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This is no dream, this is really happening! (Horror Through The Decades, 1960's)
12 Plays5 months ago
In this episode, we’re hitting the 1960’s. This episode brings ghosts that may or may not be there, and the foundation for zombie films as we know them. We’re going to take an in depth look at a few key horror movies from this decade and explore how issues relating to second wave feminism and the Civil Rights Movement were showing up in horror movies of the time.
Movies discussed: Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Innocents (1961), The Haunting (1963), and Night of the Living Dead (1968)
instagram.com/whathauntsyoupod
Intro Music: Body in the trunk by Victor_Natas -- https://freesound.org/s/717975/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
Outro Music: drum loop x5 by theoctopus559 -- https://freesound.org/s/622897/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
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Transcript
Introduction to 'What Haunts You' Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to What Haunts You, a podcast about the stories that haunt our dreams. You can find the podcast on Instagram at whathauntsyoupod, and you can find our episodes on YouTube and Spotify.
Social Upheaval of the 1960s and Its Impact on Horror Films
00:00:11
Speaker
I'm your host Carly, here to continue to talk to you about horror through the decades, and we have officially arrived at the nineteen sixty s
00:00:42
Speaker
The 1960s was a time of upheaval in the United States, as various social issues were put more squarely in the public eye.
The Influence of Second-Wave Feminism on Horror
00:00:50
Speaker
The civil rights movement and second-wave feminism were fighting for a more equitable world.
00:00:55
Speaker
And the protests against the Vietnam War were starting to pick up, but we'll talk more about those in the 1970s episode. People were thinking about power, the misuse of power, and the power discrepancies that were built into the world that they were living in.
00:01:11
Speaker
In the movie world, the restrictions created by the Hays Code were loosening and eventually dissolving, creating opportunity for movies to talk about this stuff more directly than ever before.
00:01:23
Speaker
So at a time where these serious but controversial conversations were happening more often, Hollywood was also able to confront these issues more head-on. A lot of horror in the 1960s, beyond just the movies I'll get into today, were more invested in female characters than ever before.
00:01:42
Speaker
These movies were interested in women's experiences and in the roles that they were allowed to inhabit. In horror movies, it really wasn't until the 1960s that women started to feel like real characters.
00:01:54
Speaker
They were more dynamic, more complex, and felt a lot more real. Okay, we'll start with some background. In the 1940s, women had entered the workforce to support the men who had left to fight in World War II.
00:02:07
Speaker
These were the Rosie the Riveter times, and women were working not only in industrial jobs and jobs directly related to the war, but they were filling in all of the gaps that had been left by all of the men who had left to serve.
00:02:19
Speaker
They were working in a wider variety of jobs than ever before, including a lot of jobs that had been previously thought of as unsuitable for women. Then in the nineteen fifty s with the war over, women were being back to housewives, homemakers, and a lot of them were no longer working outside the home.
00:02:36
Speaker
I do want to highlight that this entire situation really only applies to white women whose husbands were able to financially support their family. Women of color and poor women have been in the workforce and would continue to be in the workforce, but with much narrower opportunities than during World War II.
00:02:54
Speaker
The privilege of being able to stay home as a housewife often goes unacknowledged in conversations about the pressures that mid-century women were facing. While women deserve the right to decide if they want to be housewives or working women or some combination of the two, the option to choose is a massive privilege that not everybody has.
00:03:13
Speaker
But in response to this shift back to more quote-unquote traditional roles and being back in the home, second wave feminism emerged.
Cultural Significance of 'Rosemary's Baby'
00:03:22
Speaker
Second wave feminism was when relationships between men and women were being more closely examined and more closely critiqued.
00:03:29
Speaker
with issues of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and domestic violence being seen as more legitimate concerns than ever before. First-wave feminism's main focus was the public sphere, with issues like education, voting rights, and property ownership.
00:03:43
Speaker
It didn't really address the dynamics that show up in the private relationships between women and men. It lacked any particular interest in the actual outcomes that women were experiencing, and crucially, it lacked intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 describe the intersections between various identities and marginalizations, like race, class, disability, sexuality, and more.
00:04:07
Speaker
First-wave feminism was primarily about white women trying to gain the same rights that white men already have. But it did disregard the fact that Black people of any gender were lacking most of those same rights as well.
00:04:20
Speaker
In second-wave feminism, while the view of things did broaden, there was still a lack of intersectionality and a lack of representation of multiple marginalized women sitting at these various intersections of identity.
00:04:32
Speaker
But there was more talk about reproductive rights, about gender-based violence like sexual assault and domestic violence. And there was more talk about how things were for women in their homes and in their relationships.
00:04:44
Speaker
Feminism was no longer exclusively about the public sphere, but it was encompassing the private lives of women, including their environments, their relationships, and their personal experiences. During the 60s, there was finally a conversation to be had about the disproportionate power given to men and how that shows up in the relationship dynamics of heterosexual marriages of the time.
00:05:05
Speaker
And movies did not miss this conversation. In 1968, Rosemary's Baby came out and scared the shit out of a nation. Rosemary's Baby was based on a book by Ira Levin of the same name, a very faithful adaptation if I ever saw one,
00:05:20
Speaker
but it's really Mia Farrow's portrayal of Rosemary, the sheltered housewife and mom-to-be of a devil baby, that brought the story to life. She is so captivating in this role, and she plays it in a way that makes Rosemary really, really believable.
00:05:34
Speaker
We're with her in the joy of moving into a new apartment with her husband, of trying to get pregnant and finding out she is pregnant. We're with her in the terror of suspicion and feeling like everybody is out to get her and that there is this big plot emerging against her.
00:05:49
Speaker
And we're with her in the loss of being told that her baby didn't make it. We're also with her in the devastation of realizing that the plot had not only been real, but it had been even worse than she thought. But I won't just leave you with that speed run.
00:06:02
Speaker
If we're really going to talk about the cultural significance, we have to get all the way into it. Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse move into the infamous apartment house, The Bram, ah previously the site of witchcraft and murders.
00:06:15
Speaker
It's above their price range, but Guy is an emerging actor, and he is hopeful that his star will continue to rise. I'm going to get this statement out of the way early. Guy is the villain of the story.
00:06:27
Speaker
Okay? In the story, the neighbors are witches. That is true. The devil is real. That is true. Even with those conceits, Guy is the villain. He is the person who makes all of this stuff happen, and he is the reason that all these things go wrong.
00:06:42
Speaker
Anyway, Rosemary excitedly decorates the new apartment. She's brightening it up. She's making it beautiful. She's making it younger, right? The previous resident had been like an elderly lady.
00:06:53
Speaker
um It was really stuffy and dark before, and and she really makes it a warm and inviting apartment. Soon, Rosemary meets a neighbor, seemingly the only neighbor in this building who is even close to her own age.
00:07:05
Speaker
Her name's Terry, and the neighbors next door had kind of saved her off the street when she was going through a hard time. Shortly after meeting Rosemary, Terry dies. She dies from a jump, a fall, maybe a push out a window.
00:07:20
Speaker
It's never really made clear unless you count the more recently released prequel, but we're not going to we're not going to get into that right now. At the site of Terry's death, Rosemary and Guy meet the Castavets, their next door neighbors, Minnie and Roman, who immediately impose themselves upon this young couple as like surrogate parents or grandparents with very little respect for boundaries.
00:07:43
Speaker
Neither Guy's nor Rosemary's parents are nearby, which makes it easier, I think, for them to impose themselves in this way. And previously, their only real relationship like that that's been talked about is Rosemary's relationship with her previous landlord, Hutch, who served as kind of a father figure to her.
00:07:59
Speaker
After the cast events have Rosemary and Guy over for dinner, we see the gender split. So after dinner, Rosemary and Minnie are in the kitchen. They're doing dishes. They're kind of talking about nothing.
00:08:12
Speaker
And we just see the smoke wafting in of the men smoking cigars in the next room after their dinner. Crucially, Rosemary doesn't hear anything that they're talking about in the other room. It's it's very much like, okay, the men are talking, you guys go do the dishes. And that's that's what it is. So we're in the dark, she's in the dark. We don't know what's happening in that room.
00:08:34
Speaker
Guy has recently auditioned for a play that he didn't get the lead role in. Shortly after this dinner, the man who did get the role suddenly goes blind. Like, no symptoms leading up to it, totally out of nowhere, woke up one morning, can't see.
00:08:48
Speaker
So obviously he had to give up the role. And and obviously the role went to Guy. So Guy is now getting his big break. In the context of the story, it's pretty easy to see that this is the coven next door laying the evidence that they can make things happen for Guy, and the bargain has officially begun.
00:09:07
Speaker
Another thing that happens very quickly after this first dinner is that Guy finally tells Rosemary that he is ready to have a baby, and they get to work on planning immediately. On what they call baby night, Minnie drops off a dessert for the couple to share. Chocolate mouse, she calls it, which is adorable.
00:09:25
Speaker
And Rosemary doesn't really like it. She doesn't want to eat it. But she pretends to eat the whole thing because Guy basically berates her and talks to her like a child for not wanting to eat this dessert. And this is like one of a million moments where Guy treats her like a child, like just talks to her the way you would talk to a young child and not even like a respectful way you would talk to a child, but like a very belittling way that you would talk to a child, the way you would talk to a child if you were an invalidating parent.
00:09:52
Speaker
But anyway, she eats like a little bit of this and then pretends to eat the rest. And soon she becomes pretty like dizzy and disoriented. And it's pretty clear that she's been drugged. But because she didn't eat all of it, she is not like fully dosed. She stays in this space of being kind of half awake and half dreaming and like in this kind of weird liminal space.
00:10:13
Speaker
But the sequence ends with a sexual assault. She's surrounded by elderly neighbors of hers and Guy is with them. And she has this kind of like famous moment of the movie where she looks around and she says, this is no dream. This is really happening.
00:10:28
Speaker
But she does eventually fall asleep. And so when she wakes up, she's not really sure what happened. But she does wake up with scratch marks on her body. And she confronts Guy about this. And he essentially says he didn't want to miss baby night.
00:10:41
Speaker
And he says to her... in a truly disgusting moment. He says, it was fun in a necrophile sort of way, which is not the thing you want to hear from your husband. Definitely not the thing you want to hear from your husband you're trying to have a baby with. Not not very comforting.
00:10:58
Speaker
Rosemary is visibly uncomfortable with this. She's telling him that it was not that urgent. They did not have like one split second to make a baby. It doesn't work like that. But she doesn't really have the language to talk about what happened, and she doesn't really seem to know how to express her discomfort as fully as she's feeling it.
00:11:16
Speaker
It actually wasn't until the 1970s that marital rape started to be made illegal in various states, and it wasn't until 1993 that all of the states in the U.S. got on board.
00:11:27
Speaker
So there's not really a frame of reference for this experience that Rosemary's just had. She doesn't really have the language to express what's happened, but she knows that something was wrong with it. She tells Guy that she had a dream that an inhuman monster was assaulting her.
00:11:41
Speaker
And he responds like seeming almost offended as if he is the one who has somehow been wronged here. Talk about reversing victim and offender, right? So here are Rosemary's options.
00:11:53
Speaker
She was either raped and impregnated by the actual devil or she was raped and impregnated by her husband. And honestly, I can't really decide which one is worse.
00:12:05
Speaker
Even by the end of the movie when we know for sure what's happened, I still can't really decide which thing would be better or worse. The beginning of Rosemary's pregnancy is an absolute nightmare for her.
00:12:17
Speaker
She's in a ton of pain, which is just like constantly brushed off by her doctor, by her husband, by the neighbors who are like kind of stepping in and taking care of her in this very intrusive way.
00:12:28
Speaker
And her doctor, Dr. Saperstein, is obviously recommended to her by none other than Minnie and Roman, who insist she stop seeing the doctor that her friends recommended to her and start seeing their doctor instead.
00:12:40
Speaker
It's very quick that they are exerting just, like, very inappropriate levels of control over her. and inserting themselves into their lives and their family planning in ways that they have no business doing.
00:12:53
Speaker
Dr. Saperstein is not only dismissive of her pain, but he really wants her to not take in any information about pregnancy. He tells her not to read books. He tells her not to talk to her friends about her pregnancy, not to talk to her female relatives.
00:13:07
Speaker
He wants her kept in the dark. He wants to control the information coming in. He wants to be the only source of information coming to her about what being pregnant is going to be like. I know for me sitting here today, like that is an incredibly massive flashing red flag.
00:13:24
Speaker
But honestly, at the time where women's concerns were so unconsidered, is it really all that surprising for a doctor to treat a woman this way? How much would this level of dismissal from a doctor really come as a surprise to somebody at that time?
00:13:39
Speaker
I obviously don't know the answer. I did not live at this time, but I can guess that this was not that unusual. How much would this level of
Themes of Perception in 'The Innocents'
00:13:48
Speaker
dismissal from a doctor really even register for a woman of that time as abnormal, let alone threatening the way that it really was?
00:13:56
Speaker
At one point, Rosemary is like sick of all of the old people in her building and she decides to have a party. She decides to have a party and like only invite her young friends who she really hasn't been seeing much, if any, of since moving into this building.
00:14:09
Speaker
Their whole social life right now revolves around Minnie and Roman and all of their other like elderly neighbors in this building. At one point during the party, her girlfriends actually lock a guy out of the kitchen to talk to her because she is so upset about everything that's been going on.
00:14:26
Speaker
She's crying. She's telling them, how much pain she's in. She's telling them how scared she is. She's scared for herself. She's scared for her unborn baby. And she's really letting it out. And it's kind of the first and one of the only moments in the entire movie where we really see her getting support, especially support from women.
00:14:45
Speaker
Pretty soon, the coven starts to see Hutch, Rosemary's like surrogate father, as a threat. And they essentially put him into a coma and he eventually passes away. At his funeral, Rosemary shows up late and a woman gives her this book that he had left for her.
00:15:01
Speaker
The book is a book about witches and Rosemary uses it to gain more information about her situation and more information about Minnie and Roman next door. Through the book, she discovers that Roman is the son of like an infamous witch who was like up to all sorts of nefarious things.
00:15:17
Speaker
She brings the book to Guy to try to kind of get him on her side and tell him that these people are a threat. And Guy eventually throws the book away. But at first, he puts it up on a high shelf the way you would put something away from like a puppy or a small child.
00:15:32
Speaker
And again, these it's like beat after beat of him treating her like she is a child and not like she is a full grown woman who is like growing a child in her body at this time. But she still slowly pieces everything together and she starts to suspect that the neighbors are witches and she thinks that they want to steal her baby for their rituals because the book basically says that like baby blood is the best kind of blood for rituals, so they need her baby.
00:15:58
Speaker
And the thing about Rosemary is that like despite her lack of autonomy, despite her lack of power, despite her lack of access to anything that would really be helpful to her, she is nothing if not smart and resourceful.
00:16:11
Speaker
The way she discovers that Roman is the son of this witch is by looking in this book and using a Scrabble set to like decode the anagram from this old name to his new name.
00:16:21
Speaker
She takes the tiles and like moves them around. And it's actually very genius. I don't even think that I would think of that if I was trying to figure something like that out. And while she isn't like totally right on the money with what she thinks is going on she's quite close.
00:16:36
Speaker
And she's really on track to figuring it out despite like everything being in her way to being able to find the answers. While all of this is going on and like shortly after she has that party, the pain stops and she finally gets to start working on nesting. She finally gets to be excited to have this baby and like everything feels very different and lighter. And she finally has like a pregnancy glow after this whole chunk of time she's pale and kind of She's losing weight instead of gaining weight. And she really looks she looks very unwell in the first part of the movie during her pregnancy.
00:17:09
Speaker
And this is when she really starts to look like a like beautiful pregnant woman with just like who is just glowing and like preparing to bring a human into the world. As she becomes more and more suspicious, Rosemary eventually decides that she wants to go to another doctor.
00:17:25
Speaker
She goes back to the doctor that she had been seeing at the beginning of the movie that her friends had recommended to her. She tells him of the plot she suspects against her, and it seems like he's listening. She's telling him about her experiences with Dr. Saperstein and her neighbors.
00:17:40
Speaker
And this doctor seems to be on board, and he tells her that he's going to get her into a hospital that night so that she can be safe and comfortable until she delivers her baby. Instead of doing this, while Rosemary is asleep in his office, he calls Guy and Dr. Saperstein in.
00:17:55
Speaker
They come and get her, they give her a sedative, and they take her home. It's never really made clear if this other doctor is in on the plot or if he simply assumed Rosemary was, like, losing her mind and called in reinforcements in these men.
00:18:08
Speaker
It's also possible that he, as, like, a younger doctor, obviously newer to the field, was like just bowing to hierarchy because Dr. Saperstein is a well-respected, kind of renowned doctor in their field, and he doesn't want to fuck up his own situation by going against someone who's more powerful than him.
00:18:27
Speaker
And again, i can't really decide what the best or worst option is there. Like all of those options just suck. They just, they suck. Every single one of them ultimately prioritizes like every single person involved except for this vulnerable and pregnant woman.
00:18:42
Speaker
It ends up being a tragedy all around. For Rosemary, she gives birth in her home and she gets told that the baby didn't make it. They tell her that if she had been more calm and she hadn't freaked out like that, they might have been able to get her to a hospital to give birth and then maybe the baby would have made it.
00:18:57
Speaker
So they're not only lying to her and telling her that her baby is dead, but they're essentially telling her that it's her fault her baby is dead. And if she had behaved herself, that the baby would still be here.
00:19:08
Speaker
But she starts to hear baby cries in the apartment building. And eventually she does go to investigate it. And so she goes into the apartment next door. And what does she discover? But this whole coven of people, all of her neighbors are there, plus some other people.
00:19:22
Speaker
They're surrounding this black bassinet. And in the black bassinet is this devil baby that she has given birth to and has been taken from her. Roman basically asks Rosemary to be this kid's mom. He says, you don't have to join the coven. You don't have to get involved in the witchcraft, but you gave birth to this baby. Like, what if you what if you raise him? What if you be his mother?
00:19:42
Speaker
And the movie appears to end with her agreeing because the last thing that we really see is Rosemary rocking her baby, this devil baby, in the bassinet. Up until this moment, this movie is a perfect movie. I have no notes.
00:19:56
Speaker
The last minute goes, the last like two minutes of the movie goes a little bit off the rails with the chanting and the rhyming and the kind of unintentional camp in such a serious movie. But I will forgive it that last moment of unseriousness because like I said, otherwise this movie is flawless.
00:20:13
Speaker
But this movie is fundamentally about bodily autonomy and about manipulation in the context of a romantic relationship. Rosemary is violated from start to finish, and Guy lies to her and gaslights her every step of the way.
00:20:27
Speaker
He minimizes her fears, he trivializes her pain, and in what might be ah the most disturbing scene to me personally, when she says she wants to get a second opinion from another doctor, he tells her that he doesn't think that would be fair to Dr. Saperstein.
00:20:42
Speaker
And Rosemary is obviously incredulous at this and is like, what about what's fair to me? And he doesn't really have anything to say to that. and what about what's fair to me, might be the thesis of this movie.
00:20:56
Speaker
Why is everyone else more considered than the woman who is literally growing a human being in her womb? The scariest part about this movie is not the devil.
00:21:06
Speaker
It's the speed with which Guy Woodhouse is willing to sell his wife's body without her consent in exchange for money, power, and fame through his acting career.
00:21:18
Speaker
We don't know what's said when this deal gets made, but we do know that there was not much said. It happened quickly. This was not an extended process. This was not a lengthy negotiation. It was quick. It was over and done with before Rosemary even really knew these people.
00:21:32
Speaker
He didn't consult her. He didn't ask what she thought. And he didn't think that he needed to because his career and his desire for fame was far more important to him. than his wife's safety, well-being, or health ever were.
00:21:45
Speaker
And without the presence of Guy's actual parents, Minnie and Roman kind of become like surrogate in-laws for Rosemary. She's stuck in this like weird little family-like coven that Guy has become a part of.
00:21:57
Speaker
And Guy and his new chosen family are like making decisions for her and kind of going above her head on everything. She's basically just at the whim of Guy and his new weird parents. And I think ultimately that's an experience that a lot of women can probably relate to, like joining this new family that basically sees her as like a baby-making machine and doesn't really take her seriously as a human.
00:22:19
Speaker
It's not unheard of for a woman to feel like her in-laws see her as a baby incubator and nothing else. And while the baby being incubated it is not normally a devil baby, women are still often treated by their husbands and their husbands' families in ways that reduce them to their baby-making capacity.
00:22:36
Speaker
Unfortunately, we're not very far from this kind of state of existence ourselves. I'm recording this really shortly after a baby was recently removed from a black woman who was in a vegetative state whose body was basically used as an incubator for this child.
Mental Health and Supernatural in 'The Haunting'
00:22:51
Speaker
So this is reality. I mean, again, it's not a devil baby, but it is a human being that is growing inside of you that you may or may not really want. And everybody is just kind of expecting you to put anything that's going on for you on hold. And like they don't even care if your brain is alive.
00:23:09
Speaker
Like so many women, Rosemary is just disempowered at every single turn. Her husband overrides her bodily autonomy. He belittles her experiences and he lies to her at every single point of this journey.
00:23:21
Speaker
Her neighbors are feeding her and giving her vitamin drinks and checking in on her in a way that is like so invasive and intrusive and just like obsessive and not okay.
00:23:32
Speaker
Her doctor is trying to prevent her from taking in any information that might indicate to her that there is something different about her pregnancy or something wrong with what's happening to her. And the very last resort, the doctor that she goes to to get help when this has all gone too far, sends her right back to the people who put her in that situation to begin with.
00:23:51
Speaker
And I know I said it earlier, but like how different is this really from the average experience of a pregnant woman in America? Like today, let alone... in mid-century America. The conversation that this film is having is a complicated one.
00:24:04
Speaker
It's about bodily autonomy, but it's also about the power discrepancy that inherently exists in heterosexual marriages and the risk that that poses to the women who enter them. Statistically speaking, the most dangerous man for a woman to be around is her own husband.
00:24:20
Speaker
But like Guy Woodhouse, most of these husbands don't start out seeming particularly scary or dangerous. And also like Guy Woodhouse, they don't see themselves as particularly villainous.
00:24:31
Speaker
They don't see what they're doing is wrong. They usually find ways to justify it as something they need to do or something that is a means to a well-deserved end, like guy with his fame.
00:24:42
Speaker
And while they do these mental gymnastics to make their own behavior okay, they do like the same amount of mental gymnastics to frame their wives as hysterical or overreacting or dramatic or whatever like disparaging adjectives people like to use about women.
00:24:59
Speaker
And research on domestic violence actually shows that women are at more risk of domestic violence when they are pregnant. That's like the most dangerous time to be a woman. The vulnerability of pregnancy and the way that that vulnerability is like further impacted by these power imbalances that exist in these relationships is a big part of what this movie is ultimately exploring.
00:25:20
Speaker
In addition to all of the standard pregnancy-related changes, pregnancy can cause a lot of pain It can cause a reduction in mobility. Some women who are at higher risk even end up like primarily in bed rest for chunks of their pregnancy to protect themselves and the baby.
00:25:35
Speaker
It's a time where you have to rely on people and the person you're the most likely to rely on is also the person who's most likely to be dangerous to you. It's really, really tricky situation for a woman to be in.
00:25:46
Speaker
Pregnancy is an intensely vulnerable state of existence and it's one that occurs within the existence And it's one that occurs within the context of this power dynamic that's usually not really being talked about.
00:25:59
Speaker
I don't want to talk about Rosemary's Baby and not talk about the fact that this movie was made by a rapist. 1977, less than 10 years after this movie came out, Roman Polanski faced charges for drugging and sexually assaulting 13-year-old girl.
00:26:18
Speaker
13 years old. Similarly to the way that Rosemary was taken from an already vulnerable position, being a mid-century woman in a heterosexual marriage, into a more vulnerable position by being pregnant and was in the process sexually assaulted.
00:26:33
Speaker
in real life, Roman Polanski took a girl who was already in a vulnerable position, being a child, put her in an even more vulnerable position, being a drugged child,
00:26:45
Speaker
and then sexually assaulted her in the process. And I, for one don't really know what to make of this. I never have. This is not the only case of a man telling like a highly sympathetic story about the plight of women and their and like the experiences that women are going through, who's later revealed to have preyed on women or girls in some way.
00:27:07
Speaker
So this isn't really unique. I said something similar to this in a previous episode, but I think that men, including Polanski, the director of this movie, needed there to be a real actual devil in this movie because otherwise Guy is just kind of a normal guy He's exerting too much power over his wife, her health, and her body, but he's not really doing it in ways that are super far outside of the norm if there's no devil and no devil baby.
00:27:36
Speaker
It's unclear whether Polanski fell into the same trap of seeing the devil as the primary villain of this movie rather than Guy Woodhouse, or if he was like unsuccessfully trying to exercise some of his own demons about women and their autonomy.
00:27:50
Speaker
But either way, it bears discussion that this movie was made by a rapist and it's not something that you can just gloss over. Rosemary's Baby keeps Rosemary's mental state fairly ambiguous until the end. It's not really clear until the very end of the movie if she's right or if she's crazy.
00:28:07
Speaker
The dream sequence where the baby is conceived could be argued to be proof that this is all really happening, but at the same time she was drugged, she was dreaming, like it could all be attributed to her dream.
00:28:19
Speaker
This kind of like is she or isn't she crazy type of deal that Rosemary's Baby is playing with is a common thread among 60s horror movies, especially ones that center around female characters.
00:28:30
Speaker
It shows us how when you're in a vulnerable position, the line between madness and reality can become a lot more ambiguous and a lot more blurred. We see this theme showing up especially in movies that surround like hauntings and ghosts.
00:28:43
Speaker
With the most prominent examples, I would say being 1961's The Innocents and 1963's The Haunting. So we're going to get into those to kind of explore this a little bit further. In The Innocents, which is based on a turn of the screw, our main character, Miss Giddens, is hired by a man who has become kind of against his will responsible for his niece and nephew.
00:29:05
Speaker
He hires Miss Giddens to be their governess, and he basically tells her that her job is to be totally responsible for these kids. He doesn't want her checking in with him or, like, updating him. He literally cannot be bothered about what is going on with these kids.
00:29:19
Speaker
She doesn't really acknowledge how strange this is, and she tells him that she's going to do anything she can to keep these kids happy. Miss Giddens arrives at Bly Manor and she first meets Flora, who she is like totally smitten with right away. and this girl is adorable, like it's understandable why.
00:29:33
Speaker
And then Flora introduces her to Miss Gross, the housekeeper. Her brother Miles is away at school, but Flora tells Miss Giddens that he will be returning home soon. We don't know why she's saying this. It doesn't really make sense, but she says it with some level of conviction. So we'll see where it goes.
00:29:48
Speaker
Miss Gross tells Miss Giddens a little bit about the governess who had been there before who had passed away. They later get Flora ready for bed and she says her prayers. And after she says her prayers, she asks Miss Giddens.
00:30:00
Speaker
because She says the whole like, now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take prayer. And then she asks Miss Giddens about like where the Lord would be taking her soul exactly.
00:30:14
Speaker
And she asks, like, if I'm not a good girl, would he just like leave me here to walk around? And she basically says, like, isn't that what happens to some people? So we're already setting the stage that like ghosts are familiar to Flora, this idea that someone who had passed away would be lingering around kind of like left stranded wherever they were.
00:30:32
Speaker
is already on her mind. Very soon, they get a letter from Miles's boarding school that he is getting expelled and sent home. So Flora was right that he would be home soon.
00:30:43
Speaker
He gets off the train with flowers for Miss Giddens, who is every bit as smitten with him as she was with Flora. The children are charming, they're well-behaved, they're well-spoken, and Miss Giddens like totally falls in love with them right off the bat.
00:30:57
Speaker
which ultimately, if someone was going to take care of your kids, like you want them to love your kids. So it's kind of a good thing, but it is a little bit weird how quickly it happens. When Miss Giddens talks to Miles about what happened in school, he's pretty evasive. He like won't really tell her about what happened and he doesn't really want to talk about it.
00:31:14
Speaker
And Miles pretty much knows that his uncle does not care what happens to him. Like he knows that his uncle does not have time for he and his sister. and he kind of like says it in a cheeky way. But you kind of have to wonder like, you know, how much that fucks with him as a child.
00:31:29
Speaker
Miss Giddens assures him that she has time for them and that she does care about them. A gust of wind blows the candle out in the room as they're talking and Miss Giddens is scared, but Miles assures her that everything will be fine and that it was just a gust of wind.
00:31:42
Speaker
He tells her there's nothing to be afraid of. And already this little boy is comforting this grown woman who is like charged with his care, right? She's there to take care of him. And yet there's this role reversal happening kind of from the beginning of her being scared and him being the one to comfort her.
00:31:58
Speaker
While she's out in the garden, Miss Giddens sees the figure of a man on top of the house. And when she goes to investigate, the man is gone. And there's no one on the tower but Miles, who says he's been there playing by himself for like a while.
00:32:10
Speaker
Miles says to her, I hope you won't have to wear spectacles because you're much too pretty for that. And like, this is not even the first time he's said something like this. He's already also told her that she's far too pretty to be a governess.
00:32:21
Speaker
Miss Giddens asks Miss sc Gross if there's anybody living at the house that she hasn't met yet. She doesn't really indicate what she saw, but Miss Gross definitely thinks that this is a weird question because no, there is not.
00:32:33
Speaker
Flora comes to get Miss Giddens to show her that Miles is riding around outside on his horse. And while they're out there, Miss Giddens senses something, but we don't really know what. Later, the kids are talking to Miss Giddens about what they might be when they grow
Conclusion on Gender Dynamics in Horror Films
00:32:46
Speaker
up.
00:32:46
Speaker
And Miles says, quote, There's nothing I want to be except what I am, a boy living at Bly. If only everything could go on just as it is now. It's bedtime for Flora and Miles, but they decide to play just one game of hide and seek.
00:33:00
Speaker
While searching for the kids, Miss Giddens finds a music box that has a photo of a man in it. As she looks at the photo, Miles runs in and like kind of takes her prisoner. He's playing rough and he's not really listening to her until Flora comes in, who is thrilled to see this music box. She says she's missed it and she's just like over the moon that it's been found and and that she has it again.
00:33:21
Speaker
It's now the kids' turn to be it. So they count and Miss Giddens goes to hide. And as she hears the kids laughing, she sees a man in the window. He looks at her and then he like slowly disappears into the darkness to leave her there wondering if she really saw anything at all.
00:33:35
Speaker
When she goes to investigate, once again, nobody is there. She tells Miss Gross what happened, and Miss Gross like weirdly asks her, would you say he was a very handsome man? And Miss Giddens realizes that it's the same man from the picture in the music box that she had found earlier.
00:33:52
Speaker
She finds out that it's Peter Quint, the previous valet of the kid's uncle, and that he used to work at Bly Manor, but now he is dead. The next day, the kids are being terrible.
00:34:03
Speaker
Flora is making an awful noise with her pencil, like totally, totally on purpose. And Miles accuses her of doing it on purpose to get attention. She cries and then he basically says, yes, you were doing it for attention and now you're crying for affection.
00:34:16
Speaker
And Miss Giddens does go to comfort her because she's crying. Miles is starting to show just like way too much misogyny for such a tiny young boy. Flora blames it on the rain and how she feels when she doesn't get to go out to the garden.
00:34:29
Speaker
They decide to pretend that it's Flora's birthday to cheer her up and they decide to have a party, a costume party. So the kids go and they get dressed up and they return and they're kind of dressed almost as like old school royalty.
00:34:41
Speaker
During this party, Miles recites a poem for everyone. It is utterly creepy. And like, I also just want to take a moment and acknowledge how amazing these two child actors are playing Miles and Flora.
00:34:52
Speaker
They are like so articulate. They are so mature in a way that is like really, really eerie. They are doing amazing jobs in their roles. Like I'm going to have to go look up what else they're in because I cannot believe how well they play these parts.
00:35:05
Speaker
But anyway, later, Miss Giddens and Miss Gross are talking about the kids and also talking about the people who used to work at Bly. Miss Gross says that Quint was always really domineering, but that Miles would just like follow him around and they were always together.
00:35:19
Speaker
Miss Jessel, the previous governess who had passed away, was really close with Flora and they used to dance together like all the time they would dance together. Miss Gross hints at an ill-advised and maybe abusive relationship between Miss Jessel and Quint, expressing disapproval because Quint kind of seems like a lowlife and she says that Miss Jessel was an educated woman.
00:35:40
Speaker
But it seems like there's more to the story that she's not really letting on yet. The next day, they're out at the pond and Flora tells Miss Giddens of a time where Miles said that he saw a woman's hand under the water in the pond.
00:35:52
Speaker
when he was out on the boat. As Flora hums the song from the music box, Miss Giddens sees the figure of a woman out on the pond. That night, Miss Giddens tells Miss Gross that there are two of these quote-unquote abominations,
00:36:05
Speaker
which I guess is her way of avoiding saying that there's two ghosts in the house. She starts to suspect that it's the previous governess, Miss Jessel, that she's seeing, and she suspects that the kids are in on it.
00:36:16
Speaker
She says, quote, the kids are playing or are being made to play some monstrous game. I can't pretend to understand what its purpose is. I only know that it is happening. Something secretive and whispery and indecent.
00:36:30
Speaker
Miss Gross says that she believes her, and Miss Giddens asks her if Quint and Miss Jessel were in love. Miss Gross says that she wouldn't call it love because Quint was abusive, and no matter what he did to Miss Jessel, Miss Jessel could never look at anyone else.
00:36:43
Speaker
Miss Gross had seen them together all over the house, and there were suspicions that because the kids followed them around so often that they probably had seen them as well. And Miss Gross says that they were always whispering.
00:36:56
Speaker
Miss Giddens finally expresses real suspicion of the children and Miss Gross was kind of appalled. Miss Gross says that during their time at Bly Manor that she felt like Quint and Miss Jessel were using the children and didn't really care about them.
00:37:10
Speaker
When Quint was found dead, Miss Jessel sort of went crazy, apparently. She stopped eating, she stopped sleeping, and she eventually died as well. And reluctantly, Miss Gross reveals that Miss Jessel took her own life.
00:37:22
Speaker
Miss Giddens wants to go to the vicar, and Miss Gross says that it's not worth it, that it might result in a scandal. She doesn't want people knowing the family's business. She doesn't want to air out dirty laundry, even though it's not her business, it's not her family. She's very protective of Bly and the family that resides in it.
00:37:38
Speaker
For people as wealthy as the kid's uncle seems to be, appearances are everything. Miss Giddens is convinced that it might be the only way they could find help, though, so she's fairly insistent. Miss Giddens has an ominous dream about Flora and Miles whispering about secrets and spending time with Quint and Miss Jessel.
00:37:56
Speaker
And she wakes up and decides to go get the kid's uncle. She says, quote, They haven't been good. They have been merely easy to live with because they are not living with us. They have no part in their real life.
00:38:07
Speaker
This is when Ms. Gross reveals that Ms. Jessel actually did kill herself. So this is where we find out that last kind of puzzle piece of information. Miss Giddens cancels the trip to visit their uncle, telling Miss Gross that she was visited by Miss Jessel. But we don't actually see this, we just kind of continue to see her sense something.
00:38:24
Speaker
She tells Miss Gross that they have to watch these kids constantly. They have to be diligent and never let the kids out of their sight. She tells Miss Gross that her suspicion is that Quint and Miss Jessel, quote, can only reach each other by entering the souls of the children and possessing them.
00:38:39
Speaker
So she thinks that Quint is possessing Miles and Miss Jessel is possessing Flora so that they can be together in death the way they were in life. She thinks that if she can get the children to admit what is happening, that it will get the ghosts out somehow.
00:38:52
Speaker
And Miss Gross is kind of finally seeming on board, despite Miss Giddens sounding super duper crazy at this point. She sends word to their uncle that he has to come home immediately, but she says she's going to proceed with this plan with or without him, which is kind of what he said, right? He told her to do whatever she needed to do and not really to consult him about it.
00:39:11
Speaker
That night, she walks through the house. She hears whispering. She hears a voice saying, kiss me, kiss me. And she hears giggling. She seems to be like hearing echoes from the past. We're not hearing this in the kids' voices. We're hearing this in theory in Quint and Miss Jessel's voice.
00:39:27
Speaker
She's disoriented and afraid and she's pacing around like unable to find the source of these voices. She goes to Flora's room and finds her staring out an open window down to the garden where Miles is walking around.
00:39:39
Speaker
She goes down and I just have to say there is nothing like watching a woman in like a billowy white nightgown. running through the house, or rushing down the stairs, bonus points if she has a candelabra. It's just like such iconic and classic gothic imagery and it just like tickles me every single time I see it in anything.
00:40:00
Speaker
Anyway, Miles says that he wanted her to think he was quote unquote bad for a change. He says that good children get boring and that he hopes that he has not been boring her. He says that they had been laughing and whispering about their plan and like surely she must have heard them laughing and whispering.
00:40:15
Speaker
Miss Giddens then finds a pigeon under his bed who appears to have had its neck snapped. He says that he plans to bury the pigeon tomorrow and he asks her to kiss him goodnight and then he kisses her like fully on the mouth. It is very unsettling.
00:40:29
Speaker
When Miles finds out that Miss Giddens is writing to their uncle, he basically says that he knew she would eventually do that. He's playing the song from the music box on the piano, which prompts Miss Giddens to, like, rush off to go find Flora.
00:40:41
Speaker
Flora has taken the boat out on the pond by herself, which she's not allowed to do. They find her dancing in the gazebo by the water alone. And Miss Giddens demands to know where Miss Jessel is, pointing to her ghost over the water, demanding that, like, Flora must be able to see her too.
00:40:57
Speaker
While she is yelling about this, Miss Gross comes over and Flora is crying and screaming that she hates Miss Giddens. She seems very scared. And Miss Giddens sounds totally crazy. And Miss Gross, of course, sides with Flora despite her previous solidarity in the situation because she doesn't see anything.
00:41:15
Speaker
Now Miss Giddens really looks even crazier because they're saying they haven't seen anything. But again, it's a situation where like maybe she's crazy and maybe she's right and Flora just doesn't want to give their secret away to Miss Gross or anyone else.
00:41:28
Speaker
At this point in the movie, there's really, really no way to know. So Flora is back inside the house. She is like shrieking, screaming. Miss Giddens looks dejected and Miss Gross comes out saying that Flora has been yelling obscenities, which is very, very unlike her.
00:41:43
Speaker
Again, these are children that like at first seemed incredibly well behaved. Miss Giddens says that this must be proof of what she's been suspecting. She accuses Miss Gross of only pretending to believe Flora when she said she didn't see anything.
00:41:56
Speaker
But Miss Gross says that she didn't have to pretend. Ms. Giddens is incredulous. She berates Ms. Gross, saying that she only wants to help the children. She's afraid and has been afraid of Quint and Ms. Jessel and their influence on these children.
00:42:12
Speaker
Miss Gross is furious and accuses Miss Giddens of causing all of this trouble since it basically started when she arrived to Bly Manor. Miss Giddens insists that Miles wants to tell her what's happening and that Quint is not allowing him to and that they just have to give him the opportunity.
00:42:27
Speaker
So she insists that she be left alone with Miles. Miss Gross asks what she should tell the kid's uncle when she gets to him and Miss Giddens tells her to tell the truth. Only Miss Gross doesn't look totally confident about what the truth actually is at this moment.
00:42:43
Speaker
Ms. Giddens asks Ms. Gross not to judge her until she comes home and sees Miles again. Miss Gross replies, I can't judge you. a body can only judge itself. And then she rushes out of the house. She and Flora leave Bly Manor and head for the city, and Miles and Miss Giddens are alone.
00:42:58
Speaker
When they finally sit down to talk, Miles accuses Miss Giddens of being afraid, and he tells her she doesn't have to be afraid because there is a man in the house. Him, of course. And he says, don't worry, I'll protect you.
00:43:10
Speaker
He's again positioning himself as the comforting presence for this adult woman who is, like, there to take care of him. It's very, very strange. Miss Gidden says that the house didn't agree with Flora and that that's why she left.
00:43:22
Speaker
Miles tells her that he knows what Flora is feeling before Flora even knows what she's feeling. She tells Miles that she is afraid and she is afraid for him. Miles finally confesses in this conversation that he sometimes heard things at school and would sometimes say things that would scare the other kids.
00:43:39
Speaker
He then says he made the things up. He's scared and he's denying everything that she throws at him. He tells her that she is trying to make him admit something because she is afraid that she's gone mad and she needs him to admit this so that she has proof that she hasn't gone mad.
00:43:54
Speaker
And we keep seeing Miss Giddens see things, but we never really get confirmation that anyone else has seen them. So is this gaslighting or is this just the truth? It's not totally clear at this point, but while he is saying this, Miss Giddens again sees Quint's face in the window.
00:44:09
Speaker
Miles in this moment starts cursing her, mocking her, and he's laughing, and Quinn Spector is like laughing behind him. And again, like such big misogyny for such a tiny, tiny little boy.
00:44:20
Speaker
He flees and she chases him until he falls in the grass. He asks her to forgive him. She says she knows that those were not his words. She tells him to say the name of the person in control of him.
00:44:33
Speaker
She tells him to say his name and Miles is horrified. He's refusing to do it. and she sees the ghost of Quint again, insisting that Miles say his name. Miles circles around, screaming, screaming into the wind, like, where is he? Tell me where he is, asking where she sees him, and then Miles faints.
00:44:52
Speaker
The specter of Quint then disappears, and she tells Miles that he is safe and free now. But she's wrong. Miles is dead in her arms, and just like that, the movie is over.
00:45:03
Speaker
We have no idea what happens from here, but we do know that the children's uncle is likely to come back, and when he does, he's going to find his nephew dead and the governess the only person there.
00:45:14
Speaker
And will he believe her story? Will Ms. Gross support her? we don't really get to know. And was Miles pretending not to see Quint, or did he really not know what was going on?
00:45:25
Speaker
Because behavioral issues like the type of behavior he was displaying would be kind of understandable in a child who knows that the only family he has left in the world can't really be bothered with him and isn't taking any interest in taking care of him.
00:45:39
Speaker
Miss Gross is in control of the house and Miss Giddens is in control of the children. In theory, Miss Giddens should not be so powerless, but it's really clear that she is as she sounds more and more unhinged as the movie goes on.
00:45:52
Speaker
This film and others like it explore the complexity of situations where a woman has been given some amount of power over a situation, but is still not necessarily seen as credible even in whatever role she's been given.
00:46:04
Speaker
Ms. Giddens is told to make all of the necessary decisions herself, and yet she is not really trusted to do that. It's wild that people would simultaneously trust women enough to put them in charge of something as significant as raising children, but not trust them enough to even view them as like moderately credible sources of their own experiences.
00:46:24
Speaker
This movie never really makes it totally clear if what she's seeing is real or not. It's just a woman left alone, left in charge, and ending in disaster. Supernatural horror movies that center around female characters love to play this game, never really making it clear if the woman is really having a supernatural experience or just kind of having a mental breakdown.
00:46:44
Speaker
And they often either don't clarify this or they wait until like the very end of the movie to clear it up, like in Rosemary's Baby. Well, 1963's The Haunting is an adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.
00:46:57
Speaker
And it has the same sort of structure where a woman like decompensates, goes crazy, whatever you want to call it And we don't really know if she's having real experiences or not. In The Haunting, we also sort of don't know if she might be causing those experiences, like either knowingly or unknowingly.
00:47:13
Speaker
The Haunting opens with narration about the house itself, informing us that this house was evil from the beginning and that it was born bad. And it's time for a little Hill House history to set the scene.
00:47:24
Speaker
The house was originally built by Hugh Crane for his wife, who unfortunately died basically moments before she got to enter the house. Hugh Crane eventually remarried, and his wife that did get to live in Hill House with him fell down the stairs and died.
00:47:37
Speaker
Hugh Crane's daughter remained in the house into old age, and she hired a local young woman to be her companion so that she wouldn't be alone in the house. As the story goes, she had been calling for help from this companion who had been sneaking around with her boyfriend, essentially, and instead of Helping her, she stayed with her boyfriend and inevitably she died.
00:47:58
Speaker
The young woman who had been the companion inherited Hill House, but the townspeople were suspicious of her. They thought it might have been her fault that the old woman had died or that she may have killed her herself. The town's suspicion on her, or maybe the house itself, eventually drove her to suicide and she took her own life within the bounds of Hill House.
00:48:17
Speaker
With all this history in mind, we jump ahead to Dr. Markaway, who is trying to rent Hill House for his experiment. He is researching psychic and supernatural phenomenon. He has hand-selected a couple of people to come to the house with him who have previous supernatural or psychic experiences.
00:48:32
Speaker
While he's discussing this with the people that he would be renting the house from, they're a little suspicious of him. They ask him, are any of these people women? And he says that there are. They ask him if he's married and he says that he is married, but that his wife will not be coming to Hill House and will not be participating in the experiment.
00:48:49
Speaker
This makes them more suspicious of him. So basically they say, you can have the house, but we're going to send Luke, who is the soon to be inheritor of Hill House, to come with you and keep an eye on things.
00:49:00
Speaker
Our main character, Eleanor, nicknamed Nell, lives with her sister and her sister's husband and child who don't seem to treat her very well. Nell is begging her sister to let her take the car that she helped pay for.
00:49:12
Speaker
she's never had a vacation before. So this invitation to Hill House is really exciting and she really wants to go, but she can't go without the car. Her sister says that there's a very good reason that mother did not feel comfortable with her going anywhere and that that reason still applies.
00:49:26
Speaker
So we don't know what that reason is, but everybody is basically not viewing Eleanor as like credible or able to take care of herself or be okay in the world. We also learned that Eleanor had been responsible for taking care of their mother for about 11 years until she died.
00:49:41
Speaker
And that this was kind of a traumatic experience for her. But Nell's sister is laying it on thick with the guilt. She is, for lack of a better word, like a total bitch to Eleanor. She belittles her. She infantilizes her. And she seems to take advantage of this dynamic they have where they're kind of both paying for things, but then those things are presumed to be the sister's.
00:50:02
Speaker
Nell's sister and brother-in-law refer to her as nervous, which is kind of like mid-century slang for mentally ill, right? They didn't really want to talk about it. And nervous was kind of the polite way of saying that someone was mentally unwell.
00:50:14
Speaker
And at this point in the conversation, Nell kind of ominously says to her sister, get out of here or I'll show you what my nerves can do. So there's, again, some hint that something is off about Nell, that there's like something going on with her, but they're never really making it totally clear.
00:50:29
Speaker
So what does Nell do? Nell steals the car, if you could call it stealing. She hopes that this will be a new start for her. It's the first time she's really been out of the house, away from her family. And as far as we can tell, she has no intention on going back to her sister's house. Like she's getting out of there and she's going for good.
00:50:45
Speaker
Her internal dialogue as she drives is focused on freedom and like the freedom she hasn't had and the freedom that she wants. She sounds really wistful and she sounds like she has this sense that she's been wasting her life so far.
00:50:57
Speaker
She talks about how much she looks forward to going somewhere where she is quote unquote expected. This is something that keeps coming up over and over again in the movie. And when I hear her say expected, what I think I really hear is she's excited to go somewhere where she's wanted.
00:51:12
Speaker
She's supposed to be at this house. She was invited to this house. And it might be the first time in her life that she's been somewhere where she felt wanted, where she felt like she was specifically supposed to be there.
00:51:23
Speaker
And several times throughout the movie, she says, this is the only thing that's ever happened to me. When she gets to the house, she's anxious and jumpy and like startled of her own reflection in a mirror, like literally jumping at her own shadow.
00:51:37
Speaker
Miss Dudley, who works at the house, informs her that most people from town won't go near the house. They don't come closer to the house than town and that she and her husband, the caretaker, get the hell out of there way before it gets dark. Like they're not risking being there once it's dark.
00:51:50
Speaker
Soon after this, we meet Theodora, who is this kind of like old school queer character. There's some acknowledgement that she may have been previously living with a female partner. It's more explicit in the book, but there's definitely hints of it throughout the movie too.
00:52:05
Speaker
But Theo is like stylish and bold. We get early on hints of her being psychic, which does get confirmed later. But she knows things about Nell without being told. So she knows her nickname is Nell and that she doesn't just go by Eleanor.
00:52:19
Speaker
She knows that Eleanor has like gone shopping and has a bunch of new clothes for Hill House because she was so excited about this whole trip. And they start to bond. They start to spend time together. And while they are wandering the house, they get lost. And Nell is totally, totally terrified already.
00:52:34
Speaker
Just as Nell is about to like totally have a breakdown, dr Markaway arrives. And so he is there to kind of save the day for a moment. He tells them about the house and its eccentricities. He tells them about the doors that won't stay open. He tells them about how none of the corners of the house are 90 degree angles.
00:52:50
Speaker
So the house is set up in a way that is like meant to be disorienting. meant to be confusing, and this is probably part of why everyone's getting lost so easily. This is where we also meet Luke, who comes in charming, cute, he's made drinks, he's a little flirty with Theo, but the best thing about Theo is that she does not have any interest in anything a man says to her ever at any point in the movie.
00:53:11
Speaker
She's sarcastic and standoffish with Dr. Markaway, and despite Luke making these drinks and kind of introducing himself and being flirty and charming, Eleanor is literally the only person Theo has any interest in in this entire group.
00:53:25
Speaker
They sit down to dinner, and Dr. Markaway starts to explain why they're there. This is where we get confirmation that Theo is psychic. He says that on that test where they hold the cards up and you can't see them and you have to guess what the card is, it's like a test for psychic abilities,
00:53:39
Speaker
Theo is scoring 19 out of 20 on these tests, so she is like very psychic and very capable as a psychic. And Nell denies any supernatural experiences, but Dr. Markaway reminds her of a time where she experienced poltergeist activity as a young girl.
00:53:55
Speaker
He reminds her of the time that stones rained down on her family home when she was a teenager And she says that this didn't really happen and that the neighbors hated them and the neighbors were throwing stones and it really didn't have anything to do with anything else.
00:54:10
Speaker
Dr. Markaway says that this is in a police report and that is the only police report of supernatural activity that exists. But Nell continues to deny that this is what happened. Now, the thing about poltergeists is that they are very closely associated with adolescents and like more specifically associated with teenage girls.
00:54:29
Speaker
I'm not going to debate like the veracity of the claims of Poltergeist. That's not really worth my time to get into. But the background of Poltergeist does matter in the context of this movie. So I'm just going to break it down a little bit.
00:54:41
Speaker
Poltergeists are something that are sometimes viewed as ghosts that are like playful or like mischievous ghosts that are drawn to teenagers, often teenage girls, pubescent girls because of their emotional intensity and like the turmoil of going through puberty.
00:54:57
Speaker
The alternative view is that poltergeist activity is an actual kind of externalization of that inner turmoil and experience made physical kind of against the will of the person and sometimes without their knowledge.
00:55:10
Speaker
Either way, they are associated with high levels of emotional intensity and they kind of act as like outbursts for the rage and frustration of teenage girlhood. And Nell is in a state of arrested development. She has never really been outside the home.
00:55:26
Speaker
It doesn't seem like she's ever been on a date. She doesn't seem to have any friends. Her family treats her pretty badly in both the ways that they are rude and infantilizing to her. So Nell never really got to grow out of adolescence. So she's still kind of in this like intense and emotionally tumultuous state of existence with a lot of unexpressed rage and a lot of unexpressed frustration, ah especially in the wake of her mother's death.
00:55:50
Speaker
So the idea does lurk in the background of this movie that it wouldn't be totally out of nowhere if she was still having poltergeist-type experiences as an adult, especially in a place like Hill House with its dark history and very weird energy.
00:56:04
Speaker
But anyway, while Dr. Markerway is giving everybody the rundown, he describes the house as diseased, sick, and crazy. a deranged house isn't a bad way of putting it, he says. So he is really laying it on thick that, like, this house is messed up.
00:56:18
Speaker
ah After dinner, Eleanor thinks to herself, these people are my friends. I'm one of them. I belong. She's developing an attachment to the people in Hill House a little too quickly and investing really heavily into these relationships, despite the fact that she's just met these people, which is kind of like further indication that she doesn't really have a lot of relationships in her life.
00:56:39
Speaker
After dinner, Theo walks her to her room and then she's alone, maybe for the first time. Eleanor wakes up to the sound of banging on the walls and she hears Theo calling her. So she runs to Theo's room and they're like huddled in the bed together in their nightgowns. They're terrified. They just hear this loud banging that won't stop.
00:56:56
Speaker
When the men show up, they say they didn't see anything. They didn't hear anything. Nell and Theo kind of break into like a fit of hysterics and explain to them what just happened. And the men say that they kind of had their own experience. They thought they heard something outside.
00:57:10
Speaker
They had gone to kind of like explore and see if they could see anything. But they say they didn't hear any of the banging that the girls heard. At breakfast the next morning, Dr. Markoay tells Nell that he wants to learn more about her.
00:57:22
Speaker
She starts to give him like a list of very random facts about herself. But then she gets to a point where she says that she sleeps on her left side because she heard it, quote, wears the heart out quicker.
00:57:33
Speaker
He says that's a dark thought, but he doesn't really seem alarmed enough by it, especially for the state of what they're doing. But it is another indication of Eleanor's like very vulnerable psychological state.
00:57:47
Speaker
Nell is depressed. She is passively suicidal at best, if not actively suicidal. She's anxious and she feels clumsy in social interactions, having had so few of them in her adult life.
00:58:00
Speaker
She's in a fragile state and she's in a really vulnerable situation being in this new and disorienting place. As they're talking about everything, she says, as they're talking about everything, she says, I've always been more afraid of being left alone or left out than of things that go bump in the night.
00:58:16
Speaker
It speaks to the loneliness that's really at the core of Nell's character throughout the entire movie. And depending on your read of the story and the dynamic she has with Theodora, she also might be like so deep in the closet that she doesn't know she's in the closet. So there's also kind of that hanging over everything.
00:58:32
Speaker
She asks Theo what she is afraid of, and Theo, with kind of like a gleam in her eye, says that she's afraid of, quote, knowing what I really want. It like hangs in the air for a moment, kind of unacknowledged by the group.
00:58:46
Speaker
Theo does these sort of little nods, and since we know that Theo is psychic, and since Theo is so heavily implied to be queer, it's hard not to wonder if she can maybe see further in into Nell than Nell herself can, and like sees the kindred spirit there.
00:59:00
Speaker
Luke comes in to show them the literal writing on the wall. So written on the walls of the hallway in chalk is help Eleanor come home. Obviously, as the most vulnerable person of this group, Eleanor is totally freaked out and she has the sense that the house is somehow fixated on her specifically.
00:59:18
Speaker
Theo talks about what might have happened, including the option that Eleanor may have done this to get attention. Theo kind of picks on her a bit and she gets mad and Markaway then kind of points out that By making her angry, Theo kind of stopped Nell from being so scared.
00:59:33
Speaker
It makes sense that this was not a real accusation anyway, because we know that Theo is psychic with some serious accuracy, right? So if Nell had been doing this deliberately, Theo probably could have known pretty immediately.
00:59:46
Speaker
Theo tries to usher Nell away to her room to calm down, and Nell asks the doctor, you won't leave me behind, will you? Her insecurities are ever-present. Every time someone says anything to her, she questions it internally.
00:59:59
Speaker
She second-guesses the relationship that she's building with the rest of the people in this group, and she expresses concern consistently about what other people think of her and judgments they might have. She vacillates between this kind of unfounded, intense attachment to the other people in Hill House and,
01:00:16
Speaker
total like sheer panic over what they might think of her and what judgments they might be making behind her back. Dr. Markaway leads the group to the library and Nell is totally triggered. And I mean triggered like in the real sense of the word.
01:00:29
Speaker
She gets a whiff of that room and she jumps back like immediately is just repelled by the smell of this room. She says she can't go in there and it's really clear that she's being sucked back into her memories of the trauma of her mom's illness and the trauma of her mom's death.
01:00:44
Speaker
And this trauma is sprinkled through like the entire movie. is She really often, seemingly kind of out of nowhere to us, will start saying something and she'll start saying, my mother. And then she kind of trails off. So she wants to talk about it, but she feels frustrated by how often she's thinking about it and she's being kind of pulled back and forth between talking about it and not talking about it.
01:01:07
Speaker
Later that day, Eleanor almost collapses over the side of the balcony of the house, and she could have died. Dr. Markaway expresses concern, saying he didn't know she was so nervous. And there's that word again, nervous, right? Mentally ill. I didn't know you were so mentally ill.
01:01:21
Speaker
um She begs him not to send her home, and he is concerned about his experiment. He says that if even one of her reports turns out to have been a hallucination, then the entire experiment and any other results they get would be totally ruined.
01:01:34
Speaker
he would be lost of any credibility. So again, we see this situation where Eleanor is given a position where in theory she should be trusted to be reporting on supernatural experiences.
01:01:46
Speaker
And yet when she does speak up about it, like she's not believed. And this is exacerbated by the fact that he is studying a haunted house and he is asking her to report supernatural experiences.
01:01:58
Speaker
What an incredible fucking catch-22 this is She is there to witness, experience, and report on supernatural phenomenon. And when she does that, she's kind of treated like she might just be crazy.
01:02:10
Speaker
Now, Eleanor is probably mentally ill. Like, let's get that kind of comment out of the way. I'm not going to get into the details and try to actually diagnose her, but it's clear that she's unwell and it's clear that she's really, really struggling and doesn't really know what she wants to do with her life.
01:02:24
Speaker
But here she is being asked to report supernatural phenomena and then is disregarded for having experienced supernatural phenomena. This is the kind of contradictory rule set that women are navigating all the time.
01:02:38
Speaker
There are expectations of women that are in direct opposition of each other, and yet we are supposed to somehow fully inhabit each one at all times. It honestly reminds me of the monologue at the end of the Barbie movie, so I'm going to read that here.
01:02:51
Speaker
You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crass.
01:03:03
Speaker
You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean. You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas. You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your damn kids all the time. You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people.
01:03:16
Speaker
You're supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you're supposed to be part of the sisterhood. And in Shirley Jackson's world, always report your supernatural experience to the scientist, but if you report your supernatural experience to the scientist, the scientist will always think you're crazy.
01:03:36
Speaker
Dr. Markoway suggests that Theo should move into Nell's room just so that they'll be safe. He says he doesn't really feel that comfortable with either of them being alone. And honestly, you can see the smirk on Theo's face when she's like, you're the doctor.
01:03:49
Speaker
And she moves into the room. But Nell is upset and says, this is my room, my very own room. And it's really in that moment that we remember that Nell has never had her own space.
01:04:00
Speaker
She's always been with her family. She's living in her sister's living room right now. She doesn't even have a bedroom there. So this means a lot to her. And she had the drop from being her mother's caretaker to being in her sister's living room being constantly treated like a child.
01:04:15
Speaker
Theo tells Nell that they'll have fun together like sisters, she says coyly to Dr. Markaway. But they're drinking and they're painting their nails and they're talking and kind of bonding. Nell starts to make fun of herself for talking about her mom so much and talks about how her mother like never let her have any moment of peace. She says that she used to bang on the wall any time Nell was like trying to do any sort of activity even if she didn't need anything she would just bang on the wall she asks Theo about her apartment and Theo talks about it a little and reveals that she has never been married but there's an implication that she had been living with someone Nell lies to Theo and says that she has her own apartment and speaks of her efforts to make it nice for herself Theo playfully says that they have to get Nell back to her apartment as quickly as possible
01:05:00
Speaker
Nell kind of misses the joke. It goes over her head and she's immediately defensive. She asks Theo, why do you all pick on me? Am I the public dump or something for everyone's fear? And then she says she doesn't ever want to leave Hill House. She wants to stay here.
01:05:15
Speaker
Dr. Markaway calls everybody over later and he's found a cold spot in the house that is significant enough that he thinks he can document it. The girls, as he refers to them, are in their nightgowns while the men are fully dressed, which is a dynamic that like continues to come up in this movie. It's very gross and it gives me the ick.
01:05:33
Speaker
ah But Dr. Markaway sends them back to bed and stays there talking to Luke. There's this infantilization happening with the women that are like consistently shown as like coming out of their rooms after bedtime like children and like being sent back to their beds like children. It's just very...
01:05:49
Speaker
It's very belittling and like it's very, there's there's a big power dynamic there that's not being talked about. Theo is a really empathetic person overall, maybe because she's psychic, maybe it's just something about her personality, but she's able to be affectionate towards Nell even when Nell is being defensive.
01:06:05
Speaker
And I don't know if it's because she can read her mind and like maybe see that when Nell is lashing out, it's really coming from this place of like sadness and loneliness and fear. So maybe she just picks up on that. But she also might just be a nice person.
01:06:18
Speaker
Who knows? But earlier that night, Theo said to Nell about her mom, I don't think you killed your mother. And knowing that Theo is psychic and they were talking about her mom, obviously Theo is like picking up on the things that Nell isn't saying as much as listening to things that she is saying.
01:06:34
Speaker
So she's picking up on this guilt that Nell has about her mother's death and that she might not have done enough to help her. But Nell doesn't want to talk about it and is like totally dismissive of this line of conversation. But we do see repeatedly that Theo will say things with the hope of providing Nell some amount of comfort for like an unspoken fear or concern that she has.
01:06:54
Speaker
She wants Nell to feel safe and happy and comfortable. And I think she's the first person who's ever really wanted that for her. Anyway, Nell wakes up in the middle of the night. She hears like ghostly laughing and voices and she reaches out for Theo and we see her react to somebody holding her hand, but we don't see her hand. We don't see Theo.
01:07:12
Speaker
We really are only seeing shots of Nell's face. And eventually this other hand starts to grab her too tightly and she believes it's Theo. And then she screams and like fully wakes up and she realizes that she is not in the bed next to Theo's bed holding Theo's hand. She is like on the daybed And she has no idea who was holding her hand or what was holding her hand. And she's freaked out, understandably.
01:07:35
Speaker
The next day, she and Dr. Markaway are talking. He talks about how people are scared of things that they don't understand, but that if nothing has really harmed her, maybe there's not anything to be really this scared of. She expresses concern that she's just crazy and imagining all of it.
01:07:50
Speaker
He tells her that she can't be imagining all of it because there are three other people in the house who are seeing things, although he isn't sure that that confirms some of her specific experiences. And he isn't totally convinced that she's not crazy either.
01:08:04
Speaker
So he's trying to, like, reassure her by basically saying, no, the house is definitely haunted. But he's still hinting at the possibility that some of her experiences are just her imagination or even are, like, fully hallucinations that she's having.
01:08:17
Speaker
This is where Nell spontaneously confesses that on the night that her mom died, she had banged on the wall trying to get Nell's attention and that Nell did not go to her. You can see and hear the guilt that she carries for this, and she has the sense that she did kill her mother.
01:08:32
Speaker
She tells him what happened and is like, is this how a normal person acts? And thank goodness for this, but he's very empathetic to her situation here. And he says yes. He tells her, quote, you're human.
01:08:45
Speaker
Stop trying to either be a saint or a martyr. You probably like thinking it was your fault. And he's right. He tells her that she's a good person. and she looks at him so longingly and like starts to have these romantic thoughts about him that are probably not prompted by much other than the fact that that might have been the nicest thing anybody has ever said to her in her entire life.
01:09:07
Speaker
After this moment, we start to see Theo pick on Nell a little bit for the first time and teases her for what she said about her apartment. You know, the apartment that she made up. Don't lie to proven psychics, you know?
01:09:19
Speaker
But is that jealousy, Theo? Like, was this from Nell paying too much attention to a man, to Dr. Markaway? um She could read her mind so she could see these kind of romantic thoughts that were coming up and reads a little bit like jealousy to me.
01:09:33
Speaker
Theo follows Nell after she flees from the room and they have this like intense confrontation moment. She says, I didn't know you were serious about Dr. Markaway. And then she tells Nell that she's making a fool of herself and she calls Nell foolish and innocent.
01:09:47
Speaker
Nell says, I'd rather be innocent than be like you. Theo asks her why should she believe that Nell is sane and that everyone else isn't? And Nell, in a truly scathing moment, says, the world is full of unnatural things, nature's mistakes, they're called.
01:10:03
Speaker
You, for instance. This conversation is interrupted by the arrival of Dr. Markaway's wife, who Nell did not know about. She arrives and she's concerned about the reporters who have found out about what this experiment is, and she's worried about her husband's reputation.
01:10:20
Speaker
Nell is really disappointed to find out that Dr. Markaway is married, and Theo kind of tries to tell her, like, I tried to warn you and you didn't listen to me. They're going to give her the nursery to sleep in, which they've kind of established as, like, the most haunted place in the house, and everyone kind of pauses and, like, doesn't really want her to go in there, but Dr. Markaway realizes that he doesn't have a key anyway, and he's relieved.
01:10:43
Speaker
But then everyone is shocked when they get there and the door has been, like, aggressively blown open. Later on, we go back to Eleanor and she's in her room and her mental state is definitely deteriorating.
01:10:55
Speaker
She's thinking about how even if Dr. Markaway is married, she belongs at Hill House and nobody can make her leave if the house wants her to stay. Nell and Theo are summoned to go sleep in the parlor where they think they might be safer.
01:11:07
Speaker
They awake in the night to hear the banging again, this time on the downstairs level where the parlor is, so it's closer to them. Nell thinks that whatever it is that is making all of this noise in the house, it's looking for her and it's not going to stop until it finds her.
01:11:21
Speaker
Nell is sort of like overtaken by this whole situation or by the house or by her own mind and thinks, I'll come. Whatever it wants of me, it can have. So we can see this process of her continuing to deepen the level of surrender she has to this house and this situation.
01:11:36
Speaker
Nell runs around the house and the camera moves in these chaotic ways that make us feel as disoriented as Nell probably does. The chandelier is shaking and the mirrors are crashing down and she thinks the house is coming down around me. The house is destroying itself.
01:11:51
Speaker
She thinks that the ghost must be in the nursery and so she goes in there and Dr. Markaway comes after her followed by the rest of the group. Mrs. Markaway is gone. Nell is dazed and she wanders away. She thinks to herself, I'm coming apart a little at a time.
01:12:05
Speaker
Now I know where I'm going. I'm disappearing inch by inch into this house. She goes to the statue of Hugh Crane saying that they have killed her. She begins to dance, which is an echo of an earlier scene where she had been dancing around the statues.
01:12:20
Speaker
In the other room, Theo is arguing with Dr. Markaway, saying that she is going to take Nell and get the hell out of there. She's had enough, but then they realize that Nell is actually gone and they start to go looking for her.
01:12:31
Speaker
Nell is still with the statues, thinking to herself, I'd like to stay here always. I will not be frightened or alone anymore. She runs from them as they look for her and ends up in front of the staircase where the companion had hung herself all those years ago.
01:12:45
Speaker
She thinks to herself, I'm home, I'm home, I'm home. And she ascends the spiral staircase, which is shaky and unstable and threatening to collapse at any moment.
01:12:56
Speaker
As she approaches the top, the group rushes in and Dr. Markaway like implores her to come down. And you can see that he's like, knows that if she doesn't come down, he's going to have to go up. Theo begs her to come down, but she keeps going. So Markaway starts up the stairs himself, making them even more unsteady and unstable.
01:13:14
Speaker
Once he's up there, she's about to lean over the edge and he pulls her back. As this happens and as he goes to drag her away, she sees a ghost. She thinks that the ghost is Dr. Margoe's wife. He says that regardless of what it is, he needs her to leave to keep herself safe.
01:13:30
Speaker
She begs to stay. She like offers to join the staff of the house. She's like, I don't even care what capacity I stay in. I just need to stay. She tells them that she has totally fabricated the existence of her own apartment and that she has no home and nowhere to go.
01:13:45
Speaker
And since there's no place they can send her, she'll just have to stay at Hill House. She tells them that the house wants her. She's jealous that Miss Markaway gets to stay because she feels like she's the one who's supposed to get to stay.
01:13:57
Speaker
They're going to send her away with Luke with her so that she has an escort to make sure she gets away safely. But as Luke is going to get a key from Dr. Mark away, she drives off. She loses control of the car and she thinks, I knew it. Hill House doesn't want me to go.
01:14:10
Speaker
She wonders why they don't stop her, seeing that her car is so out of control. At last, she thinks to herself, it's really happening to you, Eleanor. Something at last is really, really, really happening to me.
01:14:22
Speaker
She sees a figure run out in front of her car and she crashes. Mrs. Markaway shows up later saying that it was her that Eleanor had seen. Theo accuses her of killing Eleanor, but Mrs. Markaway says that the car was out of control far before Eleanor and she saw each other.
01:14:38
Speaker
Dr. Markaway says, call it what you like, but Hill House is haunted. It didn't want her to leave and her poor bedeviled mind wasn't strong enough to fight it Theo expresses her hope that Eleanor might be happier at the house now that she's staying there, but will she?
01:14:53
Speaker
The movie closes with Eleanor's ghostly voice saying, quote, Hill House has stood for 90 years and might stand for 90 more. Within, walls continue upright, bricks meet, floors are firm, and doors are sensibly shut.
01:15:07
Speaker
Silence lies steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and we who walk here walk alone. The last line of The Haunting, adjusted a little bit from the original book, but kind of still holding the same message, lands harder when we remember Eleanor talking throughout this entire movie about how her biggest fear is being left out and being left alone.
01:15:29
Speaker
The house has tricked her. It's convinced her that she belongs there and has left her there to walk alone. So we have some options here about what happened. We have confirmation that other people in the house are experiencing something and like probably supernatural things. So we can believe that something is really going on here.
01:15:48
Speaker
But we don't really know what. So either the house was doing all of this stuff on its own and because of Eleanor's vulnerable mental and emotional state, it was like simply too much for her and she broke under the pressure.
01:16:00
Speaker
Or Eleanor could have been having like a resurgence of the poltergeist incident from her past with the trauma of her mother's passing and her fears about her own life or lack thereof overwhelming her and like manifesting in all this supernatural activity around the house.
01:16:17
Speaker
It doesn't seem like a coincidence that some of the supernatural incidents that happened included banging on the walls, which was the same thing that her mother did relentlessly when Nell was her caretaker, never giving her like a moment's break or a moment to rest.
01:16:30
Speaker
Personally, I think it's probably a combination of things. The house definitely seems to have some weird stuff going on just inherently. But then I think that the house itself and Eleanor's poltergeist situation kind of like join forces and just drive her totally over the edge.
01:16:46
Speaker
But I'd be curious to hear what you think about movies that leave things ambiguous
Civil Rights Movement and 'Night of the Living Dead'
01:16:49
Speaker
like this. So feel free to let me know your interpretation in the comments. Okay, so in addition to second wave feminism, the 60s also saw the continuation of the civil rights movement.
01:17:00
Speaker
The 50s had seen victories like Brown v. Board of Education, where it was deemed unconstitutional to have segregated public schools, and the Montgomery bus boycotts, where Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks refused to give up their seats to white passengers and moved closer to the integration of public transportation.
01:17:18
Speaker
I obviously cannot break down the civil rights movement in full any better than I could break down second wave feminism in full for this video. It would be too long. And as far as the civil rights movement goes, even if I had time, i would not be the person to listen to about that topic. So like, you know, go go somewhere else, go listen to someone else and go get that information.
01:17:39
Speaker
In 1963, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place, with a couple hundred thousand people gathering for the cause. This is where Martin Luther King delivered his famous I Have a Dream speech.
01:17:50
Speaker
The goals of this march ranged from things like civil rights and voting laws to better housing and employment opportunities for Black Americans. In the wake of all these events, the Civil Rights Act was passed, which banned discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, or nationality,
01:18:06
Speaker
But obviously we know that this did not actually end discrimination in America. In 1965, the Voting Rights Act was also passed. But again, we know that there are a lot of deliberate obstacles in front of people for voting. So I don't really think that this created equal voting rights.
01:18:22
Speaker
And I don't really think that we have equal voting rights today. But ostensibly, equal voting rights. Again, this civil rights movement refresher is like far too brief to do any of it justice, but I just wanted to really set the scene for the world that this next movie emerged into and out of.
01:18:42
Speaker
So Night of the Living Dead in 1968 was essentially the first mainstream horror movie to feature a Black protagonist in a really like resourceful and heroic role. George Romero says that he didn't write the character to be a Black man, but that Dwayne Jones was just the best man for the job, so he hired him.
01:18:59
Speaker
I do believe it because i cannot imagine someone doing a better job in this role than Dwayne Jones, but it does make me wonder if they wrote anything differently into the script based on the casting because there are some moments that feel very poignant and very, I guess, controversial in the in the context of having a Black protagonist in this movie.
01:19:19
Speaker
A lot of the dynamics between the people in the movie are shifted because the main character, Ben, is played by a Black man and It especially changes the ending, which we'll get it more into later. But the movie opens up with Barbara and her brother visiting the cemetery.
01:19:33
Speaker
Barbara is a little freaked out, and this is where we get that kind of famous, they're coming to get you, Barbara, moment. Her brother is kind of teasing her, making her scared. Barbara goes to apologize to a nearby man because she thinks her brother has been being kind of a jerk.
01:19:48
Speaker
And it turns out that he is a zombie and he attacks her. And her brother goes to save her and she flees from the scene, leaving him behind. Barbara runs and finds a farmhouse to hide in. I have to say, Barbara does not have final girl energy.
01:20:01
Speaker
Barbara is not a good female character at all. She is really in like a shrunken violet state of existence. Like she's catatonic. She's non-responsive. She's not really able to help with anything. She's just kind of there.
01:20:13
Speaker
And at first she's there. She's like alone, surrounded by like trophies of hunted animals that are really freaking her out. And the zombies are coming for her. And then Ben shows up.
01:20:24
Speaker
And here we have this dynamic initially off the bat of a black man just like shoving this white girl into the house and locking the door behind them. And like then they're there by themselves.
01:20:35
Speaker
This is already a moment that's fundamentally changed by it this character being played by a black man in the sixty s at a time where Black men were, like, commonly but wrongfully still portrayed as a huge threat to white women's purity and safety and, and like, general existence.
01:20:52
Speaker
Ben finds a body upstairs and Barbara is like like sitting there cuddling her knife. A knife, by the way, which at several points she holds by the blade itself just to like show how useless she actually is in this moment.
01:21:04
Speaker
They have a confrontation that's kind of common in this type of a movie where Ben is like grabbing her and kind of like trying to get information out of her because he really needs to know what she's seen and what she knows so far. He needs as much information as he can possibly gather.
01:21:19
Speaker
And she's just like totally hysterical, unable to engage with him. And in any other movie, this man would be grabbing this woman. But like in the 60s, you can only imagine how an audience would be reacting to like grabbing and like a little bit like shaking and like interrogating this white woman.
01:21:38
Speaker
And the movie has a lot of scenes because Barbara is like so useless and so kind of out of it where Ben is like grabbing her, moving her physically, dragging her around. Like she needs this because she is not able to function anymore.
01:21:52
Speaker
But again, it just like plays totally different than it would if it was a white character, especially in the 60s. Dwayne Jones playing Ben was far more likely to be viewed as like aggressive or threatening by audiences of the time, whereas like a white protagonist probably would have been seen in a more utilitarian way and seen more as like he's just doing what he needs to do because she's useless.
01:22:14
Speaker
Eventually, she's able to start to tell him the story of what happened with her and her brother, but As she does it, she's kind of like getting increasingly worked up. And I think he realizes that her being worked up is not going to be better than her being borderline catatonic. So he's like, maybe just focus on staying calm. He knows that if she loses her cool even more, that everything is just going to get more difficult. So he's trying to prevent that.
01:22:35
Speaker
She begs him to go with her to go look for her brother. And he's basically like, there is no way we're going out there. Your brother is obviously dead. And She's trying to leave. So again, he like grabs her and tries to pull her back and she slaps him across the face and then he punches her like square in the face, which if you're going to go outside into zombies, you kind of deserve a punch if that's going to be the thing that keeps you there. But again, to imagine like a 60s audience to see a black man on a giant screen punching like a distressed white woman must have been...
01:23:09
Speaker
very strange for people, honestly. And I think that a lot of people were probably very upset about it. I mean, you have to remember, like, this is at a time that, like, lynchings were still happening. This is why I did want to give, like, the brief rundown of the civil rights movement and, like, what had been going on in recent years when this movie came out. Because to think about audiences watching this movie at the time that it came out, they had known, like, segregation longer than they had known integration at that point.
01:23:35
Speaker
And lynchings were a very recent memory, if not still happening. The Klan was a very recent memory, if not still active. And this was very different to see in a movie. Like this was this was probably really confronting for people. And I think that there were probably a lot of people really pissed off about it.
01:23:51
Speaker
But ultimately, that's probably part of why the movie is so good. And like, that's also kind of what George Romero does. He like pokes at whatever is going on in society that's like fucked up at the time.
01:24:02
Speaker
And it kind of keeps getting more intense because Barbara is like fully knocked out from this punch. So he is like dragging her to the couch and we see him like go to unbutton her coat, which again, at a time where black men were being like really consistently and falsely accused of like violating the purity of white women. This is kind of alarming, but he doesn't do anything to her. And like right before this big freak out moment, she was like going to unbutton her own coat and saying that she was too hot and she was uncomfortable. So he was actually just trying to make her more comfortable. But like, again, you can only imagine where people's minds were going at the time.
01:24:39
Speaker
Ben is working on fortifying the house. He's looking for weapons. He's listening to the radio for more information. And ah there is like evidence coming in that says that the killers, they're calling them killers. They don't know what zombies are yet.
01:24:52
Speaker
The killers are eating the flesh of the people they kill. After he hears this, two men come up from the cellar and we like meet the rest of our cast of characters. Ben is like furious when these two people come up the stairs. He says, surely you must know what a girl screaming sounds like. Anybody would have known that somebody needed help up here.
01:25:10
Speaker
And they basically brush him off and like give him contradictory excuses as to why they didn't come upstairs. And they're totally baffled by the idea that he thinks that they should like put someone else's safety before their own and like risk their own lives to help somebody.
01:25:23
Speaker
They start to argue about what to do, and the older of these two men, Harry, says that they should go to the cellar because the cellar will be the safest. Dwayne says that they should stay in the main area of the house where there's easier ways to escape if they need to.
01:25:35
Speaker
The younger of this new pair, Tom, is undecided. Harry is, like, pissed off that Tom is not immediately siding with him, but Tom is trying to not die, so he's trying to, like, really think about the situation instead of just go along to get along. So, you know, good on Tom, I guess.
01:25:50
Speaker
Ben calls the cellar a death trap, and Harry says he's going down to the cellar and he's going to board up that cellar door with or without the rest of them. While they're all debating, some zombies approach the window and they realize that there are a lot more zombies near them than they thought there were.
01:26:05
Speaker
And here we finally get some like crucial zombie lore established because again, this is like the first zombie movie of its kind. and We see them shoot a zombie like repeatedly in the chest and the zombie is just like not stopping.
01:26:18
Speaker
And it isn't until they shoot it in the brain that it goes down. So like now we're starting to get this number one rule of zombies of remove the head or destroy the brain, right? Like remove the head, destroy the brain, you kill the zombie Harry is still talking about going to the cellar and he is not only talking about going to the cellar, but he tells Ben that he's going to the cellar and he's taking the girl with him, referring to Barbara, who he had previously left up there and not helped when she was screaming. So that doesn't sound great.
01:26:44
Speaker
Ben has had enough of this man's bullshit. Like he is so done. and he says, you leave her here. You keep your hands off her and everything else that's up here too. Because if I stay up here, I'm fighting for everything up here.
01:26:55
Speaker
The radio and the food is part of what I'm fighting for. Harry reveals that downstairs, there's actually his wife and daughter and Tom's girlfriend. And in honestly, like such an iconic moment, Ben says to him, well, you're her father. if you're stupid enough to go let her die in that trap, that's your business. However, i am not stupid enough to follow you.
01:27:15
Speaker
It's tough for the kid that our old man can be so stupid. Now get the hell down to the cellar. You can be the boss down there. I'm the boss up here. Mic fucking drop. Iconic. Tom not only abandons Harry to stay upstairs with Ben, but he calls his girlfriend up out of the cellar to do that too. He's essentially saying that yes, Ben is probably a better leader than Harry and that they're probably more likely to survive if they stick with him.
01:27:39
Speaker
So Harry goes back down to his family. His wife and daughter are still down there. And as his wife finds out more about what's going on upstairs and like what resources are available upstairs, she's getting more and more pissed at Harry.
01:27:50
Speaker
they're locked down there with no information and there's a radio up there and like access to information from the world so that they could be getting updates on the situation as it like progresses or escalates or gets resolved like they're not going to know what's going on if they're locked down there she insists that he opens the cellar and she wants to go up there and talk to him so they ask judy tom's girlfriend to go down and sit with their daughter while they do Harry continues to be a raging asshole. He says that he does not want anyone else's life in his hands, which is a wild thing to say when like your wife and child are with you there. So like, I don't know what he means by that, but he just continually demonstrates how selfish he is.
01:28:29
Speaker
Ben is having none of this nonsense. And he says, i don't want to hear any more from you. If you stay up here, you're taking orders from me. And again, we have this moment where it may not have been written to be about race, is really heavily impacted by race, right? Like we have this young black man telling this older white man and his family that like, if you're going to be here, I'm in charge. You're going to have to listen to me whether you like it or not. And like, I'm not going to listen to you.
01:28:55
Speaker
They find out from the TV that there are rescue stations that they can try to get to where they would find more food and supplies, and the National Guard is there to kind of protect everybody. There's talk on the TV about whether a recent explosion in space could have produced enough radiation to cause something like this.
01:29:10
Speaker
One of the scientists is kind of like, yeah, that's probably why this is happening. And the military guy with him is kind of like, blah, blah, blah, military obfuscation. We don't really know. Blah, blah, blah. but Like, he just doesn't want to confirm or deny anything.
01:29:23
Speaker
but the scientist seems like he wants to get the word out. They also find out that the only way to keep dead bodies from reanimating right now is to burn them immediately. so They take all this information, they're getting ready to leave and to head to one of these rescue centers.
01:29:37
Speaker
And they have this plan to like Molotov cocktail the zombies on their way out because they've noticed that the zombies are afraid of fire and they need to kind of get them out of the way so that they can make this journey. They need to get more fuel for the truck if they want to make it there. So Tom and Ben and Tom's girlfriend go outside to like go to the fuel pump and get more gas for the car.
01:29:57
Speaker
Ben is a total badass in this moment. He's like standing in the bed of the pickup truck as they're going with a torch just like lighting up zombies left and right. It's so cool. But they accidentally light the truck on fire and Tom and Judy don't get out fast enough and they die in an explosion. So Ben is back to the house with the rest of them and now they don't have a car.
01:30:19
Speaker
Harry, asshole that he is, was really going to leave Ben out there. Ben had to kick the door down, even though he was not like close enough to the zombies for it to be so dangerous for them to let him in He had to kick the door down to like get back into the house because Harry was going to leave him out there.
01:30:37
Speaker
After he's back inside, we watch the zombies like feast on the bodies of Tom and Judy. They're like gnawing on different bones and we see like organs and other body parts and like we're starting to really kind of see what these zombies are capable of a little bit more than we had so far.
01:30:53
Speaker
And then it is revealed that the reason the daughter is hurt and sick is because she got bit by a zombie earlier. So the thing about zombie movies is that any of us watching this today know what that means. We know they got a zombie brewing in that house with them. Like we know that. We know the rules. We know how zombies work.
01:31:13
Speaker
But before The Night of the Living Dead, zombies were a totally different thing. This was not how zombies worked. Zombies before this movie were like drugged or hypnotized or cursed people who would be kind of like slaves to whoever drugged or cursed or hypnotized them.
01:31:30
Speaker
They were not undead. They were just kind of like between being dead and being alive because they couldn't really think or make decisions or like participate in life in a meaningful way. They were just kind of enslaved to the whims of whoever did it to them.
01:31:43
Speaker
And crucially, zombies were not contagious before this moment. So like there might be one or two zombies in a movie, but there's never really fear of like a full zombie outbreak or that this would like spread and become a big problem.
01:31:57
Speaker
So in the house, they're worried about like diseases or potential infection and things like they know it's not good that she was bitten by a zombie, obviously. But they have no concept that they have like a developing zombie in this house with them.
01:32:09
Speaker
And neither did the audiences of the time. Like nobody knew what this was going to mean and nobody knew that this was going to turn into its own thing. So I know we have the zombie lore now and it's like so embedded into pop culture, but really try to imagine watching this movie without that information in the cultural zeitgeist and like not knowing what's going to come.
01:32:29
Speaker
Later on, they see another news report that shows that the cops and military are kind of like roaming around with lots of guns to kill the zombies. And they confirm that the zombies can be killed by like a shot or a heavy blow to the head. Like they're emphasizing that like you have to get to the brain of the zombie to kill it.
01:32:45
Speaker
They say kill the brain and you kill the ghoul. I would think that for Ben, as a black man in America, to see a band of like cops and military like waving guns around and walking around with kind of just like a license to kill whoever they need to kill would be more likely to view that as a threat than protection the way that the rest of the people in the house might have seen it as protection.
01:33:05
Speaker
But bands of men empowered to kill en masse should probably be seen as a threat to all of us. I know that it isn't for a lot of people, but like it really should be. right? Like we shouldn't have people roaming around with guns with like a free pass to shoot whoever they need to shoot.
01:33:21
Speaker
As the night goes on, the power in the farmhouse goes out and the zombies are picking up things that they can use to like smash the windows and try to get in. So the zombies are using tools now. Like we're really in it. This is the moment where you start to be a lot less confident in this group's ability to withstand the situation or like get to safety at any point.
01:33:39
Speaker
Harry uses the opportunity not to help, as he typically wouldn't, and he decides to steal the gun from Ben, like an asshole, because he is an asshole. He pulls the gun on Ben and orders his wife into the cellar.
01:33:51
Speaker
Ben gets the gun back and, like, actually does shoot him, which, honestly, fair, because this man is reckless and putting everyone else in jeopardy. Harry goes down to the cellar after getting shot and he tries to go to his daughter and he dies.
01:34:04
Speaker
Upstairs, the zombies are ripping the boards down from the windows and like grabbing at the people inside. So it's like the zombies are coming. They're they're getting into the house. The danger is escalating really, really quickly.
01:34:15
Speaker
This is when it is revealed that Karen, the daughter of Harry and his wife, who has been bitten by a zombie, is maybe a zombie herself. We see her start to eat the dead body of her father.
01:34:28
Speaker
And then she like zombie walks towards her mom. And like, we don't really know what she's going to do, but we can only guess it's not good. ah Her mom falls down and Karen the zombie grabs a spade and we get a moment that's actually like very reminiscent of the psycho shower scene where we hear like the high pitched score and like the spade is going up and down and we don't see like a whole lot of gore in that exact moment as she's killing her. But we are like watching a child kill her mother, which is pretty alarming for the time.
01:34:57
Speaker
The Hays Code was only replaced like about a month or so after this movie came out. And I feel like in this movie, you you can just like see the death blows to the Hays Code and like the regulations that existed around what could be shown in movies.
01:35:12
Speaker
Barbara sees a zombie version of her brother Johnny and like totally breaks down. And like who wouldn't really, right? We don't understand what's going on. You just see your brother and he's attacking you. Like that's horrifying.
01:35:23
Speaker
And he like drags her outside. So Barbara is gone, presumed dead. Like that's the end of Barbara. After this, the little girl comes upstairs and like the windows are breaking. And just like that, like the house is full of zombies. The zombies are inside the house.
01:35:37
Speaker
The zombies are calling from inside the house. And finally, Ben goes to the cellar. He has no choice left. He is alone. He's the only one left. And the house fills with zombies. But like there he is safe in the cellar.
01:35:51
Speaker
And unfortunately, it appears that Ben may have been wrong to keep everyone upstairs. But he was wrong for the right reasons. And Harry was very much right for the wrong reasons and very much still an asshole.
01:36:06
Speaker
So we're not giving Harry any credit for this. He was a dick. No credit for Harry. Harry comes back to life, like zombified, and Ben shoots him again and then sees his wife dead on the floor with a spade in her chest. And like just as he looks over, her her eyes open and she's zombified and he shoots her in the head too. So he's now taken care of, at very least, the zombies that are in the cellar with him. So he's relatively safe, but the house upstairs is like riddled with zombies.
01:36:31
Speaker
Ben is able to ride out the situation in the cellar. The zombies eventually leave and he goes upstairs and is kind of like scoping out the situation. at this point, the band of like military and police officers are showing up at the house at the farm.
01:36:45
Speaker
And just when you think like maybe Ben will be rescued and maybe Ben will be okay, Ben gets shot in the head by the cops and the movie is just over. Like that's it.
01:36:57
Speaker
This is the moment I think that is the most heavily impacted by Ben's race. To be clear, Dwayne Jones is amazing in this movie. It's not just the layers that he adds in He's just so like commanding and he's take charge and he's the type of person you would really want around in a zombie apocalypse. Like he really sells it But in a world where a white man had been cast as Dwayne Jones instead, which isn't really a world I want to live in, but let's just explore it, does he really still get shot in the head at the end?
01:37:25
Speaker
I don't think so. And if he does, i think we can more quickly assume that it was a mistake on the part of the cops and the military and not something that they did deliberately.
01:37:37
Speaker
But with Dwayne Jones as Ben, it raises a lot of questions. Like I said, this was a time where lynchings by Klan members, many of whom were cops, were a very recent memory.
01:37:48
Speaker
So wasn't a mistake on their part to shoot Ben. i don't think that I buy that. I'm sure there are people who would make that argument, but... I'm not convinced. They do walk into the situation assessing it for danger and acting like they're in a dangerous situation, but I don't necessarily consider that more than a formality.
01:38:07
Speaker
it seems just as likely to me and like maybe more likely that they saw a black man who survived this like kind of catastrophic event that had probably killed a lot of the white people that they know, and they weren't going to let that happen.
01:38:20
Speaker
The most generous read that I can give it, which is not very generous, is that they simply viewed him as a threat, which is still just them being incredibly fucking racist. And I wish that this no longer felt like such a relevant moment in the movie, but like we have not moved out of the times where cops will just shoot black men because they can.
01:38:41
Speaker
That's still very much the world that we're living in today. this movie This movie leaves you on a really uncomfortable note, and I think that's done on purpose. That's kind of what these movies continue to do, because this movie stems like a larger franchise of zombie movies that kind of continue to evolve with the times and explore the like societal fears and concerns that people had at the times they came out.
01:39:04
Speaker
And I think that might warrant its own episode at some point, like just to kind of walk through the George Romero zombie franchise and like talk about the different stages of it. But in this movie, it ends with a cop shooting a black man.
01:39:17
Speaker
That is how the movie ends. And like that has to mean something.
Reflecting on 60s Horror and Societal Issues
01:39:22
Speaker
Like the rest of the Horror Through the Decades episodes, the point of this journey through 60s movies was to explore how the events of the world at the time were showing up in the horror films.
01:39:31
Speaker
So far in this series, it's been pretty fun to go through the different time periods and kind of like pick out the standout movies of the time and like really pick them apart. And I was really looking forward to the 1960s because some of my favorite movies are from the 1960s and I was really looking forward to like getting into the weeds on some movies that I really love.
01:39:50
Speaker
But this one did leave me feeling a little different than the other horror through the decades episodes did. Because when I look at these movies from the 60s, I'm honestly struck by how little has changed despite like how much has actually changed.
01:40:04
Speaker
We're living at a time where police are still shooting black men for no reason other than racism and just because they can. And we're living in a time where threats to women's bodily autonomy are like constantly present.
01:40:17
Speaker
And we do continue to see these themes explored in movies that are coming out now. But it is weird to see these movies from like 60 years ago that kind of feel like they could have been made last week.
01:40:28
Speaker
And none of this is really news to me, but it was something that I felt like I needed to acknowledge just because it felt so different from the other episodes. Yeah. Like I said, a lot of things have changed. Our technology is worlds away from what it was in the 60s, and we're much more connected to people all over the world. We have a lot more access to information, but I don't know how much that would change these movies.
01:40:50
Speaker
I can sort of step back and think, like, what if Rosemary had a smartphone? But ultimately, the information she could learn from one would only help her if she was able to find a doctor that would take her seriously, and I don't know that her chances today are that much better than they were back then.
01:41:05
Speaker
She had no money. She had no resources. She was basically estranged from her family. So would she really have been any less trapped or any less like subject to the whim of her husband and her new strange weird in-laws?
01:41:19
Speaker
I don't really think so. And honestly, there isn't even a point in wondering if cops would randomly kill a black man during a zombie apocalypse because in the world we live in, it doesn't even take that extreme of a situation for a cop to just kill a black man.
01:41:33
Speaker
i don't really have a good conclusion I don't really have a good conclusion for this one. I think that we as a society have some work to do. But I guess it's worth remembering that like there are people...
01:41:45
Speaker
who are out there, who are trying to make the world a better place, and that we do have the choice and the power to try to get involved in that fight in ways that make sense for us. So after you listen to this episode, spend some time looking into ways that you can get involved with your local community. I'm sure there are things happening nearby to you.
01:42:03
Speaker
Or if doing stuff online is more accessible, look look up ways you can get involved through the internet. And in between all of this, try to still find moments of connection and moments of joy because ultimately we all deserve them.
01:42:35
Speaker
Thanks for listening to this episode of What Haunts You, the podcast about the stories that haunt our dreams. Don't forget to follow us on Spotify and YouTube and turn on notifications for new episodes. And you can find us over on Instagram at whathauntsyoupod.
01:42:49
Speaker
I'll talk to you soon.