Just a heads-up, everyone! Thanks to the good, good people at Amazon, Twice the Trouble will be a Kindle Daily Deal on August 6, 2026. That’s this Thursday, a mere three days from now!
Starting at midnight Pacific Time (that’s 3:00 A.M. Eastern Standard Time) on Aug. 6, the Kindle edition will go on sale for just $1.99. That’s less than half price of a Starbucks coffee. That’s also 85% off from the edition’s regular price of $14.99.
As the name implies, a Kindle Daily Deal only lasts for twenty-four hours, so get it while the gettin’s good.
The idea that horror films might in any way be construed as “pro-feminist” seems counterintuitive to most people. It certainly did to me. After all, women are the preferred victims of horror films, especially the slasher genre in which entire sororities and girls-only sleep-overs are massacred wholesale, often in grisly—and blatantly sexual—methods.
But, as I recently learned, pro-feminist readings of classic horror films are a genuine thing, having a genuine moment. And I was completely convinced of their validity by Eleanor Johnson’s excellent book, Scream With Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism, 1968-1980. Early in the book, Johnson’s addresses the apparent absurdity of looking for feminist ideas in horror films, going so far as to quote Alfred Hitchcock’s famous formula for an effective thriller: “Torture the women.” Johnson does not minimize the misogyny of classic horror films. Indeed, she goes to great pains to explain that horror films—like any work of art—can often be self-contradictory, sexist on one visceral level but feminist on a deeper, almost subconscious one.
She writes:
[H]orror also has a deep and enduring relationship with American feminism. In fact, American feminism and American horror have been—for more than half a century—allies on issues of domestic abuse, reproductive control, and women’s restricted rights relative to men.
Horror films that focus on violence and persecution of women often do double-duty, serving as a means of getting otherwise conservative or traditionalist viewers to see the plight of women in the first place. More importantly, as Johnson’s title suggests, horror films subconsciously force the viewer to participate in the suffering of women, and thus empathize with their condition.
She writes,
What’s so important about the domestic horror films in this book is that they make viewers—whether or not the viewers are female—carry the fear and vulnerability embodied by the women in the films home with them. They center on a woman’s perspective, making audiences feel wracking physiological and psychological compassion for the women characters who are abused and terrorized. The films, although they showcase women’s suffering, do not simply fetishize that suffering, but rather humanize it, make it palpable, exportable to the viewers’ own minds and bodies. They invite viewers into the lived, embodied experiences of abused women; women barred from power, barred from speaking for themselves, barred from defending themselves; women who weren’t taken seriously by the people from whom they sought aid—doctors, police, lawyers, psychiatrists, husbands, coworkers. These movies took what was going on in American cultural, political, and legal history in the late 1960s and 1970s, and they made those things feelable. They made women’s suffering come alive to viewers who might not otherwise ever have stopped to think about what or how women suffered in the United States, behind closed doors, in the twentieth century. They made that suffering seem like an emergency. And then they made that suffering follow viewers all the way home and nest there.
Johnson goes on to explain her main thesis—namely, that horror films were instrumental in raising public awareness of women’s civil rights issues, and even in changing laws—by focusing on six classic horror films: Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Stepford Wives, The Omen, Alien, and The Shining. She examines these films in chronological order, and so it is probably no accident that the oldest, 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby, is also the basis for her most compelling argument.
For those who haven’t seen it (i.e., anyone under 40), Rosemary’s Baby is the story of a young couple, Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse, who move into an old, spooky apartment building in Manhattan. They befriend their elderly neighbors, the Castevets, who (it later turns out) run a coven of witches. With the secret cooperation of Guy, the witches drug Rosemary, conjure up Satan, and watch as he rapes the poor woman. Throughout the act, Rosemary is doped up but conscious, hallucinating that she is on a boat, rocking on a rough sea. At moments, though, she becomes lucid, and realizes that she is actually being raped by a huge, hairy creature. “This is no dream,” she yells, in the film’s most horrifying line. “This is really happening.”
The next morning, Guy tells her that he had sex with her while she was asleep. (The scratches on her body, he explains, are due to his “getting a little carried away”). Rosemary is unconvinced but, in true trad-wife fashion, doesn’t make a fuss. When she later becomes pregnant, the Castevets refer her to an old OB-GYN, Dr. Sapirstein, who puts her on a regimen of foul-tasting protein shakes and other noxious concoctions. As the pregnancy progresses, Rosemary finds herself in agonizing pain. Her women friends (whom Guy discourages her from seeing) beg her to find a new doctor, but, again, Rosemary doesn’t make a fuss.
Mia Farrow in “Rosemary’s Baby”
After she finally gives birth at home, the witches take the baby away. Guy tells her it died. But she can hear an infant crying from next door, and the neighbors insist on collecting Rosemary’s milk, which they convinced her to express into glass jars.
At some point, she finds a secret door into the Castevets apartments, only to find them, Dr. Sapirstein, and a bunch of other nattily-dressed devil-worshipers having a party. They are gathered around a cradle in which, of course, Rosemary’s baby lies. The baby himself is never shown. Rather, we only see her horrified reaction when she pulls back the veil and views the hell-spawn. “What’s wrong with his eyes?” she asks. “He has his father’s eyes,” Mr. Castevet replies.
I’ve probably seen Rosemary’s Baby half a dozen times, yet I never put it together that the film is almost a parable about the cruelty of anti-abortion laws. Not until I read Ms. Johnson’s book, that is. As she points out, Rosemary is probably cinema’s most extreme example of a woman forced to complete an unwanted (and very dangerous) pregnancy. One that is, in fact, the result of a rape (by the Devil, no less). As Johnson writes,
By New York State’s own abortion laws in 1968, Rosemary would not have been able to get an abortion on grounds of rape alone. Rape was not justification enough for abortion in 1968 in New York, nor was physical danger, nor psychological harm. Nor, indeed, was the prospect of having a baby born with deformities—which would seem likely when the child’s father is a claw-handed, leather-skinned, goat-eyed demon. The Satanic fetus, whose true range of deformities could only be known after the birth of the child, allegorizes the thousands of thalidomide pregnancies across the United States that women were forced to carry to term, anxiously waiting to see how compromised their babies would be by the drug the women had taken. Like them, Rosemary is going to be forced to carry to term a pregnancy of unknown viability. [Link added]
Of course, it isn’t just a lack of reproductive health rights that causes Rosemary’s ordeal. It’s her lack of freedom in general—financial, educational, and (above all) psychological—that traps her in a private hell. In some ways, her husband, Guy, comes off as even more evil than the Castavets in the way he gaslights and manipulates his wife. And it is this kind of domestic abuse—sometimes physical, always mental—on which Johnson primarily focuses for the rest of the book.
Lee Remick in “The Omen”
In The Omen, for instance, a wealthy man lies to his (much younger) wife, Kathy, when their baby dies at birth. At the urging of a local priest, he takes another baby whose mother has just died and passes him off to Kathy as her own. Naturally, the baby turns out to be the anti-Christ (once again), and the wife suffers mightily (once again), finally being killed by the little bastard and his evil minions. Unlike Guy Woodhouse, the husband in this story is not evil, nor self-serving. He genuinely thinks he’s being kind to his wife in doing the ole baby switch-a-roo, trying to spare her the heartbreak of losing a child. Of course, she has lost a child, and she deserves to know the truth. Moreover, she certainly does not deserve to be tricked into raising the spawn of hell. But her husband, in true patriarchal fashion, does what he sees fit. The result is the same.
I especially enjoyed Johnson’s examination of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which she presents as an apotheosis of the domestic-abuse horror genre. I have always felt that Shelley Duvall’s fine, selfless performance as the tormented wife, Wendy, was the most underappreciated (and even mocked) aspect of the film. Indeed, she is the center of the movie, without which it would have no meaning.
Also, of all the films’ hapless heroines, Wendy’s plight is the most isolating and claustrophobic. As Johnson writes,
Rosemary can’t easily get away from the coven, but she can go see her doctors and, on occasion, her friends. Chris [in The Exorcist] is in thrall to the demon every bit as much as Regan is, but she still manages to go out to see doctors and priests. Joanna has quite a bit of freedom of movement, until the end of Stepford Wives; same with Kathy from The Omen. Ellen Ripley [in Alien] is every bit as imprisoned as Wendy Torrance, but her imprisonment feels incidental because she’s trapped on a floating domestic space, and everyone else is trapped right along with her. Wendy’s entrapment feels obvious, manifest, total, unbreachable. She’s trapped by the hotel; by [her husband] Jack; by the weather; by the distance to any other person or place, to any kind of shelter. The horror of The Shining isn’t ultimately the ghosts in the hotel. It’s Jack and his total imprisonment of Wendy. And, as viewers, we are trapped with her.
Shelley Duvall in “The Shining”
Indeed.
Scream with Me is a hell of a book. Check it out…!
Author’s Note: Well, I finally watched Project Hail Mary a few days ago. The film is a mash-up of The Andromeda Strain, Planet of the Apes, E.T., Wall-E, and at least half-a-dozen other classic sci-fi movies. And that’s okay. Everything is a remix. And Project Hail Mary is a fine film—gorgeous, exciting, suspenseful, and (yes) heartwarming.
It’s also another great example the The Scientist Hero archetype that I suggested a while back (writing about another Andy Weir film, The Martian.) So, I thought I would repost. Enjoy…
One of my favorite movies of the last twenty years is Ridley Scott’s The Martian. It’s a science-fiction/adventure movie about an astronaut (Matt Damon) who becomes stranded on Mars after his comrades leave him for dead. Marooned on a barren, hostile world, he has to use his brains and ingenuity to survive until his friends come back to rescue him. By the end of the movie, he has survived dust storms, explosions, freezing temperatures, and starvation.
How does he overcome all these challenges?
Science.
The story is familiar, of course. It has many antecedents, including with the original stranded-on-an-island novel, Robinson Crusoe, and also (more directly) to a great B-movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars. In that classic 1964 cheese-fest, the hero survives by finding a Martian cave full of air where plants still grow, water still flows, and there’s a steady source of light (which is never explained). He even befriends an alien who is also trapped on the planet.
Ever since I stumbled upon it some years ago, In Deep Geek has been one of my favorite video podcasts. In each episode, the creator/narrator (known only as Robert) goes into extreme depth on some subject of profound interest to fans of The Lord of the Rings, The Witcher, and A Game of Thrones. I’ve never seen those two latter shows (yeah, I know; I live under a rock), but I am a big fan of LOTR, so I watch those episodes with great interest and enjoyment. I don’t know Robert’s background, but I would guess he has some training in English Literature. His explications—which are unfailingly graceful, insightful, and genuinely interesting—remind me of the “close readings” I used to do as an English Major.
One especially perceptive episode is one that I saw recently on the subject of Tolkien’s Eagles. These are, of course, the race of giant, sentient eagles that play a small but crucial role in the lore. In fact, they literally save the heroes from catastrophe, flying in to assist in the Battle of the Five Armies at the conclusion of The Hobbit, and rescuing Frodo and Sam from incineration on the slopes of Mt. Doom in The Return of the King. As Robert explains, the eagles provide a eucatastrophe—a word I had never heard before, and one which (as Robert helpfully goes on to explain) was coined by Tolkien himself.
You don’t need to be a linguist like Tolkien to get the gist of what the word eucatastrophe means. Basically, it’s the opposite of a catastrophe—a sudden, unexpected change of fortune that saves the hero(es) from near certain doom. I think the key adjective here is unexpected. Indeed, a true eucatastrophe must be not only unexpected but unforeseeable, coming (quite literally, in the case of the eagles) out of the blue. For example, the ending of Star Wars: A New Hope, when Luke Skywalker uses the Force to blow up the Death Star, is a great, thrilling ending, but it’s not a true eucatastrophe. After all, Luke did what he came there to do. Yes, the odds were incredibly stacked against him, but the ending is not unforeseeable. It’s just very, very unlikely (and, therefore, very exciting and dramatic).
Upon being introduced to the term, one might wonder—as I did—what the difference is between a eucatastrophe and the classic Deus ex machina ending, as used in the theater of ancient Greece. Literally the “God-from-the-Machine,” it took the form of an actor playing Zeus or Poseidon or some other God, who was “levitated” over the stage using a wooden cherry-picker called a mechane. The “God” would then deliver some boon that rescues the protagonists and resolves the drama. Basically, a happy ending, courtesy of the divinity.
All good writers know that a Deus ex machina-style ending is usually pretty lame, simply because it has nothing to do with the drama that has preceded it. It doesn’t force the characters to get themselves out of trouble in a way that has meaning for the reader (or viewer). It’s the sudden “happy ending” that completely subverts the conflicts and themes that the reader has invested themselves in and is anxiously waiting to see how they will be resolved, not by some magical deity swooping in and snapping His fingers, but by the characters themselves.
Clearly, this is not the kind of ending Tolkien had in mind, nor does it describe the rather fabulous and exciting conclusions of both The Return of the King and The Hobbit. Rather, in both cases, the sudden appearance of the eagles seems somehow perfect. Unexpected, yet totally satisfying. And fitting.
But how? How does Tolkien do it?
I think it has something to do with the fact that, in Tolkien, the appearance of the eagles only comes near the end of some great struggle. In The LOTR, for instance, when the eagles rescue Sam and Frodo, the main goal of the story has already been achieved. That is, they have already destroyed the ring and defeated Sauron. More importantly, they have overcome—not just Sauron—but themselves. Their own fear, exhaustion, and despair, as they held the true course to victory.
Tolkien knows that if Sam and Frodo were to die afterward, their deaths would serve no purpose, either dramatically or thematically. So, the eagles’ showing up at the critical moment seems not only fitting but logical; the eagles have witnessed the Hobbits’ ordeal, and, like us, they seek a better ending for those poor little fellows who have saved the world.
In other words, unlike a Deus ex machina ending, a true eucatastrophe comes as a result of what has come before. It is a kind of miracle, but an earned miracle.
Also, as Robert points out so beautifully in his video, the eagles also function as a stand-in for God in Tolkien’s legendarium, Eru Ilúvatar. Ultimately, a eucatastrophe represents a kind of divine intervention. A deliverance from evil.
As Robert states:
This is sometimes dismissed rather sneeringly as Deus ex machina…. The writer intervening in the plot to save characters or move things along in a way that otherwise wouldn’t happen in that created world. The eagles, some have said, are a failing in Tolkien’s writing. A convenient, easy way to save characters from whatever scrape they find themselves in. But to think that would be to completely misunderstand Tolkien’s notion of eucatastrophe and what the eagles represent. The eagles’ appearances aren’t failures of imagination on Tolkien’s part. They are deliberate and intentional, and they are supposed to feel like God intervening. They are God in the works.
The important thing to note is that intervention comes after the fact. The battle, in a sense, must already be won, if only symbolically. In the Battle of the Five Armies, for instance, the true victory—the coming together of dwarves, elves, and men in common purpose—has already been achieved, even before the battle starts. The intervention of he eagles to finally win the day is, more or less, just icing on the metaphysical cake.
Come to think of it, there is a kind of eucatastrophe in Star Wars: A New Hope. It comes, not at the end of the battle for the Death Star, but just before it, when Luke is about to be blown to smithereens by Darth Vader. “I have you now,” Vader intones from inside his deluxe, specially fitted TIE Fighter as he prepares to pull the trigger. At that very last instant, though, Vader’s ship is hit by a laser blast and disabled. Luke is free to finish his mission.
But where did the blast come from? All of Luke’s friends are already dead.
The blast was fired, of course, by Hans Solo, who has come to the rescue in the Millenium Falcon. The moment feels momentous because we, the viewers, know that Solo should not be there. He has, in the previous scene, vehemently declared himself to be a selfish man—a cynic—concerned only with his own survival. He would never be a sucker for any crazy, doomed cause like the Galactic Rebellion.
Yet, there he is—a symbol of people’s ability to change, to discover their own basic, human decency and courage. And, just as the eagles are a stand-in for Eru Ilúvatar, Solo is a stand-in for God, The Force, or whatever you want to call it. He represents the potential for good in all people and living things.
“Will the Wolf Survive” by Los Lobos came out just a few years before I moved to Arizona for a few years. And so, finding myself living forty-five miles from the Mexican border, the song really resonated with me. I saw a lot of very poor immigrant people doing very hard menial jobs. I drove through countless immigration checkpoints in Texas. I saw the two Americas.
The real reason I love the song, though, is that…well…it rocks. East L.A. style. I love David Hidalgo’s soulful voice, and Cesar Rosas’s lead guitar work fires on all cylinders.
Also, the song seems particularly poignant at the moment, here in America, with all the persecution going on. Same old, same old. Just more of it.
No self-respecting cinephile could live with themselves if they failed to mark the passing of a great movie star like Sam Neill. Yes, Neill was a movie star. He seldom played the lead in big-budget films—Jurassic Park was a lucky exception, and even that film was more of an ensemble piece—yet whenever he was on-screen, it was impossible to take your eyes off him. And that inexplicable quality, more than anything, is what defines a movie star.
I say inexplicable, because no one can really define it. Yes, it has something to do with good looks, and Neill was definitely handsome. (Early in his career, he was an outright heartthrob in his native New Zealand.) Intelligence, too, often has something to do with star-power, and Neill was certainly, obviously smart. And charming, albeit in a reserved, unassuming way.
But there are lots of other good-looking, smart, and charming actors who never achieve the status of movie star. Neill did. How did he do it? I’m not sure. If I had to assign Neill one of my 15 Hollywood archetypes, I guess he would fit best in the Noble Everyman slot. But he was almost too handsome for that category. Really, he was almost his own archetype—that of the quiet, capable, professional man.
These terms certainly describe the first role I saw him in, which made me a fan—that of the titular superspy in Reilly, Ace of Spies. A 12-part miniseries shown on the Masterpiece Theater program in America, it told the story of the dapper, aristocratic, and amoral Sidney Reilly, a Russian-born secret agent who works for the British Empire circa 1910. With his deceptively soft, incisive voice and penetrating intellect, Neill was perfect for the role, and it made him a star.
Throughout his subsequent film career, he played many other resourceful, smart, but quiet characters, often in supporting roles. He played naval officers (Dead Calm, The Hunt for Red October), scientists (Jurassic Park, The Dish), and, of course, spies (Reilly, Ace of Spies, Plenty).
Whatever he played, though, he always exuded a kind of affable, open, benign quality that viewers instinctively warmed to.
Once again, I’ve been too slammed to finish a new blog entry, so I’m re-running an oldie-but-goodie (I hope). Enjoy…!!!!
A few months ago, I wrote a post about M. R. Carey’s excellent sci-fi novel, The Girl with All the Gifts. I recounted how incredibly impressed I was by the way Carey took an exhausted genre—the zombie apocalypse story—and found a way to make it fresh and vital.
As luck would have it, the next novel I chose to read was William Gibson’s latest book, The Peripheral. I tore through it over the course of a weekend, and at some point, it occurred to me how similar the book is—in spirit, if not content—to Carey’s. Gibson, after all, faced a similar challenge to Carey in that his preferred genre, the cyberpunk novel, was also played out, in large part due to his (Gibson’s) own amazing success. His iconic works like Mona Lisa Overdrive and Burning Chrome helped define the cyberpunk aesthetic, that weirdly prescient vision of a future divided between poor street people and the ultra-rich. It was Gibson who coined the term cyberspace, and, by the end of the 1990s, the cyberpunk vibe had permeated not only popular fiction but movies (Blade Runner, The Matrix) and anime (Akira).
Now, in 2019, reality itself seems to have caught up with Gibson’s work. We live in a world where the vast bulk of humanity is virtually impoverished and uneducated. These teeming masses distract themselves with 3D games and social media (literal cyberspace) while a few fantastically rich individuals build spaceships and private islands for themselves. We live in a world where teenaged soldiers kill people via satellite-controlled drones on the other side of the planet, and where rogue Chinese scientists make designer babies.
How’s a poor science fiction writer supposed to keep up?
For this latest entry in my Classic Sci-Fi Book Covers series, I’ve chosen a fairly recent (2004) edition of Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley. The book is a great, sci-fi action yarn about a post-WWIII America in which most of the heartland is scarred by nuclear radiation. Gale-force winds above 500 feet prevent any kind of air travel between the coasts, where the few remaining cities struggle to survive. When an epidemic breaks-out in Boston, officials in Southern California offer a tough criminal, Hell Tanner, a pardon if he will lead a convoy through Damnation Alley, a cross-continental route that bypasses the worst radiation spots. The rest of the story is a kind of post-apocalyptic Iditarod, complete with bandits, micro-hurricanes, and grotesque mutants (both human and animal), all of which Tanner must survive in order to deliver a vaccine.
If you grew up in the 1970s, you might remember the really cheesy (but fun) B-movie that was adapted from it (starring George Peppard, no less!). But even if you’re younger than that, the outlaw-turned-hero plot might seem familiar, mainly because it’s been ripped-off so many times in movies, from Mad Max: The Road Warrior to Escape from New York to Pitch Black.
Speaking of movies, Zelazny himself was probably inspired by numerous Westerns from the 1950s and 60s that used the same story. (I’m thinking of The Magnificent Seven, 3:10 to Yuma, and even The Searchers). All such tales focus on a criminal whose ruthlessness and brutality cause him to be ostracized from civilization under normal circumstances, but whose strength and cunning become indispensable in a crisis.
The idea, of course, goes back further still. Greek and Hindu epics like The Iliad and The Mahabarahta are full of instances of big, nasty warriors who must face a seemingly insurmountable gauntlet of enemies (warriors, monsters, demi-gods, etc.) and defeat them all to achieve some seemingly unattainable boon. In the process, the hero delivers his people from danger and (usually) achieves some kind of moral rehabilitation, if only after his death.
But there are a couple of key differences between modern tales like Damnation Alley and The Illiad. In ancient literature, the warrior’s violent tendencies are not a minus; they’re a plus. Paleolithic civilizations valued and glorified violent aggression even more than we do, probably because they faced real, existential threats much more often. Also, in ancient myths, it’s usually the hero himself who, seeking glory, embarks on the challenge of his own free-will. In stories like Damnation Alley, the hero (really more of an anti-hero) is compelled by others to take part in the saga. In the end, he might fight some deeper, non-selfish part of himself—or not. It all depends on the worldview of the author.
I really like this cover (by renowned comic book artist Dennis Callero) because it highlights the book’s anti-hero—Hell Tanner—in all his badass glory. He looks like a Hell’s Angel because, according to the story, he is a Hell’s Angel (back before the world got nuked). Now, instead of a Harley, he rides a tank-like vehicle called a Landmaster, bristling with weaponry, which is shown in the background. I also like the greenish glow (of radiation, presumably) coming from the edge of the picture.
Most of all, I admire how the cover, which was probably done using some kind of digital tool, still looks like an oil painting from old days of 1960s and 70s sci-fi illustration. It’s realistic, but not photo-realistic. It looks like…art.
Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, America’s birthday. So, for tonight’s Friday Night Rock-Out, I was going to share Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” which is my favorite “patriotic” song ever. I love it because the narrator seems genuinely proud to be an American while at the same time lamenting our country’s many, many flaws.
But, at the last minute, I decided to go with another great “heartland rock” singer—and one of my favorite artists of all time, generally—John Mellencamp, and his dark ode “Paper in Fire.” The song is about Mellencamp’s heritage, tracing back to a long line of tough, angry, and sometimes violent men. Which, in a way, describes America itself. Violence and anger are woven through our nation’s history, all 250 years of it. Maybe even further back than that.
Despite the song’s heavy themes, though, there is something thrilling and fun about it. Inspiring, even. I really like the way it evokes Kentucky as much as Kansas, with its blend of rock, bluegrass, and gospel.
I’ve written a lot about the liminal space aesthetic recently, and especially its importance in a brand of speculative fiction that I call Vortex. So, I was pleased to learn that it has a thriving following on Youtube. Specifically, The Backrooms channel.
I learned this from another Youtube channel that I really like, Monstrum. Here is the episode on The Backrooms. Check it out!
Ash Clifton, Writer 