Says the Wall Street Journal,

Academics never have known quite what to do with Jackson. They often resist canonizing writers who dabble in genre categories and enjoy mass appeal. Yet Jackson's reputation has grown rather than diminished. Next June, the Library of America will publish a thick volume of her work, edited by Joyce Carol Oates.

Jackson had a thriving career writing light domestic pieces, although nowadays she's better remembered for her spine-tingling stories of human perfidy and otherworldly menace. Everyone's read "The Lottery" in school, just one of many amazing short stories - "The Mouse" and "My Uncle in the Garden" are just two that have refused to budge from my conscious. Her last novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castleis haunting and disturbing and has a well-deserved cult following. And then there's Hill House: For those of you who've read the book, or seen the excellent adaptation, you know the drill: several motley subjects - including a beautiful and enigmatic socialite, a playboy, and a high-strung, sheltered protagonist - agree to do a test in a spooky New England mansion to help determine the presence of the paranormal. What follows is not just deeply scary in the best gothic tradition, but plays into lots of deeper issues of women, loneliness, and the power of imagination.

Loneliness and the often ugly dynamic between people (especially women) is an ongoing theme in Jackson's work. Families and homes aren't refuges but sources of despair and [persecution and treachery. You come away from it, not just scared, but uneasy - her universe is not a pleasant one. And yet she has an eye for delicate description, an appreciation for quotidian detail (the menus in WHALITC are, not incidentally, fantastically-rendered) that's a pleasure to read. Her characters veer between lonely and steely, but no one is one-dimensional; there's always enough compassion to keep them real. Reading her is a submersion; she also takes well to being read aloud.

If you get the chance, Jackson's biography, Private Demons, is interesting: a dutiful faculty wife ("The Lottery" was apparently a dig at Bennington) Jackson also struggled with alcohol and overeating and, later, mental illness. She was often deeply depressed. She died at 48. It could not have been easy to have inhabited the world she did - even if it gave birth to such wonders. It's terrific that we're able to duck into it for a few chilling hours - and a relief that we can leave, even if hers are the stories that stay with you.

Chilling Fiction. . . [WSJ]
Shirley Jackson [Tabula Rasa]

Although the most recognized “strange girl” is probably Carrie White from Brian De Palma’s classic bloodfest Carrie, Rafferty mentions several other strange girls that appear in recent movies. He argues that horror films provide a place for the strange girl, the outsider with big eyes and a scary past: “Horror has a special place in its icy little heart for strange girls: the sad girls, the lonely girls, the ones who feel invisible to others and often ghostly to themselves.” For Rafferty, the weird little girl is celebrated in horror films through her victimization and revenge, and through this process, she taps into the sleeping teenager in all of us:

What you may recall, though, from the dimmer recesses of memory, is the feeling this movie evokes, a feeling perhaps peculiar to (certainly most vivid in) adolescence:the sense that the world is almost unbearably charged with significance, electric with meaning. It’s a state akin to madness, or possession. Every teenager’s mind is a haunted house.

This is the reason the strange girls, friendless everywhere else, feel so at home in horror. Their painfully heightened sensitivities make them ideal mediums for all the terrors of the phenomenal world; the long hours they spend alone facilitate brooding and, sometimes, dire imagining. They suffer from a constant and bizarrely eroticized awareness that everything around them, animate or inanimate, is (or can be) threatening.

The strange girls are not a phenomenon limited to film. Strange girls also show up in horror fiction, from Edgar Allen Poe to Shirley Jackson, who created one of the most archetypal strange girls in her 1962 novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The strange girls could be seen as just another unfortunate, two-dimensional label (like the evil twin of the manic pixie dream girl), and sometimes they are just that, but generally, strange girls are allowed a power that the MPDG’s lack. The trailer of The Uninvited shows spooky-girl Anna (Emily Browning), who recently returned from a stay at a mental institution, taking an active role in outing her father’s new girlfriend, and possible murderer, Rachel (played by Elizabeth Banks). Anna, while wide-eyed, pretty, and young, does not appear to be as blandly accepting as the classic quirky MPDG.

However, the most interesting about the weird-girls of horror, and something that unfortunately Rafferty barely discusses, is the fetishistic way that we watch the strange girls. These girls are not simply passive victims; their power arises from a sort of sixth sense, a hyperawareness of the threatening nature of the world. But, as Rafferty points out, this persistent suspicion is eroticized, made sensual and appealing. It is the appealing/appalling dynamic that hints toward the greater conflict of the adolescent (female) sexuality itself. Rafferty writes that part of the appeal of the evil/strange girl could arise from a fear of the “entire female gender.” Indeed, there seems to be a long tradition of connecting female sexuality with supernatural forces. It remains to be seen whether The Uninvited falls into this trap, although from the trailer, it appears as though weird-girl Anna is not the sexualized one, but rather her succubus-like co-star, Elizabeth Banks.

‘The Uninvited,’ ‘A Tale of Two Sisters’ and Cinema’s Sisterhood of Spookiness [New York Times]
The Uninvited- Official Trailer [YouTube]

The movie has a March 2009 release date and this is all we know about it: After the women of a rural Welsh town are enslaved by lesbian vampires, the remaining townspeople leave two young men on the moors as a sacrifice. Oh yes, AND THE TITLE IS LESBIAN VAMPIRE KILLERS. Clip below.

[Ain't It Cool News]

Until fairly recently, just about all the big names in horror, the writers whose stories dominate the anthologies and whose novels stay in print forever, have been of the masculine persuasion: Poe, Le Fanu, Stoker, Lovecraft, M. R. James, King, Straub. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s remarkable 1892 tale of madness, "The Yellow Wallpaper", manages to creep into the odd collection, as does Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery,” which is so disturbing that it induced a significant number of New Yorker readers to cancel their subscriptions when it appeared in the magazine’s pages in 1948. But for the most part, a woman’s place in horror has been pretty well defined: she’s the victim, seen occasionally and heard only when she screams.

Even the few notable exceptions (Gilman, Jackson and Shelley) are set apart from the true purveyors of the occult in that they only “dabble” in the unspeakable, never devoting as much of their time and ink to the supernatural as their male counterparts. Many of the women writing in horror often fall into the “paranormal romance” genre, including the insanely popular Twilight series, where the real aim is not to evoke terror, but to present an impossibly romantic alternative to reality. For many years, horror fiction, like video games and action movies, seemed to be an exclusively masculine sphere, only occasionally broken into by the female voice.

Now, the Times argues, the tide is turning. Women writers are producing some of the most interesting and provocative horror fiction. Authors Sara Gran (Come Closer), Alexandra Sokoloff (The Price), Sarah Langan (The Missing, and The Keeper) and Elizabeth Hand (Generation Loss, and The Bride of Frankenstein: Pandora’s Bride) have received both critical acclaim and awards for their contributions to the genre. With works featuring female protagonists and narrators, these writers are following in the footsteps of Shelley and Shirley Jackson, creating psychologically rich dramas and returning horror fiction to its subtly-creepy roots.

Horror can be powerful medium for feminist works. Monsters, zombies, ghosts, and vampires have been used before in both fiction and film to address social injustice. The end-of-the-world feeling that Elizabeth Hand and Sarah Langan capture seems similar to the terrifying and repressive future depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale. Although some of the novels described by the Times are not overtly feminist, there's a sense that these authors are willing to take risks with subject matter that many male authors shy away from, including sex and sexual violence (Hand’s novel, Generation Loss, is narrated by a former rape victim). In a way, the supernatural seems a fitting setting for a discussion about the real horrors of madness, violence, and death. In The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman draws upon her own experience with post-partum depression to create a chilling tale of madness and haunting, taking the hysterical-women stereotype and making it into something far more threatening, and thus far more subversive. Through playing with the boundaries of sanity and insanity, real and unreal, Gran, Sokoloft, Hand and Langan have created a new space for women in horror.

Shelley's Daughters [NY Times]