Women refusing to forgive is the most horrifying thing of all
How horror movies have something to teach us about female agency
For most of my early life as a movie fan, horror movies were an absolute no go. With their low budgets, hammy scripts, “final girl” clichés and ridiculous plot arcs, horror films just didn’t feel worth my time. I’m no snob when it comes to entertainment — my current watch list includes The Bear but also Love Island UK1 — but obligatory gore + humorlessness + bad acting just didn’t appeal.
Somewhere in the mid 2000s or so, however, the independent film studio A24 started releasing horror movies that are, for lack of a better word, arty. That’s not a knock on these films. My dad was an art house film fan, and evenings at Berkeley’s legendary UC Theater were a regular outing. I’d seen films by Kurosawa and Bergman before I hit high school. So when I first saw Midsommar, I knew right away that the director Ari Aster was more than familiar with the creepier side of Ingmar Bergman. Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, filmed in black and white, bore visual similarities to silent films like the 1922 classic Nosferatu, a very early horror film that Eggers is currently remaking.
But it wasn’t until I saw Eggers’ 2015 movie The VVitch that I understood how much this new brand of art house horror filmmaking is also giving the finger to the idea of forgiveness, and often giving female characters much more agency than they had in horror films of the past. Of course, in those old school slasher horror films like Friday the 13th or Halloween, there’s no forgiveness either. But the female characters in those films are so often written as not much more than a pair of boobs in a tube top that we don’t really know what they felt before Jason or Freddie stabbed them.
The final girl theory that the survivor of a horror film lives to tell the tale most often just leaves room for multiple sequels in which more women get chopped up. There’s no room for subtle or philosophical lines of inquiry about character’s psychological back stories in slasher films, and those kinds of backstories are often what lead to forgiveness subplots in movies from other genres.
The VVitch’s Black Phillip. If you know, you know.
In The VVitch, set in the Puritan era of American history, the lead character Thomasin, played by Anya Taylor Joy, starts out as a typical teenage girl of her era: blamed for everything by her unhappy mother and dour father, a minister so Puritanical he was expelled from a colony of Puritans. As Tomasin’s siblings and parents start dying in shocking ways, she takes the blame, and when it becomes clear that *spoiler* something witchy and devilish is what’s carrying off her family members, she’s faced with a choice: refuse to forgive her family for treating her so shabbily and joining a coven of witches (led by a goat who morphs into a sexy whispering man), or do her penance and rejoin society only to be cast into the same miserable life as her mother. Well, come on. What do you think you’d do? Fly around naked at night or marry some dude whose idea of a good time is a many hours long sermon about how all people are condemned followed by a nice walk to see who’s being imprisoned in the stocks today?
Thomasin chooses unforgiveness, and gets to fly around naked and be free. In Ari Aster’s Midsommar, Dani, played by Florence Pugh as a young woman deep in grief over the death of her sister and parents, decides to tag along on her emotionally stunted grad student boyfriend’s research trip to Sweden. He’s looking into a commune called The Harga, about which he appears to have done little actual research in advance of his research trip. One of the first Harga rituals they witness is the planned suicide of two members of the commune who are turning 722, the age at which all members of the Harga voluntarily exit the world. One elder jumps at a poor angle, at which point they bring out this to finish the job:
It’s actually quite grimly, blackly hilarious, as are many other moments in Midsommar. By the end of the film, Dani’s boyfriend Christian is coerced into sleeping with a member of the cult commune in order to impregnate her, and when Dani witnesses this she goes into a deeper mental spiral, but the Harga support her through it. When Christian dies in a ritual sacrifice at the end of the film, Dani watches him dying with a smile on her face. She, too, has run out of forgiveness.
A feminist take on these movies would doubtlessly note that both are written and directed by men, which could make us pretty skeptical about their accuracy when it comes to understanding how women think about forgiveness and unforgiveness. But much like the ongoing collaboration between director Yorgos Lanthimos and the actor Emma Stone, both Aster and Eggers work with gifted female leads like Taylor Joy and Pugh, and emphasize the agency of their characters even in the harsh and relentlessly patriarchal worlds they’re desperate to escape.
Thomasin escapes through witchcraft, and Dani escapes through finding a community that actually understands her grief. But both of them escape not because they’re forgiving, but because they’re not.
What is the deal with Joey Essex? The man seems to have been on approximately 500,000 British reality shows and yet he’s not particularly charming, good looking or funny. Is this why my Irish forbears hated the British so much?
This age reminded me of Ezekiel Emannuel, a medical ethicist and former member of Obama’s cabinet who argued that he would stop all medical interventions at age 75. Who knows, maybe there’s something wise about the Harga’s cliff jumps.