Even at age eleven, I knew The Exorcist was more than a chronicle of the terrible things that happen when you dabble in games of the occult. It was about sacrifice and faith, innocence lost, and the human body as the battleground for good and evil. Regan’s possession demonstrated the latter in a series of progressively more ruinous and humiliating bodily changes. Her voice grows unrecognizable. Her body is subjected to violent and uncontrollable flailing. Her head memorably twists fully around, defying the generally rigid laws of the spinal cord. In the twenty-fifth-anniversary rerelease, a previously cut scene of Regan’s body contorted into an insect-like pose and scampering down a flight of stairs found its way into new nightmares. These physical disfigurements are mirrored by her descent into moral disfigurement, punctuated by memorably profane proclamations like “Your mother sucks cock in hell!”
Though Pet Sematary mercifully spares its audience from a lot of screen time with Zelda, the particular horror of her disease leaves an indelible mark. “She started to look like this monster,” her sister Rachel recalls through tears; Zelda’s entire spine and rib cage are revealed through withering skin as she lurches toward her frightened sister. She is at once pitiful and terrifying, her expression pained as her head turns 360 degrees and she gurgles a cry for her sister’s help. Zelda chokes to death in this scene and returns only as a gruesome and vengeful specter that warns, “I’m coming for you, Rachel, and this time, I’ll get you.” Her spinal disfigurement is healed in death, but the harshness of her prominent bones remains as she screeches, “I’m going to twist your back like mine so you’ll never get out of bed again! Never get out of bed again! Never get out of bed again!” She lets out a sinister cackle at the amusing prospect of such torture being inflicted on a loved one.
The Scary Little Girl is at this point a tired horror cliché thrown haphazardly into films to draw foreshadowing pictures with crayons and allude to voices that adults cannot hear. But Regan and Zelda were frightening not because of eerie childlike qualities but because of monstrous adult ones. Their disfiguring physical transformations saw these once-innocent girls become sexual and ruthless in Regan’s case and pitiless and manipulative in Zelda’s. They were the victims of possession and disease that first incapacitated their bodies and then deformed their innocence, polluting childhood values with outsized variations on adult ones.
There is a third girl who haunts me, too, but not because of any physical scars making me cringe at the prospect of the pain at their origin points. It is instead the speed at which her body transforms both literally and figuratively from an emblem of innocence into a vessel of unadulterated evil. That girl is the title character in Carrie, an ostracized, harmless teen whose traumatic first menstrual period occurs in the film’s memorable opening scene, a harbinger of the outpouring of blood that will soon be unleashed on her the night of the prom. “They’re all gonna laugh at you,” her mother warned, predicting that Carrie would endure that universal adolescent nightmare that is far worse than being drenched in pig’s blood. When they do laugh at her, her heretofore unfocused telekinetic power has a purpose: to slaughter everyone in sight, laughing or not. Though Carrie’s mother is remembered as a religious psychotic, her belief that it was nothing short of satanic influence that gave Carrie the powers is not so far from our culture’s approach to the process of girls growing out of childhood. Little girls are good until they touch sin, at which point they grow ravenous for the stuff.
The great solace of the sleepover was the opportunity for a welcome retreat from negotiating my value in the presence of newly established bodily assets like breasts and new bends in my profile where there had once been straight lines. But the films we watched at them were stark reminders of the impending threat of adolescent change that would render our bodies unrecognizable, despite our protests, and in turn, transform our moral understanding of the world. It is easy to reject spiteful thoughts in a social environment not set about with the romance and ambition that plague the teen years. It is easy to reject the unseemliness of sex when you don’t live in a body that is physically prepared to engage in it. But once the body is prepared to gestate new life, the genre told me, the body is also ready to bring destruction and even death. When a girl’s body retreats so that a woman’s can take its place, it is ready to betray the innocent mind still inside it as it grows more amenable to the latent evil that was waiting to be unlocked the entire time.
The horror genre is awash in male villains whose primarily facial disfigurements are thinly veiled metaphors for the moral disfigurements that prompt them to violently terrorize their victims. But it was these broken-bodied girls who haunted me well into adulthood as fracture points between the innocence of youth and the moral decay of adulthood. The border ran in a jagged, bloody line across the screen as we watched in transfixed terror in the darkened living rooms and basement rec rooms of our youth, the screen cruelly offering light but no salvation.
Charlotte in Exile
A Case for the Liberation of Scarlett Johansson from Lost in Translation
THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE FOR THE 2003 film Lost in Translation remained live and intact at the beginning of 2016, well over a decade after the film was released.1 The central image is a still photo of a disheveled Bill Murray, sitting on a hotel room bed, looking into the camera. He is schlumpy and morose in a bathrobe and slippers, his hairline deeply receded. A much smaller still image of Scarlett Johansson standing outside in the Tokyo rain is offset to his left with her gazing in the direction of Murray. The alignment is such that if you follow her path of vision, it is actually at his shoulder, but the creative intention is clear. Below her image is the film’s tagline, “Everyone wants to be found,” in an uninspired font. At the bottom of the page is the claim, “Over 245 Critics Nationwide Rave ‘ONE OF THE BEST PICTURES OF THE YEAR!’ more than any other movie of 2003” next to an appeal to buy the sound track on CD.