All the Lives I Want by Alana Massey

Author:Alana Massey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2017-02-06T16:00:00+00:00

Broken-Bodied Girls

On the Horror of Little Girls Grown

WATCHING HORROR FILMS AS A child was primarily an exercise in witnessing the injured inflict more injuries. Freddy Krueger’s body is a giant burn that doesn’t heal. The only kindness ever extended by Jason Voorhees over the last three decades has been to cover his deformed head with a hockey mask. The eerily symmetrical torture inflicted on Pinhead’s skull on display in Hellraiser was less merciful. But while these ghoulish men frightened me out of more nights of rest than my mother can likely count, they never inspired the same inconsolable terror that would reverberate in me after encountering the disfigured young girls of the genre—notably, Regan from The Exorcist and the lesser-known but far more gruesome Zelda from Pet Sematary.

Most men in horror movies show no evidence of having ever been children. While a perfunctory nod is given to Jason as a child victim in the first Friday the 13th film, the bloodthirsty adult is too unsympathetic to render his backstory much more than an afterthought. But we meet Regan as a bright-eyed adolescent whose innocent tinkering with a Ouija board was hardly sufficient vice to invite the brutal possession that followed. In Pet Sematary, Zelda is introduced in her sister Rachel’s painful memory of being left by their parents to care for her in the excruciating stages of advanced spinal meningitis. Unlike their adult male counterparts, a major focal point of their respective stories was the girls as victims before they were villains. Growing up, I was afraid of running into Freddy or Jason in a dark alley or a nightmare, but I was more afraid of becoming Regan or Zelda.

I watched each of these movies at least a dozen times and so find it difficult to pinpoint my inaugural viewings. The sleepovers and all-nighters I pulled with my older sister bleed into one another and blur what might have indeed been revelatory moments. But my horror-bingeing definitely hit its peak (or its rock bottom, depending on your chosen addiction model) in the sixth grade, that especially cruel point in youth at which half the girls have crossed over into puberty while the other half have remained behind. Both groups are humiliated by belonging to their respective camp, indulging in misguided fantasies that the grass might be green anywhere on the landscape of early adolescence.

Even at age eleven, I knew The Exorcist was more than a chronicle of the terrible things that happen when you dabble in games of the occult. It was about sacrifice and faith, innocence lost, and the human body as the battleground for good and evil. Regan’s possession demonstrated the latter in a series of progressively more ruinous and humiliating bodily changes. Her voice grows unrecognizable. Her body is subjected to violent and uncontrollable flailing. Her head memorably twists fully around, defying the generally rigid laws of the spinal cord. In the twenty-fifth-anniversary rerelease, a previously cut scene of Regan’s body contorted into an insect-like pose and scampering down a flight of stairs found its way into new nightmares.

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