haunts
Manila, 29 October—Halloween is just around the corner—if your feed is anything like mine, it is likely full of office halloween parties, dressed-up kids who may or may not be your godchildren, and rec lists of horror books and Netflix shows.
I'm not exactly a horror fan, although I do have fond memories of Kabayan's old halloween specials, plus the bad CGI, Noli de Castro's makeup, and the flying coffins. Outside of that, though, I usually kept out of the horror movie circuit, passing on the numerous Shake Rattle and Roll movies during the MMFF and not even daring to go anywhere near the Conjuring-verse.
A friend commented that the horror scene is extra alive this year with really good material, like A Quiet Place, Hereditary, and Haunting of Hill House. While we haven't seen Hereditary yet, we did catch A Quiet Place at the cinemas in April, and we just finished Hill House earlier this week. Imagine that. Anyway, I have quite a number of feelings about it, so a portion of this letter is bound to be very spoiler-y
Anyway. Drive-by note: An old high school friend messaged me the other day to ask if I was open to teaching journalism at the old high school alma mater, and I... got a bit excited about it at first, before getting terrified by the thought of it, and then, much later, by my initial reaction to it HAHA. Parking that for when I am not swamped, I guess.
SPOILER WARNING: The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix)
I have feelings about Theo Crain [SPOILERS]
To reiterate, this show was sold to me as The Lesbian Lives In This One, but out of atmospheric terror/fright during the first few scenes of episode 1, I promptly forgot about her—that is, until she was introduced during the club scene. Wearing that outfit. Of course, I had to pry my hands from my eyes.
Many would say that the stand-out eps of the ten-episode series is either Nellie's ep (Episode 5, The Bent-Neck Lady) or the marvelous, multiple-timeline, single-shot episode after that (Episode 6, Two Storms), but for me, the episode that spoke to me is the Theo-centric episode (Episode 3, Touch).
Played by Angelina Jolie x Gal Gadot deadringer Kate Siegel, Theo is a child psychologist, a middle child, and an emotionally unavailable woman-loving woman—which means she automatically earns her rightful slot in Kate's Grand Collection of Emotionally Closed Off Fictional WLWs, putting her alongside Naomi of Skins, Alex of Orange is the New Black, Root and Shaw in Person of Interest, and Lexa of The 100. (LOL, the death rate in that list is 3/5, which says a lot and makes me mad)
ANYWAY. Theo's episode has her confronting her own demons as she tries to help one of her child patients, who reports seeing a terrible "Mr Smiley" in their foster home. It plays out like an episode of any procedural show, complete with stake-outs, red herrings and arrests. I'd watch an entire series of it, actually; perhaps something along the lines of Buffy, Lost Girl or Veronica Mars.
Later, it is more explicitly explained that Theo has a gift—she knows by touching. Like every supernatural gift, it also doubles as a curse. One of her character's turning points occurs when she touches the body of her dead sister Nellie at the morgue, thereby absorbing whatever is there on Nellie to absorb. Toward the end, Theo goes on a magnificent monologue that is terrifying because it says something true about grief, how all-consuming it is, how heavily it fills those it afflicts with nothing.
But for all the show's insight about grief and mental illness, its insight about queerness, even when one of its characters is explicitly one (sex scenes with a hot Asian girl and all) is horribly lacking. Theo's queer side with girlfriend Trish felt token-ish and flat for me, which is quite disappointing, considering the many rich ways you could write a wlw who is literally a Feelings Doctor who is Bad at Feelings, and whose Magical Hands Bring Both Horror and Pleasure. (I'm not quite sure yet where I stand on the whole I Did Not See Him I Saw Just A Light -thing with her sister Shirley's husband Kevin. I mean, is it an I Don't See Gender statement? Maybe?)
In any case, Hill House's true horror lies not in the ghastly ghouls that walk the house, nor the room that is at the heart of it. The core of Hill House's horror is made up of dead mothers and scars our own parents give us, despite their best intentions. And to me, that's what makes it so relatable and so terrifying—we may not have all spent some creepy summer inside a haunted house, but many of us do have dead parents and do have parent-dealt scars that we carry with us and split with our siblings for years and years.
So yeah, yell at me about Theo please.