Variante de control por modelo cinemático con medición de la variable espacial.

In the ‘backlash’ texts of Faludi’s study, the independent, assertive ‘bad women’ are always punished and the representatives of the dominant patriarchal ideology – either male

188 characters or appropriately feminine and unthreatening ‘good women’ – are rewarded. Similarly, in The Witches and Hocus Pocus the evil witch characters are eventually killed, and the women and girls who survive the narratives are those who adhere to hegemonic norms of femininity, notably Eva’s put-upon assistant, Miss Irvine, who is read above as the ‘positive’ and unthreatening career woman. As a petite blonde woman wearing white and pastel colours, she is the opposite of the tall, haughty, black-haired Eva as the negative and emasculating career woman. Mid-way through the film Miss Irvine quits her job, fed up of being commanded by Eva. This spares her from the film’s gruesome climax in which Luke and his grandmother lace the other witches’ food with their own magic formula. Having been turned into mice, all of the witches bar Miss Irvine are then killed by the vermin-phobic hotel staff. Miss Irvine returns to Luke at the end of the film as a reformed ‘good witch’ to turn him back into a human boy – a protector of children and restorer of (human) masculinity, rather than a threat to either of these. This is a departure from the ending of Dahl’s novel, which features no Miss Irvine character and Luke is not restored but remains a mouse. The narrative arc of Luke in the film, and the effect of the film’s altered ending, is given further attention toward the end of this chapter.

Like Miss Irvine, the key female survivors in Hocus Pocus,Dani and Allison, share a function in establishing the masculinity and maturity of the male protagonist, Max. Both girls embody ‘safe’ femininity in that they are young and fair-haired, while Allison wears white and cream shades and is framed as an acceptable romantic match for Max. Both girls also express a fascination with witches early in the film; Dani even dresses and play-acts as a witch for Halloween. However, like Miss Irvine, Dani and Allison eventually come to reject the witch identity, as implied by Dani’s vitriolic remark that Winnie is the ‘ugliest thing that’s ever lived’ (provoking Winnie’s wrath) and that both girls have witnessed first-hand, and become targets of, the witches’ malevolence. This allows an assumption that the association between the witches’ unruly womanhood and evil has made its mark. Lending credence to this is that

189 the three children are framed as a family unit as the film ends, with teenagers Max and Allison standing in as parents to the younger Dani, which is in direct opposition to the spinster-esque lifestyles of the child-hating, male-dominating Sanderson Sisters (Figure 4.19). Allison thus reinforces Max’s masculinity in her role as love interest, in keeping with the Hollywood trope of the hero ‘getting the girl’.

Dani’s role is more integral as it is through her endangerment by the witches that Max is forced into the role of heroic rescuer. Max begins the narrative as a surly teenager who is reluctant to partake in Halloween festivities and babysit his little sister, who wants Max to take her trick-or-treating as she is not allowed to go alone (possibly due to fears of stranger danger and/or Halloween Sadism). Max is also sceptical of the supernatural, a trait that displays a preference for the ‘rational’ and a furthering of his efforts to seem mature. However, Max’s attempts to seem mature are undermined by a host of embarrassments including his inability to defend himself against bullies and references to his virginity. The former could be considered a failure to fulfil traditional expectations of masculinity, thus ‘feminising’ Max. The centrality of his virginity to the narrative also arguably achieves this feminisation. As discussed above in relation to Phoebe in The Monster Squad, the term ‘virgin’ was initially gendered female. In this context, Max’s virginity undermines his (sexual) maturity and masculinity, mortifying him whenever the subject is raised. However, Max’s

190 futile pretence at appearingmature actually reveals his true lack of maturity. As suggested by C.S. Lewis,

To be concerned about being grown up, […] to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood […]. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness (1966: 25)

This thinking can also apply to becoming truly ‘masculine’, if this is considered the acceptance or valuing of typically ‘feminine’ attributes rather than outright rejection of them. Indeed, Erica Burman explains that, culturally, ‘maturity is equated with masculinity’ due to women and children being associated with each other in their function as ‘others’ to adult men (1995: 54). For Max, qualities of femininity and childishness are chiefly represented by his virginity. His acceptance of this is signalled over the course of the film by his diminishing embarrassment, and finally indifference, whenever his virginity is referenced by another character. Childishness and femininity are also embodied by Dani, who attempts to bring these qualities out in Max by persuading him to take her trick-or-treating, and by bribing him into agreeing to wear tights the following year for a Peter Pan costume. When Dani becomes victimised by the witches towards the end of the film, Max sacrifices himself in her place in a stark contrast to his earlier attitude.

Max’s changing attitude toward the supernatural is also integral to his narrative arc. A belief in or connection with the supernatural is often associated with femininity, in opposition to ‘rational’ masculinity.8 _{It is thus significant that in Hocus Pocus all of the}

believers in the supernatural are female characters: Dani, Allison and their teacher (Kathleen

8 _{This association can be seen, for example, in long-held conceptions that the being a medium is a}

female profession. As summarised by R. Laurence Moore, in the nineteenth century mediums were considered to be ‘weak in the masculine qualities of will and reason and strong in the female qualities of intuition and nervousness’ (1975: 202). This strong association between femininity and a belief in spirituality or the supernatural pervades in contemporary popular depictions of mediums and psychics, such as Patricia Arquette’s character in Medium (CBS, 2005-11), Zelda Rubinstein’s in

Poltergeist (Hooper, 1982) and Whoopi Goldberg’s in Ghost (Zucker, 1990), as well as in other children’s horror films such as the characters Miss Spink and Miss Forcible in Coraline.

191 Freeman). Max’s refusal to believe in the supernatural and his cynicism regarding Halloween, both associated with women and children respectively, can be read as part of his act of maturity and masculinity. This dichotomy of rationality/masculinity and supernatural/femininity allows for Hocus Pocus to be read as what Clover calls the ‘occult film’ (1992: 65). This further illuminates the film’s gender politics in relation to the question of address, and speaks to one of this thesis’ core aims to highlight the aesthetic, narrative and formal overlaps and distinctions between adult and children’s horror films.

Clover identifies the occult film as the most ‘female’ of horror subgenres as it regularly concerns a female character in the grip of a supernatural force, but behind this female ‘cover’ is ‘the story of a man in crisis’ (ibid.). This results in a split between two competing forces that Clover terms ‘White Science’ and ‘Black Magic’. White Science refers to ‘Western rational tradition’ and is usually represented by white men who are typically doctors. Black Magic refers to Satanism, voodoo and similar practices, and is identified as being represented most commonly by non-white or non-Western women (ibid.: 66). Max, a white male who privileges ‘rationality’ over the supernatural, is Hocus Pocus’ White Science representative. Further, while all of the characters are white, eliminating a clear racial divide, Max is from California (a Westerner in the sense of US and global geography) making him an ‘other’ in Salem (in the East of the US), and his scepticism conflicts with Salem’s historical associations with witchcraft. Clover writes that the plot of the occult film hinges upon the White Science representative admitting the supernatural nature of the narrative problem and yielding to the superior Black Magic to solve it (ibid.: 67).9

9 _{Clover identifies The Exorcist as an example, in which a young female, Regan, is possessed by the}

Devil. When Western medicine fails to cure her, help is enlisted from the White Science

representative. This is psychiatrist and ex-priest Dr/Father Karras (Jason Miller). Having previously lost his faith, Karras experiences a spiritual reawakening when he is forced to conclude that an exorcism – a form of ‘Black Magic’ – is the only way to help Regan.

192 Max’s scepticism of the supernatural causes the Sanderson Sisters to be resurrected when he lights the black-flamed candle, but upon their resurrection he has no choice but to accept the existence of supernatural forces. Regardless, he attempts to use ‘scientific’ methods to dispatch the witches: first, by using a cigarette lighter to trigger the fire alarm in the Sanderson Sisters’ former house, which tricks them into believing that he has magical powers; later by burning the witches in a pottery kiln; and finally, by using the headlamps of a car to trick them into believing it is dawn (upon which they will permanently turn to stone). These methods only temporarily delay the witches, aligning with Clover’s observation that ‘the inevitable lesson of the modern occult film is that White Science has its limits’ and must eventually yield to ‘the wisdom of Black Magic’ (ibid.: 66). Hence, it is only when Max harnesses the supernatural that the witches are defeated. Max sacrifices his soul to the witches in place of Dani’s, an act that he fulfils by drinking the potion that enables his life force to be ‘sucked’ out by them. This distracts the witches long enough for the sun to rise and turn them to stone. In embracing the ‘feminine’ supernatural, Max fulfils a role of ‘masculinity’ – that of heroic protector of a young, vulnerable female. In Clover’s terms, Max emerges a ‘new man’ who ‘not only accepts the feminine […] but even, up to a point, shares it’ (ibid.: 99).

Max’s arc can be considered an example of the way that films concerning stranger danger address adult anxieties about children, by presenting a particularly reassuring image of the child inside the text ‘in order to secure the child who is outside the [text]’ (Rose, 1984: 2). It is reassuring in the sense that Max gains a new sense of maturity and responsibility, particularly the responsibility to take care of his younger, more vulnerable sister when his parents are unable to. Although Max’s character arc also has the potential to appeal to child viewers who may see him as a role model or peer, this only further fulfils Rose’s thesis that children’s fiction presents an adult ideal of childhood in order to shape the child reader/viewer into matching it.

193 Despite Max’s embracing of the feminine supernatural, there remains the fact that he uses this in order to defeat the Sanderson Sisters who embody an oppositional form of undesirable, monstrous femininity that threatens to upset the status quo. In this way, Hocus Pocus incorporates the pattern of the occult film with attributes that are associated with films of the ‘backlash’ period, in which women who display characteristics stereotypically associated with feminism – career-driven, power-hungry emasculators who have a disinterest in or hatred of children – are punished for their ‘transgressions’. In the context of this chapter’s focus on the depictions of ‘risky strangers’, the witch stands out as a unifying scapegoat of both the anxiety of second-wave feminism disrupting patriarchal dominance and that of child predators and molesters. This association between feminism and child endangerment is particularly egregious given that, far from being the perpetrators of this crime, feminist campaigners were active from as early as the 1970s in working to raise awareness of child sexual abuse, the prevalence of rape culture and toxic masculinity. As discussed by Jenkins, ‘[f]or feminists, sex crimes occurred not because of abnormalities in pathological individuals’, as was previously assumed, but that, ‘because of the patriarchal ideologies of the society as a whole’, a rapist could be any man (Jenkins, 1998: 136-37). The Witches and Hocus Pocus, in portraying women who display cartoonishly exaggerated qualities associated with feminism as the predominant perpetrators of child abuse, can therefore be understood as existing within a culture that feared the destabilisation of the patriarchal status quo by feminist discourses.

It therefore seems that Bird’s allegation that The Witches’ sexual references and gender politics priotitise an address to the fears of adult male viewers over those of children is valid in relation to both films. The depiction of witches as women who are at once grotesque, sexually threatening and transgress patriarchal constructs of acceptable womanhood invites a reading of them as embodiments of Creed’s ‘monstrous feminine’, a primarily male fear that imagines ‘what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific,

194 abject’ (1986: 44). In painting certain aspects of femininity as monstrous or unacceptable, it becomes justifiable to repress and control them ‘in order to secure and protect the social order’ (ibid.: 70). The use of the witch is especially deliberate in this regard, given that throughout history the ‘[r]hetorical use of the witch has been extremely effective at justifying normative gender roles’ (Godwin, 2012: 91). That the negative portrayal of the witch is very common in fairy tales and children’s screen media is therefore highly problematic if, as Tatar suggests, the texts we consume as children ‘get under our skin in countless ways that do not always register in obvious ways’ (2009: 22). Although the negative constructions of unruly and powerful women in The Witches and Hocus Pocus are not necessarily addressed to children, the fact is that these are popularly considered to be children’s films and are widely viewed by children. It is therefore probable that as a result of watching these films, child viewers are taught to fear and reject the witch-like characteristics of power, sisterhood and spinsterhood and distrust women who possess them, despite the fact that they are valid qualities, pursuits and life choices.