Finding beauty in the Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The marmot’s early wake-up call. A long-form comic on sinking prisons. An ebullient character with the power to manipulate TikTok. And the reasons for a good scare.

1. I Loved “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” Before I Loved Myself

Zefyr Lisowski | Electric Lit | October 26, 2023 | 3,553 words

Apparently, this month marked the 49th anniversary of the seminal horror film Texas Chain Saw Massacre. (That odd-number-ness might explain why you haven’t been bombarded with oral histories, retrospectives, and inane listicles like “11 Times Leatherface Gave Glam-God Chic While Dismembering Hippies and We Can’t Stop Crying About It.”) I’ve never seen the movie, but that didn’t stop me from being mesmerized by Zefyr Lisowski’s essay about its outsized role in her life. Though the piece will linger with you, “haunting” is the wrong word here. Nothing about Lisowski’s prose is uncertain or vaporous; she shows the reader her scars from sentence one, and the next 3,500 words are equally stark and vulnerable. She came to Chain Saw in high school, a miserable adolescent desperate for the distraction of a watch-it-if-you-dare YouTube challenge. What she found was revelation: a brightness and beauty that helped her embrace her Southern roots, and ultimately her own self. “There are marks that are left on us, and there are marks we leave on ourselves, and I’m not sure there’s a significant difference between the two,” she writes. At multiple turns, she expresses a thought with such economy that it becomes nearly aphoristic, escaping the borders of an individual experience to become universal. That’s the mark of a great essay—whether you can stomach horror movies or not. —PR

2. The Broken Clock

David Gessner | Orion Magazine | October 11, 2023 | 1,997 words

I recently read that we’re in for an El Niño winter, which brings less precipitation and increases temperatures. I thought this was a cause for celebration—I’ll gladly take any relief from our brutal winters—until David Gessner helped me understand how global warming is altering the habits and habitats of birds and wildlife with his piece at Orion Magazine. “Consider the lowly marmot,” writes Gessner. (Up until this point, I had not considered the marmot at all other than being mildly amused at the screaming marmot meme, despite our recent move to its natural habitat.) All jokes aside, warmer winters cause marmots to emerge from hibernation earlier, before the green shoots they feed on sprout from the soil. “’The salad bar was open,’ is how Anthony Barnosky, a University of California paleoecologist, put it. ‘But now with warmer winters, they wake early and stumble out into a still snow-covered world. They starve.’” What I loved most about this piece—in addition to learning more about how habitats are stretching farther north—is how Gessner conveys that all is not doom and marmot gloom. Later hard frosts let marmots feed longer before hibernation, allowing them to put on more fat so that they’re better equipped to survive a shorter winter. “We humans have changed the basic cycles of the years. We have altered the clock of the world. . . .Noticing, it turns out, matters.” Now, if only we could turn back time. —KS

3. In Harm’s Way

Susie Cagle | The Marshall Project, in partnership with Grist | October 24, 2023

In the ’80s, a prison complex was constructed in Corcoran, a poor community in California’s Central Valley, in the dry Tulare lakebed. (Historically, Tulare Lake has been the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi.) The Department of Corrections convinced lawmakers to exempt the facility from environmental law. Fast-forward several decades, and the two prisons now house 8,000 people, the largest incarcerated population in the state. California’s very wet 2022-23 winter resulted in a record-high Sierra snowpack—great for drought conditions, but a threat to the state’s agricultural interior, bringing epic flooding to the region. In this engaging long-form comic, the first of its kind at The Marshall Project, Susie Cagle chronicles how decades-old decisions to hastily build the prisons has put thousands of incarcerated people at risk. (If you enjoy this piece, I also recommend Cagle’s illustrated Longreads feature about another rural Central Valley community, “After Water,” which offers a different angle on California’s climate and water crisis in a similarly engrossing way.) —CLR

4. Watch This Guy Work, and You’ll Finally Understand the TikTok Era

Brendan I. Koerner | Wired | October 19, 2023| 6,959 words

Brendan I. Koerner’s splendid, exuberant piece took me a long time to read. For starters, it’s nearly 7,000 words—but then there are the links. So. Many. Rabbit holes. Although not one to usually click on every link on offer, after becoming engrossed in how Ursus Magana’s company, 25/7, elaborately manipulates algorithms to link music with TikTok videos, I needed to see the wrestler videos that launched YoungX777’s “Toxic” and the teens twerking to Syko’s “#BrooklynBloodPop!” (No, I was not previously familiar with these works.) Despite the time invested, I remained fascinated throughout this deep dive into the creator economy—a mystical world that Magana can weave to his will like a magician. (Probably less mysterious for those who didn’t grow up in an era where a mobile phone’s greatest wonder was Snake.) The musicians and content creators are a diverse collection, being pulled out into the light from behind their bedroom doors, but they still pale against Magana, whose backstory demonstrates true entrepreneurship in the face of adversity. His frenetic, joyful character is what repeatedly pulled me back in from the wilds of the TikTok video vortex. —CW

5. The Evolutionary Reasons We Are Drawn to Horror Movies and Haunted Houses

Athena Aktipis, Coltan Scrivner | Scientific American | November 1, 2023 | 3,137 words

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a Halloween event. It was a big deal, with different haunted houses built in old farm buildings. As someone who jumps a mile if a piece of paper blows across my path, I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect—but my niece and her friend dragged me along. I’m not proud of how tightly I gripped the hands of those teens, or that I made them lead the way through rooms where witches and ghouls jumped out of the shadows (different teenagers, dressed up and trading their dignity for holiday money, but still terrifying). So why exactly did I do this to myself? Athena Aktipis and Coltan Scrivner know. Their absorbing essay details how this is all a part of our evolutionary past. A morbid fascination with danger is widespread amongst all animals—we inspect threats to know how to face them in the future. I was subconsciously rehearsing for when a real witch came to whisk me away. (Spoiler: she’d get me.) The modern decline in risky play has even led to increased anxiety in children. Full of such intriguing facts, Aktipis and Scrivner’s exploration into the psychology behind the scare will keep you on your toes—and inspire you to go out for some proper frights this Halloween weekend.  —CW

Audience Award

Who won the most sets of eyes this week?

The spooky season is officially upon us. If you’re looking for reading recommendations to get you in the mood, we’ve compiled some of our favorite Longreads pieces below. Consider Lesley Finn’s “Final Girl, Terrible Place,” a sharp essay on horror films, the male gaze on the female body, and the American patriarchy. Dive into Jeanna Kadlec’s commentary on the witch/mother archetype in the Maleficent films, which is part of her Deconstructing Disney series. Or try “The Corpse Rider,” Colin Dickey’s piece about Lafcadio Hearn, the famous chronicler of Japanese culture, including its ghost stories and folk tales.

We’ve also gathered editors’ picks we’ve highlighted over the past few years about haunted houses, the ghosts of history and in our own lives, famous fictional monsters, and other monsters and figures of evil on our screens—and in our bedrooms.

Doree Shafrir | Longreads | October 2018 | 12 minutes (3,123 words)

It never fully dawned on me that Halloween was really a holiday for kids until I was trying, and failing, to have a child myself. But really, it wasn’t immediately obvious to me in my 20s and much of my 30s, when Halloween seems like the ultimate party for adults — an excuse to prove, via costume, just how clever and/or how sexy you are. Then one day, bam, it hits you: you’ve outgrown sexy adult party Halloween, and all your friends are doing daytime kid-party Halloween and taking their baby pirates and toddler dinosaurs trick-or-treating while it’s still light out, and since you’ve been trying to have a baby for two-and-a-half years it’s a little much to be bombarded with all these photos on Instagram for, like, three days straight. So instead you’re at home watching The Crown because it’s basically the chamomile tea of television and that’s about all you can handle right now.

Since Halloween is now a several-day spectacle, it’s hard to escape, and last year, Halloween fell on a Tuesday, so naturally the weekend before was filled with festivities. Compounding my misery at seeing everyone’s kids looking even cuter than usual for days on end was that the week before, we’d found out the IVF embryo we’d transferred “wasn’t viable,” as they say in the biz. I’d been pregnant for about 4.5 seconds — my blood tests had shown me to be barely pregnant, and from the beginning the doctor had told me there was only a very slim chance it was going to make it. But I’d been in an agonizing limbo for a week-and-a-half while the embryo — a girl, which we knew because it had been biopsied and tested for chromosomal abnormalities before we had our doctor insert it, via a catheter, in my uterus — took its sweet-ass time deciding whether or not it was going to stick around. It probably heard me talking about the wage gap and how we were all going to die in natural disasters because of climate change and was like, nah, I’m good.

So I was already deep into self-pity mode when Halloween came around. I hadn’t been asked to go to a single Halloween party, except for a kids’ party that I had been invited to because the host clearly felt sorry for me after it came up in a gathering where I was the only one without kids. “You should totally come!” she said, in the bright, cheery, please-don’t-actually-come-it-will-just-be-awkward-for-everyone way that people who have kids and are currently pregnant invite people who have been trying to have kids for two years to their kid-oriented gatherings. So of course, I didn’t go. My husband Matt was away for Halloween weekend, because he’d taken an eight-week job hosting a TV show that required him to be in New York every weekend. This was week four, so we were deep into long-distance marriage territory, and I was starting, a little bit, to lose it. I was alone with our dog Beau, who, thanks to his behavior issues (namely, his predilection for lunging aggressively at strangers and acting like he was going to bite their heads off), couldn’t dress up like a carton of French fries and participate in any kind of dog costume festivities. My social media feeds were filled with pictures of parties, literal and figurative, that I hadn’t been invited to.

One day, bam, it hits you: you’ve outgrown sexy adult party Halloween, and all your friends are doing daytime kid-party Halloween and taking their baby pirates and toddler dinosaurs trick-or-treating while it’s still light out.

It’s not like I was ever a real Halloween enthusiast as a grown-up anyway. I didn’t ever plan far enough in advance to have a really good costume, never had friends who wanted to coordinate on a group costume, except that one time in college that my friend Marc was Clark Kent turning into Superman and I was Spidergirl, and the other time that two girlfriends and I decided to be “the ‘90s.” (This was around 2004, when “the ‘90s” were still recent enough that it was hilarious that we would dress up like them. Now all you have to do to re-experience the ‘90s is spend time with people who were too young to actually remember them but who consider themselves experts because they watched a few reruns of Saved By the Bell — a show that I didn’t actually watch in the ‘90s.) I tended to throw something together last-minute, reusing the few Halloween props I kept around — which included a long black-haired wig and clip-on glittery devil horns — which culminated in the year that I was a Real Housedevil of New Jersey for lack of any better use of those things.

But even if you don’t particularly like Halloween, there’s still something reassuring about knowing that it’s there, that if you really wanted to, you could put together a costume and go to a party and get drunk and maybe make out with a doctor. A fake doctor, of course, but a doctor nonetheless. (Also: grown-ups who LOVE Halloween are kind of iffy, don’t you think? Like really, you’ve waited all year just to show off your Cereal Killer costume?) That when you’re still in your early 20s, you could put on devil horns and wear a vintage blue dress and call yourself a devil in a blue dress and on your way back to your boyfriend’s friend’s apartment, where you’re staying the night sharing a sofa (not a sofa bed — a sofa) with your boyfriend, said friend, who is so drunk that he will spend the rest of the night and early morning throwing up, will start inexplicably screaming, thereby encouraging two men with crowbars to run towards him and almost beat him up until you defuse the situation.

Halloween really brings out the best in people.

***

I grew up on a four-house, dead-end street in Brookline, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. Technically it was a “private lane” — it even said so on the street sign — but from what I could gather, that mostly meant that when it snowed our street didn’t get plowed.*

At the entrance to our street there was a big brick house where a British couple and their three children lived. The dad was almost ridiculously British, a tall, droopy doctor who clattered off “to hospital” every day on his bicycle, and the mom was the self-appointed neighborhood busybody, always watching who was going in and out of the lane from her living room window. (Think Miss Marple in her younger days, but into organic food.)Their oldest and youngest kids were the same age as my brother and sister, and then they had another boy stuck in the middle. Every year, the family would commandeer the garage of the house across the street, as well as their own garage, for a Halloween party. It was as though this British mum, having moved to America, decided that she was going to out-America all the Americans. So all the kids in the neighborhood would troop through and bob for apples and get some candy on their way to more lucrative trick-or-treating opportunities.

By high school, I had mostly left dressing up for Halloween — and what were in retrospect some horribly offensive childhood costumes, like “an Arab” in third grade and in fifth grade, a geisha complete with whiteface (the ‘80s were nothing if not filled with misguided white people cosplaying as “exotic”) — behind. Being a teenager on Halloween is another one of those weird transitional times. You’re too old to go trick-or-treating — sure, you can accompany a younger sibling, but when you’re 16 you want to hang out with your younger siblings as little as possible — and you’re too young to drink legally, and Halloween is often on a weeknight anyway, so even if you’re able to sneak off and go to some horrible high school party where the drinks are way too strong, you still have to get up for first period the next day. Of course there was always the option of being a bad kid and going around egging people’s houses, but that wasn’t really my scene either, and besides, I didn’t have a car. Throwing eggs on foot is somehow the saddest thing I can possibly imagine.

Today, social media has made dressing up for Halloween so much more of a thing. For those of us who grew up without it, it’s hard to fathom what day-to-day high school life must be like with the added million layers of stress about whether that idiot boy in your U.S. government class liked one of your photos on Instagram, because as much as social media drives adults crazy, it has to drive teenagers even more crazy, so just imagine the extra stress that Halloween brings on when you’re an already insecure, depressed, anxious 16-year-old! I know that people say today’s teens don’t see a difference between the “real” world and the online world, but still: It sounds like hell.

In the early ‘90s, we had no Instagram, we had no Snapchat, we had no cell phones. In any case, we were mostly too cool and disaffected to wear costumes to school, which would indicate sincerity and earnestness at a time when irony, alienation, and cynicism ruled. Earnestness is tiring, but I think cynicism is even more exhausting. I started high school in 1991, just as Kurt Cobain and the rest of the Seattle grunge scene were starting to become nationally prominent. There was a senior guy who got on the loudspeaker every morning and played a snippet of music before going into announcements, which he read in a knowingly detached drawl. It seemed like every day he was subtly poking fun at the headmaster, a humorless woman who would leave the school at the end of the year. I’d seen Pump Up the Volume four times in the theater the year before and was obsessed with Christian Slater’s character, a high school student who ran a pirate radio station from his house, and this kind of sly anti-authoritarianism was both incredibly attractive and also so perfectly ‘90s that it almost hurt.

Since you’ve been trying to have a baby for two-and-a-half years it’s a little much to be bombarded with all these photos on Instagram for, like, three days straight.

When I was a teen, being over Halloween was a statement about growing up. It said, very clearly, I am not a child anymore, and instead of putting on a Wonder Woman costume or letting my mom put me in fucking whiteface, I am going to sit on my bed and put my Beastie Boys CD into my mini-stereo and read Sassy and wish my parents would let me have a phone in my room. Maybe that’s why I never fully embraced Halloween as an adult: I never fully got over my generation’s posture of Halloween literally being too cool for school. But maybe this is also why, later, I was surprised, and more than a little shaken, to find myself caring so much about this holiday that I thought I’d left behind. Halloween, it seemed, was managing to literally haunt me.

***

I never thought, when I started doing IVF treatments, that a byproduct of those treatments would be that I would actively start to hate Halloween. Not that it would have changed anything, necessarily, but it just would’ve been one of those things that’s nice to know. Like, “this is going to cost tens of thousands of dollars, you’re going to have hormones injected into you constantly, it might not work, oh and you’re going to really start hating Halloween. Any questions?” When you’ve been stuck in pre-parenthood for what feels like forever, it can seem as if you’ve never known anything different, that your life has always been this way and always will be this way, and even though the rational side of you knows this isn’t true, you still might want to throw your phone across the room when one too many pictures of a cherubic infant in a pineapple costume comes across your feed.

There’s no way to be right on time when it comes to having kids — it seems like you’re either the first among your friends, or you’re playing catch up — but certainly turning 40 and not having a kid felt like crossing some kind of Game of Life Rubicon. Living in New York in my late 20s and half of my 30s, I was surrounded by women who were like me: we worked in media, we lived in Brooklyn, we were not married and we did not have children. It was easy, in those days, to feel like this was the way life was always going to be. I wanted to get married and have kids in the vague, slightly ambivalent way that many of my friends did: when we met the right people, we told each other, then it would happen, but we weren’t in any rush. The women in the age cohort just above us, five or 10 years our senior, had managed to figure it out; they’d had kids well into their late 30s and early 40s, hadn’t they? What no one had caught on to in those days was that many of them had struggled for years to have kids; all we saw were the end results, not the work and money that had gone into them.

But for awhile, in those willfully if blissfully ignorant days, there was a happy moment in my social media life that I think most adults experience, albeit at different ages: it’s that period before babies, but just after people stop going to the Halloween parties where they get completely wasted, where your stream is taken up not with children but with very adorably dressed pets — mostly dogs, of course, because what self-respecting cat is going to let its owner humiliate it with a costume? This was a phase in the Halloween life cycle I could get behind: Bring on your pictures of Pup-o-Ween, of Golden Retrievers dressed as UPS drivers and a million dachshund hot dogs. What I didn’t know then is that the stream of dogs becomes a stream of babies very quickly, almost before I really realized what was going on. The first few friends who had kids were enough of a novelty that I didn’t even feel envious — I was mostly curious about the logistics of having a new, helpless, tiny human around at all times. Other people without kids complained about the number of babies in their social media feeds, but for a long time, they didn’t bother me. That is, until trying to have a baby became an uncomfortably significant part of my life, and then they really started to bother me. I’d gone from being somewhat ambivalent about having kids, but leaning towards wanting them, to having to force myself to admit that the idea of having a small person who you could dress up as a box of popcorn, no questions asked, seemed like it could be kind of fun.

Mixed in with this jealousy was guilt. Even though technically I was resenting their parents — both for having the temerity to have children when I couldn’t, and also for posting adorable pictures of them — it sort of felt as if I was resenting babies themselves, which just feels like a sneaky cherry-topping-of-guilt on a shit sundae. I didn’t want to hate babies! What did babies ever do to me? They’re babies! But that’s the great thing about infertility — it fucks with your emotions in ways you never would’ve been able to anticipate. It turns you into a person you never wanted to be.

Of course, it’s almost always women who bear the brunt of this emotional fuckery, and I was maybe just a tiny bit pleased when it finally seemed to be getting to Matt, too. Only a tiny bit, because it’s not a great place to be, and really we couldn’t both be depressed about this, because then ours would be the saddest house in the world. But a tiny bit.

Matt was home on actual Halloween last year. He even got out of work a little early. We hadn’t bought any candy — Beau would’ve gone ballistic every time the doorbell rang — and I was pretty sure we weren’t on a hot trick-or-treating block anyway, but we turned off the front stoop light just in case anyone decided to traipse up to the door.

After years of looking at dozens if not hundreds of babies and children dressed up for Halloween, you’d better believe that I have more than a few ideas of what this child will be wearing this time next year.

Matt is a generally more well-adjusted person that I am, so I was surprised that he agreed with me when I said that Halloween had been really hard. “Everyone else at work is the parent of a two-and-a-half-year-old,” he said. “I had to sit there while they showed each other pictures of their adorable dressed-up kids.” I was kind of shocked to hear these words coming out of Matt’s mouth. In our (then) three-and-a-half years together, he’d seemed completely ambivalent about Halloween. He didn’t hate it; he didn’t love it. It seemed like it was just another day on the calendar for him.

Matt is a comedian. He writes on a sitcom now, but he got his start in stand-up and podcasts. This means he is incredibly open about everything emotionally tough that’s going on with him, but also makes light of it. Which for someone like me, who tends to take everything extremely seriously, has been mostly good. He’s made me see that infertility was more of a dark comedy than the Shakespearean tragedy I had made it in my mind. But Halloween had made even Matt crack.

***

Before I could even get myself riled up about this Halloween, something completely unexpected happened: in August, after our third embryo transfer, I found out I was pregnant. I say that it was completely unexpected — even though we very deliberately had a doctor put an embryo inside me — because I’d pretty much given up on the idea, after years of disappointment, that IVF could ever work for us.

In the first few weeks, when it seemed especially tenuous, I found that reminding myself, “Today, I am pregnant” calmed me. No matter what else happened, I knew that at least in that moment, I was pregnant. Even now, in the second trimester, it’s hard to get too excited about it, even though I’ve been reassured at every ultrasound that things are just fine. So doing things to prepare for my child’s arrival, like thinking about the nursery, or my “birth plan,” or even a baby shower, can seem overwhelming and fraught. But after years of looking at dozens if not hundreds of babies and children dressed up for Halloween, you’d better believe that I have more than a few ideas of what this child will be wearing this time next year. I just think I might keep the photos off Instagram.

* * *

*By the way, here’s how crazy real estate in Brookline is: Our house — which my parents bought in 1982 for $120,000, which is around $310,000 today, and sold in 2001 — is now worth $1.7 million. On the one hand, I’m glad I got to grow up in Brookline at a time when you could still have a normal job (my mom taught ESL and my dad worked sporadically exporting textiles) and live in Brookline, but on the other, I can’t believe my parents sold that house!

* * *

Doree Shafrir is a writer and podcaster. She lives in los Angeles.

Editor: Sari Botton

* * *

Also In the Fine Lines Series:
Introducing Fine Lines
Gone Gray
An Introduction to Death
Age Appropriate
A Woman, Tree or Not
The Wrong Pair

“Who doesn’t wanna look like Diana Ross?” journalist Megyn Kelly asked panelists Tuesday morning on her news show, during a segment about Halloween costumes. She was defending former Housewife Luanne de Lesseps, who dressed up last year in a crude costume that looked nothing like the glamorous Ross, with a white jumpsuit, a tower of a curly wig, and darkened skin. “She wants to look like Diana Ross for the day — I don’t know how that got racist on Halloween,” Kelly said. Her claim to the harmlessness of blackface betrayed an empathy problem, but also an ignorance that was too much to ignore; NBC’s top brass reacted swiftly. It seems for that and, (likely, mostly), the show’s lackluster ratings, the commentator’s morning show was canceled. At least publicly, blackface is universally condemned now, and understood to be borne of racist intentions. But Kelly’s comments reveal several truths about a complicated anxiety at the heart of American entertainment and the tradition of minstrelsy upon which it all resides.

* * *

I caught a screening of the silent film Lime Kiln Club Field Day earlier this fall, at an independent theater in Brooklyn. Possibly the oldest surviving set of moving images with a cast of Black actors, Lime Kiln has made rounds on the independent circuit since 2014, when it first released to the public. It was made a century earlier, in 1913, and restored from a trove of negatives found in MoMA’s film department. Legendary vaudevillian Bert Williams, born in Nassau, Bahamas in 1874, stars. He plays a lovable, almost clever oaf who competes with three other gentlemen for a local woman’s favor.

The actors in Lime Kiln filmed scenes of leisure: sitting in a local club and at tables in their homes, walking on sidewalks, and, at a raucous field day, dancing a cakewalk. Bert Williams is excellent in the role. His impressive comic timing, flexible, open face, long-limbed stature and commanding posture make it impossible to look anywhere else. He plays the role in blackface — a mask of burnt cork, a kinky wig, long black gloves. The rest of the cast does not. MoMA’s associate curator Ron Magliozzi called this “a sop to the white audience,” and noted “the fact that the lead wore blackface allowed the rest of the cast not to wear blackface before white audiences.” Camille Forbes, author of Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America’s First Star told me in an email that the mask for Black performers of that era “might be considered the price of admission to the entertainment world,” and that fair skinned Blacks, especially, were under pressure to cork up.

It is because minstrelsy, the theatrical practice that began in the urban North in the 1830’s, in which white men ridiculed southern Blacks, “established the representation of blackness, in the society at-large and entertainment in particular,” said Forbes. Its singular popularity fueled its influence. According to the scholar Eric Lott:

Minstrel troupes entertained presidents (including Lincoln), and disdainful high-minded quarterlies and rakish sporting journals alike followed its course. Figures such as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Bayard Taylor were as attracted to blackface performance as Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany were repelled by it. From “Oh! Susanna” to Elvis Presley, from circus clowns to Saturday morning cartoons, blackface acts and words have figured significantly in the white Imaginary of the United States.

When Williams filmed Lime Kiln Club Field Day, America’s motion picture industry was not yet two decades old. Production on D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation began the same year. When it released in 1915, it became the first blockbuster, and its direct nods to minstrelsy (white actors blacking up to play one-note, not-quite-human black characters and blatant Confederate nostalgia) reinvigorated the Klan. Lime Kiln Field Day lingered in post-production and, despite its shortcomings, forms a contrast, an alternate history —one of  Black excellence in American performance. It showed Black characters struggling toward their own goals, with back stories.  Lime Kiln’s cast of 50-100 actors haven’t yet been all identified, but we know some performers had previously worked in the Harlem-based musical revue, “Darktown Follies,” which drew white audiences uptown. “Darktown Follies” anticipated the all Black Broadway musical Shuffle Along, which played a part in Harlem’s artistic flowering of the 1920s and 1930s and helped launch the careers of Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson.

Williams had been a working actor since starting out in 1893 in minstrels. He was a featured performer at Zeigfield’s Follies for nearly a decade starting in 1909. He also became a legitimate star of the record industry, composing and recording songs for Columbia Records. Once he started, he never abandoned blacking up, and he played several variations of the long-suffering “Jonah Man” throughout his career.

At my Brooklyn screening of Lime Kiln, a piano accompanist followed the drama in a jaunty ragtime. The reconstructed film lays out alternative takes of many scenes, arranged with an estimated chronology of the storyline, based on the feedback of lip readers MoMA hired to study the actors’ encounters. There’s also footage of the cast and crew between scenes. It is dizzying to watch some of the scenes in public space — there’s the blackface, as well as other humiliations like a wrestling match for discarded shoes and a watermelon eating contest. The audience was mostly white, with a smattering of Blacks, and sometimes, during close ups of Williams’ facial contortions, I felt a simmering discomfort at the laughter of my white neighbors. Still, Williams was known to have performed in only two other films, both shorts — A Natural Born Gambler and Fish — both released in 1916. The multiple takes in the Lime Kiln restoration reminded me how rare it is to see these particular actors in this particular way, how invaluable is every frame.

* * *

Williams stated in an interview that blacking up allowed him to find his actual humor, to conceive of himself, finally as a character. It explains the unsettling mix of feelings I had watching him being excellent, yet, still, to my eyes, debasing himself. By most accounts, he was an apolitical artist in a politicized age. During his professional life, the U.S. formalized rollbacks to Reconstruction and institutionalized Jim Crow; concerned citizens created institutions in response. W.E.B. Dubois’s Niagara Movement, the NAACP, Black Greek Letter Organizations, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs all arose during this era. What the scholar Imani Perry calls Black formalism — ritual practices “internal to the black community,” concretized. Some of the new Black organizations and associations that employed these rituals were purely social, with no explicit connection to politics, yet had an implied, vested interest in the sustenance and uplift of Black people in an apocalyptically difficult time.

Williams made no formal statement of protest, expressed no pro-Black sentiments on the record. He did chafe at the racist treatment he could not avoid, and claimed concern for racial uplift. He and ten other Black men in entertainment started the Frogs, a social club for Black artists based in Harlem. Williams led the art committee. Their aims were philanthropic, and also, to create an archive collection for a theatrical library. They held a popular annual social event, “The Frolic,” with a ball and vaudevillian revue. Many Black people held Williams’s accomplishments in esteem. The Black press assiduously and soberly covered his performances and business dealings. When he died in 1922 at age 47, after working through illness and collapsing near a stage after performing in Detroit, Forbes says Black critics “assess[ed] his role as a black man as well as his influence as a performer.” (Emphasis mine).

Eric Lott described the pull of minstrelsy as a combination of “love and theft,” which suppressed “the real interest in black cultural practices they nonetheless betrayed.” It was an attempt, in the anxious antebellum period, to enforce a social order, and in various eras of rampant social confusion, its tropes and formulations, which never really disappear, become lightning rods again. Kelly’s comments about walking in the skin of Diana Ross mirror this “love and theft,” and our current era is one where we may be approaching another nadir, another near-apocalyptic, broad loss of hard-won rights and access to the privileges of citizenship, similar to the cascading losses of Bert Williams’s time. It’s probably why our discourse is so contentious, even among friends and comrades. It helps explain our interest in relics like Lime Kiln. 

In a piece from the New York Times Magazine’s culture issue, Wesley Morris laments, “Everything means too much now.” He bemoans how “we’re talking less about whether a work is good art but simply whether it’s good — good for us, good for the culture, good for the world.” It annoyed Morris that he couldn’t pan Insecure the way he wanted, without blowback, because it feels so “necessary” to see a Black woman beautifully shot, performing irreverent messiness and coming into her own. He’s right — we’re all entitled to art for its own sake. But everything has always meant a lot, and excellence has always been a factor, and the threads of politics and aesthetics rub up against each other all the time. Probably, we need to imagine even more lenses through which to think and talk about art and culture, and demanding the best, from everyone, on all fronts, may be the way we get through the difficulty that could be coming.

He’s coming. Hide. No, not there. Oh god. No. No! *Fade to black* “What’s happening? WHAT’S HAPPENING?! IS SHE DEAD? DID HE KILL HER?” I hear my boyfriend sigh. This is how I watch horror movies, with my hands mostly over my eyes. I watch through my fingers, obscuring all the scary parts. It’s like being a prisoner, nose to the bars of my cell. I miss a lot, or sometimes nothing at all. Sometimes I’m not fast enough. Like with Hereditary, that moment provoking a collective gasp from the entire theatre, or, more recently, with “The Haunting of Hill House,” where ghosts drop into the scene with the phantom grace of house spiders. I jump and scream and laugh, but as sure as this is the sense of injustice — I know that at night I will have to keep my light on, check under my bed, shut the doors until they click. I know that every shadow, every sound, every movement will terrorize me. But even though I know this, I will do it again and again and again. This torture, I will welcome it.

There is no genre I enjoy more than horror even though, as a woman, it seems that I shouldn’t. There’s Don’t Breathe, in which an old blind man who started out as the victim actually ends up trying to artificially inseminate the young woman who burgled him; It Follows, in which a young woman is haunted by the sentient STD her boyfriend gave her; The Innkeepers, in which a young woman is trapped in a cellar with the ghost of an ancient bride who was jilted by her groom; Drag Me to Hell, in which a young woman who refuses an old woman a loan ends up cursed, her face gnawed by a toothless demon. These are the horror movies in the past 10 years that I have been unable to get out of my mind, that I have loved — despite the nightmares — four movies about young women who are tormented, none of them written or directed by women. What does that say about me? What does that say about horror?

* * *

In 1992, the year Tony Todd’s Candyman stalked Virginia Madsen’s grad student, the seminal book on women in horror shed some blood of its own. Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film had been written after a sudden rush of low-budget horror movies, starting in the mid-70s, which newly revolved around young women; specifically, young women whose perspective became that of the audience. Cinemagoers of both genders thus became female prey fleeing male predators. “Taken together, these films offer variant imaginings of what it is, or might be, like to be a woman,” Clover wrote, “to menstruate and be pregnant, to be vulnerable and endure male violence, to be sexually violated.”

It was the book’s first chapter, however, “Her Body, Himself,” that seeped into the cultural conversation. Clover had noticed a trope in slashers, a female character — androgynous, virginal, studious — that acted as both victim and hero, who was menaced, but ultimately became empowered to the point of vanquishing the man in question. Clover called this character the Final Girl. In Carrie (1976), for instance, the eponymous high schooler internally immolated by her bullying female classmates, uses telekinesis to literally immolate them at prom. “The women’s movement has given many things to popular culture, some more savory than others,” Clover wrote. “One of its main donations to horror, I think, is the image of an angry woman – a woman so angry that she can be imagined as a credible perpetrator (I stress ‘credible’) of the kind of violence on which, in the low-mythic universe, the status of full protagonist rests.”

The first modern horror movie, Psycho (1960), had already introduced the emasculated male killer (cross-dressing Norman Bates) and his sexually transgressive female victim (Marion Crane). Alfred Hitchcock’s appetite for torturing women only became further fodder for a more socially aware generation with the addition of the Final Girl, the young woman who claims her power through conservatively sanctioned purity. “The Final Girl is, on reflection, a congenial double for the adolescent male,” wrote Clover. “She is feminine enough to act out in a gratifying way, a way unapproved for adult males, the terrors and masochistic pleasures of the underlying fantasy, but not so feminine as to disturb the structures of male competence and sexuality.” Clover believed adolescent males were the predominant audience for horror movies, which, when you consider the stereotypical view of boys (they are gross, violent, even misogynistic) follows. But these two ideas — young women are empowered by virginity and young men prefer to watch them suffer — helped turn the public perception of horror movies into a guy thing, a specious claim so insidious it persists to this day, even among people who know the genre better than that.

Jason Blum, the producer who founded Blumhouse, which specializes in horror budgeted at around $5 million, has in less than 10 years been responsible for rejuvenating a middling genre with franchises like Paranormal Activity, The Purge and Ouija, not to mention the ones I preferred: Dark Skies, The Lazarus Effect and Happy Death Day. His latest release, Halloween, is the sequel to John Carpenter’s original of the same name, one of the films Clover used to exemplify the Final Girl. Except that now survivor Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is a middle-aged grandmother, a basket case who only stops shaking when she is confronted with killer Michael Myers. “The first movie I was running more, and in this movie I’m hunting more,” Curtis recently told Entertainment Weekly. “[You] watch this woman take back the narrative of her life.”

Though Halloween was co-written by a woman in 1978, in 2018 its follow-up is both directed and written by men. In a widely circulated interview published last week, Polygon’s Matt Patches asked Blum why none of the horror movies he has produced have been directed by women. “There are not a lot of female directors period, and even less who are inclined to do horror,” Blum responded (he’s not wrong: film researcher Stephen Follows analysed every feature film in American cinemas between 1988 and 2017 and found that only 9.9% of the directors were women). It could have been generously considered an off the cuff misstatement, particularly considering Blum was promoting a highly feminist horror, one in which three women starred and Curtis had producing credit for the first time. But women have little generosity left (if any) for an industry that has not only been negligent of them, but detrimental.

On Twitter they responded by sending Blum lists of the women he had failed to consider —  Julia Ducourneau, Ana Lily Amirpour, Jenn Wexler, The Soska Sisters — underscoring the truth, which is not that women are disinclined to direct horror, but that they aren’t hired to do it. In fact, women have an affinity for horror, they always have.

* * *

The earliest horror films were inspired by gothic literature, a genre pioneered by writers like Ann Radcliffe who used it to rattle the shackles of gender norms in the Victorian era, their heroines rejecting claustrophobic roles they had been bequeathed by a patriarchal society. Horror has acted as a similar outlet for contemporary women. “Horror, more than any other film genre, deals openly with questions of gender, sexuality and the body,” film historian Shelley Stamp observed in The Guardian. “In many ways horror films bring to the fore issues that are otherwise unspoken in patriarchal culture — which itself constructs female sexuality as monstrous.” As popular as Radcliffe was, so too became the films built on her legacy. In a 2011 article in Cinema Journal, Richard Nowell disproved Clover’s claim that adolescent males were the primary horror audience. He discovered that not only were the genders equally represented in youth audiences in the ’70s and ‘80s, producers and distributors, believing girls chose horror movies as date movies, actually skewed their projects and their marketing to young women by highlighting romance, friendship and the kind of powerful heroines that “Wonder Woman” and “Charlie’s Angels” had turned into idols. “Largely jettisoned were images of women in jeopardy-partially dressed, cowering, screaming, and vulnerable,” wrote Nowell of the ad campaigns, “and in their place came, for the most part, images of strong, focused female characters.”

Even today, horror movies lean more XX than XY. In 2017, Google and the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media reported that this was the only genre where women appear on screen more than men (53 percent) and the one in which they are heard the most (47 percent). “When I watched movies like The Goonies and E.T., it was boys having adventures,” Diablo Cody, who wrote 2009’s Jennifer’s Body, told The New York Times. “When I watched Nightmare on Elm Street, it was Nancy beating up Freddy. It was that simple.” Though it has never seemed to occur to Hollywood to actually hire women to make the movies they want to appeal to women, Debra Hill, producer and co-writer of Halloween, is an early rare example. She was responsible for choosing Jamie Lee Curtis to play Laurie Strode (a nod to Curtis’ family legacy, her mother Janet Leigh having starred in Psycho) as well as for the girls’ sparkly teen-speak. “I was a babysitter and I knew what it was like to be, you know, all those characters,” she said in the 2003 documentary Halloween: A Cut Above the Rest. But where women proliferated in front of the camera, their presence behind it was unexpected. “I was never assumed to be the writer or producer,” Hill said, according to The New York Times. “I took a look around and realized there weren’t many women, so I had to carve a niche for myself.”

Almost 40 years later, Honeymoon director Leigh Janiak, the horror filmmaker whose name Blum struggled to remember in the Polygon interview, echoed Hill’s feelings of gendered isolation. “I didn’t think a lot about ‘oh, I’m a female filmmaker,’ it really didn’t sink in until I got to SXSW and I did a horror panel there,” she told AMFM Magazine in 2014, explaining “it was all dudes and me!” Karyn Kusama, director of Jennifer’s Body and The Invitation, blames the gender disparity on the gatekeepers, who include men like Jason Blum. “You just need more people at the top who make it a priority to hire women,” she told MTV last year while promoting the female-centric horror anthology, XX, which filmmaker Jovanka Vuckovic co-created as a response to the lack of opportunities for women. “And I don’t think there are enough people yet who have that track record…”

* * *

The day after the Polygon interview was published, Jason Blum issued an apology on Twitter for his “dumb comments.” “Over 50 percent of our audience is female. Over 50 percent of Blumhouse execs are women,” he wrote, with the caveat, “we have not done a good enough job working with female directors and it is not because they don’t exist. I heard from many today.” Three days later Jamie Lee Curtis tweeted a “BOAST post” about Halloween’s $76 million debut weekend, with the notes, “Biggest horror movie opening with a female lead. Biggest movie opening with a female lead over 55.” She deployed the hashtag #womengetthingsdone, which was reminiscent of the final moment in her film. Three generations of Strode women carrying three generations of trauma stare through bars at Michael Myers as he bursts into flames in the basement that is now his prison. The room that was thought to be a cage for the women has been revealed to be a trap for this man. As Laurie said: “Forty years ago, he came to my home to kill. He killed my friends, and now he’s back to finish what he started, with me. The one person who’s ready to stop him.”

OK. I’m going for one BOAST post. Biggest horror movie opening with a female lead.
Biggest movie opening with a female lead over 55.
Second biggest October movie opening ever.
Biggest Halloween opening ever #womengetthingsdone @halloweenmovie pic.twitter.com/DhUBy82z3U

— Jamie Lee Curtis (@jamieleecurtis) October 21, 2018

I liked Halloween well enough, but my favorite horror movie will always be The Descent. I own two copies of Neil Marshall’s 2005 spelunking nightmare (cut and uncut) and I have seen it dozens of times. In it six women go caving in the Appalachian Mountains only to find themselves lost and, worse, fighting a population of blind humanoid bottom-feeders covered in K-Y (or something). The “Final Girl” is not a girl at all, but a woman (Shauna Macdonald) whose husband and daughter were killed in a car wreck and who uses the memory of her child to empower her to single-handedly battle a horde you already know she can’t defeat. The original ending — the U.S. released a “happier” version — has her facing the ghost of her child, smiling despite her impending death. There is no romance here, the friendships are broken, the power is an illusion, but you know this woman will not fold. What does that say about me? Everything.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Boo! Read these stories about the scariest weekend of the year while getting over your candy hangovers.

1. “I Was a Halloween Costume Model.” (Freddie Campion, GQ October 2015)

Looking to make a little extra money, our anonymous hero answered a Craigslist ad.

2. “The Husband Stitch.” (Carmen Maria Machado, Granta, October 2014)

A sexy, spooky take on the tale of the woman with a ribbon around her neck.

3. “Not That Kind of Ghoul.” (Wailin Wong, The Distance, October 2014)

In the midst of pop-up shops and online superstores, Fantasy Costumes in Chicago endures year-round.

4. “Monsters at the Door.” (Chris Randle, Hazlitt, August 2014)

Meet Emily Carroll, whose horror-laced comics are as stunning as they are scary.

5. “31 Fairly Obscure Literary Monsters.” (J.W. McCormack, Electric Literature, October 2014)

A detailed glossary of villains and weirdos and spooks.

6. “Why is Scaring People So Much Fun?” (Alana Massey, Pacific Standard, October 2015)

“It took until the end of the school year for me to come clean and apologize for fabricating the entire story of Jules, the doll-dwelling murdered girl.”

Boo! Read these stories about the scariest weekend of the year while getting over your candy hangovers.

1. “I Was a Halloween Costume Model.” (Freddie Campion, GQ October 2015)

Looking to make a little extra money, our anonymous hero answered a Craigslist ad.

2. “The Husband Stitch.” (Carmen Maria Machado, Granta, October 2014)

A sexy, spooky take on the tale of the woman with a ribbon around her neck.

3. “Not That Kind of Ghoul.” (Wailin Wong, The Distance, October 2014)

In the midst of pop-up shops and online superstores, Fantasy Costumes in Chicago endures year-round.

4. “Monsters at the Door.” (Chris Randle, Hazlitt, August 2014)

Meet Emily Carroll, whose horror-laced comics are as stunning as they are scary.

5. “31 Fairly Obscure Literary Monsters.” (J.W. McCormack, Electric Literature, October 2014)

A detailed glossary of villains and weirdos and spooks.

6. “Why is Scaring People So Much Fun?” (Alana Massey, Pacific Standard, October 2015)

“It took until the end of the school year for me to come clean and apologize for fabricating the entire story of Jules, the doll-dwelling murdered girl.”

Halloween, All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days represent a friendly (if bony, skeletal) handshake between Paganism and Christianity, an exaltation of escape and revelry, as well as somber respect for death and those whom it has claimed. I still love graveyards, rattling chains, black cats, black velvet, and all manner of spooky things. And I adore the blessing of sacred serendipity — that you can discover yourself while pretending to be someone else. That you can pray for a guiding angel and God will send Alice Cooper.

-From an essay by Lily Burana on The New York Times’ Women in the World page, about trying to reconcile her love of Halloween and all things Goth with her “surprisingly Jesus-y” faith, plus the time she asked for a sign from God that she was in the right church and looked up to see Alice Cooper dressed in “Goth golfer casual.”

Read the story