XX: This One’s For The Ladies

Hot take incoming: Horror film is capable of communicating genuinely unsettling and uncomfortable experiences and points of view. On the other hand, the horror film industry is - like so many profit-driven industries - deeply conservative, if not downright reactionary. Horror fandom isn’t much better, for that matter. Scratch the surface even a little and you get some pretty shitty ideas about women and other marginalized groups. It’s part of a larger insistence on a status quo. Scare me, but don’t make me genuinely uncomfortable. Give me thrill rides filled with blood and tits, but don’t make me examine myself.

I think this is part of why I’m coming into this post about the anthology XX with kind of a bad taste in my mouth.  The whole marketing angle, down to the title, is that these are four films made from a female point of view - all four directed by women, three written by women. That it’s a marketing angle at all says a lot to me - this anthology is different! It’s special! Why? Because women made these films! Isn’t that wacky?

The rest of it? Well, that’s all on me. As the film began, my first thought was that these films should be especially subversive, they should Say Something about gender and being a woman in a patriarchal society. And you know what? No they shouldn’t. That isn’t any fairer than treating horror films made by women like a sideshow curiosity. That’s tokenism, plain and simple. They don’t need to make some big statement - the existence of the work is statement enough, and everything else follows from that. Any film is at least in part a product of the director and writers’ worldview, so if a woman wrote it and directed it, then by its very nature, it is saying something.

So with that out of the way, I’m going to talk about each entry as, well, horror films.

The film is bookended by stop-motion animation that reminds me of the Brothers Quay, and additional segments in the same style serve as interstitials between the films. It’s reasonably creepy and impressionistic, evoking a mood rather than serving as a conventional framing narrative. Which is fine with me, since framing stories in anthology films suck as often as not.

The Box

We open on Susan, traveling with her son Danny and daughter Jenny on the subway. It’s Christmastime, and there’s a voiceover from a woman (presumably Susan) about how she doesn’t remember whether they’d gotten presents or not at that point. So she’s recalling this from sometime in the future. Danny asks the man sitting next to him what’s in the box he’s carrying. It’s a red gift-wrapped box with a bow on top. The man says it’s a present, and Danny asks if he can look. The man obliges, and Danny looks puzzled as he stares into the box, his smile fading. Come dinnertime at home, he says he isn’t hungry. He doesn’t eat his dinner that night.

Or the next night, or the next night, or the next night.

It’s a terse, economically told story about a little boy who just won’t eat, and won’t say why. The acting is a little stiff in places, but it’s nicely restrained and makes good use of a repeated motif of the family sitting at the dinner table, with overhead shots of the food. It creates a rhythm which it then begins to disrupt as things get worse and worse. Susan doesn’t know why this is happening, she and her husband start to fight about it, and then things get much, much worse. At every turn, it doesn’t overexplain, letting the little details do the work along with the judicious use of some shocking imagery. It does a good job of being really unsettling without falling back into melodrama.

The Birthday Party

Mary is a well-to-do housewife in a fancy suburb full of other well-to-do housewives. She’s wound up tight about her daughter’s birthday party going exactly right, as one tends to be when one has the time and privilege to become obsessed with one’s social standing. In Mary’s case, however, this is complicated by the fact of her husband sitting in his study, very dead, with the party starting very, very soon.

It’s an odd, off-kilter domestic drama that takes upper-middle-class keeping-up-with-the-Joneses anxiety and turns it up to absurd levels, treating a dead husband like a profound inconvenience rather than a source of grief, playing the whole thing for slapstick and scoring it with the sort of minor key synths and sharp music stabs you’d associate with a horror film. The end result feels like we’re watching Mary’s worst nightmare play out, but it’s a worst nightmare that is, in the vast scheme of things, pretty low-stakes. But that seems like it’s kind of the point. It’s well-shot and composed, with a vividly colorful palette, but it’s not really that scary, and the ending title card reveals it for the black comedy it is.

Don’t Fall

Four friends - Jay, Paul, Gretchen, and Jess - are out for a hike in the desert, and as it transpires, they’re probably in a nature preserve area that’s off-limits to the public. The other three get some mileage out of messing with Gretchen, who is afraid of heights and scorpions. Soon enough, they find some mysterious paintings on a rock face, and Gretchen gets bitten by something which causes her to...change.

This is probably the only real dud of the bunch. The Birthday Party wasn’t horror, but it was cohesive and evoked a mood (and the ending made me laugh loudly). This is…just sort of an inconsequential monster story that doesn’t really take time to set things up or really establish a mood. At first it feels like it’s going to be an exercise in tension where a bunch of potential threats get set up, only for us to be blindsided by something that comes out of nowhere (which isn’t a bad thing) or maybe a survival story about a bunch of young adults out of their element, but it isn’t. The four friends hang out for a bit, one of them turns into a monster and kills the others. That’s it. It all just sort of happens, without a lot of tension, and the practical effects let the whole thing down a little bit more. The best thing I can really say about it is that it’s short.

Her Only Living Son

This one opens cryptically, with a fraught conversation between a woman and a doctor, shot in close-ups, with talk of how people have agendas and how she’ll run away, someplace far away where nobody will find her or “little Andy and Jenny.” The doctor gives her some money, says “Godspeed, Mrs. -“and the woman interrupts him to say “no, she’s gone.” Then there is the buzzing of an alarm clock, the woman (now called Cora) waking up, and the caption “18 Years Later.”

“Little Andy” appears to be Cora’s son, it’s coming up on his 18th birthday, and there’s something not quite right about him. It’s in how he treats the dog, the way he tastes the blood from an egg yolk.

The squirrel nailed to the tree.

This one shares a lot of the strengths of The Box, in its restraint and willingness to let suggestion do a lot of the heavy lifting. At its heart, it’s the story of a mother who doesn’t really recognize her son anymore as he’s passing through adolescence, but  this is shot through with echoes of We Need To Talk About Kevin, in Cora’s struggling with the knowledge that she has a son who has done something awful, as well as Rosemary’s Baby - it’s not just that Cora can see there’s something terribly wrong, it’s also that nobody around her seems to acknowledge it. In fact, some of them seem to be enabling it. According to them, her son is very, very special.

The end result is a little richer in texture than The Box, and just as uneasy, forsaking easy shocks for a constant simmering dread as Cora’s situation becomes clearer to us. It does get a little ham-handed and obvious in a couple of spots, but it ends well, tying the universal horror of not knowing your own child anymore to the more specific horror of who Andy’s father really was, bringing them together in a reckoning that ends up being both unsettling and touching at the same time. It’s a powerful piece of work and ends the anthology on a strong note.

So, what do horror films made by women look like? Mostly they look like horror films made by men, for good and ill alike. At their best, there’s some good subtext and imagery in here around motherhood and family, the sacrifices women make, and the pressures they live under without really being didactic about it. I’d love to see more from most of the directors, not just because I like the idea of more different voice in horror (though that’s true), but also because The Box and Her Only Living Son are examples of the kind of horror I like - reliant more on detail, mood, and suggestion than full-on gore, tying together the fears we face every day and fears borne of far stranger things. Life is already full of nightmares, and pairing them with fictional nightmares makes for good horror in my book.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon