The horror landscape of the eighties, often characterized by slashers and classics like John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), also featured a remarkable amount of horror films set in the deep sea. Let me take you on a dive into the murky waters of this fascinating era, where sea monsters reigned supreme in the B-movie realm.

While the horror genre had been forever marked by Steven Spielberg’s iconic blockbuster Jaws (1975), the mere suggestion of a sequel was initially dismissed by the acclaimed director. According to his biographer Joseph McBride, Spielberg found the idea of crafting a sequel to be “a cheap carny trick.” However, Universal Pictures disregarded this sentiment and went on to release Jaws 2 in 1978.

Spielberg’s apprehension toward sequels aside, Jaws 2 proved to be a financial success. The impact of this unexpected success has transcended time, shaping the landscape of horror cinema and influencing subsequent generations of filmmakers. In the realm of B-movies, the sea monster emerged as a prominent figure, weaving its tentacles, so to speak, around the eighties.

B-movies
As the new decade begins, the masses find themselves still captivated by cinematic sharks and sea monsters. Film studios churn out B-movie after B-movie, each unveiling a horrifying creature from the deep sea.

In Humanoids from the Deep (1980), a coastal village is plagued by murderous humanoid monsters coming from the sea, their menace escalating to grim proportions as they not only kill but also assault the female population. The macabre atmosphere is heightened by the exceptional monster costumes crafted by the Rob Bottin, who worked on iconic films such as Star Wars (1977), The Thing (1982), and Robocop (1987).

In 1981, ‘schlockmeister’ Larry Buchanan released the Loch Ness Horror. A low budget disaster based on the famous legend of loch ness. Known for his budget-friendly yet lucrative horror productions, Buchanan left a mark on Hollywood by making low-budget double features that appealed mostly to teenagers. The Loch Ness Horror, however, failed to impress audiences and was quickly forgotten.

In 1981, Piranha 2: The Spawning surfaced as James Cameron’s directorial debut, a thematic precursor to his illustrious career in cinema, where water would continue to play a pivotal role. Despite facing production challenges, including clashes with an Italian crew that hindered Cameron’s access to footage, the film served as a stepping stone for the director’s future successes. Lead actors Lance Henriksen and Tricia O’Neil, initially associated with the ill-fated sequel, found redemption in subsequent collaborations with Cameron, landing roles in blockbusters like The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986), and Titanic (1997).

Each of these films adheres to the archetypal crew established by the Jaws blueprint: a scientist, an experienced fisherman, a rugged hero, and, to divert attention from the thin plot, an attractive woman. This formulaic approach became a hallmark of the era’s iconic creature features.

The prevalence of water monsters in 1980s cinema coincided with a growing public awareness of the underwater world. Greenpeace’s activism played a pivotal role in the International Whaling Commission’s 1982 ban on whaling, utilizing the distribution and playback of whale songs as a campaign technique. This strategy allowed the public to forge a connection with the world’s largest mammal.

While the image of whales improved, the great white shark faced a contrasting fate. Universal’s release of Jaws 3-D in the summer of 1983 further reinforced the misguided perception of these creatures as man-eating menaces (rather than endangered animals that rarely pose a threat to humans). Directed by Joe Alves, who’d worked on the original mechanical sharks featured in Jaws and Jaws 2, the 3D sequel achieved financial success but also marked the end of Alves’ directorial career.

Jaws 3-D, later achieved cult status thanks to its comically awkward 3D effects. A particularly cringe-worthy scene involves the monster shark breaking through a glass panel. The creature’s cardboard-like appearance and the underwhelming impact of the breaking glass underscore the film’s unintentional comedic power.

Beaten to death
Following the dissapointing reception of Jaws 3-D, major film studios appeared to distance themselves from sea monster films. It seemed as though the weariness induced by increasingly lackluster Jaws and Friday the 13th sequels had taken its toll on horror enthusiasts. Younger audiences in particular, preferred to spend their money on an action- or fantasy film rather than another mindless horror sequel.

The American media landscape experienced a shift in 1985 when oceanographer Robert Ballard filmed the wreck of the Titanic. This event, coupled with the tragic end of the space program due to the Shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986, led to a dwindling interest in space exploration. In contrast, an emerging fascination with the mysteries of the deep sea took root. Although Hollywood didn’t fully embrace this trend until 1989, the groundwork for a renewed interest in underwater stories had been laid.

In 1987, Universal made a belated addition to its iconic monster franchise with Jaws 4: The Revenge. The film, however, reinforced the notion that the general public was growing weary of the Jaws franchise. Despite boasting a budget two million dollars higher than its predecessor, Jaws 4 raked in a whopping 40 million dollars less at the box office. Not even the presence of acclaimed actor Michael Caine could divert critics from the film’s disjointed plot and lack of tension.

The turning point arrived in 1989 with the release of James Cameron’s The Abyss. At the time, Cameron was renowned for directing beloved action films like The Terminator and Aliens, with blockbusters like Titanic and Avatar still on the distant horizon. Professing a deep love for the sea, Cameron embarked on his most ambitious project yet, aiming to craft an epic underwater thriller using a blend of practical and special effects. The Abyss marked a pivotal moment, not only for Cameron’s career but also for reigniting Hollywood’s interest in the enigmatic depths of the ocean.

The abuse
What James Cameron couldn’t have foreseen was that the production of The Abyss would become an (underwater) hell. Initially eyeing the picturesque coast of the Bahamas for filming, Cameron heeded Steven Spielberg’s advice, drawing on lessons from the trouble-ridden set of Jaws. Opting for an abandoned nuclear power plant as the shoot location instead, preparations proved to be expensive and a lot of work. Filling the massive tanks became a Herculean task. Problems arose when the stagnant water proved to be an ideal breeding ground for algae, limiting visibility to a mere few centimeters. To combat this, copious amounts of chlorine were added by crewmembers, resulting in skin irritations and bleached hair for the cast. Actors, required to obtain diving licenses, faced life-threatening situations, with Cameron himself narrowly escaping drowning when his oxygen tank unexpectedly ran empty. Ed Harris, too, confronted a near-death experience when a crew member mishandled supplying him with more oxygen, leading him to ingest water instead of just air.

Dubbed ‘The Abuse’ by the crew, The film’s extended shooting days and Cameron’s perfectionism led to a hostile atmosphere on set. Challenges persisted even on dry land, as production and special effects issues caused a one-month delay in the release of the sci-fi epic. Despite this, The Abyss received positive acclaim and eventually garnered a cult following over the years.

Around the time The Abyss was released, a surge of sea monster films flooded the box office. Five horror films about the deep sea, including DeepStar Six, Leviathan, Lords of the Deep, The Evil Below (all released in 1989), and The Rift (1990), emerged during that period. While their overall quality may be considered low, these films collectively stand as a testament to Hollywood’s sudden fixation on the underwater world. The trend, lacking a specific cause, has been loosely associated with heightened attention to whaling and renewed interest in the Titanic wreckage.

DeepStar Six features a submarine crew inadvertently unleashing a prehistoric creature with dynamite. The highlight of the film are Mark Shostrom’s practical effects, who are still convincing to this day. Leviathan, often hailed as the standout film of 1989’s water monster releases, delivers an imposing hybrid sea monster but falls short in terms of an original script, borrowing heavily from The Thing.

The Evil Below, released directly to videotape in 1989, is a forgettable low-budget thriller about an adventurer seeking a Spanish treasure guarded by a supernatural water monster. While the film may not be remembered for its quality, the videotape has become a collector’s item for horror enthusiasts eager to complete their 1989 monster film collection.

In Lords of the Deep, a sci-fi thriller produced by Roger Corman, future Oscar winners Janusz Kamiński and Robert Skotak played crucial roles in cinematography and the underwater special effects. Despite their contributions, the film is considered a slow burn, notable only for its unexpected plot twist — an environmentalist message highlighting the consequences of overexploitation.

The Rift, the final American underwater film made in the 1980s, sees a submarine confronting hellish creatures at the ocean’s depths. Despite an impressive cast featuring R. Lee Ermey and Ray Wise, the film faltered at the box office. However, practical effects enthusiasts can find solace in the Lovecraftian sea monsters, creating a nihilistic atmosphere and tension.

With the exception of The Abyss, all of the sea monster films around the end of the eighties flopped at the box office, marking an eight-year period during which studios shied away from underwater settings. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that a new wave of water monster films, including Deep Rising, Deep Blue Sea, and Lake Placid, surfaced. In stark contrast to the B-movies’ crews, both Hollywood and the audience had seemingly outgrown their fascination with the mysteries of the deep sea.★

By Jelle Havermans

Exploring Hollywood’s latest obsession with voyeurism and crime

Over the past two years, Hollywood has been releasing movie after movie in which casual voyeurism of the female star leads to them being the witness in a murder plot. Let’s take a peak at this trend and analyse what it says about society.

In Rear Window, one of Hitchcock’s most beloved and influential movies, professional photographer Jeff is confined to a wheelchair in his apartment in Manhattan. During an intense heatwave, he watches his neighbors, and begins to suspect one of them has committed murder. The iconic film has long since inspired countless filmmakers, such as Brian De Palma, who used the premise of Rear Window and morphed it into the twisted Body Double (1984). In this layered thriller, a man housesitting a villa witnesses a gruesome crime across the street. In the box office hit Disturbia (2007), which was also loosely based on Hitchcock’s classic, a troubled teen with house arrest begins to suspect that his neighbor is a serial killer.

Resurgence
Recently, this specific type of thriller (that over time almost seems to have become a genre on its own) is going through a notable resurgence. In 2021, Amazon Prime released the erotic mystery thriller The Voyeurs, in which Pippa (Sydney Sweeney) and Thomas (Justice Smith) move into their dream apartment. They start spying into the apartment across the street, which starts a chain of disastrous events. That same year, Amy Adams starred as an alcoholic agoraphobic that witnesses a crime at her neighbors house in The Woman In The Window. In 2022, Kimi hit Prime Video: another movie about a woman suffering from agoraphobia unraveling a murder plot.

During the summer of 2022, Watcher was released in the United States. In this thriller, Julia (Maika Monroe) — a young actress who just moved to Bucharest with her boyfriend — notices a mysterious stranger watching her from across the street, while a serial killer stalks the city. Further proving that the Rear Window-esque mystery thriller is going through a popularity spike to the point of exhaustion is Netflix’s mini-series The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window (2022). The show was sold as a satirical spoof on the aforementioned pictures, making fun of the tired tropes featured in these films.

Pandemic
An obvious explanation for the sudden popular demand of these type of mystery thrillers is found in the covid-19 pandemic. Over the course of multiple lockdowns, spying on your neighbors was a common pastime for many urban citizens. Logically, many writers and film studios got inspired and turned their voyeuristic fantasies into products of entertainment — now more relatable than ever — with many people still working from home. These narratives have always been perfect for film as a medium, which in itself is voyeuristic, requiring the viewer to passively watch as the drama unfolds on screen.

As is the case in Rear Window, the godmother of the genre, the camera as a tool often plays an important role in these narratives. This can be explained by the obvious connection between the photograph and the window: both are frames that capture a still image — in the case of these movies, the intimacy of domestic life. Susan Sontag once wrote: ‘to photograph is to exclude.’ The mystery in these Rear Window-esque films lies in what is excluded… what eludes the protagonist(s). Often, the characters use camera’s, microphones or amplifiers to capture, enlarge or enhance images and sounds. Most of these films operate in a morally gray area and challenge the norms and values of its characters. Both The Voyeurs and Watcher question the morality of spying on your neighbors by turning the spectator into an assailant.

Psychological turmoil
An important change, however, is that in all of these recent movies the protagonist is a woman. The change in gender can be explained simply by pointing out changes in cinematic landscape, in which a shift towards female lead movies has been ongoing ever since the 2010s. But these new takes on the spy-on-your-neighbor mystery thriller aren’t merely gender-swapped. They are profoundly different, in the sense that the female character are almost always struggling with some form of psychological hardship. Notable is that the protagonists are often wealthy substance abusers or alcoholics. For example, in The Woman In The Window, Anna (Amy Adams) is a rich psychologist/landlord that misuses medication and wine to wade off processing her personal trauma.

Some critics of the book as well as the movie adaption cited her substance abuse as a cliché that is merely there to turn Anna into an unreliable narrator for the sake of the plot. In the Paula Hawkins 2015 novel The Girl On The Train, an alcoholic divorcee witnesses an affair through the window of her commuter train. Not long after, the woman she noticed turns up dead. Two movie adaptations under the same name were released, one in theatres in 2017, starring Emily Blunt, the other on Netflix in 2021. The book these films were based on was heavily marketed as the new Gone Girl, successfully hopping on Flynn’s female narrative bandwagon but using a Rear Window inspired premise. Gillian Flynn’s success sparked a trend of domestic thriller novels (and movies) in which unreliable female narrators struggle with substance abuse and psychological illnesses while trying to solve a crime. A trend which is still immensely popular.

Agoraphobia
In Steven Soderberghs Kimi, protagonist Angela (Zoe Kravitz) is a Seattle tech worker stuck at home after she develops agoraphobia. In this solid thriller, the protagonist doesn’t witness a crime by spying through a window, but uncovers evidence of sexual assault through a Siri-like device she has to monitor for work. Just as in The Woman In The Window, agoraphobia is used here to create a redemptive arc for the heroin. The gruesome crime Angela uncovers forces her out of the safe cocoon and requires her to take action. From a commercial viewpoint, one could argue that these films are simply being catered to a female audience. In a time where true crime podcasts and documentaries are most popular amongst women, perhaps the (subconscious) idea of witnessing a crime — albeit from the safety of the home — is more relatable than ever.

But to dismiss the dark psychological turmoil of these female heroines as plot convenience or a commercial motive would be too simple. Note that in these recent films, the reasons for these female protagonists to stay home are rooted in their mental health, while the reasons for house arrest in male-lead mystery thrillers in the genre are always practical. Jeff in Rear Window, for example, can’t leave his apartment because of a broken leg, and Disturbia’s Kale is homebound after court issues an ankle monitor and a proximity sensor to keep him from fleeing. This important difference proves that there is something more reflective to these narratives; they seem to reflect on the psychological state of modern women.

However, note that in most recent Rear Window-esque thrillers, it is also a woman that falls victim to a crime, which gives weight to the argument that these films merely use a familiar crime plot in order to reflect on womanhood in modern times — that these movies are collectively dissecting societal issues and fears. The Voyeurs, for example, explores Pippa’s sexuality and how a monogamous, domestic existence dulls her adventurous spirit. At first she feels morally obliged to look away when she and her boyfriend witness their neighbors having sex. It doesn’t take long though, for these moments to become a voyeuristic delight for Pippa. Aside from female sexuality, the film takes on a large array of subjects privacy in the modern age and the moral boundlessness of contemporary art.

Introspective look
The Woman In The Window can be perceived as an introspective look at a woman’s struggle to stay sane in times where women’s rights are under threat, especially in the US. The protagonist is constantly gaslit, deceived and dismissed. The same happens in Watcher, but this movie switches things up by turning the person being spied upon into a stalker and vice versa. This horror film has a clear anti-patriarchal message, though: it is dangerous not to believe women. Especially now men have become more clever in their ways of preying and are still supported by systems of power. In the shadow of the Supreme Court overturning Roe VS. Wade and the Amber Heard VS Johnny Depp trial, the movie gained relevance.

It seems the female-lead resurgence of the Rear Window-esque movie seems to signify an underlying fear of a society that pretends to be civilised and safe, but in reality is nowhere near. The female protagonists are slowly isolated, and can only watch as violence is inflicted on their fellow women… initally unable to intervene. Furthermore, these films seem to represent a more universal feeling of hopeless; of being powerless in the face of horror. They represent the fear of being confined and questioned, rather than believed.

The 1975 TV movie Who Is The Black Dahlia? is a rare find. The film, which was directed by the late Joseph Pevney, was never released on DVD or Blu-ray. It is only available as a bootleg on obscure websites or in rather disappointing 360p quality on YouTube channel TVTERRORLAND. The movie is a dramatization of the investigation of the grisly murder of Elizabeth Short, better known as ‘the Black Dahlia’. That it is largely forgotten is a shame, for I would like to argue that is still the best picture based on the infamous Black Dahlia cold case. It is the only feature film that dares to looks past the sensationalist aspects and actually investigates who the enigmatic but mysterious Elizabeth Short was.

The film opens with an old man and his grandson walking through a vacant lot. The boy stumbles upon the remains of Elizabeth Short, after which his grandfather quickly covers his eyes. (Interestingly, this is one of the biggest changes. In reality, Short was found by a woman walking her baby). The movie then switches to the perspective of the experienced Sergeant Harry Hansen who is put on the case by the Los Angeles Police Department. This story is just one of the two narratives of which the movie is built up. Through flashbacks, we follow Short as a sweet but somewhat naive girl who moves to Hollywood to live with her father and pursue an acting career. Her hopes and dreams are slowly crushed by the reality that, despite her unique appearance, Short is just one of many starlets hoping for their big break. While she tries to get by in the bustling city of LA, she brushes up to all kinds of dishonest characters in the process.

Unfortunately, what hasn’t aged well is the film’s look. From the first scene it is clear that Who Is The Black Dahlia? was a low budget TV movie and looks the part. The cinematography is safe and predictable, and its decors look like 70s soap opera sets that have been dressed up with thrift store furniture to make them pass for 1940s interiors. But looks are not everything, and it is curious that such a cheap production still stands out as the only adaption that makes a decent effort to humanize Short and show her as a multifaceted woman.

The film is refreshing in the sense that is doesn’t exploit its sensational subject for cheap thrills or shock. It barely shows the corpse and rarely ponders over the gruesome details of the murder. Instead, it spends roughly half of its playtime showing Elizabeth Short (unsuccessfully) trying to make it as an actress in LA. In these segments, she is constantly harassed and chased by men that just seem to want to take advantage of her. Lucie Arnaz plays the role brilliantly — not only does she resembles Short eerily well, she portrays her as an aspiring young woman who feels and looks like the girl-next-door-type. It was sensatinonal journalism and the horrifying crime is was never solved, that turned Short into a mythical archetype of victimhood. With her role, Lucie Arnaz actively dismisses that caricatural way in which The Dahlia was often written about in the papers after her death (mostly as a promiscuous liar who was hanging with the wrong crowds).

While more well-known movies like True Confessions (1981) and The Black Dahlia (2006) paint Elizabeth Short as either a promiscuous loser or a mysterious femme fatale (or something in between), the point this film tries the make is that she was just a young woman with healthy boundaries, still trying to find out what she wanted in life. The film shows Short in the many roles she inhabited before her tragic demise — a daughter hurt by her cold father, an aspiring actress and a flirt desperately looking for love and (male) validation.

In one scene, she gets a rose tattoo at a parlor to impress a sailor. ‘And you said I wouldn’t dare!‘ she says right after her tattoo is done, but she quickly realizes that the sailor has already left to chase another woman. Through her struggles to make it as an actress and trying to find love at the same time, shatter the romanticized image of Hollywood in her mind. Elizabeth’s failure to acknowledge her struggles are poignantly emphasized in the voice-over letters she sends her er grandmother, in which she romanticizes the City of Angels and makes up that she has a successful Hollywood career.

After each tragic flashback of Shorts life in LA, the shot freezes and turns black-and-white. It is a rather corny, but interesting aesthetic choice, that reminds the contemporary viewer of the grainy black-and-white photos of Elizabeth Short’s corpse, that are just one click away. The stills could be interpreted as metaphors; despite Short being a real woman with hopes and dreams, she will forever remain trapped in the black-and-white photos that were printed of her posthumously for police records and newspapers.

What’s refreshing about the main detective, played by the late Efrem Zimbalist Jr, is that he gradually changes his view of the victim that is the center of his investigation. Despite multiple setbacks in the investigation, he becomes fond of Elizabeth Short and not just out of pity. To solve her murder, he defies orders and goes out of his way to speak to everyone that knew Short in the final months of her life. As the title suggests, Who Is The Black Dahlia? Is less about the killer, and more about the victim, or rather who she aspired to be in the time before her gruesome death.

‘Lady, what the hell could you do to make anybody that mad?’ the detective states in the first part of the movie, essentially victim-blaming Short right from the bat. As the movie progresses, however, he — simultaneously with the viewer — begins to see her as a human being, instead of just a piece of the puzzle he has to solve. In the end, his boss considers taking him off the case. When his colleague protests and argues that he is simply showing dedication necessary for solving the case, the chief dismisses him by saying; ‘There is a big difference between dedication and obsession’. Harry has lost the distance and dissonance that is expected from a gumshoe detective; he begins to care for the victim, of which he gradually learns more and more through examining witnesses, acquaintances and relatives.

There is a macabre aspect to his obsession with the dead pretty girl, of course. Like it is the case in many books and movies based upon The Black Dahlia, it is not so much the murderer, but the ghost of Elizabeth Short that haunts the detective. However, in most cinematic takes that took inspiration from case, Short’s gruesome death merely serves as a way for troubled men to find some form of redemption. The mini-series I Am The Night (2019) favors the hardships of Fauna Hodel (the supposed illegitimate daughter of prime suspect George Hodel) and a disgraced journalist’s (Chris Pine) quest to solve the Dahlia case in order to redeem himself over the victim. Another example is the film True Confessions (1982) in which Robert Duvall plays an obsessive detective with an anger problem who uses the case to prove to himself and his brother that, despite his destructive rage, he is a righteous person. In James Ellroy’s twisted but thrilling bestseller The Black Dahlia (1980) and the less successful 2006 Brian De Palma film adaption of the same name, the detective investigating the murder slowly spirals into maddening obsession… even projecting his necrophiliac desires on a woman that dresses like the victim.

In Who Is The Black Dahlia? The motivations of the detective are more morally pure. Notable is the tagline: ‘Before he could hunt her killer, he had to learn who ‘’The Black Dahlia’’ was — hard chick or easy mark… home girl or party girl!’’. This dated, sexist tagline eagerly frames The Black Dahlia as the black-and-white cliches the movie so cleverly avoids. At the end of the movie, Detective Harry Hansen isn’t trying to fit Short into a box. He wants to know who the victim was and understand how her senseless death impacted her loved ones. How tragic it all really is for them, is best captured in a heartfelt scene in which the detective speaks with Short’s grandma, who raised her. ‘I know I never really knew who she was trying to be.’ Grandma says, ‘Maybe she never really knew who she was trying to be,’ he answers with a sigh. ‘That may be the truth, but we’ll never know anything more,’ grandma replies. The scene ponders on the ambiguity that is left after a life ends before it properly began. Despite Who Is The Black Dahlia?’s age and low budget, it treats Elizabeth Short with respect, and never lazily turns her into a stereotype. Instead she is portrayed as a young woman who was still playing roles to find out which one suited her best. A woman that, in her pursuit of happiness and success, became the unfortunate victim of a monster that took away all that she could’ve become.

While no longer a true taboo in Hollywood, the explicit depiction of infanticide in film is still frowned upon by most. Filmmakers that dare to make films about the sensitive issue of child murder are often criticised but provide insight into the way society deals with its most horrific type of crime. From M to It, Let’s have a look at the captivating history of one of cinema’s most controversial topics.

The Art Of Suggestion
One of the first notable films about child murder is M — Eine Stadt Sucht Einen Mörder (1931), in which both the police and the local criminal underworld hunt a pedophilic serial killer. Peter Lorre broke through as the twisted Hans Beckert, but later stated that the role haunted him for the rest of his life. The expressionist Fritz Lang classic received critical acclaim and paved the way for grimly themed thrillers. M was controversial, but never shows explicit violence: Lang cleverly uses suggestion to portray the killer’s horrors. In the eerie first scene, we see the killer’s shadow on a wanted poster as he convinces a little girl to follow him.

Lang then symbolizes her innocence with two theatrical shots of her ball which she left behind and her balloon, which is shown caught between some electricity cables. Beckert’s terrifying whistle, sounding right before he strikes, is timeless. M is still relevant, partly because the film sheds a critical light on the witch hunt that ensues after the police are unable to catch the killer. In the end, Beckert is finally caught and the angry mob of citizens form their own court room in which they decide his fate.

An American remake followed in the 1950s, but without the same success. Even less successful was The Night of the Hunter (1955), which distinguished itself from the Hollywood norm that was predominant at the time with expressionistic, poetic cinematography. Robert Mitchum plays a shrewd criminal who pretends to be a priest. His character was based on a real child murderer that was hanged in 1932. In the haunting final part of the film, he tries to hunts down the children of the woman he killed in cold blood in order to collect her inheritance. Three years later, the Swiss Es Geschach Am Hellichten Tag / It Happened In Broad Daylight released, based on the book by the same name. The screenplay is written by Friedrich Durrenmatt, who skillfully evades mystery conventions and turns the film into a layered portrait of an obsessed detective who uses psychology and tricks to capture a monster that kills young girls in the woods. Several remakes followed, including in The Pledge (2002) with Jack Nicholson, which will be discussed later.

Stranger Danger
Hollywood films in which child murder was the subject are rare in the 1960s till the early 1970s, because showing them (explicitly) is still a sensitive issue in the relatively moralistic America. In Italy, two gialli appeared in 1972 in which child murderers take center stage: Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture A Duckling and Aldo Lado’s Who Saw Her Die? Although filmmakers in Europe increasingly dared to tackle controversial subjects, the Italian directors consciously chose to portray the murders in a fairly discreet way. However, that didn’t stop the Catholic Church from criticizing Don’t Torture A Duckling for its cynical portrayal of a religious southern Italian town.

One of the best-known films in which child murder occurs is undoubtedly The Shining (1980). In an iconic scene, Danny Torrance rides his bicycle through the hallways of the eerie Overlook Hotel, and encounters the Grady twins, who have been chopped to pieces by their father with an axe in another time. In two striking split seconds we watch as the girls lie dead in the hall.

In the 1980s, Hollywood reflected the societal paranoia of ‘stranger danger’ in the horror and thriller genre. Ronald Reagan’s United States saw an explosive increase in fears of crimes against children, fueled in large part by the murders of Etan Patz and Adam Walsh; two horrific cases that were both hugely covered by national media. Most people that grew up during that time can no doubt remember this alleged epidemic of child abductions, thanks in part to the ‘Milk Carton Kids’; a nickname for the missing children whose portraits were printed on milk cartons in the hope that large-scale distribution would produce leads.

It was a method that rarely proved effective and was criticized for focusing mainly on white, upper-middle class children, while poor black children were more likely to go missing. The campaign also seemed to sow fear among American children. Brad Feuerhelm, editor of art and photography magazine American Suburb, wrote about the “Milk Carton Kids” and its connection to the “satanic panic,” fueled by a rapidly changing America in which the 24/7 news cycle emerged, crime rates soared and questionable reports of Satanic abuse were discusses on popular talk shows. “To sip from the carton of the specter’s image itself leaves traces of ephemeral traumas on the lips of all children,” Feuerhelm wrote poetically.

In 1982, Universal tried to move into a different direction with its successful Halloween franchise. The third part, in which John Carpenter was only involved as producer and composer, removed Michael Myers entirely and tried to mold the franchise into an anthology-like format. Halloween III: The Season of the Witch tells the bizarre story of an Irish toy company that tries to kill an entire generation of American children using magical Halloween masks. Although the film was destroyed by critics and Michael Myers fans were disappointed that the film lacked their favorite psychopath, Halloween III has since then become a cult favorite. Large-scale child murder is merely a menacing doomsday scenario in this unintentionally funny film, but we do see a child suffocate in a pumpkin mask.

The lingering fear of child abduction and murder, which was particularly persistent in America in the 1980s and 1990s — and perpetuated even longer in Europe through the horrific deeds of Marc Dutroux and Michel Fourniret — had a major influence on cinema. Freddy Krueger can be considered the personification of the fear of child murder in popular culture. The iconic child killer from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) in the red-green-striped sweater appeared in a total of nine films over the years and was a nightmare for several generations of young people. Interestingly, Craven actually wanted to turn Krueger into pedophile but didn’t, because of a pedophilia case that was in the news at the time.

Another film that incorporated ‘stranger danger’ into the plot is Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (1987), a cool cult classic set in a Californian town where mostly young people and children mysteriously disappear. In a scene emblematic of the turbulent era in which the beloved vampire flick is set, the main characters’ mother visits downtown Santa Cruz for the first time, only to encounter a wall plastered with posters depicting punk concerts and missing persons. Later, a group of stylishly dressed vampires turns out to be responsible for the numerous missing persons and murders in Santa Cruz.

A film often linked to ‘satanic panic’ is The Believers (1987), in which Martin Sheen plays a psychiatrist who must protect his son from a cult that believes in child sacrifice. A gruesome detail is that the film inspired the cult leaders Adolfo Constanzo and Sara Aldrete, who sacrificed multiple people in Santeria, Mexico in the late 1980s.

In Stephen King’s novel It (1986), a mysterious entity in a fictional Maine town feeds on the fears of its inhabitants, especially children. In the 1990 two-part TV film adaptation of the same name, Tim Curry plays Pennywise, a murderous clown who lurks in Derry’s sewers and reduces Georgie to a snack in an iconic early scene. In remake of the same name from 2016, the children take on the horrifying clown that takes the shape of their biggest fears. Bill Skarsgård plays Pennywise this time. It is striking how the two clowns couldn’t be more different from each other. Tim Curry’s Pennywise looks relatively normal and symbolizes how pedophiles and murderers often look like ordinary people, while the 2016 version is less subtle. In the more recent adaption of It, Pennywise awaits his prey with bulging eyes and saliva dripping from his chin.

Hollywood likes to symbolize society’s fears of child killings through monstrous antagonists, while in Europe of the 1980s and 1990s few filmmakers dared to make films that symbolized the horrific deeds of human monsters like Marc Dutroux, but this likely has a lot to do with the fact that Europe has much less of a genre tradition than Hollywood.

More than a crime
In 1995 HBO released the television film Citizen X, based on the true story of the most infamous serial killer from the Soviet Union, Andrie Chikatilo, who killed fifty young women and girls between 1978 and 1990. If you can look past the odd Russian accents, this excellent thriller aptly shows Detective Viktor Burakov continuing his hunt for the killer while his investigation is hampered by Soviet ideology and a bureaucratic police force. In a memorable scene where the body of a young girl has just been found in the woods, one of Burakov’s agents smashes his head against a tree until he bleeds, after realizing he knows the victim. “I have 49 on my conscience. You mustn’t blame yourself,” says Burakov. “It’s not that. She’s my cousin’s daughter. Natasha Dunakova. She was eight.” The scene aptly illustrates how the murder of a child is more than an abomination in itself, and disrupts entire communities.

In 1999, Neil Jordan’s In Dreams releases, a thriller about a mother who has a paranormal link to her daughter’s (Robert Downey Jr.) killer through dreams. A year later, Battle Royale (2000) hits cinemas, which can certainly be considered the founder of Netflix’s most recent hit — Squid Game — and the popular mode from the game Fortnite. In the Japanese action film, forty-two fourth-graders are taken to a deserted island, where the teens must kill each other to the last man with an arsenal of weapons that are scattered across the island.

Tragic Hero
After the turn of the century, child murder on the silver screen seems to meet with less and less resistance. It is striking that the violent death of babies and (young) children is now frequently used to set the plot in motion or to give the main characters a tragic background story. What many detective films about infanticide have in common is that they focus on confrontation or revenge. Most are male-driven stories in which a detective has to solve the crime or a father has to protect a vulnerable child. An illustrative example is The Pledge (2002), a remake of the aforementioned Es Schach am hellighten tag, in which Jack Nicholson plays an outcast detective who befriends a single mother and uses her young daughter as bait to catch a child murderer. Neo-noir Sin City (2005) also revolves around the revenge of a sidelined detective. In the first part of the film, John Hartigan prevents the sadistic killer Roark Junior from raping and murdering eleven-year-old Nancy Callahan. Hartigan shoots off his ear, hand and genitals before the creep escapes. In the second part of the film, which takes place years later, Hartigan faces Roarke again, who returns as the ‘Yellow Bastard’. Even though a — now full-grown — Nancy comes to his aid, movies like these one aren’t so much about victims, but more about aging, guilt-ridden men. Their revenge is often the final heroic deed.

An exception is Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones (2009), which was based on Alice Sebold’s bestseller. The film tells the story of fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon, who is lured to a hiding place and murdered by a pedophile serial killer. While Jackson’s film adaptation received mixed reactions from audiences and critics, mainly due to an overkill of CGI and kitschy sentiment, the performances of Stanley Tucci (who brings child killer Harvey to life) and Saoirse Ronan (who convincingly played dreamy Susie Salmon) unanimously praised.

The Lovely Bones is a tragic fantasy in which we see Susie coming to terms with her own death from some sort of limbo. Some of the aforementioned films, such as citizen x and in dreams, give way to our fascination with the psychology of serial killers and pedophiles. They show the viewer how they calculate, plan and ultimately carry out their horrific deeds. The Lovely Bones, on the other hand, considers the horrific violence from the perspective of the victim and her relatives. In the end, Susie takes revenge from the afterlife by dropping an icicle on her killer. Harvey stumbles, and falls to his death in a garbage dump. With this scene, Sebold and Jackson criticize the tendency to elevate serial killers to more than what they are: a piece of filth that should be forgotten as soon as possible.

Sensitive
The VVitch: A New England Folktale (2015) uses the kidnapping and likely murder of the youngest family member as a starting point. In this grim witch tale by Robert Eggers, a devoted Christian family moves to the edge of an ominous forest. The film tells a layered story about the loss of innocence and breaking free from your oppressive family. Doctor Sleep (2019), Mike Flanagan’s sequel to The Shining (1980), set thirty-two years later, pits the now 40-year-old Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor) against a vampire-like gang called The True Knot, whose members can live forever by torturing and killing children and stealing their life-force. In a gruesome scene bordering on inappropriate, we see how ‘baseball boy’ becomes the victim of the gang. That it, sometimes, is better to portray infanticide discreetly became apparent from the fact that Stephen King, who shy away from horrors against children, urged director Flanagan to scale back the scene a bit.

Very recently, it became clear that that the depiction of real child murder in film is still not without risk. Jean Lambrecks, father of Eefje Lambrecks, who was murdered by Marc Dutroux, threatened to take legal action against Maldoror; a film inspired by the Dutroux case on which director Fabrice Du Welz brooded for fifteen years. Whether he can build a compelling story around the tragic murders of Dutroux, we can tell soon, when the film hits cinemas.

One of the scenes that made me fall in love with cinema was that iconic moment in North By Northwest (1959) in which Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) meets Eve Kendall (Eva Marie-Saint) in the dining car of a train heading for Chicago. There is something timeless about this undeniably erotic scene, in which Roger — on the run after accidentally being caught up in an international conspiracy — meets up with Eve, a seductress CIA agent who is sent after him. Their ambiguous dialogue and meaningful glances beautifully display the chemistry between the two Hollywood legends, while the atmospheric decor adds to the ambiance; the American plains are rolling past in the background as the leads only have eyes for each other. When they later sleep together in Roger’s car, the train enters a dark tunnel; a visual pun which Hitchcock considered ‘one of his finest, naughtiest achievements’.

Hitchcock clearly had an affinity with trains, since he made two other thrillers in which the modern mode of transport plays a vital part. The Thirty Nine Steps (1935) was based on the book of the same name and is often considered a precursor for Hitchcock’s American work. In this black-and-white film, the Canadian general Richard Hannay uses a train to escape from his enemies. Hitchcocks 1938 picture The Lady Vanishes (based on the book The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White) takes place entirely on an old-fashioned luxury train. That many people find a mystery taking place on a moving decor thrilling, is proven by the endless list of mystery and detective books in which a train functions as a primary location. The obvious reason for that is practical for narrative reasons: unless the train stops, no one can go in, and no one can leave. The Lady Vanishes effectively uses the space of the train as a decor — providing a feeling of confinement and suspense. The suspects are all stuck in the small but decadent cars as they get closer to their destination, both literally and figuratively.

By the time Hitchcock released Strangers On A Train in 1951, he was a well-established director, having long ago exchanged his British homeland for the sunny hills of Hollywood. Still, like he allegedly refused to stop wearing his three-piece suit while directing in the Californian heat, the British filmmaker never seemed fully able to let go of the classical, theatrical movie sets, which look and feel as British as a cup of earl grey with a splash of milk. The plot of Strangers On A Train revolves around tennis player Guy Haines, who is eager to divorce his promiscuous wife Miriam so he can marry the daughter of a US Senator. On a train, psychopath Bruno Antony recognizes Haines and casually reveals his idea for a murder scheme: two perfect strangers meet and “swap murders” — Bruno suggests to kill Miriam and Guy kill Bruno’s hated father. Guy is amused by the idea but doesn’t take it seriously. Later, he finds out that Bruno, however, was deadly serious and went ahead with the plan.

Nostalgia
When watching these train scenes in movies from a bygone era, it is not hard to feel a little nostalgic about them, especially in a time when trains have become an inferior mode of transport for long distance in large parts of the world. Although the train still holds merit as a popular mode of commuter transport in Asia (Japan holds the global top score for railroad infrastructure efficiency) and Europe, the United States have clearly chosen Greyhounds and (domestic) flights over the more environmentally friendly alternative of the railroad. The trains as depicted in many classical Hollywood movies, however, beam with an atmosphere of luxury and decadence, long lost since then. Just as in Strangers On A Train, a conversation with a stranger sets everything in motion in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995). Jesse (Ethan Hawke) tries to convince Celine (Julie Delpy) to get off a train and spend the evening wandering around a foreign city with him. ‘If I turn out to be some kind of psycho, you just get on the next train,’ he jokes.

That there might actually be violent psychos lurking on trains, is an idea that The Midnight Meat Train (2008) uses as its premise, which was based on a Clive Barker short story. The underrated film stars Bradley Cooper, relatively unknown at the time, who plays an aspiring photographer investigating a string of murders in the New York underground. The antagonist is a broad-shouldered but sharply dressed serial killer (Vinnie Jones), who wields a giant meat hammer to butcher late night travelers with. The successful South Korean zombie horror flick Train To Busan (2016) uses a high speed train as the stage for a familiar but entertaining story about a diverse group of people that have to survive while a deadly zombie virus spreads across the coaches.

Train Terror
The train has proven itself a popular element in cinema, not in the least because its assocations with bygone eras and mystery. Perhaps its prevalence could be further explained by the fact that movies embody constant movement (as trains do, too). It’s not hard to see a correlation between the movie — best experienced on a rectangular frame, and the passing landscape that one sees from a train window. The shape of classical analog film roll also slightly resembles the looks of a train — with the rows of images interpretable as endless train compartments. And one cannot write about trains and movies without mentioning the infamous myth of L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895): one of the first publicly shown motion pictures. The story goes that when the film was first shown, the audience was so shocked by the moving image of a life-sized train coming directly at them, that people screamed in terror and ran to the back of the room. Although the truths behind this myth are often debated, it is noteworthy that the first appearance of a train in cinema caused shock and horror amongst its audience, turning the short accidentally into an unexpected horror short.

Another milestone in cinematic history that only arrived a few years later was The Great Train Robbery (1903), which was only twelve minutes long but turned out to be a major commercial success for The Edison Company. Historians have cited The Great Train Robbery as a popular early film that collects numerous important Western tropes, such as “elements of fisticuffs, horseback pursuit and gunplay.” Although the train occurs in countless Westerns, its presence wasn’t limited to any specific movie genre. Many beloved mainstream movies have used the train in one way or another. Harry Potter and his friends travel to Hogwartz using the Hogwartz Express, for which the romantic Jacobite steam train in Scotland was used. Another example of a famous franchise which used the train effectively as a set peice is Indiana Jones. In a thrilling scene from Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade, Harrison Ford chases his enemies on a moving train.

Privacy
Despite the fact that the train frequently occurs in all film genres, it seems to be featured most in the thriller and horror genre. Aside from associations with mystery and nostalgia (as mentioned earlier) an element that explains the railroad’s prominence in so many thrillers and horror films is plot-related: the train allows a relatively anonymous way of travelling long distance and therefore provides an interesting means for writers. At airports, one needs passports and easily traceable tickets. On a train, one can travel in (relative) anonymity and hide in a private car till the destination is reached. In A Perfect Murder (1998), a loose remake of Dial M For Murder, a businessman (Michael Douglas) kills the man that’s blackmailing him in the anonymity of his private car; and slips out unseen after. The scene itself could be interpreted as a nod to Strangers On A Train, where the two main characters discuss ‘a perfect murder’.

In the brilliant but largely forgotten TV movie Citizen X (1995) — which was based on the hunt for Soviet Russia’s most prolific serial killer Andrej Tsjikatilo — the murderer lurks around railroad stations where he preys upon the young and unsuspecting. After a fruitless investigation of multiple years, head investigator Burakov devises a plan to blanket almost all railroad stations in the area where the killer is active with conspicuous uniformed men to discourage him. Three small stations, however, are deliberately left unattended, except for undercover agents. A plainclothes officer finally discovers Chikatilo at the back of the station, as he returns from the woods, having just killed his final victim.

In the aesthetically pleasing but ultimately disappointing remake of The Oriental Express (2017), based on Agathe Christie’s classic novel, a murder is committed on the train, prompting detective Hercule Poirot to investigate the many suspicious characters that reside in its many cars. Unfortunately, the movie proved that traditional niceties are not always enough to make a who-dunnit compelling; things are not helped by the apparent need of the director to (literally) stop the train as often as possible, breaking the flow of the film and disrupting its sense of confinement. In The Girl On The Train (2016), Emily Blunt beautifully plays an alcoholic that aimlessly rides the commute after she loses her job and is left by her husband. From the window, she romanticizes the suburban live of a beautiful couple she passes by on a daily basis. One day, she spots a strange man kissing the wife of the home she is so particulary fixated on. A few days later, the papers report that the beautiful blonde she has seen kissing a stranger, has gone missing. Just as the viewer, Blunts character is a voyeur. In contrast to Hitchcocks train movies and Agathe christies Murder On The Orient Express, this film is not so much concerned with what happens on the train, but with what happens outside of it… and the flashes of a hidden world that can be perceived through its windows. The train itself is presented quite realistically in the film; it is always busy with tired commuters, who judge Emily — looking more disheveled every day — as she sips vodka from a plastic bottle. The idea that one could see something crucial by simply staring out of a window appeals to the imagination, especially considering the fact that 99% of all commuters nowadays are glued to their phones.

In Brian DePalma’s Carlito’s Way (1993), the train is nor decor nor a plot tool. Instead, it is a metaphor. In the final act of the movie, Carlito (Al Pacino) almost seems able to escape his treacherous gangster’s life, but he is eventually betrayed and killed by an assassin, just before he can get on the train to Miami with his pregnant sweetheart Gail. The train symbolizes an unattainable goal; a fantasy of retirement in the sun… of simply running away from one’s problems. Carlito’s Way is a Greek tragedy disguised as a gangster’s tale; as is made clear in the first scene, the film’s flawed hero will never escape the demons of his past. When Carlito is wheeled away on a gurney, dying, his crying lover gets on the train with a bag full of cash, riding off to a new life. As he leaves his final breath, Carlito peacefully stares at a billboard with a sunset on it… which reads ‘Escape to Paradise.’

Analysing the Tate murders and two contemporary movies based on the crime

Recently Quentin Tarantino released the novelisation of his hit-film Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood (2019), and also announced that he is working on a stage play based on characters from the film, proving that the acclaimed director is far from done with his alternative history tale based on the Tate Murders. Neither was I, for Charles Manson and his following have intrigued me ever since I first heard about their gruesome crimes. They are grimly fascinating, not least because of their historical significance and sensational associations with cults, Hollywood and glamour, but because they represented the end of a cultural era. As Karina Longworth said in her podcast You Must Remember Manson, ‘The massacres Manson became responsible for wouldn’t just help kill off the sixties, and adding to a climate of paranoia that, for better or worse, inspired members of the Hollywood community who lived in fear that they could be next. Manson helped to invent the seventies, and that decades ground-breaking wave of new American films.’

Even now, after more than fifty years have passed, the story of the ex-convict turned cult leader and his following of drug-fueled hippies remain a subject of collective morbid fascination. In our true crime-obsessed post-Serial age, the murder case of actress Sharon Tate and her friends — having been adapted into countless books, movies, documentaries and tv-shows—is solidified as Hollywood’s most engaging true horror story. After watching Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood for the second time, I wanted to write a critical analysis on the movie as well as another, less prominent picture based on the Tate murders; The Haunting Of Sharon Tate (2019), which was released in the same year. Through analysing these two films, I want to shed a light on how modern cinema uses the Manson murders (in particular the Tate murders at Cielo Drive) as a vessel for bloody fantasies about the violent murders that supposedly helped to end Hollywood’s Golden Age. My goal is to dissect telling scenes from these two movies as to understand how contemporary (male) directors portrayed fantasies of masculinity and female victimhood in the films they based on the Manson’s horrors. For those that are not familiar with these murders, I start with brief exploration of Charles Manson’s most influental crimes and their place in pop culture.

The Tate/LaBianca murders
On the night of August 8–9, 1969, four members of the so-called Manson Family (a cultlike group of hippies led by Charles Manson, who resided at the Spahn movie ranch) invaded the rented home of actress Sharon Tate and movie director Roman Polanski at 10050 Cielo Drive, Los Angeles. They murdered Tate, who was eight months pregnant, along with their three friends — Voytek Frykowski, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger. Steven Parent, an eightteen year old who was leaving the Polanski residence after visiting the caretaker, was also killed. The extremely violent murders were committed by Charles Denton ‘‘Tex’’ Watson, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel. Manson had ordered the murders because the previous owner of the house at which the deaths occurred — Terry Melcher, a music producer — had refused to make a record with him. The following night, Manson took the four murderers plus Leslie Van Houten and Clem Grogan for a drive, after which they stopped at a house at which they had once had a party, and proceeded to murder its owners; supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary, who was the co-owner of a dress shop. Much later, it would turn out that Manson, who was preparing his following for a apocalyptic race war he predicted, was also responsible for the failed murder attempt on Bernard Crowe (also known as ‘‘Lotsapoppa’’), the torture and death of music teacher/PHD-student Gary Allen Hinman and Hollywood stuntman/actor Donald Jerome Shea (also known as “Shorty”).

The Tate/LaBianca murders had a significant societal impact worldwide and are often described as a symbolic end for the ‘Swinging Sixties’, a period of love, peace and sexual freedom… that was seemingly already overdue. Writer Joan Didion described her recollection of the events beautifully in an essay in The White Album (1979): ‘Many people I know believe that the sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment […] The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.’

The brutal murders and the lengthy trials that ensued after Manson and the remains of his following were finally caught in Death Valley four months later, marked the end of the hippie era and gave way for a more conservative political time. ‘In the wake of the Tate-LaBianca slayings, Southern California was thrown into a panic and fear against the hippie movement.’ writes Donaghey for Vice, echoing the sentiment described by Didion. ‘The trust and idealism of the late 60s had curdled into paranoia, and the feeling carried well into the hangover of the early 1970s.’

Investigators found out that Manson had told members of his ‘family’ to kill those residing in Cielo Drive 10050, after a music producer — who used to live there — had declined to work with the aspiring musician. Although Manson didn’t kill anybody at the Polanksi/Tate residence with his own hands, the fact that he was involved in the planning and looked like the hippies that conservatives feared, quickly caused to media to turn him into a demon whose sinister motivations were eagerly attributed to his troubled upbringing and the decline of Christian morals in American society. During his prosecution, Manson revealed to be a highly disturbed, yet intelligent individual, immortalizing himself with quotes like this one: “These children that come at you with knives — they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.” Aside from his memorable court appearances, Manson’s messiah-like behaviour and the female groupies that worshipped him only added further to his legendary status as the true perversion of the American Dream. ‘Manson achieved his goal, becoming so famous that his name replaced those of his victims. The crimes became known as the Manson murders.’ William McKeen wrote. Manson served a life sentence till his death in 2017.

Sharon Tate: token of victimhood
Despite the many victims of the Tate/Bianca murders, actress Sharon Tate remains the best-known and most glamorized of them all — the official casefile of the slaughter at Cielo Drive even starts with her last name. At the time of her death, she was 26 years old and eight months pregnant of a boy that was posthumously named Paul. Tate was also a beginning actress and model, who’d had small parts in a few major motion pictures like The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967). Before police finally zeroed in on Manson and his followers, Tate was the star of the headlines and glamorous pictures of her were featured on front pages. But it didn’t take long for Charles Manson to take her place. In the years following the crimes, he established himself as a cult figure. ‘If Manson didn’t live to memorialize his golden anniversary, the rest of us have, thanks to a Manson-industrial complex that has been working overtime. […] In addition to comic books and multiple websites devoted to him and his groupies, jewellery, coffee mugs, and T-shirts displaying his image sell on eBay, Etsy, and Amazon,’ Peter Biskind wrote for Esquire.

While the name Sharon Tate still rings a bell with many people, Charles Manson became an icon of evil. Kelly Wyne wrote about him for Newsweek; ‘Though America has had its history of cults and offensive behaviour, Manson’s influence of dozens of people, along with his behaviour until his death — he tattooed a swastika on his head in prison — was utterly captivating an unrelatable for so many, it continues to make news, movies and more, maybe just to show the darkness of humans, and how it can impact an entire community and country.’

The beautiful Sharon Tate, in contrast, remained another example of an aspiring starlet that died too young… her victimhood being, sadly, her biggest legacy. Her tragic story is as sensational as it is American, for she was a moderately successful star that found most of her fame in death. Her husband, Roman Polanski, went on to become one of the most succesful and celebrated film directors of his time, despite fleeing the United States after he was found guilty of the drugging and rape of a 13-year-old-girl in 1977.

Hollywood after Manson
The Tate/Bianca murders would go down in history as the symbolic end of the hippie era, and the societal shift marked the death of Hollywood’s Golden Age. As the Vietnam War was raging on and counterculture was demanding more space in the cultural and entertainment field, conventional genre movies and spaghetti Westerns that were so populair in the 50s and 60s made room for more experimental films characterized by their darker themes and explicit violence. Movies like Deliverance (1972), Black Christmas (1974) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) were deemed depraved and morally harmful by several critics at the time of their release in the early seventies, but they resonated with younger audiences, that seemed to be fed up with the predictable narratives of classical Hollywood movies. Perhaps their predictable structures and morally safe narratives didn’t suit the time where the Vietnam War divided the country and crime rates and drug use spiked all across the United States. It was also the time when serial killers like John Wayne Cagy, Ted Bundy and Richard ‘The Night Stalker’ Ramirez terrorized suburban America. Harold Schechter, a crime historian, even called the 1970s — 1999s the ‘Golden Age of serial murder,’ and found the reasons encompassing everything from sociological changes, to biology, technology and linguistics.

The Tate/Bianca murders, bridging two decades, formed the base of a new cinematic era. The first documentary film about Charles Manson released four years after the murders. Ever since, countless movies and series have been made about Manson and his crimes. Actor Damon Herriman even portrayed Charles Manson twice, first in the second season of Mindhunter (2017), and then in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood (2019). Hollywood’s fascination with the Manson family murders reached a peak in 2018, when no fewer than four projects based on the crimes were in production. The reason behind the many revisits of Tate’s murder were probably rooted in its fifty year anniversary, as well as an increased interest for everything (true) crime.

In many fictionalisations, Sharon Tate takes centre stage, arguably because she, as a victim, is the glue between the glamorous world of Hollywood and the dark underbelly of 1969 California that Manson represented. Despite still being a sensitive topic (some of the Manson family members, as well as Sharon Tate’s sisters are still alive and vocal), the tragic, sensational story of the beautiful actress getting murdered by tripping hippies is still frequently capitalized on by the entertainment industry. But aside from the sensational aspects, there must also a deeper, more disturbing reason behind Hollywood’s need to fictionalize the horrific crime over and over again. To further explore this, I will dissect two 2019 fiction films based on the Tate murders in the next part of this essay, as to further deconstruct how the sensational crime was and is used to convey fantasies of female victimhood and traditional masculinity. In the first analysis of Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, I’ll reflect on the masculine fantasies that this film builds around the historical murder. In the analysis of The Haunting Of Sharon Tate, I’ll mainly focus on the film’s fantasies of female victimhood.

WARNING: Spoilers for Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, The Haunting of Sharon Tate and Inglourious Basterds

­Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood (2019)
Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood was the only project that obtained the public backing of Debra Tate (Sharon’s sister). Despite this, the film — starring Hollywood veterans Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Margot Robbie — was the subject of multiple controversies. The first was based around the way Tarantino treats women in his movies. Another one stemmed from his ‘casual rewriting of historical events’. The third controversy was about the depiction of Bruce Lee, who is portrayed as an annoying caricature in a scene in the film. ‘At the core of all three of these ideas is that Hollywood is still a place that largely tells stories dominated from a cisgender, heterosexual white guy point of view,’ Emily vanderWerff claimed in an article for Vox. These controversies, however, didn’t stop the film from becoming a box office hit when it released in the summer of 2019. Critics praised the film for its ambiguity and strong performances, and it went on to win two Oscars at the Academy Awards.

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood has all the familiar tropes that the director is known for: bloody violence; dark humour; extensive dialogue and meta movie references. Still, this film feels more evocative and subtle than his earlier work. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that it might be his most personal project. ‘Tarantino was a boy of 6 in 1969, living far from the centre of Los Angeles, and in a sense what he’s done here is re-create the world he’s imagined the adults were living in at the time.’ Kenneth Turan wrote for the LA Times. The film focusses on the buddy-like relationship between the two male protagonists: a failing actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his loyal stuntmen Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) while Charles Manson and his Family members lurk in the background. ‘The relationship between Rick and Cliff is at the emotional heart of Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, which openly pines for the carefree irresponsibility of youth.’ According to Katie Rife. The friendship between the two leads references the buddy-trope that drove many popular spaghetti westerns from the sixties, like The Big Gundown (1967) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). ‘The pair function here a bit like Raymond Chandler’s tarnished knights, doing good despite themselves, an association heightened by a bookstore scene reminiscent of one in Humphrey Bogart’s “The Big Sleep.” Kenneth Turan wrote in his review.

Halfway through the film, aging stuntman Cliff Booth visits the infamous Spahn Ranch, in search for an associate producer. After Cliff finds out that the producer has become an apathetic victim of the Manson crew, he decides he can’t do anything for him. After Cliff Booth leaves the grounds, Pussycat (Margaret Qualley), an underage female hippie he has encountered before, confronts him (see figure 4). The camera pans up from her legs to her waist. We see her body in parts; the camera cuts off her legs and bottom; objectifying her. Cliff Booth walks past her indifferently, casually dismissing her. Just as the ‘tarnished knights’ starring in film noir didn’t allow themselves sexual diversions, Cliff doesn’t fall for the alluring trap that is this underage girl.

But then, he discovers that one of the hippies has stuck a knife in the tire of his ride. Visibly annoyed, Cliff stands in front of his bosses Cadillac, looking at the culprit (figure 5). Brad Pitt resembles legendary actor Robert Redford in his glory days; a heavily tanned, blond cowboy, looking like a Marlboro Man from a sixties advertisement. The hippie provocatively grins while Pitt’s character sighs at the childish act and dramatically takes off his glasses. The viewer can feel the tension rising, perhaps there is even reason enough to feel a little scared, for confrontation is now inevitable. But Cliff Booth, behaving like a stoic outlaw from a Sergio Leone film, stands firmly in his booths and asks the hippie rationally to replace the tire. Naturally, the fool declines. Then, Cliff Booth walks up to him and promptly punches him in the face, knocking him to the ground. The viewer can only cheer him on. Our flawed hero didn’t resort to violence right away; the antagonist was given a fair chance to solve the problem he caused. Therefore the beating feels justified— for in Tarantino’s world, one does not fuck with another man’s car; an overused symbol of manhood and American freedom.

Halfway into the film, we see main protagonist Rick Dalton’s neighbour Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) strolling through downtown Los Angeles. The camera follows her legs as she casually heads towards the theatre on a sunlit Hollywood boulevard. Again; the camera is used as a tool of decapitation and disembodiment. The machinery of Hollywood cuts up Margot Robbie body into pieces; her legs become the subject of male desire. The viewer then watches Sharon Tate as she casually watches her own film, her feet resting on the chair in front of her. She is magnificently played by Robbie as a cheery but naïve blonde-embodying the male fantasy of a movie starlet. As someone who knows what happened to Tate in reality, these scenes feel slightly eerie… as a silence before the storm, as well as a way of setting up Sharon Tate as a somewhat childlike but sexual character, bursting with innocence and joy; representing a classical male fantasy of the passive and harmless beauty.

On a first watch, one can only look at these scenes with a sense of growing dread. But in the final scene Tarantino subverts the expectations of the viewer. Like he did in Inglorious Basterds (2009), where Adolf Hitler was brutally shot to pieces in the explosive climax, he now warps history into his own fantastic reality. ‘This is Tarantino’s most personal film in decades, and the longings expressed in it seem to flow directly from who he is as a person: an established middle-aged white guy confronting his own impending irrelevance,’ Katie Rife wrote for AVClub. ‘That exact prospect eats away at the film’s protagonist, Rick Dalton […], a fading Western TV star whose diminishing celebrity has forced him to contemplate the unthinkable for an actor of his calibre: going to Rome to star in “Eye-talian” Westerns.’

In the final scene, the Manson hippies enter Rick Dalton’s home, where they encounter Cliff Booth in the living room, who just lit a LSD-tipped cigarette. Charles ‘‘Tex’’ Watson says something about the devil and his deeds after which the intoxicated stuntman mocks him in response. One of the intruders asks Tex to shoot Cliff, but before he can, the stuntman whistles and his loyal pit-bull sinks his teeth into the flesh of the intruder. A violent battle engulfs, in which Cliff and his dog inflict brutal violence on the home invaders, which surpasses what a court would consider reasonable self-defence (figure 7). It is a show of violence and carnage for an audience that has been waiting for it for more than two hours. After the gunman is killed, one of the female intruders is mauled by the dog while another attacks Cliff with a knife. He overpowers her and slams her head repeatedly at several surfaces across the house (figure 8), including a framed movie poster with Rick Dalton’s face on it.

Rick Dalton is chilling in his pool with headphones on, not aware of the violence happening inside, when the last intruder (that’s still alive) runs towards the pool, screaming in agony. The fictionalised violence that made Rick famous finds its way into the film’s ‘reality’ in the form of an actual flamethrower, a prop that Rick has kept as a souvenir in his shed. He burns the screaming hippie to a crisp (figure 9), just as he did with the nazi’s in his most popular film, signifying that Manson’s hippies were a threat of similar severity; deserving the worst death imaginable — a cinematic death. When a neighbour from the Tate residence later comes to check if everyone’s all right, Dalton replies; ‘Well the fucking hippies aren’t, that’s for sure.’ Despite their swift reaction to the intruders, the protagonists are completely oblivious to the Manson threat over the course of the film. Nonetheless, Rick and Dalton end up as heroes, for with their action they save the only ‘pure’ and innocent woman in the film. All the other women in the film are portrayed as dangerous and untrustworthy… Pussycat is an alluring siren, Cliff Booth’s wife a nagging bitch and Lena Dunham’s character, who appears to be based on the Manson follower Catherine “Gypsy”, is a dangerous crook. In Tarantino’s universe, the extreme violence inflicted by the old school Hollywood archetypes saves society from the harsh reality in which a pregnant, innocent woman and her friends were tortured to death. The climax of bloodshed in Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood creates a moment of catharsis for the leading men; through killing the hippies, the aging has-beens finally have found meaning again. The brutal killings are justified, for the viewer knows that if the Manson hippies would have succeeded, all the characters would’ve been killed. The scene also seems symbolic for the relation between actor and stuntman; Cliff — loyal and unbothered by fame — does all the hard labour and ends up in the hospital, while Rick Dalton, — self-obsessed and vain — still manages to steal the show by getting the most glorious kill. Perhaps a comment on the actor’s fantasy of everlasting success and fame without really working for it. Maybe the brutal act is also meta-foreshadowing for the cinematic era that would follow soon; in which lighthearted genre movies would be replaced by films characterised by their brutal violence and depressing endings.

The film is a captivating, wistful fairy tale for aging men, a celebration of 1960s filmmaking in which the flawed but likable buddies save themselves and the innocent woman through the act of violence. Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood is Tarantino’s poignant love letter to classic Hollywood, as well as a emotional exploration into the masculine fantasies we construct for ourselves. The graphic violence that is commited against the intruders in the finale, is subtly justified by framing strong-willed and independent women as violent and dangerous. The corollary is masculine supremacy; the men in question are actually impotent and more or less useless, but through protecting their own fantasy, they are eventually redeemed. This narrative works on a meta-level as well: Quentin Tarantino, an aging Hollywood legend himself, has the power to change history inside the borders of his cinematic fantasy… to save Tate from her horrible death. Maybe Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood is the only movie so far that tackles one of Los Angeles’ most haunting crimes in a way that doesn’t feel exploitative or depraved, despite having one of the most violent endings ever seen in cinema. It is somewhat ironic, though, that a female actress that was constantly sexualised and objectified through her life, is posthumously celebrated by a male director known for warping history to indulge his own bloody fantasies. Despite the fact that Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood can be perceived as a glorification of male supremacy, Tarantino is gentle on the most sensitive aspect of the film and allows the viewer to leave the theatre with a sense of relief and optimism. Just like would always happen in the movies that died in the sixties, everything works out in the end.

When I mailed Charles D. ‘Tex’ Watson, who is now 75 years old and has long ago subverted to Christianity while serving a lifetime sentence in the California department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for his participation in the Manson murders, as to ask what he thought of Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, he wrote that ‘the title is pretty much what I thought about it’ (figure 10). On my question of what he thought of the societal effects on our collective fascination for the cinematic re-enactment of historical crimes he answered ‘there is a computer acronym ‘‘gigo’’: garbage in, garbage out, or ‘‘we are what we eat.’’

The Haunting of Sharon Tate (2019)
Just as Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, The Haunting of Sharon Tate is based on the 1969 Tate murders but with fictional elements. It follows actress Sharon Tate (Hilary Duff) who suffers premonitions of her murder at the hands of Charles Manson’s followers. The Haunting of Sharon Tate was written and produced before the plot of Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood was known, which suggests that both filmmakers came up with the concept for a feature film that warped the historical murders of Sharon Tate at roughly the same time. According to Kylie Harrington from The Hollywood Reporter, ‘He [director Daniel Farrands] combined the facts of Sharon Tate’s death with an alleged quote from her, published posthumously in Fate Magazine, where she recounted a nightmare eerily similar to her actual death. The result is a fictionalized version of the actress’ last 72 hours, incorporating elements of psycho-horror, slasher and home invasion movies.’ While Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood was a major Hollywood production with a 90 million dollar budget, The Haunting of Sharon Tate was allegedly made on a meagre budget less than 1 million dollars and was shot in just two weeks. Prior to the release of the film, Sharon Tate’s sister Debra publicly rebuked the project in an interview given to People Magazine. Among the many reasons for lambasting the film, Debra claimed the film was “classless” and “exploitative.” The Haunting of Sharon Tate was slammed by critics and was nominated for the Golden Raspberry Awards for worst picture. Hillary Duff won ‘worst actress’ for her portrayal as Sharon Tate. The film was a major box office flop; grossing only $68,504 after DVD and Blu-Ray sales.

The film starts with a black-and-white montage of an interview with Sharon Tate, in which she recounts a nightmare; suggesting she foresaw the terrible murders. The Haunting of Sharon Tate then switches to the morning after the slaughter, in which the camera slowly pans past the victims at Cielo Drive; ending with a brief shot of Sharon Tate’s mangled body inside the living room. What’s noticeable is the level of craft and accuracy with which the ‘bodies’ are replicated (figure 11 and 12). This early scene is eerie in its simplicity; an account of the silent dead lying butchered in a beautiful mansion overlooking Hollywood in the morning sun.

After this harrowing beginning, the movie flashes back in time to follow the very pregnant Sharon Tate, as she waits for her husband Roman Polanski to return from London, where he is finishing a movie. Her friends, Jay Sebring (Jonathan Bennett), Abigail Folger ((Lydia Hearst-Shaw) and Wojciech Frykowski (Pawel Szajda) keep her company in the meantime. In contrast to Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film, which is centred on two male protagonists, The Haunting of Sharon Tate focusses mainly on Sharon Tate. Hillary Duff portrays her as a intuitive and caring woman who grows increasingly paranoid as her nightmares worsen and her friends interfere with the management of her home. At some point, her friends even start to worry about Sharon Tate’s mental health, attributing her anxiety and nightmares to pregnancy-related tiredness and paranoia. This narrative trope (the sensitive protagonist that realise something’s amiss but is ignored, belittled or treated in a condescending way by the other characters, who try to rationalise the supernatural warning signs) is often used in haunted house horror movies and can be interpreted as criticism on the way society belittles intuitive and sensitive women. ‘There’s something unsavoury about presenting Sharon Tate as one of the crazy ones,’ Wes Greene wrote for Slant, but one could argue just as well that the opposite is true; Duff’s Tate seems to be the only one in the doomed residence that is intuitive and smart enough to foresee the horrors that loom over their heads (or have already happened, considering your take on the ending, which I will discuss later).

Halfway through the film, the Cielo Drive murders play out in a shocking and bloody sequence similar to that described in police reports and the court proceedings that followed after the capture of the Manson Family in october 1969. Everything plays out similarly to what truly happened according to forensic reports and testimonies: Steven Parent (Ryan Cargill) is shot in his car by Charles ‘Tex’ Watson (Tyler Johnson). Tex then enters the home with the other family members and shoots Jay Sebring (Jonathan Bennett) in the stomach after he protests the poor treatment of Sharon. He then stabs and finished Jay off as he crawls through the garden, while Abigail Folger makes her escape but is caught up and stabbed in the chest by Patricia Krenwinkel until she is dead. Tate is the last one to be killed; Susan Atkins (Bella Poppa) stabs her multiple times in the stomach and chest. The scene is disturbingly brutal and the first scene to brand the film as a schlocky slasher — almost nothing is left to the imagination. In the final scene, that also functions as an agonizing metaphor, Sharon Tate, tied up, is stabbed to death in front of a blanket with the American flag on it (see figure 13); an object that was really present in the room when Tate was killed and Charles Manson himself apparently moved around after he visited to home some time after the murders. After the slaying, Sharon wakes up screaming. The nightmare (or perhaps a memory?) feels like an easy excuse to visualise the most brutal violence subjected to the victims, as it really happened. This scene makes it clear that The Haunting of Sharon Tate is — above all else — a slasher with an exploitative nature. It is somewhat ironic that the slasher genre, which sprung from the dark and cynical cinematic trends that were established after the Tate/Bianca murder, has finally produced a slasher that is based on the murders that allowed for the genre’s rise itself. It’s hard to argue with the exploitative nature of these scenes, which clearly was put in to shock and disturb to viewer.

After roughly an hour of ominous foreshadowing, more nightmares and supernatural events (such as a tape player starting to play Manson’s music in the middle of the night), the film turns into a fairly straight up home invasion movie, similar to modern horror movies like The Strangers (2008) and The Purge (2013).

Now the roles are reversed, and Jay Sebring gets the first kill when he pushes Atkins who then fatally hits her head into a fireplace. Voytek Frykowski fights off the other assailant and proceeds to drown her in the bathtub (see figure 14). Just as in the climactic scene from Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood (in which Cliff Booth kills the assailants) the movie doesn’t shy away from showing the violence against women; finding a moment of catharsis in a male victim overpowering and eventually ending the life of one of the female assailants.

Steven Parent flees with Sharon and tries to call the police with a radio, but is unsuccessful. In a redemptive twist, Sharon Tate takes away the gun of Tex Watson and finishes him off after he is smacked in the neck by Steven Parent (see figure 15). Sharon Tate brings some form of catharsis to the viewer, by reversing the violence. By turning history on its head and ending the life of the male assailant (Tex Watson is the main antagonist in The Haunting Of Sharon Tate) the movie explores what would’ve happened if the victims would’ve fought back against their assailants. The climax paints Sharon Tate as a typical ‘final girl’; an archetype coined by Carol J. Clover in her book Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film which refers to the last girl or woman alive to confront the killer, ostensibly the one left to tell the story. Considering the fact that The Haunting Of Sharon Tate is a slasher film, is it useful to consider this archetype. ‘Detached from her low-budget origins and messier meanings, she now circulates in these mostly cleaner and more upscale venues as a ‘female avenger’, triumphant feminist hero,’ and the like.’ The final girl trope is often considered to be a rather onedimensional fantasy of an attractive female character with the skills and capabilities of a young man. Director Daniel Farrands does little to steer away from the archetype. He clearly aimed to change Sharon Tate, a token of victimhood, into somewhat of an avenger, but then undoes this attempt in the final scene.

After the survivors gather at the front of the house, any notion of a happy ending is crushed when Sharon Tate discovers that there are bodies in front of the house. Sharon Tate watches in horror as she lifts the sheet that is covering her own body… revealing that she is a ghost… and her survival was a fantasy all along (see figure 16).

In an interview with Gruesome Magazine, director Daniel Farrands stated that: ‘None of the movie is supposed to be a retelling of the exact events. […] in the story they’re all ghosts… no one is alive when it starts. No one is alive when it ends. […] everything that plays out is their souls trapped in some sort of limbo, or purgatory and they’re having to work out the trauma of what just happened to them.’ Despite this fairly logical explanation, this layer went over the head of most reviewers. David Ehrlich described the movie as ‘a cheap revenge fantasy that suggests its subjects only died because they couldn’t see the writing on the wall.’ Maybe the film is indeed a revenge fantasy; but not one aimed at Manson and his following. As Karina Longworth put it the first episode of her podcast You Must Remember Manson: ‘It’s hard not to see [the Tate murders] as the fulfilled revenge fantasy of one of the millions of pilgrims that come to Hollywood, looking to make their mark, only to be condescended and lied to and turned to away with nothing to show for their efforts.’ Maybe the low-budget horror flick should be considered as a cynical reflection on the ignorance and vulnerability of the wealthy Hollywood elite and the looming darkness that they should’ve seen coming.

The Haunting Of Sharon Tate, however, doesn’t has the confidence to be coherently cynical. Parts of it can be perceived as an empowering fantasy, while other scenes tastelessly exploit the Tate murders for cheap thrills. the film is largely a messy collection of worn out tropes of different horror genres, but despite this, the film offers an interesting display female victimhood as perceived through the male gaze, which comes in many forms.

This is an adaption of a graduation thesis written for The Piet Zwart Institute. It contains spoilers for The Black Dahlia, True Confessions, American Horror Story: Murder House and Sin City. It also contains graphic forensic photographs that some may find disturbing. Discretion is advised.

Introduction
In the summer of 2012, my stepmom hung herself. She had separated with my mom for almost a year then, but naturally, her premature death came a big shock to me. I was eighteen at the time, and had just graduated high school. I vividly remember watching Sin City with my mom, just a few months after the funeral. Halfway through the film, Bruce Willis’ character is strung up by his neck, and just barely stays alive by tiptoeing on a stool (figure 1). When the scene came up, my mom burst in tears and didn’t stop crying for hours. It is perhaps no coincidence that I can still clearly remember this particular scene… its brutal violence amplified by the noir-inspired contrast and stark shadows.

When I was a teenager, I mainly used films and videogames to escape from my harsh home situation in which an alcoholic and verbally abusing stepmom created a unsafe environment. While she projected her frustrations about her personal struggle with identity and gender norms on me, I fled to my room and — ironically — watched films in which outdated gender norms were celebrated. I particularly enjoyed the simple but compelling narratives in classical thrillers, in which a detective had to solve a crime. I didn’t go to the funeral my of stepmom in 2012. Afterwards, my sister described the visible marks she’d seen on her neck, which the mortician had, apparently rather unsuccessfully, tried to cover up. Although I hadn’t seen my stepmom’s body with my own eyes, I could picture it easily. The image that formed inside my head was based on the numerous bodies I had seen laying in coffins and mortuary tables in thriller and horror films. Therefore, the ‘reality’ of death and violence had already mingled with the Hollywood images in my mind. Fictionalised crime helped me escape my personal horrors and perhaps even assisted in surviving it. But they also distorted and warped my views the world. Popular crime writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett gave rise to the so called ‘hard-boiled’ crime genre in the 1920s, in which rough private eyes shot their way through Los Angeles’ underbelly in order to get closer to the truth. Hollywood quickly caught on and morphed these dark stories into film noir. This gritty type of film was in high regard and its influence is still noticeable today. Sin City is a fairly recent example of how Hollywood still can’t seem to let go of its noir past.

There is an obvious male fantasy at work in the detective genre, one that’s has progressed from the literary world to the silver screen and is still predominant in contemporary media culture. A few years ago, my therapist asked me to describe the inner figure that had protected me during my youth. I told her it was a he, and that this man was very masculine and wore an old fashioned raincoat. I stated that he was reminiscent of Philip Marlowe, the moody, no nonsense detective often played by Humphrey Bogart. Much later I found out that Woody Allen wrote a film about an insecure man who seeks help from Philip Marlowe, much like myself at a younger age (figure 2). This proves that, however Philip Marlowe popularity has long since faded, the masculine fantasy that he represents, still lingers.

In this thesis, I want to explore how the masculine fantasies shaped by the hard-boiled crime genre has come off the page and live on in film. Furthermore, I want to show how a notorious Hollywood murder from 1947 correlates with the disembodiment of women by men in cinema. This thesis is about men cutting up women. Literately and figuratively. As case studies, I’ll dissect two pictures — True Confessions and The Black Dahlia that are based on the real murder case of Elizabeth ‘The Black Dahlia’ Short — one of Hollywood’s most notorious unsolved crimes — in which a woman was found cut in half. The films I’ll analyse both created a male-driven fictional story around the crime. Through exploring the history of the hard-boiled crime genre and how this genre relates to the Black Dahlia murder, I hope to demonstrate how women are disembodied on the silver screen and how this affects me as an male artist.

I Hard-boiled: forensic disembodiment and objectification in crime literature & cinema

As a teen, I read and watched detectives for the purpose of entertainment. In the current day, I look more critically and recognize many of the tropes, characters and narratives that were established in American crime literature from the 20th century. In this chapter, I’ll describe how this particular genre bled into film, and how its male-driven narratives and forensic processes manifested a tradition of disembodiment and objectification. Hard-boiled crime fiction Writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain gave rise to ‘a specific type of crime literature, known as the ‘hard-boiled’ crime genre, which often takes place in the Los Angeles of the first half of the 20th century.’ (Moore, 2006) In most of these novels, that were most popular between 1920s — 1950s, a male private eye is hired to solve a problem or a crime. ‘The hard-boiled private detective is among the most recognizable characters in popular fiction since the 1920s-a tough product of a violent world, in which police forces are inadequate and people with money can choose private help when facing threatening circumstances.’ (Moore, 2006) The crime stories are action-packed, contain explicit language and have easily recognizable and recurring archetypes; such as the femme fatale, corrupt cops and sleezy journalists. Chandler wrote that the ‘smell of fear’ generated by such stories was evidence of their response to the modern condition: ‘Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine-gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power.’(Chandler, 1950) The best hard-boiled crime writers used a recurring protagonist in their novels. The example that is most close to my heart is Chandler’s Philip Marlowe; the weary private eye that starred in over thirty stories and was later famously portrayed by Humphrey Bogart on screen. ‘Marlowe, Chandler’s virtuous and chivalrous “would-be-hero”, finds himself violating his own knightly codex on his impossible quest for a better world. Thus, Chandler renews the detective genre by violating the rules of the knightly hero and disrupting social stereotypes.’ (Biro, no date) Before the hard-boiled crime genre came into fashion, detective stories were constructed to follow the classic pattern established by Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with ‘the application of a heroic puzzle-solving detective like Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin or Sir Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.’ (Biro, no date) Chandler’s Marlowe broke with the classical, well-mannered European detective established in the nineteenth century. The hard-boiled protagonist isn’t afraid to use violence as well as his connections to get to the truth. For me, Marlowe was the ideal vessel for my personal fantasies of traditional masculinity in a household that consisted solely of women. ‘Chandler’s private eye is not only an anachronism in the detective genre but also deviates from our expectations concerning the heroic. Chandler thus paradoxically violates both the norms of the detective genre and defamiliarizes our view of the society he is describing. […] Marlowe moves through Los Angeles constantly searching for ladies to rescue.’ (Biro, no date) As a teen, I didn’t realise yet thatin most of these hard-boiled stories, female characters are shallow victims that give the male protagonist purpose. The premise of The Lady In The Lake reads as following: ‘A couple of missing wives — one a rich man’s and one a poor man’s — become the objects of Marlowe’s investigation.’ (Chandler, 1943) The wives are fittingly described as objects, since they are plot tools that give the hero purpose.

Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle established a narrative where evidence is isolated — set apart, dissected and objectified. In their stories characters and the evidence became placeholders for a narrative, they produce a process of (forensic) dissection and disembodiment. Although the hard-boiled protagonist differs much from the well-mannered, scholar-like detectives in earlier crime novels, the process of forensic examination and dissection of evidence remained intact. The disembodiment of female characters is perhaps even more prominent in the hard-boiled genre, and often displayed quite literally. On the cover of The Lady In The Lake (Figure 3), note the disembodied hand sticking out the water. Chandler’s Philip Marlowe didn’t age well. I realise now that he is often homophobic, xenophobic, sexist and racist. I consider many of the stock characters that take a prominent place in the hard-boiled crime genre as problematic stereotypes. The femme fatale, for example, is a one-dimensional, devious woman that merely exist to create sexual tension and obstruct the main protagonist. ‘These novels simmer with resentment over perceived encroachment and a desire to contain female power.’ (Bancroft, 2018) Despite this, I always found a voyeuristic pleasure in watching the (erotically charged) interplay between the femme fatale and the hero. The male protagonists in the hard-boiled crime genre often lived my personal fantasies: playing into conservative ideas of masculinity and heroism, continuing in narratives in which there is little room for the female perspective. In many of these stories, the glamorous and wealthy inhabitants of Los Angeles mingle with its lowlifes. For me, these aspects fuelled my imagination of a darker and more enticing surrounding, for nothing remarkable happened in the small place that I grew up in. In the hard-boiled crime novels, however, the city’s dark heart is brooding with ‘dope fiends’, organised crime and gambling rackets. In many of these novels, the questionable history of Los Angeles is a viable part of the story. Shady deals, blackmail and political scandals get in the way of the investigation. These stories were written a time of social progress, enlightenment and social and industrial advancement. The Chandler characters feel like the messy biproducts of these developments and a counter to optimism. ‘These stories share a cold morality, a bleak view of a cruel world and guns.’ (Jordison, 2014) Perhaps this crime genre came into fashion because it’s morbid and pessimistic undertone reflected a recognizable part of American society, which struggled with poverty, crime and drugs. ‘Those novels and the subsequent movies were born of an especially downbeat era — an age characterised and shaped by first the Great Depression and then World War II. The spirit of those stories perfectly fit the zeitgeist and summed up […] a real, resonant sensibility felt in both America and around the wider world.’ (Clayton, 2014)

Film Noir
Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep and In A Lonely Place are just a few of the hard-boiled film adaptions that used Los Angeles’ dark side as their backdrop. The French called this particular type of American genre ‘Film Noir’ (Eggerston, 2019), A name earned for the genre’s dark subject matter and gloomy visual style. The cinematography of film noir is said to be derived from German expressionist films (Bergstrom, 2014) and is characterized by grainy black and white imagery, stark contrasts, and a playful emphasis on shadows and light. The aesthetics resonate with the sombre tone of the plots,

which play out in seedy motels, dark back alleys and dusty gangster holdouts. The editing techniques of film (cutting, splicing, assembling and disassembling) closely resemble the procedures that the male protagonist uses in hard-boiled narratives in order to separate evidence from singular reality, and therefore these narratives translated naturally to the silver screen. Film noir existed in a time when the deeply conservative Hays Code was still active. Between 1934 and 1968, American films had to abide to a strict list of moral ‘don’ts and be carefuls’; which included the prohibition of scenes with ‘profanity’, nudity or an implied sympathy for criminals. (Adebowale, 2020) Over the course of its existence, the rules became less strict or were stretched. During the forties and early fifties, however, the code still heavily influenced Hollywood and censored an industry that thrived on films in which sex and violent crime were key factors. These films lack explicit scenes, but often make use of cinematography and suggestive dialogue to imply violence or eroticism. The narratives in the genre were always centred on the male detective. Female characters merely existed as victims or served as romantic interest for the protagonist. In many noir films, the female character has to be rescued by the knight-like protagonist, embodying male fantasies of heroism and projections of female victimhood. To further build upon these fantasies, the camera — operated by men — was a tool used to further objectify and disembody its female subjects. Through close ups and the (re)assembling of images, film noir ‘cut up’ and rearranged female bodies in the studio and editing room (figure 4). Only now, in the post-me-too era, do I see how these traditional narratives and film techniques have distorted my personal view on masculinity and women. Film noir was one of the most prominent Hollywood genres of the forties and fifties. The numerous catalogue of hard-boiled crime novels lend itself perfectly for filmmaking, prompting major Hollywood studios to release multiple noir productions a year. Many authors in the genre were also screenwriters at the time and became a vital force in male-dominated Hollywood. The influence of film noir reached far and wide, and sparked successful European imitations, like Carol Reid’s The Third Man (Guardian Film)

In the late fifties, the golden age of film noir passed with the rise of Technicolor and the end of the classical Hollywood studio system. ‘Even so, the angles, aesthetics and beats that characterised those essential crime movies informed the genre films that followed in the post-studio system, post-Hays Code period.’(Clayton, 2014) Examples are Point Blank, The Long Goodbye and Chinatown. The 80s and 90s gave rise to a revival of so-called ‘neo-noir´ films. Movies like Body Double and Basic Instinct continued many classical noir traditions, although warping tropes and characters to serve a new audience. After the turn of the century, ‘neo-noir’ had become a genre that stood on its own, thus passing on the legacy of the hard-boiled crime into a new millennium. Examples of recent ‘neo-noir’ pictures are Inherent Vice and Motherless Brooklyn. The most remarkable thing about film noir is that it never seems to get out of fashion. ‘The best noir stories could have been written today, even if they’re 50, 60, 70 years old. […] Men in power taking advantage of the weak and getting away with murder — that’s the stuff of headlines today.’ (O’Callaghan, 2016) However, I think there is a deeper reason for the everlasting appeal of film noir though; every generation, the genre seems to reinvents itself, although the underlining power of Los Angeles crime fiction is the way it captures the dread and anguish of urban existence. ‘Aside from the aforementioned aesthetic allure, film noir is all about dwelling in — or at least dipping your delicately painted toes in — darkness.’ (Clayton, 2014)

In the next part of this thesis, I’ll briefly explore the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short and analyse two modern movies that were based on the case in order to demonstrate how this particular crime — and its fictionalised adaptions — display the interrelation between the hard-boiled crime genre, the disembodiment of women and the apparatus of film.

II Murder in Hollywood: The Black Dahlia

If there is one crime that feels like it comes straight out of a hard-boiled crime novel, it must be the murder of Elizabeth Short. Like numerous internet sleuths before me, I got captivated by her case when I first came across it and spend hours looking at the theories and evidence that is circulating online. Significant is that this 1947 murder has multiple tie-ins with Hollywood and the apparatus of cinema, which I will point out in this chapter. The Murder of Elizabeth Short ‘On the morning of January 15, 1947, a mother taking her child for a walk in a Los Angeles neighbourhood stumbled upon a gruesome sight: the body of a young naked woman sliced clean in half at the waist. The body was just a few feet from the sidewalk and posed in such a way that the mother reportedly thought it was a mannequin at first glance. Despite the extensive mutilation and cuts on the body, there wasn’t a drop of blood at the scene, indicating that the young woman had been killed elsewhere. […] The young woman turned out to be a 22-year-old Hollywood hopeful named Elizabeth Short — later dubbed the “Black Dahlia” by the press for her rumoured penchant for sheer black clothes and for the Blue Dahlia movie out at that time.’ (Federal Bureau of Investigation)

The murder would go down in history as one of the most notorious unsolved crimes in the history of the United States. An ensuing media frenzy followed, thanks to the ‘brutal, misogynistic and ritual nature’ of the gruesome killing. [BBC, 2017] ‘The murder was never officially solved, only adding to the crime’s mystique. ‘There was also the connection to the glamour of the area. She lived in Hollywood, had aspirations to be an actress.’ (Martin, 2017). These aspects fuelled my personal fascination with the case and elevated it to a crime of mythical proportions in pop culture. ‘The slaying of Elizabeth Short launched one of the most celebrated manhunts and crime-related media spectacles in history. The Black Dahlia case has come to symbolize a sordid and politically corrupt aspect of mid-century Los Angeles that coexisted, and sometimes commingled, with the Hollywoodwealth and glamour.’ (Nelson, Baybliss, (2006) As the Los Angeles Police Department almost completely consisted of men at the time, the murder was mainly investigated from a male perspective. At the time of the murder, ‘Los Angeles had a rich newspaper and tabloid culture. All of these papers had underworld columnists… crime reporters. Crime was central entertainment in a pre-tv world, when people still got morning and evening newspapers.’ (Buntin, 2019) Early crime reporters from the Herald dubbed it ‘The Werewolf Murder,’ says John Gilmore (1994), as to further sensationalise on the gruesome details that slowly leaked out. According to the 2019 podcast Root of Evil (Gentille, Y & Pecoraro, R, 2019) there was a Black Dahlia cover story in the LA Times for thirty-one straight days (figure 5). In his book Hard-boiled Hollywood, Jon Lewis (2017) claims that ‘the tragic and mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of Elizabeth Short, or the Black Dahlia, and Marilyn Monroe ripped open Hollywood’s glitzy façade, exposing the city’s ugly underbelly of corruption, crime, and murder.’ To me, the gruesome tale of Elizabeth Short symbolizes LA’s dark heart and embodies my personal fascination with the interwovenness between Hollywood, misogyny and (true) crime. Exquisite corpse Steve Hodel, who worked as an LAPD homicide detective for years, wrote a book called The Black Dahlia Avenger, in which he claims that his father — George Hodel — is Short’s killer. This book prompted writers/historians Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Baybliss to investigate the murder and its possible links to the surrealist movement; which has a long history of portraying women dissected at the waist or ‘in pieces’. In their book Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder, they propose the theory that the murderer was familiar with surrealist art and that the crime might have been a macabre version of an ‘exquisite corpse’; an artistic method of collectively assembling words or images. The book connects surrealist collage, and its ideas of dreams with the apparatus of film. Luis Bunuel’s famous surrealist 1929 film Un chien Andalou starts with a scene in which a man seems to slice a woman’s eye but then quickly cuts to the slicing of an animal’s eye. The scene plays with the idea of splicing as an editing technique and the metaphysical suggestion of a cut. Surrealist artists had a fascination for female mannequins; which they often used in art pieces and exhibitions and presented as ‘readymade’ art pieces (see figure 6). These objects can often be detached or dismantled into pieces. Aside from this, the surrealism movement is known for its interest in the subconscious and dreams of erotized violence. ‘These themes provide a meaningful backdrop against which to consider the Black Dahlia murder.’ (Nelson & Baybliss, 2006)

Feminist author Adriana Cavarero coined the term ‘horrorism’, which is a form of violation grounded in the offense of disfiguration and massacre. Elizabeth Short, mutilated and cut into pieces, fits perfectly into Cavarero’s theoretical framework. ‘What is unwatchable, above all, for the being that knows itself irremediably singular, is the spectacle of disfigurement, which the singular body cannot bear.’ (Cavarrero, 2008) However true this statement rings in real life, it doesn’t explain why people like me can’t seem to get enough of fictionalisations in which female victims are cut up. This ‘spectacle of disfigurement’ and an interest in the macabre seems to be the main reason why so many writers, filmmakers and artists find the need to explore or fictionalise the murder or Elizabeth Short. Multiple novels, motion pictures and shows were based on Elizabeth Short’s death, and the case was featured on countless true crime shows and documentaries. In American Horror Story: Murder House, Elizabeth Short’s ghost (Mena Suvari) cries and exclaims that that she had dreams of becoming famous, but was found ‘naked, on display for the whole world to see.’ Another spirit (Kate Mara) responds; ‘You were the front news of every paper for two months.’ Elizabeth Short lightens up and utters; ‘I really did become somebody,’ The dark scene perfectly captures the morbid irony that is found in Hollywood’s most notorious murder case, and the way the media have exploited Short’s death for profit. In the following two chapters, I’ll analyse two films based on the hard-boiled literature based on Black Dahlia murder, in order to explore how fictionalisations of this crime make use of the forensic process of disembodiment as described in chapter I. For each film, I’ll analyse three scenes which involve a part of forensic examination: the discovery, autopsy and the examination of the crime scene. Finally, I’ll discuss the movie poster for each film.

III Case study 1: True Confessions (1981)

True Confessions is centred on a LAPD detective Tom Spellacy (Robert Duvall) that tries to solve the case of young woman that is found cut in half, while reconnecting with his brother Des (Robert DeNiro), an ambitious monsignor. The screenplay was written by John Gregory and Joan Didion, and was based on Gregory’s novel of the same name. ‘It is a Los Angeles more or less familiar from dozens of other movies […] small town, really, where the grafters and the power brokers know each other.’ (Ebert, 1981) The detective that is put on the case checks all the boxes for a classical hard-boiled crime protagonist. He is everything that I am not; rational, hot-tempered and conservative. The only thing we have in common is the obsession for the case; a desperate need to solve it.

Discovery
The scene where the body is discovered, differs little from how Elizabeth Short was found. The body parts of the female victim (called Lois Fazenda in this adaption) are found in a vacant lot at the edge of a shabby LA neighbourhood, laying naked and torn in half, amidst rubbish. In the film, the two halves are found far apart. Simone Weil (1940) wrote that ‘violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing’. On the set of this film, this statement rang true quite literally, for the victim’s halves are artificial props on a set. (figure 7) As the photographs of the discovery of Elizabeth Short’s corpse prove, the scene was teeming with reporters and police men. (figure 8)

In the adaption, the discovery of the murder plays out in a similar way. The only ‘woman’ on the scene is the cut-up corpse. What remains of her is subjected to the male gaze; the police men swarm the premises around her naked remains like hungry gulls looking for food. In both figure 7 and 8, the discovery looks like a spectacle. The detective briefs the protagonist while a photographer takes photos of the victim’s lower half, further reducing Lois’ remains to pieces of evidence. ‘Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.’ Wrote Susan Sontag (1977). This scene displays the cinematic distortion of the male gaze, as enabled by a forensic process. Lois Fazenda is no longer a human being, she has been reduced to two forensic objects of evidence at the mercy of the men that investigate them. Autopsy Investigator Tom later visits the morgue to learn more from the coroner. As a viewer, I am present in the room; taking on the role of observer, or an assisting detective, perhaps. The most striking difference between the forensic photos and fictionalised victim (Amanda Cleveland), is the absence of the facial wounds; especially the ‘Glasgow smile’ (see figure 9). The movie victim’s face appears somewhat angelic, almost statue-like. The wound of her dissection is neatly stitched up and a table conveniently covers the part where her body was severed. The bruise on her head is the only sign that violence was inflicted upon her.

‘All images that display the violation of an attractive body are, to a certain degree, pornographic. But images of the repulsive can also allure,’ (Sontag, 2003) In light of this statement, I think it’s important to consider that Amanda Cleveland, who played the ‘corpse’, was a Playboy model. A detail that illustrates the link between violence and erotica that is established in this scene. Perhaps the harsh reality of death is too graphic for the filmmakers to show, for the gruesome autopsy photos of Elizabeth Short (figure 10) contrast sharply with the romanticised way the victim is presented in the autopsy scene. In the forensic images, short’s eyes are halfway closed, her face is heavily battered and there are several cutting wounds visible on her breasts and lower body. Even I flinch as the sight of these photographs; the cold display of a senseless death.

In True Confessions, the press labels the victim as ‘The Virgin Tramp,’ for they find out that Lois was a Catholic and a prostitute and thus use this information to the murder into a sensational spectacle. Although Elizabeth Short was never proven to be a prostitute, the victim in the adaption is subtly blamed throughout the entire movie for hanging with the wrong crowd and being a ‘party girl’. ‘There’s not a foolish line in it [the film], nor a bland character,’ Canby (1981) writes, but he obviously forgot the dead girl. She, as a character, is hollow and almost functions like a prop; for I never learn anything about her personality or interests. Lois Fazenda is, quite literally, disembodied as soon as she enters True Confessions in the form of two props, and then, over the course of the film, what remains of her in memory is criticized and defiled.

Examination of the crime scene
Detective Tom eventually discovers that a sleazy porn producer is involved. Lois stars in a ‘stag film’ that is a recurring trope in fictionalisations of the Black Dahlia case, despite the fact that such a film was never found. Aside from True Confessions, a porn plays a vital role in The Black Dahlia, which I’ll discuss later. It was also a plot point in the videogame LA Noire. In one scene, I watch along with two detectives as Lois Fazenda undresses (figure 11) The fact that many fictionalised stories based on the Black Dahlia case involve a porn, says something about the male fantasies that are so easily projected on this crime story, and further links eroticism with violence; assisting in the eradication of the victim’s personality. Because the film portrays the victim based on Short as a prostitute, which, in the eyes of the protagonists as well as the media, means she had it coming. Post-mortem, Lois is constantly belittled, blamed and given a mocking title by sensationalist media. Throughout this misogynistic process, Lois Fazenda’s humanity is erased.

After discovering new evidence in the stag film, Duvall’s character follows up and discovers an abandoned movie set: the place where Lois was tortured and killed. Tom opens a backdoor and finds a bloodstained matrass. A trail leads to a bathtub where the victim was drained of blood. Nor the camera nor the detective linger longer than necessary at the crime scene, and after I’ve seen the bathtub for two brief seconds (figure 12), the detective leaves the room and draws his final conclusions. What’s notable, is that the detective finds the scene on his own. In contrast to discovery site, riddled with reporters and detectives, there is an absent space… no body. The crusty red blood that trails from one horrific scene to the next is the visual manifestation of the violence that remains invisible. With a face of anguish, Tom visualises the horrors that occurred. I see a the man coming to terms with the violence that another man has inflicted upon a woman. What he sees is the rampage of a monster… and it reminds him a little bit of himself.

This cathartic scene intelligently borders between discomforting realness and the notion that it’s all just make-believe… Staged. This particular scene has basis in reality: the murder spot was found two years after the murder in Los Angeles (Rosen, 1949) although it was a house instead of a movie set. The examination of the crime scene in True Confessions is an addition that merely serves the redemption of the protagonist. He cracks the case through clever detective work, and therefore plays out my fantasy of solving the murder. The film is not about the victim, but uses a real life murder as basis for a tale about two brothers. Two clever but emotionally incapable men, both powerful in their own way, but each dictated and restrained by hierarchic powers and societal rules.

Poster
The poster for True Confessions (figure 13) shows a picture of the two stars. A female leg is put over it. It represents the victim as perceived through a male gaze; her stockings (which the victim in the film doesn’t even wear) are added to create associations with prostitution and eroticism. There is no face, no body. Just a leg; an object of desire. Only when looking closer, I notice a splash of blood. The rest of the victim’s body is excluded from the poster, as is the identity of Lois Fazenda in the film; where her murder is merely treated as a compelling puzzle for the male protagonist and me, the viewer, to obsess over. The poster couldn’t be more fitting, for the movie cuts the horror into digestible parts while the actual violence is never shown; excluded. The victim is anonymized and sexualised; her death little more than a masculine fantasy of eroticized violence. The poster, like the film, uses the ordering of images to encourage dissociation with the female victim so the focus stays on the male heroes; the two brothers that are centred in the image. As the tagline suggests, the men are trapped by a murder… imprisoned in the wire-like stockings of the victim. The metaphor removes the victim as central figure and beacons the message that this film is more about the struggle of the protagonists than her victimhood.

IV Case Study 2: The Black Dahlia (2006)

In Brian De Palma’s The Black Dahlia, two policemen see their personal and professional lives fall apart in the wake of the Elizabeth Short’s murder investigation. The film was based on the 1987 novel of the same name by James Ellroy; a heavily fictionalised account on the case. Despite being based upon the critical acclaimed novel, the movie was received badly, both critically and commercially. The only thing critics applauded was Mia Kirshers performance, who plays Elizabeth Short in audition tapes that are scattered throughout the movie. In one of these scenes, she crawls towards the director that’s giving her instructions. De Palma himself voices the director; implying himself as a culprit of her abuse. In these dreamlike fragments, Elizabeth Short is a melancholic but pathetic figure… desperate for fame and not afraid to use her body to get what she wants. A hybrid between a femme fatale and an insecure, wannabe starlet with spooky blue eyes. The scenes amplify the idea that the victim is held on a leash by Hollywood; a male-dominated world of powerful men. The detective on the case watches these pieces of film with a mixture of fascination and disgust. At the heart of this film are two buddies/co-workers Dwight ‘Bucky’ Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) and I would argue an homosexual element to their relationship is implied. In the first part of the film, the two men fight each other bare chested under their boxing aliases Mr. Fire and Mr. Ice. This violent physical confrontation marks the beginning of their companionship in both work and private life. Later, they even share a wife — Kay (Scarlett Johansson) — a scarred beauty that functions both as an object of desire as well as a symbol for 1940s domesticity. She dresses in white for most of the film, in contrast with the Dahlia, known for her dark attire (figure 14). Both are victims of (sexual) abuse, but Kay is eager to put her dark past behind to play out the traditional role of housewife, while Elizabeth gets murdered for her promiscuous behaviour. Female characters are literally and figuratively perceived through the gaze of men in this film and the two most important women are visually rendered as polar opposites. They both conform to 1940s Western beauty standards, but aesthetically represent dark versus light. The women are allegories — either victim or survivor; but always suffer by the hand of men.

Discovery
The film spends its first twenty-five minutes establishing the ‘buddy-cop’ relationship between the protagonists; experienced LAPD detective Lee Blanchard and rookie Josh ‘Bucky’ Hartnett. While on a raid, they conveniently notice several cops rush over to a corpse. (figure 14). Not much later, reporters breach the perimeter and flash their cameras at the gruesome discovery. As in True Confessions, everything happens similarly to the actual discovery of Elizabeth Short’s remains. But instead of lingering his camera on the corpse, ‘De Palma defies typical mystery/horror conventions by not displaying her mangled body in its entirety. Instead, he basically only shows the enthusiastic crowd of men […] hovering over her, taking notes and photographs, muttering about the case.’ (The Film Stage, 2016) De Palma seems aware of the male gaze and mirrors it back to me; showing the muttering cops from a Short’s perspective. ‘A single shot is dedicated to showing Elizabeth Short’s face — when a hungry crow pecks away at her cheek. An apt metaphor.’ (The Film Stage, 2016)

Autopsy
When Bucky and Blanchard later visit the morgue, again, a group of men eagerly hovers over the body, taking notes (figure 16). The scene is shot from above and slowly pans down, implying me as a spectator, who — almost like a Peeping Tom — takes a closer look at the many inflictions on the dead girl’s body, which are almost complety consistent with the ones Elizabeth Short suffered. The scene feels perverse and invasive… as if De Palma is mocking the victim through this forensic process. ‘One of the cops asks, “Is it okay if I smoke?” The doctor jokingly replies, “She won’t mind!” Elizabeth Short is already no longer a woman, no longer someone to be courteous and considerate of.’ (The Film Stage, 2016).

Instead, she quickly becomes a canvas upon which the male characters project their fantasies. During the investigation, Bucky gets involved with troubled rich girl called Madeleine (Hillary Swank) that gets a kick out of impersonating the Black Dahlia. Bucky starts an affair, but this cheap impersonation of the ‘real’ Elizabeth Short can’t compete. Housewife Kay, patiently waiting for him at home, is no match for the necrophiliac fantasies he tries to play out with Madeleine. Meanwhile, his partner Lee slowly loses his mind as he subjects the guilt he feels about the vanishing of his younger sister to the case. Ellroys story unapologetically mocks the men that are projecting their fantasies upon the victim, and forces me, the (male) viewer, to reflect on my own complicity. ‘In many respects, the corpse of a woman is the ideal vessel for the hopes and desires of the men burying her. She can be anything they want her to be — a dream girl (Bucky’s ideal), an opportunity to retroactively be a hero (Blanchard’s take), a slut who had it coming (Elizabeth Short’s father’s opinion), on and on. The ultimate fantasy.’ (The Film Stage, 2016) The media are just as guilty… exploiting the crime; further objectifying and disembodying the young woman that wasElizabeth Short. In this movie, almost everyone is complicit. The only one that isn’t, is Kay; the obvious allegory for the suburban dream wife.

Examination of the crime scene
Detective Bucky drags the audience through the film with a narration of his thoughts. As De Palma is known for exhausting certain genre tropes through exaggeration and reference, I can only speculate if he deliberately turned the protagonist into such a film noir cliché. He mutters quasi-poetic one-liners while doing what gumshoe detectives do; going over clues while drinking whiskey, breaking the law and shooting people that get in his way. Just as in True Confessions, a stag film is found, and Bucky finds the scene of the crime because he connects a clue from this film to Madeleine. That further leads him to unfold a complicated plot. It turns out that Short was killed inside a barn on Hollywood(land), owned by the father of Madeleine; a crooked estate magnate called Emmett Linscot. Bucky breaks the lock and finds an improvised torture chamber (figure 17). As in True Confessions, a bloody mattress is the central piece of evidence. But here there is also a strand of black hair and an eerie clown painting, explaining the Glasgow smile. The movie then explicitly shows the torture and murder through flashbacks for shock value. Later, Bucky finds out that the unhinged Ms. Linscot murdered Short out of envy. I find it notable that a woman is the culprit; for the actual suspect list consists solely of men. Writer Ellroy stated that he wrote the 1987 book in order to cope with the unsolved murder of his mother, that was found dead in a vacant lot when he was still a kid, much like Short.

According to Ellroy, the book ‘Is an attempt to honour two women who had died too young: Betty Short and Jean Hilliker. (Ellroy, 2020). Ironically, Ellroy earlier claimed that Short pawned his ‘lifelong dialogue with misogyny.’ (Ellroy, 2006). The female characters in The Black Dahlia are either a pathetic failure (Short) or a crazy degenerate (Ms. Linscot, Madeleine). The only sane person is Kay, that escaped her abusive past to become a nuclear housewife with the wits and curves of a femme fatale. Unfortunately, Kay is a living fantasy, and rather than feast on it, the male protagonists grow obsessed with the mythical Black Dahlia. They chase her ghost in order to find redemption or fulfill their darkest desires. But they all fail and eventually succumb to their fantasies.

Poster
The poster for The Black Dahlia shows Short (Mia Kirshner) looking vacantly at the sky, the dripping lipstick in the corner of her mouth referencing her ‘Glasgow smile’ (18). It hints at the brutality of the murder without actually showing the violence (and thus gets around strict laws for theatrical posters). Short is pale and expressionless; almost like a mannequin or a waxlike doll. The profile of Kirshner’s pale, model-like face contrasts starkly with the black background. Just as is the case with her pseudonym, Elizabeth Short is turned into an object that functions as a symbol, or a representation of the victim and her mythical place in pop culture. On the poster she lingers somewhere between dead and alive; she is still attractive enough for me to be compelling, but her glazy eyes eerily signal that she is likely dead. I find an almost necrophiliac quality in this the image; treading a line between disturbing and intriguing. To put Elizabeth Short solely on the cover was a daring move, though, even more so because Mia Kirshner was not an established actress at the time. Perhaps the lack of prominent Hollywood stars on the poster amplified the movie’s poor box office results; The Black Dahlia earned back half a million dollar short of its budget. On the cover of the DVD/Blu-Ray release, however, the three main stars were put prominently in the center, while the Dahlia is absent. As with the poster for True Confessions, the victim’s face is excluded from the image.

Conclusion

Over the course of the 1920s, the hard-boiled LA crime genre broke with the conventional crime fiction by introducing a new type of rough protagonist against the backdrop of Los Angeles underbelly; reflecting the downside of modern developments and America’s problems with crime and corruption. This type of narrative broke with many tropes from earlier detectives as made popular by Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, but replaced the classical detective for a rougher antihero, while further building upon a forensic process of objectification and disembodiment. With the rise of Hollywood, this process, as well as character tropes, naturally transcended from the hard-boiled crime genre into film. Stories of hard-boiled crime writers turned into film noir: a movie genre with a dark visual language, derived from German expressionist film. The genre reinvented itself over the years, but its source in the hard-boiled literature genre is still noticeable in contemporary cinema. Film, with its editing techniques and cutting, embodied the forensic processes of investigation; in which men isolate, disembody and objectify evidence.

The murder of Elizabeth Short — better known as The Black Dahlia — was committed in 1947, when the popularity of hard-boiled crime fiction was at its peak, mirrors the exploitative, misogynist nature of post-war Los Angeles, in which the police force was an male-driven force and sensationalist media capitalized on crime stories. The mutilation and the display of Elizabeth Short correlates with the themes found in surrealist art and the apparatus of film. The murder perfectly fits into Adriana Cavarero’s theoretical framework of ‘horrorism’: a form of violation grounded in the offense of disfiguration. In order to further understand the connection between the forensic disembodiment, the Black Dahlia murder and modern cinema, I analysed two films that were based upon the case. True Confessions takes a classical approach to the LA crime genre. The central murder merely operates as a plot motif in the story of two brothers. The detective functions as a flawed but righteous antihero through which the viewer can solve the case that is based upon the Black Dahlia murder. It first dehumanizes the female victim by portraying here as a promiscuous, so she can become a forensic object of evidence; a puzzle for the protagonist and viewer to solve. The film establishes a link between eroticization and violence, which is underlined by the poster, in which a bloody female leg in stockings is shown over the faces of the two male protagonists. In The Black Dahlia, two men are also starring, but here masculinity is defined through obsession and projections of guilt and sexual desire. Elizabeth Short is a mythical victim; prompting the two male protagonists to project their obsessions and (necrophiliac) desires upon her. Just as in True Confessions, this film uses both the camera as well as the narrative to disembody the female characters and metaphorically cut them into pieces; turning them into forensic objects. While True Confessions carefully anonymises the victim through narrative denigration and cinematic objectification, as to make room for the male narratives, The Black Dahlia does something else. Here Elizabeth Short is given a voice through audition tapes that the detective watches throughout the film. These fragments, however, reveal that Elizabeth Short — as in True Confessions — is a promiscuous and pathetic figure, an image that conflicts with the fantasies the male characters project on her. In both films, Elizabeth Short is revealed to have starred in a stag film, even though this has no basis in reality. Both films eagerly portray Elizabeth Short as a desperate starlet willing to everything for fame. She starkly contrasts with the character of Kay; a love interest of both the protagonists that is portrayed as a suburban dream wife. In the eyes of the male protagonists, the fact that the victim is promiscuous, justify her gruesome fate. The Black Dahlia further puts emphasis on her as a victim of Hollywood; a male-dominated world that makes a living through the abuse and objectification of young women. Sontag’s theory of the erotization of horror is appliable here, for the female victim is sexualised through the necrophiliac fantasies. These fantasies echoes in the poster, in which Short is portrayed in a mannequin-like way; she is visualised as a necrophiliac fantasy of mythical proportions, lingering somewhere between dead and alive. Both films are centred on the relationship between two men, which are played by famous actors. In both pictures, the men share an intimate bond. There is a homosexual element to these relationships; especially in The Black Dahlia.

The two films, in their own way, alter historic events in order to fit their narrative; to play out masculine fantasies projected on the Black Dahlia. The main difference is that True Confessions displays masculine investment in female victimhood as a means to find redemption for both the protagonists and the audience. The Black Dahlia merely uses the murder case as a way to explore and cynically comment upon men’s delirious stake in the case; the detectives lose their sanity while chasing the ghost of the female victim. What’s important in the fantasies played out True Confessions, is that the ideal masculinity is defined by a classical, stoic rationality, defiance of rules and a resort to violence. Violence is shown as necessary and cathartic, while female victimhood is merely a plot motif. In order to (re)gain relevance, the male characters have to solve the case. The female characters are either dated stereotypes (such as the femme fatale or the hysterical mother) or objects that are disembodied or dissected by men through a forensic tradition, which they can process and obsess over. After examining the hard-boiled tradition and analysing two films based on hard-boiled fiction in which the Black Dahlia murder plays a key part, I can clearly recognize the interrelation between the hard-boiled crime genre, the apparatus of film and the Black Dahlia murder. Through cinematic analyses of two movies based on the case, I have shown how the hard-boiled crime fiction is a carrier for traditional masculine fantasies and allows the eroticization of violence through forensic investigation. The fictionalisations of the Black Dahlia case show that the apparatus of film is complicit in the anonymization, objectification and disembodiment of women.

[For a references list, check out the full thesis, posted on Academia.]

On November 30, 1954 a meteorite hit a house in the small town of Sylacauga, Alabama. Ann Elizabeth Fowles Hodges was feeling a bit ill and was taking a nap on her couch. She was sleeping, wrapped in quilts, when a grapefruit-sized 8,5 pound meteorite broke through the ceiling, bounced off a radio set, and hit her. Ann Hodges was rushed to the hospital, but aside from an enormous black bruise on her thigh and a slight aberration on her hand, no lasting physical harm was caused. There was a rather invasive photo taken in the hospital, on which a doctor shows Ann’s enormous bruise to an media photographer. Striking is the bruise, which looks dark and speckled, somewhat reminiscent of NASA’s pictures of milky ways, which almost everyone is now familiar with. Ann Hodges looks somewhat apathic dazed. The story of a small town woman getting hit by a meteorite was documented by several news photographers in different forms, and is most likely remembered because of its prevalence in media. “Think of how many people have lived throughout human history,” Michael Reynolds said, author of the book “Falling Stars: A Guide to Meteors and Meteorites,” “You have a better chance of getting hit by a tornado and a bolt of lightning and a hurricane all at the same time.” It’s a unique and remarkable story, which captivated readers all around the globe.

One of the most bizarre images that was taken soon after the event, shows Ann is lying in her bed laughing, still recovering from her injuries (see figure 2). Next to her is husband Eugene, cradling the meteorite like a new-born baby. What’s notable is that in most of the images that were taken during or after the Sylacauga meteorite event, men take central stage. One photograph that was published months after the event, three men — one a geologist, the other a police chief and a military general — hover over an enormous map of Alabama. One of them holds up the meteorite and points to the place where it hit the ground. Decades later, the picture was featured in a series curated by Regine Petersen, which was called ‘Men With Meteorites’; a collection of images with a self-explanatory title that display the commodity of this phenomenon but leaves it up to the viewer to make (moral) judgements. The image of these men is particularly telling of the time period. 1950s United States was a man’s world, and therefore it is not surprising that the men in charge of several authorities — in the case of the Sylacauga meteorite those were science, law enforcement and the military — were eagerly claiming authorship over the space rock that caused a small town disaster (or miracle, depending on who you’d ask). Ann endured the suffering, then men took the stage . The important men gather and pose in front of the camera, while Ann Hodges is willfully excluded from the picture. ‘To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude,’ wrote Susan Sontag in an essay. With that phrase in mind, one could argue that the image itself is a striking symbol of 1950s patriarchal American society, but there is even more to it.

Fake News
The fact that the image is obviously staged, recalls a time when ‘fake news’ was not such a widespread and emotionally-laden term as it is in the post-Trump era. It was not until the violent, non-staged war photography of Vietnam became mainstream that American news photographers would casually stage photos to illustrate their written stories, as happened with Ann Hodges’ extraterrestrial ordeal. Newspaper photographers made a living out of carefully orchestrating images, whether they were shooting wars far overseas, or taking pictures of small town happenings.

It is not hard to see a correlation between this staged type of news photography and the works of Hollywood, which both serve the general public of information as well as entertainment. The movie business, which mastered the art of staging, had become one of America’s largest industries over the course of the 20th century. In the 1950s, The United States were considered champions of fabrication; globally known for their epic works of fiction in numerous forms . Comics, art, literature, but above all, movies became — and still are — the country’s biggest cultural cornerstones. But even as early as 1938, legendary filmmaker Orson Welles directed a radio play called The War Of The Worlds, which was based on the H. G. Wells 1898 novel of the same name. The play quickly became famous for supposedly tricking some of its listeners into believing that a Martian invasion was actually taking place due to the “breaking news” style of storytelling employed in the first half of the show. ‘Radio Listeners in panic, take war drama for fact,’ The New York Times posted after its broadcast. Despite frequent re-telling, this narrative is disputable; many researchers now claim that the play was an early example of how sensationalism and selective media attention is retroactively capable of fashioning just about anything into a spectacle. Maybe the reason for modern America’s obsession for science fiction and fabrication is rooted in their lack of a history. For when one can’t look for stories in the past, it makes sense to fabricate them about the future.

Welles’ influential radio play was turned into a sci-fi blockbuster about a Martian invasion one year before Ann Hodges was hit by an object from outer space. Only two years after the event, a drive-in cinema called ‘The Comet’ opened close to Ann’s home, its name likely a reference to the meteorite event (see figure 3). As almost all cinema’s at that time, this drive-in must’ve regularly showed sci-fi movies about aliens invasions and space explorations.

Sci-fi movies were quite popular at the time, likely because of the onset of the ‘space race’ (a Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to develop aerospace capabilities) and Cold War paranoia running high. Both of these developments manifested themselves into the sci-fi and horror genre. As the popularity of film noir slowly died down, sci-fi films like It Came From Outer Space (1953), Forbidden Planet (1956) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) capitalized on a general interest for space exploration and the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. According to many film theorists and academics, these low budget sci-fi movies represented America’s societal fears of the time. ‘Hundreds of science fiction films presented indirect expressions of anxiety about the possibility of a nuclear holocaust or a Communist invasion of America,’ wrote Victoria O’ Donnell. The films […] vary markedly in story, symbolism, and attitude toward the threat, but they are certainly aimed at specific political and scientific problems.’

These conditions may explain why the immediate response to the Sylacauga meteorite event was one of suspicion. Although the object was quickly claimed as a meteorite by a local geologist, not everyone in town agreed with him. According to a publication by the Alabama Museum of Natural History ‘Many thought a plane had crashed — others suspected the Soviets.’

Stars Fell On Alabama
Aside from the tense societal climate of 1950s America, it is also important to recognize that Alabama, the state Ann Hodges was living in at the time of the meteorite event, was a place with a long and vivid history of extra-terrestrial occurrences and supposed UFO sightings. In 1833, a meteor storm caused more than 30.000 meteorites to blaze over Alabama. “The sky was literally filled with fireworks, and people thought it was the end of the world. That was the night stars fell on Alabama and most of North America,” said Bill Cooke, an astronomer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. The event was later immortalized in the song Stars fell on Alabama, which was a major hit in 1934. Furthermore, Alabama has an incredibly high rate of supposed UFO sightings. Wayne Ruple wrote a book about the many sightings and links them with cow mutilations and other supernatural occurrences that were reported in the state over the course of the past century. The Northeast Alabama town Fyffe — dubbed Alabama’s UFO capital, even celebrates an annual UFO festival, ever since February 11, 1989. During that night ‘more than 50 people, including the chief of police, reported seeing odd objects flying over the small community.’

One could speculate endlessly on the reasons for Alabama’s relatively high number of supposed UFO sightings and reports on other extraterrestrial incidents. Most likely, the large number of these reports are fueled by the state’s history as well as its rural and religious character. Researchers suggest that ‘UFO sightings spiked after the release of popular sci-fi flicks, such as the ever-popular X-Files, Independence Day and Steven Spielberg’s remake of War Of The Worlds.’ Alabama, having much affiliation with extra-terrestrial events, might be even more susceptible to the influence of these films — their exciting aesthetics, narratives and premises always in the back of their mind.

With the rise of social media, conspiracy theorists have esthablished lively online communities in which theories are discussed, shared and spread.
The power of these communities and acollective fascination for extraterrestial secrets were showcased in 2019, when a viral Facebook gag implored thousands of people to storm military base Area 51, to find proof of aliens supposedly being held there by the American government. In 2021, the Pentagon cheered enthusiasts and conspiracists in the search for extraterrestrial life when the Pentagon de-classified and publicly released three Navy videos that contain “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

Tragedy
However fascinating the United States’ (and especially Alabama’s) history of UFO sightings are, maybe Ann Hodges’ account remains such a memorable story because it is not some mysterious, unproveable scenario reminiscent of a science fiction film. Despite her story being staged through news hotographs, Ann Hodges was not a cardboard character from a movie, but an ordinary middle-class American. Reviewed outside of its context of Cold War paranoia, the event was a rare but scientifically explainable natural event. Nonetheless, the surroundings are significant, for they captured and shaped this simple yet layered tragedy about (bad) luck, sensationalism and greed. Still, the center of the story will always remain Ann Hodges, who, at the time, was portrayed as the lucky star of a small town miracle. In modern interpretations, however, the space rock became an antagonist. Only after Ann Hodges suffered a mental breakdown and died a premature death, journalists turned Ann’s encounter with the meteorite into a narrative of suffering and tragedy.

Aside from the mental strain that the crash must’ve caused for Ann, she and her husband were caught up in an exhausting legal squabble with their landlady, who claimed ownership of the rock. After public outrage, Ann got the rock back, but failed to find a suitable buyer after all the time that had passed. When she got the meteorite back, she said: ‘I think God intended it for me. After all, it hit me!’ As with many spectacles, media interest for the story had quickly died down, after which the couple failed to find a buyer. She therefore donated the meteorite to the Alabama Museum of Natural History in 1956, where the rock is still on display. At the time, nothing was written on the traumatic impact such a rare occurrence must’ve had on a human being. Nor did anybody care for the psychological strain that the sudden burst of media attention must’ve caused for Ann. Museum director Randy Mecredy later claimed that Ann wasn’t a person who sought out the limelight. ‘The Hodgesses were just simple country people, and I really think that all the attention was her downfall’, he stated.

In August 2020, at the height of the corona virus pandemic, a Indonesian man named Josua Hutagalung, a coffin maker in a village in Sumatra, was at home when heard a odd noise from above and — seconds later — a loud crash outside. Just like Ann decades earlier, he found that a meteorite had crashed through the roof of his home. But what differed mostly was that in times of internet and social media, word got around quickly after the man posted blurry pictures of the meteorite to his Facebook profile. Not soon after, an American collector flew out to Indonesia to buy the meteorite and global media ate the story up. The BBC later reported that ‘it was suggested that the find was worth $1.8m, making the man an overnight millionaire — and if he wasn’t, they debated whether he’d been short-changed selling it to US buyers. Neither of these things seemed to be true.’ It turned out he sold the rock to the collector for only 200 million Rupee, which is around 14,000 US dollars. Nonetheless, the story starkly contrasts with Ann Hodges’ tale of tragedy, for even if Hutagalung’s earnings were greatly exaggerated, is it still a story with a happy end.

Newspapers seemed to liked Hutagalung’s story so much they got carried away with it, not even bothering to confirm facts. Maybe that’s because they are similar to the popular stories of lottery winners: narratives that taps into fantasies of ordinary people suddenly becoming rich and famous - effortless and overnight. And of course there is the compelling idea of an unremarkable person being touched by something from the heavens; inciting philosophical examination on the mysteries of space, or the possible religious meanings behind such an extraordinary event. Just as Hollywood’s science fiction movies, Ann Hodges’ and Josua Hutagalungs stories force us to reflect on the incredible forces of nature and the vastness of outer space, concepts which exceed the limits or our everyday considerations.

How the aesthetics of the missing poster channel dread into our everyday lives

Big, bold letters reading ‘MISSING’ in capital letters, accompanied with a picture of the person that is lost. The ink on the paper washy and the colours faded from exposure to the sun. When strolling through a big city it doesn’t take long to stumble upon a poster similar to the one described, stapled to a tree or taped to a pole. I always found these missing posters fascinating, merely because they channel a feeling of dread into our everyday lives. One can speculate endlessly on the fate of the person on the poster. A missing person can be a runaway, holed up somewhere. Or the person was kidnapped, murdered or commited suicide. A missing poster is a desperate attempt to find a loved one. A mixture of despair and hope is flattened and compressed into a single piece of paper and then put on display, for everyone to see. The photo at the centre a stark reminder of a happier time. The saddest thing, of course, is that many of these missing persons will never be found alive.

Controversial Dutch rapper Steen once made an art project involving the missing posters of cats and dogs. He took every one he stumbled across and presented them as a bundle at his art academy, playing with the moral implications of removing such sensitive imagery (on which telephone numbers and home addresses are often displayed) from the street while simultaneously raising questions about ethics and privacy.

Photographer Bjorn Staps also created a photo series in which missing pet posters were the subject (see Figure 1). He shot details of the posters, highlighting the weary images, often worn down by exposure to the elements. The fact that these artists were drawn to this macabre type of imagery says something about its moral language and aesthetic appeal. It doesn’t really matter if it is a poster made in order to find a pet or a person: the layout and typography are almost always the same — predominantly functional — describing the missing one using bold, simple font and (in most cases) a single, recent image. The posters are distributed in places where the chances of a sighting are most likely. Aside from being handed around, this often means that the posters are distributed on public service boards, bus stops or on surfaces at busy streets; making them the most democratic part of an investigation, no matter the level of professionality. With the poster, people or law enforcement aim to find the one that’s missing. They shoot broad and wide, like buckshot. Aimed at the general public, hoping that one of the bullet fragments will hit a target… a person that has seen or heard something. The posters are indiscriminate and the opposite of private for they always appear in the public space and give a cognitive shock to everyone who sees them, in so reminding the general public of a (possible) disaster or crime. There is something invasive about these images, for no matter if you are just going for a walk, are rushing towards your office or picking up your kids, the posters are designed to grab your attention and plant a seed of worry and alarm in your mind.

In the cult vampire movie The Lost Boys (1987), two teenage boys move to the small beach town of Santa Carla, California with their mother Lucy. They are immediately greeted by an ominous graffiti scene which states that Santa Carla is the murder capital of the world. Later, when Lucy (Dianne Wiest) explores the busy pier, she comes across a signpost on which numerous missing person posters are stapled on top of each other (see Figure 2). The poster for the police officer that is killed off in the first scene of the film, is added right at that moment. The scene communicates to the character of Lucy — as well as the audience — that when people go missing in Santa Carla, they are most likely killed, and it’s a common occurrence. In this film, the missing poster functions as a ominous prop. The poster here is a macabre allegory of America’s societal dangers. Amidst all the rollercoasters, ice cream parlours and arcade halls they’re might be something dangerous lurking, intent on harm.

The fact that people in The Lost Boys (1987) go missing instead of being found dead adds to the dreadful assocation with the images, mainly because of the ambiguity that can be interpreted in them. Although there exists hope behind these images, they mainly seem to amplify that, no matter how safe you might’ve felt, someone else wasn’t. Many of the missing in The Lost Boys are teenagers and young adults. The happy high school portraits — devoid of all colour — are a haunting token of the fact that most of these people will never be found and most likely have become the victim of (sexual) assault and/or murder.

In the seventies, eighties and nineties, missing persons posters used to be copied in printing shops at low cost and were therefore black-and-white, grainy and high in contrast. The overall quality of the central image often deteriorated to the point that it was just barely recognizable. The missing poster is one of the most cost-effective posters because it is always needed in high frequency. One does not just print one or two missing person posters. When a loved one goes missing, one needs hundreds, or maybe thousands of copies to spread around.

The formulaic ‘artistic’ language of the missing poster, so to speak, is collectively recognized as ominous. In the still from The Lost Boys (1987) one can see the high school photos of kids printed in the missing poster format, instantly alarming Lucy and the audience that something sinister is happening. The posters are stapled next to flyers for parties and rock concerts; events for young adults… signifying that these might be the places where danger lurks. It is probably no coincidence that this horror film (and many others) uses the missing person poster so effectively as a discouraging prop; a signifier of violence. The film was released in 1987; a time in which the United States was still suffering from a supposed epidemic of child kidnappings and murders. This tells us something about the interplay between true crime and its fictionalised counterpart. The missing posters designs and their recognizable aesthetics are a prime example of how visual objects related to true crime exist in realms of reality and fiction and feed off each other.

The ‘Milk Carton Kids’
During the late 1970s and 1980s, missing child cases garnered a great deal of media attention in the United States. Chief among these were the disappearance of six-year-old Etan Patz (abducted in 1979, declared dead) and the kidnapping and murder of Adam Walsh (abducted and killed in 1981). These reports developed into a type of moral panic that gained media notoriety under the name ‘stranger danger’; the idea that all adults not known to the child must be regarded as potential sources of danger. In Ronald Reagan’s United States, advertisements on milk cartons (see Figure 3) were used nationwide to publicize cases of missing children from the early 1980s until the late 1990s. Although the ads were considered useful at the time, many criticized them in retro-perspective for being racially biased and overstating the risk of the so-called ‘stranger danger.’ The ‘Milk Carton Kids’ were a institutionalisation of the missing person poster in a consumer-based society. An everyday product was used as a canvas for the traditional poster in order to create awareness amongst suburban public. Aside from the fact that these images rarely produced viable leads, they also seemed to strike fear into the hearts of children all across the United States. Brad Feuerhelm wrote about the missing kids on milk cartons and it’s connection to satanic panic. ‘To sip from the carton of the spectre’s image itself leaves traces of ephemeral traumas on the lips of all children,’ he wrote. ‘The portraits of the children were usually taken from the missing’s school photographs adding another layer of comfortability to their relic-like status as consumer good and epitaph of hope.’

Stephen King’s acclaimed novel IT (1986) capitalised on the American fear for child abductions and murders. In the book, young children disappear and are later found dead, heavily mutilated. The monstrous creature called Pennywise — which took the shape of children’s biggest fears — became a horror icon. It was further immortalized by Tim Curry in the persona of a terrifying clown in the 1990 TV movie.

Nine years later, the low budget horror film The Blair Witch Project (1999) released on Sundance Festival. The film’s official website featured fake police reports as well as ‘newsreel-style’ interviews, which indicated that the film was entirely made out of found footage and that the filmmakers had gone missing. One prominent marketing campaign tactic was that missing person posters of the cast were put up at the festival grounds. These images used the classical missing poster characteristics: portraits in a high contrast, bold and black typography, short descriptions and contact information at the bottom (see Figure 4). The posters fooled many viewers into actually believing that the characters bore the same name as their respective actors. This resulted in family members receiving condolences and people on the internet investigating the case. The marketing stunt turned out to be very successful. According to USA Today, The Blair Witch Project (1999) was the first film to go viral, despite having been produced before many of the digital technologies that facilitate such phenomena even existed. The fact that the poster used realistic missing poster characteristics embedded in the consciousness of the public, probably bolstered the campaigns success.

Another interesting example of a fictional missing persons poster is seen in Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone (2007). In this poster, it is just a black-and-white image of the missing girl Amanda McCready, that is printed in the centre space of a a4 while the rest of the paper appears to be handwritten with a black marker. (see Figure 5). This first detail mentioned is notable, mainly because the film is set in a time where colour print was already the norm. The style choice have something to do with the fact that the film revolves around a poor mother living in a low-income neighbourhood in Boston, perhaps lacking the financial means to distribute colorized pictures. But, it could also be that the filmmakers considered the notion that the typical black-and-white, high contrast evokes more clearer associations with (true) crime. The handwritten text adds a personal touch to image; emphasizing the desperateness in this public cry for help. Gone Baby Gone (2007) was shelved in the United Kingdom because of similarities to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

Over the course of the 21st century, computers and household printers became more affordable, enabling relatives and friends of missing persons to produce their own material from home. Before that time, missing posters were often created by local law enforcement, using a format in which aesthetics are measured against functionality. The introduction of more affordable colour printers in the global market also meant that many missing posters were suddenly printed in colour; changing the grim aesthetic of the grainy black-and-white flyer that was commonly used for decades.

Although the real fear of ‘stranger danger’ has died down since the late 1990s, the popularity of children facing evil in horror films has recently increased. ‘Endangered children are one of society’s prime fears, and many a modern horror centres on either scared kids or scary kids — ideally both,’ wrote Steve Rose in an article for the Guardian on the psychological effects on children working in Hollywood. When the first set footage from of the anticipated IT-remake got out, many fans pointed out the missing person posters. ‘The posters are truly scary in that they remind us how omnipresent evil is, but they are also fascinating in a morbid, not-to-be-spoken-of sort of way,’ wrote journalist Dustin Kemp for the Inquisitr. ‘Those everyday horrors that lurk under the surface of “normal” life were and are one of Stephen King’s favourite themes to invoke in his writing, and It […] was laced with allusions to such themes.’

Only a year after the release of IT (2016), the third season of David Lynch’s hit series Twin Peaks (1990–2017) was promoted with guerilla marketing techniques in Australia (see figure 6). ‘Posters portraying the murdered prom queen from the series are being spotted plastered on walls from Sydney to Melbourne to Perth, prompting viewers to call a mysterious telephone hotline for information,’ Emma Mack stated in Mandatory.

Guerrilla marketing stunts like these prove that the aesthetics of older missing person posters have become a part of our collective consciousness. Almost everyone immediately recognizes these images and associates them with true crime and thriller films, even if the aesthetics of actualised missing posters have changed drastically and now often use colour. What is interesting is that in fictional media, it is mostly kids or young adults that are the subject of the missing poster. Movies, even more so than society, deem the young as vulnerable and viable symbols for their stories. Perhaps their innocence is easily framed inside the eerie format of the missing poster; the sole image format in which you never want to see a child portrayed.

Amber Alert
The ‘Milk Carton Kids’ campaign mentioned earlier became practically obsolete in the 1990s with the introduction of the AMBER Alert System, a more modern child abduction alert system distributed by media channels and via SMS, that is still used in the United States today. The AMBER Alert System was initiated in the US after the murder of Amber Hagerman in 1995. Her death sparked outcries for tougher laws on child molesters and initiated the development of the AMBER Alert programme, which used SMS, internet and radio to quickly alert the public when a child went missing.

Inspired by the success of the Dutch AMBER Alert, the AMBER Alert Europe foundation was launched in 2013. In many European countries, public digital signs are used to display the image of the missing child. In big cities, the image and contact info is can be instantly displayed on ATMs, digital billboards, road signs and other digital displays in the public space.

The increased use of the internet over the course of the 21st century largely shifted the spread of the missing person to being distributed online. The FBI, intelligence services and local governments have established online databases in which missing person cases are archived and categorized, easily accessible to investigators as well as the public. Technological advances have led to large improvements in (digital) facial constructions. Sometimes digital technologies are used to create a so called age progression of the missing person, as to match their respective appearance in the current day (See figure 8). There is something incredibly eerie about these age progressions. Aside from their ‘uncanny valley’ attributes, they function as a reminder of what the missing person would’ve looked like if they hadn’t disappeared. The brutal truth, of course, is that most of these people are long dead. Despite being a admirable attempt of assistment in the search for these victims, the dark irony is that these age progression images — the visual representation of a final glimmer of hope — mainly seem to remind the public of a life that could’ve been.

The rise of social media further increased the online circulation and spread of missing persons flyers. Images on these digital flyers were often distributed in colour and with more elaborate descriptions of the person in question. Its imagery sometimes matches the characteristics for product advertisements, since its colours are vivid and layouts are designed to garner attention. Through online communities, pictures are shared easily and have helped to solve numerous missing person cases.

Although still using some similar characteristics, these contemporary posters lack the rough aesthetics that used to be so typical for the 20th century missing poster. Still, Through means of reproduction in television and film, the traditional missing poster lingers in the our collective memory as an eerie image of silent violence. No matter its shape or form; the missing person poster will always remain an ominous presence inurban society… the smiling person on the paper reminding us of the horrors that lurk beneath the surface of our everyday lives.