Halloween Film Guide to: Kali Chthonian Feminine Subtext

Halloween is a time to look back, into graves and open mouths of demons, into the depths of the soul, and down the barrel of the gun as the white patriarchy falls apart in terror beholding the avenging rainbow warrior feminine. Forget about the fake-castration poseurs like HARD CANDY and TEETH. Go for the big guns! Here’s a small sampling of writings from Bright Lights and my own Acidemic that can perhaps help in choosing post-party flicks, and/or inciting you or your other to an orgy of castration and Kali-esque bloodletting… for charity!

An Unsawed Woman: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (2003 remake)

“This is the slamming indictment of both feminism and the counterculture as reflected in the swinging free love hedonists of the 1970s. Erin is riding in a van full of dope-smoking wannabe non-conformists but she is utterly unable to accept that in this part of Texas right and wrong are just different ways to skin the same hippy. Even taking into consideration the amount of drugs in the car, Erin insists that the sheriff step in and relieve them of the responsibility of dealing with this dead body. The free love liberals see the cops as “pigs” until the situation gets out of hand, at which point their aid is not merely requested, but demanded by Erin. As Camille Paglia writes, “Liberalism sees law as tyrant father but demands it behaves as nurturant mother.” (SP, 3, 2005)

Acid’s Greatest Horror #1 – ANTICHRIST (2010)

May I venture to take a page from the book of Camille Paglia and suggest that if someone is afraid to look head on into the wild devouring Dionysian oceanic dissolution represented by pure unleashed feminine sexual drive, then it is they who are the misogynists, not Von Trier, and not Sam Peckinpah or Roman Polanski or Hitchcock or D.W. Griffith–directors who at least have the cajones to wade into the murky swamp of the chthonic? At least their films are more fearless and honest than the films of the countless directors who, rather than wade into the swamp at all, just scoop out a handful of muck from off the bank and shoot it out of a wet t-shirt canon. Is there a difference between silicone and sawdust when it comes to Norman’s mommy’s smothering breasts? Ding dong the witch is dead and she got a nose job! But when the witch melts back into water it’s no more a death than the Medusa losing a snake of her hair. Norman knows this all too well –he must kill and display his trophies over and over again; the hair keeps growing long after the body has withered to bone and parchment skin. Death not ends it, only castration… Ancient, old Teiresius with his bitch-tits, wandering off into the Led Zeppelin wasteland night..” (Acidemic, 2009)

“What It Takes to Make a Softie” – Breaking Noir Tradition in The Leopard Man

The Foxy, the Dead, and the Foxier – Re-Visiting Death Proof

Note that for the Catholic priests in the film, any contact with the feminine is risky and traumatic: Karras abandons his own mother, leaving her to rot in Bellevue for the vague reason that he’s “busy” – here in itself is the battle for good and evil boiled down to the basics; the banal made uncanny through proximity; the fear of going into your daughter’s room to tuck her in at night– with all the shady incestuous implications that tug hither and yon–cranked to eleven. The father of Regan has left and cannot even call her on her birthday, probably for fear of facing the outraged mother who will lay in with the guilt. He doesn’t want to face his wife just as Karras is loath to face his own mother. Thus Regan’s possession is a flinging open the doors to the dark animus of the anal command to enjoy, a lack created, in effect, by the father’s fear of his own castration (or rather his fear of being forced to check under his elastic band of protection and realize that his phallus is, in fact, already long gone). ” (Acidemic #7, 2008)

Someone to Fight Over Me- Feminism, S&M, and the Daemonic in Twilight

An Argento Family Reunion Special: Crying over Mother of Tears

“Exhibitionism, which must run deep in all artistically successful families, becomes its own obsessive double in the Argento world, especially once dad directs both mom, Daria Niccoldi, and daughter, Asia, together as he does here (and also did in the traumatizingly strange Stendahl Syndrome). The end of this film, which is basically watching gallons upon gallons of yucky ooze get poured onto Asia as she climbs to freedom, is something that, taken at an incestuous Elektra-complex meta-textual level, would be at home in Eraserhead.” (2008)

Naomi Watts: Cinema’s Post-Modern Mother of Mirrors

“…the impossibility of any sort of sexual interaction between Watts and her giant ape “son/lover/father” is an interesting mirror to our own position as viewers of the film who harbor an objective longing to “possess” Watts in whatever way we might possess an image. Our eternal misfortune as viewers stranded in an audience is that we’re “wrong-sized” and “wrong-dimensioned” for the onscreen woman. If we were able to jump inside the movie of King Kong we would be as clumsy and destructive as Kong himself, crashing around the New York City sets, not knowing proper 1930s etiquette , bumping into the blue screen and knocking over the gaffer’s coffee. Much as we desire Naomi, we can only try and protect her much as Kong does, and once the airplanes get him, so too do the house lights and ushers come to kick us out of the theater. “

BIRTH: Kidman out-Kubrick’s herself with an even shorter leading man…

“He hair cut Rosemary’s Baby short, her legs spindly thin, it’s as if she’s Rosemary the Sequel, with that film’s Satanic promises of wealth fulfilled, and she still trapped in the mundane patriarchal conspiracy of conception and birth. Sean represents more than a reincarnated little bastard– he’s her inner child reduced to a zombie. He’s the ghost of her true nature, and she hardly recognizes him at first, but when she finally does it makes her giddy.” (Acidemic 2004)

Great Acid movies: MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH

“Consider the Satanic initiation of Hazel Court in the film: desperate to regain Prospero’s favor after the arrival of lovely Jane Asher, Court undergoes a solo ceremony where she is “stabbed” by a series of shamanic figures from throughout the ages: there’s an Egyptian, Japanese, Russian, all waving their scythes and knives over her prostrate immobile heaving buxom figure and distorted through sheet metal reflection and green tinting. With it’s thumping Les Baxter score (which John Williams ripped off for JAWS), this scene should be familiar to anyone whose ever dropped hardcore psychedelics (or had a really bad fever) and had to undergo similar life/death blurring at the hands of “the threshold dwellers.” (Acidemic, 2009)

A Moon, Cat Women, and Thou…

“I like that there’s no exterior footage in CAT WOMEN, no daytime shots, mismatched day-for-night driving scenes… No sense of grass or earthy values. It’s soothing to my Swedish blood to imagine a world where the sun never comes up and the planet is populated only by cat girls who, for all their guile, are so much more sympathetic than the clods of earth like gullible, brain-dead Tufts or the suspicious, reptilian Victor Jory, who never doubts his own moral rightness as he punches out women right and left (he’d be a great candidate for Summers’ Isle)–or the nakedly greedy and self-serving Walt (Douglas Fowley), and the blank-as-candy Doug (William Phillips), who somehow earns the love of Lambda, ah sweet Lambda (Susan Morrow).”