Directed By Women: Lisa Frankenstein (2024)

Focus Features

By Andrea Thompson

You wouldn’t think the latest Diablo Cody-penned vision of feminine horror would lend itself much to deep contemplation, but “Lisa Frankenstein” got me thinking about how history tends to do a lot of repeating. And not simply for the multitude of references and the nostalgic 80’s sheen of its setting.

It shouldn’t be surprising. A number of more recent movies have more than proven that a deeply feminine gaze which embraces the soft colors and the general pink of it all is actually great for horror. “The Love Witch,” “Medusa,” and another Diablo Cody gem, “Jennifer's Body,” all have proved to bring the terror right along with the often brightly lit color palette. 

The past decade does not have a monopoly on this by any means of course, as tempted as we so often are to throw up a few examples as indicators that our current era came up with any and all good ideas. No less than Agnès Varda gave us a nightmarish vision of male entitlement and its consequences wrapped in sunflowers in “Le Bonheur,” to use one example.

“Lisa Frankenstein” is a tribute to much of this history, and those who managed to create in spite of a decade which could be very unkind to women. Sure, plenty of the movies at the time seemed willing to feature some form of assault to a queasy extent, but along with even more retro references such as Georges Méliès and “Creature From the Black Lagoon,” there are other reminders of the other cinematic legacies the decade gave us, such as “Look Who’s Talking.”

Lisa (Kathryn Newton) is the kind of teenage girl who would immerse herself in its more gothic offerings, and as she grows more sure of herself throughout the movie, her brand of lacey black clad, punky femininity are fashionable callbacks to Winona Ryder’s own time well spent as the heroine to weird girls in “Heathers” and Beetlejuice.” 

Lisa is the weird girl who doesn’t want to be, a budding artist who has found herself in the wrong story. Her life has essentially become a slasher since her mother was murdered trying to protect her from a deranged home invader and her father Dale (Joe Chrest) remarried a mere six months later to Janet (Carla Gugino), a stepmother whose dysfunction errs into cartoonishly evil territory. 

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To cope, Lisa endeavors to remake her life into a Gothic romance through the sheer power of imagination. She loves to hang out alone in the lush greenery of the local graveyard, and she even has a favorite tombstone. It’s a lot for a brooding weirdo in the yuppie era, where teen girls were expected to get out and get socialized, often a euphemism for shut up and conform already.

But along with the genre’s blood-spattered killers, the 80’s also saw a number of at times tragically misunderstood, persecuted creatures interact with humans. So when the undead monster is magically raised from the grave, his existence isn’t merely the most obvious shout-out to Mary Shelley’s most famous creation who also just happens to be one of the greatest misunderstood monsters of all time, he’s also a bridge to multiple genres.

As The Creature, Cole Sprouse gets to put a bloody spin on his image as the tormented bad boy with a heart of gold. Thanks to a Tim Burtonesque animated intro before we even meet Lisa, he already has his own backstory full of artistic passion and heartbreak, and he quickly becomes a mute companion to Lisa while yearning for much more. 

As the two begin to pile up the bodies between them, partly out of revenge, partly for the spare parts The Creature uses to rebuild himself, he begins to look dangerous in an entirely different way as Sprouse goes from dank to his usual dreamy. It’s a more complex look at a teenage girl who is often unlikable and takes advantage of everyone around her, leaving a bloody path in her wake as even the undeserving are left shattered, including her sweet, well-meaning stepsister Taffy (Liza Soberano), the only person who has staunchly stood by and defended Lisa. At heart, this may be Lisa’s fairy tale, but she’s no long-suffering Cinderella or even Belle, even if her love does transform a beast into a handsome prince.

Multiple genres that can’t be reduced to simplistic messaging and an extremely flawed female protagonist who dares to be horny, enraged and generally unlikable? It means another type of history is playing out, that of critical panning and lackluster box office returns. The teenage girls at my screening were loving it though, and chances are that another familiar path will manifest given time: a cult favorite and a staple of plenty a sleepover. 

Directed By Women: Birth/Rebirth (2023)

IFC Films

“Birth/Rebirth” is what I like to call an odd little film. The kind you probably shouldn’t watch while you eat.

It benefits from multiple viewings, and a sense of trust that the medical professionals know what they’re doing. Because in writer/director Laura Moss’s dark meditation on motherhood and Frankenstein, they’re clearly interested in the science of it all. If you were actually skilled and twisted enough to successfully reanimate a human corpse, what exactly would it involve?

The short answer is in some ways what you would expect: a whole lot of gruesome. And it takes all types to make it happen. The duo who bring it about, and who eventually become a twisted, odd couple co-parenting unit, are the kind of polar opposites who are brought together by their mutual interest in the undead six-year-old girl who comes to (re)define their lives.

Celie Morales (Judy Reyes) is the warmly empathetic embodiment of motherhood. Her daughter, the soon to be deceased Lila (A.J. Lister), conceived, we later discover, via IVF, is the sort of adorable moppet who will respond to her mother’s distracted state by telling her a secret: “I’m not getting enough attention.”

It’s so effortlessly sweet that getting invested in mother and daughter is one of the easier demands “Birth/Rebirth” makes, and it’s especially crucial once things really get going and the movie reveals what Celie is willing to do in the name of motherly love. 

The other half of what is to come is naturally a very deliberate contrast. A pathologist at the same hospital where Celie works as a nurse, Rose Casper (Marin Ireland) is the source of much of the film’s dark humor and its spirit. She’s the one who’s been interested in reanimating corpses since second grade, with tales of cutting off starfish legs and similar, disastrous experiments on the class hamster.

As an adult, Rose is far more comfortable around the dead bodies she’s made her life’s work, coldly dismissive of colleagues and the guy she masturbates in the bathroom to get the necessary materials for her process. She’s so socially inept in fact that she doesn’t predict that someone is bound to come looking for Lila after she tragically passes and Rose makes off with her deceased body for her obsessive quest in treating death as if it were a scientific obstacle to surmount.

To be fair, she could hardly anticipate that Celie would know to go straight to the hospital basement and track down Rose at her coldly efficient apartment to claim her daughter’s body, only to discover exactly what Rose has been up to. Like the busy single mother she is, Celie doesn’t waste time condemning, going straight into mom and nurse mode, eventually moving in with Rose in order to aid her and track Lila’s progress.

The work that they do involves the aforementioned gruesomeness of motherhood that we tend to not want to acknowledge, from the routine checkups like amniocentesis, which involve a very long needle being inserted into a pregnant woman’s belly, and the everyday efforts that involve keeping Lila reanimated.

Much like old age, motherhood ain’t for sissies. In their efforts to keep it going, Rose and Celie begin to take on each other’s characteristics, with Celie isolating herself from her well-meaning friends and Rose becoming warmer to a degree that her startled coworker asks her if she’s okay when he sees her smiling. 

It’s hardly the expected route to take, with cinema’s long tradition of creepy kids in horror that shows no signs of slowing down, from “The Bad Seed” to “Pet Sematary” to “Sinister” to more recently, “Hereditary.” But “Birth/Rebirth” keeps it real, in a manner of speaking, with the revived Lila exhibiting more of the limited motor skills and speech patterns that would be expected from such a grisly turn of events.

It’s refreshing in a way to see a movie that never forgets that in the best of circumstances, birth (at least from what I can gather from my own childfree by choice status) is a “disgusting and beautiful process.” Not to mention a bold choice to make those responsible for bringing the unnatural state of affairs into the world as the potential monsters. After all, much like the “Frankenstein” story that serves as the inspiration for this dark and twisted tale, the so-called monster didn’t ask to be created, and is not the real source of the horror to follow.

It’s us. It’s always us.

Directed By Women: The People's Joker (2022)

By Andrea Thompson

Ah, autumn. For others, it means leaves changing, pumpkin spice lattes, spooky fun, and sweaters. For film critics, it means a whole lot of film festivals that we insist on running ourselves ragged for. Why should that change? For those afflicted with cinephilia, it’s a fantastic way to experience films that wouldn’t otherwise be discoverable, even in our supposedly stuffed-with-options streaming content era. 

Personally, I have immersed myself in the Chicago Underground Film Festival, the Reeling International Film Festival, and am now turning my attention to the Chicago International Film Festival, which features an absolute beauty of a lineup this year. And one particular offering seemed to almost beg for a place in this recently revamped Directed By Women column: “The People’s Joker”. 

Like last week’s focus, “T Blockers,” “The People’s Joker” is a trans film, and there’s a whole lot of horror contained in it without its characters being reduced to their oppression. But where “T Blockers” is a Gen Z anthem of defiance made by a budding artist just on the cusp of what will hopefully be a long and promising career, Vera Drew’s “The People’s Joker” is a millennial tale full of hard-lived wisdom and steeped in meta.

It’s also an incredibly low budget movie that’s equal parts queer coming-of-age story, extremely unauthorized superhero parody, and love letter to queer creatives. And filmed in a style that I can only describe as mixed media dystopian zine fused with pure camp. 

If that sounds baffling, that’s nothing against you or me, it’s merely part of the gleefully deranged, utterly fearless experience that is viewing this movie. IP doesn’t generally lend itself to much creativity in our incredibly corporatized environs, but Drew, who not only directs, but co-writes and stars as the lead, a trans girl who eventually blooms into her true identity as Joker the Harlequin, makes gleeful use of beloved fan favorites of the DC universe, as well as her many inspirations.

Batman’s problematic nature has been discussed and dissected long before this, but in “The People’s Joker” he’s not only a corporate fascist who’s unleashed a vicious army of drones onto Gotham, he’s also a predatory closeted gay man who grooms and exploits the penniless orphans he takes in. When Joker arrives in Gotham to pursue a comedy career after a harrowing childhood in Smallville - the kind only sunny Midwestern repression can dish out - she meets and falls for one of them, Jason Todd (Kane Distler), a young queer boy who has since refashioned himself into a Leto-esque Joker.

This isn’t only a setup for a toxic relationship that the older, wiser Joker the Harlequin uses as a guide for how to recognize abuse, it’s also a way for Drew to throw a whole lot of shade, with much of her ire reserved for Lorne Michaels and his toxic stranglehold on the state of comedy itself. He may be the catalyst for Harlequin’s rebellion and subsequently forming her own anti-comedy troupe that becomes her found family of recognizable DC villains, but Drew isn’t about to allow her own story to become subsumed in any sense.

And what a story, which doesn’t only incorporate fan conspiracy theories, Michelle Pfeiffer’s legendary Catwoman transformation, but shout-outs to “Goodfellas,” with Harlequin proclaiming she “always wanted to be a Joker,” and bringing in the Necronomicon itself for a cameo.

It’s a lot for a tight, 92 minute runtime that’s also a sincere laugh riot in the way stories from those who have not only survived but thrived tend to be. Drew’s most important inspirations get their due right away however. The film is dedicated to “Mom and Joel Schumacher.”

Directed By Women: T Blockers (2023)

By Andrea Thompson

Yes, the prodigal column has returned, just in time for spooky season, and my favorite holiday no less. Choosing a film to focus on was something of a dilemma, at least until I came across Alice Maio Mackay’s “T Blockers” while I was writing up a festival preview for the Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival Reeling. Then it became something of an easy choice.

Mackay was all of 17 when she made “T Blockers,” already has a respectable chunk of IMDB credits as well as a host of other accomplishments to her name, all of which shout upcoming filmmaker. Mackay is also trans, and the slim 74 minute runtime contains a multitude of complications her surrogate heroine Sophie (Lauren Last), also a trans filmmaker, must wrestle with once she discovers an ancient parasitic worm is preying on the bigots in her small Australian town.

Some of “T Blockers” is about exactly what you’d expect, and a fair amount of it is the rage of it all. There’s the viciousness of the anti-LGBTQ+ politicians, the minefield of attempting to find love in the midst of what seems like a neverending oppression in their daily lives, the crappy jobs the characters have to sustain themselves with as they struggle with every step in fulfilling their artistic ambitions, and the rising hordes of fascists who are rallying against any attempt they make at proclaiming their humanity.

No, the kids are not alright, but they are an extremely tight-knit group in the way people under siege tend to be. But bring on the camp, because Sophie and her bff and roommate Spencer (Lewi Dawson) refuse to be all gloom and doom. The gross-out humor isn’t only reserved for the worms which find plenty of willing hosts, but some of the less than healthy coping methods Spencer and Sophie utilize, which include drugs and vomit. Learn your limits kids, but in the meantime it fits well with the movie’s punk sensibilities, with the more obvious influence John Waters getting himself a name drop later.

These kids also have a kind of clear-eyed, lived wisdom it often takes their more privileged brethren years to acquire. They wait for no one’s approval and make no apologies for immediately fighting back once the possessed gather and go on the prowl, but they have no illusions that this will make their problems vanish, or even their lives necessarily easier. As Sophie tearfully acknowledges after facing a devastating personal loss, the bigots they’re really fighting can win even when they lose, and the battle will have to be fought again and again.

“T Blockers” isn’t merely a salute to Mackay’s B-movie sensibilities and their accompanying idols, it’s also a heartfelt tribute to queer filmmakers of the past, some of whom ultimately lost the battle with their own demons, but managed to create something for future generations to stand on. The movie’s framing device is a film made by a fellow trans filmmaker in the ‘90s who later committed suicide, but which nevertheless acts as both warning and guide so Sophie and her friends can put out the fire this time. In some cases by burning it all down, but I digress.

It’s so damn fun that the movie’s real flaw is all that more irritating (and somewhat spoilery), namely that the whiteness of it all somewhat bogs things down. The first victim of the parasites is Thai Hoa Steven Nguyen, and the other good guy casualty is another actor of color, Toshiro Glenn. In any other movie this would absolutely reek of hypocrisy, yet Mackay shows such promise, namely by making the most of the screen time both of them get. And Glenn’s is infused with a special tenderness due to his budding romance with Sophie, which finally gives her a taste of romantic love, untainted by fetishization.

So “T Blockers” is a success at getting its audience to consider the very questions it brings up. Namely, whether we really know an oppressive regime when we see one, and what exactly makes a monster.

52 Films By Women: Tale of a Vampire (1992)

By Andrea Thompson

There are precious few films that would round out Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and be a fantastic watch on World Dracula Day, and that’s a shame. There should be more, and they should all be as fascinating as the 1992 film “Tale of a Vampire.”

It came out at an odd time. Seeing the world from the vampire’s perspective was still relatively new at the time. Sure, the book “Interview With the Vampire” was published in 1976, but the movie adaptation wouldn’t come out until 1994. Not that vampires stuck to the shadows in the meantime. They’d always been a part of cinema since its earliest days with “Nosferatu” in 1922 and maintained a steady screen presence since, mostly in slashers and general B movie fare. 

But the 1980s saw a large number of vampire movies that took the undead seriously, and that attitude carried over into the 90s, which saw the release of many films that would come to define the genre. The same year “Tale of a Vampire” crept onto screens, two hugely influential films that would come to define how vampires were depicted burst onto the screen with far more flash - Francis Ford Coppola’s “Dracula,” and the far more infamous “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” which would soon be eclipsed by the iconic (and now very problematic) series of the same name in 1997.

So it’s hardly surprising that “Tale of a Vampire” seems to have come and gone with little fanfare, or notice in general. Written and directed by Shimako Sato, she was less inspired by Anne Rice than Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee.” And “Tale” commits, both to Poe’s inherent undercurrent of dread and its bibliophilism, which it wears on its sleeve like a deranged, twisted heart, with much of the film’s plot taking place in a beautifully musty London library with texts that would make any book lover swoon.

Sato has become more known for her work in Japanese horror and the “Resident Evil” video games, but “Tale of a Vampire” was her directorial debut, which occurred after she left Japan to study film in London. According to Variety’s dismissive review of the film, “Tale” was shot over a mere four weeks on a relatively paltry budget of $375,000, and Sato almost seems to delight in her confines, fetishizing the city to a degree that is thrilling and exquisite. She doesn’t make use of the London atmosphere with its fog and shadows as create her own, infusing even the most brightly lit restaurants with unearthly dread.

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There’s a more conventional, love across the ages romance too of course, with vampire Alex (Julian Sands, in some of the creepiest work of his career) mourning his lost 19th century love as he returns to the library day after...I mean, night after night to research religious martyrs for his thesis. Ah the wonders and drawbacks of a pre-digital age. One day, he’s struck by a new hire, Anne (Suzanna Hamilton), who bears a remarkable resemblance to his lost love Virginia. 

Anne is mourning a loss of her own, and is dressed down to appear believably appealing rather than a lust object, but she still has (dare I say?) quirks like singing on her way to the cemetery at night to visit her recently departed love, reading palms, and conveniently for the film, the electricity at her place never seems to work, leaving her to make constant use of candles. No wonder Alex is quickly obsessed.

Make no mistake, obsession rather than love is what really sets the gears of “Tale of a Vampire” in motion. There’s no question that Alex is a monster rather than the gentle, sensitive loner he comes off as, and the movie is very aware of this. When Alex kills the victims he chooses at random, it’s violent, bloody, and painful for them as well as messy. How he drinks their blood is less like an elegant feeding than a clumsy attempt to drink liquid from an unwieldy jug. Even the lost love he mourns had a queasy beginning to say the least, since the film eventually reveals he met her as a young child, with their love blossoming when she became an adult.

If Alex has a redeeming quality, it’s that he seems very aware of how repulsive his needs and desires are, unlike his opponent Edgar (Kenneth Cranham), who cloaks his toxicity in righteousness. He bullies and manipulates Anne, and he confesses to consigning his wife to a fate worse than death because, as he puts it, “She dared to betray my high ideals. I had to punish her.” Shudder.

Like many a genre film directed by women, “Tale of a Vampire” is very aware of what a high price women tend to pay in struggles between powerful men, and the film ends by staying true to its coldly unblinking gaze. There’s no reassurance that good or even anyone’s better angels will triumph. Its lasting impression is that in the midst of so much darkness and toxicity, it isn’t love or any other lofty note of hope that lasts, but rather, pain.

Tale of a Vampire is streaming on Amazon.

52 Films By Women: Prevenge (2016)

IMDB

By Andrea Thompson

The 2016 British offering “Prevenge” is a comedy that might just be too dark even for those who prefer their laughs as bleak as possible. In a sense it's...the mother of all comedies.

What can I say? I'm sure Alice Lowe, the director, writer, and star of “Prevenge,” would agree that you just need to get some things out of your system. Ruth, the woman, she plays, certainly does. She's a heavily pregnant woman who lost the father of her child in a climbing accident that wasn't so much an accident as the result of a group decision from the other climbers to literally cut him off to save their own lives.

Given such circumstances, it's hardly a surprise that Ruth decides to take revenge by hunting down and killing the other members of her partner's climbing group. What is a shock is that it isn't her idea, but her unborn daughter's, who speaks to Ruth in a psychotic baby voice to encourage Ruth's murderous deeds throughout “Prevenge.” It's the perfect Halloween watch, with part of the movie even taking place during the holiday. And in a time when the behavior of pregnant women is more monitored than ever, it's refreshing to see a heroine directly take on the motherhood's strict expectations.

IMDB

At first, it's not that hard to get behind Ruth's mission. The first people she offs seem pretty deserving, from a creepy pet store owner, and a DJ who talks about how he loves fat girls because they're so open-minded they don't mind what people do to them, then vomits, and kisses her right after. Really, by the end of her time with this dude, I was practically cheering, “Kill this guy!” The fact that he lives with his mother didn't humanize him so much as reveal him to be an even bigger asshole than he seemed, as impossible as it sounds.

By the time Ruth gets to her third victim, a cold-hearted woman who has clearly centered her life around her cutthroat profession, Ruth starts to develop a taste for murder, much to her daughter's glee. Ruth also begins to engage more with her child, with the camera emphasizing their newfound unity in a straight on shot as Ruth converses directly with her looming baby bump.

It's hardly how pregnant women are allowed to act on-screen, and it'll probably make even some of horror's most jaded fans who pride themselves in remaining unfazed by violence rather squeamish to know that Lowe was actually pregnant when shooting “Prevenge” over a scant 11 days. Ruth's wardrobe also undergoes a metamorphosis that begins as subtle, with her outfits changing from that of demurely typical, earthy mom clothes to a style that favors black hoodies as she stalks her various victims.

IMDB

And Ruth's victims also get steadily more sympathetic, even human. Ruth's mental state deteriorates further as she works her way through her kill list, then even disposes of a witness (off-screen) who actually came across as a genuinely nice guy. Not that her daughter seems to mind, much to Ruth's annoyance. “Kids these days are really spoiled,” she says, exasperated. “It's like, 'mummy, I want a Playstation! Mummy, I want you to kill that man!'”

And it's not just the murders that are graphic, the methods of which include a castration as well as more classic throat slittings. (Fans of “Game of Thrones” will recognize a few of the victims.) No, “Prevenge” also gives us a birth scene via C-section that includes plenty of blood and viscera. Yet for all that, Lowe is incredibly adept at keeping the laughs coming along with the scares. Don't expect jump scares, or really any kind of flashiness at all, since the scares in “Prevenge” all involve body and psychological horror.

Ruth is the kind of anti-heroine who is truly unique, a woman who isn't driven to extremes by a desire for a child, to protect hers, or from fertility issues. Mothers and motherhood in general have both long been a source of horror in cinema, from “Psycho” to “Rosemary's Baby” to “Black Swan.” In a sense, Ruth is a fusion of both the old and the new. She's terrifying in the ways she represents a permutation of motherhood, but she's also part of a new wave of heroines in which parenthood itself is the ultimate horror, as was the case in films such as “The Babadook,” “Hereditary,” and “Us,” all of which are female-centric and feature flawed, complicated matriarchs. Yet Ruth is unique in how fully she embraces and embodies old and new fears.

52 Films By Women: Near Dark (1987)

IMDB

By Andrea Thompson

“Near Dark” is a creative kind of genre fusion that absolutely works, but also tends to be unprofitable if it's not released at the right time. Even if 1987 looked like the right year for Kathryn Bigelow's now cult film, it just wasn't familiar enough for audiences to get behind at the time, resulting in a very familiar situation: positive reviews, but not much returns at the box office.

The neo-western “Near Dark” was part of a number of serious vampire films in the 1980s. “The Lost Boys,” “Fright Night,” “Once Bitten,” “Vampire Hunter D,” and “The Hunger” are all just a small sampling of the large proliferation of films that revolved around the undead. And while the smash hit “Interview with the Vampire” wouldn't be made until 1994, the book it was based on had hit shelves in 1976, followed by “The Vampire Lestat” in 1985 and “The Queen of the Damned” in 1988 to a very appreciative audience.

“Near Dark” flips many of the genre staples from the start. The first and most obvious is it is not a young woman who is victimized by a vampire's bite, but a young man. Caleb Colton (Adrian Pasdar) is the quintessential good ol' small town boy. Hell, he even lives on a farm with his father Loy (Tim Thomerson) and sister Sarah (Marcie Leeds). One night, he meets a beautiful drifter named Mae (Jenny Wright) and gets bitten by her. He heads back home, but begins burning up in the sun. Just before he returns to the farm where he lives, the vampires Mae runs with pull up in an RV and kidnap him. During the rest of the film, Caleb is engaged in a battle for his soul. His nature now requires that he kill people to survive. “The night has its price,” Mae tells him soberly.

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Once Caleb resigns himself to staying with his kidnappers for survival purposes, the movie gets into territory that was probably too uncomfortable for audiences. Colton's struggle to live without killing is constant, and there's genuine suspense as to whether he'll kill or not. Even when he refuses, with Mae giving him blood from her wrist in lieu of killing, there's no guarantee he'll stay on a non-lethal path, not just due to his thirst for blood, but the other vampires, who insist that he kill to prove himself.

It's not just Caleb's struggle, which is all too recognizable, that probably made audiences uncomfortable. It's the vampires themselves, which also include Bill Paxton as the most psychotic of them, and Joshua John Miller as Homer, a vampire child who is actually decades old. They quickly become the other protagonists of the story along with Caleb, and they're mostly unrepentant monsters, killing the evil and the innocent alike, and bear more resemblance to the truckers in “Alien” (directed by James Cameron, whom Bigelow was married to from 1989 to 1991) than our most iconic bloodsuckers. These are blue collar vampires, with no aristocratic bearing whatsoever. For the most part, they became vampires by accident rather than being carefully chosen by a darkly handsome psychopath.

Nor are they particularly smart. Their leader, Jesse (Lance Henriksen), is charismatic, but it's hard to imagine these idiots surviving in a non-digital age, and it's also chilling to see just how easy it was for people to disappear before that age hit. This is a group of vampires who just decide to walk into a bar and kill everyone there in the most sadistic ways possible, and are nearly killed – by the police of all things. These guys may have superhuman abilities, but humans still pose a major threat since they're unable to get far enough away from the crime scene before daylight. Humans also manage to put up a credible threat later in the film's final battle.

Over thirty years later, “Near Dark” is still one of the best vampire or horror movies ever made, even if the word vampire is never uttered. Bigelow herself went on to make other films that became even bigger pop culture staples. “Near Dark” isn't just a melding of genres, it combines many of the topics Bigelow became famous for: machismo and women who are making their own lonely way in a male world. Films like “Point Break” and “The Hurt Locker” are examples of the former, while “Zero Dark Thirty” is the latter. Mae bonds with Caleb because of the loneliness and isolation inherent in her life. While she is equal to the men in her lethal family, they are clearly the ones who rule. The film was also a subversive look at the politics of the Reagan Era, which villainized the poor to make the public more comfortable with the continuing erosion of their safety net.

In their own way, the vampires of “Near Dark” are a kind of found family that embrace the very values Reagan was espousing with their loyalty and devotion to each other. But in spite of their strength, they face a constant struggle for survival, and are constantly dependent on others for it. They're essentially a struggling white working class family who mostly gets away inflicting pain and death, mainly because people who being taught that other groups were responsible for such vicious crimes. It feels even more relevant now in our current age, which makes the happy ending even more of a relief. It may be a bit too unrealistic even for a vampire movie, but with hope in ever shorter supply, the possibility of a new, better day after such horror feels like a much needed ray of hope that doesn't burn, but heals.

#52FilmsByWomen: The Babbadook

By Andrea Thompson

For Week 2 of my #52FilmsByWomen project, I decided to do another rewatch. But where last week's viewing was about kicking off the project in a fun, lighthearted way, viewing the horror offering “The Babbadook” was about being made uncomfortable in entirely new ways.

Make no mistake, Jennifer Kent's “The Babbadook” aims to make you uncomfortable, and it should. In the tradition of classic horror, it uses the monstrous specter that may or may not be terrorizing widowed mother Amelia (Essie Davis) and her son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) as a vehicle for the more everyday pressures Amelia is subject to, which threaten to blossom into something truly horrific.

When the movie starts, Amelia is already beginning to break under the weight of all the responsibilities she is expected to carry. As a carer for the elderly, she nurses others for a living, while at home she must provide all the financial, emotional, and physical support for her young, troubled son. But his difficulties are not the real reason Amelia seems to have trouble bonding with him. Seven years ago, she lost her husband Oskar in a car accident en route to the hospital to give birth to Samuel. Amelia has been unable to move on, and her child has become a living reminder of what she has lost. Samuel can sense this, and his behavorial issues can be traced directly back to this one day, his birthday, and his mother's inability to fully accept what happened.

Compounding Amelia's issues is the fact that she's struggling with the two of the most taboo subjects in modern society-death and abivalence about motherhood. You're not supposed to talk about people dying, and you're not supposed to admit you have difficulty truly loving and bonding with your child. When death occurs, people are expected to firmly adhere to the rituals around it, then move on. In regards to motherhood, you are not only expected to provide an endless reserve of unconditional love and care, you are supposed to do it effortlessly and without complaint.

So when The Babbadook manifests via a terrifying children's book, it's a stand-in for not only her grief, but the mental illness that threatens to engulf her. Her isolation increases, as her work, Sam's school, the police, and even her sister seems uninterested in providing any real help. Only after her son and elderly neighbor Mrs. Roach tell her they love her unconditionally when she's at her worst is Amelia able to find the strength to fight the monster. It's no coincidence that both of them are also easily able to talk about uncomfortable topics. Mrs. Roach knows she needs support, and her son knows she needs saving.

Is the Babadook real? A shared delusion? Or just something that Amelia's mind has manifested? Much like the spinning top at the end of “Inception,” we'll never get an answer. Amelia may be able to build a happy life after her struggles, but there's no fairy tale ending. She'll have to cope with the effects for the rest of her life, but the point is that in the end she's able to have one again.

Jennifer Kent, who also wrote the film in addition to directing, is able to very eloquently capture so many aspects of the female experience. She is able to not only capture but allow us to identify with Amelia as a single mother desperately trying to protect her son even as she herself feels increasingly vulnerable. Her transformation and possible possession by the Babadook is genuinely terrifying, and Kent's terrific filmmaking abilities make it and the buildup to it truly frightening and unsettling, rather than just another stereotypical caricature of a madness very specific to women. Often when male directors try to take on women's experiences, they result in supbar offerings that involve great skill but no real insight, with “The Neon Demon” or “mother!” being a few recent examples. But Kent is able to show us the worst case scenario of a mother-child relationship going south while keeping Amelia someone worth sympathizing with and investing in. Here's hoping more filmmakers take note of how to not just make a “strong female character,” but a good one.