Witches -- an Age-old Conflict of Age

The concept of the witch is an interesting trope within the horror genre, both because the witch is one of several commonly (exclusively?) female magical entities, and because she can be either good or evil in nature. This nature of witches has been shown throughout literature; some memorable examples include the witches from The Wizard of Oz and the Harry Potter series. The witch in Black Mariah is an example of an evil witch. Recently, the good witch has been becoming more standard than the evil witch in popular media, as seen in installments such as Harry Potter (again), the Maleficent reboot(in which the title character actually possesses traits of both good and evil witches),  and Kiki’s Delivery Service (which we watched in class.) Although the evil witch can serve as a convenient villain, her motivations often seem to come across as two-dimensional at best and misogynistic at worst. It can be hard to pull off a purely evil witch nowadays. Despite these potential setbacks, a witch character can be used to provide commentary on these aspects of the evil witch trope, or commentary on the human characters.

            This week, after a partial viewing in class, I finished watching the movie Suspiria. In this film, the witch characters had some very hard-to-comprehend motivations. Essentially, the evil witch coven in this movie would kill anyone that got in their way, had the potential to get in their way, made them angry, or just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The way I interpreted it, they were so evil that normal viewers couldn’t begin to understand their motivations.

            Although the motivation of the head witch of the coven was not to gain/regain youth, there was definitely a conflict of age in the movie. The head witch was centuries old, while her victims were (mostly) young girls. In fact, as I found out later after watching the movie, the script originally called for 12 year old girls rather than 20 year old young women. That idea was scrapped but much of the original dialogue remained, resulting in the young women having very child-like “voices”. In addition, the actors were placed in a larger-than-normal set to give the illusion that they were small and weak. Altogether, this movie fits into the witch trope of old women preying on young girls. And, following another witch trope, the young triumphs over the old, and the evil is vanquished.

            The witch trope of associating old age with evil puts old women in a negative light, which is only reaffirmed by the triumph of the young and beautiful characters over the old witch. This treatment is much more rarely seen in old male characters, as the old wizard character is usually shown to be wise and helpful (ex. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter). The fact that the old woman witch character is shown in such a negative way shows how society values women only for their beauty. Once that beauty is gone, and they have nothing left to offer society, they can only burden and leech from others. Luckily, this trope seems to be dying out, and more good witches are being shown in stories. The good witch is unfortunately usually a young character (because youth attracts audiences—ironically playing into the witch trope again) but that will hopefully change over time.

The "New Weird" is the "Current Weird"

This week I read some stories from Three Moments of an Explosion.

            The first short story, Three Moments of an Explosion, offers what I think is a really perceptive view of the future. Mieville manages to fit in a great amount of speculation into only two pages. The idea that one day even decay will be turned into advertisement was an ironic idea that I found very entertaining. One would think that no company would want to associate themselves with rot and decay, and yet it could very well be a brilliant untapped marketing idea. It’s truly a weird idea, and yet no weirder than how we advertise nowadays. Once we exhaust all the advertising space on the nonliving, perhaps we will move onto the living?

            The death defying stunt in the second section is reflective of our current adrenaline-seeking culture. This section makes you consider whether in the future, immersive fiction such as books, movies, and video games will be enough to satisfy our desires for action and adrenaline. Or, will it just never be enough until there is a chance you could literally kill yourself doing it? In this section, this adrenaline-junkie culture is still something of a counter-culture, but its intensity is clearly exponentially higher than today’s counter-cultures. What must the mainstream culture be like to induce such a frightening counter-culture?

            The horror in this story comes from the question of our unknown future. It is impossible to know what the future will be like, and this in itself is frightening. Even more frightening is the knowledge that a bad future must develop sometime in the present, and yet we are essentially powerless to change as long as we have no idea what exactly it is that leads to our downfall. The only option seems to be to sit and wait as the world gradually grows worse. Or, perhaps it has already gotten worse, and yet like the people in Three Moments of an Explosion, we just take our reality for granted.

            The second story in the collection runs even further with the theme of “fear of the unknown.” In Polynia, giant icebergs float innocuously over London. There is danger in this, and also beauty. It’s implied that the existence of the floating icebergs is a sort of karma for global warming. There is ultimately no explanation, and no resolution. The icebergs are just there one day, and they stay there. After a while, people stop questioning them, and they become a normal aspect of life.

            Similarly to the first story, this story offers a question about our present. Is there something hovering over our generation with the potential to kill us that we have gradually ignored, or accepted as a way of life? All the signs here are pointing to climate change, but it could just as well be a symbolic representation of pretty much anything.

            These stories, while discussing a future or an alternate reality, do much to comment on the present.

Eastern Vs. Western Horror

In western horror, the “horrific” element often comes from the suspense of whether a character will live or die. This concept, however, doesn’t seem to exist in the traditional Japanese horror stories recorded in Kwaidan. In Kwaidan, fate and tradition are strongly ingrained in each story. There is little that the human characters can do to change their fates; if they are fated to die, then it’s going to happen regardless of what measures are put in place to stop it. There is very little question of who is going to make it through to the end of each story. In contrast, western horror gives characters more freedom to decide their own fates. The reason for this difference has to do with the nature of the “monsters” in each genre.

The monsters of western horror are often evil without any redeemable qualities, while the monsters of eastern horror are more like forces of neutrality. Early western horror relies on the dichotomy of good and evil to create a scary situation—and the only way the protagonist can escape said situation is to choose to align himself with the “good” side. In contrast, in Kwaidan it is hard to say which characters are good and which characters are bad. There is a much greater ambiguity of good and evil in eastern horror.

While both eastern and western horror ultimately have some sort of moral, the way this moral is arrived at differs greatly between the two sides.