the lords of salem: it's the women who matter

(2013. dir: Rob Zombie) This may be the first truly gynocentric horror film I've ever seen: most of the characters, and all the characters who matter, are women. Villains, ostensible hero, intended victims, all women. It's not spoken in the script, but you come away with a sense that within the vast, metaphysical reality of this film, it's the women who are fighting, hip-deep in the blood and muck and quagmire of the things that matter, life and death and the consequences of the war amongst angels in heaven, while the men live superficial, dancing existences in a sort of lightweight, parallel existence. There are male characters, and they feel true and three-dimensional, and they try to help, try to get involved, but ultimately their efforts glance shallowly off the sides of the true action and they can do nothing but helplessly observe. Even the original witch-killer who kicked the whole plot into whirring motion, you could argue he did very little. Yes, he burned a coven of witches, but here they still are, centuries later, while he is worm-food, long past. As one of the witches (there is also a strong sense that every woman in this film, whether she knows it or not, is a witch, and not in some sleazy, she's-a-spider-and-lured-me way, but a witch of immeasurable, untapped power) points out, destiny gives you some room to maneuver, but your fate was written in stone long before your lungs ever filled with breath.

This is the first horror film I've ever seen that never once uses female nakedness, which is plentiful here, for titillation. Nakedness is, rather, a stripping away of the false trappings of society, and a necessary state for the birthing and blooding and mudding and murdering that is involved in the metaphysical war which is their true work. Zombie gives aging actresses strong roles to play, women of an age at which you never hope to see them playing anything but powerless and dotty: Judy Geeson (10 Rillington Place), Dee Wallace (the Howling, Cujo), Patricia Quinn (Rocky Horror), Maria Conchita Alonso (Running Man) and, most notably, Meg Foster, who was all over American television in the '70s, with her astonishingly beautiful, strange-looking eyes. Now she looks amazing, a true crone, with a fantastic, otherworldly voice and as strong a presence as ever as the original coven's Master-Witch, Margaret Morgan.

Most obviously an offspring of Rosemary's Baby and Ringu, it reminded me several times of the Tenant, with its claustrophobia and the horrible sense that insanity is encroaching and there is not a thing you can do about it. It really ought to be seen in a cinema, in a bounded, inescapable, darkened room, so that its creeping atmosphere can close slowly around you. As I watched it in my living room, I felt guilty whenever I paused it to answer the phone or get something to drink, aware that I was cheating, not allowing the spell to weave its full course. Sit still, if you can, while you watch it.