Hi friends! I’ve got an interesting month ahead—we’re moving to Worcester, MA on June 1st so I have a lots of packing to do, and lots of packing means lots of TV, horror movies, and fun-but-not-difficult audiobooks. I may end up doing a couple of these micro reviews in the next few weeks to cover what I’m watching and reading…to be honest, mostly watching. I feel like I haven’t read anything really interesting lately, or at least anything I’m prepared to talk about. I’m slowly working through Anthony Grafton’s Magus, a new history of Renaissance magic—it’s fucking fantastic, but I only have a paper copy, and I haven’t yet figured out how to read with my eyes and pack at the same time. Maybe, like a Renaissance magus, I need some kind of brilliantly engineered device that only appears magical to the uninitiated, or a possibly magical device that I can claim is engineered…
Anyway:
American Horror Story: Delicate
The latest entry in the American Horror Story anthology series, Delicate is a slow-moving nightmare about a pregnant woman who has constant creepy encounters with people who may be witches. The heroine is blonde, delicate, imperiled, persecuted on all sides—no one around her can be trusted, including her friends, her husband, and her increasingly monstrous fetus. This could be a great story, and in a way, it is. It’s just called Rosemary’s Baby.1
There are several major differences between Delicate and Rosemary’s Baby (including uh, quality), but the most important one is the placement of the ambitious actor character. The husband in Rosemary’s Baby is a struggling wannabe actor who is willing to sell his wife’s womb to Satanists in exchange for a successful career. In Delicate, the wife is the actor and an extremely successful one, having just starred in a film called The Auteur for which she expects to be nominated for an Oscar. We find out during the course of Delicate that The Auteur and the actress’s whole career have been shaped by the evil witches for reasons that never really make sense; they don’t need to make sense, really, because the important point is that this apparently talented artist doesn’t deserve what she has. This is stated baldly in the final episode by the witches, who accuse the actress of being selfish and greedy, demanding to have it all—career, awards, children, I mean how DARE she, what YEAR does she think it is, 2024???????? In the end, the actress really does achieve it all…but only (so the imagery strongly implies) if she embraces being an evil witch.2
The ending of Delicate isn’t just offensive, it also feels like a dodge, like the writers were scared of what they had wrought. Horror writers love to address pregnancy and women’s bodies, images which suggest the scariest subject of all: women’s power. Delicate offers a vision of women’s power as a circle of giggling witches obsessed with children and blood and eternal beauty who have contempt for the idea of a woman doing anything else, or valuing anything else, or daring to think of herself as an artist (not to mention an auteur). There’s something potentially powerful about this as a metaphor about subordinated, self-inflicted misogyny, but Delicate runs screaming from it, wringing its hysterical hands. Unacceptable. Feminist jail for 1000 years.
Immaculate (2024)
Speaking of pregnancy horror, Hollywood has yet to find a blonde actress who it doesn’t want to depict screaming while a terrible unborn monster crawls beneath her distended stomach. Sydney Sweeney is the victim this time, and she’s a good choice for an innocent American nun who arrives at a glamorously decaying Italian convent only to fall mysteriously pregnant. Sweeney’s enormous, slightly downturned eyes naturally suggest Renaissance depictions of the Virgin Mary and other saints, even when she’s in pain (maybe especially when she’s in pain). The camera just loves her eyes, and the beautiful convent in general: there are some gorgeously framed shots and inventive, creepy, bottom-up camera angles.
But the whole thing is rushed and action-driven rather than holy and mysterious, which weakens the contrasts between the sacred and the horrifying. More than anything else, it’s just very Hollywood. In the last half hour of the movie—always the point at which a 90 minute horror movie falls apart—a mid-labor Sydney Sweeney goes America all over Italy’s ass, garroting a bishop with rosary beads and stabbing a priest in the neck with a Holy Nail. Don’t get me wrong, it kinda rules, but in an interchangeable action flick sort of way. John Wick couldn’t have slaughtered his way through the evil convent any better than Sydney Sweeney’s laboring nun (and actually, I’d like to see him try that while pregnant.)
True Blood
True Blood is the dumbest show I keep watching. I think I enjoy it because it’s aware that it’s very stupid, and even deliberately slaps you in the face with it, which is a power move that I respect. Anyway, if you don’t remember True Blood from when it aired (2008-2014), it’s one of the vampire stories that capitalized on Twilight’s popularity, featuring a relationship between a brooding stalker-ish 100+ year old vampire and a young ingenue who is mysteriously special, and also there’s a love triangle and werewolves blah blah blah. Dumb as it is, True Blood is still more interesting than Twilight, because it recognizes that the cliched relationship between vampire and maiden can get boring real fast, and so there are lots of other storylines about the heroine’s Louisiana bayou town and the loveable messy people in it. The people of this town get to participate in the larger supernatural narrative because vampires aren’t a secret in this world: they have recently “come out of the coffin” (this phrase seriously occurs multiple times and it’s what I mean by the show deliberately slapping you in the face.) Some of the characters are more fun than others, or at least get to have more fun, and the wild tonal shifts between, say, the heroine’s goofy horndog brother’s sexual mishaps and her miserable best friend who is constantly suffering the worst imaginable human tragedies are uh, jarring to say the least. In general the show is best when it sticks to the supernatural, and worst when it tries to make the supernatural a cheap allegorical stand-in for extremely serious issues (i.e. domestic abuse, which keeps popping up in the best friend’s storyline.)
The supernatural can of course always allude to something real and serious: creatures like vampires and werewolves are always suggestive of other things, often multiple things. But as usual with any kind of horror or fantasy, it’s never a good idea to say what you mean directly: the images exist to do the saying for you. This is part of why “lore” exists: a body of information about a fictitious supernatural that contributes, in its consistency, to the meaning of these images. The lore in True Blood—I cannot believe I am saying this—is nicely consistent.3 Its vampires drink blood, kill at whim, can’t go out in daylight: they are death and life at the same time, they are every passion taken to extremes. The concepts they embody are the reason why vampires remain interesting to us, even though everything about them is outworn and terribly cliche. And when True Blood breaks from traditional vampire lore to introduce new ideas like humans getting high off drinking vampire blood, the show (usually) turns the afterschool special-ness of it all into a winking joke. If the show were dead serious it would kill me, but it’s having just enough fun that I keep—begrudgingly—clicking next episode.
Baldur’s Gate 3
Okay obviously I am not playing a video game while I’m packing, only afterward, but I still want to talk about it because it rules. In fact I think Baldur’s Gate 3 is so good that it puts most contemporary fantasy novels to shame, and helps demonstrate what I think is wrong with them. The plot of BG3 is big and loopy and depends a lot on the decisions you make, but there are some consistent plot points and themes: namely, that you and a lot of other people have been infected with literal brainworms which threaten to turn you into someone you don’t recognize, and also all your friends are trapped in or trying to escape their evil bosses and/or toxic “it’s not a business it’s a family” situationships. What is this silly medieval fantasy game about? It’s partly about being alive in the 21st century. It never says that, of course. At no point does the game meta-textually turn around and tell you that the brain worms function as a metaphor for Online and the evil bosses for capitalism etc, etc. I’m not sure the writers even directly intended the imagery, though it’s so consistent that it’s hard to imagine they didn’t notice.
Basically any contemporary fantasy novel, however, would turn and tell you what it’s about: in fact it would be basically required to, whether because the writer has concerns about being misunderstood or because the publisher believes every book needs an immediate plug to contemporary issues in order to sell. A fantasy novel, like every other novel, isn’t supposed to just be a book anymore, an aesthetic object with meaning that can be teased out and argued over: it needs to be direct, important, possibly even revolutionary, especially in These Troubled Times. But I think video games are still just disreputable enough—and the form has enough plot elasticity—that a game doesn’t have to insist it’s Saying Something About Society—it can just, quietly, say something about society. You can choose, in BG3, to keep your brainworms, or at least control other people’s (I believe so, anyway, I’ve logged over a hundred hours but I’m not at the end yet, this game is HUGE). You can choose to kill your friends, or permanently enslave them to their toxic bosses. You don’t have to be morally good, though the good paths are clearly delineated as such, and if you commit terrible acts then people will get mad at you, though sometimes if you choose to behave heroically you will only enrage the wicked. If you help the refugees fleeing a war, you may annoy the city folk who have recently accepted the rule of an authoritarian leader who promises law, order, and militarized cops on every corner…it is truly just like life for real, but it respects me enough not to grab me by the shoulders and insist that I get it. I get it.
The movie version of Rosemary’s Baby is of course a classic, but the book is also quite good if you haven’t read it.
The actress in Delicate does technically agree at one point to trade her baby for an Oscar but she doesn’t fully know what she’s agreeing to or who she’s dealing with, unlike the husband in Rosemary’s Baby who seems to have understood what he was getting into.
At one point Sookie, the heroine, finds out that her specialness is because she has fairy blood and it’s all very dumb…but True Blood’s fairies kidnap people, they rely on glamour, they are alternately helpful and treacherous, time passes differently in their realm, and if you eat or drink what they offer you there will be consequences…I am once again forced to respect the commitment to the Lore.