Hunter's daughter doing the loli dance trend

She became an internet sensation in a night and Hunter is gonna go hunting down the predators

He's making sure if his daughter becomes a child star, she'll have the best protection

A/N: Sorry, this took so long to answer. College is pilling up on me again. Also, I made Hunter's daughter a teen (15 going on 16) in this because I don't know how to write children who are really young.

"You did what?!" Hunter shrieks, waking you up.

"Hunter, what are you fussing about now?" You ask, getting off the couch.

"Come see what your daughter has danced to on that clock app!" Hunter yells, making their preteen daughter, Melody go into the kitchen.

You look at Lauren dancing and are slightly impressed she can dance so well.

"She got my moves," You say, smirking until you see Hunter's face."But, of course, the lyrics of the song are very inappropriate."

"Mom! That's so unfair! You've danced to much more inappropriate songs when you were on the majorette team when you were my age," Lauren whines, making you go still.

"Oh...true," You mumble, looking away from your eldest daughter.

"Don't use your mother's past against her. You're not going to dance to songs with lyrics like this on the internet for who knows what to save and view. In fact, I'm going to Henry to completely wipe this from the internet," Hunter says, storming out of the house.

You and Lauren look at each other and then laugh.

"How about I cut you a deal? You can still dance, but you join my old majorette team?" You offer, passing your daughter her phone.

"Deal!" Lauren exclaims, hugging you. "I wonder how long it's going to take for Dad to realize that the video of me doing the loli dance trend was in my drafts?"

"Oh, probably a while. Despite your father's job, he's not very smart. I remember when we were dating, I asked Hunter to get me a B-cup bra. He brought me a literal bra with bees on it. I laughed so hard that water spurt out of my nose. The best part was that the bra was an A-cup!" You laugh, making Lauren burst into laughter. "Oh, and then there was the time at our high school graduation, Hunter nearly fell off the front of the stage!"

You and your eldest daughter crack up and eventually stop.

"Mommy, what are we going to do for food?" Melody asks, tugging on your sleeve.

"Hmmm...how about GIRL DINNER!" You scream, making all of your daughters shriek with delight.

You give them your phone and they order their favorite dishes from their favorite restaurants. You pay for the order with Hunter's debit card and go into your room for face masks and salon care.

"Ugh! What does Elliot want now?" Lauren groans, flopping onto the bed. "Oh, Dad wants to know why there were four transactions on his debit card."

You had almost forgotten Henry has children. Elliot VanHelding, the eldest of Henry's children, goes to the same school as Lauren, and Delilah. Not only that, but he seems to fancy Lauren, which makes you worried.

"Just tell him we decided to take a girl's day off," You respond, sipping a strawberry lemonade margarita from the fridge.

"Ok, mom!" Lauren says, high-fiving you.

Hunter receives the text message and smiles a little.

"So, is the video deleted?" Hunter asks Elliot, crouching next to him as his friend's son does his magic.

"Yep! Completely erased from her drafts!" Elliot says, turning around to face Hunter.

"Drafts? So it was never published?"

"Nope."

"I've got to get back to my house."

By the time Hunter had gotten back, you, Lauren, Delilah, and Melody had locked every door, entrance, and window.

"Honey, this isn't funny! Open the door!" Hunter yells, pounding on the door.

"Sorry, babe! It's girl's night now!" You exclaim, shutting the curtains.

Hunter sees you wearing a fake scarf with cheap star-shaped sunglasses and hides a smile. Hunter grabs a pillow and blanket from the trunk and makes a bed for himself in the backseat of his car. He takes in the smell of the blanket and takes comfort in knowing that it smells like your perfume from when you went to the beach with Hunter for the summer before your senior year in college. His mind fills with summer memories, and they carry him to sleep.

1950s Horror: Week One

The 1950s saw a lot of changes in the horror world. The Hays Code was still exerting its influence in many ways, but it was also losing some of its hold in others. The supernatural horrors of the previous decades were giving way to the rise of science fiction, fueled in large part by the events of the time: the atomic age, the cold war, the space race. (that “mad scientist” was a more culturally acceptable villain these days than “demon-worshiper” sure helped)

But before we go all-in on the monster movies and creepy sci-fi of the era, we stopped off for a pair of films neither of us had seen. 

The first was the 1958 The Screaming Skull, directed by  Alex Nicol. 

A directorial debut and indie production, The Screaming Skull was not particularly well-received. It also somehow never got copyrighted (oops), so it’s easy to find for free. If you prefer, there’s a MST3K episode of it. 

Honestly, it’s not that bad. I found it quite charming despite how laugh-out-loud ludicrous it becomes in places. The basic plot is that a woman moves in with her old husband and starts to be terrorized by what seems to be the ghost of her husband’s dead wife, who died under mysterious circumstances. The husband, naturally, spends the movie telling her she’s imagining everything. But maybe he has an ulterior motive for silencing her fears...

The Screaming Skull fits neatly into a very old (and continuing) tradition of films where a couple start a new life together, the woman discovers that the house is haunted as shit, and the husband refuses to take her concerns seriously. 

It fits right in with Gaslight and Cat People (see our 1940s “#horror by the decade” entries). What’s interesting to me about all of these films is the way the silencing of the wife is framed. In modern movies, the narrative is often something along the lines of how the man is the logical one and the woman is superstitious (if usually vindicated once the supernatural occurrences crank up). In these older films, the silencing starts up before the supernatural stuff even heats up, and it stretches beyond the realm of “that’s impossible.” 

Time and again, we see scenarios where women have trauma in their lives -- in The Screaming Skull, it’s the death of her parents -- and the men straight-up shut them down. “Stop making a big deal out of it. Stop worrying. Just listen to me because I know what’s best.” How dare these women inconvenience their partners with their silly feminine pain, right? 

So all of that was interesting to watch, in the sense that it continues a conversation with previous films we’ve seen. It was also unintentionally hilarious thanks to excellent sequences like “skull rolls aggressively down stairs,” “man punts an object at a ghost/mannequin,” and “man wrestles with disembodied skull as it bites his throat.” 

The other movie we watched was Night of the Hunter, a 1955 release directed by  Charles Laughton. Just like Freaks, this movie was a bit of a career-killer for the director: It bombed at the box office, and Laughton never directed another film. 

And, like Freaks, the movie ended up becoming beloved and respected as an artistic masterpiece that failed ultimately because it was ahead of its time. 

Night of the Hunter tells the story of a smooth-talking, charming psycopathic preacher with a nasty habit of killing women. After being arrested for stealing a car (but getting away with murder), he goes to prison for 30 days and meets a cellmate who is scheduled for execution for robbing a bank and killing a few people. He learns there that the robber has hidden the money and decides to go find this fortune once he gets out.

And by “find this fortune,” I mean he seduces the widow and terrorizes her children. 

This movie is chilling. The preacher’s conviction is haunting, the performance is spot-on, and it’s one of the most visually beautiful movies we’ve watched in this film series to date. I’d recommend watching it side-by-side with Fritz Lang’s M, which touches on some similar material and has a similar visual style -- Laughton clearly draws on inspiration from the German Impressionist school of filmmaking. 

What stands out most to me is the blatant, unapologetic look at Christianity. By the end, it becomes a literal face-off between two versions of Christianity -- the self-serving, misogynistic, violent, corrupt aspect and one based on compassion and generosity and care for the misfortune. It’s a story of good and evil, and here “evil” truly comes as a wolf in sheep’s clothing -- a story that still feels exceptionally relevant all these years later. 

The pacing does seem to falter a bit toward the end, and the ending -- while deserved -- feels almost tacked-on. The film is based on a novel of the same name, and I got the impression that the book may have a much bleaker outlook. 

Either way, Night of the Hunter is a spectacular film, and it holds up very well for modern audiences. Go rent it on Amazon Prime or YouTube prime, it’s worth it. 

The mystery of Rachel’s Priorities

The tragic/strategic self repression of the feminine (above and below, alas)  is the beginning of the Lunar mystery. This is sometimes adressed in Kabbalah under the euphemistical epithets: Rachel and Leah.

Leah is expressed, the full moon, Artemis as Hunter-Queen. King David is an avatar for expressiveness, identified with prayer and psalm, harp and Lamentation: Leah, mythically overcomes destiny through her tears and longing, expressed, and thus is able to both marry Jacob and birth the messianic king triumphal: Judah, in the aspect of the Lion. Expressed, apologetic as well as unapologetic, the eloquence and will to be clear with G-d and people makes the entire Jewish tradition and it’s emphasis on co-operative and occasionally loud prayer: the tradition is that this was how Leah changed everything. Rachel, on the other hand, is beautiful... and quiet. She is some kind of expressed with her sister, begging to trade nights-with-Jacob for fertility-totem-plants (”Mandrakes”/Dudaim). She does not speak up when her father marries off her sister to her own betrothed in order to keep everyone around and working for longer. And at the seminal moment depicted in this drawing: she steals some of her father’s “Teraphim” as her and the rest of her family household prepare to run away from their father Laban’s house with Jacob.  As a child in school hearing these stories, I was so mystified about why she did this.  Didn’t she know that idols were bad? Or useless? We were told as kids that all the forebearers were totally, intuitively righteous. Why-- does she even want Teraphim? http://bigfaithministries.com/ancient-mystery-of-the-teraphim/ The Ibn Ezra Then: as Laban comes after his daughters and their brood, outraged at noticing both the missing icons and absconded family, he begins to demand at Jacob about it. Jacob honestly denies knowledge, and curses whoever stole them. Unknowingly cursing his love-of-loves and original intended partner, to early death. Because he didn’t know either. Because she didn’t tell him either. BECAUSE RACHEL COULDN’T FEEL SAFE ENOUGH WITH JACOB TO TRUST HIM WITH HER HEART’S PRIORITIES. I think in this mystery is much of the challenge and nature of gender conflicts in post-modernity: Rachel trusts none of the men in her life: both because their ideals conflict with her clarity regarding her own needs and self care. When confronted by Laban and their caravan searched, Rachel hides the Teraphim under her saddleseat, and refuses to stand, claiming to be “in the way of women.” Neither Laban nor Jacob ask more of her, surrendered to their alienation and respectful disgust. Notice how much of Biblical and later Jewish purity law institutionalize this respect-horror as the main imperative for Giving Women Space, and becomes historically manifest as the way women would ask for space, as well as countered by the alienation laws that men would take in to insist the physical distance of menstruant women across the ancient diaspora. The things mean cannot know or understand about women’s distinct needs and feelings become the central institutionalized alienation: instead on insistence on understanding the feminine, “respect” was classically given, as a way of sparing someone who doesn’t trust you from having to lie to you. This is the curse of Rachel: silence facilitates autonomy, just doing things because you want to, without justification or negotiation. Had Rachel asked her father, the story gives the impression he would have use manipulative justification to make it more of a negotiation, as he did with Jacob about her herself. Had she told Jacob, he PROBABLY would have pish-poshed her “vulgar” attachments to “things” from HER father’s house, just like later biblical law insists on captives and intermarriers; that they leave all their idols behid, or at least break them enough to become “powerless”. She knows better than to waste time being clear. Alas. Like Shakespear’s Juliet, her unsafety in being clear about her will leads to all who love, treasure, or even just fetishize her being heartbroken about her death.  And still, in the biblical narrative: even her last request is not honored. She dies in childbirth, her last recorded words are a plea that the son who she births be named “Ben-oni”, son of of my hurt, my sorrow. He is never named that. He is immediately named instead  “Benyamin/Son of the right” Even her last request, Jacob will not trust. He knows Benyamin is the one who is going to have to deal with the name, so blah blah excuses excuses. She wanted something unreasonable and he refused to, or was incapable of, honoring that. And from then on, biblical idolotry is identified with the fetishized sculpted image, and the violent crusade against it with the triumph of holiness-justification and even reason itself, over the false identified with Venus, Istar, Ashtoreth. Her dumb, irrational attachments. This is arguably the fundamental moral failure in the bible, the capacity to resolve between masculine “reason” eschewed and villified tho it may be in later romantic literature and the post modern philosophy of Foulcault, Queer theory, and the 21st century in general, where the emptiness of reason and the injustice of it’s pretension is acknowledged and localized narrative, including all religious fundamentalism, as well as political priority, given reign, and it’s distrust of feminine attachments, intuitions, biases and feelings. This is Jordan Peterson’s core speaking point, after all the Jungian jargon filters itself out: Civilization is made of the noble repression of the feminine, IDENTIFIED WITH PRIMORDIAL CHAOS ITSELF by the phallic violent masculine, identified with reason itself. This is the Apollonian confidence that traditionally build the university model and all the liberal sciences into such effective colonial machines: the word penetrates and invades. Jacob himself, Moses later recounts, goes down to Egypt “Insisted(raped!) by The Word”. This is the main popular justification for all the insistance of all the repression: we don’t have time, this is stupid. Forget about it. You’re being hysterical.  Hysteria = Istahar, Esther Listening to Rachel is some of the main work of the prophets, who try to feel and help us feel the hurt of the repressed world, as in Jeremiah 31:15 כֹּ֣ה ׀ אָמַ֣ר יְהוָ֗ה ק֣וֹל בְּרָמָ֤ה נִשְׁמָע֙ נְהִי֙ בְּכִ֣י תַמְרוּרִ֔ים רָחֵ֖ל מְבַכָּ֣ה עַל־בָּנֶ֑יהָ מֵאֲנָ֛ה לְהִנָּחֵ֥ם עַל־בָּנֶ֖יהָ כִּ֥י אֵינֶֽנּוּ׃  )Thus said the LORD: A cry is heard in Ramah— Wailing, bitter weeping— Rachel weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted For her children, who are gone. https://www.sefaria.org/Jeremiah.31.15-16?lang=bi And so nationalism itself is identified with Rachel: attached to the personal. It’s repression, like in the Book of Maccabees, is met with fountains of defensiveness, all Crusades in defense of the Grail, the great divine mother who could only accept, and cry. This is what we all need to become better at listening for on some level: the true need plead, and the best expression of that need that we can secure. Because as much as any of the things anyone could long for or be attached to are silly-- they are so full of meaning, and to be right with each other, we must always honor what things mean to each other, in a way that liberates us all with them, and each other, able to hear and be heard at last-- --as well as making space for how much we just are not trusted, for reasons or beyond reasons, and still: just caring and trying. Pray for the peace of the quietest of mothers, that she know and feel welcome to know how much more we’d like to hear her deepest will expressed.  This is the aspect of Leah, Athena. Screaming a truth so that all that lives can’t help but sing along.