Editor’s Note: Our resident cinephile, author Joseph Aisenberg, looks back at director Brian de Palma’s first attempt at a Hitchcockian horror movie, Sisters. Do you recall Brian De Palma’s Nightmare Classic?

By Joseph Aisenberg

“Lord help the mister who comes between me and my sister 

And Lord help the sister who comes between me and my man.”

— ”Sisters,” Irving Berlin, as sung by Peggy Lee

1

Alfred Hitchcock Presents

Brian De Palma’s first Hitchcockian assault on audiences was a funktacular horror doozy called Sisters (1972). A mix of sex, blood, exploitation and art cinema, this visionary shocker hints at more than it shows, and it shows a lot. Deceptively couched so to speak in DP Gregory Sandor’s stark, realistic cinematography, its graceless, harshly lit 1970s modernity represented a new-style, daytime Expressionism as radical in its way as Stanley Kubrick’s florescent approach in The Shining—sharpened to a gleaming knife’s edge by legendary editor Paul Hirsch. Sisters, only Hirsch’s second feature film (his first Hi, Mom, was with De Palma as well) has ice pick precision; its shock cuts provide a jagged vitality, jarring the Hitchcock of it all in a way perfectly suited to De Palma’s hip, offbeat perspective.     

Philip Woode, a suave African American advertising professional (Lisle Wilson) meets adorable, French Canadian Danielle Breton (Margot Kidder), a model and actress, when he’s punked by her on a Candid Camera style game show. After a one night stand Philip ill-advisedly tries to stretch to a second day, he’s stabbed by Danielle’s berserk twin sister Dominique, jealous Danielle had plumped to spend their birthday with him and not her. Philip drags himself to a window whose shade has magically snapped open during the attack, to get help. Across the street, counter culture reporter Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt) has witnessed the whole grisly dealio and promptly calls the, of course, useless cops. Mostly they’re mad she wrote a piece about police brutality recently, seen framed on Grace’s wall, “Why we call them pigs”.  “Yes,” she says on the phone during her report. “I’m the Grace Collier. I wrote that story.” Detective Kelly (Dolph Sweet) will waste yet more precious time bitching about it in person, so that all traces of the murder can be dealt with before they reach Danielle’s apartment. 

Predictably, nothing turns up. The only evidence found, a cake with “Happy Birthday to Dominique & Danielle” written on it, suggesting Danielle does have the twin Grace suspected, Grace drops on Kelly’s foot neatly wiping it out. Super annoyed by Grace’s pushy-ass, Kelly dresses her down royally, writing her off as a crank. She insists she saw the murder and that she’ll prove it, realizing there’s an opportunity here. She can solve the crime and break a juicy story about racial injustice—the incompetent police, she correctly thinks, didn’t do their job because the victim was a black man. Hilariously, brilliantly, this race angle, which hangs over the first part of the movie, will turn out to be a narrative red herring. Several satirical comments do get made (on the game show where Philip and Danielle meet for instance, Philip is condescendingly given a prize “specially chosen” for him: a dinner for two at a tacky place with grass-skirted waiters, a stuffed gorilla and piped in jungle noises called The African Room!) but there’s no socially conscious, messagey reason the character needed to be black. 

 After pitching the idea to her newspaper editor, Grace hires private investigator Joseph Larch (Charles Durning). He breaks into Danielle’s apartment, discovers Philip’s body hidden in a couch bed and finds also a convenient file explaining that Danielle wasn’t merely a twin, as Grace had already figured out, but a Siamese twin. Cue Bernard Herrmann’s fantastic, screeching, electro-horror music. While Larch trails the couch to Canada Grace follows up on the file, source material for a piece about the Blanchion Twins, as they’re called, printed in Life Magazine the previous year. This section concludes with the reporter (Bernard Hughes) telling Grace a suture nurse he bribed informed him that Dominique, presumed murderess, had actually died during surgery to separate the sisters. Mind blown, Grace goes home and waits for investigator Larch to update her on the couch’s progress, slouching towards Canada. He never does. Grace sees that Danielle and Emil are clearing out for good, so she abandons the phone and follows them to the mental clinic Emil runs, where the obvious comes out: Danielle and the killer are the same person! “Dominique”, for some pretty kooked out reasons (see below) is actually her alter ego, fueled by pure murderous rage.

Written and shaped for the talents of its stars Margot Kidder and Jennifer Salt—De Palma famously gave them copies of Sisters’ screenplay as a Christmas present while the young women were roommates in California—it’s easy to take their performances for granted. Kidder, with her fake French accent, brings a diabolical innocence to Danielle Breton, mixing soft charm with malignant confusion. She seems to exist above a hellacious dream of sexy feminine chaos; trying to escape victimhood, the poor girl doesn’t really know what direction to go, because she doesn’t really know herself. Jennifer Salt, however, is blunt. She’s all rough edges. She gives her Grace Collier a determination which feels both, admirable and slightly aberrant. She’s so used to resistance from all sides her nose is permanently out of joint. The character is like a Jane Fonda type of the era, heroic, heedless; at times almost feral. And the way she winds up only underscores a girlish middleclass vulnerability we’d sensed throughout, something she couldn’t get away from despite that cool ass Angela Davis picture prominently displayed in her apartment. The conclusion is such a perverse joke on the character and the audience viewers are left uncertain what to make of her finally, a De Palma specialty. And if neither performance in Sisters seems as full or resonant as some of the greatest women’s roles of the decade (Jane Fonda in Klute, Ellen Burstyn in The Exorcist, Faye Dunaway in Chinatown or Sissy Spacek in De Palma’s own Carrie) it’s partly because these roles are so interdependent they can’t be judged apart. Kidder and Salt function together thematically as seamless aspects of the movie’s design. To see how great they really were, just compare to Chloe Sevigne and Lou Doillon in the muddled, ill-conceived 2006 remake. 

****

Now, Brian De Palma is probably best known for five things: taking from Hitchcock, use of split-screen, voyeurism, slow motion sequences; and misogyny. Sisters, has four of them. 

But let’s start with the Hitchcock. Obviously De Palma and screenwriter Louisa Rose raided Psycho (1960) for Sisters’ plot and structure. The movie even has a score by Hitchcock’s greatest composer, Bernard Herrmann; and Sisters with its blaring, screaming orchestra and warbling Moog synthesizer weirdness is one of his coolest. After a scary titles sequence, like Psycho’s, showing us a pair of fetuses in a womb which seems to be suspended in space (not so Psycho-like), the movie begins with a character in a furtive situation, whom the audience assumes will be the protagonist, and then kills him off violently less than halfway through, jump-starting a new storyline. Sisters, also makes use of a seemingly nice character harboring a second, distinct personality revealed at the end to be a sex-insane murderer. From Rear Window (1954), Sisters has borrowed the amusing device of a character witnessing a killing window to window and when the police can’t or won’t do anything about it, feeling compelled to solve the crime themselves. 

These elements have been not only combined to form a single satisfying movie, but freakily altered and renovated, warping Hitch’s themes into something mind-bendingly new; improving things critics of Hitchcock had been complaining about for years. Like at the end of Psycho which Hitchcock has to bring on a smug psychiatrist, Dr. Richmond (brilliantly played by Simon Oakland) for a lengthy scene, to explain everything. Sisters fixed this by 1: making the psychiatrist an important character and not simply a drive-by, which 2: means the explanations aren’t mere commentary on the drama but integrated directly into it. When William Finley’s bizarro Emil Breton lays out Danielle’s backstory during the movie’s hallucinatory climax it’s not simply expository gymnastics staged for our benefit, as with Oakland’s winking tirade, but it’s a means for Emil to deal with and punish reporter-witness Grace for having pried into he and Danielle’s fishy lives (see below). Sisters, in other words, shows rather than tells. 

Deeper than that, though, the doctor character’s becoming a part of the story allows for monstrous possibilities untapped by Psycho. Dr. Emil Breton as presented in Sisters is a grotesque, as much a freak as Danielle and Dominique. Pale, concave-chested, hump-backed, he wears huge glasses which exaggerate his gaunt, feral features to expressionist proportions. An enormous red splotch disfigures his forehead. During the Peeping Toms game show segment which opens the movie, where Philip and Danielle have one of the most ambiguous meet-cutes in movies, we’re given shots of the show’s studio audience. Among them Emil sits wearing a trench coat, well before he becomes an active character, looking every bit the pervert he’ll turn out to be. Most perverse of all he’s reading a book instead of paying attention to the show like a normal person. 

His presence here following Danielle, to keep her from getting into trouble—i.e. having sex—will for re-watchers of this very re-watchable flick cast a long shadow over the story. During Philip and Danielle’s date at the African Room, botched by sneaky Emil, we learn Danielle actually saw his ass in the game show audience; he says he waited for her afterward, but she avoided him. Our first time seeing the movie we think she asked Philip out to dinner, to make up for her part in Peeping Toms’ humiliating prank, only it seems the movie’s entire trajectory maybe has to do with Danielle’s determination to elude Emil’s control.

He properly jumps into the story during that African Room date. Pops up seated directly behind Danielle, insisting she leave with him at once. Makes such a screaming fuss about it he has to be removed by two husky men wearing those absurd straw skirts—Sisters’ mixing of ironic and serious tones is only another subtle, schizoid splitting. Through such scary-goofy touches, the audience’s responses to the characters and situations are always being made to morph, double; re-reflect upon themselves. For instance in this scene we at first think Emil is the jealous ex-husband of melodrama, desperate to keep Danielle from getting on with her life. After Philip’s murder, when he arrives at Danielle’s apartment and goes right to work resourcefully cleaning up the mess, marshaling shell shocked Danielle to help him secret Philip’s body in the couch bed and get ready for visitors, the audience develops an odd respect for him. Emil’s so damned devoted to Danielle he’d apparently do anything to protect her, despite her having been humiliated him the night before. However once we learn all the hot goss surrounding his and Danielle’s relationship (see below) our feelings about him reach a final stage of revulsion. As Danielle’s husband/doctor he shamelessly exploited, used and manipulated both Danielle and Dominique; the depths of his depravity is truly difficult to comprehend, and not just because the whole situation’s so insane. 

When Grace follows Emil and Danielle to the clinic he runs (this guy should never be allowed to run anything), she approaches its looming structure like Vera Miles stalking the Bates house at the end of Psycho. On its huge porch, through a large window, she spies Emil injecting Danielle’s arm. Soon as it knocks her out, Emil makes as if to lean down over her prostrate form, kiss her; maybe even go to town on her. He stops himself but we can see he’s a piece of work; while this unpleasant moment barely has time to register before the movie passes us on to something other disturbing thing—Emil incarcerating Grace as a mental patient and putting her under too—the yuck factor remains, building a cumulative effect. 

Should also be pointed out by the way that Emil’s character and Sisters as a whole has another source, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). The wacky game show gambit which De Palma uses to disorient viewers at the movie’s beginning is an obvious reference to it, not just because the game show has been called Peeping Toms. Sisters, starts when a supposedly blind girl, Danielle, wanders cane-clicking into a men’s dressing room. Supposedly not knowing Philip’s standing right there she begins to remove her clothes, a groovy white coat with red, slit-like zippers zagging across the front; her blouse; before the bra comes off, though, Philip’s inscrutable face freezes and a keyhole forms around it, Peeping Toms’ cutesy logo. 

The whole iffy, semi illicit, vaguely sinister setup echoes the opening of Powell’s film, though it’s no prank in that one. An anonymous man turns on a handheld camera which he conceals in his overcoat; through it, we watch as he approaches a street hooker. She accepts the man’s presumed offer and leads him up a set of backstairs to a room, secretly filmed the whole time. As the woman starts undressing she realizes something’s up—the guy’s unveiled something; a click sounds and a light begins to shine weirdly on the woman’s face—causing her to rear back and scream, followed by a cut to a projector afterwards, replaying her murder.

Peeping Tom and Psycho, which came out the same year, are actually a natural pairing. Together they form a damn near perfect nuclear family of crazy. And Peeping Tom’s serial killer Mark (Carl Boehm), a voyeuristic weirdo with ambitions to be a filmmaker, fits De Palma’s self-conscious movie preoccupations far more snugly than does nerd-boy Norman Bates’ sexual hang ups. The snuff films Mark makes, the way he uses of them later, enact the whole dynamic of horror movie consumption and the bad conscience everybody seems to have about it. Viewing his movies from the comfort of his own home theater, Mark can savor his victims’ reactions of confusion and terror (they’re made to watch themselves die reflected in a mirror attached to his camera, explanation for that light on the hooker’s face), which he seemingly identifies with! The cause of Mark’s kink and murderous impulses don’t derive from a repressive momma as in Psycho, but an oppressive, always looking father. Mark’s dad, an unscrupulous psychologist, had used him as a guinea pig to further his career. Tried to record Mark’s entire childhood including responses to emotional abuse he regularly inflicted on the boy, hoping to document the complete development of human personality. Emil in Sisters is similar to Mark’s father, using Dominique and Danielle for reasons professional and pathological. By having Powell’s tyrant bogey fleshed out here—he was seen only fleetingly in home movies in Peeping Tom—a desperate and pathetic figure emerges. Emil seems almost a cracked romantic, rotted through by the abuse he’s inflicted. Abuse he doesn’t even bother trying to justify. It’s just given. 

****

And by blending the doctor/psychiatrist characters of both movies in Sisters De Palma and screenwriter Rose also utilize unresolved aspects of Psycho having to do with wobbly identity; the slippery nature of truth and perception. For instance the possibly unintended weirdnesses hiding between Dr. Richmond’s explanations of the murder in Psycho and “Mrs. Bates’” own assertions. Once Richmond finishes wrapping everything up like a cheap Christmas gift, we’re shown Norman sitting in a white holding cell, looking like an allegorical figure; hear him thinking in his mother’s voice, a wild monologue. Basically she says she tattled on her son because she didn’t want anyone thinking she’d shower-stabbed Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), assuming Norman would try to pin the blame on her if she didn’t rat him out first. After which we get the mordantly “ironic” bit of her refusing to swat a fly walking on her hand, forcing anyone watching to admit: “Why she wouldn’t even harm a fly.” What’s buggy here, is that this monologue doesn’t match Dr. Richmond’s spiel. He said he got the whole story directly from Mother, but if we believe her, what she told him read more like this: “Hey doc, my son’s the killer not me—no matter what he claims.” And her reasoning, that the only thing she could do in any case was sit and stare, like one of Norman’s stuffed birds, seems pretty sound. So what gives? 

Well either the doctor is lying or else he’s off somewhere in conjectural Narnia. Having listened to Mother, he somehow translated her babbling into what he wanted to think was true: everything she blamed on Norman was her doing. Because of this (the product of hasty writing between Joseph Stefano and Hitchcock adapting Robert Bloch’s book?) a couple possibilities get into the mix.  A). the Norman persona was only pretending to be Mother when he offed Janet Leigh. Considering Mother’s fears, maybe Norman put on the wig and dress, in an effort to frame her—because he resented her domineering ways? Or: B). Mrs. Bates is lying. This seems the most obvious choice, but if so to whom is she lying? She’s alone thinking all this. Is she lying to herself? Whatever that self actually even is. 

There’s a crazier possibility still: C). Norman has a second Mother persona. If the main Mother, the one we overhear thinking at the end, is telling us true, that she didn’t kill anybody, it could mean another Mother is lurking around in Norman’s unconscious, unbeknownst to her or even know-it-all Dr. Richmond. The way it might work: you’d have Mother/Norman out front, but with the Norman side of the equation somehow sprouting a distinct variation of momma, acting out its own interests. While possibility A is pretty dang strange, Norman trying to frame his mother, actually himself, it’s easier to grasp than choice C, that Norman has two different Mother personas going at once. And if that is what’s happening, why stop at two? You could have a revelation of splits with an infinite regress of Mothers reflected back and forth in the mental madhouse of Norman’s fragmented, mirrory mind, each more minute and fuzzy, until identity has vanished, motive disappeared, guilt dissolved.

Is all this some, newfangled psychological conundrum or one of those nonsense glitches Hitchcock enjoyed littering his movies with, to stump viewers in search of plausibility? Whichever it was, it must be part of what drew De Palma to the theme so often. In this kind of multiple personality thriller (following Jekyll and Hyde) the self exists through tenuous opposition to an unstable other, an opposition which finally can’t be sustained. Identities and realities eventually bleed together and split again, and again and again, in dialectic re-combinations. With Raising Cain (1992), De Palma’s third and last thriller based on the can of worms opened by Psycho’s Unreliable Psychiatrist, John Lithgow’s Carter Nix (as in nobody), a child psychologist, turns out to contain multitudes, a Sybil-like hive of compensatory personalities, each built to deal with different stresses and triggers. They are the result of abuse carefully inflicted by Carter’s father (played also by Lithgow for further confusion), a child psychiatrist himself and ghoul-patriarch taken directly from Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. Without scruple, hoping to make a big name for himself, he has deliberately traumatized his own child, Carter, trying to splinter the kid’s psyche into all those multiple selves, apparently for fun and profit. He’s essentially De Palma’s synthesis of the egoistic psychiatrists from both Psycho and Peeping Tom into pure malignance. First set loose in Sisters, muddied by trans-sexualism in Dressed to Kill, they have in Raising Cain reached a crazy apotheosis of self aggrandizing ambition and exploitation, un-tethered to anything remotely resembling reality.   

****

The Rear Window element of Sisters is much simpler than all this Psycho junk, and even that can’t be separated from effects employed in Psycho. Murder witness Grace Collier, so named for Grace Kelly, who played Lisa Fremont in Hitch’s movie, has been put into the position of Rear Window’s Jeff (Jimmy Stewart), though her task differs from his. He had not only to bring a killer to justice but also to figure out whether or not a murder had taken place. And Jeff, unlike Grace, doesn’t just hawk-eye the killer’s window but the neighbors’ whose mini story-arcs work as a symphonic counterpoint to the mystery; their comings and goings comment on Jeff’s anxieties about love, marriage, and what waits for him beyond the threshold of matrimony with Kelly’s character. 

At a more basic nuts-and-bolts level, though, Jeff needs a murder to solve, as does the audience. Hitchcock makes us aware of this untoward desire, and what may motivate it, in the final third of the film, when the possibility is teased that the victim, Anna Thorwald, may be alive and well after all. An idea which leaves Jeff and Lisa visibly dejected, because it means they’re nothing but a couple of creepy snoops and clearly the murder’s the only thing giving their rocky relationship meaning. “Jeff,” says Lisa, “you know, if someone came in here, they wouldn’t believe what they’d see—you and me with long faces. Plunged into despair because we find out a man didn’t kill his wife. We’re two of the most frightening ghouls I’ve ever known.” But the audience feels the same. Ghoulish or not, if there wasn’t a murder then what’d be the point of all this?  In Sisters we don’t have to worry about whether or not a killing happened—the audience has been given a front row seat for the gory fun. And Grace doesn’t need to decode reality searching for clues to the existential dread she’s projected onto it, as does Jeff. Rather Sisters’ laser focus is on the psychic link between murderer and witness, flipping the witness/victim doubling of Rear Window, which Hitchcock had pointed out to Francois Truffaut in Truffaut’s interviews with him. De Palma’s realignment of this dynamic doesn’t reveal the anti-social pleasure we get from murder in the way Rear Window does, but it lays bare the mechanics of movie-watching in ways similar to Peeping Tom; liberates perverse audience reactions resembling, actually, two other moments in Psycho.

The first happens after Marion Crane is killed in the shower. Faithful Norman cleans up the mess. He takes mop and bucket, and Marion’s things, out to her car, so he can dispose of them in the trunk. As he’s doing so someone suddenly is heard driving by the motel. Afraid they’ll stop Norman drops everything and stands startled, unsure what to do. Fortunately for him, the car continues on, headlights sweeping past, and the audience feels a palpable sense of relief. After Norman’s dumped everything in Marion’s trunk—her shower-curtain-wrapped body, clothes, the 40,000 bucks she stole, hidden in a folded newspaper—he hurries onto the second incident when he sinks all in a nearby swamp. Before the car goes under it stops and sits awhile, floating on the surface as if it might not go all the way in. Norman looks around nervously; the audience feels nervous for him. What’ll Norman do if the goddamn thing stays like that? We wonder. The possibility is as much a threat to the narrative as Marion’s shocking murder. But the car goes ahead and disappears into the gunk, and viewers again experience a sense of relief on Norman’s behalf. 

As Francois Truffaut noted of the movie in his interview with Hitchcock, “One intriguing aspect is the way the picture makes the viewer constantly switch loyalties. At the beginning he hopes that Janet Leigh won’t be caught. The murder is very shocking, but as soon as Perkins wipes away the traces of the killing, we begin to side with him […]Later on, when we learn from the sheriff that Perkins’ mother has been dead for eight years, we again change sides and are against Perkins, but this time, it’s sheer curiosity.” Very odd considering what we’ve been through with Marion the first forty minutes, but as Hitch knew, that’s just how movies work. Put someone in front of a camera and generally the audience will start to root for them. Even if they’re criminals. And this nearly seamless effect also is thematic. It splits our reactions against what we know they ought to be; parallels Norman’s compulsion to cover up his mother’s crime.  

Sisters, very much plays this game but in a trickier, much more involved way than Psycho. After Philip has been killed and the audience handed off to witness Grace, our loyalties divide not momentarily but for the length of the movie. Ostensibly, we’re with Grace in her determination to save Philip, but also we partially hope Danielle and Emil will manage to clean the crime away before Grace and the authorities get there: the suspense lies in our weirdly contradictory reactions. When the police arrive and take an instant dislike to Grace, who understandably is appalled they’d rather argue about the validity of her work as a journalist than do their duty, we become aware of the way the movie’s pulling our legs in different directions. It’s frustrating, but also fun. And Sisters, by putting us into the apartment where the murder will take place first, well before we get to know the nosy neighbor who’s going to solve it Rear Window’s meanings are further inverted. It works on the secret anxieties we have about what others might think if they saw the bad things we did when we’re alone—inducing a conjoined, mirror-twinned link between our urges toward justice and lawless chaos. The women become secret sharers.

This sort of thing barely comes up in Rear Window, but we do get a good taste during its climax. When wife-murderer Lars Thorwarld (Raymond Burr) realizes that Jeff’s been watching and tormenting him the whole time he crosses the courtyard, breaching Jeff’s false sense of security watching from the shadows, and tries to kill him. Thorwald, like Emil, is so pathetic and desperate at this moment we feel almost sorry for him; viewers may hope at some level Thorwald can defenestrate Jeff’s self-righteous ass while simultaneously being on the edge of their seats, wishing the darn cops would hurry up and get there already, to save the poor guy.

2

And Now For Misogyny! 

The Woman Question 

For decades the big knock on De Palma (aside from his being a Hitchcock ripoff) was that he hated women, though among the other Movie Brat auteurs of the era—Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorcese, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, who were all friends—De Palma was drawn to subjects with strong female characters far more often. Half his output through the 1970s featured women protagonists—Sisters, Carrie (1976), with an almost entirely female cast; The Fury (1978) and Dressed to Kill (1980)—though his putting women at the center of such shocking, violent stories probably made things worse. Eventually reviewers came to think his stuff was a putdown to women as crazy sirens and perpetual victims; loathsome sex objects. And De Palma did himself no favors saying he used women the way he did because it worked: audiences, he claimed, were scared for ladies in peril as they just never could be for dudes. As if he’d forgotten his scariest movie involved a man being murdered more horribly than Angie Dickenson in Dressed to Kill, a film protested by feminists in America and the UK. Soon even academic critics sympathetic to his work were portraying De Palma as the premier reactionary misogynist auteur, though his roots were in the lefty counter cultural attitudes of the 60s; and he’s been a big time liberal since. 

From one direction Sisters can be read as the story of a wanton maniac seducing a man to his death. The sexy game show prank Danielle plays on Philip, to ensnare him; her aggressively asking him out to dinner afterward, as a ploy to dodge her ex hubby Emil. “I don’t bite, you know,” she says playfully when Philip hesitates. “That is if I’m fed, I don’t bite.” A line looking forward to the wildcat scratches we will see all over Philip’s back and shoulders when he wakes on Danielle’s couch bed the next morning, an amusing borrowing of the ones Mia Farrow got as souvenirs after she was mated with Satan in Rosemary’s Baby. They’re a clue to what a beast Danielle really is and the lust and rage she’s repressed. Danielle fools even herself with her good girl act. Smoothly, she plays both the part of herself and her own killer twin sister Dominique. But on the other side of the window, where murder-witness Grace watches all, things don’t seem so hot either. A supposedly liberated gal, she’s so prickly, difficult, frustrated, pushy, ambitious she’s practically begging for punishment. 

Ideological, moral and philosophical critiques of horror have so much framed the way movies like Sisters are understood it’s worth questioning the assumptions. Namely that horror films evoke emotions representing filmmakers’ actual attitudes toward their subjects. I.E. witness protagonist Grace wants to be a serious journalist, is thwarted and humiliated, therefore De Palma must personally wish to punish independent women. Even sophisticated critics and reviewers have often watched movies in this crude way. And if a film contains positively stated messages, fair enough. The Best of Everything (1959) has speeches advising the Hope Lange character Caroline Bender to abandon ideas of a career in publishing for the fulfilling security of marriage and family. Otherwise she risks winding up a loveless aging crone like Joan Crawford’s Amanda Farrow, having nothing to show but a fancy office. Basically Margot Channing’s (Bette Davis) nightmare fate, awaiting all unfeminine women in All About Eve’s (1950) worst, most retrograde monologue. When, however, a movie’s ideas aren’t clearly stressed, and they rarely are in horror movies, especially not in De Palma’s, such meanings have to be read into or out of them. 

Stephen King has said many times that “the horror story, beneath its fangs and fright wig, is really as conservative as an Illinois Republican in a three piece pinstriped suit; that its main purpose is to reaffirm the virtues of the norm by showing us what awful things happen to people who venture into taboo lands.” But it’s not that simple; horror is a provocation not a statement. This sort of art throws things at the audience, triggering anxieties they might not otherwise have known they had. Without going all woo-woo Rorschach here (see below), something which scares characters in movies isn’t necessarily a condemnation of the thing which does the scaring much less the figure being scared. And a viewer getting successfully zapped by a movie doesn’t necessarily translate to direct attitudes about a movie’s themes. Often fear indicates uneasy contradictions papered over in a viewer’s thinking, like all the feminist touchiness about unflattering depictions of female characters in movies like Carrie being supposedly judgy swipes at women as a whole. 

Now for a thought experiment: consider the classic truism “there are no atheists in foxholes”. The suggestion seems to be that if you pray in the face of impending doom, really you’re a hypocrite who believed in God the whole time. But does anyone truly believe this? The answer isn’t important. I just want to let the question sit there. Does it annoy you? Do you want to chime in, quibble with what you think I’ve implied? Congratulations, you’ve wandered into the shadowy territory, where lurks horror and dread. For no matter how black and white depictions of good and evil may seem, great horror stories always do their best dreamwork in a moral landscape obscured by the thick gray waft of studio-produced fog.

****

But talk of feminism is relevant to Sisters because the movie’s wasn’t only De Palma’s mutant brainchild. It was screenwriter Louisa Rose’s as well. She met the director several years before the movie got made, when still a student at Sarah Lawrence. He gave her the scenario and notes for several visual set pieces he wished to film; she cobbled a screenplay together around them, which became her Masters Thesis. Eventually she moved to Hollywood and continued work on Sisters (it would be cut significantly by the time it got filmed) and what eventually became Phantom of The Paradise. There she was subjected to the casual harassment and sexism Hollywood’s well known for. As a divorced working mom it’s not a huge leap guessing she experienced some of the same conflictedness Ellen Burstyn’s single mother character, Chris MacNeil, did the year after Sisters came out in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). By the mid 1970s practically the whole Boomer generation divorced and most women were going through what Rose had been living out since the end of the 60s.  Sisters, reflects the same uneasy concerns about womanliness All About Eve and The Best of Everything did, but at a later stage of raised female consciousness, through a gothic distorting lens. 

And this theme isn’t buried in the story’s symbolic grotesquerie either. It’s on the surface in much of the dialogue during the movie’s first two-thirds. The night before Danielle/Dominique kills Philip, while on that damn date at The African Room, Danielle, recently divorced, refers to an ex boss she had in Canada disparagingly as a “son of a bastard”. Yet no sooner has Danielle said this than she feels compelled to throat-clear. “I’m not like you, uh, you know American women’s liberation,” she drunkenly insists. “I don’t, uh, I don’t spend my life to hate men.” Leaving aside the implied definition of feminism here, it’s ironic because her alter ego sister Dominique does live to hate ‘em. 

And the theme of the problematically unmarried woman gets pounded really hard once the Grace character is brought in. After her failed attempt to save Philip and suss out his killer; after Detective Kelly has read her the riot act, threatening to arrest her if she so much as goes near Danielle again, Grace’s mother (Mary Davenport, Salt’s actual mother) tops the humiliation off by showing up right that second for a previously planned lunch date, one of the best parts of the movie. During the drive looking for a place to eat momma Collier spews a constant, hilariously annoying gush of conservative parental bunk. Nags Grace about her bad housecleaning, blathers about an experimental mental health clinic (the real point to this scene); asks Grace if she’s still having problems with her editor boyfriend (Grace doesn’t want to talk about it); suggests setting her up with a hot romantic prospect. Grace refuses and her mother demands to know when the hell she plans to get married. Later the woman chides her daughter for being brusque and unladylike with a source questioned in a local bakery. “Don’t you think you’re taking this little job of yours seriously?” The woman asks before again suggesting Grace just settle down. Grace erupts, “I’m not gonna marry anybody!” and starts venting about her career frustrations. “I want to follow the drug bust!” she shouts. Her mother’s dismissive response is priceless: “Are you on diet pills again?” And from the beginning, her dealings with Detective Kelly had been as thick with sexist condescension as foggy London in a Dickens novel. “I hope there’s not too much imagination involved here,” he said first thing. When Grace became understandably frustrated that he and his partner Spinetti didn’t seem too interested in doing their job Spinetti cut her off saying, “All right, take it easy lady. These people are always stabbing each other”—referring to black people.

****

Sisters’ crazy feminist logic; how its psychology fits together derives from the way Psycho’s double personality shenanigans have been altered. According to Psycho’s questionable explanations (see above), Norman Bates was so pathologically jealous of his mother he murdered her and her boyfriend, obstacle to his quasi-incestuous dependence on her. He then mentally recreated the woman to deny these crimes happened; whoever the “real” Norma Bates had been, Norman’s reconstruction of her worked as a mirror of his needs. In this situation mother reigns, a domineering figure so jealous that, like Norman, she kills any woman who gives him a boner, because the possibility of external fulfillment threatens her parasitical relationship with him. The woman spends her undead life in constant fear of the same separation which tormented Norman before he poisoned her. Meanwhile the Dominique personality in Sisters, acts out of vengeful anger, because the separation that so terrified Norman has already been made to take place. 

In Sisters Danielle doesn’t bring back a parent who had existed at a traumatic distance, but her lost Siamese twin sister, a symbiotic sibling forcibly amputated from her. Oddly, Danielle has resurrected fake-Dominique post-operationally separate, after the “real” Dominique died, when one would have thought Danielle would bring her back in the sisters’ previous state of coexistence, literally attached to her hip—we are shown a huge jagged scar flexing across Danielle’s hip as she and Philip get hot and heavy on her couch, indicating Dominique’s absent presence, as a deconstructionist might say. Later Emil will significantly force Grace to touch this scar, during the climactic hypnosis scene. 

As with Norman’s mother, sex is the mechanism which triggers Dominique’s appearances, but her murderous motivations differ greatly from Norma’s. Every time Danielle sleeps with a man Dominique emerges and tries to whack the son of a bitch, imagining whoever he is to be Emil—doctor/husband/exploiter/killer—a Blue Beardesque figure who functions as Norman’s mother’s usurper-boyfriend had, a seductive wedge between Danielle and difficult Dominique. Danielle’s alternate self, like Norman’s, has been constructed out of guilt, because Danielle feels her romantic relations with Emil led him to kill and discard Dominique. Yet while Norman actually is guilty—he really did murder his mother and her lover—Danielle has been the victim of Emil’s manipulation, made complicit with him through their illicit relations. The guilt he ought to feel Danielle has taken aboard and displaced onto Dominique as the rage she can’t acknowledge she does feel; re-externalized against Emil, the correct target, which, in a bizarre twist, gets misdirected at other men. 

****

Before all this is made explicit the movie plays cheeky, unsettling games with our assumptions about what’s going on versus the grotesque reality. Re-watches release meanings in casual metaphors usually taken for granted. Danielle’s first mention of her sister Dominique serves example. After Emil ruins their date at The African Room Philip agrees to take Danielle home, to Staten Island, still hoping he can get some. On the ferry ride from NYC (the movie’s passage into the underworld) they stand on deck at twilight, watching the city fall away. 

”You know,” Danielle says with a far off look, “there are so few people that I have any feeling for. Not just men you know. Ever since my sister left. We have had such a close bond.” First time around the word “bond” seems only a banal way of describing emotional intimacy with a loved family member, but really, it’s Danielle’s coy reference to the very literal physiological condition she shared with her sister; the traumatic surgery that separated them. Knowing this, the words take on an odd, almost wacky sense of import. She hasn’t had a lot of feeling for people, because she’s spent most of her life institutionalized as a freak, which meant she had to be kept away from them. And those she was around abused the crap out of her trust and vulnerability. Plus, again, the last two lines—“Ever since my sister left. We have had such a close bond”—demonstrate some choice slippage. At first Danielle seems to be saying something like, “I miss my sister since she moved away” but once we know Dominique is dead the remark has deeper significance. Is it merely a French speaker’s awkwardness with the English language? or is Danielle, or De Palma and Rose through Danielle, giving the game away: Danielle’s gotten closer to Dominique since she died ‘cause the girl’s in her goddamn head now. But remember, Danielle thinks that Dominique is still alive if not well; though earlier she had claimed to like being alone, she sounds here wistfully nostalgic for the days when she and sis had formed a nightmare platonic whole. 

Such teasing questions hang in the background of the movie, continuing to resonate, cumulatively imparting to the world of Sisters an illusion of ever-evolving depths. De Palma, expert at narrative prestidigitation, manages this effect by constantly distracting us from one thing to another; changing speed, overlapping actions. He pulls an astonishing, almost pre-Lynchesque transition into the morning after Philip and Danielle’s one night stand through revealing her scar. It starts when the two begin going at it, sprawled across the couch. The camera cuts to a high angle above them; as they kiss, Philip works his hand up Danielle’s outer thigh, causing her dressing gown to fall away, showing more and more skin; finally the enormous scar on her hip. Simultaneously, the camera slowly zooms down on them, fixating on this hideous scar until it fills the entire screen. Bernard Herrmann’s ominous, sharp-whipping music crashes out in shattering percussion and alien electronic throbs—Hermann always knew how to pile on the fixings musically. 

The question lingers: did Philip ever ask Danielle about her disfigurement? De Palma doesn’t give us time to wonder. The writhing image of that scar immediately dissolves into a white window shade. From there the camera pans left across the living room where we hear Danielle’s breathy moans (next distraction), which sound a lot like sex noises. But when the camera finds her white-knuckling the couch bed’s armrest, sleeping next to Philip, she’s clearly in the midst of a nightmare (next unanswered question). There’s so much psychosexual weirdness glossed over through these shifts and changes that dream and reality seamlessly blend as Danielle wakes and goes to the bathroom, to take her morning crazy-pills (a question which won’t be answered until the climax). Removing the last three from a bottle in the mirror cabinet, she takes one; puts the other two on the edge of the sink where Philip will unknowingly knock them down the drain while she’s busy outside in the hall, fighting with sister Dominique (overlapping action). Danielle wearily confronts Dominique at the front door (Dominique didn’t knock, shouted from the hall; really from somewhere inside Danielle’s mind) and the camera deliberately hangs back as she slips outside, to conceal the fact of no Dominique; searches out Philip waking up with Danielle’s scratches on his back (maybe the best placed distraction of all). Intriguingly though, Dominique’s shadow is momentarily seen cast against the apartment’s door; this shadow, usually put down as cheating, is in fact a surreal projection of Danielle’s delusion onto the world, another metaphor made literal (cue the Twilight Zone theme).

Dominique seems to have shown up in order to throw a big French hissy, helpfully subtitled in English for viewers’ benefit, which Philip doesn’t understand seems to be about him. During the argument, which is similar to the one Marion Crane overhears Norman having with his mother in Psycho, Dominique calls Danielle “disgusting” and a “bitch”; carps that “he” has “separated” the twins, keeping them apart on their birthday; that Danielle chose “him” over her; “he” put her in a mental hospital etc. On a first viewing we figure Dominique is pissed off at Danielle because she’s jealous of Philip, but crazy Dominique isn’t talking about Philip. She’s referring to absent Emil’s influence. More importantly Danielle is Dominique, bickering with herself. The two women, in fact one, are yet more divided than when Dominique was alive. Danielle’s loss of her sister, we will learn, has set off a cyclic re-enactment of Danielle’s separation trauma. It is transferrable from place to place, situation to situation; through sex, person to person. Danielle turns into Dominique when she sleeps with Philip; Philip acts as stand in for Emil when Dominique kills him; Grace is made to become Dominique after witnessing Danielle’s secret crime and trying to intervene, which starts the process all over again.

Superficially Sisters is a shocker about “good” and “bad” siblings, but since they’re the same person the distinctions are a wash. Dominique is just another side of Danielle; dissociated, kept at a distance, she translates Danielle’s feelings into action seemingly independent of her. Such displacements, suppressions, deflections, denials and divisions make of the story, when put together, a kaleidoscopic allegory about the hard choices women make to get by. Grace and Danielle, Danielle and Dominique offer diametrically opposed options; each with her own set of drawbacks. If like Grace a woman tries to act on her ambition, is aggressive, impulsive; appears pushy, angry, difficult she risks seeming unfeminine. If she represses this aspect of herself and plays nice, using flirty smiles as Danielle so expertly does when manipulating the cops Grace has called in, convincing them, and almost convincing us, it’s ludicrous any murder could have taken place in little ole her’s apartment—she risks making herself vulnerable to those who would use and exploit her, the way Emil did. 

The stylized contrasting between the women is what drives the sequence where Grace sics the police on Danielle; the whole movie’s about it. Grace wears no makeup, has terrible hair; acts like a rude scowling busybody. Danielle, carefully made up (instructed to do so by Emil before the police arrive), is soft, demurely dressed in a satiny peignoir; playfully accommodating. “You have not say, ‘Open up in the name of the law. You have not say that,” she purrs after allowing detectives Kelly, Spinetti and Grace into her apartment. When Danielle insists she’s been alone all morning and Grace asks about Philip—“What about the man who stayed over?”—Danielle slyly gaslights her with some primo passive aggressive sexism: “But you know, Ms. Collier, many time I watch the television show and I watch the horror film [like Sisters] and it make me full of fear and I jump at every noise. I understand that when you live alone it make you, uh, it’s very difficult. I understand that.” Grace, not amused, responds, “What I saw was real.” 

Over the course of the movie De Palma elaborates and comments on these distinctions through repetitions, echoes, inversions until all that’s left are a mess of contradictions. I.E the good and bad sister turning out to be the same person; the witness and killer being spiritual twins psychically linked; victims and predators switching roles back and forth: Emil stalking Danielle whose alternate persona seeks to kill him, because he originally offedher. We’re provided a way to read the dynamic between Danielle and Dominique, between everyone and everybody actually, during the Life Magazine scenes. Grace, having discovered Danielle was a Siamese twin meets with the author of a story about them, who shows her a creepy ass black and white video. An odd figure dressed like a Franciscan monk named Dr. Pierre Milius, head of the Loisel Institute where Danielle and Dominique had lived from infancy up to the year before the movie takes place, explicates the girls’ condition. “It seems,” Milius says walking toward the camera, the older they become the more precarious their psychological balance, both within themselves and between one another. In this I am in agreement with my colleagues. Although they tend to think that Dominique is the truly disturbed one, I think they will find that Danielle, who is so sweet, so responsive, so normal, as opposed to her sister,  can only be so because of her sister.

 Meaning that by literally lopping off the symbolic bad sister, Danielle’s lost an essential part of herself—the part allowing her to function despite its/her seeming socially unattractive; the part unmistakably like Grace. Viewed this way it’s easy to see what screenwriter Louisa Rose was intuitively getting at. The idea isn’t only sociological or topically political, but universally human. We all have hidden within us aspects, desires and yearnings seen as unappealing from the outside, even anti-social. Still, we feel them to be defining attributes, as necessary for us as for society to try to repress them. And injustices like sexism and racism, glancingly referenced in the film, demand the persistence of such throttled monsters whose preservation, like the destructive urges of Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange, we rejoice despite ourselves. The movie makes our feelings about having to hide who we are or risk social estrangement into a literal form of mutilation. And here we’ve moved beyond any Oedipal Phase to take up residence in a backstreet of civilization and its gimpy malcontents, where mass culture is contingent on the subjugation/sublimation of those it exploits to function. The inevitable pathological crippling this business inflicts has been objectified into the nightmare surgery that pulls the sisters apart, resulting in the scar on Danielle’s hip. 

Hers, Grace’s and our unresolved feelings of fear and guilt over the external/internal squashing of our worst selves splits and fractures not only of the main characters’ but others as well; also doubles the surface features of reality. There are so many instances. We have two shots in two different scenes of Danielle and Grace gazing at the New York City skyline while standing on deck of the Staten Island Ferry; the same goofy uselessness of Detectives Kelly and Spinetti mirrored by private investigator Larch—both Kelly and Larch insist upon their competency in similar terms when Grace questions them. “You’re not a cop,” Kelly says. “Have you ever been a detective?” asks Larch when discussing how to get into Danielle’s apartment.  Emil and Grace each have wacky slapstick slipups on the luckily linoleum floor of Danielle’s living room, made slick by Emil’s methodical post-murder cleanup. Emil falls on his way out, toting a plastic trash bag full of evidence in need of disposal (see below). Grace takes a tumble on the same spot when rushing in to show Detective Kelly evidence she’s discovered, a birthday with the names Dominique and Danielle on it (see above). Two visits are made to the local bakery where the cake was decorated, attended by two women (one played by Olympia Dukakis) who echo the dumb prattle of the cop couple. Philip bought the cake there shortly before his murder; Grace ducks in to confirm the names she saw on the cake. During the nightmare/hypnosis/brainwashing climax Grace is placed side by side on a bed with Danielle; her visions feature multiple sets of twins, triplets; the video footage of Dr. Pierre Milius prognosticating on the twins’ psychological dynamics is repeated. The more times you watch the movie, the more on its wavelength you get, the more apparent the echoes become until it starts to seem a great hall of mirrors in infinite regress. One’s heightened sensitivity can even prompt viewers to start seeing probably unintended examples (see below my discussion of Grace’s shadow on a door), a form of paranoid pattern recognition which only intensifies the movie’s freakiness. 

3

Split Screen, Split World: What we see in the window

Sisters’ splits and doublings aren’t only achieved through character opposition, repeated motifs or the movie’s two-part plot-structure—one night stand romance/murder mystery horror flick. It’s built into the film’s style, which is where De Palma’s frequent use of split-screen technique comes in.  By deploying the device extensively after the murder De Palma foreshadows the conjoined relationship between Danielle and Dominique, and its deeper meanings, cinematically. 

Philip returns to Danielle’s apartment with a boxed birthday cake, purchased while out refilling her loony-pill prescription (too late). He selects a knife from the case of Danielle’s Peeping Toms cutlery and after snipping the string tying the box, plates the cake; arranges on it and lights several candles. He then places the knife on the plate beside the cake and walks it to the couch-bed where Danielle, now become sinister Dominique (wearing a black sweater to signal evil), lies heaped amongst the bedding. You can tell something awful is going to happen. The visual emphasis put on Philip’s approach to the bed prepares us: POV shots bearing down on Dominique intercut a couple times with counter ones of Philip awkwardly carrying the cake toward the camera, filmed from a low angle—scored with Bernard Herrmann’s eerie, tinkling, childlike music for extra added hair-raising. Not my favorite suspense-building trick here, but effective.

Reaching the bed, Philip unknowingly proffers the cake to Dominique. She goes for the knife. “Now you know you’re not supposed to cut the cake before you blow out the candles,” Philip says flirtily. She stabs him in the thigh, groin and mouth, the speed and force of which puts the candles out. Tosses the knife to the floor in front of an un-shaded window; through Bernard Herrmann’s garish scare-music Philip, trailing blood, crawls toward it. Dominique may be twitching epileptically on the couch bed, but she realizes where he’s headed, rushes over, takes up the knife again and gives Philip a second round of vicious stabbings before running off for good, to revert to her Danielle persona and a white nightgown. After which Philip slowly drags himself toward the window where he tries to write “help” in his own blood. 

That’s when De Palma goes into split-screen. Philip fingers blood-letters on the glass and the picture divides, showing him from two angles. On the right, the camera remains inside Danielle’s apartment with him as he desperately tries to flag Grace’s attention across the way. Screen-left, we are shown Philip from outside, waving. When he seems to drop dead, the camera reverse-zooms back into Grace’s window revealing the shot as her point of view. Grace now phones the police. While she gets into it with Detective Kelly on the left, the right side cuts to Danielle waking up on the bathroom floor, where last we saw her, having a fit. Someone, Emil, is buzzing her door; she doesn’t answer right away so he starts pounding it (Emil knows what’s going on). Meanwhile left-screen, Grace, finishes with the police, throws on a coat and hurries downstairs to meet them; on the right, Danielle dazedly opens her door for Emil, thinking everything’s fine now. 

Here De Palma returns to full screen. Yet just as the movie has two parts, two sisters, two female leads, there also are two split-screen sequences separated by a short interlude during which Emil and Daniele hide Philip’s body in the couch bed (the mattress removed to do so magically vanishes, never to be seen again). Once the couch’s cushions have been replaced, a disturbed Danielle dashes to the bathroom and vomits. Emil, weirdly calm and resourceful throughout (has he done this before?), tells her to make herself up while he finishes cleaning the place. “It must look as if nothing has happened,” he says anticipating the authorities. Downstairs Grace, anxious to do something while waiting for the cops, figures out which apartment the attack took place in. 

When they arrive the screen again comes apart, but this time things are inverted. Grace now argues with Detective Kelly and Spinetti on the right-side screen while Emil scours Danielle’s floor, walls and window on the left. The cleaning is intercut, and very much cheated, with shots of Danielle applying cosmetics. She uses her bathroom’s sliding, mirror-covered cabinet, which creates a seam exactly bisecting her face, a split image within the split-screen! It’s a terrific early version of a now ubiquitous trope in Lifetime thrillers, indicating multiple personality disorder. De Palma was to use a variation of it again in Dressed to Kill when Michael Caine, that movie’s psychically split character, looks at his face in his office-mirrors at three significant moments. 

Fascinatingly, in this second portion of split-screen Grace will cross back to the left side, where she started. While still on the right, though, she, Kelly and Spinetti bicker their way up in the elevator, to Danielle’s floor. During this Emil, on the left, races a stuffed plastic trash bag (see above) out of Danielle’s apartment, to hide in his car. Seeing that elevator on the right screen is in use, however, he scrambles back to the left and secrets himself in a niche of hallway whose walls are a broody dark yellow lined with blood-red doors. Grace and the police emerge from the elevator, move screen-left. They pass Emil, unnoticed in the dimness, smoothly allowing him to slip away behind/beside them back on the right, where disappears in the elevator. Now firmly left-screened, Detective Kelly buzzes Danielle’s door; the right side cuts from the elevator, to Danielle answering him. 

De Palma doesn’t come out of split-screen here the way he did when she opened up for Emil in the first section. He keeps his joined images going quite awhile as Danielle tries to put the police off. Grace, standing behind Detective Kelly, notes Danielle’s clear nervousness. The dialogue between Detective Kelly, Grace and Danielle overlaps a bit, like the imagery, forcing viewers to either focus on Danielle’s exchanges with Detective Kelly or Grace’s comments about Danielle, to him. When Danielle demands a search warrant and starts to close the door, Kelly becomes audibly suspicious. She changes tack, goes into charm mode and lets everyone in (see above). De Palma then yanks us out of split-screen for good. 

This whole passage involving the murder and its aftermath represent some of De Palma’s most masterful and creative filmmaking. He makes intuitive use of a bold technique to articulate his themes. The splitting gets viewers past the implausibility of such a quick, effective cleanup by seeming to show us everything going on simultaneously; builds extra suspense by slyly, literally dividing our allegiances (see above). At its deepest, most aesthetic level though, the split-screen device literally Siamese-twins the two women’s storylines together, thereby re-setting the separation trauma underlying the murder to its beginnings, for another reenactment that will involve Grace. Also these two distinct chunks of split-screen are another example of doubling in and of themselves aside from the way they visually mirror each other. And note the symmetry. When Danielle opens the door and everyone can be seen on both sides of the screen at once this neatly bookends Philip’s being duplicated from two angles at once, which began the first split section. In this way the division and opposition between the women, and the eventual dissolution of that distinction, attains stylistic consistency and coherence resonating through the whole movie. Danielle and Grace are visually displayed first one way, flipped around and finally fused—the whole movie in miniature.

****

The glue holding all these elements together is De Palma’s pet theme, voyeurism. Specifically this definition: “The practice of taking pleasure in observing something private, sordid or scandalous.” In De Palma’s earlier avant garde comedy Hi Mom! (1970), a semi-sequel to his 1968 underground arthouse hit Greetings, De Palma did a far more self conscious parody-variation on the Rear Window material explored in Sisters. Robert De Niro, a disaffected Vietnam vet adrift in 60s America, takes a gig making experimental porn films called “peep art”. The idea is to get furtive footage of real people having sex out of some sort of authenticity kink. Setting up cameras in his apartment and directing them at the neighbors’ windows across the way, De Niro becomes interested in one of his “subjects”, played by Jennifer Salt. He crosses into her life/window/movie and seduces her, hoping to film the two of them having sex, but it doesn’t work of course. Clearly the concept of “peep art” has in Sisters become the Peeping Toms game show, wherein situations are deliberately contrived to see how people will act when they don’t know they’re being watched. De Niro’s pornographer character has been morphed into the prying female journalist Grace Collier; Hi, Mom!’s ambiguous, ambivalent satirical commentary on the ethically questionable nature of such exploitation absorbed into a more conventional, self contained plot. Earlier De Palma flicks like Murder a La Mod (1968), Greetings, Hi, Mom! were episodic, scattershot. They took a sledge hammer to manipulative movie-magic techniques. Sisters, sustains its illusion but winks at the artifice. In an interview De Palma gave about Sisters when it came out he discussed his approach using a sequence from Hi, Mom! as example: “First of all I am interested in the medium of film itself, and I am constantly standing outside and making people aware that they are always watching a film…In Hi, Mom! for instance, there is a sequence where you are obviously watching a ridiculous documentary and you are told that and you are aware of it, but it still sucks you in. There is a kind of Brechtian Alienation idea here: you are aware of what you are watching at the same time that you are emotionally involved in it.” 

Sisters method exactly. It pulls viewers into a horror thriller situation more completely than any De Palma movie had before yet points up the fakeness at key moments, in critical ways—i.e. during the Peeping Toms game show at the beginning and the climactic hypnosis nightmare sequence. These scenes bracket the action suggesting we, the audience, are a bunch of snoopy, perv-voyeurs who maybe have more in common with depraved, creepy old Emil than we’d like to think. The Peeping Toms game show satirizes audiences’ appetite for the kind of cheap boob-tube thrills they’re still buying today as “reality television” or YouTube amateurity. It’s also a wacky funhouse reflection of the movie’s viewers. Builds an awareness of their interests, right into the tone and texture of Sisters.  During the Life Magazine scenes the author of the story about Danielle and Dominique remarks of his readers that their letters responding to the story “all had that same tone of morbid fascination.” That’s us.

And by the way, let’s talk about that game show prank again—Danielle’s pretending to be a blind woman who stumbles into a men’s dressing room and starts taking off her clothes in front of Philip. It isn’t really about Philip, it’s also about us. We’re the ones fascinated by this little private faux pas; who’d like to see a hot blind momma yamma like Kidder remove her clothes, innocent of the circumstances. We resemble the idiot game show’s contestants and its “groovy” audience, who get off on judging what Philip does or doesn’t do—they guess whether he’ll watch her, tell her where she is or let her be. His not stopping Danielle from undressing and merely going about his business silently, hardly matters. The main thing is the way it reflects us making assessments of those we spy on, like the hypocrites we R-rated moviegoers are. Not only does this observation inform the whole movie, but two self conscious jokes which grow out of it continue, further deepening aspects of the plot. 

For instance, at the end of the game show Philip and Danielle are given courtesy gifts for participating in their self-abasement. First time we see the movie we laugh mostly at poor sophisticated Philip’s being given that dinner for two at The African Room club, but on re-watches Danielle’s gift is even funnier. A set of Reynold’s cutlery, from which derives the knife Dominique will use to kill Philip (see above). This box of cutlery goes on quite a journey through the film. Right after the game show Danielle asks Phillip out to dinner by jokingly tempting him with it, “I have brought my own cutlery?” she says holding the box up to him. After their failed date the cutlery then follows them to Danielle’s apartment. At one point Philip has to pretend to leave her place in order to trick Emil, who’s followed them, into thinking he’s left for the night. When Philip returns eager to bump uglies, he comes bearing gifts: Danielle’s stupid game show prize, forgotten in his car—making sure the knife is on hand the next day for his murder. As with the dreamily appearing, disappearing and reappearing straight razor in De Palma’s second double personality horror thriller Dressed to Kill, the cutlery persists past the murder and crops up during the film’s climax, where it does a good bit of surrealizing noticed by few on a first viewing.     

Afraid Danielle is about to abandon her apartment for good late in the movie Grace impulsively car-tails her, Emil, and the murder-knife retained by Emil, to the mental health clinic he runs. Dominique had bitched about the place to Danielle before the murder; Grace’s mother bitched about it during their annoying mother/daughter outing after Grace’s disastrous run in with the police. Grace’s mother’s divided response about the place, admiration and bougie horror of its progressive methods provides another comic example of the split attitudes structuring the film—she describes it as an “experimental madhouse” where the inmates are “allowed to walk around just like real people”. Up to date, open minded, the facility nonetheless allows a mad, witchdoctor Prospero privacy to indulge all manner of weirdness and criminality. 

On its veranda, through the clinic’s big front window (see above where I emphasized a different aspect of the scene) Grace watches Emil pull the knife used to kill Philip, still blood-covered, out of his bag; figuring she’s got the goods, Grace decides she’ll just waltz inside and call the police rather than go someplace else. Of course she gets caught. Emil convinces his staff Grace is a schizophrenic patient named Margaret Grisham who only thinks she’s roving reporter Grace Collier. By having Grace deemed a double personality, like Danielle, she not only has her modern career gal identity stripped away, but is neatly reduced to the Deluded Hysteric Detective Kelly suggested she was from the beginning; it’s how she feared the world saw her. One of Emil’s attendants forcibly settles “Margaret” into a room not of her own and, for a moment, we see his and her shadows cast on its open door, echoing Danielle’s and Dominique’s shadows on the door of Danielle’s apartment earlier (see above). In this way Grace finally is slotted into her spot as Danielle’s troublesome sibling, Dominique. Struggling wildly with the attendant, who keeps condescendingly calling her Grace, she snaps at him, “And stop calling me Grace!” “Then you really do want to be called Margaret?” he asks cheerfully. “No,” she insists, “my name is Grace!”

When Grace starts screaming she’s held down and drugged; wakes later in a grogged-out hypnotic state, hovered over by Emil filmed with a freaky, tilted fisheye lens. Bernard Herrmann’s far out electronica warbles underneath. “Repeat after me,” Emil says as he quickly programs Grace to forget what she saw, say it never happened; “there was no body because there was no murder.” Grace regurgitates Emil’s suggestions back to him exactly; satisfied, he decides then to bake this brainwashing in by punishing and traumatizing her. “You came to watch us,” he says threateningly, “to spy on us, to feed on our sorrows…at no cost.” He isn’t just talking to Grace here. Looking bug-eyed, leaning down into the camera, he speaks directly to the audience through Grace, pointing up what the Peeping Toms section joked about. We watch a movie like this hoping to get a dose of sordid thrills while remaining safe in a dark theater or at home on the couch; De Palma now whops the hell out of us for getting our morbid yaa yaas on this way. “You want to know all our secrets?” Emil asks us. “All right, we will share them with you.” Of course Sisters’ story’s too far out and absurd to challenge us in the kind of solemnly serious, moral way a book like, say, Susan Sontag’s Regarding the pain of Others does, but its playful goosing is pretty nasty stuff, and maybe goes a lot deeper than a straight film could.

****

Amidst shocked shots of Grace’s eyeballs Emil rips Danielle’s hospital smock, revealing the huge surgical scar on her hip, and forces Grace to touch it in a pseudo Siamese twin bonding. “Why is she here?” Danielle asks looking at Grace beside her. “Don’t you remember?” says Emil sounding like Grady in Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). “She was always here”. An extreme close-up of Grace’s eye prefaces each of three black and white visions retelling Danielle and Dominique’s back story, which emerge from Grace’s pupil via an Iris shot, as if directly out of her mind. In the first, we are returned to Dr. Milius’ speech about the sisters’ co-dependent psychological relationship, but this time shot the opposite way round. Milius’ voice is weirdly echoic as the camera follows behind him, leading us to a dim common area where Grace-as-Dominique and Danielle sit in a double wheelchair surrounded by an assortment of grotesques, the film crew, tap dancing triplets, a midget, croquet-playing nuns and other oddities. Several nightmare figures including Grace’s mother, step forward and gloatingly photograph the girls as Emil pushes them about on display. Both inside and outside this phantasm he prods Danielle to recall how such nice-seeming lookie-loos and their children had laughed at the sisters in their early years, calling them “freaks”, title of Todd Browning’s infamous gothic revenge fable, which these bizarre black and white hypno-hallucinations so much suggest. 

The second episode of this raree-show is yet more disturbing. Once Danielle had come to realize the full implications of her deformity, that she would never have her own home, babies, she somehow got romantically involved with Emil. We see them kissing in a dank expressionistic room with a crucifix hanging on the wall. Grace/Dominique attached to Danielle lies on the bed beside them, looking uncomfortable and disgusted. Danielle complains to Dominique that she’s supposed to be asleep. When this has no effect Danielle asks Emil if he can “make her go away”. He agrees, knocks Grace out with another of his trusty shots while Dominique, desperately resisting throughout seems directly to beg us for help. During this, the camera slowly recedes through a two way mirror, revealing silhouette observers taking notes, another reflection of the movie’s audience. Once Dominique passes out, the camera crawls back inside the mirror; a light dangling from a cord above, having been knocked by Emil during his efforts to inject Dominique, sways back and forth a la Psycho as Danielle and Emil start swapping spit again, hard. 

After the vision fades we’re told this bit of back-room ick had eventually resulted in Danielle’s getting pregnant, good news she was to give Dominique one afternoon, walking Loisel’s gardens. Danielle had optimistically tried to suggest the baby might be something the sisters could share, but Dominique’s furious response was to kill it by stabbing Danielle with a pair of garden shears. This attack we had seen Danielle reliving before Philip’s murder, while he was out getting her crazy pills and the birthday cake. Gasping and clutching her abdomen on her bathroom floor, she was again re-experiencing the events that had led up to the operation which killed Dominique…and liberated her. 

The camera descends into Grace’s eye for the final horrific nightmare, a deformed mixture of early cinematic gothic imagery out of Robert Wiene, Murnau, James Whale and others. Emil intones mesmerically, “Everything will be fine. Everything will be fine” as Grace/Dominique and Danielle appear lying on an operating table beside a swimming pool, casting rippled shadows as if from inside a womb (it is, after all, a scene of death and rebirth). Even more strangeolas have been gathered to watch this than in the first vision. The Life Magazine reporter sits on a diving board between a pair of wraith-like twin sisters wearing hospital smocks, scribbling in a notepad. Dream-Emil, dressed in surgical scrubs, sooths Danielle after telling she lost their baby. “The only way I can save you is to separate you from Dominique.” Danielle asks, “Am I going to die?” Emil responds, “No. You will be fine. Everything will be fine.” Obviously there’s a suggestion here that Emil murdered difficult Dominique to get rid of her, but that possibility remains at a paranoid Rorschach level. Also goes nicely with Grace’s own guilty anxieties concerning her sense of self worth, introjected throughout these lurid fantasies; probably why her mother and the Life reporter appear as vulturous spectators. 

The nightmare operation which dream-Emil performs is surreally, excitingly crude; the Reynolds murder-cutlery from the game show once more appears to start it off. Private investigator Larch, heavily gloved, removes an already bloody meat cleaver from the box (filled with placental fluid) last shown in Danielle’s kitchen. As far as we know Grace never saw the box, so we have to wonder how the hell it got into her nightmare. A subliminal psychic link perhaps, heightening the sense some dark mental bond or affinity exists between the women, adding another layer of uncanny menace to the situation. Grace watches as the filthy cleaver is ritualistically handed around the operating table, passed from one freak to another, a set of bespectacled male twins and two tiny nuns who, synchronized, raise it flat across their palms to Emil. After carefully lining the cleaver up with the spot between the women’s bodies he plans to cut, the instrument is raised high in a suspense-building montage, sharply cut by Editor Paul Hirsch, with Bernard Herrmann’s electro-music shrieking full blast. Then he just chops ‘em the hell in two. Grace and Danielle wake screaming hysterically on the bed and come apart, concluding another of De Palma’s great horror sequences. 

The idea of melding all this background exposition to Grace’s hypno-hallucination nightmares was inspired by ironic dream-sequences in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, really straight out of Ira Levin’s amusing book. Sifting plot machinations through Rosemary both furthered the story and revealed the guilty conscience at the center of hers’ and the audience’s paranoia. De Palma brilliantly refitted and extended the technique for Sisters. Complicates Psycho’s psychiatrist-explanations (see above) by pouring them through Grace’s scrambled psyche; on first viewing, it disorients as much as elucidates. But it does more than that. The theme of conjoined and split identities is expressed through the formal design itself, as was with the split-screen device after the murder. Grace’s ordinary daylight mental perspective and Danielle’s freak-underworld double life of deformity and sex-madness are fused. The process aligns the women in a way similar to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), worth a quick look here. 

Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann) is an actress who stopped speaking during a stage performance one night and remained silent ever afterward. Alma (Bibi Andersonn), her psychiatric nurse, is driven batty trying to get even one dang word out of the woman. After a whole lot of mystifying, psychological, post modern and slightly lezzie strange, Alma sits Elisabeth down and unleashes a bizarre monologue on her, purporting to articulate Elisabeth’s internal conflicts the way a medium would psychically channel her subject. In truth, though, the monologue is an insane amalgamation of each woman’s storylines. To drive this home, Bergman repeats Alma’s jumbled, mashed up tale twice verbatim, once with the camera trained exclusively on Elisabeth’s reactions; the second time from the reverse angle, staring at Alma’s trance-like recitation. Bergman caps this astonishing sequence with the famous shot of both women’s faces merging into one. De Palma may well have had Persona in mind not only thematically—his heroines coming together, switching places and going back again—but also technically as when Dr. Milius is shown twice laying out his idea verbatim (from the reverse angle), describing how Danielle’s and Dominique’s opposed temperaments are necessary for each to function. His theory is true also of Danielle and Grace as plot devices, a self-conscious meta-concept underlying Bergman’s poetic masterpiece, which is all about the blurry line between literal cinematic projection and the metaphorical emotional kind. 

Tough, forceful Grace only exists in Sisters’ world because of Danielle’s crime, the result of an emotional disturbance created by a social milieu which had consigned Danielle’s true self to shadow. Ultimately the window filled with murderous horrors Grace gazes into and investigates; that she plans to use in furtherance of her career—also is a monstrous mirror onto which she projects her internalized self-loathing. It’s not that different from the way viewers use movies like Sisters for cheap thrills. This is the place where Hitchcock and Bergman merge in exploitation.

****

Making both women re-live Danielle’s separation trauma this way wasn’t only intended to hurt Grace. It was also a way to force Danielle to confront Dominique’s death. She still can’t though, so Emil puts both babbling babes back to bed—they continue to be tripping their asses off—and proceeds seducing Danielle into Dominique Mode. Squeezing one of her boobs, he whispers the rest of their story against her cheek. He and Danielle had married after the operation, moved to NYC hoping to make a fresh Mary Tyler Moore start of things, but Danielle could never get over the “terrible guilt” she felt about Dominique’s death, as opposed to Emil who seems to have felt little. She kept Dominique alive in her mind. Eventually she started becoming Dominique, turning into her whenever the two had sex yada yada (see above); Emil’s only way of handling that development, he insanely claims, was to sedate Danielle until Dominique just went away again (those pills on the sink!). Finley is so good here, so disgustingly pitiable there’s a genuine berserk pathos when he sobs at the hopelessness of it all saying, “Danielle? Danielle? I love you!” and he kisses his now fully aroused lass. Grace meanwhile is passed out on the bed next to them as in that hypno-vision moments before. Paul Hirsch montages his way around Danielle’s and Emil’s smacking faces until Dominique’s angry eyes snap open. 

She shoves Emil’s gross ass off (who wouldn’t?) and tries to flee. Emil chases her down, confronts her with the butcher knife he’s kept, the murder-cutlery’s final appearance in the movie, and demands confession. Face slack, mouth atwitch Dominique manages, unnoticed, to get hold of a stray scalpel on a nearby table. “There was a cake,” she rasps, describing the murder. “They had candles…I make a wish. And I blew out the candles… And then I cut him!” At which point she slashes the crap out of Emil’s groin, twice. Bleeding badly, he clings to Dominique who drags him across the room where the two plop over on Grace’s legs. There Emil forces Dominique’s hand down to his bleeding crotch, between them. He pulls it back out gore-coated and dies with his and her hands entwined, finishing off their, for him, tragic love story. Danielle comes out of the Dominique persona, cries and hugs Emil bloodily; Grace wakes, to the couple lying across her legs. She sits up, sees those blood-drenched hands and starts screaming like the character in a horror movie she is. 

Cut to: the arrival of a useless ambulance. Danielle is escorted out of the clinic, lovingly accompanying Emil’s corpse. She holds his hand while following the gurney. Detective Kelly asks if she’s prepared to admit she killed him. With an almost serene glow she says, “I have never hurt anybody in my life.” Confused, Kelly asks if she’s claiming her sister did it. “My sister died last spring,” she responds gently and is led off to a police car. One of the great odd jokes of the climax is that what to viewers and Grace had seemed unrestrained horror, for Danielle was genuinely therapeutic. She’s chased her guilt/rage down to its source—mad doctor/separator/husband Emil—and it’s cured her! Meanwhile Grace, removed from the clinic by her parents, wrapped in a blanket, looks stunned, catatonic. 

She’s the traumatized one now. 

Next morning, confined to her childhood bed, surrounded by various girlish items, including her mother, Detective Kelly speaks to her for the last time. Having finally realized Grace actually did witness a murder way back when, he’s ready to get her story. But she’s repressed the knowledge of it so completely all she can do is blurt out Emil’s post-hypnotic brainwash suggestion, doubtless forgotten by most viewers the first time around. “It was all a ridiculous mistake,” she says again and again. “There was no body because there was no murder!” We laugh because the whole thing’s just so ridiculous yet so out there the very pointless absurdity of it seems exactly right for the movie.

Epilogue: The Murder’s solved, but does it matter?

De Palma’s themes, his doubles, voyeurism, projection, the movie itself, conclude on a good gag, with roots deep in the Euro-existentialism of Michaelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966). Far more than Persona, Blow-Up is the relevant arthouse text for De Palma, persisting throughout his work. First referenced ironically in Greetings (1968) De Palma would go on to rework if not remake it ten years after Sisters in Blow Out (1981), now widely considered De Palma’s best movie. 

Blow-Up has an ingenious little premise. A morally wobbly fashion photographer named Thomas (David Hemmings) is followed about through twenty-four hours of his groovy, empty life in ultra Mod London. While taking pictures of a seemingly romantic couple in a park before lunch, the woman (Vanessa Redgrave) sees him and is irate he’s violated their privacy. She demands the film; even tries to steal his camera by biting his hand to get it. He puts her off, saying he’ll give her copies of the pictures later, but she follows him back to his studio and desperately demands the film right away. Wondering what all the desperation’s about (she’s willing to sleep with him to get the film, and Hemmings has the body of sixteen year old), he gives her the wrong roll, to get rid of her. Developing the film himself after she leaves, he carefully blows up the resulting pics until he realizes he’s inadvertently caught a murder plot in broad daylight. 

First he thinks he interrupted it, and is some kind of hero, but further inspection after a quick sex-break with a couple wannabe models, suggests the intended victim was killed after all, while Thomas was busy haggling with Redgrave. But by now the photos have been blown up so much he has only abstract grain to interpret, so he rushes back to the nighttime park, implausibly sans camera, and finds there a dead body, laid out flat behind a tree. Scared by vague sounds, he hurries back to his studio—not going to the police—and discovers his pictures and negatives were stolen while he was out—all but that last useless, grainy abstraction. Speeding to a hipster pot party, and not the police, he spots Redgrave on the street and tries to chase her down only to lose her for good. After which he continues on to the party, rather than swing by the police, and there tries and fails to rouse his kite-high book editor into returning to the park with him, so they can get pictures of the body, presumably for a book. Unsure what to do next, but definitely not going to the police, Thomas crashes at the party; when he wakes up the following morning he finally goes back to the park, at what seems a leisurely pace, and of course the body is gone. The movie ends with Thomas abandoned somewhere on the edge of realizing he’s a nonperson in a dream world which only mimes reality. 

And Blow-Up actually has a whole damn crew of annoying mimes bookending the movie. At the start they drive through London, screaming their butts off for whatever reason, until passing Thomas on his way to his studio—he’s nice enough to give them some cash—whence the movie is handed off to him. Then a couple minutes before the end, after Thomas discovers the body’s vanished, the last evidence there was a murder, they pull up at the park for a pretend game of tennis on its court. A few back and forths are managed before one of the mimes “hits” the “ball” over the court’s fence and Thomas is silently implored to retrieve it for them. He pretends to toss it back and the camera stays on his face as the mimes resume their fake play; something sounding like an actual ball being thwacked by real rackets mysteriously starts to become audible. A cut to an overhead shot of Thomas shows him standing isolated on the park’s greensward among several tennis balls, though powdered green on emerald blurs many out. The wider image seems to resemble Thomas’ most abstract and grainy blown up picture of the murder, which not only leaves us unsure what we’re seeing but what we’re supposed to make of it. Especially since the last active image is of a ball rolling to a stop in the grass near Thomas. Has the fake become real? 

With its sophisticated ennui and sexual hijinx Blow-Up administers a pleasurable, if not entirely satisfying, dose of high fashion, highbrow chic. It’s a metaphysical, meta-ficitional trip, a wandery meditation deliberately lacking conventional narrative drive. De Palma’s bright idea was to combine Antonioni’s aestheticized existential bathos with Hitchocock’s Pyscho/Rear Window suspense plot mechanics, deriving a new kind of potboiled existential exploitation. The result is a garish, horror mind-bender whose mind turns out to be located in the alpine region of Post Modern irony, where reality, self and everything else are impossible to know for sure, either by means of technological investigation or tawdry film artifice. 

As with Blow-Up, every aspect of Sisters’ story is made to vanish. After the revelation/nightmare/therapy session Danielle, who is innocent, accepts that Dominique is dead, and she ceases to exist; Grace, witness to the killing, is now so traumatized and brainwashed that she no longer thinks she saw anything. And in an important sense even the murder itself has disappeared. Sure there was a guy named Philip who got whacked, and there’s a body to prove it all right, but the defunct murderess thought she was killing Emil not him. The only thing that remains of the mystery is private investigator Larch, who no longer works for anybody, pointlessly waiting for Godot to pick up that couch with Philip’s corpse. Disguised as a phone service repairman, he’s stationed himself up a pole with his trusty binoculars trained on the irrelevant couch, which sits before a rural Quebec train depot next to a lowing cow. The tale is literally left up in the air the same way Blow-Up’s was; The End appears over the final ironic image as well, an old fashioned device by the 1970s leaving Sisters’ world in an absurd Nowhere.

The movie seduces us as Danielle did when she taunted Philip in the dressing room on Peeping Toms at the beginning, tugging us into a gruesome, but artificial world of lurid perversity, which De Palma uses to try to shake us out of our sense of cinematic complacency. Shaking us up further, however, he asks “What’s the point? Why bother?” De Palma’s early films through Blow Out (with a quick return to form in a more traditional key with his Vietnam movie Casualties of War [1989]) are tantalizingly contradictory. They subvert subversion. Viewers and characters are urged to act, do something, but when his people try, mostly it makes things worse: Grace, Amy Irving’s Sue in Carrie and Nancy Allen’s Liz in Dressed to Kill are left emotionally scarred in bed at the end; Carrie Snodgress’s Hester in The Fury and Nancy Allen’s Sally in Blow Out die for nothing, no one’s saved or brought to justice; and John Travolta’s crusading Jack in Blow Out, the one most like Grace, whose myopic integrity makes him a failure twice over, is left semi-responsible for getting two people killed. In the end, there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: either way we all lose.

Joseph Aisenberg is an Oklahoma-based writer, film critic and historian. His noted works include the critical film analysis Brian De Palma’s Carrie: Studies in The Horror Film, which was nominated for The Bram Stoker Award, horror’s premier literary award. Aisenberg is also a regular contributor to film magazine Bright Lights Film Journal, has provided commentary tracks for Shout Factory’s 4K/BluRay steelbook special edition of Carrie, and is also the author of numerous other stories and novels. Freeline Media happily welcomes his contributions here.

Check out Joseph Aisenberg’s contributions to Freeline Media:

• Bloody Rabbit Review: A Wily Comic Nightmare
• A Christmas Eve Story Review: A Holiday of Darkness
• Short Fiction: “Motherhood’s End”
• Short Fiction: “Folk Art”
• Short Fiction: “An Old Friend”
• Sontag’s Song Of Herself: Thoughts on Cinema