#helen mcclory

Let’s talk about the way you look. In that white, flowy dress, how you’re dancing and swaying barefoot by the shores of a muddy river.

Let’s talk about your crisp black dresses, bright honey blonde hair cut to fall justso, highlighting your cheekbones. Balancing that cigarette, tapping the ash free with your long fingers.

Let’s talk about your gigantic red curls, cat’s-eye glasses, and passion for gloves – and Balenciaga.

Let’s talk about your statement necklaces layered and layered and your hoop earrings to contrast with your endlessly long sleek braids.

Let’s talk about how you’re a witch, and you are really into looking good. And into looking. Taking an eyeful. Judging the quantities and qualities of what you see. Let’s talk about how you and your girls breeze about being the crème de la crème of New Orleans, looking your absolute best – but how sometimes, the perfection of your image can mask a lack of depth and certain coherence of personality traits – and plot lines.

The main arc inAmerican Horror Story: Coven is the vainglorious pursuits of a group of witches looking for a new ‘supreme’ or top witch, a witch with the strongest powers who will lead them before their current supreme, Fiona Goode (Jessica Lange) succumbs to the cancer currently weakening her. 

But the series starts in typicalAHS fashion with a romp that suddenly turns bloody – SPOILERS ABOUND (though this occurs in the first few minutes):

Zoe Benson (Taissa Farmiga), an apparently normal teenager, discovers that she has a particularly gruesome special power when she attempts to have sex for the first time and graphically kills her boyfriend. It’s particularly p-in-v sex that causes the trouble: Zoe possesses a vagina that causes blood to burst out of noses and eyes. It turns out that she is the descendent of a witch from Salem, and is promptly shuffled off, out of the family home to live at Miss Robichaux’s Academy in New Orleans, in order to learn how to control this and possibly other powers.

For witches have power they know or learn how to use, or it seems so for every other witch we meet. Choice, for the most part, plays into whether or not these powers will be used for good or evil, at full strength, or to clumsy, catastrophic effect.  Even Zoe will eventually find a (admittedly pretty ethically grey) workaround after she falls for tender fratboy Kyle (Evan Peters).

At the school, run by Fiona’s meek and ‘disappointing’ daughter Cordelia Foxx (Sarah Paulson; specialty: niceness, plants – a bit like a frailer, more elegant version of the mother from Kiki’s Delivery Service), we find former Hollywood child star Madison Montgomery (Emma Roberts; specialty: faux fur, eyeliner, telekinesis, cruel one-liners), 

Queenie (Gabourey Sidibe; specialty: human voodoo doll, putting up with racist shit),

and Nan (Jamie Brewer; specialty: clairvoyance, mind control, being chronically underestimated and wastefully killed). 

Also at the school is live-in butler/creep Spalding (Denis O’Hare), who lacks a tongue. 

Later he will be replaced by Kyle the tender fratboy, who was killed in a telepathically-induced bus crash, then brought back to life as a Frankenstein-esque construction, with limited vocabulary and possibly mental faculties, but all the love. His role (object of much exploitation) will be discussed later.

Significant figures outside the school include the immortal voodoo priestess Marie Laveau (Angela Bassett), who has lived in New Orleans since its beginnings (thanks to the old annual-innocent-soul-in-exchange-for-immortal-life deal with Papa Legba, a spirit that certain folk on the internet who seem to know more than I do on the subject say was misrepresented),

Madam Marie Delphine LaLaurie, and later, the head of Madam Marie Delphine LaLaurie (Kathy Bates), Myrtle Snow (Frances Conroy), leader of the witches’ council (specialty: truth spells, plummy voice, eccentric aunt fashion) and the too-sweet-for-this-world Misty Day (Lily Rabe; specialty: spectacular resurrection powers, love of Stevie Nicks).

While I love Misty Day and Myrtle Snow, there’s not too much I feel the need to say about them, so we’ll focus on the other two.

Laveau (specialty: everything? It seems she can do all the magic, also has excellent one-liners) runs a hair salon, which is both a successful business and a front for the spell casting she does. Marie Laveau is, like all the witches, magnificently stylish. She hates witches however because their white ancestors were given their powers as a gift from a slave woman called Tituba– the original witches in Salem were black. Only Queenie is descended from Tituba, and Laveau attempts to bring her over to her side by pointing this fact out.

Marie Laveau was a real woman from New Orleans and a practitioner of voodoo, as too was Salem resident Tituba – she was the first person in the town to be accused of practicing witchcraft.  It’s apparently uncertain as to whether she was black, or a Native American, or Afro-Caribbean but either way she was a woman of colour who was enslaved. It’s not even certain that Tituba practiced voodoo, since there are no records, and all of the ‘witchcraft’ she confessed to conformed to European myths – although we can guess the reason why that might be, given her torturers were white European-origin settlers. Well, so the Wiki tells me.

Here, hold this grain of salt; it’s probably smaller than the one you need to hold in order to watch Coven.

What does it mean to take the story of women, even two relatively far back in time, and use these – clumsily, to put it kindly – to discuss racism in modern America? I don’t even know. There are parallels to be made between the misuse of Tituba’s gift and subsequent division between witches and voodoienne, the appropriation of African American art – say, Jazz music for one, given the location – but I don’t think the series sets up anything close to a coherent point on the matter. 

Coven seems to rob liberally from history and slap the whole thing down on the table, cracking gum. The whole thing is really hard for me, a white woman in Scotland, to even attempt to wrap my head around. Another character in the show based directly on a real-life person is Marie Delphine LaLaurie. She was another real life resident of New Orleans in the 1800s, a wealthy white Creole socialite onto her third husband, who was discovered to be a torturer and serial killer after a fire revealed that her slaves had been chained up, beaten, mutilated and starved. Subsequently, tales of her abuses were made more lurid, though even at the time, the rescued slaves were held in a prison and made available for viewing to the public to help ‘convince them of the severity of the tortures’ or euphemisms to that effect.

Her house, which appears on the show (though I don’t think it’s the real LaLaurie house, which was for a time owned by Nicholas Cage, make of that what you will) is the site of her immortal internment under the ground, trapped by a spell of Marie Laveau’s as revenge for her crimes. For some reason the witches dig her up and have her at their place? Maybe because Fiona Goode likes to have bargaining chips in hand, or possibly because she’d like someone demonstrably even worse than herself around to make her seem less heinous.

My memory is fuzzy on this part. What I remember pretty clearly is the Minotaur, an inexplicably transformed version of Marie Laveau’s lover, all gleaming abs and mindless masculinity sent to attack the monstrous racist and then encountering Queenie, who is defending LaLaurie and then – I don’t even know, I reach the end of my understanding. And beyond that understanding, I recall Queenie is given LaLaurie as a slave and at the same time tries to rehabilitate her, and then in exasperation handing her over to Laveau, who has her head cut off. The head lives! The head is made to watch the box set ofRoots, and cries about slavery. Mmm, hmm.

Coven is in my mind the most frustrating season of American Horror Story. I would be hard pressed to say what all of these characters get up to over the course of the series. I barely manage to touch on the above, and I pull my hand away, and it feels like I’ve stuck my fingers through some rotten fruit. The show has one great strength in the great visual touches – mostly in clothing, but also in the great, minimalist white-painted house which acts as an anchor for the action. I’ve discussed before how AHS is generally wound up tight and placed inside a singular location – the murder house, the asylum.

But too often inCoventhe story strays outside of it, sometimes briefly, sometimes for longer, into other less convincing boxes. A penthouse building straight out of the eighties, a futuristic science lab, a frat house, a small home with a large, disturbing secret, the historical museum made of LaLaurie’s house and the streets around it, a hair dresser’s salon, a swamp hut, a necropolis, a boardroom, an old Jazz player’s apartment that feels straight out of a Tennessee Williams play, or at least, the acts that take place within it do, as seen through several smoked glasses of bourbon and a book about New Orleans Gothic stories. It’s a clunky bounty, andCoven doesn’t seem to know what to do with it all, instead letting characters pop up in whichever new place, visually moving on the action, but too often failing to keep the current linked up.

On the subject of visual interest, I’d like to touch on how the male body performs here. In contrast to the witches, all poise and style, the men inCoven appear fragmentary. There’s Kyle, with his body broken apart and reassembled poorly. Spalding with his tongueless mouth, the jazzman who trails between the spirit world and this, half ghost half man, the hunk next door pinned under his mother’s jealousy, and the Minotaur, another hybrid kept alive by his lover only to be used as a muscled weapon. You might raise Madam LaLaurie ending up as just a head – but this fragmentation is played for laughs. 

And…reconciliation? (Nope!) Whereas the men are most often presented as either desiring object (who can be ignored or used by the witches as seen fit) or desired object – in the case of Kyle particularly. He is subject to the female gaze relentlessly. Even when dead, his divided body is the subject of comment:

Madison Montgomery: Zoe, look around this room. Okay, what do you see?

Zoe Benson: Tragedy.

Madison Montgomery: I see potential. Look, nice legs over here. A great set of guns. [chuckles]  I wonder if he’s a show-er or a grower.

Zoe Benson: What’s your point, Madison?

Madison Montgomery: We take the best boy parts, we attach them to Kyle’s head, and we build the perfect boyfriend.

Zoe Benson: Is this just a joke to you?

Madison Montgomery: No, it’s a challenge. All we have to do is follow this recipe. Find me a saw.

Building the perfect boyfriend out of mutilated body parts. Reanimating them. Loving them, even when it’s not clear whether Kyle, mumbling and prone to rages, has returned to himself intact.

We see Kyle’s anguish as he recognises that a tattoo on his ankle was the one that used to be on his friend’s ankle. The built boy, no say in the matter, and little able to speak. I would love it if the show had made something of this premise, but it squanders ethical considerations on, what else, a cringy threesome between Kyle, Zoe and Madison – because two of the party are formerly deceased, Zoe’s killer vagina will be no impediment. The ethics of consent of the dead and possibly mentally incapacitated are firmly thrown on the railings.

While it was a hot and gorgeous mess, I found myself with a lot to say in the end. This being a Tumblr based site I have one recommendation for what could help the immortal memory of Coven– fan fiction. Fresh narratives crafted by those dedicated enough to pull out the threads and rework them, to take the potential this show had and bring it to a more satisfying fruition. 

Art, little one-shots, some huge great novel that takes all the main characters and renames them and plants them in the White House or Middle Earth or even a coffee shop, for goodness sake. Pick a fixed stage and shine a great bright light on things. Maintain, supplement, complicate, extrapolate and philosophise all the wonky sex and endless machinations until there’s honey from this leonine corpse.

Next up –Freakshow. Hold my hand, dear reader.

Review by Helen McClory.

Before I started writing this essay, I asked myself what exactly it is I love about Asylum, the second season of AHS. The plot is like a bag of thorn cuttings; it just confounds me the more I dig through. There’s the mental institution, Briarcliff (hence the thorn metaphor). Here it is at the opening of the season as a ruin haunted by a murderous psychopath. Here it is in 1964, bustling with nuns and the sick, and, as is swiftly revealed, seamy with the twisted motivations of those who run it. I’m on board, I follow.

SPOILERS ABOUND.

The characters of Asylum are played with a heartfelt screwiness and occasional poised venom. There’s Kit Walker (Evan Peters once again), the sweet-hearted garage assistant with the secret wife, Alma (Britne Oldford). It’s a mixed-race marriage, and there are lots of enemies out there, but this being Asylum, it’s not the racist pack who keep hounding Kit that bring about the strange turns of events.

Alma is inexplicably abducted by aliens, and a dead woman with a faceless resemblance shows up. Her murder echoes a number of others in the area, so it’s Kit, who earnestly pleads the alien abduction case, who is taken in to the asylum awaiting psychological evaluation. He is a celebrity patient, drawing reporter Lana (Sarah Paulson). 

When Lana comes against resistance to her wish to interview Kit from the redoubtable Sister Jude (Jessica Lange), she decides to sneak inside the asylum to find out the full scoop. This however, lands her on a permanent visit – Sister Jude is able to use Lana’s sexual orientation to trap her. 

Being a lesbian in 1964 is seen as an affliction, a mental condition that only confinement and occasional whippings can cure. Good thing Lana’s wily and tough as nails, because she’s about to be witness – and victim – to some truly grotesque happenings, many of them directed at her by the hospital’s visiting evaluating psychiatrist, Dr Oliver Thredson (Zachary Quinto, expertly creepy here).

The (almost) closed set, as with Murder House, in which human drama however oozy will play out within these set parameters, is so effortlessly appealing. And, like Murder House, it retains, unfortunately, rape as plot advancement, but it also lacks the weaknesses of the first season, in that there is no tedious side-plot of infidelity – in fact, there’s no time at all to be bored.

Asylum does not proceed with even Murder House’s whip-crack pacing of one strange, spooky, nonsensical thing after another. It’s instead everything at once. Rubbing shoulders: a secret Nazi doctor (Dr Arden, played by James Cromwell), Sister Jude as a nun with a violent past, 

the innocent Sister Mary Eunice (Lily Rabe) possessed by the devil, corrupt church officials, a serial killer lurking the corridors, mutants, aliens – and then there’s the experimentation, corporeal punishment, unwanted leg removal, an unexpected song and dance number, alien pregnancies, desperate sex, resurrection, copious bread baking.

Shouldn’t I be appalled that it attempts so much?

But it’s a bottled chaos: beautiful, torrential, a bit leaky at the edges (in keeping with the AHS family, it doesn’t always handle the issues with much degree of subtlety) but crucially, contained. Limited, as TV always is, by the confines of the medium: after 50 minutes, the episode will end. After so many episodes, the season will end. So unlike the real world, with its sickening sprawling complex horrors. Here’s where fiction in all its forms saves me just a little. 

As I write this, the great wave of grotesque is to be found in the American Senate Intelligence Committee report into the torture used by the CIA against suspected (and sometimes, not at all suspected) terrorists in the wake of 9/11. The report, still partially censored, is a catalogue of human rights violations: inflictions of rape, homicide, near-drownings, hypothermia. In one instance, a man with mental disabilities was tortured and kept confined by the CIA for the sole reason that his suffering provided leverage over his family.

And now, on the tenth of December, it’s International Human Rights Day, and I feel like throwing up. Mostly, as a citizen of a country that colluded with the rendition of prisoners, a country that is currently trying to expel a man with Down’s syndrome just because, what’s humanity, right? Every week a new death, a new revelation, a new ‘villain’ in the form of an immigrant, a child with a toy, a man trying to walk home. Every week a politician talking of ‘patriots’ and those with ‘tough jobs’ to do. 

It feels like the situation is hopeless. My entire adult life has taken place under the shadow of wars and torture inflicted by the institutions of countries I either live in or have heart-deep ties to. But God, what do you do? Sign petitions, sometimes march. Keep writing to recover a little bit of humanity. Keep reading for the same. Listen to the wronged. Listen to writers who might have been, or might still be, silenced.

And sometimes you have to take time to realise your smallness.
And sometimes you need to retreat. Just for a while.

We look to be consumed by all sorts of things. By substances, by ideas, by God, by other people far more charismatic than ourselves, by blankets of art that compound the pains of the world and seek to transcend them. Or trashy TV that makes puppets of the horrors and then makes them dance for the viewers. Within that bottled chaos, a tiny Nazi tortures a tiny mental patient. It’s horrendous. But look, they’re both made of plastic. Tip up the snow shaker, watch the glitter fall around them. Now there’s a man who has lost his wife to an alien, and everyone thinks he’s been murdering a whole load of people.

Now here’s the man who has done this to him, showing off his human skin mask and explaining to the captive Lana how she will be the mother he never had.

Now Sister Jude has become lost, trapped in her own asylum and doped up to the nines, suffering a kind of purgatory for all the sins that she committed. Here’s the Nazi doctor, moved to real tears by the death of the devil-possessed Sister Mary Eunice, burning himself to death on her crematorium pyre. Their plights can move me, I can be challenged by the brief moral complexities emerging out of the rush, but I know what I’m seeing is just this much, and no more.

The Russian critic Mikhail Baktin explains this concept as (translated into English) the ‘carnivalesque’. He talks of this as a literary concept, but it’s evident in many films – particularly horror. Carnival as a concept is an ancient one in which the most sacred rituals, the most accepted and comforting behaviours are tipped on their heads for the duration of the carnival. Everything is excess, everything a bit bawdy and shocking. Think of Mardi Gras, think of the medieval Feast of Fools. 

American Horror Story as a series takes the tropes – the family, the figures of religious life, the school – and dismantles the order, throwing confetti and consistency out the window. (It is only in the current season that the show has perhaps stumped itself. How can you have a carnivalesque of the carnival? It might be why it seems the least interesting production so far.)

There’s one episode of Asylum I think of now and then. It’s the final episode of the season, “Madness Ends.” It’s the one where the snowshaker rights itself again. Lana Winters has become a venerable journalist having written a tawdry and not entirely loyal memoir of her experiences at the hands of Dr Thredson and eventually having worked to shut down Briarcliff (much declined even from its satanically-run years). She gives a lot of exposition in an interview at her elegant New York home, where she lives with her partner of many years.

When the cameras have left she wins the trust of the son she abandoned (the product of a rape by the serial killer, and a serial killer himself) who has popped up to kill her - only for Lana to shoot him dead.

Loose ends rather grimly tied up. Kit rescued Sister Jude and brought her into his family for the remainder of her days. Much later, the aliens take a terminally-ill Kit up to alien heaven with them. There are flashbacks to the beginning of the show, where the carnivalesque of the characters’ lives began. It’s not an episode that should work. Too much heavy-handed telling, dripping with melodrama. But watching it play out, I was getting teary. Somehow I cared about the fates of characters. In attempting to tie everything together (however violently, however sadly) this last episode brings the kind of closure we cannot get in life, only in film and in stories. An overview as if from the vantage point of standing on a cloud watching over the parade of years, watching each trajectory come to a close. 

And all was well, as much as it could be; though there was regret and pain, there was also redemption, sudden cheesiness, and an end to suffering. A kind of peace that though fictional, unreal, seems hard-won. The little flakes of fake snow, finally settling.

Review by Helen McClory.

American Horror Story is a gaudy, gory, hugely flawed mishmash of an anthology series, with each season set in a closed-system locale. It has been from the beginning intent on raiding the larder of pop culture horror and filling these particular closed systems – house, asylum, witchy school, and now freak show – to bursting with scenes that are by turns (and sometimes at the same time) cheesy, repellent, spooky and moving. A mostly-brilliant cast then elevates the lot to something transcendent. It is like nothing else, and like everything else – and it will not let go of your throat (which then, you can imagine, makes a kind of rubber-duck noise as it is squeezed). The show has won and been nominated for a tonne of awards, as well as attracting valid criticism over its treatment of mental illness, rape and abortion.

You love what you love, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be clear-eyed and critical of it. So! For this essay, I’d like to focus on perhaps the least coherent of the seasons – the first, Murder House. I’d like to pick it apart like a gooey candied bug and we can have a look and see what there is there at which to marvel and wince. Watch out for spoilers, although this show is so wild, so salted in disruption and weirdness I don’t know if it is possible to spoil it.

To summarise the plot of Murder House might be difficult and off-putting for those who have not yet see it. Quick setup – a family troubled by infidelity and grief after a stillbirth move across the US to live in a large, suspiciously cheap house in LA. The place is just darling, with all original features – and a cast of dead folk keen to torment the living and add more to their brood. The list of bogles (throwing a Scots word for ghosts at you) is long and unwieldy:  the tow-headed sweet monster teen Tate (Evan Peters), who appears at first in need of counselling – from Ben (Dylan McDermott), the psychiatrist father slash adulterous pityparty slash terminally oblivious naysayer – and becomes quickly besotted with the psychiatrist’s daughter Violet (Taissa Farmiga); Chad and Patrick (Zachary Quinto and Teddy Sears), the bickery couple who owned the house previously and were killed by a mysterious entirely-black-rubber-covered figure who lurks around variously ominously creaking as a rubber bodysuit tends to do, murdering and sexually assaulting various inhabitants as and when the plot needs advancing; Moira, the housekeeper who ‘comes with the house,’ and who appears young and sultry to heterosexual men but as an older woman to the other women on the grounds; women see things as they actually are while men see what they desire to see (old Moira played by Frances Conroy, young Moira by Alexandra Breckenridge).

Nora (Lily Rabe) a mournful, self-pitying figure who killed her husband and herself in the 1920s after her baby was murdered by the vengeful boyfriend of a woman Nora’s husband had given an abortion to AND after said mutilated and murdered baby of Nora’s was reassembled by the abortionist husband into a kind of indescribable abomination – the ghost of which is somewhere in the cellar along with that of the husband. Oh, and I almost forgot, LA’s famous murder victim the Black Dahlia (Mena Suvari) is in the house too, because why not.

This is not a comprehensive list, and yet more ghosts are added as the season goes on.

The living members of the household are, as mentioned, the world’s worst psychiatrist Ben, warm and down-to-earth Vivien (Connie Britton), and stroppy teen Violet. Into the house poke other former residents – the slick, sinister housewife Constance (Jessica Lange) and her daughter Addie (Jamie Brewer), with the latter’s main purpose at first seeming to be simply uttering ‘you’re going to die here’ to various folk throughout the eras of the house who then, yes, die.

Oh and then there’s the horribly burnt Larry (Denis O’Hare), recently released from prison for (sloppily) setting fire to his family in the Murder House. He decides to harangue Ben, often while Ben is out jogging, in some of the show’s funniest, most Lynchian moments.

I suppose most of the plot comes from this shoving, cajoling press of lost souls. It’s better to think instead of plot, of a subway car full of strangers that has broken down on a long dark stretch of track. Frayed tempers are responsible for a lot of the goings on. As to why the house is so full of dread and menace, that is pleasantly left unexplained. It has just accumulated passengers along the way and none of them, if they die within the grounds of the house, are allowed to leave, except for one day of the year – Samhain, Hallowe’en.

In a desperate attempt to draw this essay into some kind of focus (discussing AHS is like wrestling an exploding, blood-and-streamer party popper), I’d like to look at my favourite part of Murder House, the Hallowe’en episodes. In respect for Hallowe’en as the most significant time of the year for dead folk (who generally live beyond time, as is to be expected), AHS grants two whole episodes to covering the thinnest day’s events. Some of what happens ties in to the narrative arc, so I will streamline a little –

Part one introduces Chad and Patrick, the couple who were murdered in the house prior to our family moving in. In 2010, they were living in stressful conditions. Financially stretched, the two fought over money as well as Patrick’s suspected infidelity and Chad’s actual callousness. After an intense argument, they go their separate ways for a time, only for the infamous rubber man to appear and off them both inside the house. In the present day, Vivien and Ben are trying to sell their nightmare of a house, and have called upon the service of ‘fluffers’ to redecorate the house in an appealing neutral style. Chad and Patrick show up and are mistaken for the home decorators. If there is one thing this show tells us, it’s how easily a ghost can be mistaken for a living human being. There is, visually and corporeally, no difference at all, when a ghost is given reason to manifest. Patrick Swayze lied to us! Or perhaps it’s only a quality of Murder House? Tactile ghosts who obsess over girls and arrange apples and gossip. Or, like Moira, freed for the night, going off to visit ailing parents. Moira watches her mother in her hospital bed held on to this world by life support. She mourns her mother’s wrinkled hands, which used to be so fine. Then, she pulls the plug. A kindness, she thinks. Mother’s spirit goes off across the veil, while daughter remains, bound to the house and to a life of finding things to do with this oddly physical afterlife, which for her is the comforting ritual of cleaning and keeping house.

Is it better to be beyond the human world (whether in heaven or as nothing) or to be a ghost that can feel all the things a living person can feel, but is trapped into cycles of behaviour for longer than the human lifespan? Moira copes in her small, often conflicting ways. Besides cleaning, she falls into testing the men she abhors by taking on her sultry form for weaknesses she knows are there. So she can confirm, over and over, that the abusive sexuality of the man who brought about her murder – she was shot dead by an angry Constance after she was ‘caught’ being raped by the master of the house – is a common, abiding trait. It’s not clear whether she has much say in her repeated seductions, whether fate – the Moirai, in Ancient Greek – push her to it, or whether to be a ghost is to define oneself by habits just as impulsive as those of the living. She will crawl into the laps of married men, she will bite off penises, she will hide bodies and at the same time, she will sympathise with Vivien of the no-good cheating husband, she will cook her food in her time of need. Morality of the Murder House dead works on a strange logic, and it is one of the things I love it for. It leaves room for complexity in Frances Conroy’s excellent, weary performance. And if it’s by intent or clumsy characterisation I simply cannot tell and do not care.

Tate, the forever-teen, is another complex character who is at his most interesting – and whether he knows it or not, most revealing – on Hallowe’en. In part two, he and Violet skip out of the house on their first date to an after-dark beach. I greatly approve of night beaches in horror, though this setting is as far as I can tell rare. But beaches at night are cold and dark and liminal. An edge-zone where anything could happen. When a group of other teenagers in some awfully convincing Hallowe’en costumes show up on the beach and start harassing Tate, it feels as if we have fallen into an eighties horror of ghostly Lost Boys. Their bodies are broken and oozing blood, while those of the house have always been for the most part whole and visibly unscathed.

Again I wonder about the choices that can be made by the AHS dead. To wear their deaths like a costume for maximum impact. To wear a youthful mask, as Moira does, to her own ends. To wear an all-black fetish outfit that dehumanises and heightens fear and confusion in the beholders. Ghosts as actors working to a script that they perhaps have only had a partial hand in writing, if any at all.

While Tate – and Violet – can escape for a while, Hallowe’en allows the aggrieved group to follow them back to the Murder House for a confrontation. Turns out that Tate may be rather further beyond therapy than previously thought. The teenagers were murdered in a school shooting that Tate, a resident of the house, carried out. But the boy just can’t remember doing it. Are they mistaken? Is he lying? In denial? He runs off, getting the murdered group to follow him and leave Violet alone. So that she won’t hear what they have to say, for better or worse. But Tate has always been the Edward Cullen of the house. We will not find out for much later his depths, but those of us not caught up in his devotions can sense that they are there, a yawning gulf of awfulness.

I’m ignoring subplots in these episodes. The dreariness of Ben’s infidelities do not appeal to me, and the misadventures of Addie hurt too much to analyse. I am drawn instead to the spectres with the most nuanced roles. Too often in ghost stories, the spirits are a blank malevolence rattling the doors, pinching skin and throwing objects around. In Murder House, a ghost can have hurt feelings, can be banished momentarily at least by simply telling him or her loudly to go away. That’s the central soothing of the story – ghosts can be reasoned with. The dead will interact with you in meaningful, if not at all safe ways.

It turns grotesque when these bodily ghosts can murder – can rape. I don’t see why this needed to be in the season. Rape is used as a way of providing drama and schlocky turns that could have been achieved in other, less traumatic ways. But AHS thrives on pushing buttons, not questioning whether in a show so already full of bodily dis-ease these buttons need to be jammed. The identity of the rubber man, which we find out later, is one that upends the whole sense of character integrity for me. But then, the difficulty with horror is in where it chooses to fall or walk along the line between queasy horror of the real (rape, murder, abuse, home invasion, unwanted loss of pregnancies, poor mental health, family-destroying secrets) and the mutated, transmuted horrors of the supernatural. AHS chooses both type of horror, all at once, now, now, now. A weakness that is disguised by profusion, the shudder of a train stuck on a sparking track. And it all adds up to a kind of hypnosis performed by the glare off a lurid carapace. For all its problems, I do love this dancing, outrageous, venomous beastie of a show.

Review by Helen McClory.

This is the story of Martha (Elizabeth Olsen, in a debut role), who becomes alternatively ‘Marcy May’ and ‘Marlene,’ and, with a great tremulousness, steps back towards Martha again. It’s the story of a fractured identity, and the things that get in the cracks made when a name is detached from a person. It’s the story of fractured sibling relationships, paranoia, and of the significance and dissonance of place in respect to human tensions. Martha Marcy May Marlene also made me gnaw off the tips of all my fingernails while watching, and then have to take a walk afterwards in an attempt to shift all that tension lingering against my skin like a cool, menacing vapour.

Early one morning, a girl runs away from a white farmhouse full of sleeping bodies. She darts into a gap in the woods, a gap that hangs waiting for the next scene, one beat too long. From a payphone in a small nameless town, she calls her sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), her voice hesitant and cracking, head down low. She doesn’t know where she is exactly. Can Lucy come and pick her up?

Lucy (Sarah Paulson) takes her to the lakeside house in Connecticut where she and her architect husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) are spending the summer. It’s a huge place, baffling Martha – just for the two of you? she asks, as she and her sister face one another in the gigantic kitchen. Yes, says Lucy, mildly defensive and with a hint of a patronising tone. Martha remains tight lipped, incredulous.

It’s hard not to explain the plot, which quietly and ambiguously unravels at its own pace, in terms of the contrasts of place and house interiors. The element linking these two very different places is the barely-hinged Martha herself. She has run from one life into an utterly different world, and the contrast between the lingering, slowly-shot landscape of green pastures and leaning, plain farm buildings, and the riches of the large summer house and its smoothly rippling lake make this starkly clear. Worldviews manifest in the choice of dwelling and decoration. Selfhood defined by the choice, or lack of choice, of dress.

Jolts into flashback let us see all that Martha does not tell her sister: Life at the farmhouse from which she has run, we become immediately aware, was not idyllic. The men of the farm all eat first, and only after they file out from the dining room, are the women allowed access. The women share all their sweet farm dresses in rotation, keeping them hanging together in a spare room. The leader of the group, Patrick (John Hawkes), is an intense, charming wire of a man. He is the one who says to Martha, ‘You look like a Marcy May,’ sings for the group a song called ‘Marcy’s song,’ and from then on, that is what she is called. We see fairly quickly that the group at the farmhouse is nothing more than a cult, but what was it that brought Martha into that awareness, and what made her decide to leave?

I don’t want to give too much away about the plot. Unlike Stoker, where the turn of the story is not so much key as is the sense of character, Martha Marcy May Marlene depends on suspense - on waiting to see what exactly it is that Martha did, or had done to her, which has made her into the wreck we meet at the beginning of the film. We know more is coming. We will not know what it is until the film chooses to show Martha remembering it, to show how abuse builds up over time, how an abuser takes advantage of a sense of loss or need in his victim or victims, giving and giving, providing shelter, songs, companionship, before calling in the ‘loved ones’ debt to him, whenever, and however often he chooses. Another thing the film asks of us – will Martha really be able to run from what has happened?

Elizabeth Olsen is incredible in the central role, full of tensions and small outburst, sullen and swamped in fear and vulnerability and self-righteousness, without ever feeling theatrical. Not that there’s anything wrong with the unreal – it’s just that in a quiet film, an unquiet performance, such as the one Olsen delivers, is quite a risk. My hat off too to Steve Durkin, who both wrote and directed a piece with an unquiet girl, a barely-contained tornado, at its centre.

How often it seems that the scripts for women in many mainstream films tend to forefront likeability (this discussion, endlessly, everywhere, in literature too). The typical heroine is hurt, but never shrill. Devoted to an ideal, a principle. Fights back. Is a tough, empowered character. Saves herself, has revenge. How by the end of the movie, she will stand over the bad guy, or bad group, or bad situation, often with a look of defiance, however worn out she is, however drenched in blood. Or she might do this in a neat outfit, the victory a social one. What does this mean in actuality – what’s so wrong with the overabundance of likeable, successful female characters? Don’t I want a role model?

Well, sure. I want to think, yes. I could do that. By proxy, become the hero. Or the victorious villain. But not always. Sometimes this presentation of the indefatigable heroine serves to minimise pain – to trivialise it, to allow that little voice in to say, if she could do it, why can’t you? What’s wrong with you? Why are you so sensitive? Why are you still stuck in act three? Act four’s already here, pick yourself up and kick some ass already. A muttering which comes from the outside, but can invade our inner monologues as well.

For another thing, this charted path of suffering-defeat-self-discovery-rise towards success is just not how life is, a lot of the time. There is no map of progression, no time limit on illness or disability. And it’s quite often the case that people struggling with mental health problems or having just come out of an abusive situation AREN’T likeable. Aren’t winsome. At all. And that’s fine. As has been mentioned elsewhere anywhere women are speaking for each other, there is no obligation on anyone to be perfect at all times. Sometimes you are suffering from delusions, or from an eating or anxiety disorder and you can’t just pull yourself out of that to formulate a nice front. Down beneath your surfaces (whatever they are doing) your self might be in turmoil, or exhausted past its limits. You need care, to learn techniques, to find the right and wrong medications for you, in short, time – time with no restrictions on it. Time with no judgements on it.

What I like about this film is its sense of time. Time is slow. Recovery isn’t even on the agenda at first. Lucy and Ted expect it, even demand it, but they have only a dim awareness of what’s happening, and it takes time to even begin to understand a person from whom you’ve been estranged, or who doesn’t yet want to acknowledge they need help, exactly. We see their pain, recrimination, indignation, horror, confusion, the complexities of loving someone in distress, a girl who hasn’t been a part of their life for a long time, and who may be suffering this way because at some point in the past, Lucy were not there for her, because she didn’t know how to be. At one point, Martha says to Lucy, who is trying for a baby: ‘You’ll make a horrible mother.’ Here is the low point - of cruelty, acid oozing out of a wound. Lucy’s job as elder sister, after their mother died, was, at least in part, to look after Martha, and she has failed. Because failure is possible. There’s no quick-witted comeback. No sweeping forgiveness. All they can do is move forward, carrying this burden. Those lines in Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay, on memory:

You remember too much,

my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,   

Where can I put it down?

We don’t know if Martha is going to be alright. Neither do Lucy or Ted. By the end what do we know? No woman is born to be a perfect mother, perfect sister. No gesture out of kindness is guaranteed to heal. Forgiveness isn’t something you can flick on like a switch. Pain is ugly, and it doesn’t get put aside when the next thing and the next come on, demanding your attention. And that events in life remembered become part of the landscape, part of the body, part of the fabric of your life, altering and animating it all in painful, confusing ways. If all this sounds too grim, this film also tells us that the girl is here, is living, and that time with or without our knowing is steady moving onwards, that nothing is over, yet.

Review by Helen McClory.

This dreamy film opens with a slow shot of fields, a sprig of pinkish flowers growing in the young green corn, and a girl, giving a voice-over, speaking of herself –

My ears hear what others cannot hear; small faraway things people cannot normally see are visible to me. These senses are the fruits of a lifetime of longing, longing to be rescued, to be completed. Just as the skirt needs the wind to billow, I’m not formed by things that are of myself alone. I wear my father’s belt tied around my mother’s blouse, and shoes which are from my uncle. This is me. Just as a flower does not choose its color, we are not responsible for what we have come to be. Only once you realize this do you become free, and to become adult is to become free.

Oh, the viewer thinks, it’s a coming-of-age story, a story of family connections, a little bland perhaps, in its details of inheritance, clothes, some vague romanticised thoughts of the upsides of acute loneliness. A bit hipster-side of Tumblr, which is quite alright if you’re in the mood for soft-focus melancholy (which I generally am). But then, a second thought – doesn’t everything feel ever so slightly – off? It’s hidden in that slowness, in the hints of glee on the girl’s face in the sun. Stoker, in fact, is a coming-of-age story, but one that explores adolescent potential outside of the normal positive associations. A coming-to-know the murky depths of the self and how much of that energy, violence, lies under a still surface. Stoker is as much a story of a girl’s coming-of-age as it is about a family rent by secrets, and shuddering with the power of unspoken currents. In the slow-ramping of revelations it performs like a thriller, and, I’d argue, one of the best horror stories of girlhood in recent years. The very name Stoker invoking a certain Bram Stoker – and nudged from there into Dracula territory, it’s not hard to smell something spoiling in the blood.

It’s India Stoker’s eighteenth birthday, and her father, who was her best friend and her hunting companion, has just died in a violent and inexplicable car crash. India (Mia Wasikowska) is set adrift in her sprawling family estate, running across the overgrown lawn, popping blisters, climbing trees in her floaty nightgown. She hides under a shawl of dark hair, freezing under touch and questions alike, and hiding in the kitchen from the suave crowd gathered to express sympathies. She is all raw nerve and eye, which infuriates her mother (Nicole Kidman), who it is clear, has long been very much herself; icy, glamourous, troubled, prone to sleeping like a dead woman, curled and limp, animated only by other people.

At the funeral, a mysterious figure appears, seen only by India. This man is India’s uncle Charlie (Mathew Goode), her late father’s much younger, debonair brother, mysteriously absent from all mention before this point in the Stoker household. I hadn’t seen Mathew Goode in anything else but in this he was absolutely immense: I mean that he filled the screen, physically not imposing so much as deliberately poised in his every moment, with eyes that seemed to glow with unhinged charisma. It’s no surprise that India is immediately drawn and repulsed by him and his attempts to insinuate himself into the brittle lives of the two women – Uncle Charlie is worldly, but otherworldly; well-dressed and debonair but subtly restraining himself from – something. India’s mother is very much taken in, despite her awareness of his alienness. It transmits to her a frisson, a catching sight as if through glass of her younger, vanished life with his brother, her husband.

“Who are you?” she asks flirtatiously, as Uncle Charlie steps into the kitchen to replace the missing housekeeper (last seen by India talking to her uncle in an outbuilding, in harsh, hushed tones), as he recommends an older red wine as sophisticated and palatable over a more tannin-harsh younger one. Red wine as blood, as mother and daughter. This is a film of tastes and the fall of light – sunlight drenching huge rooms, or glowing neon signs turning a white dress red. India eats everything on her plate, as Uncle Charlie points out. Charlie, himself, does not eat a single bite.

But what is the significance of India’s hunger? Her descent into the underbelly of the house (her flicking of the lightshade, deliberately throwing the shadows down a long, webbed corridor) to get the ice cream she is ordered to bring back upstairs? Be patient, for this is a film that takes its time to roll out the full weight, and in the meanwhile we get all these gorgeous moments, darkness, gossamer and sunlight. All these slow moments are not for nothing – they allow time for revelation. For Uncle Charlie singling out his prey, testing her limits. But also for the viewer, and India herself to find out exactly what sort of a girl she is. Wasikowska’s performance is riskily slight and mute. She wanders the world like an Emily Bronte, imprisoned by the bars of her life, and her slithery, violent heart beating behind a passive moony face. She watches. Soon an aunt, who invites herself to the table and attempts to warn India’s mother that Uncle Charlie is not, as he claims, the world-traveller, will be rebuffed.  The stalking and murder of this aunt by Charlie is one of the most chilling things I have seen in a long while, drawn out and patterned with bad motel lighting and heavy-handed side shots of animal documentaries (just in case the viewer had decided the aunt was safe after all). The aunt conceals herself, but there is no hiding from any movie monster once logic has dictated you must go. Auntie has lost her mobile, and tries to get to a payphone to call India and tell her – but we don’t get to hear what she tries to tell India. Uncle Charlie, having found the woman by an innate genius for prey, stands in the bright light in the motel car-park, almost childlike in his rebuking questioning, before he reaches to remove his belt…

India finds a body in the chest freezer after she scoops herself some of that chocolate and vanilla her uncle knows she likes.  She pushes aside ice-burned meat, and there’s the face, right there. She doesn’t freak out, doesn’t tell another soul. If I had to describe Stoker in one word it would be ‘gorgeous’; not for nothing does it have at the root the sense of ‘gore’, the queasy sense of rapture. I’m thinking of one scene in particular, which might all be in the mind of the girl – India is playing the piano, when Uncle Charlie walks up and starts pressing on the keys. Soon he sits himself on the same chair and they play a duet together. India’s responses invoke something like luminous, sensual unease - her intakes of breath, her glances and the push of her feet as he suddenly puts his arm around her in order to reach the ivory. India shudders with discomfort and delight, and this viewer for one is forced to set herself outside of the frame, to say, these are actors, and not actual blood relatives. The first time I watched this film, I found I had to do so behind a cushion, emitting involuntary squeaks of ‘nooo’ and ‘yeeechh.’ Beautiful, gorgeous, rotten to the core.  If you have seen Park’s previous work, especially the iconic Old Boy, you will be familiar with his brilliant ability to summon tension, to twist a family dynamic until it throws off sparks and burns the world down. But this film would not work half as well as it does without a grand monster – or two – at its centre.

Mathew Goode might be the subtlest incarnation of Dracula – it’s all in those mesmerising eyes – but his Charlie is also a madman. And as you guessed, not the only terrible creature here. As India explores her father’s office with the key her uncle slyly gifted her, she discovers what her father had been keeping from her, eighteen years worth of letters from Charlie, to his beloved niece, speaking of their inherent connection, greeting her from places around the world. But the stamp on the back of every envelope gives him away; he was incarcerated for years, mostly voluntarily, at an institute for the criminally insane, for the murder of his toddler brother when he was very young. He tells her all of this, he wants her to know. That he killed her father, in one of the most visceral moments of the film, bashing his head in with a rock, because the man was trying to prevent Charlie from coming back to the estate, from meeting with beloved India. Perhaps the father knew as much as Charlie somehow psychically sensed (or transmitted, your choice) what the viewer has come to see – that there is something latent in India, in the blood.  Who are you? asks her mother, as things come to a head. That pale daughter, hardly anything at all. A waif. But capable of rejecting blood. By means of the gun she has always known how to use. Of knowing herself, the depths beyond the threshold beyond the lock that Charlie helped her open. The answer to who she is was always in those pink flowers we saw so dreamily at the beginning.

The flowers that did not choose to be pink. That India chose to make that way, with a bright arterial spray.

Review by Helen McClory.

Imagine prose with a kind of precision haze to it. Opaque and crisp at once. A breath of rich perfumed air hanging over a city built and long inhabited only by women. Or else imagine a spell, an incantation, that goes through numerous iterations and leaves the listener rapt, but gives no answers as to what was being powered through enchantment – only the certainty that enchantment is occurring. I am being vague, I know - but it is hard to speak of Walsh’s collection of short stories without grappling with the delightful contradictions wrought by each story. And, looking back, I’ve used images traditionally associated with women to describe her work – perfume, mysteriousness, a hint at witchery. I hope in doing so I am not doing the work down – so often women’s writing is made smaller by such similes – but to attest to its feminine qualities – that is, its dry, precise, enchanting, recalcitrant focus on experiences of women.

The first story of the collection, ‘Let it be Autumn,’ is a litany of a piece, rhythmic and melancholy:

LET IT BE Autumn

Let it be another town. Let the houses be lowrise, undistinguished, a mix of old and new. Let the doctor’s surgery in a terraced sidestreet be new sandbrick with a porthole window and double doors, and thick brightly-coloured metal bars at waist height to steady the entering infirm.

Let the branches of chain stores in the high street be too small to carry the full range. Let their sales be undermined by charity shops selling just as good as new. Let there be other shops stocking nothing useful: handicrafts; overpriced children’s clothes; holidays on window cards, faded; homemade homewares. Let these shops be unvisited and kept by old women still peering from doorways expecting their ideal customer. Let fashion be something heard of somewhere else.

The opening, inspired by an Emily Dickenson poem, is kin to poetry, in its chiming repetition, settling on a landscape that a kinder-hearted Larkin would have described. With this, and many of Walsh’s stories, there is an intense observation going on, either by a character or a presumed but unnamed indirect character (as in ‘Let it be Autumn’).  Story, too, emerges slowly, often through a stacking of detail, a catalogue of failures, distraction, indecision, focussing too much on the wrong thing, the immediate thing, in order to look indirectly at what hurts, or define, by negative spacing, what is achingly absent.

In one of my favourite stories in the collection ‘Femme Maison,’ there is an absence, or even abscess, at the heart of the house – a clever title that holds within it a feminine house, a female space, a space that expresses a particular identity, and expresses the limits and failings of the woman within:

It’s question of systems. go upstairs and you’ll notice a tea towel that should be in the kitchen. Bring it down and there are the books that should be by your bed. How did they change places? Why didn’t you notice the books before you went upstairs for the tea towel? Then you could have taken them up and put them by the bed and picked up the tea towel and taken it down. Except it wasn’t the tea towel you went to look for, was it? It was something else, but exactly what you can’t remember.

Sewing machine needles.

You should have established some kind of process.

Thereis a process to the day. You eat at established times though it’s such a bother to make. Always afterwards you find a wrapper without a name snaking across the kitchen surface. What is it from? If it is vacant, why was it not cleared? How did you miss it? On tables small things migrate according to the season: the seals from plastic milk cartons, beer bottle lids (though it was He who drank beer whereas you drink wine). How did they get there? Why were they not removed? There must be a way to get rid of them.

We have a ‘He’ – capitalised, as if godlike - who is not there any longer. We have clutter and misplacement, process that has to fight against the chaos of loss, deliberate or otherwise. This story reminds me, even though it has a human character to populate it, of ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ by Ray Bradbury. If you haven’t read it, it’s a post-nuclear apocalypse story, centred upon a mechanised house still trying to feed and comfort owners who are now nothing but scorch marks on the walls outside, as the house itself slowly loses control and winds down into the silence. A strange comparison, perhaps, yet I keep coming back to it in my mind. Where the woman becomes machine-like without being numb – operating on a circular track, trying to complete tasks that don’t need doing, but are somehow, mournfully essential.

This pattern of performance is repeated in its strangest iteration in the haunting ‘Hauptbahnhof.’

I know what you are thinking.

But it is possible to sleep on the station.

If you don’t look like a tramp, if you change your clothes with reasonable regularity, above all if you look like you are waiting for someone.

I have perfected the waiting look.

After all, even if I am no longer sure whether I am waiting, or whether I only wish to appear to be waiting, it is my responsibility not to cause a ‘situation’, an incident. It is my responsibility to protect the people who pass through the station from the sight of a woman alone who is not waiting for anyone. Although, of course, I am.

And there is no better place to wait than the Hauptbahnhof. It is large enough for me to change platforms regularly. It is clean.

As matter-of-fact as can be, a woman waits, or merely exists, at a train station in Berlin, the site of where she was to meet ‘you’, and instead was met by no one, and found the ‘you’ to be beyond contact. Undiscouraged, she stays, waits, keeping up an appearance of solidity by visiting the train station’s hair salon and trying on new makeup in the chemist’s, as well as learning German, reading the ‘signs’ around her, like a priestess officiating her rites. Not lonely, somewhere out beyond loneliness. Cool, still, but – and here I pause. Here I look for the word that escapes. The charm of the stories of Fractals is the sense of the gulf, that each story contains a step out into the void, but that the character about to make the step, or about to stand at it forever, is woman and a human, however little they have of names or reason or place. This narrow ledge allows sufficient dwelling place; a marginal, liminal existence, but heightened too. An edge is always sharp, precisely marked, and it is where many women have made or been forced to make a home.

In case you don’t know, Joanna Walsh is spearheading a project to draw attention to women writers – she is an artist as well as a writer, and has created a series of bookmarks, illustrated with prominent novelists and with a long list on each of women you can go out there to read.

If you need any further reasons to buy Fractals I’d nudge you towards this: towards the bright blue cover with its white delineating stars. I’d urge you to place it in your handbag, for when you are alone in the city, feeling out the way over your shadow across the plaza.

Review by Helen McClory.

It’s the end of the run here—the final recap of Supernatural. I’ve been off lost in the Canadian Rockies – even staying at one point in a cabin in the woods in British Columbia without road access, electricity or running water, which probably was the premise of a Supernatural opening scene at least once. But I’m back, and I’m here to talk to you about love. Filial love, fiery angelic god-granted love, fated love, unspoken like-a-brother-to-me love, blind date desperate-for-connection love, strapped-to-a-chair-wailing-you-deserve-to-be-loved love. And to recap the last episode in series eight, ‘Sacrifice.’

This episode is about what it means to say ‘love’ in conjunction with ‘sacrifice’ and a whole other mess of things, like bodies and dictates and rituals and brutality and trust, how we trust and have that trust turn out to be misplaced. And how love is always that sort of sacrifice, of the self’s self-containment, of the body’s pretend-impermeable boundaries, in favour of something else, something more complicated and potently, potentially, always greater than each of us.

O LOVES, SPOILERS:

Castiel and the schlubby scribe of God’s word Metatron are building a spell together. One that will seal shut the doors of heaven, and keep pesky angels from interfering with mortals for a good long time. Castiel’s off acquiring a bow of a Cupid, while Sam, inescapably aligned with the demonic as he is, prepares to complete the last demon tablet trial in order to seal the gates of Hell with all of Hades’ wicked little monkeys inside. Nice parallels here. For this, he needs to ‘cure a demon’. And the suavest, most nefarious and neatly-suited demon of them all is Crowley.

What cures a demon? What does that even mean, first off? To cure a puff of black or red smoke – Crowley, once king of the crossroads, is oxblood red when out of his human host – It seems a herculean task, that is, totally doable within an accommodating narrative structure. But first of all, Crowley needs to be at his absolute worst. And he is, within the first few minutes luring lonely Sherriff Mills on a blind date, bonding with her, then holding her ability to breathe ransom in order to get Dean and Sam to stop with their Hell-closure plans. Surprisingly, they acquiesce, and will exchange their demon tablet which Kevin previously buried for safe keeping for the angel tablet. It’s good they can all agree that the holy beings of light are the real enemies here. Of course, it’s all a Winchester Brothers scam, one of the usual wonky kind that may or may not come off – and this time does.  Crowley, cuffed.

On the heavenly project, Castiel and Metatron run into a bit of a speed bump with Cupid when Metatron is forced to depart with the season’s supposed baddie, Naomi the angel of paperwork and torture.

Meanwhile, Sam and Dean have lugged Crowley to a suitably atmospheric ruined church where he can be purified with Sam’s blood. Yes, the same veins that were once tainted with demonic blood can now be used to save a demon. The idea of forgiveness is at the heart of this – Sam is clean, has been for years. Even so, he has to confess his sins, whispering them to the ever-absent God, before he can go about giving jabs of blood to Crowley.

Castiel shows up to take Dean out to a bar – ostensibly to help capture the cupid, but who is anyone kidding with this? With an important task at hand, no one has to speak of their feelings – they have to keep their eyes peeled, after all, who knows who the victims of love are going to be? So feelings come out in the spaces between the TV and the foaming beer. Look, it’s not a heterosexual couple, it’s the two manly guys, a bartender and a customer who just look like they’ve been friends for years. Huh. And for Dean and Castiel, love is subtext, love is merely one part of a spell – time to get cupid to hand over her bow. She looks at them, no problem, take it. It’s the smallness of the bow that’s really significant. A tiny mark on the palm of her hand, which passes love on with gentle contact – as with the men in the bar – and presumably, has to be gouged out of her vessel’s flesh with an angel blade. A metaphor, yes?

Sam is busy being dutiful and drawing his blood to put into the king of Hell. Wily Crowley bites him, then uses his blood to call for help, but no love there from his minions, it’s his not-at-all-friend Abbadon. There’s a nice bit of snarling, then she’s up in flames (just despatched like that – though SPOILERS for CHEERS she will return next season).

AND THEN perhaps my favourite moment from the entirety of Supernatural happens. Crowley starts to regain his humanity.

He’s had his body pumped with human blood, but we get the sense at least it’s not blood alone that’s doing it. Love don’t end with blood. It’s in Sam’s patience, his loyalty to humanity in carrying out this task – as we’ve seen in other episodes, a task which takes a terrible physical toll. He’s likely unfixable; going to subsume himself for the sake of the task. Crowley, though? He’s always seemed to like Sam more, to banter with him, call him silly teasing names. Now he’s bound to the boy by strange God-given magic, and, as he starts to try to joke more, to cover his discomfort, to gain some kind of upper hand – he can’t. He starts off quoting from Girls and winds up yelling I deserve to be loved at his confused tormentor. And then he asks the ultimate question, how can he begin to be forgiven for everything he’s done, as a demon?

Forgiveness of a demon who has led souls down to Hell for centuries. That’s radical. But in phrasing the question, we hear the beginnings of it being answered. It doesn’t matter at this stage whether the answer is yes or no. It marks instead the beginning of atonement. And maybe I’m too soft, but it seems to me, if you can ask that brave, open, vulnerable question, how can I be forgiven, surely the answer cannot be a stone-built you can’t.

After all, Sam has been forgiven. That’s former blood-drinking Lucifer-freeing demon-shagging Sam (as Dean reminds him in this episode before his confession). If you’re human, there is hope for redemption. Kind of a scary thought, really, in the immensity of what it means.  What’s the worse thing you’ve ever done? No, really. You don’t have to say to anyone but yourself. Maybe you didn’t tell someone what they needed you to. That’s Sam’s thought, anyway. When Dean returns, Sam’ll tear up and let his big brother know that everything he confessed was connected to how he’d let his brother down.

Ah, good old angsty bottle-your-feelings-til-they-can’t-be-bottled-no-more Winchester love.

Still more love twinned round the plot twists: Castiel has his showdown with Naomi, who, as it turns out, was a bad person but maybe, just maybe not the most deceptive. That award goes to Metatron, scribe of God, shruggy little schemer. He’s not trying to seal up the gates of Heaven, Naomi insists. Woops, what was it then? Castiel goes up to sort this out. And Metatron pins him, slices his blue-white Grace right from out his throat. The Grace is the syrupy ether which makes Castiel angelic. Without it, he is human. Metatron exhorts his surprised dupe to live as a human, fall in love, get married, have babies, die, and say hello again when they meet again in heaven.

In this episode, even theft comes with the message, go love.

Where’s our angel, wonder the boys, as they prep Crowley for the last dose of blood, the one that will return him to his full humanity – whatever that might mean. A question that after all will not be answered. Dean can’t let Sam complete his trial, not after the teary confession of confessions. He can’t let his little brother sacrifice himself for what seems like only him.  Even if it means demons (many of which they themselves let out in an earlier season) will walk the earth forever. And Crowley won’t get all the way along to being a real little boy. And to say nothing of all those souls still riding the flumes down to Hell after they die. Who forgives them? Was this the biggest cruelty committed for the sake of one person’s life in the entire show? Yes probably. And given the flexibility of death when it comes to the Winchesters, kind of hard to sympathise with. But sometimes love is blind.

Sometimes duty is too. Why did Metatron dupe the growly-voiced beloved angel of the lord Castiel and then steal his Grace? Why, to expel all the angels from heaven. To start over with a clean slate. Hey, angels, Metatron is saying. It’s not me, it’s you. Time for a long fall to earth.

Time for the series to end. Sam, collapsed in pain, though saved. Cradled by his big sappy brother. Castiel, lost, wet-eyed, alone, human. And in the sky the sight of thousands of angels falling, like comets, like stars burning out in the velvety blue. Ah, I nearly yelp in my chair at the magnificence. The epic inhuman arcing, shattering, above the tiny, suffering, feeling bodies of men.

And what happens now? Now that desire for the mechanisms of forgiveness have been whispered. Love affirmed. Humanity – the ability, after all, to love – forced upon one and a half entities.

Now that my recaps are over.

What happens?

The show runs on. Series nine has started. A black car dotted with dew speeds down a black highway. Lights comb against the interior. America outside, full of lost souls, lost and shimmering presences. It’s only a TV show, it’s not always right, not always as brilliant as it should be, but it’s given us all these questions. It’s given us ways to think, grasp, shift into kindness despite all the door-kicking and gore. It’s given us a vision of some times of masculinity. Outdoors, hunting. Indoors, poking through old books, stirring soup. It’s given us men being in love and talking only in stares and glimpses, or bursts of emotion. It’s given us cheese, discomfort, fear, eye-rolls, admiration. It’s given us a landscape that’s a narrative in itself. It’s given us the place beyond the real. The supernatural. That’s not a bad amount, all told.

Review by Helen McClory.

Season Seven! Full of all sorts of monstrous activity, geo-political underhandedness, betrayal and those ever present, ever wonderful angsty dudebro looks.

It’s so chock full of uneven elements that it’s hard to pick a single representative episode. I don’t mean this in a negative way – though season seven is not my favourite, who can fault it when the biggest bad is a GOP/Romney stand-in?

It is what it is, a season in which nearly nothing nor nobody can be trusted for long. So I just picked the episode that’s one of the most fun; one that centres a wonderful aspect of Supernatural– the general wonky excellence of its one-shot side characters.

I SEE SPOILERS IN YOUR FUTURE…

Sam and Dean haven’t been getting on too well since Dean killed Sam’s teenage crush/monster friend Amy Pond (yes.) after Sam had promised she wouldn’t kill again. Dean, judgy over his little brother’s recent Hell-related mental instability got stabby, lied about it, only for Sam to find out and understandably flounce off in disgust. That Sam had been seeing Lucifer and hallucinating wildly is not a great excuse for murder, but there you are. When you’ve been going at one job long enough, you probably get used to ticking the boxes without reading as closely as you should. It’s a thorny enough dilemma though, given she was in fact murdering (bad) people for sustenance for her child. But add Dean’s lies to the situation and suddenly everyone is in a murky forest dark and deep – wearisome and recriminatory with no easy outs.

Chance brings the brothers Winchester together in Lily Vale, a town of psychics, new age mystics and other assorted individuals of varying degrees of actual ability. Disclaimer – I know that this place has some real connections in the US. I know, too, that Supernatural completely ignores the ‘true’ story of Lily Vale. But I don’t think that impedes enjoyment. Fiction about psychics is not something I’m particularly invested in seeing told in an authentic, historically sensitive way. Onwards!

So, someone is killing the cranks, and in suspiciously not-natural ways. The first to go is a medium, killed by animated flying planchette to the throat. Not sure of what a planchette is? It’s that little sorta heart-shaped piece of wood used in Ouija boards and the like. I also think Planchette would make a great character name for the heroine of a spooky YA novel. Feel free to break that out for your next story set in the Deep South.

Sam and Dean bump into each other in a local café –Dean gruffly sitting himself down and re-asserting himself into his brother’s life again after a week and a half of separation. We know, of course, the brothers are going to make up, but until then, it’s going to be heavy. But, not entirely. In perfect balance to the justified discomfort, we have the residents of Lily Vale. First, the waiter of the café – a smiling man who promises a free affirmation with each order. To Dean, on setting down his food, the waiter says: “You are a virile manifestation of the divine,” thus delivering one of my favourite lines of the entire Supernatural series.  Dean, not one to take a compliment, bizarrely, cringingly poetic or otherwise, huffs at this. Where would we be without the waiter, the first to tilt our Winchesters off their stubborn sanctimonious perches? Next we have a woman who mistakes the two for their phoney counterparts, who made the news a few weeks before by going on an epic killing spree across the US (um, easy mistake, given those two were monster-clones deliberately trying to get Sam and Dean in trouble) – no, no, that wasn’t us, the boys say. Get that all the time. The woman says of course, because she can tell by their energies they are both peaceful. Nikolai the spoon-bender comes up to let her know these men are the Feds. At least he’s on sort of the right track? Then he has to go and break Sam’s coffee spoon – from a distance. How rude.

Elsewhere, another psychic – Camile, along with her friend Melanie (granddaughter of one of the murdered), as down-to-earth after hours as the others have been quirktastic - has a vision of her own death. Dean and Sam move in to help, and find out that a ghost appeared in the psychic’s home and was caught on security cam. The ghost of a woman who looks suspiciously like Kate Fox, one of the two famous psychics, the Fox sisters. To the museum for further research!

My next favourite side-character appears – the museum curator. What a marvellous fellow. Shades of the bartender in The Shining, but much nicer. He sees Sam and Dean inspecting the photographs on the wall of a corridor, looking at the famous psychics of the town. He points to a picture of two brothers and says they got on much better than the Fox sisters. This being, of course, because they were not siblings at all but trying to conceal their ‘alternative lifestyle.’ A sly nod to the audience, to the whole Wincest phenomenon with fans online. They are not brothers, they are actors. So. Step gingerly away from that meta-joke. Just as Dean is about to go, the curator grabs him by the arm – he passes on a message from one ‘Ellen’ who is in the afterlife. She’s concerned how much he is hurting, and urges him to tell someone or else she’ll ‘kick his ass from beyond.’

Even in a town of fakery, there are nudges at the boundaries.

This triggers more grumblings between the brothers – but at least they are talking - then it’s off to get bad Kate Fox dug up, salted and burned. Job done. No of course not. One Fox sister gone and one Fox sister remains. It turns out Kate was trying to warn everyone but was just a terrible communicator. She was only trying to help. Our lesson from this is – perhaps she should have tried that with her sister? Or else worked out that giving people a premonition of their own death tends to stop them making the most rational choices available to them. At night, bad sister Margaret kills Camille despite Melanie’s attempts to help. Sam and Dean rush back too late of course, then attempt to track down a possible link to Margaret. An emporium store owner – another brilliant side character, insouciant as he is suspicious – misdirects him to a building across town where a Lamaze class is taking place.  Dean and Melanie flail at Bad Sister, while Sam goes to confront the store owner and get him to take off whatever binding spell he’s using on the ghost to do his jealous bidding. Showdowns all over the place!

It turns out that Jimmy the store owner hasn’t been using a binding spell at all – he and the ghost are just working together to strike down the charlatans who are more successful at the customer service side of the industry. Jimmy has real powers – and an uncomfortably close relationship with the dead woman. Once Sam gets past Jimmy, he finds Bad Sister’s bones in his bed. Salted and burned just in time to save Dean and Melanie.

The episode ends on a good note. Melanie saved, grateful, delivering a message that any guilt for Camille’s death is not on him. Modest resolution between the brothers – Sam admitting that perhaps Dean was right to kill the monster, Dean admitting it was wrong of him to lie so much. It’s a tough, adult moment. No choice is totally clear of blame, but there, for a moment, is forgiveness.  So I suppose this episode is unusual in that regard – it’s both a comic jaunt and a tying of knots. Beyond that it also speaks to how complex sibling relationships can be.

There are bound to be moments of toxicity, jealousy in any relationship. We never choose our brothers, our sisters. They are just there, always, and sometimes we don’t realise how sometimes just being there is not enough. Sometimes sisters get bitter across the barrier between the living and the dead and start dating shop owners and brutally murdering people, all because in life one sis got all the attention (and perhaps did not know how to tell the other how much, aside from that, she was loved).  Sometimes one brother doesn’t speak. Or says the wrong things because they’re tired and too much shit is going on in their lives. It’s hard to be truthful when you don’t tell yourself the truth. It’s hard to be kind when all you see are enemies and things to run from, the dark shadows you cast yourself.  Likewise, it can be hard to know what to say to someone who is nothing like you, or too much like you. Clarity comes from distance, perhaps. The Winchesters will never be parted, and that too is part of their problem.

But here we see there can be an end to it. It’s tough, but talking can get it out. Straighten your mind. If you don’t tell anyone it hurts, it’ll never stop, right? Let’s hope it continues. Angst is all well and good, but sometimes a little forgiveness is a smidge of balm, needful while - like Dean’s soul, like Sam’s mind – something’s still got to be healing.

Review by Helen McClory.