organic combination, and 3 probably teleporting some how.

2. Consequences
Alternately, if they don’t come back, the way they’ve all gotten away screamed intentionality. In this scenario, the plot isn’t so much about every villain who was let go coming back as about putting the Doctor in a position where letting the villain go like she’s done is an option she can’t abide. Here the conflict isn’t direct, it’s an internal emotional one, with the villains being let go building up an internal conflict for the Doctor.

3. Return of the Stenza
The Stenza come back, and the focus is simply on them as a villain. If this is the route, I predict a very heavy lean in to the bodily autonomy angle. Maybe the Stenza are teleporting in beings and kidnapping them, using them for experiments, and the Doc has to stop them, for example.

4. Stenza of the Daleks
The Stenza come back, but it’s all just a built up to us meeting a Dalek for the first time. The Dalek would be the ultimate in a synthetic/organic hybrid, and a villain that keeps getting away.

So, there are my predictions. Let’s see if I fall flat on my face or not with this. What do you think of them?  

Today in the USA, a lot of people are going to be voting, and a lot of people’s opinions are going to be based on what an evil, callous, selfish, entitled, petty, hotel mogul with a bad haircut has been doing recently.

That’s right, Jack Robertson.

We’ve all seen his hotels popping up everywhere, and that callous--

Okay I’ll quit playing around, we all know Jack Robertson is a Trump stand in. The choice to make him a stand in (even mentioning Trump exists as well) rather than an explicit rendition of Trump is a smart one here for a lot of reasons, but first of all it gives Chris North the opportunity to do more than an imitation or a caricature. Jack Robinson is the essence of Donald Trump, without needing to do the entire shtick, and that essence is a clearer view. It removes the inessential distractions: the taped on ties and strange hair that moves in such a strange manner that people have spent more time than is humanly necessary tracking down exactly what technique was used to put it there.

But these things are aesthetics, they’re not the character of a man.

Which we’ll get back to after the spiders.

* * *

Arachnids in the UK finally returns us to the excellent format of making a music related pun as the episode title, which I still wish had been for every episode, and also returns us to the same patterns we’ve had in every episode so far.
-Something has been put into a living being without it’s consent (the spiders).
-The villain of the story gets away at the end (Jack Robertson).

And new this this list, we’re also 4 for 4 on having an artificially created or modified life form in the episode. So the themes here are getting layered on thick here. It’s fairly clear we’re heading towards something with all this, but I’ll save that speculation for the next essay.

But noted, right?

* * *

Despite the cool title, the spiders are sort of a distraction. They aren’t the villains, they’re just the consequences of the villain’s actions. Jack Robertson has casually saved money by dumping waste below his hotel, and that toxic brew caused genetically modified spiders to mutate and grow super huge. The spiders kill people, but not maliciously. They’re just big dumb confused spiders. The real villain is the business mogul.

Chris North makes Jack Robertson have all the self-concern and self-obsession of Trump, the obsession with power that tumbles into horrific actions (like shooting the spider), and the sheer disregard for anyone else’s well being that leads to many people around him, like his niece's wife and his bodyguard dying. He also fires Yaz’s mum, which is an action that rightly should disqualify anyone from higher office.

All of this is awful, and along with Graham seeing Grace everywhere in his home, unable to escape from her memory, and Yaz’s family being simply a lot for her to deal with and manage, the entire gang decides to leave the Earth behind and go off with the Doctor. After all, things suck here right now, that’s fair. But we can’t all leave, can we? Still, one can’t blame them. They’re going to have wonderful adventures. Can’t wait to see those!

That Jack Robertson gets away with no consequences feels particularly rough right now, but also very realistic. After all, what consequences have their been for all sorts of awful things?

I mean, can you imagine if Jack Robertson was elected president? And put children in cages, removed an entire group of people as existing according to the government, bragged about how he could put millions of people into camps, admitted on tape to sexually assaulting women, made fun of a disabled journalist on camera, was credibly accused of rape by a former wife, ignored the biggest threat to the world’s ecosystems, blamed people who weren’t white for all sorts of horrible things, lumped an entire group of people together as criminals, cheated on all of his wives, called neo-nazis “Fine people”, put in policies that are destroying manufacturing jobs he claimed he’d bring back, and tons tons more extremely well documented things that only a fool could deny as it was all there right in front of their eyes.

Can you imagine if people who claimed they loved good morals just stood by and let him walk away and get away with it? Or even tried to make excuses for him because they liked his power?

If you live in the United States, just imagine there was a whole party of people who’d been claiming for years to love good morals who’d suddenly sidled up to that kind of horrible man because he had power? Wouldn’t you want to do what you could to show them you wouldn’t tolerate that hypocrisy and depravity? If there was an election, wouldn’t you vote in anyway you could to keep Jack Robertson from being able to do more evil?

Then go vote today, if you can.

Because Trump is not as nice as Jack Robertson, and real people will be hurt if he gains more power, or keeps it.

So vote. Because we can’t just let him walk away.

We can’t let our story end like Arachnids in the UK.
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