XX (2017)

I’m always wary of horror anthologies and they’re notoriously difficult to review because you have to think of them as the sum of their parts. Why am I bothering with this year’s XX then, especially writing about it? Not only is it newly released on Netflix in Australia as I'm transferring these reviews over to this blog, it also falls squarely into my wheelhouse. Let’s do some feminist horror dissection!

If the name or the surrounding buzz in the usual feminist internet hotspots hadn’t clued you in, every short in XX is directed by women and theoretically based around ideas in horror linked to femininity and the female experience. It manages to do this, thankfully, while retaining near-consistent quality. 

My hopes were not high. I always loudly advocate for more prominent female voices in horror, and this felt like too good a concept to be well executed. I've watched V/H/S descend into chaos and sat through the goddamn mess that was ABCs of Death. There are lulls in the movie that are the type I expect from anthology projects - I was not a huge fan of the stop motion framing device, which was unnerving but felt discordant, and the third short (Don’t Fall, about camping and evil spirits directed by Roxanne Benjamin) seemed rushed and a little out of place. Some performances are weaker in contrast to great stories - I loved Jovanka Vuckovic’s opening short The Box, based on the Jack Ketchum story, but some performances were far better than others - and in Annie Clark’s directorial debut Birthday Party, Melanie Lynskey basically stole the whole movie with her anxious energy. The last short, Karyn Kusama’s Her Only Living Son, is certainly a familiar feeling piece but plays out with a nice delicacy to end to cap the movie off.

With only four short films and a strange framing device (also directed by a woman, Sofia Carillo, and you have to at least allow that it has a distinctive style), I can’t really say that I’m disappointed in its overwhelming focus on motherhood as the main spring point for feminine fear. I was worried that would be the entire movie - all shorts in which motherhood and rape become the basis of the horror - but I’m thinking through the lens of the ridiculous amount of male directed horror movies I watch. Motherhood is aggressively represented in three out of the four shorts, but I would say that the active idea of motherhood as a primal fear and a “uniquely female” horror is presented in two of the four, which is not too bad. I worry when it dominates all female media, because of course motherhood and childbirth are not the hallmarks of womanhood - not only do not all women have vaginas or the same experience of being female, but motherhood is not the only element of womanhood. It is definitely a visceral one, due to the nature of parenthood, but that’s not for everyone and I at least appreciated in Don’t Fall the focus on younger women and very different kinds of fear (and the very different kind of fear expanded on in Birthday Party). 

I want more of XX. I want a second edition. I want to get to the stage where a movie like this is not a novelty, because men aren’t telling 90% of the horror stories so that the horror experience becomes almost universally masculine. It might not have achieved major blockbuster success, but I’d say the mostly positive feedback I’ve seen - keeping in mind that I tend to avoid places that are general breeding grounds of misogyny - is encouraging and indicates that there are lots of people like me who want these movies made. I want more directorial debuts - who knew that St Vincent was kind of awesome at lighthearted horror? I want more of her work! Let’s stop icing women out of genres.

Rating: 8/10 - I really enjoyed this movie, even attempting to remove my surgically attached feminism hat. Three out of the four films were successes for me, and each with their own flaws but also wins to the point where I feel like I could probably write full reviews for them.