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Session 5: Devilish Movies
Chair: Liesbet Depauw

Monstrous and Murderous Maternity in Contemporary Japanese Horror: Kurosawa’s Sweet Home (Suito Homu, Japan: 1989)
Colette Balmain
Department of Arts and Media, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, United Kingdom

The term ryôsaikenbo, which means a “good wife and wise mother” was often used in relation to women in the past. It is not used so much today, but it remains an important unconscious concept among the Japanese. (Davies and Ikeno 2002: 179)
While the concept of the “good wife” belongs to the Edo period in Japanese history (1683-1867), it was during the Meiji period (1868-1912) that being a “wise mother” responsible for the education of children became part of the duties of woman. Hence the phrase ryôsaikenbo, which translates as “good wife and wise mother”, which was used to define woman’s responsibilities in the household, and by association, wider society and the ie system. Representations of women in Japanese horror cinema post World War 2 and the Allied Occupation (and enforced democratisation) work within this construction of the dutiful woman and wife. Take for example, the self-sacrificing figure of Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka) in Tales of Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, Kenji Mizoguchi: 1953). The popularity of the mother film, hahamono, with its suffering and sacrificing central female protagonist as in A Japanese Tragedy (Nippon no Higeki, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1953), constructs the mother ‘as a kind of scapegoat, for nobody’s fate could possibly be worse than hers.’ (Buruma, 1984: 25). This can be seen in contemporary Japanese film and horror cinema, perhaps nowhere more profoundly expressed than in Nakata’s Dark Water (Honogurai mizu no soko kara, 2002) in which the mother in the present, Yoshimi Matsubara (Hitomi Kuroki), dies in order to take care of the neglected child from the past, even though by doing so she abandons her own child.
In this paper, I consider another type of mother film - the homicidal hahamono - using Kurosawa’s haunted house mystery, Sweet Home, as a case study. This mother is the epitome of monstrosity, as she murders children and throws them into a furnace to burn. And yet at the same time, the monstrosity of these actions is undercut by her devotion to her own dead infant, and her belief that these children will join her child in the afterlife so that it will not be lonely. This can, I argue, be understood by reference to Japanese cultural and religious myths around motherhood, in which the demonic child-eating mother, and Buddhist deity, Kariteimo, derived from the Indian Hariti, is transformed into the guardian of children, through the loss of her own child. In Sweet Home, the Medusa like mythic mother may well be monstrous but she is somehow rendered a sympathetic figure through her suffering.  I suggest that the monstrous figure of the mother in Japanese horror cinema should not be simply dismissed as an example of patriarchal anxiety over female sexuality (the monstrous-feminine, Creed: 1992), but needs to be understood in terms of a long religious history of the (over)valorisation of the mother in Japan.

Human Monstrosity: Rape, Ambiguity, and Performance in Rosemary’s Baby
Lucy Fife
Department of Film, Theatre & Television, University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom

The monstrous in Rosemary’s Baby is embodied in both the real and the supernatural. The film’s narrative hinges on a central hesitation between the delusions of a pregnant woman and the existence of Satanism, yet I would argue that despite the inherent ambiguity of the plot, Rosemary’s husband Guy (John Cassavetes) represents the monstrous through both explanations. The positioning of him as the monster is crucially demonstrated by Rosemary’s rape. The film presents this as a nightmare where the semi-conscious Rosemary (Mia Farrow) is surrounded by a coven, approached by her naked husband who transforms into the devil and then rapes her. The next morning her husband claims he had sex with her unconscious body so as not to miss optimum conception. In this paper I would like to suggest that whether Guy exchanges Rosemary’s body to incubate the antichrist or not, the rape is still crucially performed by Guy and it is the duplicitous nature of his behaviour towards his wife and total disregard for her body that makes him monstrous.
Furthermore, I would like to argue that detailed consideration of performance is the key to understanding his monstrousness and its effect on engagement with him. Through Guy’s status as an actor, combined with the various levels of performance he generates throughout the film - in the form of rehearsals as well as impressions and ridicule - Cassavetes reveals a detailed portrayal of actorly self-absorption, phoniness and charm that emphasises the depth of his duplicity regarding his wife’s body. By scrutinising the film’s depiction of rape, during the nightmare and after it, I will demonstrate how the notion of performance in both the literal physical embodiment of a monster and as selfish husband/rapist reveals Guy’s monstrousness as supernatural and real and the difficulties this represents in our engagement with him. 

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I Live in the Weak and the Wounded: The Monster of Anderson’s Session 9
Duane Kight
Haverford College, USA

An invisible authority sits at the center of an insane asylum, its panoptic gaze disciplining the inmates, who in turn internalize that gaze and the dictates of its authority.  We could certainly be in an institution organized according to the model proposed by Michel Foucault, where social lines of power establish "normal" subjectivity as marked by its distance from the abnormal and root it in a body and mind disciplined from both without and within.  But in this case, the inmates are (at least initially) sane, not mad; the authority whose gaze they internalize is a supernatural entity intent on using its power to disrupt the binaries that comfortably define identity in the quotidian world, thereby undoing subjectivity.  Moreover, Foucault posits within his pessimistic model the possible creative subversion of the panoptic gaze on the part of those it seeks to control; no such positive subversion is possible in the bleak version of the modern condition presented in Brad Anderson's Session 9 (2001).  Anderson's film, in fact, presents its asylum as an inversion of Foucault's from the outset. At the center of this asylum's irrational structure, a monster stalks its victims to draw them into a void of obliterating madness.  This paper proposes, then, to examine how Session 9's monster deconstructs Foucault's model of post-Enlightenment institutions, destroys the conventional understanding of identity as founded at the intersection of lines of force established by comfortable polarities, and offers a critique of the horror genre (whether cinematic or literary) as founded primarily on the body through its emphasis on acoustic, rather than visual, horror.   In this, it stands apart from other examples of the genre with which it might be grouped.

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